Running for Your Life: Zuck-ing Sound

It’s time for some straight talk.

Consider this reportage * about Commissar Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook:

“[He is] being photographed jogging in Beijing’s reeking, toxic smog, asking Xi Jinping to name his daughter (Xi declined) and making sure he has a copy of Xi’s arse-numbingly tedious ‘The Governance of China’ on his desk when Chinese journalists visit Facebook. (‘I’ve bound copies of this book for my colleagues as well,’ Zuck says. ‘I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics.)’ ”

Here is the master of the Western Hive Mind genuflecting before the King of the Hive Mind, Xi Jinping, head of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).

On Tuesday, the Democrats will gather for yet another all-candidates debate, aka, the kumbaya circle of like-minded cultural elitists.

Who among them will call out the Zuck for bowing down to his hive mind master? Who among them sees the existential threat from this pole of “executive” power – Zuck in his anti-democratic drive to manipulate millions for profit as dangerous to the commonweal (You are the bomb, Xi!) as the current resident of the White House?

Republicans are silent while Trump flouts democratic norms, and Democrats – at least in these critical national forums like the all-candidates dance – are silent while Zuck flouts democratic norms. (Anybody want to talk about the peril of a truly free press as Facebook drains advertising and readers from daily and weekly newspapers so that the number of even two-paper big cities is down to the single digits in a country as big and as powerful as the United States … ?)

That’s all for now – gotta freshen up my Instagram account.

*John Lancaster’s review of two new books about tech, China and surveillance, in the London Review of Books, Oct. 10, 2019

Next: Running for Your Life: Leafing It!



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