Tech, culture, democracy. Scope, scale, speed. Loyal but disobedient.
Dab, Stockholm, 15 August 2019, CC-BY.
I found this as-is, in a beautiful art supply store on Kungsgatan. Something about the location of the figures — down low in a busy corridor — and the playful poses gave me the impression that little hands had been at work.
Valasek and his collaborator Charlie Miller found a way to remotely hack, and take, for all intents and purposes, full remote control of an entire class of automobiles by exploiting a vulnerability in their Internet-connected sound systems. Valasek and Miller’s work shows that hackers could create “a wirelessly controlled automotive botnet encompassing hundreds of thousands of vehicles.”
The article also notes,
Wikimania conference, Stockholm, 16 August 2019; CC-BY
I was privileged to attend the Wikimania conference in Stockholm last week and give the opening keynote (here). The conference theme was about the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. Almost all of the sessions were livestreamed (over 200 hours) and most are available on the program page and on YouTube.
There were so many good talks and sessions, including this “spotlight session” titled “Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals” featuring Liv Inger Somby (Sámi University of Applied Sciences), Ryan Merkley (Creative Commons), Karin Holmgren (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), Tyler Radford (OpenStreetMap), Emanuel Karlsten (journalist), Mark Graham (Internet Archive), John Cummings (Wikimedian in Residence for UNESCO), and Annika Söder (Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden).
“Speak your mind, but ride a fast horse.”
Imagine if signing up to read Twitter was free, but posing required you to spend a week doing moderation first.
Everyone who came into the community would have to learn the rules before they violated them.
Then, when you’re tempted to break the rules, you’d remember that there were people who would read what you wrote, just like you did for others, and you’d lose your account and have to do another week of moderation before getting to post again.
This is not too hard to implement. It’s certainly easier than inventing a magic AI that will solve all your problems. It just requires that Twitter care enough about their community to do it.
To which Christina Xu (@xuhulk) replied: “I wrote my undergrad thesis on the history of instant messengers and learned that teenagers misusing productivity tools to flirt is truly one of the driving forces of the internet.“ (14 March 2019)
Madrid, 2018; CC-BY
“Increasingly, our work has no real answers.”
“The truly scary part about that campaign was not that people can be swayed by media, because we’ve known that since the start of media, it was how cheap it was. It cost nothing to do this.”
“We want voters to be aware of who is trying to influence them. That’s the reason we have disclosure requirements on our campaign ads. We’ve known, at least since Aristotle in Western culture, that the source is judged as part of the message.”
Leo Laporte: Maybe what he's thinking is Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook to connect and everything like that. It was used against us in our elections by the Russians particularly to convince people not to vote or to stay at home mostly or to vote for somebody in particular. To me that was the come-to-Jesus moment where somebody figured out how to use social media in a very powerful way and they understood it but Zuckerberg did not and it took Facebook off guard, and at first they denied it even happened. Finally of late they've admitted yeah that's what happened.
Larry Magid: I think part of the problem for consumers is that most of us don't know how it works. We know that there are algorithms…
Leo Laporte: But do you think Zuck [Mark Zuckerberg] does is the question?
Larry Magid: That's what I'm saying, I assume that Zuck does, but maybe he doesn't fully understand it.
…To my great shame, I could not explain what had happened to my friends and family back home. Because my teachers could not. They did not include money or banking in their models. They didn’t see the crash coming. What insights could they have offered?
In a sentence, I realized I had been brainwashed.
Every experience in the financial reform world, every experience in law school, and every professional experience since, has only proved to me, more and more, that the Big Names do not know — or refuse to acknowledge — what’s actually going down. They were wrong about the global financial crisis. They were wrong about austerity. They were wrong about the EU. The list goes on and on and on.
Today, I work to help low-income communities directly fight banks, debt collectors, and other financial villains. I also collaborate with a wide range of heterodox scholars and activists.
In any case, I promise you what they’re saying is far closer to on-the-ground reality than anything I’ve ever learned from the Big Names, with rare exceptions. I know it’s scary to dismiss what the Big Names say. They have power and prestige.
But they are not scientists. They are not doctors. They are not objectively the best at what they do. Most of them are representatives of a failed elite consensus. They are afraid to admit their lens for looking at the world is fundamentally warped.
The Big Names simply could not and cannot explain the old world. They should not lead us into the future. Let them go.
Impartiality is still a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage. But you don’t get there by walking down the center line with a blindfold on.
Why do journalists and news organizations insist on doing this? I think the answer is pretty clear.
It’s because they want to appear fair without taking any chances.
