The Zero Room

This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Where loneliness can lead — Samantha Rose Hill in Aeon: The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves. By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power. And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right. But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical, so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment: "Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist."
• Universities belong to the whole community: why we should fund the humanities — Daniel Gregory in Pearls and Irritations: The greatest difficulty in deciding how to fund universities is that students, academics and prospective employers are not the only stakeholders. Universities exist for the benefit of the whole community, including those who will never have the privilege of studying at one. It is easy to see how medical and scientific research benefits the community. It is easy to see how training engineers and computer programmers and nurses benefits the community. We can justify funding universities to do these things without even thinking about the interests of students and academics. What about the humanities? Does the community benefit from funding research and teaching in history and philosophy and the arts?
• The long-term unemployed are not an inflation constraint in a recovery — Bill Mitchell: The first issue to clear up is the definition of long-term unemployment. Long-term unemployment tracks the total unemployment rate in a lagged fashion. So as governments abandoned full employment in the in the 1970s and allowed unemployment to rise significantly, they also had to then contend with the politically troubling issue of long-term unemployment. The solution they took was the purely political – they redefined long-term unemployment. So in the early 1970s, a person was long-term unemployed if they has been unemployed for 13 or more weeks. This was changed in the late 1970s to 26 weeks and from the mid-1980s to 52 weeks. There is on-going pressure change the threshold to 104 weeks and confine it to a small number of so-called intransigents. The changes were designed to disabuse the citizens of the severity of the problem that occurs when government’s fail to deal with an economic downturn in a timely and sufficient manner.
• Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results — Cory Doctorow in Locus Online: Machine learning operates on quantitative elements of a system, and quantizes or discards any qualita­tive elements. And because it is theory-free – that is, because it has no understanding of the causal relationships between the correlates it identifies – it can’t know when it’s making a mistake. The role this deficit plays in magnifying bias has been well-theorized and well-publicized by this point: feed a hiring algorithm the resumes of previously successful candidates and you will end up hiring people who look exactly like the people you’ve hired all along; do the same thing with a credit-assessment system and you’ll freeze out the same people who have historically faced financial discrimination; try it with risk-assessment for bail and you’ll lock up the same people you’ve always slammed in jail before trial. The only difference is that it happens faster, and with a veneer of empirical facewash that provides plausible deniability for those who benefit from discrimination.
• KSP training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence — Satchel Walton and Cooper Walton in the Manual RedEye, a High School newspaper: A training slideshow used by the Kentucky State Police (KSP) — the second largest police force in the state — urges cadets to be “ruthless killer[s]” and quotes Adolf Hitler advocating violence. […] One slide, titled “Violence of Action,” in addition to imploring officers to be “ruthless killer[s],” instructs troopers to have “a mindset void of emotion” and to “meet violence with greater violence.” A line from Adolf Hitler’s fascist and anti-Semitic manifesto, Mein Kampf, is featured in the slide: “the very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.” The presentation also links to a Hitler page on Goodreads, a database of quotes and books. Two other slides quoting Hitler bring his total to three, making him the most quoted person in the presentation.
• Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer — Cory Doctorow at the EFF: HP's latest gambit challenges the basis of private property itself: a bold scheme! With the HP Instant Ink program, printer owners no longer own their ink cartridges or the ink in them. Instead, HP's customers have to pay a recurring monthly fee based on the number of pages they anticipate printing from month to month; HP mails subscribers cartridges with enough ink to cover their anticipated needs. If you exceed your estimated page-count, HP bills you for every page (if you choose not to pay, your printer refuses to print, even if there's ink in the cartridges). If you don't print all your pages, you can "roll over" a few of those pages to the next month, but you can't bank a year's worth of pages to, say, print out your novel or tax paperwork. Once you hit your maximum number of "banked" pages, HP annihilates any other pages you've paid for (but continues to bill you every month).
• Facebook Manipulated the News You See to Appease Republicans, Insiders Say — Clara Jeffery at Mother Jones: Conservatives had been very effective at working the refs by accusing the platforms of liberal bias, especially after a widely publicized 2016 incident in which platform moderators were accused of suppressing pro-Trump content. After that, says a former employee who worked on News Feed, it was made clear that “we can’t do a ranking change that would hurt Breitbart—even if that change would make the News Feed better.” (Breitbart News, where Steve Bannon was still executive chair, seems to have been a particular obsession.) So, too, with the January 2018 changes: “Republican lobbyists in the DC office said, ‘Hold on, how will it affect Breitbart?’” recalls another ex-employee. Testing showed that the proposed changes would take a “huge chunk” out of Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, the Daily Wire, and the Daily Caller. There was “enormous pushback. They freaked out and said, ‘We can’t do this.’” The code was tweaked, and executives were given a new presentation showing less impact on these conservative sites and more harm to progressive-leaning publishers—including Mother Jones. “The problem was that the progressive outlets were real [news] outlets like yours,” recalls the ex-employee, “and the right ones were garbage outlets. You guys were one of the outlets who got singled out to balance the ledger.” […] The graphs and slides appear to have appeased Kaplan. Zuckerberg signed off on the algorithm changes. And soon, the million-plus readers who had chosen to follow Mother Jones saw fewer of our articles in their feeds. Average traffic from Facebook to our content decreased 37 percent between the six months prior to the change and the six months after.
• Calvin and Hobbes — by Bill Watterson:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Antitrust as Economic Stimulus — Hal Singer and Marshall Steinbaum at Pro Market: Consider the following experiment: Under the current antitrust regime, which places coordination rights in the hands of corporations and punishes atomistic suppliers from coordinating in their dealings against dominant platforms, Uber captures about a third of the revenues from each ride in the form of commissions. Suppose a policy intervention—whether a reform to antitrust, labor, or some other law—altered the workplace power imbalance, such that drivers captured an additional 10 percentage points of the fares, reducing Uber’s commissions from 33 to 23 percent. New research on the stimulus checks from the 2020 CARES Act shows lower-income households spent a greater share of the checks than did middle-income households. To the extent that lower-income drivers would spend a greater portion of every incremental dollar than do Uber’s higher-income shareholders, this redistribution of fares towards drivers would mean a greater multiplier effect for the economy every time a passenger takes a ride.
• Driving the 2021 Cadillac Escalade was one of the most stressful experiences of my life — Andrew J. Hawkins in the Verge:
  I don’t consider myself a timid driver, but being behind the wheel of this 6,000-lb behemoth gave me high-grade, flop-sweat-inducing anxiety. I’ve never ridden on the back of an elephant before, but driving the 2021 Escalade may be as close as I’ll get. […] Sitting in the driver’s seat, it’s easy to feel disconnected from the outside world — mostly because you can’t see a lot of it. The grille was like a sheer cliffside, obstructing my view several feet out in front of the wheels. An entire kindergarten class could be lined up in front of this vehicle and I wouldn’t see them. […] When you need a suite of high-definition cameras and other expensive sensors to safely drive to the grocery store, there might be something inherently wrong with your design. Manufacturers know that these types of vehicles are more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, but they keep making them because people keep buying them. Cadillac says it is responding to customer demands for more interior space and cargo room. Super-sizing its vehicles helps it sell more SUVs to more people.
• Eyewitness to the Agony of Julian Assange — John Pilger interviewed by Timothy Erik Ström for Arena: The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, was then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.
• America Has No Allies, Only Hostages — Caitlin Johnstone on Medium: We saw the dynamics of the imperial blob explained quite vividly last year by American political analyst John Mearsheimer at a debate hosted by the Australian think tank Center for Independent Studies. […] “You’re either with us or against us,” he continued. “And if you’re trading extensively with China, and you’re friendly with China, you’re undermining the United States in this security competition. You’re feeding the beast, from our perspective. And that is not going to make us happy. And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro.” Nervous laughter from the Australian think tank audience punctuated Mearsheimer’s more incendiary observations. The CIA is known to have made numerous attempts to assassinate Castro. If you’ve ever wondered how the U.S. is so successful in getting other nations around the world to align with its interests, this is how. It’s not that the U.S. is a good actor on the world stage or a kind friend to its allies, it’s that it will destroy you if you disobey it. Australia is not aligned with the U.S. to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the U.S. to protect itself from the U.S..
• Trump’s Turn From Immigration to the Enemy Within — Ryan Devereaux at the Intercept: This widening of the threat aperture is straight out of the authoritarian playbook, said Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” “You begin with something that separates citizens from noncitizens,” Stanley told The Intercept, explaining how fascistic power grabs often take place. “You have your colonial war, your war on terror, your imperialist war that focuses on distinguishing between citizens and noncitizens, and then you direct that force inwards against your political opponents.” “He’s been wooing the security forces his entire term,” Stanley said. As Tuesday night’s debate wrapped up, Trump explicitly encouraged his supporters to head to election polls and be on the lookout for suspicious activity in what he predicted would be “a fraud like you’ve never seen.” Courting paramilitary groups and loyal security services, calling the integrity of the election into question, and urging his supporters to take it upon themselves to respond are “classic fascist tactics,” Stanley argued. “He’s been using fascist tactics, unquestionably, and he’s already transformed many of these things into policy, particularly around immigration,” he said. “Now he’s turning to his political opponents, so now we’re really facing the concern about transformation into a fascist regime.”

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The Scramble to Defuse the ‘Feral Swine Bomb’ — Diane Peters in Undark: “I’ve heard it referred to as a feral swine bomb,” says Dale Nolte, manager of the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program at the United States Department of Agriculture. “They multiply so rapidly. To go from a thousand to two thousand, it’s not a big deal. But if you’ve got a million, it doesn’t take long to get to 4 [million], then 8 million.” Most wild pigs are a mixture of domestic breeds and European wild boar. “The problem with the hybrids is you get all of the massive benefits of all of that genetics. It creates what we’d call super pigs,” says Brook. Domestic pigs have been bred to be fertile year-round and have big litters — now averaging more than 10 in each — and also to grow large. (Farmers limit their diets in captivity, but they fatten up when they graze at will in the wild.) Boars, meanwhile, have heavy fur and other attributes that help them brave the winter months. Wild or domestic, the species is highly intelligent with a keen sense of smell. Over the last few decades, wild pigs in some regions have grown to unmanageable numbers: Texas has about 1.5 million and spends upwards of $4 million annually controlling them, with little hope of eradicating the population. Florida, Georgia, and California also have vast populations.
• The Internet is for End Users — Internet Architecture Board, at the Internet Engineering Task Force: For whom do we go through the pain of gathering rough consensus and writing running code? After all, there are a variety of parties that standards can benefit, such as (but not limited to) end users, network operators, schools, equipment vendors, specification authors, specification implementers, content owners, governments, nongovernmental organizations, social movements, employers, and parents. Successful specifications will provide some benefit to all the relevant parties because standards do not represent a zero-sum game. However, there are sometimes situations where there is a conflict between the needs of two (or more) parties. In these situations, when one of those parties is an "end user" of the Internet -- for example, a person using a web browser, mail client, or another agent that connects to the Internet -- the Internet Architecture Board argues that the IETF should favor their interests over those of other parties.
• Ad Tech Could Be the Next Internet Bubble — Gilad Edelman in Wired: The real trouble with digital advertising, argues former Google employee Tim Hwang—and the more immediate danger to our way of life—is that it doesn’t work. Hwang’s new book, Subprime Attention Crisis, lays out the case that the new ad business is built on a fiction. Microtargeting is far less accurate, and far less persuasive, than it’s made out to be, he says, and yet it remains the foundation of the modern internet: the source of wealth for some of the world’s biggest, most important companies, and the mechanism by which almost every “free” website or app makes money. If that shaky foundation ever were to crumble, there’s no telling how much of the wider economy would go down with it.
• Dying in a Leadership Vacuum — the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine: The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states. Governors have varied in their responses, not so much by party as by competence. But whatever their competence, governors do not have the tools that Washington controls. Instead of using those tools, the federal government has undermined them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was the world’s leading disease response organization, has been eviscerated and has suffered dramatic testing and policy failures. The National Institutes of Health have played a key role in vaccine development but have been excluded from much crucial government decision making. And the Food and Drug Administration has been shamefully politicized, appearing to respond to pressure from the administration rather than scientific evidence. Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government, causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed “opinion leaders” and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.
• Back to Normal — Ted Rall:
  
• Be Still — George Monbiot: Fundamentally, this is not a vehicle problem but an urban design problem. Or rather, it is an urban design problem created by our favoured vehicle. Cars have made everything bigger and further away. Paris, under its mayor Anne Hidalgo, is seeking to reverse this trend, by creating a “15-minute city”, in which districts that have been treated by transport planners as mere portals to somewhere else become self-sufficient communities, each with their own shops, parks, schools and workplaces, within a 15 minute walk of everyone’s home. This, I believe, is the radical shift that all towns and cities need. It would transform our sense of belonging, our community life, our health and our prospects of local employment, while greatly reducing pollution, noise and danger. Transport has always been about much more than transport. The way we travel helps determine the way we live. And at the moment, locked in our metal boxes, we do not live well.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Your Man in the Public Gallery: Assange Hearing Day 10 — Craig Murray: The gloves were off on Tuesday as the US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information, citing the Rosen case. Counsel for the US government also argued that the famous Pentagon Papers supreme court judgement on the New York Times only referred to pre-publication injunction and specifically did not preclude prosecution under the Espionage Act. The US Government even surmised in court that such an Espionage Act prosecution of the New York Times may have been successful. It is hard for me to convey to a British audience what an assault this represents by the Trump administration on Americans’ self-image of their own political culture. The First Amendment is celebrated across the political divide and the New York Times judgement is viewed as a pillar of freedom. So much so that Hollywood’s main superstars are still making blockbusters about it, in which the heroes are the journalists rather than the actual whistleblower, Dan Ellsberg (whom I am proud to know). The US government is now saying, completely explicitly, in court, those reporters could and should have gone to jail and that is how we will act in future. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the “great liberal media” of the USA are not in court to hear it and do not report it, because of their active complicity in the “othering” of Julian Assange as something sub-human whose fate can be ignored. Are they really so stupid as not to understand that they are next?
• First Elect Obama, Then Move Left! — Ted Rall:
  
• Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People — Ashwin Rodrigues for Motherboard: "SINCE COVID-19 MANY AMERICANS FELL BEHIND IN ALL ASPECTS," reads the website copy. The button below this statement is not for a GoFundMe, or a petition for calling for rent relief. Instead, it is the following call to action, from a company called Civvl: "Be hired as eviction crew." During a time of great economic and general hardship, Civvl aims to be, essentially, Uber, but for evicting people. Seizing on a pandemic-driven nosedive in employment and huge uptick in number-of-people-who-can't-pay-their-rent, Civvl aims to make it easy for landlords to hire process servers and eviction agents as gig workers.
• The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world — Nick Couldry and Bruce Schneier, CNN: What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It's that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building.
• Sutton Impact — Ward Sutton:
  
• Did the FBI Downplay the Far-Right Politics of Las Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock? — Daryl Johnson and Eric Lichtblau at the Intercept break Betteridge's law of headlines: The FBI’s silence on a possible motive is unsatisfying. Attacks carried out by Muslims and Middle Easterners are routinely labeled as terrorism inside the United States, while many of those carried out by non-Muslims like Paddock — a 64-year-old white man — often are not. It was not until earlier this year, after mounting evidence from outside studies, that FBI Director Christopher Wray acknowledged, belatedly, that the bureau considered the rising threat of violent domestic extremists to be on a par with foreign and Islamic-inspired terrorist groups like the Islamic State. Then came the news earlier this month from a high-ranking Homeland Security whistleblower who said he had been pressured to downplay the threat of white supremacists and other intelligence that might be frowned upon by the Trump White House. Another high-ranking Homeland Security official made the same claim in a Forbes interview last month.
• Facebook Sued Over Kenosha Killings — Theodore Hamm at the Intercept: In order to recruit foot soldiers for the August 25 protest, the Kenosha Guard created an event page on its Facebook account. Titled “Armed Citizens to Protect Our Lives and Property,” the posting summoned “patriots willing to take up arms … and defend our City from the evil thugs.” Over 450 Facebook users alerted the platform’s moderators that the Guard’s violent rhetoric violated the company’s policies. According to BuzzFeed News, four Facebook moderators deemed the Guard’s posts “non-threatening.” In Flores-Williams’s view, Facebook’s actions subsequent to the event — shutting down the Guard’s account and admitting to what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called an “operational mistake” in not heeding the 450 warnings — amounted to a recognition it behaved with negligence.
• All of Us Are Smarter Than Any of Us — Alfie Kohn: In America, the individual is almost always the point of reference for thinking about success, about morality, about how children are educated and what defines adulthood. It’s about me, not us. As I argued recently, the astonishing selfishness of people who refuse to wear masks or restrict their activities during an epidemic — putting their “liberty” to do whatever they please above a sense of responsibility to (let alone concern for) the well-being of others — is really just an amplified version of what our whole culture represents. Once you start to pay attention, you notice this motif everywhere. You hear it when we’re told that the hallmark of maturity — the primary indicator of healthy development for young adults — is self-sufficiency. (The corollary is that moms and dads who value their children’s interdependence, not just their independence, are often accused of “helicopter parenting.”) You hear it when well-meaning teachers talk about providing “scaffolding” for students — that is, temporary support for what the kids can’t yet, but soon will be expected to, do entirely on their own. Again, it’s taken for granted that continuing to rely on others is something to be outgrown. (And if it’s not, well, providing help to — or receiving help from — a classmate is sometimes given another name: “cheating.”)
• Your Man in the Public Gallery: Assange Hearing Day 16 — Craig Murray: On Wednesday the trap sprang shut, as Judge Baraitser insisted the witnesses must finish next week, and that no time would be permitted for preparation of closing arguments, which must be heard the immediate following Monday. This brought the closest the defence have come to a protest, with the defence pointing out they have still not addressed the new superseding indictment, and that the judge refused their request for an adjournment before witness hearings started, to give them time to do so. Edward Fitzgerald QC for the defence also pointed out that there had been numerous witnesses whose evidence had to be taken into account, and the written closing submissions had to be physically prepared with reference to the transcripts and other supporting evidence from the trial. Baraitser countered that the defence had given her 200 pages of opening argument and she did not see that much more could be needed. Fitzgerald, who is an old fashioned gentleman in the very nicest sense of those words, struggled to express his puzzlement that all of the evidence since opening arguments could be dismissed as unnecessary and of no effect. I fear that all over London a very hard rain is now falling on those who for a lifetime have worked within institutions of liberal democracy that at least broadly and usually used to operate within the governance of their own professed principles. It has been clear to me from Day 1 that I am watching a charade unfold. It is not in the least a shock to me that Baraitser does not think anything beyond the written opening arguments has any effect. I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her.
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro: