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Google, Surrogacy, Bluesky, And Our Broken Elites [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-04
This is a fairly long one. Might want to settle in with a snack. But I promise, it does have a point.
A judge has just ruled on the remedies after finding Google a monopoly, and they are completely inadequate. Another round of right-of-center pundits strenuously insisting that Bluesky is not only lame and dying but that it is actively damaging to democrats. A rich woman attempts, against the law, to ruin the life of the surrogate who was unable to carry the baby term. Seemingly unrelated stories, but I think that they show how broken our elites are and how that brokenness leads to a lack of accountability that actively harms the rest of us.
A lot of centrist pundits do not like Blueksy. There are a lot of reasons for this, I believe. Bluesky started as refuge for populations that twitter was actively harming or making their position on twitter difficult — blacks, LGBQT, politically active leftists, etc. Therefore, the political vibe tends to be more left than right. Which is a shock coming from twitter, as the algorithm there marinates them in far right and even outright Nazi content. Their perception of reality is more than a little skewed as a result. In addition, Bluesky has excellent self-moderation tools and no algorithm. These people are used to the algo pushing them and not used to people pushing back and/or simply ignoring them. What use their brilliant insights into how, specifically, to toss people they don’t like anyway under the bus in order to win elections if those annoying leftists don’t listen to them? All of this ties into what appears to be the primary reason: they do not like it when people push back on them.
This is, frankly, pathological. I get that it is not pleasant when people disagree with you. And I get it that some people get really, really over the top. Those people are assholes, and no one deserves (well, okay, almost no one) deserves to be asshole-d at. But a lot of these people seem to think that any pushback on their obviously brilliant ideas is tantamount to open warfare on them. It’s not. It is the normal give and take of healthy debate (again, excluding people who are being assholes). I promise you, speaking as a leftist, that centrists are not kind in their critiques. Ask anyone who protested for Gaza last year, or anyone who supports Mamdani publicly, or anyone who wants police accountability, or anyone who doesn’t think tossing trans people or immigrants under the bus is a good idea, or anyone who wants to hold up Trump corruption and police state tactics is a good idea. The pushback on those points are generally not made via Marquis of Queensbury rules. And while that is not nice, it is basically okay.
Politics are important. How we order our lives collectively, how we allocate resources, how we do or do not share power. People obviously get worked up on these issues, especially when we are talking about survival or the right to live a full life. No one owes anyone else agreement. No one owes people they think are being stupid or dangerous deference. You can argue back and forth about flies and honey and whatnot, but that doesn’t really seem to be the issue. A lot of these pundits seem to think that any pushback is wrong. That they are owed deference because they are serous thinkers involved in serious thinking and honing their serious arguments in serious debate with serious right-wingers. Surely, surely, the rabble should respect that?
This is not unique to pundits, of course. I have written about this before, but it is also an issue with our tech leadership. Elon Much bought twitter, seemingly, because he did not like that it had moderation standards. And when he didn’t have the highest engagement, he made his employees tweak the algorithm to put him in front of everyone and fired the one person who told him that people didn’t want to engage with him. Marc Andreesen, one of the most powerful venture capitalist sin the world, blames his far right turn on people no longer agreeing with his version of how to run an economy. Peter Thiel thinks democracy and capitalism are incompatible and that women should not have the right to vote because people disagree with his opinions on government and the economy. These people appear to have a childish belief that since they are rich, they are obviously experts in anything that they choose to discuss. And that anyone who does not defer to their pronouncements is evil and waging a literal war on their person. It is the mentality of a toddler, a fragile, superficial ego that can stand no criticism because it can not envision ever being wrong or being challenged. They “made it” and now life is apparently supposed to be a serious of victories cheered on by the rest of us forever. It is the kind of attitude that leads to a woman trying to destroy the life of her surrogate.
I want to start by saying that miscarriages are very sad and I do not blame anyone for grieving. However, the woman in this story, a wealthy venture capitalist, apparently takes that grieving to an evil — and I use that word advisedly — place that no decent society should allow. Please do read the entire article, as my summary is not going to do the depths of this woman’s sense of entitlement justice, but the facts are fairly damning. This woman contacted for a surrogate and the surrogate lost the baby. As far as the available record goes, the surrogate did nothing wrong and the loss is just one of those sad events that sometimes touch even the lives of rich venture capitalists. Surrogacy pregnancies are more likely to end badly than normal pregnancies, and the donors had a history of difficult pregnancies in their families, a risk that they did not disclose to the surrogate. It is unfortunate, but the state of the art in medicine has not yet found a way to ensure that all babies are born. But to the woman in the story, the baby died, and the surrogate had to pay.
The donor apparently set out to destroy the surrogate’s life. She stopped paying for the medical bills. She sued. She hired private investigators and then accused her of having the wrong kind of sex. She accused the surrogate of deliberately avoiding care because the surrogate left the hospital, with doctor’s consent, to retrieve a rare vitamin that the donor suggested she take. She outed the surrogate by name in a public Facebook group. She revealed the name of the surrogate’s under-age child in public. All of that lead to a restraining order and a warrant for her arrest for doxing the surrogate. And yet.
This woman obviously feels that she will suffer no consequences for her actions. She still talked on the record to Wired, stating that she felt the restraining order was unenforceable. The surrogate, one should add, did not speak to Wired because of the ongoing legal cases. Obviously, the much poorer surrogate did not feel that she lived a consequence free life, unlike the donor. And the donor is likely correct — the state that has the arrest warrant for her has, apparently, taken no steps to take her into custody. Her friends, her Facebook surrogacy support group her family and husband — they have all either cheered her on or refrained from pointing out that she is behaving badly. She obviously feels that she can do whatever she wants. As far as she is concerned, the surrogate should be in jail because the baby died, never mind how insane that position is in the face of the actual facts. She is untouchable, she appears to believe, because she is rich.
And that brings us, the long way round, to the Google penalties. The penalties are wildly inappropriate for the crime of being a monopolist, and the consensus seems to be that the Google will continue to enjoy its monopoly. They are, based on binding precedent, completely inappropriate. Wall Street rewarded Google with a stock surge.
That a judge would treat with kid gloves is depressing but not surprising. It is part and parcel of the notion that elites do not and should not operate under the same rules as the rest of us. Google violated the law, and per that law, should have faced penalties severe enough to prevent it from continuing to break the law. Instead, the judge cast about for any way (in this case, Google’s belief that AI will change everything — so we get a twofer: a complete lack of accountability married to a complete lack of understanding about imitative AI) to not have to impose the penalties demanded by law and binding precedent. The charitable version of this ruling is that the judge is trying to protect it from the Supreme Court. But that merely pushes the lack of accountability higher up the chain. At the end of the day, our elites and legal system cannot conceive of being held to account for anything.
This is the rot at the heart of our current problems. People with money and power should be held to higher standards rather than lower standards. People with power must be constantly checked, lest they abuse that power. No one is entitled to a consequence free life, and the fact that consequences are so rarely applied to the powerful and so frequently over-applied to the normal goes a long way to explaining the sense that society is weaker than ever. Because in many ways, it is. We have a group of elites that have been so coddled, so isolated from reality, so protected from the consequences of their actions that the mere whiff of misfortune, discomfort, or accountability sends them running to the ramparts as if the guillotines were being built in the streets. It would be amusing if it were not so dangerous.
No democratic society can long survive a class of people above the law and common decency. If we want to preserve ours, we need to start by holding those at the top of the pyramid to account. Otherwise we just have an aristocracy with occasional elections for giggles. Bread and circuses where the circuses are politics that never manage to touch the elite. I, for one, think we all deserve better.
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