Yves here. The Biden effort to wrap himself in the mantle of Eisenhower in warning about a “tech-industrial complex” is vile. The Biden Administration, as we know from the Twitter Files, statements by Mark Zuckerberg and ample other evidence, was all on board with the “tech-industrial complex” wielding great power when the Biden team wanted to use it as a propaganda and enforcement arm. This goes well beyond suppressing threatening ideas on big social media platforms and extends to deplatforming and de-monetizing dissidents, and even freezing/canceling bank accounts.
Biden was perfectly happy to take advantage of this influence when he could obtain cooperation, either via asking it of largely PMC-orthodoxy aligned who were willing to go along, or force it by threatening anti-trust suits and/or the restriction or termination of Section 230 protections.
Telling, Biden focused only on the supposed threat of the pet liberal bogeyman of misinformation, and not about a even greater danger, that of ever-rising surveillance, which again the likes of Biden were perfectly happy to exploit. Nick Corbishley has relentless documented the danger of the rising implementation of biometric ID, and the coercive potential of eliminating cash in day-to-day commercial transactions.
Biden’s echo of Eisenhower is telling in another way. Some scholars claim that the military-industrial complex already was extremely powerful by the time Eisenhower left office, so his warning was a cover-up for his failure to try to check in when he could have done so.
By Richard Murphy, part-time Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School, director of the Corporate Accountability Network, member of Finance for the Future LLP, and director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Fund the Future
Joe Biden’s swan-song speech to the people of the USA warned about the threat to the people of the USA from what he called the tech-industrial complex, otherwise known as Musk and his tech billionaire friends. Was he right to do so? But was he also too late?
This is the audio versiomn:
This is transcript:
President Joe Biden, in his farewell speech from the Oval Office in the White House, warned the USA about what he called the Tech-Industrial Complex.
He wasn’t the first president to issue such a warning. Sixty four years ago, and I don’t remember the speech in question, President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office as president of the USA and also issued a warning to the people of that country about the threats to it from commercial power.
Eisenhower, who was the general who led the invasion of Europe during the Second World War which ultimately led to the fall of the Nazis, said this. when he left office in January 1961.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists only and will persist.
Eisenhower was clearly right. The rise of misplaced power was a threat to the USA. In 1961, and as Joe Biden had to say in 2025, it is still a threat. All that Joe Biden did was rename the military-industrial complex and call it the tech-industrial complex.
His words were:
Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation. and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.
And that power he called the tech-industrial complex. He did, of course, have some very specific people in mind. There is no doubt that these comments were aimed at the likes of Elon Musk and the other so-called ‘tech bros’ in Silicon Valley who are supporting the rise of Donald Trump.
But what he was talking about was something that was remarkably similar to what Eisenhower described in 1961. What he was suggesting was that the power of the private corporation to shift the values within American society in its favor – to enrich a few at cost to the many, by spreading fear, by spreading misinformation, by spreading abuse – that threat remains as real now as it was 64 years ago. And I believe Biden is right.
I wish he’d done it earlier in his career. I wish he had talked about this a long time before his farewell speech. I wish we’d seen the Democratic Party in the USA do something about this. Because frankly, it seems to be as in hock to corporate power in the USA as the Republican Party does. Well, perhaps slightly less, but so little less as to make almost no difference. But at least he’s used those words now.
He’s said that this tech-industrial power threatens us all. And it does.
It threatens the ordinary person who’s abused online, and there will be nothing to stop that happening.
It threatens the person who is abused in a libellous way.
It threatens the young person who’s bullied at school.
It threatens the small business who these large tech powers literally try to bring down through their own ability to force others out of the market.
All of this is an exercise in extracting profit, just as the military complex tried to do in the early 60s.
I remember the 1960s all too well. There was a US Air Force base not far from where I was brought up, so the reality of US military power was something that was quite familiar to me at the time. USAF Bentwaters it was, for those who are geeks about these things. And what happened then? There was this massive expansion of military spending, partly, of course, because of Vietnam, but partly because that was a proxy war in the whole Cold War between the USA and Russia.
A total pack of lies was said about the threat to us from Russia; that Russia was going to be marching troops across the plains of Germany and threatening the UK, when, frankly, there was not a hope that Russia could have done such a thing at the time. Any more, by the way, than it could now.
And, things were said about China which were so unrealistic at that point in time that it was absurd. And slightly more credible if they were said now. But again, really not credible.
And now we have the tech bros coupling with that military power to actually, in a sense, produce something that is very similar.
Remember that Trump is demanding that the countries of Europe increase their military spending to 5 per cent of their gross domestic product – their national income.
It’s the same force on the march. “You gotta spend on the military, or you’re gonna die.” No, you’re not. Almost certainly, you won’t. Spend money on diplomacy, solve the conflicts, understand the causes, resolve them, talk about how we can actually live peacefully together on this planet rather than threatening each other, stop spreading the lies and the misinformation, and then you might achieve an outcome. But that’s not the style of the neo-fascist. And I do happen to think, and I’m allowed to have this opinion, that Trump is one of them.
So, where are we? We are, as Joe Biden said, at threat, real threat, from the tech-industrial complex. And things have changed since 1961. The change is that these people have more power over the media, over the network of ideas, and the information that we get all the time, every day, day and night, if we want it. And that really does change the potential outcomes for the way in which the world sees itself and each other. Those tech companies literally influence our worldviews in ways that it’s very hard to understand. But they threaten us if they believe that aggression at a macro and a micro level is the way to leverage profit for themselves. And I fear they do. And I fear the consequences of that.
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I have a hard time not believing that Biden’s tech industrial complex speech was made for the sole purpose of building his legacy and trying to keep his name in the history books long after he is gone. He surely knew this in 2021 at the start of his term and yet said nothing. That was the time for this speech, when he had 4 years to fully explain the problem and to actually do something about it. Yet nothing was said and nothing was done. This pretty much sums up Biden’s entire political career. He was always the guy you could depend on to go along with the program.
Meanwhile, the presidents get millions for the foundations to affirm their legacy. What a cartel of criminals!
I have a hard time not believing that Biden’s tech industrial complex speech was made for the sole purpose of building his legacy.
Based on what we have all seen, Biden has already lost any capacity for coherent thought, and I would say that planning for his legacy, or any kind of planning, is well beyond his ability at this point.
The speech must be the voice of Biden’s handlers and beneficiaries, who are afraid that Trump is going to do to them what they have done to him in terms of surveillance, lawfare, and weaponization of social media. It’s payback time and they know it, and now, that the tech giants are abandoning the Democrats for the victor, they are positioning themselves in anticipation of Trump’s wars of revenge. At least this is my cynical take on this shit show.
Being the vindictive SOB that he is, I think it was mostly aimed at Silicon Valley as a whole which abandoned him in favour of Trump. Yes, mostly Musk, but also Zuckerbeg, Bezos and others.
As long as Genocide Joe gets his 10% of the 30 pieces of silver, everything is jake.
I agree with Yves Smith’s headnote that “misinformation” is a suspect concept. Like conspiracy, it is hard to discern what misinformation is supposed to mean. The surveillance state, I agree, is a bigger problem: The vacuuming up of personal data, the scraping of e-mail messages, the tracking of posts, GPS in telephones, zillions of videocameras. As I have mentioned, I was at demonstrations in Chicago before my departure where I was photographed hundreds of times — certainly so at the NATO summit at McCormick Place a dozen or so years ago.
I may be dazzling, but I am not that photogenic. And there aren’t that many outlets for the news.
This quote, in my not-so-humble opinion, shows Biden at his weakest (which is pretty darn weak): “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation. and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”
At this point, I see two separate problems. First, there are likely too many media, and they quickly deteriorate. The WWW is best at shopping, porn, and exercise programs. The highest achievement of the WWW may just be Etsy. Sorry to disappoint.
Luckily, the WWW offers many sites in one-country languages and languages with smaller numbers of speakers. Italian, Catalan, Piedmontese, Basque, Japanese, and so on.
As to the quality of information, I submit that mis-, dis-, mal- are just distractions. There are three registers of unreliable information: Lies, bullshit, and propaganda.
The fact that the Biden administration has two major proxy wars going, producing millions of deaths, and that Joe’s deteriorated brain was kept a secret, is an indication of how steeped his administration is in lies, bullshit, and propaganda. He’s the last one to be telling us to sharpen our listening skills.
Thank you. Maybe I’m just old school, but lies, bullshit and propaganda work just fine for me. When I hear the other terms, it’s like fingernails on a chalk board. Far too much of a whiff of “1984” or “We” about them.
GenocideJoe is trying to burnish his “legacy” and I don’t think it will work. Has any president been fondly remembered for all the orts and scraps they produced on their way out the door?
Argentines are having their retinas scanned en masse in exchange for receipt of a crypto currency that I never heard of(“WLD”) and is presumably worthless.
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/scanning-your-iris-in-exchange-for-cryptocurrencies-in-an-argentina-in-crisis.phtml
“Some three million people worldwide have so far provided their iris data to Worldcoin, an initiative of OpenAI chief Sam Altman, but few have embraced the project more fervently than Argentines.
Half-a-million people across the country have participated since Worldcoin launched last July, and queues for scans have grown longer in recent months of fast-shrinking disposable income.”
To what end? Are people signing over exclusive rights to use of their retinas for future apps or identification as part of this process? Is this just to create enough WLD to run a “pump and dump”?
Deceptions are lies reduced to practice, as Robert Southey, the famous English poet would say.
If you view lies and distortions of information as noise, you can understand the transition to Internet media as an engineering problem. There are technology tools, such as blockchain, that can safeguard accurate information, effectively watermarking its authenticity. Other methods will be devised to suppress pernicious digital content once sufficient resources are brought to bear. In the U.S. we have developed a kind of learned helplessness regarding readily solvable problems, such as reliable vote counting. The famous Onion headline is relevant: “Nothing can be done in only nation in which this happens.” The Internet media sky is not falling, we just need to make the weather reports reliable.
Oh, you’re back with more techno-optimism. We walked through all of this before:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01/what-has-happened-to-our-grand-experiment-the-internet.html#comment-4158175
Sorry, blockchain is not going to save us.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01/what-has-happened-to-our-grand-experiment-the-internet.html#comment-4158292
Yves here. The Biden effort to wrap himself in the mantle of Eisenhower in warning about a “tech-industrial complex” is vile.
Only emendation I would want to ad to brilliant introductory sentence is, “particularly” vile.
I second your statement.
Biden may have won the 2020 election due to his campaign’s promotion of the “Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation” story.
And his campaign got many US officials to lend credibility to that story, without offering any evidence.
Joe and Hunter could have corrected/prevented the laptop “misinformation” story when it mattered but did not.
It is hard for me to not see Joe’s “come to Jesus” concerns about misinformation as anything other than TelePrompTer words read by Biden, written by someone else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNcEVYq2qUg
The above moment was when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the republic was in peril. To appoint this individual to any kind of position of power over free speech would have been a death knell for our rights.
It is hard for me to remember because the entire 4 years of the Biden Administration was so chocked full of weirdos, hangers-on, and misfires, but I believe she had already been named to position or was in consideration. But after this video came forth, that was completely shelved. It is not like they had not already made unfortunate appointments. Remember the trans guy in charge of nuclear waste who was going around the world stealing women’s clothes in baggage claims? I can go on and on and on. Never been anything like it in my life. It truly has been a clown show. My long gone New Deal elders are rolling in their graves.
I now use the above Mary Poppins video as a tool for student education. As physicians, there was a time when we were trained to quickly evaluate someone’s personality and demeanor, and then to quickly alter our behavior in response. Since patient care, patient interaction, and actually even talking to people are no longer part of our profession for its younger cohort, these skills have fallen by the wayside.
This woman’s video is absolutely perfect for certain traits. She exhibits angry eyes almost through the entire thing, interspersed with moments of inappropriately surprised eyes. All the while at various stages of the angry eyes, she exhibits an overly happy forced smile. Along with this, are histrionic inappropriate hand movements, and just look at the constant biting or cutting motions the hands are making. This person is a classic narcissist with very sadistic tendencies underneath all the smiling and pleasantries. She is also likely to be a confabulator and even a liar. Watch out.
Good actors whether they know it or not have the ability to walk in and out of these traits on command. This woman is no actor. This is real. And when they put this woman up for any kind of leadership position with our free speech at stake, I knew instantly where the priorities of this administration were with regard to “misinformation”. And for Biden to make such statements on the way out will absolutely cement his legacy as on of our worst Presidents in history. As my PMC friends were so fond of condescending in 2020 – CHOOSE WISELY. WE NEED THE ADULTS BACK IN CHARGE, ETC. What a joke. I can barely listen to anything these people say when discussing politics in the lounge, etc.
It’s a cult.
ZOMG I missed that video. Lordie.
Even with a pretty singing voice, an official position is no place to show it off. So we have bad judgement to add to all the other poor character traits you sussed out
goooood
god
I remember Taibbi making that a regular punchline. But I never cared really watch it.
But this…is Springtime-for-Hitler-like. With the benefit that Springtime is intended as a joke by people who know what a joke is…and what not.
wow.
Iron or paradox that in the information age we seems to have no objective, honest information at hand>
57 channels, and nothings on
“Remember the trans guy in charge of nuclear waste who was going around the world stealing women’s clothes in baggage claims?”
Oh, yeah. Sam Brinton. That was bizarre. Managing nuclear waste is a serious business, and the US nuclear fleet is staffed heavily by grizzled ex-Navy veterans who take their jobs very seriously. I can’t imagine what the Biden administration was thinking when they appointed a gender-fluid “they/them” man who liked to wear dresses and bright red lipstick to be in charge of nuclear waste management. It seemed like a deliberate thumb in the eye to an industry sector that is both politically and technically conservative.
And Brinton certainly lacked the maturity and discipline that’s expected in the nuclear power industry. Getting arrested multiple times for stealing women’s luggage? If this is what Democrats means by having “the adults back in charge”, it’s no wonder they lost the last election.
Glad someone else noticed this about her, too, IM Doc. You have her pegged. I should’ve gone to her talk here, kind of regret missing it, but I figured I couldn’t stand it-not good for my blood pressure. Since she came on the scene she had always sent up lots of red flags for me, and my tolerance for the kind of person she is and what she pushes is long gone. I would’ve gotten angry over the space of the hour and not been able to do anything about it. She was treated and viewed as some kind of hero.
YT link to her Dartmouth talk
Thank you for the video. It feels so surreal but that’s the reality we’re living, with overt narcissists in positions of real power creating very real harms to people and great damage to society as a whole.
Another reader posted this or another article from a three-part series penned by Gaius Baltar on the subject of narcissism a while back. Having given these a read, I found much to mull over.
EMPATHY AND THE FALSIFICATION OF NARCISSISM
What is the single biggest social problem facing the West now? Well, there are many problems, all serious. However, if I were to pick one I would say narcissism. Why would I say that? That takes some explaining, to say the least. I will attempt to do that in this article and others which will follow…
The interest in narcissism is not surprising. We see how people have started to behave on social media and in real life. They are selfish, isolated in a fantasy world of their own self-importance, and they seem oblivious to the strangeness of their own behavior. It’s not just the man on the street who sees this. Research has shown that there are massive trends in society toward selfish behavior. It looks like an unstoppable wave which threatens to swallow up our society.
https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/empathy-and-the-falsification-of
This video also had a similarly powerful effect on me – the flippancy, combined with the deeper danger of having someone so certain, condescending, and also oblivous in the position of “Disinformation Czar.”
I pair this video – which at least got her and her position officially tossed – with the video by the marketing VP for Bud Light excitedly explaining the enlightened philosophy behind her new ad campaign. Similarly oblivious, for similar reasons, and also leading to a quick career exit, though in the case of Jankowicz there was no permanent harm done.
She’s not done yet — she is the co-founder and CEO of The American Sunlight Project.
“This woman’s video is absolutely perfect for certain traits.”
I haven’t been in a corporate office for about 5 years, but this species was not uncommon then. Never going back.
To restate the obvious, Eisenhower was clearly right about the dangers of the military-industrial complex – and clearly too late warning us on his way out the door after unleashing the Dulles bros on the world. Biden is clearly right here about the “tech-industrial complex” and the avalanche of disinformation that smothers us – and even more hypocritical than Eisenhower since he was one of its main promoters and beneficiaries.
For me “tech-industrial complex” is too narrow. I prefer Ray McGovern’s MICIMATT – the “military-industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-media-academic-think tank” complex. “MICIMATT” is catchy and more accurate. It’s all one Permanent War Blob now.
Exactly. When he could have done something about MICIMATT, Eisenhower took a pass and went to Augusta to play golf (not that there is anything wrong with playing golf). The Dulles Brothers Blowback from the Mossadegh defenestration in 1953, which was approved by Eisenhower, took 26 years to come to fruition. It was fierce when it did and the world is still wobbling on its axis in its fixation on the latter day Persia. Eisenhower also let Joseph McCarthy go about his merry way destroying people until he went after the US Army. Only then did Tail Gunner Joe go too far for Ike. Eisenhower the politician was no different from 95% of the others, but he had fewer excuses.
I’m going with the idea that he only said this as not only sour grapes on his way out the door but to brew mistrust in some of the people Trump has aboard his train with the public. He has been doing nothing but setting up booby traps and bad situations for Trump to deal with as soon as he is President ever since the elections so this speech was just more of the same.
Biden was a clown, this is a calculated appeal to try and get the Musks, Zucks and Bezos’ out of the frame by accusing them of political interference, if they were on the side of the DEMs (as Zuck was) he wouldnt even have mentioned it. Biden was a mid ranking, corrupt, US career poitician who spent the majority of his time lying and for money, he is sadly representative of the larger part of the political spectrum in the US, liars, hawkers, snakeoil salesmen, all in the pockets of Wall St, the MIC and the Israelis. Opportunism is exactly what I would expect from him.
Biden lamenting the power of big tech after his administration unashamedly wielded it like a weapon against political opponents and the American public is an obvious case of ass-covering. I’m sure the media will happily oblige him in wrapping his ‘legacy’ in this oh-so altruistic warning as opposed to pointing out his administration was caught red-handed abusing its powers to use big tech as an end-around the 1st amendment.
Yves hit the nail on the head. This is a case of crocodile tears. If Harris had won, or Biden has continued to run and won, big tech would still be at their beck and call and they’d be happily sending requests to censor and deplatform.
The Biden clan is unbelievably nasty, corrupt, vicious, etc., etc.
It has been on display clearly since Geno Joe got his first seat in the Senate. I have no idea why ANYBODY can’t see through it. It has been cemented time and time again, with even nicey-nice “Dr.” Jill B. wearing the red pants suit on election night. I predicted long ago, when the corrupt plea deal for Hinter got rejected that he’d be pardoned by “the big guy”.
I cannot for the life of me understand why people don’t see it.
Luckily the corruption is over.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/18/trump-meme-coin-25-billion
A desperate public offering expected to age well, given inside information. More pump and dump of the future
USA! USA!.
The thing about truth is, you can no longer trust it. Truth-generators of yore, whether media, science or state, are now more nakedly edited by the money they make generating it, which is to say, they’re hired liars.
Eg, science runs on grants, grants run on corporate influence over govt grantors, or corporate dollars directly. Pure science is a quaint concept with no money in it. The Bezos Post lurching from its leftish blue hysterics to some fuzzy red ‘popular’ focus (what kind of hysterics will that be?) is a good model for how what Biden calls the ‘truth’ is generated. Simply put, each citizen must get on their hands and knees to go looking for truth, exercising judgement as well as effort. Knowing, with their best efforts, how elusive truth remains. And that government can only be part of the problem, not the solution.
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kern did a good job of covering this issue and others in Biden’s “Farewell Speech”. The entire speech was close to revolting.
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-jan-17-2025-the
American ‘Oligarchy’ Decried by Biden Gained $1.5 Trillion in His Term
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/american-oligarchy-decried-by-biden-gained-1-5-trillion-in-his-term/ar-AA1xjd46
Success! Nothing has fundamentally changed!
Biden in 2020: “I beat the socialist!”
Biden in 2024: “I am the socialist!”
Nice try, Biden.
First of all “Biden” said nothing. “Biden” is a corrupt running-dog sock puppet whose only political strength is that he will do whatever his wealthy patrons tell him to do no questions asked. And that’s before he becomes senile.
So why did ‘Team Biden’ suddenly say something halfway decent? Some thoughts.
1. As others have suggested, perhaps a way to make his legacy look better now that it doesn’t matter.
2. Spite, given that many of the tech billionaires jumped ship to Trump at the 11th hour. (I wonder what Trump promised them).
3. It’s a rule that when out of office politicians can propose working class policies, but when in office it’s neoliberalism all the way. Expect the remnants of Team Biden to suddenly start sounding like FDR and Eisenhower – until such time as they get elected again, and it’s back to business as usual.