I hate to say “it’s a generational thing”, but it’s a generational thing.
Those of us who came of age before Endless September still regard the Internet as a tool. I can do online in two minutes what used to take me two hours in meatspace. For instance, when I first started working full time, I’d have to waste my entire lunch break on the first Monday of every month taking my physical paycheck down to the brick-and-mortar bank, where I’d fill out a bunch of paper to move money around, which I’d hand to a real person who took her sweet goddamn time filing it, and so on. Fight traffic all the way there, fight traffic all the way back, and yeah, that’s a full hour, even when the bank is relatively close. If that bank is closed, or there’s road construction or something, I’d have to spend all Saturday morning doing it, because banks kept bankers’ hours and so I’d better get there and get it done during the three-hour window the brick-and-mortar place was open. And since everyone else on earth was in the same situation …
These days, I’m hard pressed to remember the last time I stepped a real foot inside a physical bank. There’s simply no need. Everything is automatic. Which is convenient, no doubt, but that’s ALL it is: I’ve saved X minutes / hours in my day, which I can use to do other stuff. Other stuff like “see my friends” or “take a walk” or “read a book”. You know, real person stuff. I might read the book online; I might check my email if there’s nothing else to do; but there too the Internet is just a boredom-alleviation tool; something conveniently to hand that passes the time when there’s no other easily accessible way to pass the time.
I would find it inconvenient, sometimes extremely so, to throw the Pocket Moloch in the nearest lake, but the thought doesn’t fill me with dread. Oh, the Net’s down? Shrug.
Not so with the younger generations. I have friends I haven’t seen in weeks, months, years, but when we get together again, it’s like we were never apart, because we met in meatspace and have so much real, personal interaction to fall back on. Younger generations have “friends” they’ve never met in the flesh. Not once. Tell me “Hey, you’re not going to be able to see Tim for a few months” and it’s no big thing. I can still call Tim, or write Tim a letter, or just catch up with him when he gets back, to hear all the cool stories he has. Tell the younger folks “Tim is offline” and they freak the fuck out. Tim is inseparable from the Pocket Moloch in a way we oldsters can only dimly grasp.
They would, I’m sadly sure, prefer to interact with Tim entirely digitally. If you haven’t done it yet, try to find some young people hanging out in a group. It’s actually not the easiest thing to do – which should tell you something right there – but if you manage it, you’ll notice that they spend more time texting than they do talking to each other. And here’s the real kicker: Half the time, they’re texting each other. The same people who are physically right there.
That’s a mentality I can’t begin to grasp. I wonder if it can be broken. I’m not optimistic.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-07-07.
October 8, 2023
September 29, 2023
Bored? Lonely? No girlfriend? Mister, you want an AI Girlfriend!
As discussed earlier, GenZ men live in a sexual hellscape unless they meet statistically unlikely criteria. Many of them turn to alternatives like online gaming and porn … but some are apparently paying for AI Girlfriends:
Apparently ads for AI girlfriends have been all over TikTok, Instagram and Facebook lately. Replika, an AI chatbot originally offering mental health help and emotional support, now runs ads for spicy selfies and hot role play. Eva AI invites users to create their dream companion, while Dream Girlfriend promises a girl that exceeds your wildest desires. The app Intimate even offers hyper-realistic voice calls with your virtual partner.
This might seem niche and weird but it’s a fast growing market. All kinds of startups are releasing romantic chatbots capable of having explicit conversations and sending sexual photos. Meanwhile, Replika alone has already been downloaded more than 20 million times. And even just one Snapchat influencer, Caryn Marjorie, makes $100,000 a week by charging users $1 a minute to chat with the AI version of herself.
Of course most people are talking about what this means for men, given they make up the vast majority of users. Many worry about a worsening loneliness crisis, a further decline in sex rates, and ultimately the emergence of “a new generation of incels” who depend on and even verbally abuse their virtual girlfriends. Which is all very concerning. But I wonder, if AI girlfriends really do become as pervasive as online porn, what this will mean for girls and young women? Who feel they need to compete with this?
Most obvious to me is the ramping up of already unrealistic beauty standards. I know conservatives often get frustrated with feminists calling everything unattainable, and I agree they can go too far — but still, it’s hard to deny that the pressure to look perfect today is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. And I don’t think that’s necessarily pressure from men but I do very much think it’s pressure from a network of profit-driven industries that take what men like and mangle it into an impossible ideal. Until the pressure isn’t just to be pretty but filtered, edited and surgically enhanced to perfection. Until the most lusted after women in our culture look like virtual avatars. And until even the most beautiful among us start to be seen as average.
September 17, 2023
How much mis-, mal-, and dis-information do you encounter on an average day on the internet?
I don’t know the answer to that question … although I suspect it’s a pretty big proportion of what you’ll see, especially if you stick to legacy media sites who regularly indulge in cover-up, state propaganda, and outright lies while condemning other media as “conspiracy theorists”. Chris Bray, on the other hand, thinks there are hopeful signs that we’ve passed peak disinformation as the pandemic lockdowns get further behind us:
I’ve been trying to come up with a count: If you consume a typical amount of news media and social media product, how many individual pieces of dishonest, misleading, and calculatedly or ignorantly unreal “information” do you take on board over the course of a typical day?
Walter Kirn’s one-sentence summary of contemporary media is stuck in my head: “This is a world-concealing layer of diversionary and illogical and internally inconsistent noise, under which the world exists somewhere.” How much noise do you have to purge to merely get to zero, not at all informed but not not deeply misinformed? And if you encounter the deep thoughts of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, does the deficit merely double, or is it much worse than that?
Democracy means you must not question or oppose the head of state
I’ve been reading on The Site Formerly Known as Twitter this week that Elon Musk’s refusal to activate the privately owned Starlink network over Crimea is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which now apparently apply to corporate product, and also high treason, for which Elon Musk should be executed. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it’s like the Internet allows strangers to use your brain as a toilet. Although, as the Twitter randos always end up explaining, I just feel this way because I’M PUTIN’S NAZI BUTTBOY.
All day, every day, 24/7/365 — well, maybe with some breaks for sleep, but only if you stop looking at your phone at night — you take on garbage. Your brain is loaded with information barriers, dressed up as information. You read and hear sentences that are designed to prevent understanding.
August 27, 2023
When the techno-utopians proclaimed the end of the book
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte harks back to a time when brash young tech evangelists were lining up to bury the ancient codex because everything would be online, accessible, indexed, and (presumably) free to access. That … didn’t happen the way they forsaw:
By the time I picked up Is This a Book?, a slim new volume from Angus Phillips and Miha Kova?, I’d forgotten the giddy digital evangelism of the mid-Aughts.
In 2006, for instance, a New York Times piece by Kevin Kelly, the self-styled “senior maverick” at Wired, proclaimed the end of the book.
It was already happening, Kelly wrote. Corporations and libraries around the world were scanning millions of books. Some operations were using robotics that could digitize 1,000 pages an hour, others assembly lines of poorly paid Chinese labourers. When they finished their work, all the books from all the libraries and archives in the world would be compressed onto a 50 petabyte hard disk which, said Kelly, would be as big as a house. But within a few years, it would fit in your iPod (the iPhone was still a year away; the iPad three years).
“When that happens,” wrote Kelly, “the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords.”
But that wasn’t what really excited Kelly. “The chief revolution birthed by scanning books”, he ventured, would be the creation of a universal library in which all books would be merged into “one very, very, very large single text”, “the world’s only book”, “the universal library.”
The One Big Text.
In the One Big Text, every word from every book ever written would be “cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before”.
“Once text is digital”, Kelly continued, “books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single, isolated book.”
Readers, liberated from their single isolated books, would sit in front of their virtual fireplaces following threads in the One Big Text, pulling out snippets to be remixed and reordered and stored, ultimately, on virtual bookshelves.
The universal book would be a great step forward, insisted Kelly, because it would bring to bear not only the books available in bookstores today but all the forgotten books of the past, no matter how esoteric. It would deepen our knowledge, our grasp of history, and cultivate a new sense of authority because the One Big Text would indisputably be the sum total of all we know as a species. “The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.”
And it was going to happen in a blink, wrote Kelly, if the copyright clowns would get out of the way and let the future unfold. He recognized that his vision would face opposition from authors and publishers and other friends of the book. He saw the clash as East Coast (literary) v. West Coast (tech), and mistook it for a dispute over business models. To his mind, authors and publishers were eager to protect their livelihoods, which depended on selling one copyright-protected physical book at a time, and too self-interested to realize that digital technology had rendered their business models obsolete. Silicon Valley, he said, had made copyright a dead letter. Knowledge would be free and plentiful—nothing was going to stop its indiscriminate distribution. Any efforts to do so would be “rejected by consumers and ignored by pirates”. Books, music, video — all of it would be free.
Kelly wasn’t altogether wrong. He’d just taken a narrow view of the book. He was seeing it as a container of information, an individual reference work packed with data, facts, and useful knowledge that needed to be agglomerated in his grander project. That has largely happened with books designed simply to convey information — manuals, guides, dissertations, and actual reference books. You can’t buy a good printed encyclopedia today and most scientific papers are now in databases rather than between covers.
What Kelly missed was that most people see the book as more than a container of information. They read for many reasons besides the accumulation of knowledge. They read for style and story. They read to feel, to connect, to stimulate their imaginations, to escape. They appreciate the isolated book as an immersive journey in the company of a compelling human voice.
August 3, 2023
“Tech giants” obey the law and block access to Canadian news sites to Canadian users
For some reason — despite a clamour of warnings from sensible observers — the Canadian government still seems shocked and surprised that the much-reviled “tech giants” have chosen to obey the new Online News Act and are actively blocking links to Canadian media outlets just as the law requires:
For months, supporters of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, assured the government that Meta and Google were bluffing when they warned that a bill based on mandated payments for links was unworkable and they would comply with it by removing links to news from their platforms. However, what has been readily apparent for months became reality yesterday: Meta is now actively blocking news links and sharing on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. The announcement does not reference Threads, but it would not surprise if news links are ultimately blocked on that platform as well. The company says that the blocking will take several weeks to fully roll out to all users, suggesting that it has learned from the over-blocking mistakes made in Australia and is proceeding more cautiously in Canada. By the end of the month, the world’s largest social media platform will become a news desert in Canada, with links to all news – both Canadian and foreign – blocked on the platform.
It is worth revisiting that it was only a couple of months ago that some industry leaders, lobbyists, and academics were assuring the Senate that the Meta threat was just a bluff. Kevin Desjardins of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, referenced the Australian experience, and told the Senate committee studying the bill that “when legislated to do so, they will come to the table”. Sylvain Poisson of Hebdos Quebec confidently said “they made those threats in Australia and elsewhere and every time they back down”. Chris Pedigo of the U.S.-based Digital Context Next assured the committee “it’s important to understand what happens when these bills become law. In Australia, they moved quickly to secure deals. They have done similar work in Europe, and I expect it would happen quickly in Canada as well.” And Carleton professor Dwayne Winseck said “I am not worried. The threats they are making, they are doing this all around the world.”
Despite the assurances, the company was true to its word and blocking news links is now here. If this is a negotiation tactic, it’s a pretty strange one given that reports indicate the company is not talking to the government about potential changes to a law that has already received royal assent. Indeed, while the new Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge urged the company to participate in the regulatory process, there is nothing in the regulations that could alter the fundamental principle in the bill of mandated payments for links. At best, the government could toss aside its commitment to stay out of negotiations by using the regulations to dictate to the supposedly independent CRTC how much needs to be spent in order to avoid Bill C-18’s final offer arbitration provisions. Government negotiating total payment value and eviscerating the CRTC’s independence does not inspire confidence and Meta reasonably wants no part of it, since the time to fix Bill C-18 was before it received royal assent, not after.
Bolded section mine: I didn’t realize that it wasn’t just Canadian media links that were being blocked … it’s all news sites in the world being hidden from Canadian users. That’s an escalation from what I’d originally understood. I don’t blame the “tech giants” at all, but it will be tough on older Canadians who’ve been depending on social media to keep them up-to-date on domestic and foreign news.
July 30, 2023
Letting a UN agency police “disinformation” online? What a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?
Savroula Pabst outlines the United Nations Development Program’s new online anti-disinformation tool, iVerify:
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has quietly announced the rollout of an automated anti-disinformation tool, iVerify, this spring. The instrument, initially created to support election integrity, centers a multi-stakeholder approach spanning the public and private sectors to “provide national actors with a support package to enhance identification, monitoring and response capacity to threats to information integrity”.
The UNDP demonstrates how iVerify works in a short video, where anyone can send articles to iVerify’s team of local “highly-trained” fact-checkers to determine if “an article is true or not”. The tool also uses machine learning to prevent duplicate article checks, and monitors social media for “toxic” content which can then be sent to “verification” teams of fact-checkers to evaluate, making it a tool with both automated- and human-facilitated elements.
On its website, the UNDP makes a blunt case for iVerify as an instrument against “information pollution“, which they describe as an “overabundance” of harmful, useless or otherwise misleading information that blunts “citizens’ capacity to make informed decisions”. Identifying information pollution as an issue of urgency, the UNDP claims that “misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech threaten peace and security, disproportionately affecting those who are already vulnerable”.
But, behind this rhetoric of fact-checking expertise and protecting society’s most marginalized, iVerify, as a tool functionally claiming an ability to separate the true from the false, actually provides governments, adjacent institutions, and the global elite an opportunity for unprecedented dismissal, and perhaps thus subsequent censorship, of dissenting perspectives and inconvenient information and reporting, all behind the pedigree of a UN institution with international reach.
July 19, 2023
Infohazards on the internet of lies lead us into the clutches of “egregores”
The latest review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf from John Psmith, is on the 1872 novel Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky”. I didn’t read the post immediately, as Russian literature and I aren’t even nodding acquaintances. I should have remembered that both of the Psmiths have an amazing ability to tell you a lot more than a “review” would normally contain, and this one certainly lived up to expectations, including a brief discussion of philosopher Charles Taylor’s ideas about pre-modern versus modern concepts of the self. Most pre-modern cultures believed in external influences having disproportional impact on the person, while most modern cultures believe the influences arise internally within the mind. Most pre-modern cultures also feared the self could be taken over, or possessed, by malevolent external entities, ideas, or thoughts:
Dostoevsky obligingly gives us a character who’s clearly possessed in exactly this sense — a dissolute nobleman around whom the various radical conspiracies swirl. He is, simultaneously, a subversion of the brooding Byronic hero archetype that was so popular in 19th century European literature, and an eerie anticipation of the modern concept of the serial killer. How did he get this way? Remember the modern view of our desires is that they come from within us, and indulging them leads to inner harmony. But the older and truer view is that they can come from outside, force their way into our skulls through an opening, set their hooks in our brains, lay their eggs. These fledgling desires start out small and weak, but to indulge them is to feed them, grow them, until they take over their host and move its mouth and limbs around like a puppet. In this sense the porn addict, the drug addict, and the rage addict are all alike: sensual dissipation gets boring eventually, and you need harder and harder stuff to feel the same thrill, until one day you reach for something so hard you lose yourself forever.
The Dostoevskian twist to all this is that the proto-serial killer is far more sympathetic, and ultimately more redeemable, than the revolutionaries. The radicals’ motivations spring from the same emotional source as his, theirs are just sublimated into politics, which is why the form of the dystopia doesn’t really matter to them, all that matters is that there be a boot stomping on a human face. The sexual sadism of the serial killer is unflinchingly portrayed as less disordered and less socially destructive than its political equivalent and, ultimately, as rather basic. It’s actually quite easy to miss all of this because it’s so deeply at odds with modern sensibilities. Not just “serial killers are better than communists actually,” but also “serial killers are really pretty boring actually,” and all from the guy who just invented serial killers.1
But what if the radicals aren’t sublimating anything at all? What if there’s another kind of demon, another kind of infohazard, another kind of meme, which rather than infecting or possessing individuals, instead tries to do that to entire societies? Such a being might still work through individuals, the way a Haitian voodoo spirit speaks through a chwal, but here the individual puppet is not a target, but rather an instrument or a transmission vector. The internet jargon for such a being is an “egregore,” and you’ve encountered them before: the bizarre fad that sweeps through a middle school class like a wildfire, the war fever that grips a nation and turns it overnight into a basket of bloodthirsty lunatics. Dance crazes, viral TikTok challenges, internet-mediated mental illnesses. There’s a classic Futurama gag involving the Brain Slug Party, but the real joke is that every party is the Brain Slug Party, they’re all egregores. Have you ever spoken with somebody who had hashtags in their Twitter bio? If you looked carefully, you may have seen the slender, silvery proboscis emerging from the back of their neck and vanishing into the ether. If you listened carefully, you may have heard the alien metallic clacking of the egregore’s mandibles, as it sent messages down that tube for the meat puppet to vocalize.
Sometime in the mid-19th century, an egregore was born in the Russian Empire. It went by a thousand different names — among them: anarchism, communism, nihilism, democracy. What’s that? Those four ideologies are completely opposed to one another? That’s the entire point! It wasn’t actually any of those things, it was an egregore, its true name was something like Melkhorbalai or Uztaa-Binoreth. It wore those other names like skins when it was convenient to do so, which is why in the real life history of 19th century Russia we see countless examples of individuals switching between communism, anarchism, and democracy like they were flavors of ice cream.
The egregore wanted none of these things: it wanted to grow, to spread, to manifest itself into this reality. Madly, it willed destruction, and the more destruction it caused the stronger it got, and the easier further destruction became, a runaway exothermic reaction endlessly feeding on itself. So the reformist zeal of the 1840s became Nechayev’s insane nihilism of the 1870s, then the even more insane terrorism of 1900-1917 with which I opened this review, until finally, strengthened by half a century of blood sacrifice, that rough beast slouched towards St. Petersburg to be born. The trauma of that birth ripped apart first Russia, then Europe, then it almost ate the rest of the world too.
Could anything have stopped it sooner? In Dostoevsky’s story there’s one character who tries lamely to stand in the way of the swirling, coalescing, immaterial malevolence. He is a reactionary, a newly-freed former serf,3 and (like Dostoevsky himself) a repentant former revolutionary. He’s young and hip, but has old and edgy views, a perfect stand-in for online “trads”. Given Dostoevsky’s own views it would be easy to make him the hero of the story, but Dostoevsky is too great a writer for that, and instead makes him a pathetic LARPer:
“I only wanted to know, do you believe in God, yourself?”
“I believe in Russia … I believe in her orthodoxy … I believe in the body of Christ … I believe that the new advent will take place in Russia … I believe …” Shatov muttered frantically.
“And in God? In God?”
“I … I will believe in God.”
How great a description is that of all the crusader-avatar twitter accounts named “DeusVult1571”? Imagine one of them blubbering: “I believe in based aesthetics … I believe in Western civilization … I believe in the Hajnal line … I believe …” Ah, but do you believe in God? Probably some of them do, but for many others it’s a pose, or a meme, or a philosophical premise that they must accept in order to turn the rest of the brand they’ve assumed into a self-consistent whole.2 For these, the god they worship is just another egregore — one small and weak for now, less threatening perhaps than some others, but feed it, let it grow, and see how fast it turns on you.
The other force that could have resisted the growing darkness is the parents’ generation, the liberals of 1848, Turgenev’s boomers. We already know how that turned out in real life, but while Dostoevsky didn’t live to see it happen, he had these peoples’ number. Once so bold in condemning their government and sneering at their civilization, they are suddenly timid in the face of their children, terrified of being seen as uncool or conservative or just not with it. That’s a good way to raise a psycho, and Dostoevsky more than hints that everything which follows is ultimately their fault. And it’s a bad way to face down an egregore. Doing that requires boldness and … well:
“But this is premature among us, premature,” he pronounced almost imploringly, pointing to the manifestoes.
“No, it’s not premature; you see you’re afraid, so it’s not premature.”
“But here, for instance, is an incitement to destroy churches.”
“And why not? You’re a sensible man, and of course you don’t believe in it yourself, but you know perfectly well that you need religion to brutalise the people. Truth is honester than falsehood …”
“I agree, I agree, I quite agree with you, but it is premature, premature in this country…” said Von Lembke, frowning.
“And how can you be an official of the government after that, when you agree to demolishing churches, and marching on Petersburg armed with staves, and make it all simply a question of date?”
“Premature, premature”, is what the useless normies will bleat when our own radicals are blowing up Mt. Rushmore and pulling down statues of George Washington. Who are these radicals? I have no idea what the egregore will call itself this time. It doesn’t matter. Its true name sounds to human ears like a high-pitched mechanical screeching and clicking, a sound calculated to drive men mad, and to drive madmen into making it real.
1. I’m told that the internet jargon for this is an “unbuilt trope.”
2. Dostoevsky positions a former serf as the defender of “Holy Russia,” Orwell suggests that if there is hope it lies in the proles, Bismarck believed the poor would serve as a reactionary bulwark against liberalism, and MAGA believes that various dispossessed and subaltern groups will keep America great. Are they all correct? No. They’re all wrong. The lower classes have no special compass for political or religious truth, they’re just almost definitionally slightly behind the times. When an egregore is rapidly accumulating strength, they’re likely to oppose it out of inertia, but they’re as vulnerable as anyone to its blandishments, and will just as vigorously defend the new thing once it has taken over.
3. Look, I have a lot of sympathy for these guys. Like the Russian radicals of the 1870s, they correctly observe that there’s something insane and rotten about our society, but unlike those radicals they’re attracted to something that’s really out there and really true and good. “Fake it til you make it” is not the worst strategy ever invented for securing a mature and authentic faith in a supreme being. But once you’re in that state, there’s a clock running, your time is limited, there are other things out there in the night, attracted by the smell of lost and receptive souls.
July 4, 2023
It’s not “bullying” for corporations to act in their own (and their shareholders’) best interests
The weekly round-up from The Line editors wasn’t happy reading for fans of the Canadian mainstream media:
The Canadian government approached this as if it was “Big Tech” who were reaping all the rewards … when in fact it was the Canadian media companies getting most of the benefit from the arrangement. No wonder “Big Tech” chose to take their bat and ball and go home.
There are two major items up for consideration, and we’ll deal with each in turn. The first is a proposed merger between Postmedia and the Torstar/Metroland newspapers. The second, and most significant, news item, is that following on Meta/Facebook’s decision to stop featuring news on its feeds, Google is promising to drop the Google News Showcase feature, and to stop surfacing Canadian news links on its search feeds. All of this is in response to C-18, the Online News Act.
This law is trying to force Facebook and Google to compensate news organizations for the links that appear on their platforms; so the companies reacted in an entirely predictable way after the bill received Royal Assent last week — they announced they are going to absent themselves from the scope of the bill by no longer providing those links.
The government, its supporters, and many in the media itself reacted to this announcement with the same inane bluster that has come to dominate the conversation around this byzantine and poorly conceived bill. The Liberals promised to stand up to “Big Tech”; and the media organizations that pinned their survival on milking this new revenue stream are now accusing Google et al. of “bullying”. We at The Line don’t consider this rhetoric to be rational or in good faith. We are annoyed — we are horrified — by these companies’ decisions, but we understand them.
Both Facebook and Google made it clear that C-18 was untenable from a business point of view; they both warned that they would consider pulling news links in response. From Big Tech’s perspective, the decision-making tree is real simple here: does the revenue generated by news outweigh the potential uncapped financial liability that C-18 would present? Further, would complying with C-18 in Canada present a greater risk to the company globally if the bill were replicated in larger media markets? Or are the companies better off to withdraw from a low-priority market pour encourager les autres. We can scream about the evils of Big Tech all we want, but ultimately, these are just math conversations.
No one ought to be surprised that the math didn’t go our way. But almost everyone was. Because — and there’s no nice way to say this — this country’s media industry is both painfully parochial and embarrassingly self-important. For people whose job it is to understand and explain the world to Canadians, it often astonishes us at how incompetent we are at understanding and explaining that world to ourselves. Canadian journalists have an unshakeable faith in our vocation; we genuinely believe that our work is a vital service to democracy. Therefore the fruits of that labour — the news content — must be valuable to the digital platforms that we now depend upon to distribute it. This is why many in the industry were so unshakeably convinced that Facebook and Google were bluffing during the course of C-18. Incredibly, many seem to remain convinced that Big Tech will capitulate to their demands for capital, even now. To quote this old gem: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
The flaw in this reasoning ought to be apparent, yet the industry lacks the digital savvy to understand the risk it is courting. “What about Bing, amiright?” Denial and self-importance are now sucking Canadian journalism straight into the maw of an existential crisis. To lose Facebook is a major set back; to lose Google is death.
The thing our colleagues and peers need to come to terms with is that Canadian journalism just isn’t that important in the global scheme of things. Facebook and Google aren’t out to get us — they are indifferent to us. Canadian news comprises a small and un-lucrative segment of even Canadian traffic flows. And Canada is a mid-tier market, at best. Optics aside, global tech oligopolies simply don’t lose very much by cutting us off. Facebook and Google are in the business of advertising, not journalism. They share neither our self regard, nor our democratic mandate; as a result, there is no internally coherent reason for them to take losses in order to save our industry. We just don’t matter to them.
On her Substack, Tasha Kheiriddin doesn’t blame Google for the impending destruction of what’s left of mainstream Canadian media:
The funeral has begun. The pyres are lit; the mourners are weeping. RIP, Canadian media industry, we hardly knew ye. Between mergers, acquisitions, closures, and layoffs, you didn’t stand a chance. And then came Bill C-18.
The legislation, passed last week, compels internet behemoths Meta and Google to compensate Canadian news outlets in exchange for featuring links to their content. Bill C-18 is modeled on an Australian law that saw the two tech giants enter into financial arrangements with media outlets in that country. Here in Canada, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates similar deals could produce annual revenues of $329 million, a juicy sum for the cash-strapped news business.
Instead, Meta and Google announced that they would no longer include Canadian news links. Rather than reap a profit, Canadian media companies now face the prospect of far fewer eyeballs on screens – and the decimation of their ad revenue. Meta also cut its funding to CN2i, the Coopérative nationale de l’information indépendante, which supports six print publications, including La Presse, further damaging media companies’ bottom line.
Cue the sound of “Taps” and political outrage. Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez had this to say:
Big tech would rather spend money to change their platforms to block Canadians from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations … This shows how deeply irresponsible and out of touch they are, especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users.
No, this shows how deeply out of touch the government is with the business model of these companies – and with internet technology in general.
July 2, 2023
If you were trying to destroy trust online, you’d use the playbook currently in use by all the major players
Ted Gioia calls it the “Information Crap-pocalypse”:
People keep telling me that we’re living on an Information Superhighway. But that’s not true.
The flow of information today is more like a river. A very polluted river.
Folks have been dumping their crap into our information flows for a long, long time. Big corporations and institutions are the worst offenders — they actually get rich by polluting our data streams. But individuals are adding to the raw sewage too.
Some of them do it just for kicks.
It’s gotten worse lately. A whole lot worse. Just look at the polluted streams of information in your own life, and try to find a single safe space where the data stream is fresh and clean.
Some of us have stopped even trying.
This is how the Information Age ends, and it’s happening right now.
In the last 12 months, the garbage infows into our culture have increased exponentially. As a result, nothing is harder to find now than actual information — which I define as “knowledge based on demonstrable or reliable facts”.
The result is a crisis of trust unlike anything seen before in modern history.
We are bypassing the Web 3.0 we were promised — which was supposed to deliver trust-based systems and validation tools. Instead we’ve gone straight to Web 4.0, which is like the worst kind of Wild West Web. Outlaws and desperados contol all the data highways and byways. Trust and reliability are scarcer than gold nuggets.
Do you think I’m exaggerating?
Let me ask you a question. If your job was to destroy access to reliable information in our society, how would you do it?
You would start with the 30 steps outlined below.
July 1, 2023
The Trudeau plan to eliminate Canada from the internet is going great!
Wait, you mean that wasn’t the plan? It must have been, if you judge the plan by the amazing results:
The damage caused by the government’s Bill C-18 continues to grow as Meta has started to cancel its existing agreements with Canadian publishers. The move should not as a surprise since any deals that involve facilitating access to news content would bring the company into the legislative framework and mandate payments for links. Indeed, Meta said earlier this week that its 18 existing deals “did not have much of a future“. When this is coupled with a reported “impasse” between the government and Google over its approach to Bill C-18, the risks to the Canadian media sector look increasingly dire.
This was entirely foreseeable, yet Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez never seemed to take the risks seriously. It raises the question of whether the government developed estimates of the cost of its legislation if Meta and Google chose to comply by stopping news sharing or linking. While there were estimates for the benefits of new deals that ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars, did it conduct a risk assessment of the economic costs that would come from Internet companies exiting the news market in Canada?
There are obviously costs that extend far beyond the economics that include reduced access to news, increased prominence of low quality news sources, harm to the Canadian Internet, and the reputational damage to a government that handled this about as incompetently as possible. But from a pure economic perspective, the risks were always understated as they extended beyond just the value of increased traffic to publishers from the links they were themselves posting. Both Google and Meta have deals with Canadian publishers reportedly worth millions of dollars. As Meta’s step to begin cancelling deals suggests, those agreements are unlikely to survive the decision to exit news in Canada.
And of course, Google doesn’t want to set any kind of precedent by accepting a shakedown from any two-bit hoodlum country like Canada:
The worst case scenario for Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, the Canadian news sector, and the Canadian public has come to pass: Google has announced that it will block news links in Canada in response to the mandated payment for links approach established in Bill C-18. The decision, which the company says will be implemented before the law takes effect, will cover search, Google News, and Google Discover. The decision – which government seemingly tried to avoid with last minute discussions with Google executives after it became apparent that the risks of exit were real – will have lasting and enormously damaging consequences for Canadians and represents a remarkable own-goal by Rodriguez who has managed to take millions away from the news sector and left everyone in a far worse position than if he had done nothing at all.
If you’re in any way interested in Canadian government … machinations … when it comes to digital policy, you really should be following Michael Geist‘s reporting. He’s been doing a great job and deserves the support.
June 29, 2023
When “flashy” became “constantly flashing”, the user experience got significantly worse
Scott Alexander on the irritating advance of meaningless flashing elements on so many web pages where they serve no real purpose, but successfully generate anger in their users:
Everyone hates flashing banner ads, but maybe they’re a necessary evil. Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine. But what’s everyone else’s excuse?
A few days ago I needed to look up an obscure point of Jewish law, as you do, and found this Jewish law website:
The background toggles every few seconds between a picture of a rabbi and a picture of … a different rabbi? There’s no conceivable benefit to this and it makes it almost impossible to concentrate on the text.
I used to think I must be the only person who worried about this; maybe it was a weird OCD thing. But I asked about it on the ACX survey …
… and 88% of people find them at least a little annoying! 16% of people go all the way, and say they wouldn’t use a website that has them!
Yet websites have been adding them to more and more parts of the user experience. Most aren’t as blatant as the Jewish law site, but they’re still there.
June 21, 2023
QotD: Working online
[…]
For lots of people, the office was their only social outlet. Coffee breaks, water cooler chatter, happy hours … for lots of people, that was pretty much it, socially. “Work/life balance” was always a joke, because all your friends are work friends, so even if you’re “socializing” and not “working”, it’s with the same people from the office, talking about office stuff. And the longer you stayed in the same job, the higher up the corporate ladder you got, the more specialized your position, the worse it got – your rookie customer service reps still had buddies from college to hang out with, but junior managers tended to hang out exclusively with other junior managers, etc. The “professions”, of course, are famously clannish — the only ways to talk to a lawyer or doctor are to hire one, or be one.
Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.
June 16, 2023
Friday Foundlings
A few items that I didn’t feel required a full post of their own, but might be of interest:
- “Lunch of suffering”: plain “white people food” goes viral in China
- From a review of Njal’s Saga – “There are only about 40,000 people in medieval Iceland. The book focuses on the Southwest Quarter, so let’s say 10,000 there. Each of our characters is a large landowning farmer with many children, servants, tenants, etc; if he is patriarch of a 20 person household, then there must be about 500 such patriarchs. Each of these 500 relevant Icelanders is profiled in loving depth. And if there are 500 characters in Njal’s Saga, and n people can have n(n-1)/2 possible two-person feuds, that’s 124,750 possible feuds. Of these, about 124,749 actually take place over the course of the saga (Njal and his friend Gunnar are best buds, and refuse to feud for any reason).”
- The Canadian government continues to rack up the internet regulation wins – “The fallout from Bill C-11 has been the subject of several posts this week, including the demands from a wide range of services for exceptions to the law and warnings from streaming services such as PBS and AMC that they may block the Canadian market due to the regulatory burden imposed by the law. While those stories focus on the availability of services and content in Canada, a new Variety report points to another negative impact from the bill: less film and television production in Canada, at least in the short term. Throughout the Bill C-11 debate, there were concerns that the large streamers might pause their productions in Canada given the uncertainty over whether they would ‘count’ for the purposes of new CRTC imposed contribution requirements. In other words, the bill could initially lead to less investment in Canada.”
- Random meme of the day:
June 15, 2023
QotD: Incels
Freddie deBoer, “Some Reasons Why Smartphones Might Make Adolescents Anxious and Depressed”, Freddie deBoer, 2023-03-07.
June 9, 2023
QotD: The Fundamental Paradox of Internet Liberalism
- If you were smart enough to understand what I’m saying, you’d be a liberal, too
- You aren’t smart enough to understand it, because you’re not a liberal
- And yet here I am, arguing with you anyway.
So who, exactly, is the dumb one?
Severian, “Alienation II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-30.
