Found in the Gutter, 12 May 2019
The Sunday New York Times, Washington edition, is delivered to my house sometime before 7:00 a.m. most Sundays—a gross extravagance and ecologically catastrophic sin for which there can be no moral justification or atonement. Here are some things I gleaned from that paper, in all my decadent shame, ink-smudged and coffee’d up and unbothered by my children’s pleas for attention.
1. Maybe Facebook is bad
Print headline: It’s Time to Break Up Facebook
Where is it: Sunday Review, front
What is it: An op-ed by Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, that calls for the government to bring antitrust action against Facebook, and, at minimum, spin off WhatsApp and Instagram into distinct companies. He also believes that Congress should pass sweeping consumer data privacy legislation that makes explicit American’s right to control their data, and a mandate for a new federal agency to enforce the law.
Why is it: Because Facebook is too big, with too much power vested in its majority shareholder, and Americans / possibly earthlings are incapable of breaking up with Facebook themselves, even if we all know it’s for our own good.
The short of it: This damn essay takes up four newspaper pages! There is no short of it. Facebook, its Messenger program, Instagram, and WhatsApp represent an inescapable part of the internet ecosystem and economy. Zuckerberg has expressed and actuated a desire to “dominate,” snatching up innovative competitors or simply copying their most popular features in a bid to maintain and expand this dominance. Facebook’s size and appetite have eliminated the possibility of meaningful competition, and they should be broken up to allow for a more free market to flourish.
What matters: Breaking up Facebook is all well and good, but it won’t matter without some sort of a regulatory framework that includes something like a “Personal Data Bill of Rights.” Hughes makes this point, but it’s such a seemingly huge and impossible problem. The internet relies on data as its basic currency, and we’ve been giving it away for nothing for a generation, because we didn’t understand its actual value. Rejiggering the whole thing to reflect the value of that data to the individual is quite a task!
Picture this: Want to break up with Facebook? Great! Just click this, acknowledge that, and presto! Your FB account is deactivated. Further, Facebook has, in compliance with the Freedom to Own Your Data Act, emailed you a transferable data file, complete with all the information, photos, words, messages, and locations you’ve plugged into Facebook over the years. It also includes all the data compiled about you by Facebook as it built its secret profile of you that it used to turn you into a product to be consumed by data merchants, ad buyers, politicians, and whoever else FB was selling to. This is not just data, after all, but your unique digital identity, and the source of your economic power in the digital space, and it belongs to you. You are now free to take all that data and plug it into a FB competitor, maybe a paid subscription service that promises not to sell your data or feed you ads, or maybe another free service that monetizes your data for its own ends. Would you even need to break up Facebook if there was a law that did all that? I don’t know, but I doubt it. The market would correct on its own pretty quickly, I think.
The most important line of the whole piece, by this reading, is an under-explained throwaway that stands in for the above Herculean and possibly impossible task. “The agency should also be charged with guaranteeing basic interoperability across platforms.” Good luck!
2. FB is fine and good, actually, and you should definitely not break us up
The print headline: Breaking Up Facebook is Not the Answer
Where is it: Sunday Review, page 3, right in the middle of the above article
What is it: An official response from Facebook’s in-house PR flack, arguing that while more regulation is indeed needed, Facebook likes being a motherfucking unstoppable juggernaut just fine, thank you very much.
Why is it: I don’t know. I guess the editorial team thought they should give Facebook a chance to respond themselves, but it seems to me that if Facebook wants to respond, they can buy an ad, rather than get one printed for free, or post a status update just like the rest of us. “What’s on your mind, Facebook?” I’d be fine with a competing view posted in the section, but letting FB itself serve it up strikes me as kinda gross. Surely there were any number of unaffiliated bootlicking weirdos who’d have been happy to carry FB’s water in opposition to antitrust action.
A fun part:
While we operate under more regulation now than at any point the history of the company, we believe more should be done. Mark Zuckerberg was in Paris last week meeting with regulators and President Emmanuel Macron of France to discuss the impact of technology and the need for legislative solutions.
(…)
…We are in the unusual position of asking for more regulation, not less.
Toadie here is pointing out that because there were no rules at all back when Zuck made his first forays into the social media spaaaaace as a Hot or Not innovator and disruptor, things are actually pretty draconian these days, relatively speaking. (But we’re open to more!) Of course there are more regulations now than ever before, you dope! This whole industry didn’t even exist two decades ago. You’re not asking for more regulation, you’re hoping to write it, now that you’ve captured an overwhelming share of the market, and growing.
Toadie goes on to argue that despite the company’s billions of users, they’re no monopoly, but in truly very tough competition with, like, Pinterest and Yelp.
We are a large company made up of many smaller pieces. All of our products and services fight for customers. Each one has at least three or four competitors with hundreds of millions, if not billions, of users. In photo and video-sharing, we compete against services like YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest and TikTok, an emerging competitor.
(…)
The second misunderstanding is of antitrust law. These laws, developed in the 1800s, are not meant to punish a company because people disagree with its management.
“Management” in this case is Zuckerberg, the only person in the world who has any meaningful say on what Facebook does. Given the amount of power concentrated in this one person, it’s rather absurd to claim that an antitrust case would arise because some people disagree with “management.”
But Toadie saves the best for last, wrapping up by arguing that a broken-up Facebook wouldn’t have the resources to SAVE FUCKING DEMOCRACY.
Over the past two years we’ve focused heavily on blocking foreign adversaries from trying to influence democratic elections by using our platforms. We’ve done the same to protect against terrorism and hate speech and to better safeguard people’s data. And the resources that we will spend on security and safety this year alone will be more than our overall revenues at the time of our initial public offering in 2012. That would be pretty much impossible for a smaller company.
As ever, Facebook’s response to problems with Facebook is that what the world really needs is more fucking Facebook. If you break up Facebook, Putin’s troll army wins! We must allow Facebook to grow ever larger so that they can spend more of their revenues on…making sure that Facebook’s size and ubiquity isn’t weaponized against us.
The short of it: Facebook is arguing that the democracies of the world have an existential interest in Facebook remaining a dominant, ever-growing, unstoppable juggernaut. This piece of (free) sponsored content in the opinion pages has done a better job of convincing me that FB should be broken up than the one it was responding to ever could. Eat shit forever, Toadie.
3. What it means to be a man
The print headline: I Never Stopped to Think About Why I Idolized My Cousin — Until The Day He Tried to Kill Me
Where is it: The Magazine, cover story
What is it: A very long memoirish exploration of how the author believes the performance of traditional cultural expectations of masculinity are, ahh, bad.
Why is it: This dude’s cousin lost the thread one day and beat the ever-living shit out of him. The author makes a case that toxic masculinity is to blame, perhaps for his cousin’s violence and the author’s own husband-y and father-y and human-y failings as a result of his conceptions of what it means to “be a man,” though the phrase “toxic masculinity” does not actually appear in the essay.
A fun part:
I heard him shout, “What does ‘I’m all out’ mean?” I sputtered that I didn’t know. He screamed: “Are you fucking my wife? Are you selling drugs in my house?” I pleaded that I wasn’t, that I wouldn’t. I told him that I didn’t understand what was happening. I tried to raise my arms to block the punches, but they wouldn’t move. He battered every inch of my body from the shoulders to the hip. I shrieked that he was going to kill me. He didn’t answer. He kept pitching me around the room, pounding me with his hands, and when my body sailed into the main part of the garage, he followed and looked down as I curled into a ball. He crouched beside me, lobbing a fist into my head. I heard him grunt from the effort. I felt my skull ricochet off the concrete. He punched again and again, bouncing my head off the pavement like a ball. He was wearing himself out. The blows grew further apart. Finally, they stopped. He stood, and I watched him walk back to his workshop. He took a seat on the metal stool and began rubbing his palm against his forehead.
Is it my toxic masculinity that made me highlight the unexplained, merciless, violent beatdown as “a fun part?” Who can say!
What matters: I’m always so flummoxed by these sorts of pieces. I’m not about to deny that the weight of cultural expectation can have a negative impact on the actual behavior of actual human beings, but it never makes any sense to me when the subject recognizes their own behavior as abhorrent and directed at least in part by external forces and still finds themselves unable to do anything but blame the culture. Doing so posits the problem as so massive as to be cosmically intractable. This guy knew he was being a shitty husband and father, recognized his behavior as being caused by his culture-taught deeply ingrained feelings about what it means to “be a man,” and kept on doing those things. Maybe at the point that you have a meta-grasp on the narrative of your character’s motivations and behavior—that is to say, YOU—you have to take a little ownership of the situation, man! Or, maybe, the sort of self-examination that takes place in an essay like this is entirely meta-fictional, wallowing in hollow self-recrimination as a way to comment on the SOCIETY at large. Who can say!
The essay ends with the author wondering if he can offer his kids a better model of what it means to be a man. (“Oh, but sir, this essay is all the proof we need,” the audience gasps, wiping the author’s tears away.) “…and my boy needs, as all boys need, to begin thinking about how men fail. He needs to know what it means and does not mean to be a man, what the world will tell him it means and why he can’t believe it.” The problem is not what the world tells us about what it means to be a man, but that this dipshit has couched his entire essay in terms of the toxicity of how the culture constructs masculine identity, and then insists that the solution is another construct of male identity. It doesn’t mean anything to be a man—that’s your whole problem!
It is terrifying that this guy’s cousin might just be biologically incapable of controlling his anger and violence. It’s entirely likely that “the culture”—re: other people—feeds his natural shitty tendencies in destructive ways. But it’s all too convenient and comforting to imagine that we can track shitty human behavior back to an identifiable and fixable primary source, as though there’s something we could inject in the culture recipe that would give us better outcomes. The culture is just the accumulated and communicated behavior of all the people. What does it mean to be a man? Nothing, dipshit! Read to your kids.
4. We’re so fucked, FAKE NEWS Euro edition
The print headline: Hackers Sow Discord as Vote Looms in Europe
Where is it: Front page, below the fold, continued on page 8
What is it: An article about the efforts of Russia and other bad-faith actors to interfere in the vote for the European Parliament.
A fun part:
Russia dismisses accusations of meddling.
“The election has yet to come, and we are already suspected of doing something wrong?” the Russian prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said in March. “Suspecting someone of an event that has not yet happened is a bunch of paranoid nonsense.”
What a wonderfully absurd deflection! The elections haven’t even happened yet, how could we possibly interfere, you paranoid weirdos? Russia doesn’t even bother denying things, half the time.
Medvedev: Fake news and propaganda and trolling online to disrupt an election that hasn’t even happened yet? Why, that would require wizardry and time-traveling majiks! :: does wizard hands ::
Reporter: Um, wouldn’t it just require, like, an internet connection and the motivation to undermine the legitimacy of European democratic institutions?
Mededev: :: cackles maniacally, disappears in a puff of wizard smoke ::
The short of it: The cost-to-benefit ratio is so out of whack with these disinformation campaigns that it’s hard to imagine bad actors ever ceasing to act in this way. Every time a media outlet reports that a FAKE NEWS item was traced back to a Russian IP address, Russia wins another battle in the war on the legitimacy of all information and knowledge. Nothing is true, nothing is legitimate, and believing otherwise is a sign of your naivete and foolishness. Every time Facebook shuts down a bogus page for spreading disinformation, they’re just agents of the DEEP STATE proving their mal-intent, trying to hide the truth. The only thing that is to be believed unquestioningly is that nothing is to be believed. Good thing Facebook is spending all those resources on its effort to save democracy!
5. Howard Stern is immune to The Wokenning.
The print headline: Howard Stern on his past.
Where is it: The Magazine, page 13, but the online version is much longer and better.
What is it: An interview with Howard Stern in which interviewer and subject wrestle with his history as a sort of performative scumbag for much of his career.
Why is it: Because Howard has a new book coming out.
A fun part:
Are you ever worried about the prospect of people digging up old offensive material you’ve done? It’s not hard to imagine folks getting freshly upset. I am the poster boy for doing everything offensive. I’ve done insane things. But everything I did, I make no apologies for, because I was trying to entertain people. I wanted to be interesting and entertaining to that guy driving the car. But, you know, it’s painful for me to look back on my career, because a lot of that stuff I said I don’t know how much I believed.
This is a weird standard for when to apologize! I’m going to try it out in my life, to only positive effects on all my relationships, I’m sure. I like Howard Stern, though, and it’s true that he has provided me with many hours of entertainment through the years. It’s weird how some people get much more of a free pass to offend than others do for far less objectionable content. I don’t know what else to say about that—I just enjoyed the interview.
6. Some people are just fuckin’ nuts
The print headline: Unwelcome Flattery
Where is it: Sunday Styles, page 8
What is it: “Social Q’s,” the Times’ monumentally stupid advice column.
Why is it: Because some people are just fuckin’ nuts.
A fun part: Here is the fourth and final question in this week’s column, in full. I can’t really explain how I got through the first three stupid questions and answers and decided I should read the fourth, but I guess I don’t read the goddamn paper because I’m not a glutton for punishment.
An Unwelcome Alarm Clock
My husband and I live on a quiet cul-de-sac and like to keep our windows open at night. Our neighbor has a ritual of walking his dog at 5 a.m. and coughing in a loud, prolonged and disgusting manner. He wakes us up, as well as our dogs — which adds to the problem. How do we let him know that his morning routine is disturbing us?
ANONYMOUS
Try knocking on his door and explaining the problem nicely. (I add “nicely” here because, unfortunately, we have no constitutional right to sleep with our windows open.) Perhaps he can cough it out before he leaves home or walk in the other direction around the cul-de-sac? Otherwise, explore white-noise machines.
Holy shit, you absolute lunatics! Do not, under any circumstances, tell your neighbor to stop coughing in the out of doors while he walks his dog! Do not, under any circumstances, knock on your neighbor’s door and ask him to cough it out before he leaves the house! Do not, under any circumstances, do anything about this problem besides close your fucking windows and buy a fan! The only acceptable response to this question “How do we let him know that his morning routine is disturbing us?” is “don’t fucking do that, you weirdo!” Is he walking up to your open window and coughing into the screen? No? Then do not bring this up to him! Close your windows! Buy a white noise machine! Wait for the gentlemen to mercifully expire! Move! All of these things are things you should do instead of and before letting him know that he’s disturbing you with his morning dog walk and his cough—not his loud conversations on the phone, not his howling at the moon, not his pre-dawn playing of Reveille on the cul-de-sac PA, but his cough. Some people are just fuckin’ nuts.
