TOOn August 31, at 10pm, Elon Musk’s Twitter account went dark in Brazil, a country of more than 200 million souls, many of them enthusiastic users of online services. The day before, a Supreme Court judge, Alexandre de Moraes, had done something previously unthinkable: he ordered the country’s internet service providers to block access to the platform, threatened daily fines of 50,000 Brazilian reals (just under £6,800) for users who circumvented the ban by using virtual private networks (VPNs), and froze the finances of Elon Musk’s internet service provider Starlink in the country. The order would remain in place until the platform complied with the Supreme Court’s rulings, paid fines totalling 18.3m reais (nearly £2.5m) and appointed a representative in Brazil, a legal requirement for foreign companies operating there. Moraes had also ordered Apple and Google to remove App X and VPN software from their stores, but later reversed that decision, citing concerns about potential “unnecessary” disruptions.
Shock, horror, disbelief, outrage and all the reactions that were unleashed between the two of them ensued. Musk, who has been arguing with Moraes for quite some time, tweeted: “Freedom of expression is the basis of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” The animosity between the two dates back to January 8, 2023, following Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, when a mob of his supporters attacked federal government buildings in the capital Brasilia. The mob invaded and deliberately damaged the supreme federal court, the national congress, and the Planalto presidential palace in a failed attempt to overthrow the democratically elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Judge Moraes is in the firing line because before the 2022 presidential election, the country's Supreme Court had granted him broad powers to crack down on online threats to democracy and he has been an enthusiastic defender of that ability ever since. The New York Times One report, for example, claims that he “jailed five people without trial for social media posts he said attacked Brazil’s institutions. He also ordered social media sites to remove thousands of posts and videos with little room for appeal.” And it is this latter practice that brought him into conflict with Musk, whose platform was one of the channels used by the January 8 insurgents.
Unsurprisingly, media coverage of this showdown has characterized it as a clash between a ruthless enforcer and a tech giant. Who will blink first? Why on earth did Musk pick this fight? Did his fatuous obsession with free speech finally drive him over the edge? After all, he could have complied with Moraes’ orders to withdraw his signature, kept the office in Brasilia, and fought the matter in the Brazilian courts. Instead, he took his ball, leaving more than 20 million Brazilian X users stranded. On the other hand, while Moraes turned out to be a fairly effective check on Bolsonaro—a low-rent Donald Trump who attacked the country’s media, courts, and electoral system—some critics are starting to wonder whether, in his mission to protect democracy, the judge may also end up eroding it.
IWho knows? But at least for now, one thing is clear: this is the first time a democratic state has shut down a major tech platform. Autocracies do so at will (e.g. China, Russia, Iran, the Gulf states), but so far democracies have been reluctant to take such an extreme measure. Listening to some comments on the web about Moraes’ order provides a clue to the timidity, as what comes across is astonishment at the effrontery of a mere Brazilian daring to take down a major American platform because it does not obey the law of his particular country. Who does he think he is? Does he not understand the Silicon Valley “insurgency”?manifest destiny“To be the prime mover of human progress, leaving the inferior races reeling helplessly in its wake?
This slavish shaming suggests that Silicon Valley technology is just the latest manifestation of what political scientist Joseph Nye famously called “soft powerNye defined it as the “power of a nation, state, alliance, etc., derived from economic and cultural influence, rather than coercion or military force,” but it can be more cynically described as the ability to impose the cultural norms of a hegemonic superpower on the rest of the world. In that sense, Facebook and company are simply doing the same job that Hollywood, McDonald’s, Nike, and their ilk did in the 1960s and 1970s. And if that’s really the case, then we’re in serious trouble, because the United States has morphed into a chronically polarized superpower that’s in thrall to corporate interests, governed by a dysfunctional and outdated constitution, and hell-bent on imposing libertarian nonsense on the rest of the world.
Whatever the explanation for our democratic passivity, the balance sheet of the past two decades has not been encouraging. Western governments seemed to be asleep at the wheel as their citizens eagerly adopted new tools and media that empowered and delighted them, but at the same time left them vulnerable to detailed surveillance (and manipulation) by a small number of monopolistic foreign corporations. Yet in 2015, alarm bells should have been ringing in the West, when it became clear that technology was enabling foreign adversaries (as well as domestic subversives and criminals) to spread disinformation on an industrial scale that could undermine democratic institutions, particularly elections. And if anyone doubted that technology posed an existential threat to liberal democracy, then the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington DC should have settled the matter.
But behind all this was an even more important question: do liberal democracies have the capacity? ability How can we control the corporations that own and operate this technology? We know it can be done because authoritarian states do it. But are we too bound hand and foot by our attachment to the rule of law, the deep pockets of corporations, and our lawmakers' tolerance of lobbyists to do so? Until recently, my fear was that the answer would be no because, historically, democracies have been slow moving beasts.
Suddenly, though, the mood seems to be changing. The EU now has three major pieces of legislation under its belt: the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and now its Artificial Intelligence Act. Across the Atlantic, we’ve seen Google convicted of monopoly and now prosecuted for abusive control of the digital advertising market. Here in the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority has been casting a baleful eye on the sort of tech corporate mergers that were once approved without a hitch. Across the Channel, the French have Telegram’s CEO in custody while they investigate the toxic cesspool he runs. And now a judge has shut down X in Brazil. So something is up. It’s about time.
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What I've been reading
Viral load
There is no such thing as an “awake mind virus”” is a striking essay by Dan Williams about the pernicious idea that if people disagree with you, they must be suffering from the cerebral equivalent of Covid.
Text message
By Daniel Rothschild Speech journal essay In praise of reference books He argues that these publications should be valued at least as much as fiction and other nonfiction works.
Engine mouth
An interesting blog entry is About five ridiculous years In which EW Niedermeyer reflects on half a decade of observing Tesla Inc.
