This is the first summer it’s not running all day, or at all, so I figured it’d be worth documenting what it looks like. Not really decrepit, but still no noises or people so a little bit weird if you’re used to it being busy.
Nothing to do but mess around in darktable sometimes and I think I’ve improved so some new versions of photos from last year.
One of Facebook’s many sins, according to critics, is that is has undermined faith in expertise and truth itself by allowing conspiracies, fake news, and propaganda to run rampant. The most compelling exploration of this phenomenon comes in Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri, which explores it as an internet phenomenon rather than focusing on Facebook specifically so does it best. Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen’s viral speech expressing the frustration specifically at Facebook and numerous other critics have made the same point; Facebook is a threat to democracy if it allows conspiracies, hate speech and lies to to be amplified endangering liberal society and public safety. The proposed solutions, empowering Facebook to arbitrate truth being the most common, leave much to be desired. I have no interest in defending Facebook, but our epistemological crisis goes beyond Facebook and understanding the technological, political, and human aspects of the crisis shows proposed solutions can’t work and that there may not be any solution.
Critics that focus their ire primarily on Facebook and tech companies argue that moderation and tweaking algorithms believe the crisis is rooted in the attention economy. Advertising companies masquerading as social media platforms are pushed by market demands to try and occupy more and more of our attention. Extreme content, including fake news and wild conspiracies draw a lot of engagement. The platforms thus created disinformation amplifiers to line their own pockets. This is true, changing the business model, or regulating it, would help reduce the amplification and addictive engagement race in Silicon Valley. That would be good, but it wouldn’t solve the problem. Already the margins of the political spectrum are pushed to private messaging and less scrupulous or regulated forums. The technological problem is not one of algorithms, but the nature of online communication.
The golden age of truth and trust in institutions that critics yearn for, the mid to late 20th century, was dominated by television and radio technologies that allowed one voice, or a small cadre of voices through the day, to dominate the news and opinions broadcast to the population en masse. The internet, as many early optimists celebrated, bypasses the network and corporate choke points, allowing each of us to speak to mass audiences in a way never before possible. Networked communication, not the amplifying algorithms, is the root technological problem. If people can get a mass audience without the moulding, and fact checking, that existed on previous technologies then lies, conspiracies, and fake news will continue to be a problem. Deamplifying will be helpful but insufficient. Technology companies didn’t force us to be interested in bullshit, they’re exploiting natural interest in new ideas. Even if we convince or force them to stop exploiting it, the interest will persist. The networked design of the internet will continue to allow for those ideas to propagated and believed at scale not possible before the internet existed.
Imagining an internet economy not driven by attention maximizing advertising firms seems like a waste of time considering present conditions, but accepting it we can see there are more reasons why truth will not prevail. If the internet economy didn’t incentive fake news and conspiracies the political and economic value of lies would still exist. The political, economic, and social capital gained from lying combines with the technical capacity for lies to spread to massive audiences and the human interest in the new and salacious into a toxic brew that benefits misinformation and put truth at a disadvantage. There will always be a newer, more interesting or more comforting, and just more lies that there will be truths. The networked communication of the internet means those lies will spread virally and truth with lose.
Truth may be at a disadvantage, but we can fight for it is the final refuge in this debate. Critics call for tech platforms to hire more moderators and more strictly and effectively enforce their policies, the platforms say they’re creating AI to fight misinformation. DARPA is investing in research for similar technology. Most tech platforms are now doing some form of labelling or instant fact checking next to some disinformation, they’re downranking ‘bad’ pages and search results, they’re banning purveyors of misinformation. The war for truth is on, but it’s an unwinnable war. There is a ton of research showing that correcting false beliefs is astonishingly hard. When people are corrected about some false belief, even when they accept the correction, which is hard enough, a huge percentage end up forgetting the correction and remembering the false thing. It’s not that everyone will end up believing the same false thing, but many people will end up finding some false thing that is comforting and hard to stop believing. We are not truth finding machines, so it’s only natural that in an information environment with an overwhelming amount of conflicting information we’ll end up believing something false. Despite the best human, or machine, efforts the only recourse is to never allow bad information to be seen by more than a small handful of people; to effectively curtail speech or reorient the structure of modern communication. Until truth and insitituions have a hegemony over communication truth will not prevail.
The thorniest problems around truth and trust in institutions are philosophical. Should we trust our institiutions? What is truth? I don’t have answers to those questions, but I have shown that truth and trust in institutions rooted in a monopoly of mass communications is not going to be recreated in a network communication age. Renee DiResta wrote an essay titled Mediating Consent that wrestles with the world of multiple truths and realities that is worth reading even if I don’t agree with it entirely. The American liberal order coming out of the second world war rested of the economic and military power of the U.S., the information hegemony of those years facilitated empire as well so perhaps it’s not surprising that as the hegemony slips our truth consensus is also lost and the next hegemony will reorder online communications or exercise force with less regard for free speech and that will recreate a truth consenseus. Until then, we must prepare to live in a world with many ‘truths.’
Probably a 3.5/5. This is an interesting dive into the psychological and social pressures advertisers use to manipulate and try to get us to buy stuff. Some of the research described seems to small and the generality of the results overstate, but it only takes a low level of effectiveness when the means are used on a large population to pay off for advertisers or anyone else using these tools. The other weakness of the book is the section on tech and surveillance, despite being only about ten years old the book is already out of date in some ways and understates the extent and power of commerical, advertising surveillance. It’s still a good read and generally interesting, but a certain degree of skepticism is warranted; of course a man working in advertising wants people to believe it works, but even if it doesn’t work nearly as well as implied in the book it’s interesting to see what ad industry people believe does work and are trying.
Can’t go anywhere really, so some photos from closer to home.
This book suffers from three problems; first, Kaiser claims to have very little insight into how the microtargeting, data science, or psychology worked at Cambridge Analytica, second, she mostly tries to deflect blame from herself preferring to frame herself as a victim of a charismatic leader, and finally Chris Wiley has written a much more insightful book about the same thing so there’s very little reason to read this one. If you’re interested in reading a book that sounds how I imagine Eichmann writing a book in Argentina would sound then you may be interested and it’s fine as that but if you’re interested in Cambridge Analytica then there’s a much better book to read.
Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy is an excellent primer on the growth of conspiracy theories and the secret machinations of the American government that fed them in the 20th century. Olmstead argues that conspiracy theories result from mistrust of institutions and the government. The mistrust is well earned due to various plots and lies that have emanated from presidents, banks, intelligence agencies, and other powerful actors. The thesis holds weight, obviously a healthy degree of skepticism is warranted to stories spun by politicians and intelligence agencies, and, of course, powerful financial interests and the forces of global capitalism do inflict numerous wounds on Americans and people worldwide but the space from skepticism to theories is where the thesis slips. The vacuum of trust doesn’t necessarily have to lead to conspiracy theories; if it does, then perhaps an exploration of human psychology the book shuns is in order. Not trusting the government or the media merely leads to ignorance, to then fill that ignorance with unsupported theories only makes sense if there’s some human psychological need to ‘know.’ I’m personally skeptical that the erosion of trust is entirely due to the failure of government and institutions. While it makes sense that some of the erosion of trust comes from well publicized failures and malicious activity the reality is that there have always been failures, malicious actors, and power worthy of skepticism. The growing erosion of trust in government, since the 60’s, and the media more recently is can not be entirely tired to failures or bad actions of either since neither of those traits are new. If the lack of trust stems from something deeper than bad actions then the thesis of the book falls apart both because mistrust doesn’t necessary lead to conspiricism and mistrust isn’t directly caused by bad actions. It’s still a well written book that’s worth reading, tracing conspiracy theories is always interesting and the book does it well, but the thesis doesn’t hold.
The epilogue discusses the birther conspiracy which is an example of the information being available and not being convincing which undermines Olmstead’s conclusion about openness and transparency being the balm for our problems; I probably should’ve worked that into the paragraph above but I just remembered thinking it while running this morning and I’m lazy so it’s going down here.
It’s cheaper to fly into Seattle and spend the night than fly into Portland for Heather, so we did that a few weeks. We stopped at the Space Needle and Mt. St. Helens before heading home, here are a few photos I took while I was out.
Photos Creative Commons
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