Antimony Demonstrates The Physical Demands Of Roller Derby

Or perhaps irony is not the right word to capture the difference between the freedom-loving Clinton of a decade ago and the pro-censorship activist of today, but it gets at what appears to be the about-face done by a class of people who were public standard-bearers for radically different ideas barely 10 years earlier. These people—politicians, first and foremost—saw (and presented) internet freedom as a positive force for humanity when it empowered them and served their interests, but as something demonic when it broke down those hierarchies of power and benefited their opponents. That’s how to bridge the gap between the Hillary Clinton of 2013 and the Clinton of 2023: Both see the internet as an immensely powerful tool for driving political processes and effecting regime change.

Which is why, in the Clinton and Obama worlds, the rise of Donald Trump looked like a profound betrayal—because, as they saw it, Silicon Valley could have stopped it but didn’t. As heads of the government’s internet policy, they had helped the tech companies build their fortunes on mass surveillance and evangelized the internet as a beacon of freedom and progress while turning a blind eye to their flagrant violations of antitrust statutes. In return, the tech companies had done the unthinkable—not because they had allowed Russia to “hack the election,” which was a desperate accusation thrown out to mask the stench of failure, but because they refused to intervene to prevent Donald Trump from winning.

In his book Who Owns the Future?, tech pioneer Jaron Lanier writes, “The primary business of digital networking has come to be the creation of ultra-secret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this information to concentrate money and power.” Because digital economies produce ever-greater concentrations of data and power, the inevitable happened: The tech companies got too powerful.

What could the leaders of the ruling party do? They had two options. They could use the government’s regulatory power to counter-attack: Break up the data monopolies and restructure the social contract underwriting the internet so that individuals retained ownership of their data instead of having it ripped off every time they clicked into a public commons. Or, they could preserve the tech companies’ power while forcing them to drop the pretense of neutrality and instead line up behind the ruling party—a tempting prospect, given what they could do with all that power.

They chose option B.

Declaring the platforms guilty of electing Trump—a candidate every bit as loathsome to the highly educated elites in Silicon Valley as he was to the highly educated elites in New York and D.C.—provided the club that the media and the political class used to beat the tech companies into becoming more powerful and more obedient.