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January 13, 2021 - 5:04pm
With the Trump administration now in terminal disgrace, the President’s allies are coming under attack. Not literally, of course — not like, say, the Capitol last week — but any public figure who gave him any support at any point over the last few years can expect a rough ride from the media.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, is the target of an Axios piece this week by Dan Primack. Specifically, Primack criticises something that Thiel said in an interview shortly before Trump’s election. You can listen for yourself here (starting at the 34.30 mark), but the nub of Thiel’s argument is the media takes what Trump says literally but not seriously, while his supporters take his words seriously but not literally.
It’s a clever juxtaposition, but Primack argues that last week’s events show it to be catastrophically wrong: “What’s come into stark relief, however, is that Trump says what he means and means what he says.” In suggesting otherwise, Primack claims that Thiel has helped to “cement a viewpoint through which even Trump’s most egregious statements were taken at other than face value.”
I’d suggest that both Thiel and Primack are missing the point. Donald Trump is the first President of the United States to operate primarily within a post-modern mode of communication. In this context there is no distinction between the literal and non-literal. It’s all just narrative, which may be taken seriously or unseriously as the mood takes you.
That’s not to say that this isn’t dangerous. It is dangerous — especially when applied to the politics of a superpower.
Of course, politicians have always tried to tap into the irrational — appealing to the heart as well as the head. However, conventional politics tries to do this in a rational, even scientific, manner. Messages are tested by focus group and opinion poll — and backed up by facts and figures at least purporting to be the truth.
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SubscribeAnother account of the Trump presidency which, like most accounts, entirely misses the point.
Trump, considered in himself, is like Julius Caesar’s definition of Gaul, divided into three parts.
One of those elements is courage. Few individuals today would endure for two days the torrent of hatred and abuse he has been drenched by 24/7 since he announced his intention to run for president in June 2015. He fights back, not least against a particularly grotesque mainstream media, 90% of which (in his country) is preposterously biased, partisan and propagandist – has long since lost all journalistic ethics.
Another part of his nature is that he is an exceptionally silly man. All he had to do to become the most respected and popular president in U.S. history was to stick by his excellent campaign-period policy positions of 2015/16;for instance by building the Wall, eliminating the DACA scam, the anchor babies scam, the extended-family-can-join-an-immigrant scam, and the H1B visa outrage (which sells foreign slaves into indentured serfdom while taking away their jobs from Americans); and evicting the 11-60(??) million illegal aliens in the land.
Building the Wall, for instance, merely required him in his capacity as Commander in Chief to command it, in point of national defence against what is indeed a massive invasion, and hand the bill to the Depts of Defense and of Homeland Security. District judges might have struck this down; the Supreme Court would have had to uphold his decision. He had the Constitutional right to do ANYTHING that would defend the United States from a vast foreign incursion.
Instead, on acquiring election, he lumbered into office wholly unprepared and flopped backwards into the arms of the Establishment. Being an unfocused panderer with the attention-span of a gnat, he spent his days trying to curry favour with all sorts of unworthy people.
Corruption: He is in hock to his dreadful son-in-law Jared Kushner, because he hopes the latter will dig him out of his financial difficulties; and Kushner has used his time in the White House to enrich himself.
All this said, the meaning of the Trump presidency, from the point of view of people who voted for him, was to protest at the awful elites, the merit-less ‘meritocrats’ long since running their country (and the western democracies generally) and their dismal policies which have ruined so many lives.
He was the outsider for whom a large percentage of the electorate voted in its desperation at what the Political Establishment had done these past 25 years and what it still offered (and offers).
I think hardly anybody has ever voted for Donald Trump on the ground that he was a moral beacon, a shining Knight of the Grail, a superb example of high ethics – whether in his private or public conduct.
Your last two paragraphs sum up beautifully. Trump was voted in because the electorate was sick of the system. But ultimately he didn’t have the sophistication to fight it. With the support of the media, big tech and the bad pandemic numbers, the system won. What will be interesting will be to see the public response to a term of the bureaucracy reasserting itself.
Remarkably astute analysis. While the opposition asserted he was an authoritarian, he used very little of Presidential power or prerogative. His lack of skill shows when he simply blurts his thoughts often without thought of consequence. That human quality is adored by supporters. He had some decent policy notions but caved to his hated establishment over the budget; to get what he wanted he gave up more. But he is a constant danger to the entrenched DC world and therefore must be destroyed.
I would agree. Just the same he was hugely superior as a candidate to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and again to Joe Biden in 2020. And he did start the process of making the C-CPI-U the default inflation measure for upratings in the US, which is more than you can say for George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
So “the people” have it together and if not for the terrible elites or “the Establishment” life would be jolly? Those good folks who voted for Trump only did so to protest against policies they object to on rational grounds? Your tidy analysis doesn’t have much to do with anything in the real world.
I tend to agree. It always amuses me when Trump’s detractors piously count his lies – number 27 352 they intone with a look of despair – while his fans blithely assume Trump is playing sophisticated power games with his rambling stream of consciousness diatribes (he isnt serious, he is just trying to disconcert his enemies!). Trump and the “resistance” which has won power both exemplify the zeitgeist. They are so much alike. The salutary lesson is to not get dragged into the vortex of America’s ridiculous culture wars but I think it is too late for the UK.
What amuses me is all the constant lying about him and things he has said. Why do they need to exaggerate and lie about what he says? The man is an immature, exaggerating, blowhard. (I was going to add narcissist before I realized it was a requirement to run for president)
You do not need to lie about the things he has said to make him look bad. He can do that fine on his own. It’s still not enough for them. He has to be the spawn of Hitler and Cruella Deville. “He said to inject bleach!” (no he didn’t) “He asked the Russians to acquire Hillary’s emails!” (a sarcastic, offhand joke is absolutely a request to a foreign power) “Some of those Nazis were good people” (complete fabrication, listen to his actual speech sometime) Then these people have the nerve to ask “Why oh why do Trumps ‘fake news’ attacks work on us!?”
Deplatforming Trump or letting him remain on the Social Media platforms is besides the point – an irrelevance. What Trump’s actions and reactions to him have bought to a head, is the searchlight over the extent to which governments are now beholden to the leviathan tech companies . And notwithstanding the Trump tantrums, the Social Media and Messaging giants (Twitter, Facebook etc) are the least of it. The really lethal dependence is on different companies who hold the reigns to tech infrastructure – Enterprise Cloud Platforms, Search Engines, Telecomms platforms, top end Chip makers, Operating Systems makers, etc – Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Huawei, Baidu etc.
Governments, having suddenly been slapped awake and smelling the rather unpleasant covfefe, will now inevitably attempt, over the next months and years, to wrench back control via the usual routes: regulators, regulations, legislation, rules and laws, anti-trust, anti-monopoly, company breakup, even company nationalisations (esp. China will look to do this) etc. They will do this because these are the only routes our ruling classes know.
And I posit, none of this has any chance of actually succeeding. Why do I say this? Because fundamentals about the nature and consequences of ubiquitous computation are plain flat not understood by administrators. It’s the reason why the very obvious possibility of tech corporations creating extraneous defacto law was ignored all this time (when it was obvious they could do this anytime to anyone), and why suddenly the avalanche of implications are now dawning in the heads of politicians across the globe. There is a blind spot about the fact that algorithms and data are not amenable to governance in the same way human societies and physical assets can be governed. In fact, I don’t see that ultimately they can be governed at all. There are many, many ways to show this (and I can present many arguments showing this if challenged), but that will only be believed once all attempts at superimposing traditional governance over tech fails repeatedly. Although, the fight will play out differently in countries who originate the tech versus those who are entirely dependent on bought-in tech – and the different class of countries will fail in different ways. For example, the CCP is not the type of entity to accept loss of control without a brutal counter reaction, so the fight in China with the tech companies is likely to get highly unpleasant. Those countries/entities that don’t produce their own tech will now look for ways to make the platforms themselves, eg the EU – although they may as well not bother for all the good it will do them.
Because another fundamental is that a breakup of the tech giants worldwide, and a fragmented global tech landscape, won’t slow down the rate at which tech becomes ungovernable, it will speed it up.
I take your point but tech companies are now becoming beholden to governments, witness Twitter whining about Uganda banning it before its own election. With apparently straight faces, they now suddenly believe in free speech. Read their public policy tweets in response to Uganda’s action. Priceless doesn’t even begin to cover it.
+10 upvotes for working covfefe into your post!
🙂
I’m not especially concerned about algorithms and makers of physical products that do not depend on connectivity to a centralized system (maybe because that’s the area in which I work).
Algorithms are like the actuarial tables that insurance companies use when working out our insurance premiums – they cannot cover all cases, but are amenable to analysis. My real worry is “AI” which is really sophisticated pattern-matching. The problem here is the validity of the data on which the AI is trained, and the impossibility of ensuring that there are no cases where it will get things horribly wrong.
When combined with a “mothership” approach where the AI models are centrally derived, that creates potential for arbitrary action on the part of the tech companies. And when that is combined with an ad-based business model – where the company makes money by keeping people hooked on 3rd party content mediated by their platform – top management will do what it takes to maximize their revenue.
Other key characteristics of companies which could become a problem are the dependence of their business on network effects – e.g. Microsoft’s unfair competition in the 1990s – or a rental model. In the latter case IBM and Xerox are the elder gorillas and masters of lock-in by leasing. You may remember the saying “nobody got fired for buying IBM” (equipment).
With the chip businesses I think we are okay, since the dominance of x86 was broken by ARM. And even in the x86 years, the software compatibility between Intel and AMD kept competition alive. And once hardware is bought, it stays working (unless it relies on a mothership for updates…).
Although some tech giants have been allowed to concentrate power by purchasing rival platforms – Facebook is the case in point – and should be broken up, there is a historical example that might still be applicable.
Now maybe it’s just showing my age, but I still think the best way of controlling the baser instincts of tech companies is through open systems: standardized interfaces.
Standards make it possible for customers to change tech providers because you don’t have to change everything. Intel vs AMD is a case in point – if Intel had managed to copyright the x86 instruction set, it would be very hard for customers to change to PCs with AMD CPUs now that they are the better performing option.
Maybe it is necessary for there to be banging together of tech companies’ heads and that regulators should drive the creation of standards for interoperability of social-media platforms and mandate their use. The goal would be to make it impossible for a person’s social connectivity to be owned by any one platform.
Could this work? I don’t know, because the successes that I’m aware of are mostly dependent on leveraging government funds – for example standardization of the underlying Internet protocols.
The problem is that for this to work there need to be viable competitors to the dominant tech companies, and in social media these all seem to be Chinese companies… not exactly free from government control. And the Western companies with advertising-based business models are not dependent on government funding.
Fascinating debate. It’s nice to have found Unherd, where an intelligent civilised debate can be had BTL instead of the usual politically oriented dingdong.
Your stances are pretty similar to ones I held until about a decade ago. Since then I have slowly gone full-fat techno Cassandra, and by now I hold some pretty odd (but entirely apolitical) high level views about the nature of both tech and biotech (stuff like CRISPR which I follow avidly) – and where they are taking humanity in short order.
I certainly agree that the global approaches to AI are wonky as they stand and pose uncharted dangers. Especially when married to Ad driven business models. Not the non tecchy concerns of suddenly emergent malignant sentient AI, but some odd variants on that theme. However, I no longer believe humanity as a whole has much agency to change direction – regardless of political systems and individual human decisions – which will sound bonkers but still.
The ideas you mentioned around preventing any single company from amassing all data and all connectivity for individuals – in essence the reverse of what the Chinese are forced into via WeChat through government diktat – can work as a slowing down mechanism, but ultimately I believe is still a lost cause. The more I look at the nature of data and information, the more I’m convinced that the innate nature of *all* information is that it will proliferate over time and space. The likes of Napster etc have been suppressed for now because the tech giants own the wires and servers through which all data must traverse, but this is not a winnable fight in the long run. To illustrate in practical terms, there is already pretty much no digital asset, piece of music, or book, or newspaper content, or algorithm, etc, I cannot get a hold of without paying for it if I so choose. So the fact that people are paying Apple and Netflix etc to rent content will come under pressure as a model, because I feel it is fragile even though the companies are seemingly uber powerful.
Wondering whether to open out this debate further here or wait for a more appropriate tecchy main piece – I feel I’m squatting in the BTL space of a piece about a different debate.
You have some interesting ideas there, and write well – why not submit an article to Unherd?
So I’ll just offer a few more thoughts…
The only “saving grace” so far in the history of technology is that it keeps changing. So companies that have become dominant stagnate while trying to keep their customers attached to the one thing that they do well. They try to suppress new technologies that threaten their seemingly captive market – by strengthening lock-in and/or buying out the rising competitors. Or thinking they can feed their captive audience a half-baked imitation of the perceived threat (PCs with a touch screen, GPUs with an x86 instruction set, etc.).
That blinkered thinking ultimately results in some other company bringing the successor tech to market. And with rapid replacement cycles, consumers are willing to jump ship when they buy new gear. BUT that doesn’t help in the case of services.
So, what’s going to happen with the service-based companies as they grow and ultimately stagnate? On the positive side, social media is generational so there is the possibility of a successor that appeals to the next generation. But with Facebook having been allowed to buy Instagram, that opportunity has been lost. Perhaps forced unbundling will be necessary?
I’m also concerned by the end of Dennard scaling, and the coming end of Moore’s law. The hardware isn’t getting better and faster at the rate it used to, reducing the frequency with which customers re-evaluate their choice of tech.
A purely selfish question: how do I go about getting all that free stuff you mention? Books, for example, or newspaper content that’s behind a paywall.
Ok. I (mostly) pay for legit copies because authors should get a return on their work. So this discussion is purely for journalistic investigative purposes. Lets take books (non technical ones) as a starter. If I post instructions and sites here, Disqus will undoubtedly take the comment down, possibly even ban me. There are many, many sources. In the next post I will post a link to one example site (Russian I believe). Let’s see if the comment survives.
You simply are unaware of the tools. They exist in a world that few bother to study. The torrent world is one as is Usenet (research them) but there are pitfalls and cautions to be observed. Regarding paywalls, my local library provides me access to most news sites. Perhaps less convenient and not all libraries provide access but it works for me. There exists a deeper web (dark web) that requires some technical skill that I hesitate to even discuss but you can research.
…and it looks like the moderators whacked it.
News content with simple add-ons that come with browsers like Firefox, books – google the last letter of the alphabet with the word library.
It was all so predictable. From the moment he started his electoral campaign words like impeachment were being banded about even before he was elected. The biggest fear is that some of his accusations about the voting system come out into the open and the it will be tighten your seat belts is this going to be one heck of a ride or what? He gave an ignored area of the population a chance to dream and have hope and a belief in their country. He did not say attack Washington he said march to Washington. Was he undermined with outside forces taking advantage of the situation. The truth will always out and a lot of friends in America have concerns on either side of the political divide about the way this whole election process hs been handled by everybody. Lets hope that it is not going to come out and bite all the political classes very hard in the fanny. If it does the sticky and smelly will really hit the fan
“Conventional politics tries to do this in a rational, even scientific, manner. Messages are tested by focus group and opinion poll.”
Surely the reliance on focus groups was the first step into the world of postmodern politics. It meant that political parties started deciding policies on the basis that they were popular, rather than proposing what they thought to be right, prudent or plausible and tried to persuade voters to think likewise.
Yep. I’ve been saying for four years he’s the first millennial president. Which means in about twenty or thirty years we’ll have this nightmare all over again. I smoke, so hopefully I won’t have to live through it again. but the rest of you should learn as much as you can from this in preparation.
People have always called Trump a “liar” when he is not. He is something worse for a politician to be — he is a bullshitter. Matthew Yglesias explained this in term of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit in early 2017. (https://www.vox.com/policy-…
Yglesias said essentially what Mr. Franklin writes above.
This article makes a critical insight, one that I have been wrestling to clarify ever since Donald Trump turned the Republican presidential nomination process on its head. As a conservative living in California, I have become somewhat accustomed to political cognitive dissonance. It’s in the water here ( what little of that we have ). But Trump was in another league altogether. Neither fish nor foul, I couldn’t understand him, even if, like many conservatives, I sought for a political alternative to the utter madness on the left and its public face, the Democrat Party ( which is anything but democratic ).
Now, thanks to Peter Franklin, I know the answer. Different category. Of course! It was staring me in the face all along. It was just too weird to accept. My little gray cells couldn’t process the contradictions this man posed to my previous experience of reality. Now – as Jonah Goldberg would say – it’s “incandescently obvious”. Thanks, Peter!