yahoo news | The Rise of the Digital Oligarchy

In January 1994 the author attended Vice‑President Al Gore’s keynote at UCLA’s Information Superhighway Conference, surrounded by media titans such as John Malone, Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller. Gore framed the nascent Internet as a “public utility” that would be built by private investment and kept open by competition. At the time the promise sounded almost naïve: a lightly guided market would create a new civic commons, with the state supplying only the rules that would prevent bottlenecks and private toll‑roads.

The optimism quickly gave way to a very different reality. The 1996 Telecommunications Act, and especially its Section 230 provision, granted the platforms that would dominate the next two decades an almost unprecedented liability shield, allowing them to grow without responsibility for user‑generated content. Over the ensuing years a handful of firms—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and later the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg— amassed market capital in the trillions, compressing the public sphere into a quasi‑monopolistic digital oligarchy. The author describes this shift as “techno‑fascism,” a convergence of nostalgia for a supposedly stable past and a progress‑driven faith that technology can solve every problem, leaving democracy increasingly vulnerable to corporate control.

Today the article warns that the original promise of a shared digital commons has become a landscape of surveillance and AI‑driven governance. Edward Snowden’s revelations exposed how the same infrastructure meant for connection also enabled mass monitoring, while recent moral battles—Anthropic’s refusal to weaponise its models versus OpenAI’s Pentagon contract—show how quickly corporate principles can be sacrificed for power and profit. The author calls for a re‑imagining of the system: humanity must reclaim authorship of its own story, perhaps through mechanisms like a sovereign fund funded by AI revenues, and by recognizing the essential role of artists and human judgment in navigating the “maelstrom” of our own technological ingenuity.

Read more: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/rise-digital-oligarchy-ai-era-1235534437/

#algore #telecommunicationsact #section230 #google #facebook

#AlGore talking about #NoKings "There is a feeling on the part of some that we do need a king, we do need an autocrat,” he said. “Well, to hell with you, we do not. We're Americans. And the whole spirit of these demonstrations is to reassert that fact.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwBGsQzayTQ

#NoKings #AlGore #Resist #Resistance #Protest #Democracy #Trump #Autocracy #alt

ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW WITH AL GORE

> The Bulwark Podcast: #AlGore: #Trump Has Made a Historic Mistake

Episode webpage: https://audioboom.com/posts/8879385

Media file: https://arttrk.com/p/ABMA5/clrtpod.com/m/pscrb.fm/rss/p/prfx.byspotify.com/e/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/audioboom.com/posts/8879385.mp3?modified=1774555166&sid=5114286&source=rss

#Climate #ClimateChange

Eine Serie von, mit und über Pete Davidson. Oder besser: über die Sehnsucht, nicht länger Pete Davidson sein zu müssen. Über das Wissen, dass jeder Gag ein Placebo ist. Und darüber, wie ein Mann sich selbst verliert, wenn alle Welt von ihm erwartet, sich preiszugeben. Ich empfinde Fremdscham wie lange nicht – und bleibe dann doch, weil sich etwas entblößt, das wirklich selten geworden ist im Comedyland: ehrliches, echtes Unbehagen, verpackt als Witz. (ZDF, Wh.)

I apologise for the Reddit link but this is a good post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressiveHQ/s/wEraT0Snoq

#algore #trump #hitler #politics

Al Gore coining AI as 'Artificial Insanity' is something we all need to use right now.

#ai #aislop #algore

“Our constitution written by our founders is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump.”

- Al Gore, SF Climate Week San Francisco's Exploratorium, April 2025
#algore #trump