Back on the Road!

My month-long hiatus from the internet ends. A whole new dish has been installed so I'll never be absolutely clear why the previous connect died (was it trees growing on the horizon? did it become seriously misaligned? was the satellite just badly oversold?) but a new era of faster access is here.

A month without the internet was surprisingly easy to bear. It annoyed when you wanted a quick fact - but that just gave me an excuse to dig out dusty old encyclopedias. For weather forecasts I returned to my vacuum barometer and skywatching. For news - I enjoyed a break from the gibberish, it was a real break too, no headlines, no tweets, nothing.

I could feel the 'old days' sometimes, I'd just be outside and a flash of the pre-net life would hit me. I'm neither nostalgic or a luddite, I had no longing for those days, but I could feel them and I could really feel the unbridgeable technological gap that separates 2017 from 1997. Disconnection from the internet world is no miracle cure, the hungry minds of humans have always sought distraction, but without the daily infinity of possible connections offered by the net, the smaller local connections are savored more. There were far less 'half-conversations' where one (or both) of the parties are half-surfing the internet as they converse in the real world. This doesn't guarantee good conversation but it a necessary condition for it.







FACEBOOK

One of the members of R2N suggested I join Facebook but I declined. Not because hate Facebook (like so many FB users!) but I think who I am conflicts with Facebook's core purpose on such a core level that an obscuring mist prevents us from seeing each other. The worst thing I can say is that Facebook cut down on my activism over the last decade as activist email lists became just links to Facebook pages on those events. Sometimes you can access FB pages, sometime not, so eventually you stop trying.

Yet rethinking this topic did nudge me to to read a new essay called 'You Are the Product'. It's a compilation of book reviews on the new 'attention' economy mostly focusing on Facebook.
Here are the things that stood out.

1) We Are at Peak Facebook

At the end of June, Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users.

Let's put that number in perspective:
Global population in 2017: 7.5 billion
People who have any potential access to the internet: 3.5 billion
People with net access but whose government blocks FB access (India & China) or use a local FB clone (Russia): 1.75 billion

This means that 1/4 of all humans is on FB and that the modern Western world is dominated by FB use, the US usage is at 75% of the population! My brain boggles at this quick yet deep cultural saturation. I find it hard to imagine that less people use Google every month (1.5 billion) than FB but so it is.

This also means that FB has peaked unless China or Russia open the door.

2) Elite dick measuring contests for the Masses!

The term ‘facebook’ has "traditionally referred to a physical booklet produced at American universities to promote socialisation in the way that “Hi, My Name Is” stickers do at events; the pages consisted of rows upon rows of head shots with the corresponding name"

Zuckerberg was a Havard grad (double major: psychology & computer science) who digitally recreated a device that elite kids use to meet in dormitories. Old facebooks where a mix of high-school yearbooks and the American institution of the 'social registry' (link).

The Product is You wrote:The initial launch of Facebook was limited to people with a Harvard email address; the intention was to make access to the site seem exclusive and aspirational. Then it was extended to other elite campuses in the US. When it launched in the UK, it was limited to Oxbridge and the LSE. The idea was that people wanted to look at what other people like them were doing, to see their social networks, to compare, to boast and show off, to give full rein to every moment of longing and envy, to keep their noses pressed against the sweet-shop window of others’ lives.

[Early investor] Peter Thiel latched onto Facebook with such alacrity was that he saw in it for the first time a business that built on people’s deep need to copy. ‘Facebook first spread by word of mouth, and it’s about word of mouth, so it’s doubly mimetic,’ Thiel said. ‘Social media proved to be more important than it looked, because it’s about our natures.’ We are keen to be seen as we want to be seen, and Facebook is the most popular tool humanity has ever had with which to do that.

We are homo mimeticus. ‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.’

Here is Zuckerberg himself describing FB drunken origins right after a break-up: "I’m a little intoxicated, I’m not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is the more attractive … Let the hacking begin."  




3) Facebook is "scuzzy"

The Product is You wrote:Google and Facebook have both been walking this line from the beginning. Their styles of doing so are different. An internet entrepreneur I know has had dealings with both companies. ‘YouTube knows they have lots of dirty things going on and are keen to try and do some good to alleviate it,’ he told me. I asked what he meant by ‘dirty’. ‘Terrorist and extremist content, stolen content, copyright violations. That kind of thing. But Google in my experience knows that there are ambiguities, moral doubts, around some of what they do, and at least they try to think about it. Facebook just doesn’t care. When you’re in a room with them you can tell. They’re’ – he took a moment to find the right word – ‘scuzzy’.

4) Rich and scuzzy...

Here is a report from someone at Facebooks going public by selling stocks

sss wrote:I had chosen a seat behind a detached pair, who on further inspection turned out to be Chris Cox, head of FB product, and Naomi Gleit, a Harvard grad who joined as employee number 29, and was now reputed to be the current longest-serving employee other than Mark.

Naomi, between chats with Cox, was clicking away on her laptop, paying little attention to the Zuckian harangue. I peered over her shoulder at her screen. She was scrolling down an email with a number of links, and progressively clicking each one into existence as another tab on her browser. Clickathon finished, she began lingering on each with an appraiser’s eye. They were real estate listings, each for a different San Francisco property.

I took note of one of the properties and looked it up later. Price: $2.4 million.

5) Facebook has become a massive sociology laboratory

In 2014 social scientists at FB deliberately manipulated the news feeds of 700,000 users to see what effect, if any, it had on their emotions. The resulting paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was a study of ‘social contagion’, or the transfer of emotion among groups of people: "When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks."

[Why did they make this public?]

6) Advertisers could not have ever imagined they have access to your personal diary

Like most media (magazines, TV, radio, ect...)  Facebooks sell their audience to advertizes to make money. But they don't just sell a certain broad demographic they sell populations that have voluntarily detailed their lives on a daily basis. Between your FB postings/information and cookies that track everything from links clicked, credit-card purchases to your mobile phones location. [This is a big part of the surveillance infrastructure that CIA/NSA have backdoors too...]

A recently leaked Facebook document indicated that the company had been touting to advertisers its ability to determine teens’ emotional state based on their on-site behavior, and even to pinpoint “moments when young people need a confidence boost.” Facebook acknowledged that the document was real.

Facebook-powered ads can target you when you give signs of being emotional weak. I'm a guy who still duct tapes over annoying logos on soap bottles and pours cereal into transparent ziplocks because I grew-up in the 'ad-busters' era of the late 1990s. As I said a misty chasm will always separate me from FB.


7) "Fake news"
I have ignored this whole topic but I thought that 'fake news' meant reporting you didn't like or Alex Jones-style screeds, I didn't realize that 'fake news' on facebook meant spam!

Zuckerberg himself has spoken up on this issue, in a Facebook post addressing the question of ‘Facebook and the election’. After a certain amount of boilerplate bullshit (‘Our goal is to give every person a voice. We believe deeply in people’), he gets to the nub of it. ‘Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 per cent of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes.’ More than one Facebook user pointed out that in their own news feed, Zuckerberg’s post about authenticity ran next to fake news. In one case, the fake story pretended to be from the TV sports channel ESPN. When it was clicked on, it took users to an ad selling a diet supplement. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, found the same post by Zuckerberg next to a different fake ESPN story and another piece of fake news purporting to be from CNN, announcing that Congress had disqualified Trump from office. When clicked-through, that turned out to be from a company offering a 12-week programme to strengthen toes.

Political Power

‘In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News and others.’

Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan have hired Democratic pollster Joel Benenson, a former top adviser and longtime pollster to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant. In January, Zuckerberg hired David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run, as president of policy and advocacy. They also brought on Ken Mehlman, who ran President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.


9) Facebook and Google are the new colonial powers

sss wrote:Growth can only come from connecting new areas of the planet. An early experiment came in the form of Free Basics, a program offering internet connectivity to remote villages in India, with the proviso that the range of sites on offer should be controlled by Facebook. ‘Who could possibly be against this?’ Zuckerberg wrote in the Times of India. The answer: lots and lots of angry Indians. The government ruled that Facebook shouldn’t be able to ‘shape users’ internet experience’ by restricting access to the broader internet. A Facebook board member tweeted that ‘anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?’ As Taplin points out, that remark ‘unwittingly revealed a previously unspoken truth: Facebook and Google are the new colonial powers.’

Summary

The old world is being swept away. The guy who installed my new dish was heading out to some obscure hunt-camp near Verner to wire the whole place-up. "Every guys escaping to the woods for a few days can't do without wireless," he said with a shrug. He told stories of wireless houses where the fridge keeps track of your food and automatically orders new products. No Facebook, no smartphone, using an old desktop tower, this is the old way.

This has been a century of sweeping away the old and I'm not into sentimental nostalgia or luddite puritanism.

But I can drag my feet, good old feet-dragging against the unstoppable current, just to get a few more last glimpses of the old ways, just to have the time to read about the dark shadowed future we are heading into.

Maybe have a few conversations without one eye on the internet.  Type up a few R2N posts for the FB-impaired....

The one sentence that didn't sit well with me was that Facebook was "scuzzier" than Google. Google actually has less monthly users than Facebook but its capacity for evil is still pretty high. To take just one instance - there has been a clear drop in the amount of viewers anti-war, socialist and alternative news websites since Google's new 'anti-fake news algorithm' came into effect this spring.



Here is the key statement:

wsws.org wrote:In a set of guidelines issued to Google evaluators in March, the company instructed its search evaluators to flag pages returning “conspiracy theories” or “upsetting” content unless “the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.”

Eric Maas, a search engine optimization consultant working in the San Francisco Bay area, said his team has surveyed a wide range of alternative news sites affected by changes in Google’s algorithms since April.  “While the update may be targeting specific site functions, there is evidence that this update is promoting only large mainstream news organizations. What I find problematic with this is that it appears that some sites have been targeted."

So unless you now type in "conspiracy theory" with the topic you are wondering about Google will shunt you to a big corporate site. Inch by inch the wide open gates of the internet are being shut. Garbage-strewn Facebook news feeds and Google guardians shoving you towards corporate pablum will be the default.

A full two weeks back on the net and I can feel the drop in mood. Two many toxic little tentacles come back in for every query I send out for answers. Even with a concentrated effort to break the habit of surfing political sites, the headlines and references seep in. Hooking up everyone to this primitive global hive-mind might turn into some sort Sci-Fi disaster.

The internet is better than the Library of Alexander, a true wonder for the ages, but the social/mental cost might be a substansial.

Final bit on Trump & Facebook

President-elect Donald Trump's digital director Brad Parscale, said Facebook was massively influential—not because it was tipping the scales with fake news, but because it helped generate the bulk of the campaign's $250 million in online fundraising. "Our biggest incubator that allowed us to generate that money was Facebook," says Parscale, who has been working for the campaign since before Trump officially announced his candidacy a year and a half ago.

Over the course of the election cycle, Trump's campaign funneled $90 million to Parscale's San Antonio-based firm, most of which went toward digital advertising. And Parscale says more of that ad money went to Facebook than to any other platform.

Now watch this BBC clip showing how Trump's team used Facebook's unheard demographic powers (aka the finger up the ass of every Facebook'd Western noting their every click and like) to win the election. They actually talk to someone at the heart of this operation so it's worth your 5 minutes.

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/magazine-40852227/the-digital-guru-who-helped-donald-trump-to-the-presidency

I have two more links open but I cannot bear to wade through this anymore. If you are heartier than me, try:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/06/08/how-trump-used-facebook-to-win/

https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-election-not-just-fake-news/

That interview was more terrifying than I was expecting.

More on 'Cambridge Analytica' from the Guardian. The Guardian is usually an unbearable centrist/liberal newspaper that loves war and hates the left - but they do deliver the goods occasionally. The fact that they are being sued for publishing the article I'm quoting from is a sign of bravery too often absent from their reporting.

guardian.com wrote:The key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass English electoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia. It was with AggregateIQ that the official 'Leave' campaign chose to spend more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns.

Director of the Centre for the Study of Communication at King’s College London: “I went through all the Leave campaign invoices when the Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site in February. And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.”

How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a pivotal role in Brexit?

A source emailed me to say he had found that AggregateIQ’s address and telephone number corresponded to a company listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as its overseas office: “SCL Canada”. A day later, that online reference vanished.

Ex-Cambridge Analytica employee: "We were still just a psychological warfare firm. MI6 for hire. It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian and you got to do some really cool things. [...] There wasn’t just a 'relationship' between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ - they were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercer’s distributed empire. The Canadians were our back office. They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved. You need to find Chris Wylie, he’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualized political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada."

[...]

What’s been lost in the US coverage of this “data analytics” firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial complex. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories. SCL/Cambridge Analytica/AggregateIQ was not some startup created by a couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. It’s effectively part of the British defence establishment. And, now, too, the American defence establishment.

Tamsin Shaw (professor of philosophy at NYU): “The capacity for this science to be used to manipulate emotions is very well established. This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t even see, don’t even realize is happening to them,” she says."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

I got to spend a week going crazy and researching the 2016 US election for my crime class. The biggest insight I got was how much unaccountable 'dark money' was being spent on it, rightwing 'hedgefund' billionaires like Robert Mercer were just flooding in $$$ to the election without any public oversight.

Now, I at least know what they were buying.

The Forbes article on how Cambridge Analytica works wrote:
   This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change.

   Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/

I have discussed the de-humanizing/reactionary nature of The Walking Dead in my big zombie round-up. I have collected a few more articles on this topic so I'm collecting them here:

zombie-western-of-the-post-mortem-south

obligatory-fear-the-walking-dead

walking-dead-got-good-again (in which yet another right-wing liberal un-ironically embraces 'social darwinism')

The southern US setting of Walking Dead is no accident, this is a typical 'Southern Gothic' - just like 'The Road'. There may be some cross-over with the right-wing Civil War 'Lost Cause' Romanticism that shows up in so much American fantasy works.

https://roadtonowhere.forumotion.org/f20-books-book-exchange (The Road)

https://roadtonowhere.forumotion.org/t513-col-pladoh (Gary Gygax and the Lost Cause)

If you want to understand why Trump's data-miners targeted viewers of a Southern Gothic 'zombie apocalypse' - or why neo-con chieftain James Woolsey is promoting South Park than - R2N has got you covered.