Why Would The U.S. Govt Fund TOR/Dark Web If These Limited Its Power?

The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the US government. In the process of writing my book Surveillance Valley, I was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence — including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates — between the Tor Project and its main funder, a CIA spinoff now known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). These files show incredible cooperation between Tor and the regime change wing of the US government. The files are released to the public here. —Yasha Levine

surveillancevalley |  I obtained the documents in 2015. By then I had already spent a couple of years doing extensive reporting on Tor's deeply conflicted ties to the regime change wing of the U.S. government. By following the money, I discovered that Tor was not grassroots. I was able to show that despite its radical anti-government cred, Tor was almost 100% funded by three U.S. national security agencies: the Navy, the State Department and the BBG. Tor was military contractor with its own government contractor number — a privatized extension of the very same government that it claimed to be fighting. 

This was a shocking revelation. 

For years, the Tor Project — along with other government-funded crypto tools like Signal — has been seen in almost religious terms by the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government spying online. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital equivalent of the First Amendment. The ACLU backed it. Fight for the Future, the hip Silicon Valley activist group, declared Tor to be “NSA-proof.” Edward Snowden held it up as an example of the kind of grassroots privacy technology that could defeat government surveillance online, and told his followers to use it. Prominent award-winning journalists from Wired, Vice, The Intercept, The Guardian and Rolling Stone — including Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Andy Greenberg — all helped pump up Tor's mythical anti-state rebel status. Even Daniel Ellsberg, the legendary whistleblower, was convinced that Tor was vital to the future of democracy. Anyone who questioned this narrative and pointed to Tor's lavish government support was attacked, ridiculed, smeared and hounded into silence. I know because that's what Tor supporters tried to do to me. 

But the facts wouldn't go away. 

The initial evidence that I had gathered in my reporting left little room for doubt about Tor's true nature as foreign policy weapon of the U.S. government. But the box of FOIA documents I received from the BBG took that evidence to a whole new level.

Why would the U.S. government fund a tool that limited its own power? The answer, as I discovered, was that Tor didn't threaten American power. It enhanced it. 

The FOIA documents showed collaboration between the federal government, the Tor Project and key members of the privacy and Internet Freedom movement on a level that was hard to believe:

The documents showed Tor employees taking orders from their handlers in the federal government, including hatching plans to deploy their anonymity tool in countries that the U.S. was working to destabilize: China, Iran, Vietnam, Russia. They showed discussions about the need to influence news coverage and to control bad press. They featured monthly updates that described meetings and trainings with the CIA, NSA, FBI, DOJ and State Department. They also revealed plans to funnel government funds to run "independent" Tor nodes. Most shockingly, the FOIA documents put under question Tor's pledge that it would never put in any backdoors into their software. (See below.)

Anti-Soros Equals Anti-Semite?

thenation |  The word “bizarre” does not begin to capture the everyday craziness of our politics in the Trump era. Here’s the opening paragraph of a column in National Review, titled “An Epidemic of Dishonesty on the Right,” by bona fide right-winger Kevin D. Williamson:

First it was the Holocaust, now Parkland—is there any act of depravity to which the less respectable right-wing media cannot imagine a connection for George Soros?
David Clarke, the sheriff of Fox News, insisted that the Florida students’ reaction to the shooting ‘has GEORGE SOROS’ FINGERPRINTS all over it,’ idiotic capitalization in the original and, one assumes, in his soul. The idiots at Gateway Pundit suggested that one of the student survivors was a fraud because—get this—he’d been interviewed on television before about an unrelated incident.

Had I written the above in The Nation, I would not change a word, except perhaps to add that, roughly simultaneously to all of the above, the head of the Missouri Republican Party was blaming Soros for the indictment of the state’s governor, Eric Greitens, who is accused of taking surreptitious nude photos of his mistress for the purpose of blackmail. 

The desire to attach Soros’s name to virtually everything that Trumpists seek to denounce of late is inextricably tied to the fact that the liberal Jewish billionaire/philanthropist has been turned into a bogeyman for anti-Semites the world over. Soros is today’s stand-in for the time-honored anti-Jewish slanders sensationalized in Europe and elsewhere in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That’s why Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary practically turned Soros—whom he blames for “destroy[ing] the lives of millions of Europeans”—into his opposition party in that nation’s recent elections. It’s why, in Macedonia, a group called Stop Operation Soros, or SOS, emerged to try to defend that nation’s corrupt right-wing party. It’s why Poland’s ruling party leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, said he believes that Soros views cosmopolitan societies as “extremely easy to manipulate.” Right-wing idiots have been setting fire to effigies and portraits representing Soros in rallies from Warsaw to Tbilisi. 

One of the gifts that Trump and his “alt-right” acolytes have brought to American politics is the mainstreaming of this particular political poison. It’s no coincidence that the most recent report by the Anti-Defamation League showed a nearly 60 percent spike in anti-Semitic incidents in the US in 2017. “The president’s retweeting of white supremacists and anti-Semitic memes during the campaign and, more recently, sharing tweets from a UK racist group—those are alarming. Those tweets and rhetoric have emboldened and given encouragement to the worst anti-Semites and bigots,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League.

Keep Effing Around And SmugglyPuff Will Take It To The Streets!!!

consortiumnews |  Considering all of the threats to democracy posed by unconstitutional overreach, unfair elections, corruption, and voter suppression – not to mention environmental challenges, economic inequality, an out-of-control U.S. foreign policy, numerous foreign conflicts that the U.S. is engaged in, and the ever-present threat of nuclear war – it is telling that the liberal establishment is mobilizing on this particular issue.

Social psychologists have long talked about how emotional manipulation can work effectively to snooker a large percentage of the population, to get them, at least temporarily, to believe the exact opposite of the facts. These techniques are known in the intelligence community as “perception management,” and have been refined since the 1980s “to keep the American people compliant and confused,” as the late Robert Parry has reported. We saw this in action last decade, when after months of disinformation, about 70% of Americans came to falsely believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 when the truth was the opposite – Saddam was actually an enemy of the Al Qaeda perpetrators.

Such emotional manipulation is the likely explanation for the fact that so many people are now gearing up to defend someone like Mueller, while largely ignoring other important topics of far greater consequence. With no demonstrations being organized to stop a possible war with North Korea – or an escalation in Syria – hundreds of thousands of Americans are apparently all too eager to go to the mat in defense of an investigation into the president’s possible “collusion” with Russia in its alleged meddling in election 2016.

Setting aside for the moment the merits of the Russiagate narrative, who really is this Robert Mueller that amnesiac liberals clamor to hold up as the champion of the people and defender of democracy? Co-author Coleen Rowley, who as an FBI whistleblower exposed numerous internal problems at the FBI in the early 2000s, didn’t have to be privy to his inner circle to recall just a few of his actions after 9/11 that so shocked the public conscience as to repeatedly generate moral disapproval even on the part of mainstream media. Rowley was only able to scratch the surface in listing some of the more widely reported wrongdoing that should still shock liberal consciences.

Although Mueller and his “joined at the hip” cohort James Comey are now hailed for their impeccable character by much of Washington, the truth is, as top law enforcement officials of the George W. Bush administration (Mueller as FBI Director and Comey as Deputy Attorney General), both presided over post-9/11 cover-ups and secret abuses of the Constitution, enabled Bush-Cheney fabrications used to launch wrongful wars, and exhibited stunning levels of incompetence.

Poor Cass Sunstein, Out of Power and So Very Misunderstood...,

NewYorker |  In 2010, Marc Estrin, a novelist and far-left activist from Vermont, found an online version of a paper by Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and the most frequently cited legal scholar in the world. The paper, called “Conspiracy Theories,” was first published in 2008, in a small academic journal called the Journal of Political Philosophy. In it, Sunstein and his Harvard colleague Adrian Vermeule attempted to explain how conspiracy theories spread, especially online. At one point, they made a radical proposal: “Our main policy claim here is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories.” The authors’ primary example of a conspiracy theory was the belief that 9/11 was an inside job; they defined “cognitive infiltration” as a program “whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups.”

Nowhere in the final version of the paper did Sunstein and Vermeule state the obvious fact that a government ban on conspiracy theories would be unconstitutional and possibly dangerous. (In a draft that was posted online, which remains more widely read, they emphasized that censorship is “inconsistent with principles of freedom of expression,” although they “could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable.”)* “I was interested in the mechanisms by which information, whether true or false, gets passed along and amplified,” Sunstein told me recently. “I wanted to know how extremists come to believe the warped things they believe, and, to a lesser extent, what might be done to interrupt their radicalization. But I suppose my writing wasn’t very clear.”

Sunstein has studied the spread of information since the mid-nineties, when he co-wrote a series of law-review articles about “cascade theory”—a model describing how opinions travel across juries, markets, and subcultures. He was particularly interested in what he called the Law of Group Polarization: how ideologically homogenous groups can become “breeding grounds for unjustified extremism, even fanaticism.” In 2001, his first book on political polarization on the Internet, “Republic.com,” warned that, even when people have access to a range of robust and challenging views, many will favor information that confirms what they already believe. He updated the book in 2007, as “Republic.com 2.0: Revenge of the Blogs,” and again this year, as “#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media.” When he wrote “Republic.com,” social media didn’t really exist; when he wrote “Republic.com 2.0,” social media’s impact was so negligible that he could essentially ignore it; in “#Republic,” he argues that services such as Facebook comprise the contemporary agora, and that their personalized algorithms will make it ever more difficult for Americans to understand their fellow-citizens.

In the endless debates about what constitutes “fake news,” we tend to invoke clear cases of unfounded rumor or outright deceit (“Melania has a body double,” or “President Trump saves two cats from drowning after Hurricane Harvey”). More prevalent, and more bewildering, are the ambiguous cases—a subtly altered photograph, an accurate but misleading statistic, a tendentious connection among disparate dots. Between the publication of “Republic.com 2.0” and “#Republic,” Sunstein became a target of the same online rumor mill he’d been studying from a distance, and many of the conspiracy theories about “Conspiracy Theories” fell into this gray area—overheated, but not wholly made up. “If you had told me that this obscure paper would ever become such a publicly visible and objectionable thing, I would have thought it more likely that Martians had just landed in Times Square,” Sunstein said. “In hindsight, though, I suppose it’s sort of appropriate that I got caught up in the mechanisms I was writing about.”

The Rape of RAP - Don't Say ISHT To Me About Harvey Weinstein...,

yournewswire |  John Homeston, a retired CIA agent, has admitted this week on National Russian Television (NTV) that the CIA was behind the creation of the 1980s hip hop scene and financed major hip hop acts including NWA, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five.

The government at the time spent “big money, serious money” on this covert operation destined to “further division” and “corrupt the American youth to nihilist, anti-establishment and anti-American ideologies”, he explained in a half hour interview broadcast on national television.

Famous hip hop songs of the legendary hip hop outfit NWA were even scripted by a team of psychologists and war propagandists of the CIA. “F#ck the police,” and “When I’m called off, I got a sawed off / Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off,” and other nihilist and anti-establishment lyrics were intended to unleash a wave of cynicism towards authorities, promote the use of heavy drugs, and entice the youth with revolutionary, counter-establishment ideas.

The retired CIA agent claims the social engineering maneuver was “extremely successful.“

“We understood at the time that music was a powerful means of propaganda to reach the youth,” explained the 77-year-old man.

“Our mission was to use teenage angst to our advantage and turn Generation X into a decadent, pro-drug and anti-establishment culture that would create uprisings and further division within society. We even infiltrated mainstream radio to promote their music and reach millions of people everyday,” he admitted, visibly proud of the accomplishment.

“For many of us in the CIA, infiltrating the 1980s hip hop scene was one of the CIA’s most successful experiments of propaganda to date,” he acknowledged during the interview.

“You could say Frankenstein’s monster got up off the table and started goose-stepping.”

The Long Leash

independent - 1995 |  For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

gizmodo -2010 |   There's little more divisive than modern art—most take a staunch "brilliance" or "bullshit" stance. So it should come as a surprise that the straight-laced feds at the CIA leaned toward the former camp—or at least saw it as brilliantly exploitable in the psychological war against the Soviets. Reports from former agents acknowledge what was always a tall tale in the art world—that CIA spooks floated pioneering artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, to drop an aesthetic nuke on Communism. What seemed like natural popularity of certain artists was, in part, actually a deliberate attempt at psychological warfare, backed by the US government.

But why modern art? At the time period in question—the 1950s and 60s—the artistic style of the moment was Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism (or AbEx, if you want to impress people at your next snooty cocktail party) stood for, above all else, self expression. Radically so. Take a look at a Pollock, for instance.

bbc - 2016 |  In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, something exciting happened in the art world in New York. A strange but irresistible energy started to crackle across the city, as artists who had struggled for years in poverty and obscurity suddenly found self-confidence and success. Together, they formed a movement that became known, in time, as Abstract Expressionism. It is currently the subject of a major exhibition, featuring 164 artworks by 30 artists (including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko), at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

One of the most remarkable things about Abstract Expressionism was the speed with which it rose to international prominence. Although the artists associated with it took a long time to find their signature styles, once the movement had crystallised, by the late ‘40s, it rapidly achieved first notoriety and then respect. By the ‘50s, it was generally accepted that the most exciting advances in painting and sculpture were taking place in New York rather than Paris. In 1957, a year after Pollock’s death in a car crash, the Metropolitan Museum paid $30,000 for his Autumn Rhythm – an unprecedented sum of money for a painting by a contemporary artist at the time.

Next Up: Ekmanized Pre-Cog Face-Reading AI...,

berkeley |  Using novel statistical models to analyze the responses of more than 800 men and women to over 2,000 emotionally evocative video clips, UC Berkeley researchers identified 27 distinct categories of emotion and created a multidimensional, interactive map to show how they’re connected.

Their findings are published this week in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

“We found that 27 distinct dimensions, not six, were necessary to account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in response to each video,” said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychology professor and expert on the science of emotions.

Moreover, in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an island, the study found that “there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration,” Keltner said.

“We don’t get finite clusters of emotions in the map because everything is interconnected,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “Emotional experiences are so much richer and more nuanced than previously thought.”

“Our hope is that our findings will help other scientists and engineers more precisely capture the emotional states that underlie moods, brain activity and expressive signals, leading to improved psychiatric treatments, an understanding of the brain basis of emotion and technology responsive to our emotional needs,” he added.

Is Dis-Inter-Mediation Necessarily A Bad Thing?

theatlantic  |  Agony is the natural state of the news industry. Newspaper sales per capita peaked before color television was a thing, and magazines have been in decline since the Clinton administration. When it comes to the finances of the Fourth Estate, bad news is, generally speaking, the news.

But 2017 has been a uniquely miserable year in the media business, in which venerable publications and fledging sites, divided by audience age and editorial style, have been united in misery. At Vanity Fair, the editorial budget faces a 30 percent cut. At The New York Times, advertising revenue is down $20 million annually after nine months. Oath, the offspring of Yahoo and AOL’s union, is shedding more than 500 positions as it strains to fit inside of its Verizon conglomerate. Meanwhile, almost every digital publisher seems to be struggling, selling, or soliciting, whether it’s the media company IAC exploring offers to offload The Daily Beast, Fusion Media Group offering a minority stake in The Onion and former Gawker Media sites, or Mashable selling for a fifth of its former valuation. So many media companies in 2017 have reoriented their budgets around the production of videos that the so-called “pivot to video” has became an industry joke. Today, the pivot seems less like a business strategy and more like end-of-life estate planning.

Even the crown princes of digital upstarts, Vice and BuzzFeed, are projected to miss their revenue targets by 20 percent each, which amounts to a combined shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars. Finally, this week, Time Inc., the storied publisher of magazines and websites, including People, Sports Illustrated, and Time, announced it had reached an agreement to be sold to the Meredith Corporation, whose focus on lifestyle is inspiring rumors that it may yet offload or even shut down Time, Fortune, and Money.

What on Earth is going on? There are at least three major trends contributing to this dismal media moment. They all point to the same solution, and it’s something everyone in journalism should know by now: News publishers have to get better at making money outside of advertising.

NYC-DC Elites (The Deep State) Reimposing Narrative Control

strategic-culture |  That the relationship between Moscow and Washington should be regarded as important given the capability of either country to incinerate the planet would appear to be a given, but the Washington-New York Establishment, which is euphemism for Deep State, is actually more concerned with maintaining its own power by marginalizing Donald Trump and maintaining the perception that Vladimir Putin is the enemy head of state of a Russia that is out to cripple American democracy.

Beyond twisting narratives, Russiagate is also producing potentially dangerous collateral damage to free speech, as one of the objectives of those in the Deep State is to rein in the current internet driven relatively free access to information. In its most recent manifestations, an anonymous group produced a phony list of 200 websites that were “guilty” of serving up Russian propaganda, a George Soros funded think tank identified thousands of individuals who are alleged to be “useful idiots” for Moscow, and legitimate Russian media outlets will be required to register as foreign agents.

Driven by Russophobia over the 2016 election, a group of leading social media corporations including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have been experimenting with ways to self-censor their product to keep out foreign generated or “hate” content. They even have a label for it: "cyberhate". Congress is also toying with legislation that will make certain viewpoints unacceptable or even illegal, including a so-called Anti-Semitism Awareness Act that would potentially penalize anyone who criticizes Israel and could serve as a model for banning other undesirable speech. “Defamatory speech” could even eventually include any criticism of the government or political leaders, as is now the case in Turkey, which is the country where the “Deep State” was invented.

NYC-DC Elites Struggle With Midwest-NoCal Elites Over Controlling Narratives

thenewyorker |  McCarthy wasn’t persuadable on the matter, and certainly not through personal testimony. To his way of thinking, there was no such thing as inappropriate tech or inappropriate speech. Besides, who could be trusted to decide? One post, which McCarthy endorsed, suggested that letting I.T. administrators determine what belonged on the computers at Stanford was like giving janitors at the library the right to pick the books.

McCarthy’s colleagues innately shared his anti-authoritarian perspective; they voted unanimously to oppose the removal of rec.humor.funny from Stanford’s terminals. The students were nearly as committed; a confidential e-mail poll found a hundred and twenty-eight against the ban and only four in favor. McCarthy was soon able to win over the entire university by enlisting a powerful metaphor for the digital age. Censoring a newsgroup, he explained to those who might not be familiar with Usenet, was like pulling a book from circulation. Since “Mein Kampf” was still on the library shelves, it was hard to imagine how anything else merited removal. The terms were clear: either you accepted offensive speech or you were in favor of destroying knowledge. There was no middle ground, and thus no opportunity to introduce reasonable regulations to insure civility online. In other words, here was the outline for exactly our predicament today.

McCarthy, who died in 2011, considered his successful campaign against Internet censorship the capstone to a distinguished career. As he boasted to a crowd gathered for the fortieth anniversary of the Stanford computer-science department, on March 21, 2006, his great victory had been to make the school understand that “a faculty-member or student Web page was his own property, as it were, and not the property of the university.” At the time, almost as much as in 1989, McCarthy could safely see this victory as untainted; the Internet still appeared to be virgin territory for the public to frolic in. Facebook wouldn’t go public for another six years. The verb “Google” had yet to enter the Oxford English Dictionary. The first tweet had just been sent—the very same day, in fact.

Today, of course, hateful, enraging words are routinely foisted on the public by users of all three companies’ products, whether in individual tweets and Facebook posts or in flawed Google News algorithms. Championing freedom of speech has become a business model in itself, a cover for maximizing engagement and attracting ad revenue, with the social damage mostly pushed aside for others to bear. When the Internet was young, the reason to clean it up was basic human empathy—the idea that one’s friends and neighbors, at home or on the other side of the world, were worth respecting. In 2017, the reason is self-preservation: American democracy is struggling to withstand the rampant, profit-based manipulation of the public’s emotions and hatreds.

Why the Hyperbolic Language of Child Molestation and Pedophilia?

dailybeast |  Liberals have clucked their tongues at Judge Roy Moore, the “family values” conservative now dodging accusations of sexual contact with a minor. But Moore’s not a hypocrite; he’s an exemplar of the morality he preaches.

Moore, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama, has been accused of making unwanted sexual advances on three teenage girls in 1979 when he was a single man in his thirties. Two of the girls were of legal age, 16, but one was 14. She says he drove her home, took off her shirt, touched her bra and underwear, and guided her hand to his pants.

Moore has denied the incident with the 14-year-old, but has not denied dating teenagers when he was a thirty-something district attorney – “always with the permission of their parents,” he said.

While Moore has blamed the eruption of the scandal on Democrats, in fact it’s Republicans who would most like to see it bring him down. Some of this, of course, is because Moore is an anti-democratic theocrat who tarnishes the entire Republican brand with unreconstructed homophobia and contempt for the rule of law. Democrats would benefit if he actually stays in the race.

But a big reason conservatives are running from Moore is to make him into a scapegoat, which is why he has so often been described not as someone accused of statutory rape but with terms like rape, pedophile, sexual predator and child molester.

On Sunday, for example, Marc Short, the White House Director of Legislative Affairs, told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that “there’s a special place in hell” for pedophiles like Roy Moore. “There’s no Senate seat more important than the issue of child pedophilia,” he said.

None of These WEAPONS Products Is What It Appears To Be...,

nakedcapitalism  |  As the Philadelphia meetup, I got to chat at some length with a reader who had a considerable high end IT background, including at some cutting-edge firms, and now has a job in the Beltway where he hangs out with military-surveillance types. He gave me some distressing information on the state of snooping technology, and as we’ll get to shortly, is particularly alarmed about the new “home assistants” like Amazon Echo and Google Home. 

He pointed out that surveillance technology is more advanced than most people realize, and that lots of money and “talent” continues to be thrown at it. For instance, some spooky technologies are already decades old. Forgive me if this is old hat to readers:

Edward Snowden has disabled the GPS, camera, and microphone on his cell phone to reduce his exposure. As most readers probably know, both the microphone and the camera can be turned on even when the phone has been turned off. He uses headphones to make calls. This makes the recent phone design trend away from headphone jacks look particularly nefarious.
“Laser microphones” can capture conversations by shining a laser on a window pane and interpreting the vibrations. However, this isn’t really a cause for worry since there are easier ways to spy on meetings.
With a voice recording (think a hostage tape), analysts can determine the room size, number of people in the room, and even make a stab at the size and placement of objects, particularly if they get more than one recording from the same site.

But what really got this reader worked up was Amazon’s Echo, the device that allows users to give voice instructions to a device that will tell your TV to stream video or audio. order from Amazon or other participating vendors, provide answers to simple search queries, like “Tell me the weather,” perform simple calculations, and allow you to order around smart devices in your home that are on the networks. like tell your coffee maker to make some coffee. He said, “I’d never take one of them out of the box.”

He was at a party recently with about 15-20 people when the host decided to show off her Echo. She called across the room, “Alexa, tell me the capital of Wisconsin,” and Alexa dutifully responded.

Based on his knowledge of other technologies, here is what he argues was happening:

The Echo was able to pick a voice out of a crowd engaged in conversation. That means it is capable of singling out individual voice. That means it has been identifying individual voices, tagging the as “Unidentified voice 1″, Unidentified voice 2” and so on. It has already associated the voices of its owners, and if they have set up profiles for other family members, for them as well, so it knows who goes with those voices.
Those voices may be unidentified now, but as more and more voice data is being collected or provided voluntarily, people will be able to be connected to their voice. And more and more recording is being done in public places.
So now think of that party I was at. At some time in the not too distant future, analysts will be able to make queries like, “Tell me who was within 15 feet of Person X at least eight times in the last six months.” That will produce a reliable list of their family, friends, lovers, and other close associates.

CNET claims that Amazon uploads and retains voice data from the Echo only when it has been activated by calling to it and stops recording when the request ends. But given the Snowden revelations that every camera and microphone in computers and mobile devices can be and are used as viewing and listening devices even when the owner thinks they are off, I would not be so trusting. Even if Amazon isn’t listening and recording at other times, the NSA probably can. CNET adds:

Amazon Echo is always listening. From the moment you wake up Echo to the end of your command, your voice is recorded and transcribed. And then it’s stored on Amazon’s servers….
It’s unclear how long the data is stored, but we do know that it is not anonymized. And, for now, there’s no way to prevent recordings from being saved.

Reread the first paragraph. The Echo has to be listening at all times in order to respond to the “Alexa” command. So the only question is whether Amazon or some friendly member of the surveillance state is recording then too. 

This scenario ties into a recent development I find alarming: banks and other retail financial firms relentlessly offering to let you use your voice as your identifier if you wind up calling them. Every time I have called, I have to waste time rejecting their efforts to route me into that system. I’ve told the customer reps I never want that done but there is no way to override that even when I call in from a phone number they recognize as belonging to a customer.

Too Big To Self-Regulate - Social Media Fitna Get Federalized...,

oftwominds |  The nation's elites are desperate to misdirect us from the financial and power dividethat has enriched and empowered them at the expense of the unprotected many.


There are two competing explanatory narratives battling for mind-share in the U.S.: 1. The nation's social discord is the direct result of Russian social media meddling-- what I call the Boris and Natasha Narrative of evil Russian masterminds controlling a vast conspiracy of social media advertising, fake-news outlets and trolls that have created artificial divides in the body politic, or exacerbated minor cracks into chasms.

2. The nation's social discord is the direct result of soaring wealth/power inequality-- the vast expansion of the wealth and power of the nation's financial elites and their protected class of technocrat enablers and enforcers (the few) at the expense of the unprotected many.

Core to this narrative is the view that the elites and technocrats have engaged in a massive, coordinated official/media propaganda campaign of fake newsaimed at persuading the bottom 95% that their prosperity and financial security are expanding when the reality is they have lost ground they will never be able to recover. 

This propaganda campaign includes official (i.e. gamed/distorted) statistics such as unemployment and inflation, a reliance on the manipulated stock market to "signal widespread prosperity" and a steady drumbeat of corporate media coverage promoting the Boris and Natasha Narrative as the primary source of all our troubles. 

The reality the elites must mask is that the few (the elites) have benefited at the expense of the many. The rising tide of financialization, globalization and neofeudal-neocolonial neoliberalism has not raised all boats; the yachts have floated higher while the rowboats have either sunk or are leaking badly. 

bloomberg |  Forces are aligning to bring some sunlight to the political dark arts as they’re practiced on social media. Last week, Congress held a hearing to discuss a bill that would require new disclosures for online political ads, and a bigger confrontation looms Tuesday when executives from Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc., and Alphabet Inc.’s Google come to the hill to discuss Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. 

Tech platforms, understandably worried that the salad days of benign neglect from regulators are numbered, are scrambling to head off new rules by proposing ways to increase transparency on their own. At the least, it seems possible that online advertising will soon be subject to some version of the rules that apply to political ads on TV. But drawing a line around political activity on social media is tricky no matter who is wielding the pencil. That’s partially because it’s hard to define what counts as political activity, and also hard to define what counts as advertising.

Is Hip-Hop Good For Anyone? (REDUX Originally Posted 6/29/17)

theoccidentalobserver |   It is unfortunate, to say the least, that Black hip-hop scholarship never mentions the elephant in the room: Jewish control of the music industry. If hip-hop is, indeed, ethno-politics set to music, if hip-hop has taken the place of the civil rights movement in the hearts and minds of Black youth, it is impossible to ignore the historic Black-Jewish alliance against WASPs. For much of the twentieth century, that alliance was a constituent element in what Black nationalist Harold Cruse called the “fateful triangular tension among national groups…coming to the fore” in the 60s.[28] It is a truism of American political history that, from the Leo Frank trial and the founding of the NAACP in the early twentieth century down to the Black Lives Matter movement, Jewish intellectual-activists have worked tirelessly to imbue disaffected American Negroes with their own revolutionary spirit.[29]

Cruse was himself a Negro member of the American Communist Party. By that time, Jews had displaced Anglo-Saxons as the vanguard of American Communism. Unlike WASP Communists, the Jews shaped radical politics in accordance with “their own national group social ambitions or individual self-elevation.” Negroes were relegated to the status of a national minority in the party while Jews were free to pick up or drop their Jewish identity as it suited them.[30] This arrangement enabled Jews to become experts on “the Negro problem.” Not surprisingly, Jewish artists, musicians, and radicals then became highly visible players in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. “As a result,” Cruse observes, “the great brainwashing of Negro radical intellectuals was not achieved by capitalism, or the capitalistic bourgeoisie, but by Jewish intellectuals in the American Communist Party.”[31]

In the contemporary hip-hop community, Jewish leadership has been hidden behind the corporate veil. Tricia Rose vehemently denounces the corrupting influence of corporate control on the hip-hop community but her treatment of the subject obscures the identity of the corporate high command.[32] The music industry is absorbed into a vast impersonal system of “White power,” a matrix whose denizens all routinely swallow the blue pill. The closest we come to identifying those in charge is when Dyson criticizes the “White corporate interests” exploiting Black talent.[33]

Jews are never mentioned in Dyson’s work on hip-hop. Not surprisingly, Dyson has unimpeachable philo-Semitic credentials. Blacks and Jews, he believes, are united in common struggles against oppression in White America. Far be it from him ever to cast Jews as an enemy of Black folk. On his account, Blacks love Jews and Jews love Blacks.[34] Professor Rose also tip-toes around the issue of Jewish influence in the hip-hop community; The Hip Hop Wars has no index entry for Jews. Only in passing does Rose name names. But, when she does identify a few of the corporate heavyweights involved in the hip-hop community, the elephant moves onto center stage.

In a chapter on hip-hop’s responsibility for sexist and misogynist lyrics and imagery, Rose mentions a rare public appearance by leading figures in the corporate record industry. In their statements “corporate executives such as Universal chairman Doug Morris, Warner chairman and chief executive Edgar Bronfman, Sony chairman Andrew Lack, and Viacom president and CEO Phillipe P. Dauman have defended their role as distributors of intensely sexist content by subsuming sexism under artists’ rights to express themselves freely.” Interestingly, in the same paragraph, Rose urges us to “pull back the veil on the corporate media’s manipulation of Black male and female artists and the impact this has on fans and the direction of Black cultural expression.”[35] Why does she not see fit to mention that the four corporate kingpins she names are all Jews? The ethno-political fact is that Rose leaves the corporate veil intact by ascribing blame for the corruption of the hip-hop community to an abstraction called corporate greed. Rose heads the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.[36] How can she not be aware of the stunning success Jews have had in mixing business with ethno-politics?

After all, a simple Google search on “Jews run hip hop” turns up a wealth of investigative leads for a researcher eager to see how the “triangular tension” between Jews, Negroes, and Anglo-Saxons” has accommodated itself to the new players in American ethno-politics. Black scholars typically ignore the criticisms of Jewish control commonly made by rappers and fans.[37] Traditional Catholics such as E. Michael Jones are also critical of rap music as “one more manifestation of the behavior which goes along with the Jewish revolutionary spirit that took over the Black mind during the course of the 20^thcentury.”[38] The Jewish revolutionary spirit has pioneered the techniques of using sex as an instrument of political control.[39] The hip-hop brand of sexuality is no exception.

Bearing that in mind, it comes as no surprise to learn that hip-hop is deeply involved “with the multibillion dollar pornographic industry. The strip club has long been an integral part of both the music video and business end, but since the start of the new century, there has been a complete cross-over into pornography.” Orlando Patterson describes scenes from these productions as “the most degrading and abusive depictions of women imaginable.”[40] Small wonder, then, that a Google search for “Jews run pornography” yields another treasure trove of investigative leads sure to be left unexplored (for fear of the Jews?) by both Black and White scholars.

The Political Economy of Black Music (REDUX Originally Posted 9/16/11)

HWP | Black music exists in a neo-colonial relationship with the $12 billion music industry, which consist of six record companies: Warner Elektra Atlantic (WEA), Polygram, MCA Music Entertainment, BMG Distribution, Sony Music Entertainment, and CEMA/UNI Distribution. These firms, according to New York's Daily News, "supply retailers with 90% of the music" that the public purchases (rap accounts for 8.9% of the total, over $1 billion in 1996; these firms are currently being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission for price-fixing CDs ). While there are black- owned production companies like Uptown Records, Bad Boy Entertainment, La Face Records, Def Jam, and Death Row, which make millions, these black-owned companies do not control a key component of the music making nexus, namely distribution, and they respond to the major labels' demand for a marketable product. In turn, the major labels respond to a young white audience that purchases 66% of rap music, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), as reported by the Daily News. But the music industry's dependence on alternative music has led to flat sales and the only growth has been, once again, black music in the cultural form of rap. Rap is still on the move. For example, Lil' Kim, a protege of the late Christopher Wallace, has sold 500,000 units of her raunchy Hardcore. While Scarface has sold over 160,000 of his The Untouchable - without radio airplay.

The relationship between black music and the "Big Six" is a post-modern form of colonialism. In classic colonialism (or neo-colonialism) products were produced in a "raw periphery" and sent back to the imperial "motherland" to be finished into commodities, sold in the metropolitan centers or back to the colonies, with the result being that the colony's economic growth was stunted because it was denied its ability to engage in manufacturing products for it own needs and for export. Blacks in the inner cities, if not as an aggregate, share some of the classic characteristics of a colony: lower per capita income; high birth rate; high infant mortality rate; a small or weak middle class; low rate of capital formation and domestic savings; economic dependence on external markets; labor as a major export; a tremendous demand for commodities produced by the colony but consumed by wealthier nations; most of the land and business are owned by foreigners. With rap, the inner cities have become the raw sites of "cultural production" and the music then sold to the suburbs, to white youths who claim they can "relate" to those of the urban bantustans. If there is indeed a struggle for the control of rap, it is merely a battle between black gnats, for the war for the control of black music had been won many years ago by corporate America, aided and abetted by black leadership that has never understood the cultural and economic significance of its own culture.

Kevin K. Gaines, the author of Uplifting the Race, argues that most black leaders (spokesmen and women and intellectuals) have had a condescending attitude toward the black lower classes, urban and rural; the black elite's world view has been built on a white, bourgeois Victorian model of comportment that internalized white beliefs about blacks and race. Gaines noted that although the black elite was outraged at whites' lucrative expropriations of black culture...," they "extolled Victorian and European cultural ideals and looked with disapproval, if not covert and guilty pleasure, upon such emergent black cultural forms as ragtime, blues [and] jazz..." Black leaders' ideas about "racial uplift," notwithstanding, were based on differentiating themselves from the black lower classes who were seen as "bringing down the race." Even today's so-called black public intellectuals use various codes to dissociate the "good black middle class" - themselves - from the "bad black under-class," which can be translated to hip hop. (Randall Kennedy's featured article in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly is a spin on racial uplift; now it's about racial extrication based upon class positioning.) Such elitist attitudes have prevented middle-class blacks and black leadership from seeing the worth of their "own" folk culture that spawned the blues and other music forms from the lower classes, and it, black music, forms the base, the very foundation of the $12 billion music industry in the United States.

But there is a problem with black music: it is created by black people, particularly the rural and urban lower classes, and the black middle has always disdained those of their own race who are considered too Negroid, too black and too ignorant. Black musical forms have been "the juice" that has driven American musical expressions and whites have grown rich off of it. The problem has been that the black middle class has been too incompetent to champion and exploit (in the best sense of the word) its own folk culture and develop the geniuses that has produced black music. Instead, black music has never had an enlightened middle class leadership to give it a proper business footing. There has been no A. Philip Randolph or Thurgood Marshall in black music. The contempt for black artists is so palpable that even blacks have resorted to the same kind of rank exploitation that whites engage in.

Unfortunately, the history of black music has been a continuous one of whites' lucrative expropriation of black cultural forms. Black music has become a part of a structure of stealing that ranges from the minstrels shows of pre- Civil War America to white composers copying black jazz styles to white rockers covering original black R&B performer songs to segregating music by black performers as "race music" thus limiting their audience appeal to publishers stealing publishing credits to the nonpayment of royalties by record companies, etc. To be clear, black music forms are perhaps the single most critical foundation of American music which is a Creole hybrid of African and European influences, but the producers of such forms, blacks them- selves, brought over to the New World as black bodies to work for whites, have been viewed as either having no culture worthy of respect or having one that's worthy of rank exploitation and domination. This is the basis of the structure of stealing that other national groups - principally Anglo Saxons (slavery), Irish (minstrelsy), Jews (Hollywood, record industry) Italians (mob influence) - have participated in regard to black music forms. American individualism not withstanding, American society is made up of economic classes and ethnic blocs, of which a black individual can only achieve so much because he or she is a member of a weak group. "Hence, the individual Negro has," argued Harold Cruse in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, "proportionately, very few rights indeed because his ethnic group (whether or not he actually identifies with it) has very little political, economic or social power (beyond moral grounds) to wield."

The theft of black music has been so blatant and pervasive that a Rhythm and Blues Foundation was set up in 1994, with $1 million contributed by the Atlantic Foundation of Atlantic Records, Time-Warner and other music industry organizations. The foundation was set up to assist R&B artists of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, who have been "victims of poor business practices, bad management and unscrupulous record companies," wrote The New York Times. The money contributed by those record firms (which have been gobbled up by larger concerns) is a fraction of the amount of money that white-controlled record firms have made off of black artists, directly or indirectly by holding on to some of these artists' back catalogues.

Because black leaders have ignored the early years of black music development, others have come into the black community and have established a foothold before them. Even during slavery whites were dissing black folks by the back-handed compliment of minstrelsy, they just couldn't ignore the creativeness of blacks but knew "how to grow rich off of black fun," as one minstrel poseur put it. Motown was that rare exception of black control but didn't come into existence until the late fifties (and even today it is basically a shell; a mere label of Polygram, a foreign company; an expensive footnote in music history when it recently sold a 50% interests in its catalogue to EMI for $132 million). The sniping about Jews "controlling" the music business clouds over the fact that blacks have often ignored the "cultural capital" potential of blues, jazz, and R&B until it was too late. The same can be said about hip hop; it was the independents labels not Motown that produced the initial acts and the major labels rushed in when they saw the staying power of the music and that young whites were buying it. During the twenties, according to Amiri Baraka in Blues People, when Harry Pace, the owner of Black Swan Records, began selling blues, he was castigated by the black middle class for not selling music that was more racially uplifting. When jazz began circulating through the speakeasies of America during the 20s and via the new communication technology of the day, the radio, "the big brain" denizens of the Harlem Renaissance couldn't figure it out. As cited by Nathan Huggins in his Harlem Renaissance:

"Harlem intellectuals promoted Negro art, but one thing is very curious, except for Langston Hughes, none of them took jazz - the new music - seriously. Of course, they all mentioned it as background, as descriptive of Harlem life. All said it was important in the definition of the New Negro. But none thought enough about it to try and figure out what was happening. They tend to view it as a folk art - like the spirituals and the dance - the unrefined source for the new art. Men like James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke expected some race genius to appear who would transform that source into high culture...[T]he promoters of the Harlem Renaissance were so fixed on a vision of high culture that they did not look very hard or well at jazz."

The black intelligentsia of that era could no more accept the folk reality of its own folk culture than the white intelligentsia could accept the black basis of American culture, that American society is a creolized one, pre- dating multiculturalism. Jazz and blues were urban and rural expressions of working class blacks, but the black intelli- gentsia, trained in the aesthetics of the dominant society and unable to produce a cultural philosophy its own, neglected a very vital music in hopes of it becoming something else. There was a market there, for blacks were buying five to six million discs yearly in 1925 and in 1926 the record business reached $128 million dollars in sales, and did not reach that high point again until after the Second World War.

Israel: First Amendment Be Damned - Put Respeck On My Name!!!

libertyblitzkrieg |  Assaults on freedom speech can be found in many aspects of American life these days, but one specific area that isn’t getting the attention it deserves relates to boycotts against Israel. Increasingly, we’re seeing various regional governments requiring citizens to agree to what essentially amounts to a loyalty pledge to a foreign government in order to participate in or receive government services.

I’m going to highlight two troubling examples of this, both covered by Israeli paper Haaretz. The first relates to Kansas.

From the article, In America, the Right to Boycott Israel Is Under Threat:

The First Amendment squarely protects the right to boycott. Lately, though, a legislative assault on that right has been spreading through the United States –  designed to stamp out constitutionally protected boycotts of Israel…

Over the past several years, state and federal legislatures have considered dozens of bills, and in some cases passed laws, in direct violation of this important ruling. These bills and laws vary in numerous respects, but they share a common goal of scaring people away people from participating in boycotts meant to protest Israeli government policies, including what are known as Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns.

Today, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging one of those laws — a Kansas statute requiring state contractors to sign a statement certifying that they do not boycott Israel, including boycotts of companies profiting off settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

If this was the only example of such behavior, I suppose we could dismiss it as a one-off, misguided directive. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is far more common than any of us would like to admit.

Here’s another recent example, from the article, Houston Suburb Won’t Give Hurricane Relief to Anyone Who Boycotts Israel:

A Houston suburb will not approve grants to repair homes or businesses damaged in Hurricane Harvey if the applicant supports boycotting Israel.

The city of Dickinson’s application form for storm damage repair funding includes a clause stating that “By executing this Agreement below, the Applicant verifies that the Applicant: (1) does not boycott Israel; and (2) will not boycott Israel during the term of this Agreement.”

Representation and Normalization in Everyday Lives....,

gawker |  The news that X-Men director Bryan Singer is being sued by a man who says Singer raped him multiple times when he was 17 might come as a surprise to some—but in Hollywood his taste for a very specific sort of young man was well known.

In the lawsuit (the second filed against Singer), plaintiff Michael Egan says that he was introduced to Singer by a man named Marc Collins-Rector, who was ordered to register as a sex offender after being convicted of luring minors across state lines. Egan describes what is essentially a sex ring, with older men like Collins-Rector scouting barely legal twinks who might be looking to saddle up to Hollywood's rich and powerful gays.

This is the way things have happened in the industry for decades: this BuzzFeed post that culls stories from the memoir of an old Hollywood liaison named Scott Bowers gives a good idea of how some film bigwigs used to get off.

But Hollywood gays and lesbians don't need to be as discreet as they did 60 years ago, and it's not too difficult to find stories and photos of Singer's infamous gay pool parties—and rumors of more.

Over at Dlisted, Michael K. recalls when he initially became aware of the culture around Singer.

I first heard about Bryan Singer's "infamous" coke and twink pool parties when I was 18 and was at some party in Orange County that a bunch of dancers from Disneyland were at. One of the twink dancers bragged to me and my friends about how the weekend before he was at a party in L.A. that the director of Usual Suspects was at and the white twinks, coke and meth were falling from the sky. The twink dancer said that Bryan Singer and his fancy Hollywood friends always throw parties like that and when I asked him to take me to the next one, bitch said, "Uh, you're not white, skinny and cute enough, though."

A few years ago, Queerty published photos of a post-gay pride pool party at Roland Emmerich's house that was co-hosted by Singer. "No photos of the after-after party (which generally has a clothing-optional policy)," the site writes, "nor do we have pictures from what happened when Roland and Bryan (pictured, Page 3) took a few select young men into the house for private casting sessions[.]"

vice |   When people think of a pederast or sexually deviant film director, they are likely to imagine Roman Polanski having sex with a 13-year-old or Woody Allen marrying his adopted daughter. But those stories are a bit tired and cliched now, so, for those with a thirst for horrible stories about film men abusing their power, we present mid-budget journeyman director Victor Salva. In 1989, Salva was jailed after molesting the 12-year-old star of his first feature film, the low-budget horror thriller Clownhouse.

Salva has said that the idea of making a horror movie like Clownhouse had been on his mind for some time, and when you watch it, you can see why. The plot's victims are three pre-pubescent brothers, led by debutant Sam Rockwell, who spend their time running hysterically around their enormous suburban house getting terrorised by sadistic escaped lunatics dressed as circus clowns (the leader is called "Cheezo").

As a concept, it’s pretty basic, though the nightmare's enlivened by a constant, thrumming undercurrent of high school homoeroticism, which manifests itself in lingering crotch-shots and constant close-ups of half-naked teens. It's basically as terrifying as you'd expect a film about murderous, child-killing clowns directed by a pedophile to be.

Trans-Turing Trains Silly Monkey Brains

hackernoon  |  At the heart of digesting online information is the evolutionary propensity to mine all input as social cues or signals. In the case of the “trending news,” Facebook was presenting a manufactured image of the social world which more closely resembles a world which the curators would approve of, than it does the actual world we live in. This manufactured world is then presented as social reality. No matter what side you come down on, this is no trivial thing.

We humans are built to use attention as a cue for status. We then use status as a signal of mastery for which we are constantly on the lookout to apprentice under. Joseph Henrich and Francisco J. Gil-White, while at the Universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania respectively, describe a theory of “information goods.” They show that humans, unlike chimpanzees, use “relative prestige” to assign status, and then use that status as a signal of what to believe and emulate.

The challenge is that this evolutionary mechanism was developed long before mass media. It developed through direct observation. The hunter getting the most attention is likely the fellow who most often comes back with the biggest kills. Thus, trusting the attention of others to point you in the right way was adaptively useful. The Internet is particularly adept at scrambling these signals. We are built to believe that seeing others give their attention to somebody, or something, signals the ability for that someone to teach you something useful. Therefore we implicitly connect attention with prestige and prestige with expertise.

Granny Goodness President Trump, who has an objectively terrible track record with the truth, provides one example of this. A giant swath of the nation, I assume mostly reasonable and well-adjusted people, describe her him as trustworthy, despite what the other half, which I assume are also mostly reasonable and well-adjusted people, feel is obvious and damning evidence to the contrary. Her His supporters are surrounded, physically or digitally, by others who are paying attention to her him. Therefore, some basic, even primordial, part of their brain signals to them that this is someone who deserves attention, emulation, and trust. They believe in him, at least in part, because of his ability to attract attention signals of trustworthiness. When each of President Trump’s tweets, to his 40 million followers, and now to the whole world, receives hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets, we shouldn’t be surprised that he didn’t need to actually do anything to earn that trust. He just needed to attract attention to himself, and then claim that he deserves the trust. The attention supports claim.

Smartphone Dystopia

Guardian  |  He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button in the first place. 

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to disentangle themselves. “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”

Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat during a stint at Google, and now leads a San Francisco-based company that improves office productivity, appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”

But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market that drives it.

Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.

The Promise and Peril of Immersive Technologies

weforum |  The best place from which to draw inspiration for how immersive technologies may be regulated is the regulatory frameworks being put into effect for traditional digital technology today. In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force in 2018. Not only does the law necessitate unambiguous consent for data collection, it also compels companies to erase individual data on request, with the threat of a fine of up to 4% of their global annual turnover for breaches. Furthermore, enshrined in the bill is the notion of ‘data portability’, which allows consumers to take their data across platforms – an incentive for an innovative start-up to compete with the biggest players. We may see similar regulatory norms for immersive technologies develop as well.

Providing users with sovereignty of personal data

Analysis shows that the major VR companies already use cookies to store data, while also collecting information on location, browser and device type and IP address. Furthermore, communication with other users in VR environments is being stored and aggregated data is shared with third parties and used to customize products for marketing purposes.

Concern over these methods of personal data collection has led to the introduction of temporary solutions that provide a buffer between individuals and companies. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s ‘Privacy Badger’ is a browser extension that automatically blocks hidden third-party trackers and allows users to customize and control the amount of data they share with online content providers. A similar solution that returns control of personal data should be developed for immersive technologies. At present, only blunt instruments are available to individuals uncomfortable with data collection but keen to explore AR/VR: using ‘offline modes’ or using separate profiles for new devices.

Managing consumption

Short-term measures also exist to address overuse in the form of stopping mechanisms. Pop-up usage warnings once healthy limits are approached or exceeded are reportedly supported by 71% of young people in the UK. Services like unGlue allow parents to place filters on content types that their children are exposed to, as well as time limits on usage across apps.

All of these could be transferred to immersive technologies, and are complementary fixes to actual regulation, such as South Korea’s Shutdown Law. This prevents children under the age of 16 from playing computer games between midnight and 6am. The policy is enforceable because it ties personal details – including date of birth – to a citizen’s resident registration number, which is required to create accounts for online services. These solutions are not infallible: one could easily imagine an enterprising child might ‘borrow’ an adult’s device after-hours to find a workaround to the restrictions. Further study is certainly needed, but we believe that long-term solutions may lie in better design.

Have you read?

• The true power of immersive virtual reality
• Augmented Reality is already changing the way we work. Here's the proof
• The next stage of virtual reality is coming, and it's all in your mind

Rethinking success metrics for digital technology

As businesses develop applications using immersive technologies, they should transition from using metrics that measure just the amount of user engagement to metrics that also take into account user satisfaction, fulfilment and enhancement of well-being. Alternative metrics could include a net promoter score for software, which would indicate how strongly users – or perhaps even regulators – recommend the service to their friends based on their level of fulfilment or satisfaction with a service.

The real challenge, however, is to find measures that align with business policy and user objectives. As Tristan Harris, Founder of Time Well Spent argues: “We have to come face-to-face with the current misalignment so we can start to generate solutions.” There are instances where improvements to user experience go hand-in-hand with business opportunities. Subscription-based services are one such example: YouTube Red will eliminate advertisements for paying users, as does Spotify Premium. These are examples where users can pay to enjoy advertising-free experiences and which do not come at the cost to the content developers since they will receive revenue in the form of paid subscriptions.

More work remains if immersive technologies are to enable happier, more fulfilling interactions with content and media. This will largely depend on designing technology that puts the user at the centre of its value proposition.

This is part of a series of articles related to the disruptive effects of several technologies (virtual/augmented reality, artificial intelligence and blockchain) on the creative economy.