Big Tech Is The Government

Big Tech corporations don’t have a moral or constitutional right to engage in censorship. The iniquity of their censorship is multiplied by the fact that most of what they censor is true. The notion that Big Tech is comprised of “private corporations,” and thus can’t be restrained by the first amendment, is an untrue narrative that has proven very useful to the powerful. Big Tech works with, at the behest of, and as a government themselves, incessantly. Big Tech works in a governmental capacity on demography, infrastructure, surveillance, crime-fighting, regulation writing, and political messaging, to start.

Academic discussions about balancing concerns of privacy and safety are anachronistic in a world with little to no privacy, where people are censored for discussing safety. We can legitimately debate hate speech, the limits of free speech, the need to quell online terrorism recruitment and so on, after we stop censoring journalists and doctors, and after the people who did it are fired and the politicians who supported it are changed out like Twain’s used diapers. The contention and acrimony in the congressional hearings with Tech executives is fake and theatrical, except when the politicians are demanding more censorship and more granular control over who is de-platformed. Then the head-butting seems almost real, like the jockeying for power between branches of government. Is it time to regulate? That’s a bit like asking if it’s time to regulate the military industrial complex… in closed door sessions with the CEOs of arms manufacturers. The real questions are who will write the regulations and what new powers will they grant themselves?

NPR will tell you that the 1st-grade classroom should be a free marketplace of ideas but that internet should not be. Fox will tell you that the most powerful corporations in the world are as privately owned as a Christian bakery. The discussions are conceptual but the ongoing relinquishing of rights is street level. What’s worse, the generations that relinquished those rights actually had positive definitions and connotations of speech and privacy, the younger generations much less so.

In United States constitutional law, a “state actor” is a person or entity acting on behalf of a governmental body and therefore subject to the limitations of the Constitution and amendments.

There is plenty of precedent and jurisprudence on this, and complex debate. Private conduct is not state action simply because the private entity serves a public function or is hired by the state. It is state action when the state and a private entity engage in a “joint enterprise,” or “symbiotic relationship” or are “entwined,” or the state becomes a “joint participant.”  The judicial branch has repeatedly deemed private entities to be state actors for activities narrower in scope, and with less coordination, than almost anything Big Tech is doing with the government.

Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelley_v._Kraemer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brentwood_Academy_v._Tennessee_Secondary_School_Athletic_Ass%27n

“The nominally private character of the Association is overborne by the pervasive entwinement of public institutions and public officials in its composition and workings, and there is no substantial reason to claim unfairness in applying constitutional standards to it.”

There are state actors, and there are “common carriers,” like trains, planes, utilities, internet providers, and telegram companies. Common carriers have always been subject to special laws, regulations, responsibilities, privileges, and also don’t have the right to discriminate or violate rights.

Clarence Thomas wrote about both common carriers and state actors in this most relevant concurrence from 2021. 

“It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information. A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail.”

Below are a handful of examples of Big Tech working as state actors, or common carriers, or just direct political operatives. It could easily be 50 examples. There is an entire ecosystem of Tech/government collusion. Scroll through those and then I will tell you the real reason why Big Tech is the government.

Here’s one about the new California bill to stop misinformation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for politicians punishing doctors at the direction of pharmaceutical companies, but how are they going to figure out which doctors are wrong-thinking without the help of Big Tech? It is critical to remember that doctors/citizens were de-platformed, fired, called dangerous, forced to resign from boards, etc. for suggesting the possibility of post mRNA shot cardiac or menstrual involvement, which is now incontrovertible. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/technology/california-doctors-covid-misinformation.html

Here’s one of the 11-figure federal contracts Amazon has been awarded for data storage. If you think there are “firewalls” between Big Tech’s data on you and the federal government’s data on you, I got a data farm in Brooklyn to sell ya: https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2022/04/nsa-re-awards-secret-10-billion-contract-amazon/366184/

Google gives location data to law enforcement: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/28/geofence-warrant-constitution-fourth-amendment/

Have you even heard of Palantir? Palantir is a 20+ billion dollar Silicon Valley data company. They do secretive data analytics work for the CIA, NSA, FDA, FBI, CDC, Marines, Army, and Air Force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir Technologies

This is a classic. Here is the then CEO of google, Eric Schmidt, writing the Hillary Clinton campaign to pledge his support and offer his musings on how to leverage all that sweet sweet data: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/37262

Here again is Eric Schmidt, this time very slickly working Ben Shapiro, which is not easy. He is framing the discussion in terms of it being nearly impossible to balance safety and rights, philosophically and technologically. It’s not impossible to refrain from unilaterally de-platforming people. He promises a rapidly approaching new epoch of A.I. and expresses many balanced and reasonable concerns, even warns against the Metaverse. In the end he demonstrates more concern for controlling people than for letting them speak, as is likely the case with those programing the A.I.

Before his exile, Eric Snowden was a member of the secret cadre of elite information architects that implemented the Big Tech-government alliance. He is uniquely qualified to explain both the technology and bureaucracy of this alliance:

Mark Zuckerberg explains why the false universe he is creating will be more immersive than you can even imagine, and how it will morph and commoditize every aspect of human life, and require new forms of governance :

Today, the number of Facebook users is higher than the population of the world when my grandparents were born, and twice the number of today’s Catholics worldwide. Any institution that ubiquitous should protect for free speech or expect to be detested by free-thinkers.

The size of a company doesn’t by itself confirm that it is governmental in nature. What does, is the reality that our interactions with these companies are not voluntary. Being personally tracked and commoditized is surpassing death and taxes in the rankings of inevitability, well, taxes anyway.

“Yeah Google is evil, but they offer a great service!”

Put “build your own platform” aside. You can not even opt out of their platforms. I started a small shop in North Carolina and chose to not have a Facebook page. Two weeks after opening, somebody walked in and said, “I saw you on Facebook and wanted to check it out.” I said, “Not me, my shop isn’t on Facebook, but I’m glad you’re here.” I was wrong. Sure enough, Facebook had used google images to create a strange and ugly page for my business. After a couple weeks of trying to get it taken down, I figured out that the only practical way to get it down was to create my own page to supplant it. Then I had to prove to them that I was the owner. A common trope in dystopian sci fi is the main character checking in via screen with a dead-eyed or faceless apparatchik of the overlord conglomerate in order to demonstrate some generalized compliance. I did that for the first time in my life while “verifying” a small business with google. The questions and demands were as intrusive as anything an inspector or licensing body would ask. If removing myself from these platforms would take more effort than operating my business altogether, my involvement is coerced. Also, my current store would likely fail without google, but these platforms achieved that type of critical mass by presenting themselves as the “town square,” and with government capital.

You could opt out of dealing with a privately owned bakery, and they could opt out of baking you a cake. Nobody could actually opt out of involvement with Big Tech. To attempt it would be to eject yourself from society and commerce. You couldn’t have a phone. Cars were once private and autonomous, but soon no longer. You can’t shop at Walmart or Lowes without being subjected to facial recognition image capturing and data-basing. Even if you made a pariah of yourself to avoid tech companies, the high-frequency waves that carry their data would still flow though your body. Even if you stripped down naked and wandered into the desert, head covered in tin foil, they would still be filming you with satellites launched and operated in a joint venture with the US government. An old quote, attributed to many, goes like this, “Honor is what you do when you think nobody is looking.” What if you never think nobody is looking? Do you begin to abdicate your sense of honor to the state?

Social media helps bad information spread faster than ever before, so the warning goes. Social media could also afford us a new opportunity to discuss the bad information and move past it faster than ever before, but they don’t want us discussing the bad information spread in the service of wealth and power. I’d rather live in a world with some hateful and bogus information, than in a world with only one source of information. De-platforming and canceling are only part of the story. Some of the most important news stories of our time are buried deep enough to be disregarded by the superintended public discussion.

People everywhere, American people, are afraid to speak their minds. The natural right to speak precedes and supersedes the Bill of Rights. If the Bill of Rights proves insufficient to protect that right in this new epoch, I would call the Bill of Rights insufficient and still not willingly relent. I admit my bias towards lofty notions of speech and privacy, and that I don’t know how to fix this. The first step is to dispel the absurd notion that these are private companies.