In 2019 Carole Cadwalladr gave a TED talk that broke from their tradition of glowing techno-optimism. She told the world about the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. She was met with a lot of anger, and she got sued.
Now she's back with a talk about the "digital coup" in the US. I'll just quote a lot of the transcript. The whole transcript is here:
broligarchy.substack.com/p/spe…
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I have a lot of emotions about coming here. And TED, also, I suspect, is feeling them too. But what actually I finally realized yesterday is that the denial and the confusion that I've been feeling is maybe what you're feeling, too.
I felt powerless for a really long time. So if that's what you're feeling, I get it. But we have to act now. My alarm system is ringing again. There are things that we can do. In my case, I survived. And you will too. But it's by learning how to fight back. This is my guide, and it has to start with naming it. It's a coup.
I know you probably don't want to hear that, and especially here, but we can’t fight it if we can’t see it. And we can’t see it if we don’t name it.
The Russian and American presidents are now speaking the same words. They are telling the same lies. We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time. And this is just the start.
Coups are like concrete. When they stop moving, they set. It is already later than we think.
(1/n)
youtube.com/watch?v=TZOoT8AbkN…
Speaking truth to tech gods: I return to TED
Six years ago I was sued for libel. This time, I call Silicon Valley collaborators and data rapists. What could possibly go wrong?Carole Cadwalladr (How to Survive the Broligarchy)
John Carlos Baez
in reply to John Carlos Baez • • •[Photo of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk et al looking uncomfortable at Trump's inauguation.]
This image, some of you in this room might know these people. I call it tech bros in hostage situations. It's a message to you. This is Putin's playbook. He allows a business elite to make untold riches in exchange for absolute loyalty.
Some people are calling this oligarchy, but it's actually bigger than that. These are global platforms. It's broligarchy.
There is an alignment of interests that runs through Silicon Valley to what is now a coming autocracy. It's a type of power that the world has never seen before.
Follow the data. It's always the data. It's the crack cocaine of Silicon Valley. You know, the first thing that Elon Musk did was to send his cyber troops into the US Treasury to get access to the data. That is not a coincidence. It's a hack. That data is now feeding AIs that are choosing who to sack and who to replace - Sorry -- eliminate fraud and waste.
When we broke the Cambridge Analytica story about the harvesting of 87 million people’s Facebook data, people freaked out, rightly. That is chicken feed compared to this. But it is the blueprint. It's always the data. Which is why it's so important that you start thinking about your private life. The broligarchy doesn't want you to have one.
This is the old headquarters of the East German secret police. They kept detailed files on almost one in three of their citizens. That is nothing compared to what Google has on every single one of us, and hundreds of other companies.
(2/n)
John Carlos Baez
in reply to John Carlos Baez • • •The entire business model of Silicon Valley is surveillance. It harvests our data in order to sell us stuff. We are already living inside the architecture of totalitarianism. It may not have been deliberate, but we now have to start acting as if we live in East Germany, and Instagram is the Stasi.
Politics is downstream from culture. So I actually learned this from somebody who I think of as one of the great philosophers of our age, Steve Bannon. He actually stole it from somebody else. But it's not politicians who have the power. He knows that. It's why he's a podcast bro, these days. But culture now is just what's next on your phone. And that's AI. Culture is AI now.
And forget the killer robots. If you want to know what the first great AI apocalypse is, we're already living it. It's total information collapse. And if you take one thing only away from this talk, it's politics is technology now. And that's why everybody in this room, you can't look away. It's why your CEOs have been taken captive and are paraded on TV like hostages. But you, you have a choice.
So Trump, he calls the press the enemies of the people. And he probably doesn't even know that he's quoting Stalin. So what happened to me is a playbook, and it's now coming for all sorts of other people. It was actually a friend of this guy who came after me. This is Nigel Farage. He's a Brexit funder.
[Carole Cadwalladr was sued for libel by Arron Banks, co-founder of the "Lean EU" Brexit campaign. She had said he lied about "his relationship with the Russian government". The courts agreed with this, but still say she owes damages and £1m in costs.]
(3/n)
John Carlos Baez
in reply to John Carlos Baez • • •I'm not going to go super into the details. But 19 press-freedom organizations called the lawsuit against me a SLAPP. That means it’s a Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. A really long-winded way of saying it's using law as a weapon to shut people up. Not just journalists, but other public people, too. And it works.
I just wanted to tell you about one aspect of the litigation, which I found terrifying. And that was the data harvesting. There's this quote you may know, it's Cardinal Richelieu:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
In my case, the first forensic searches of my phone and laptop yielded 40,000 pieces of data. It was my messages, my emails, my voice memos, my personal life. And the whole thing about this: the attack which came for me, was really personal. Because the thing about this litigation is only one part of the playbook. It was also this sort of massive online campaign of abuse, which is just day after day, after day, after day. Because my most unforgivable crime was reporting while female. It was a digital witch burning.
And I believe that this man came after me personally, not at "The Guardian" and not TED, it was because I looked like the weakest link. But he was wrong.
30,000 people rose up to support me. They contributed almost a million pounds to a legal defense fund. Because they saw a bully trying to crush me, and they would not let it stand.
(4/n)
Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm)
in reply to John Carlos Baez • • •She sounds great. Anybody know if there is a full transcript?
I really don’t like processing these kind of ideas through video.