Category: Uncategorized

facebook’s reckoning

Chris Kammerud

 

John Herrman, reporting in the New York Times Magazine, in August.

Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

 

Mark Zuckerberg, earlier this week, responding to speculation over the impact of fake news on Facebook, as reported in the Verge

After a day of criticism over his company’s role in spreading fake news about political candidates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected the idea that the News Feed had tilted the election in favor of Donald Trump. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

 

Mike Isaac in the Times

Even as Facebook has outwardly defended itself as a nonpartisan information source — Mark. Zuckerberg, chairman and chief executive, said at a conference on Thursday that Facebook affecting the election was “a pretty crazy idea” — many company executives and employees have been asking one another if, or how, they shaped the minds, opinions and votes of Americans.

In May, the company grappled with accusations that politically biased employees were censoring some conservative stories and websites in Facebook’s Trending Topics section, a part of the site that shows the most talked-about stories and issues on Facebook. Facebook later laid off the Trending Topics team.

In September, Facebook came under fire for removing a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a naked 9-year-old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, as she fled napalm bombs during the Vietnam War. The social network took down the photo for violating its nudity standards, even though the picture was an illustration of the horrors of war rather than child pornography.

Both those incidents seemed to worsen a problem of fake news circulating on Facebook. The Trending Topics episode paralyzed Facebook’s willingness to make any serious changes to its products that might compromise the perception of its objectivity, employees said. The “napalm girl” incident reminded many insiders at Facebook of the company’s often tone-deaf approach to nuanced situations.

 

Michael Nunez in Gizmodo

According to two sources with direct knowledge of the company’s decision-making, Facebook executives conducted a wide-ranging review of products and policies earlier this year, with the goal of eliminating any appearance of political bias. One source said high-ranking officials were briefed on a planned News Feed update that would have identified fake or hoax news stories, but disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing that content from people’s feeds. According to the source, the update was shelved and never released to the public. It’s unclear if the update had other deficiencies that caused it to be scrubbed.

 

Ben Thompson, back in September of this year, writing in Stratechery about the incident regarding the photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc.

The truth is that Facebook may not be a media company, but users do read a lot of news there; by extension, the company may not have a monopoly in news distribution, but the impact of so many self-selecting Facebook as their primary news source has significant effects on society. And, as I’ve noted repeatedly, society and its representatives may very well strike back; this sort of stupidity via apathy will only hasten the reckoning.

what the hell just happened

Chris Kammerud

 

Lots to dig into in this intelligent screed from Dave Pell, including this bit on our bubbling off into separate bubbles.

Segregation: This election displayed a remarkable geopolitical split between cities and inner suburbs, and outer suburbs and rural areas. This makes perfect sense. We never interact. Many of us hoped that the internet would increase our interaction with people who didn’t look and think like us. Sadly, it merely offered us the opportunity to create and live in digital silos of homogenization.

This segregation makes us perfect targets for the political messages of those who would choose to divide us. It’s much easier to stereotype the other when you never see the other.

Discovered at Daring Fireball. Here’s what Gruber said.

One, I’ve struggled mightily to put my thoughts together. This piece by Dave Pell does a hell of a good job of that.

Second, because I know that many of you are struggling with this, Daring Fireball can serve as a place where you turn to think about something else. It felt good to write yesterday’s analysis of the new MacBook Pros. But I can’t ignore it forever, and you shouldn’t either.

slur

Chris Kammerud

John Gruber, reacting to an op-ed in the Times, back in March:

That phrase at the end — that we have “a culture in which some people believe that it’s worse to be called racist than to be racist” — is something I started noticing years ago. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it, and it explains much about our current discourse on racism.

A recent piece at Breitbart concerning an essay by Neil Gabler at BillMoyers.com (emphasis mine):

So, according to Gabler, there you have it: The voters, at least the Trump voters, are judged to be racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and nativist.

We might pause to wonder: What is Gabler trying to accomplish here? Who thinks that such a slur-filled string of characterizations will inspire anyone to slap his or her forehead and say, “Gee whiz, now that I’ve read Mr. Gabler’s insults aimed at me, I’m starting to see things his way. So I’ll vote Democratic from now on!” Answer: Nobody.

a crack in everything

Chris Kammerud

 

Maria Popova, collecting pieces of Leonard Cohen’s life and lyrics:

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Western world was ablaze with the euphoria of a blind faith that democracy was coming to the East. I was there — that’s not what happened. Cohen, too, saw things differently.

One of his most beloved lyric lines, from the song “Anthem” — a song that took Cohen a decade to write — remains what is perhaps the most meaningful message for our troubled and troubling times: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” It springs from a central concern of Cohen’s life and work, one which he revisited in various guises across various songs — including in “Suzanne”, where he writes “look among the garbage and the flowers / there are heroes in the seaweed,” and in the iconic “Hallelujah”: “There’s a blaze of light / In every word / It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah”.

real life. sort of.

Chris Kammerud

Hello, readers.

Regina Spektor performed last night at the Southbank Centre. She wore a billowing black blouse and incredibly red shoes. She sang songs about orca whales and dark-hearted politicians. Picket fences and horns hidden beneath fedoras. Her voice–always playful, often operatic–echoed this night with deeper sadness and necessity. It rose and cracked and went on standing. Occasionally, it slipped into Russian. That’s a thing she can do, having growing up in the Soviet Union.

“Real life,” she had said, when she first sat at the piano.

“Real life. Sort of.”

She mentioned, more than once, feelings of depression, of greyness, of finding it hard to play. At times, it appeared she might cry during a song. I think, perhaps, she might have. I certainly did. Only once, did she speak at length about the election. Taking a break halfway through the show, she talked about being on tour these past couple months. About being away and the dislocated feeling of returning to a home that no longer felt like home. Searching for ways to go on. Love and friends and art. It didn’t seem like enough to travel with.

But this is what she had.

And this is what she gave us.

She went back to playing. And the three songs she played next tore my heart out and held it up and said look. See? Here it is. Here is where it always is.

Everything she couldn’t bring herself to say. Everything that brought her nearly to tears before and after and during each song she performed this night poured out of her. Her voice made a sound I’m not sure I’ve heard before.

Here are the names of two of the songs she played.

And a few of the lyrics from each.

“Ballad of the Politician”

A man inside a room is shaking hands with other men
This is how it happens
Our world under command

Shake it, shake it baby
Shake your ass out in that street
You’re gonna make us scream someday
You’re gonna make us weak

But I am
But I am
But I am not a number, not a name

“Apres Moi”

Be afraid of the lame
They’ll inherit your legs
Be afraid of the old
They’ll inherit your souls
Be afraid of the cold
They’ll inherit your blood
Apres moi, le deluge
After me comes the flood

I must go on standing
You can’t break that which isn’t yours
I, oh, must go on standing
I’m not my own, it’s not my choice

 
After the show, she received, as she deserved, a standing ovation that lasted for quite some time. I looked around at everyone. And everyone looked around at everyone else. Taking it all in. All of us standing, our faces lit as much by the darkness as by the light.

I told EG, later on at home, that I had never seen anything quite like it. I joked that, perhaps, this is what shows were like in Germany in the 20s, before the flood.

Haha, I said. Hah. Um.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Here we are, readers. If you hear someone singing a song near you, listen. They might have the words you need.

 

ttfn.

a constraint upon our imaginations

Chris Kammerud

 

Leon Wieseltier, in the Washington Post way back in June, wrestles with the expanses of pain and the limits of our imagination.

As I watched “The Deer Hunter,” I was struck by the scattershot nature of American compassion. There are many groups in our society that suffer hardship and discrimination, but we confer moral glamour on some of them and not on others. We are never concerned in equal measure about them all. We are inconstant in our decency, which is perhaps the most common form of indecency. The media has made our attention, and therefore our mercies, fickle; from our digital sources we know about all sorts of suffering, and we just live with the knowledge. But our passing sympathies, the soft betrayals of the intermittent heart, are not exactly random.

The partiality of our consciences, our inability to care about all who have a proper claim upon our care, is not the result of a constraint upon our budgets, or more generally upon our institutions of politics and government. It is the result of a constraint upon our imaginations. Ethical principles are most commonly ascribed to the operations of reason, but we need to remind ourselves of the role of the imagination in moral action.

…this mental and spiritual preparation, is what transforms justice from a fantasy into a cause. All this is very uplifting. But it is hardly the whole story. The white working class differs in a significant way from the people who have discovered it. Our moment does not consist only in millions of Americans stepping outside themselves and proclaiming their sympathy for others. It consists also of millions of Americans staying inside themselves and proclaiming their sympathy for themselves. And just as the emphasis on other people’s tribulations expands us, the emphasis on our own tribulations contracts us.

Pain has no special access to truth.

a time for refusal

Chris Kammerud

 

Teju Cole, in The New York Times Magazine, writing of Rhinoceros–a play inspired by the rise of fascism in Romania–and the unfortunate tendency of humans to herd.

Things become more disturbing in the next act. (This is a play: “Rhinoceros,” written by Eugène Ionesco.) The rhino sightings continue to be the subject of pointless dispute. Then, one by one, various people in the town begin to turn into rhinos. Their skin hardens, bumps appear over their noses and grow into horns. Jean had been one of those scandalized by the first two rhino sightings, but he becomes a rhino, too. Midway through his metamorphosis, Berenger argues with him: “You must admit that we have a philosophy that animals don’t share, and an irreplaceable set of values, which it’s taken centuries of human civilization to build up.” Jean, well on his way to being a rhino, retorts, “When we’ve demolished all that, we’ll be better off!”

 

 

onward

Chris Kammerud

 

William Kristol, from a piece in The Weekly Standard, equal parts elegy and clarion call.

We know America has no manifest destiny. We know America does not face manifest doom. We know we do have a manifest duty to our predecessors, our contemporaries, and our posterity. We know America remains an experiment in liberty and self-government that can succeed, and that can fail.

 

rules for survival

Chris Kammerud

 

Masha Gessen, in The New York Review

Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm.

 

Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture.

 

See also. Hitler’s only kidding.