The Times piece brought to its conclusion a dialectic that has increasingly consumed the news media in the age of Twitter. A narrative generated on social media is fed back into the “mainstream” press, and then in turn fed back into Twitter in the form of reporting that appears to confirm the pre-existing narrative. It acquires along the way the force of sanction, rewarding those who participate in the dissemination of the narrative, and punishing those who dissent from it in the form of mob-style attacks and ostracism. This machinery for the spontaneous coordination of orthodoxy exploits vulnerabilities in our evolved psychology. “Confirmation bias” is the tendency to lower our threshold of proof for claims that conform to what we are already primed by habit, familiarity, and the desire to believe. “The availability heuristic” is the tendency to mistake the vividness of an occurrence for its frequency. Use these quirks of the mind to feed the bias held by partisans that the only people that could possibly oppose them are knaves and fools, and you can gaslight even otherwise bright and skeptical people into accepting and repeating blatant falsehoods.
Wesley Yang, “The Shocking Truth About Jordan Peterson”, Tablet, 2018-05-28.
June 22, 2018
QotD: The “narrative” and social media
June 13, 2018
Cultural appropriation is the universal outcome of inter-cultural contact
Claire Lehmann talks about the most recent ginned-up outbreak of cultural appropriation idiocy:
The flare-up was reported on internationally, and dozens of op-eds both condemning and defending the tweet and the dress spilled forth. Writing in The Independent, Eliza Anyangwe officiously declared that the teenager who wore the offending dress, Keziah Daum, was “the embodiment of a system that empowers white people to take whatever they want, go wherever they want and be able to fall back on: ‘Well, I didn’t mean any harm.’” The title of the piece was “Cultural Appropriation Is Never Harmless.” But it failed to define what cultural appropriation actually is.
For most observers, these complaints are bemusing and baffling. For many, no defense or condemnation of cultural appropriation is required, because such complaints are almost beyond the realm of comprehension in the first place. Without cultural appropriation we would not be able to eat Italian food, listen to reggae, or go to Yoga. Without cultural appropriation we would not be able to drink tea or use chopsticks or speak English or apply algebra, or listen to jazz, or write novels. Almost every cultural practice we engage in is the byproduct of centuries of cross-cultural pollination. The future of our civilization depends on it continuing.
Yet the concept was not always so perplexing. Originally derived from sociologists writing in the 1990s, its usage appears to have first been adopted by indigenous peoples of nations tainted by histories of colonization, such as Canada, Australia and the United States. Understandably, indigenous communities have been protective of their sacred objects and cultural artifacts, not wishing the experience of exploitation to be repeated generation after generation. Although one might be quizzical of complaints about a girl wearing a cheongsam to her prom (the United States has never colonized China) even the most tough-minded skeptic should be able to see why indigenous peoples who have historically had their land and territories taken away from them might be unwilling to “share their culture” unconditionally. Particularly when it is applied to the co-opting of a people’s sacred and religious iconography for the base purposes of profit-making, the concept of cultural appropriation seems quite reasonable.
Nevertheless, the concept quickly becomes baffling when young Westerners, such as Mr. Lam, of the cheongsam tweet, use the term as a weapon to disrupt the natural process of cultural exchange that happens in cosmopolitan societies in which culture is, thankfully, hybrid. When controversies erupt over hoop earrings or sombrero hats or sushi or braids or cannabis-themed parties, the concept of cultural appropriation appears to have departed from its formerly understood meaning — that is, to protect sacred or religious objects from desecration and exploitation. It appears that these newer, more trivial (yet vicious) complaints are the modern-day incarnation of sumptuary laws.
Elites once policed what their social inferiors could wear, in part to remind them of their inferiority, and in part to retain their own prestige and exclusivity. In Moral Time, the sociologist Donald Black, explains that in feudal and medieval societies, sumptuary laws were often articulated with religious or moralizing language, but their intention and effect was simply to provide a scaffold for existing social hierarchies. Writing in the 15th century, French philosopher Michel de Montaigne made the astute observation in his essay “Of Sumptuary Laws”: “’Tis strange how suddenly and with how much ease custom in these indifferent things establishes itself and becomes authority.”
May 30, 2018
“Characters in children’s books are increasingly the victims, rather than the heroes, of their own stories”
In Spiked, Christopher Beckett explains how children’s books are increasingly becoming “misery lit”:
According to the judges of the Branford Boase Award, which is presented annually to an outstanding children’s or young-adult novel by a first-time writer, fiction for young people is getting increasingly narrow and downbeat. Philip Womack, one of the prize’s judges, told the Guardian that around one third of this year’s entries were domestic dramas, all with a ‘very similar narrative’: ‘There’s an ill child at home, who notices something odd, and is probably imagining it, but not telling the reader. They’re all in the first person, all in the present tense, all of a type.’ Such books were, he added, ‘so enclosed, so claustrophobic, so depressing and formulaic… It does make for a rather depressing children’s literary landscape’. Adventure stories, he says, seem to be on the way out.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. Children’s worlds have become smaller and more claustrophobic over recent decades. They have become less adventurous: they spend less time outside and more time under the watch of their parents. Children are also now more likely to be found glued to smartphones, tablets, computers and videogames rather than books. The escape they get from everyday life and parental supervision comes largely from tracking the lives of Instagram and YouTube celebrities, and immersing themselves in gaming adventures. But neither of these mediums leave space for the imagination to flourish – for play and interactions with others.
Worse still, kids’ lit today seems to reflect an unhealthy obsession with the private sphere and family life. Julia Eccleshare, co-founder of the Branford Boase Award and children’s director of the Hay Festival, writes in the Bookseller that more and more children’s books are now dealing with ‘family breakdown, accidents, deaths [and] mental-health problems… all of which it will be impossible for a child to resolve as the issues are insurmountable’. Characters in children’s books are increasingly the victims, rather than the heroes, of their own stories.
May 27, 2018
The Decreasing Viability of YouTube as a Platform for Independent Creators
Computing Forever
Published on 25 May 2018
May 23, 2018
Farage and Zuckerberg
My message to Mark Zuckerberg today:
Stop telling us Facebook is a “platform for all ideas”. The evidence shows your algorithms censor conservative opinions. pic.twitter.com/HWLabaDcP9
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) May 22, 2018
May 17, 2018
QotD: Emotion beats the facts (to post on social media)
Suppose a black guy is shot by a cop. I have absolutely no information about it. I don’t know if the black guy was shot, for example, accidentally or in a conflict. I don’t know if he was armed or not. I don’t know if the cop shooting is black or white.
I know nothing about it.
Now — should I have an opinion on this matter?
The obvious answer is “No, I should not,” but that’s not the real answer.
In this #HotTake non-culture culture, I should definitely have an opinion.
Based on what, if i have no information?
Based upon my tribal sympathies and chauvinisms, is the answer.
See, anyone can condemn a cop shooting once they know the actual facts and the facts turn out to show that the victim was innocent and the cop was blameworthy, fast on the trigger or negligent or what have you.
But if I wait to know the facts, what does that say about me as a person? It says nothing about me — again, anyone can see the facts of a bad shooting and then say “That was a bad shooting.”
No — to establish yourself as on a higher moral plane than other people, You have to offer a strident, emotionally-hot opinion without knowing anything.
Because only if you don’t have the proper facts upon which to make that determination can you successfully advertise the fact that you are knee-jerkedly siding with BlackLivesMatter.
(Or, for that matter, with cops, if that’s your preference.)
Again, this is not a game of showing that you’ve come to a reasoned judgment after the evidence has emerged and you have apprised yourself of it.
Bad people can use the power of reason too, after all. Racists can see a shooting was bad, if the evidence proves the shooting was bad.
The game is not to make a reasoned, fact-based judgment — because that says nothing about your default sympathies, tribal allegiances, and ideological priors.
The game is to make an unreasoned, non-fact-based judgment, a judgment based only on emotion and allegiance and chauvinism — because that, unlike a fact-based judgment, shows where your heart is.
That’s why people in the #HotTake culture pressure others to take positions before any facts are actually known — facts are for the emotionally cold.
Ace, “Our #HotTake Culture and Why It Exists, and Open Thread”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2016-08-26.
May 7, 2018
“Playing Pied Piper for a lost generation of lefty-baiting edgelords has given an ambitious academic incentive to embrace his inner troll”
In the June issue of Reason, Matt Welch looks at the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and notes that he’s not “the second coming”:
“If you think tough men are dangerous,” University of Toronto psychologist and overnight YouTube superstar Jordan Peterson writes in his new book, “wait until you see what weak men are capable of.” It’s a warning shot for would-be social engineers trying to defang maleness and for Peterson’s startlingly large audience of young dudes teetering on the edge of nihilism. Perhaps it is also a subconscious caution to the author himself.
January 2018 was the month Jordan Peterson went from unknown to inescapable. The two reasons for that were a Channel 4 News (U.K.) exchange that went viral after an increasingly hostile and flustered female interviewer failed to hang an unflappable Peterson as a misogynist, and then the appearance one week later of his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Random House Canada), which immediately shot up bestseller lists throughout the English-speaking world. “He has skyrocketed from relative obscurity to international celebrity in a couple of weeks,” Psychology Today noted with wonder.
As befits a lecturer fixated on the “tightrope” between chaos and order, good and evil, yin and yang, “the Jordan Peterson moment” (so christened by New York Times columnist David Brooks) has produced an almost perfectly polarized response. Celeb psychologist Jonathan Haidt called Peterson “one of the few fearless professors”; Houman Barekat in the L.A. Review of Books deemed him a peddler of “toxic masculinity” and “reactionary chauvinism.” He is “the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan” (Camille Paglia), or an “an intellectual fraud who uses a lot of words to say almost nothing” (Nathan J. Robinson).
What is indisputable — and what makes the Peterson pop phenomenon more interesting than the quality of his work — is the way it has galvanized a generation of wayward young men, including many who have clustered around the “alt-right.” The numbers are staggering, and vaulting upward by the minute: As of early April, there were 49 million views of his YouTube videos, 1,008,000 subscribers to his channel (plus 584,000 Twitter and 256,000 Facebook followers), and, most impressively, an estimated $90,000 a month donated to his account on the crowdfunding site Patreon. By Peterson’s own reckoning, the solid majority of his sold-out audiences on the lecture circuit are males between the ages of 20 and 35; their gratitude for his “grow the hell up” message has moved the man to tears on several public occasions.
Peterson self-identifies as a classical liberal, frequently retweets content from the Cato Institute, and forthrightly criticizes the alt-right for playing the “collectivist game” of identity politics. Yet he’s a lightning rod among libertarians too. I first became aware of the psychologist last fall when his name came up serially at a private gathering of libertarian activists anxious about the real and perceived overlap between their world and the reactionary right. One participant counseled keeping Peterson at arm’s length, lest “we end up with another cult-leader libertarian.” Taking the opposite view at the website Being Libertarian was Adam Barsouk, who argued that “Peterson is able to do something no libertarian commentator before him could: he can argue that a freer, less coddled way of life is not just ethical, but also adaptive, better for humanity as a whole.”
Peterson’s popularity has demonstrated the happy fact that you can reach illiberal ears with a message that contains some classical liberal content. But he has gotten there not via persuasive argument about intellectual ideas but through the top-down, teacher-student, authoritarian exhortations of self-help. Playing Pied Piper for a lost generation of lefty-baiting edgelords has given an ambitious academic incentive to embrace his inner troll.
April 25, 2018
Please give generously to help fight Cleese’s Disease
James Delingpole is doing everything he can to fight this awful ailment:
Today I am launching an appeal on behalf of a former British comedian called Robert Webb.
Unless you live in the UK you probably won’t have heard of him. But in his day he was very funny – first as part of the double act Mitchell and Webb, later in the even funnier series Peep Show (which really was much better than the travesty of a U.S. remake, honest).
Anyway, sadly, those days of being funny are long behind him. Poor Webb has fallen victim to a disease which has ravaged the global comedic community so cruelly and on such a scale that it could probably provide Tony Kushner with enough material to write another Pulitzer Prize-winning play.
This disease comes in several ugly mutations.
There’s the basic form – Cleese’s Disease – where you started out funny but you haven’t been for years because you now take yourself far too seriously.
There’s Schumer-Degeneres Syndrome, where you probably weren’t that funny to start with but you’re definitely even less funny now that you’ve become obsessed with hating your own white privilege.
There’s Linehan Complex, where your youthful frivolity has mutated into hideous arrogance and bitterness and extreme self-righteousness which leads you to lash out viciously on social media at anyone who doesn’t share your impeccably woke SJW politics.
Robert Webb, poor chap, has managed to contract all three variants of the disease at once.
April 22, 2018
QotD: Chronic Truth Aversion Disorder
When little children can’t understand things, they often lash out and throw tantrums.
Workplace and safety considerations prevent adults stamping their feet and hurling themselves onto the playground, so they have to content themselves with spewing invective all over the virtual playground of Twitter.
They take aim at whoever confounded them, claim to be offended and engage in a cathartic process of name-calling and abuse.
This therapeutic process is effective, but flawed.
By enabling tantrum-throwers to re-establish their feelings of moral superiority they can walk away purged, but it doesn’t get to the root of their problem: Chronic Truth Aversion Disorder.
The CTAD epidemic that is raging unchecked through Australia’s social media population is rendering impossible any intelligent debate on serious social issues, such as the rampant violence, abuse and neglect of children in remote indigenous communities.
The reactions of people in an advanced stage of the condition to anything that so much as hints at the truth, while utterly irrational, are also so hostile that anyone inclined to speak the truth understandably becomes afraid to do so.
Bill Leak, “Bill Leak cartoon: what are you tweeting about?”, The Australian, 2016-08-05.
April 20, 2018
Memes for morons
On Facebook, SF author Larry Correia responds to a currently popular meme (NSFW language, so it’s below the fold):
April 15, 2018
Facebook is stalking you, even if you don’t have an account
At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Gennie Gebhart and Jamie Williams explain why Facebook doesn’t need to listen in on your microphone to serve you with creepy ads:
In ten total hours of testimony in front of the Senate and the House this week, Mark Zuckerberg was able to produce only one seemingly straightforward, privacy-protective answer. When Sen. Gary Peters asked Zuckerberg if Facebook listens to users through their cell phone microphones in order to collect information with which to serve them ads, Zuckerberg confidently said, “No.”
What he left out, however, is that Facebook doesn’t listen to users through their phone microphones because it doesn’t have to. Facebook actually uses even more invasive, invisible surveillance and analysis methods, which give it enough information about you to produce uncanny advertisements all the same.
This was what finally got Elizabeth to close her Facebook account: very shortly after posting a status update that referenced a particular business (that’s been gone for decades), she started getting ads for modern equivalents outside her Facebook session. Clearly, her advertising profile had been updated to include her “new” interest, and the ads were now tailored to this sudden change of tastes.
But how does Facebook know to serve you an ad for a specific product right after you talk about it? What explains seeing ads for things you have never searched for or communicated about online? The list is long. Instead of listening to your conversations through your phone, Facebook:
- tracks you through Like buttons across the web, whether or not you are logged in or even have a Facebook account.
- maintains shadow profiles on people who don’t use Facebook.
- logs Android users’ calls and texts.
- absorbs unique phone identifiers through in-app advertising to associate your identity across the different devices you use.
- tracks your location and serves ads based on where you are, where you live, and where you work.
- tracks your in-store purchases to link the ads you see online with the purchases you make offline.
- watches the things you start writing but don’t post to track your self-censorship.
- linked purchases to Messenger accounts to allow sellers to send confirmation messages without affirmative user permission.
- bought and advertised a VPN to track what users are doing on other apps and crush competition.
- manipulated your Newsfeed to see if it can make you sad or happy.
- files patents for emerging tracking technology, like tracking your location through the dust on your phone camera, for potential future use.
Tracking and analysis methods like these power not only those too on-the-nose ads, but also invasive “People You May Know” recommendations.
Users are onto this. If you have ever been creeped out by an ad for a product popping up right after you were talking out loud about it, your fear and even paranoia are warranted — just not for the exact reasons you might think. No matter how Facebook achieves its frighteningly accurate ads and suggestions, the end result is the same: an uncomfortable, privacy-invasive user experience.
I’m getting closer to the point of pulling the plug on my Facebook account as well … it seems like every week or so I need to go spelunking in the privacy settings to shut off yet another way they want to monetize my information or invade my privacy even more. Several of my FB friends are dabbling with MeWe.com as an alternative and they do claim not to track you or otherwise compromise your privacy.
April 10, 2018
QotD: The built-in toxicity of social media
The internet age has brought us a medium with a bias towards even more gutteral, visceral messaging. Social media encourage short, punchy messages, and by punchy, I mean people are trying to punch each other with words. The medium has a bias towards stridency and absolutism, because you really can’t include too much nuance and caveat in 140 characters.
It also has a strong bias towards anger, because, as far as short missives go, “Go fuck yourself” has the virtue of being brief, direct, and very easy to write.
Much easier to write a bunch of fuck yous to strangers than compose an article explaining your beliefs or the defects of the claims of those you disagree with.
And a lazy medium thereby encourages lazy thinking.
I kind of think anything important one has to say should be said in person. If you’re going to break up with someone, it should be in person.
If you’re going to tell someone you’ll never speak to him again because he supports a candidate you don’t like, you should probably man up to deliver that message in person, too.
If you have the guts. But that’s hard. Much easier just to rip someone in a 140 character Sick Burn.
Ace, “Divisive Political Season Causing Mass Unfriending on FaceBook”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2016-08-15.
March 30, 2018
New Firefox extension to reduce Facebook‘s default tracking
If you use Firefox as your primary browser, you might be interested in a new Firefox extension that limits how Facebook tracks your activity:
Mozilla Firefox has a new extension to prevent Facebook from tracking your online habits.
Capitalizing on the fears surrounding Facebook privacy, Mozilla has designed the “Facebook Container,” a Firefox add-on that blocks Facebook from tracking users when they click on ads or links that take them off the site.
Facebook currently uses a program called Pixel to collect information on how users engage with the site. When users click on links, they visit external sites but are still logged in to Facebook‘s platform. These outside sites will contain “share” or “like” buttons, and when users engage with these functions, this activity is connected to their Facebook identity. That’s how Facebook is able to fine-tune its advertisements to its users. While this is a well-known practice, many aren’t aware that their behaviors outside the core function of Facebook are tracked.
But when people using Facebook Container click a link on Facebook, it loads in a seperate blue tab that isolates users’ activities from the core site. In these blue tabs, users will not be logged into Facebook, which prevents further data collection. Users do have the option to continue to use the “share” and “like” buttons, but Mozilla notes that these activities may still be tracked. The extension doesn’t prevent data collection, but it offers users more control over their privacy.
It may only be a token toward reclaiming a tiny bit of your online privacy, but even tokens can be valuable in the aggregate.
March 29, 2018
Google, Facebook, anti-trust laws, and the Network Effect
Google and Facebook (and other, lesser, social media companies) have a lot of information on you. Lots and lots and lots of information on you. Many people are coming to the conclusion that this is bad, bad news and “something must be done”. Politicians and activists share a tendency to respond to such demands by pushing “something” they already favour as the solution to the popular demand for action. A few days ago, the “something” seemed to be some form of anti-trust action over the social media giants.
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains why an over-the-top anti-trust offensive is likely to leave everyone in a worse state than the status quo:
Which brings us to the tech companies of today:
Big Tech May Be Monopolistic, But It’s Good for ConsumersQuite so, thus no antitrust actions should or need be taken.
At the first level there’s the simple point that Facebook, Google a little less, Microsoft, e-Bay, they benefit from network effects. The more people who use them the more attractive they become to the next user. Meaning that size, in and of itself, creates yet more size. That’s just what we mean by network effects.
In turn that also means that the efficient size of an organisation here is that global monopoly. It isn’t true in most cases because there are diseconomies of scale as well as economies of it, but another way to describe network effects is just that we’re insisting that the -economies outweigh the dis- at scales up to and including 7 billion people.
In that first reading of antitrust that would mean they gain economic power and thus government must step in. In our second reading that’s not enough.
Firstly, the monopolists must exercise that economic power they have. Something not greatly in evidence as just having power doesn’t mean it can be exercised. For when you do try to, say, raise prices can someone come in and try to undercut you? If so you’ve got contestable economic power, or even a contestable monopoly. As an example, think the Chinese and rare earths. They were producing some 97% of the world’s supply. So, they decided to play silly buggers, exercise that power. It took a couple of years but two new mines opened, China’s share of rare earths fell and prices halved, below their original point. People contested that Chinese economic power when China tried to exercise it. China didn’t win either.
If Google tried to raise the price of adverts then business would flow away from them. If Facebook started charging for access then there wouldn’t be a Facebook. They’ve got contestable monopolies.
[…]
Sure, we should keep a wary eye open and if the consumer is being gouged then we could and should do something. But while we’ve got efficient companies, monopolies or not, benefiting consumers then the correct response is to get the hell out of the way.
Unless you’re a politician who simply wants to expand the powers politicians have over society – something which explains most politicians – but then we can tell them to go boil their heads. Only the exercise of economic power to the disbenefit of consumers justifies intervention.
March 26, 2018
QotD: Virtue signalling
It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are. If you were frank and said, ‘I care about the environment more than most people do’ or ‘I care about the poor more than others’, your vanity and self-aggrandisement would be obvious, as it is with Whole Foods. Anger and outrage disguise your boastfulness.
One of the occasions when expressions of hate are not used is when people say they are passionate believers in the NHS. Note the use of the word ‘belief’. This is to shift the issue away from evidence about which healthcare system results in the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. The speaker does not want to get into facts or evidence. He or she wishes to demonstrate kindness — the desire that all people, notably the poor, should have access to ‘the best’ healthcare. The virtue lies in the wish. But hatred waits in reserve even with the NHS. ‘The Tories want to privatise the NHS!’ you assert angrily. Gosh, you must be virtuous to be so cross!
Comedians make use of virtue signalling of the vituperative kind. With the right audience they can get laughs scorning the usual suspects: Ukip, the Daily Mail, Eton, bankers and the rest. The audience enjoys the caricaturing of all of these, sneering at them and, in the process, joining together as a congregation of the righteously contemptuous. What a delight to display your virtue, feel confirmed in your views, enjoy a sense of community, let off some anger and have a laugh all at the same time! It is so easy, too!
No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words or even from silently held beliefs. There was a time in the distant past when people thought you could only be virtuous by doing things: by helping the blind man across the road; looking after your elderly parents instead of dumping them in a home; staying in a not-wholly-perfect marriage for the sake of the children. These things involve effort and self-sacrifice. That sounds hard! Much more convenient to achieve virtue by expressing hatred of those who think the health service could be improved by introducing competition.
James Bartholemew “The awful rise of ‘virtue signalling’: Want to be virtuous? Saying the right things violently on Twitter is much easier than real kindness”, The Spectator, 2015-04-18.
