Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Systrom, and other social media tycoons certainly have a lot of influence over public opinion, but they are not oligarchs in the sense of having any direct control over the government, much less being the small cabal with exclusive access or power. From your post, you seem to imply that the action of blocking the President from using Twitter is unjust and an infringement upon liberty that “decent men” should not side with, but as others have noted Trump has long been in violation of explicit user agreement on Twitter to not incite violence or hateful rhetoric, and the company has arguably been dilatory in allowing its platform to be used to distribute mistruths, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks on other people.
In any case, the President has had available to him all manner of tools and means of official communication which have been available to past presidents, and his use of a commercial social media site as a primary means to issue formal pronouncements, policy agenda, firing staff, et cetera is at odds with the official communications policies of all US Government agencies which require formal communications to be conducted on government-owned machines and networks so the records can be archived and maintained in accordance with 5 U.S. Code § 552 - Public information; agency rules, opinions, orders, records, and proceedings, more commonly known as the Freedom of Information Act, as well as various individual department and bureau policies for the archiving of communications. Social media has otherwise been viewed as an informal means that spokespersons for agencies use to communicate informally with the public at large, and it is abnormal at best and worrisome that Twitter has come to be used as a primary conduit. Putting an end to this misuse, particularly for the act of inciting a riot in the Capitol Building with the avowed intent of interfering with the process of formalizing an election result he personally disagreed with, and resulting in the deaths of five people, is long overdue.
You may recall there was some issue with a prior Congressperson and presidential candidate using a non-official private server even though she was one of many in government service using private email accounts–many of them not at all secure–for official business. Trump may still give press briefings to those media outlets who still care to broadcast his rantings, as well as issue press releases, demand time on public airwaves to make formal announcements and speeches, send postcards to every household and Post Office Box, or robo-dial until he gets someone who wants to hear his bizarre view of a world that has so unreasonably denied him reelection despite all available evidence that he lost without any significant error, fraud, or malfeasance to be found in the electoral process. He has not been “blocked” in any material way other than being denied access to his favorite game like an ill-mannered toddler who won’t eat his dinner.
Not random. Multivac(Asimov’s supercomputer) chose him as being most representative of the population. The results actually determined every election in the country down to dogcatcher.
I did not but I have heard numerous people make this suggestion without jest, and it worries me because as much as I like thinking and reading about machine cognition, future automation, transhumanism, et cetera, I am concerned for all the consequences our current prognostications will miss. The real threat of artificial intelligence is not that it will make terminator killbots that will hunt humans down over a post-apocalyptic hellscape and send liquid metal death-droids back in time to change history, but that we will so subordinate our own responsibility and authority that we will no longer be able to functional manage or operate our own government, economy, or even basic equipment.
I am in favor of using machine cognition and “deep learning” in an advisory capacity where it makes sense to do so, such as a physician’s diagnostic tool, or a simulation tool that looks that the practical implementations of laws and policies prior to enacting them in reality, or for examining the more obscure areas of physics and biology that are too complex for any human mind to grasp, but I would caution against any effort to put “AI” in charge of anything beyond purely functional tasks like driving or warehousing, and even in that I think there should be rigorous standards and oversight to assure public safety and interests.
Clearly Trump isn’t a doper, or he would know exactly what to do: register a new account on Twitter under a new name, introduce himself as a “long time lurker”, then go right back to posting exactly the same things as before.
Fiveminutes later, we’d see: BANNED for socking
by Tuba Diva, Jonathan Chance, Hi Opel!, and Cecil Adams.
For many idiots on the right, the 1st Amendment reads “I can say whatever I want, and nobody can disagree with me. No private company can tell me what to do or say while using their business. But I can tell others what they cannot do or say.”
Wikipedia tells us, the Defense Data Network, based on ARPANET technology, was used 1983 through 1995. The earlier Automatic Digital Network system (AUTODIN) was deployed in the 1960s and already facilitated electronic communications among hundreds of bases.
His reasoning about the immense risk from A.I. is hard to dispute, and quite disturbing. Approaching the singularity, how do you implement adequate safeguards against something that will quickly become orders of magnitude smarter than you? Well worth a read if you haven’t come across his work.
We’ve had things smarter than a human for millennia. What’s smarter than a human? A group of humans working together. What’s smarter than both a group of humans and a machine? A group of humans and a machine working together. The Singularity does not involve us being left behind; it involves us becoming part of something.
Certainly people in the defense department could have been using it well before anyone else. And certainly in my experience when people first encountered email at universities, which I got a sneak-peek at in an academic camp in the early 90s (I’ve fairly sure it was summer 1994), a lot of the people failed to understand some thing about it that we’d now take for granted, such as knowing who each piece of mail is from even if it wasn’t signed. It wouldn’t surprise me that defense department personnel in an era even earlier than that would fail to understand similar protocols surrounding message retention. People used to not have copies of what mail they sent unless they made a copy before they sent it, which is trivial and automatic with email, but most people didn’t bother with in paper.
Here is a history of email on Multics. I remember using email on Multics for a class the fall of 1969, but my memory could be faulty.
PLATO had email in 1975 when I started on it - and Instant Messaging, message boards, MUDs, multiplayer interactive games …
And I definitely had email in 1980 when I started at Bell Labs. Not the current domain addressing, of course, you had to route your mail through mail servers like decvax and ihnp4.
The airline industry had the equivalent of email back in the early 1960s too. It was trivial to send a sorta-telegram to multiple addressees all over the planet via first teletype or later video screen. There was a hierarchical addressing scheme, though no equivalent of DNS.
But within the bureacracy, it was simple to send a message to Airline X, location Y, department Z from any other Airline A, location B, department C. Latency was measured in seconds. Pretty quickly vendors and large customers such as travel agents were added to the burgeoning worldwide network. All back when Kennedy was President.
My recollection of my first email (Unix, mid-70’s) was that an email to another university typically took about the same amount of time to be delivered as snail mail (a few days)!
I don’t know if the system actually worked but some BBSs tried hanging on by providing users with email addresses. I had one of these prior to getting on AOL.
“If you weren’t upset when a private business was held to be able to refuse to provide gay wedding cakes, you shouldn’t be upset if Twitter can refuse to provide services to the Trump.”