Normally we would not recommend that you carve out even a thin slice of your day to virtually attend a meeting of two House subcommittees, much less the potentially paralyzing commingling of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology with the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce.
But this one should be a dilly.
It's coming Thursday at high noon with triple headliners Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Sundar Pichai of Google. True, Congress has produced this show before, but this will be the first performance of the terrible Big Tech triumvirate since they unwittingly (a term used generously) facilitated a movement that came within 100 feet of overthrowing the government Jan. 6.
Twitter, which celebrated its 15th birthday this week, thereby surpassing the mental age of most of its users, kicked the 45th president off its platform right after the United States nearly became a dictatorship that day. Facebook, still trying to explain away its responsibility for that nettlesome Rohingyan genocide in Myanmar, kicked Donald Trump off as well. Google, where the truth is whatever your search history indicates you'd prefer that it be, did the same thing to Mr. Trump through YouTube.
So if you can get to the website of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Thursday, you can watch live as both sides of America's great political divide converge in mutual disgust at three of capitalism's greatest gazillionaires. Everybody hates these guys. The left hates them for monetizing greenhouses of conspiracy, the right hates them for censoring conservative viewpoints, and the middle hates them for unleashing an enormous, intractable cultural quagmire from which our eventual escape is all but unimaginable.
Among the horrifying things demonstrated by that selfie-snapping crowd of Capitol rioters in January was that corporate America, and Big Tech in particular, has never had any compunctions about flooding the market with potentially dangerous tools and worrying about the implications much, much later, if then.
There's a chilling sequence in Jerry Seinfeld's otherwise hysterical book "Is This Anything?" that just might be worth restating in this context.
"So, when they come up with these things like the camera in the cell phone do they ever go, 'Hey, before we put this out to every human being all over the world ... are you sure this is a good idea?
'I don't know ... I was just wondering ... You don't think there's any chance that this one feature all by itself, could result in so many useless pictures, video, posting, liking, not liking comments and clapbacks that the entire essential life force of the human race just drains out like a puddle of p... by the side of the road and we never accomplish anything significant ever again? You don't think there's any chance of that do you?'"
To the prideful Trump loyalists, to the Proud Boys, to the Oath Keepers, to the just plain lunatics who breached the police line at the Capitol in January, killing five, injuring 140, and nearly ending centuries of American democracy as we know it, accomplishment can take on some narrow, twisted meanings.
Messrs. Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Pichai must state unequivocally, according to their business models, that they never dreamed they'd see a day like Jan. 6 in America, but Big Tech has long since been telling stories on itself that counter its best defenses.
"We optimized for short-term profitability at the sake of our democracy," former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya told CNBC. "And what we left in tatters was any sense that there was any sort of moral or ethical imperative that would govern decision-making at that company. So that saddens me, saddens me for the people who work there. As a business person I think we're also slightly to blame because we've said, 'That's OK,' because we've been enamored with the short-term profitability of Facebook."
And that was before all three of these platforms crossed into the too-big-to-fail prototype that always works out so well for all of us. The threats tomorrow from a rightfully outraged House will sound familiar — it's a regulatory issue, it's a public safety issue, it's a personal privacy issue, it's ultimately an antitrust action waiting to happen, but it's all of those and many more.
The committees have spent weeks sharpening spears. I tried to reach Rep. Mike Doyle this week, but the 18th District Democrat wasn't talking before the big show.
In a joint statement with the chairs of the two subcommittees, Mr. Doyle said this previously: "Whether it be falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine or debunked claims of election fraud, these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety. For far too long, big tech has failed to acknowledge the role they've played in fomenting and elevating blatantly false information to its online audiences. Industry self-regulation has failed."
But at least the statement had a killer closer:
"This hearing will continue the committee's work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation."
Seriously?
Not even Seinfeld could get away with that.
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