Author: lebelinoria

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

tatterdemalionamberite:

orestian:

tatterdemalionamberite:

orestian:

bana05:

smitethepatriarchy:

ladygreytea76:

smitethepatriarchy:

I’m trying to get through this but with every paragraph I finish the screaming in my head gets louder.

For everybody who doesn’t want to read the whole thing – do, it’s really eye-opening – here some key paragraphs:

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so
to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a
series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate
change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute);
and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of
the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve
Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he
gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting
“liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger,
and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at
the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a
rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a
Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo
Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic
views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands
after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the
29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s
bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than
PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on
Twitter.

…

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name:
because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics
company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was
spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in
“election management strategies” and “messaging and information
operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and
Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological
operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign.

…

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a
database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting
population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post
reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington
office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s
administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in
engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly
if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

…

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of
thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have
tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a
trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together
to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then
exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools
developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy
with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”


The last sentences:

(…) a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the
60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With
no divisions between military and civilian participation.”

By that definition we’re already there.

I’m gonna break it down further because seriously, holy shit.

1. Billionaire white man is spending millions to “disrupt mainstream media.” He’s very conservative and backed Trump with $13.5 million in donations, and has close ties to Steve Bannon.

2. He funded Breitbart.com with $10 million, which is now more popular with U.S. Internet users than HuffPo or PornHub.

3. He also has a large stake in a company that specializes in psyops, also known as propaganda and other forms of psychological warfare, refined in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia.

4. This company lent its software both to the Leave side of Brexit and Trump’s presidential campaign.

5. This company claims to have a database with information on almost every eligible voter in the U.S. 

6. This information is then used to target people with ads, websites, and headlines in a way designed to control their thinking and change their minds on political issues.

7. There are thousands, maybe millions of cookie cutter “news” websites and Twitter bots designed to spread a specific message to make it seem legitimate and drown out actually legitimate news.

Other important quotes:

“Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.”

“The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.” 

“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

“It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.”

“There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”

““Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.””

Hydra and Project Insight are real. Terrifying to know.

… so that’s what happened to 4chan. I could tell it was being used as a testing pool for propaganda – free human test subjects! – but I was stuck using forensic linguistics to catalogue “insincere posters” and check for patterns in the things they said. It’s already known that people are paid to post on there, but the overarching motive was unclear.

I have been witnessing this happening on Facebook and Reddit with my own eyes and struggling to describe it in coherent words that don’t sound alarmist, but I’m not sure there are any.

^ This has been happening for a very long time. I would estimate this started around 2006, aka, “the summer that never ended”, but it was absolutely in motion by 2009. I’ve been watching it happen. My friends have been watching it happen. It’s not “oh no, this is happening”.

We finally found the wallet. This has been the proverbial serpent in the frog garden for a decade. It has devoured the internet.

Yeah, 2006 sounds about right. I was talking about this with my partners the other night.

The rise of Facebook is a linchpin because it’s the best implement anyone’s ever had for delivering individually tailored propaganda to a large number of people. (Peter Thiel was its first funder…)

Account signup opened to the public in ‘06 and the userbase started expanding dramatically around 2009-10. This was also when they started turning a profit. I don’t have a timeline for the development of their manipulative algorithms, but it seems a reasonable inference that that’s when they figured out how to get people hooked and also convince them to buy things, so…

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

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solo1y:

(via bookshelves)

I don’t mean to be unkind, but I don’t get how you can claim to “love books” and have a shelf full of Harry Potter and Jodi Picault. Have we created a nation of people who honestly believe that “reading” is one of their hobbies because they own a copy of The DaVinci Code? Where did we go wrong?

Your homework: Burn your books. All of them. If you think they’re good books, then burn everything else you have that you think is good. Don’t give them away, or donate them – that’s just moving the problem on to some other poor bastard.

Now populate your shelves with: William Faulkner; Vladimir Nabokov; Ernest Hemingway; Hunter S. Thompson; Kurt Vonnegut; Nikolai Gogol; Fyodor Dostoevsky; Frank Kafka; and that’s just for starters.

Come back to me for further recommendations when the fog has lifted from your brain.

I’d forgotten about this lovely reply to one of my photos from 7 years ago. Oh, literary snobbery, you haven’t changed much.

I’d forgotten about it too. I hope you’ve developed a love of literature in the last 7 years, or at least burned your copy of The DaVinci Code.

And what have we learned?

  • Never confuse “snobbery” or “elitism” for having standards. (If you don’t have any standards for yourself, then why should anyone else?)
  • Never confuse “popular” with “good”. (If every book on your bookshelf appeared on a best-seller list, how do you tell the difference?)  
  • Learn to accept criticism, especially from people who have no investment in whether you take their advice or not. (If you find it difficult to accept criticism, you’re missing out on many opportunities to improve. Here are my book reviews. I might have got it all wrong. Please feel free to reblog any of them with any criticism you may have – let’s get a conversation going! I’ve also started a blog of simplified classics called Pretend You’ve Read. Please feel free to criticise anything you feel I got wrong there, too. Why not? Hone your reader’s instincts.)
  • Keep pushing forward. (Otherwise, what are you doing with your life?)
  • Always try to be a better version of yourself. (ditto)
  • Put your energy into creating things, making things and helping people, not into destroying things, taking things apart or trashing people. (I made that post with the sole intention of improving your life. I wasn’t try to upset you or make you feel bad or come across as “snobbery”. I was trying to help you understand what literature is, what it can do, and how you can cut yourself off a slice of that crazy action.)
  • A great way to learn to be a better version of yourself is to read literature. (I assume you understand this better than you did seven years ago. At least, I hope so!)

All from that one little post I reblogged from you 7 years ago. 

Let’s be friends! 

Well actually, my career in publishing and the book industry – which I hadn’t yet begun when I posted this – is down to my passion for all books, whether they’re deemed to be “literature” or not. The book industry is not sustained by holding onto the novels of dead white men, but by recognising that there are gems in all genres, and valuing all readers.

I personally love children’s books and YA. But I also ran a successful Classic Challenge for five years. (Don’t think that was anything to do with you, dear reader).

I have not moved on from Harry Potter or A Series of Unfortunate Events (maybe Dan Brown, but hey, it was seven years ago) and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” – Haruki Murakami


William Faulkner; Vladimir Nabokov; Ernest Hemingway; Hunter S.
Thompson; Kurt Vonnegut; Nikolai Gogol; Fyodor Dostoevsky; Frank Kafka.

Wow. White guys. So many white guys. They are the one true coming of all literature.

Wow. This guy. Telling OP that all her interests are trash and that she should burn them so she could learn about real literature. Then, seven years later, telling her he was doing it to improve her life.

This whole set of interactions is so new and different. It’s almost like it hasn’t happened a billion times in the last day. Wow.

image

Good grief. What a tool.

Don’t you know all good arguments start with “burn that book”?

Frank Kafka.

Frank. 

The day someone tells me to burn books of any kind is the day I know that they are a moron who believes in censorship of individual taste and of FUN. The day that person only recommends books that are on any school syllabus and doesn’t branch out beyond them underscores the point with fifteen exclamation marks.

Probably my favorite is the fact that OP had 2 obvious Richard Dawkins books (The Selfish Gene and The Greatest Show on Earth) indicating a wide and well-nourished range of interests – from evolutionary biology to young adult fantasy to women’s fiction. (and how satisfying and beautiful is her bookshelf!!) I mean, the cure for a balanced literary diet is not “apply a small wodge of tedious historical men’s fiction following the same themes.”

Meanwhile, her self-appointed critic literally just has a list of dead white American/Russian men who wrote Gritty Literary Fiction About Sad Stuff during a narrow period of history. THEY’RE NOT EVEN THE PRETENTIOUS CLASSICS! THEY’RE NOT EVEN THE OBSCURE FARE!

I am actually a lot more accepting about people being snotty about Classics ™ because I accept that they’ve gone so deep that they probably don’t realize how much they need to decompress – they have lost their adaptations to surface life and normal human interaction, like those deepwater fish that you have to bring up slowly in your net, or they’ll burst. But imagine bringing yourself to be snobby about angsty men’s fiction written between 1800 and 2000.

(Also, Frank Kafka. We shouldn’t laugh)

the day i let go of the Dead White Men School of Worthwhile Fiction was the day i began to truly live as a writer.

i’ve read all of those things Judgy McCriticpants thinks are the only real books. some were brilliant, some were okay, some were disappointing. i’ve also read most of the things on OP’s shelf. same spread of quality. funny thing – being the beloved darling of the establishment doesn’t make you a better or worse writer than the ones who get relegated to the ‘girl stuff’ and ‘kid stuff’ pile. it just makes you more famous.

even that’s not really true anymore. the wheels of academia grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine, and as the literary establishment gradually wakes up to its own shameful obsession with bygone fuckboys, it embraces a wider array of authors and genres every year.

i read all the classics, but i wrote pulp, and i was disappointed in myself. why couldn’t i aspire to The Great American Novel? no one would ever respect me if i kept writing slam-bang action, especially with queers in it! but there came a time when i took a step back and thought, no, you know what, the one i need respect from is myself. i write what i enjoy, and it’s okay to pour all my skill and inspiration into that, because it’s what i goddamn well want to do.

it started as an act of defiance. before long i realized it was actually just common sense. the illusion of Real Literature is only that – an illusion. hype that believes itself.

oh, and for the record, and keeping in mind that i have in fact read every damn one of the books you’re Supposed To Read: the best writing i have ever seen is in fanfiction.

i’m not exaggerating.

on an almost daily basis, i find fanfiction that shames hemingway with its powerful simplicity, or joyce with its experimental creativity, or kerouac with its joyful freedom, or tolkein with its intricate worldbuilding, or – really, name anyone and i could rec you a fanfic that does their thing better. and you know what? most of these writers are women or queer men. the literary world still sees them (us) as alien, but they (we) are no less skilled for all that.

tl;dr: farenheit 451 here can take his snooty nose and shove it up his clenched ass. he doesn’t have the faintest damn clue what he’s talking about.

What is the curb cutter effect

tatterdemalionamberite:

Here’s a post talking about it WRT interaction badges at cons:

“The Curb-Cutter Effect is when something to fit a specific need is found to create convenience in a broader area than intended.  Curb cuts allowing for wheelchair accessibility to sidewalks proved to also be convenient to anyone who may have trouble with steps or even simply a mother with a baby stroller or maybe a child with a wagon.  This is a desirable outcome with disability rights advocacy as creating convenience for non-disabled people often makes the assistive technology easier to advocate for.”

Or, in a series of examples: 

When moms with strollers use curb cuts, they also start demanding them and supporting them, and the sidewalks become easier to traverse for people in wheelchairs.

When neurotypical people use badges to indicate their interactional boundaries, curb-cutter effect makes it easier for neurodivergent people to do the same.

When a bunch of folks who can tolerate wheat decide they like gluten-free bread, it becomes easier for people with celiac disease to find it at the grocery store.

When asking people to tag their content becomes normalized, it means that people with severe triggers are less likely to encounter confusion or disdain when they ask. 

When able-bodied people understand spoon theory, it becomes easier for those of us who need it to talk about it. 

When people with mild mental health problems see a therapist, it makes it easier for that therapist to stay in practice and see their more vulnerable clients.

When people who aren’t direly affected by dysphoria access trans health care, the increased demand familiarizes more primary care doctors with an area of medicine they should all be able to practice, so that when people with severe dysphoria seek care, it’s less likely to require moving to another city or state.

TL;DR convenience users of any service or assistive technology are the shock troops of accessibility and I love them. 

the-real-seebs:

zetablarian:

mashmoments:

writerofthought:

To all the young Millenials about to watch M*A*S*H for the first time, do not be turned off by Max Klinger being a guy in a dress.

For those of you unaware, the character tries several schemes to get out of the army on the grounds of being mentally unfit for service, most notably being a man who wears a dress, which no one buys. It’s played off as a joke but everyone loves him and treats him very respectfully unless it’s a character you’re not supposed to sympathise with.

You might want to call bull on the fact that they’re getting a cheap joke at a man in a dress. But, this man in a dress had a gender identity crisis ON SCREEN (although they couldn’t call it that) and also helped pave the way to allow transgender people into the armed forces.

No, seriously. A congressman who was a fan of the show brought up how Max Klinger cross dressing never was an issue at this M*A*S*H unit and it allowed transgender people to serve in the armed forces!

I’m a trans(masc) millenial and the biggest thing I feel was made fun of was how much some people were bothered by Klinger’s clothes, not the fact that he’s wearing them.

Klinger learns a lot about fashion and sewing and seems to develop a genuine passion for it over time.

There’s even one time when he develops a psychosomantic (spelling?) rash during a short time when he has to wear his uniform. Even after it is clear that he’s not gonna get to go home by wearing dresses, he continues – suggesting either a persistent act of defiance to make him feel better, or a real appreciation of the clothes… or both!

He’s clearly coded as straight, is accepted by his peers, and his character arc and development is barely focused on his clothes (rather it focuses on what he wants to do with his life; his dream future).

For a show made in the 70’s depicting the 50’s, M*A*S*H was a show before its time – with feminist messages and anti-war messages, as well as speking out against homophobia and racism – and Klinger was a groundbreaking character.

This is especially true, I think, if you watch the episodes sans the laugh track. Without the canned laughter, Klinger’s costuming comes off as especially sincere.

Klinger is a good man and a great character and everyone in the camp respects him (and if they don’t, it’s not because of his attire).

The discovery that you can select “English Without Laugh Track” as an audio track has made the DVDs wonderful.

brainstatic:

I’ll vote for the first candidate to come right out and say: “no, they couldn’t have just taken the eagles to Mordor from the beginning, for a number of reasons. The mission rested on the fact that Sauron didn’t know anyone was coming to destroy the ring, because evil underestimates the willpower of good. Coming in with eagles would kill that. The eagles are also servants of Manwe, king of the gods, and after the wars of the First Age and ruin of Beleriand they retreated from the affairs of mortals, and the eagles themselves were crushed by the winged demons of Morgoth. They only listen to Gandalf occasionally because he’s one of the Maiar, a lesser god. The role of the gods comes from Tolkien’s Catholicism and the belief that people need to accomplish things on their own without God’s help.” But they won’t say that, because of the corporations.

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

The frequency with which I see folks reblogging my posts with the tag “#not homestuck” raises some interesting questions about this blog’s readership.

@yoshilisk replied:

at this point i’m not convinced that everything you say ISN’T secretly a homestuck thing, honestly

Hey, let’s be fair.

I also make references to other, equally pretentious webcomics.

@mostlyscrutable replied:

Do you have any recommendations for equally pretentious webcomics?

Sure thing!

  • The Abominable Charles Christopher – In theory, it’s about a mute yeti having whimsical adventures. In practice, like 80% of the strips have nothing to do with that, instead focusing on the daily lives of various forest creatures whose primary pastime seems to be acting out a surreal parody of human society. Also, there’s a couple of primal gods involved in some capacity, and this elderly bear whose blood-soaked tragedy of a backstory keeps popping up completely at random. The end result is like a very bleak sendup of Garfield-style newspaper comics with a complicated epic fantasy yarn just sort of happening in the background.

  • Minus – The daily life of a little girl who is, to all indications, completely omnipotent. Her various misadventures range from cute and heartwarming to utterly horrifying in their implications, and the comic doesn’t distinguish between the two; both extremes are presented in the same soft-toned, storybook-like fashion. The author vanished off the face of the Internet some years ago, and their comics are now accessible only via independent backups (one of which is linked above); by fortunate coincidence, Minus is one of their few works for which a complete archive still exists.

  • Rho – Highschool magical realism with a post-ironic twist. Basically, picture Scott Pilgrim if the protagonist was a. a teenage girl, and b. not an irredeemable douchebag, and that won’t be exactly right, but you’ll be in the same general ballpark. Largely episodic with few recurring characters, it ends abruptly and without resolution, so if you’re looking for an actual arc, this one may not be the best choice. It was published like a decade ago, when screen resolutions were lower, so the dialogue can be kinda squinty on a modern desktop, and also the site sometimes runs porn ads – fair warning on both counts.