Big tech

It seems like we can’t help getting attached to robots. It also seems like the people making the robots are counting on that. In the 2015 video game Fallout 4, one of the factions with which the player can align him- or herself is “the Railroad,” an organization that helps seemingly sentient androids escape from the lab in which they’re created. A friend of mine mocked me mercilessly for aligning myself with the “SJWs” of the Railroad and insisted that the androids — who spoke eloquently of their emotions, friendships, and aspirations — actually had the same moral worth as a toaster. I laughed, but secretly still felt I’d made the right choice. Surely it was always better to err on the side of greater empathy.

Take my hand, darling, and off we go into the metaverse. It's a whole new world...or at least it's a new world...maybe a brave new world? Enter Mark Zuckerberg, that Titanic captain of industry, who last week released a video introducing his latest plan to leave his Nike shoeprint upon reality. It's called the metaverse, and while even the savviest tech writers are grasping to explain what it is, it appears to be the fusion of our world with the virtual. Big Zuck wants what's on our screens to spill over into real life. We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, now we will live in "home spaces" with digitally rendered pterodactyls flying just outside the windows.

'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922 Wittgenstein wrote that as an ontological and epistemological foundation for his larger belief in freedom of speech. He who controls the language also controls reality, something that today's left understands brilliantly, even devilishly. America historically has not limited freedom of thought and speech, and the resulting clash of ideas has improved our national discourse. The language police makes us weaker intellectually by limiting the world in which we live. The language around climate change and the green movement is one more area the left wants to control, especially given that trillions of dollars in spending are on the line.

What would Adam Smith think of cancel culture? Many advocates of banning books now hide behind a veil of free-market purity: If Amazon bans a book, it’s not really banned because the online megalomart is, a private company. But it controls an outright majority of book sales in the United States, and even that remarkable measure may underestimate the power Jeff Bezos’s company wields over individual titles. Bestsellers can be found elsewhere perhaps, but most books have few other outlets. So Amazon doesn’t ban books. It just makes them much harder to buy and read. If a private company chooses to do that, who are you to complain?