#Dave Karpf

[thatstormygeek]

The problems with her campaign are mostly problems that take years, rather than months, to fix. It sure would be nice if the Democratic Party network had the type of networked media apparatus that the Republican Party network enjoys. It sure would be nice if the party had spent years building local organizing capacity at the grassroots level across swing states and the south (Give us forty-eight more Ben Wiklers and Stacey Abramses, please!). It sure would be nice if the billionaire class hadn’t bought up all the media networks, and if the courts hadn’t repeatedly decided that the law is for little people, and if government was still mostly in the business of trying to improve peoples’ lives. But you campaign in the short-term and then (try to) govern in the medium- or long-term. Over the course of these few months, there aren’t many decisions the Harris campaign has made that I think they should meaningfully regret. I’m not sure how to feel about all the Liz Cheney, cross-partisan-coalition events. It’s clear that the Harris campaign is betting that they can create a permission structure for Nikki Haley voters to cast a ballot for a Democrat. That makes me nervous, because I'm old enough to get a strong Charlie-Brown-and-the-football vibe from it. Throughout my adult life, Democrats have tried to appeal to an imagined bloc of moderate swing voters. It rarely seems to pan out. But I can also see the sense of it here. They’re basically targeting two clusters of voters — Republicans who voted in the primary, are therefore high-propensity voters, and have already voted against Trump because they don’t want to put up with his bullshit anymore, plus low-information moderates who generally just wish the parties could get along. If that sort of message was ever going to work, this is probably the election to try it.

People, en masse, just don’t believe that the economy is in good shape right now. That’s a comms problem for Harris/Walz. You can’t have the candidate insisting “no, no, the public is mistaken. Things are great right now.” That kind of gaslighting is not exactly a winning message. The state of our media infrastructure surely doesn’t help. Elon bought Twitter and turned it into a Republican propaganda and misinformation network. A handful of billionaires own most of our major media outlets, and they do not appreciate that the government is sometimes looking at their cool merger ideas and saying “no.” This, again, is a medium-term problem. You solve it by rebuilding the regulatory state and building your own media institutions over the course of years, not months. Seth Masket has summarized the state of the race as “people want change but MAGA terrifies them.” My personal hunch is that people want change because we have collectively never dealt with the pandemic. It was a once-in-a-century global catastrophe. No one was prepared for it, no one has dealt well with it, and our political leaders do not have the moral authority to address it.

[charliejaneanders]

I don’t see how else to make sense of it. 2022 was the year the 20-year tech bubble finally burst. 2023 was still bad for startups, and was full of bad headlines for the big platforms. And yet, in the markets, tech investors just took a deep collective breath and started inflating the next bubble, as though the previous year had never happened.

Silicon Valley runs on Futurity

[nextwavefutures]

The long boom that wasn’t

I spent much of the ‘90s working in a technology-related job, launching an interactive television channel for a cable company in London. One of the side effects of this was that I needed to know about the nascent internet, and to do this you needed to read WIRED magazine. At the time, this was like opening a vein and injecting yourself with Silicon Valley, before it became a vampire. And,…

[azspot]

There will be a parade of corruption and incompetence scandals. If I had to guess, I’d say RFK Jr won’t last long in the administration — not because any Trumpist will stand up for basic public health protections, but because he has served his purpose, and his ego is too voluminous to show proper deference. Expect lots of infighting. Anyone not related to Donald Trump by blood or by marriage will have only a tenuous grasp on power.

Dave Karpf

[readingsquotes]

Tech libertarianism is, fundamentally, an ideology for people who are both cheap and lazy. That is the great advantage that attracts businesspeople to adopt a libertarian perspective on speech regulation. If your first instinct about content moderation is “I would rather not think about this, it shouldn’t be my problem, and I definitely don’t want to spend any resources on it,” then libertarianism is the ideology for you. ... It is bad and weird that Google, Facebook, Apple, and the rest of big tech have been left to play the role of regulator-of-last-resort. Their executives at times complain, at times correctly, that even if they have the right as private businesses to make these decisions, we would all be better off with some other entity making them. (The hitch here, of course, is that one reason we have reduced government regulatory capacity to make and enforce these decisions is that these same companies have worked tirelessly to whittle down the size and scale of the administrative state. It has been a project of attaining great power while foreswearing any responsibility. Which is, y’know, really not great!) .. This is why every tech CEO loves the libertarian approach to speech issues. Tech libertarianism holds that someone else (or no one at all) should expend resources on setting and enforcing boundaries for how your product is used. The essence of the position is “I shouldn’t have to spend money on any of this. And I shouldn’t ever face negative consequences for not spending money on this.” (It’s a bit like someone who refuses to tip at a restaurant and insists its because they believe philosophically that the whole system is unjust and restaurants ought to pay fair wages to their workers. Sure! Fair point! But in the meantime, here and now, you’re still being a cheapskate asshole.)

On Substack Nazis, laissez-faire tech regulation, and mouse-poop-in-cereal-boxes

Dave Karpf

Dec 14, 2023

[barrapontoquotes]

(1) how do these technologies actually work? What are their actually-existing capacities and limitations?

(2) how are they likely to be incorporated into existing social practices? What economic, political, and cultural practices will they amplify? What will they disrupt? How will the existing institutional forces of money and power warp their deployment?

(3) who is positioned to do what to alter this likely trajectory? Which possibilities ought to be promoted or foreclosed, and through what means?

Dave Karpf in On technological optimism and technological pragmatism

[bluefly]

Nate Silver gives me the willies. His interview with Ezra Klein made my skin crawl, and I had to turn it off. Big overtones of the bros of my youth wanting to hear themselves talk...

Can't hide my head in the sand though. Might as well learn more second hand.

Edit: On second thought, I tried reading the thread and felt my anxiety rise. I'm out.

[loud-brain]

I've learned more about current politics over the past year from Dave Karpf's newsletter than all the news outlets combined. This one was a particularly good take imho

[pscottm]

What Elections Are For - by Dave Karpf

All I can say to them (calmly now, and with increased urgency as the year progresses) is that politics is a constant struggle, and elections are inflection points. The choice is not between the lesser of two evils. The choice is whether you would rather spend the next four years fighting to improve the status quo, or spend them fighting to preserve it.

[wilderhazard]

Dave Karpf using the catastrophic last month as pretext to send a grandstanding "vote for Biden anyway" newsletter is so obnoxious lmao, but "progressive" political scientists are a lost cause anyway

[thoughtportal]

Paris Marx is joined by Dave Karpf to discuss Meta’s misguided attempt to turn Facebook into a metaverse company, how Wired Magazine has evolved, and why the tech billionaires are destroying the world.

                 Guest                      

Dave Karpf is an Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University. He’s also the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy. Follow Dave on Twitter at @davekarpf.

[thatstormygeek]

I can’t believe I have to point this out: You endorse against the vindictive fascist because he is a vindictive fascist. You do not withhold endorsement because if he wins, he might aggressively punish his enemies.

To further spell out the obvious, Donald Trump is not going to reward the Washington Post for refusing to make an endorsement. He is not going to forgive the previous years of critical coverage. He will not conveniently forget Jeff Bezos’s name as a result of this act of compliance. You are on the enemies list regardless. Quit jostling for a slightly-lower position on the list. It’s as embarrassing as it is pointless.

The only remaining defense is "eh, our editorial statements don’t really matter anyway.” And there is some truth to that claim. This isn’t the Comey Letter. The outcome of the Presidential Election does not hinge on courageous words, or lack thereof, from the Washington Post Editorial Board. But you have to believe it matters in order to competently run a newsroom. Let me draw an autobiographical parallel for a moment: I spent my student years as a political activist. I nearly dropped out of college to work full-time in activism. When I did graduate college, my advisor wanted to talk to me about grad school and I blew him off. Academia wasn’t for me. I was going to go help bend the arc of history towards justice. The TL;DR story of how I went from practicing political activism to studying political activism is that I lost that internal certainty that our work was making a difference. I became less effective as an activist because I became mired in self-doubt. And so I had to do something else. I ended up in academia, trying my best to produce research that would be matter to people who still had that passion/that fire/that internal confidence to try to force the power structure to be something better. If the CEO and Publisher of the Washington Post does not believe that the Washington Post taking an editorial position fundamentally matters in some meaningful way, then what is he possibly doing other than collecting a paycheck? Journalism is not activism, but the work of journalism is hard and thankless in many of the same ways. You cannot lead a newsroom, particularly in these times, if you think the work doesn’t make a difference.

[nextwavefutures]

Looking for the money in the AI business

Looking for the money in the AI business—is it like the steel industry? Or Visual Basic? Or high performance productivity tools? New post. @ByrneHobart, @davekarpf, @AINowInstitute

I’ve been following the noise since ChatGPT was launched a few months ago, and am struck by the way that it seems to have fired up some of the old tropes about the inevitability of technology that emerged much earlier in the long digital wave. I’ve also seen some excitable chat about how AI is, somehow, going to be the backbone of the next long technology surge. Both of these assertions seem…

[azspot]

I’m beginning to suspect that this “Elon Musk” isn’t a real person. He’s a fictional character meant to make Mark Zuckerberg look like less of a dumbass.

dave karpf

[thebiscuiteternal]

Big Tech's QAnon problem is just beginning - CNN

And in perhaps the ultimate indictment of how online platforms failed to stop QAnon from gaining traction sooner, the baseless claims on which QAnon thrives have already been embraced or sympathized with by at least six Republican congressional candidates in districts ranging from Georgia to California.

The problem goes beyond QAnon. Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who has called herself a "proud Islamophobe" and has been banned by numerous online platforms, won a primary on Tuesday and became the Republican party's nominee in a Florida congressional race.

Now, the tech companies find themselves in an even more difficult position: Having to reconcile their commitments to limit the spread of harmful content without appearing to censor the politicians who are directly involved in driving those messages to an ever-wider audience.

"Once the conspiracy theorists become the elected officials, you either need to say 'Forget it, we're never touching anything, let the conspiracy theories reign,' or they need to go in the other direction and say, 'We need to no longer give elected officials an exemption anymore,'" said Dave Karpf, a political scientist at George Washington University who has studied digital political movements.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Warren trolls Facebook by running campaign ads that lie about Mark Zuckerberg

Xeni Jardin:

This morning I posted that Facebook and Twitter have taken the position that they will accept political ads that contain lies because they don't feel it's in their best interest to fact check claims made in the ads.

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren put Facebook to the test by running an ad on Facebook falsely claiming that Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have publicly announced their endorsement of Trump for president. Facebook said it will let the ad run. “If Senator Warren wants to say things she knows to be untrue, we believe Facebook should not be in the position of censoring that speech,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told CNN.

"Either Facebook doesn't touch the ad and the ad is therefore noteworthy, or they touch the ad and it's noteworthy," Dave Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, told CNN. "It's a smart tactical move."

https://boingboing.net/2019/10/11/warren-trolls-facebook-by-runn.html