Silicon valley

It’s a funny old world. Cockburn noticed today that Facebook and Instagram have been told to overhaul their longstanding ban on exposed female nipples, as the policy impedes the right to expression for, wait for it, trans and nonbinary people. Isn’t it funny that more than a decade after breastfeeding mothers first held a “nurse-in” at Facebook’s headquarters to protest, Meta’s oversight board has called for an overhaul to the boob ban to satisfy the rights of people that insist they are now men. What a victory! “Lactivists,” otherwise known as women, spent an entire decade in the 2000s attempting to reverse the ban by explaining that images of breasts were not inherently sexual. This resulted in the campaign to #FreetheNipple, which went mainstream in 2013.

It’s been less than two weeks since Elon Musk took over Twitter — and Cockburn is finding the app more chaotic than ever. The news of the tech takeover really separated the kids from the grown-ups. One by one, the haughtiest users have bravely announced their departure from the bird website. Ciao! The latest to go is the British actor Stephen Fry, who posted a picture of Scrabble letters spelling out "goodbye" to his 12.5 million followers. He’s since headed over to Mastodon. Never heard of it? Neither had Cockburn until he got his tech-savvy nieces to give him a hand. And now he can say, with authority, that it is even worse than Twitter. When signing up to Mastodon, users choose a "server," which is based on your interests. "Mindly.

The way I see it, there are two options for the future: a transplanetary society or a transhuman one. What got me thinking about this was right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel’s recent interview with Mary Harrington, which she wrote up in UnHerd. As Harrington puts it, Thiel’s diagnosis of modern social ills is not that “progress is inevitably self-destructive,” but that we’ve been making the wrong kind of progress. "We’ve had continued progress in the world of computers, bits, internet, mobile internet, but it’s a narrow zone of progress. And it’s been more interior, atomizing and inward-focused,” Thiel said. Meanwhile, “there’s been limited progress in the world of atoms.” So far, so good. But then the interview took a strange turn.

Testosterone is having a moment. At once a molecular vector for toxic masculinity and a health-optimizing supplement for middle-aged tycoons eager to project vigor, “T” is perhaps the most discussed hormone around. I blame Jeff Bezos, who has apparently aged in reverse since founding Amazon. After a tight-shirted appearance at the 2017 Sun Valley conference, his transformation from dweeby online-book-salesman to Vin Diesel-clone-with-alpha-swagger was unmistakable. Was he getting some hormonal help? Fast-forward a few years and he has acquired a hot Latina girlfriend and blasted himself into space in a giant metal penis. This left little room for doubt: surely he was marinated to a T, in T.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the C-suite at Twitter on Thursday afternoon. The social media company’s San Francisco headquarters reportedly played host to an all-hands meeting in which concerned employees were given the chance to ask questions about billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to buy their company. Their panic is not entirely without merit — Musk has floated the idea of turning Twitter’s building into a homeless shelter. Yet it's worth noting that Twitter’s employees have been told they can work from home indefinitely, and their questions were delivered to a largely empty building via the messaging app Slack.

Four years in the making, the Online Safety Bill has now been sent to senior ministers for review — a process that allows them to protest, to shout if anything obvious that has been missed. In this case, the process is invaluable because something huge has been missed. The Bill, if passed, would empower the Silicon Valley firms it’s designed to suborn. It would formalise and usher in a new era of censorship of UK news — run from San Francisco. This Bill would backfire in a way that its Tory advocates have so far proven unable to understand let alone address. That’s why it needs to be halted, and a rethink ordered. The original aim is to make Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and others liable for any genuine filth promoted online.

Gstaad Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over: did any of them feel morally entitled to their privilege? The problem with talking about privilege is that the discussion goes around in circles, original thoughts get lost, and what emerges says more about those conversing than about the subject at hand. Ditto when I posed the question to my son’s friends. There were no straightforward answers. Let’s face it, privilege is so enjoyable that the beneficiaries are mostly seen as undeserving, spoilt lightweights — by the underprivileged, that is. Envy has always been around, as has the urge to take away wealth from those not seen as having earned it.

A few weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche bragged to an admirer that he had completed a ruthless attack on our Lord, he collapsed, had convulsions, shouted like a madman and never recovered his faculties again. It was early 1889. He was 44 years old, his books had just begun to be noticed, and he lived for a decade longer, empty-eyed, silent and entirely unaware of the fame that was about to engulf him. Was his tragic end divine punishment for his sacrilege? My devout Catholic wife begs to differ. Our Lord is not vengeful, she insists. That’s the only thing wrong with him, I reply.

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?

Nothing duller for those of us not in therapy than listening to people who are in therapy talking about it, something they seem to like to do incessantly, at every opportunity. For this reason, my heart sank during the Oprah interview — which I’d been looking forward to tremendously — when early into his appearance, Prince Harry made an unsmiling reference to the ‘many years’ he had spent ‘doing the work — and doing my own learning’. Here we go, I thought. Sure enough, not long later he was telling the ludicrously softball interviewer of his family, his father, particularly: ‘they only know what they know. I’ve tried to educate them, through the process that I’ve been educated.’ Difficult to imagine how much the Windsors must have enjoyed that.

Where does one find freedom these days? A billion dollar Silicon Valley tech company now appears to be the answer. Mr S was delighted to read in the Wall Street Journal this afternoon that Prince Harry, 36, will be taking up his first formal job post-Megxit as the chief impact officer at tech start up BetterUp in California.  The Duke of Sussex will be providing 'proactive coaching' for personal development, increased awareness and 'an all-round better life' at the startup which provides professional coaching, mental health advice and 'immersive learning.'  BetterUp was founded in 2013 and recently raised $125m from international investors to fund expansion which valued the company at $1.7bn.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, some industry pundits predicted that the ‘techlash’ — the souring of public opinion on huge technology companies like Facebook and Google — would cool off or even disappear entirely. After all, with everyone cooped up at home, surely we’d develop a newfound appreciation for the technologies that became the only way to connect with others?That was short-lived. Following extraordinary social pressure amid this summer’s heated civil unrest, an advertiser boycott of Facebook has taken hold. Under the moniker Stop Hate For Profit and backed by the Anti-Defamation League and NAACP, brands from Starbucks to Unilever to Coca-Cola have bravely pulled ads from Facebook for the month of July.

As civil unrest reverberated throughout virtually every corner of American life, culture, and industry this week, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced that he was resigning from the company’s board of directors. He hopes that his seat will be filled by a black person. ‘I’m doing this for myself, for my family, and for my country,’ Ohanian (who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams) wrote on Twitter. ‘I’m saying this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks, “What did you do?”’Later, Ohanian tweeted, ‘I'm seeing more and more people in tech who are frustrated and have been hitting a wall in their companies leaving!

The Western COVID-19 crisis started with another skirmish in the Nerd-Hack war and the conflict has continued. Back in February, Vox published a rather snide piece about how Silicon Valley weirdos were not shaking hands for fear of picking up and passing on coronavirus. Balaji Srinivasan, a noted angel investor and entrepreneur, hit back with a detailed critique of the piece. The reader can decide for themselves who was more prescient, though I will pose one question — when did you last shake someone's hand?Nerd-Hack conflict has boiled up again this week. Marc Andreessen, the co-author of Mosaic, the granddaddy of web browsers, published a rousing call to build. ‘Our nation and our civilization,’ Andreessen writes:‘...were built on production, on building.