Category: Media Page 2 of 8

I try not to write about topics about which a lot of other people have said what I’d say, or, indeed, written it better than I would. Musk’s takeover of Twitter is one of those topics. There have been plenty of excellent articles about what it means and about how Musk could really screw up Twitter by destroying the feeling of safety which advertisers require and by misunderstanding that the users are the product, not the customers.

I’ve been on Twitter since August of 2008 (@iwelsh). I visit it almost every day, and for many years, I spent a lot of time there. Nowadays, it probably takes up 30 to 45 minutes of my day. My account isn’t huge; I have something like over four thousand followers, and I follow about thirteen-hundred. (Following too many people is a sign of disrespect and twitter-gaming, because it means you don’t actually read them.)

For me, Twitter takes the place of the email lists I was on in the 2000s and which collapsed near the end of the decade. “Townhouse,” which some people may have heard of, was one, but only one of them. Emails on these lists would often include links to articles of interest and discussion of important topics of the day.

Each list would have a primary topic; I was on lists that focused on domestic US politics, foreign affairs, the tech industry, and so on. The lists acted as both a filter and a way to read people discussing topics in which I was interested — often, very well-informed and smart people. Because the lists were semi-private, there was some additional value: People could be frank.

These lists collapsed near the end of the decade, in part because of a series of leaks. A lot of the value was that it was “off the record.”

Twitter, frankly, isn’t quite as good for quality of discussion about controversial topics, simply because it is public. You can’t “let your hair down” and everything you say can and probably will be used against you. But it is still a venue where everyone talks about everything, and if you curate who you follow, you can still connect with people interested in specific topics discuss them and share article links and so on.

I don’t just follow political types; I follow book-twitter, archeology-twitter, a bunch of artists, a fair chunk of the crypto-crowd, some pagans and hermeticists, classicists, and so on.

A lot of what passes in my Twitter-stream is chuff, especially from the political junkies, but a lot is smart and interesting and seeing what the people I have chosen to follow think is worth talking about is useful in itself.

Twitter is a curated experience, and if Musk doesn’t fuck it up (his idea of not showing non-blue checks content would destroy its value — most of the best accounts I follow don’t have a blue check), it will remain useful because you choose who you follow. It’s just that simple. Turn the timeline to chronological so the algo doesn’t go all Facebook on you, and it’s much like early Facebook was before Zuckerberg screwed it up by trying to over-monetize it.

A timeline on Twitter is just people you chose to follow talking or re-tweeting something they like someone else wrote.

And frankly, at it’s base, that’s marvelous. If you don’t like your Twitter feed, well, you chose it, and you can change it.

This can easily be fucked up, of course. Facebook screwed this up with algos instead of just giving you a chronological timeline of people you chose to follow; Twitter has gone some way down that road, but it can still be made to work. Musk may screw that up, and if he does, I’ll leave. If he doesn’t, I’ll stay.

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How Standard Media Skews Public Understanding

By Ian Welsh

On July 12, 2022

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I recently had a long conversation with a fellow Canadian about current events, especially Covid and the economy. He read a lot of newspapers: he’s well informed by normal standards.

But over the course of the conversation I realized he was terribly informed.

For Covid, he was convinced both that China had only controlled Covid thru very long lockdowns and that they were lying about results. In particular, he remembered Shanghai well, but didn’t realize Shanghai was an exception. Most Chinese cities have locked down much less over the course of Covid than we have.

When I mentioned that other countries had much lower rates than us, he dismissed that as well. He thought travel bans and quarantines were completely pointless, when they have worked very well for those countries which implemented them. Western Australia’s travel ban kept Covid low there for ages, and New Zealand had a wave almost immediately after as they released restrictions.

He believed that not doing zero-Covid style policies was better for the economy and that China’s economy was in free fall. It has issues, to be sure, but it also has a 2% inflation rate, among other advantages.

He was convinced governments could not just find money to support people in lockdowns, believing money comes from taxes (it doesn’t, most money is created of thin air, this is something the MMT people are right about.)

He believed that vaccines are the most effective anti-Covid measure. They aren’t: China has worse vaccines than us and much better performance, and Covid variants have optimized for vaccine and natural immunity evasion. BA.5 in particular laughs at immunity, whether natural or vaccine.

In general he felt that the economy must be prioritized, and that is done best by keeping it open at all times. There was no acknowledgment of long Covid as a factor, or of the fact that each infection increases the odds of long term health damage to victims.

There was a sense of hopelessness about Covid being international, and that it would just keep going forever as a result, without knowledge of us restricting vaccines for much of the world, not doing travel bans or quarantine properly and not supporting other countries to do the right things (not that we are ourselves.)

He wouldn’t acknowledge that if shutdowns are to be done, they should be done at the point where numbers start going into exponential growth, even though there aren’t a lot of cases then, instead of waiting for hospital ICUs to be overwhelmed, and that by doing so we’d actually have shorter lockdowns and a lot less deaths and disabled and sick people.

This isn’t a badly read guy; he knew about the things the media has covered at length.

And this is the problem with propaganda; it creates a world view among its victims that is simply incorrect, and if you don’t actually know what’s going on you can’t make good decisions or support good decision at the political level.

What I see is that the West, in most cases, is creating circumstances where 15-20%, or more, of our population will wind up disabled in some way. Repeated Covid infections are going to gut us: our society cannot run with that many people with long term health damage.

But the media’s coverage has been of the “what we’re doing is the best way and everyone else is doing it badly.” It’s not that there aren’t exceptions, but that’s the general tone and message, along with a huge push for vaccines at the cost of other measures like masking, quarantines, travel bans, and proper indoor ventilation which actually, in some combination, work better.

One could call this “learned helplessness.” My conversation partner was convinced that everything reasonable had been tried, that zero-Covid policies hadn’t worked where tried and that doing them was tyrannical, bad for the economy and worse than what we had done.

Nothing could be done, so Covid would remain chronic, with wave after wave.

In a sense he’s right, except that so far we have refused to do what works, so Covid will keep going.

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ATMs and Debit Payments Go Down In Canada

By Ian Welsh

On July 8, 2022

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So, I’m not sure if it’s all ATMs, but I know Interac (our debit) is down. This is also apparently affecting 911 (emergency) calls.

Canada has three providers of phone and internet, everyone else is either niche (satellite) or actually uses their networks. They are Bell, Telus and Rogers.

Rogers is down, with no ETA to being back up. I found out when I tried to call Canada’s tax people (the Canada Revenue Agency) and got “no network”.

The short term point here is to always keep some cash. I’ve got $25 in my pocket, which is less than it should be but at least I can buy some food and so on.

Cashless societies are bad. Not just because it’s easy for the infrastructure to go down for technical reasons or due to some disaster or war or terrorism, but because they are inherently totalitarian. The government or corporations can freeze people out of the economy any time they want. PayPal, Visa and Mastercard have done this repeatedly (many years ago it was Wikileaks, since it’s been people with the wrong political views.)

I didn’t much like the Trucker protests in Ottawa, Canada, but they should have been dealt with by the police, not by freezing people’s bank accounts. That’s tyranny. It was done, I’m fairly sure, because the Ottawa police were sympathetic to the truckers and politicians didn’t think they’d obey orders.

Likewise, many folks who use things like bitcoin don’t understand blockchain technology: it’s inherently totalitarian and its traceable. It’s a LOT harder to trace cash. If you want anonymity, cash is still king. Any society which removes cash is doing so for two reasons:

So they can track much more, micromanage what people spend and shut people and organizations they don’t approve out of the economy easily; and,
So that middlemen (corps, governments if they want to) can take a cut off everything.

I believe we should pay our taxes, but it’s not an absolute value. Black and especially gray markets exist for a reason, and it’s not always a bad thing. In particular, in many countries, including the US and Canada, you can’t always get a bank account. The cash economy allows those who can’t to survive; it allows those shut out to survive, and gray and black markets put a check on government power to say “absolutely not” to people things really want or need.

That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

The more we love to e-cash only, the more our societies, intrinsically, are vulnerable to shocks, to authoritarianism and to rentierism.

Cash is worth keeping and I would go so far as to make it illegal for most businesses to not accept cash. Cash is, in a certain sense, freedom. In another deeper sense money based societies are anti-freedom, but that’s another argument and for another time. If we use money, we need cash that can’t go down and which isn’t inherently authoritarian.

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Books and TV and Movies Are Mind Control

By Ian Welsh

On June 27, 2022

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I read a lot. I’ve read many thousands of books.

Books are mind control, quite literally.

The words in a book are mean to make you experience certain emotions, imagine scenes, and understand certain themes, including moral and ethical ones. A book is a small world with rules, and if you read enough books with the same rules, you learn the rules.

All of this is also true of audio and audiovisual media; they are intended to make you think certain thoughts and feel certain emotions. They, especially audiovisual media like TV, leave less room for visualization and the use of your own imagination (and are both more and less powerful because of it, doing the work invests you more, but fine control is lost).

Every time you read something (including this essay) you’re putting your mind; your consciousness, under the control of someone else.

They may have your best interests at heart (does Fox, MSNBC, Disney, or Ayn Rand?) and they may not, and even if they mean the best, well, what they think is best may not be, or may not, be for you.

This isn’t exactly a revelation. We know advertising works, we know propaganda works, we know media changes how people think of and view the world, and how they feel about it.

But I’ll suggest (trying to change your view) that you see it as mind control. It’s not necessarily bad, and in most cases you’re consenting to it, but you are letting someone else control your mind.

If you’re consuming media, including mine, and it’s making you into a person you don’t want to be, then the best thing to do is stop consuming that source of media, and in general, you should consider very carefully who you let control your mind.

Consider why they are doing so. Don’t assume it doesn’t matter — and for God’s sake, don’t think you’re immune, because you aren’t.

Media is mind control. It’s conditioning, and you need to know who’s controlling your mind, and who’s making you into what, and why, and who that benefits.

Does it benefit you?

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The Free, Diverse Internet In America Is Coming To An End

By Ian Welsh

On January 27, 2021

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Matt Taibbi’s been covering who is being censored, and his latest is worth a read.

But basically the internet now runs thru a number of major content aggregators: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc… (many of these are owned by the same few firms.) Most people go to the major sites and find their media there, and those who don’t use Google as their search engine.

These platforms are private and thus, as we are told over and over again by fools, are not subject to the first amendment, which they seem to think means “it’s not censorship.” But when almost all of the media consumption on the internet goes thru sites owned by five or so large companies, the commons are owned private firms, and all that has happened is that private firms are doing the censoring.

These content aggregators are aggressively banning outlets, and there is effectively no appeal. The content producer Taibbi talks to had live-streams of events taken down because “guns”, but YouTube left up streams from large media outlets of the same content. They took down his stream of the Jan 6th protests beccause it included a bit of Trump lying about election fraud, but left up clips from large media outlets with that speech.

This all really took off after 2016, with RussiaGate hysteria and concerns over Cambridge Analytica’s program of targeted propaganda. It is now about to enter a new phase, and sweep internet aggregators of a vast number of independent voices.

Both the right and center are to blame for this. The right has been putting out straight up lies, in large quantities. Q-Anon was a funded operation, no one with sense will pretend otherwise. Lies are flooded into the discourse, and have led to real, and nasty effects, like the January 6th capitol attack, which as I pointed out at the time, was the right thing to do IF the election had really been stolen. (It hadn’t.)

The center wants only the discourse they approve of in the media. It’s not primarily about lies: after all, they aren’t pushing for the people who lie all the time in the mainstream press to be de-platformed; no one is screaming for the heads of those who spread the ridiculous Russian bounties on American soldiers story.

So the internet of free ideas and diverse ideas is about to take it in the neck. Some stuff that seems diverse will remain; a lot of identity politics, for example, because elites really really believe that women and minorities and gays and trans people should also be in boardrooms and oppress everyone else. It is important that representatives of every group bomb foreigners and so on. You can see this in the constant stories about people weeping in corporate meetings about how their company is about to publish someone nasty.

A lot of this won’t effect me much. When Google changed its algos after 2016 I lost a lot of traffic (aim right, hit left), but I don’t get much from any social media outlet. I’m glad that I never really engaged, except on twitter, which I don’t spend time on for traffic.

But the internet of truly diverse voices we dreamed of and, to some extent, created in the late 90s and early 2000s is dying; being strangled before our eyes. And it’s going to get worse.

The internet was a nice idea. Now it’s just a few large firms controlling most of the meaningful traffic. Some good remains: the vast information available without going to a library; email, and so on. But diverse politics and controversial ideas?

That time approaches dusk.

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Laura Poitras Fired From The Intercept

By Ian Welsh

On January 14, 2021

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She has an open letter on her firing from the Intercept. I believe her. Poitras is a legend, and put her ass on the line repeatedly. She is perfectly correct that the Intercept was built on her and Greenwald, because of their coverage of Snowden. This is undeniable.

It is also undeniable that the Intercept completely screwed over Reality Winner, asking the government to confirm the validity of the documents she leaked to the Intercept. It then let Greenwald (who was not involved) take the blame for years.

I suggest reading the whole letter.

Here’s one takeaway, from both Glenn and Poitras: you can’t hire other people to be in charge of your creations.

This is the same mistake that university faculties made: hiring administrators to run the universities, till the administrators wound up in control and turned faculty into employees, and, increasingly, badly treated ones.

The Intercept was built on Greenwald, Poitras and Snowden.

Once they were no longer needed, they were gotten rid of, because they have, even if you disagree with them (and I disagree with Greenwald on some important things, like Citizen’s United), integrity.

Easily replaced journalists who know their position in the pecking order are so much easier to deal with.

Greenwald and Poitras remain legends, and the CEO of First Look will be forgotten long before they are. His rewards, as with all who sell their souls, must come from the fruits of his betrayals.

Unless Poitras is straight up lying, the people who should have been fired aren’t her and Greenwald, but the Intercept’s Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed and First Look Media’s CEO Michael Bloom.

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Terrible Assange Extradition Ruling for Press Freedom

By Ian Welsh

On January 4, 2021

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We have a brilliantly authoritarian ruling on the Assange extradition case. The judge (who was endlessly hostile to Assange) ruled he couldn’t be extradited because of his bad health, but said that none of the press freedom arguments worked.

Now this is good news for Assange, but it is terrible news for press freedom. If the judge had approved the extradition of Assange, he would have appealed, and there is a very good chance for a reversal on appeal. Assange isn’t a US citizen; the US has no jurisdiction, and he was clearly acting as a publisher through the entire sequence.

The Australian journalists’ union sums this up well:

MEAA, the union for Australian journalists, welcomes today’s decision by a British judge to prevent the extradition to the United States of our member Julian Assange and calls on the US government to now drop his prosecution.

The court ruled against extradition on health grounds, accepting medical evidence that Assange would be at risk in US custody.

However, journalists everywhere should be concerned at the hostile manner in which the court dismissed all defence arguments related to press freedom.

“Today’s court ruling is a huge relief for Julian, his partner and family, his legal team and his supporters around the world,” said MEAA Media Federal President Marcus Strom.

“Julian has suffered a ten-year ordeal for trying to bring information of public interest to the light of day, and it has had an immense impact on his mental and physical health.

“But we are dismayed that the judge showed no concern for press freedom in any of her comments today, and effectively accepted the US arguments that journalists can be prosecuted for exposing war crimes and other government secrets, and for protecting their sources.

“The stories for which he was being prosecuted were published by WikiLeaks a decade ago and revealed war crimes and other shameful actions by the United States government. They were clearly in the public interest.

“The case against Assange has always been politically motivated with the intent of curtailing free speech, criminalising journalism and sending a clear message to future whistleblowers and publishers that they too will be punished if they step out of line.”

MEAA now calls on the US government to drop all charges against Julian Assange and for the Australian government to expedite his safe passage to Australia if that is his wish.

This is a brilliant way to paint Assange guilty of a crime, who is just being let off for sympathy, when he is not guilty (or if he is, so are hundreds of other journalists who have reported on leaked or hacked data from “dubious” people). The US may be appeal, so it’s not clear whether (as of the time of writing) Assange will go free.

At any rate, mission accomplished: An evil law (The Official Secrets Act) is not declared a dead letter by British courts and so can be used as a cudgel in the future. Assange is a broken man; a shadow of himself, and a warning to anyone else who would reveal American war crimes or that the DNC colluded to elect a specific candidate (Clinton) against another candidate (Sanders.)

And no, I don’t give even one shit who hacked the info: It was in the public interest and the public had and has a right to know about American war crimes and Democratic party election fixing.

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Last Day of Fundraiser and the Role of Opinion and News

By Ian Welsh

On December 18, 2020

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Fundraising Update: As of this writing, we’re at approximately $10,430, leaving us $570 from the final goal and tier of $11,000.

$11,000: two more articles, these on the conditions that create good and bad societies to live in; an introduction and conclusion and some commentary and connecting text as seems necessary.

Again, I want to thank everyone who has given. It means a great deal to me, and I will remember. I’ll update tomorrow or Monday on whether we make the final goal.

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The Role of Opinion and News

In a properly run news outlet, news tells you what happened, and opinion tells you what it means.

I’ve seen a lot of people who distrust opinion and respect news, and that’s fine, as far as it goes, but it’s often based on the idea that one can trust news, and that’s a problem.

To give two examples, much of the news leading up to the Iraq war was wrong, or, rather lies and propaganda. But it was presented as fact, and about 70 percent of the American population wound up believing that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, and therefore supported an illegal war which may have wound up killing a million people or so (and which certainly was responsible for spawning ISIS).

More recently there was a story that Russia had offered bounties for dead American soldiers to the Taliban in Afghanistan. No proof, laughable on its face, and no proof has ever been presented. It was an intelligence agency propaganda op, and the media fell for it.

The problem with news is that people think it’s almost certainly true.

Opinion tends to be labeled opinion, so people know it isn’t fact, but interpretation. Further, it’s easier to deal with; if I read a columnist or blogger regularly, I know their biases, how they think, and what they want. I can know what their financial interests are, who their spouse is, and so on. I can take all of that into account.

As a result, opinion is overall less dangerous because the conflicts are clear, and it is presented as opinion, not fact.

News and Opinion were traditionally separated for exactly this reason — so that readers could (supposedly) know what they could trust and what they had to view carefully. But bad news is far more dangerous than bad opinion, because despite many instances where it has been false, people still tend to assume most of it is true. They don’t run the filters on it or assume someone has an axe to grind or may be operating in bad faith.

Be far more wary of “news” than opinion.

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