in a paywalled post on his very lucrative and popular Substack, the ersatz Hunter Thompson Matt Taibbi covered a recent development in the ongoing battle between European regulatory bodies and the Big Tech firms. The EU passed the Digital Services Act, which places far greater onus on platforms for monitoring content and for doing away with manipulative user interface designs. as part of this roll out, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton has sent letters to Zuck and Musk warning them that they’ll need to do something about the “illegal content” on their respective platforms if they want to avoid hefty consequences for continuing to operate on the Continent.
Taibbi’s very reasoned and thoughtful stance on this supposedly censorious overreach by the EU is that Zuck and Musk “should hire Louis C.K. and have him flown to Brussels to tell Breton in person, American-style, to eat a bag of d— (sic).” the post is titled “Europe, Get Off Our Speech Lawn,” and subtitled “The European Union deigns to lecture America on free expression.” you don’t need that lecture though, huh Matty, seeing how polite you were to self-censor your slam dunk dick joke.
whatever Taibbi goes on to say about this I have no idea, because I’m not giving Substack my credit card information. this morning I’m feeling pretty down on Substack, despite my own use of the platform, since they rely on schlubs like me to provide free content while making cash deals with gigapundits like Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, all to legitimize their business model and erode what’s left of public journalism in the exact same way Uber destroyed taxi cab companies.
the extent to which the DSA actually censors anything that would not be censored in offline media is unclear to me. “hate speech, child sexual abuse material, scams, non-consensual sharing of private images, promotion of terrorism, the sale of counterfeit or unsafe products and copyright infringement,” these are all things that American news media can’t broadcast/print anyway, so is Taibbi upset he won’t be able to promote a scam selling counterfeit child pornography that incites terrorism on Twitter? maybe, I don’t know the man. I didn’t even read the newsletter. anything’s possible.
the DSA also covers a broader, vaguer, and more insidious range of content: disinformation. this is where things get murky. what constitutes disinformation? who decides? is disinformation pushed by government officials, usually styled “propaganda,” at issue here? is anything the EU disagrees with false, anything it says true?
these are dark times, epistemologically speaking. for centuries, power maintained tight control with strict monitoring of who can know what, what secrets must be kept. since the the exponential increase in information made available in the last 60 or so years, a different strategy was taken, at least in the West: drown everyone in so much information that it’s impossible to sort through it all and come to an adequately “informed” decision. this makes it so that what’s easiest is to continually seek out confirmatory sources, partitioning off the social sphere into noncommunicable psychic sectors. in such a world, what difference does it make if a few people get the straight dope, if everyone’s convinced their mutually exclusive view of the world is Gospel? and yet here we have a regulatory body, a supranational hierarchical power structure, fretting over the idea that the wrong information might get into the wrong hands.
again, I have no idea if Taibbi wrote about any of this; he can make money keeping his posts behind a velvet rope that I don’t care to be let into. meanwhile, I’m offering all this, for free, and no one even notices.
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