A weekly reading list to stimulate thoughts about the (digitised) world you might (or might not) want to live in.
The week in hyperlinks #21
Here is this week’s collection of articles and ideas that caught my eye, with a focus on ‘digital life’ , broadband Internet and personal data. They offer data about the world we presently live in, and hints about the one we might wish to pass on to future generations.
Censorship corner
Since the news is so dominated by one topic this week, I’m giving it its own section.
“Each social media platform said Monday that it had removed content from Jones or InfoWars because it had violated their policies. The companies’ moves shut down key distribution channels that had given the controversial media figure easy access to millions of internet users. The most dramatic action came last, from YouTube, which is owned by Google (GOOGL). It removed many top channels associated with InfoWars, including The Alex Jones Channel, which had 2.4 million subscribers and videos that were viewed over 1.5 billion times.”
Related comments:
- Robert Steele — this is “digital assassination”.
- Economic Collapse Blog — “This coordinated, illegal censorship is clear proof of an organized criminal racket being conducted by the tech giants. The RICO Act allows for federal prosecution of such criminal conspiracy.”
- CNBC — “Alex Jones’ Infowars rockets up the charts in Apple’s App Store, days after Apple and others banned his podcasts”
- Spiked — “There will of course be apologists for the corporate control of speech, on both the left and right, who will say, ‘It’s only censorship when the government does it!’. They are so wrong.“
- @1969_z28 — “100% Inside Job”
- James Perloff — “Any chance that his recent banning was orchestrated to restore his image as true foe of Establishment, after which he’ll be reinstated with larger, invigorated following?”
Microsoft threatens to boot the far-right’s favorite social network off its cloud over posts that threatened Jews with ‘vengeance’ — Business Insider
Title speaks for itself. Is it really the job of a digital landlord to evict the bookshop owner if he sells a libellous or offensive publication?
Gary Cohn calls Facebook worse than pre-crisis big banks — Axios
“Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president who later served as President Trump’s first national economic advisor, believes social media companies like Facebook are a larger societal danger than were banks before the financial crisis, due to their dissemination of misinformation.” — But who guards us against “fake news”? And who guards the guards?
See also:
- Twitter asks academics to help it kill off toxic tweets with algorithms
- Facebook Has Eliminated 93% of Traffic to Top Conservative Websites Since 2016 Election
- California Judge Rules Twitter CAN Be Sued for Falsely Advertising Free Speech
- Apple removes ‘wrong apps’ in gambling purge
- ‘Fiction is outperforming reality’: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth
- Disqus Bans Infowars from Comments Platform Amid Big Tech Purge
Noteworthy news
“Kim Dotcom and Thomas Paine had a conversation over the weekend where the internet entrepreneur confirmed he is currently building a new social media platform to rival the totalitarian duo of Twitter and Facebook. “It’s true and it’s going to be great,” Kim Dotcom told True Pundit. “Make Social Media Great Again.”” See also Blowback: UniCredit Becomes First Major Corporation To Sever Ties With Facebook Over Ethics and Quit Facebook Before It Inevitably Accesses Your Banking Data.
“As Norwegian news publication Tadens Krav reports, the material shows penetration of toddlers, children being tied, children who have sex with animals and children who have sex with other children. … Take special note of the shocking file size — 150 terabytes! It’s too horrible to even contemplate. To put this into context, the Library of Congress holds about 600 terabytes of Web data.”
Senate Democrats Are Circulating Plans for Government Takeover of the Internet: Reason Roundup — Reason
“Here’s how Warner is suggesting we deal: Mandatory location verification. … Mandatory identity verification. … Bot labeling. … Define popular tech as “essential facilities.” … The paper also suggests making it a rule that tech platforms above a certain size must turn over internal data and processes to “independent public interest researchers” so they can identify potential “public health/addiction effects, anticompetitive behavior, radicalization,” scams, “user propagated misinformation,” and harassment—data that could be used to “inform actions by regulators or Congress.”” — A mix of the downright dangerous with the simply sensible.
Leader technologies files trillion dollar bond lien on the U.S. government — I-UV
“The timeline also reveals disturbing long-time collusion of Leader’s former patent attorney, James P. Chandler, with the White House ever since Bill Clinton’s presidency, right through George Bush and Barack Obama. It also shows his collusion with rogue intelligence operatives in the NSA, CIA, FBI and with IBM, among others. … Leader says the damages are valued at least $40 billion for historical damages, which they say is not actually close to the real number, and $184 billion per year in ongoing annual license fees.”
Cool tech
The Media Industry is in Serious Trouble — tvMEO
Conified content creation presentation. I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where people who create valuable content actually get paid for it?
FuzeX — Cryptocurrency Payments at your Fingertips
“The FuzeX Ecosystem provides real-time exchange between crypto and fiat currencies. This means that you can now bridge the gap between your online wallet and the one in your pocket.” — Are the legacy payment processors and retail banks all Nokias and Motorolas in an iPhone and Android world?
Important ideas
Brian Eno message – Don’t get a job — YouTube
“All these people who are called genius actually sat in the middle of something that I call scenius. Just as genius is the creative intelligence of an individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of a community.”
Living by the Rule of Law — Roger Hayes
“This author is not opposed to ‘statutes’ per se – he is opposed to the abuse of the use of statutes which has reached staggering proportions. Statutes are now used to override and nullify our laws and put power in the hands of the governing elite… but only because we allow it. Our freedoms are our right – but we must be prepared to defend them when they are being snatched from us from right under our noses.”
Data of distinction
You Bet Your Life: ‘Death Bonds,’ the Investments That Want You Dead — Catapult
The world of necrocapitalism: “The faster the patient dies, the better the investor’s rate of return. Financial risk is thus directly tied to the patient’s odds of survival and the investor is essentially betting against the patient’s life. … financial news outlet The Deal reported that the market grew by 47% in 2016, with $2.14 billion in policies purchased by investors that year.”
Developing, Mastering and Weaponizing new technology to control you — Veterans Today
“It’s a sad fact that over 985 Billion USD per year is being spent by the USG to spy on you and control you. The actual total is considered classified but you can bet it is now very near to 1 Trillion USD per year.”
The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature — Quanta Magazine
““Octonions are to physics what the Sirens were to Ulysses,” Pierre Ramond, a particle physicist and string theorist at the University of Florida, said in an email.” — We are unconsciously limited in our ability to describe the universe by our progress in pure and applied mathematics.
Spare change is dying, and the UK’s homeless people are worried — Wired
“Across the UK, 300 cash machines close each month. Poorer rural areas, where machines were brought in to cushion the closure of branches, are being hit hardest. In 2006, 62 per cent of payments were made in cash. Today, only 40 per cent are, and by 2026 this is expected to be as low as 21 per cent. For people without a stable bed, who rely on the generosity of strangers, the disappearance of spare change is an urgent issue.” See also Would you scan a homeless person’s barcode to give them money?
Music found to induce cooperative behavior: Upbeat tunes improve mood, inspire teamwork — Natural News
“In both studies, when music like Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl, which has an upbeat tune and is deemed a “happy” song, is played, the chances that team members would use the tokens to boost the group’s value was higher, unlike when “unpleasant” music was played or if there was no music at all. This proves that happy music can encourage employees to make decisions that can benefit the whole team.”
Modern scientists are wrong far more than you think — PacificStandard
“Estimates of the proportion of published scientific discoveries that are false is a hotly debated issue. While Ioannidis thinks it possible that the vast majority of published findings are false, Professor Jeffery Leek of University of Washington puts the figure much lower, estimating in an interesting 2014 paper that about 14 percent of scientific findings are likely to be false. However, as Ioannidis and others would quickly point out, there are some serious reasons to suspect that this estimate is too small.”
Interesting views
Overcoming overshoot: how to stop stealing resources from future generations — Insurge Intelligence
“The graphic below by the Global Footprint Network shows the way that Earth Overshoot Day continues to be earlier and earlier every year, since on December 23rd 1970 humanity — as a whole and by no means everyone — started to live on resources stolen from future generations. In other words, this the day that we started to erode the capital of the inheritance of life, rather than thriving together by living off its interest and staying within a resource use that is below the amount the Earth is able to regenerate every year.”
Basic income is the bait — Critical Thinking
“However, in this world of inversion and amid growing monetisation and control of our lives, basic income is being championed in conjunction with digital cash. When your means to life is granted or withdrawn at the click of a mouse button, is that going to feel like and operate as freedom?”
Who knew? The Facebook Marketplace as CBT for PTSD — David Heitz
“I think it’s fair to say that two weeks of working the FB Marketplace has been sort of like a new sort of cognitive behavioral therapy treatment. People with PTSD isolate – that’s our number one problem. So, this has been a very healthy exercise, right down to how I handled the kind of scary TV incident. I’m relieved I didn’t do something stupid like sell my house. And I even have made a few new friends.”
Yuval Noah Harari: ‘The idea of free information is extremely dangerous’ — The Guardian
“The more people believe in free will, that their feelings represent some mystical spiritual capacity, the easier it is to manipulate them, because they won’t think that their feelings are being produced and manipulated by some external system.”
Provocative perspectives
Compassion in the Aftermath of The Storm — Chris Jacobson
“Based on information from Q, I believe many high-level politicians including Barack Obama and the Clintons will be tried, convicted and jailed (or maybe even executed for treason). When these events take place, those who have set their hopes on these corrupt individuals are going to be blindsided, distraught and likely very angry at being led astray. That’s when we need to be there for them, and we need to be loving, empathetic and compassionate.”
The Anatomy of Satanism in Hollywood — James True
“Aztec culture has a bloody history of human sacrifice. We are bewildered at the very thought of it being real. We call those people animals and bury them deep down in history. We rest easy knowing how evolved we’ve become. We insist something so savage could never happen to us here today. After all, we have our airplanes. We have our crosswalks. We go to movies. Impossible.”
Media of merit
From Twitter:
- The anti-bike lobby back in the 19th century
- Best newspaper correction ever
- A ship-shipping ship, shipping shipping ships
- The most Scottish computer ever
- Korean banana packaging innovation
Podcast:
Bas Van Abel “Fingerprints on the touchscreen”
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