#Mobile Technologies 2020

[thisisrealy2kok]

The Unbearable Weight Of Being An Influencer , Vouge Portugal (2021)

[jesse-cosay]

How tf do I add the "view under cut" thing to my posts, I thought it was automatic I feel so bad, some of my shit is really long and I can't post drabbles here until I figure this out I am SO SORRY YOU GUYS

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[soon-palestine]

HP hewlett packard

HP-branded corporations provide and operate technology that Israel uses to maintain its system of apartheid, occupation and settler colonialism over the Palestinian people. Hewlett Packard’s violations of Palestinian human rights have been well documented. Aside from providing services and technology to the Israeli army and police that maintain Israel’s illegal occupation and siege of Gaza, HP provides Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority with the exclusive Itanium servers for its Aviv System. This system enables the government to control and enforce its system of racial segregation and apartheid against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and is directly involved in Israel’s settler colonialism through its “Yesha database”, which compiles information on Israeli citizens in illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

HP has been described as the “Polaroid of our times”, a reference to huge mobilisations against the use of Polaroid technology by the South African apartheid regime for its racist passbook system. Polaroid’s 1977 withdrawal from South Africa marked a turning point in the international effort to end apartheid there.

HP-E is contracted by Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority to provide and maintain the Itanium servers that house Israel’s population registry through 2020. Known as the Aviv System, this population registry is the basis of Israel’s ID card system. This ID system forms a core part of the Israeli apartheid regime’s tiered system of citizenship and residency that privileges Israel’s Jewish population and gives inferior status and rights to Palestinians, especially those in East Jerusalem. This leads to institutionalised racial discrimination and segregation in freedom of movement, housing, employment, marriage, healthcare, education, and policing. This discrimination is further exacerbated in the case of Palestinian “residents” in occupied East Jerusalem, whose most basic rights can and are being revoked arbitrarily.

The system also holds information about Israeli citizens living in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, therefore serving Israel’s settler colonial project directly. HP-E’s spin-off DXC Technology runs an R&D facility in the illegal settlement of Beitar Illit.

In 2015, HP split into HP Inc.- which carried on the brand name and provides consumer hardware, and HP-E for business and government services. In such a scenario, the BDS National Committee maintains that: “The onus is on each company to demonstrate to the public that it is free of illegal and unethical business activities.” Further, despite multiple requests for clarification, both the new companies sharing and profiting from the HP brand are yet to provide unambiguous evidence to show that their business activities with Israel do not violate International Humanitarian Law and Palestinian Human Rights. HP has, in the past, held a contract with the Israeli Ministry of Defence under which it developed and maintained the Basel System- the biometric identification system installed on checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian Territory, controlling the mobility of Palestinians. It also worked with the Israeli military, helping build its IT infrastructure. This included a program with the Israeli Navy which enforces the illegal naval blockade on Gaza. For these and other past ties of complicity with Israel’s occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism, HP-branded companies must provide reparations to the Palestinian victims of these crimes.

https://bdsmovement.net/boycott-hp#tab3

[earth-64]

Wake Up Call - Nintendo Alarmo

All through Summer 2024 the Nintendo fandom had been in a fervor. The Nintendo Switch’s reign had eclipsed its seven year apex: the time had come for a new flagship piece of hardware to take its place. The stage seemed to be set: the game releases were thinning, the Nintendo Directs sparse, and the major game releases clearly smaller, outsourced, and not the main focus of development. Nintendo had already acknowledged the new machine’s existence with an assurance of it being announced within the fiscal year, followed by a continuous promise below each and every announcement stream that there “will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during [...] these presentations.”

As the dog days passed by, during the fleeting few weeks of Fall that still existed between the ever widening record-high Summers and devastating Winter storms, it seemed undeniable that the stage was being set. Nintendo filed new patents for motion sensor technology. Word got out that they were filming a commercial for a new piece of hardware. They flew out content creators to demo something kept under wraps. And on October 9th, 2024, fans awoke to a flurry of notifications, an early morning unheralded announcement shaking the very foundations of what was thought possible for the gaming giant: 

Alarmo.

Nintendo’s smart alarm clock. A touchscreen device with a sleek interface, loaded with 35 themes inspired by 5 games (and more to come), and a $100 price tag. Their patented motion sensing technology made for a hands-free experience. Set the alarm once and from then on, each and every morning, your eyes would flutter open to a jazzy Mario tune, and your triumphant rise from bed would be rewarded with a victory jingle, a “Lets-A-Go!”, and a shot of nostalgic dopamine. 

But is nostalgic the right word? The motion sensor only works with a very specific set-up: most notably being limited to one person, a small bed, and a room that will remain otherwise empty through the night. No spouses, no pets, no roommates. It was clear this was intended for a child’s room. So no, it wasn’t nostalgic. At least not yet. It was designed to create new nostalgia.

Nintendo Alarmo, along with the similarly aimed Pokemon Sleep, are part of Nintendo’s long-running obsession with intentionally forming habits and responses. From the scheduled broadcasts of the Satellaview to the daily-task centric Animal Crossing series, and especially the predatory practices of their mobile game releases, Nintendo had a penchant for designing parasites that attached themselves to your waking (and non-waking) cycle. 

Today I’ll be sharing excerpts from interviews with people who received Alarmos as children, and uncover the shocking effects of waking each morning to a pavlovian coin-get jingle. But first, speaking of coin-getting, a word from today’s sponsor: LoanFast. Is payday just a—

God what a waste of time. Shit’s always so negative these days. These nostalgia-grab video essays used to be pleasant. Here’s an old-school animated movie you haven’t seen since the DVD bargain bin! Top ten cartoons of the 2010s! The misunderstood genius of the Wii U! But nah, now time has crept past the optimistic millennials. We’re struggling to find the diamonds in the rough patch that was the 2020s, to salvage anything from that fucking trash heap of a decade. God, no wait. Now I sound like them. I grew up with that age of media. I love that age of media. It’s just so easy to let the zeitgeist of doomerism– Okay stop. It’s way too easy to let these things override my brain. I had to mentally backspace the phrase “easily impressionable” right there too. I watch these videos with their big words and their gloomy ways of lookin at life and I feel it all start to seep into me. 

Millennials will convince you that the 00s were the peak of human creation. That the 10s were the last big push of creativity. But that's just not true! My cartoons were way better! Our video games are just objectively cooler and bigger! Adults get stuck on trying to make fun of my generation for the same few bullshit things, if I hear one more Skibidi Rizz I’m gonna– Shouldn’t think like that. I’m 24 now. That’s an adult. I’m an adult. I keep saying that and it doesn’t sound any more true. It happened so fast. It took so much time but it happened so fast. I was just a kid, playing Super Mario Odyssey on an old LCD, and then I was a teenager and a lot happened, so much happened, and now I’m an adult playing Super Mario Odyssey on an old LCD and nothing happens, nothing ever happens. I am an adult and it is Christmas Eve and I am alone.

It was Christmas Eve then too. Back when Christmas felt like Christmas. I was 12 years old when I got the Nintendo Alarmo. December 24th, 2024 when I tore open my first present of the year. It was tradition to get one present the night before, usually something to pass the time until I was more tired than I was excited for the next morning. You wouldn’t think a clock would keep me busy but I spent the whole evening fiddling with the options, looking at every theme, resetting the time to hear the top-of-the-hour jingles for each game. I remember dad helping me put in the wi-fi password, I remember mom’s hurried trip to whatever convenience store was still open on the holiday because the damned thing didn’t come with an AC adapter. She brought back a package of Reese’s and one of those juice drinks with a plastic toy on it. It was… a Spongebob one? Yeah, and I set it on the shelf and it fell off during all the unwrapping the next day and it rolled underneath the shelf and it was down there for months and I’m remembering every single time I was sitting on the floor playing Mario and Luigi Brothership after getting it the next day and every single time I could see the Spongebob juice topper below the tv smiling at me and I never thought to get it I never put any thought into it being there it was just there until a day my mom must have swept and it wasn’t there and I didn’t think about it not being there. Until right now. 

Why didn’t that thing come with an AC adapter, god that’s so stupid.

I think about all that and I don’t think about everything that happened afterwards. I’m 12 years old and it’s Christmas Eve 2024 and I’m getting the Nintendo Alarmo and now I’m 24 years old and it’s Christmas Eve 2036 and I look over at the window sill next to my bed and the Nintendo Alarmo is still there, still ticking. The AC adapter has been replaced a couple times and it’s a bit dinged up but it’s still ticking. So much happened all the while that clock kept ticking. I’m still ticking. I’ve gotten so worked up over this fucking video and I’ve been scrolling my home page this whole time. I try to actually read the titles my eyes are glossing over: “The Untold Story of Minecraft’s 1.50 Disaster”, “What Went Wrong With Forza 2030”, “Does Sony Regret Dropping Out of Consoles?” and I almost click the last one to see which retired executive guy they’re interviewing and personifying the whole company onto this time and I stop myself. It just takes one god damn clickbait title to manufacture curiosity like that and I’ll be watching another two hour video about job layoffs and feeling like shit again. I’m so sick of feeling like shit. It’s getting harder and harder to find content that makes me feel good. 

I decide to just turn the damn thing off. I sit there in the dark for a minute, as a dim light comes from across the room: it's 11:00pm and my Nintendo Alarmo is displaying a top-of-the-hour animation. Mario runs into view, bumps a block 11 times. I hear the little coin-collection jingle 11 times, and then the screen defaults back to its calmer darker state. 

I google for a day calculator on my phone and punch in that Christmas Eve and this one. 

4,383 days. If you take into the fact that after the Animal Crossing theme releases I swapped to that for Halloween and Christmas mornings, that’s 22 Animal Crossing mornings, and 4,360 Super Mario mornings, and 1 Mario Kart morning that I hated. Who the fuck wants to wake up to tires screeching? And the “FIRST PLACE VICTORY!” out-of-bed message was a bit patronizing even for me. But yeah, 4,360 Super Mario wake up calls. 4,360 times I have heard the Super Mario Bros. theme song as the very first sound of the day. Through thick and thin, from one side of the country to the other, through every school morning from 2024 onward and every single day of every job I’ve worked, it's remained constant. A morning without that jingle is just not conceivable to me, it's as natural a part of life as anything else. As sure as I’ll eat food and as sure as I’ll take a crap and as sure as I’ll turn my computer on and as sure as I’ll sleep again the next night is as sure as I will hear that jingle. Speaking of, sleep.

I brush my teeth with Scooby Doo bubblegum toothpaste and a toothbrush that I avoid looking too closely at because its got Spongebob on it and I’m too tired to let myself start back down that path of thinking about the things I took for granted. I can feel on my teeth that the brush is awfully frayed. I’ve been putting off buying a new one for months. I don’t know why. I could just grab one at the store and swap it out and it would make me feel so much better and be so much better for me, but I just don’t do it, I just never think to get it while I’m there and that just happens everyday and I blink and it's been months and my toothbrush is still frayed. 4,360 times. 4,360 times. 

I catch my brain multi-track drifting and decide I can’t sleep without a distraction. I open Youtube on my phone and start scrolling for something to play while I sleep. I crawl into bed and I just barely remember it's Christmas tomorrow. I grab the Nintendo Alarmo and thumb through the settings, swiping through menus. 

When I wake up tomorrow I’ll think that maybe I was just too tired, maybe I just got other shit on my mind, and that maybe these old LCD touchscreens are just over-sensitive pieces of shit or that maybe just maybe I am. But tomorrow my eyes will open at the time they’re used to opening anyway and I’ll be ready to hear the special Animal Crossing Toy Day Jingle that I was so certain I set it to, and I’ll hear the horrible screeching of tires on pavement and something will snap in me and I’ll hear the “FIRST PLACE VICTORY” and think about the empty platitudes and the 12 years I can barely remember and the four thousand wake-up calls that accompanied me as I kept sleep-walking through them and I’ll wake up and something will shatter and I’ll spend Christmas morning cleaning up the shards. 

[campgender]

hey! I'm currently writing a paper discussing experiences of disabled and neurodivergent students at my uni (spoiler alert: it's not great lmao), and while I have a couple references so far (mostly Lund and Pearlstein) about the larger Disabled Student ExperienceTM I'm struggling to find academic papers talking about this, particularly since my field of study is psychology rather than disability theory/disability justice. are there any texts regarding this that you would reccommend? doing my best to lean on crip theory for this essay and you were the first person i thought of! no worries if you don't have the energy to answer this rn ofc, i hope you're having a good day ✨

omg what a fabulous & vital project! i’d love to hear more about your work both out of interest & to potentially refine my recommendations because this is such a complex, multifaceted area of experience + research + activism — i tried to draw from a variety of perspectives so you can dig deeper into what seems most relevant!

my number one recommendation is the book Academic Ableism by Jay Dolmage, i still need to read most of it rip but it’s absolutely considered foundational in this topic. the rest i’m gonna put under a cut because it got super long lol, i’ll also reblog to my disability sideblog @crippleprophet in case anyone else has suggestions!

best of luck with your work, i hope some of this is helpful! feel free to reach out for more recommendations, input, or encouragement❣️💖

on the built environment – eg, the physical campus & how it impacts students

if you’re in the US, this summary of colleges’ responsibilities under the ADA has been helpful for me (link).

Building Access by Aimi Hamraie

Accessibility for Historic Buildings: A Field Guide, 2nd Edition (link to pdf)

written by David Provost and revised by Joseph Hoefferle, Jr. as part of the University of Vermont Graduate Program in Historic Preservation

back in 2020 i used the first edition of this document in a project arguing my undergraduate university should make its historic buildings more accessible

lays out policies & options in tables with photo examples from their campus

Aimi Hamraie & Kelly Fritsch’s Crip Technoscience Manifesto (2019)

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5(1), pp1-34.

this piece is honestly just incredibly life-giving for me in general so i highly recommend giving it a full read when you have time. specific parts that i thought might resonate with the experiences of students at your uni:

“user-initiated design” (Hendren & Lynch, cited p9)

“access as friction” (p10):

Emerging out of historical fights for disability rights, the terms accessibility and access are usually taken to mean disabled inclusion and assimilation into normative able-bodied relations and built environments. […] However, the etymology of the word access reveals two frictional meanings: access as “an opportunity enabling contact,” as well as “a kind of attack” (2016, p. 23). Taking access as a kind of attack reveals access-making as a site of political friction and contestation. While historically central to the fights for disability access, crip technoscience is nevertheless committed to pushing beyond liberal and assimilation-based approaches to accessibility, which emphasize inclusion in mainstream society, to pursue access as friction, particularly paying attention to access-making as disabled peoples’ acts of non-compliance and protest.

noncompliant users and assistive technology as friction (p11):

Lifchez and Winslow offer the concept of “non-compliant users,” illustrating this with an image of a powerchair user wheeling against traffic on a street without curb cuts (1979, p. 153). This technology-enabled movement against the flow of traffic marks anti-assimilationist crip mobility: not an attempt to integrate (as in the liberal approach to disability rights), but rather to use technology as a friction against an inaccessible environment.

collaborative mapping of (in)accessibility, something i know happens more informally among disabled students on many campuses (p15):

Unlike mainstream disability technoscience “crowdsourcing” projects, which invoke a charity model of disability wherein non-disabled people collect data but do not engage in disability culture or politics, emerging projects such as Mapping Access are making participatory access-making the basis of a kind of technoscientific “access intimacy” (Mingus, 2017) through practices such as “critical crowdsourcing” of accessibility data (Hamraie, 2018). […] Collaborative mapping visualizes the evidence of inaccessibility while creating opportunities for collective response. Crip cartographic technoscience thus enables more critical design, and interrogation of the everyday built environment.

access to education

the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities includes the right to inclusive education (Article 24). scholarship in this area is about primary & secondary education, not postsecondary / university education, but a lot of the concepts can be applied

in addition to inclusive education, “universal design for learning” (UDL) might be a helpful keyword but it definitely trends toward the liberal as a whole

“Hidden contradictions and conditionality: conceptualisations of inclusive education in international human rights law” (2013) by Bronagh Byrne (link)

references the importance of identifying barriers as a step in the process of accessible education, which depending on your work may be a nice succinct justification of its necessity (p234):

Inclusion ‘necessitates the removal of the material, ideological, political and economic barriers that legitimate and reproduce in equality and discrimination in the lives of disabled people’ (Barton and Armstrong 2001, 214). According to this view, an identification of barriers within the school’s environment, teaching and learning strategies, and attitudes that prevent the full participation of children with disabilities, will also be required.

argues for a focus on inability of schools to meet students’ needs rather than students’ inability to conform to an ableist environment (for example, p242):

International human rights law has conditionalised the right to inclusive education for children with disabilities by making inclusion contingent upon the extent of individual rather than institutional or structural deficits.

psychological/emotional impact on disabled students

“psycho-emotional disablism” may be a useful search term for you, with the disclaimer that a substantial portion of scholars in feminist disability studies are TERFs / express “gender critical” beliefs / etc. so like i’m listing one paper i came across that looked relevant + two from my grad program’s recommended reading, but i haven’t read these & suggest vetting authors before citing them:

“The psycho-emotionally disabling impact of academic landscapes of exclusion: experiences of a disabled postgraduate in perpetual lockdown” (2023) by Joanne Hunt (link)

Reeve, D (2004). Psycho-emotional dimensions of disability and the social model. In C Barnes & G Mercer (eds), Implementing the social model of disability: theory and research. The Disability Press, Leeds, pp. 83-100. http://donnareeve.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ReeveChapter2004b.pdf

Reeve, D. (2014) 'Psycho-emotional disablism and internalised oppression', in J. Swain, S. French, C. Barnes and C. Thomas (eds) Disabling Barriers - Enabling Environments, 3rd Edition, London: Sage, pp. 92-98. http://donnareeve.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ReeveChapter2014a.pdf

[gacha-incels]

[Exclusive] "Namu Wiki, a Haven for Sexual Exploitation Content, Grows in Size… Remains in a Regulatory Blind Spot"

published Oct 16 2024

Kim Jang-gyeom, People Power Party Lawmaker, at National Assembly Audit Namu Wiki Headquarters in Paraguay, Generating Revenue in South Korea

this article is originally in Korean and has been mtl and edited into English here. it’s not going to be 1:1 but the basic info should be there, if you see any discrepancies though lmk and I’ll edit it asap. thanks everyone for your continued help and understanding.

During the pandemic, exposure and advertising revenue surged Affiliated 'Arca.Live' Faces Issues with Illegal Pornographic Content Distribution Selective Compliance with Korea Communications Standards Commission's Regulations

The participatory knowledge-sharing site "Namu Wiki" is expanding its reach through illegal content, yet remains in a regulatory blind spot, according to reports. Although its headquarters are located in Paraguay, Namu Wiki generates substantial revenue in South Korea while selectively responding to requests for cooperation from the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC).

According to data obtained by Kim Jang-gyeom, a People Power Party lawmaker and member of the National Assembly's Science, Technology, Broadcasting, and Communications Committee, Namu Wiki's combined PC and mobile advertising banner revenue approximately doubled during the pandemic. This increase was attributed to a significant rise in both exposure and click rates, which nearly doubled.

From April 2019 to October 2021, over a span of 2 years and 7 months, the estimated revenue generated by a single advertising banner on Namu Wiki amounted to 479.85 million KRW (approximately 359,000 USD). During this period, the total number of ad impressions reached 19.15 billion, while the total number of clicks was around 2.09 million.

The affiliated platform "Arca.Live" has also come under scrutiny due to issues with the distribution of illegal pornographic content. Despite these concerns, Namu Wiki’s response to regulatory oversight has been selective, responding to requests from the KCSC on a case-by-case basis.

This situation has raised concerns that the platform, while continuing to grow its user base and revenue, is not sufficiently addressing the illegal content problem. Calls are mounting for stronger regulatory measures to prevent illegal and harmful content from spreading on online platforms such as Namu Wiki and Arca.Live.

During this period, Namu Wiki's advertising revenue steadily increased each year: 112.05 million KRW (approximately 83,900 USD) in 2019, 177.1 million KRW (approximately 132,600 USD) in 2020, and 190.7 million KRW (approximately 142,700 USD) in 2021. Monthly revenue ranged from 7 million to 15 million KRW (approximately 5,200 to 11,200 USD) in 2019 but rose to around 20 million KRW (approximately 14,900 USD) per month by 2021. Considering that the last two months of 2021 were not included in these figures, the total advertising revenue for that year is estimated to have surpassed 200 million KRW (approximately 149,000 USD).

These figures represent the revenue generated from a single advertising banner on the Namu Wiki website. The platform's total advertising income is likely several times higher, possibly even reaching multiples of ten.

The number of ad impressions also saw significant annual growth: 3.7 billion in 2019, 7.6 billion in 2020, and another 7.6 billion in 2021. Monthly ad impressions were in the range of 400 to 500 million, but doubled to around 700 to 800 million in 2021. If the trend continued at a similar rate towards the end of the year, the total number of impressions in 2021 is expected to have exceeded 9 billion.

The number of ad clicks, which directly impacts revenue, also showed changes: 510,000 clicks in 2019, 850,000 in 2020, and 720,000 in 2021. In 2019, monthly clicks fluctuated significantly between 15,000 and 75,000. From 2020 onward, however, the numbers stabilized at a relatively higher level, ranging between 65,000 and 80,000 per month. Assuming a similar trend continued towards the end of 2021, the overall annual clicks are expected to be comparable to the previous year.

Since Namu Wiki’s headquarters are based in Paraguay, its exact revenue structure remains unclear. Nonetheless, the platform is known to generate income through advertising on its site as well as through its affiliated websites such as Arca.Live and Namu News.

The Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), Namu Wiki's regulatory authority, has previously granted the platform a high degree of autonomy. Even when reports were made regarding inappropriate content or potential defamation on Namu Wiki, most cases resulted in "no action" decisions.

Meanwhile, issues have arisen with Arca.Live, a community site under Namu Wiki, which has been involved in the distribution of illegal pornographic content, including material featuring children and adolescents. Recently, it was confirmed that "deepfake" sexual exploitation content was being disseminated through Arca.Live. Although the site is fully serviced in Korean, harmful content remains accessible without age restrictions, facilitated by the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) and unrestricted sign-ups.

Following criticisms, Namu Wiki removed some pornographic content from Arca.Live in August at the request of the KCSC. However, the platform has maintained a lukewarm stance, declining to participate in regulatory meetings with the commission. It is reported that communication between Namu Wiki, which is based overseas, and the KCSC primarily occurs via email.

This has led some to call for the KCSC to move beyond self-regulation and take a more active role in content review and regulation. There have been repeated concerns about the platform's lack of transparency regarding information sources and the absence of any measures against discriminatory or hateful content.

Lawmaker Kim Jang-gyeom criticized Namu Wiki, stating, "Namu Wiki has become a primary conduit for the spread of illegal content, including deepfake pornography and fake news. While it presents itself as a self-edited encyclopedia based on collective intelligence, it allows for malicious edits and stigmatization."

He further stressed the need for the government to implement strong countermeasures against the illegal and dangerous aspects associated with Namu Wiki.

[pigeon-smidge]

Hello, my dear friend 🌟

I am Mahmoud Jihad from Gaza, currently living in a flimsy tent after my home and university were completely destroyed, along with my PC and my city. I was studying Information Technology while caring for my sick father and siblings, but now all my hopes seem shattered. 😢

As we face this devastating crisis, I am raising funds to help my family escape from Gaza and to continue my studies abroad 🎓. Every day is a struggle, and your support can make a significant difference in our lives ❤️.

My GoFundMe campaign has been verified by @beesandwatermelons ✅ #190.

Please consider sharing, liking, commenting, or donating, even a small amount 🙏.

Your help could be the turning point that saves my family and helps us survive in this harsh and relentless war 😔.

GoFundMe link: https://gofund.me/463cbf01

Thank you from the bottom of my heart! 🌹

If you can donate, please please do. Share as well, as a simple reblog and pasting the link somewhere can help more people see. It can save lives. It brings more attention to these stories that desperately need activism.

If you can’t, please share.

Arab.org actually allows you to donate FOR FREE to Palestinian refugees with clicks. You can normally click once per day but if you use different browsers, devices and open it from different platforms on mobile you can do it more often.

Peace for Palestine and the world. No one deserves to be hunted for simply existing.

We can all coexist peacefully. We are all human. 

[poly-mc]

Lore dump

CW: Blurred line between IC and OOC under the cut; trauma

My OC, Poly MC, is basically just me. I came up with that, after figuring out that I have feelings for all the brothers in the game Obey Me. This lead me to believe that I'm ambiamorous🦋

For more info on me, you can see my intro🪷

Full name: Fairwish Chanzé Breytenbach

Birthday: 25 February 2002

Age: 22

Gender: A fairy sitting on a leaf, looking over a beach and the ocean, under a starlit nightsky. I am that fairy🧚🏽✨️

My own flavour of non-binary 💛🤍💜🖤

Pronouns: Sea/star

*Please see my intro for a more in-depth explanation on that

How to use: Sea is cooking for starself. Basically, you replace "she" with "sea" and "her" with "star"

Sexuality: Pansexual

Nationality: South African

Race: Mixed (50% Black, 50% White)

Culture: Afrikaans and Zulu

Height: 5'1 (157cm)

Things I like doing: Colouring🧑🏽‍🎨, painting 🎨 video games 🎮(I played A LOT of Nintendo 3Ds as a kid, but now I mostly play Genshin and Sky)🎮, mobile games; 420 (eating and smoking)🍃, jigsaw puzzles🧩, cooking 🧑🏽‍🍳(my parents never tought me how to cook, so now I'm experimenting and teaching myself)🍲, singing🎤 (I guess I'm okay🤷🏽), dancing🕺🏽 (at least I have fun😂), writing poetry✒️

Likes: My boys❤️, my rp kids💖, my Bubba🐱❤️my bio mom🫂❤️, food, music, anime, animals, making people happy, rain, the ocean

Dislikes: My adoptive mom (she's narcissistic), hurting people, pedophiles, bigots, Trump

What I look like/Selfie dump:

I don't take a lot of pictures of myself, because I don't really like the way that I look most of the time😅 Recently, that's been getting a lot better though, since I got top surgery, started showering regularly again and taking better care of my hair. This allowed me to find a look that I really like on myself🤩 These are the only pictures of me that I feel comfortable posting right now, though ☺️😅

I'm an AuDHD-er (autism is self-diagnosed) and am currently recovering from what I suspect is burnout. I'm pretty sure I burnt out during high school. When I was in school, I always had to work harder than everyone else in class, on account of being the slowest. I write slower, make more mistakes and sometimes it takes me longer to process information. A lot of times, this caused me to hold everyonein class back with lessons and made me feel very ashamed. Every year, with a new class, I knew that I was the slowest out of everyone there. I also have a really hard time studying, without writing everything down or highlighting everything.

Everything started going downhill in 10th grade (16 yrs). It was really scary, having to watch as my grades/marks went down more and more with every passing term. Mostly in Science and Maths and sometimes EGD (Engineering Graphics and Design). No matter how much or how hard or how smart I worked, they just kept going down. If they weren't going down, they were stagnant. And I was the nerd. I was constantly spending my time with my nose in a book, or doing some type of homework or studying. Every afternoon, immediately after school (and all evening), even during breaktime/lunch - I would sit and do homework. I never went out with friends, went to parties or sleepovers (in high school. I did have and go to sleepoves in primary school, though. Those were fun). My whole life revolved around school. In high school, I didn't really have close friends. You know when you're friends with someone, but you only ever see them in school? It was like that. Those were the only friends I had in high school. So, essentially, I didn't really feel like I belonged anywhere.

Electrical Technology was fun, though🙃 I was the only "girl" in class, so being the top student and getting better grades than the boys that bullied me, felt that much better 😆😂

Having my final year in 2020, really did it for me. 2019 is the last time I remember everything being "normal". I still have a semblance of regret for not being able to have that high school anime (love) story that everyone talks about. *Sigh🌸* It was also really tough, knowing that that was our year of lasts and we didn't get to do all the things that students usually do in that year. I still remember the feeling of not being able to hug my teachers or my friends, how empty, quiet and orderly the hallways felt. Lifeless...It was horrible.

I could go on, but I think I'm going to end it here🌿 I feel that's enough trauma for today😂 Remember, if you have any questions my asks are always open🌼 I'm pretty much an open book with people I feel safe around and I feel really safe and loved in this community🫶🏽 So, I don't really mind talking about my trauma and past experiences with you guys 🤷🏽 Don't expect that from other people, though 🙅🏽 They might not be as comfortable about it. Just because I am, doesn't mean that they will be too.

Okay, bye🌻

[mariacallous]

As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.

All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of “data elements” on every single US citizen.

These groups could have a major impact on the 2024 election. In addition to disenfranchising voters and putting additional pressure on already overstretched election offices, they could convince more and more people that US elections are fraudulent.

Catherine Engelbrecht and her organization True the Vote have effectively tried to disenfranchise voters for more than a decade by claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony voter registrations. Engelbrecht’s rhetoric was given an unprecedented boost in the wake of 2020, when Trump and other elected officials mainstreamed conspiracies that the elections had been rigged in favor of Democrats. Hundreds of national and local election denial groups were formed, and many of them amassed huge followings on social media platforms like Telegram. As the 2024 presidential election looms, they are ramping up efforts to do it again.

“It could be exponentially worse than what we saw in 2020, but we're going to be awake, we're going to be engaged, we are going to understand the process, and we're going to have options to continue to hold to those truths,” Engelbrecht said during a March webinar titled “Election Integrity Team Building 101.” “We're not going to back down. There's too much to lose.”

The hour-long presentation was delivered from a hotel room in Denver, with Engelbrecht laying out what could sound like a relatively benign plan to monitor elections and check voter rolls. “Keep a soft heart, keep a kind word in your mouth, approach people irrespective of party with love. You will find that things will be much better if that is the approach that is taken,” Engelbrecht said. The session, she said, was overbooked.

Engelbrecht then began speaking about elections being “perilously close to cracking in half,” and her presentation became a highlight reel of election conspiracies, references to crystals, Christian nationalist rhetoric, and militaristic jargon. “If this republic’s to be saved, it's because [of] people like all of you that are on this webinar right now. There are some bad actors out there and we live in particularly chaotic and caustic times,” said Engelbrecht. “If we wait on somebody to do something, we will watch freedom slip away on our watch. That's how close we are.”

“These groups are trying to lay the groundwork to potentially make later claims about the election that very well may be false. But the more chaos that can be caused along the way will give more fodder to that disinformation,” Andrew Garber, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, tells WIRED. “It's not just bad if there's a mass voter challenge because people might get kicked off the rolls. It's also bad if people then take that challenge and say, ‘See, look at all these ineligible voters,’ when in fact that's not the case.”

Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010, when she was an activist for the right-wing populist Tea Party movement. After the 2020 election, Engelbrecht and her collaborator Gregg Phillips became central figures in the Stop the Steal movement, and starred in the widely-debunked election conspiracy film 2000 Mules. They were also arrested for contempt of court after refusing to identify their source behind allegations that the Chinese government had accessed US election data. True the Vote also made wild allegations of widespread ballot stuffing in Georgia during the 2020 vote and a subsequent runoff in 2021. Earlier this year, True the Vote was forced to admit in court that the group had no evidence to back up its claims.

In 2022, the group rolled out a slick new software tool known as IV3, based on technology developed by Phillips, that compared names on voter rolls to a database maintained by the US Postal Service, allowing anyone to challenge voter registrations across the country if they spotted a discrepancy. A WIRED investigation, however, revealed that the information used to challenge the registration of hundreds of thousands of people was based on unreliable data.

Undeterred, True the Vote announced last week that it was relaunching IV3. Phillips claims that the software’s database now has close to “100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States.” WIRED has not seen proof of this claim. The new IV3 system will soon be available in all 50 states, the organization said. On Thursday, the group held a webinar to train local activists on how to use it. The new system also relies on data from the US Postal Service, but Engelbrecht claimed during the presentation that Phillips and his team had “normalized” the data from all 50 states to ensure the system would not produce inaccurate results. She also said that thousands of people across the country were already registered, and that they had a long waiting list.

Additionally, she said that another software tool developed by Phillips’ team, called Ground Fusion, would be released soon; it is aimed at organizations and PACs looking to identify voting irregularities across larger geographic regions.

Engelbrecht declined to comment, claiming without evidence that WIRED had “written unfairly about True the Vote and IV3 in the past.”

True the Vote is not the only group seeking to leverage technology to supercharge the spread of election conspiracies. A secretive Georgia-based firm called EagleAI NETwork has developed a voter information database to fast-track the deletion of ineligible voters from the system. Voter rights groups have advised against its use, as insignificant errors—such as a missing comma before the suffix “Jr.”—have led to eligible names being removed. Still, at least one county in Georgia has agreed to use EagleAI to review voter challenges and conduct list maintenance activities.

One of EagleAI’s key backers is former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, who in the past two years has become central to the push to spread election conspiracies on a national level through her well-funded Election Integrity Network.

The group has held in-person training seminars in recent years, with session topics including how to protect “Vulnerable Voters from Leftist Activists” and “Monitoring Voting Equipment and Systems.” More recently, the group has made its training sessions available online, and is now once again ramping up its efforts ahead of the 2024 election with an initiative called Soles to the Rolls, aimed at boosting challenges to voter registration.

Mitchell, EagleAI, and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Another training webinar called “We the People” was also hosted last month by the America Project and its offshoot, Vote Your Vision. Broadcasted online to hundreds of attendees, the webinar featured a lineup of election conspiracists, Republican lawmakers, a guy who wrote a book about fifth-generation warfare, and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

The webinar, the group’s website said, was designed to give people “the secrets to reclaiming our power and reshaping history” by using “state-of-the-art election tools,” including those involving artificial intelligence technology. While the details of exactly what these tools will look like and how they will be used are unclear, the America Project has already scheduled more training sessions in the coming weeks to give supporters more information. The group also did not reply to requests for comment.

The America Project was cofounded by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO and conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who also funds part of the organization. Both Flynn and Byrne reportedly attended a White House meeting in late 2020 to urge Trump to essentially declare martial law and seize voting machines.

While Flynn didn’t speak during last month’s webinar, he has arguably done more than anyone since 2020 to push the notion that America’s elections are fundamentally fraudulent, appearing at conferences, in podcasts, and on right-wing news shows on a near-daily basis. Trump has also indicated that Flynn will be brought back into his administration should he win.

These efforts have been given the seal of approval by the Republican National Committee, which was recently restructured by Trump to include election deniers and family members in top positions while cutting minority outreach efforts. One of those election deniers is Christina Bobb, who will be running the “election integrity unit.” A former Trump lawyer and TV presenter on far-right channel One America News, Bobb is a major promoter of the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The RNC’s election-related priorities, according to an internal memo recently obtained by NPR, include “a broader effort over the coming months to [legally] challenge voter identification and signature verification rules which were put into place for the 2020 election.”

During the America Project webinar last month, one of the hosts apologized to listeners for being unable to get Bobb to join the call that day, but promised that she would join a future session—highlighting just how closely these conspiracy-focused groups work with the mainstream GOP apparatus.

“These groups have a playbook nationally that they tend to deploy locally,” says Garber. “Some of these playbooks that have an intended national reach are then deployed through local activists, and it's concerning because it's the voters at the local level who suffer the effects. It's the election officials at the local level trying to keep order at the polls, trying to make sure their voter rolls are up to date, who have to deal with this stuff.”

One of Flynn’s core messages over the past four years has been that “local action equals national impact” —an expression that revolves around a concept called “precinct strategy,” which aims to get people into key positions on local committees in order to push their narratives at the local level. In 2024, that strategy has been primed and polished.

“This concept of precinct strategy was actually endorsed by President Trump in the last election cycle,” Yehuda Miller, a Republican county committee member in New Jersey, said during the America Project seminar. “We want to take the strategy to the next level. We want to get more organized, we want to start organizing across multiple counties in a state, we want to start organizing across multiple states. We have the power to direct our elected officials.”

[tomorrowusa]

Hurricane Helene was not the first tropical cyclone to hit Georgia. But it entered the state through Georgia's land border with Florida, still at hurricane strength, and retained its tropical characteristics all the way through the middle of the state until exiting at the border with North Carolina and Tennessee.

Helene was one of the increasing number of tropical cyclones experiencing rapid intensification. And it also moved more rapidly than usual for a storm of this type at such latitudes. What people in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee experienced with Helene may be a taste of our climate future.

Helene reminded many Georgia voters, especially younger voters, that climate is an issue which needs to be addressed.

In 2020, Donald Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million cast in the state, one of the closest races in that election.  Since that time, the Peach State has seen an increase in extreme heat days, rising sea levels and frost damage to crops. And the electorate has grown more concerned about climate change — with 76% of registered voters now supporting congressional action on climate. This time around, with voters in the battleground state closely divided between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, climate activists are determined to make sure that their concerns help swing the election to Harris, whose policies are seen as more climate-friendly than those of the former president. Almost half a million voters in Georgia who have expressed concerns about climate change but have not voted in the last two election cycles are now being targeted by the Environmental Voter Project. The overwhelming majority of the voters in this group (88%) are between the ages of 18 and 34 and almost half are Black.  Of all the states, “Georgia has the largest number of low-propensity climate voters,” said Nathanie Stinnett, director and founder of EVP, which is nonpartisan but because of its climate focus tends to mobilize more Democratic voters. The group has been targeting young voters in the state with door-to-door canvassing, phone calls, direct mail and social media.  According to EVP’s polling, 40% of young voters in five battleground states including Georgia will only support candidates who prioritize climate change — it’s a “deal breaker” for them. And an additional 40% of them said they’d prefer candidates who make it a priority to address climate change. “Young voters are seeing the increases in extreme weather events in Georgia and their rising power bills driven in large part by fossil fuel costs, and noting the need for greater investment in climate technology and solar,” said Marqus Cole, the director of church engagement and outreach for the Evangelical Environmental Network and a former political candidate. 

Voters in climate sensitive states need to hear more about climate-denying Donald Trump's coziness with fossil fuel companies. While the increasingly demented Trump often has trouble putting a sentence together, he has no difficulty reciting his favorite mantra, "DRILL! DRILL! DRILL!"

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Cloudburst

Enshittification isn’t inevitable: under different conditions and constraints, the old, good internet could have given way to a new, good internet. Enshittification is the result of specific policy choices: encouraging monopolies; enabling high-speed, digital shell games; and blocking interoperability.

First we allowed companies to buy up their competitors. Google is the shining example here: having made one good product (search), they then fielded an essentially unbroken string of in-house flops, but it didn’t matter, because they were able to buy their way to glory: video, mobile, ad-tech, server management, docs, navigation…They’re not Willy Wonka’s idea factory, they’re Rich Uncle Pennybags, making up for their lack of invention by buying out everyone else:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

But this acquisition-fueled growth isn’t unique to tech. Every administration since Reagan (but not Biden! more on this later) has chipped away at antitrust enforcement, so that every sector has undergone an orgy of mergers, from athletic shoes to sea freight, eyeglasses to pro wrestling:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/07/09/the-importance-of-competition-for-the-american-economy/

But tech is different, because digital is flexible in a way that analog can never be. Tech companies can “twiddle” the back-ends of their clouds to change the rules of the business from moment to moment, in a high-speed shell-game that can make it impossible to know what kind of deal you’re getting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

To make things worse, users are banned from twiddling. The thicket of rules we call IP ensure that twiddling is only done against users, never for them. Reverse-engineering, scraping, bots — these can all be blocked with legal threats and suits and even criminal sanctions, even if they’re being done for legitimate purposes:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enhittification isn’t inevitable but if we let companies buy all their competitors, if we let them twiddle us with every hour that God sends, if we make it illegal to twiddle back in self-defense, we will get twiddled to death. When a company can operate without the discipline of competition, nor of privacy law, nor of labor law, nor of fair trading law, with the US government standing by to punish any rival who alters the logic of their service, then enshittification is the utterly foreseeable outcome.

To understand how our technology gets distorted by these policy choices, consider “The Cloud.” Once, “the cloud” was just a white-board glyph, a way to show that some part of a software’s logic would touch some commodified, fungible, interchangeable appendage of the internet. Today, “The Cloud” is a flashing warning sign, the harbinger of enshittification.

When your image-editing tools live on your computer, your files are yours. But once Adobe moves your software to The Cloud, your critical, labor-intensive, unrecreatable images are purely contingent. At at time, without notice, Adobe can twiddle the back end and literally steal the colors out of your own files:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

The finance sector loves The Cloud. Add “The Cloud” to a product and profits (money you get for selling something) can turn into rents (money you get for owning something). Profits can be eroded by competition, but rents are evergreen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

No wonder The Cloud has seeped into every corner of our lives. Remember your first iPod? Adding music to it was trivial: double click any music file to import it into iTunes, then plug in your iPod and presto, synched! Today, even sophisticated technology users struggle to “side load” files onto their mobile devices. Instead, the mobile duopoly — Apple and Google, who bought their way to mobile glory and have converged on the same rent-seeking business practices, down to the percentages they charge — want you to get your files from The Cloud, via their apps. This isn’t for technological reasons, it’s a business imperative: 30% of every transaction that involves an app gets creamed off by either Apple or Google in pure rents:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

And yet, The Cloud is undeniably useful. Having your files synch across multiple devices, including your collaborators’ devices, with built-in tools for resolving conflicting changes, is amazing. Indeed, this feat is the holy grail of networked tools, because it’s how programmers write all the software we use, including software in The Cloud.

If you want to know how good a tool can be, just look at the tools that toolsmiths use. With “source control” — the software programmers use to collaboratively write software — we get a very different vision of how The Cloud could operate. Indeed, modern source control doesn’t use The Cloud at all. Programmers’ workflow doesn’t break if they can’t access the internet, and if the company that provides their source control servers goes away, it’s simplicity itself to move onto another server provider.

This isn’t The Cloud, it’s just “the cloud” — that whiteboard glyph from the days of the old, good internet — freely interchangeable, eminently fungible, disposable and replaceable. For a tool like git, Github is just one possible synchronization point among many, all of which have a workflow whereby programmers’ computers automatically make local copies of all relevant data and periodically lob it back up to one or more servers, resolving conflicting edits through a process that is also largely automated.

There’s a name for this model: it’s called “Local First” computing, which is computing that starts from the presumption that the user and their device is the most important element of the system. Networked servers are dumb pipes and dumb storage, a nice-to-have that fails gracefully when it’s not available.

The data structures of source-code are among the most complicated formats we have; if we can do this for code, we can do it for spreadsheets, word-processing files, slide-decks, even edit-decision-lists for video and audio projects. If local-first computing can work for programmers writing code, it can work for the programs those programmers write.

Local-first computing is experiencing a renaissance. Writing for Wired, Gregory Barber traces the history of the movement, starting with the French computer scientist Marc Shapiro, who helped develop the theory of “Conflict-Free Replicated Data” — a way to synchronize data after multiple people edit it — two decades ago:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-cloud-is-a-prison-can-the-local-first-software-movement-set-us-free/

Shapiro and his co-author Nuno Preguiça envisioned CFRD as the building block of a new generation of P2P collaboration tools that weren’t exactly serverless, but which also didn’t rely on servers as the lynchpin of their operation. They published a technical paper that, while exiting, was largely drowned out by the release of GoogleDocs (based on technology built by a company that Google bought, not something Google made in-house).

Shapiro and Preguiça’s work got fresh interest with the 2019 publication of “Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud,” a viral whitepaper-cum-manifesto from a quartet of computer scientists associated with Cambridge University and Ink and Switch, a self-described “industrial research lab”:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/static/local-first.pdf

The paper describes how its authors — Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg and Mark McGranaghan — prototyped and tested a bunch of simple local-first collaboration tools built on CFRD algorithms, with the goal of “network optional…seamless collaboration.” The results are impressive, if nascent. Conflicting edits were simpler to resolve than the authors anticipated, and users found URLs to be a good, intuitive way of sharing documents. The biggest hurdles are relatively minor, like managing large amounts of change-data associated with shared files.

Just as importantly, the paper makes the case for why you’d want to switch to local-first computing. The Cloud is not reliable. Companies like Evernote don’t last forever — they can disappear in an eyeblink, and take your data with them:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23789012/evernote-layoff-us-staff-bending-spoons-note-taking-app

Google isn’t likely to disappear any time soon, but Google is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA program (“I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further”) and notorious for shuttering its products, even beloved ones like Google Reader:

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social

And while the authors don’t mention it, Google is also prone to simply kicking people off all its services, costing them their phone numbers, email addresses, photos, document archives and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches

There is enormous enthusiasm among developers for local-first application design, which is only natural. After all, companies that use The Cloud go to great lengths to make it just “the cloud,” using containerization to simplify hopping from one cloud provider to another in a bid to stave off lock-in from their cloud providers and the enshittification that inevitably follows.

The nimbleness of containerization acts as a disciplining force on cloud providers when they deal with their business customers: disciplined by the threat of losing money, cloud companies are incentivized to treat those customers better. The companies we deal with as end-users know exactly how bad it gets when a tech company can impose high switching costs on you and then turn the screws until things are almost-but-not-quite so bad that you bolt for the doors. They devote fantastic effort to making sure that never happens to them — and that they can always do that to you.

Interoperability — the ability to leave one service for another — is technology’s secret weapon, the thing that ensures that users can turn The Cloud into “the cloud,” a humble whiteboard glyph that you can erase and redraw whenever it suits you. It’s the greatest hedge we have against enshittification, so small wonder that Big Tech has spent decades using interop to clobber their competitors, and lobbying to make it illegal to use interop against them:

https://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

Getting interop back is a hard slog, but it’s also our best shot at creating a new, good internet that lives up the promise of the old, good internet. In my next book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso Books, Sept 5), I set out a program fro disenshittifying the internet:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

The book is up for pre-order on Kickstarter now, along with an independent, DRM-free audiobooks (DRM-free media is the content-layer equivalent of containerized services — you can move them into or out of any app you want):

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Meanwhile, Lina Khan, the FTC and the DoJ Antitrust Division are taking steps to halt the economic side of enshittification, publishing new merger guidelines that will ban the kind of anticompetitive merger that let Big Tech buy its way to glory:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/biden-administration-corporate-merger-antitrust-guidelines/674779/

The internet doesn’t have to be enshittified, and it’s not too late to disenshittify it. Indeed — the same forces that enshittified the internet — monopoly mergers, a privacy and labor free-for-all, prohibitions on user-side twiddling — have enshittified everything from cars to powered wheelchairs. Not only should we fight enshittification — we must.

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad- free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers

Image: Drahtlos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motherboard_Intel_386.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

—

cdsessums (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monsoon_Season_Flagstaff_AZ_clouds_storm.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[sherlynnxy]

 ‘Is blogging still relevant in the age of TikToks and Instagram?’

MDA 20009 Digital Communities

Hello and welcome to my blog, I hope you all had a great weekend :)

In today's “gen-z” era, media platforms like Tiktok and Instagram are becoming a frequent trend. As new forms of content such as videos, podcasts and social media platforms continue to dominate, some believe that the era of the traditional blog is coming to an end. One of the questions that is constantly being explored is, “In the age of TikToks and Instagram, is there still a point to blogging? However, based on my observations, I don't think blogging is dead, there is still a market for blogging, rather it has evolved and adapted to the changing digital landscape and can be differentiated from the audience of social media platforms. A closer look reveals that blogging will still have considerable value in 2024, for both individuals and businesses.

Before we dive into this topic, let's define Blog, Tiktok and Instagram.

Background: What is Blog, TikTok and Instagram?

According to Dennis, M.A. (2024), blog is an online journal in which an individual, group, or company presents a record of activities, thoughts, or beliefs. A blog consists of more than just words and pictures, and it can't be just words. Instead, it's a sum of text, layout, connections and links, and posting speed (Blogging, n.d.). Examples include blogger.com and wordpress.com, as well as Tumblr, which is the application you are now using to view this post :3

In addition, Herring et al.'s 2004 study showed that not only did personal blogs reveal their feelings and experiences, but that the mainstream media considered blogs to be newsworthy or relevant to current events, calling them “a new genre of journalism” (Filloux, 2009; Hermida, 2010), and that professional journalists were adopting the blog format as well.

Social media has been defined by Obar and Wildman (2015) that it is a mobile and internet-based platforms used to facilitate various forms of communication, social interaction, marketing and knowledge sharing (Hovestadt et al., 2021). Also, others define the term as ‘a web-based service or platform based on web 2.0 technology that enables sharing, co-creation, discussion and modification of user-generated content’ (Werder et al. 2014). Famous social media include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.  

TikTok is a relatively new social media platform that allows users to create and share short videos of up to 15 seconds in length. As a user-generated content (UGC) platform, it has become a popular application for sharing videos (Feldkamp, 2021)

While research by Larson & Draper (2017), Instagram is a mobile application that allows users to instantly transform mobile phone snapshots into visually appealing images that can then be shared with others on the web Van Dijck (2013). TikTok and Instagram have become popular platforms for marketing campaigns because the content shared on these platforms is short, fun, trendy, creative and interactive (Zhang, 2020).

Do Blogging still holds significant value?

There is a perception that blogging may be seen as a dying industry.

Source: HubSpot

The data shows that 73% of respondents admit to skimming blog posts, while 27% read them carefully. Teicher (2020) has stated that 75% of the public prefers reading articles under 1,000 words. Teicher (2020) states that 75% of the public prefers to read articles of less than 1000 words.

Due to shifting consumption patterns and a culture of ‘instant gratification’ - in this age of instant information and short attention spans - a comprehensive and detailed approach to blog writing may seem somewhat outdated and unnecessary. Infographics and visualizations are designed to be visually appealing and interactive, which helps to capture the attention of the target audience more effectively than a lot of text (Blogging, n.d.).

However, in my opinion, blogging is not a dying industry. Even in the age of TikTok and Instagram, blogging is still relevant because of its unique capabilities, especially when it comes to deep content, personal expression, and fostering community engagement. Here are some statistics that prove that blogging is still significant.

Source: Statista

Source: Social Media Today

Evidently, there are 1.8 billion websites in the digital ecosystem and more than 600 million blogs worldwide (Armstrong 2021). Accordingly, 77% of internet users still read blogs. (Walker-Ford, 2017) which reveals that blogging is still incredibly valuable. 

Source: HubSpot

On top of that, this survey results that show that blogging is still alive and well. The findings show that people enjoy reading blogs that teach them how to do new things, solve problems, and learn about new trends related to their career or industry.

Personally, I also like to use blogs when I'm learning something new, as it's perfect for providing in-depth tutorials, comprehensive guides or sharing personal experiences rather than short descriptions.

Additionally, blogs can be used not only for the purpose of sharing one's thoughts, but also as an educational tool. Oravec states that blogging is appropriate for students and helps to encourage participation in the classroom. According to Alsareef (2013), students are generally satisfied with taking courses online through social networks because it is easy to use, classes become more interesting, it provides more flexibility for extracurricular activities, and they are able to feel well educated.

Here's the end...

In short, blogging is still relevant in the age of TikTok and Instagram, and both platforms clearly have their own unique strengths and nuances. Blogging allows for in-depth content creation, while Instagram focuses on visual storytelling. However, blogs can continue to fulfill different social and informational needs, making them adaptable and relevant in the broader digital landscape. For example, blogs can also embrace the power of multimedia, and bloggers can consider incorporating images, infographics, and GIFs to enhance the visual appeal of their content and help segment text. According to a survey by Bump (2024), 32% of respondents said that videos, images, or other multimedia are the elements that interest them most when reading blog content.

Thank you for reading! See ya in next post ;)

Reference:

Alshareef, M. A. (2013). Evaluate student satisfaction for social learning network at King Abdulaziz University. Advances in Internet of Things, 03(03), 41–44. https://doi.org/10.4236/ait.2013.33006

Armstrong, M. (2021, August 6). How many websites are there? Statista Daily Data. https://www.statista.com/chart/19058/number-of-websites-online/

Blogging. (n.d.). Google Books. https://books.google.com.my/books?hl=en&lr=&id=VrhvqxjhSaEC&oi=fnd&pg=PP5&dq=blog&ots=JCUTMzaBSN&sig=aHWVbBua_dTSGpcZFQ4ctnfubOA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=blog&f=false

Bump, P. (2024, January 2). The Top 3 Reasons consumers read blogs & How to attract them in 2024 [New data]. HubSpot. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/why-do-people-read-blogs#:~:text=In%20this%20blog%20post,%20I%E2%80%98ll%20walk%20you%20through#:~:text=In%20this%20blog%20post,%20I%E2%80%98ll%20walk%20you%20through

Dennis, M. Aaron (2024, September 17). blog. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/blog

Feldkamp, J. (2021). The rise of TikTok: the evolution of a social media platform during COVID-19. In SpringerBriefs in information systems (pp. 73–85). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66611-8_6

Hovestadt, C., Recker, J., Richter, J., & Werder, K. (2021). Digital responses to COvid-19. In SpringerBriefs in information systems. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66611-8

Teicher, J. (2020, August 19). The lost art of the Mid-Range blog post. Contently. https://contently.com/2019/01/14/mid-range-blog-post/

Walker-Ford, M. (2017, December 4). The benefits of Blogging: 20+ stats Business owners need to know [Infographic]. Social Media Today. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/the-benefits-of-blogging-20-stats-business-owners-need-to-know-infograph/511816/

Van Dijck, J. (2013). Social media platforms as producers. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263565270_Social_Media_Platforms_as_Producers#:~:text=With%20the%20prolific%20use%20of%20social%20media%20platforms,

Zhang, J. (2020). Study on social media marketing campaign strategy -- TikTok and Instagram. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/127010

[posttexasstressdisorder]

GOOD NEWS!

There’s a new plan to revive the Affordable Connectivity Program, a pandemic-era initiative that provides low-income households in the US with discounts on high-speed internet access.

At the end of April, funding for the program was set to run out, affecting millions. But a bipartisan group of senators, led by Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, have proposed using a Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization measure as a vehicle for funding the ACP and other telecom programs for a combined $6 billion. Luján’s coalition includes senators J.D. Vance, Peter Welch, Jacky Rosen, Steve Daines, and Roger Wicker.

“Right now, there are over 23 million households participating in this program. That’s more than 55 million people. But it’s not only benefiting these individual families—it’s benefiting their local communities as well,” Luján tells WIRED. “It gives families access to better-paying jobs, to training and education to create economic mobility, to better deals on groceries and household goods. The time is now to save this program.”

The measure also includes a provision for the Federal Communication Commission’s “rip and replace program,” which refunds US telecom providers for removing equipment from Chinese manufacturers including Huawei and ZTE from their networks and replacing it with less-risky tech. Earlier this month, the FCC asked Congress for around $2 billion to help bolster the program, which has faced a shortfall. That initiative has been in place since 2020, which is when the FCC identified Huawei and ZTE as national security threats and then-president Donald Trump signed the “rip-and-replace” bill into law.

“It’s also critical that we adequately fund the ‘rip-and-replace’ program to ensure our country can move forward the effort to remove and replace untrusted technological equipment. This amendment also empowers the FCC to reauction spectrum licenses to free up airwaves and allow more opportunities for the public to access faster internet speeds and more responsive networks,” Luján said.

The Biden administration has made significant investments in broadband expansion over the past few years. In a speech last month, Biden called on Congress to reinvest in the ACP.

“High-speed internet isn’t a luxury anymore, it’s an absolute necessity,” Biden said. “Congress needs to reauthorize that program now.”

Update, May 7 at 7:19 pm: A previous version of this story misidentified the state Ben Ray Luján represents in the US Senate. It is New Mexico.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Innovation and Cooptation

With Musk’s purchase of Twitter, we see the conclusion of a cycle of innovation and cooptation in the field of communications. In the late 20th century, the dominant political and technological models were monolithic and unidirectional: network television, mass-based political parties. In response, anarchists and other rebels experimented with independent media and underground networks, producing innovative horizontal and decentralized models like indymedia.org. Tech corporations eventually monetized these models as the participatory media of Web 2.0, such as Facebook. Yet from the turn of the century through the uprising of 2020, the lingering horizontal and participatory aspects of the internet in general and social media in particular continued to empower those who sought to achieve more self-determination—witness the “Thank you Facebook” graffiti in Tunisia after the so-called “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2010-2011.

Over the past decade, however, corporations and governments have introduced more and more online surveillance and control. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is the latest stage in a reactionary clampdown with grim implications.

Musk and his colleagues see capitalism as a meritocracy in which the shrewdest and most hardworking competitors inexorably rise to the top. Hence, presumably, their own success.

Of course, if Musk wishes to prove that his success is not just the consequence of privilege and luck—of fortune and good fortune—he could demonstrate this easily enough by giving away his wealth, cutting his social ties, changing his name, and repeating his supposed rags-to-riches feats a second time. If he were able to climb the pyramid a second time without the benefit of growing up white in apartheid-era South Africa (setting aside the question of his father’s emerald investments for now), we might have to grant a hearing to his claims that the market has elevated him on account of his personal qualities—though that still would not show that capitalism rewards the efforts that are most beneficial for humanity.

According to the Silicon Valley narrative, platforms like Twitter are the inventions of individual entrepreneurs, propelled into being by the finance capital of canny investors.

But Twitter did not simply spring, fully formed like Athena, from the head of company co-founder Jack Dorsey. In fact, it was a modest refinement of a model already demonstrated by TXTmob, the SMS text messaging program developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy for protests at the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.[1] Blaine Cook and Evan Henshaw-Plath, anarchist developers who worked alongside Dorsey at his previous company Odeo, helped refine TXTmob and later took the model with them into the conversations with Dorsey that gave rise to Twitter.[2]

If the unrelenting urgency of social media in general and Twitter in particular can be exhausting, that’s to be expected—the infrastructure of Twitter was originally designed for street communications during high-stakes mass mobilizations in which information must go out immediately, boiled down to its bare essentials. It’s not a coincidence that, despite its shortcomings, the platform has continued to be useful to street activists and conflict journalists.

The point here is that innovative models do not necessarily emerge from the commercial entrepreneurism of the Great Men of history and economics. More often, they emerge in the course of collective efforts to solve one of the problems created by the capitalist order. Resistance is the motor of history. Afterwards, opportunists like Musk use the outsize economic leverage that a profit-driven market grants them to buy up new technologies and turn them definitively against the movements and milieux that originally produced them.

We can identify two stages in the capitalist appropriation of the TXTmob model. In the first phase, a framework that was originally designed by volunteers for the use of ordinary protesters was transformed into a publicly traded corporation, around the same time that the open spaces of the early internet were being colonized by the for-profit surveillance systems of Web 2.0. In the second phase, this publicly traded corporation has been transformed into the private plaything of a single entitled tycoon—with consequences that remain to be seen.

Musk claims that his goal is to open up the platform for a wider range of speech. In practice, there is no such thing as “free speech” in its pure form—every decision that can shape the conditions of dialogue inevitably has implications regarding who can participate, who can be heard, and what can be said. For all we might say against them, the previous content moderators of Twitter did not prevent the platform from serving grassroots movements. We have yet to see whether Musk will intentionally target activists and organizers or simply permit reactionaries to do so on a crowdsourced basis, but it would be extremely naïve to take him at his word that his goal is to make Twitter more open.

[rosszulorzott]

Reading Journal

After reading Why Civil Resistance Works, The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan (2011), I'm now on to the update from 2021, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know by Erica Chenoweth. This link is from the author's page and you will find many more resources there.

"Written by leading experts in their fields and with over 100 subjects to explore Oxford University Press's acclaimed What Everyone Needs to Know® series offers authoritative discussions of complex contemporary issues from gender to sustainability to robots in a lively question-and-answer format."

I'm now halfway through this book and I thought to share some quotes and commentary.

I have evolved from being a detached skeptic of civil resistance to becoming an invested participant in nonviolent movements. I now study the history and practice of resistance with much greater urgency, for the sake of my own democracy and in solidarity with human rights defenders around the world.

Although many cases don’t make headline news, the past decade—2010 to 2020—has seen more revolutionary nonviolent uprisings around the world than in any other period in recorded history. In fact, there have been more such campaigns in the first two decades of the twenty-first century than there were during the entire twentieth century. ... Even though nonviolent resistance is now ubiquitous as a leading strategy for creating change worldwide, the data also suggest that governments are defeating revolutionary nonviolent movements more often than in prior decades ... since 2016, far-right and neo-Nazi groups in Germany have been relying on the work of nonviolent resistance scholar Gene Sharp to better understand how to build and wield people power to pursue their racist and exclusionary aims. ... Just because people are protesting in the streets does not mean they are engaging in civil resistance. Spontaneous, improvised street actions that are not coordinated across various civic groups as part of a broader strategy rarely have staying power or capacity for long-term transformation. ... Few if any civil resistance campaigns have succeeded using protest alone. ... The first known feminist rebellion in North America was a sixteenth-century civil resistance campaign by Iroquois tribal women to end unregulated warfare within the Iroquois nation. Men exclusively controlled declarations of war, along with other political powers. Iroquois women coordinated a sex and childbearing strike, refused to harvest and prepare crops, and refused to produce moccasins necessary for war-making. Ultimately Iroquois women won the power to veto war declarations. ... Since World War II, very few civil resistance movements that excluded women at the front lines succeeded. ... No movements have failed after getting 10% of the nation’s population to be actively involved in their peak event. Most succeed after mobilizing 3.5%. ... successful movements do not necessarily need to turn mortal enemies into active supporters. Civil resistance is not about converting the opponent or melting the hearts of brutal dictators. It is about pulling their supports away in key moments—and taking away their options. ... Digital technology makes it easy to skip the critical steps of building relationships, developing ongoing coalitions, planning strategies, building alternative institutions, and preparing a population for a long struggle. With the convenience of social media, many movements may fall into the trap of organizing only in the short term, moving from one event to another, while failing to absorb their base of supporters into long-term movement adherents. Every movement faces the temptation to put tactics before strategy. Social media dramatically increase that temptation. ... Civil rights organizer Bernice Johnson Reagon once said that if you’re comfortable with everyone in your coalition, you’re not in a coalition. Maintaining a winning coalition is much more difficult than selecting a clear and concrete objective; it often requires skilled mediators and a movement-wide willingness to resolve conflict through some accepted process. ... we know from historical studies that people tend to be more willing to put themselves in harm’s way than to actively hurt others. ... even more important than tactical discipline may be narrative discipline

I have grouped some of these quotes by topic, because the book is written in a very detailed and recursive style, repeating key findings in different contexts and in varying depths. No matter what question the reader wants to explore first, they will find the answer substantiated by research and other background info. This also makes the book hard to read, more like a study course - but one we desperately need to take. Maybe when translating it we could create a shorter version from the essentials (localized for each region's own political environment) and referenced back to the full text. This way we could have a format better suited for general education and organization needs.