The FCC, The FTC, and The Miracle Metal
Friday's Chariot Ride: 4/18/25
The FCC
Donald Trump is continuing his onslaught against freedom of speech.
During the 2024 presidential race, CBS's show 60 Minutes aired an interview with Kamala Harris, which portrayed her in a reasonably favorable light. As a result, Donald Trump threw a tantrum on Truth Social, threatening that if he took office, he would impose stiff fines on CBS and have the FCC revoke their broadcasting license. This caught my eye recently because, after 60 minutes released two programs critical of Trump: an interview with Zelenskyy and a section on the Greenland embarrassment, he took to Truth Social once again to reiterate his fury--this time, though, as the sitting President of the United States.
The first and most obvious point to make is that it is an affront to the letter and spirit of the Constitution that any media company should worry whether the president views their content production as for or against his agenda. There are many things that a media producer should be thinking about, but the constitution is supposed to ensure that petty power-lusters are not one of them.
This outburst against CBS is characteristic of Trump in so many ways. It puts on display his childishness in the face of criticism and his disregard for any principle or ideas higher than his own whims, but it is also characteristic of the pattern of many of Trump's government overreaches. Trump takes the worst aspects of the government, the kind that have always occurred in dark rooms behind closed doors, and embodies them unapologetically to the world.
In particular, the FCC is not a legitimate institution. The founding mission of the FCC is to: "Make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination... a rapid, efficient, nationwide and worldwide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges." The only way this could be done is to have the government define and control a large and (at the time) rapidly growing medium of speech, which should have been protected by the First Amendment. In practice, what inevitably happened (and this has been happening for ~60 years [1]), is that the FCC, using its power to distribute licenses would give "suggestions" for the kinds of content that might make it more likely that one's license is renewed. These are, of course, extremely worrying violations of the first amendment.
In the past, these kinds of "suggestions" had always been aimed at preserving the "public interest" by restricting profanity or increasing the number of educational programs. However, whatever licensing restrictions the bureaucrats impose are ultimately just their particular whims--there's no rational central planning scheme for radio or television content.
Trump has, as he always does, taken the hidden ghoul behind the actions of the government and begun wearing it on his sleeve. He's taken the ultimately arbitrary actions of the FCC and begun to use it in an openly capricious way against his personal enemies.
I think this can end in one of two ways: either Americans rapidly recognize that the whole scheme of government control and regulation of media companies is authoritarian, or we continue the escalation of government control over freedom of speech.
The FTC
The FTC is now one step closer to a vile injustice.
In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust suit against Facebook for its anti-competitive practices. The government believes that Facebook's strategy of either "buying" or "burying" potential competitors was an "intent to monopolize" under the Sherman Antitrust Act. When they bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, these were the characteristic actions of a monopolist, they intend to prove. This was initially dismissed, but has since been recast and, in the last few days, has been taken to trial. Last week, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg testified for hours on end as the state's first witness.
The main flaw in the FTC's case is in the very concept of antitrust law itself. In fact, the central concepts used to define the nature of antitrust law are illegitimate and lead to disastrous consequences. The most "anticompetitive" thing for Facebook to do is for Facebook to create products that are so good that nobody wants to use anything else. Then nobody would ever compete with them. And if they were to make an acquisition, the most "monopolistic" thing they could do is be willing to pay well-above-market prices for companies that integrate extremely well with Facebook's current business. The thing that antitrust law would find as "smoking guns" against Facebook are the things I would most wish for Facebook to be doing.
There are a number of deeply galling things about this case. One is the gall with which one could complain that *social networking* of all industries, one whose capital requirements in order to compete are as near-zero as any business has ever been in history, is non-competitive. The *only thing* that could make a business with literally zero barriers to entry "uncompetitive" is if nobody could figure out an idea better than the dominant player. And when those great new ideas in social networking came around, Facebook was first and loudest in recognizing and incorporating their valuable contributions, either by adapting Facebook to leverage those new isnights or, in some cases, by paying huge amounts of money to buy these companies.
The second comes from how tenuous the Instagram acquisition actually was at the time. Instagram acquisition was a landmark acquisition because of how unprecedented it was for a company that had been around for as little time as Instagram had been to have the kind of valuation that Facebook bought it at. In some circles, it was regarded as a brilliant move (and it indeed it was), but it was far from obvious.
The third irony is the gall with which one could tell *Mark Zuckerberg* that buying companies is uncompetitive--as though an offer from a big company is a siren song which one could not resist. When Zuckerberg was 22 years old, running a rapidly growing startup, Yahoo offered him one billion dollars to sell it. That kind of money would have been life-changing for many of his founding team and would have been a wonderful return on his investors' money. After Zuckerberg turned down the offer, most of his founding team left in despair over this decision, and very soon, Zuckerberg was proven unequivocally right in not selling.
If someone wanted to unseat Facebook in the social networking space, they would have to have at least two things: a better idea than Mark Zuckerberg's, and a greater strength of character. Nobody yet in that space has managed to meet the mark.
The Miracle Metal
I’m a little sensitive to being totally, idiotically wrong about what I’m about to write below. If it is as important as I seem to think, I feel like more people would be talking about it. But I can’t see why this isn’t the coolest thing ever.
MIT scientists just created a material stronger than steel and lighter than plastic.
I don't know much about this field, but from what I'm seeing, it sounds like it could be the materials-science equivalent of something as crazy as cold fusion.
The holy grail of material's science has been a material that combines extreme strength, light weight, and scalability. Polymers—like those in plastic containers or nylon—seemed like promising candidates because they’re light and easy to make, but their long, tangled molecular chains deform too easily under stress. However, if one could arrange these chains into flat, bonded sheets, the result could combine unparalleled strength with the lightness and versatility characteristic of plastics.
For decades, chemists thought this was impossible to achieve in practice.
Now, a team at MIT has proven otherwise. Their new material, called 2DPA-1, is built from melamine molecules that self-assemble into two-dimensional discs, which bond in flat sheets via hydrogen bonds. These sheets stack into a structure that’s incredibly strong and airtight. It’s twice as strong as steel, several times stiffer than bulletproof glass, and far lighter.
Though this is obviously brand-new and there's probably a ton to work out, it seems like 2DPA-1 can be produced using standard industrial methods. If scaled, this material could radically change what we think is possible in fields from construction to aerospace. Imagine skyscrapers twice as tall made at half the cost, satellites and aircraft made stronger and more fuel-efficient, or protective coatings for electronics that are thinner, tougher, and longer-lasting than anything on the market today. Even consumer goods—phones, cars, packaging—could become lighter and more durable. What was just a few months ago a chemical impossibility may soon be the structural backbone of a new technological era.
Notes:
[1] See Have a gun, Will Nudge for a super insightful, prescient analysis of this phenomenon as it was getting started in the 1960s