Mile
Zero

A few years ago, right when I moved to Chicago, I was working for a small tech consulting company. The founders were decent guys, well-meaning, progressive. I didn't love the work — "the customer is always right" is not a mindset I easily adopt — but it seemed generally harmless. So one day I was surprised to hear, in an all-staff meeting, that a coworker's web performance audit for Philip Morris had been a rousing success, and might lead to follow-up work.

Listen, I said in my regular check-in with the COO, I know we've got to pay the bills. I'm not trying to be a drama magnet. But this is Philip Morris, one of the most amoral corporate predators in the world. My grandfather died of cancer after smoking his whole life. It's a complex world, but I believe you can draw a few bright lines even under capitalism, and the two easiest examples are Literal Nazis and Big Tobacco.

Ever since I left that company, when I apply somewhere, I try to mention this scenario and ask "What are the clients you wouldn't take? Do you have a process for making that decision?" You may or may not be surprised to find that most people do not have a particularly good response. I interviewed for one well-known agency, and after a pause, the manager said "...that's a very 'journalist' question." I assume that was not meant to be flattering. They'd done work for Facebook, he said, after thinking about it, and for a lot of people that might be the same thing.

This week, there are a lot of comparisons between Facebook and Big Tobacco as whistleblower testimony from Frances Haugen confirms that the company is not only leaning on addiction as a business strategy, but has also been sitting on internal research about how awful its product is (Big Oil is probably a closer parallel). These discoveries aren't new. But Haugen's testimony and leaks are doing a good job of cutting through the usual dynamic around regulating Facebook, where Republicans insist that the company is biased against them (it's emphatically not), and Democrats wring their hands ineffectually.

Let's be clear: Philip Morris made $8 billion last year in profit. It's still a member of the Fortune 500. Apparently, for a lot of people, it's just another client. If this is the comparison for Facebook, they're going to be fine.

But at the same time, regardless of the bottom line, you can see the perception changing. Remember the interview where I was told that it was a "journalist" question to ask about client choice? This week, that agency's founders spent their podcast extending the tobacco and oil comparisons, arguing that Facebook should be regulated if it can't be eradicated. Now, maybe the right hand and left hand aren't talking to each other here (I wasn't interviewing with either of the speakers on the podcast), but that feels like a shift to me.

In the web community, it's time to start collectively questioning the norms around collaborating with Menlo Park. We have the ability to change the perception and access of Facebook — just look at Oracle or Intellectual Ventures! Like the tobacco companies, they're still profitable, of course. The market's gonna market. But it's harder for them to hire. Their influence and mindshare in shaping the conversation are substantially diminished. Nobody's excited about their output.

It was weird to me, when I questioned the Philip Morris contract, that nobody else seemed to have raised an issue. It hadn't even really occurred to them. But it definitely stuck with management: even when I left to go to NPR, it came up in the exit interview. There was a little unease that hadn't been there before. Sometimes that's all it takes.

Facebook, and by extension working with Facebook, or using code that comes from Facebook, should be considered embarrassing, or shameful. You can argue against using React or GraphQL on valid technical terms, in addition to the obvious moral hazard. Integrations with Facebook code should be isolated, treated as untrustworthy, and built in such a way that they can be replaced. When you meet Facebook employees at conferences or gatherings, let them know that it's nothing personal, but you just don't feel clean building on top of that legacy, and you hope they find a better place to work soon.

Imagine an airport smoking lounge: a dingy, nicotine-stained room where participants have to stand and face each other, away from everyone else. Now make that for Facebook. Regulation takes time and lobbying, but low-key shame is free and easily renewable.

I wish I could say I'm surprised by the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case. It would have been nice to see the manslaughter charge stick--even Florida should be able to prosecute the poor man's murder--but that was probably a long shot. The fix was in from the moment that the police had to be embarrassed into even charging Zimmerman in the first place.

There were a lot of ugly parts of the American character wrapped up in the case. There was the casual, almost off-handed racism of the whole affair, but there was also the clownishness of our national fixation on firearms. That's the narrative that drove George Zimmerman, after all: a one-man neighborhood watch, following whatever "punks" were unlucky enough to find themselves the antagonists of his inner screening of Death Wish. I imagine that there are a lot of people who knew Zimmerman, who thought he was a nut and a caricature--almost a joke. After all, I have known people who were a hair's breadth from being George Zimmerman, and I've laughed at them. They're a lot less funny now.

Over the last year, since the shooting in Newtown, Josh Marshall has reposted stories to the TPM Editor's Blog whenever there's a story on the wire services of child deaths caused by guns. On average, there's probably one a week. It's a powerful, if understated, kind of journalism, like one of those Family Guy hanging gags: at first it's horrific, then it becomes routine, and then the normality of that routine becomes devastating in and of itself. There have been a lot of kids killed in the last eight months, with surprisingly little outcry.

It's as if, across the country, we've decided to raise our kids in a tank filled with deadly scorpions. Even though we lose children on a regular basis, discussing the obvious solution--getting rid of the scorpions, maybe buying a puppy instead--doesn't seem to be an option. To the contrary: more scorpions, screams the NRA! Scorpions for everyone! Only when everyone is covered in poisonous arthropods will we truly be safe!

(Of course, as various people have commented, the NRA is oddly silent on whether or not Trayvon Martin would have been safe from assault if he had been packing heat. This differs markedly from their usual argument that the solution is always more, and more powerful, weaponry. I can't imagine what's different in this case.)

With every recent shooting, there's been a sense on the left that this time, people will see how terrible our firearms fetish has become: Tucson, Aurora, and Newtown each brought a fresh sense of unreality to the whole debate. And now George Zimmerman walks, after shooting an unarmed black teenager for the simple crime of being where George Zimmerman didn't think he belonged. Maybe, finally, this will be the case when we start to think about what all these guns actually mean as a society, but I doubt it. That gives us too much credit: the deadlier our guns, the more we cling to them for comfort. Heaven help us all.

These "Academic Freedom Act" laws seem like a very good idea to me, but I wonder if we're taking them far enough. If the Discovery Institute and all manner of right-wing think tanks want to Teach the Controversy, why limit ourselves to evolution and climate change? With that in mind, I've assembled a new school curriculum that (finally!) acknowledges the complicated world beyond "facts" and "truth."

Social Studies: Students will learn about the checks and balances built into our democratic way of life, of course. But we shouldn't leave them ignorant of competing theories, such as David Icke's "lizard oligarchy," in case the queen of England really does turn out to be a giant space reptile bent on world domination. As high school seniors, students will also spend the semester learning about Ayn Rand's theory of radical selfishness, in the hopes that it will keep them from reading Atlas Shrugged in college and becoming insufferably tedious for about a year and a half.

History: Move over, eurocentric history! Take cover, afrocentric and multicultural history! Under new management, history class will approach the hard questions of the past with an open mind toward alternate theories. For example: did the holocaust really happen, or is it just the invention of a shadowy cabal working behind the scenes of our financial and entertainment industries? You know who I'm talking about.

Physical Education: Gym class doesn't change, but students who get sick will now be told that their humours are out of balance, and will be bled by on-site leeches. Coaches also have the option of blaming vaccines when the football team loses.

English: Given the predominance of "literacy" in the early grades, students will spend the second half of their primary education learning how to communicate pre-verbally, mostly by pointing and grunting. For many teenagers, this won't be much of a change. The curriculum will culminate with a trip to a local quarry, where the students will attempt to recreate the Lascaux cave paintings, thus teaching them the valuable life lesson that art is hard so why try anyway?

Math: I tried to think of something funny about math, and then I remembered that we still teach kids about "imaginary" numbers, and to add insult to injury we do so very badly. Math is weird, y'all.

Foreign Languages: One word: Esperanto. Ironically, in Esperanto, this is actually twelve words. It's the language of the future, people. William Shatner did a whole movie in Esperanto once. I've got a good feeling about this one.

You're welcome.

With a post on Boing Boing this morning and a decent amount of chatter on Twitter, BitCoin appears to have hit the Internet mainstream. CNN will probably run a story in a week, although they'll be hard-pressed to make it seem any sillier than it already is, because BitCoin is the seasteading of economics: a bizarre scheme created by technolibertarians to address a problem nobody needed solving with a solution that nobody will ever find practical.

The site went down when the first flurry of links hit (a tremendously comforting state of affairs for an entirely-digital currency, I have to say), but here's the gist of BitCoin: it's a monetary system where you earn money by letting your computer "solve" large, complicated mathematical problems. The exact difficulty of these problems is adjusted by a peer-to-peer network to keep the rate of money generation at a planned level. Once created, each "coin" is a cryptographically-signed hash that can be passed from one person to another using a form of public key encryption. The theoretical advantages of this whole scheme are that:

• There's no inflation, because the supply of coins is strictly constrained. In fact, they're designed to deflate over time. (As if this is a good thing?)
• The coins can't be tracked, so the Man won't know what you've been buying. (This strikes me as a surpremely dim view of The Man's capabilities and/or motivation.)
• It's all digital, so it supposedly can't be taxed. (And yet somehow we developed taxation before the invention of the electronic funds transfer.)

If these seem like they hit the all the standard talking points for crazy people who read Cryptonomicon and thought it was non-fiction, you're not far off. Avery Pennarun's explanation of its flaws has caught a lot of attention (as well as a lot of derision from the pro-BitCoin crowd, although I have yet to see anyone rebut it with anything more convincing than "nuh-uh!").

I'm not an economist, but I play one on the Internet. And from my point of view, the biggest strike against this, or any other alternative currency, is simply that it'll never get more of an audience than conspiracy theorists and utopians. Normal people won't use BitCoin because you can't buy lunch with it. Businesses won't use it because normal people don't use it. And banks won't use it because they already have a perfectly usable system of moving money around electronically, and because they have no incentives to switch unless businesses and normal people demand it, which they won't. Much of the argument for BitCoin seems to be "well, good, we didn't want banks or banking to exist anyway." At that point, the only reasonable response is to back away slowly toward the nearest exit.

Despite the fact that it's completely bonkers, I feel like it's a bit of a shame that BitCoin's so obviously useless. Not because we need a global, untraceable currency that eliminates useful governmental controls on the market, but because our current options for spending money online are so limited. If you pay for something over the Internet, chances are that your transaction went through one of the big credit card companies--they've become the de facto standard platform for remote purchases. That's a huge cash cow, built on a framework with little transparency or real competition. As we move more and more of our economy online, their dominance is basically a license for a small number of corporations to print money.

But mostly BitCoin just leaves me melancholy. It's a dream by and for people who have missed the real lesson of Internet commerce, which is that it succeeded not because it was independent of the real world economy, but precisely because the two could be linked. Sites like eBay and Amazon were revolutionary because they were built on the same basic mechanisms as regular commercial networks: reputation, reviews, consumer feedback... and of course, plain old dollars. BitCoin (much like seasteading) tries to reduce the messy, human parts of economics to a set of sterile game mechanics. That's not even really libertarianism--it's nihilism, masquerading as a political philosophy.

I'm no great fan of money for its own sake, and I think we could stand to tweak our economic systems a bit, but the concept isn't broken in and of itself. If I thought BitCoin had a chance, I'd probably be worried. But despite its extreme principles, it still has to compete in the same marketplace of ideas as everything else--and I'm pretty sure nobody's buying what they're selling.