For the millionth time, the media is fabricating a moral panic around their belated discovery that Facebook does what they do, but better, more scalably, and more profitably.
This is the 2016 Facebook panic all over again, but with fewer Russians. You’d think the storyline would get old, but no…
There's almost nothing novel in the leaked Facebook docs, other than confirmation of Facebook's slowing growth and aging userbase.
Everything being discussed now was being discussed years ago. There were whole chapters in Chaos Monkeys about it. Big whoop.
As for why this is getting nonstop coverage:
Aside from mere anti-FB animus, the aesthetics of all this--a compelling whistleblower, leaked docs, internal discussions of (known) tradeoffs--plays precisely into the necessary Aaron Sorkin drama and regnant journalist epistemology.
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@realchrisrufo When I did my due diligence on someone that the entire NYT/WaPo/NYer media empyrean is lining up to trash, I was surprised to discover his background as a mainstream PBS/Netflix blue-state filmmaker.
But then something flipped....
@realchrisrufo The @realchrisrufo I spoke to no longer cares about the elite media sphere; he cares about winning anti-CRT measures across the United States, one school district at a time.
The reason why the Left loses its mind on the topic of genetics is twofold:
1. It undercuts blank-slatism, which presupposes humans are infinitely malleable (to not say perfectable) by society. This is one of the core beliefs of contemporary liberalism.
2. Among the horrifying implications of abandoning blank-slatism is that in our technological society which prizes mental agility beyond all other virtues, it may be the case that some, when measured against this very one-dimensional metric, may do less well than others...
...and since this liberal society (for all its appearances of cuddly progressivism) accepts status and power as the only sources of moral dignity (and rejects other virtues such as kindness, loyalty, humility, steadfastness, etc.), to even go here is unthinkable.
Like a good PMC worker bee, I bought a Tesla 3 for my (brief) Apple job, and it ended up changing everything about my life. Now I can't imagine living without it. Neither will you, after you've tried it. The world won't be the same after wide adoption.
Driving goes from a miserable task where your entire attention is squandered on a menial task, to a question of what to do sitting in a leather chair in an internet-connected lounge. It’s more like taking a business-class flight than anything else.
You tell yourself that when you hit 'fuck you' money you're going to really put yourself out there and tweet what you think. Then you have conversations with people well beyond that level, and they're generally much bigger wusses than you.
Capitalism, how does it work?
If pressed, they'll say that now they bear an *even greater* responsibility to entities like portfolio companies or investment partners, meaning they must be even more cautious of what they say.
Another reality is probably the 'coercion of the brunch invite', and being part of a certain social cohort whose membership isn't based only on wealth.
But that implies bestowing that circle with a blinding, preponderant importance. That circle must seem the navel of the world.
My new exercise as I doomscroll Twitter in my official job of Very Online Person is identifying the underlying issue--the abstract class, to use a programming analogy-- that people are *really* angry about.
To quote Willa Cather: "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."
If you peer hard enough at all the sundry issues of the day, you'll note there are really only a few foundational ones....
Corporations are the last functional organizations that most Americans experience. To them has the government forfeited responsibility for many of the functions—some involving our most deeply-held values—that typically would have been legitimized by democratic governance.