#technocrat garbage

[handkinkbis]

REDDIT CEO STEVE HUFFMAN IS A HYPOCRITICAL CUNT

At least I can say it here without getting banned. 💁‍♂️💁‍♀️

STEVE HUFFMAN BANNED THE LUIGI SUBREDDIT IN NO TIME BUT WON'T BAN MISOGYNISTIC SUBREDDITS OR THE PEDOPHILE HIDING SPOTS ON REDDIT, STEVE HUFFMAN IS A BIGOTED PEDOPHILIC PIECE OF SHIT.

CEO's of social media companies are looking to become to leaders of a new world order where they are the royalty and us plebs will accept what little we get.

[ap-trash-compactor]

Russian interference existed in 2016 and 2020. The country was racist and exist in 2016 and 2020. The left flank was unreliable and third party candidates ran in 2016 and 2020.

Biden’s career and his professional style genuinely represented a political coalition that reflects where slightly more than half the country actually is.

The Dem party leadership, elite donors (cough Clooney cough), and twitterati live in a shared delusion, and their passionate resistance to the politics that made Biden a fixture in the senate and a victor in 2020 is what fucked the country over this time around.

“The nation is bad because teamsters and white people and men especially young men and old people all have Problems that they need to Fix and they need to Be Better and do what we want in the way we want with the words we want” is a losing campaign message, but watch Twitter and the DNC triple down on it.

The loss last night was a pure reversal of Biden’s gains from 2020. Which doesn’t mean the country, which is the same racist and sexist and generally conservative place it was in 2020, is just made purely of deplorable people and should be thrown wholesale in the garbage. It means that a winning coalition includes a lot of people the party decided to kick in the nards this time around. And unless the party learns from that, unless the party takes seriously the business of governing with all those people instead of having a technocrat’s tantrum about how the country isn’t where it ~should~ be, the party is not going to be able to govern.

[envcurevalaypatel]

Organic Waste Composter: Maximize Your Green Efforts

An Organic Waste Composter is a device for one of the greenest ways of disposing waste, organic waste by converting it into compost. This is for homes, offices and factories that want to reduce carbon footprint and practice waste friendly disposal. 

Applications of Organic Waste Composter: 

Home Composting: For families who want to recycle kitchen scraps and garden waste at home by using an organic waste converter machine for home use. 

Gardening and Landscaping: Supplies top grade compost to customers who need supplies for quad gardening, ground making or farming, to improve soil quality. 

Commercial & Industrial Use: Establishments like restaurants, hotels and factories can handle large quantity of organic waste by converting it into compost to save cost of disposal. 

Schools & Institutions: Composting is perfect for sustainability education of students in schools and colleges. 

Municipal Waste Management: Using large scale composters can help cities and towns to manage organic waste efficiently and reduce the pressure on landfilling. 

Features of Organic Waste Composter:  

Fast Composting: Organic waste composter can convert garbage into compost in a few days, faster than traditional methods. 

Compact Size: Most composters, especially home organic waste recycling units, are compact in size so it can be used at home. 

Odor Control: More advanced composting machines have inbuilt odor absorbing filters and mechanisms to prevent foul smelling odors during composting. 

Energy Efficient: Current organic waste composting systems are designed to use less energy and maximize compost output for both energy and cost efficiency. 

Eco-Friendly: These composters reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote environmental well-being by reducing the amount of organic waste sent to landfills. 

Automated: Many composting machines have automated functions of temperature control, mixing and air control so composting is made easy. 

Benefits of Organic Waste Composter: 

Reduce Waste: Reduces biodegradable waste sent to landfills and contributes to a healthier environment. 

Produces Nutrient-Rich Compost: Compost is highly nutritious for soil enrichment and plant growth. 

Sustainable: Reduces dependence on synthetic fertilizers, promotes biological soil fertility. 

Cost Saving: Save by reducing waste disposal cost and get free organic manure for gardening and farming. 

Conclusion 

The Organic Waste Composter is for anyone – families and businesses who want to go green in waste management. The machine or device you choose like industrial organic composting machine or organic waste converter machine is useful for easy waste management. Use organic composting for many reasons; it’s good for the environment, makes agriculture sustainable and reduces carbon footprint. 

For further details, or to learn more about the ideal solutions for composting organic waste, reach out to ENVcure Technocrat LLP now and see how we can help you with our revolutionary Organic Waste Composters in achieving your sustainability ambitions. 

[commercialroplants]

Top Commercial RO Plant Manufacturer In Faridabad

Water resources are not divided/distributed sufficiently fairly in the modern commercial & industrial world. Most of the world's water is found in its oceans, with only 30% of it on land. More than or over approx. 30% of the 30% of water on land is encased in glaciers & icebergs. As such, lakes, streams, & the ground contain less than a percent of the water that is accessible to humans.

Polluting Resources of Water

A definite sizable section/portion of the populace or residence utilizes surface as well as groundwater basins for their raw water (H2O) needs. Since groundwater poisoning is frequently irreversible, it is challenging to restore the original water quality once it has been tainted. Direct contamination from the lateral movement of contaminated water is the main cause of groundwater pollution.

Groundwater can reach its contamination by leachates from garbage/trash dumped or disposed in abandoned mines/quarries, gravel pits, & other locations. If the contaminated water isn't cleaned up over time, the utilizer's/user's health will suffer. Commercial RO Plant is the best commercial ro plant manufacturer in faridabad at best affordable price.

The water in cities like in the state of Haryana, i.e., in Faridabad, which is proposed to be a good location for businesses & industries, has gotten tainted over time.

Employing/Utilizing commercial Reverse Osmosis (RO) plants to treat water

A commercial Reverse Osmosis (RO) plant is a technique/method of purifying & clarifying water that supports & helps/aids in separating harmful dangerous materials & dissolved segregated impurities to leave behind or create only pure water. This facility greatly contributes to the production of clean drinking water & lowers the danger of water-borne illnesses & disorders.

It utilizes membranes for water treatment to purify & make the water safer to consume or utilize in other applications. Self-employment & firm-investment are also permitted under this arrangement.

One of the top manufacturers of commercial RO plants in India, Netsol Water, is actively involved in providing a wide spectrum/range of these facilities in Faridabad. And made employing & utilizing premium high-quality materials & cutting-edge trending technology, directly or straightforwardly supervised by skilled professionals/technocrats, & is provided/offered at the most competitive pricing.

Commercial RO Plant Application/Utilization Faridabad

Businesses from a variety of industries, including ice manufacturers, food processors, farms, chicken farms, schools, colleges, shopping centers, & so on, treat their water with our produced Commercial RO Plants. These plants filter out excess pollutants that might harm our ecosystem, machinery, & aquatic life.

Why should you choose Netsol Water for your Commercial RO Plant installation, mounting, maintenance, & repairs?

You may rely on us to assist you in purchasing a commercial RO plant & to provide high-quality maintenance & repairs for your existing one.

With over a decade of experience, we have built a solid base of devoted & content customers. This has only been possible because to the expertise, experience, & dedication of our team of service specialists, who consistently attain the greatest level of client satisfaction. Our technicians as well as appointed professionals can simply & easily handle any RO model/brand because they have vast experience operating a wide variety of Commercial RO Plant apparatuses/systems.

The Indian WQA (Water Quality Association) has recognized Netsol Water as a business commerce that has procure ISO accreditation or certification. We are renowned for not only offering outstanding service but also for charging fair prices for our offerings.

As the leading producer of commercial Reverse Osmosis plants in, Uttar Pradesh, we should be your first choice for any installation or services related to commercial ROs in Faridabad. We guarantee that once you utilize our service, you won't think about utilizing anyone else.

[nielsbrabants]

ending stoner lifestyle (excerpt from my novella SLUTMANIA)

The lonely stoner seems to free his mind at night but lately I’m just having panic attacks. Wednesday, already stoned and with one more joint to conquer the night, I flush away my stash. The flushing does not work, this is a lie of the entertainment industry, I have to reach my hand down our shared toilet and fish the floating weed out.

Thursday with Seán sitting at his kitchen table, while booking our weekend trip, I get anxious and we order five grams which we split. I do not sleep at all, smoke frantically, my heart beating like a techno track. 

Friday afternoon I rid myself of the weed, my American Spirit tobacco, brown rolling papers and sleek gold tinted grinder by throwing them in a garbage bag and disposing of this downstairs in the container. I find myself on my knees asking God to give me the strength to kick my habit which is serving me in no way anymore. ‘Rid me of this addiction,’ I say over and over again, thinking labeling it as an addiction, permanently shifting the frame of my perception, is an important step towards cleanliness. I download an app called ‘Quit Weed’ which shows me how long the manifold of withdrawal symptoms will last. Basically I need to get through the first week. No one tells you how unchill weed actually is. In the evening I resubscribe to Netflix, wanting a streamlined entertainment experience to distract me from the angst and physical discomfort. 

Oh how hard it is not to go and knock on Miss Iantha’s door and beg for some hash, but I keep on telling myself, twisting and turning on my soaked in cold sweat mattress, I just have to get through this one night. 

At 3 am, aggravated and awake, I open my laptop and end up having a Spotify spiral of recent music. It’s all dark, with techno undertones and lyrics which seem to be written by the algorithm, but the production is impeccable, reflective of our times and I feel as if I am reconnecting somehow. I text some of the songs to Santos, saying, omg I thought no bangers came out in 2021 but I was wronggggg.

The next day, having slept zero hours, on the bus to Poznań, I show Seán the music video of a recent Berlin techno track with lyrics about cum and ego. 

Withdrawls and snow in Poland. I keep thinking ‘what if I die during this weekend,’ then realizing what a ridiculous notion this is. The first evening we go eat pierogi which is being hand made by some Polish ladies in the tiniest restaurant. Feasting on this freshly prepared three euro quality meal, I have to think of the Shock Doctrine and how these people’s economy was raped beyond repair by Harvard and Chicago school Clinton technocrats in the nineties, feeling some vague sense of guilt.

At night, in our shared room, after finally drifting off, I am haunted by extremely vivid nightmares. In one, a freakish figure, wearing a leather trench coat and with a black plastic dog’s head, comes to steal my younger sisters, because I read too much about deep state politics on the internet. In a second one I aggressively spit in my team lead’s face, from up close and I can smell his cheap cologne. Relieved when the alarm goes off. My naked body low key convulsing on the white tiled bathroom floor of the Mercure hotel as I can throw up nothing but vial, embracing the toilet seat with both arms, before breakfast on this snowy Sunday morning, while Seán is doing yoga stretches on the bed. At least I feel as if in a Tom Ford movie. During mass, on my knees in the Neo-Baroque church I cry three times, thank the Lord for getting me this far and receive communion while reflecting on not being baptized.

So yeah, Poland was weird, dreamlike, feverish and strangely transformative. Sunday night I finally sleep and my dreams are less disheveled and Monday morning I feel like a whole new person.

Monday after work, in the East Side Mall, which is on a walking distance from my flat, I surrender to retail therapy. In Bershka and h&m I buy three pair of pants, a shirt, a beige turtleneck, and a pair of knockoff designer boots. It amazes me that each item costs only twenty five euros and I think of the Bangladeshi sweatshop children and in my room I observe myself in the mirror looking fine as hell. Giving up all my principles and being lulled into compliant capitalist bliss actually feels amazing and I cannot understand how I have been denying myself these pleasures for years and no wonder I was feeling so empty and depressed. In the supermarket I buy eggs and bacon for the next morning and for dinner I get myself a Middle Eastern style chicken wrap and for the first time in months I am not hungry at night.

[nikolasongsa]

The government that keeps people jobless, moneyless, treats them like garbage. people living a technocratic bureaucratic hell void of human spirit and positive aspirations, no future no skills no freedom no children, nothing and hatred for their own country, then I'm glad the literal manifestation of evil is happy that you exist. Being trans is also fake ass hell, I am going with nature fallacy in this one

Jos oot nainen niin toivon että testosteronis antaa pari ÄO pistettä ja huomaat että vähän hassusti kävi :-/

love seeing the general population react with anger and hate when a new law was accepted where i as a trans person have basic human rights and agency over my own body <3<3<3<3

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Smart cities are neither, 2021 edition

The lockdown was a chaotic time for “smart cities.” On the one hand, the most prominent smart city project in the world — Google’s Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto — collapsed thanks to the company’s lies about privacy and land use coming to light.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#ding-dong

On the other hand, the standalone vendors that promise smart city services that you can graft onto your “dumb” city saw their fortunes surge, as the world’s great metropolises sleepwalked into a surveillance nightmare.

From license plate cameras to facial recognition to fake cellphone towers to location data harvested from vehicles and mobile devices, city governments shoveled billions into the coffers of private-sector snoops in the name of crimefighting and technocratic management.

The smart city has long been criticized as a means of quietly transforming public spaces of democratic action into private spaces of technological surveillance and control. Recent books like Jathan Sadowski’s “Too Smart” (2020) make the case in depth.

http://www.jathansadowski.com/book

Books can set out a long argument and cite examples in support of it, but those examples need to be updated regularly and the critique likewise because the field is moving so quickly — as is the critical response.

This month, Harvard’s Belfer Center published “Whose Streets? Our Streets! (Tech Edition),” a long report by Rebecca Williams that revisits the smart city nightmare in light of the mass protests, lockdowns and other high-intensity events of 2020/1.

https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/whose-streets-our-streets-tech-edition

As Williams writes, the smart city always starts with the rejections of participatory dialogue (“What would we like in our neighborhood?”) in favor of technocratic analysis (“They will design data collection that will inform them to what they will do with our neighborhood”).

Technocrats don’t want dialogue about surveillance because the dialogue always leads to a rejection. The Sidewalk Labs consultations in Toronto were overwhelmingly dominated by people who didn’t want a giant American monopolist spying on their literal footsteps 24/7.

Detroiters roundly rejected a $2.5m project to put cameras at their city’s intersections. When Apple asked Iphone owners whether they wanted to be tracked by apps (switching from opt out to opt in) 96% of users said no.

The commercial surveillance industry runs consent theater — whether that’s grey-on-white 8-point warnings that “Use of this site indicates consent to our terms of service” or discreet signs under street cameras: “This area under surveillance.”

https://onezero.medium.com/consent-theater-a32b98cd8d96

Plans for urban technological surveillance don’t survive real public consultation. The people just don’t know what’s good for ’em, so the vendors and the officials cutting checks to them have to instrument the city for spying on the down-low.

This secrecy festers, and the harms it brings are not limited to spying on people and chilling democratic protest. Secrecy also allows vendors to get away with overcharging and underdelivering.

CBP procured facial recognition spycams that analyzed 23m people in public spaces and never caught a single bad guy, while Chicago PD murdered a Black child called Adam Toledo after Shotspotter falsely reported a gunshot at his location.

Secret procurements for defective technology wastes money and puts communities of color at risk — but they also create systemic, *technological* risk, because they embed janky garbage software from shitty surveillance vendors right in the urban fabric.

Vendors who lie about how well their facial recognition or gunshot triangulation works also lie about their information security, and these tools get hacked on the reg, leaking sensitive personal information about millions of city-dwellers to identity thieves.

This defective, sloppy spyware is also a dark, moist environment perfectly suited to harboring ransomware infections, which can see vital services from streetlights to public transit frozen because some “smart city” grifter added a badly secured surveillance layer to it.

Because smart cities are inherently paternalistic (because they always bypass democratic dialog in favor of technocratic fiat), they replicate and magnify society’s biases and discrimination, with a coating of empirical facewash: “It’s not racism, it’s just math.”

Williams cites many 2020/1 examples of this, from Baltimore’s 25:1 ratio of CCTVs in Black neighborhoods to white neighborhoods, to Tampa and Detroit’s use of surveillance tech for “safety” in public housing.

Meanwhile, in Lucknow, India, the technocratic solution to an epidemic of sexist street harassment was to surveil women (“to protect them”) rather than the men who perpetrated the harassment.

https://perma.cc/FU62-NBQF

All of this is driven by private companies who mobilize investor capital and profits to sell more and more surveillance tech to cities. The antidemocratic, secret procurement process leads to more antidemocratic forms of privatization.

Democracy is replaced with corporate decision-making; constitutional protections are replaced by corporate policy; and surveillance monopolies expand their footprint, fill their coffers and sell more surveillance tech.

And far from making police accountable, surveillance gear on its own simply gives corrupt cops a broader set of tools to work with — as in Mexico City, where the C5 CCTV project let corrupt cops blackmail people and extort false confessions.

https://perma.cc/87QK-3HZG

Williams ends with a highly actionable call to arms, setting out a ten-point program for analyzing smart city proposals and listing organizations and networks (like the Electronic Frontier Alliance) that have been effective at pushing back.

https://www.eff.org/fight

[fatehbaz]

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, developments in the fields of public health and domestic science transformed the modern home into a space of dangerous multispecies entanglements. In response, state-sponsored hygiene initiatives aimed at the reproduction of white futurity recruited housekeepers as domestic guardians against nature's encroachments. However, a cohort of women writers and scientists had also begun to take the home's biological heterogeneity as the starting point for a new science that challenged these mandates. [...] In a narrative that has been well-documented by cultural and social historians [...], the prescribed role of the white American housekeeper transforms dramatically during the latter part of the nineteenth century from holistic cultivators of moral law and order to quasi-technocratic administrators of the nation’s productive and reproductive capacities. [...] What the “light” of sanitation revealed, however, was a veritable jungle ecology of ostensibly pathological threats living right, as it were, under the nose of the domestic worker. [...]

---

Alongside a dramatic expansion of state-sponsored initiatives including municipal sewage systems, water purification technology, garbage collection, and food inspection, Americans during the closing decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of mass-marketed literature and advertising advocating “the private side of public health.” [...]

By the turn of the century, the highest level of insect research in the country, the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Entomology, had fully absorbed the emergent cultural discourses around women’s newfound proximity to their domestic co-inhabitants. A widely circulated public memo titled “The House Centipede” written by Bureau Chief Charles Marlatt, begins with the assertion that “the house centipede, particularly within the last 20 or 25 years, has become altogether too common an object in dwelling houses in the Middle and Northern States for the peace of mind of the inmates.”

It may often be seen darting across floors with very great speed, occasionally stopping suddenly and remaining absolutely motionless, presently to resume its rapid movements, often darting directly at inmates of the house, particularly women, evidently with a desire to conceal itself beneath their dresses, and thus creating much consternation.

Posing as a practical, informative tract “of interest to housewives throughout the United States,” the memo in fact deploys a complex rhetorical vocabulary that figures housekeeping as kind of psychosexual drama between woman and insect, the stakes of which are nothing less than the security of both home and nation. [...] This suggests that the Department of Agriculture’s attempts to naturalize the relationship between women and household insects as inevitably one of violation and contamination represents only one of many possible ways to engage the newly-visible sphere of household ecology.

---

Alternative relationalities become visible, however, through the same figural potentiality by which they are naturalized. We might consider, for example, domestic scientist Helen Campbell’s remarkable proscriptions against “personification” in her 1897 treatise, Household Economics, as symptomatically registering – in the mode of a disavowal – exactly the kinds of ecological orientations to the home debarred by neo-materialists and historicists alike.

To generalize, however hastily and crudely, marks growth in mental power. Here, in household economy, most of us are still in the stage of untutored and untutorable savages. We can say “my house,” “my mother’s house,” and “Mrs. Jones’s House,” but THE HOUSE we have no brain cell ready to hold […]. Every detail mentioned in our work -- and our work must deal largely in detail -- fills the mind with crowding memories, pleasant, funny, exhausting, always personal. In touching on matters of detail in household economy, every woman who hears will feel the temptation to receive the thought with a strong personal color, and, perhaps, have her feelings hurt.

---

What makes Campbell’s account so striking in contrast to the historicists’ is its insistence upon the home as a material assemblage of forces that itself acts upon the subjects seeking to administer it. In advocating for the importance of mental “generalization” – an abstraction (or extraction) of the subject from its personal and situated relations within domestic minutiae – Campbell raises the unexpected suggestion that even if we know what women ostensibly should do in their homes, we nevertheless do not know what homes do to women nor how they will respond to such pressures. According to Campbell, a woman’s proximity to and entanglement with modernity’s domestic ecologies is liable to engender not sanitary vigilance but a varied set of dispositions – affection, nostalgia, laughter, exhaustion – whose effects within a particular biopolitical milieu cannot be known in advance.

To grant the “details” of household economy particular morphologies that mobilize them for specific ideological ends, such as the desires of centipedes [...], simultaneously imbues those details with modes of agency and affective energies potentially irreducible to those ends themselves.

What would it mean, then, to reciprocate the affections of house centipedes?

---

All text above by: David Hollingshead. “Women, insects, modernity: American domestic ecologies in the late nineteenth century.” Feminist Modernist Studies. August 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[lligkv]

what the world will look like when it’s over

Can’t Get You Out of My Head is the first Adam Curtis documentary I’ve seen. I gather it’s not the most successful demonstration of his method; it sounds like Hypernormalization or The Century of the Self are tighter in their construction, less effortful (count how many times Curtis says something like “But then it started to run out of control” in this one), and perhaps less frustrating in their narration. In the early episodes of this documentary in particular, it feels like Curtis is constantly presenting what’s being covered as the turn, the decisive shift in his narrative—the emergence of the American counterculture, the revolution of the “unit of One” led by Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing to help her break the stalemate with the other revolutionaries in China into which Zedong had fallen in the 1960s, George Boole’s development of Boolean logic to describe human thought. And the whole thing feels longer and baggier than it needs to be. The early episodes devote much time to interesting individual narratives, like that of the Trinidadian British activist or sorts named Michael Freitas (or Michael X) or a trans woman named Julie in 1960s Britain; they also sprawl in a way that makes the overall argument a bit hard to divine. It’s not until the fourth episode that the shape of Curtis’s narrative becomes clear—that our age is the product of a struggle between a new, broadly liberal-democratic and capitalist image of individualism, a dying era of collectivist struggle, and older, more vicious systems of power, derived from the control of capital and expressed through the middle classes’ suspicion and viciousness toward the subaltern and toward each other, even as they remain subject to the power of oligarchs and billionaires.

Curtis also seems to play fast and loose with the facts sometimes. When he presents Médecins Sans Frontières’s founder Bernard Kouchner as an avatar of a theory of the “one world” of liberal democracy—the idea that we’re basically one world of individuals, enjoying certain human rights regardless of political orientations or ideologies, and that Western nations are duty-bound by virtue of their prosperity to intervene when other nations violate people’s rights—it seems a distortion of what Kouchner actually says in the footage Curtis includes: “We don’t care on leftist or rightist countries [sic]; there is no leftist and rightist suffering, and there is no possibility to split the world in[to] ‘good’ people or ‘bad’ people, ‘good’ dead and ‘bad’ dead.” Which isn’t to say Kouchner didn’t believe in liberal-democratic ideas—he may well have—but what he’s shown as saying has to do with the consideration of suffering as suffering regardless of a person’s identity or allegiance, which is a different matter.

This is just one of several moments when I stopped to wonder how secure I actually was in Curtis’s hands. But ultimately, I find the emotional history he lays out resonant. The age we’re living through now, in the 2020s, is indeed the product of certain fantasies of individualism and of a post-end-of-history, neoliberal “one world”—with no ideologies but capitalism and putative democracy—meeting age-old systems of power, acquisition, and control, and age-old features of the human mind and heart: resentment, prejudice, betrayal, jealousy, the need to be prosperous, the need to be free.

And Curtis’s work appeals to me for the same reason the writer Pankaj Mishra’s work does. He historicizes our underhistoricized time. What’s more, he does so in a way that’s especially rare to see in any mainstream media venue. Usually, when you want to understand the connections between, say, colonial-era empires and post-war welfare states, or if you want to understand what happened to turn Western societies as they were post-war to Western societies as they are post-financialization, you have to seek the information out on your own. It’s valuable to have someone in a place like the BBC willing to put the pieces of these narratives together. And willing to remind us of the events that are so incredibly easy to forget even in one’s own lifetime. Abu Ghraib, for instance, which pops up in part 6 of the documentary. That shit happened while I was alive. How often do I remember it? How many American sins get drowned out in the new ones that emerge every day of every month of every year? Or in the stasis that sets in when what was once novel, like the War on Terror or the invasion into our privacy represented by the Patriot Act, fades into regular life?

I was jotting down copious notes while watching the doc, as is my wont. The questions and thoughts that came up, in no particular order:

How do the elites of a given era impose their preferred ideologies? How are the structures of power we grow up with constructed, and how do those go on to shape our behavior?

Control, as it’s practiced by societies in the 21st century, often comes down to the recognition of patterns in human behavior—and their manipulation.

The loss of power, like that which was suffered after the collapse of Britain’s empire or in the slow hollowing-out of America’s manufacturing industry in the 20th century, leads to anger and melancholy that people can’t be expected to abandon. Does doing what you’re supposed to do bring you the happiness you were promised—or anything even resembling that happiness? When we’re living in a historical moment in which the answer is no, as is often the case today, we’ll need to watch out. It’s a sign people are being manipulated and abused.

Over time, the tech industry has come to understand that you can manage people en masse by collecting their data and manipulating the messages they receive in social media activity feeds and advertising—and you can make them feel like sovereign individuals at the same time through the very same means. In light of all this, will there ever be a revolution that actually changes the structure of power we’re currently stuck in? Is there a chance to alter this extreme individualism. on the part of people who are surrounded by political systems so enervated, by the supra-governmental system that is global finance capital—which politicians can’t control, and must appease and palliate—that they can’t respond to phenomena like climate change or meaningfully punish atrocities like wars prosecuted on false pretenses? Or are we stuck where we are, in a world that’s corrupt and exhausted? In nations whose governments depend on technologies of surveillance and myths of consumerist abundance or nationalist glory to maintain power, in the absence of any real vision for the future?

It all leads to some interesting takeaways. For one, the way culture reacts to politics and vice versa. As I was watching Can’t Get You Out of My Head, I was reminded of a conversation folks on the Discord server for the Relentless Picnic podcast had had recently about the strange things Richard Dawkins posts on his Twitter account. And it led me to think: when religious “caring conservatism” was in the White House, Richard Dawkins and his New Atheism, this brash repudiation of religion and its pieties, grew as a counterweight. When Obama and his technocratic regime were in power, with social media bringing on a wave of progressivism in popular culture and algorithms presenting us a fantasy of endless choice—much of which was a thin veneer over the same old shit: banks getting bailed out, forever wars going on, productivity rising while wages stagnated—we also got Jordan Peterson-types who claimed to speak to a human need for narrative, even in this point of stability we had seemed to reach, this recovery of sanity after the chaos that was the Iraq War and the financial crisis; who claimed we needed ideas and myths to animate and drive our lives, because they sensed there was something hollow and mendacious driving all this consumer choice, for all it seemed a symbol of our freedom and progress.

Of course, both Peterson and Dawkins are provocateurs, not intellectuals; I don’t mean to dignify the movements they led much, since in both the appearance of intellectual rigor or moral clarity often covered the indulgence of the worst instincts: immaturity, obstinacy, provocation for provocation’s sake, contempt for women and trans people. The New Atheists had a point, and could be absolute assholes about it; they ultimately could be as fundamentalist and dogmatic as any religious people. As for Jordan Peterson, his actual work, in the way of so many grand theorists, uses the appearance of profundity to cover something ultimately pretty banal. And he’s most known for grandstanding in the public sphere—refusing to use people’s pronouns, the usual conservative shit. But these movements do seem to reflect a countercultural response no less than 1960s counterculture reflects a reaction to the staid culture of 1950s America and the sins it covered up.

Which leads me to the question: what was the culture’s response to Trump’s administration? Maybe QAnon and Russiagate, as conspiracies—that is, actual narratives people inhabit to explain the world’s evils, and not just a vague need for them that they satisfied with Jordan Peterson’s light form of Stoicism or his theories of Light and Dark or whatever the fuck. And in that way, perhaps, once a countercultural movement—namely nationalism and Trumpian populism—actually seemed to have overthrown a regime, of Obama-era liberal technocratic management, culture and politics came to mirror each other, rather than standing in opposition to each other. Both became equally conspiratorial and unhinged; in fact, they merged. All the ruling myths and conspiracies mutate in kind these days: Trump’s garbage about draining the swamp, a cover for Trump and his family enriching themselves and Stephen Miller’s like getting to fashion the state they wanted, becomes QAnon’s garbage about rings of child trafficking and pedophilia and Trump, of all people, being their savior—all while actual trafficking and abuse perpetuated by Jeffrey Epstein and his ilk goes unpunished, Epstein’s death swallowed up by the state without a sound—becomes the liberal pundit class’s screaming about Russia: connections between Trump and Putin that were always conjectural to me, because no one who pled them seemed to feel much need to substantiate them.

Here again I feel like what were once centrifugal forces in our culture—between mainstream and the independent media, for example; between people in power and their critics, either in the media or at society’s margins—have collapsed into a single morass. We’re all in hell and there’s no way out.

In all this, what does Biden’s administration represent? Little more than an interregnum, to my mind. How disappointing to see not even a gesture toward forgiving student debt or raising the minimum wage in these first 100 days of his presidency. There’s been some progress in climate legislation, and progress in putting Stephen Miller’s deportation machine to a halt (though they’re also reopening several emergency shelters to accommodate more minors already being held past the mandated limits for keeping them in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement). But there’s also been such triangulation on policy by the administration and its supporters and such complacency on the part of the media covering the administration, refusing to call them out on or even cover this. And how can the average voter respond but with resignation?

Ever since I read Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus near the start of lockdown, absorbing the picture of the world pre-World War II that’s presented in that book, I’ve thought we’re in the same sort of moment that Mann’s protagonist Zeitblom was in. There’s a crisis that’s passing over this whole planet like a wave or a seismic event, and no human intervention can interrupt it. We can only wait for it to pass—holding on to whatever’s to hand, waiting to see what the world will look like when it’s over.

[cultml]

Ranting about this Moment

This moment in time is a gray paste. It means nothing... and i need done with it. There is no great tragedy or torment in my life. I am never the less tired in all the way humans get tired.

The lethality of the virus will not be know for IDK ever. their methodology is garbage and they can’t see it...IDK don’t care ...done

Masks...  "masks don’t work” ..childish technocratic  BS ...don”t care done

New guidance from CDC... that’s funny . no

the press is .... NOPE   done

Trump is a self aggrandizing carnival barker so let let him give a press conference everyday and spent half our time arguing about what he said... meant.. or fantasize about he said or ..........no done

congress is.................NO done

China is bad.... and some ignored it.....and some are helping them..... and lets take them to court over this pandemic?  Anything that doesn’t start with an eye to the removal of the CCP and a plan for sustained mockery of communist nonsense .....waste  time    no    done

Europe is nope... NY is ...nope

Things will never go back..... yeah...oh wait that's not what they mean... they just get to lock in a whole new set of rules / IDK and nope

The Globalist Conspiracy to.............. No human behavior dictates that over long period of time significantly democratic organizations lean left. People want safety they want protection.... thus is human nature.......... some will take advantage....... Is not ... plot ...no done

Cut paste.. “ Virtue ….. Puffery?  It’s not virtue signalling, there is a semi virtuous act involved. Having a kids plat a concert out side the door of your elderly neighbor, or showing Grandpa your engagement ring through the window or going to the store for them is What Your Supposed to do “   done

Police and fire men and Drs. and nurses knew what they where singing up for...... doing your job doesn’t make you a hero in my book. Are they working 48hr sifts? What is the above and beyond here??????? And those stocking selves...... How much more exactly are they risking ..... IDK and IDK what my threshold for calling someone a hero is but that isn’t it...... done

The idea that crisis accelerates the patter it doesn’t change it looks to be the case.... and frankly I’ve been a little angry about it. It’s sliding in to quite frustration will eventually y be some sadness and acceptance that that is really whats happening. .......

The progressive collectivist decided not to go nuclear so, the slower freight train to our collectivist hell it is....and  it looks and sound a lot less scary than the Bernie Nuke... On the other side the “common good” conservatives, the new theocrats... the enemy the good is perfection as is the enemy of the new(better or not) is the good.  IDK if they think it is better to take power and use it to “fix” things than act thought the culture and convince the mob things are better their way or they aren’t thinking... and the rest are opining on conspiracy and shadows

Either way collectivist hell here we come.  If we could understand the the battle isn’t just the battle between the individual and government or just a battle with ourselves we might have a chance at something different... I done see that happening.

Any who going to try to post some of the misc. good and bad with out much commentary either way today.. tomorrow. catch up the Covid19 tag.  Going to stop ML-PNP for a week or so.  I am going to move the drafts to the queue on the dormant Tourist Camera. there is a few gig of picture i can play with and some water paint I never got to play either. It seems the time to do so

[netsolwatersblog]

Who Are The Best Commercial RO Plant Manufacturer In Noida ?

Water resources are not distributed fairly in the modern world. The majority of the world's water is found in its oceans, with only 30% of it on land. More than or over 34% of the 30% of water on land is encased in glaciers & icebergs. As such, lakes, streams, & the ground contain less than 1% of the water that is accessible to humans.

Polluting Resources of Water

A sizable section of the populace utilizes surface & groundwater basins for their raw water needs. Since groundwater poisoning is frequently irreversible, it is challenging to restore the original water quality once it has been tainted. Direct contamination from the lateral movement of contaminated water is the main cause of groundwater pollution.

Groundwater can become contaminated by leachates from garbage dumped in abandoned quarries/mines, gravel pits, & other locations. If the contaminated water isn't cleaned up over time, the utilizer's/user's health will suffer.

The water in Indian cities, such as Noida, which is proposed to be a good location for businesses & industries, has gotten tainted over time.

Employing/Utilizing commercial Reverse Osmosis(RO) plants to treat water

A commercial Reverse Osmosis(RO) plant is a method of purifying water that helps/aids in separating dangerous materials & dissolved impurities to leave behind only pure water. This facility greatly contributes to the production of clean drinking water & lowers the danger of water-borne illnesses & disorders.

It utilizes membranes for water treatment to purify & make the water safer to consume or utilize in other applications. Self-employment & firm-investment are also permitted under this arrangement.

One of the top manufacturers of commercial RO plants in India, Netsol Water, is actively involved in providing a wide spectrum/range of these facilities in Noida. It is made utilizing premium materials & cutting-edge technology, directly supervised by skilled professionals/technocrats, & is offered at the most competitive pricing.

Commercial RO Plant Application/Utilization

Businesses from a variety of industries, including ice manufacturers, food processors, farms, chicken farms, schools, colleges, shopping centers, & so on, treat their water with our produced Commercial RO Plants . These plants filter out excess pollutants that might harm our ecosystem, machinery, & aquatic life.

Why should you choose Netsol Water for your commercial Reverse Osmosis(RO) plant installation, mounting, maintenance, & repairs ?

You may rely on us to assist you in purchasing a commercial RO plant & to provide high-quality maintenance & repairs for your existing one. Netsol Water is the best commercial ro plant manufacturer in noida at best affordable price and quality.

With over a decade of experience, we have built a solid base of devoted & content customers. This has only been possible because to the expertise, experience, & dedication of our team of service specialists, who consistently attain the greatest level of client satisfaction. Our professionals can easily handle any RO model or brand because they have vast experience operating a wide variety of Commercial RO Plant systems.

The Indian Water Quality Association has recognized Netsol Water as a business that has received ISO accreditation or certification. We are renowned for not only offering outstanding service but also for charging fair prices for our offerings. Additionally, you can use any digital payment method to cover the cost of the reserved service.

As the leading producer of commercial Reverse Osmosis plants in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, we should be your first choice for any installation or services related to commercial ROs in Noida. We guarantee that once you utilize our service, you won't think about utilizing anyone else.

[gaykarstaagforever]

My YouTube Rewind Top 10 for 2022, based generally on time "viewed" (Starting 7 months ago, I drive for a living now, so "Can I just listen to it?" is weighted very heavily here).

(Also I am 40 so this is a very Dad Content list. Which is weird because I am not a dad and do not follow the sportsball. But Dadness still infiltrated things a bit. There are no golf or sportstalk channels, don't worry. Not yet, anyway.)

1. The Weekly Planet -- Generalist nerd media podcast out of Melbourne, Australia. Hands down the only good podcast on the entire Internet. Their Best Of compilations from years past are required listening and relistening. Also they do a short weekly show about movies and TV shows called Caravan of Garbage that is the bar by which all others are judged, and always come up short.

2. DankPods -- Sydney, Australian, retro mp3 player channel that has now expanded into general audio hardware reviews. But oh, so much more is going on here. This guy is one of the funniest, most energetic creators on the platform. Even if you don't care about anything he is interested in, you will love watching him talk (and scream) about it. Co-starring Frank the Snake. He also has two side channels about fixing up trashed Australian cars and drumming (he is a drummer by trade) that are just as good.

3. That Chapter -- True crime with a sense of humor, that is only occasionally mean-spirited. But even in those cases it is usually in the service of bad Dad Jokes so that's okay. He always tries to include actual 911 calls and trial footage, 20+ minutes, here is what happened, in a straightforward way that respects your intelligence. None of that "creating a narrative" horseshit that make true crime podcasts by actual journalists un-fucking-bearable 10 hour slogs that pretend they are saying something profound about the universe by the end. They're not. Stop paying 8 people to produce these; maybe then you wouldn't have to shill for whatever criminally-overpriced nonsense Peloton just invented. True crime podcasts suck, That Chapter is why.

4. Morbid Midnight -- He covers what I can only call "disasters," some true crime, others extreme sports accidents, also plenty of generally horrendous historical events. Lots of stories about people being blown off of mountain sides or getting trapped in caves. His subdued delivery of dark content is like what Chills pulled off, back before it became a meme and a parody of itself. I don't know why I like hearing about adventurous people dying horribly. Probably because I can then feel smug about how I wasn't so stupid as to dive into a cave like a big stupid idiot, you idiots. You shouldn't have been doing that. You should just get drunk and watch YouTube like me. See? They're the losers, not me.

5. Professor of Rock -- Oh god, the Dad. This is a daily upload channel in which Adam Reader, the Professor of Rock, talks about Dad Rock, and how great Dad Rock is, and how modern not-Dad Rock sucks. Tons of classic rock trivia, and also snippets of long-form interviews with the artists who made this stuff. This is the channel you are forced to admit is good and you like while simultaneously being embarrassed about how old that makes you look. But that's not Adam's fault. Seriously, a good channel for music nerds.

6. Cathode Ray Dude [CRD] -- He started doing short-form videos about the old camcorders he collected. He now does long videos about fascinating and obscure cul de sacs in tech history, routinely with live demonstrations of said tech. And yes, he almost always ends up explaining how this wonky failed media format can actually be a metaphor for our sad, short little lives. Which would be forced journo bullshit. Except it always ends up forcing me to respect the legions of unsung engineers and desperate marketing executives who had a hand in creating our modern technocratic world, even if only by failing spectacularly. These goofy creations really are artifacts of entire little worlds, many of them long-dead and forgotten. It is as sad and funny as it is fascinating.

7. Snipe and Wib -- A Warhammer 40,000 channel, but HOLD ON, this is one of the good ones! They do a show called Codex Compliant that goes through the published history of Warhammer lore from Rogue Trader in the mid-1980s to now. They love 'grimdark' and Space Marines as much as they understand that all of it was created as a cheeky English parody of melodramatic, misogynistic total-war fantasy worlds. I always thought Warhammer 40K was a boring expensive thing for the grossest WASP nerd boys before I watched Snipe and Wib. Now I know that Warhammer 40K is a boring expensive thing for EVERYONE. I'm not buying and painting miniatures or arguing over protractors yet, but I kind of want to because of Snipe and Wib. I at least get it now. It is a lot to manage, but a lot of it is pretty cool.

8. Imbrandonfarris -- Like I have to explain who Brandon Farris is. He is a charismatic guy who hurts himself and destroys his own apartment to entertain the world's children. And he doesn't say swears so they're allowed to watch it. And BOY, do they watch it! This is content for 8 year olds. But goddamn it if it isn't really, really GOOD content for 8 year olds, the kind the rest of the family can enjoy, too. Brandon is charming as hell, his story is heartwarming, his family is adorable, and you don't even resent him for recently buying a palatial estate in which he can spray foam on everything. This is a guy who exists to do the stupid shit the rest of us wish we could do, and he kills himself doing it, and the world has rightly responded by rewarding him for it. Good on you, Brandon. Also it is just really funny to watch a man destroy a bedroom with an exploding pumpkin filled with glitter and then fall down.

9. Warlockracy -- Russian-based gaming channel that mostly posts long-form analyses of PC RPGs, especially those in the isometric family of the original Fallout games. These games maintain a huge cultural influence on gamers in Russia and Eastern Europe, and being one of those, Warlockracy uses his platform to give the rest of us an insider's perspective of that world. Seriously, if you want to understand modern Russia, and even the war in Ukraine, Warlockracy casually explains complex aspects of both of these, via the easily-grasped context of games like STALKER and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. I believe he is still in Russia, so I don't know how he pulls off this kind of commentary at this point and hasn't gotten in trouble yet. But he keeps doing it, and with an easy sense of humor that I cannot comprehend, having to live under those circumstances. I wish him the best, and hope to enjoy his content as long as it lasts.

10. Thew Adams -- Thew reviews Transformers. But that...that doesn't begin to cover it. Threw Adams is a ray of sunshine on YouTube, and everyone needs to watch his videos. Don't care about Transformers? Doesn't matter. Seriously. It DOESN'T MATTER. You will like Threw. You will never see a more delightful person. And no matter your gender or sexuality, if you don't want to kinda kiss him on the mouth, you're not human. Thew makes everything fun, especially when he doesn't like something. Thew Adams is the bit of chocolate you let yourself have every day because no, you don't NEED IT, but it makes you happy, goddammit. Watch Thew. Thew is good.

Honorable Mentions (in that, these are consistently good channels I have liked for years, even if their specific content every year might not be perpetually notable):

Jenny Nicholson

Ashens

LGR

Techmoan

PeanutButterGamer / Peebs

Scott the Woz

Your Dinosaurs are Wrong

Secret Galaxy (formerly Toy Galaxy)

Drew Gooden

Pyrocynical

[southeastasianists]

There is a history of Singapore that is taken as a straightforward truth by millions of people in the world. According to this narrative, up until 2004 the city-state was an unliveable hellscape where violent crime, drug trafficking, terrorism, murder, and corruption ran rampant. Women were practically raped on sight, the streets were strewn with garbage, and traffic was insolubly chaotic.

All of this changed that year, when the new prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, instituted the death penalty for all violent criminals, drug traffickers, and corrupt officials. As a result, the prison population was reduced from 500,000 to 50 within six months (presumably through mass executions). Moreover, in what appears to have been a matter of weeks, crime vanished, Singapore became an economic powerhouse, its universities shot up in the world rankings, and its citizens became trilingual. The draconian use of capital punishment, according to this narrative, is the secret to having a peaceful, developed country.

This narrative was popularised on the Spanish-speaking internet through a postauthored by a Cuban pastor based in Honduras named Mario Fumero. Fumero’s blog, United Against Apostasy, published a series of articles extolling Singapore’s purported crime-reducing policies. Fumero suggests that all Latin American countries should emulate Singapore’s example and exterminate all offenders (either through judicial or extrajudicial means), so that Latin Americans will promptly reach the desired development that Singapore now enjoys.

To get a sense of ​​how widespread this narrative is, Fumero himself comments that these articles on Singapore are by far the most popular posts on his blog, a blog which has attracted over 20 million views. The actual reach of this particular article, however, goes much further. Its text has been copied or paraphrased in various YouTube videos that, taken together, add up to hundreds of thousands of views. It has been reproduced on several posts on Taringa! (an extremely popular Spanish-language “community knowledge” website), and reposted on countless blogs and forums. Its contents have even been copied in printed newspapers (with evidently poor fact-checking standards), and they have been cited as the basis of numerous editorials published throughout Latin America.

The number of Spanish speakers who have been exposed to this narrative through social media can probably be estimated in the millions; for many of them, this portrait of Singapore is axiomatic by virtue of its ubiquity. Few people have sufficient familiarity with Singaporean history to challenge this narrative.

Fumero has a concrete political agenda: the reinstatement and dissemination of the death penalty in Latin America. Although he has stated that he is against capital punishment, he immediately qualifies such statements by arguing that “…there are situations in which it [the death penalty] can be justified even biblically, becoming the only option for instilling fear in a system where impunity prevails, and where there is a lack of respect for life.” In fact, a quick glance at the many columns written on the basis of his article—as well as the comment sections of any of the websites where his article has been reproduced—reveals that the “successful” Singaporean case has become a key touchstone for the pro-death penalty agenda in Spanish-speaking virtual forums. Along with them, Fumero insists on the exemplary success of the alleged Singaporean policy of indiscriminate judicial executions.

For Fumero and his supporters, it is precisely Singapore’s prosperity and rigidity that they find useful in their attempt to promote a particular political agenda. Latin Americans may not know much about Singapore, but they have heard that it is a rich and seemingly excessively disciplinarian country—the ban on chewing gum is well-known. Along with almost complete ignorance of the country’s history, due to hitherto relatively limited cultural and academic exchange, the conditions are perfect for historical visions like that one conjured by Fumero to flourish. With a contemporary Orientalist twist, he fabricates history to create a simulacrum of an “exotic” country to advance his disciplinarian agenda. The fable he creates serves to answer questions such as “why are they prosperous and we are not?”, or “why is there so much crime here and not there?”. These questions correspond to Orientalising impulses which presume that, unlike North America or Europe, Singaporean prosperity is not natural, and there must therefore be some kind of secret to success that Latin Americans could appropriate as a shortcut to “development.”

But why should we care about this? After all, a generation of young Spanish-speakers with a completely distorted view of a remote country like Singapore could be dismissed as a mere anecdote, as a sort of contemporary version of the Prester John myth. However, Fumero’s article is not just a harmless fable; it is the historical narrative that frames a call to action, action which would ultimately promote the judicial or extrajudicial execution of thousands of people. The sobering reality of Rodrigo Duterte’s popularly-endorsed campaign of extrajudicial execution of alleged drug pushers is too blatant, too painful, for us to ignore historical narratives which might justify such policies. Law and order narratives have been successfully deployed time and time again to win elections in Latin America, claiming to end crime and drug trafficking in blood and fire, but without producing significant results.

Like Fumero, the Singaporean state and many Singaporeans have their preferred historical narrative as well, albeit one that is demonstrably less fanciful. It runs something like this: the People’s Action Party (PAP), headed by Lee Kuan Yew, steered Singapore through the chaos of separation from the Federation of Malaya in 1965. Since then, it has, through technocratic competence and indomitable strength of will, propelled Singapore towards a multi-ethnic meritocracy, good governance and a dynamic capitalist economy. If authoritarian-leaning practices were developed along the way, they are dismissed as the price of success in the face of adversity. This narrative is integrated into the national curriculum, espoused by politicians, and provides the thematic framework for performances staged by students and volunteers at the annual national day parade. It pervades journalistic discourse in both Singaporean and international media organisations. Naturally, this treasured mythos of nation-building elides many unsavoury things, but there is more than a kernel of truth to it.

Singapore’s national mythos is primarily meant for domestic consumption, but it is also part of how Singapore projects itself to the rest of the world. Its preferred origin story of chaos to order, of insecurity to wealth, is an integral part of Singapore’s carefully-cultivated image as a good place to do business, park one’s money, and educate one’s children, or even to hold international summits. This narrative is deployed for specifically political purposes: the trope of dependable PAP stewardship leading to economic success is routinely deployed at campaign rallies before each general election.

By contrast, Fumero’s reformulated narrative of Singaporean history deliberately misrepresents the underlying reasons for Singapore’s perceived success to an audience familiar only with a fleeting image of Singaporean “success”. This (ab)use of Singaporean history is instructive, because it sheds light on how powerful a tool history can be in the “post-truth” era—even when it is deployed far from its point of origin and targeted at a very different audience.

Fumero’s article represents an unusual permutation of the weaponisation of history: we are used to the idea that history is weaponised, usually by states (authoritarian or otherwise), for domestic political purposes. We are less used to the notion of history being mined far from its point of origin to generate political gain in seemingly irrelevant contexts, especially by non-state actors like Fumero.

That, however, is exactly the opportunity that the post-truth era of social media-driven news affords, and various actors have not been slow to seize it. The destabilisation of informational legitimacy—which until recently for most people was embodied in whichever newspapers and televised news channels were most readily at hand—is not the heart of the problem. The number of gatekeepers, and the location of the gates themselves, have changed. With the low barriers to entry afforded by internet access, both state actors with modest budgets and non-state actors with virtually no budget at all can now shape historical narratives, with serious consequences for the societies in question.

Fumero’s article may be an outlandish example, but it forces us to confront the reality of how history can be successfully weaponised; the consequences of his historical fabrications are hard to measure and may have yet to flower. How much easier would it be for an organisation with more resources to weaponise history, and what havoc could it wreak? The state’s existing tendency to weaponise history already gives citizens sufficient cause to equip themselves mentally to resist these historical narratives, and the cultivation of citizenries capable of evaluating or filtering information (though inconvenient to the state) has become more important than ever for democracies.

[brooklynislandgirl]

Lexicon Common Parlance: P-Z

Paradox: An anomalous state of reality caused when a mage disrupts the momentum of reality with her own magickal acts. Paradox Realm: A small Realm created by Paradox spirits to entrap a mage and thus prevent any further disruptions of reality. Paradox Spirit: A spirit formed from the collective beliefs of humanity. Mages who are careless or unlucky with their magick in front of Sleepers will find themselves hunted by these spirits. Path: A general term for a mage’s chosen destiny. Pattern: The mystical composition of an object, entity, place or idea. Procedures: What Technocracy mages call their magickal Effects. Pure Ones: The legendary primordial beings of the Tellurian. Many mages believe that all souls are fragments of these shattered entities. Pogrom, The: The systematic purge of all opposition (“random elements”) by the Technocracy. Portal: A permanent Gate. Portals are usually guarded by powerful spirits that require a task to be performed or a puzzle to be solved before they will allow safe passage. Prime: The original unified force that composes the universe. All things flow from this primordial energy. Protocols, The: A code of honour established by the Traditions to prevent abuses of power. Violation of this code is punishable by censure, branding, ostracism, death or Gilgul. Quiet: A state of insanity caused by the excessive use of magick. Quintessence: The stuff of magick; the raw substance of the universe in condensed form. See Tass. Realms: The worlds of “solid” reality that exist within the Tellurian. Resonance: The mystick traces that actions leave behind. Rote: A tried and true magickal Effect, passed down as a tool or weapon. What Sleepers would call a spell. Seeking: A mage’s Avatar-guided quest for enlightenment. Shade Realm: The Umbral “shadow” of a Shard Realm. Shard Realm: One of nine Realms said to have been part of Gaia in ages past. They roughly correspond to the other planets (including Luna the moon) and the nine Spheres of magic. Each is ruled by a Celestine. Sleeper: A person potentially capable of magick, but not yet aware of its existence. The Masses of humanity. Sphere: A particular element of reality manipulated by mages. Static Reality: The foreword momentum of reality, often guided by the deeds and beliefs of humanity. Magick, by its dynamic nature, disrupts static reality to some degree. The parameters of static reality have, in recent centuries, become more restrictive due to a single global paradigm (belief system) espoused by the Technocracy. Symposium: A monthly meeting of the Technocracy. At these meetings members of the Conventions gather to make policy. Tass: Quintessence stored in physical form. It tends to collect in Nodes and takes various forms based on its surroundings – i.e., mushrooms at a wooded caern, water from a specific spring or magickal garbage mold at an urban Node. Talisman: An object that stores Quintessence and uses it to create a specific magical effect – i.e., magic carpets, wishing wells or etheric ray guns. Technocratic Talismans are called Devices. Tapestry, The: A metaphor for reality. Technocracy, The: A ruthless and powerful group of mages that seeks to eliminate the harmful elements of reality, thus making it safe for humanity. Their magick, based on scientific principle, conforms and shapes modern reality – to a point. This group will not be satisfied until all possibilities lie within its control (See Pogrom). Also called the Technocratic Union. Tellurian: The whole of reality. Tradition: One of the Nine Mystick Traditions, a Council formed in the 1400s to oppose the Technocracy, resist the radical changes of the Marauders and fight the evil of the Nephandi.  Tribunal: A formal gathering of Council mages to discuss matters important to the Traditions; usually held in times of strife. Umbra: The spirit world (actually a series of worlds) outside of the material one. Umbrood: Any non-human not born or created on Earth. This includes both the spirits that roam the Umbra and the inhabitants of other Realms. Vulgar magick: This is the fireball-and-lightning kind of magick, visible as such to normal observers. Vulgar magick takes static reality and tears it out by the roots. This also creates paradox. Wyck: A common name for the original magick, supposedly descended from the Pure Ones.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation"

The mainstream critique of Facebook is surprisingly compatible with Facebook’s own narrative about its products. FB critics say that the company’s machine learning and data-gathering slides disinformation past users’ critical faculties, poisoning their minds.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself tells advertisers that it can use data and machine learning to slide past users’ critical faculties, convincing them to buy stuff.

In other words, the mainline of Facebook critics start from the presumption that FB is a really good product and that advertisers are definitely getting their money’s worth when they shower billions on the company.

Which is weird, because these same critics (rightfully) point out that Facebook lies all the time, about everything. It would be bizarre if the only time FB was telling the truth was when it was boasting about how valuable its ad-tech is.

Facebook has a conflicted relationship with this critique. I’m sure they’d rather not be characterized as a brainwashing system that turns good people into monsters, but not when the choice is between “brainwashers” and “con-artists selling garbage to credulous ad execs.”

As FB investor and board member Peter Thiel puts it: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” In other words, the important word in “evil genius” is “genius,” not “evil.”

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1440312271511568393

The accord of tech critics and techbros gives rise to a curious hybrid, aptly named by Maria Farrell: the Prodigal Techbro.

A prodigal techbro is a self-styled wizard of machine-learning/surveillance mind control who has see the error of his ways.

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/09/23/story-ate-the-world-im-biting-back/

This high-tech sorcerer doesn’t disclaim his magical powers — rather, he pledges to use them for good, to fight the evil sorcerers who invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew a fidget-spinner, then let Robert Mercer hijack it to turn your uncle into a Qanon racist.

There’s a great name for this critique, criticism that takes its subjects’ claims to genius at face value: criti-hype, coined by Lee Vinsel, describing a discourse that turns critics into “the professional concern trolls of technoculture.”

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

The thing is, Facebook really is terrible — but not because it uses machine learning to brainwash boomers into iodine-guzzling Qnuts. And likewise, there really is a problem with conspiratorial, racist, science-denying, epistemologically chaotic conspiratorialism.

Addressing that problem requires that we understand the direction of the causal arrow — that we understand whether Facebook is the cause or the effect of the crisis, and what role it plays.

“Facebook wizards turned boomers into orcs” is a comforting tale, in that it implies that we need merely to fix Facebook and the orcs will turn back into our cuddly grandparents and get their shots. The reality is a lot gnarlier and, sadly, less comforting.

There’s been a lot written about Facebook’s sell-job to advertisers, but less about the concern over “disinformation.” In a new, excellent longread for Harpers, Joe Bernstein makes the connection between the two:

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/

Fundamentally: if we question whether Facebook ads work, we should also question whether the disinformation campaigns that run amok on the platform are any more effective.

Bernstein starts by reminding us of the ad industry’s one indisputable claim to persuasive powers: ad salespeople are really good at convincing ad buyers that ads work.

Think of department store magnate John Wanamaker’s lament that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Whoever convinced him that he was only wasting half his ad spend was a true virtuoso of the con.

As Tim Hwang documents brilliantly in his 2020 pamphlet “Subprime Attention Crisis,” ad-tech is even griftier than the traditional ad industry. Ad-tech companies charge advertisers for ads that are never served, or never rendered, or never seen.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

They rig ad auctions, fake their reach numbers, fake their conversions (they also lie to publishers about how much they’ve taken in for serving ads on their pages and short change them by millions).

Bernstein cites Hwang’s work, and says, essentially, shouldn’t this apply to “disinformation?”

If ads don’t work well, then maybe political ads don’t work well. And if regular ads are a swamp of fraudulently inflated reach numbers, wouldn’t that be true of political ads?

Bernstein talks about the history of ads as a political tool, starting with Eisenhower’s 1952 “Answers America” campaign, designed and executed at great expense by Madison Ave giants Ted Bates.

Hannah Arendt, whom no one can accuse of being soft on the consequences of propaganda, was skeptical of this kind of enterprise: “The psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.”

The ad industry ran an ambitious campaign to give scientific credibility to its products. As Jacques Ellul wrote in 1962, propagandists were engaged in “the increasing attempt to control its use, measure its results, define its effects.”

Appropriating the jargon of behavioral scientists let ad execs “assert audiences, like workers in a Taylorized workplace, need not be persuaded through reason, but could be trained through repetition to adopt the new consumption habits desired by the sellers.” -Zoe Sherman

These “scientific ads” had their own criti-hype attackers, like Vance “Hidden Persuaders” Packard, who admitted that “researchers were sometimes prone to oversell themselves — or in a sense to exploit the exploiters.”

Packard cites Yale’s John Dollard, a scientific ad consultant, who accused his colleagues of promising advertisers “a mild form of omnipotence,” which was “well received.”

Today’s scientific persuaders aren’t in a much better place than Dollard or Packard. Despite all the talk of political disinformation’s reach, a 2017 study found “sharing articles from fake news domains was a rare activity” affecting <10% of users.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586

So, how harmful is this? One study estimates “if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point.”

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211

Now, all that said, American politics certainly feel and act differently today than in years previous. The key question: “is social media creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them?”

After all, American politics has always had its “paranoid style,” and the American right has always had a sizable tendency towards unhinged conspiratorialism, from the John Birch Society to Goldwater Republicans.

Social media may not be making more of these yahoos, but rather, making them visible to the wider world, and to each other, allowing them to make common cause and mobilize their adherents (say, to carry tiki torches through Charlottesville in Nazi cosplay).

If that’s true, then elite calls to “fight disinformation” are unlikely to do much, except possibly inflaming things. If “disinformation” is really people finding each other (not infecting each other) labelling their posts as “disinformation” won’t change their minds.

Worse, plans like the Biden admin’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism lump 1/6 insurrectionists in with anti-pipeline activists, racial justice campaigners, and animal rights groups.

Whatever new powers we hand over to fight disinformation will be felt most by people without deep-pocketed backers who’ll foot the bill for crack lawyers.

Here’s the key to Bernstein’s argument: “One reason to grant Silicon Valley’s assumptions about our mechanistic persuadability is that it prevents us from thinking too hard about the role we play in taking up and believing the things we want to believe. It turns a huge question about the nature of democracy in the digital age — what if the people believe crazy things, and now everyone knows it? — into a technocratic negotiation between tech companies, media companies, think tanks, and universities.”

I want to “Yes, and” that.

My 2020 book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism doesn’t dismiss the idea that conspiratorialism is on the rise, nor that tech companies are playing a key role in that rise — but without engaging in criti-hype.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

In my book, I propose that conspiratorialism isn’t a crisis of what people believe so much as how they arrive at their beliefs — it’s an “epistemological crisis.”

We live in a complex society plagued by high-stakes questions none of us can answer on our own.

Do vaccines work? Is oxycontin addictive? Should I wear a mask? Can we fight covid by sanitizing surfaces? Will distance ed make my kind an ignoramus? Should I fly in a 737 Max?

Even if you have the background to answer one of these questions, no one can answer all of them.

Instead, we have a process: neutral expert agencies use truth-seeking procedures to sort of competing claims, showing their work and recusing themselves when they have conflicts, and revising their conclusions in light of new evidence.

It’s pretty clear that this process is breaking down. As companies (led by the tech industry) merge with one another to form monopolies, they hijack their regulators and turn truth-seeking into an auction, where shareholder preferences trump evidence.

This perversion of truth has consequences — take the FDA’s willingness to accept the expensively manufactured evidence of Oxycontin’s safety, a corrupt act that kickstarted the opioid epidemic, which has killed 800,000 Americans to date.

If the best argument for vaccine safety and efficacy is “We used the same process and experts as pronounced judgement on Oxy” then it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical — especially if you’re still coping with the trauma of lost loved ones.

As Anna Merlan writes in her excellent Republic of Lies, conspiratorialism feeds on distrust and trauma, and we’ve got plenty of legitimate reasons to experience both.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

Tech was an early adopter of monopolistic tactics — the Apple ][+ went on sale the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the industry’s growth tracked perfectly with the dismantling of antitrust enforcement over the past 40 years.

What’s more, while tech may not persuade people, it is indisputably good at finding them. If you’re an advertiser looking for people who recently looked at fridge reviews, tech finds them for you. If you’re a boomer looking for your old high school chums, it’ll do that too.

Seen in that light, “online radicalization” stops looking like the result of mind control, instead showing itself to be a kind of homecoming — finding the people who share your interests, a common online experience we can all relate to.

I found out about Bernstein’s article from the Techdirt podcast, where he had a fascinating discussion with host Mike Masnick.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210928/12593747652/techdirt-podcast-episode-299-misinformation-about-disinformation.shtml

Towards the end of that discussion, they talked about FB’s Project Amplify, in which the company tweaked its news algorithm to uprank positive stories about Facebook, including stories its own PR department wrote.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#zuckerveganism

Project Amplify is part of a larger, aggressive image-control effort by the company, which has included shuttering internal transparency portals, providing bad data to researchers, and suing independent auditors who tracked its promises.

I’d always assumed that this truth-suppression and wanton fraud was about hiding how bad the platform’s disinformation problem was.

But listening to Masnick and Bernstein, I suddenly realized there was another explanation.

Maybe Facebook’s aggressive suppression of accurate assessments of disinformation on its platform are driven by a desire to hide how expensive (and profitable) political advertising it depends on is pretty useless.

Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_(41793470192).jpg

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

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

[wolfliving]

Toronto: Google Smart City, or sump of technocratic oppression?

*Why not both?

https://www.cigionline.org/articles/searching-smart-citys-democratic-future

(...)

As a whole, the grand marketing vision for Toronto’s neighbourhood of the future is expansive and data driven, and speaks to issues of affordability, resilience and sustainability. It features underground garbage robots, autonomous vehicles, snow-melting sidewalks and more. While many of the features rely on the use of new technology and data to create responsive and adaptive places and spaces, other key features — modular housing and wooden buildings, for example — do not rely on new technology at all. The proposal also makes persistent mention of the need for access to more than the initial 12-acre plot of land for the innovations to be realized at scale. This nods to a possible play for a larger stake in the development of Toronto’s prime waterfront real estate.

Setting the particulars of this deal aside, there is definitely a case to be made for rethinking cities. Ken Greenberg, planner, author and adviser to Sidewalk Labs, puts it this way: “Our systems are strained; established ways of doing basic things are stretched to the limit and beyond...The Sidewalk partnership may just provide the catalyst, R&D resources, and the time and space we urgently need to help us make the leap in critical areas.”

While Greenberg’s definition of the problem is correct, the solution that’s on the table for Toronto should be considered somewhere on the spectrum of highly contentious to full-fledged democratic emergency. This piece will outline a series of approaches to address the challenges associated with Sidewalk Toronto’s vision for Quayside — or with any other smart city.

Commit to Open Procurement and Contracting

In February, The New York Times editorial board wrote that “we find ourselves at a moment of profound uncertainty about the role of technology in our lives, the influence of the tech companies and the correct direction of public policy to address all this change. We’re effectively asking technologists and policymakers to do so much — to secure our elections, to reinvent our business models, to educate and entertain and safeguard ourselves and our children, to protect us from extremists around the world. We expect all of this, across 200-plus nations and uncountable cultures, while also aspiring to privacy, transparency and prosperity.”

As the public becomes more aware about the impact of technology, they also grow more alert to related dangers that privacy and surveillance experts have been ringing alarms about for decades. This recent awakening should give cities permission to take decisions around smart cities seriously and slowly, and to demand open information about them. Procurement is a good place to start.

In Toronto, the opposite has played out. For nine months the public was kept in the dark about details of the deal, despite promises of an open and collaborative process and public pressure. Recently, however, both agreements that the organizations have signed were released. The newest agreement details the nature of the working arrangement between both organizations and some high-level language around data use. Still, the agreements are short on specifics, and they fail to impose baseline requirements around control of public data and publicly owned digital infrastructure....  (((etc etc)))