“The truly scary part about that campaign was not that people can be swayed by media, because we’ve known that since the start of media, it was how cheap it was. It cost nothing to do this.”
“We want voters to be aware of who is trying to influence them. That’s the reason we have disclosure requirements on our campaign ads. We’ve known, at least since Aristotle in Western culture, that the source is judged as part of the message.”
Discourse Saboteurs
[Kathleen Hall Jamieson's] case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers — whom she terms “discourse saboteurs” — and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”
How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump, by Jane Mayer, New Yorker, 24 September 2018. The article is a profile of Kathleen Hall Jamieson forensic's analysis of the 2016 election: Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President — What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know (Oxford University Press, 2018)
A pre-Newtonian moment
“Social media is in a pre-Newtonian moment, where we all understand that it works, but not how it works,” Mr. Systrom told me, comparing this moment in the tech world to the time before man could explain gravity. “There are certain rules that govern it and we have to make it our priority to understand the rules, or we cannot control it.”
A Wise Man Leaves Facebook: Kevin Systrom, a founder of Instagram, wasn’t a “team player.” That was exactly what the company needed, by Kara Swisher, New York Times, 27 September 2018
Leo Laporte: Maybe what he's thinking is Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook to connect and everything like that. It was used against us in our elections by the Russians particularly to convince people not to vote or to stay at home mostly or to vote for somebody in particular. To me that was the come-to-Jesus moment where somebody figured out how to use social media in a very powerful way and they understood it but Zuckerberg did not and it took Facebook off guard, and at first they denied it even happened. Finally of late they've admitted yeah that's what happened.
Larry Magid: I think part of the problem for consumers is that most of us don't know how it works. We know that there are algorithms…
Leo Laporte: But do you think Zuck [Mark Zuckerberg] does is the question?
Larry Magid: That's what I'm saying, I assume that Zuck does, but maybe he doesn't fully understand it.
This Week in Tech (TWIT) 606, 19 March 2019, [at 43:51]
Obscurity
Obscurity makes meaningful and intimate relationships possible, ones that offer solidarity, loyalty and love. It allows us to choose with whom we want to share different kinds of information. It protects us from having everyone know the different roles we play in the different parts of our lives. We need to be able to play one role with our co-workers while revealing other parts of ourselves with friends and family. Indeed, obscurity is one reason we feel safe bonding with others over our shared vulnerabilities, our mutual hopes, dreams and fears.
Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd, by Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger, New York Times, 17 April 2019. This article by Dr. Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science, and Dr. Selinger, a professor of philosophy, is part of the New York Times’ Privacy Project
Let them go
“As an undergrad at Harvard, I had the privilege of learning economics from the Big Names. The mainstream textbook writers. The World Bank presidents. The White House advisors.
“And then Lehman fell.”
“And then Lehman fell.”
…To my great shame, I could not explain what had happened to my friends and family back home. Because my teachers could not. They did not include money or banking in their models. They didn’t see the crash coming. What insights could they have offered?
In a sentence, I realized I had been brainwashed.
Every experience in the financial reform world, every experience in law school, and every professional experience since, has only proved to me, more and more, that the Big Names do not know — or refuse to acknowledge — what’s actually going down. They were wrong about the global financial crisis. They were wrong about austerity. They were wrong about the EU. The list goes on and on and on.
Today, I work to help low-income communities directly fight banks, debt collectors, and other financial villains. I also collaborate with a wide range of heterodox scholars and activists.
In any case, I promise you what they’re saying is far closer to on-the-ground reality than anything I’ve ever learned from the Big Names, with rare exceptions. I know it’s scary to dismiss what the Big Names say. They have power and prestige.
But they are not scientists. They are not doctors. They are not objectively the best at what they do. Most of them are representatives of a failed elite consensus. They are afraid to admit their lens for looking at the world is fundamentally warped.
The Big Names simply could not and cannot explain the old world. They should not lead us into the future. Let them go.
Raúl Carrillo (@raulACarrillo), 5 March 2019 (with light edits)
The center line
Impartiality is still a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage. But you don’t get there by walking down the center line with a blindfold on.
Why do journalists and news organizations insist on doing this? I think the answer is pretty clear.
It’s because they want to appear fair without taking any chances.
The media feel safest in the middle lane. Just ask Jeff Flake, John Kasich and Howard Schultz by Margaret Sullivan, Washington Post, 30 January 2019
Now the war
“Now the war has come to Walmart. And Hooters. And Sam’s Club and McDonald’s, and an unnamed but homey looking restaurant that has a $7.99 Lunch Special. If this doesn’t look like war, that’s only because we so reflexively resist the idea of a war on American soil that we refuse to see the obvious.”
What perpetual war looks like in America, by art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 4 August 2019
Kennicott's essay, in reaction to this week's mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, begins with a reflection on a photograph by Joel Angel Juarez of police in paramilitary gear outside a Hooter’s restaurant in El Paso.
Kennicott continues,
This convergence of our commercial landscape with violence is what the 21st century, slow-motion but persistent American war looks like. It also looks like the underside of a child’s school desk, people hiding in closets and wailing into cellphones, SWAT teams in parking lots, nightclubs with overturned bar stools and tables, piles of shoes abandoned outside a bar, and movie theaters soaked in gore. If we have the courage to do what we must do and look at the facts, we will also see that in one essential way, the American war looks like every other war everywhere on the planet, full of bodies riddled with bullets, bloodied, broken and dead.
Some wars are over in a day, or a week, and others go on for years. If there are opportunists and profiteers and cynical actors who are willing to fuel the mayhem for a tiny bit of personal or political advantage, then they can go on for decades. If war takes root in a society slowly, or by stealth, it can come to seem the ordinary state of affairs.
Ossington and Argyle, 2018, CC-BY
Charlotte S H Jensen
Charlotte S H Jensen
My friend and colleague Charlotte S H Jensen died suddenly last week. She was beautiful, kind, and funny and I will miss her very much.
Charlotte was an archivist and as far as I could tell she worked simultaneously for the National Archives of Denmark, the National Museum of Denmark, and the Copenhagen art and history museums. I’m not sure how she did that but I’m not surprised that it took three institutions to even partially contain her willpower.
She was a fierce advocate for the right of so-called ordinary people to use, benefit from, and contribute to the work of archives; and she was a force-of-nature in the vanguard of Danish museum, library, and archive professionals developing a more open, democratic, and engaged vision of cultural practice.
Charlotte was for the people, always, and I have never met anyone so passionate about their work and so dedicated to doing what is right for all.
Charlotte in Storm20, 2017.
Charlotte’s most recent project was the creation of the Storm20 makerspace in the ground floor of the Copenhagen History & Art offices in central Copenhagen. It is a warm, welcoming place — intimate but open — drenched with sun during the long Nordic winter and a welcome haven for ice cream during hot summer days. I always loved the fact that it was both a place to make and to socialize, with a little coffee house and shop up front.
Whenever I visited Storm20 there were a mix of tourists and locals; colorful bits of knitting, glue, electronics and fabric everywhere; and always photocopies, books, and notes about a half-made project going on — usually something connecting the past to the present through your hands.
Storm20 was created, as a sign in the workshop says, as a “historic maker space”, a place where you could “learn about the city of Copenhagen by participating in activities and workshops.” One of the first times I visited they were working on a project to reconstruct knitted work gloves found in the excavations for Copenhagen’s new subway line. One of the gloves, a mitten really, was unearthed and discovered to have two thumbs (!) and the Storm20 knitters were making reconstructions from the archaeological documentation to figure out why. All of the gloves were gorgeous, fascinating to touch and behold, and the point was clearly made: What one knows in one’s hands really matters; One can learn about the past — live it, feel it — by making something now; History belongs to, and is within reach of, all of us.
Interior of Storm20 makerspace. Knitted glove reconstructions are on the table in the foreground. The ones with two thumbs are on the far right.
‘Yarn bomb’ on a vent pipe outside Storm20
Charlotte cared about people, and history, and joy. And also about change.
As you work at Storm20 you can sometimes hear the screams of people on the rollercoasters at the Tivoli amusement park across the street. I often thought of those rollercoaster screams — screams of happiness and terror — as we talked about the joys and sorrows of trying to make a difference in the world. Change can be hard, and Charlotte took it seriously; both the successes and the setbacks. She was one of the first people to believe in me as I began to have bigger thoughts, and take more risks, in my own work and I believed in her and supported her as well.
Charlotte in Storm20, keeping careful eye on the robotic embroidering sewing machine, 2017
A memorial service will be held in Copenhagen on August 5th (details here).
Goodby Charlotte. We loved you and we’ll miss you so much.
On stage at the Danish archives conference, 2017. Det er svært at spå navnlig om fremtiden — “Sometimes it’s difficult to predict the future”
Photos CC-BY Michael Edson
WhatsApp — half of Zimbabwe
The crackdown on social media [in Zimbabwe], in part, is a demonstration of how the WhatsApp corner of the internet has become a powerful space for Zimbabweans. WhatsApp facilitated the spread of misinformation during elections in Brazil and has contributed to caste-based violence and mob killings in India. But it can also serve as a platform for democratized distribution of news in a country with a storied history of oppressing government critics.
Independent media in Zimbabwe are turning to WhatsApp as a primary distributor of news in the midst of an information landscape that is shifting to social platforms. State broadcasters and newspapers have long dominated the media, but alternative platforms began to exist and gain increasing traction in the last years of the Mugabe era.
Zimbabwe, with a population of 16.7 million, has a mobile penetration rate of close to 100 percent, and an internet penetration rate of about 50 percent. WhatsApp connections comprise almost half of all Internet usage in the country. Mobile network operators such as the country’s largest, Econet Wireless, provide data bundles specific to WhatsApp and Twitter, or Facebook and Instagram, for as low as $0.50 or $1 per week, making it more affordable for people to freely communicate in an economy where a significant majority are unemployed.
“When someone talks about internet access in Zimbabwe, they basically are talking about WhatsApp access,” said Thulani Thabango, a Ph.D candidate in media at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
WhatsApp has come in to fill the void: In Zimbabwe, the future of news is messaging, by Julia Thomas, Neiman Lab, 13 March 2019
Hudson Yards
“Up in the sky, Hudson Yards’ observation deck may also become an attraction — a triangular platform, 1,100 feet high, theatrically cantilevered from the top of 30 [Hudson Yards], with bleachers that provide an even loftier view. It opens next year.
I got a preview the other day. It’s one of the most amazing vistas over the city. I gazed north toward Harlem, gaped at the Empire State Building, and took in Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.
New York is awesome, I thought.
Then it occurred to me.
From that deck, you can’t see Hudson Yards.”
I got a preview the other day. It’s one of the most amazing vistas over the city. I gazed north toward Harlem, gaped at the Empire State Building, and took in Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty.
New York is awesome, I thought.
Then it occurred to me.
From that deck, you can’t see Hudson Yards.”
Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the Neighborhood New York Deserves? by Michael Kimmelman, Architecture critic, The New York Times, 14 March 2019
What sort of place?
Screen grab of https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/14/arts/design/hudson-yards-nyc.html
“A new place is emerging.
The question is, what sort of place?
And this is the immediate problem with Hudson Yards.”
The question is, what sort of place?
And this is the immediate problem with Hudson Yards.”
It is, at heart, a supersized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent.
A relic of dated 2000s thinking, nearly devoid of urban design, it declines to blend into the city grid. […]
[T]he whole site lacks any semblance of human scale…as if the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism.
It gives physical form to a crisis of city leadership, asleep at the wheel through two administrations, and to a pernicious theory of civic welfare that presumes private development is New York’s primary goal, the truest measure of urban vitality and health, with money the city’s only real currency.
Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is This the Neighborhood New York Deserves? by Michael Kimmelman, Architecture critic, The New York Times, 14 March 2019
Breaking news
“I'm still learning how to say things like ‘allegedly’ or ‘it’s being said’ when I’m describing breaking news,” Ms. Villarreal said. “It’s a challenge, because I speak the language of the streets, and that’s why people follow me.”
La Gordiloca: The Swearing Muckraker Upending Border Journalism, by Simon Romero, New York Times, 10 March 2019. The article is a profile of Priscilla Villarreal, a self-taught, self-employed journalist in Laredo, Texas.
“Following the results of the poll suggesting a quarter of Americans do not know the Earth circles the Sun, we look at some other examples of surprising US survey results…”
“[In a National Geographic poll] conducted three years after the Iraq War began, only 37 per cent of young Americans could find Iraq on a map of the Middle East.”
“When asked in April which policies the United States should pursue regarding North Korea, Americans diverged on their views depending in part on whether they knew where it was.”
It was so easy
“On November 5, 2016, Jestin Coler, founder of the fake newspaper Denver Guardian, posted a ‘news story’ saying an FBI agent involved in leaking Hillary Clinton’s emails was found dead in an ‘apparent murder-suicide.’”
“Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy,” Coler told NPR. “Our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums, and boy, it spread like wildfire.” The made-up tale went viral on Facebook before the 2016 election—and was probably seen by tens of millions. “It was so easy,” Coler told me once.
Zeynep Tufekci, The Imperfect Truth About Finding Facts In A World Of Fakes, Wired, 18 February 2019