Reorientation and Compliance

Continuing on his psychotic warpath of breaking the government and society, I want to draw your attention to a somewhat silly but relevant story. The story I am talking about is Trump forcing a rename of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. Additionally this story includes a renaming of Denali to Mt. McKinley, undoing over 50 years of established tradition deferential to local Alaskan tribes. Presumably because it owns the libs sufficiently with the added bonus of sticking it to the groups of people the American government has repressed throughout history.

On its face one might ask if this is something that really matters. Names are fickle, often change, and are often coded to certain political expectations. I do actually think it matters because of that political coding. Names matter a lot to people, as we of course see in the attempt to dehumanize trans people but in other less sinister ways such as using nicknames, avoiding outdated terms or just trying to generally identify things correctly.

There is a dangerous second order effect lingering underneath this change, one that is quick to get lost in the flooding of our newsfeeds. That is the fact that Google has very quickly complied to implement this change with the funny caveat that it only applies to US visitors to the Google Maps site. What is startling about this comes into focus when you see the wider movement of big tech. The big firms have been prostrating themselves before Trump in an attempt to curry favor with him, to craft policy away from holding them accountable. They ultimately would like to dispose of rules and institutions that hold them to any sort of legal scrutiny, but they also want to avoid being retaliated against by a petty man who controls a powerful legal apparatus. I can’t say that I blame them for that last part.

The reason this should concern you, dear reader, is that in their fervor to comply aggressively with his orders, expect them to tighten the screws on free expression on their platforms. If they jump so readily at this request, what happens when Trump issues his executive order to ban liberal speech from the platforms? You might think I am being alarmist, but as we can plainly see already, courts have no meaningful enforcement mechanism. Even if the white house backs off in time, a lot of damage can be done.

I won’t lament the end of the republic in this post. That said I do feel that we are rapidly moving to the kind of situation the screws will be tightened on speech. I have started exploring more and more technology alternatives so that I am not overleveraged too much in a handful of American companies who want to act as Trump’s enforcement wing in the digital world.