Huxley and Orwell

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacies to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985. (via 20th anniversary Edition, published 2005. Page XIX.)

Not about the cheese

“Have you seen a man in his 60s have a full temper tantrum because we don’t have the expensive imported cheese he wants?” said the employee, Anna Luna, who described the mood at the store, in Minnesota, as “angry, confused and fearful.” “You’re looking at someone and thinking, ‘I don’t think this is about the cheese.’”
From A Nation on Hold Wants to Speak With a Manager, by Sarah Lyall. New York Times, 1 January 2022

Gone

“The Molokaʻi creeper is among the eight Hawaiian birds that were officially declared extinct on Sept. 29. (Jeremy Snell/Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum)” — Washington Post

“The Molokaʻi creeper is among the eight Hawaiian birds that were officially declared extinct on Sept. 29. (Jeremy Snell/Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum)” — Washington Post

“Among the eight Hawaiian birds officially declared extinct Wednesday are the prismatic Maui ’akepa and Moloka’i creeper, and curve-beaked Kaua’i ʻakialoa and nukupu’u. Also gone is the Kaua’i ’o’o, whose haunting, flutelike mating call was last heard three decades ago.”
Ivory-billed woodpecker officially declared extinct, along with 22 other species, by Dino Grandoni. Washington Post, 29 September 2021.

If an economist was a horse

Economics, over the years, has become more and more abstract and divorced from events in the real world. Economists, by and large, do not study the workings of the actual economic system. They theorize about it. As Ely Devons, an English economist, once said in a meeting: “If economists wanted to study the horse, they wouldn’t go around and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, `What would I do if I were a horse?’”
Economist Ronald Coase, in a speech to the International Society of New Institutional Economics, September 17, 1999, Washington DC. (Citation via Wikiquote.)

All that stuff about democracy and fairness and diversity

“All the questions I got were fundamentally the same. People around the world asking, ‘All that stuff you’ve been telling us for so long — about democracy and human rights and fairness and diversity — it’s not really true, is it?’ American public diplomacy is ultimately about values. And now people around the world were saying that this story was a fiction. It’s not as though people around the world had never said that before. We’d been called hypocrites long before Donald Trump decided to run for president. But we’d never had someone running for president who so explicitly rejected those values both in his ideology and in his behavior. That was something new.”
The view from 2016, from Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 326

A referendum on reality itself

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally.

Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not — but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along — and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear — not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President, by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, March 2020
“He tells you what you want to hear, and I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so fuck it.”
— Trump rally attendee Tony Willnow, from The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President, by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, March 2020

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

Expertise in any field

But I also suspect that Trump is afraid to try anything substantive. To do public investment successfully, you need leadership and advice from experts. And this administration doesn’t do expertise, in any field. Not only do experts have a nasty habit of telling you things you don’t want to hear, their loyalty is suspect: You never know when their professional ethics might kick in.
Trump Doesn’t Give a Dam, by Paul Krugman, New York Times, 12 February 2018

Four times the number of votes

In a Facebook experiment published in Nature that was conducted on a whopping 61 million people, some randomly selected portion of this group received a neutral message to “go vote,” while others, also randomly selected, saw slightly more social version of the encouragement: small thumbnail pictures of a few of their friends who reported having voted were shown within the “go vote” pop-up.

The researchers measured that this slight tweak — completely within Facebook's control and conducted without the consent or notification of any of the millions of Facebook users — caused about 340,000 additional people to turn out to vote in the 2010 U.S. congressional elections.

(The true number may even be higher since the method of matching voter files to Facebook names only works for exact matches.)

That significant effect—from a one-time, single tweak—is more than four times the number of votes that determined that Donald Trump would be the winner of the 2016 election for presidency in the United States.

From Zeynep Tufecki's Twitter and Tear Gas (2017), page 157. The study published in Nature is available for free on PubMed Central here.
“There aren’t many comparisons in American history for Thursday’s press conference in which Donald Trump suggested that the coronavirus might be defeated by shining lights inside human beings or injecting people with disinfectant. But there is the song ‘Miracles’ by Insane Clown Posse.”
— Insane Clown Posse Is Modeling Ideal Pandemic Leadership, by Spencer Kornhaber, 27 April 2020, The Atlantic

Hurting people at scale

Selected passages and quotes from Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman’s outstanding piece in Buzzfeed News, Hurting People  At Scale: Facebook’s Employees Reckon With The Social Network They’ve Built

On July 1, Max Wang, a Boston-based software engineer who was leaving Facebook after more than seven years, shared a video on the company’s internal discussion board that was meant to serve as a warning.

“I think Facebook is hurting people at scale,” he wrote in a note accompanying the video. “If you think so too, maybe give this a watch.”

Most employees on their way out of the “Mark Zuckerberg production” typically post photos of their company badges along with farewell notes thanking their colleagues. Wang opted for a clip of himself speaking directly to the camera. What followed was a 24-minute clear-eyed hammering of Facebook’s leadership and decision-making over the previous year.

What the departing engineer said echoed what civil rights groups such as Color of Change have been saying since at least 2015: Facebook is more concerned with appearing unbiased than making internal adjustments or correcting policies that permit or enable real-world harm.

Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook's former election ads integrity lead, said the employees’ concerns reflect her experience at the company, which she believes is on a dangerous path heading into the election.

“All of these steps are leading up to a situation where, come November, a portion of Facebook users will not trust the outcome of the election because they have been bombarded with messages on Facebook preparing them to not trust it,” she told BuzzFeed News.

She said the company’s policy team in Washington, DC, led by Joel Kaplan, sought to unduly influence decisions made by her team, and the company’s recent failure to take appropriate action on posts from President Trump shows employees are right to be upset and concerned.

“These were very clear examples that didn't just upset me, they upset Facebook’s employees, they upset the entire civil rights community, they upset Facebook’s advertisers. If you still refuse to listen to all those voices, then you're proving that your decision-making is being guided by some other voice,” she said.

“[Zuckerberg] uses ‘diverse perspective’ as essentially a cover for right-wing thinking when the real problem is dangerous ideologies,” Brandi Collins-Dexter, a senior campaign director at Color of Change, told BuzzFeed News after reading excerpts of Zuckerberg’s comments. “If you are conflating conservatives with white nationalists, that seems like a far deeper problem because that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about hate groups and really specific dangerous ideologies and behavior.”
“Facebook is getting trapped by the ideology of free expression. It causes us to lose sight of other important premises, like how free expression is supposed to serve human needs.” — Max Wang

Replying to Wang’s video and comments, Facebook’s head of artificial intelligence Yann LeCun wrote,

“American Democracy is threatened and closer to collapse than most people realize. I would submit that a better underlying principle to content policy is the promotion and defense of liberal democracy.”

Other employees, like [engineer Dan Abramov], the engineer, have seized the moment to argue that Facebook has never been neutral, despite leadership’s repeated attempts to convince employees otherwise, and as such needed to make decisions to limit harm. Facebook has proactively taken down nudity, hate speech, and extremist content, while also encouraging people to participate in elections — an act that favors democracy, he wrote.

“As employees, we can’t entertain this illusion,” he said in his June 26 memo titled “Facebook Is Not Neutral.” “There is nothing neutral about connecting people together. It’s literally the opposite of the status quo.”

Zuckerberg seems to disagree. On June 5, he wrote that Facebook errs on the “side of free expression” and made a series of promises that his company would push for racial justice and fight for voter engagement.

The sentiment, while encouraging, arrived unaccompanied by any concrete plans. On Facebook’s internal discussion board, the replies rolled in.

Hurting People  At Scale: Facebook’s Employees Reckon With The Social Network They’ve Built, by Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman, Buzzfeed News, 23 July 2020

A permission structure for ignorance

“Search for Bill Bennett’s name on this site [Twitter], and you’ll see ‘Fox & Friends’ viewers cheering him on. And that’s the real problem. This show provides a permission structure for ignorance.”
CNN Chief Media Correspondent Brian Stelter (@brianstelter), 13 April 2020

Stelter was reacting to dismissive statements on Fox & Friends by William Bennet, former Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, about the severity of the Coronavirus.

Bennett smugly stated,

And now they say 61,000 people will die…I’m going to tell you I think it’s going to be less.“…We’re going to have fewer fatalities from this than from the flu. For this we scared the hell out of the American people…closed down the schools…closed the churches… This was not and is not a pandemic…Look at the facts.

At the time William Bennett made those statements — April 13, 2020 — 22,000 Americans had already died of COVID-19.

“Social media is a nuance destruction machine…”
— Jeff Bezos, in testimony at an antitrust hearing of the US House Committee on the Judiciary, 29 July 2020. Via Geekwire

The full quote, in response to a question about so-called “cancel culture”, was, “What I find a little discouraging is that it appears to me that social media is a nuance destruction machine, and I don’t think that’s helpful for a democracy.”

Only until they are personal

Crises are political only until they are personal. As news of Mr. Frilot’s diagnosis spread, among his friends and on Nola.com, his story was no longer just that of a young, healthy person who caught a virus that young, healthy people had been told they were not supposed to catch. It was a revelation for the conservative suburbs of New Orleans, where many had written off the pandemic as liberal fear-mongering. Mr. Frilot, a registered Republican, and his family are generally apolitical, and were not thinking much about the virus — whether as a fiction or anything else — before he got sick.
covid-infection-story.jpg
On Facebook, Kathy Perilloux shared a similar conversion. Before March 16, Ms. Perilloux’s page was almost solely posts questioning the severity of the virus. March 10: “Hurricane Corona …. HYPE …. sigh,” she wrote. (“I stole that from Rush, but I was thinking the same before he said it!!!!!” she added in a comment.)

Then Ms. Perilloux commented on Ms. Frilot’s post: “Your story puts a real face on a real danger, that’s what had been missing.” She hasn’t posted anything else about the pandemic.

Since Friday, March 13, Mark Frilot has managed just two breaths on his own.
Her Facebook Friends Asked if Anyone Was Actually Sick. She Had an Answer, by Elaina Plott, New York Times, 19 March 2020
“When we balance out what’s more important, speed or accuracy, it’s not even a close call. We should be expecting accuracy and adjusting our expectations in regards to speed.”
— David Becker, Executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, in Iowa’s Lesson: Political Parties Are Not as Good as Government Officials at Counting Votes, by Jessica Huseman, Jack Gillum and Derek Willis, 4 February 2020

As Zuck prattles on

“As Zuck prattles on in revisionist blog posts about how he intended [Facebook] to ‘Give people a voice’, he consistently misses this point: harassment of this sort *silences* voices. It deters counterspeech to terrible ideas by making the reputational, time, and sanity cost too high…”
From a thread by Renee DiResta (@noUpside), of the Stanford Internet Observatory, regarding anti-vaxers harassing and threatening physicians’ over vaccination-related content.