Big Tech

Biden Continues Conflict With China Through The Quad

March 19, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Asia Times. Educate! Big Tech, China, Joe Biden, New Cold War

On March 12, the heads of government of four countries, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, and US President Joe Biden, met for a virtual meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, better known as the Quad. Modi’s opening remarks illustrate the emptiness of the public agenda; he called the Quad “a force for global good” with no details beyond a list of areas of collaboration (“vaccines, climate change and emerging technologies”). There was no direct mention of China during the meeting. In the details relating to the launching of “an ambitious new joint partnership that is going to boost vaccine manufacturing,” a more disturbing agenda reveals itself

Antitrust Is Back In The United States

March 14, 2021 Eric Posner, Public Syndicate. Educate! Antitrust, Big Tech, Democrats, Monopoly

Chicago – President Joe Biden is signaling that his administration will get tough on monopoly. With the appointments of Columbia University law professors Timothy Wu to the White House National Economic Council and Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), he has selected two well-known proponents of breaking up the Big Tech monopolies. Moreover, these appointments come on the heels of a major antitrust reform bill that Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota introduced in the US Senate last month. Klobuchar’s bill aims to bolster antitrust enforcement in a number of ways. It would increase funding for the FTC and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, establish new bureaucratic offices to investigate and monitor antitrust compliance and market conditions, slap new civil penalties on violators, and expose firms to liability for anticompetitive business practices that currently fall through the cracks.

Digital Colonialism: The Evolution Of American Empire

March 6, 2021 Michael Kwet, ROAR Magazine. Educate! Big Tech, China, colonization, United States

In 2020, billionaires made out like bandits. Jeff Bezos’s personal holdings surged from $113 to $184 billion. Elon Musk briefly eclipsed Bezos, with a net worth rise from $27 billion to over $185 billion. For the bourgeoisie presiding over “Big Tech” corporations, life is grand. Yet, while the expanded dominance of these corporations in their domestic markets is the subject of numerous critical analyses, their global reach is a fact seldom discussed, especially by dominant intellectuals in the American empire. In fact, once we investigate the mechanics and numbers, it becomes apparent that Big Tech is not only global in scope, it is fundamentally colonial in character and dominated by the United States. This phenomenon is called “digital colonialism.” We live in a world where digital colonialism now risks becoming as significant and far-reaching a threat to the Global South as classic colonialism was in previous centuries.

Against Big Tech’s Algorithmic Cancel Culture

March 3, 2021 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. Resist! Algorithms, Big Tech, Censorship, Liberal class

The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas , the lead organizer for that is Dr. Nolan Higdon , whom I've worked with for years on various things. And Project Censored was a co-sponsor of this event. It was also co-sponsored by several academic institutions, including UCLA, USC, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford, and Cal State across the State of California. So, in other words, as I’ve mentioned in a couple of other interviews, Alan Macleod over at Mint Press News, did a pretty in-depth piece on this. I know you talked about it; I think in a Black Agenda Report piece. This is an ongoing issue. This is an issue of Big Tech gatekeeping, algorithmic censorship. We have not been able to get any real feedback from YouTube about what happened, except that they, in true Orwellian fashion, flipped the script, and basically tried to say that Nolan didn't upload the videos or that the videos maybe didn't exist in the first place.

Privacy, Immigrant Rights Groups Slam Biden’s ‘Smart Wall’

February 27, 2021 Chris Mills Rodrigo, The Hill. Educate! Big Tech, Border Patrol, Democrats, Joe Biden, Surveillance

A coalition of privacy and immigrant rights groups are pushing back on the Biden administration’s proposal to deploy a “smart” wall on the southern border. In a statement released Thursday, first obtained by The Hill, the 40 groups slam the legislation introduced in Congress last week as a “continuation of the Trump administration’s racist border policies, not a break from it.” The letter pans the proposed use of "smart technology" at the border as "Trump’s wall by another name." The mammoth immigration bill, which is being spearheaded by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to develop technology and surveillance infrastructure to “manage and secure the southern border.”

Prisons Prime Testing Ground For Dehumanizing Hi-Tech ‘Advances’

February 23, 2021 Raul Diego, Mintpress News. Educate! Big Tech, Capitalism, Prison, US Postal Service

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is coming under fire again from Democratic lawmakers, as well as from the American Postal Workers Union, who are calling for President Joe Biden to pave the way for DeJoy’s removal after the Trump-appointee announced higher mailing fees and logistical changes that could further slow down mail. The US Postal Service (USPS) has already suffered a more than 50% drop in on-time arrivals for first-class mail deliveries, according to the service’s own data. Nevertheless, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of high-speed internet, the personal communications of most Americans don’t seem to be fundamentally affected by the problems at USPS. Excluding the mail-in-ballots controversy leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the majority of the country remains little more than a...

Congress Escalates Pressure On Tech Giants To Censor More

February 22, 2021 Glenn Greenwald, Substack. Educate! Big Tech, Censorship, Congress, Demorcats

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.” The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for...

Nevada Bill Would Allow Tech Companies To Create Governments

February 6, 2021 AP News. Educate! Big Tech, Corporatization, Governance, Nevada

Carson City, NV - Planned legislation to establish new business areas in Nevada would allow technology companies to effectively form separate local governments. Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan to launch so-called Innovation Zones in Nevada to jumpstart the state’s economy by attracting technology firms, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Wednesday. The zones would permit companies with large areas of land to form governments carrying the same authority as counties, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and courts and provide government services. The measure to further economic development with the “alternative form of local government” has not yet been introduced in the Legislature.

Letter: Groups Oppose Repeal Of Overbroad Changes To Section230

January 28, 2021 Fight for the Future. Resist! Big Tech, Congress, Free Speech, Internet Freedom

In the wake of this latest act of white supremacist violence directed at the U.S. Capitol, it’s more urgent than ever that lawmakers take steps to address systemic racism and injustice, and to hold Big Tech companies accountable for their role in undermining democracy and amplifying harmful content. However, repeal of or injudicious changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would only make the situation worse. Gutting Section 230 would make it more difficult for web platforms to combat the type of dangerous rhetoric that led to the attack on the Capitol. And certain carve outs to the law could threaten human rights and silence movements for social and racial justice that are needed now more than ever.

Scheer Intelligence: Wrestling Back Privacy From The Jaws Of Big Tech

October 13, 2020 Robert Scheer, ScheerPost.com. Educate! Accountability, Big Tech, Podcast, Privacy

Over the course of just a few decades, technology has come to play a role in nearly every single aspect of our lives. While there have been undeniable benefits to technological advances, one of the main concerns that has grown alongside its presence in daily life is how tech companies collect, use and profit from our data in ways we’re often unaware of. James Steyer, a professor at Stanford University and the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a leading consumer advocacy group that promotes safe media and technology for families, joins Robert Scheer on this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence” to discuss how we can fight back against tech companies’ encroachments on our privacy.

How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

August 30, 2020 Cory Doctorow, One Zero. Strategize! Big Tech, Capitalism, Mass Surveillance, Monopoly

Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose. I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism.

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