Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

Author:Vivek Ramaswamy [Ramaswamy, Vivek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781546090786
Google: afYwzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2021-11-15T23:44:49.760915+00:00

I HAD A long call with one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists on a Saturday night during the peak of the ideological purge in January 2021. He’s served on boards of some of the largest tech giants. He explained to me with alarming clarity that there are about fifty pieces of infrastructure that comprise the modern internet—and that every single one of them, from individual browsers to cloud computing, serves as a node to effectuate political censorship and each could be used to banish defectors from the ideological cartel in the future. In a subsequent text exchange, he called it “*the* issue of our time.” Yet despite being a famous jillionaire27 himself, he was also personally frightened: when I asked him what we could do to stop the tide, he immediately requested that I not cite his name publicly for fear of retribution. He acknowledged that his inability to speak up was a case in point of the underlying problem, but he felt the personal risks to him were just too great.

So I wondered who, or what, would be the next target. If Twitter has a moral obligation to censor misinformation and offensive speech in public tweets and private direct messages, does Google have an obligation (and therefore justification) to censor private emails? Will Verizon say it has a responsibility to stop hate and conspiracy from spreading via text messages? If text messages become fair game, then why not live phone conversations too?

This isn’t just a matter of hyperbole. Earlier this year, at the 2021 Game Developers Conference Showcase, Intel revealed new technology that “uses artificial intelligence to get rid of other gamers’ hateful and abusive audio chat.” The new product is called “Bleep.” This piece of software allows users to screen out “White Nationalism,” “Aggression,” “LGBTQ+ Hate,” or “Racism and Xenophobia.” But who decides what counts as racist or xenophobic for purposes of training the artificial intelligence algorithms? Of course, Intel Corporation.28 Is it really such a stretch to believe that this kind of technology couldn’t easily be incorporated into our iPhones and email accounts too?

Nowadays, concepts like “racism” and “sexual exploitation” are regularly being used to censor content not just for political reasons but for commercial reasons too. Just look at what happened earlier this year to online chat groups focused on trading stocks.

Early in 2021, a group of traders on a Reddit forum called WallStreetBets realized Wall Street might have made a mistake. As it turns out, hedge funds had short-sold more shares of struggling video game retailer GameStop than actually existed. Short-selling means borrowing a share of a company and then selling it in the market. It’s a way of betting against a stock: the short-seller makes money when the share price of a company goes down, allowing the short-seller to buy back the share at a lower price and return it to the lender.

Predictably, short-selling isn’t very popular with the public for the same reason that predators and scavengers aren’t popular in nature,

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