Standard conservatives and libertarians are arguing, on principle, that the state has no business telling private businesses what to do, even if it disadvantages conservatives. I can admire their sticking to principle, but this is an example where free-market dogma doesn’t match reality. Spend some time with Shoshanna Zuboff’s great book The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism, which details how Silicon Valley bigs are gathering all kinds of personal data, and exploiting it for profit. There has never been a business like this one, one that poses such extraordinary dangers of personal and political liberty. This is not merely about freedom of expression. […]
Last month, sitting in the apartment of Czech anti-communist dissident Kamila Bendova, in Prague, a flat that was bugged by the secret police, Kamila told me that it shocks her how unconcerned Westerners are about giving up their personal data to these companies. She said, “Don’t you realize that all of this is going to be used against you, sooner or later?”
The stakes in this political fight are far beyond whether or not the government should tell a tech company what it can and can’t do. This is not a left or right thing. The stakes go down to the kind of society we’re going to live in for the rest of this century, and beyond.
Excerpts from a response (in agreement) by Rod Dreher: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/facebook-peggy-noonan-imperious-twerp-mark-zuckerberg-caesar/