links
-
It was almost at a humane size, my reading list. Not because I got through it. I just looked at a few bookshelves and, you know, gave up. ↩︎
-
Most of them will sit somewhere between “We have questions” and “Dangerous to yourself and others”. ↩︎
I’m Being Censored, and You Can Read, Hear, and See Me Talk About It in the
I weep for this country, where the media completely cancels anyone with a different point of view, like the one I’m expressing in this highly popular newspaper.
(via Nick Heer.)
Neo-Nazis recruiting people to Telegram after Parler shuts down
Nature abhors a vacuum (and so do extremists looking to yell about things). So, of course, everyone feeling lost without Parler are looking for somewhere to go. Enter Neo-Nazis and Telegram.
Here’s Cam Wilson, reporting for Gizmondo:
With Parler down for the time being, those banned from mainstream platforms, free speech advocates, the far-right and — as is often the case — those who are some combination of the three have been looking for a new safe space online. And Neo-Nazis are rolling out the red carpet for these disgruntled netizens by inviting them to their Telegram channels, in hopes of winning them over to their cause.
[…]
Gizmodo Australia has also seen users in Neo-Nazi chats discuss trying to radicalise former Parler members.
“Redpill these kids”, one administrator said in an international Neo-Nazi chat, and included a link to one of the new chats for Parler refugees.
This won’t end well. Misinformation, propaganda, and more has spread for years on WhatsApp, contributing to some truly horrible things (like lynchings in India), not to mention rampant fake news in the 2019 Brazilian election. Info spreads from group chat to group chat, often pushed along by well organised campaigners, and it’s all incredibly difficult to track.
If Neo-Nazi groups manage to swell their ranks on Telegram, things could even more extreme in the US – quietly and then very loudly.
UPDATE: Telegram Finally Takes Down Neo-Nazi Channels – Ali Breland, reporting for Mother Jones.
The two Americas
In one America, you get killed by sleeping in your car, selling cigarettes or playing in your backyard. In another America, you get to storm the Capitol, and no tear gas, no massive arrests, none of that.
Austin Mann’s stunning iPhone 12 Pro review
Austin Mann’s reviews of iPhone cameras are beautiful. Gorgeous photos, great write ups. His take on the iPhone 12 Pro is no different.
There’s always one point or one shot that makes me think that maybe, just maybe, I need to splash out on a Pro version of an iPhone after all. Here’s this years:
Just like last year, when I first compared non-Night mode shots to Night mode shots, the results are not even in the same league. What software is doing with Night mode is truly a night and day difference. In one test, I found the Ultra Wide with Night mode on the iPhone 12 Pro captured a beautiful image where the Ultra Wide without Night mode on the iPhone 11 Pro rendered a mostly black frame full of noise.
I thought the iPhone 12 Pro version of this shot turned out gorgeous and I can’t wait to see how it looks as a B&W fine art print on the wall. Stop and consider that for a moment… because of Night mode and computational algorithms we went from “completely unusable dark frame” to “I want that on my wall.”
Check out those photos. Special things happen when great gear combines with great ability.
Ad tech, content, and the next internet bubble
Gilad Edelman, reviewing Subprime attention crisis by Tim Hwang, for Wired:
Similar conditions were in place when mortgage-backed securities flooded the market in the early 2000s. These financial instruments traded at prices far above their true value, because the average trader had no idea they were backed by toxic assets. Once the truth came out, the bubble burst.
Hwang thinks online ads are heading in the same direction, since no one really grasps their worthlessness. There are piles of research papers in support of this idea, showing that companies’ returns on investment in digital marketing are generally anemic and often negative. One recent study found that ad tech middlemen take as much as a 50 percent cut of all online ad spending. Brands pay that premium for the promise of automated microtargeting, but a study by Nico Neumann, Catherine E. Tucker, and Timothy Whitfield found that the accuracy of that targeting is often extremely poor. In one experiment, they used six different advertising platforms in an effort to reach Australian men between the ages of 25 and 44. Their targeting performed slightly worse than random guessing. Such research indicates that, despite the extent of surveillance tech, a lot of the data that fuels ad targeting is garbage.
See also: Brad Esposito on the content collapse.
We believe that a piece of content with a million views has a million views. Everyone has bought in to the narrative, so as long as things stay that way nothing can go wrong. But anyone who works within the media will tell you, or will know deep down, that it’s not all blue skies. We’ve all seen things go viral and wonder why.
Sure, there is an insider audience within the media sphere that understands all of this. That knows the difference between a three second view and a three minute view. That knows the difference between local shares and international shares when you go to market. That knows how to sell what they’ve been told has value. Who can blame us? But the general population, so regularly forgotten by the mediaclass instructed to inform them, see this content and its success as a positive. As a fact. As a reality. Our jobs depend on it. It’s the way the water’s flowing – why would you swim upstream?
A whole lot of money is tied up in things that, at the end of the day, don’t hold much value. I wonder what will happen people start to reckon with that.
NYT: The Tangled Web We Weave review
Margaret O’Mara, reviewing The tangled web we weave by James Ball, for The New York Times:
The internet’s greatest strengths — its nonhierarchical architecture, its scalability — allowed it to quickly expand after American regulators opened the network up to commercial activity in the early 1990s. Yet the pace of expansion overwhelmed the organizations tasked with its maintenance and oversight, such as ICANN, the registry of domain names, and revealed the difficulties inherent in having a global network born in and governed by America.
Although Ball does not go into great detail about the broader political dynamics, his tale demonstrates how very much this timing and context mattered. Emerging as a commercial platform at a moment when Reaganite conservatism gave way to Clintonian centrism, the internet became a system where deep-pocketed industries prevailed over a public sector withered by four decades of austerity politics and an increasingly laissez-faire approach to corporate regulation.
The result was something that one Silicon Valley investor once termed “the largest single legal creation of wealth we’ve witnessed on the planet.”
Another book for my once-again-burgeoning reading list.1
The conspiracy theory classification model
Abbie Richards has developed The Conspiracy Chart, grouping conspiracies from “grounded in reality” to, once you cross the final “antisemitic point of no return”, “detached from reality”. This will make categorising my family a lot easier come Christmas time.1
Surprise: it’s worth taking a break from social media
If the last few days haven’t already convinced you that social media can have a detrimental effect on people’s mental health, perhaps some research will. Evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks, in an effort to convince his kids that social isn’t all that, has been digging into the evidence.
First, research from psychologist Jean M. Twenge on what she dubbed “the iGen“ – people born in or after 1995:1
According to Twenge’s exhaustive analyses of the data, the time that they spend on social media has caused big spikes in iGen anxiety, depression, and suicide. The individual youngsters who spend the most time on social media and text-based interaction experience the greatest risk.
The news is not all bad. iGen don’t drink as much, they don’t have as much risky sex, and they don’t take risks with drugs and dangerous driving as much as the preceding generations. As Twenge put it in The Atlantic, today’s teens present more danger to themselves than to one another.
But, of course, it’s not all about young people. They may receive an overwhelming amount of attention when people talk about trends online, but they’re not the only ones affected by it. Especially when it comes to politics.
Here’s Stotts, describing a study from four economists who had people quit Facebook for a month:
Americans get more of their news through Facebook than any other source, a fact blamed for the intense polarisation of the American polity. Study participants who quit Facebook knew less about what was going on in the news, attended less to politics, and were less politically polarized than the control group who kept their Facebook accounts active.
The people who quit Facebook were happier, more satisfied, less anxious, and less depressed after the study.
But that mightn’t be the most interesting takeaway from their study. The researchers also found out how much they’d have to pay people to stay off Facebook for a month. Turns out, for the people who applied to take part in the research, it was $102.
Makes me wonder how much people would pay to access Facebook, if it came without everything that makes it a nightmare engine. Some have suggested that “Facebook makes about $2.40 profit per user per year from selling targeted ads.“ If it takes $100 to keep people off the platform for a month, chances are FB could make more than $3 a year to keep people on it.
It probably wouldn’t scale, of course, otherwise they would’ve already done offered that kind of deal.2 But it’s an interesting thought.
Anyway. The point is take social media tends to make people’s lives worse in some ways. Surprise.
“There’s no launch party for decay.”
In the last three months America has lost more people than Sri Lanka lost in 30 years of civil war. If this isn’t collapse, then the word has no meaning. You probably still think of Sri Lanka as a shithole, though the war ended over a decade ago and we’re fine. Then what does that make you?
America has fallen. You need to look up, at the people you’re used to looking down on. We’re trying to tell you something. I have lived through collapse and you’re already there. Until you understand this, you only have further to fall.
“Doomer trad wife” and reactionary culture
Ryan Broderick, writing about a growing sense of reactionaryism in some online communities (and what it could lead to), in Garbage Day:
I’ve had this feeling as if I had seen this sort of online discourse before and after seeing the “doomer trad wife” meme it finally dawned on me. It reminds me of the early days of the incel community, before it had become a full-on extremist movement. I’m not sure a lot of people remember this, but incels started on a message board called PUA Hate. The board started as a space for frustrated men to vent about how they felt ripped off by the pickup artist industry. These men had bought books or taken classes and tried to become masters of seduction or whatever, failed out, and became radicalized.
I think we’re seeing a similar reactionaryism happening in certain Gen Z online spaces right now, but instead of a pushback against the pickup artist industry and traditional ideas of masculinity, it’s a response to an oppressive and all-consuming attention economy. It’s a growing resentment of the parasocial relationships happening across social media platforms and it seems to be getting worse.
Ryan has been writing about this here and there for a while and his concern seems justified. Combine this pushback against against the attention economy with the QAnon crowd and the anti-sex community and things could be interesting pretty soon.
The only good answer is “Yes”
Tom Ley, editor-in-chief of Defector:
When we all stood in that abandoned office 10 months ago and detonated our own careers together, it was because we were tired of watching the most insipid, parasitic members of the media industry go on charting its course. Are you?
Political leaders are sabotaging renewable energy
Christine Milne, former leader of the Australian Greens party:
If you fail to remember the past you are condemned to repeat it. In the UK in the 1860s the horse carriage industry and new railways were threatened by the self-propelled motor vehicle. So the government swung into action on behalf of its supporters, sabotaging the new industry by requiring every motor vehicle to be preceded by a man waving a red flag. All it achieved was to deny the community the benefits of the new technology and transfer the innovative advantage to other countries.
Now the same thing is happening with renewable energy.
Microsoft’s console names make yet another good feature confusing
IGN:
Microsoft has confirmed that the Xbox Series S will not run Xbox One X Enhanced versions of backwards compatible games, and will instead run the Xbox One S versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 titles with other beneficial features.
Microsoft‘s consoles names are a joke and this one paragraph hammers home how cumbersome they make it to explain what should be a simple feature. A commenter on Eurogamer summed it up best:
So the Xbox Series S can’t do the Xbox One X doing the Xbox but can do the Xbox One S doing the Xbox but the Xbox Series X can do the Xbox One X doing the Xbox?
The world could use a little bit of tact right now
Tact, or délicatesse, was an old obsession of Barthes’s, going back to the early years of his career in the polarised, Manichean world of the 1940s. That had been a time, as the historian Tony Judt in 1992 showed, when experience, choices, humanity itself were ‘divided … into binary categories: good or evil, positive or negative, comrades or enemies’. The suspicious atmosphere of the Cold War in France, when both Left and Right were in Barthes’s view equally compromised, required not political commitment, as defended by his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre, but a particular kind of neutrality – difficult to define, because it was not an absence of concern or lack of care; rather, it came from a desire to preserve the integrity of life itself, in its endless human differentiation. The neutral is, for Barthes, a refusal to participate in oppressive social systems; an anticipation of utopia.
We don’t want everyone to understand us all the time
Florence Hazrat, writing about the myriad failed attempts to introduce punctuation that indicates sarcasm, for Aeon:
The fact that we haven’t jubilantly included any of these marks, and ‘hashtagging’ in speech is clunky, suggests that, perhaps, the ambiguity of texts is something important and necessary, something we feel drawn to and need, not a problem in every instance to be solved. Signalling irony in a Jane Austen dialogue through punctuation is probably as euthanising as explaining a joke.
Clarity is great and all. But sometimes it’s best when you have to work to get it.
The problem is when everyone who won’t do a bit of work to get it start replying all the same.
“There’s nothing novel about Netflix’s competitive culture of fear”
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, writing about Netflix’s management culture:
The Wall Street Journal article on Netflix notes that the company’s managers study the ultimate instantiation of meritocrat-as-authoritarian, the dictator Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, a man famous for creating an ethnically homogenous military overclass to rule the country. But unlike a political system, which has wide implications for an entire society––and where the distribution of resources requires engaging with slackers, jerks, sweet people, and pessimists––the meritocratic corporation is the fantasy of an elite that wants to feel relevant in an age when all their collective brain power can do is reinvent the bus, create complex tax schemes, and invent fictional new securities to trade on financial markets. The back cover of Hastings and Reed’s book breathlessly claims that “there has never been a company like Netflix.” The history of talent-obsessed, highly punitive, conformist companies attests that the opposite is true. Netflix’s own comparison of itself to a professional sports team proves it isn’t new, because professional sports teams are businesses, too. But as my elitist friend acknowledged at the end of his email, there is at least one big difference between Netflix’s corporate employees and professional athletes: the athletes have unions.
Sleep tracking in watchOS 7: simple but thoughtful
Ryan Christoffel, writing about the upcoming sleep tracking features in watchOS 7 for MacStories:
I’ve been using the new sleep-related features of Apple’s forthcoming OS versions for two full months now, and in true Apple fashion, they’re in some ways more comprehensive and elegant than third-party solutions, and in other ways they’re underpowered.
More or less what we expected. And Apple’s take on sleep tracking does have some truly ingenious touches:
A similar long-time annoyance I’ve had with the Apple Watch and iPhone’s alarm system involves the times I would get up before my alarm went off. In watchOS 7, the Apple Watch will detect when I seem to be awake and moving about before my alarm has come due and will send a notification that offers to turn my alarm off.
And, in typical Apple fashion, Ryan didn’t get the notification if he had just gotten up for a moment in the middle of the night. Fantastic feature.
My only question about sleep tracking and the Apple Watch: when are we going to see watch bands from Apple that are designed to be slept in? The current bands are fine but not the most comfortable for bed.
A lot of people would roll their eyes at watch bands for bed, sure, but people who really care about comfort and design would jump at them. So, you know, Apple’s core fan base. Bonus points if there’s a Pride edition as well.
Can Uber delete itself?
Some companies, however, are taking a stand once and for all against racism. Uber has begun plastering cities across the country with billboards proclaiming: “If you tolerate racism, delete Uber.” Uber being the same company which continues shoveling money into a legal fight to continue treating their employees as independent contractors who do not deserve full legal protection, and the same company found earlier this year to be utilizing a handy-dandy algorithm that charges riders more for rides to non-white neighborhoods. Uber, perhaps, should consider deleting itself.
The public helped fund great tech – what should they get in return?
Mariana Mazzucato, in her book The value of everything:
Yet in presenting themselves as modern-day heroes, and justifying their record profits and cash mountains, Apple and other companies conveniently ignore the pioneering role of government in new technologies. Apple has unashamedly declared that its contribution to society should not be sought through tax but through recognition of its great gizmos. But where did the smart tech behind those gizmos come from? Public funds. The Internet, GPS, touchscreen, SIRI and the algorithm behind Google – all were funded by public institutions. Shouldn‘t the taxpayer thus get something back, beyond a series of undoubtedly brilliant gadgets? Simply to pose this question, however, underlies how we need a radically different type of narrative as to who created the wealth in the first place – and who has subsequently extracted it.
Mazzucato argues we need new stories and new ideas to shape how we think about value, capitalism, and economics. I‘ve only just started her book but she‘s building a strong case.