Inherent Weaknesses

The other day, I read an article on the inherent weakness of personality-based, authoritarian regimes like Putin's Russia.  The difficulty, it suggested, was the inevitability of death and the consequent need for succession.  Because political power is centered on a single individual, the regime really cannot plan for succession without undermining the power structure.   The regime may lumber along successfully until the great leader's demise, at which point it degenerates into a squalid scramble for power among the "second best."  Our constitutional government doesn't particularly have that problem.  Though I doubt that many would agree with the statement that follows, it is disdainful of individuals.  It outlines a process for succession that, on the one hand, formalizes the squabble for power, makes of it a "game," played frequently enough to be familiar and accepted.  I suspect Trump wants, with every fiber of his being, to become a personality-based, authoritarian leader like Putin, but the pesky constitution and the almost perpetual squabble for power that it guarantees will prevent him from fulfilling his heart's desire.  Given the way things are going of late, I suspect it will crush him, and I for one will not shed a tear when it does.

The article did not, however, completely reassure me. I began to wonder what the "inherent weakness" of our constitutional regime might be. I'm not entirely sure, and I would be open to counter-arguments, but it strikes me that our constitution, not unlike other documents of extreme faith, is a product of its time.  Thinking narrowly, for example, of the first amendment and our "freedom of the press," it strikes me that the framers could not have anticipated the emergence of social media.  Although the first amendment was adaptable enough to accommodate the emergence of mass media, specifically broadcast media, it was able to do so in part because mass media, radio and television, were quantitative changes more so than qualitative changes.  Social media, or so it seems to me, represents a qualitative change.  The recent flap over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is a case in point.  To put a human face on it, Lora "unfriended" several people on Facebook recently because they were re-posting mean-spirited political memes, the same sort of targeted meme used to bolster Trump in the recent election.  Here, one might ask, "what is the point of Facebook?"  For Lora, it was simply a tool to remain connected to family and friends, but I suspect that Facebook sees itself as a tool to generate personal data which can be exploited for "product advertising," but as Cambridge Analytica has demonstrated, one such "product" can be n insidious political hack.  Is it "free speech" when a third party uses my personal data to bombard me with memes that are designed to reinforce and intensify my likely prejudices?   The differences between the users view of Facebook and Facebook's view of themselves deserve a book of their own, but one thing seems clear enough.  The vast interconnectivity of "social media" has not done much in the way of "bringing us together" as a human family, but has on the contrary intensified our "factional" divisions and represents a threat to civil discourse.   Perhaps the First Amendment will prove resilient enough to accommodate the likes of Facebook, but that remains to be seen.

Thinking more broadly, however, there is another fissure along what might be called "the economics of national identity."  Consider, for example, the following statement recently published by Aja Romano in Vox:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged this much in recent public statements regarding the Cambridge Analytica data breach — but what needs far more acknowledgment is that Facebook has far outstripped the moniker of “social media.” If we think about the internet as a global system, then Facebook is a global world power, and it’s high time we acknowledge that such global power comes with monumental social responsibility. That requires major global leadership and oversight, as well as increased self-scrutiny and accountability from Facebook itself.

The acknowledgement centers on the impossibility of "just quitting" Facebook, in part because they exercise a sort of monopoly power over an Indira's Web of interconnectivity that far outstrips anything any one user might imagine.   In the case of the Cambridge Analytica data breach, as the issue at hand, a particular app developer offered a personality quiz through Facebook that garnered personal data not only from those who signed up for the quiz, but all their on-line "friends" as well.  The data this generated was then sold to a third party, Cambridge Analytica, who in turn used it in support of the Trump campaign.  A good deal of money was at stake in all of these transactions, and consequently it's not altogether credible when Zuckerberg claims that he will prevent such abuses in the future, writing "I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community."  What is remarkable in this statement, however, is neither the fleeting public accountability nor the lack of credibility in the corporate response, but the first person, the "I," the amount of power vested in a single, somewhat questionable individual.

I bring this forward, not to bemoan the fact that "Facebook has far outstripped the moniker of 'social media'" or to excoriate Mark Zuckerberg, but simply to point out a few things, not least the decentering of economic and political power.  We can more or less acknowledge that each has "influence" on the other, and this "balance of power" is implicit to, if not explicit within, our constitutional system.  Some hint of this can be found in the yet unresolved Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian dispute which asked, in effect, where in the constitutional system should political power be exercised over the economic power?  It depends, of course, on what one sees as the center of "economic power," whether agrarian or manufacturing, et cetera. We could go on arguing this point, and we probably will.  The current flap over trade policy is retrogressive to discussions that permeated much of our earliest national history, but the discussion misses the point.  One assumption behind this question, of course, is that both economic and political power are national.   What does it mean when Romano writes that "Facebook is a global world power?"  Facebook, clearly, is not a world power in the "sovereign" sense that, say, "Russia" or "China" is a sovereign world power.  Nor is it a national world power in the sense that, say, the Hudson Bay Company was a national world power representing a particular sovereign colonial power.  To say that Facebook has "monumental social responsibility" might be true, but forgive me if I don't quite trust Mark Zuckerberg to provide "global leadership and oversight," in part because the governing intentionality of a "private business" is not to fulfill as yet undefined social responsibilities, but to make money.  If Zuckerberg is wallowing in mea culpa, it is not because he feels the burden of global leadership, nor because he is engaging in "self-scrutiny" but because he believes his actions will help Facebook continue to make money. 

I am reasonably convinced that we don't quite understand what it might mean to call Facebook "a global world power, except perhaps that the "balance of power" has tipped toward the economic, and that the centers of economic power exists outside national boundaries in ways that the founders could not have imagined when the ownership of land and the so-called "means of production" created the centers of economic power.  So, I'm suggesting the paranoid right-wingers are in some respects correct. A new world order is emerging and it is eroding national sovereignty, but again, please don't misunderstand me.  I do not think that getting rid of the UN will do one damn thing to reverse the trend, nor do I think that there's a secret cabal of any sort plotting for world dominance, at least not in the comic book version of world dominance.   If Facebook represents a near monopoly, and as such has become a center of real economic power on a global scale, there will be those who threaten to "disrupt" Facebook.  It's in the nature of power to be challenged. Indeed, Emily Parker, writing for CNN, has suggested that the answer to one technology is, of course, a new and better technology. She writes,

In their new book, "The Truth Machine," Michael Casey and Paul Vigna describe how companies like Uber, Airbnb and Facebook have become examples of entrenched monopoly power. Blockchain technologies "aim to do away with these intermediaries altogether, letting people forge their own trust to build social networks and business arrangements on their own terms."                

Such thinking is ultimately utopian.  I might suggest that, just as more guns are not a likely solution to gun violence, another technology is not a likely solution to the disruptions of technology.  I suggest this in part because it wasn't all that long ago that Facebook was touted as a way of "letting people forge their own trust to build social networks," and we have seen where that leads.   If not Mark Zuckerberg playing us for a sucker, it will be someone else, and if I don't quite trust Mark Zuckerberg or his disrupter to provide "global leadership and oversight," who then can I trust?