Quotulatiousness

November 17, 2022

TikTok (aka “Digital Fentanyl”)

Filed under: China, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Geoffrey Cain at Common Sense on the malign influence of the massively popular Chinese social media platform on US politics and culture:

The midterm elections of 2022 were many things — a shocker for Republicans, the possible end of Donald Trump, a win for centrist Democrats. Overlooked is the fact that they were also a big turning point for TikTok, the Chinese social-media platform.

TikTok is not only the most trafficked news app for Americans under 30. It was also a major political force this year. Exhibit A: the Senate race in Pennsylvania, in which both Democrat John Fetterman and his Republican rival, Mehmet Oz, deployed TikTok, with Oz railing against the cost of vegetables in one video, and Fetterman slamming Oz for saying “crudité” in a highly effective response. Other candidates who took to TikTok this cycle include Tim Ryan, who ran for Senate in Ohio, and Val Demmings, who ran for Senate in Florida. (Both are Democrats.) The Democratic National Committee, early this year, launched its own TikTok channel.

Now, there are calls to shut it down. Just yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau has “national-security concerns” about TikTok. Last Friday, the top Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, called TikTok “China’s digital fentanyl”. The day before, Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Mike Gallagher, both Republicans, introduced legislation banning the social-media platform, noting that the data of millions of Americans is “effectively controlled” by the Chinese Communist Party. Earlier in the month, Carr also said the U.S. government should ban TikTok.

It’s about time.

Ever since TikTok began expanding into the United States, more than four years ago, we’ve known that it was a disaster waiting to happen. What’s shocking is that it’s taken this long to get serious political attention.

I know all about this. I used to be an investigative reporter in China. In December 2017, I first heard from friends on social media that a Chinese tech unicorn called ByteDance was planning on entering the American market with a new app. It was called TikTok.

Alongside its sibling app, Douyin, which operates only in China, TikTok was poised to sweep up the Gen Z audience in America, with its preference for video snippets of dancing celebrities, DIY projects, cooking demonstrations, skincare routines and other Gen Z’ers singing and dancing in their parents’ kitchens. As the fastest growing social media app ever, it rankled American competitors Facebook and YouTube, which were banned in China.

By October 2018, ByteDance was the world’s most valuable startup, with a valuation of $75 billion.

Four years later, ByteDance is worth $300 billion. TikTok is expected to reach 1.8 billion users globally by the end of the year. And a quarter of American adults under 30 get their news from the social-media app.

There’s a good reason for this success. TikTok has developed one of the most powerful machine-learning algorithms ever — one that is able to reveal people’s unknown desires to themselves.

Every day, every hour, every waking minute, TikTok is hoovering up seemingly infinite bits of information about its users — their tastes, hobbies, political views, sexual preferences, their facial structure, the sound of their voice. Ostensibly, all this is meant to provide a better product. It should also be noted that this information can be used for spying, influencing millions of users — even waging war. Every time we swipe for the next video, every time we post videos of our own, we are helping the world’s most sophisticated police state learn more about us.

The Pornstars of World War Two – Pin-Ups – On the Homefront 017

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 16 Nov 2022

How do you motivate men to leave home and go fight in a foreign land? Send them packing with Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, and Irene Manning, of course! It helps if you include an Esquire magazine and girlie cartoons from the infamous Alberto Vargas.
(more…)

“The most disturbing concept Freud ever invented – and he had a few, that bloke – is Thanatos, or the ‘death instinct'”

Filed under: Books, Business, Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia on the apparent death wish of the academic publishing industry:

The most disturbing concept Freud ever invented — and he had a few, that bloke — is Thanatos, or the “death instinct”. This is an alleged drive among living organisms to destroy themselves.

Many have disputed that such a thing exists. Instincts preserve life — that’s their evolutionary purpose. The idea of a death instinct is impossible, so the critics claim. It’s like that Peacekeeper Missile or soft rock or marijuana initiative or any of those other two-word combinations of things that don’t belong together.

I’ve often criticized Freud, but I’ve come to accept this Thanatos notion, at least as a sociocultural concept. It explains so many otherwise inexplicable happenings in our society.

Take, for example, academic publishers. They are clearly imbued with a death instinct, no? How else can you explain their self-destructive behavior?

Universities have been publishing books for almost 500 years — dating back to 1534 A.D. when King Henry VIII allowed Cambridge University to set up a printing press. Running one of these publishing outfits is almost a requirement if a college wants to rise in the rankings, but I wonder how much longer this can last. After all, how can you succeed as a publisher if you put so little energy into selling books?

I know one academic publisher that previously sent out two hundred or more review copies of each new book — because they obviously wanted publicity for these titles. Those days are gone. Nowadays their preferred strategy is to send out zero physical copies to reviewers. I’m not exaggerating — I’ve heard it straight from their mouths: their goal is to distribute absolutely no hard copies to media outlets and book critics.

    College students are spending 26% less on textbooks this year. That’s a bloodbath for the publishers. But this is the inevitable result whenever you assume the customer has no choice — because, sooner or later, they actually do.

Okay, I don’t blame the publishers entirely — just consider how rarely the New York Times reviews books from academic presses. You might think the cultural elites in New York would give some support to their fellow travelers in idea-mongering, but no dice. They treat those academic books like they’re toxic.

(By the way, I’m grateful to the Times Literary Supplement over in London, which still takes time to tell me about important scholarly works, most of them ignored in US media. But even that last holdout in Britain feels precarious — I fear they’ve been too contaminated by Yankee values.)

Yankee values? That’s up there with the Peacekeeper Missile.

But the lack of review copies is just one symptom among many. Let’s look at a few others.

Just consider the flurry of rebranding efforts in academic publishing. As I’ve explained elsewhere, successful organizations rarely redesign their logos or “refresh” their brands. They don’t have time for such nonsense. But even more to the point, when you’re thriving, your logo is part of that success — it’s a sign of your strength, and you just don’t mess with it.

But that’s clearly not the case in academia nowadays.

I could give you countless examples from college campuses — where “rebranding” is more popular than a hot high school football prospect on a recruiting visit. But I’ll settle for two instances:

My only disappointment is that these brand redesigns didn’t come packaged with a new slogan. May I suggest something along the lines of: Information Solutions for a Changing World.

Or maybe, if we can be a bit more boastful: The Ultimate in Handheld Data Storage.

Does anybody still believe in this rebranding malarkey? Surely any reasonable person can see it’s all smoke and mirrors? But that hardly matters, because the brand redesign has tremendous symbolic value.

That’s why they do it.

The road to hell was once paved with good intentions — but nowadays we settle for symbolic gestures. They’re much cheaper than good intentions. And there’s no shortage of symbolic gestures nowadays — more than enough to pave that whole damned highway to hell.

It’s a shame that symbolism doesn’t pay the bills. Or fix problems. And it certainly won’t sell books.

A History of Tacos

Filed under: Americas, Food, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Jul 2022
(more…)

QotD: The Dummies’ Guide to Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Difficulty: Easy. You can beneficially read Meditations even if you know next to nothing. You’ll get more out of it the more you know, of course, but it’s the closest thing ancient philosophy had to a how-to manual.

Who: Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor in the mid-late 2nd century AD. The last of the “Five Good Emperors”, Marcus spent much of his time dealing with barbarian incursions and plague. There are some good biographies of the man, but Wiki covers the high points.

What: Because of the above, the Meditations were something like Marcus’s private self-help manual. He’s reminding himself to remain literally Stoic in the face of serious, seemingly unsolvable problems.

When: Late 2nd century AD. Greco-Roman philosophy was well-developed at this point; Stoicism was part of the classical tradition.

Where: In general, the European part of the Roman Empire. Specifically, on campaign against the barbarians – Marcus wrote a lot of the Meditations at the front.

Why: Because this man was the richest, most powerful individual in his world … and hated it. As a Stoic, he believed that virtue was its own — and, indeed, the only — reward, but as Roman Emperor he was forced to do un-virtuous things all day every day. It’s good instruction for how to live with yourself — how to be a man in a world that so often forces you to act like a snake.

Essential Background: Not much beyond the above.

Nice to have: The basics of Stoic doctrine. Specifically, their belief that “living virtuously” and “living according to nature” were basically synonymous, and that they were the only way to true happiness. A little Stoic epistemology, too — as their way of life depends on seeing the true nature of things, their standards for knowledge (what we’d call “justified true belief”) are extremely high. A statement like “pain is indifferent” is clear, and useful, on its own, but knowing the Stoic view of knowledge helps one appreciate just how prevalent the “indifferents” are, and how tough being truly indifferent is. Also nice to know: The wholesale adoption of Marcus by medieval Christians. There’s a very strong Stoic streak in Christianity’s first 1500 years; Marcus is always up there with the very best of the “virtuous pagans”.

None of these are necessary, though — you could lightly edit the Meditations (taking out the “thank you’s” at the start of Book One, explaining a few allusions) — and publish it today as a self-help manual. Also not necessary: Any real background in ancient philosophy. Back then, “philosophy” meant “a way of living”, not “a system for investigating the world”. Since Marcus is convinced of Stoicism’s truth, he doesn’t spend any time engaging the doctrines of other schools.

Severian, “Reading the Classics: An Illustration”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-14.

Powered by WordPress