Morning Comrades! Here I was thinking I could have a moment to write out another lengthy piece on police abolition and then the fuckos up top decide to, one, get caught again being the corrupt lying bastards they are and, two, someone spilt their coffee on a server knocking out the worlds largest propaganda advertising company. Yikes. As you can tell there are many thoughts to be shared, and not those intended so here is the plan. I am going to spend time on Facebook today, tomorrow’s email to the paying subscribers will deal the Panama / Pandora Papers Vol. 2 and what happens on Friday I don’t know yet.
Before any of that though, the above is making a much needed comeback this weekend. At the time of writing this though I am unable to upload images to my online store so no promises of a preview but rest assured I will get that to work. There will be a Long and Short Sleeve version of this one and the money generated from this drop will be donated. I will share teasers and links through here and our telegram group. As usual the paying subscribers will be getting an early bird email on Thursday as well as their discount code.
So, once again, let’s talk about Facebook. This will be a singular topic today with several interconnected points to it.
The Whistleblower
Earlier in the week, Frances Haugen was interviewed by 60 Minutes and blew the whistle on a bunch of internal fuckery that we all “knew” Facebook Inc. was up to. If you can make it through the atrocious style of this interview then watch the below.
To cut a very long story short, Haugen, who worked as a product manager on the civic misinformation team at Facebook ( un-ironically ), essentially laid out that Facebook will manipulate anything to make a buck, essentially doing what it is supposed to. Irrespective of its size and role in global communications, Facebook’s only purpose is to generate profits for its shareholders at all costs. Human Rights, Ethics and Morality play no role in this and similar to Google, any and all communications to the contrary that paint them as a positive, progressive role for humankind is a lie, call it techwashing instead of greenwashing if you like. Hats off to her though for stepping out and doing so, I dare not imagine the trouble, literally and legally that she is now in. The fact remains, that their core, Facebook, IG and to a certain extent WhatsApp are, whilst used to support good, are not good, healthy and Zuckerberg’s team of “leaders” are some of the most immoral entities currently on the planet. They know full well what they are doing and are responsible for many crimes against humanity to make a buck. I am not necessarily talking about the destruction of trust in the public sphere here in the West but more so the actual, real life death at the hands of Zuckerberg in the Global South where FB Inc. often is the only source of communication, internet and often even hardware. Here are a few links to dig into.
Facebook admits it was used to 'incite offline violence' in Myanmar
A look inside Facebook’s efforts to expand Wi-Fi in developing countries
The Problem Isn't Cambridge Analytica: It's Facebook
On the Facebook Outage
All of Facebook’s service dropped offline for around 6hrs on Monday night and all hell broke loose. Sort of anyway and admittedly the shit talking on Twitter was glorious.
For all the shits and giggles this caused there are several serious points to be made about all of this, from various perspectives.
There is no Robin Hood Hacker
The immediate assumption was that “someone” took down Facebook, which, in itself would be a wonderful event but that did not happen. Someone at FB fucked up, a human error and their products went offline. The notion that we are all so clearly waiting on some anonymous entity to right all societies wrong for us, take down the evil elite is something so deeply engrained in our narrative that it deserves a quick analysis. Just from the top of my head, myths such as Robin Hood have existed around the world to give us poor peasants a glimmer of hope since time started, hell, entire religions have been built around this omnipresent saviour mythology. This will not happen. Stories such as Fight Club and more pressingly, Mr. Robot are wonderfully entertaining and needed but they will remain fiction. If there was such an entity that could take down FB, why not eradicate all records of global debt for example? The reason being is that this remains fiction and any entity even remotely developing such capabilities would immediately be scooped up by the likes of the NSA and either killed or enticed to work for them. No. The buck starts and stops with us. If you need a more respected opinion on Social Constructs and Realities I highly suggest you start with the late, great David Graeber.
The Problem Is The Monopoly
The main and the most serious issue that was laid bare, once again, by this outage is the monopoly Facebook Inc. holds. Now, so called free markets ideologists have always championed the unrestricted developments of ideas but that is some of the biggest nonsense I have yet to come across. There is no Free Market, even in the US, the silliest, most deadliest place with Capitalism Cancer, where Gov’t regulations / interference is broadly ignored as long as they serve the Elite. Now, under Capitalism the final successful stage of any company is a monopoly. Facebook, Google and Amazon are prime examples of this. Some of the people in charge, for once doing something right despite their wrong reasons, at some point decided to that monopolies are in direct opposition to the Free Market and have set up Anti-Trust Laws, that essentially don’t allow companies to dominate “the market” - a grand idea that exists on paper and paper alone, as witnessed by the above. Some idealists always try to break up these monopolies through parliamentary legals ways but throw a couple of a million bucks at anyone in power and watch that idealism melt quicker than polar ice caps. What is important to put into context here is that FB not only hold the monopoly on providing misinformation and propaganda here in the West but additionally, holds the monopoly on communication in the Global South.
Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match
As it stands, the majority of user growth for FB is in the global south, where it not only provides the same “services” as they do here in the West, but essentially provide the entirety of what we consider “the internet”- and communication being at the heart of this, especially FB Messenger and increasingly WhatsApp. Imagine the situation in, for example, Myanmar where WhatsApp is the number one tool for communication and that it goes down. We have the luxury of switching in between Telegram, Signal etc but the majority of the world does not, and with one company, led by a sociopath, in charge of providing A PUBLIC SERVICE - and that is the key, and it decides to go down, well, the implications are much more serious in comparison to Chad not being able to send a dick pic.
Communication as a Human Right
This is not a new discussion, as a matter of fact this discussion has been ongoing for almost a hundred years. Corporations, be it AT&T or Facebook have and will always argue that providing communication tools is a private/corporate matter. The reality is that the infrastructure needed to communicate was funded and founded by us, through tax money and with that the discussion should be at an end, but alas it is not. The Free, Private and Reliable ability to communicate ( think of your postal systems ) is one of the cornerstones of any and all humanistic, progressive societies and with ample examples of what happens when this cornerstone is sold to a private company at hand this is a no brainer. Allowing companies such as FB, Google, Amazon - via their Amazon Web Services to privatize and thus manipulate communication creates one reality only: an un-free, unable to progress society at the whim of quarterly profit sheets on Wall Street. This outage has once again shown a stark light at swift, direct action against these malevolent monopolies.
Breaking Up Facebook
By this point it is clear that we, as a society, need to end the stranglehold put upon us by FB and co. For clarity, this applies to any and all tech monopolies, as a start- we can deconstruct the rest of the global economy later. Again, breaking up FB isn’t a new topic, far from it, it has been spoken and written about for about as long as the damn company existed, however, always from the viewpoint of greed, envy and capitalistic rhetoric, all of which is bullshit. Any and most discussion on the subject has come from Free-Market “Thinkers” at this point and whilst the point of breaking up monopolies is right, creating smaller entities to allow “competition” just misses the mark, purposefully, by light years. The point is to not only break up these monopolies but to establish the fact that:
Communication is a public right, in the publics hand and needs to be free as well as free from capital based manipulation
When communists speak about public, democratic ownership things get really muddled, only because the factual reality of how that actually works and what it actually means is something that we in the “west” have unlearned and generally have trouble with, psychology mostly because self-determination, freedom as such requires a lot of bloody work and responsibility.
A good example can be found in Uruguay. Here, the vision of a democratic society is explicitly part of the constitution, social objectives written into the missions of public companies which are understood, by policy makers and the population, to be an integral part of the Uruguayan democracy.
Founded on pro-public, democratic principles, Uruguay's constitution was strengthened after the successful struggle against a directorship. It establishes a fundamental framework for democratic public ownership. With this as a baseline, we will now turn to how democratic principles are translated to the managerial model of public enterprises. There are numerous experiments in establishing democratic governance in public enterprises, for instance ‘Workers on the Board’ can be a good step forward. However, such worker representation alone is not generally sufficient to change the balance of power between management and worker. A real change in the relations of production thus remains limited.
All in all, these experiences demonstrate that democratising public ownership requires more than institutional engineering. To shift the balance of power towards front-line workers and affected communities, we must also strengthen the role of worker's and citizen's organisations in shaping this transformation. These cannot be mere ‘participants’ – a democratic dynamic can only be realised if there is a conscious movement for industrial and service transformation coming from workers and communities themselves.
Again, to cut a long story short, any power, and thus any “wrong” is a social construct, that we, the workers, the outrageously massive majority of the world, can re-construct to serve the needs of the many, not the few and FB is a great place to start.
Thank you for your time and interest, by all means share this far and wide and see you all tomorrow.