Quotulatiousness

September 29, 2023

Bored? Lonely? No girlfriend? Mister, you want an AI Girlfriend!

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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 25, 2023

Something, something “sins of the fathers”, something, something Elon Musk

Filed under: Africa, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray provides an example of how “mainstream psychosis” has become the new normal, at least among academics and our so-called “elites”:

My argument is not “the news media lies”, or “there’s a lot of misleading discourse”. My argument is that whole overlapping layers of high-status America — in academia, in media, and in politics — are psychotic, fully detached from reality and living in their own bizarre mental construction of a fake world. I don’t mean this figuratively, or as colorful hyperbole. I mean that the top layers of our most important institutions are actually, literally populated by people who are insane, who have cultivated a complete mental descent through the looking glass.

So: Jill Lepore.

Lepore is as high-status as it’s possible to be. She holds an endowed chair at Harvard, she has a Bancroft, and she’s been on the masthead at the New Yorker for almost two decades. She has about as much institutional validation as an academic historian can get. And she just published an essay that wouldn’t be out of place in foot-high crayon letters on the wall of a mental institution.

“What happened to antisemitic rants before social media”, is the actual subhed. You see, before Twitter, people who said that Jews were bad were very marginal, and no one ever listened to them. At the risk of giving away too much personal information, I’m writing this in a bar, and the bartender is giving me some fairly aggressive side-eye over the burst of nervous laughter that I just dropped. Musk’s grandfather was named J.N. Haldeman, and he wrote a lot about how much he didn’t like Jews, and here’s what Lepore has to say about that:

    But Haldeman’s legacy casts light on what social media does: the reason that most people don’t know about Musk’s grandfather’s political writings is that in his lifetime social media did not exist, and the writings of people like him were not, therefore, amplified by it. Indeed, they were very unlikely to circulate widely, and are now quite rare.

Jill Lepore has a PhD in history, and she thinks that antisemitic speech was quite rare before social media. Here’s a link to a non-paywalled version of the essay, and I encourage you to go read it. Otherwise you’re going to struggle to believe me. See for yourself, and then come back and I’ll talk about it.

How, if you want to argue that negative statements about Jews had little reach before social media, do you explain … Jewish history? Why didn’t they have time for the bread to rise, Jill? Before Twitter, screeds against Jews “were very unlikely to circulate widely,” except for, I don’t know, Mein Kampf? We dip the parsley in the salt water to remember the bitter tears of our ancestors, who never faced any antisemitism because it was very marginal and never allowed to circulate widely.

It gets better, though, because Haldeman was born in Minnesota, then raised in Canada, and then moved to South Africa two years after the formal implementation of apartheid. He wrote white supremacist tracts in apartheid South Africa, and Lepore maintains that the reach of his racist literature was sharply limited by the absence of social media. See, it was very rare to be able to read racist views in apartheid South Africa.

Ted Gioia explains why he loves writing for Substack

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s much easier to reach the audience he wants to share with using his Substack than either Twit-er, er, I mean “X”, or Facebook:

Below I look at some surprising ways Substack has changed the media (and social media) landscape.

This gives me a good excuse to recommend the new Substack app. It’s now my go-to source for informed writing — providing access to a smarter and more diverse group of authors, thinkers, and creators than I’ve found anywhere else.

I’ve now been on Substack for 30 months, and the improvements in the platform during that time have far exceeded my expectations. I didn’t know any music writers on Substack back when I launched, but it now boasts a better roster of critics than any newspaper or magazine. By the way, I’m also subscribing to writers in a dozen or so other fields (culinary arts, economics, literature, finance, technology, psychology, etc.).

I’m a heavy user. I must have signed up for almost a hundred Substacks.

Substack has also added a lot of new features during those 30 months. I especially like Notes, which is similar to Twitter but with extra IQ points. And I’ve also benefited from cross-posting, recommendations, and many other new features. I also applaud options I don’t currently use (like chat and podcasts), because they empower writers and readers.

The reality is that Substack is innovating faster than I can keep up with. But I like it that way. It’s creating an interconnected and independent media ecosystem here.

Best of all are the core values behind all this:

  • Substack supports writers — who receive almost 90% of subscription revenues. This is the exact opposite of the traditional publishing model, where royalty rates of around 10% are typical.
  • I don’t need to attract advertisers, and this frees me from the conflicts-of-interest advertising brings to other platforms.
  • There’s no surveillance or selling of users’ private information here.
  • I share my articles directly with readers, and no algorithm or gatekeeper intervenes to prevent our direct connection.

For these and other reasons, I’ve been an advocate for the platform. And that’s a good introduction to my subject today.

September 20, 2023

“Future Edward Gibbons’ [will] have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Andrew MacDougall finds something good to say about social media:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Say what you will about social media, but one unalloyed good is the future Edward Gibbons’ of this parish are going to have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet.

Future historians will not only know what happened as we cratered, but, thanks to our ubiquitous digital sketch pads, they will have all of the horrific micro detail. They will know how many times we circled the bowl, what we were saying about circling the bowl as we were circling it and which streaks we were or weren’t arguing about as we went down. Social media is an infinite canvas home to a limitless number of voices and — while we might not be richer for it in the present — our future societal homicide detectives will be forever grateful that we left so many stains to analyze.

For example, when historians consider — as they surely will — whether the moment Canada truly began to crumble was when a WestJet cabin crew allowed Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre to grab the conch and address a planeload of (mostly) Conservative Party of Canada delegates on his way back from a successful party convention, we will have a panoply of voices to consult. From all walks of life and social stations, too. What, for example, did a famous singer like Jann Arden have to say about the whole episode?

Well, thanks to our good friend ex-Twitter we don’t have to guess; we know. And what Arden said was: “Hey @WestJet you and I will not be doing business ever again. This is so ridiculously disappointing.”

In life, I try my best not to be insensitive, but imagine having so little going on that this is considered a good use of your time? Imagine possessing such a delicate constitution that you would rather chain yourself [to] the be-vomited reclining seats of Air Canada than ever fly WestJet again. When you live in Calgary. And what has to be going on to then quote-tweet a bunch of nasty replies and joust with a network of digital cretins, as Arden went on to do. Dozens of them. Who stirs the sewage and then pins the best turds to their page?

As someone who has spent (far) too much time wasting time on platforms like ex-Twitter, I feel I speak from experience. I’ve picked a fair few fights I didn’t need to pick. Both with randoms, and rock stars. I have fed the trolls and I have done performative tweeting. And you know what I’ve learned? The only people who win are our algorithmic overlords. People like Arden are the modern-day Olds-and-Milner lab mice hammering the dopamine reward button — look at me get likes and retweets! — until they (metaphorically) die.

September 17, 2023

How much mis-, mal-, and dis-information do you encounter on an average day on the internet?

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

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.

September 15, 2023

The old “war of the sexes” has been won decisively by women … and the aftermath won’t be pretty for any of us

Filed under: Education, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I saw an article earlier today in The Free Press on the plight of young men in the dating scene these days (discussed earlier this month here and in July here). In short, men who don’t meet certain arbitrary minimums will have almost no chance with modern women in their age cohort. If you’re not at least six feet tall (males average 5’9″ worldwide), earn at least six figures (US men average under $60K per year), and have a penis at least six inches long (official estimates say American men average 5.1″ to 5.5″), you might as well give up on the dating scene.

Tom Knighton links all that from the Free Press article with some advice for young men on the off-chance they ever do have a date:

First, let’s look at this from Fox News, where a mother laments some of the issues at college with regard to Title IX and rape accusations.

    If my two sons were starting college this Fall I would tell them this: be doubly sure you get consent — for her sake and yours. Maybe even record that consent (how romantic!). Your education and future may depend on it.

    Under Biden’s proposed Title IX rules, if a college student is accused of sexual assault or harassment, he will no longer have the right to a live hearing, to cross-examine his accuser and witnesses, or to be represented by an attorney. Instead, a school administrator can decide to forgo a hearing and weigh the “credibility” of each party on his own, acting as investigator, judge, and jury in the case.

    The standard for determining guilt will also be weakened from “clear and convincing” to a “preponderance of the evidence” — in other words, that there’s a 50.1 percent or greater chance an assault occurred. Not great odds in what are often “he said, she said” cases.

    …

    College students — mainly young men — should be worried. Biden’s Title IX changes are a reversal of rules implemented by the Trump administration in 2020, and a return to the “believe all women” attitude laid out in the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter.

This suggests a fraught landscape for young men, many of whom might just decide not to risk it.

As it is, our educational system actually favors women in many ways.

The primary, middle, and high school classrooms are constructed in a way that actually favors the way girls typically learn as opposed to how boys do. As a result, girls tend to get better grades and a leg up on getting into college.

Further, as a protected class, even before the recent Supreme Court ruling, women had a bit of an edge at being accepted to college under affirmative action guidelines, though race did tend to play a larger factor.

Now you’re favoring women’s position in a “he said/she said” environment of sexual assault allegation, even when there’s no other evidence. I say this because I’ve covered these stories off and on for years now. That’s how it happens in a surprising number of cases.

It’s a situation where young men are disfavored and operating at a disadvantage from day one, then it gets worse from there.

Schools often have all kinds of support services for female students on top of the support services open to all students. Guys, however, get no such help.

With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that women graduate college at a much higher rate than men.

The relationship between graduating university and earning a higher salary isn’t as robust as it used to be, but it’s still financially advantageous to have a degree in most careers. More and more women do and fewer and fewer men do. That means more higher-income women are competing for fewer high-status men. That tiny proportion of men benefit disproportionally from their increasing rarity in the dating pool.

Men aren’t graduating college at a similar rate to women? Well, who cares? At least women aren’t being kept out of education.

Men can’t find romantic partners and instead, turn to online porn? Well, who cares? At least women are empowered enough to be picky.

I’m not saying we should dictate anything to do with people’s personal choices, but we could at least start to realize that young men are in crisis mode and that we might want to do something about that before we have real problems.

Then we have the potential decrease in the population as fewer and fewer families are starting and I just don’t see good things happening going forward.

Large numbers of angry young men with no chance at forming relationships with women and generally under- or unemployed? This is not a scenario for a happy or stable future.

September 5, 2023

QotD: “Karl Marx was right after all”

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Alas, as my fictional namesake said somewhere, time has a habit of turning all our lies into truths. It turns out Karl Marx was right after all. Who, I ask you, is more cartoonishly evil, more like the caricature capitalist of paranoid Communist fantasies, than Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? Tim Cook? Jack Dorsey? Sundar Pichai?

We’re actually living, comrades, in the class-warfare world Marx preached in the 1840s. Everything Marx said about the factory owners of the First Industrial Revolution, that seemed so luridly absurd that even other Socialists criticized him for it, is true of the tech fascists of the Biden-Harris Revolution. Solzhenitsyn cites Russian writers from the late nineteenth century noting that Marxian socialism would end up as nothing more than dialectically-constructed feudalism, and lo, here we are. America in 2021 looks almost exactly like the USSR looked upon Lenin’s death …

… that was 1924, gang, and in case you’ve forgotten, what happened next was a vicious intra-Party civil war, in which Stalin crushed his enemies. AOC makes a pretty unlikely Trotsky, but it’s no less ludicrous than the thought of Nancy Pelosi as Koba … but that’s just the thing, isn’t it? We’ve been noting here for years that the modern Left is dedicated to being the Hollow Men in all things. They’re Revolutionaries without a Revolution — they go on and on (and on and on and on) about fighting the power and sticking it to the Man, even though they, themselves, have been the Man since at least 1974. They’re moralizers without morality — you’ll be scolded for not being as perverse as humanly possible. And, of course, their politics is a cult of personality without the personality — not even Orwell or Kafka could’ve come up with the Party installing an obvious dementia patient as its figurehead, not even if you’d dropped LSD in their tea.

As always — and yes, even in the depths of Stalin’s terror — the real rulers are the nomenklatura, the apparatchiki. Not even Koba the Dread can be everywhere. Being Hollow Men, our Postmodern Leftist masters have decided to dispense with the whole Kremlin thing. Who needs the NKVD, the gulag, the dreaded Lubyanka? The Junior Volunteer Thought Police “fact checking” everything on social media will do it for free, and much more efficiently, at which point their fellow travelers in the banking system will simply cut the badthinkers off. The only reason the gulag persisted after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” was that the Soviets, those fools, wanted to exploit their natural resources themselves, to build things themselves; labor camps were thus integral to the Soviet economy. Our masters don’t care about that, and their masters, the Chinese, certainly don’t. Much more efficient, and psychologically effective, to let the unperson simply starve in the middle of the town square, pour encourager les autres.

But hey, at least we’ll have some fun figuring out who the new Trotsky is. Again, my money’s on AOC — she’s so stupid that she’s bound to do something irrecoverably dumb sooner or later, after which she gets the digital icepick. That’ll be a hoot. Enjoy what parts of the spectacle you can, comrades – if you’re a student of human folly, you’re going to love the next few decades, because Marx was right about that too, the bastard — second time as farce.

Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.

September 3, 2023

Online dating apps

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The modern dating scene is evidently catastrophic for the majority of men:

After all, dating apps digitally castrate 85 percent of men.

On Bumble, sixty percent of women say they’re looking for a six-foot-tall or taller man. Just 30 percent will drop their requirements one inch lower. Just 15 percent of women would consider a man just one inch shorter than the average 5’9 man. Shorter than that? Your chances fall with each descending inch. Understandably, 80 percent of men lie about their height. Why? Dating apps are merciless, Latin American economies. Most women on dating apps like Tinder and Bumble seek the top 20 percent of men, leaving the rest to compete for a small portion of the dating pool. Reader, I’m not bearing a tall grudge from a short height, I’m six-foot-two.

When I was younger, we used to meet people in person. This antiquated exercise was meritocracy in action.

For the genetically ungifted, that is, the ordinary 80 percent of men, this was the great leveller.

No matter how short or aesthetically unblessed, meeting in person gave all a fair hearing. As the great Christopher Hitchens once wrote, there’s a good reason why men employ humour and why women tend to value a man’s mastery of humour.

Dating apps are anti-merit. Essentially, they provoke a biological feudalism that determines your prospects before you escape the womb.

The 5’9 guy with good humour, high intelligence, seasoned wit, and good manners? Nope.

Social media mutates the ideal into the ordinary. Every man is six-foot-plus. Every woman resembles a Reality TV star: big lips, ballooning bum, bouncing boobs.

In this strange, digital landscape, some porn-addled men use dick pics as a greeting. Three-quarters of women have endured such “greetings”.

Dating apps are a primitive world in which some men say “hello” by showing you their rather ugly organs.

Offline, leery weirdoes masturbating vigorously (Is there any other way?) on the night Tube often end up in jail or in the newspaper. Endearingly, the Daily Telegraph still calls this “performing a sexual act” as if on a stage before a ticket-waving audience and a shrivel of critics.

Reader, I’m no reactionary prude — I’m spiritually French — the only people on earth a majority of whom think adultery is an invigorating hobby rather than a grave sin.

The business of life works better without a screen and an algorithm.

Unsurprisingly, presenting oneself as a product on the “dating marketplace” degrades self-esteem, afflicts mental health, and corrodes our sense of reality. I’m no philosopher, but maybe our burgeoning mental health crisis has something to do with our living as if products on a shelf to be thumbed over by complete strangers.

As Rob Henderson reported last year, the world of dating apps is a hellscape for everyone but the tiny minority of men who get a “swipe right” from vast numbers of women:

Some findings on dating apps:

  • 18 to 25 percent of Tinder users are in a committed relationship.
  • Women aged 23 to 27 are twice as likely to swipe right (“liked”) on a man with a master’s degree compared with a bachelor’s degree.
  • Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.
  • Half of men who use dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app. All women who used dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app.
  • 30 percent of men who use Tinder are married.
  • In terms of attractiveness, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.

September 2, 2023

The 4% non-solution

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist updates us on the Canadian government’s latest blunder in the Online News Act saga:

The government is releasing its draft regulations for Bill C-18 today and the chances that both Google and Meta will stop linking to news in Canada just increased significantly. In fact, with the government setting an astonishing floor of 4% of revenues for linking to news, the global implications could run into the billions for Google alone. No country in the world has come close to setting this standard and the question the Internet companies will face is whether they are comfortable with the global liability that would see many other countries making similar demands. The implications are therefore pretty clear: there is little likelihood that Meta will restore news links in Canada and Google is more likely to follow the same path as the Canadian government establishes what amounts to 4% link tax from Bill C-18 on top of a 3% digital services tax and millions in Bill C-11 payments.

The estimated revenues from Bill C-18 or the Online News Act have always been the subject of some debate. The Parliamentary Budget Officer set the number at $329 million, using a metric of 30% of news costs for all news outlets in Canada. Under that approach, over 75% of the revenues would go to broadcasters such as Bell, Rogers, and the CBC. The Canadian Heritage estimates were considerably lower, with officials telling a House of Commons committee last December that they expected about $150 million in revenue:

    I won’t speak to the PBO report which is the source of the numbers that you cited. That was not a department-led initiative. The internal modelling that we did when we tabled the bill and mentioned in our technical briefings was more around $150 million impact. That was based again in terms of how this played out in Australia and making some assumptions about how it might play out here. With respect to the PBO report, any questions about that particular number would have to be directed towards them.

By the time the bill reached the Senate several months after that, the number had grown to $215 million.

With the release of the draft regulations, the government has established a formula with an even bigger estimate. The creation of a formula is presumably designed to provide some cost certainty to the companies and represents a change in approach in Bill C-18, given that the government had previously said it would not get involved private sector deals but it is now setting a minimum value of the agreements. Officials told the media this morning that it believes Google’s contribution would be $172 million and Meta’s would be $62 million, for a total of $234 million. However, that may understate the revenues by focusing on search revenues alone. If based on total revenues, with a 4% minimum floor, the requirement would exceed C$300 million for Google. Either way, the number is more than 50% higher than the $150 million estimate the department gave the Heritage committee just eight months ago.

The draft regulations will also provide some additional clarity on several issues. The standard for a digital news intermediary has been fleshed out to include $1 billion in global revenues and 20 million Canadian users. As for the process, those companies subject to the rules are required to conduct a 60 day open call for negotiations. To meet a fairness standard, the resulting deals must be within 20% of the average and cover a wide range of news outlets. Contributions can include non-monetary items but it seems unlikely the resulting deals would grant links significant value. The CRTC would then pass judgment on the deals and determine whether the companies are exempt from a final offer arbitration process. The timing on this includes a 30 day consultation process on the regulations, before they are finalized prior to the December deadline. But with the CRTC not having established a bargaining framework before 2025, the liability issues start arising well before any deals are concluded or approved.

August 24, 2023

“Facebook has made a calculated business decision about the value of its fucks. These fucks are expensive. So they won’t give any.”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson fought the good fight as long as she could, but finally had to load up the old shotgun and share both barrels with the participants in the ongoing clusterfarce over the Online News Act (the artist formerly known as Bill C-18):

Look, I’ve largely said my piece on the Online News Act: it’s poorly conceived legislation that risked terrible outcomes. It’s pointless, now, with those terrible outcomes unfolding, to say “I told you so”.

But the response to the news that Meta has decided to continue blocking news — even in the face of devastating wildfires in B.C. and the Northwest Territories — has been such disingenuous dumbfuckery from every corner that I have failed to bestill my cursed fingertips.

Let’s start with this quote from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who at a recent press conference, said: “Right now in an emergency situation where up-to-date local information is more important than ever, Facebook’s putting corporate profits ahead of people’s safety, ahead of supporting quality local journalism … This is not the time for that”.

Wait, a major global corporation that has been labelled as actually literally evil by both progressives and conservatives in recent years is putting its own profits and self-interest ahead of the priorities and values of politicians and pundits?

Sir, surely thou art in jest.

Is this government only now figuring out that major global corporations exist to extract profits; that whatever social corporate responsibility roles they may choose to enact, they aren’t a public service? Is Trudeau shocked — shocked, I say! — to just this very moment discover that Meta isn’t actually some combination of the Red Cross and Reuters?

I mean … welcome to the adult world, I guess, and please leave your copy of Adbusters near the coat check at the door.

But if Meta is as evil as all that, why did so few politicos or pundits anticipate that the company would follow through on its explicit threat to block news if C-18 were passed? This is like watching an Allied general who says: “I think these Nazi fellows are the baddies!” and then gets flustered when the guys with skulls on their caps pull out their guns and start shooting in the midst of afternoon trench tea. “Well, I never. That’s hardly sporting!” This is some Black Adder comedy, friends, and we may be on the side of the angels, but our angels also happen to be a little slow in the head.

Oh, but surely Meta wouldn’t block news to put their own self interest “ahead of people’s safety”, hmmmm?

With advance apologies, but is our antipathy toward Meta so intense that we’re going to straight-face pretend that AM radio, FM radio, emergency text alerts and broadcasts, municipal and provincial emergency websites, formal and informal social media networks and chat groups, and local news broadcasts with websites that can be accessed directly through web browsers all just ceased to exist, simultaneously, the very moment that CBC stopped being able to post news links to Instagram?

If Facebook is actually putting lives in danger, that’s an admission of impotence and incompetence from our entire communications infrastructure, including government, private and public media. It is an incredible and embarrassing self-own.

August 19, 2023

“Twitter used to work well, but now he receives negative comments, which means that it has stopped working”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on the claims that Twitter, er, I mean “X” is broken from people who are suddenly being exposed to unfriendly opinions that the old platform used to kindly keep out of their very comfortable bubbles:

The Democratic Party’s go-to election lawyer, Marc Elias, is disturbed by the decline of Twitter:

Twitter used to work well, but now he receives negative comments, which means that it has stopped working. People can criticize him and express disagreement, so the platform is broken. If it worked, he would only be praised.

“Epistemic closure” had its pet rock moment in 2010, as the news media looked back on the George W. Bush years and the Iraq War and concluded that American neoconservatives had simply lost their ability to think.

[…]

It was supposed to mean this:

    It’s rather about information, and what counts as evidence about the real world … if one only gets information from a narrow set of sources that feed back into each other but do not engage beyond themselves, that one will have a closed mind … regardless of what one does with that information.

And this:

    Epistemic closure is a fancy term for the practice of defining – or redefining – reality in ways that support your pre-existing ideological preferences. Most of us think of it as “creating and living in a bubble”.

It was a fair enough point, as Bush watched sectarian brutality continue in post-Saddam Iraq and kept drawing the conclusion that everyone everywhere really yearns for democratic pluralism, honest elections, and a free press.

But that era’s epistemic closure is bush-league — sorry — compared to the sealed-in-a-jar-in-a-closed-box-in-a-deep-cave closure of the “mainstream” mind in 2023. If you’ve been on social media since roughly the night of November 8, 2016 and you’ve expressed disagreement with a politician, academic, or media figure, you’ve been a Russian bot, and Putin told you to say that. Criticism of institutions can’t simply arise from authentic grievances, or even from an authentically felt but misperceived grievance; rather, criticism is an op, a calculated string-pulling effort by manipulative forces. The far-right Putin-aligned Nazi grifters are tricking you into believing that you’re unhappy with the Biden administration. Your brain has been fooled by cognitive warfare, see?

August 13, 2023

Don’t worry about losing all your news links, citizen! The Liberal government’s Ministry of Propaganda will tell you everything you need to know!

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The federal government still seems shocked and a little bit hurt that the “tech giants” are carefully obeying the letter of their new Online News Act instead of pumping millions of dollars into government-favoured media outlets. How dare Alphabet and Meta obey the law we wrote? We wanted to soak them for bribes subsidies to give to legacy corporations who can be depended upon to cheerlead our agenda!

Blocking of news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada has becomes increasingly widespread in recent days, leading to a growing number of public comments from media outlets and reporters expressing surprise or shock about the scope of the link blocking. Indeed, outlets with blocked links include university student newspapers, radio stations, and foreign news outlets. While there may have been some errors (Facebook has a page to seek review of any blocked link decision), the inclusion of a very wide range of Canadian and foreign news outlets is no accident. Rather, it reflects the government’s Bill C-18 approach, which effectively covers all news outlets worldwide whose links are accessed in Canada. The Canadian government could have adopted a more targeted approach – for example, limiting the scope to news links from those news outlets eligible to negotiate agreements with Internet platforms under the law – but it instead went for the broadest possible approach that includes foreign news outlets with little or no connection to Canada.

Understanding why Bill C-18 covers news links from outlets who are not “eligible news businesses” under the law requires unpacking several provisions. First, start with the definition of a “digital news intermediary”, which states:

    digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada. It does not include an online communications platform that is a messaging service the primary purpose of which is to allow persons to communicate with each other privately.‍ 

This definition is critical since the only companies that are subject to Bill C-18’s requirement to negotiate agreements with news outlets are (1) those that qualify as DNIs under this definition and (2) meet the requirements found in Section 6 on a significant bargaining power imbalance. The absence of significant bargaining power imbalance is why companies such as Twitter, Microsoft or Apple are not subject to the law. That leaves Google and Meta, provided that they qualify as DNIs. The key phrase in the qualification requirement is that the companies “make news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada”. If the companies do not make news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada they are not DNIs and are not subject to the law.

[…]

… the government’s choice was to try to bring Meta and Google into the scope of the law by virtue of any news links to any news outlet anywhere in the world, even if those outlets have nothing to do with Canada or with the Bill C-18 system. Given Meta’s stated goal of complying with Bill C-18 by removing links to news content that would render it a DNI, the government’s legislative choice of covering all news links from all news outlets therefore effectively requires it to block all of those news links.

It takes a lot to make Google, of all companies, a sympathetic victim … yet Canada’s awesomely awful Liberal government aced it. Bananada strikes again!

August 6, 2023

What’s in a (tech) name?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia isn’t a fan of all the recent rebrandings of social media platforms, and tries to explain “why web platforms keep changing their names like criminals in the Witness Protection Program”:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When I first heard that Twitter was renaming itself as X, I thought it was a joke.

Not a funny joke, just a goofy one. Elon Musk has a taste for schoolboy humor — and on many occasions has posted something undignified for a laugh. I assumed X was another example of this.

Who could take that name seriously?

Just consider the significations of X:

  • The crossbones you put in front of a skull on a bottle of poison;
  • A mistake on a test, marked by the teacher in red;
  • How you sign your name if you can’t read or write;
  • Something you haven’t figured out in algebra;
  • A movie that’s dirty, raunchy, or offensive in some manner;
  • A mark on a map where stolen wealth has been buried by pirates or criminals;
  • The street name for an illegal drug (MDMA) with various adverse long-term effects — including depression, anxiety, and impairments of cognition, memory, and learning;
  • A symbol of betrayal (i.e., a double cross);
  • In marketing language, an inferior product, as in “Brand X”;
  • A radioactive ray so dangerous that it killed the people who invented and developed it.

Given these associations, nobody in their right mind would replace a familiar, proven brand name with X. Mr. Musk must be joking again. Or so I thought.

But I thought wrong.

If this were an isolated event, I would dismiss it as just one more quirk on the part of an eccentric CEO. But these horrible rebrands are now standard practice in Silicon Valley, especially among dominant Internet platforms.

Why did Google change its corporate name to Alphabet? Why did Facebook change its corporate name to Meta? These were two of the best known brand names in the history of capitalism. Why get rid of them?

And consider this bizarre coincidence. The very same month that Twitter became X, Instagram launched its own text posting option. But it refused to use the familiar Instagram name, instead calling this new feature Threads.

Threads is another word that has all sorts of negative connotations. It refers to something old and torn. It’s associated with poverty and an embarrassing appearance.

What gives?

Do you remember the carefree early days of the web? Brand names were innocent and playful — they sounded like something from a nursery rhyme: Yahoo, Google, Tumblr. Twitter was one of those cutesy names.

Its symbol was a chirping bird. So sweet. So innocent.

But nowadays, web platforms take on names straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft horror story — Threads, X, Ghost, Twitch, Discord, etc.

Today’s writing prompt: Use all of those words in the opening lines of a story. Then send it off to an editor at Weird Tales.

Current day techno bro vibe

August 1, 2023

“Tonight in the news: the moon is made of green chees- wait, patch downloading … not made of green cheese, and anyone who says it is is a MAGA conspiracist h8er.”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt on the amazing co-ordination of messaging from so many legacy media and their social media collaborators:

Many of us are amused with how fast the left acquires a sudden mission to propagate the one holy acceptable opinion. How it changes overnight, and how it comes from all of them at once, in almost the same words. And how it gets repeated ad-nauseam, in defiance of all sense, until the message changes.
This has led the least kind among us (eh. Myself, sometimes) to refer to our leftist brethren as “NPC”s who do whatever the programmers put in their heads.

The sad truth, though, is they’re not NPCs. They’re humans, like the rest of us, just — a lot of them — through cowardice or a more conformist temperament, humans who want to be “right” with the “majority” as they perceive it. They, like most primitives the world over, have no moral center, and want to back the winner and the strong horse.

Add in a dose of truly bad education, and their self-conceit as smart, and what you have is someone who reads all the accepted publications, catches on to what they’re saying, and runs to get ahead of what they think will be (and to be fair is, of their kind only) a parade.

The sequence goes something like this: Leftists, for nefarious, stupid, or money reasons (and often all three) declare that they want something utterly, inconceivably stupid to happen: ban something, force some tech, whatever.

Immediately, on command, some “scientist” (usually of the softer side) who smells grant money does studies showing this idea is brilliant and will bring about utopia. The stupid is flawed and irreproducible, but the journalists are all leftists who want to “support the current thing” and jump on it. Suddenly every possible and some imaginary publications tell us how the Current Thing is the most important thing ever, and it must be done nowwwww.

Take Joe Biden’s idea of cooling the Earth by covering the sunlight. — Okay, not his idea. Or maybe it is. Who knows how much meth they’re putting in his ice-cream? — But the idea of the group of people who form “Joe Biden.” Or the idea of those jokers at the WEF that the planet is BOILING and the only solution if for us peasants to surrender to their wisdom and eat the bugs, and give up private transportation.

July 19, 2023

Infohazards on the internet of lies lead us into the clutches of “egregores”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

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.

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