In the cases I was thinking of, the good thing is it’s mostly the “invisible hand” of the market that gets to defines the boundaries. Person A acts reprehensibly in public, Person B records the video and posts on social media. Person A’s employer then gets to decide if the behavior is too transgressive for them to associate with them any further. From there it’s just a matter of scale.
As for large platforms like Twitter and Facebook, they also have the right to enforce their TOS however they like. Many people make the argument that these platforms are the equivalent of the “public commons” but I absolutely reject that premise, because I absolutely reject the idea of the public commons being subject to private interests or profit motives. I see the internet itself as being much closer to the public commons, however. I have a right to ban Alex Jones from the Integral Life platform, but he still has a right to host his own website (unless he also violates thr ISP’s TOS, of course).
As an example of this, the web hosting company “Bluehost” is known to be Mormon owned and run.
It would be foolish of me use Bluehost as a web host to facilitate a borderline illegal takeover and occupation of the Salt Lake City Mormon Temple that will likely escalate to violence. I would expect that not only would I be “cancelled”, but that they would fully cooperate with law enforcement and the ensuing investigation, lol.
If I want to publish anti-Mormon propaganda or a violent coup of the Mormon Temple, it would be wiser for me to use Dreamhost at the very least.
It’s a simple and seemingly universal tactic for those looking to solidify and consolidate power.
This is the rationale for our multi systematic Liberal Democracy. It enables maximum engagement of the citizenry with inclusion through distribution of power, with safe guards against tyranny of the majority.
It’s quite easy for us to gyrate on how something is said (the political discourse), which leads to policy development and ratification (or not), and finally the administration of policy and governance.
Politics is as much virtue signaling as discourse. Policy should be the focus of discussion with a very knowledgeable and capable systematic / multi systematic view. As we should also be viewing the efficacy and efficiency of administration and governance.
I am 100% saying this, yeah. Just because they are the platforms most people use, they are in no way “public commons”. “Public commons” means “resources that are held and managed by a community”, so by definition we cannot have public commons owned by private interests.
By analogy, Facebook and the others do not represent an open “town square”. They are more like a popular privately-owned nightclub on the corner where people like to congregate. The internet itself is more like the town square (which is why it should be classified as a utility with all the net neutrality protections that involves). Different nightclubs will come and go over the years, but none of them are owned by or accountable to the public.
There has been a very strong impulse for decades to privatize our public resources, and I absolutely resist that. Declaring Mark Zuckerberg the steward of the “public commons” sounds like a neoliberal nightmare to me.
On my more conspiratorial days, I would say the culture wars between the “mean green meme” and the “mean amber meme” are all overhyped in order to distract from the clear and present danger of the “mean orange meme”
I agree from a Capitalist property rights perspective but think it worthy to exam in perhaps new ways. When many receive majority of their information and also communicate 1 to 1 and 1 to many these platforms, with groups formed we in essence see a public commons created.
This public commons creation is already monetized through advertising and sales. When you see manipulation of information presentation in order to drive agendas without transparency its imperative that we view in a Meta systematic perspective.
Thanks for making the point so clearly and unambiguoulsy… a point often made by others, but less successfully. This forces me to more directly address what bugs me about it.
BigTech (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc) are private interests that have considerable influence over culture, in their ability to impact on the cultural narrative. This is very dangerous. NO private interest should wield that level of power. There is considerable talk of implementing anti-trust legislation to limit them… but what if they are complying with all required laws? You can’t implement anti-trust legislation if they’re not doing anything anti. The simple reality is that BigTech is big because it’s popular, and there is nothing illegal about being popular.
And an equally simple fact is that large BigTech can change the cultural narrative, and that presents a serious problem. How do we deal with it? Here’s how Australia has addressed it in the context of Rupert Murdoch (Fox News). Australia recognizes the dangers of unconstrained media within the context of politics (Australians don’t care much about culture; political power-plays are their priority), and there are laws in Australia that limit the size of media. Murdoch did not like that, and circumvented these constraints by becoming an American citizen and this freed him up to become the head of one of the world’s largest media empires… it is the reason he became an American citizen.
What do we do with BigTech? I see two options:
We define them as a form of public utility, so that they can become the equivalent of our town square, and we prohibit their meddling on constitutional matters, such as free speech, OR;
We implement laws to limit their size. If this sounds too authoritarian and draconian, maybe there are less authoritarian ways of constraining their reach and defining their limits via their access to resources, such as the internet.
Choose one. Something must be done to restrain BigTech unleashed upon culture. If we don’t, it will hasten humanity’s decent into a dystopian nightmare.
SUMMING UP - CULTURE
Culture provides the foundation for our knowing how to be. I think that’s what’s missing from this debate. People don’t understand culture and how important it is. Australians don’t understand culture, but they do understand politics, and that’s how they dealt with Murdoch media. We need to implement the same kind of thinking in the context of culture. Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” was my first exposure to the implications of culture… a bit long-winded, but it planted the seed that inspired me to look further and deeper.
Option 3) Since they have both human and AI promotion, demotion, shadow ban, and banning manipulators inorder to maximize revenues, social and political agendas remove their Section 230 liability protection opening them up to the Invisible Fist of lawsuits.
Would you please correlate this with race and/or sexual preference? Are you suggesting it’s okay to refuse to serve a person or deny access to a business establishment based on, let’s say, the color of their skin, or their sexual preferences, or the topics of conversation they engage in while in the marketplace? Where is the bridge or foundational logic to connect these seemingly contradictory, yet emotionally charged issues, so everyone on all sides can agree on an acceptable and peaceful arrangement?
A boogey man, eh? In addition to my previously posted links, a further consequence of woke (Floyd becomes a hero while we ignore the deaths of Daniel Shaver, Justine Damond, Tony Timpa at the hands of police - funny how nobody cares when the victims are white):
I’m sorry, but I’m losing my patience with the whole woke agenda. Expect a backlash in the not-too-distant future when woke fixes itself permanently as a subject for mockery and derision.
Culture is the thing that matters… law is only culture’s servant.
I second that @excecutive. In principle, @raybennett does have a point. But there’s something that bothers me about a cake shop owner (Masterpiece Cakeshop, for example) trying to impose their view on a gay couple wanting to marry. What business is it of theirs? They’re in the business of baking and selling cakes. Supporting the marriage of strangers that they don’t know is NOT their business and it is none of their business. Let’s play devil’s advocate and try looking at this from a different perspective… a thought experiment to illustrate my point:
Property is interconnected with culture, the environment and shared living space. Taxation is an expression of this “shared environment” concept. If you want your business to intrude into our shared environment, taking away opportunities for other possibilities, then the payment of taxation is one way for you to compensate us for that intrusion that is our lost opportunity.
Having factored in this shared living-space concept… is it reasonable for a property-hogg to dictate that he can do whatever the hell he wants with his property? If his property is taking up space that might otherwise be used for other purposes, if his property is belching out pollutants from his ovens into our shared living space, if his property requires public roads to make deliveries, then no, he does NOT have license to do whatever the hell he wants. His property is a part of our living space.
If our property hog really wants to do whatever the hell he wants on his property, he should move to a shack in the mountains without water or electricity. There. Fixed it for him.
Let’s extend this line of thinking to BigTech and the internet. BigTech is occupying internet space that has been paid for, in large part, in taxes. The internet is an environment that belongs to all of us. BigTech does not have the unlimited powers of a property hog cut off from the system. BigTech has a duty to respect the wishes of the community that they interface with.
Things are not as black-and-white as what they might seem at first glance. Reality is more complex than “I pays the money, I does whatever I wants.”
From an integral Quadrants perspective, I wonder what motivated the gay couple to not simply go to another of many cake bakers in Denver? What level, altitude, quadrant was the couple coming from?
Here is an interview (linked):
When the three sat down with Phillips, the baker immediately asked them who the cake was for, according to Mullins.
“We told him it was for us, and he immediately said he would not make a cake for a same-sex wedding,” he said.
Mullins recalled a horrible silence.
“We were just mortified and embarrassed,” he said.
The three quickly left.
For Craig, the interaction was devastating. He remembered how bullies had taunted him for being gay in the small Wyoming town where he grew up. He later attended the University of Wyoming, around the same time gay student Matthew Shepard was murdered. He moved to Denver after he graduated, hoping to find sanctuary in the liberal city encircled by mountains and high plains.
“I really thought that would be a place where I could be myself and express myself,” he said. But the past followed him.
“I felt like the residuals of the bullying basically kind of made me have my guard up for the most part,” he said. “But on that particular day, it was a really special day. I had my support system with me. I had my mom, my fiancé, and so I let my guard down. I was going into a bakery, and I was like ‘What’s the worse thing that could happen?’”
“Yeah,” he added, “and then we got discriminated against.”
The couple filed a complaint against Phillips with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which agreed the baker violated state law. Colorado state courts also ruled in the couple’s favor.
Phillips then appealed to the Supreme Court. He argues the state law violated his First Amendment rights by forcing him to express a view counter to his religious beliefs.
Mullins and Craig married in 2012. They said the five-and-half-year legal battle has, in a way, defined their marriage.
“To this day, Dave and I still, when we go into a business, really have to think, ‘Can we show affection? Can we talk about our relationship?’” Craig said.
“It’s the fear of getting lesser service or denied service,” he added.
The Supreme Court will make a decision by late June. Mullins said its ruling will affect more than cake and nuptials.
I’d like to make sure your points are clear before flaming.
Are you saying the court ruled with the gay couple and now you are afraid this will happen in other areas?
Or are you concerned if there is congruency in my opinions and have already assumed what my position is?
Good question @raybennett - First paragraph sums up where I was coming from.
From an integral Quadrants perspective, I wonder what motivated the gay couple to not simply go to another of many cake bakers in Denver? What level, altitude, quadrant was the couple coming from?
The Constitution clearly states that there are several categories that cannot be discriminated against. So of course businesses have to follow the constitution. The reason this was placed in the constitution is that it was deemed necessary by the majority of the population at the time. At some point in the future society might progress to the point and make these laws unnecessary.
THE GAY WEDDING CAKE
Here are the facts of the matter:
A business refused to make a Gay Wedding Cake
The customers complained to the county commission, who took action against the business
The Supreme Court ruled that the county commission had no right to do what it did in the way it did it
So the Gay Wedding Cake is a great big straw man. The law of the land now is that if you want to challenge a businesses right to deny service, you better have a damn good case, cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s and do your homework. And that’s how it should be. That’s my personal opinion. If another case comes up then the standards are set high and we’ll be able to better refine the law on a more worthy case. Just being offended is not a case the Supreme Court is even willing to look at.
I don’t even think this is relevant to my point of view. I would say they obviously have some kind of childhood trauma that affects them, but that doesn’t mean anything to me in deciding if they should or should not have been refused service. Maybe you can tell us what you think about their quadrants and levels but honestly I think making those judgments about other people isn’t what Integral is about.
Wonderful question
Answer - it 100% starts with you @excecutive. (and me, but let’s talk about you, lol) If an issue is emotionally charged for you, then you have to recognize that and understand that your judgement is already skewed going in. It’s not the emotionally charged topic that is the “problem” - the problem is that you have an emotional charge about it. Inevitably emotions will influence people’s decisions. The bridge of all these emotionally charged issues is you. You have the emotional charge. @excecutive I judge that you are ready to take this deep dive.
After we recognize our own emotional charges - then we can address a topic at whatever tier we think is most practical or effective.
Authoritarianism is an issue and it’s a very dangerous one. The problem I see is when people go into the topic ruled by their emotions they easily see the “other side’s” authoritarianism clearly, or even make it up - but fail to see their own authoritarianism coming out.
This is what we see clearly in the whole desire to control social media. A completely tyrannical idea and also a terrible idea. Because then what will they do when the government is Liberal and also controls what is on social media? Answer: complain, be butt hurt and express outrage. Completely stupid IMO. Give the government control of what social media can and cannot publish? Are people out of their fucking minds But they are ruled by their emotional charges and only see the short term us-vs them and come up with really bad decisions in this frame of mind.
“Oh, but someone sued someone for not making a gay wedding cake” - Yeah, and they LOST, lol. What’s the point? @steljarkos says he is losing his patience with the whole woke agenda - yeah, I see that … and also has an emotional charge that prevents him from presenting well structured ideas.
GEORGE FLOYD
A policeman violates a man’s human rights and kills him. There is also a dubious prior history between the two.
The African American community rallies around this and turns Floyd into a martyr
The police don’t know how to react so they “retreat”
Logically, the problem is that police needs to be reformed. Other democracies don’t have this problem, so it’s clearly not the only way to do police work. The “police vs community” paradigm has got to go.
But somehow this gets turned around into somehow being a problem with “wokism” because people have an emotional charge and want to blame “them”. Again, rather than looking at the problem, or their own emotional reaction to the problem and misdirecting it against their perceived enemy, their emotional charge is first directed at their enemy and then afterwards they make a convoluted argument that makes zero logical sense to support it.
I agree that this is one of the primary life conditions that we are facing as a still-emerging global society. And my hope is that it is one of the life conditions that helps integral emerge in a more full-throated way. I just think it requires a somewhat different language to make proper sense of, and comparisons to “public commons” don’t work for the reasons I mentioned in my last comment. I think there is likely a deliberate effort by malicious actors to repeat the “public commons” frame as often as possible, in order to hasten the privatization of public resources, which I personally think we should all resist.
But yes, we are suspended between dystopian nightmares – misinformation and aperspectival madness on one side, and authoritarian censorship on the other. Sometimes it feels like a binary choice – we can have 100% of one, or 100% of the other. What are we to do?
Really, I think the problem is with the platforms and algorithms themselves, all of which are built upon flat postmodern assumptions about how people communicate and congregate together. There really is an unavoidable “flatness” to these platforms, where all views and values sort of slide across each other with no built-in mechanism of enfoldment to help people discern “more true” from “less true”, and where a small number of people can dominate the discourse simply by yelling the loudest. It used to be that the cacophony of public views and values had some degree of meritocratic curation and moderation, at least in terms of how they are represented by “the media”. This more centralized approach certainly had its downsides, but at the very least it helped create a more cohesive “shared reality” between and among people.
But information moves very differently in Zone 7 these days, which has in turn dramatically reshaped our culture, our behaviors, and even our immediate consciousness. Sometimes in noticeable ways, and other times it feels like that old “boiling a frog” metaphor. We have almost totally shifted from a centralized orange “mainstream media” model where all information was filtered through a handful of minimally-orange perspectives (think: Walter Cronkite) to a decentralized green “social media” model where people began to curate their own informational terrain. And a whole new slew of issues, challenges, and life conditions have emerged from that. Fortunately, some new possibilities too, I think.
The good news is, something new will most likely come down the line at some point in the future, new platforms that are better equipped at handling these problems. And they will, almost by necessity, be at least somewhat integally-informed – not because a small crowd of integral busybodies demand it, but because it simply does a better job of prioritizing “good information” over “bad information”, better incentivizes “generative enfoldment” rather than constant division, has some perspectival algorithms beneath it that can recognize higher/deeper/wider points of view, and allows people to simply feel better in their own UL for using it.
My hope is that these problems become so painful that we naturally begin selecting for better platforms – not because they are more or less “integral”, but simply because of the immediate pain relief that they would offer.
I keep hoping the leadership team over at Google has a series of spontaneous satoris that leads them to an awakened appreciation of the complexity here, and prompts them to start building their own “integral semiotic algorithms” and AIs that can actually transform the web into the sort of ‘giga-glossary’ that Ken Wilber has fantasized about for decades
But they are ruled by their emotional charges and only see the short term us-vs them and come up with really bad decisions in this frame of mind.