by Matt Gaetz
One of Peter’s key insights is that because it effectively costs nothing to distribute the latest and greatest software, your company can get to scale very quickly and literally take over the world. If you have a really good idea, you really can get it everywhere. That’s when the network effects really kick in. Thiel and his co-author Blake Masters write about that tendency in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future:
Monopolies deserve their bad reputation—but only in a world where nothing changes…. In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector. If you corner the market for something you can jack up the price…but the world we live in is dynamic: it’s possible to invent new and better things. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.
And yet the bigger the monopolists get, the less creative they seem to be. It’s impossible to invent new and better things if you can’t openly collaborate about what needs to be fixed or invented.
The tech companies spent the last ten years addicting people to their vices. LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman bragged about how the best companies are those that celebrate the seven deadly sins. (Twitter is wrath, Instagram vanity, Uber Eats gluttony, Tinder lust, and so on.) In the long run, the wages of sin are death. But in the meantime, tech has enjoyed wages of a different sort as Silicon Valley turns the most productive minds to the most wasteful of tasks—addicting people and turning them into mindless consumers.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” noted former wunderkind Jeff Hammerbacher, a twenty-three-year-old math genius recruited to work for Facebook. “This sucks,” he pronounced. And yet it’s very rational to go work for Facebook.
In politics, we treat monopolies differently because of their overwhelming and corrosive effects on the public square and marketplace. We recognize that monopolies are bad not just for the public but also for those holding the monopoly. They do little to encourage innovation; they use their largesse to buy off competitors. Note, for example, how America’s tech monopolists are partnering and buying companies with India’s. Sure, Indian monopolies were built with graft and ours with grit, but are we really so confident that they won’t end up behaving the same way in the end?
Past thinkers on monopoly, including Judge Robert Bork, argued that monopolies need not be bad for consumers, but we are not a nation of consumers. We are a nation of free citizens. Not everything that has a price can be put into dollars and cents. There is a high price for free things. We should always be embarrassed by monopolies—and not make excuses for them. They should have to explain themselves to us, and to the extent that they are necessary, they should behave in ways that are in the national interest. While businessmen may seek to be monopolies, statesmen seek to bust them.
This trust-busting must be done when a monopoly ventures into those areas that intersect with the public discourse. We cannot tolerate an enforced private monopoly in public opinion; we must be free to disagree not because we know all the answers but because we know so few. Information makes us free. And so, too, does open debate.
“Public sentiment is everything,” said Abraham Lincoln during one of his famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statues or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” Lincoln would have dominated cable news.
What about he who codes to suppress public sentiment? I fear we are already finding out.
The major tech companies—Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, YouTube—make it impossible for tech’s best minds to help make America great again if they ever want to work in technology. Like all people playing intimidation games, these companies make an example of the weak.
Software engineer James Damore was fired from Google for pointing out well-established personality research between the sexes. Kevin Cernekee was also fired from Google. He warned on Tucker Carlson’s show that he, along with other conservatives, had been harassed and bullied and added to an internal political blacklist. In America you should be fired for being bad at your job—not your “bad views.” No wonder Elon Musk calls it “Sanctimonious Valley.” We wanted flying cars, but we got Communistic struggle sessions.
Cernekee raised the problem to the Google human resources department and eventually the California and federal labor boards. He was ignored. He told the country about the censorship on national TV, but still our conservative leaders are “monitoring” the situation—and doing nothing to fix it.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and tech increasingly has absolute power over what we see, feel, and hear. They’ve bought off most of our politicians, Republican and Democrat alike. In Washington, corruption is often a family affair. When they can’t buy a congressman, they oftentimes buy the kids or spouse. A lot of members have adult kids working for the tech companies, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose daughter Alison works as project manager for Facebook. Facebook has donated hundreds of thousands to and through Chuck Schumer, who worked with the company to stop regulation.
Bobby Goodlatte is a left-wing venture capitalist who praised the FBI agents who worked to overthrow the results of the 2016 election, calling Peter Strzok “a patriot.” Bobby’s father—Congressman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia—stopped meaningful tech regulation when Republicans were in the majority. That wasn’t good enough for his son, who endorsed and raised $40,000 for the Democrat seeking to replace his own dad in Congress.
“The way you raise money on the Judiciary is by playing the tech companies and the content publishers against each other,” Chairman Goodlatte told me in my first year. How degrading.
Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley (R-Establishment) seems resigned to defeat in the battle against Big Tech. Or is her acceptance of the status quo an obvious signal she is on their side? Her tweet was like a white flag of surrender: “Censorship by tech companies, esp censorship of conservative opinions, violates the spirit of the law & the 1st Amendment. But more regulation would go too far in the other direction, putting bureaucrats & lawyers in control of what gets said online. Either way, free speech loses.” Either way free speech loses? Not exactly the talk of winners. We should fight like hell to vindicate the rights of all Americans. Losing should not be an option, much less a strategy.
With “leaders” like this, we can be forgiven for thinking we might never be able to stop the tech companies from undermining our elections.
And yet stories continue to get out about the censorship of American voices and about harassment. What began as a conspiracy theory has now reached the desk of the president of the United States. He promises reforms, and I’ve introduced them along with Sen. Josh Hawley. He has promised executive action, and I’m going to advise him on how to deliver it.
To fix our tech companies, we must bear witness to their flaws. The truth always triumphs against tyranny, even if it takes a while for most of us to notice there’s a battle going on. Eventually, though, we do. There is no algorithm that can break the human will to do the right thing. And so there have been brave whistleblowers who have detailed how Facebook and Twitter and Google and Pinterest suppress conservative content with impunity and without apology.
We must be courageous enough to encourage these brave voices to guide us and to expose what’s truly rotten at these #AmericaLast companies. All technology means is doing more with less. You can sometimes have more tyranny at a cheaper price. If we are entering a networked world, denying someone access to that network constitutes a kind of maliciousness we should oppose. Ever since the ancient world, we had two punishments—death and banishment. It’s easier to ban your opponents than to debate them.
&nbs
p; Software is eating the world, prominent VC and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen once said. And it is eating our political discourse whole.
Your wealth is a function of your intelligence, your capacity for risk, and network social media bans are a kind of taking, no less personally destructive than taking property. Do we make America great again by banning people with bad politics from Uber or DoorDash or Instacart? Why again do we allow the tech or for that matter banking companies to work with fraudulent hate groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center to determine who can use their products? Does the heart of a tyrant beat in the heart of every Woketopian? Are they all secretly building the Chinese social credit score system to turn us all into their captive Uighurs?
Naivete has made us terribly vulnerable. Google partnered with the Chinese Communist military to build artificial intelligence—but not the U.S. military. More than 1,600 Google employees petitioned CEO Sundar Pichai to deny cops basic email services. The woke Left wants the cops to show up when they are under attack, but heaven forbid they have a right to access the basic digital necessities. Twitter hired a Chinese Communist Party-linked A.I. expert who wanted to hide “secret” weapons contracts.
We must make our tech sector love America before our tech overlords take us over. Here, policy can be our guide.
Big Tech should be required to provide transparency to validate the neutrality of its platform. Valid explanations should accompany all takedowns and suspensions. It was embarrassing when Jack Dorsey didn’t even know why users were suspended. Individual users should be able to appeal, be told exactly where they went out of bounds (quotes, timestamp) and exactly what policy guidelines they violated. The big platforms should also be required to publish aggregate data on takedowns/suspensions. Maybe also have an independent board of review. It should be hard to comply with the conditions justifying bans so that they’ll censor less.
We need a culture of free speech, and large or market-dominant communication platforms need to serve the public interest rather than their own whims. The big players need to be regulated as common carriers.
Big Tech needs to stop hurting the little guy. Sure, they need to remove spammers, scams, and child porn, but their algorithmic tools can’t be allowed to censor sociopolitical ideas, constitutionally protected hate speech, or everything deemed “misinformation.” Twitter has now made it so that their employees can work from anywhere. They should do what they can to make sure that that army of employees is representative of society as a whole, not just a narrow group of Silicon Valley woketopians.
Ban foreign companies like TikTok that are little more than data collection operations. We must ban certain Chinese organizations from operating in our country, just as they have with ours. Why do we allow the Chinese state to buy access to genetics companies like 23andMe or Complete Genomics anyway?
Don’t set sweeping public policy targeting FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) that winds up screwing upstarts, though. Making large and small companies play by the same rules will always favor the large companies.
Major operating system vendors need to offer a level playing field and encourage third-party innovation. They need to let third-party developers replace their built-in apps and let users replace their OS with modified versions on the hardware they own. App store curation shouldn’t exclude software that the OS finds distasteful.
Politics and tech need not be in an antagonistic conflict. Whatever necessary tech disruption occurs should ultimately make America great and not just enrich a few in tony zip codes. Ask not what America can do for your tech company but what your tech company can do for America.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Revenge Porn Chivalry
October 27, 2019
World Series Game 5. Presidential Sky Box. Washington Nationals Stadium.
“You’re dating her, aren’t you?”
I was not.
“No, Mr. President. But chivalry is not dead. And I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress. Besides, we all fall short of perfection in our personal lives. That doesn’t mean she should be getting bullied like this.”
(Melania nodded in approval.)
The president pointed to then-congressman Mark Meadows, his best beltway buddy, and then back at me.
“He’s dating her. Totally dating her. And he won’t even admit it to his favorite president.”
I have never dated that congresswoman, Katie Hill. Katie came to Washington a term after me, in the 2018 “blue wave,” but with much more initial acclaim. She was a rising star in the new Democratic majority before she even took the oath. Hot, young, and blonde. Openly bisexual. From donor-rich California. She beat a multi-term Republican. A documentary movie chronicled her upstart millennial campaign. Well…most of it.
Katie and her husband Kenny were having sex with a young female campaign staffer. Apparently that arrangement is called a throuple—a festive label for sure. It’s weird, but in my experience, very normal-looking relationships can inflict just as much pain and resentment as the strange ones. If folks aren’t getting hurt any more than usual, I’m not a judger. Different strokes for different folks. Live and let live. Besides, I have plenty to work on to be a better partner in my own relationships before judging the choices others make in theirs.
All good throuples come to an end, apparently. Who knew that wasn’t the most stable of affairs? This one ended with now-estranged Kenny releasing Congresswoman Hill’s naked pics online. Bongs, questionable tattoos, and scenes with Katie and her staffer without clothes dripped out over several days.
I have already laid out my rules against sleeping with staffers. But technically there is no congressional rule against sleeping with campaign staff. Maybe there should be. Though, more than a few congressmen have ended up marrying their campaign workers. My predecessor Joe Scarborough did. Ex-Mrs. Scarborough #2—after the intern stuff, before the co-host stuff. All’s fair in love and war and MSNBC.
Releasing revenge porn is a crime and it should be. If two people (or, given the example, maybe more) share photos in the confines of a relationship, society shouldn’t judge the object of the image as harshly as we judge the betraying releaser. Only a bully violates trust for spite and sport. And I have never tolerated bullies. My dad taught me to stand up to them. No matter the trouble I found myself in during school, if I was pushing back against a bully, all was absolved at home.
Sometimes home can be the scene of the crime. Katie’s mean husband was victimizing her—our colleague. Adding to the very real photos were very false claims that Katie was also sleeping with her congressional staff (apparently this time without Kenny). Katie and everyone who worked with her in the House of Representatives denied that she was. Who knows? Who cares? Nobody complained. But as Professor Alan Dershowitz points out, too often we accept Guilt by Accusation, especially if the details are salacious and tribal.
Congress treated a female member expressing her sexuality worse than the man exploiting her because of it. It wasn’t our best hour fighting the Man.
If you are a liberal, California Democrat the only thing potentially worse than having nobody defend you is having only Matt Gaetz defend you. But where was the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuit?!
Did the woke women of the new Democratic majority stand up for Katie? Did the squad don pink hats and organize protests? Did it occur to them that an abusive man was ruining the life of a human being we worked with who broke no rule and was the subject of no complaint?
One hundred and two women serve in the House—more than ever before in America’s history. But not one initially stood up for Katie. #ImWithHer was quickly converted to #ShesOnHerOwn. I had Katie’s back in hours. The few who ever spoke up took days and weeks as their wet fingers tested the political winds. It takes these feminists-in-name-only less political courage to smear President Trump than to stand up for one of their own against a real monster.
If the Democrats were too gutless to defend Katie, the Republicans were all too happy to see an opponent embarrassed—maybe even forced to resign. Could we retake the seat? Get excited! None of us are at our best when singularly focused on the zero-sum nature of power in Washington. (We did end up winning the seat. More on that in a moment.)
Tribalism makes us blind and careless. It reduces us from being our best selves and stops us from living our best lives. I don’t believe in defending every Republican just because they are a Republican. Ask senator Richard Burr, whom I roasted for selling off stocks during the coronavirus pandemic as he lied to America publicly. He’s now a *former* chairman and will never win an election again. He may even go to prison given the current FBI investigation of his conduct. If he cheated and lied to the country for personal gain, he should.
I also won’t attack Democrats just because they are Democrats. As the son of a mother confined to a wheelchair most of my life, I hate when people pick on the vulnerable and weak. I stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. I believe in civil rights for the gay, the trans, the unborn, and our animal friends. It’s why I support laws that crack down on those who abuse defenseless animals. It’s why I’m the only Republican co-sponsor of the FAIR Act to stop mandatory arbitration in employment claims. Sexual harassers shouldn’t get to pick their own juries in advance.
“Who among us would look perfect if every ex leaked every photo or text? Katie isn’t being investigated by Ethics or maligned because she hurt anyone—it is because she is different,” I tweeted.
I wasn’t done.
“Congress should write a budget before we play ‘bedroom police’ or allow an ex to illegally humiliate our colleague for being different. Key fact: Not a whiff of a complaint from anyone who has worked for Congresswoman Hill. Just an angry ex releasing revenge porn. Sad!”