#karpf

[thatstormygeek]

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

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

[charliejaneanders]

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

Silicon Valley runs on Futurity

[darshanan-blog]

The Thanksgiving Play: Review

The Thanksgiving Play running at @citylights tackles many hot button issues around culture, #diversityandinclusion and more.

The Thanksgiving Play Review  The Thanksgiving Play is currently playing in the Bay Area at City Lights Theater in San Jose. Written by Lariss FastHorse, it is a satirical play centered around attempts of four stage artists played by Sarah Dove, Keenan Flagg, Caitlin Gjerdrum, and Bryan Moriarty, to create, write and produce a play. These artists are attempting to create a perfect play that…

[nextwavefutures]

The long boom that wasn’t

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

[1hundred1hundred30]

18. Book - How To Age

Author - Anne Karpf Year - 2015 Rating - 8/10

What it is.

This books invites the reader to change the narrative around ageing - a concept that is often seen as a burden to society and the worst thing that can happen to people. Karpf instead offers us to see ageing as a time of growth.

What rates it.

The book turns out biggest fear, into our biggest hope; to age is a privilege because we get to grow, and we get to build on our experiences so that each one is better than the one before it. To frame ageing like this is the antithesis to our ageist society.

[azspot]

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

Dave Karpf

[benkaden]

Ansichtskarte

Aue Altmarkt

Reichenbach (Vogtl): BILD UND HEIMAT REICHENBACH (VOGTL) (III/26/13 A1/723/83 300723 01 14 0506)

Foto: Karpf, Oelsnitz (Erzgeb.)

1983

[filmcourage]

I've Made Documentaries For 20 Years... Here's Why I Had To Make A Narrative Movie - Rory Karpf

Watch the video interview on Youtube here.

[readingsquotes]

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

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

Dave Karpf

Dec 14, 2023

[thatstormygeek]

So for the next couple months, we are essentially Schrödinger’s Electorate. There is no uncertainty about Trump’s ambitions....But there is real uncertainty about his capacity to execute.

We won’t know until at least January just how dark things are about to get. There is a version of Trump’s second term where he talks a lot about mass deportation, but actually deports comparatively few people. He gestures at massive tariffs, but mostly as a negotiating tactic. The most dangerous parts of Project 2025 languish because they require more attention to detail than he cares to give. (Plus they would be unpopular. And Trump likes to feel popular.) This would be a Trump II that kind of resembles Trump I, when he talked a whole lot about “building the wall,” but lacked the will and skill to actually put the plan into practice. This is not a good future, mind you. But it’s the best possible of all the bad futures. Its one where we suffer through several years of mid-level corruption and a ceaseless barrage of Trump intrigue and incompetence. It’s a future that still yields a couple hundred more Trump judges with lifetime appointments to the federal bench, ensuring that no future administration can accomplish its goals. It’s also a future that sets us back at least four years on climate commitments, all while handing the plutocrats more money and power that they will ruthlessly work to defend. It’s, y’know, still really bad. But the other version of Trump II is the one where he deputizes and mobilizes a deportation force that removes tens of millions of people from their homes. Some will be sent back to their home countries. But most will be rounded up and sent to makeshift camps. And that’s a future where he also uses Schedule F to replace all federal workers with Trump ideologues, reducing the federal government to a cutout front for the Trump organization. It’s one where he shuts down all progressive organizations under the cover of fighting “extremism,” rendering the Democratic Party network incapable of competing in future in elections. One where his political opponents go into hiding, and the military is deployed against protestors, and press critics quickly learn that their constitutional protections are not self-enforcing. This would be much, much worse.

I’ve heard a cold-comfort, rally-the-troops message in some progressive circles: “we’ve been here before. We know how to mobilize against him!” I hate to be a downer, but… no. If your strategic plan for Trump II relies on a repeat of the conditions of Trump I, that is a very bad strategic plan. When Donald Trump assumed the Presidency in 2017, we had (1) a mainstream media that was eager to play a watchdog role, (2) a Republican Party that had not been entirely cleansed of Trump critics, (3) a judicial branch with zero Trump appointees, and (4) Trump and his team lacking even the vaguest sense of how to run the executive branch. We had, in other words, a huge attack surface. ... It’s also going to be harder to tie him up in the courts than it was in the first term. Trump appointed 234 federal judges, including three Supreme Court Justices. These Trump judges have shown no deference to precedent. Many are naked partisans, with no incentive to hide it. (Hell, a Trump judge just struck down Biden’s overtime pay Executive Order yesterday.) The Supreme Court has also gotten very comfortable using its shadow docket to speed up and slow down cases to Trump’s benefit. ... Here’s a rough outline of what I think might work. The basic assignment is simple: run out the clock. There are 102 weeks until the 2026 midterm election. There are 206 weeks until the 2028 Presidential. That’s a lot of time to be playing prevent defense against an opponent who controls all the structural power levers at the federal level. This will hardly be easy. But Donald Trump is not some strategic genius, enacting a meticulously-crafted long-term plan. He has grown older, but no wiser. He is as likely to focus on deporting 20 million people as he is to get into a weeklong Twitter spat with Mark Cuban. He is a ridiculous person, and tremendously vulnerable to ridicule. His administration will be staffed by devoted ideologues, not skilled operators. Rudy Giuliani was a devoted Trump supporter. So was John Eastman. Both were comically inept, and are now disbarred as a result. The benchwarmers suiting up now that they are off the playing field have no great excess of skill.

[moviesandmania]

GARGOYLES (1972) Reviews and free to watch online

Gargoyles is a 1972 American made-for-television supernatural horror film directed by Bill L. Norton from a screenplay written by Stephen and Elinor Karpf (Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell). The movie stars Cornel Wilde, Jennifer Salt, Grayson Hall and Bernie Casey. The film is, perhaps, most notable for being the first showcase for the talents of makeup and special effects guru, Stan Winston…

[barrapontoquotes]

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

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

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

Dave Karpf in On technological optimism and technological pragmatism

[thatwritererinoriordan]

"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail. "There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail."

[nextwavefutures]

Looking for the money in the AI business

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

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

[bluefly]

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

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

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