Shoshana Zuboff (@shoshanazuboff): Friends, Musk/Twitter headlines are all variants of ‘what will Elon do?’ It’s a signal of how lost we are. We obsess over one man and his whims because we don’t yet have the democratic rule of law needed to govern our information spaces. Without law power is dangerous.🧵[1/8]
Shoshana Zuboff (@shoshanazuboff): The result: people, society, & democracy are at the mercy of the individuals who exercise ownership and/or executive control over information. We beg Mr. Zuckerberg to stop the social wreckage, honor our privacy, protect us from disinformation, but he refuses.@mariaressa [2/8]
Shoshana Zuboff (@shoshanazuboff): We've learned FB is big business in which corrupt information is positively correlated with revenue. FB's profit-maximizing imperative ignores us. Privacy is destroyed. Corrupt information triumphs. Society fractures. Profit wins. Only law can change this. @carolecadwalla [3/8]
Shoshana Zuboff (@shoshanazuboff): Mr. Musk wants to join the gods who rule the information space and control answers to the essential questions of knowledge, authority, and power in our time: Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides? But we never elected them to govern. We need laws not men.[4/8]
Shoshana Zuboff (@shoshanazuboff): Democracy will only advance with laws & institutions designed to guarantee our knowledge rights and the integrity of information in the digital century. Absent law, we're forced to worry,‘What will Elon do?' The emperors have all the clothes, while we run naked. @Moonalice [5/8]
Shoshana Zuboff (@shoshanazuboff): Just as Mr. Zuckerberg leans on “free speech” to justify corrupt information flows that advance data extraction, Mr. Musk takes center stage with the same rhetoric. It’s a shameless distortion of the First Amendment and Bill of Rights. [6/8]
Shoshana Zuboff (@shoshanazuboff): As Constitutional scholar @tribelaw tirelessly repeats, the Bill of Rights pertains only to government action, not to private companies. [7/8] https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/552735-laurence-tribe-first-amendment-fantasies-in-the-social-media-debate/
Shoshana Zuboff (@shoshanazuboff): Abdicating our information spaces to private control concentrates unaccountable power in the regime of #SurveillanceCapitalism. Our fate should not depend on the whims of individuals. What they decide today may be undone tomorrow. No democracy can survive these conditions.[8/8]