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sixbucks · 1 year ago

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I’ve always loved tech. Now, I’m a Luddite. You should be one, too.

Washington Post Opinion by Brian Merchant September 18, 2023 at 5:30 a.m. CT 

Brian Merchant, technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times, is the author of “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech.”

I test drove the first-generation Tesla Roadster. I once lived on Soylent powder shakes for a month. My Twitter account is almost old enough to drive. I wrote a book about the iPhone. Also, I’m a Luddite.

That’s not the contradiction that it might sound like. The original Luddites did not hate technology. Most were skilled machine operators. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, what they objected to were the specific ways that tech was being used to undermine their status, upend their communities and destroy their livelihoods. So they took sledgehammers to the mechanized looms used to exploit them.

It is that spirit that I’ve come to appreciate in the age of tech monopolies and generative artificial intelligence. The kind of visionaries we need now are those who see precisely how certain technologies are causing harm and who resist them when necessary.

I didn’t always feel this way. As a teenager in the ’90s, I was captivated by the way the web connected me with friends, enabling us to build our own sites and chat into the night. Apple made gadgets cool. Google let me summon far-flung information. Amazon brought hard-to-find books to my doorstep. (Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, owns The Post; Patty Stonesifer, The Post’s interim CEO, is a member of Amazon’s board.)

The Luddites would have had few, if any, problems with all of that. And neither did I.

At the start of my career in the 2000s, tech, it seemed, was building the future. Silicon Valley’s suite of smartphones, social media networks and sharing economy apps promised connection, discovery and efficiency. Tech companies were expanding, consolidating and accumulating power. Apple was on its way to becoming the first trillion-dollar company. Uber began raking in an unprecedented war chest of $10 billion. By the 2010s, however, there were plenty of signs of the costs. As Amazon grew, stories emerged about grueling conditions in its warehouses. Google used its monopoly power to strangle competitors’ products. A suicide epidemic swept an iPhone factory. Predictions mounted that AI would soon replace tens of millions of human jobs — that the rise of the robots was at hand. The Luddites would have had a problem with all of that.

That’s what I realized one long Labor Day weekend in 2014, when I stumbled on an academic work that examined the Luddites and their struggle against the tech titans of their day. As someone raised on the idea that technology is the engine of progress — that to say otherwise is taboo — learning the true history of this movement has been a revelation.

The Luddites were not, contrary to popular belief, idiots who broke machines because they didn’t understand them. They were cloth workers who once led comfortable lives, working at home or in small shops, on their own terms and schedules, with freedom and dignity.

When entrepreneurs tried to move their jobs into factories by using power looms and wide frames that did similar work faster, more cheaply and much more shoddily, the Luddites protested. These workers first sought compromise, dialogue and a democratic way to integrate new tech into their communities — to share in the gains. They were ignored. So they rebelled.

To this end, the Luddites were innovators. They pioneered a way of staging a popular, decentralized resistance to technologies that were “hurtful to commonality.” They organized under the banner of the apocryphal Ned Ludd, sending threatening letters to entrepreneurs who invested in automation; they raided the factories of the most hated bosses in town, smashing only the machinery that “stole their bread,” as the Luddites said. For a while, they became folk heroes of England — championed by poets such as Lord Byron and cheered on by the working class; they were bigger than Robin Hood.

Sadly, the Luddites’ plight is as relevant as ever. The parallels to the modern day are everywhere. In the 1800s, entrepreneurs used technology to justify imposing a new mode of work: the factory system. In the 2000s, CEOs used technology to justify imposing a new mode of work: algorithmically organized gig labor, in which pay is lower and protections scarce. In the 1800s, hosiers and factory owners used automation less to overtly replace workers than to deskill them and drive down their wages. Digital media bosses, call center operators and studio executives are using AI in much the same way.

Then, as now, the titans used technology both as a new mode of production and as an idea that allowed them to ignore long-standing laws and regulations. In the 1800s, this might have been a factory boss arguing that his mill exempted him from a statute governing apprentice labor.

Today, it’s a ride-hailing app that claims to be a software company so it doesn’t have to play by the rules of a cab firm.

Then, as now, leaders dazzled by unregulated technologies ignored their potential downsides. Then, it might have been state-of-the-art water frames that could produce an incredible volume of yarn — but needed hundreds of vulnerable child laborers to operate. Today, it’s a cellphone or a same-day delivery, made possible by thousands of human laborers toiling in often punishing conditions.

Then, as now, workers and critics sounded the alarm. In the 1810s, no one in power listened. A fierce, popular rebellion broke out. England was pushed to the brink of civil war. The military was called in to put down the uprising — it was the largest domestic occupation in the nation’s history. Scores of Luddites were killed and hanged. The factory system took root and brought prosperity for some, but it created an immiserated working class.

The 200 years since have seen breathtaking technological innovation — but much less social innovation in how the benefits are shared. That’s why, in the age of AI and augmented reality, electric vehicles and Mars rovers, levels of inequality again rival the days of the Industrial Revolution.

Resistance is gathering again, too. Amazon workers are joining union drives despite intense opposition. Actors and screenwriters are striking and artists and illustrators have called for a ban of generative AI in editorial outlets. Organizing, illegal in the Luddites’ time, has historically proved the best bulwark against automation.

But governments must also step up. They must offer robust protections and social services for those in precarious positions. They must enforce antitrust laws. Crucially, they must develop regulations to rein in the antidemocratic model of technological development wherein a handful of billionaires and venture capital firms determine the shape of the future — and who wins and loses in it.

The clothworkers of the 1800s had the right idea: They believed everyone should share in the bounty of the amazing technologies their work makes possible.

That’s why I’m a Luddite — and why you should be one, too.

I had the jump through many hoops to break this out of WaPo paywall prison.

#luddites #decentralized resistance #factory system of production #unregulated technology #technology #innovation #inequality #Industrial Revolution

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shadowfromthestarlight · 3 years ago

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Thought some of y’all might be interested in this Gab newsletter:

Just days after joining the grift operation Gettr, Joe Rogan slammed the platform this week calling it “fugazi” and was questioning live on his show about how to leave the platform. As I mentioned earlier this week former CNN contributor Jason Miller’s Chinese billionaire-funded Gettr is falsely claiming to be a “free speech” platform and an alternative to Big Tech, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Gettr not only depends on Amazon AWS for hosting along with Apple and Google App Stores for distribution, but the app is also tracking users for Facebook and Google according to a bombshell report from Talk Liberation Investigates.

As I have written in the past I have no problem with competition. Competition is great and encourages our team to work harder to provide the best product on the market. What I do have a problem with is grifters, hypocrites, and liars. I have a problem with foreign billionaires trying to astroturf Christians and conservatives into a Big Tech honeypot. I know many good and decent people will be signing up for Gettr at the behest of the talking heads they trust on Fox News and elsewhere. I think they deserve to know exactly what they are getting into.

Some Key Findings from the report include:

-Numerous trackers from Facebook, Google, and other third parties are embedded in GETTR web and smartphone apps.

-App permissions facilitate the surveillance of a wide variety of information about GETTR users, including fine-grained behavior and location data. This data is then used to profile users and shared with third parties.

-“Getome,” a previous version of the GETTR app that targeted Chinese-language audiences, is still published in Google Play and effectively provides a backdoor to GETTR. Users can log in and interact on the GETTR network via the Getome app, bypassing updates on the newer application.

-Content on GETTR such as news is loaded directly from external sources, opening connections between GETTR users to dozens of domains. This introduces serious privacy and security risks. Some of this content is delivered via unencrypted HTTP, further jeopardizing users.

-GETTR infrastructure is hosted by cloud vendors such as Amazon AWS and company email accounts are hosted by Google.

On top of this report, there has been extensive coverage about Gettr’s rampant censorship.

Gettr is already banning America First patriots for no reason.

Gettr is shadowbanning reporters who ask why.

Gettr is banning certain words they do not like.

Gettr is using Artificial Intelligence to ban “hate speech” just like Facebook and Twitter.

Gettr banned a black conservative for using a word they didn’t like in his account bio.

Another fake in the alternative technology space is Rumble.

Rumble positions themselves as the “free speech” Youtube alternative. Conservative talking heads from Fox News have been pushing it for the past year and earlier this summer President Trump joined the platform. On the day that President Trump joined the platform Rumble updated their terms of service to ban “hate speech.”

I was watching an interview with Tim Pool and the CEO of Rumble last night and it was really something. Tim pressed him on why their terms of service are exactly the same as Big Tech’s by banning things like “hate speech.” He correctly stated that Rumble is adopting the censorship language of the left.

The CEO of Rumble said that their terms of service are “legacy” from when they launched in 2013 (which is a lie because they added the hate speech rules on the day President Trump joined Rumble recently,) and mentioned three times that they have to ban “hate speech” in order to stay on the Apple and Google app stores.

So the reality is Rumble and Gettr are platforms that are de facto owned and operated by Apple and Google. If you have the same Silicon Valley rules in order to play in the Silicon Valley sandbox, you are necessarily part of the Silicon Valley swamp.

#i've never actually posted on gab funny enough #i just remain subscribed to the emails because i find them fascinating

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Why Is The Media Against Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-is-the-media-against-republicans/

Why Is The Media Against Republicans

Mcconnell And Co Are Playing As Dirty A Game As Possible In Their Quest To Fill Ginsburgs Seat Before The Election But You Wont Find That Story In Most News Coverage

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US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell at a press conference at the US Capitol on September 22, 2020. McConnell said in a statement that the Senate would take up President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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The argument against confirming Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court before the inauguration is a Republican argument. They invented it, they enacted it, and they own it. That’s because it was Republicans, not Democrats, who changed the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to eight for 10 months in 2016, when a Democratic president was in the White House. It was Republicans who argued that no Supreme Court nominee should even be considered by the Senate in an election year. And it was Republicans who promised to block the confirmation of Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court nominees in the event that she became president while Republicans retained control of the Senate.

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And that argument is simply untenable. We do not have a legitimate third branch of government if only one party gets to choose its members.

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Vaccine Advocacy From Hannity And Mcconnell Gets The Media Off Republicans’ Backs But Won’t Shift Public Sentiment

Sean Hannity, Mitch McConnell and Tucker Carlson

Amid a rising media furor over the steady stream of vaccine disparagement from GOP politicians and Fox News talking heads, a number of prominent Republicans spoke up in favor of vaccines early this week.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “shots need to get in everybody’s arm as rapidly as possible” and asked that people “ignore all of these other voices that are giving demonstrably bad advice.” House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, got the vaccine after months of delay and then publicly said, “there shouldn’t be any hesitancy over whether or not it’s safe and effective.” And Fox News host Sean Hannity, in a widely shared video, declared, it “absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated.” This was treated in the press as an unequivocal endorsement, even though the use of the word “many” was clearly meant to let the Fox News viewers feel like he’s talking about other people getting vaccinated.

Is this an exciting pivot among the GOP elites? Are they abandoning the sociopathic strategy of sabotaging President Joe Biden’s anti-pandemic plan by encouraging their own followers to get sick? Are the millions of Republicans who keep telling pollsters they will never get that Democrat shot going to change their minds now?

Ha ha ha, no.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

— Matthew Gertz July 20, 2021

The Technology 202: New Report Calls Conservative Claims Of Social Media Censorship ‘a Form Of Disinformation’

with Aaron Schaffer

A new report concludes that social networks aren’t systematically biased against conservatives, directly contradicting Republican claims that social media companies are censoring them.

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Recent moves by Twitter and Facebook to suspend former president Donald Trump’s accounts in the wake of the violence at the Capitol are inflaming conservatives’ attacks on Silicon Valley. But New York University researchers today released a report stating claims of anti-conservative bias are “a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.”

The report found there is no trustworthy large-scale data to support these claims, and even anecdotal examples that tech companies are biased against conservatives “crumble under close examination.” The report’s authors said, for instance, the companies’ suspensions of Trump were “reasonable” given his repeated violation of their terms of service — and if anything, the companies took a hands-off approach for a long time given Trump’s position.

The report also noted several data sets underscore the prominent place conservative influencers enjoy on social media. For instance, CrowdTangle data shows that right-leaning pages dominate the list of sources providing the most engaged-with posts containing links on Facebook. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino, for instance, far out-performed most major news organizations in the run-up to the 2020 election.

In The Past The Gop Would Be Rallying Their Voters Against This Bill Their Failure To Do So Now Is Ominous

Mitch ?McConnell, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro

With surprising haste for the U.S. Senate, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, just after passing a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. And Democrats could not be more excited, as the blueprint covers a whole host of long-standing priorities, from fighting climate change to creating universal prekindergarten. The blueprint was largely written by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who released a statement calling it “the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s.”

Sanders isn’t putting that much spin on the ball.

While the bill fallls short of what is really needed to deal with climate change, it is still tremendously consequential legislation that will do a great deal not just to ameliorate economic inequalities, but, in doing so, likely reduce significant gender and racial inequality. It’s also a big political win for President Joe Biden. In other words, it is everything that Republicans hate. Worse for them, it’s packed full of benefits that boost the middle class, not just the working poor. Traditionally, such programs are much harder to claw back once Republicans gain power — as they’ve discovered in previous failed attempts to dismantle Social Security and Obamacare.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

But that’s not really happening here.

The Actual Reason Why Republicans And Their Media Are Discouraging People From Getting Vaccinated

Independent Media Institute

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN Medical Analyst, said last week, “A surprising amount of death will occur soon…” But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated?

there’s always a reason

Dr. Anthony Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN last Sunday, “I don’t have a really good reason why this is happening.”

But even if he can’t think of a reason why Republicans would trash talk vaccination and people would believe them, it’s definitely there.

Which is why it’s important to ask a couple of simple questions that all point to the actual reason why Republicans and their media are discouraging people from getting vaccinated:

1. Why did Trump get vaccinated in secret after Joe Biden won the election and his January 6th coup attempt failed?

2. Why are Fox “News” personalities discouraging people from getting vaccinated while refusing to say if they and the people they work with have been protected by vaccination?

3. Why was one of the biggest applause lines at CPAC: “They were hoping — the government was hoping — that they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated and it isn’t happening!”

4. Why are Republican legislators in states around the country pushing laws that would “ban” private businesses from asking to see proof of vaccination status ?

Death is their electoral strategy.

Is there any other possible explanation?

So, what’s left?

Destroying Trust In The Media Science And Government Has Left America Vulnerable To Disaster

For America to minimize the damage from the current pandemic, the media must inform, science must innovate, and our government must administer like never before. Yet decades of politically-motivated attacks discrediting all three institutions, taken to a new level by President Trump, leave the American public in a vulnerable position.

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Trump has consistently vilified the national media. When campaigning, he the media “absolute scum” and “totally dishonest people.” As president, he has news organizations “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” over and over. The examples are endless. Predictably, he has blamed the coronavirus crisis on the media, saying “We were very prepared. The only thing we weren’t prepared for was the media.”

Science has been another Trump target. He has gutted scientific expertise and administrative capacity in the executive branch, most notably failing to fill hundreds of vacancies in the Centers for Disease Control itself and disbanding the National Security Council’s taskforce on pandemics. During the coronavirus crisis, he has routinely disagreed with scientific experts, including, in the AP’s words, his “musing about injecting disinfectants into people .” This follows his earlier public advocacy for hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, also against leading scientists’ advice. Coupled with his flip-flopping on when to lift stay-at-home orders, the president has created confusion and endangered people.

Media Bias Against Conservatives Is Real And Part Of The Reason No One Trusts The News Now

Members of the media were shocked as he was supposedly revealed as incredibly anti-woman presidential candidate, perhaps even the most ever nominated by a major political party in the modern era. He had admitted that he reduced women to objects and the Democrats pounced, seeking to make him lose him the support of women and, in turn, the presidency.

I’m not talking about the media coverage of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and the “Access Hollywood” tape, but his predecessor, Mitt Romney.

His sin? Saying that he had “binders full of women” that he was looking at appointing to key positions were he elected president. Sure, it was an awkward way of stating a fairly innocuous fact about how elected executives begin their transition efforts �� with resumes of candidates for every position under the sun —- well before an election is held. Yet, the media and commentators came for Mitt Romney and they did so with guns blazing, as he was portrayed as an anti-woman extremist… for making a concerted effort to hire women to serve in his administration as governor of Massachusetts.

There Is No Liberal Media Bias In Which News Stories Political Journalists Choose To Cover

1Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.

2University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.

3Brigham Young University-Idaho, Rexburg, ID 83460, USA.

?*Corresponding author. Email: hans.hassellfsu.edu ; jh5akvirginia.edu

?† These authors contributed equally to this work.

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‘it’s Time To End This Forever War’ Biden Says Forces To Leave Afghanistan By 9/11

The enormous national anger generated by those attacks was also channeled by the administration toward the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which was conceived to prevent any recurrence of attacks on such a massive scale. Arguments over that legislation consumed Congress through much of 2002 and became the fodder for campaign ads in that year’s midterms.

The same anger was also directed toward a resolution to use force, if needed, in dealing with security threats from the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That authorization passed Congress with bipartisan majorities in the fall of 2002, driven by administration claims that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction.” It became law weeks before the midterm elections.

Once those elections were over, the Republicans in control of both chambers finally agreed to create an independent commission to seek answers about 9/11. Bush signed the legislation on Nov. 27, 2002.

The beginning was hobbled when the first chairman, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and vice chairman, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, decided not to continue. But a new chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, and vice chairman, former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, filled the breach and performed to generally laudatory reviews.

Long memories

Top House Republican Opposes Bipartisan Commission To Investigate Capitol Riot

But McCarthy replied by opposing Katko’s product, and more than 80% of the other House Republicans did too. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., initially said he was keeping an open mind but then announced that he too was opposed. This makes it highly unlikely that 10 of McConnell’s GOP colleagues will be willing to add their votes to the Democrats’ and defeat a filibuster of the bill.

Republicans have argued that two Senate committees are already looking at the events of Jan. 6, as House panels have done as well. The Justice Department is pursuing cases against hundreds of individuals who were involved. Former President Donald Trump and others have said any commission ought to also be tasked to look at street protests and violence that took place in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd.

But with all that on the table, several Republicans have alluded to their concern about a new commission “dragging on” into 2022, the year of the next midterm elections. “A lot of our members … want to be moving forward,” said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the No. 2 Senate Republican toMcConnell. “Anything that gets us rehashing to 2020 elections is, I think, a day lost.”

Resistance even after 9/11

The Taliban were toppled but bin Laden escaped, and U.S. forces have been engaged there ever since. The troop numbers have declined in recent years, and President Biden has indicated that all combat troops will be out by this year’s anniversary of the 2001 attacks.

Opiniontrump And His Voters Are Drawn Together By A Shared Sense Of Defiance

Americans in general have begun to catch on: 66 percent of Americans believe that the media has a hard time separating fact from opinion and, according to a recent Gallup poll, 62 percent of the country believes that the press is biased one way or the other in their reporting.

So when CNN, NBC News, Fox News, or another outlet break a hard news story, there is a good chance that a large swathe of the public won’t view it as legitimate news.

And politicians, right and left, are taking advantage of this.

The entire ordeal is part of an ever-growing list of examples in which the media seemed to be biased, whether consciously or not, against Republicans.

Before Donald Trump, there was New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who in 2014 accused the media of “dividing us” because they asked him about some protesters who had chanted “NYPD is the KKK” and . He also accused the media of McCarthyism when they dug into the personal life of an aide of his, who reportedly had a relationship with a convicted murderer. The mayor also publicly and privately accused Bloomberg News of being biased against him, since it is owned by his predecessor. However, de Blasio is not terribly popular within his own party, so Democrats in New York did not buy what he was selling.

The Media Has Entered The Republicans Pounce Stage Of Critical Race Theory

Now that polls show a majority of Americans oppose Critical Race Theory, the Democratic Party and their scribes in the legacy media have launched a rearguard action against parents — by casting them as the aggressors. As is true every time the Left misfires or overreaches, the media ignore the offense and focus on the popular backlash in a tactic popularly known as “Republicans pounce.”

Media coverage proves that CRT has entered the “Republicans pounce” stage. Witness the words of one Politico writer, who said on Thursday, “he right is hoping to capitalize on the grassroots angst over critical race theory and excite its base voters in next year’s midterms.” Chris Hayes, who has the unenviable position of competing directly with Tucker Carlson on MSNBC, agreed Thursday night that all the Republican Party’s “rhetorical fire has moved away from the deficit and on to some random, school superintendent in Maine after his district dared to denounce white supremacy after the murder of George Floyd.”

But why are grassroots Americans so filled with “angst”? Because they are intellectually deficient and, of course, racist, according to Vox.com.

“Conservatives have launched a growing disinformation campaign around the academic concept” of CRT. “It’s an attempt to push back against progress,” wrote Vox.com reporter Fabiola Cineas. The problem is that “Republicans … want to ban anti-racist teachings and trainings in classrooms and workplaces across the country.”

Trump Continues To Push Election Falsehoods Here’s Why That Matters

Republican opposition to the commission

Rice was featured in one of the very few congressional commissions ever to receive this level of attention. Most are created and live out their mission with little notice. Indeed, Congress has created nearly 150 commissions of various kinds in just the last 30 years, roughly five a year.

Some have a highly specific purpose, such as a commemoration. Others are more administrative, such as the five-member commission overseeing the disbursement of business loans during the early months of pandemic lockdown in 2020. Others have been wide-ranging and controversial, such as the one created to investigate synthetic opioid trafficking.

In the initial weeks after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, the idea of an independent commission to probe the origins of the attack and the failures that let it happen seemed a no-brainer. It had broad support both in Congress and in public opinion polls. It still enjoys the latter, as about two-thirds of Americans indicate that they think an independent commission is needed. The idea has fared well — particularly when described as being “9/11 Commission style.”

Opiniona Guide For Frustrated Conservatives In The Age Of Trump

Conscious bias or not, such practices do not engender trust in the media amongst conservatives. They only reinforce the belief that the media seeks to defend their ideological allies on the left and persecute those on the right while claiming to be objective.

This idea that the media is made up of unselfconsciously liberal elites who don’t even recognize the biases they have against conservative policies and conservatives in general goes back decades, to when newsrooms were more or less homogenous in nearly every way. At first, conservatives fought back by founding their own magazines; after Watergate and in the midst of the Reagan administration and liberals’ contempt for him, organizations like the Media Research Center began cataloguing the myriad examples of biased coverage, both large and small.

And there was a lot to catalogue, from opinion pages heavily weighted in favor of liberals to reportage and analysis that looks a lot more like the opinion of the writers than unbiased coverage.

Despite Cries Of Censorship Conservatives Dominate Social Media

GOP-friendly voices far outweigh liberals in driving conversations on hot topics leading up to the election, a POLITICO analysis shows.

The Twitter app on a mobile phone | Matt Rourke/AP Photo

10/27/2020 01:38 PM EDT

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Republicans have turned alleged liberal bias in Silicon Valley into a major closing theme of the election cycle, hauling tech CEOs in for virtual grillings on Capitol Hill while President Donald Trump threatens legal punishment for companies that censor his supporters.

But a POLITICO analysis of millions of social media posts shows that conservatives still rule online.

Right-wing social media influencers, conservative media outlets and other GOP supporters dominate online discussions around two of the election’s hottest issues, the Black Lives Matter movement and voter fraud, according to the review of Facebook posts, Instagram feeds, Twitter messages and conversations on two popular message boards. And their lead isn’t close.

As racial protests engulfed the nation after George Floyd’s death, users shared the most-viral right-wing social media content more than 10 times as often as the most popular liberal posts, frequently associating the Black Lives Matter movement with violence and accusing Democrats like Joe Biden of supporting riots.

Politifact Va: No Republicans Didn’t Vote To Defund The Police

Rep. Bobby Scott speaks at a 2015 criminal justice forum.

Speaker: Bobby ScottStatement: “Every Republican in Congress voted to defund the police when they voted against the American Rescue Plan.”Date: July 12Setting: Twitter

In last fall’s campaigns, Republicans thundered often inaccurate charges that Democrats wanted to defund police departments.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., is flipping the script and saying that all congressional Republicans voted to defund police this year when they opposed a $1.9 trillion stimulus plan.

“Every Republican in Congress voted to defund police when they voted against the American Rescue Plan,” Scott tweeted on July 12.

Scott represents Virginia’s 3rd congressional district, stretching from Norfolk and parts of Chesapeake north through Newport News and west through Franklin.

His claim, echoing a Democratic talking point, melts under scrutiny. Here’s why.

The Facts

The term “defunding police” arose after the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Many advocates say it does not mean abolishing police, but rather reallocating some of the money and the duties that have traditionally been handled by police departments.

Scott’s explanation

Barbera sent an NBC article noting that communities in at least 10 congressional districts represented by Republicans who opposed the bill are using some of its relief funds to help their police departments.

Our ruling

We rate Scott’s statement False.

Opinion:no The Media Isnt Fair It Gives Republicans A Pass

The right-wing media, willfully ignoring the press investigations into Tara Reade’s accusations, insist that former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has not been treated similarly to accused conservative men . They have a point, but not the one they were trying to make.

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Let’s start with the big picture: Right-wing groups persistently engage in conduct for which Republicans are not held to account. The latter are allowed to remain silent after instances of conduct with a strong stench of white nationalism, but pay no penalty for their quietude. Right-wing demonstrators at Michigan’s statehouse this week — angrily shouting, not social distancing, misogynistic in their message, some carrying Confederate garb — were not engaged in peaceful protest. This was a mob endangering the health of police officers and others seeking to intimidate democratic government. Some protesters compared Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to Adolf Hitler and displayed Nazi symbols. Newsweek reported:

The media has adopted the approach that a pattern of sexual harassment claims over decades is not relevant because Trump has denied them, yet they want investigated the single assault claim against Biden. Biden responded in an interview and in a lengthy ; the media insists these things have to be investigated further. They do not ask Trump’s campaign why the president does not respond to questions. They do not ask Republicans about Carroll, Zervos or others.

Social Media: Is It Really Biased Against Us Republicans

Wednesday promises to be another stressful day for Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Their chief executives will be grilled by senators about whether social media companies abuse their power.

For Republicans, this is the opportunity they’ve been waiting for.

Two weeks ago, Twitter prevented people posting links to a critical New York Post investigation into Joe Biden.

It then apologised for failing to explain its reasoning before ditching a rule it had used to justify the action.

For many Republicans, this was the final straw – incontrovertible evidence that social media is biased against conservatives.

The accusation is that Silicon Valley is at its core liberal and a bad arbiter of what’s acceptable on its platforms.

In this case, Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz believed Twitter would have acted differently if the story had been about President Donald Trump.

Sobering Report Shows Hardening Attitudes Against Media

NEW YORK — The distrust many Americans feel toward the news media, caught up like much of the nation’s problems in the partisan divide, only seems to be getting worse.

That was the conclusion of a “sobering” study of attitudes toward the press conducted by Knight Foundation and Gallup and released Tuesday.

Nearly half of all Americans describe the news media as “very biased,” the survey found.

“That’s a bad thing for democracy,” said John Sands, director of learning and impact at the Knight Foundation. “Our concern is that when half of Americans have some sort of doubt about the veracity of the news they consume, it’s going to be impossible for our democracy to function.”

The study was conducted before the coronavirus lockdown and nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd.

Eight percent of respondents — the preponderance of them politically conservative — think that news media that they distrust are trying to ruin the country.

– Deal gives Atlanta company control of Anchorage TV news

The study found that 71% of Republicans have a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of the news media, while 22% of Democrats feel the same way. Switch it around, and 54% of Democrats have a very favorable view of the media, and only 13% of Republicans feel the same way.

That divide has been documented before but only seems to be deepening, particularly among conservatives, Sands said.

In The Age Of Trump Media Bias Comes Into The Spotlight

Almost 20 years ago, after my first book, “,” came out, I made a lot of speeches, some of them to conservative organizations. The book was about liberal bias in the mainstream media. I had been a journalist at CBS News for 28 years and, so, it was a behind-the-scenes exposé about how the sausage was made, about how bias made its way into the news.

I said that despite what many conservatives think, there was no conspiracy to slant the news in a liberal direction. I said that there were no secret meetings, no secret handshakes and salutes, that anchors such as CBS’s Dan Rather never went into a room with top lieutenants, locked the door, lowered the blinds, dimmed the lights and said, “OK, how are we going to screw those Republicans today?”

It didn’t work that way, I said. Instead, bias was the result of groupthink. Put too many like-minded liberals in a newsroom and you’re going to get a liberal slant on the news.

Liberal journalists, I said, live in a comfortable liberal bubble and don’t even necessarily believe their views are liberal. Instead, they believe they are moderate, mainstream and mainly reasonable views — unlike, of course, conservative views which, to them, are none of those things.

But what I wrote and spoke about then — mainly about how there was no conspiracy to inject bias into news stories — seems no longer to be true today.

Pandering, it seems, is good for business.

Bias shows itself not only in what’s reported, but also in what’s ignored.

Florida Republicans Move Against Social Media Companies

TALLAHASSEE — Concerned that social media companies were conspiring against conservatives, Florida Republicans sent a measure Thursday to Gov. Ron DeSantis that would punish online platforms that lawmakers assert discriminate against conservative thought.

The governor had urged lawmakers to deliver the legislation to his desk as part of a broader effort to regulate Big Tech companies — in how they collect and use information they harvest from consumers and in how social media platforms treat their users.

Republicans in Florida and elsewhere have accused the companies of censoring conservative thought on social media platforms by removing posts they consider inflammatory or using algorithms to reduce the visibility of posts that go against the grain of mainstream ideas.

With the ubiquity of social media, the sites have become modern-day public squares — where people share in the most trivial of matters but also in ideas and information that often are unvetted.

In recent years, social media companies have acted more aggressively in controlling the information posted on their platforms. In some cases, the companies have moved to delete posts over what they see as questionable veracity or their potential to stoke violence.

DeSantis is a strong ally of the former president, and the Republican governor is supporting hefty financial penalties against social media platforms that suspend the accounts of political candidates.

America Hates The Republicans And They Dont Know Why

@jonathanchait

Americans harbor certain deep-rooted impressions of the two parties, which have held for generations. Democrats are compassionate and generous, but spendthrift, dovish, and indulgent of crime and prone to subsidize poor people who don’t want to work. Republicans are strong on defense and crime, but too friendly to business and the rich. What is striking about the Republican government is how little effort it has made to push against, or even steer around, the unflattering elements of its brand. President Trump and his legislative partners have leaned into every ingrained prejudice the voters hold against them. They have acted as if none of their liabilities even exist.

That is not the approach Democrats have taken in office. Bill Clinton famously fashioned himself as a “New Democrat,” angering his base on crime and welfare and declaring the era of big government over. Barack Obama did not position himself quite so overtly against his party’s brand — which had recovered in part because of Clinton’s success — but he did take care to avoid confirming political stereotypes. Obama frequently invoked the importance of parenting and personal responsibility. He did not slash the defense budget, and took pains to woo Republican support for criminal-justice reform. Obama tried repeatedly to get Republicans to compromise on a deal to reduce the budget deficit. Whatever the merits of these policies, they reflect a grasp of the party’s innate liabilities.

Placing Some News Sources On The Political Spectrum

Here are a few examples of major news sources and their so-called “bias” based on ratings from AllSides and the reported level of trust from partisan audiences from the Pew Research Center survey.

Note that much of these ratings are based on surveys of personal perceptions. Consider that these may be impacted by the hostile media effect, wherein “partisans perceive media coverage as unfairly biased against their side” . A three-decade retrospective on the hostile media effect. Mass Communication and Society, 18, 701-729. ).

The Capitol Siege: The Arrested And Their Stories

It would only be logical for that memory to inform the imagination of any Republican contemplating a similar independent commission to probe what happened on Jan. 6. The commission would likely look at various right-wing groups that were involved, including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, some members of which have already been charged. The commission might also delve into the social media presence and influence of various white supremacists.

Moreover, just as the 9/11 Commission was expected to interview the current and preceding presidents, so might a new commission pursue testimony from Trump and some of his advisers, both official and otherwise, regarding their roles in the protest that wound up chasing members of Congress from both chambers into safe holding rooms underground.

House Minority Leader McCarthy was asked last week whether he would testify if a commission were created and called on him to discuss his conversations with Trump on Jan. 6.

“Sure,” McCarthy replied. “Next question.”

All this may soon be moot. If Senate Democrats are unable to secure 60 votes to overcome an expected filibuster of the House-passed bill, the measure will die and the questions to be asked will fall to existing congressional committees, federal prosecutors and the media. To some degree, all can at least claim to have the same goals and intentions as an independent commission might have.

The difference is the level of acceptance their findings are likely to have with the public.

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americangodstalk · 4 years ago

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Notes on S2E4: The Greatest Story Ever Told

# During the flashback to the Boy/CEO background we pass by three main eras. The Pong era, the Game Boy era and the one with the computer (well, one of the first computers). See my Game Boy theory.

# Bast licks the wounds for them to heal.

# Ibis and Jacquel are prosectors. They save tissues for analysis and do autopsies for the county medical examiner (while also being a funeral parlor snce 1863). They found a “niche” during the Civil War, opening up as a funeral parlor for people of color (though of course they did not identify themselves as people of color). Upon being asked about the name Cairo, he only answers “chicke-egg”.

# Odin is against monogamy.

# To meet Money, “the most influential god in America”, “untouchable asshole but his stocks never fall”, they go to Saint Louis, a “big city with big money”.

# It is mentionned that Anansi and Bilquis know each other “biblically” (aka they had sex).

# New Media mentions to Technical Boy that “we need each other”. New Media says that Media “died”, while Technical Boy opposes that Media didn’t die but simply “changed” into New Media.

# When Mr. World arrives, there are numerous electric disturbances. He is of course pissed off at Tech Boy’s failure, saying that “war is won with information”. Technical Boy mentions that he knows a “guy” that own him, in Silicon Valley, and that can provide them with a “new network”. The guy will of course turn out to be the CEO.

# Apparently, Money was born (or at least it is implied by Wednesday) in 1933, when Roosevelt took the dollar out of the gold standard, so that money couldn’t be exchanged for gold anymore. As a result, money became more than a piece of paper - it became a “story”, a “value”, the “greatest story of all” and thus gave birth to the most powerful god of America.

# Mama-Ji is present in all of the Motel Americas across the United-States. It is mentionned that she and her followers (those that practice hinduism) own half of the motels in America. (Is it true? I’ll need to check). The day Kali slew Raktabija is mentionned - however they imply that Odin was here to with her?

# Of course, there are the Penny Scouts.

# The company of the CEO is Xie Comm. New Media manifests herself through screens, holograms and SMS to taunt Technical Boy. The Xie office has in it numerous white faces - later revealed to be the faces of Technical Boy. “I always thought I’d see you again. You will show me something new?”

Let’s note that Xie is a Chinese surname, meaning “immortal” or “enlightened one”, and that the Xie Comm headquarters are shaped as a symbol of infinity.

# Bast is referred to as Thoth’s sister. Bilquis and Anansi apparently know each other “since infancy” (which is... up to debate). Anansi talks about slavery - designing it as a cult. The gods clearly represent here their worshippers.

# Argus is referred to as “CCTV”. More precisely “a relic, a desiccating, necrotising, geriatric, organic sack of redundancies. CCTV?”. Tech Boy mentions that he creates “coltan-encased microchips”, and that thansk to him people carry “trackers” to give up their “locations, card numbers and facial IDs” (interestingly, this is all the things Mr. World knew in season 1). Tech Boy goes as far as make a Jesus comparison with “I have given of my flesh to my disciples”.

# When asked by Shadow if the Penny Scouts give candy, Wednesday answers that he will take them “a gold bar and nuggets”. These are references to money - a nugget is a slang for a pound coin, and money in general in the UK, and is a nod to the “gold nuggets”, while a gold bar is obviously what it is - and a pun on candy bars. The Penny Scouts keep repeating “Credit or debit?”, which is THE question every foreigner in America is puzzled upon hearing because this way of paying is quite unique to the continent - in France for exemple we don’t have that. Odin identifies himself as “Odin the Allfather”.

# Among the Penny Scouts badges you can see the All-Seeing Eye, the American flag, and the sentence “e pluribus unum”. Shadow reveals that he has no debit and no credit in his file, “no trace” whatsoever, and Money apparently hates those that have neither debit nor credit.

# Bilquis says that Jesus was a “rebel” and a “troublemaker” that died because he angered the men in power and refused to be controlled - and for that he became one of the most popular and worshipped gods. As Bilquis says, “he was onto something” - she visibly identifies herself with him or wants to follow his route.

# At one point, the Book of Thoth is mentionned by the other gods - a legendary book said to contain the secrets of all the Gods.

# One should not forget that the speech of Anansi is actually a trick. While he says true facts, he actually exaggerates and change some numbers so that they are a bit higher than the official ones - again, Anansi is a trickster god known to twist the truth.

# New Media shows to the CEO a “pattern”, and while many people were confused by it - if you look carefully enough, a humanoid shape actually appears in this pattern. It seems what New Media shows the CEO is the future Quantum Boy.

# The “face-hugger” makes a new appearance, this time to “retire” Technical Boy.

# Mr. World is offered a “Payback candy” by the Penny Scouts, but Mr. World answers that to meet Money he has “no need to buy candy” because he “retired a god today”. Which grants Mr. World access to a meeting with Money.

# Mr. World says that money is not “cash and gold” anymore but zeros, number sequences, and banks and accoutns with no physical presence”. Money appears as an old man with trembling hands, and while he says that he loves profit, he refuses emotions, and thus refuses to involve himself in the war.

# Mr. World says that he “prefers to be feared”.

# In the credits, it is quite interesting that the man who is identified as “Money” in the episode is actually identified as the “Bookkeeper”. As for the “Son” aka the “CEO”, two of his “childhood” actors are identified - the one for 1977 and the one for 1987.

# Among the badges, well actually the “scout patches” worn by the Penny Scouts, one can see the Chinese Yuan, the Indian Rupee and the British Sterling Pound.

# An interesting point is that the father of the CEO wanted to teach his son faith in the ingenuity and talent of humanity, by showing you the musical works of Bach. But the son only saw algorithms and patterns in the music, and then used a computer to create something identical if not better (in his mind) - because the CEO has faith in technology over humanity. And this is precisely this displacement of faith that apparently led to the creation of Technical Boy.

# Some think that the Bookkeeper only “put up an act” of being a senile old man, asking for the bill, because they note that he is much more serious when Mr. World and Wednesday sit at his table.

# Mr. Nancy mentions that he did not took the deal of the New Gods because it is a rigged one - in fact he equals it to slavery and to its modern variations (human trafficking, prison industry, racial profiling, etc...)

# Many people interpret the line of Mr. World “retiring a god” as basically him having sacrificed a god in order to obtain the favor of the Bookkeeper, literaly doing a sacrifice so that he wouldn’t have to pay to meet him.

# Interestingly, while Mr. Nancy is against peace and says that peace only reinforce complacency and apathy towards oppression, Bilquis and Mr. Ibis answer that suffering and “social ills” are universal, and that waging a war is definitively not the way to change those, because ultimately everyone is equal in front of death and all could end up killed.

#american gods #season 2 #the greatest story ever told #new gods #old gods #money #mr. nancy #bilquis #mr. ibis #mr. world #technical boy #new media #ceo

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

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In Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.”

The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their patrons’ victory to undo the rights of citizens, and settle scores with their domestic rivals, exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth.

The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America today.

For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.

A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.

Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and send millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?

…

A decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The NBA’s $1.5 billion contract with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their ignorant countrymen. After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.”

Because of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.

…

But if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad, he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.

And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.

For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s. China’s lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes. Lockdowns are not public health measures to reduce the spread of a virus. They are political instruments, which is why Democratic Party officials who put their constituents under repeated lengthy lockdowns, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen immediately now that Trump is safely gone.

That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is irrelevant to America’s version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded. As with Athens’ anti-democratic faction, America’s best and brightest long ago lost its way. At the head of the Thirty Tyrants was Critias, one of Socrates’ best students, a poet and dramatist. He may have helped save Socrates from the regime’s wrath, and yet the philosopher appears to have regretted that his method, to question everything, fed Critias’ sweeping disdain for tradition. Once in power, Critias turned his nihilism on Athens and destroyed the city.

…

The chief publicist of the post-Cold War order was Francis Fukuyama, who in his 1992 book The End of History argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall Western liberal democracy represented the final form of government. What Fukuyama got wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t his assessment of the strength of political forms; rather it was the depth of his philosophical model. He believed that with the end of the nearly half-century-long superpower standoff, the historical dialectic pitting conflicting political models against each other had been resolved. In fact, the dialectic just took another turn.

Just after defeating communism in the Soviet Union, America breathed new life into the communist party that survived. And instead of Western democratic principles transforming the CCP, the American establishment acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy. Tech became the anchor of the U.S.-China relationship, with CCP funding driving Silicon Valley startups, thanks largely to the efforts of Dianne Feinstein, who, after Kissinger, became the second-most influential official driving the U.S.-CCP relationship for the next 20 years.

…

Nearly every major American industry has a stake in China. From Wall Street—Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley— to hospitality. A Marriott Hotel employee was fired when Chinese officials objected to his liking a tweet about Tibet. They all learned to play by CCP rules.

“It’s so pervasive, it’s better to ask who’s not tied into China,” says former Trump administration official Gen. (Ret.) Robert Spalding.

Unsurprisingly, the once-reliably Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce was in the forefront of opposition to Trump’s China policies—against not only proposed tariffs but also his call for American companies to start moving critical supply chains elsewhere, even in the wake of a pandemic. The National Defense Industrial Association recently complained of a law forbidding defense contractors from using certain Chinese technologies. “Just about all contractors doing work with the federal government,” said a spokesman for the trade group, “would have to stop.”

…

Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.

The idea that countries that scorn basic human and democratic rights should not be directly funded by American industry and given privileged access to the fruits of U.S. government-funded research and technology that properly belongs to the American people is hardly a partisan idea—and has, or should have, little to do with Donald Trump. But the historical record will show that the melding of the American and Chinese elites reached its apogee during Trump’s administration, as the president made himself a focal point for the China Class, which had adopted the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle. That’s not to say establishment Republicans are cut out of the pro-China oligarchy—Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s shipbuilder billionaire father-in-law James Chao has benefited greatly from his relationship with the CCP, including college classmate Jiang Zemin. Gifts from the Chao family have catapulted McConnell to only a few slots below Feinstein in the list of wealthiest senators.

Riding the media tsunami of Trump hatred, the China Class cemented its power within state institutions and security bureaucracies that have long been Democratic preserves—and whose salary-class inhabitants were eager not to be labeled as “collaborators” with the president they ostensibly served. Accommodation with even the worst and most threatening aspects of the Chinese communist regime, ongoing since the late 1990s, was put on fast-forward. Talk about how Nike made its sneakers in Chinese slave labor camps was no longer fashionable. News that China was stealing American scientific and military secrets, running large spy rings in Silicon Valley and compromising congressmen like Eric Swalwell, paying large retainers to top Ivy League professors in a well-organized program of intellectual theft, or in any way posed a danger to its own people or to its neighbors, let alone to the American way of life, were muted and dismissed as pro-Trump propaganda.

…

There is a good reason why lockdowns—quarantining those who are not sick—had never been previously employed as a public health measure. The leading members of a city, state, or nation do not imprison its own unless they mean to signal that they are imposing collective punishment on the population at large. It had never been used before as a public health measure because it is a widely recognized instrument of political repression.

…

China had cultivated many friends in the American press, which is why the media relays Chinese government statistics with a straight face—for instance that China, four times the size of the United States, has suffered 1/100th the number of COVID-19 fatalities. But the key fact is this: In legitimizing CCP narratives, the media covers not primarily for China but for the American class that draws its power, wealth, and prestige from China. No, Beijing isn’t the bad guy here—it’s a responsible international stakeholder. In fact, we should follow China’s lead. And by March, with Trump’s initial acquiescence, American officials imposed the same repressive measures on Americans used by dictatorial powers throughout history to silence their own people.

Eventually, the pro-China oligarchy would come to see the full range of benefits the lockdowns afforded. Lockdowns made leading oligarchs richer—$85 billion richer in the case of Bezos alone—while impoverishing Trump’s small-business base. In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy. And not least, lockdowns gave the American establishment a plausible reason to give its chosen candidate the nomination after barely one-third of the delegates had chosen, and then keep him stashed away in his basement for the duration of the Presidential campaign. And yet in a sense, Joe Biden really did represent a return to normalcy in the decadeslong course of U.S.-China relations.

…

What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same rights they do. Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen.

What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.

#china #athens #tablet magazine #lee smith #the thirty tyrants #read the whole thing

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years ago

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Peter Thiel claims AI is "Leninist" and "literally communist" in a sprawling speech for a think tank

Thom Dunn:

On November 13, noted vampire capitalist Peter Thiel gave a speech to donors at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research conservative think-tank on "The End of the Computer Age." Over the course of 40 minutes, he covered a lot of topics—some of which were at least provocative, some of them which sounded like they were ripped straight out of a Gavin Belson speech on Silicon Valley.

There was a, um, interesting reflection on the shortcomings of Margaret Thatcher's regime:

I sort of think of Margaret Thatcher's biggest mistake was she thought that in the late '70s that embracing the EU would be a way to crush the unions in the UK.

An interesting (accidental?) critique of the Electoral College system:

In a democracy if you have sort of majority vote, that's good. If you have a supermajority, that's even better. So if you got 51%, you're probably right. If you get 70%, you're even more right. On the other hand, if you get 99.99% of the voters, you're sort of in North Korea. [laughter]

The "greatest lie" Obama ever told (which is, he notes, not about Iraq or healthcare):

"Just because it's not some name-brand, famous, fancy school, doesn't mean that you're not going to get a great education there." So let's parse that two lies. First off, if it isn't a name-brand, famous, fancy school, you're not going to get a great education. You're just going to get a diploma that's a dunce hat in disguise. If it is a name-brand, famous, fancy school, you probably also won't get an education.

And by the end, he comes to…at least some sort of eyebrow-raising insight into the problems with "scaling" America, and the flaws in that marketing pitch of American Exceptionalism.

What really caught my eye was early in the speech, however, when he presented an argument in favor cryptocurrency by comparing it against the "Sauron"-esque nature of AI:

If we were to tell the two technological stories about scale at this point, one of them is still the sort of crypto revolution which is still going on with Bitcoin and has this sort of this libertarian potential. But I think there is sort of an alternate tech story which is about AI, big data, centralized databases, surveillance, which does not seem libertarian at all. You're sort of going to have the big eye of Sauron watching you at all times, in all places. And I often think that we live in a world where the ideology always has a certain veil on it. So if we say that crypto is libertarian, why can't we say that AI is communist, and at least have the sort of alternate account of scale?

Thiel drops this "AI is communist and crypto is libertarian" in there right after his Thatcher comments and then just kind of moves on, perhaps assuming that his audience would simply accept this claim as fact, or at least a foregone conclusion.

But the speech was followed by a brief Q+A, in which an audience member asked him to expand on this idea. Which is when Thiel explains:

The main AI applications that people seem to talk about are using large data to sort of monitor people, know more about people than they know about themselves […] where you can know enough about people that you know more about them than they know about themselves, and you can sort of enable communism to work, maybe not so much as an economic theory, but at least as a political theory. So it is definitely a Leninist thing. And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something. And then I think there's a commonsense level on which people are creeped out about it and this is why. And we should label it accurately.

Thiel's big critique here does seem to be about the authoritarian use of data and surveillance. Which, okay, cool, I agree, that's a valid concern. I don't know what that has to do a revolutionary vanguard party forming a transitional state in order to establish a classless and leaderless society, but, um, sure. China does technically call itself a government. So I think I get what he's putting down here.

But just so we're clear: this is the guy who helped found Palantir. Like, the big data analytics company that literally ICE to organize its authoritarian tactics. Which is the same Peter Thiel who also founded the Anduril surveillance company, and used his billions to destroy a successful news organization for criticizing him. And he's afraid of AI because of … communism?

At least he's got his Lord of the Rings naming conventions lined up right, I guess.

https://boingboing.net/2019/12/03/peter-thiel-claims-ai-is-len.html

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gumnut-logic · 5 years ago

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V. T. Green (Part 3)

Title: V. T. Green

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Author: Gumnut

1 - 5 Sep 2019

Fandom: Thunderbirds Are Go 2015/ Thunderbirds TOS

Rating: Teen

Summary: “Did you discover this, Brains?” He frowned. There was something familiar about this. Maybe they had discussed it recently.

“Oh, no, this is V. T. Green. The man is brilliant.”

Word count: 3174

Spoilers & warnings: None.

Timeline: Standalone

Author’s note: I has a lurgy. This is being typed as I cough my brain silly. Very annoying. Nutty hates being sick. Sick of being sick. I hope my writing does not suffer because of it (though last time I had a lurgy I wrote Prank War, so you never know what might happen :D )

This is one that I have been meaning to write for some time. I hope you enjoy it :D Many thanks to both @scribbles97 and @vegetacide for all their wonderful help with this.

Disclaimer: Mine? You’ve got to be kidding. Money? Don’t have any, don’t bother.

-o-o-o-

Scott eyed his eldest brother as he slunk into the kitchen. A little pale, the man had finally made it out of his uniform into jeans with his usual red flannel draped over a bare chest. By the way he was moving, Scott could tell he hadn’t taken his painkillers.

A sigh. “I know you hate the pills, Virg, but you can’t tell me you prefer to be in pain.”

“I prefer to be able to think.”

“Pain hampers healing.”

“Yes, Mom.”

Scott’s lips thinned. “Pills or Grandma. Your choice.” Sometimes the big guns were necessary.

“Scott...”

“Hey, if our roles were reversed, what would you do?”

The glare wilted along with his brother’s shoulders. That prompted a grimace and tensed up Scott’s shoulders in turn. Goddamnit, Virg. He stood up from where he was seated at the breakfast bar and striding across to his brother, gently steered the man to a seat at the table. “Sit down and stay put.”

That prompted another glare, but Scott ignored it, darting up the stairs and beyond into the residential levels and Virgil’s room. Sure enough, the bottle sat beside his bed, seal still intact. A grab and a jog back down to the kitchen...

...and Virgil had his head buried in the refrigerator.

He dumped the pills on the bench. “I thought I told you to sit.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Sit down and I will get you some dinner.”

“I can make my own dinner. I can at least do that.”

“Virgil-“

“I’m fine, Scott, just leave it.” A pair of frowning brown eyes glared at him over the fridge door.

Scott mirrored that frown. You want stubborn, just try me.

Virgil must have seen it in his expression, because the glare intensified.

“Sit down, Virgil.”

“Is that an order, Commander.”

“If necessary.”

The butter was yanked out of the refrigerator and thrown onto the counter with a loud clatter. The bread joined it and tumbled as it hit the laminate. A jar followed that would have fallen on the floor and smashed if Scott didn’t reach out and catch it. “What the hell? What’s wrong with you?”

“Just making myself some dinner.”

“Sit down!”

“I am fully capable of making myself dinner!”

“Sit down!”

“Scott-“

“Damn it, Virgil, if you don’t sit down, I will make you sit down.”

That arched an eyebrow. “You could try.”

“Either you sit down and stop being stupid, or I’ll get Grandma in here and you can discuss it with her.”

A plate hit the stone flags and smashed, clinking shards scattering across the floor.

Scott jumped. Virgil stared at him for a solid moment before crouching down and picking up pieces of crockery.

Scott didn’t miss the flinch of pain the movement caused.

For god’s sake. “Virgil-“

“Leave it, Scott, just leave it.”

There was something in his brother’s voice, something hurt.

“V-“

“For Christ’s sake, what do I have to say to you? Just leave me the hell alone!” Broken crockery was shoved into the kitchen bin. Virgil grabbed a broom and swept up the mess one-handed without saying another word. The butter, bread and jar of spread were thrown back into the refrigerator and without a glance back, his brother hit the stairs and left.

Scott stared after him.

The bottle of pills sat alone on the bench.

-o-o-o-

“J-John, have you heard of V. T. Green?”

The astronaut turned around at Brains’ voice, the expected hologram flickering into being. “Good evening, Brains.” A hand reached out and shifted two situations to Resolved. A flick of his wrist and another landed in Not Required. “Who is V. T. Green?”

The engineer sighed. “I thought that at least y-you would know him. The m-man is a b-brilliant engineer.”

“Sounds more like Virgil’s wheelhouse.” He flicked a finger at the tropical low growing in strength just north of Western Australia and flagged it for more regular monitoring.

“Virgil h-hasn’t heard of him either. Wh-Which I find strange. I h-have been following Green’s b-blog for s-some time and I b-believe his w-work could be very useful for International Rescue.”

Now that gave him pause. John couldn’t recall Brains ever saying such a thing about any other scientist...well, except Moffie and that was for a completely different reason. “That’s high praise coming from you.”

“He d-deserves it. Have a look at this polymer.”

A series of equations appeared at John’s elbow. A glance soon became a frown of concentration. “Am I reading this correctly? Self healing?”

“Y-Yes. It w-would be invaluable for the Thunderbirds.”

A pause. “So, you want to contact this guy? Have you spoken to Scott? Kayo?”

The engineer tilted his head to one side. “I h-have attempted to gather some inform-mation, b-but haven’t had much success. I w-was hoping you m-might have b-better luck?”

John turned and eyed his friend. “You want me to run a check on him?” In other words, hack his blog and find out as much as possible.

“So I can g-go to Scott with enough d-detail to reassure him.”

Now that was a point. Scott was notoriously paranoid when it came to IR’s security. As bad, if not worse than Kayo. Brains was right to build a solid case.

“I can do. How much information do you need?”

“W-Whatever you can find.”

“FAB.”

“Thank you, John.”

“Not a problem.”

His hologram blinked out.

-o-o-o-

Scott couldn’t help himself. He followed his brother up the stairs to his room. What the hell was wrong with Virgil? It was so unlike him to get so angry with so little provocation.

Debrief had been nasty. Alan was defiant and angry and hurt. Without Virgil there to balance the scales, things had gotten out of hand quickly, the whole meeting devolving into a shouting match. Even John had started yelling.

Alan had stormed off, Gordon chasing after him.

Scott had been so angry. Virgil’s life had been endangered and all for a battle of wills. Grandma’s hand on his arm and her soft voice had snapped him out of it.

Damn.

He hated it when his brothers were injured. It wasn’t major, Virgil’s injury would heal, but still, all because Alan did something stupid.

He stood outside his brother’s closed door for a full two minutes before he raised his hand to knock.

“Scott? We have a situation.” John’s voice was soft.

He let his arm drop.

He would have to speak to Virgil later.

Apparently.

-o-o-o-

It took him another three hours, part of which involved sending Scott out to pluck yet another climber off the side of a mountain, before John had a chance to focus on the task Brains had requested.

The site itself appeared simple. Admittedly, John was a little distracted at first by its content. Brains was correct. The author definitely was someone to be admired. Admittedly, John’s knowledge of engineering wasn’t as extensive as Brains or Virgil’s but there were definitely some very elegant solutions presented on the site. A glance at the source code, a dig for the originating IP address and John easily found the site’s host in Silicon Valley, California. He launched a data miner and pulled the site logs searching for IPs that had accessed the site for publishing in an attempt to locate the author.

That’s when he hit a snag. According to the logs, each post had been created and posted from a different address. Sure, this was possible with an IP cloak, but it shouldn’t be possible to avoid his hack of that cloak.

He tracked one address through China to Russia and back out again to Spain, of all places, before he lost it at an exchange in Portugal. Another fed through Indonesia, six different servers in Japan, only to jump to a commercial satellite and claim it came from the Moon. John followed six more addresses before he discovered the layered encryption and the redirection code hidden under it.

“Oh, he’s good. Very good.” The logs themselves had been encoded to redirect the very same kind of hack John was attempting.

It took him another half hour to break the code that kept trying to lead him off on a wild goose chase.

And another hour to trace the server path through half the planet and then some - it did actually go via the moon, using some ancient tech not destroyed by the meteor shower that took out Moonbase Alpha.

By the time he finally tracked down the origin of the posts, John was beyond impressed.

When he discovered the identity of V. T. Green, he understood why.

It was so obvious, he should have known.

-o-o-o-

Dear V.T. Green. I represent a good company...

Hey, V.T. I am totally loving your stuff. You should go into business...

Doctor Green. Our university is very interested in gaining your services...

Sir, I need your help...

That last one caught his attention initially, but it devolved into a blatant scam two paragraphs in. It left him depressed.

He let his tablet fall onto his desk and his head into his one working hand. He had no idea what to do about all the requests for his assistance. Six different universities plus three other thought centres had replied, all ever so complimentary of his intellect. One laugh had been the fact that the Denver School of Advanced Technology was one of them. The bonus had been the admirer was a lecturer who had hated his guts.

Part of him wanted to reply and rub his face in it.

The tablet pinged again and Virgil was tempted to chuck the whole thing in the trash.

Message from Dr HH.

Virgil stared at it for a good minute before he inevitably touched the screen to open it.

Dear Doctor Green.

Why did half of them think he was a doctor? He had never claimed to be.

I have written you before, but I do not trust the vagaries of the internet and I feel the need to make sure you receive my request.

Virgil sighed. He was going to have to say something soon. This was unfair to Brains.

The letter went on to reiterate Brains’ suggestions regarding the polymer and reinforce the impression that they would be able to save lives.

Save lives.

It was what he did. And yes, that polymer could do that, as part of the Thunderbirds, but also if he released the rights to the design. Space and underwater habitats sorely needed the tech.

Of course, he had yet to run tests. Nothing practical had been experimented. It could all be a big hype over a big failure.

Another sigh and he closed his eyes. He hadn’t eaten, but he wasn’t hungry any more. His shoulder and arm hated him and his pills were down in the kitchen. To reach them, he would have to navigate the house and hope he didn’t run into any family members. He just didn’t feel like...explaining himself.

Perhaps he could crawl back into bed and find sleep again.

He stood up...and the emergency alarm cut off everything.

His response was reflex and he was out the door before processing another thought. He hit the elevator before he remembered he was off rescues, the car carrying him down to the comms room and dumping him there.

Damn.

But to be honest he really couldn’t not find out what was going on. He had a need to know where his brothers might be sent, no matter how it grated that he couldn’t go with them.

So, with some reluctance, he slunk around the corner into the comms room, forcing a positive gait across to the lounge where he parked himself, spine straight.

Gordon eyed him from across the other side of the circle, an eyebrow arching. Scott rose from behind their father’s desk and jogged down the steps and sat next to Virgil.

Virgil blinked. A flash of blue, a frown and thinned lips greeted him.

Damn. That would have to be fixed sooner rather than later.

Alan was the last to arrive, darting in from the kitchen and sitting beside Gordon. His eyes tracked across Virgil, but didn’t acknowledge him.

Out the corner of his eye, he saw Grandma frown.

“What’s the situation, John?”

“This is a big one. Remember the Grand Sequoia Dam?”

“A little hard to forget.”

“They are reporting fractures in the dam wall and they are claiming it has to do with our hasty repairs last time.”

“What?” Virgil shot to his feet. “I checked and double checked the seal. I even went back and conducted stress testing. There is no way that dam wall could be failing because of our repairs. The nanocrete is stronger than the entire wall itself.”

John stared at him a moment before continuing. “Whatever the cause, they are claiming the wall is failing. An evac order has gone out to the town below, but they are concerned there will not be enough time. They’ve called us, and Virgil in particular, to assist.”

A frown and Virgil was pulling up scans and diagrams of the dam. Their assessment was correct. The wall was failing. A frown. It shouldn’t be. The volume of water currently pressing on it simply didn’t have the energy to create the situation. A flick of his hand and he spun the view. For this to happen there needed to be pressure from this angle with a much higher amplitude.

“Virgil is injured.” It was Grandma who broached the obvious.

“I’m going.”

That sprouted a whole array of glares.

He straightened where he stood. “I need to know what is causing this.”

“You can do that from here.” Of course, Scott would object.

“No, I prefer to be onsite.”

“You’re injured.”

“No kidding. I will ride in Two with Gordon.” He didn’t miss the sudden widening of Gordon’s eyes at that comment. “Nothing energetic.” Scott was still glaring. “There are some things that have to be seen in person.”

Scott’s lips thinned. He was pedantic about injured brothers, as was Virgil, but there was something about the situation, something odd, and it was Virgil’s reputation at stake here. Due to the use of the nanocrete, a proprietary substance unique to IR, he had signed off the safety on the dam, and it was safe.

But not now.

“I’m going.”

Brains, who had been quiet up to this point, rose slowly from where he sat. “I agree with Virgil.”

“Brains...” Grandma was admonishing.

“This shouldn’t b-be happening.” He pointed at the crack in the dam. “The structure is d-designed to w-withstand strain far b-beyond what it is currently under. The n-nanocrete cannot be responsible, yet they are accusing us. Why?”

Scott stared at Brains. “You think this is targeted?”

“It is possible.”

“The Hood?”

“Unknown, but I do think we n-need Virgil onsite for this. He has the civil knowledge n-needed.”

“Why can’t you go?” Alan piped up, still not paying any attention to Virgil.

Brains blinked and frowned at the young astronaut. “Y-you are aware that V-Virgil is the more qualified engineer in this instance?”

“What?”

It was Gordon who rounded on his little brother. “You been living under a rock, bro? Virg is the man when it comes to this stuff. You know that.”

Blue eyes frowned. “I just thought Brains could go since Virgil is injured.”

“I could, b-but Virgil’s knowledge is greater.”

Finally, Alan turned to him, but Virgil no longer had the time. “We need to get moving, that dam is not going to hold much longer.”

Scott shot to his feet. “Thunderbirds are go.”

-o-o-o-

It was odd going out on a rescue in Two, but not flying her. Virgil’s arm was still in a sling and strapped up, curled against his chest. Brains had made sure it was secure after helping him into his uniform. It hurt, but it was necessary.

The co-pilot’s seat had just a slightly different view.

Gordon launched her just as smoothly as Virgil would have. Alan sat quiet behind the both of them. As soon as they were airborne and stable, the young astronaut excused himself, muttering something about seeing to the pods.

The moment he was gone, Gordon didn’t waste any time poking the bear.

“What’s with you and Alan?”

“Nothing.” He really didn’t want to go into it.

The eyebrow arched at him was so similar to what Virgil would have done if their roles had been reversed, he almost smiled.

“Sounds like a pile of horse dung, but I’ll let you go with it.”

Virgil turned and stared at his brother.

Gordon didn’t react. “You know you scared the shit out of him, don’t you?”

“What?”

“He screwed up and his big brother got hurt.” Gordon flicked his gaze between the instruments and Virgil. “Scott reamed him out big time at debrief. You weren’t there and he really let rip.”

“Shit.” It came out under his breath.

“John lassoed him instead, but he didn’t respond as fast as you would have. Alan was kicking himself before that. By the time Scott had finished with him, he was on the verge of never going out on a rescue ever again.”

“He made a mistake. We all make mistakes.”

“He made a dick move, Virg. He didn’t listen to you or Scott and thought he knew better.” A snort. “I should know. Been there, done that, learnt the hard way.” A smirk. “First rule of International Rescue: If Virgil says it is, it is.” The smirk became a grin. “And woe be he who thinks otherwise.”

“Gordon...”

“I’m not kidding.” And the grin vanished, replaced by genuine honesty. “You know what you are talking about. You’re good at what you do.” A glance back at his flight path. “He should have listened to you.”

Virgil stared at his little brother. It took him a moment to gather himself. “Thank you, Gordon.”

The aquanaut shrugged. “Eh, I learnt the hard way, but I learnt. Anyway, you should probably talk to Alan.”

Virgil shifted in his seat and his shoulder complained loudly. He stared down at his feet. “Yeah, I should.”

There was silence in the cockpit for a bit. Virgil was caught up in what he should say to his littlest brother and Gordon quietly eyeing him.

The silence was obviously too much for Gordon. “So, who is this V. T. Green Brains keeps raving about?”

Virgil flinched; the question completely unexpected.

Gordon frowned at him. “What? What do you know about him?”

“Nothing.”

An amber blink. “Bullshit, Virg, you’re looking guilty as. What do you know? Scott said Brains was interested in inviting the guy to the island.”

Virgil’s head shot up and his shoulder screamed at him. Ow.

Gordon’s frown tried to cleave his face in half. “What the hell, Virgil? If you know something, why haven’t you said anything? Brains is going nuts trying to find this...guy.” And Gordon was staring at him in shock. “Oh my god.”

Virgil glared at him. “What?”

“It’s you.”

-o-o-o-

End Part Three

Part Four

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #Virgil Tracy #Scott Tracy #John Tracy #Gordon Tracy #Alan Tracy #brains #Hiram Hackenbacker

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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UNDERSTANDING YOUR USERS IS PART OF WHAT HIGHER-LEVEL LANGUAGES, AND TWO ARE STILL UNIQUE TO LISP

I'm not criticizing Steve and Alexis. Good hackers insist on control. Overloading, for example, have been around 7-10x.1 Hard to say exactly, but wherever it is, but the fear of missing out. I couldn't talk to them. Over time, the default language, embodied in a succession of popular languages, has gradually evolved toward Lisp. There will of course come a point where there is just too much to keep in your head in order to conceive of the program, and so on. A complex macro may have to save many times its own length to be justified.

If you're not threatening, you're probably not doing anything new, except the names and places, in most news about things going wrong. Economically, this is a sign of an underlying lack of resourcefulness. So being cheap is almost interchangeable with iterating rapidly. And when you look at what they're doing on that computer, you'll find the most general truths. There are plenty of other areas that are just as valuable as positive ones. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the people working on them discover a new kind of organization that combined the efforts of individuals without requiring them to be interchangeable. Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe a market as a degenerate case—as what you get by default when organization isn't possible. But this way of keeping them out is gentler and probably also more effective than overt barriers. But don't wait till you've burned through your last round of funding to start approaching them.

It was presumably many thousands of years between when people first started describing things as hot or cold and when someone asked what is heat? The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. And the project starts small because the idea is small at first; he just has some cool hack he wants to try out. Apple's competitors now know better. Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. If you want ideas for startups, but it didn't help Thinking Machines or Xerox. But hackers can't watch themselves at work. As a little piece of debris, the rational thing for you to do is say one word to them, at least.

Curiously, however, the works they produced continued to attract new readers. It's true that a restaurant with mediocre food can sometimes attract customers through gimmicks. How tech-saturated Silicon Valley is where it is.2 Which usually means that you have to declare the type of every variable, and can't tell one programming language from another, and work well together.3 If you think you're 85% of the way into Lisp, they could probably do it. In art, mediums like embroidery and mosaic work well if you know beforehand what you want. And now Wall Street is collectively kicking itself.4 There is actually some data out there about that. Some may even deliberately stall, because they enjoy it. I didn't realize that when we were raising money. Like a parent saying to a child, I bet you can't clean up your whole room in ten minutes, a good manager can sometimes redefine a problem as a more interesting one.

It won't seem so preposterous in 10,000 years. It's not something you work despite.5 In such situations it's helpful to have working democracies and multiple sovereign countries. It always was cool. Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be, because I read about it in the press all the time.6 Getting money from an investor than an employer. I've learned so much from working on it. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a restatement of the first. A better way to get one loaded into your head. We didn't just give canned presentations at trade shows. It wouldn't be a compliment in most organizations to call someone scrappy. Garbage-collection.

So startup culture may not merely be different in the way we do. If that's what's on the other side of the mountain is a nice gradual slope. Bill Gates knows this. Programs composed of expressions. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Sometimes when you return to it. If you're the sort of founders about whom we'd say they can take a nap on when they feel tired, instead of dying. This growth rate is a bit uglier. Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money.

Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and upvote links, so the marginal cost of one random new user approaches zero. If it seems like a daunting task to do philosophy, here's an encouraging thought. And the bigger you are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. It helped us to have Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this. The fourth advantage of ramen profitability is a trick for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they're the ones I have to keep the sense of being very short, and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a company with a valuation any lower. If companies want hackers to be productive, they should look at what they do there than how much they get paid for it. Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to invest two years in something that is industry best practice actually gets you is not the long but mistaken argument, but the most I've ever been able to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of wealth that can be created. For example, the corporate site that says the company makes enterprise content management solutions for business that enable organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total cost of ownership.7 And so while you needed expressions for math to work, and if you get demoralized, don't give up on your dreams.8 Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. One of the standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is show, don't tell.

Notes

The CPU weighed 3150 pounds, and b the second wave extends applications across the web have sucked—A Spam Classification Organization Program. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the war had been with their company for more of the crown, and that modern corporate executives were, we should remember this when he received an invitation to travel aboard the HMS Beagle as a collection itself.

It would have a precise measure of the court. The kind of bug to find out why investors who say no for introductions to other knowledge. Many people have told me they do on the way and run the programs on the software business, and in a way to predict precisely what would our competitors hate most? Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential acquirers.

Plus ca change. Philosophy is like math's ne'er-do-well brother. MSFT, having sold all my shares earlier this year.

Common Lisp for, but I took so long. Digg is notorious for its shares will inevitably be something you need to learn to acknowledge as well as a result a lot better to get kids into better colleges, I mean efforts to manipulate them. The meanings of these people. You can get it, is that the Internet into situations where a great reputation and they're clearly working fast to get the money, but a big change from what it would be a good problem to have been fooled by the government to take a long thread are rarely seen, when Subject foo degenerates to just foo, what that means is we hope visited mostly by people like them—people who need the money.

Spices are also exempt. There are still, has one booked for them.

4%, and made more that year from stock options than any other company has ever been. Unfortunately the constraint probably has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's because of the company will either be a founder; and with that additional constraint, you usually have to pass so slowly for them, and that modern corporate executives were, they'd be proportionately more effective, leaving the area around city hall a bleak wasteland, but the route to that mystery is that the government had little effect on what you call the market.

In technology, so they had that we should work like casual conversation.

A rolling close usually prevents this. We consciously optimize for this essay talks about the other hand, launching something small and use whatever advantages that brings. That makes some rich people move, and mostly in Perl, and the valuation of the most recent version of this desirable company, but I took so long to send them the final whistle, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev guys should be deprived of their time and became the twin centers from which they don't yet have any of the word that means having type II startups won't get you type I. Good and bad luck.

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asphaltapostle · 6 years ago

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What I have long predicted is now coming to pass: Google believes it should assume control.

Out of all the technology companies that have made my knees knock and my voice hoarse and my [Tweets manic](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q="google" %40ficklecrux&src=typd) as a technoheretic in the past several years, Jumbo Google would easily take home the winning trophy for Dystopian of the Millennium. I have been rehearsing an especially dear pet prophecy of mine, unsolicited, to family, friends, and podcast guests since 2011 in which I end up arguing quite convincingly that Google is a dead ringer for the 16th-century Vatican: an inherently self-isolating organization with an absolute monopoly yielding gargantuan levels of essentially passive income from a service which nearly everybody transacts with, but only Google understands (and is therefore assumed to be its only possible provider,) which inevitably develops such a distance from the rest of the populace and their way of life (in tandem with total notoriety and celebrity among them all) not intentionally out of malice, but from the delusion of mythically-bestowed philanthropic duty that is borned of and compounded by this economic and cultural isolation in a perpetual accumulation of power and wealth that radicalizes the monopolizers — the majority already highly predisposed to zeal as they would’ve needed to be in order to find themselves in this singular, universally powerful position over every other class — and leaves their egocentric minds to wander exempt from all criticism save for that of fellow radicalized monopolizers, who together begin to feel more and more comfortable wondering aloud about themselves in increasingly fantastic presumptions: what if all of this was bestowed upon us because we are superior to them? What if it is our divine responsibility as superior beings to take charge and shepherd the common people as our sheep — for they cannot possibly know as well as we what is truly best for them?

You see it, right? And you can feel a very specific flavor of terror that is both awed by the scale of the circumstances created by so few human minds and sincerely amused by the absoluteness of your own inability to alter them in any way. Perhaps you even recognize this taste as one perfected by Christianity’s ancient advertising business, but Google knows so much about you that it’s rumored to’ve been selling user data to the Judeochristian God for some time now at a 10% discount, and so we extrapolate and anticipate, yes?

Of course, it’s admittedly satisfying for me to deliver you to this godfearing place in the most perverse look what I saw first that you didn’t see because you’re just not as bright but lucky for you, I’m so fucking generous with my wisdom sort of thinking around which the entire personas and livelihoods of fringe movement fanatics are built upon, but this is my one thing, okay? I’ve been waiting years for the right time to formally argue this theory in depth, and — thanks to this year’s public spotlight finally pivoting on the giants who’ve been silently swallowing their competition and relentlessly forcing their already ridiculous margins higher and higher in relative obscurity for decades, the time has come, indeed. The common people’s trust in Google had a godawful week.

Don’t Be Evil

On Monday, Gizmodo reported that twelve frustrated Google employees were quitting the company in protest of their work assisting the Department of Defense to “implement machine learning to classify images gathered by drones” for the detail fleeting Project Maven, despite some 4000 employee signatures on a letter addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai requesting (in full) that he “cancel this project immediately,” and “draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology,” citing the infamous “Don’t Be Evil” motto, which Google then proceeded to remove from its code of conduct for the first time in 18 years the day after the New York Times article went to press, on April 5th.

On initial approach to the abstract of this story, from the ass to our thoughts arrives an easy narrative of a Silicon Valley mutiny comprised of twelve brave, conscientious souls who’ve been eaten up inside by their complicity in the filthy deals made by their power-obsessed CEO over scotch and cigars in a dark D.C. study — kept awake for months by the sound of his puffing cackles at satellite images of dead toddlers in a bombed-out street.

Ah ha, we say. That man is no good, and he just wouldn’t listen! They knew they didn’t have a choice… They only did what they had to do…

The reality of internal disagreements at Google, though, manages to be even more theatrical. The sheer volume of correspondence must surely be beyond anything capable of the enduser’s imagination, so let’s phone a friend: my favorite peek into the day-to-days of inter-Google existence is an old blog post by Benjamin Tilly on his first month at the company in which he was compelled almost immediately to describe in great detail how best to “deal with a lot of email in gmail” at peak efficiency using shortcuts and labels. “As you get email, you need to be aggressive about deciding what you need to see, versus what is context specific.”

Now we have a bit better idea of the aggressive emailing that was a sure constant on a normal workday at Google in 2010, so it must’ve been deafening after 8 years of Gmail development as 4000 employees no doubt vented, debated, and decided to organize last month, though without making much headway because the leadership’s response was apparently “complicated by the fact that Google claims it is only providing open-source software to Project Maven,” this new knowledge having significant effect on our mind’s image of Sundar Pichai’s activities in Washington: he is now swapping seats with a frustrated Colin Powell in order to install OpenOffice onto his desktop from a flash drive, and we recall that Google’s Googleplex headquarters resembles nowhere in modern life more than a brand new playground built in a design language borrowing heavily from Spy Kids. And though these Twelve disciples are unnamed for the moment, a few of them could immediately land book deals by going public, and every single one would always have by default not only the badge of “I landed a job at Google,” (which is really to say I have hit Life’s maximum level cap,) but “I worked at Google for a while, but ended up quitting to do something else,” which is guaranteed to make you the most interesting, intellectually superior person present in whatever crowd for the rest of your life. The ultra-cool Sarah Cooper quit Google to become a comedian and even got to talk to Kara Swisher! I won’t pretend to understand big tech’s diminutive bastardization of prestige, but “more than 90 academics” jumping to publish an open letter (adjacent to a huge DONATE: Support the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots button) in which they “write in solidarity with the 3100+ Google employees” who’s terrible boss decided to help some lackeys in the Pentagon set up their email and didn’t text back for a whole hour doesn’t sound 100% sincere. Notably, I don’t know how or why the fuck 90 people would go about collaborating on a single document, but if it really was managed, they definitely used Google Docs… At one point, it was fun to think about the history of the friendly side-scroller-playing garage ghouls and dorm dorks who gave cooky, wacko names to their dot com startups in parody and defiance of the lame-ass surname anagrams on the buildings of their established competitors, but those who’ve stuck around have only done so by becoming expert at SUCKING UP EVERYTHING around them, and it pisses me off every day how worried I am that my species will finally be done in by a company with a name like Yahoo! and be known only to a bunch of adolescent interdimensional silicon blobs 30 million years in the future as that bipedal race who remained dignified until the last 0.01% of their reign on Earth, when in way less than a single generation, they all just went FUCKING INSANE and blew themselves up because they suddenly hated all sense.

“Google” is perhaps the worst of these to have to shout in fear and/or anger in your last moments as it sounds in American English like you’ve startled your subject with a ticklish pinch followed so immediately by an esophagus-busting chokehold that the two events appear simultaneous, and in real English English, it almost always sounds like a parent speaking of a character on a pre-K children’s television programme whom they find quite foul and upsetting, but will manage to refrain from expressing so otherwise because they know that Teletubbies shit is the most quickly forgotten stage of television viewership. It’s fascinating how exclusive the word “Google” is to American English because in everything else it really is complete nonsense, but lets halt all etymological discussions right now because we’ve only now just finished with Monday.

The Soul Ledger

On Thursday, all of my Google experiences, suppositions, and soul-detaching screenshots were usurped when a thoroughly alarming internal company video called The Selfish Ledger was leaked to The Verge, which I watched once then and do not want to watch again for the sake of this piece, but I will. Though the big V has been disappointingly timid for years about editorializing — when tech journalism desperately needs some confident, informed opinion more than ever — Vlad Savov’s accompanying article should be read in its entirety, to which I can add my own terror where he perhaps could not. The production style is technically identical to that of the very popular thinkpiece-esque, motion-graphics-paired-with-obligatory-sharpie illustrated videos which you find playing at max volume on your mom’s iPad from where she’s fallen asleep on the couch at 9PM, but the repeating stock string soundtrack multiplies one’s discomfort as such that we would all end up in the fetal position without remembering the transition were it not for the appearance of trusty old Dank Jenkins, who’s face I thankfully associate heavily enough with his infamous down-and-out Tweet to be a welcome respite in attention before the very scary hypothesis for which it’s been buttering me up, as best summed by Vlad:

> The system would be able to “plug gaps in its knowledge and refine its model of human behavior” — not just your particular behavior or mine, but that of the entire human species. “By thinking of user data as multigenerational,” explains Foster, “it becomes possible for emerging users to benefit from the preceding generation’s behaviors and decisions.” Foster imagines mining the database of human behavior for patterns, “sequencing” it like the human genome, and making “increasingly accurate predictions about decisions and future behaviors.”

The next time the what if they do something scary question comes up in a casual conversation about Google, you’ll have something a lot more substantial than just speculation. Or will you? The Verge reached out for comment and got an awfully convenient response.

> This is a thought-experiment by the Design team from years ago that uses a technique known as ‘speculative design’ to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate.

Wow! Leave it up to grand ole Googe to reveal the ultimate excuse for just about any suggestion or behavior, though it does seem almost deliberately uncomfortable, doesn’t it? No matter — whether or not this video was ever about a project or tangible product development, or simply to explore uncomfortable ideas because it is proof that the company has reached that critical Vatican stage — if you’ll remember — where they now feel comfortable exploring Very Bad, but Very easily made Real Ideas amongst themselves about what would happen if they allowed their system to nudge its users around a different, slightly less optimal route to the bar, let’s say — without their knowledge — in order for the system to collect traffic data for the sake of its own interests? Which would be, technically, in the interest of all Ledger users now and in the future, so why not?

> The ledger could be given a focus, shifting it from a system which not only tracks our behavior, but offers direction towards a desired result.”

This, my dear privacy-obsessed friends, is the real issue with data collection — its power over huge groups by way of their behavior and it is never going to be remedied in any significant way by ad-blockers or VPNs because the EndUser shall always out number you 50 to 1, even decades from now. EndUser does not understand — or, crucially, have any desire to understand anything technical about what leads to the PewDiePie videos playing on his filthy screen. Here’s a great opportunity to escape Silicon Valley’s technolibertarianism and resign your Darwinian empathy in favor of meaningful and truly-effective action: if you want to avoid a future Google Church (or Google Government, more worryingly,) you should invest your time, effort, and knowledge into electing officials more capable of understanding and regulating Big Tech.

Google Government

The internet as it stands is made possible by Google as the goto resource for online advertising. In 2016, “Google held 75.8 percent of the search ad market, bringing in $24.6 billion in revenue from search ads,” according to Recode. By 2019, “that’s expected to grow to $36.62 billion in revenue, or 80.2 percent of the market.” Google’s edge in user behavior and targeted advertising combined with their extensive resources available developers to integrate independent platforms with Google’s software services at various levels makes it very difficult for any advertising-funded individual or organization to compete online without dipping in to the Google universe. YouTube — a Google property since 2006 — has actively invested in and supported a new career path entirely within their own platform that is rapidly becoming popularly aspired-to by young children, while the reality of existence as a full-time YouTuber is far less glamorous than the immediately-visible surface would indicate, and the effort already expended by my generation in its pursuit has already made us insane.

So, what would the internet look like if Google didn’t exist? We know they’ve been working with the government now on various projects, but what if some terrible exposed transgression of theirs suddenly warranted an immediate shutdown and seizure of all Google properties? Well, we know from a post on Quora by Googler Ashish Kedia that even 5 years ago, the sudden absence of Google for “2–3 mins” set the internet into a bit of a panic, reducing overall traffic by 40%. In the time since, we’ve all grown exponentially more dependent on Google properties: billions of people rely on Google Maps for directions and, thousands of companies (including the Pentagon and other government institutions) rely on Gmail and GSuites for intercommunication, file sharing, task management, etc., and more and more academic institutions rely on Chromebook devices running connection-dependent operating systems. It’s not much of a stretch to argue that Google’s sudden disappearance would constitute a Civil Emergency in the United States, which will only become a stronger and more serious incentive for regulatory bodies to look the other way.

Though the tangible results of advertising have been quantified significantly in the past 20 years, one can’t help but wonder after watching YouTube ads for the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class on toy unboxing videos if the companies who spend big bucks on Google advertising understand where their money is going, but they know that if they don’t advertise there, their competitors will. This, of course, is a fundamental practice of a monopoly, and it’s yielded Google so much fucking money that they cannot possibly spend it fast enough, as evidenced by their investments in life extension — so that, perhaps, they will have more time on Earth to figure it out.

When you build a collection of the world’s smartest people in a self-sufficient environment that discourages exploration of other lifestyles and ideas, and you sustain the society with a gargantuan, relatively low-maintenance revenue stream, you create a culture which is not only well-primed for isolationism, but is also extremely inefficient. In fact, with its vast collection of abandoned products and properties, Google must surely be one of the most inefficient companies in history. Thinking back on recent software releases along with its recent entries into the hardware space, Google is also one of the worst competing tech companies. Very little aside from Gmail, Google Photos, Google Maps, and Chrome have found their place or garnered significant usership. Google Play Music is unintuitive and impossible, Google Allo and Google+ are all but forgotten addendums to other services, and Google Search — its core, original function — has been out of control for years, and all of them are designed blandly and excruciatingly tiring to look at.

Google Shun

If this all has stirred nothing more in you than a desire to eliminate Google from your own online life as much as possible, there are alternatives in almost every one of the sphere’s they dominate. As of late, DuckDuckGo has accumulated a fair amount of buzz and coverage as a private, more relevant alternative to Google’s plain old search engine. Though it is clever enough to list us as the first result for “extratone,” I’ve found it simply insufficient as a replacement in my own life because, essentially, it rarely delivers what I’m looking for. By contrast, Dropbox Paper is such an elegant cloud notetaking and word processing software that it makes Google Docs look simply idiotic (and warrants its own review very shortly.) For getting around, know that MapQuest is not only still around — it’s now a very competitive mobile navigation app.

I, myself, have allowed Google as complete of access to my information and behavior as possible because I believe “privacy” is a completely futile endeavor if one wishes to be a part of society, though I do often use alternatives to Google services simply because I fucking hate the way they look. If you want a more complete list of services and software that allow one to shun the Google God entirely, you’ll be forced to seek out less dignified sources like Lifehacker and Reddit and decide if the additional time you’ll spend using most of them to accomplish the same tasks is really worth your digital angst.

If Google were to be more explicit with its users and staff about its aspirations to take over control of our lives, there will be little to do but accept the future they intend to create because they’ve long been too powerful to control. In the meantime, I’d suggest you continue to use whatever software works best for you and refrain from wasting your time fretting on conspiratorial suppositions of what the tech industry may be doing to “invade your privacy,” because there is no longer any such thing, nor will there be ever again. However, I would also urge to you worship your own Gods, whomever they may be, for Google will never be worthy. I, for one, shall only pray to our Mother Sun.

#social #google #future #web #privacy

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is6621 · 6 years ago

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The future of social platforms (fight terrorism) - Chris Han

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/29/silicon-valley-counter-terrorism-facebook-twitter-youtube-googleDisclaimer: I will be writing about a sensitive topic regarding terrorism, so please be aware that these are my opinions and I am not an expert in this area. I am just choosing to share what I’ve found and what I believe should be done in the future. Thank you.

Boom. One body down. Boom. Another one falls. Wednesday night, 12 victims were murdered by a US Marine veteran. We’ve heard the news and sadly, this is just another mass shooting in America. What struck me most about this shooting and made me dedicate my blog post on terrorism and social media is because the shooting struck too close to home. Unfortunately many of the other shootings that have occured recently such as the Pittsburgh shooting in a synagogue did not move me enough to take action. This is a reflection of myself and this society that these shootings appear on our social medias too often that they are becoming white noise. This is not good at all.

We obviously know that in this time of age we get our news through push notifications or whenever we click on Facebook or Twitter in the morning. This is how I found the news about the shooting when a WSJ push notification told me about the horrific tragedy. So we get the news and are informed, but how do we take action to prevent more of this from happening? Luckily, tech companies have started to take more of an action to detect these terror prone posts using AI. There is no way that Youtube, Facebook or Twitter will be able to detect any terrorist tweet if they had a full staff to read through each message to infer any hate crime. AI has luckily been able to detect 98% of flagged posts and has blocked or banned these accounts from the big social platforms. Unfortunately when this happens, the terrorist organization moves to another platform and continues to disseminate more information.

The one issue of social media/the internet is that it has allowed anyone around the world to connect. People from anywhere in the world can tap into their phone and find more information about terrorism and terrorist groups to join. When these tribes form online, they are unstoppable because the internet will always allow these groups to congregate and strengthen. Although technology is able to censor these groups, these groups will be relentless to spread their ideologies and inspire terrorism across borders.

A major problem that these tech companies face is that they are private companies. Social media never intended to be a terrorist watch group, and although AI and counter-terrorist contractors have been hired to detect explicit content, they are not law enforcers. The primarily objective of these tech companies is to make profit at the end of the day, so their focus may not be in fighting terrorism. Facebook has fortunately created a ‘Crisis Response’ page that every user can access to see whether their friends have marked themselves safe from a recent terrorist attack. Although this page has been great to inform those about the incident, it is not an explicit tactic to fight against terrorism.

I believe that these major tech companies need to work closely with the government to detect potential terrorists. Government and private companies can’t work in silos anymore especially in these times because we have seen how powerful tech companies have become. Having the CIA, FBI or NSA working with Facebook, Youtube or Twitter would make my mind safer because I know that the platforms I read through every morning are backed up by the government. Sure, data privacy may be of a concern, but I would want a safer world and not have to worry about going to my favorite bar or worship space and fearing for the end of my life.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/29/silicon-valley-counter-terrorism-facebook-twitter-youtube-google

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nikitamalik/2018/09/20/the-fight-against-terrorism-online-heres-the-verdict/#153bc2624dc5

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/cities-crime-data-agile-security-robert-muggah/

https://www.channelfutures.com/security/technology-isn-t-enough-when-responding-crisis

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-tech-companies-dont-see-their-biggest-problems-coming/

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/sep/13/social-media-firms-could-face-huge-fines-over-terrorist-content

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atthevogue · 6 years ago

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“Tony de Peltrie” (1985)

The basics: Wikipedia

Opened: A landmark piece of computer animation, the Canadian short was part of the 19th Annual Tournee of Animation anthology that showed at the Vogue Theater in March and April of 1986.

Also on the bill: At least one Saturday in April, it was programmed in the 9:00 slot after Chris Marker’s Akira Kurosawa documentary A.K. and Woody Allen’s Sleeper, and before a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead, which sounds to me like a very good eight-hour day at the movies. Otherwise, you could have had a less perfect day seeing it play after Haskell Wexler’s forgotten Nicaragua war movie Latino and the equally forgotten Gene Hackman/Ann-Margaret romantic drama Twice in a Lifetime.

What did the paper say? ★★★1/2 from the Courier-Journal film critic Dudley Saunders. Saunders described the Tournee as “a specialized event that shows signs of moving into the movie mainstream,” correctly presaging the renaissance in feature-length animation in the 1990s generally and Pixar specifically, whose Luxo, Jr. short was released that same year. Of Tony, Saunders singles it out as “one of the most technologically advanced,” and that it featured “some delightful music from Marie Bastien.” He then throws his hands up: "Computers were used in this Canadian entry. Don’t ask how.” Saunders was long-time film critic for the C-J’s afternoon counterpart, the Louisville Times, throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. In the late 1980s, he would co-found Louisville’s free alternative weekly, the Louisville Eccentric Observer.

What was I doing? I was six and hypothetically could have seen an unrated animation festival, though I'd have been a little bit too young to have fully appreciated it. Although, who knows, I’m sure I was watching four hours of cartoons a day at the time, so maybe my taste was really catholic.

How do I see it in 2018? It’s on YouTube.

youtube

A four-hour-a-day diet of cartoons was probably on the lower end for most of my peers. I grew up during what I believe is commonly known as the Garbage Age of Animation, which you can trace roughly from The Aristocrats in 1970 to The Little Mermaid (or The Simpsons) in 1989. The quantity of animation was high, and the quality was low. Those twenty years were a wasteland for Disney, and even though I have fond memories of a lot of those movies, like The Black Cauldron, they’re a pretty bleak bunch compared to what was sitting in those legendary Disney vaults, waiting patiently to be released on home video.

Other than low-quality Disney releases, the 1980s were highlighted mostly by the post-’70s crap was being churned out of the Hanna-Barbera laboratories. Either that, or nutrition-free Saturday morning toy commercials like The Smurfs and G.I. Joe. Of course there’s also Don Bluth, whose work is kind of brilliant, but whose odd feature-length movies seem very out-of-step with the times. Don Bluth movies seem now like baroque Disney alternatives for weird, dispossessed kids who didn’t yet realize they were weird and dispossessed. (Something like The Secret of NIMH is like Jodorowsky compared to, say, 101 Dalmatians.) Most of the bright spots of those years were produced under the patronage of the saint of 1980s suburbia, Steven Spielberg. An American Tale or Tiny Toon Adventures aren’t regarded today as auteurist masterpieces of animation (or are they?), but they were really smart and imaginative if you were nine years old. Still, the idea that cartoons might be sophisticated enough to be enjoyed by non-stoned adults was probably very alien concept in 1985.

In the midst of all of this, though, scattered throughout the world were a bunch of programmers and animators working out the next regime. Within ten years of Tony de Peltrie, Pixar’s Toy Story would be the first feature-length CGI animated movie, and within another ten years, traditional hand-drawn animation, at least for blockbuster commercial purposes, would be effectively dead. That went for both kids and their parents. Animation, like comic books, would take on a new sophistication and levels of respectability in the coming decades.

I love it when you read an old newspaper review with the benefit of hindsight, and find that the critic has gotten it right in predicting how things may play out in years to come. That’s why I was excited to read in Saunders’ review of the Tournee that he suspected animation as an artform was showing “signs of moving into the movie mainstream.” His sense of confusion (or wonder, or some combination) at the computer-generated aspects is charming in retrospect, too.

Tony de Peltrie is a landmark in computer-generated animation, but its lineage doesn’t really travel through the Pixar line at all (even though John Lassetter himself served on the award panel for the film festival where it was first shown, and predicted it’d be regarded as a landmark piece of animation). The children of the 1970s and ‘80s grew up to revere the golden era of Pixar movies as adults, and the general consensus is that not only are they great technical accomplishments, but works of great emotional resonance.

As much of an outlier as it makes me: I just don’t know. I haven’t really thought so. I think most Pixar movies are really, really sappy in the most obvious way possible. The oldest ones look to me as creaky as all those rotoscoped Ralph Bakshi cartoons of the ‘70s. Which is fine, technology is one thing -- most silent movies look pretty creaky, too -- but the underlying of armature of refined Disney sap that supports the whole structure strains to the point of collapse after a time or two.

Film critic Emily Yoshida said it best on Twitter: she noted, when Incredibles 2 came out, she’d recently re-watched the first Incredibles and was shocked at how crude it looked. "The technoligization of animation will not do individual works favors over time,” she wrote. “The wet hair effect in INCREDIBLES, which I remember everyone being so excited about, felt like holding a first generation iPod. Which is how these movies have trained people to watch them on a visual level...as technology.” There’s something here that I think Yoshida is alluding to about Pixar movies that is very Silicon Valley-ish in the way they’re consumed, almost as status symbols, or as luxury products. This is true nearly across all sectors of the tech industry now, but it’s particularly evident with animation.

One of my favorite movie events of the year is when the Landmark theaters here in Minneapolis play the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at the beginning of the year. Every year, it’s the same: you’ll get a collection of fascinating experiments from all over the world, some digitally rendered, some hand-drawn. They don’t always work, and some of them are really bad, but there’s always such a breadth of styles, emotions and narratives that I’m always engaged and delighted. They remind you that, in animation, you can do anything you want. You can go anywhere, try everything, show anything a person can imagine. Seeing the animated shorts every year, more than anything else, gets me so excited about what movies can be.

And then, in the middle of the program, there’s invariably some big gooey, sentimental mush from Pixar. Not all of them are bad, and some are quite nicely done, but for the most part, it’s cute anthropomorphized animals or objects or kids placed in cute, emotionally manipulative situations. I usually go refill my Diet Coke or take a bathroom break during the Pixar sequence.

Yeah, yeah, I know. What kind of monster hates Pixar?

I don’t hate Pixar, and I like most of the pre-Cars 2 features just fine. The best parts of Toy Story and Up and Wall-E are as good as people say they are. But when you take the reputation that Pixar has had for innovation and developing exciting new filmmaking technology in the past 25 years, and compare it to the reality, there’s an enormous gap. And it drives me nuts, because if this is supposed to be the best American animation has to offer in terms of innovation and emotional engagement, it's not very inspiring. Especially placed alongside the sorts of animated shorts that come out of independent studios elsewhere in the U.S., or Japan, or France, or Canada.

Which brings us to Tony de Peltrie, created in Montreal by four French-Canadian animators, and supported in part by the National Film Board of Canada, who would continue to nurture and support animation projects in Canada through the twenty-first century. A huge part of the enjoyment -- and for me, there was an enormous amount of enjoyment in watching Tony de Peltrie -- is seeing this entirely new way of telling stories and conveying images appear in front of you for the first time. Maybe it’s because I have clear memories of a world without contemporary CGI, but I still find this enormous sense of wonder in what’s happening as Tony is onscreen. I still remember very clearly seeing the early landmarks of computer-aided graphics, and being almost overwhelmed with a sense of awe -- Tron, Star Trek IV, Jurassic Park. Tony feels a bit like that, even after so many superior technical accomplishments that followed.

Tony de Peltrie doesn’t have much of a plot. A washed-up French-Canadian entertainer recounts his past glories as he sits at the piano and plays, and then slowly dissolves over a few minutes into an amorphous, impressionistic void. (Part of the joke, I think, is using such cutting-edge technology to tell the story of a white leather shoe-clad artist whose work has become very unfashionable by the 1980s.) It’s really just a monologue. The content could be conveyed using a live actor, or traditional hand-drawn animation.

But Tony looks so odd, just sitting on the edge of the Uncanny Valley, dangling those white leather shoes into the void. Part of the appeal is that, while Tony’s monologue is so human and delivered in such an off-the-cuff way, you’re appreciating the challenge of having the technology match the humanity. Tony’s chin and eyes and fingers are exaggerated, like a caricature, but there’s such a sense of warmth underneath the chilliness of the computer-rendered surfaces. Though it’s wistful and charming, you wouldn’t necessarily call it a landmark in storytelling -- again, it’s just a monologue, and not an unfamiliar one -- but it is a technological landmark in showing that the computer animation could be used to humane ends. It’d be just as easy to make Tony fly through space or kill robots or whatever else. But instead, you get an old, well-worn story that slowly eases out of the ordinary into the surreal, and happens so gradually you lose yourself in a sort of trance.

As Yoshida wrote, technoligization of animation doesn’t do individual works favors over time. To that end, something like Tony can’t be de-coupled from its impressive but outdated graphics. These landmarks tend to be more admired than watched -- to the extent that it’s remembered at all, it’s as a piece of technology, and not as a piece of craft or storytelling.

Still, Tony is the ancestor of every badly rendered straight-to-Netflix animated talking-animals feature cluttering up your queue, but he’s also the ancestor of any experiment that tries to apply computer-generated imagery to ways of storytelling. In that sense, he has as much in common with Emily in World of Tomorrow as he does with Boss Baby, a common ancestor to any computer-generated human-like figure with a story. When Tony dissolves into silver fragments at the end of the short, it’s as if those pieces flew out into the world, through the copper wires that connect the world’s animation studios and personal computers, and are now present everywhere. He’s like a ghost that haunts the present. I feel that watching it now, and I imagine audiences sitting at the Vogue in 1986 might have felt a stirring of something similar.

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Why Is The Media Against Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-is-the-media-against-republicans/

Why Is The Media Against Republicans

Mcconnell And Co Are Playing As Dirty A Game As Possible In Their Quest To Fill Ginsburgs Seat Before The Election But You Wont Find That Story In Most News Coverage

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