" Like Mark Zuckerberg, Doctor Frankenstein was a good guy whose experiment just got out of hand. Now the mobs are howling after Facebook , Mr. Zuckerberg’s creature.

It is true that Facebook’s release of personal “friend data” into the ozone through Cambridge Analytica remains in the news only because of the prevailing superstition that the Facebook monster allowed Donald Trump to be elected president. The idea that omnipotent technology manipulated the 2016 election has greater appeal to advanced progressive thinking than Hillary Clinton’s explanation that married white women sold her out.

But really, all that is a sideshow. The backlash against this technology, the belief that the creature must be controlled, has been building for several years. Along with Google, Facebook is the biggest web target, so Mark Zuckerberg is about to get torched by Congress and any regulator within reach for abusing “data.”

Data is the oxygen of the internet. Any online click for any reason inputs data. In the beginning this data, organized into things like family Facebook groups or Google Maps or Wikipedia, was seen as good.

For several years BTTP—BTTP being human history Before The Trump Presidency —articles and books poured forth describing the dark side of this technology. In the past year, that criticism has reached critical mass.

Researchers and parents agree that social media is distorting the lives of young people, especially adolescent girls. No one knows what to do about it.

Web forums fill with millions of young men exchanging sexual and political rants. No one knows what to do about it.

Terrorists wallow in jihadist videos on YouTube, brainwashing themselves into acts of mass murder. No one knows what to do about it.

People write articles saying they have forgotten how to read books.

Major advertisers accuse social-media companies of allowing their ads to appear alongside pornography, a bog beyond anyone’s control.

The cyberwarfare spies of Russia’s Internet Research Agency ran around the U.S. uncaught for years.

Social media’s contribution to the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution was an era ago. The technology has been captured since by dictators who use it as an instrument of surveillance and control that would startle Philip K. Dick.

In one week, Facebook the good communitarian has become Facebook the abuser of everyone’s privacy.

The story of Frankenstein endures as a metaphor of good intentions gone haywire because it keeps happening. Some people used to argue that because Albert Einstein explained how energy could be released from atoms, he bore responsibility for the atomic bomb. By this logic blame should fall on Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, for electing Donald Trump.


Do not for a moment think that Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Berners-Lee or any of the others who created modern life online are unaware that history may conclude their creations were a mistake.

Mr. Berners-Lee, reacting to the Facebook mess, accused social-media companies of abusing his creation: “The fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to weaponize the web at scale.”

“Weaponize” evokes the idea of dual-use technology, which is tech that can be put to both a peaceful and military purpose, such as rocket guidance systems. The internet has finally been recognized as a dual-use technology, good and bad.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO and inheritor of Steve Jobs’s creations, weighed in this week, ironically from China, the global leader in Orwellian surveillance systems. “The ability of anyone to know what you’ve been browsing about for years,” said Mr. Cook, “who your contacts are, who their contacts are, things you like and dislike and every intimate detail of your life—from my own point of view it shouldn’t exist.” Of course, the iPhone became the universal gateway into this dystopia.

One can imagine that when Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google’s early motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” they sensed what Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues on the Manhattan Project knew: The power of what they had created might be a problem.

Back when superstition ruled the world, the solution to a larger-than-life problem was known as forcing the genie back into the bottle. Today, when algorithms rule the world, one would think that an industry with aggregate IQ greater than any ever assembled could figure this out. But maybe IQ correlates with the problem.

If the issue is privacy, why does every app and site incentivize users to scroll past pages of legal boilerplate to hit “I Agree,” rather than writing up top in large type: “THIS IS THE ONE SENTENCE YOU’VE GOTTA THINK ABOUT BEFORE YOU AGREE”?

There is another alternative to trying to dam up the internet torrent with regulation: Every time anyone clicks into an app or search engine, they should see this more needed personal motto for our times: Don’t Be Stupid."

" Hope Hicks Is Gone, and It’s Not Clear Who Can Replace Her "


By KATIE ROGERS and MAGGIE HABERMAN




" WASHINGTON — Hope Hicks, the White House communications director who worked behind the scenes to direct the president through multiple professional crises — and decided to resign after she found herself exhausted by them — has left the building.

Those left behind are wondering what happens now.

Thursday was the last day at the White House for Ms. Hicks, a 29-year-old from Connecticut, whose unlikely career trajectory from corporate public relations hand to White House communications director kept pace with President Trump’s own unorthodox rise to the Oval Office. Over three and a half years, from the early trenches of the presidential campaign to desks within earshot of each other in the West Wing, Ms. Hicks had become Mr. Trump’s most trusted aide — and, perhaps most important, his unofficial translator to the rest of the staff.

“Her ability to anticipate what he wants and also execute can’t be replicated,” said Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman. “At least not immediately.”

Ms. Hicks never gave a single on-camera interview during her time in the White House. Unlike her boss, attention from the news media was never something she sought.

But by the time Ms. Hicks announced in February that she would leave her post, she had unwillingly moved from her preferred behind-the-scenes role into the center of a White House scandal over security clearances. It was kick-started by reports that Rob Porter, the former White House staff secretary whom she had been dating, had abused two former wives. In days, Ms. Hicks’s image was splashed across tabloids, cable news and gossip websites.

“It’s enough to make lesser people wilt,” Mr. Gidley said of the news media exposure focused on Ms. Hicks. “I made a joke that Britney Spears shaved her head and slapped a car with an umbrella over similar treatment from the paparazzi.”

Ms. Hicks’s proximity to the president has also been a matter of interest to those investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian officials.

Investigators have sought to determine what she knew about the president’s decision to fire the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey. And in January, a former spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team had planned to tell investigators that Ms. Hicks had once said emails written by Donald Trump Jr. before a Trump Tower meeting — in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Hillary Clinton from the Russians — would “never get out,” a claim her lawyer has forcefully denied.

Testifying in a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee weeks after Mr. Porter resigned from the White House, Ms. Hicks said that her job sometimes required her to tell “white lies” on behalf of the president.

Hours later, she announced she would leave the White House. Ms. Hicks, who avoids interviews with the news media, issued a statement saying she had “no words” to express her gratitude to the president. She had told her family and a few friends three days before that she planned to leave.

It had become clear to others that by the end of her tenure Ms. Hicks was exhausted by West Wing infighting and the daily grind of spending most of her waking hours on call to the president. It was a grueling lifestyle.

After waking up and often sending her first emails of the day around 4:30 a.m., Ms. Hicks would squeeze in a workout. Then, for much of the work day, she could usually be found in her closet-size office, where she would wait for the president’s inevitable call: “Hopester,” Mr. Trump would say, or “Hopey!” He sought her advice on any number of unfolding crises facing the White House, but also to check his instincts against hers.   "

" SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean reporters visiting North Korea’s capital to cover a K-pop performance there received a surprise on Monday: an unusually graceful apology from a senior North Korean official.

The official, Kim Yong-chol, a vice chairman of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party, visited the reporters’ hotel and apologized for their having been denied entry to a theater in Pyongyang, the capital, where the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, watched South Korean musicians perform Sunday evening.

“We invited you and we are obliged to guarantee free coverage,” Kim Yong-chol was quoted in the reporters’ dispatches from Pyongyang as saying. “On behalf of the North’s authorities, I offer an apology and ask for your understanding for the wrong committed.”

It is extremely rare for North Korea to offer such a public apology to the South, or, for that matter, to apologize for anything. The rare gesture from a senior official reflected the North’s efforts to work toward a political détente on the Korean Peninsula that Kim Jong-un helped start in February by sending a delegation to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Still, the apology was all the more striking not only because the totalitarian state does not have a free press but also because it came from Kim Yong-chol, an army general considered hard-line even by North Korean standards.

He is widely believed in the South to have masterminded the sinking of a South Korean Navy ship in 2010, when he served as director of the North’s main spy agency. South Korea says a North Korean torpedo attack sank the ship, killing 46 sailors, but the North denies it.

On Sunday evening, several South Korean pool reporters were barred by their North Korean minders from entering the concert hall.

The South Korean government later lodged a protest. On Monday, Kim Yong-chol explained that the minders had been overruled by Kim Jong-un’s bodyguards. The vice chairman apologized for the lack of coordination between different branches of the Pyongyang government.

After North Korea conducted a series of nuclear and missile tests last year that increased tensions, Kim Jong-un has shifted to dialogue in recent months. He has agreed to meet with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, on April 27, and has offered to sit down with President Trump. Mr. Trump has agreed to do so by May, in an attempt to persuade him to give up his nuclear weapons.

In the past week alone, Mr. Kim has stunned the region with his breathtaking pace of diplomacy.

Last week, he met President Xi Jinping in Beijing, for his first known trip outside North Korea since he became leader. On Friday, he met with the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, in Pyongyang. On Sunday, he clapped and laughed while watching South Korean pop singers, whose influence on North Korea’s isolated populace his government has been trying to block. Afterward, he shook hands with each performer and posed for a group photograph.

His welcoming of K-pop icons, and Kim Yong-chol’s apology, are a stark departure from just a few years ago, when South Korea began blaring K-pop songs across their shared border as a psychological warfare tactic. The North Korean military warned of an “all-out war” if the South did not turn off its loudspeakers, and it even fired warning shots across the border.

In North Korea, all radio and TV channels are controlled by the government and filled with propaganda. The regime has been cracking down on K-pop music that has entered the country via bootleg DVDs from China.

But on Sunday, the same day the United States and South Korea started joint annual military drills, which usually draws warlike rhetoric and even missile tests from the North, South Korean K-pop singers were allowed to perform in Pyongyang.

On Monday, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim Jong-un as saying that he was “deeply moved to see our people sincerely acclaiming the performance, deepening the understanding of the popular art of the south side.”