Walkie-talkie tales: understanding 2021
They're what two coups -- and more -- have in common in the new year
When I was 12 years old and in New York for the first time, my father gave me $20 to play around with.
Within the hour, I spent it on a pair of walkie-talkies that didn’t work when I got them back to Chicago.
From then until this year, I thought that was the saddest story involving walkie-talkies I would ever encounter. I was wrong.
Aung San Suu Kyi, whose political party just won reelection to run Myanmar, was charged Wednesday by her own country’s military with acquiring seven walkie-talkies without the right import paperwork. If convicted, she could get three years.
Her real crime, of course, was soundly beating the military’s fave Union Solidarity and Development Party in the November 8 election. The generals responded Monday by staging a coup. They said it was necessary because Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party had failed to investigate what they considered big voter fraud in the election.
This may sound a little familiar, as if they were inspired by our own nutty coupsters to greater treasonous heights than were achieved here.
Not so much. In Myanmar, coups are things they’re good at without any outside guidance.
Also, voting irregularities actually exist there, though they don’t seem to be what the USDP was harping about. Millions of Myanmar ethnics weren't allowed to vote at all in 2020 for various reasons, mostly discriminatory. Both major parties seem to have been in on that scam.
None of this has anything obvious to do with walkie-talkies, which are largely outmoded nowadays. Almost everybody has a cell phone in their pants, and when any group of people needs to be able to click into a shared communications system at will, there’s an app for that.
The world’s biggest such app is owned by a Texas company called Zello. Zello has its own sad walkie-talkie story. The app seems to have been used by some of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6.
The Guardian called Zello on it Jan. 13, additionally asserting that about 800 of America’s wackiest groups were using its walkie-talkie app to communicate. The same day -- two hours later, according to the British paper -- Zello announced that “we have deleted 2,000+ channels associated with militias and other militarized social movements.”
Despite its speedy reaction to the bad publicity, Zello inferred in the same release that it was helpless to monitor its own business, and begged its nicer users to help it do so.
This is not a new idea for Zello, founded in 2012. Folks in the tech world have noted for years Zello’s passive attitude toward policing the use of its product.
Three years ago, Zello was faced with public amazement that it serviced accounts of Jihadists so unafraid of consequences that they actually used ISIS avatars and “Islamic State” in their user names. After being chastised, Zello killed eight of the accounts.
Zello revealed then that it had been cooperating with terrorism investigators looking at some of its customers. There was at least one good reason: The app had been used in a 2017 attack that killed five in Stockholm, it was widely reported in the Swedish press.
It’s not surprising that Zello apparently takes so little care of this portion of its business. There’s probably no one to do it.
Public data indicates that Zello has about 150 million users and 41 employees.
You can sign up for Zello on your phone’s app store without associating with any of them. That’s the way Zello, its competitors, and most other app services like it.
They are participating in a great American tradition: making money out of shit.
Just as the Myanmar generals aren’t even bothering to drum up a good case against Suu Kyi, corporations all over are running businesses without many of the more expensive and time-consuming trappings of responsible commerce. Very little due diligence, lots of marketing.
This may be a dangerous way to run a business, but American government doesn’t usually seem to mind. For generations, lots of U.S. politicians have made their bones propping up the belief that constituents can make money with relatively little effort.
Many middle class and downright poor voters are willing to support legislators who pass laws and promote policies to support multi-millionaires only because they think they, too, may soon be wealthy. This may be the main reason it makes some kind of sense to be a Republican in the South.
That’s why Texas U.S. Sen Ted Cruz and other Republicans scrambled Jan. 28 to support the call for discount brokerages to go back to allowing their customers to buy GameStop stock, running it up to ridiculous heights. Even though short-selling hedge funds -- big GOP contributors -- were being shredded by the rise in prices, Cruz knew he had a more salient interest. He had to make sure his constituents knew he backed their right to make money out of shit.
Later, he and his cronies will try to find a way to quietly protect the people who fund their campaigns and hire them to lobby after they’re out of office.
Until then, they are likely to appear to be the best friends an amateur stock trader can imagine.
They will talk the talk, but don’t expect them to walk the walk.
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