One thing I do miss about Twitter, say, 2018-2020, the height of the Blue Wave, was the jokes. Up there with the golden age of political comedy of the Colbert Report and Daily Show for me. Any random tweet from some high profile Maga moron, say, Rep Jim Jordan or Sen. Marsha Blackburn, were hilarious roasts, with forty or fifty posts mocking their alternative facts and twisted logic. Excellent training, I imagine, for budding comics. But Leon took over the algorithms and ruined the party. 

Manipulating Algorithms is Only Okay if You're American

Or it's ok if Lusk manipulates social media messaging but not if China does? 

Tik Tok and a Protectionist Internet

Matt Pearce

Notes-

One of the Great Power lessons of the internet is that whoever controls the infrastructure controls the content. 

Internet infrastructure: platforms (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc?), Oracle (Austin) "cloud" memory electricity facilities and power needs, Lusk buying Twitter now looks so much bigger and even more sinister.... The gov is investing 500 billion in AI, much of which will probably go to building energy infrastructure to run all those cloud servers and super duper smart chips. 

What is the problem with Tik Tok as is? First, that China could mass-harvest data about U.S. citizens for later strategic use. Second, that China could manipulate TikTok’s content moderation to push pro-China messaging to Americans or content that would exploit our sizable domestic divisions. What Musk, Zuckerber, Bezos, Google, etc, already do but they're at least Americans, a sovereignty issue repugs seem to totally ignore when it comes to Russia. 

What the Act targets is the CCP/PRC’s ability to manipulate that content covertly.

Who controls the algorithms now? Lusk and Grump, presumably. 

Anti-lib antitrust

Anyway, Matt Pearce, another substack blogger. Cannot possibly keep up with anymore substackers, I'm always buried under a blizzard of unread substack emails already, but caught up with this fine post. Long time journalist, based in LA, takes a critical look at the news and media spaces. Over the last fifteen to twenty years, this century, anyway, the internet and social media have cannibalized legacy journalism and media, newspapers, magazines, transforming the public square in disturbing ways. How journalists can operate in this radically harsh and changing environment is Pearce's subject. Good stuff. 

Why do bands of immigrants nearing the border always increase before elections?

"A 2022 analysis of media coverage of crime in New York City paints a damning picture of how the news distorted people’s perceptions. Toward the end of the analysis, a graph compares two values: actual shootings in New York City and mentions of shootings in local media, from 2019 to the end of 2022. For most of the graph, the two are uncorrelated at best; spikes in shootings often produce no change in coverage, and coverage sometimes spikes even as shootings remain flat. In 2022, in the run-up to a crucial federal midterm election, however, the picture becomes much worse: Shootings themselves remain almost completely flat, but the coverage of them soars, hitting levels about three to four times higher than during previous periods with similar levels of gun violence. As Politico noted, these “blood and guts headlines” helped Republicans claim one open New York House seat and take three more from Democratic control."

The New Republic

First, there is a pattern here we've seen before. The favorite scaremongering topics of conservatives, crime, immigration, gender transitions (or queer stuff), regardless of the real underlying conditions of these issues, spike dramatically in news stories in the run-up to elections.  

This is a criticism of Dems and liberals made by Ezra Klein: scolding people for hyperventilating about rising crime when the actual numbers, murder rates, for instance, are actually going down is alienating voters. People vote on vibes, not statistics or scientific measurements. 

Klein's basic point, trying to give him his due, is Dems should take people's concerns about crime seriously and not condescendingly present them with contrary evidence suggesting their feelings aren't real. Note how much this resembles, though, a similar postmortem take about the economy. People were frustrated by inflation and the price of eggs and alienated or dismissive of journalists or academics condescendingly pointing out to them facts to the contrary. 

Honor thy voter "vibes," is the cautionary tale. Okay, but it still comes back to electorate views. If Trump vs, really, Anybody, is nothing but a Humpty Dumpty 1.5% +/- choice about the price of eggs, paying no heed at all that he also promised a bunch of forced deportations and DEI purges and disregard for human rights and violent crackdown stunts, this could be some minimum threshold of civic education under which a democracy fails. 

I mean, there was no red pill, blue pill mystery here. A lot of the postmortems read as desperate efforts by journalists to try to rationalize or justify electing Trump. Biden was too old. Harris abandoned the progressives. The Dems are always weak and in disarray. 

So more bad Dem messaging to blame, say the pundits, but what can the Dems really do as a minority opposition? Oppose, I guess. Call out the crimes and abuses of the public trust, which the republicans of course will drape in a bunch of phony patriotism. Report the crimes and abuses until people hopefully figure out this crackdown fascist government thing is not a growth leader but a crypto bubble bust away from people wondering how anybody ever thought Grump or Lusk had some good economic ideas?!

But even such resistance as this feels rare and privileged. Many, myself to a degree for sure, have concluded already, reasonably, best to keep your head down, take care of business, say nothing, avoid contact with violent fascists. 

Anyway, if Grump's assault on government workers-- again, like the police in Jan 6-- and now all civil servants destabilizes the economy I'm guessing we'll learn soon enough whether this is what his supporters voted for. 

We know they voted for forced deportations (57% support, last I saw). Now we'll see how they feel when the collateral damage, legal citizens swept up in the profiling of "illegals," the stress of any forced deportation process at the scales they're boasting about, 10, 20 million, crazy scales like he's Mao Zedong dismissing the casualty rate of the Great Leap Forward. We'll see now how far they'll go. 

But I don't know how far that will be. Reviving Guantanamo is not encouraging, to be sure. But, again, republican voters did by all indications vote for forced deportations. Regrettably but true. But they really didn't vote for this Project 2025 fascist purge of government workers and the Deep State, DEI, did they? Some probably would have, the cracked libertarian (and thin and tenuous, I've heard) thread connecting Steve Bannon to the Tech Billionaires. But Grump was campaigning against any association with it, obviously responding to his base with something more than empathy. And now, fuck it, 'I was always about the Project 2025, it's a blueprint of how to save our country from the radical leftists and the creeping socialism that would restrain the animal spirits vital to great success in business and celebrity and, well, really, in being a president, like me. Thank you very much."  

I know, I'm making Grump sound like the last Elvis. The final horror, predator Elvis! 

Anyway, the brazen audacity of trying to sell the country on a retro 19th century great powers imperialist struggle for global supremacy (that did clearly culminate in two gigantic and devastating world wars, by the way) with Big Tech leading the investment rich vanguard way in a 21st century global struggle based on in reality impoverished corrupt kleptocratic petrostates that only allow "fake news"/State propaganda like Hungary and Russia or Saudi Arabia or North Korea. Where's the South Park movie on this Big Lie?   

Impossible to make-up and some day a Shakespeare's sister and/or a future Marlon James is going to write a hell of a Pynchon-like masterpiece novel about all this. Hope I get to read it. 

Surveying the Media Landscape After Reactionary Bigot Takeover

 "Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?"

The Hartmann Report

So much for the liberal bias in the media. How about the billionaire bigot bias in the media? That somehow Biden has gotten blamed, essentially, for Covid and Grump who jeopardized hundreds of thousands of lives with his anti-public health idiocy is back only four years later epitomizes the peril. One trick going forward for the opposition will be exposing republican violence and their worst human rights abuses without obstructing their agenda, and allowing them to hang themselves with their own rope. It's that adage about how some people need to experience what they want before they understand what it means. Republicans, apparently, need to fully experience the consequences of Grump's Project 2025 before they can understand how they have been played by the promise of bigot violence against their sworn enemies, "illegals," immigrants, POC, Trans, homosexuals, liberals, civil servants, journalists, etc. And the resistance, de-platformed, will have to try to get the word out about the bigot violence and hold the line in Blue jurisdictions while evading the collateral damage of the coming illiberal assault. I'm adapting the adage "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" to keep an eye on your enemies and keep your "woke," human rights respecting and social justice loving, friends closer. Peace. 

Fox and Tech Bros Turn Right-Wing Media Into Kingmaker

 Michael Tomasky @ The New Republic

One personal humiliation here right off the bat is how the legacy media that people like me fret ab all the time, NYTimes/WaPo, are actually already marginal to the real big influencers with these online audiences that dwarf the old media: Fox, Musk's X, Joe Rogan, Tik Tok, Rush Limbaugh's ghost, honestly, I don't know this stuff and I'm not sure I want to know, but point taken. 

And I'm not entirely unsympathetic to Grump being their champion. So he obviously lies about everything, cheats every which way he can in every election, that's what politicians do they reason, he is fighting for us. He isn't but you get the idea. They like the story that everyone is against him and he's a fighter. They feel like everyone (liberal establishment) is against them too and admire what they perceive as his heroic response to such terrible liberal left antifa protester opposition. This brings up that old saw about how some people need to get what they want before they can understand what that means, even if what it means is fascist violence and purges and pogroms, apparently. 

None of this is good, very very bad, but I understand it or find it legible, anyway. I'm a much less clear, or maybe I should say alarmed or worried about how this dominance of conservative media in the cell phone era effectively gets an electoral majority to overlook or dismiss as unimportant that Grump tried to overthrow the 2020 election with an armed mob, or refused to relinquish a bunch of top secret national security documents, or is obviously compromised by his relationship to Putin, who has now attacked our last three national elections and divides us from our biggest friends and allies in the world. Or even how this conservative media juggernaut gets a winning majority to forget that this guy botched badly a global public health crisis that we have barely gotten out of but, apparently, everyone wants to pretend now never happened. Yolo, etc. 

I feel like I'm saying more or less the same thing over and over, which I guess is what people do when they get my age, but it isn't just the inhumanity and injustice, the cruel and intolerant hierarchy in this popular election, which stands for over 200 years of conservative boilerplate at this point, but the who cares obliviousness to the direct assaults on our national independence and extreme, isolating, and self-destructive tendencies in this retreat from real world problems and the future that is most ominous, to say the least. 

Let's put is this way: This electoral victory isn't a model of A.I. as Techno-optimist liberation but A.I. as a tool of surveillance and corporate manipulation of the media. Doomy and repressive. And America said, yup, that's what we want: 'Grump knows how to deal with the illegals and he's easier on the pocket-book.' Okay, if you say so, we'll have to see how that works out but I have grave doubts. 

And Why Dems Are Losing the Culture War 

Horatio Hornblower @ The Atlantic  And then, yeah, more about conservatives dominating online media in the run-up to the election and Dems punking out and not even showing up for the "fight" in these spaces. Where, I might remind the author and readers, fascist monopolists and "libertarian" super corporations run the algorithms. Bless Pete Buttigieg for going on Fox. And bless Josh Marshall and journalists still putting up the good fight on X. But it isn't hard to see that these online media forums for "free speech absolutism" and troll wars are no-win situations packaged by corporate rule; pitting social media mob tendencies against ethical journalism. I was at Twitter for the Musk takeover and watched him nullify the Blue Wave there. What we need are corporate media untainted by the ideology of corporate rule and the patronage of power. But this isn't a viable business model, we are told. 

Anyway, conservative right-wing media domination is emerging as a big factor in the election. Hard to say what can be done about it but the level of dysfunction (obscuring the national security threat posed by Grump, for instance) it has imposed on our civic life is concerning, to say the least.