Don't let the sweater-vests and the (dilettantish) "education reform" work fool you: Bill Gates made his fortune through sheer robber-baronry, presiding over a vicious monopolist that shattered the law in its greedy quest for billions and permanent, global dominance.
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Microsoft's illegal conduct was so blatant, persistent and obviously wicked that it prompted serious enforcement action from the DoJ's antitrust division, which Reagan neutered and which every president since has whittled down even further.
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The most notorious moment in that last-of-its-kind enforcement action was the multi-day, video-recorded deposition of Bill Gates himself, in which he conducted himself so badly that the video went analog-viral, airing on newscasts and being passed hand-to-hand on VHS.
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Today on @arstechnica, @dangoodin001 revisits that momentous week in 1998 when Gates covered himself in everlasting shame and gave us a peek behind the curtain at the private persona of a swaggering monopolist.
Goodin's piece was occasioned by Microsoft's intervention in the Epic-v-Apple affair, in which a Microsoft exec decried Apple's abuse of its "complete monopoly over the distribution of apps … to coerce app developers into using Apple’s payment platform."
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Gates's deposition is a reminder of how far Microsoft's position changed between 1998 and now. As Goodin writes, Gates's plan for the deposition was to obstruct, paint the DoJ as technically incompetent, and to "deny even the most basic of premises in the government’s case."
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This was a brutally stupid plan. It failed SO BADLY. Government lawyer would ask Gates questions like "What non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996" and Gates would claim not to know what "concerned" means.
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It was the Fat Tony defense: "What's a truck? What's a murder?"
It was so stupid and blatant that people in the gallery started laughing aloud at Gates's obstruction (after all, part of his defense was that he was a genius whose mind could not be understood by mere govvies).
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The deposition really revealed Gates's expectation that he would be deferred to and even worshipped in the manner that his absolute authoritarian rule over Microsoft had accustomed him to.
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As Ken Auletta noted, Gates had never had to sit for a job interview or suffer other routine indignities.
Goodin: "he had little or no experience tolerating—let alone encountering—dissent, criticism, or challenges to his authority."
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But even with a better strategy, Gates would have still been in trouble, because he put a bewildering array of radioactively illegal conduct in writing, and the DoJ had it all in black and white:
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* A conspiracy to force Intuit to bundle Internet Explorer and break compatibility with Netscape
* A conspiracy to modify Windows so Netscape-rendered content would appear "degraded"
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* A conspiracy to make an incompatible version of Java that only ran on Windows, with the goal of "wresting control of Java away from Sun"
* A conspiracy to get Apple to break compatibility with Netscape, tying Microsoft Office improvement to Apple's sabotage of Netscape
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With all this evidence, the fact that Microsoft escaped serious sanction tells you just how degraded antitrust law has become (it's gotten weaker and worse since). But just as telling is the impact that antitrust enforcement had on Microsoft's conduct.
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It's undeniable that the reason web companies like Google survived the 2010s is that Microsoft had lost its nerve, after years of traumatic DoJ investigation and litigation.
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Gates admitted this last year, saying the reason Microsoft didn't bid for Android was they were "distracted" by the antitrust action:
But that action had ended YEARS before Android. When Gates says he was "distracted," he means he was terrified.
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And as @superwuster pointed out, it probably made them a better company. Monoplism makes companies act like mafias, stupid and lazy, with an emphasis on abusive commercial practice rather than technical or organizational excellence.
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When AT&T was broken up in 82, corporatists cried that America was sacrificing its "national champion" just as Japan was eroding America's technical dominance, and without AT&T's monopoly power, America's tech industry was done.
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Instead, breaking up AT&T opened the space for THE ENTIRE INTERNET, and a generation-long American dominance of a system that has become a planetary nervous system, a source of prolonged American dominance and trillions in GDP.
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In other words: Fat Tony is a shitty businessman.
People express dismay at that 2016 photo of Trump with tech's leaders around a Trump Tower boardroom table, aghast that these people who run our tech world were willing to meet with a racist bully.
This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make *recipes*, the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual *stuff*.
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This would happen in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water.
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Trump's doing a lot of oligarch shit, and while some of it very visible and obvious, other moves, like throwing the door open to "stock buybacks" are technical and obscure.
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Forget surveillance capitalism - let's talk about *surveillance infantalism*: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.
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When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (e.g. Pac-Man ghosts) and utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:
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Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard.
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When LLM users describe their experience with their chatbots, the results are so divergent that it can sound like they're describing two completely different products.
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Previously, I've hypothesized that this is because there are two distinct groups of *users*: "centaurs" (people who are assisted by a machine - in this case, people who get to decide when, whether and how to integrate an LLM into their work)...
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It's not just that Texas DA Gocha Ramirez charged a woman with murder for having an abortion (not t allowed even in Texas). It's that Ramirez paid for his mistress's abortion, after he impregnated her while having an affair with her *and* her sister:
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This is perfect Magaism, as captured by Wilhoit's Law:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.