Big Tech, Big BrotherBy Rod Dreher
March 29, 2022
A great interview by Bari Weiss, talking to the tech investor David Sacks about the threat Big Tech poses to our liberty. Excerpts:
BW: You have been making the case better than anyone else that, despite the fact that we live in a liberal democracy with a Bill of Rights and a Constitution and a First Amendment, whether most Americans are aware of it or not we also are living inside a soft version of a social credit system. So for the people who hear that and think: ‘That’s ridiculous. This isn’t China.’ I want you to make the case.
DS: Let’s start by defining what a social credit system is. A social credit system is a system that pretends to give you civil liberties and freedom. It doesn’t overtly send you to the gulag for expressing dissent. Rather, it conditions the benefits of society—economic benefits, the ability to spend your money—on having the correct opinions. If you don’t, then your ability to participate in online platforms is diminished or curtailed entirely. That’s the situation that we are gradually heading towards.
Back in the days when we were creating PayPal, in the early 2000s and late ‘90s, there was really a sense that technology and the internet would expand people’s ability to engage in speech and commerce. And for the first two decades of the internet, it really did. But for the last half-dozen years or so, we’ve really been restricting that access and trying to curtail it. The power of restricting people in both speech and commerce has taken on a life of its own. Those restrictions keep growing.
I’m not the one who’s changed. Big Tech changed. I didn’t leave Big Tech. Big Tech left me.
BW: When did you start to see the change?
DS: If you go back to the Arab Spring and the Green Revolution there was generally a sense of triumphalism. Back then, the CEO of Twitter said that we are the free speech wing of the free speech party. That’s how Silicon Valley saw itself. Ten years later, you have the widespread view that Silicon Valley needs to restrict and regulate disinformation and prevent free speech on its platform. You’d have to say that the turning point was 2016, when Trump got elected against the wishes of pretty much everyone in Silicon Valley. That was a little too much populism for them. And they saw social media as being complicit in Trump’s election.
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About debanking:
BW: It used to be that we’d hear a lot about deplatforming. Now, increasingly, we are hearing about debanking. What does it mean?
DS: It means that you are denied access to a financial service—your access to your money or to your ability to conduct a transaction or to pay people—based on your political views. All of that gets restricted because your views are deemed unacceptable by the people who run these services.
BW: Give us an example. Maybe we can use the company you helped build, PayPal, and its creation of what you’ve called their no-buy list, a play on the idea of a no-fly list.
DS: Back in the early days, we believed that our mission was to expand access to the financial system. Today PayPal, under new management, is working to deny people access. They’ve actually partnered with a couple of left-wing partisan groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, to create lists of users and groups to ban from the platform. They’ve actually announced this. They’re proud of this.
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Read it all. I can’t urge you strongly enough to read it all. There’s so much more there than what I’ve quoted, and it all has to do with our liberty, and how it is being very quickly taken from us. And if you click through, you can hear the whole podcast interview, which takes in a lot more stuff.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/bari-weiss-david-sacks-big-tech-big-brother/
