Kontextmaschine

20th December 2022

Post reblogged from Marta Monica Jaramillo Restrepo AKA La Tuti with 62,475 notes

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone talk about this at all on Tumblr, which is very lax of us all, so I suppose I shall do it myself.

Last week Elon Musk broke European law so badly that the lawyers who will finally put the case to rest have yet to be born.

I’m not exaggerating. Here’s the thing: America has terrible data privacy laws. A solid technique for an American website owner in times of financial hardship, such as accidentally buying a loss-leading debt-ridden social media platform to avoid going to gaol, is to take all the data harvested from users and to sell it to third parties for lots of money. It is fun and breezy and lets you pay off at least one lawyer for the month. What a lark.

However, the European Union has an even more fun and breezy law called GDPR.

And the thing is, the EU really, really care about GDPR. Like… they really care. This is not one of those grey area laws like jaywalking where it’s basically ignored unless you do it in front of a police officer who is having a midlife crisis because his wife left him and the dishes are piling up and he’s down to his third day of wearing the same pants and yesterday a man in the pub laughed at him for getting a football term wrong. This is the sort of law that, if you break it, grey men in grey suits with worryingly little humour will get in touch and unroll terrifyingly long scrolls of legal text and then you are in gaol for the rest of your life. This is a big law. The big one. Big boy law. Do not break.

So, if you’re going to be a website owner in times of financial hardship who needs some quick money to cover your many billions of dollars of debt who decides to sell the private data you harvested from the user base, the most important thing you absolutely MUST remember is, you can only use the American data, and never the European.

But.

I mean.

Hypothetically.

If someone were to own an American website in times of financial hardship, such as an accidentally bought loss-leading debt-ridden social media platform to avoid going to gaol… but that someone didn’t know the difference between American and European law.

Well then. That person would sell the wrong data.

And if that were to happen, on the scale of a global social media platform, with users ranging from the megalomaniacal Uber Rich to literal world governments…

The ensuing court cases would last for decades, as lawyers began the lawsuits at the richest end of the list, and worked their way down.

***

Also he posted a Twitter poll today about whether he should stay in charge of Twitter and he lost lol

Elon Musk is an icebreaker. He represents enough money, which is to say power and mass, both in personal holdings and as center of the nexus that’s accreted around him (Saudi, etc.) subject to one human will and without the narrow time horizons of a publicly traded company, that he can take on forces that less empowered agents find themselves reduced to operating under.

That’s been behind so much he’s been doing with Twitter, running it against the bluecheckerati, Apple with its App Store tollbooth, now the EU and their claims of authority over the internet.

And he not even threatens these agents claiming the apex position with certain defeat but the potential of such catastrophic defeat, and the threat of putting so much resources into the conflict – and drawing in such big broad allies in his wake – significant portions of the tech capital scene, conservative America AND implicitly the oh-God-shut-upppp Democratic Party machine vs. the bluechecks; platforms and the online economy vs. Apple; the entire American (or Saudi, just non-European, honestly European too) tech scene vs. the EU…

(and by linking fates he can start to draw the allies from one fight into others)

– that those top-dogs’ payoff matrix starts to suggest “yield”.

And what does he use this towards? A gee-whiz The Future as seen from the later 20th century: electric cars, interplanetary travel, an internet that starts out American-flavored and then becomes the global top dog itself – A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996, Code is Law in 2000, his PayPal era.

I suspect OP is an EU citizen because I’ve never seen an American even exposed to a legitimating narrative of GDPR, to civilians at most it’s the reason for those dumb interruption screens asking us to approve cookies, to American tech it’s a serious thorn from

I don’t think he’s some Ozymandias-type mastermind, the whole “icebreaker” thing is he’s a brute whose victories come by mass, but he’s at least internalized that if he wades out into a melee others avoid he’ll probably do reasonably well for himself playing for position.

Tagged: elon muskgdprit's social media