Friday, July 12, 2019

Asymmetric De-Stabilization; Why the S.400 Missile System is So Dangerous


In the 1980s, president Ronald Reagan took the United States down the path of the strategic defense initiative known as Star Wars. It fundamentally changed the nature of strategic nuclear warfare to the point that it was an economical for the Soviet Union to continue to pursue the strategy of mutual assured destruction. It changed the world and ended the Cold War. Decades later, the descendant of one of the Soviet anti-aircraft defense missile systems from the era of the Red Menace is set to do the same to the world's air forces. 

Black Swans Rising

The S.400 is the evolution of area air defense systems only dreamt about in the days of the Cold War by the Voyska PVO Strany Air Defence Armies of the Soviet Union. This is a very capable missile system. It is a missile system that renders almost the entire inventory of older generation combat aircraft in the hands of any air force obsolete.

Fighter aircraft, command and control planes, drones and even stand off missiles are at risk from the talons of an S.400 generation class SAM. The Israelis found this out in the hard way Syria on February 10, 2018 losing a very advanced version F-16L to a storm of anti-aircraft defenses, “Dangerous Skies” Dennis Santiago, AmericaOutLoud.com, https://americaoutloud.com/dangerous-skies/.

You should realize that one-half to two-thirds of the cost of a modern combat aircraft is in avionics, the electronic systems that manage the offensive and defensive ability of the platform to operate in a hostile airspace. Most of the combat aircraft on this planet do not have sophisticated electronic warfare avionics. Even among the nations that do, the S.400 missile is still a threat for so-called fourth generation and lesser combat aircraft. As S.400 systems proliferate, and the technology to make them independently along with it, entire fleets of Air Forces will have to either be modernized or scrapped. Few nations will be able to afford the next generation of aircraft is necessary to operate in the type of hostile airspace. It will increasingly alter the danger of the skies above surface of the earth.

Power projection, Maritime patrols, Surveillance, Air Defense Interdiction Zones, Close Air Support. All these missions will undergo radical transformations wherever the footprint of shows up. I have to spare general readers the specifics because I don’t want to have to put classification stamps at the top and bottom of this article; but, for those of you with the clearances, I’m pretty sure your mind is now racing about what the engagement analytics means; not just for our Air Force, but for every air force that we’ve relied upon to multiply our influence.

Like Star Wars, the S.400 takes the world’s global stability planners through what’s called a non-linear junction in the rules of engagement. Everything changes from the probability of loss mathematics to the diplomatic leverage potential of US and allied force structure inventories.
This is not a small deal. This is an asymmetric threat; as asymmetric as SDI was. This is not a problem directed against the United States. This is a systemic threat to the structure of world order that the United States depends on. It has the consequence effect of undermining and eliminating the how we think power balances between nations and factions within nations. This is what academics call a Beta Risk event, a global stability Black Swan.

And it’s going to work because here’s the thing about asymmetric threats, once the ball gets moving, entropy rules. It’s you against inevitability. It’s almost impossible to stop.

Motives, Methods, Opportunities

Some will this as profiteering by the Russians selling second generation systems to generate cash and influence among second tier countries as Vladimir Putin’s nationalist pride fights to keep his country relevant in international affairs.

But there’s more to it than that. One nation alone, regardless of intent, can case that much damage. Even Russia. But changes in the topology international power can.

It's called hill and valley power. That's the name for the regional struggles for power among so-called second tier of nations. Traditionally the proxy vassals of greater superpowers, our world is now seeing the emergence of nation-state agency, the independent action of individual parties, as the era of hegemony fades and a 21st century of fragmented or fractal alliances begins.

It’s a formula for a very unstable world. As old regime militaries become obsolete, we will see arms races. Desperate efforts to preserve the status quo of force-based order. But it won’t work. More likely, alliances and advantages will change. So many old grudges will be put to new tests between countries. Minuet wars to settle disputes will erupt.

The United States is at a crossroads in how we deal with a complex network of nations as we prepare to bolster our alliances and economic partnerships to prepare for an anticipated era of competition for global economic domination. It is a complex puzzle to be sure as we ponder our national interests with a world experiencing cataclysmic realignment.

The Tier Two Club

A power balance earthquake is rocking Eurasia. Countries like Turkey, Iran and Russia, nations with gross domestic product's in the middle range of the spectrum, are banding together. It’s an economic-interests banding of nations that don’t’ fit the European Union cooperative model. But it’s not a Warsaw Pact collection of vassals either. These are peer states brought together by not fitting in to the New World Order; they are not one of those thousand points of light.

Still, like the European Union, what they are effectively doing is banding together to shelter in place for the coming battle of the titans between the world's two largest economies, the United States and China.

To put it mildly, US relations are strained with these Eurasian Tier Two’s.

Russia

Our relationships with the Russians have been beset with a series of disastrous resets going back to the end of the Cold War. We never instituted a 1990’s Marshall Plan to help them even after Boris Yeltsin wept openly in our grocery stores about the price his people had paid to uphold their end of the Cold War global stability bargain. We could have established a powerful northern alliance with the Russians; but we didn’t. We let their world go into free fall. Today’s Russia is a basket case of oligarchy and bankrupt districts where the government looks the other way at crimes committed that bring in precious hard cash any way they can. They are still scrounging. Life is hard today.

Vladimir Putin, a very proud man, is holding a hand of cards in a poker game that requires a lot of bluff and bravado. He's pretty good at it. But he also knows he's managing a House of Cards as fragile as the one Czars had to contend with in their time.

We’ve not make things easier. We repeatedly go back to our Red Menace prejudice about them over and over; often, purely for the convenience of using them as a foil in our domestic debates. The two countries’ relations remain dysfunction as ever. That’s a lot of incentive for Mother Russia to find another way.

Iran

We have a hostile relationship with Iran that exists in what conflict strategists called a grey zone conflict, a stage of strained relations just short of outright warfare. In this case because they’re quite honesty bat shit crazy. Between a grudge their religious leadership hasn’t be able to let go of since 732 A.D. and their fatal attraction to repeat the overextension of influence mistakes of their Persian Empire history, the Iranians have a knack for making themselves unwelcome in genteel circles. Heck, they even have a knack for putting their Tier Two Club allies into some peculiar pickles on a regular basis. Khamenei, Rouhani and Salami act more like Larry, Moe and Curly on the international scene.
It’s kind of sad because Persian culture and people are quite interesting.

Turkey

And then there’s Turkey, the other former empire. Our relationship with the Ottomans is, well, chaotic. The good news, if there is such a thing here, is that’s par for the course. Everyone else’s relationship with them is chaotic too. They are barely in still in NATO. And warily members of the Tier Two Club.

The Turks do weird things. They openly call the most stalwart US allies in the region against ISIS, the Kurds, terrorists and would subdue them like the Ottomans did the Armenians. It’s a brutally pragmatic culture that looks out for itself first and only. This is the exact kind of persona that makes the “woke” parts of America freak from deep inside their safe spaces. Of course, given the socio-political fragmentation of the United States, the Turks probably see us as just as a chaotic a counterparty.

In a more practical sense, Turkey has its own share of problems. The Turkish economy is in a period of “retrenchment of previous gains”, to quote the type of thing that Alan Greenspan would have described it. A period of ebullient borrowing by the Turkish government to fund economic expansion has put them on the edge of a Venezuela-like national debt predicament. Political turmoil stemming from it has put the Turkish Central Bank at odds with the Turkish government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Like most leaders in his predicament, Erdogan turns to nationalism to weather the storm.

Fragmented Planet

Under normal circumstances, these three countries have little in common. But these are uncommon times. We are seeing the fragmentation of the world. It will be marked with greater disagreement between parties then in the past. That's a formula for a dangerous time. The kind of time where someone might make a mistake and accidentally start a World War. This represents a real worry for anyone interested in global stability that can perpetuate the conditions for constructive economic competition.

Note that it also comes at a time when the United Nations has become unable to perform its function of mitigating disharmony among the community of nations. The democratization of the UN whereby the General Assembly has become dominated by Tier Three nations has made it impossible for the Tier One and Two countries to have a working forum within that body. Their differences must be solved elsewhere; so far, in fractured bilateral dealings.

Bottom line is the UN’s path to inclusiveness failed to prevent the fractal alignments are beginning to emerge on this planet. The why, the how, the who doesn't matter anymore. The fact of the matter is that it's already happened. The world has gone through a one-way door and there is no way to step back to the other side of the looking glass.

Pivotal Importance

Turkey is, in my opinion, potentially the most destabilizing pivot point to military global stability on the planet at this moment in time. The asymmetric cascading failure will either begin in Turkey or end in Turkey. It’s important that US policy makers not treat this lightly.

I do not like or dislike the Turks. I think they are as much caught in the eye of this storm as anyone else. But it’s not lost on me that Turkey is the grand bazaar of this planet. The oldest market where goods and secrets change hands.

Two critical pieces of technology make Turkey important to every power planner on this planet. They are the S.400 surface-to-air missile system and F-35 fighter. Possession of access to these two technologies lowers the threshold of technology transfer knowledge whereby the cratering of the power of global air forces will extend to threating the viability of fifth generation stealth technology combat aircraft. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of how fast.

That bombshell will be in the hands of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I cannot see any scenario where he will not attempt to exploit it.

The China Card

None of this is happening in a battle of the Titans vacuum. The other over $16 trillion GDP economy on this planet, China, is making great effort to be friends with everyone. They send delegations to cooperate with anybody who will let them in the door. There's even a Chinese military unit drilling with NATO to cooperate in case of a catastrophic humanitarian disaster that engulfs the planet requiring everyone to help.

This positioning strategy makes sense for China. Every stability analyst with his or her weight in salt needs to respect that Xi Jinping is not a fool in this regard. No pun intended, China can read tea leaves very well. They can see the coming changes in the power structure of the planet appearing on the horizon. They want to be the other superpower that appears on the scene for the remainder of the 21st century.

Personally, I am not entirely sure the China sees the global implications of the S.400 any better than the United States does. Their actions so far do not seem to see that they are as vulnerable to the asymmetric dismantling of the Post-Cold War global economy assumption as much as the United States is. My instinct says that the United States and China are about to discover that they have more in common for their dreams of the next world order than we have differences.

It reminds me of the first admonition that was given to me when I started working on the problems of arms control during the Cold War. I was told to remember that the Russians were our partners in ensuring the success of global stability. I was told a tumultuous and dysfunctional relationship to be sure; but, ours was nevertheless a deep bond of allies to organize the world and prevent fragmentation and chaos in the aftermath of World War 2.

Some things change, some things stay the same.

US Options

What we can’t do.

Read my lips. No one on this planet can afford to allow a systemic cascading failure of military power balances on this planet to happen. we do not have the international cohesion among the community of nations to prevent the accidental initiation of a World War. We need to understand our limitations. That goes For the United States. That goes for the Chinese. That goes for the Russians. That goes for everyone. We let this happen, trade imbalances will be the least of our problems.

What we should be doing.

First, we should be asking the Russians some very tough questions about whether their intentions are indeed the crater to capabilities of every Air Force on this planet, including their own. If that is not the case, the Russians need to begin to take an active role in managing the systemic danger that they are causing.

Second, we should be discussing with the Chinese the fact that we both want a world where we can continue to interact with each other primarily based on healthy economic competition, even if that intramural sport is somewhat rough at times. We need to come to an understanding with the Chinese that it is both our interest to make sure that our economies can do so successfully anywhere on this planet. We should engage the Chinese in a serious discussion about how we, the two largest economies on this planet, are going to contain the spread of this destabilizing threat to the global stability equation.

Third, we need to stop pussyfooting around and get serious about a US national strategy to break up the Tier Two Club before something bad happens. Considering we are playing for time against a global cascading failure, I would not leave anything off the table for consideration at the National Security Council.

Fourth, we also need a national strategy about what we are going to do as a supplier of weapon systems on this planet to mitigate the threat of destabilization facing the other nations on this earth who cannot afford to respond to what is coming. We cannot stop this alone. The who we help, how we help, what we supply to help, and the conditions under which we will help, need to be thought through systematically or we will screw this up big time.

Fifth, we need to manage the awareness and expectations of the American people so that they understand how serious this problem is and how important it is that we deal with it calmly and in unison. We blink, we lose. Just is.

It’s been a long time since we’ve put ourselves in a position to accidentally burn up the planet.

Let’s not.

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Risky Business; Why Social Justice Creates Problems for Nike, CNN, Starbucks, Facebook



Within the internet, we live in our own personalized echo chambers. The dark side effect, we have become psychotically intolerant of anything outside our safe spaces. Borrowing from McLuhan, the medium has become our lifestyle. We now live on a planet that never looks up, never looks in each other’s eyes. We’ll never see the meteor coming.

Lifestyle Marketing.

It’s one of the most effective ways to sell things. The fashion, apparel, perfume, automobile, travel, sports, outdoor and other consumer industries depend on it. It’s about segmenting and beguiling human beings to transform them from disinterested parties into devoted purchasers. It’s brainwashing for financial gain. Since the days of Madison Avenue and Marshall McLuhan, America has become probably the most finely tuned consumer selling machine ever known to mankind. We have conditioned consumers to snobbishly crave products and hate alternatives not on measures of objective utility; but on how well they soothe our egos.

Many of us now have more virtual friends than real life ones. Author Julie Albright’s recent book, “Left to their Own Devices” chronicles how human value systems are changing because we have put our lives on the net; how we have become utterly alone with a tiny portal in our hands to experience the life. Humanity has become lonelier even as it has become more wired. Lifestyle marketing has achieved its apex goal, a world where humans almost entirely connect via machines designed to package and sell personal dreams.

We are entertained by the popularity of fads. A plethora of fads. Transient fads the go viral and just as quickly disappear. Fads segmented and tailored for each one of us. It’s made us hyper-tribal. Intolerant to degrees we would, until very recently, never be in person. We have become afraid to speak out of turn lest we be judged and rejected for being “incorrect”. Or vocal about our views so that we block off those who don’t soothe our fragile feelings. Either way, it’s a dysfunctional, traumatic experience to navigate. We allow ourselves to be codependent on people we’ve never met, or barely know, for affirmation. We declare everyone else to be blood enemies.

I’ve always viewed social justice to be one of those fads. Invented by academics to deconstruct theories of societal organization and analyze them, it morphed into a pop culture tool to bludgeon people. The feeling of entitlement and elitism being able to write one’s own rulebook with impunity in any way you’d like to imagine. It is the drug permeating the internet.

It is a cancer-causing drug that is killing our souls. Plurality, that tolerance respect for disparate values, ceases to have practical meaning in such prickly times. It is replaced with an ocean of hate groups, each one thinking they are the most virtuous. And underneath the noise makers, an orphaned society struggling to find its voice to call bullshit.

Artifacts of a Changing World.

This system that serves the demigod of the for-profit echo chamber may be omnipresent, but it’s still a house of cards. It’s built on a ground rule and assumption that you can exploit lifestyle marketing forever without consequence. Such grand assumptions have never been true. Every innovation has a half-life. Every belief set reaches a threshold of impracticality.

I believe we are beginning to see some of the tenets of the social justice fad weakening. I’m a bit of a student of societal artifacts. I’ve been studying for a while corporate sustainability reporting, an element of a public company’s financial filings. Investors know them as 10-K’s, 10-Q’s, 8-K’s and other documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SEC filings are an echo chamber of sorts that gives you insight into what businesses America considers to be their “safe spaces”. Don’t be fooled into thinking every company is unique. That’s not how the so-called soft and squishy part of business works. It’s more like lemming.

The reality is that the sustainability portion of a company’s filings is more like the practice of carbon copying what lawyers and risk consultants tell you will work to put into that section, what the safest thing to say is. At any time, corporate America is likely to pretty much be saying the same thing.

It’s faddish just like any other fad. For some time, copying and pasting approved platitudes about social justice and environmental sensitivity have been considered the “safe” words.

That’s beginning to not be the case. In the Internet triggered era, such platitudes have themselves become the seeds of corporate reputational risk. As social attitudes change, and in America they change and rebalance very quickly, they lead markets to question if corporate management and governance are acting in the best interest of the company. Let’s look at some case studies,













Nike, Inc.

Nike is part of the apparel industry. It is one of the most aggressive users of lifestyle marketing to carve out market share in a highly competitive environment. Nike relies on edgy attitude to not only spot fads and trends; but to make them. They walk the fine line of whom to extoll and who to disrespect in the name of aiming for maximum sales volume.

Politics aside, there’s serious mathematics in the economic calculus of a company like Nike. Inventory is just one element in a larger evaluation. For instance, to sell or junk a shoe design. If a few people in the core demographic of trendy social justice lifestyle buyers indicate they might get a little uncomfortable, is it better to take a write down loss on the shoes and parlay it into lots of free viral advertising that will make Nike’s core lifestyle purchaser’s affinity grow? For the Nike’s of the world, that’s a decision they ponder all the time.

But increasingly, it’s not a decision that doesn’t also come with business sustainability risks. Attitude can radically alter what market segments you have access to. There was a reason the Betsy Ross Flag show design made it all the way into stores. Someone at Nike did the research that said there was purchase intention there; that the market is turning.

In my opinion, Nike management chickened out. There was no danger their core market was going to abandon them. They went for the “safest word” in their version of corporate sustainability. They elected to not offend the market share they knew instead to exploring how to expand their business to address objectively found emerging areas of demand.

That’s leaving money on the table for competitors. That’s hardly ever a good thing for a company. Other lifestyle apparel companies will gain strength wherever they are not. I suggest that Nike’s board of directors should be asking some serious questions about the incident.

Quoting tongue in cheek from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, have they crossed their “shoe event horizon”?

CNN

Cable News Network is another company that invested heavily in lifestyle marketing. At one time the world’s premier global news company, CNN made a big bet that Blue America, the world of a Democratic Party controlled national agenda was the media territory that was its path to greatness. It relinquished fair and balanced reporting, gave the right of aisle market to Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News, and put their attention into battling other left of center media outlets for dominance.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump threw a wrench into that plan. Suddenly, CNN had to make a choice whether to return to the center or hold out for two years until the mid-term election. They chose the latter and proceeded to double down on their lifestyle marketing bet.

The network put its lifestyle persona bet on things like Mueller investigation and it’s ended disastrously. The network’s ratings went into free fall. They lost 24% share in as of April 2019 and estimated additional 16% of their primetime ratings in the month of May 2019 alone. They now have an estimated 1/3 the audience of rival FOX. It’s a shadow of Ted Turner’s former empire.

It hasn’t helped CNN retain audience share that the once invincible Blue Dream of the Democratic Party has descended into it’s own chaotic nightmare that sees leadership like Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Charles Schumer being challenge by Saikat Chakrabarti’s Justice Democrat harem who seem to be as good at confounding the Establishment Democrat leaders on Twitter as President Donald Trump can. Sparring with AOC? Really Nan? That’s beneath you.

And then there’s Barack Obama’s prediction of the Democratic Presidential Primary Race turning into “circular firing squad” playing out like a zombie apocalypse to the horror of orphaned centrist Democrats and the delight of Trump’s MAGA voter base.

This is about as perfect a storm as it gets.

This is wounded bird case of corporate failure that just cannot be ignored. And they’ve run into a merger with AT&T, a company that runs strictly by the numbers and is looking to economize following the acquisition of CNN’s parent Time-Warner. The word is that WarnerMedia boss John Stankey wants CNN to go down the path of developing a digital arm to rival FOX’s Digital with specializes in aggregating light news to fill the internet and yield many millions of page hits per day. Can you imagine a world where TMZ has more meat than the major outlet on the same story? You don’t have to. It’s been happening at FOX and soon it’ll be happening at CNN too.

That’s kind of a journalist’s version of a perfect storm.

Seeking redemption, I’ve also noted that the opinion section of CNN online has even begun carrying contributions that are not overtly hostile to the Trump administration, albeit with the “this op ed does not represent the opinion of the company” disclaimers prominently on display. Well, post debacle, one starts somewhere.

That is an artifact that says hell may be freezing over.

CNN are not the only ones centering up. It’s back to business by the numbers for the industry. My question is whatever possessed them into thinking dividing the country into political factions was a sustainable business model? Supernormal return for a while yes. But all overtime pay eventually ends. CNN got addicted to it. These choices are ending predictably.


Starbucks

There’s probably no business model where managing social justice expectations is more problematic than a distributed retail franchise like Starbucks. With just shy of 300,000 employees deployed at over 28,000 stores, touching humans looking up from their phones just long enough to recite mystical incantations that turn into cups of coffee is about as lifestyle retail as it gets.

Keeping the balance of peace within the interior of their store spaces has evolved into some macabre rules. Anyone can be in a Starbucks but no one can fall asleep in one. That’s a new rule to deal with homeless people coming in and hanging out in a place designed for people doing business and homework to come in and hang out while drinking coffee. You used to be able to take a nap between reading book chapters or composing article paragraphs. No more of that.

Social justice has the weirdest side effects.

Just as weird is Starbucks being a safe space that isn’t safe if a bunch of cops come in for coffee. One squeaky wheel patron causes an employee who, trying to please that person, insults other persons by preventing them from reciting their magical incantations and getting no coffee with their misspelled names on them. Then it goes viral on the internet because that’s what we do in America now whenever safe spaces collide like particles of matter and anti-matter.

Then, Starbucks corporate must send legions of trainers out to those 28,000+ locations to teach everyone a new rule that meets the universal social justice for all algorithm and, of course, to apologize to anyone that may have been slighted; in press releases so they don’t get boycotted again.

And Starbucks does send legions because unlike Nike or CNN, their business economics are about just doing whatever it takes to not pick any fights with anyone. Besides, there’s hardly enough space in one for a good fight and the merchandise display racks have breakables.

Is this just a weird version of America or what?

The microcosm of the damage social justice has created in a store the size of a two-car garage in 28,000 places everyday kind of boggles the mind when you think about it. It’s disruption without innovation. It kind of irks me and makes me want to order my coffee using the app on my phone so I never have to look up. Plus, my name will be spelled correctly on my cup because it’s a sticker.

Is this really what post-Industrial America is supposed to be like? Bizzare rules that bear little resemblance to common sense? And we’re supposed to accept this like happy sheep? Remember what I said about everything having a half-life earlier? We are stretching too many rubber bands. 

There’s something amiss about believing this is good for ordinary Americans or for America.




Facebook

Social media companies are finding out just how risky lifestyle personalization business strategies can be. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has been dragged in front of Congress to answer for the sins of an industry by a hostile government that 20 years ago didn’t want anything to do with regulating companies like these. Now, Facebook is feared because so many people have established their digital “second lives” on them. We’ve revealed our souls to a machine designed to exploit lifestyle personalization to echo chambers of one person per bubble. A universe where we are connected to each other only through the Matrix of Facebook’s omniscient engine that decides what gets through.

And we want that engine to do exactly what each of us selfishly wants. Connect us perfectly. Amplify our thoughts. Market our message. Show us only what we want to see. Make us happy. Make our experience perfect. Make anything we don’t like go away. Punish those we disagree with harshly because they don’t matter, only we, only I, matter. Make sure noise from robots and rogues is kept at bay. But not my noise. Push that into every one’s face please. Oh, and do this for free.

When you step back and breathe, it’s clear that the world doesn’t really work that way. What does amaze me is how hard Facebook works to make it come close to that as possible. Implementing technology to reduce noise in our personal echo chambers.

There are 2.38 billion active users of Facebook per month. Only 190 million of them are in the United States. The cultural echo chamber separation algorithms that Facebook uses so Americans do not see the other 2.19 billion people on the system is a lot of work just there.

And now, pushed along by the demands of social justice of every left and right persuasion, there’s the work of separating Americans from each other in our increasingly self-segregated culture. Armies of human filterers are becoming algorithmic artificial intelligence and robots tasked to make everyone happy in their disconnected loneliness.

And there’s more. I noted that there were two kinds of major earthquakes in California on 4th of July week. One was natural. A magnitude 6.4 and 7.1 earthquake centered around Ridgecrest, California just outside of what’s called the Long Valley Caldera, the site of an ancient volcano. Maybe it’s not just meteors we need to worry about.

The other, virtual world earthquake, happened on July 3, 2019. On that day, the image servers of all the properties owned by Facebook, Inc. which included Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp went dark for several hours while Mark Zuckerberg’s technology team made base object changes to the entire network. When it came back up, memes from robots, which had begun to proliferate with divisive political messages, were sparse.

Quoting from another movie metaphor, “A déjà vu means they’ve made a change to the Matrix.”

The question for Facebook is will this be enough to placate the hubris of Americans. That’s an unknown. Will that please everyone? No. That’s impossible. But Facebook can bend reality.

That’s not the important question.

The important question is does demanding Facebook do a better and better job of keeping us happily alone amount to the right thing for the United States national interest? Is this really where we want corporate governance of our infrastructure and our commerce to go? These companies will do what we tell them to either by themselves or by regulations. What should we tell them to do?

Ponder again the warning, we are losing plurality and the need to be tolerant of other Americans as technology makes it ever easier to never have to look up.

Without that cohesion, are we still Americans?