Saturday Commentary and Review #130

EU's Anti-Free Speech DSA Law, The "Diversity Myth", Orkney Islands Separatism?, African-American Ethnogenesis?, humdog, the First Internet Pessimist

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

Sometimes you actually do “gotta hand it to them”. In this case, the handing over goes to the United States of America, specifically its First Amendment which protects the right of free speech for all Americans.

Even though this right is presently under attack through a coalition of government, Big Tech, media, NGOs, and big money people, the First Amendment is an ICBM in the hands of the people seeking to defend themselves from these same attacks. Those of us in Europe should be envious of what the Americans have, because we here do not have the same protections that they do, meaning that our right to express ourselves freely is much more tenuous than theirs.

On August 25th of this year, the Digital Services Act (DSA) comes into effect in the European Union. It is a “regulation to update the Electronic Commerce Directive 2000 regarding illegal content, transparent advertising, and disinformation”. Naturally, the EU and its relevant bodies will decide for us what constitutes “disinformation”, meaning that they will act as both prosecutor and jury. They are asking us to trust them, and support their self-appointed monopoly on what constitutes ‘truth’. Suffice it to say, ‘truth’ will be whatever keeps them in their positions and promotes their interests.

Nick Corbishley digs into the DSA to give us a look at some of the details of what to expect:

Next month, a little-known development will occur that could end up having huge repercussions for the nature of public discourse on the Internet all over the planet. August 25, 2023 is the date by which big social media platforms will have to begin fully complying with the European Union’s Digital Services Act, or DSA. The DSA, among many other things, obliges all “Very Large Online Platforms”, or VLOPs, to speedily remove illegal content, hate speech and so-called disinformation from their platforms. If not, they risk fines of up to 6% of their annual global revenue.

The Commission has so far compiled a list of 19 VLOPs and VLOSEs (Very Large Online Search Engines), most of them from the US, that will have to begin complying with the DSA in 50 days’ time:

• Alibaba AliExpress

• Amazon Store

• Apple AppStore

• Booking.com

• Facebook

• Google Play

• Google Maps

• Google Shopping

• Instagram

• LinkedIn

• Pinterest

• Snapchat

• TikTok

• Twitter

• Wikipedia

• YouTube

• Zalando

Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs):

• Bing

• Google Search

Smaller platforms will have to begin tackling illegal content, hate speech and disinformation from 2024 onwards, assuming the legislation is effective.

Ominously, as Robert Kogon reports for Brownstone.org (granted, not the most popular source of information on NC, but it’s a good, well researched piece), the DSA “includes a ‘crisis response mechanism’ (Art. 36) that is clearly modeled on the European Commission’s initially ad hoc response to the conflict in Ukraine and which requires platforms to adopt measures to mitigate crisis-related ‘misinformation.'”

In a speech in early June, EU Vice-President for Values and Transparency, Věra Jourová, made it crystal clear which country is the current prime target of the EU’s censorship agenda (no points for guessing):

Cooperation among signatories and the high number of new organisations willing to sign the new Code of Practice show that it has become an effective and dynamic instrument to fight disinformation. However, progress remains too slow on crucial aspects, especially when it comes to dealing with pro-Kremlin war propaganda or independent access to data…

As we prepare for the 2024 EU elections, I call on platforms to increase their efforts in fighting disinformation and address Russian information manipulation, and this in all Member States and languages, whether big or small.

My Substack is not a VLOP (Very Large Online Platform), but I could be subject to these new rules at some point next year. If this is the case, I will have to be more guarded in what I say, while leaving enough room for everyone here to read between the lines to understand what it is that I am actually saying. Let’s hope that it does not get to that point.

Twitter has been publicly threatened by the EU already:

The EU is offering tech companies little in the way of wiggle room. When Twitter withdrew from the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation in late May, the EU’s Internal Market Commissioner, Thierry Breton, issued a fiery reprimand as well as an unveiled threat — on Twitter of all places:

Jourová also laid into Twitter, saying the platform had mistakenly chosen the path of “confrontation.”

Days later, Breton announced he was visiting Silicon Valley to “stress test” US tech giants, including Twitter, to see how well prepared they are for the launch of the Digital Services Act on August 25. Calling himself the “enforcer”, serving the “will of the state and the people” (as if the two were the same things), Breton remind tech platforms that the EU’s DSA would transform its code of practice on mis- and disinformation into a code of conduct. From Politico:

“We are going there, but don’t want to be vocal before because I don’t want to speak too much. But we offer this and I’m happy that some platforms took our proposal,” Breton said of the non-binding compliance checks. “I am the enforcer. I represent the law, which is the will of the state and the people.”

“It’s a voluntary basis, so we don’t force anyone” to join the code of practice on disinformation, Breton said. “I just reminded (Musk and Twitter) that by August 25, it will become a legal obligation to fight disinformation.”

“To fight disinformation”, so long as the disinformation doesn’t come from the EU, one the world’s leading practitioners of disinformation. This law is the reassertion of narrative control by a governmental body at the expense of its own people who will be subject to said controls.

Crime and Punishment:

Moreover, some Twitter users recently received notices informing them that they are not eligible to participate in Twitter Ads because their account has been labelled “organic misinformation.” As Kogon asks: “Why in the world would Twitter turn away advertising business?”:

The answer is simple and straightforward: because none other than the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation requires it to do so in connection with the so-called “demonetization of disinformation.”

Ultimately, Kogon notes, once the DSA comes into full effect, in 50 days’ time, if Elon Musk stays true to his word on freedom of speech and chooses to defy the EU’s “permanent task force on disinformation”, the Commission will mobilise the entire arsenal of punitive measures at its disposal, in particular the threat or application of fines of 6% of the company’s global turnover. In other words, the only way for Twitter to actually defy the EU is to leave the EU.

Who decides what is mis- or disinformation?

The ultimate decider of what constitutes mis- or dis-information, possibly not just in the EU but across multiple jurisdictions around the world (more on that later), will be the European Commission. That’s right, the EU’s power-hungry, conflict-of-interest-riddled, Von der Leyen-led executive branch. The same institution that is in the process of dynamiting the EU’s economic future through its endless backfiring sanctions on Russia and which is mired in Pfizergate, one of the biggest corruption scandals of its 64-year existence. Now the Commission wants to take mass censorship to levels not seen in Europe since at least the dying days of the Cold War.

In this task the Commission will have, in its own words, “enforcement powers similar to those it has under anti-trust proceedings,” adding that “an EU-wide cooperation mechanism will be established between national regulators and the Commission.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) broadly supports many aspects of the DSA, including the protections it provides on user rights to privacy by prohibiting platforms from undertaking targeted advertising based on sensitive user information, such as sexual orientation or ethnicity. “More broadly, the DSA increases the transparency about the ads users see on their feeds as platforms must place a clear label on every ad, with information about the buyer of the ad and other details.” It also “reins in the powers of Big Tech” by forcing them to “comply with far-reaching obligations and responsibly tackle systemic risks and abuse on their platform.”

But even the EFF warns that the new law “provides a fast-track procedure for law enforcement authorities to take on the role of ‘trusted flaggers’ and uncover data about anonymous speakers and remove allegedly illegal content – which platforms become obligated to remove quickly.” The EFF also raises concerns about the dangers posed by the Commission’s starring role in all of this:

Issues with government involvement in content moderation are pervasive and whilst trusted flaggers are not new, the DSA’s system could have a significant negative impact on the rights of users, in particular that of privacy and free speech.

The fear of contagion beyond the EU:

In other words, the legal environment for free speech is set to become even more hostile in Europe. And possibly not just Europe. As Norman Lewis writes for the British online news website Spiked, the DSA will not only force the regulation of content on the Internet, but could also become a global standard, not just a European one:

In recent years, the EU has largely realised its ambition to become a global regulatory superpower. The EU can dictate how any company worldwide must behave if it wants to operate in Europe, the world’s second-largest market. As a result, its strict regulatory standards often end up being adopted worldwide by both firms and other regulators, in what is known as the ‘Brussels effect’. Take the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a privacy law which came into force in May 2018. Among many other things, it requires individuals to give explicit consent before their data can be processed. These EU regulations have since become the global standard, and the same could now happen for the DSA.

The GDPR is not the only EU regulation that has gone global. A few weeks ago, the World Health Organization announced that it will be adopting the EU’s expiring digital vaccine passport as a global standard, as we warned would happen over a year ago.

Of course, when it comes to mass digital censorship Washington is on a similar path to the EU (albeit in the face of stiffer public and judicial resistance). So too is the UK government, which was recently ranked in the third tier of the Index on Censorship, behind countries such as Chile, Jamaica, Israel and virtually all other western European states, due to the “chilling effect” of government policies and the policing, intimidation and, in the case of Julian Assange, imprisonment of journalists.

If approved by the House of Lords, the Online Safety Bill would give telecoms regulator Ofcom the power to force chat app makers and social media companies to monitor conversations and posts before they are sent for what is permissible to say and send and what is not. It will essentially put an end to end-to-end encryption, which allows only the senders and recipients of a message to access the human-readable form of the content.

The people are not to be trusted with how they communicate with one another, because it could threaten state and corporate media-driven narratives.

Free Speech has got to go because it is a ‘threat’ to our existence.

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I’ve written at length on the subject of “Wokeness” here on this Substack, a topic that all of you are very familiar with already. I’ve explained how its 1980s predecessor, “Political Correctness”, failed, as it was rejected wholesale by people in the West.

Even though it was rejected, it was not defeated. PCism simply retreated to lick its wounds and bide its time. By 2012, it had loudly roared to announce its return to the scene, stronger than it ever was. This time, mockery and derision did not manage to scare it off. Instead, its tenets were adopted by elite institutions, codified into law, absorbed by big business, and spread globally through US diplomacy and soft power.

This incredible comeback has taken millions of people by surprise, especially because what it often promotes seems so antithetical to what the USA is about, particularly with respect to how it has succeeded over time. Intelligent people will argue that it cannot last, because it contains detrimental effects that will bring down society and the country as a whole, whether through collapsing social mores, blockages in productivity, declined ability in performance (think US military), and so on. To these types, failure is baked into the cake.

Billionaire Peter Thiel was witness to the first iteration of Wokeness when he was studying at Stanford in the late 80s and early 90s, and was less than impressed with what he saw. So opposed was he to what he was witnessing that he co-wrote an entire book entitled “The Diversity Myth”. Over time, Thiel realized that pointing out “self-evident” idiocy did not work to defeat this significant cultural (and later, political) shift. This past April he spoke at a gala where he revisited his book, putting it into the current context.

Assumption:

You would present these kinds of arguments, the idea went, and that would somehow be enough to win the debate. You just speak the truth to power, and it will unravel the whole mess.

Many involved in the debates surrounding “Wokeness”today fall into this exact same trap. What sounds absolutely logical and self-evident to these types fails when applied. Logic and reason are simply not enough to stop this speeding train. Facts get run over by feelings, Mr. Shapiro.

Realization:

When I look back on The Diversity Myth, almost three decades later, I still think that almost every point we made was right. There’s very little that’s wrong, which is both gratifying and depressing. Simply being right about particular issues—and all of you here who have been fighting these battles for decades know this—hasn’t made a dent in the broader diversity agenda. Back then, “multiculturalism” was the catchall term for this baggy, monstrous ideology; today, it calls itself “woke” and fights for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The problem has only metastasized. We did not make a difference. Is there something that we missed altogether in this debate? What is really going on?

It’s not real, but we pretend that it is:

There’s no real multiculturalism; it’s monocultural. The agenda is not non-Western; it’s anti-Western. At Stanford, for instance, multicultural initiatives were funded by slashing the budgets of the university’s foreign-language departments. You don’t have diversity when you gather people who look different but talk and think alike. It’s not enough to hire the extras from the space-cantina scene in Star Wars.

But there was always a secondary meaning to the title, in which you put the stress on the word “myth.” Rather than dismiss “diversity” out of hand, let’s just accept that we have no idea what it means. It’s like a shibboleth, some kind of idol or false god that our society worships. It’s extraordinarily hard to pin down—in fact, the Stanford administrators tasked with defining “multiculturalism” in the 1990s did so in the vaguest terms imaginable, as if protecting cult mysteries. What is clear is that we are encamped at the altar of diversity, venerating and honoring it as the highest thing.

Cui bono?

My second candidate theory—and this is where I have some sympathies with Marxist and Randian types—amounts to an economically reductionist line of questioning. It’s the classic cui bono: Who’s actually benefiting from this stuff? How does it all play out? An old-school Marxist critique of what we call “cultural Marxism” would say that all these identity politics, the whole diversity agenda, has only served to divide the working class. People are supposed to focus on their real economic interests, and they’ve been diverted into all these other questions. So from a classically Marxist point of view, dei initiatives are a fundamentally reactionary form of politics. A historian might point out that, since the diversity agenda took off in the 1970s, it has coincided with a massive increase in inequality in this country. Correlation, of course, doesn’t prove causation. But were they somehow linked?

And if we drill a little deeper, we might conclude that inequality in the United States has largely been driven by real-estate interests and corrupt land-use agreements—in short, mismanaged cities of one sort or another. If urban slumlords have benefited from citywide diversity initiatives to the tune of trillions of dollars, shouldn’t the Marxists be asking questions about how it all worked out?

The University system as a real estate racket:

In the university context, such an inquiry might explore why student debt has gone up from $300 billion in 2000 to $2 trillion today. The cop-out answer is that the $2 trillion of student debt went to pay for $2 trillion worth of lies about how great education is. In my view this reading is too generous. How much of that $2 trillion actually went to education as opposed to room and board? If you analyze the universities in economic terms, you might even conclude that the dorms and residences are the profit center driving an elaborate real-estate racket. And this is not to mention the web of offices and administrators tasked with overseeing not education but “student life.” Scale this model up, and you begin to understand why it’s so hard to exist outside of a big city in the United States—a vast country with swaths of empty space and lots of affordable housing—and why those deplorables who leave the reservation are viewed with such disdain.

Perversion:

That such considerations have been largely confined to remote corners of the internet gives you some sense of how our fixation on diversity has distracted us from a more pressing theological crisis. However we arrived at this point, the categories we started with are now all quite backwards. The progressive, theologically liberal types, backed by institutional support and intent on dispensing their vision of social justice, have come to resemble the nasty money-changers in the temple. And then the most regressive fundamentalists—stubbornly persisting in the belief that, well, yeah, everybody’s sort of guilty and everybody did some bad things in the past, but we have to forgive one another because otherwise we’re never going to move on—are spat upon like Samaritans.

You may not like Thiel for being a billionaire, or for what he has done with his wealth in terms of political donations, but he has accurately identified the battle as a theological one…one in which one side has a rabid religious faith in what they are pushing for and seeking, and the other confined to principles that can be used against them, reliant on argument and reason, lacking the fanaticism of their opponents.

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Outside of possibly Poland, Europe as a whole is sick. A continent now locked into self-chosen decline due to inertia, ineptitude, and stupidity, a general malaise has set in.

Nowhere is this malaise more pronounced than in the UK. The feeling of decline is possibly the only one that is shared across the political divide. If Europe is sick, the UK is the very sick man of Europe.

No one wants to be around sickness if they can help it. The Scots keep trying to secede from the United Kingdom, the question of Irish unity spanning all 32 counties is getting louder, and even the far off Orkney Islands are beginning to question their status within the Kingdom as well:

This stunningly beautiful archipelago off the north-easternmost tip of Scotland is also supposed to be the “happiest place in Britain”. And yet all is not well. On Tuesday, with a show of a dozen or so hands, the islands’ local council gave its support for “alternative forms of governance”, which could reframe its relationship with Westminster in line with crown dependencies such as Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, or overseas territories like the Falklands. It could attempt to go even further, declaring its independence and reviving its historic links with Norway to becoming a self-governing territory, like the Faroe Islands, an autonomous region of Denmark.

This is all very preliminary, but it does raise interesting questions.

Reasons for the disgruntlement with Westminster and Holyrood are various, but include under-subsidised ferry fares, a miserly dividend from four decades of North Sea oil exploration and underinvestment by central governments into potentially lucrative wind power projects. As Scotland’s smallest council, it also receives hundreds of pounds less per person than the others.

The above paragraph gives the game away, as sending more money to the islands would shut them up fast. Let’s hear him out anyway:

Certainly, Orkney — and Shetland to its north — is distinct from the rest of the United Kingdom. Geographically closer to Oslo than Edinburgh, the islands retain a strong Nordic character, even though they were last under Norwegian and Danish control in 1472. And life on the archipelago certainly has its upsides. It has good schools, affordable houses, clean air and abundance of space, but its winning edge is a form of Scandinavian communitarianism that instils a profound sense of safety and social trust among its 23,000 residents.

and

It is a quirk of medieval history that the Orkneys — for centuries, a central hinge in a Nordic chain linking Scandinavia with Iceland and Greenland — ever found themselves to be a peripheral province of Scotland. Last month, while raising the prospect of greater autonomy, financial security and economic opportunity for his islands, James Stockan, leader of the Orkney Island Council, noted that “we were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom”. And Stockan believes the islands are being “failed dreadfully”. He recently told BBC Scotland: “The funding we get from the Scottish government is significantly less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles to run the same services — we can’t go on as we are.”

The Orkneys are far, far out in the periphery. This is another data point in how centre vs. periphery shapes much of our political debate in the West these days. Think Coast vs. Flyover Country in the USA, or Paris vs. the Rest of France.

An independent Scotland as an opportunity for Orcadians to go their own way?

While it is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which Orkney would be permitted to leave — only last week, the Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman said: “There is no mechanism for the conferral of crown dependency or overseas territory status on any part of the UK” — an exit from a newly independent Scotland would seem much more promising. After all, if arguments of history and self-determination are ever to grant independence to Scotland, the very same would apply to Orkney. And this is where an even more practical issue would emerge: resources. A fledgling independent Scotland would struggle to balance its budget. Indeed, it may even be uncertain of how to pay its pensions — and in what currency? Without the unwarranted fiscal largesse of the Barnett formula, used to calculate the overall level of funding allocated by the UK Treasury to devolved governments, so-called “Highland economics” would be brutally applied by Holyrood.

It is in these circumstances that the prospect of self-governing status, similar to that enjoyed by the Faroe Islands, might suddenly suit Orkney very nicely. Who wouldn’t wish to be part of a Norwegian state that boasts a $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund?

Food for thought.

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The last African slave brought to the USA was in 1804, meaning that ADOS (American Descendants of Slaves) have had at least two centuries of ancestors on American soil.

Black Americans (ADOS, not the newer ones) are, in my contention, as American as it gets. They were forcibly brought as slaves to a new land, stripped of their names, their beliefs, and often separated from their families. Reduced to nothing, they had to create new identities from scratch. These new identities were birthed on a new continent, in a new context, one that was wholly American.

For obvious reasons, they were never “truly American”. Slavery, Jim Crow/segregation, and so on, meant that they were apart from White America. Of America, but still different. These same differences persist to this day.

All attempts seeking Black self-rule have failed, whether due to incompetence, disinterest, lack of resources, or the heavy hand of the US Government. In the 1960s, a path was cleared towards integration, with MLK’s vision winning out over Malcolm X’s calls for self-rule. Integration has made inroads in many places, but it has utterly failed to fuse White and Black America into one shared national consciousness.

A question that many of us have been raising for years stems from the migrant tides flooding the USA legally or illegally: what will be the position of Blacks in the USA in a multiracial America, one with immigrant groups from every inhabited continent? Can they carve out a “safe space” of their own?

Charleston Nabob visited the recently-opened International African American Museum in South Carolina to ponder this question:

I was initially confused by the name of the museum: what is an International African American? I was raised in a small town in Virginia and had few black classmates at school, fewer at my church. I was taught to call them black, then African American, and am now to address them once again as black. But it dawned on me there, a revelation, that I am witness to an ethnogenesis of peoples not just here in the States but who span the Western Hemisphere, tucked in by Monroe into our half of creation. There are Brazilian dancers flashing around the screen as messages blare across of the cultural victory now won by the diaspora. “The diaspora is connected,” the screen tells me, “The diaspora is Pan-African,” I learn.

more

I walk to the eastern end of the museum, towards the river. This area is called the “South Carolina Connections” exhibit. There is a wide screen. This one shows a repeating video of black triumphs and despair in their new homes. There is a particular emphasis on the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue. The video tells how blacks were exploited for their knowledge of rice cultivation in South Carolina. Windrush is brought up — again, this is the International African American Museum. They boldly proclaim the Windrush immigrants changed the demographics of the United Kingdom.

In a glass case is a Mardi Gras masquerading suit. Bright green feathers make up most of it, but on its center is a harder material with images of various African men and women. There is the last king of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, depicted in regal fashion. See, he is now part of the diaspora known as African American.

A global racial category as a primary location of self-identification? This would be the ultimate Americanization of the world; the entire Earth interpreted through domestic US politics and history.

An interesting observation:

Why here? Perhaps to poke the eye of history? To say this city, once the wealthiest in the Western Hemisphere, is actually the birthplace of a greater people, a diaspora so powerful it spans the globe and makes everywhere it goes better than it was before. This diaspora arrives then resists injustice that preceded arrival, that was always there — they are some kind of expeditionary force, bringing equality wherever they go. Without them, you are backward. With them, you are ascendant on a higher moral plane.

Think back to this essay that I wrote last week about the Americanization of French politics and society when it comes to race and it all makes sense.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a look at “humdog”, the first Internet Pessimist:

Carmen Hermosillo, better known as humdog, is the patron saint of online communities, and of all of us whose lives have been mediated by a screen. Or she should be, anyway. The grand original promise of the Internet was that it would finally shrink the world down to a utopian “global village”:

when i went into cyberspace i went into it thinking that it was a place like any other place and that it would be a human interaction like any other human interaction. i was wrong when i thought that. it was a terrible mistake.

This is the opening of humdog’s 1994 essay “pandora’s vox: on community in cyberspace,” which stands out in early Internet writing as both unusually prescient and unusually cynical.

Humdog, according to cyberspace pioneers and commenters Peter Ludlow and Mark Stephen Meadows, called b.s. on the “official dogma” of early virtual communities. No, they write of humdog’s early writing, digital connectivity wouldn’t usher in a “utopia of virtual barn raisings, thoughtful online salons, and democratic town hall meetings.” The Internet, as humdog saw it, was a capitalist hellhole. She’d go on to describe it as little more than a factory for self-commodification — that is, it was a place where people became content, as opposed to where they went to forge authentic relationships with one another.

At the time, the essay caused a firestorm among a certain demographic. It was an insult to Silicon Valley hippies, to the then-nascent class of Internet culture reporters (though they weren’t called that then), and to Internet sociologists. And, importantly, it was an insult to the denizens of humdog’s own online village, the WELL, or the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, Stewart Brand’s conferencing system that is today widely called the oldest virtual community.

However, humdog’s cynicism didn’t come from an analytical distance; it was a reaction to her own experience. And it also isn’t the full picture: Her complete oeuvre suggests that at many times she was hopeful about digital connection. Not only did she see its possibility, but she also believed that she had experienced it herself. It was really because of the hope she had for her online life that it often caused her immense pain, and disillusionment.

Click here to read the rest of this interesting bit of internet history.

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