The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Q for Conspiracy — Margaret Simons in Meanjjin: Elliot Brennan, research associate at the United States Studies Centre, a research centre at the University of Sydney, has identified QAnon theories spreading through parenting websites and the ‘wellness’ movement—which includes the Pete Evans network. ‘If the current global conspiracy theory landscape were like a bath, QAnon would be the drain around which the entire body of water is spiralling,’ he writes. […] It’s best to put aside, so far as you are able, rigid ideas of left and right in trying to understand QAnon. Think that organic food is something inner-city lefties worry about? When the so-called ‘QAnon shaman’—the man in the horned head dress arrested after the Capitol Hill riots—requested organic food in prison, he was true to type. Organic food is big with QAnon—part of its suspicion of big business and chemical companies in particular. […] The wellness industry—naturopathy, homeopathy—is a recognised ‘soft’ path into the QAnon world. And who of us has not taken a vitamin supplement for which there is no, or only dubious, scientific evidence?
• The Insecurity Industry — Edward Snowden: Prior to this week’s Pegasus Project, a global reporting effort by major newspapers to expose the fatal consequences of the NSO Group—the new private-sector face of an out-of-control Insecurity Industry—most smartphone manufacturers along with much of the world press collectively rolled their eyes at me whenever I publicly identified a fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone as a potentially lethal threat. Despite years of reporting that implicated the NSO Group’s for-profit hacking of phones in the deaths and detentions of journalists and human rights defenders; despite years of reporting that smartphone operating systems were riddled with catastrophic security flaws (a circumstance aggravated by their code having been written in aging programming languages that have long been regarded as unsafe); and despite years of reporting that even when everything works as intended, the mobile ecosystem is a dystopian hellscape of end-user monitoring and outright end-user manipulation, it is still hard for many people to accept that something that feels good may not in fact be good. Over the last eight years I’ve often felt like someone trying to convince their one friend who refuses to grow up to quit smoking and cut back on the booze—meanwhile, the magazine ads still say “Nine of Ten Doctors Smoke iPhones!” and “Unsecured Mobile Browsing is Refreshing!”
• I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was All a Hoax. — David Gilbert at Vice: Bill’s final semester at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was already difficult enough. He was part of the final graduating class of survivors of the 2018 shooting, and they all had just marked the third anniversary of the day 17 people were killed, nine of whom were Bill’s classmates. But Bill also had to deal with his father’s daily accusations that the shooting was a hoax and that the shooter, Bill, and all his classmates were paid pawns in a grand conspiracy orchestrated by some shadowy force.
• Snakes and Ladders — Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books: Most people seem able to accept considerable inequality in outcomes if they believe that the procedures that lead to these outcomes are in some broad formal sense ‘fair’; that is, they don’t probe too much into what determines the distribution of advantage before the selection procedure begins. Perhaps most of us are inclined, at least some of the time, to think that ability and effort are the things most ‘deserving’ of differential rewards. And many people are more bothered, it seems, by the thought that some individuals may be ‘getting something for nothing’ (in the form of benefits, for example) than the thought that some individuals are paid a thousand times as much as others. There may be no entirely coherent or justifiable basis for these views, but their persistence makes it difficult to build support for fundamental change, just as ingrained notions of what one should be entitled to do for one’s children set narrow limits on what are considered acceptable forms of redistribution. Moreover, like lottery players more generally, many of us seem to prefer to fantasise about ‘making it’ within the existing system than to accept the overwhelming evidence that the odds are rigged against us.
• Dinosaur Comics! — by Ryan North:
  
• Anatomy of a Stock Market Bubble — Frank Veneroso at the Levy Institute: With respect to moral hazard, the bailout measures during the 2007–9 crisis along with the quantitative easing policies that followed are just the most recent instances in a half-century pattern of ever-greater policy interventions that have distorted risk perceptions. Although low interest rates have not played a major role in past price-chasing bubbles, very low rates contributed to the duration and amplitude of the stock market’s trajectory over most of the last decade, and have operated as a signal to market participants that reinforces the moral hazard dimension. Regarding the growth of credit, although the Federal Reserve’s statistics do not reflect it, the United States has experienced a massive increase in nonfinancial enterprise debt. Due to a sustained high rate of corporate equity purchases financed with debt, this overarching expansion of credit has also made its way into the last decade’s bull market and steepened its price trajectory.
• The Future of Australian Universities: Bogans of the Pacific — Dr Binoy Kampmark for the Australian Independent Media Network: The assault on science teaching and research is not merely the work of the surfeit barbarians in the chancellery. Australian higher education is imperilled, not merely by a university management class keen to squeeze students and productive staff into oblivion but a Federal Parliament that sees little value in them. A country facing the sharper side of climate change, brutal weather, environmental destruction and energy crises would be expected to be pouring money into degrees directed towards their study. But scientific illiteracy, along with other forms, is as contagious as the novel coronavirus. In October 2020, changes made to higher education with the blessing of the Centre Alliance and One Nation parties in the Australian Senate saw an effective reduction of 29% to the subject of environmental science. Dianne Gleeson, president of the Australian Council of Environmental Deans and Directors, called this budgetary slicing “one of the largest funding cuts to any university course.”

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked? — Ian Welsh: School is, well, mostly bad. It teaches things slowly, it mostly trains obedience, and it’s a social horror show. When we say social dynamics are like high school, we never mean anything good, and there are dozens of movies about how awfully students treat each other. And most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten. I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.
• How to Write About Iran: A Guide for Journalists, Analysts, and Policymakers — Ladane Nasseri in McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Whether you are working from your DC office or your home in LA or New York, here’s all you need to know to become an expert on Iran. 1. Always refer to Iran as the “Islamic Republic” and its government as “the regime” or, better yet, “the Mullahs.” 2. Never refer to Iran’s foreign policy. The correct terminology is its “behavior.” When U.S. officials say Iran “must change its behavior” and “behave like a normal country,” write those quotes down word for word. Everyone knows that Iran is a delinquent kid that always instigates trouble and must be disciplined.
• Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
  
• Four-day week 'an overwhelming success' in Iceland — by somebody who doesn't get a byline for lightly editing a press release, at the BBC: Trials of a four-day week in Iceland were an "overwhelming success" and led to many workers moving to shorter hours, researchers have said. The trials, in which workers were paid the same amount for shorter hours, took place between 2015 and 2019. Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces, researchers said. A number of other trials are now being run across the world, including in Spain and by Unilever in New Zealand. In Iceland, the trials run by Reykjavík City Council and the national government eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which amounts to about 1% of Iceland's working population.
• The Delusional Scam of the Self-Help Book Industry — Ed Zitron: These books are adjacent to the world of personal branding, usually promising to provide an illuminating 100-300 pages of tips that will totally change your life. A commenter added an important addition to the thread that these books usually make vast assumptions about what things a person can actually change in their life, describing them as “the actual start point of an echo chamber,” and she’s totally right - these books are written for and geared toward a very specific audience of privileged individuals who have their life decisions affirmed and their failures explained away. The specific assumption they make is that everybody comes from the same sort of background - that they communicate in the same way, that they grow up the same way, and that, much like the world of advice articles and hustle culture, your failure to succeed is only a result of you not working hard enough. […] It’s frustrating, because these books are inherently manipulative. Their most crucial failure is the make-believe positivity of the world - even when they frame life as difficult or challenging, they couch that framing with the idea that it is just hard work that will make you succeed. Agents and publishers likely don’t want to put books on the stands that give advice that basically says “if you didn’t grow up with some form of wealth or privilege, you are going to have a 1000% harder time doing anything this book says.” Framing the world correctly - as oppressive and depressing to most people - isn’t the encouragement that people are looking for, and would be considered “cynical” or “polarizing.”
• Normal Conversation — xkcd by Randall Munroe:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Phil Are Go!:
  
• ‘Journalists’ Who Smear Assange Are Pure Scum — Caitlin Johnstone, who I wish would stop being so circumspect and just say what she thinks: If I had written an article in a major publication claiming there was “no real reason” to believe Assange would face extradition proceedings if he left the Ecuadorian embassy, and then that claim had proved horrifyingly wrong, I personally would have done what any normal person would do and shut the entire fuck up about Julian Assange for the rest of my life. Not James Ball though. There’s a certain type of personality that guarantees it will always fail upward because it possesses a remarkable combination of power-worshipping obsequiousness, a total lack of shame, and a complete lack of scruples. It’s the same type of personality that still gets lucrative punditry work after pushing for the Iraq invasion. James Ball has no more business opining about Julian Assange than John Bolton has about the merits of interventionist foreign policy, yet both remain visible and vocal. Because they are the same kind of creature. I’m pretty good with words, but I’ve never succeeded in finding any which adequately articulate the absolute depravity of the mass media smearmeisters who’ve spent years getting paid to churn out deceitful hit pieces about Assange while he’s silenced and unable to defend himself. There’s simply no one lower. There’s shit, there’s the shit that would come out of shit if shit could shit, and then there’s people like James Ball.
• The world's greatest democracy — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them? — Will Dunn at the New Statesman: In the longer term, as companies commit to greater automation of many roles, it's pertinent to ask whether a company needs a CEO at all. A few weeks ago Christine Carrillo, an American tech CEO, raised this question herself when she tweeted a spectacularly tone-deaf appreciation of her executive assistant, whose work allows Carrillo to “write [and] surf every day” as well as “cook dinner and read every night”. In Carrillo’s unusually frank description of the work her EA does – most of her emails, most of the work on fundraising, playbooks, operations, recruitment, research, updating investors, invoicing “and so much more” – she guessed that this unnamed worker “saves me 60% of time”. […] If most of a CEO's job can be outsourced, this suggests it could also be automated. But while companies are racing to automate entry- and mid-level roles, senior executives and decision makers show much less interest in automating themselves.
• Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
  
• Trump's Failed Blog Proves He Was Just Howling Into the Void — Philip M. Napoli at Wired: As platforms like Twitter and Facebook generated massive user bases, introduced scrolling news feeds, and developed increasingly sophisticated algorithmic systems for curating and recommending content in these news feeds, they became a vital means by which online attention could be aggregated. Users evolved, or devolved, from active searchers to passive scrollers, clicking on whatever content that their friends, family, and the platforms’ news feed algorithms put in front of them. This gave rise to the still-relevant refrain “If the news is important, it will find me.” Ironically, on what had begun as the quintessential pull medium, social media users had reached a perhaps unprecedented degree of passivity in their media consumption. The leaned-back “couch potato” morphed into the hunched-over “smartphone zombie.” The failure of Trump’s blog tells us that even the kind of impassioned political extremists that form the core of Trump’s base of support are so entrenched in their passive, social-media-dependent mode of media consumption that a traditional blog, absent accompanying social media accounts to generate algorithmic amplification, is incapable of gaining a fraction of the online engagement that a single tweet could achieve. Not even the most public of public figures can break free from the platform dependency that largely dictates the distribution of audience attention online. If Trump’s blog can’t gain traction without direct access to the audience aggregation and amplification tools of social media, then perhaps nothing can.
• Rob Rogers:
  
• Consent-Manufacturing For Patriot Act II Continues — Caitlin Johnstone again: As we discussed previously, Biden has often boasted of being the original author of the Patriot Act years before it was rapidly rolled out amid the fear and blind obsequiousness of the aftermath of 9/11. Now in the aftermath of the Capitol riot we are seeing a push to roll out new authoritarian laws around terrorism, this time taking aim at “domestic terror”, which were also in preparation prior to the event used to manufacture support for them. In a new article for Washington Monthly titled “It’s Time for a Domestic Terrorism Law”, Bill Scher argues against left-wing critics of the coming laws like Glenn Greenwald and Jacobin’s Luke Savage saying such “knee-jerk reactions” against potential authoritarian abuses fail to address the growing problem. He opens with the acknowledgement that “Joe Biden’s transition team was already working on a domestic terrorism law before the insurrection,” and then he just keeps on writing as though that’s not weird or suspicious in any way.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea — Robert P Baird in the Guardian: As late as 1694, a slave-ship captain could still question the racial logic newly employed to justify his trade. (“I can’t think there is any intrinsick value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so,” Thomas Phillips wrote in his diary.) But whiteness quickly proved itself a powerful weapon that allowed transatlantic capitalism to secure the labour – “white” and African – it needed. As the historian Theodore Allen put it, “The plantation bourgeoisie deliberately extended a privileged status to the white poor of all categories as a means of turning to African slavery as the basis of its system of production.” The economic utility of the idea of whiteness helped spread it rapidly around the world. Du Bois was not wrong to call it a religion, for like a religion, it operated at every psychological, sociological and political scale, from the most intimate to the most public. Like a religion, too, it adapted to local conditions. What it meant to be white in British Virginia was not identical to what it would mean in New York before the American civil war, in India during the Raj, in Georgia during Jim Crow, in Australia after Federation, or in Germany during the Third Reich. But what united all these expressions was a singular idea: that some group of people called white was naturally superior to all others. As Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian prime minister and one of the most committed race ideologists of his time, put it, “race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance”.
• Is herd immunity to COVID-19 possible? Experts increasingly say no. — Elizabeth Weise at USA Today: Last summer, the World Health Organization put the combined infection and vaccination thresholds needed to break the chain of transmission at 60% to 70%. By December, Fauci put the number for the U.S. at 75% to 85%. With the appearance of highly transmissible variants, some have bumped it to 90%. The unwillingness of some Americans to get vaccinated, however, likely has put the number out of reach. "What has surprised me most is the incomprehensible rejection of science even among otherwise intelligent people," Poland said. "I’m truly flabbergasted to be watching this on a grand scale." The split has become political. About 79% of self-identified Democrats say they have been vaccinated or intend to do so soon, compared with 46% of Republicans. About 3 in 10 Republicans say they will definitely not get vaccinated, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll. That means America could end up looking like a patchwork quilt, with areas where COVID-19 infections are low and others where the virus continues to thrive.
• Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
  
• Unfair Use: Anti-Interoperability and Our Dwindling Digital Freedom — Cory Doctorow in the Reboot: When you look at how “IP” is used by firms, a very precise — albeit colloquial — meaning emerges: “IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.” That is, in a world of uncertainty, where other people’s unpredictability can erode your profits, mire you in scandal, or even tank your business, “IP” is a means of forcing other people to arrange their affairs to suit your needs, even if that undermines their own needs.
• The Instagram ads Facebook won't show you — Signal's Jun Harada: Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives. […] However, Facebook’s own tools have the potential to divulge what is otherwise unseen. It’s already possible to catch fragments of these truths in the ads you’re shown; they are glimmers that reflect the world of a surveilling stranger who knows you. We wanted to use those same tools to directly highlight how most technology works. We wanted to buy some Instagram ads.
  
• Qualia — Cory Doctorow in Locus: Quantitative disciplines – physics, math, and (especially) computer sci­ence – make a pretense of objectivity. They make very precise measure­ments of everything that can be measured precisely, assign deceptively precise measurements to things that can’t be measured precisely, and jet­tison the rest on the grounds that you can’t do mathematical operations on it. This is the quant’s version of the drunkard’s search for car-keys under the lamp-post: we can’t add, subtract, multiply or divide qualitative elements, so we just incinerate them, sweep up the dubious quantitative residue that remains, do math on that, and simply assert that nothing important was lost in the process.