Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Monday, January 23, 2023. Going forward, every new transcript will be sent out by email and posted to our Locals page, where you'll find the transcripts for previous shows.
Watch System Update Episode #26 Here on Rumble.
Tonight: every time there are new efforts to attempt to reform or limit the power of Big Tech, especially efforts to curb their ability to censor the Internet, the same group emerges to become their most vocal defenders, warning that our safety and national security will be imperiled if any limits on Big Tech's power are permitted. That group is the U.S. Security State, led by operatives such as Obama's former senior national security official, James Clapper, now of CNN. The reasons the U.S. Security State is such a loyal and aggressive defender of Big Tech's unlimited power are important and revealing. And we will examine the latest such incidents that emerged just this week.
Then for our interview segment, we will speak to one of the nation's most independent and I think interesting thinkers: Katie Herzog, the co-host of the very popular independent podcast Blocked and Reported. We'll talk to her about her trajectory in media, which is a microcosm of how independent media is supplanting more traditional forms, thankfully, and why it is that as a lifelong lesbian, a significant focus of her work has become the excesses of the new movement of trans rights and gender ideology, but also some of the growing excesses of its critics as well.
Thank you, by the way, for your indulgence on Friday night. For personal reasons, we had to cancel the show at the last minute, but we're very appreciative of how many of you e-mailed in with interest and concern. We were fine. It was just a personal matter that required that.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Monologue:
The companies we commonly call Big Tech -- Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple -- are almost certainly the most powerful private corporations ever to exist in the history of private capital. No companies have ever been richer. The amount of data they store about us, what we read, where we go, what interests us, with whom we speak, and what we say would make the East German Stasi or the NSA envious and their supreme power to control the flow of information and to set the limits of permissible political expression and debate, not just in one country but on most of the planet, is a topic too well-documented to require much elaboration, but certainly deserves your ongoing attention and alarm.
The real and ultimate business aim of Google and Facebook -- artificial intelligence, that is to say, learning how the human brain works so that they can not only replicate its functioning but improve on it -- is still in its infancy. With almost no transparency, those two corporations, Google and Facebook, have acquired – purchased -- the vast majority of the world's human brain power when it comes to developing this new technology.
The official position of the House of Representatives Antitrust Committee expressed in a 450-page report that many scholars agree is the most comprehensive yet on the topic is that those four companies, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are classic monopolies and precisely the way the antitrust laws in the United States renders illegal. That's a view that is increasingly bipartisan in Washington. And whether or not one agrees with that legal conclusion, there is no denying that these companies are not mere private corporations exercising ordinary power. Nor do I believe there is reasonable debate possible that at least some safeguards are needed on the sprawling and still rapidly expanding power of this small handful of tech giants.