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steamedtangerine · 2 years

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Bear with me here:

I recently wrote this long screed in response to the insane situation that just happened in Walled Lake, MI a few days ago involving a QNut killing his wife and attempting to kill his daughter. The more I look back at QAnon, I’m reminded of things I went through years before the Fuckin’ Matrix film ever came out. Yet, not long ago, some guy takes his kids to Mexico to speargun them to death and admitted he “felt like Neo from the Matrix”. So, I feel like what I went through was mere prototype for shit like this, and I thank God every day that I was never exposed to the batshit nonsense some susceptible souls are now being exposed to today in a cordoned off world of high-speed media saturation that increases the chances of being “tweaked” phenomenally and also being manipulated.

This ramble will make little sense to anyone.....and where I first posted it is just mere preaching to the birds....at least here it serves as type of time capsule that I hope I can look back upon and see a bigger portion of a puzzling dilemma and how ugly things are being devised in the background.....so, against all feelings warning me to the contrary (and I learned life is a lot like that-where doing the right and constructive thing will NEVER FEEL RIGHT at the time....but you just know ever so slightly that it is the thing that needs to be done) I exhibit my previously posted rant:

(this follows a link to the aforementioned atrocity in Walled Lake) -This happened here in Michigan. Walled Lake man loses his head over the 2020 election, went into a spiral, and got worse. He kills his wife and dog and injures his one daughter, only to get killed by cops in a shoot-out. This is what genuine atrocity looks like. The surviving (other) daughter wrote a confirmed condemnation on a Reddit sub putting a spotlight on casualties of Qanon.

Remember that time a group of crazed people with weapons stormed the Capitol screaming to hang the vice President, harming guards, and trampling old women with "Don't tread on me" flags because Gore lost? Yeah, Me neither.

Remember when crackhead industrialists sunk thousands of dollars into fake conspiracy films until their last operation was closed in a mall in Minnesota because John Kerry lost? Yeah, me neither.

Making a cult of Trump is batshit insane seeing as noone (I mean NOONE) liked the guy in the 80s and 90s-Blooom County, Spy, Mag Magazine, SNL, Tim Burton, Joe Dante, the creators of Back to the Future-all beloved institutions of culture-all mocked and parodied him for what he was: a crooked, selfish, spoiled, loudmouth cheat of a person raised by the likes of Roger Stone and Roy Cohn. A person void of the essential humility to be seen redeemable in God's eyes.....and yet, people fly flags (FLAGS!! -this never happened prior to this nuttiness) in their front yards as a testimony of some dumb figurehead who represents to them the ugly aspect of never having to ever admit fault and never working towards elf-improvement.

Almost every Republican accusation has been a secret confession.....all projection and deflection from themselves. Just the same artificially culture-less 15-25 trolls here on NT reblogging terse one-way rude bumper sticker-like memes with no sources or evidence to their misinformative claims.

Yet, with Q culture we've had: nutjobs shooting up pizzerias, screeching freaks busting in on late night Christmas masses in Philly, blockheads obstructing traffic on the Hoover Dam, crazies starting forest fires in Cali, z-grade nobody drug-addled, woman abusing actors throwing themselves off bridges for "letting the movement down", the online wack-a-doos who insists Fauci should be executed only to die from their own negligent attitude about COVID, schmucks threatening platforms like YouTube, dipshits driving trains into boats, loons detonating themselves in RVs in Nashville, sickos driving their small kids to Mexico only to slay them with a speargun, online fuck-ups killing their "reptilian" brothers, and so much more....yeah, you will know them for their fruits.

They screeched about "threats" (because their cult was based around threat, fear, and unfounded righteous indignation, but not a lick of contrasting ambition or sense of virtue to their value system), but they became the very threat.

Maybe it's certain websites or doctor's meds, or government dope issued, or certain video games that glorify armed service-or maybe it's the water....and I don't doubt something happened to instigate an " existential crisis" in them (complete with odd coincidences, bad dreams, EDIT-solipsism that is either self-fostered or induced-complete with disassociation and internalization, vast susceptibility to dumb, ugly things like Trump, etc.)-the kind of things the Church of the Subgenius warned can be exploited by everything from Pentecostals, the C.I.A. handlers, Scientology, or any artificial "redpill/Matrix" cult, because they are now in a new realm of predatory reality that requires them to realize how even the phenomenal elements can be misleading.....

......but what really gets me is that almost every one one of these dupes are people who never took a risk and read an actual book about "conspiracy" (So much for "seeks and ye will find".). Those versed in it know history (Hi! ever bother to read the People's Almanac?) is steeped in the evil shit going back to Karen Silkwood, Fred Hampton, guys like Beckwith and Calley getting off scot-free, or back when King James would slow-poison someone threatening to out him. It also means developing a sense of critical thinking and comparative thinking that requires one to squint their mind to question the sources of BS out there....I mean, we all love escapism, but if you can't entertain the notion that maybe (just MAYBE) the whole UFO flap of the 20th century was an artificial means to keep on the backburner to control people down the road (along with dispensational dominionism....or even a "Virtual Reality/Redpill" theory), then you are going to get roped in by crap by guys like Von Daniken or antisemitic POSs like David Icke (whom the Forteans used to dis on major). These dupes were never motivated into looking into conspiracies in their cushy, sheltered, privileged lives, because they were never prodded by injustice like most marginalized people who know all too well how viscous, deceitful, and predatory this world can truly be.....but God forbid a black man becomes President....suddenly their little world turns upside down, and they lose their ungodly little minds, and God punishes them by letting them get deluded by the BIG LIE as so many for hundreds of years before them did-----all because they harbored delusions of grandeur by misassuming they had the inside track on things no one else can perceive......and they were easy prey for shadowy jerks who convinced them that "the REAL truth is buried" in doofy tabloids and that the button to exit their "artificial reality" was hidden by a repugnant clown of a wealthy jerk.

.....yeah, it's not too late to start looking into how things like blood-sugar affects a person, or how B-vitamains helped a guy like Robert Crumb shake off some of the bad lingering effects of psychedelics.

I made a list back in 2018-that has since grown-for a Reddit post listing all the times-with heavy Trumper/libertarian/militia/white supremacists/GOPer overlap-someone comes out as a threat or commits (mass) murder. For every leftist killer you better believe there is about 20 right-wingers who are the truly big threat. A majority folks have seen it and don't deny it-why do you think the election results came out as they did in 2020?.....yet, if some fringe site wants to be led along by the same sociopathic trolls who wanna ignore all the plague-spreading, senseless and racist killings and actual child trafficking coming from their camp, then you better hope nobody in authority on the outside takes notice in shutting things down the way things clamped down in internetland back on January 6th (and should've a lot sooner).

Yeah, a real boner-killer for this site, but as long as the same bullshitters are on here making Trump a cult figure like Q, and I'm seeing bloody psycho-killing happen too close to home, you better believe I'm gonna whole-heartedly agree with the orphaned daughter who wishes that the FBI should crush and scatter Q culture into nothingness.

#atrocity #idiocracy #top tier #propaganda #crumb #mad #spy #bloom county #Joe Dante #Tim Burton #slack!#kvetch kvetch kvetch #pray 4 me

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation"

The mainstream critique of Facebook is surprisingly compatible with Facebook’s own narrative about its products. FB critics say that the company’s machine learning and data-gathering slides disinformation past users’ critical faculties, poisoning their minds.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself tells advertisers that it can use data and machine learning to slide past users’ critical faculties, convincing them to buy stuff.

In other words, the mainline of Facebook critics start from the presumption that FB is a really good product and that advertisers are definitely getting their money’s worth when they shower billions on the company.

Which is weird, because these same critics (rightfully) point out that Facebook lies all the time, about everything. It would be bizarre if the only time FB was telling the truth was when it was boasting about how valuable its ad-tech is.

Facebook has a conflicted relationship with this critique. I’m sure they’d rather not be characterized as a brainwashing system that turns good people into monsters, but not when the choice is between “brainwashers” and “con-artists selling garbage to credulous ad execs.”

As FB investor and board member Peter Thiel puts it: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” In other words, the important word in “evil genius” is “genius,” not “evil.”

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1440312271511568393

The accord of tech critics and techbros gives rise to a curious hybrid, aptly named by Maria Farrell: the Prodigal Techbro.

A prodigal techbro is a self-styled wizard of machine-learning/surveillance mind control who has see the error of his ways.

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/09/23/story-ate-the-world-im-biting-back/

This high-tech sorcerer doesn’t disclaim his magical powers — rather, he pledges to use them for good, to fight the evil sorcerers who invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew a fidget-spinner, then let Robert Mercer hijack it to turn your uncle into a Qanon racist.

There’s a great name for this critique, criticism that takes its subjects’ claims to genius at face value: criti-hype, coined by Lee Vinsel, describing a discourse that turns critics into “the professional concern trolls of technoculture.”

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

The thing is, Facebook really is terrible — but not because it uses machine learning to brainwash boomers into iodine-guzzling Qnuts. And likewise, there really is a problem with conspiratorial, racist, science-denying, epistemologically chaotic conspiratorialism.

Addressing that problem requires that we understand the direction of the causal arrow — that we understand whether Facebook is the cause or the effect of the crisis, and what role it plays.

“Facebook wizards turned boomers into orcs” is a comforting tale, in that it implies that we need merely to fix Facebook and the orcs will turn back into our cuddly grandparents and get their shots. The reality is a lot gnarlier and, sadly, less comforting.

There’s been a lot written about Facebook’s sell-job to advertisers, but less about the concern over “disinformation.” In a new, excellent longread for Harpers, Joe Bernstein makes the connection between the two:

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/

Fundamentally: if we question whether Facebook ads work, we should also question whether the disinformation campaigns that run amok on the platform are any more effective.

Bernstein starts by reminding us of the ad industry’s one indisputable claim to persuasive powers: ad salespeople are really good at convincing ad buyers that ads work.

Think of department store magnate John Wanamaker’s lament that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Whoever convinced him that he was only wasting half his ad spend was a true virtuoso of the con.

As Tim Hwang documents brilliantly in his 2020 pamphlet “Subprime Attention Crisis,” ad-tech is even griftier than the traditional ad industry. Ad-tech companies charge advertisers for ads that are never served, or never rendered, or never seen.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

They rig ad auctions, fake their reach numbers, fake their conversions (they also lie to publishers about how much they’ve taken in for serving ads on their pages and short change them by millions).

Bernstein cites Hwang’s work, and says, essentially, shouldn’t this apply to “disinformation?”

If ads don’t work well, then maybe political ads don’t work well. And if regular ads are a swamp of fraudulently inflated reach numbers, wouldn’t that be true of political ads?

Bernstein talks about the history of ads as a political tool, starting with Eisenhower’s 1952 “Answers America” campaign, designed and executed at great expense by Madison Ave giants Ted Bates.

Hannah Arendt, whom no one can accuse of being soft on the consequences of propaganda, was skeptical of this kind of enterprise: “The psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.”

The ad industry ran an ambitious campaign to give scientific credibility to its products. As Jacques Ellul wrote in 1962, propagandists were engaged in “the increasing attempt to control its use, measure its results, define its effects.”

Appropriating the jargon of behavioral scientists let ad execs “assert audiences, like workers in a Taylorized workplace, need not be persuaded through reason, but could be trained through repetition to adopt the new consumption habits desired by the sellers.” -Zoe Sherman

These “scientific ads” had their own criti-hype attackers, like Vance “Hidden Persuaders” Packard, who admitted that “researchers were sometimes prone to oversell themselves — or in a sense to exploit the exploiters.”

Packard cites Yale’s John Dollard, a scientific ad consultant, who accused his colleagues of promising advertisers “a mild form of omnipotence,” which was “well received.”

Today’s scientific persuaders aren’t in a much better place than Dollard or Packard. Despite all the talk of political disinformation’s reach, a 2017 study found “sharing articles from fake news domains was a rare activity” affecting <10% of users.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586

So, how harmful is this? One study estimates “if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point.”

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211

Now, all that said, American politics certainly feel and act differently today than in years previous. The key question: “is social media creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them?”

After all, American politics has always had its “paranoid style,” and the American right has always had a sizable tendency towards unhinged conspiratorialism, from the John Birch Society to Goldwater Republicans.

Social media may not be making more of these yahoos, but rather, making them visible to the wider world, and to each other, allowing them to make common cause and mobilize their adherents (say, to carry tiki torches through Charlottesville in Nazi cosplay).

If that’s true, then elite calls to “fight disinformation” are unlikely to do much, except possibly inflaming things. If “disinformation” is really people finding each other (not infecting each other) labelling their posts as “disinformation” won’t change their minds.

Worse, plans like the Biden admin’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism lump 1/6 insurrectionists in with anti-pipeline activists, racial justice campaigners, and animal rights groups.

Whatever new powers we hand over to fight disinformation will be felt most by people without deep-pocketed backers who’ll foot the bill for crack lawyers.

Here’s the key to Bernstein’s argument: “One reason to grant Silicon Valley’s assumptions about our mechanistic persuadability is that it prevents us from thinking too hard about the role we play in taking up and believing the things we want to believe. It turns a huge question about the nature of democracy in the digital age — what if the people believe crazy things, and now everyone knows it? — into a technocratic negotiation between tech companies, media companies, think tanks, and universities.”

I want to “Yes, and” that.

My 2020 book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism doesn’t dismiss the idea that conspiratorialism is on the rise, nor that tech companies are playing a key role in that rise — but without engaging in criti-hype.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

In my book, I propose that conspiratorialism isn’t a crisis of what people believe so much as how they arrive at their beliefs — it’s an “epistemological crisis.”

We live in a complex society plagued by high-stakes questions none of us can answer on our own.

Do vaccines work? Is oxycontin addictive? Should I wear a mask? Can we fight covid by sanitizing surfaces? Will distance ed make my kind an ignoramus? Should I fly in a 737 Max?

Even if you have the background to answer one of these questions, no one can answer all of them.

Instead, we have a process: neutral expert agencies use truth-seeking procedures to sort of competing claims, showing their work and recusing themselves when they have conflicts, and revising their conclusions in light of new evidence.

It’s pretty clear that this process is breaking down. As companies (led by the tech industry) merge with one another to form monopolies, they hijack their regulators and turn truth-seeking into an auction, where shareholder preferences trump evidence.

This perversion of truth has consequences — take the FDA’s willingness to accept the expensively manufactured evidence of Oxycontin’s safety, a corrupt act that kickstarted the opioid epidemic, which has killed 800,000 Americans to date.

If the best argument for vaccine safety and efficacy is “We used the same process and experts as pronounced judgement on Oxy” then it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical — especially if you’re still coping with the trauma of lost loved ones.

As Anna Merlan writes in her excellent Republic of Lies, conspiratorialism feeds on distrust and trauma, and we’ve got plenty of legitimate reasons to experience both.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

Tech was an early adopter of monopolistic tactics — the Apple ][+ went on sale the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the industry’s growth tracked perfectly with the dismantling of antitrust enforcement over the past 40 years.

What’s more, while tech may not persuade people, it is indisputably good at finding them. If you’re an advertiser looking for people who recently looked at fridge reviews, tech finds them for you. If you’re a boomer looking for your old high school chums, it’ll do that too.

Seen in that light, “online radicalization” stops looking like the result of mind control, instead showing itself to be a kind of homecoming — finding the people who share your interests, a common online experience we can all relate to.

I found out about Bernstein’s article from the Techdirt podcast, where he had a fascinating discussion with host Mike Masnick.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210928/12593747652/techdirt-podcast-episode-299-misinformation-about-disinformation.shtml

Towards the end of that discussion, they talked about FB’s Project Amplify, in which the company tweaked its news algorithm to uprank positive stories about Facebook, including stories its own PR department wrote.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#zuckerveganism

Project Amplify is part of a larger, aggressive image-control effort by the company, which has included shuttering internal transparency portals, providing bad data to researchers, and suing independent auditors who tracked its promises.

I’d always assumed that this truth-suppression and wanton fraud was about hiding how bad the platform’s disinformation problem was.

But listening to Masnick and Bernstein, I suddenly realized there was another explanation.

Maybe Facebook’s aggressive suppression of accurate assessments of disinformation on its platform are driven by a desire to hide how expensive (and profitable) political advertising it depends on is pretty useless.

Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_(41793470192).jpg

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

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