nuclear-news

The Four Billionaires Who Want to Control the Universe

SCHEERPOST, September 8, 2023

In Jonathan Taplin’s new book, “The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto,” the internet innovation expert delves into activities of the gang-of-four powerful oligarchs: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreesen, breaking down their increasing profits and infinite ambitions to control and influence domestic and global affairs while sending our technology innovation in a profit-driven, dystopian direction, corrupting both sides of the political aisle. Host Robert Scheer’s question: “Wait a minute, what else is new” in capitalism?”

Taplin’s distinction between the oligarchs of new and old is that the modern tech billionaires are granted immunity for content published on their platforms through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Taplin describes the control these oligarchs possess over the speech dictated on their platforms, “So here [Musk] controls this platform, Twitter, and what he wants pushed gets pushed, what he wants suppressed, gets suppressed. And nobody even doubts that that’s happening.”

Taplin also emphasizes that there is nowhere to turn within the party duopoly to crack down on these monopolies and thus — leaving it to us, the people “getting screwed” — to do something about it.

“If you tried to do a very powerful regulation and break up a Google or break up a Meta or break up one of these companies, there would be howls from both sides of the aisle because there’s so much money being spread around by these companies that, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans are both in the pocket of the big companies.

Video Transcript

Speaker 2………………………………………….there’s a lot the technology could do to save the planet and help reform our country and make us energy independent. But these guys are not interested in that. And so I’ll just take it one at a time and tell you what they’re thinking.

So we start with Musk. So Musk is a believer that the Earth is doomed and that we need to have another planet for our species to move to. And he’s chosen the planet of Mars. The trip to Mars, even with the latest rocketry, would take about 14 months. It would cost 10 trillion to move about 20 people up there to Mars. And then you’d have to build a kind of biosphere like Space Dome to live in because you couldn’t be outside because the radiation levels are so high that you would get cancer in 5 minutes. You would have to import all your oxygen since there’s no oxygen on Mars and you would live in an extraordinarily hostile environment as opposed to trying to use the $10 trillion to fix the problems here on Earth. Musk himself would make probably about 2 trillion on that deal because the deal he has with NASA, he makes about a 30% profit on every rocket flight he makes for them. And, you know, here’s a man who claims he’s a libertarian but is actually a crony capitalist. Certainly SpaceX has only one customer, and that’s NASA. The U.S. government and the taxpayers would be paying the 10 trillion to get to Mars. His other companies, such as his satellite company, which he is using to provide, for instance, communications to the Ukrainian army, as Ronan Farrow pointed out…………………………………………………………….

So let’s let’s go to Peter Thiel next. So Peter Thiel runs a company called Palantir. Palantir is the premier surveillance capitalism company in the world………………

Jonathan Taplin:  And then then you’ve got Marc Andreessen. So Marc Andreessen is the most important venture capitalist in America. Lives in Silicon Valley and funded Facebook for, you know, funded, Instagram funded many of the early social media startups was the first really important guy into crypto. Solano is his company. Crypto.com is a company. Opensea is a company that he founded…………………………………………………………………………

the money that used to flow to the Democratic coffers from the unions was declining. And so they found two sources of new money. One was Wall Street and the other was Silicon Valley…………………………………………………the the laws, the digital laws that Bill Clinton and Al Gore, the champion of the information superhighway put through, were so beneficial to the Internet companies, early Internet companies that we have never been able to claw them back. So. Facebook and Twitter live under a regime called Safe Harbor. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which basically says that they are not producers of content. They are simply a platform on which individuals post content and that they should have no responsibility for any speaker on their platform. So when Elon Musk decides, once he takes over Twitter to become, as he called it, a free speech absolutist, and he says no longer were the neo-Nazis be prohibited from being on my platform, then Twitter gets flooded with neo-Nazi propaganda. ……………………nobody can sue him for the hate speech that is on Twitter, on X because he has safe harbor……………………you can’t have a libel suit against Twitter. You can’t have a libel suit against Facebook.

Robert Scheer………………………….Section 230, which said that these people are basically neutral carriers. They’re not publishers, therefore they can’t be sued. That’s how Facebook and Google get this tremendous freedom……………………………. And and now Elon Musk is taking it in a different direction. He’s presenting himself as a champion of free speech and bringing other people in. But the real problem is the money. The real problem is that the money talks. Right.

……………………..And Google has, in effect, a monopoly. And, you know, and really what we’re up against is and what the solution sounds very old fashioned, but nobody brings it up is regulation. ………………………. I have no argument with you about the book. My argument with is why only these four guys? Because I just see a whole system now of massive concentration of wealth, extreme income inequality, corruption of everything. Certainly our political system. Really? Why my thieves that are called billionaires and the Democrats and Republicans are right in there complicit and enablers.

Jonathan Taplin:………………………………………………. So what these guys have done and what they promulgated with social media and I would put Facebook and Twitter at the center of that problem is they’ve created a world in which there is no shared set of facts………………………………………..You’re getting new information from social media and from a small group of friends who send them things that come from these incredibly random sources, whether it’s Q Anon or something else. And and part of this book is what is it that draws people down the rabbit holes of conspiracies? So in that sense, I believe these people are responsible for that and they are protected from anyone calling them out because of this safe harbor. …………………………………..Elon Musk is undoubtedly the most powerful voice on the right. He has 150 million followers on Twitter. ………..And the problem is that these people, especially Thiel and Musk have a very anti-democratic point of view……………………………………………………..

Robert Scheer……………………………………………………………………. I’m just asking you to put on your bipartisan cap. And I think the lesson of not that your book doesn’t call things accurately, but we live in an incredibly corrupt society. And the enemies of democracy are bipartisan. ……………………………..

Jonathan Taplin:…………………………………… So take Musk. So here he controls this platform, Twitter, and what he wants pushed gets pushed, what he wants suppressed, gets suppressed. And nobody even doubts that that’s happening. ……………………….. The problem is not just that he has that control, but he also has the sole provider of rockets to the space station. He is the sole provider with StarLink of Satellite communication capability to many armies around the world. And he personally has made decisions that says, well, these these people shouldn’t get communications in this place…………………….

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Jonathan Taplin:  But here’s the thing. The scientists that worked on the bomb were doing it regardless of the ethical implications of their work. And it was only after the bomb was dropped that Oppenheimer had doubts. He began to think, Oh, maybe that was a screw up. And when he saw the pictures coming back from Hiroshima and he realized what he had done, I believe some of these same things are happening today in AI. In other words, I believe that the implications, you know, of this are such that they won’t really know what’s going to happen until it’s too late. And that worries me. 

………………………………………….. And again, the book is The End of Reality How for Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto. And that’s really the power of this book. It’s that fantasy I happen to stress. ……………………………………… https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/08/the-four-billionaires-who-want-to-control-the-universe/

September 9, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, resources - print