When I saw SPK blogging here, I couldn’t resist the Auld Lang Syne and asked Ian for permission to post sometimes. I wrote for the Agonist in the 2000s.
I’ve followed Whitney Webb since she wrote for MintPress News and find her to be an extremely informative and critical voice, especially about the nexus of tech and finance. Her work frequently frightens me and if I were a Titan of Silicon Valley I would certainly want her silenced.
Her post on Twitter earlier this week caught my eye because it revealed a sort of fuckery that was new to me:
Instead of blanket censorship, I am having YouTube bury all my actual interviews/content with videos that use short, out of context clips from interviews to promote things I would never and have never said. Below is what happens when you search my name on YouTube, every single one is a scammy video using my words and likeness to shill everything from shitcoins to insane predictions I’d never make. Collectively, they have gotten millions of views.
YouTube seems to be adopting an AI version of “security through obscurity” to bury the work of Webb and other dissenting voices. This approach won’t work if it’s your only means of concealing valuables or trade secrets.
But if the only goal is to make it harder for Webb’s audience to find her work, it’s a nasty new wrinkle.
Coming in a context of other tweets about Germany’s up is down policies declaring Jews who oppose genocide in Palestine to be anti-semites, a nominally left wing publication disinforming their readers about Brazil’s Lula, relentless economic gaslighting, a seemingly cooked-up online conflict between Black Americans and Palestinians, and the MI6 blaming Russia for the UK’s recent racist pogroms, it was like being the narrator of an H.P. Lovecraft story who’s just discovered some horrible new tentacle of Cthulhu but you know you’ll sound crazy if you try to explain it to your friends or family.
Jan Wiklund
Concerning Doctorow’s tweet on Germany, economist Erik S Reinert (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_S._Reinert) had the same experience almost ten years ago. When he – as he usually does – pointed at the difference between production and finance a choir of Germans called him a Nazi.
But it isn’t an exclusively German malady, this. When we questions the use of Sweden joining NATO and having an American soldatesque on Swedish soil, the state calls us Putin agents.
The argumentation from the powerful is beginning to look like a bludgeon. Probably this signifies that they feel weak and vulnerable. Perhaps we should rejoice.
Nate Wilcox
“The argumentation from the powerful is beginning to look like a bludgeon. Probably this signifies that they feel weak and vulnerable. Perhaps we should rejoice.”
Agree with first two points strongly.
As for rejoicing, I’m too busy bracing for the crash these idiots are pushing so hard for.
It’s funny to laugh at CyberTrucks bricking but I feel like we’re all locked in Elon’s folly and the temperature is rising fast.
Willy
One day Steve Bannon talked about how the old reciprocal loyalty to companies had been replaced by the fear and loathing of neoliberal greed, the next about flooding the zone with shit and head shots. It was confusing. When I paid attention to what he actually did, his behavior towards others, then his motives became clear.
Does a Musk who’s told advertises to fuck themselves even care about X revenues? I’d go parse the Trump interview, but it’d be impossible to not get equally silly.
I don’t know much about the hidden motives of Youtube or Google, but there are a lot of strong opinions out there.
Mark Level
Thank you, Nate, a very timely post during campaign season & beyond.
I’m glad that Ms. Webb is only being buried online rather than having some “accident” & being removed from the scene. She is one of the valuable “conspiracy theorists”, a label that some have pointed out was invented by the CIA c. 1967 to call out people who “stupidly” doubted the Warren Commission, who seems to have a very solid Bullshit Detector & doesn’t get sidetracked.
Following Due Dissidence, who are afraid of the YTube censorship & moved the end of many of their lengthy streams to Rumble to get out of “East Berlin”, I have learned about alternatives. (There’s a lot of right wing & trivial shit on Rumble but evidently for now they do allow a place for the actual Left.)
Chapo covered the Trump-Musk confab in the last 24 hours, & concluded that (a) Trump clearly doesn’t like or respect Musk, (b) all the Ketamine he uses (which his former employee Matt Taibi called out) has etched away whatever brain cells Elon once had. But yeah, it isn’t Russia that was calling on UK whites to beat or gut the evil “immigrants”, it was Musk quite repeatedly & openly. Additionally, the UK has a long, warm relationship with violence against minorities both at home & abroad that hardly needs fomenting.
But yes, the gaslighting is so thick that I’m reminded of something attributed to Hannah Arendt: “When people are constantly lied to they don’t just stop believing the official story. They stop believing everything.”– Which perhaps is the point.
Dermot O Connor
Does Whitney have her own YT channel? I searched but couldn’t find one.
Nate Wilcox
Dermot: Not according to her Linktree which lists all the socials she wants to promote. That is here: https://linktr.ee/whitneywebb
Sean Paul Kelley
Nate! My brother! How the hell have you been? Too long, eh?
That is indeed some serious fuckery. I began noticing something very similar when the Russo-Ukraine war began turning in favor of Russia and Dr. Mearsheimer and other’s who dissented from the NATO cheerleaders, began showing up on weird sites, with bizarre backgrounds and total clickbait titles. Heinous fuckery most foul, as David Foster Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest, the supreme expression of GenX’s cynicism.
Sean Paul Kelley
It is also a very good reason why Google’s monopoly power needs to be broken up.
Nate Wilcox
Hey SPK! Been trying to find you ever since you bailed on FB. When I saw you writing for Ian I was like “hey I should do that too.”
And yes all the social media monopolies need to be smashed.
StewartM
I have found on everywhere on the internet, including the search engines, it’s harder to access perspectives that buck the favored narrative. You search for “X is false” and you get tons of “X is true” hits, which is most definitely not what you searched for.
The internet as it was 30 years ago, where it WAS a place you could find dissenting voices, is gone. Predictably it vanished when free, distributed platforms were replaced by for-profit ones hosted at a known locale (distributed platforms meant that no single or even assembly of corporate or state players could shut it down; if they are in one know location run by a person or group, you can either shut it down, or pressure it to change its policies).
Sean Paul Kelley
StewartM: I remember, it was GenX that built the internet. I recall vividly dicking around with my email acccount and the Usenet groups from 90-92 and then someone asked us at the CS Lab to beta a new program. I was the only one who tried it. So I was one of the original US beta testers for Mosaic–Marc Andreesens predecessor to Netscape while at the University of Houston in 1992-3. We built the fucking internet and as soon as the Baby Boomers found a way to monitize and monopolize they literally locked us out of it. It still leaves me disgusted.
VietnamVet
Social Media’s monopolist tricks are permeating even into the old internet blogs. It is rather disconcerting that rational arguments and discussions have gone to the wayside. If a clip triggers an emotion it spreads like a virus. The reality is that that a proxy World War 3 is underway in Ukraine and Gaza and there is no indication that the West’s New World Order or the Axis of Resistance are in the least bit interested in signing Armistices, setting up Eurasian DMZs, or commencing a new Cold War II. Instead the leaders have more money to launder to themselves until human civilization finally collapses (including 3000-year old China) if the risks of nuclear war, global pollution, pandemics, and resource depletion are not addressed.
Ian Welsh
Sean-Paul – that history of the internet by generations sounds like a post. 😉
Revelo
The internet was created in the 1970’s and everything we have today is just incremental improvements over the original. It certainly isn’t a gen-X invention:
email is same underlying SMTP protocol as ever, but lots of new features
chat/messenger apps are an improvement over the original unix talk. According to legend, first few chat messages were test messages and other technical stuff, then some trolling, then sexual flirting message with a female in the room.
forums and message boards are improvement over NNTP news groups.
websites are improvement over kludgey combination of NNTP sticky/FAQ threads combined with lists of FTP addresses for downloading big text files. Http and html plus the web browser was truly a giant leap forwards in ease of use, but underlying functionality was same as ever. Namely, text and image files could be posted and then distributed around the world. Video and audio were then added once bandwidth was higher, but principle was same as for text and image files.
1990’s online BBS and then internet revolution was not revolution in functionality but rather in accessibility to those outside major universities and some parts of defense industry. This accessibility was in turn driven by cheaper personal computers and cheaper modems.
Oakchair
In the long term indirect censorship is far more effective than direct censorship. It allows for plausible deniability, is more complex, doesn’t produce headlines of “government bans x, y and z”, provides less recourse for those oppressed, can be done by side characters, and it most importantly it provides the illusion of freedom for those who would rather stay in denial which is almost all people.
StewartM
Revelo
websites are improvement over kludgey combination of NNTP sticky/FAQ threads combined with lists of FTP addresses for downloading big text files. Http and html plus the web browser was truly a giant leap forwards in ease of use, but underlying functionality was same as ever.
I’d differ. NTTP was a superior protocol in many ways. Not as flashy as http, but better.
Like I said, Usenet was a worldwide distributed system. As such, it couldn’t be shut down. Individuals could not be silenced. (It was hilarious at times, seeing two people on a forum who clearly hated each other, rail at each other and threaten each other, not seemingly knowing that there was really nothing they could do to silence the other). And though yes, someone could try to impersonate you to give you a bad reputation, as is the case in this blog, PGP-signing one’s messages made doing that pointless. It also gave people as close to hard anonymity as was humanly possible. Paradoxically, one could be both anonymous and yet (via digital message signing) verifiable (you don’t know who I am, but you can verify these messages are from “me”).
Websites, by contrast, are situated in a specific locale. They can be seized, have legal suits or injunctions brought against them. Someone has to know who is running the website at least, they can’t be anonymous. And via legal pressure, even if they want to provide anonymous messaging, they can be forced to hand over user information.
The problem with Usenet is that it got spammed and trolled by users who seemed to have oodles of free time on their hands (i.e., maybe they were being paid?) If you have this nice free park, open to everyone, and nearby is a park one has to pay to enter, wouldn’t it be in the interests of the people who run the paid service to deliberately trash the free one? That is exactly what I think happened.
Add to that, I’m sure that corps and governments weren’t happy about a system that couldn’t be shut down or where one could achieve near-total anonymity. As the Clipper chip debate showed (and more recently as Bill Barr when working for Trump opined), “we deserve all the secrecy we can and you plebes deserve none”, “we should be able to snoop on you whenever we please.”
Purple Library Guy
The early-ish internet, the 90s till things got monopolized, was never going to last. It was obvious. Everyone talked as if it would and could, but the whole “internet interprets (X bad thing) as damage and routes around it” approach was doomed from the start. People talked as if it was immune to money, government and law which, like, why would it be?
Part of the reason for that is just that the existing society is powerful and the internet was not nearly as separate from it as the early internet types wished it were. So maybe no matter what the ethos was, it would have gotten taken over. But there was another fatal flaw as well–the dominant early internet ideology was essentially a kind of atomized libertarianism. And the idea was that this, plus the nature of some internet protocols, would just inherently defend the place without anyone actually, you know, doing anything. But atomized libertarianism is a completely defenceless ideology; the establishment LOVES “rebels” who are atomized libertarians–they’re inherently incapable of organizing. Maybe if the early internet had managed to foster an ideology with some solidarity to it, something might have been done.
someofparts
Okay – I’m a boomer y’all. I would be among the first to rail against all the evils my age cohort have wrought. That said, I would like to point out what I would have hoped would be obvious. The boomers who have done so much evil did not confine themselves to only selectively hurting gen-x folk and all of those younger than you. They did a grand job of effing over lots and lots of those in the same age bracket.
So when I find myself getting roasted by younger folk after getting jacked by my own age group it is just depressing as hell. I mean yeah, I saw this coming a long time back, but that doesn’t make it fun to put up with now that my concerns have manifested in real time.
Every day that I become more comfortable in my solitary life things keep getting better – or at least as good as is reasonably possible. I’ll go you one better than dumping on all boomers for the sins of our worst cohort members, I see little if any hope for anybody in this armpit of a country and I’m glad we will soon be too broke and powerless to hurt anyone else in the global community.
Also, how can you talk about amazing guitar dudes and leave out Walter Becker and Stevie Ray Vaughn?
Soredemos
Current Affairs is only nominally leftist. That’s the been clear at least since Robinson refused to allow his staff to unionize.
Nate Wilcox
StewartM — So many of the engineering choices would have been different if the implications of the tech were clear from the beginning. Spam email for instance could have been limited by making the sender bear the cost of sending messages, etc etc
Purple Library Guy — I knew some of those “Clue Train Manifesto” guys in the 90s & 2000s and it was sad to watch them get marginalized and sink into obscure penury but that kind of thing tends to be the fate of fools who have outlived their usefulness to others bent on amassing power.
someofparts — don’t know how this turned into a thing about “Boomers” but chill a little bit. We (Gen Xers) know and love y’all good Boomers well. We certainly don’t waste any emotion getting hurt when youngsters hate on our shitty generation and I’d recommend you don’t either.
Soredemos, yes that’s why I literally described them as “nominally leftist” in the post.
Willy
“How Boomers Wrecked America” might be an interesting post.
I’ve seen GenXers blame leaded gas. I’ve heard Greatests blame the soft life without world war or economic hardship for having atrophied normal human empathic responses. Silents blame Hollywood, and “that goddamned acid rock”. I’m not sure what millennials blame.
All I know is Missouri went from being The Show Me State to being the state of Suckers And Losers during the time of the Boomers, with some of the worst judges of character I’ve ever seen.
Soredemos
@ Nate Wilcox
I misread your ‘nominally’ as ‘normally’ (ie, ‘Current Affairs is normally leftist’), despite the fact that I read over it multiple times to make sure of what it said.
@Willy
Every generation whines about every other generation. Entire generations do not have political agency as singular blocks.
Generational warfare is just another way to distract from the class war.
bruce wilder
stupid web tricks seem to be multiplying
what is being done to / with Webb involves multiple layers
so like, who makes all those scammy videos? and why does “the algorithm” (or whatever faceless mechanism we have instead or responsible policy) permit it? this is a desirable ecosystem for whom?
I saw where the clever clogs at the Harris campaign were buying Google ads that link to news articles (eg AP News) so they can rewrite the “headline” to make it appear the news organization is praising or endorsing Harris. It is brilliant — I want to do it for my employer!
Carborundum
I doubt there is specific targeting behind this. The rise of short form tic toc-like pieces on YouTube over the past 9 months to a year or so has been very pronounced and pretty much every type of content is being packaged in this way. I’ve seen some smart operators encouraging others to remix their content in this way to build audience.
There must be some sort of additional incentive behind it to explain the scale, but I have a hard time understanding what it is. Though I may be limited in some way as I find the YouTube ad-targeting algorithm particularly atrocious – feeding me, who spends a lot of time viewing stuff on active transport-related urban design, a steady diet of ads for gigantor class SUVs as an example. Sure glad that we killed display ad supported print media for this.
Willy
Generational warfare is just another way to distract from the class war.
I wasn’t being entirely serious. But going there…
Everybody can obviously be found in any generation. But in the ever-ongoing class war there will be generations of plebians which are more susceptible to patrician attacks. It might be a good idea to know why.
bruce wilder
Narratives from narrators with insufficient self-awareness to even imagine that they might want a critical signal amidst their self-serving noise take nonsense “reasoning” to a new level.
Willy
I never heard of Alex Karp. I did know somebody who lived behind one of the inventors of data mining though. That inventor lived in a brand-new mansion carved out of virgin forest which my friends kids used to play in. The inventor’s young daughter found him dead from a cocaine overdose in their 5-car garage. Some say the corporate board which inventor had sold out to (to cash in with the typical 2-year CEO transition period) drove him to it.
I think it’s wrong when the board insists the CEO go out to pave the way for some new military industrial tech investment opportunity.
I also think it’s wrong to conflate CEOs with politicians, unless they’re coming with bags of money and cocaine