Such was their belief

DURING SUBSEQUENT VISITS TO NEPAL, I WOULD CONTINUE TO HEAR stories about the power of these challenge grants. One of our projects, Himalaya Primary School, was located on the outskirts of Kathmandu, in a poor community whose economy depended on the local brick factories. The local soil was conducive to brickmaking, and six soot-belching factories surrounded the village. On a site visit to check on progress, I met the headmaster. He proudly recounted how he'd visited each factory to ask for support in building a new school. He reminded each factory owner that the workers’ ‘wages were so low that parents could not afford to contribute to the challenge grant. But Room to Read required each community to coinvest, so he proposed an innovative solution: each factory owner would donate 10,000 bricks, and Room to Read’s money would be used to buy cement, window frames, desks, and to pay for skilled labor to erect the walls. His sales strategy succeeded, and once again I was blown away by the ingenuity of the communities with which we partnered.

Two days after my visit to Himalaya Primary School, Dinesh took me into the foothills of the mountains west of Kathmandu. Our destination was the village of Katrak, which perched on a hillside overlooking verdant rice fields. Dinesh parked our rented truck along the side of the road, and with a head nod and a shout of “Jhane ho. Orolo” (Let’s go! Uphill), he announced to me that we had a steep hike in front of us.

At 8 a.m. the sun was already burning down on us, and my pace slowed as I stopped for applications of sun cream and gulps from my water bottle. On frequent occasions women with large bags hoisted onto their backs rushed past me, heading up the trail. I could not hope to match their pace, even though I was carrying only my water bottle and a Nikon. I asked Dinesh if they were returning from the market. He laughed and asked whether I realized that these women were carrying cement. I must have looked perplexed, so he explained.

When the local government of the village of Katrak requested Room to Read’s help, Dinesh and Yadav (our civil engineer in charge of the School Room program) said that they would provide half the resources if the village could come up with the other half. The head of the village development committee told our team that the village was poor, with more than 95 percent of parents living on subsistence farming. What little economy the village had was simple barter, and as a result few parents could afford to put money into the project.

Yadav explained that contributions other than cash would count toward the challenge grant. As an example, parents could

prove their commitment to education and the new school by donating labor. The women we saw this morning had responded to the call. Each morning, a group of them would wake up before sunrise, walk an hour downhill to the roadside where the cement bags were being stored, and then walk 90 minutes back up to the village. The bags weighed 50 kilos—110 pounds—and some mothers were making the trip twice in one day. Dinesh reminded me that this was a farming village, and that the women would still have to spend their day in the fields.

We crested the hill and on the building site saw 20 men, presumably the fathers, digging the foundation and beginning to put up the walls. I asked one of the mothers if I could try picking up her bag of cement. I nearly threw my back out as I struggled to get the bag above my waist. The mothers were greatly entertained, and the group around me grew larger as I failed to impress them as Hercules.

I outweighed these women by at least 50 pounds. Most of them probably survived on two bowls of rice and lentils per day. Such was their belief in the power of education to provide their children with a brighter future that they were willing to make any sacrifice. I felt inspired and vowed to work even harder to find the funding to enable more of these challenge grants. I also vowed that I'd get to the gym to lift weights a bit more often.

From Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, John Wood's inspiring book about founding Room To Read.
“There are incremental advances that happen in all kinds of things. Every once in a while there’s just this iconic leap. Soloing El Cap is just this quantum leap. ”
— Peter Croft, a professional rock climber, on Alex Honnold’s free solo climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan in June 2017. From Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin's Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo.

Double bind

After one information session, I asked my main Russian intelligence briefer about what we could do. She was young, a Russian-speaker, and philosophical about disinformation. She shrugged her shoulders. Not because she wasn’t concerned about it, but because the dark genius of disinformation is that it worked a little like double-bind theory. If you engaged disinformationists—which is what they wanted—they won; if you did not engage them, they won. They tapped into prejudice and ignorance and grievance. They weren’t so much creating resentment as aggravating it. Yes, facts mattered, but since they did not really engage with the world of facts, it didn’t have much of an effect. At the end of the day, she said, they didn’t acknowledge that empirical facts even existed. Their goal was to persuade everyone else of that, too.
Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 243

Everyone's an expert on messaging

“One of the things I’d noticed in government is that people who had never been in media, who had never written a story or produced one, who didn’t know about design or graphics, who didn’t understand audiences or what they liked, seemed to think it was easy to create content. People had the illusion that because they consumed something, they understood how it worked.”
Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 94.

In a later passage, Stengel continues,

The thing I discovered as the “communications guy” was that everyone’s an expert on messaging. People feel they can chime in on messaging in a way they would not about trade negotiations or nuclear disarmament. But there was never much discussion about what in the private sector would be a key concern: audience. Whom exactly do we want to message to? People are very quick to say, Let’s counter their message, but no one really talked about whom we counter it to or what we counter it with.

All that stuff about democracy and fairness and diversity

“All the questions I got were fundamentally the same. People around the world asking, ‘All that stuff you’ve been telling us for so long — about democracy and human rights and fairness and diversity — it’s not really true, is it?’ American public diplomacy is ultimately about values. And now people around the world were saying that this story was a fiction. It’s not as though people around the world had never said that before. We’d been called hypocrites long before Donald Trump decided to run for president. But we’d never had someone running for president who so explicitly rejected those values both in his ideology and in his behavior. That was something new.”
The view from 2016, from Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 326

Six-page narratives

We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.
[…]
The traditional kind of corporate meeting starts with a presentation. Somebody gets up in front of the room and presents with a powerpoint presentation, some type of slide show. In our view you get very little information, you get bullet points. This is easy for the presenter, but difficult for the audience. […] If you have a traditional ppt presentation, executives interrupt. If you read the whole 6 page memo, on page 2 you have a question but on on page 4 that question is answered.

Below, Amazon’s Vice President and Distinguished Engineer Brad Porter comments further in The Beauty of Amazon's 6-Pager, 2015:

The down side to the 6-pager is that writing a good six-page evidence-based narrative is hard work. Precision counts and it can be hard to summarize a complex business in 6 pages, so teams work for hours preparing the document for these reviews. But that preparation does two things.

First, it requires the team writing the document to really deeply understand their own space, gather their data, understand their operating tenets and be able to communicate them clearly. The second thing it does is a great document enables our senior executives to internalize a whole new space they may not be familiar with in 30 minutes of reading thus greatly optimizing how quickly and how many different initiatives these leaders can review.

A referendum on reality itself

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally.

Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not — but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along — and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear — not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President, by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, March 2020
“He tells you what you want to hear, and I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so fuck it.”
— Trump rally attendee Tony Willnow, from The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President, by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, March 2020

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

Expertise in any field

But I also suspect that Trump is afraid to try anything substantive. To do public investment successfully, you need leadership and advice from experts. And this administration doesn’t do expertise, in any field. Not only do experts have a nasty habit of telling you things you don’t want to hear, their loyalty is suspect: You never know when their professional ethics might kick in.
Trump Doesn’t Give a Dam, by Paul Krugman, New York Times, 12 February 2018

Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment

“But there may not be enough guardrails in the world to prevent bad outcomes on Facebook, whose scale is nearly inconceivable. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s security chief, said last month that the company shuts down more than a million user accounts every day for violating Facebook’s community standards. Even if only 1 percent of Facebook’s daily active users misbehaved, it would still mean 13 million rule breakers…”
Is This Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment? by Kevin Roose, 21 September 2017

Four times the number of votes

In a Facebook experiment published in Nature that was conducted on a whopping 61 million people, some randomly selected portion of this group received a neutral message to “go vote,” while others, also randomly selected, saw slightly more social version of the encouragement: small thumbnail pictures of a few of their friends who reported having voted were shown within the “go vote” pop-up.

The researchers measured that this slight tweak — completely within Facebook's control and conducted without the consent or notification of any of the millions of Facebook users — caused about 340,000 additional people to turn out to vote in the 2010 U.S. congressional elections.

(The true number may even be higher since the method of matching voter files to Facebook names only works for exact matches.)

That significant effect—from a one-time, single tweak—is more than four times the number of votes that determined that Donald Trump would be the winner of the 2016 election for presidency in the United States.

From Zeynep Tufecki's Twitter and Tear Gas (2017), page 157. The study published in Nature is available for free on PubMed Central here.

Facebook, Ferguson, and the Ice Bucket Challenge

On the evening of August 13 [2014], the police appeared on the streets of Ferguson in armored vehicles and wearing military gear, with snipers poised in position and pointing guns at the protesters. That is when I first noticed the news of Ferguson on Twitter—and was startled at such a massive overuse of police force in a suburban area in the United States.

On Twitter, among about a thousand people around the world that I follow, and which was still sorted chronologically at the time, the topic became dominant.

On Facebook's algorithmically controlled news feed, however, it was as if nothing had happened.

As I inquired more broadly, it appeared that Facebook’s algorithm may have decided that the Ferguson stories were lower priority to show to many users than other, more algorithm-friendly ones.

Instead of news of the Ferguson protests, my own Facebook's news feed was dominated by the “ice-bucket challenge,” a worthy cause in which people poured buckets of cold water over their heads and, in some cases, donated to an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) charity. Many other people were reporting a similar phenomenon.

Facebook's algorithm was not prioritizing posts about the “Ice Bucket Challenge” rather than Ferguson posts because of a nefarious plot by Facebook's programmers or marketing department to bury the nascent social movement. The algorithm they designed and whose priorities they set, combined with the signals they allowed users on the platform to send, created that result.

From Zeynep Tufecki's Twitter and Tear Gas (2017), page 155.
“There aren’t many comparisons in American history for Thursday’s press conference in which Donald Trump suggested that the coronavirus might be defeated by shining lights inside human beings or injecting people with disinfectant. But there is the song ‘Miracles’ by Insane Clown Posse.”
— Insane Clown Posse Is Modeling Ideal Pandemic Leadership, by Spencer Kornhaber, 27 April 2020, The Atlantic