rightweb | Last August, shortly after John Kelly replaced Reince Priebus as
White House chief of staff and Steve Bannon was fired as the president’s
chief strategist, John Bolton complained that he could no longer get a meeting with Donald Trump.
Just three months later, however, on the eve of Trump’s belligerent
address to the United Nations, Bolton was once again in direct contact
with the president. How did this turnabout take place? The reconnection
was reportedly arranged by none other than Sheldon Adelson, the Trump campaign’s biggest donor.
Politico reported
that the most threatening line in Trump’s UN speech—that he would
cancel Washington’s participation in the Iran nuclear deal if Congress
and U.S. allies did not bend to his efforts to effectively renegotiate
it—came directly from Bolton and wasn’t in the original marks prepared
by Trump’s staff.
The line was added to Trump’s speech after Bolton,
despite Kelly’s recent edict [restricting Bolton’s access to Trump],
reached the president by phone on Thursday afternoon from Las Vegas,
where Bolton was visiting with Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson.
Bolton urged Trump to include a line in his remarks noting that he
reserved the right to scrap the agreement entirely, according to two
sources familiar with the conversation.
Some analysts have suggested that Bolton, an anti-Iran uber-hawk, has
the visit to Washington of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to
thank for his imminent elevation. But Adelson, a huge supporter of
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, likely played a critical role
in Bolton’s ascendancy.
Aghdam, a 39-year-old Southern California resident,
worked for her father’s electrical company and at one time operated a
business called Peace Thunder, NBC News reports. She was listed on Facebook as an artist, NBC adds.
Aghdam, who was found dead by law enforcement
officials Tuesday, wore glasses and a scarf and carried a “big huge
pistol,” according to a YouTube employee who witnessed the incident from
a second-floor window.
San Bruno police said they found Aghdam, who died of
what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, at 12:53 p.m. in a
courtyard area inside the YouTube complex.
Little is known about her motive, according to law enforcement officials. San Bruno police said there is no evidence that the shooter was previously acquainted with any of the victims.
Aghdam was an animal rights activist, according to
the Associated Press, who participated in a 2009 protest with the People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in Oceanside, Calif.
She was also a prolific YouTube user, posting videos
on a range of topics from multiple accounts, according to a report by
NBC’s Bay Area Investigative Unit. In a video posted in January, Aghdam
alleged that the company “discriminated and filtered” her videos to
reduce their number of views; she also published rants attacking the
company on her personal website. A photo posted on her Facebook page
last February also shows her standing on a street corner with a sign
that reads “YouTube Dictatorship” and “Hidden policy: Promote stupidity
discrimination, suppression of truth,” NBC News reports.
Aghdam’s father, Ismail Aghdam, said that he told police
earlier this week that Nasim was “angry” at YouTube and “hated” the
company. Aghdam had reported his daughter missing on Monday, and early
Tuesday morning was informed that she had been found sleeping in her car
in Mountain View, about an hour from YouTube’s San Bruno headquarters.
Ismail said he warned the police that she might be headed toward
YouTube.
truthdig | Those who challenge the dominant corporate narrative already struggle
on the margins of the media landscape. The handful of independent
websites and news outlets, including this one, and a few foreign-run
networks such as Al-Jazeera and RT America, on which I host a show, “On Contact,”
are the few platforms left that examine corporate power and empire, the
curtailment of our civil liberties, lethal police violence and the
ecocide carried out by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture
industries, as well as cover the war crimes committed by Israel and the
U.S. military in the Middle East. Shutting down these venues would
ensure that the critics who speak through them, and oppressed peoples
such as the Palestinians, have no voice left.
I witnessed and was
at times the victim of black propaganda campaigns when I was a foreign
correspondent. False accusations are made anonymously and then amplified
by a compliant press. The anonymous site PropOrNot, replicating this
tactic, in 2016 published a blacklist of 199 sites that it alleged, with
no evidence, “reliably echo Russian propaganda.” More than half of
those sites were far-right, conspiracy-driven ones. But about 20 of the
sites were progressive, anti-war and left-wing. They included AlterNet,
Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked Capitalism, Truthdig,
Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web Site. PropOrNot
charged that these sites disseminated “fake news” on behalf of Russia,
and the allegations became front-page news in The Washington Post in a
story headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’
during the election, experts say.” Washington Post reporter Craig
Timberg wrote in that article that the goal of “a sophisticated Russian
propaganda effort,” according to “independent researchers who have
tracked the operation,” was “punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping
Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy.”
To
date, no one has exposed who operates PropOrNot or who is behind the
website. But the damage done by this black propaganda campaign and the
subsequent announcement by Google and other organizations such as
Facebook last April that they had put in filters to elevate “more
authoritative content” and marginalize “blatantly misleading, low
quality, offensive or downright false information” have steadily
diverted readers away from some sites. The Marxist World Socialist Web Site,
for example, has seen its traffic decline by 75 percent. AlterNet’s
search traffic is down 71 percent, Consortium News is down 72 percent,
and Global Research and Truthdig have seen declines. And the situation
appears to be growing worse as the algorithms are refined.
Jeff
Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post and the founder and CEO of
Amazon, has, like Google and some other major Silicon Valley
corporations, close ties with the federal security and surveillance
apparatus. Bezos has a $600 million contract with the CIA. The lines
separating technology-based entities such as Google and Amazon and the
government’s security and surveillance apparatus are often nonexistent.
The goal of corporations such as Google and Facebook is profit, not the
dissemination of truth. And when truth gets in the way of profit, truth
is sacrificed.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Agence France-Presse and CNN have all
imposed or benefited from the algorithms or filters—overseen by human
“evaluators.” When an internet user types a word in a Google search it
is called an “impression” by the industry. These impressions direct the
persons making the searches to websites that use the words or address
the issues associated with them. Before the algorithms were put in place
last April, searches for terms such as “imperialism” or “inequality”
directed internet users mostly to left-wing, progressive and anti-war
sites. Now they are directed primarily to mainstream sites such as The
Washington Post. If you type in “World Socialist Web Site,” which has
been hit especially hard by the algorithms, you will be directed to the
site—but you have to ask for it by name. Searches for associated words
such as “socialist” or “socialism” are unlikely to bring up a list in
which the World Socialist Web Site appears near the top.
There are
10,000 “evaluators” at Google, many of them former employees at
counterterrorism agencies, who determine the “quality” and veracity of
websites. They have downgraded sites such as Truthdig, and with the
abolition of net neutrality can further isolate those sites on the
internet. The news organizations and corporations imposing and
benefiting from this censorship have strong links to the corporate
establishment and the Democratic Party. They do not question corporate
capitalism, American imperialism or rising social inequality.
NYTimes | “There isn’t anybody here who is paid by Amazon,” he said. “Not one penny.”
(Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman, declined to comment or to provide an interview with Mr. Bezos.)
Mr. Bezos holds conference calls with The Post’s leadership every other week to discuss the paper’s business strategy but has no involvement in its news coverage, Mr. Baron said. During his occasional appearances at The Post’s building, Mr. Bezos sometimes stops by a news meeting “just to thank everybody,” Mr. Baron said.
“I can’t say more emphatically he’s never suggested a story to anybody here, he’s never critiqued a story, he’s never suppressed a story,” the editor said.
“Frankly, in a newsroom of 800 journalists, if that had occurred, I guarantee you, you would have heard about it,” he added. “Newsrooms tend not to like those kinds of interventions, particularly a newsroom that’s as proud as The Washington Post.
“If he had been involved in our news coverage, you can be sure that you would have heard about it by now,” Mr. Baron added. “It hasn’t happened. Period.”
Mr. Bezos’ hands-off approach extends to The Post’s coverage of Amazon. During a town hall-style meeting held before his deal for The Post was completed, he told the paper’s employees that they should cover him as they would any other business executive and treat Amazon no differently from any other company, Mr. Baron said.
“He’s reiterated that to me any number of times,” he said. “He doesn’t get involved. I’ve never heard from him on any story that we’ve written about Amazon, and we’ve had any number of them that are critical.”
“So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased,” the president tweeted, responding to negative reports over the weekend about the Sinclair Broadcast Group. “Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”
NYTimes | On local news stations across the United States last month, dozens of anchors gave the same speech to their combined millions of viewers.
It included a warning about fake news, a promise to report fairly and accurately and a request that viewers go to the station’s website and comment “if you believe our coverage is unfair.
The script came from Sinclair Broadcast Group, the country’s largest broadcaster, which owns or operates 193 television stations. The company is seeking a $3.9 billion deal to buy Tribune Media, a move that’s being held up by regulators over antitrust concerns.
Last week, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a copy of the speech and reported that employees at a local news station there, KOMO, were unhappy about the script. CNN reported on it on March 7 and said Scott Livingston, the senior vice president of news for Sinclair, had read almost the exact same speech for a segment that was distributed to outlets a year ago.
Mr. Burke’s video — along with a similar one created by ThinkProgress, the left-leaning news outlet — spread quickly on social media over the weekend, leading to prominent criticism of Sinclair. Peter Chernin, a media investor and longtime president of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, called it “insidious.” David E. Price, a Democratic North Carolina congressman, called the video “pro-Trump propaganda” on Monday.
Piggybacking on the attention, House Democrats resurfaced a letter, dated March 22 and signed by 38 lawmakers, that called for the Tribune merger to be rejected.
President Trump responded to scrutiny of the broadcaster on Monday in a tweet.
“So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased,” he said.
It took a minute to figure out that TOR is the antithesis of what it claims to be - and is in fact nothing other than a surveillance honeypot. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me....,
anonhq | To some Bitcoin is the Free Market’s answer to crony capitalism, communism, the endless inflation of fiat currencies and all that is wrong with the world. To others, it is a worthless digital creation – numbers on a screen with no backing, a bubble with no value beyond what arbitrarily imagined number a savvy Crypto “Expert” would tell you.
In between, you have those that view Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme – but one worth cashing in on while the getting is good; those who use it as a deflationary store of wealth, akin to a prized Picasso but more liquid; and those who see the rise of other cryptos that could do what Bitcoin does – but better, and dethrone Bitcoin with a one true cryptocurrency to break the banks.
There is one last school of thought, the conspiracy theorist of conspiracy theories so to speak; What if Bitcoin is, in fact, a creation of the NSA?
It would seem that Satoshi cannot claim credit for being the first to come up with the idea; a document titled “How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash” was written in 1997 and authored by none other than Laurie Law, Susan Sabett and Jerry Solinas of the “National Security Agency Office of Information Security Research and Technology”.
Satoshi mined the genesis block of the bitcoin blockchain in January 2009, some 12 years after the paper was written. Interestingly, Tatsuaki Okamoto is cited frequently in the paper, though beyond the apparent similarity to Satoshi Nakamoto it probably doesn’t mean anything.
The paper describes signature authentication techniques, methods to prevent the counterfeiting of cryptocurrencies via transaction authentication, and mentions terminology common to current cryptocurrencies such as “tokens”, “coins”, “Secure Hashing” and “digital signatures” years before Bitcoin.
It should be noted that the paper appears to be directed towards banks, and that it does not include mining or a p2p blockchain authentication system, but given the decade between conceptualization and implementation these features may have evolved. If nothing else Satoshi must have gotten some inspiration from the paper.
The NSA also invented the hash function that Bitcoin is predicated on, SHA-256. Thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaks, we also know that the NSA has inserted backdoors into its encryption standards before. With so many poring over the open-source code though, it is unknown if the NSA could really get away with a backdoor.If the NSA came up with the idea years before Satoshi did, and Bitcoin is dependent on an NSA hash, the theory goes that at the very least the NSA has some stake/ control over/ ulterior motive regarding Bitcoin. On the other hand, the US government created TOR and the Internet; if the NSA had a finger in its creation, perhaps this is another experiment that “got away” from the government…
NYTimes | Worried about someone hacking the next election? Bothered by the way Facebook and Equifax coughed up your personal information?
The technology industry has an answer called the blockchain — even for the problems the industry helped to create.
The first blockchain was created in 2009 as a new kind of database for the virtual currency Bitcoin, where all transactions could be stored without any banks or governments involved.
Now, countless entrepreneurs, companies and governments are looking to use similar databases — often independent of Bitcoin — to solve some of the most intractable issues facing society.
“People feel the need to move away from something like Facebook and toward something that allows them to have ownership of their own data,” said Ryan Shea, a co-founder of Blockstack, a New York company working with blockchain technology.
The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has said the blockchain could help reduce the big internet companies’ influence and return the web to his original vision. But he has also warned that it could come with some of the same problems as the web.
Blockchain allows information to be stored and exchanged by a network of computers without any central authority. In theory, this egalitarian arrangement also makes it harder for data to be altered or hacked.
Investors, for one, see potential. While the price of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies have plummeted this year, investment in other blockchain projects has remained strong. In the first three months of 2018, venture capitalists put half a billion dollars into 75 blockchain projects, more than double what they raised in the last quarter of 2017, according to data from Pitchbook.
Most of the projects have not gotten beyond pilot testing, and many are aimed at transforming mundane corporate tasks like financial trading and accounting. But some experiments promise to transform fundamental things, like the way we vote and the way we interact online.
“There is just so much it can do,” said Bradley Tusk, a former campaign manager for Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, who has recently thrown his weight behind several blockchain projects. “I love the fact that you can transmit data, information and choices in a way that is really hard to hack — really hard to disrupt and that can be really efficient.”
Mr. Tusk, the founder of Tusk Strategies, is an investor in some large virtual currency companies. He has also supported efforts aimed at getting governments to move voting online to blockchain-based systems. Mr. Tusk argues that blockchains could make reliable online voting possible because the votes could be recorded in a tamper-proof way.
“Everything is moving toward people saying, ‘I want all the benefits of the internet, but I want to protect my privacy and my security,’” he said. “The only thing I know that can reconcile those things is the blockchain.”
gizmodo | City officials in Atlanta, Georgia are still trying to recover 10
days after a ransomware attack on municipal computer systems hit at
least five out of 13 departments, knocking out some city services and forcing others to revert to paper records.
Per Reuters,
over a week has passed since the SamSam ransomware began spreading
throughout city computer systems, with a $51,000 ransom payment demanded
by the hackers going unpaid. While the recovery began last week,
large stretches of computer systems remain encrypted by the attackers.
Three city council members were sharing a single old laptop over the
weekend as they tried to reconstruct records, with councilman Howard
Shook telling the news agency the situation was “extraordinarily
frustrating.”
According
to the Reuters report, numerous local officials have found their file
systems corrupted, with tags like “weapologize” and “imsorry” appended
to document titles. Though the ransomware was not able to corrupt
everything—just eight out of 18 computers in the auditors’ office were
affected, for example—it sounds like much of the information may be
unrecoverable:
“Everything on my hard drive is gone,” City Auditor Amanda Noble said in her office housed in Atlanta City Hall’s ornate tower.
City
officials have not disclosed the extent to which servers for backing up
information on PCs were corrupted or what kind of information they
think is unrecoverable without paying the ransom.
...
Atlanta
police returned to taking written case notes and have lost access to
some investigative databases, department spokesman Carlos Campos told
Reuters. He declined to discuss the contents of the affected files.
The
SamSam ransomware is particularly advanced and “infiltrates by
exploiting vulnerabilities or guessing weak passwords in a target’s
public-facing systems,” then uses techniques like the Mimikatz password
recovery tool to seize control of the rest of a network, according to Wired.
That means attackers don’t need to launch social engineering attacks or
trick users into running malware for it to spread, and SamSam can
easily spread via “remote desktop protocols, Java-based web servers,
File Transfer Protocol servers, and other public network components.”
The city was just beginning to implement some of the recommendations of a cybersecurity audit released in January
that found “the large number of severe and critical vulnerabilities
identified has existed for so long the organizations responsible have
essentially become complacent and no longer take action,” per CBS. The
audit said that “departments tasked with dealing with the thousands of
vulnerabilities do not have enough time or tools to properly analyze and
treat the systems,” leading to a “significant level of preventable risk
exposure to the city.”
“Ransomware is dumb,” Parameter Security founder Dave Chronister told Wired.
“Even a sophisticated version like this has to rely on automation to
work. Ransomware relies on someone not implementing basic security
tenets... Not to be harsh, but looking at this their security strategy
must be pretty bad.”
TechCrunch | There’s a new playbook for oppression today. Instead of outright
totalitarian rule, you construct the appearance of democracy, while
controlling it by subtly — in some cases perhaps not even consciously —
restricting the options available to individual voters; by controlling a tiered system of “representative” electors
behind the scenes; or by simply outright stuffing the ballot box.
(There can be much sound and fury about the distinctions between the
available candidates, but if you’ve done your job correctly, and made
democracy as awful as possible, in general only establishment candidates
or easily manipulated narcissists will ever be nominated.)
Then
you give your people enough freedom to thrive; to create, to disrupt, to
innovate. And you siphon as much as you can of that created wealth.
You
don’t give them enough to actually seriously challenge the
establishment, of course; to, say, remake the system so that the
siphoned wealth goes to its poor and oppressed people instead of its
silent, invisible masters. That is a red line that must not be crossed.
But the beauties of this system — call it parasitism — is that it is
very rare to encounter a challenger who cannot be co-opted. It
vampire-squids enough wealth for its upper-tier members and their
families to live lives of extraordinary, gilded luxury, without the
unpleasant threat of being assassinated or deposed that comes with
outright fascism or totalitarianism.
These parasitic systems
couldn’t exist without today’s technology. They are mostly networked,
not hierarchical. They watch, they adapt, and they distract. They
construct shell corporations that shuttle gobs of money around the globe
like 747s. And they very rarely need to resort to violence, because,
like the Borg, and like capitalism itself — from which it is distinct,
although there are places where it has been so successful that people
rarely recognize any difference — parasitism usually has the capacity to
absorb all those who confront it.
I’m not saying fascism and
totalitarianism are things we should be completely unworried about.
They’re out there, they’re real, and they’re terrifying. But there are
playbooks for how to fight them. Parasitism, though, seems almost
unstoppable. Presumably the solution is a technological one; let’s hope
it’s discovered soon.
theatlantic | The reality, however, is that the government is uniquely responsible for creating slums, which King viewed as “a system of internal colonialism not unlike the exploitation of the Congo by Belgium.” In the 1930s, the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation introduced the private-sector to redlining when it produced color-coded maps of urban areas; black neighborhoods were marked in red, which indicated that they were the riskiest areas to insure mortgages. Consequently, white residents received virtually all loans from the Federal Housing Administration between 1934 and 1962. “But for this kind of government policy, we would not have the segregated patterns that we have today,” Rothstein said.
The FHA was so determined to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods that it provided methods for doing so in its underwriting manual, which stated that “natural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences … [which] includes prevention of the infiltration of business and industrial uses, lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.” As Rothstein writes in his book, the FHA favored areas that built highways through and between neighborhoods to keep them separated on the basis of race. In one instance, the FHA refused to guarantee loans for homes in a Detroit development adjacent to a black neighborhood unless the developer built a wall to keep the black neighbors out. “The reason federal agencies are on the hook in the first place is that they created the segregated and unequal society that we have today,” Katherine O’Regan, a former HUD official, said.
As Rothstein told WHYY’s Terry Gross, the FHA rationalized their segregation tactics on the faulty premise that home values would depreciate if African Americans moved into—or near—white neighborhoods. But this was not the case. “The reality is that when African Americans moved into white neighborhoods, the property values went up simply because African Americans were willing to pay more for housing than whites since their supply was so restricted,” Rothstein told me. In fact, property values only declined when real-estate agents scared homeowners into selling their properties at a low price by telling them that black and brown residents were moving into their neighborhood—a practice known as blockbusting. (The realtors would then proceed to resell those homes to African Americans at higher prices.)
Part of the reason that fair and open housing, of all of King’s legacies, has had such difficulty gaining traction is that homeowners are particularly sensitive about losing control of their neighborhoods. “A lot of civil rights was about making the South behave and taking the teeth from George Wallace,” Walter Mondale, who co-authored the Fair Housing Act, said in an interview for ProPublica. “This came right to the neighborhoods across the country. This was civil rights getting personal.”
Today, many homeowners still operate under the same unfounded notion that the FHA used to promote its racist housing policies. “I think that there is a perception that people of color are inferior neighbors, and that they bring down the value of a neighborhood,” said Cedric M. Powell, a law professor at the University of Louisville. Throughout the nation’s history, there has been a persisting racist notion that blackness cheapens the value of society, while only whiteness can enrich it. That begins to explain why white residents continue to resist integration; the mere perception of black residents in a neighborhood stirs worry of declining housing prices. It also explains why establishments don’t want black customers; why Hollywood executives don’t want black actors; why white voters don’t want black representatives; and why the president wants immigrants from Norway instead of Haiti. In that sense, the struggle for fair housing is no different than any other struggle in America: It poses a threat to white wealth, a threat of a more equal society.
WaPo | The scenario in “Ready Player One” seems extreme,
but it’s not so different from the fundamental dynamics at work between
fans and corporations in the entertainment industry today. Wade and his
friends, including Aech (Lena Waithe), Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Sho
(Philip Zhao) and Daito (Win Morisaki), don’t love the Oasis not because
it represents some ideal of independent artistry — in fact, it’s
flooded with licensed versions of video game, superhero and anime
characters. They love it because the game gives them the opportunity to
live inside their fantasies, whether that means dressing in Buckaroo
Banzai’s suit to go to a club or wandering around the Overlook Hotel
from “The Shining.” And Sorrento and his fellow IOI honchos differ from
contemporary entertainment executives mostly in that they aren’t very
good at disguising their eagerness to monetize fans’ passions.
Though
the conflict between Wade and Sorrento is meant to seem epic, there’s
something strangely small-scale about the core of their disagreement. As
BuzzFeed critic Alison Willmore put it on Twitter,
“Ready Player One” is “a super dark story about how the world is a
disaster but all its main character cares about is keeping ads out of
his [massively multiplayer online role-playing game].” It’s as if “Ready
Player One” were an epic movie about whether it’s okay for the
streaming service Hulu to charge a few extra dollars a month to let
viewers skip the 30-second spots that air a few times per episode.
While
Cline’s novel and Spielberg’s adaptation both suggest that it’s
probably good for people to spend some time outside of the Oasis
developing their real-world relationships, neither is capable of
grappling with the idea that, whoever owns it, preserving the Oasis
means preserving the status quo.
If IOI wins
control of the environment, spending time there may be more expensive
and irritating, given the ad placements IOI hopes to sell. If Wade and
his diverse group of friends win control of the Oasis, they intend to
preserve it as a purer experience and run it without the abuses
routinely practiced by IOI, including encouraging people to rack up debt
they can’t pay off, purchasing those debts and moving the debtors into
IOI labor camps.
But as bad as debt peonage is,
the biggest problem with the world of “Ready Player One” isn’t that IOI
is press-ganging people into spending their time in the Oasis. It’s that
reality is such a hopeless mess that everyone would rather escape it.
Closing the Oasis for a couple of days to force people to spend time
with their actual friends and family doesn’t actually make a country
defined by savage economic inequality, environmental degradation and
social unrest a more appealing place to live. If Wade and his friends
make the Oasis a more appealing place to spend time, saving it from
becoming an ad-cluttered wasteland, they may make escape even more
enticing, sapping energy from making the world habitable and enjoyable
again. Tweaking the exact organic composition of a drug doesn’t make it
something other than a narcotic.
(It’s
also true that “Ready Player One” quietly rebukes the idea that giving
women and people of color the opportunity to tell their own stories
would automatically result in very different stories getting told.
Aech’s race and gender don’t mean that she plays as a version of Audre
Lorde; rather, her avatar is a formidable, orc-like brawler and
engineer, and Wade spends much of the movie assuming she’s a man.
Art3mis isn’t just a woman; her avatar is the Oasis’s version of a Cool
Girl, an expert gamer who looks equally good in leather motorcycle gear
or a ballgown, drives a motorcycle and is lethal with a gun.)
On
a smaller scale, this dynamic is also at play in conversations about
the contemporary American entertainment industry. None of this is to say
that fighting to get power and opportunities in Hollywood for women,
people of color, people with disabilities and members of other
underrepresented communities is a worthless task. Money is valuable.
Chances to decide who gets employed on a project are valuable. The
ability to tell your story is valuable. But it’s possible to acknowledge
all of this and to recognize that putting Kathleen Kennedy in charge of
Lucasfilm or tapping Ava DuVernay to direct a $100 million adaptation
of “A Wrinkle in Time” is proof that the corporate entertainment
industry is very good at adapting just enough to endure in its present
form. Developments such as these are preemptive reforms made by savvy
companies aimed at heading off a revolt, not proof that some revolution
is underway in Hollywood, much less the wider world.
CounterPunch | Whereas the fictional rulers of Wakanda preserve their wealth by
pretending to be poor, using advanced to technology to mask their vast
fortune, the real Studio City tycoons behind the film have conjured
their own bit of subterfuge in order to receive corporate handouts.
Hence the main reason why the principal shooting for Black Panther took
place in Atlanta, Georgia: tax breaks. Over the last decade, in fact,
Georgia has become known to producers as the Hollywood of the South
thanks to the state government doling out more than $1 billion in tax
credits to industry behemoths like Disney and Sony. In return Georgia
has become the leading runaway-production site for Hollywood films,
despite few if any economic benefits.
Of course proponents say that hundreds of millions given to Hollywood
studios will eventually trickle down to the population, but there’s no
way of knowing since the state hasn’t developed a mechanism for
evaluating its impact. Furthermore, because these incentives typically
go to productions that shoot on-location, they require little in the
way of long-term investment and produce mostly temporary employment.
Even when they do
beget jobs, they’re not great: after ten years of tax subsidies, for
example, Georgia has added only 4,209 film jobs, just under 2 percent of
the industry total, and those jobs don’t pay well: on average
film-industry workers in Georgia are the lowest waged.
This is why Vicki Mayer and Tanya Goldman (following Thomas Guback) call such movie production incentives “welfare for the wealthy:”
because they function “like every other bloated financial system in the
U.S., moving capital between elites while workers live with exaggerated
job insecurity, declining market value, and uncertain futures that make
up the rest of the workforce.”
Of course revenue lost from tax credits means lower government
spending in other areas like education. And indeed since 2003, Georgia
has ranked among the nation’s austerity leaders in cuts to public school
funding. As of the 2018 state budget plan, the state’s schools will
have been slashed by a cumulative total of $9.2 billion. Those cuts in turn play out in places like Atlanta, a city that currently ranks first in the US for income inequality, and where 80 percent of black school students live in areas of high poverty and 75 percent
qualify for meal assistance. Not coincidentally, it’s also a place
where local rap stars like T.I.—“The King of the South”—have teamed up
with corporate sponsors like Walmart to make sure those same kids who
can’t eat still get to go see Black Panther.
Is it any wonder, then, why this city, located in the same state
which has lost millions in tax revenues to one the most profitable
industries in the US, is now obliged to its pop culture “royalty” for
taking its kids to the movies?
Certainly this scenario is not out of step with a blockbuster about
monarchical superheroes doing good under the specious cloak of poverty.
Nor is it out of step with a Hollywood system that delivers such
high-priced spectacles on the basis of an overall political economy of
regressive wealth redistribution, neoliberal governance and precarious
labor.
That a billion dollar industry might capitalize on such conditions and still be considered a champion
of black empowerment is telling. Indeed it’s agreeable with a
hegemonic model of identitarian wokeness that considers films about
mega-rich superheroes to be progressive insofar as those superheroes
(and the stars that play them) aren’t all white and male. The fact that
those same heroes emerge at a time when intensifying economic
inequality is acutely affecting black communities is enough to recall
Theodor Adorno’s dictum about the false promises
of the Culture Industry: wherein “the idea of ‘exploiting’ the given
technical possibilities, of fully utilizing the capacities for aesthetic
mass consumption, is part of an economic system which refuses to
utilize those same capacities when it is a question of abolishing
hunger.”
Obviously, that’s not the way the film’s promoters would have it. For
them, Black Panther affords “positive images” that take the form of
African nobility—something most welcome at time of Trump and other
noxious emitters of anti-black bigotry. But to classify such images as racial uplift
is to confuse the symbolic value of highborn black superheroes with the
ostensible communities they represent. Indeed it clouds the way we
might think about the inequalities that prevent such communities from
seeing the film in the first place. As Joseph told
the Wall Street Journal in the successful wake of
#BlackPantherChallenge: “I understand that there are other struggles
that these children have, whether housing, food or education. [But] it’s
not just any movie. It’s a symbol that you can transcend in this
turbulent era.” By this logic, which assumes
“representation and inclusion are essential to creating dreams for
yourself,” the main thing poor black kids need is inspiration, not
money.
Guardian | RuPaul likes to speak in deeply heartfelt but somewhat opaque
rhetorical flourishes, so I ask if he means that Drag Race has a
political message about humanity.
“Yes! It doesn’t have a political agenda in terms of policies in
Washington. But it has a position on identity, which is really the most
political you can get. It has politics at its core, because it deals
with: how do you see yourself on this planet? That’s highly political.
It’s about recognising that you are God dressing up in humanity, and you
could do whatever you want. That’s what us little boys who were
maligned and who were ostracised figured out. It’s a totem, a constant
touchstone to say, ‘Don’t take any of this shit seriously.’ It’s a big
f-you. So the idea of sticking to one identity – it’s like I don’t care,
I’m a shapeshifter, I’m going to fly around and use all the colours, and not brand myself with just one colour.”
Pinning him down on precisely what all of this means can be tricky,
in part I think because he doesn’t want to offend anyone by explicitly
acknowledging the contradiction between his playfully elastic
sensibility and the militant earnestness of the transgender movement.
The two couldn’t be further apart, I suggest.
“Ye-es, that’s always been the dichotomy of the trans movement versus
the drag movement, you know,” he agrees carefully. “I liken it to
having a currency of money, say English pounds as opposed to American
dollars. I think identities are like value systems or currencies;
there’s not just one. Understand the value of different currencies, and
what you could do with them. That’s the place you want to be.” But to a
transgender woman it’s critically important that the world recognises
her fixed identity as a female. RuPaul nods uneasily. “That’s right,
that’s right.”
What I can’t understand is how transgender women can enter a drag
contest. Last year RuPaul’s Drag Race was widely acclaimed for featuring
its first openly transgender contestant, called Peppermint – but if
transgender women must be identified as female, how can they also be
“men dressing up as women”?
“Well, I don’t like to call drag ‘wearing women’s clothes’. If you
look around this room,” and he gestures around the hotel lobby, “she’s
wearing a shirt with jeans, that one’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt,
right? So women don’t really dress like us. We are wearing clothes that
are hyperfeminine, that represent our culture’s synthetic idea of
femininity.”
In the subculture of drag you do occasionally find what are known as
“bio queens” – biological women who mimic the exaggerated femininity of
drag. Would RuPaul allow a biological woman to compete on the show? He
hesitates. “Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once
it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a
big f-you to male-dominated culture. So for men to do it, it’s really
punk rock, because it’s a real rejection of masculinity.”
So how can a transgender woman be a drag queen? “Mmmm. It’s an
interesting area. Peppermint didn’t get breast implants until after she
left our show; she was identifying as a woman, but she hadn’t really
transitioned.” Would he accept a contestant who had? He hesitates again.
“Probably not. You can identify as a woman and say you’re
transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body. It
takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we’re
doing. We’ve had some girls who’ve had some injections in the face and
maybe a little bit in the butt here and there, but they haven’t
transitioned.”
There’s something very touching about RuPaul’s concern to stay
abreast of subcultural developments and find a way to embrace even those
he finds confronting. “There are certain words,” for example, “that the
kids would use, that I’d be like, ‘Wait a minute, hold up now.’ But
I’ve had to accept it because I understand where it comes from.” Such
as? “Well, one of the things that the kids do now is they’ll say,
referring to another drag queen, ‘Oh that bitch is cunt, she is pure
cunt’, which means she is serving realness,” by which he means
presenting herself as realistic or honest. “They say it knowing it’s
shocking, knowing it’s taboo, and it’s the same way that black people
use the N-word.”
NewYorker | The sixty-eight-year-old style legend Lana Turner doesn’t own a cell
phone. If you wish to reach her at her home, in Hamilton Heights, you
must call in the morning, when she is near her landline. For the rest of
the day she is out and about, swanning around town in one of the five
hundred vintage hats that she keeps in neatly stacked towers, filling
her foyer and library.
It was when Turner was out, moving through the city, that the
photographer Dario Calmese first saw her—they were both at church, on a
Sunday. Calmese, whose father was a pastor, was immediately drawn to
Turner’s radiant self-presentation, spotting her bright organza gown and
jaunty felted chapeau across the pews of Abyssinian Baptist. At the
time, Calmese was a graduate student at the School of Visual Arts and
thought he might ask to photograph Turner’s hats for a class project.
Instead, once the two met inside her brownstone, which is a living
museum to her sartorial collection—she keeps her gowns and gloves
encoffined in velvety tissue paper, alongside notes to herself about
where she was, and who she was, when she procured each item—Calmese knew
immediately that it was Turner who should be his main subject. It was
only when she stepped into a strapless, pleated silk Mignon dress or a
pastel-pink suit with black velvet buttons by Cosi Belle that the items
in her wardrobe began to sing and reveal their stories.
Turner, who was born at Women’s Hospital, on West 110th Street, never
formally worked in fashion, but said in one interview that she learned
to dress by taking after her parents, who “worked as a chauffeur and a
chambermaid, but by evening they would put on those formal clothes,
gowns, and gloves, and, like so many other people in Harlem, would go
out and socialize and define themselves by who they really were.” By
day, Turner worked in real estate and in the art world, where she
defined herself by her ornate attire, never leaving her apartment
without a statement toque. People took notice—she was a favorite muse of
the late street-fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, and the chef Marcus Samuelsson put several of Turner’s hats on display at his Harlem
restaurant Red Rooster, in 2016.
As Calmese began to style Turner for these photographs, he realized that
they were collaboratively creating a work about “Sunday presentation,”
or about the ways in which churchgoers—particularly black women
churchgoers—consistently infuse glamour and imagination into the realm
of faith. As Andre Leon Talley, the editor-at-large for Vogue, writes
in the catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of Calmese’s photos this
month, at the Projects + Gallery, in St. Louis, Calmese’s photos capture
how the black woman “who intersects her faith, her religion, and her
personal style” is “reborn every single Sunday through the rituals and
universal codes of deportment, carriage, and dress.”
GregPalast | There are two dangers in the media howl over Trump’s computer gurus
Cambridge Analytica, the data-driven psy-ops company founded by
billionaire brown-shirts, the Mercer Family.
The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon,
by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique
"bad apple" of the cyber world.
That's a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic
psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge
Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no
points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.
Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in the film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],
"They know the last time you downloaded porn and
whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted."
Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: "I think that’s creepy."
The Koch operation and its competitor, DataTrust, use your credit
card purchases, cable TV choices and other personal info — which is far
more revealing about your inner life than the BS you put on your
Facebook profile. Don’t trust DataTrust: This cyber-monster is operated
by Karl Rove, "Bush’s Brain," who is principally funded by Paul Singer,
the far Right financier better known as The Vulture.
Way too much is made of the importance of Cambridge Analytica
stealing data through a phony app. If you’ve ever filled out an online
survey, Swedlund told me, they’ve got you — legally.
The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using
computer power to erase the voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters
for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on
last name (Garcia? Not American!!), the list goes on — a far more
effective use of cyberpower than manipulating your behavior through
Facebook ads.
Just last week, Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas and Trump's
chief voting law advisor, defended his method of hunting alleged
"aliens" on voter rolls against a legal challenge by the ALCU. Kobach's
expert, Jessie Richman, uses a computer algorithm that can locate
"foreign" names on voter rolls. He identified, for example, one "Carlos
Murguia" as a potential alien voter. Murguia is a Kansas-born judge who
presides in a nearby courtroom.
It would be a joke, except that Kobach's "alien" hunt has blocked one
in seven new (i.e. young) voters from registering in the state. If
Kobach wins, it will, like his Crosscheck purge program and voter ID
laws, almost certainly spread to other GOP controlled states. This
could ultimately block one million new voters, exactly what Trump had in
mind by pushing the alien-voter hysteria.
kcur | That trial wrapped up Monday. Kobach stands accused of violating federal law by refusing to register more than 30,000 legitimate voters who signed up to vote through driver's license offices.
"It's an election year, your honor, and there's no more time for games," ACLU lawyer Dale Ho told Robinson.
Kobach, who hopes to be Kansas' next governor, asked the
judge not to find him in contempt. The Republican candidate argued he
doesn't control the county officials who carry out logistics such as
sending postcards to voters to let them know where their polling
stations are.
"We ask them to do things. We plead with them to do things," he said. "If the counties did fail, it was their mistake."
That's
one of the things the ACLU said has been a problem: Not all the voters
protected by Robinson's 2016 preliminary injunction have been receiving
the postcards.
Robinson, at times sounding livid with the secretary, gave him a dressing-down.
"These
people are not second-class registered voters," she told him. "You
assured me that they had or they would get the postcards."
She
questioned why Kobach had had no problem getting Kansas' 105 counties to
require birth certificates and similar documents from voters in recent
years, yet denied he could make them mail postcards or comply with other
aspects of her orders.
Kobach is a key backer of President
Donald Trump's claim that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 popular vote
because of millions of illegal ballots. He led Trump's now defunct
election integrity commission.
He urged the Kansas legislature to adopt a law that required would-be
voters, starting in 2013, to show passports, military papers, birth
certificates, or other documents proving they are citizens. That
prompted a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters, saying it decimated
voter registration drives, and by Kansans who say they were blocked from
voting because they lacked such papers.
The ACLU is
representing them. It says Kobach can't enforce his law on voters who
register while getting or renewing their driver's licenses because they
are protected by the 1993 Motor Voter Act.
That law created the
streamlined process for registering to vote at driver's license
offices, where around 40 percent of Kansans put themselves on the voter
rolls.
medium | Renaissance
Technologies (RENTEC) is the second largest hedge fund in the US,
managing $45 billion in assets. It has a reputation for being the most
successful hedge fund in history, for using quantitative trading
strategies designed by top scientists, and for being extremely
secretive.
Publicly
available information on RENTEC implies that the firm is a massive
money laundering tool disguised as a hedge fund, operating on behalf of
Vladimir PUTIN.
BACKGROUND
Money
laundering involves a transaction where illicit money is spent by one
party, producing a seemingly legitimate profit for another party.
Ostensibly the two parties are unrelated, but in reality, both parties
are closely connected.
The money laundering process can be summarized in three steps:
• SOURCE Secure illegally sourced funds.
• TRANSACT Illegal money is used in a transaction, resulting in profits for another party.
• COVER UP The true nature of the transaction is visible only to insiders.
Evidence suggests money laundering via financial markets works like this:
•
SOURCE Criminal organization invests in a hedge fund (Fund A) operating
in a market with a high degree of corruption (for example Russia).
•
TRANSACT On behalf of Fund A, an international bank purchases a
security in the corrupted market. The bank then sells(i.e. shorts) the
same security in a second developed market (for example the UK), and
forwards the proceeds to Fund B. Both funds are owned by the same
criminal organization.
• COVER UP The nature of the transactions are
obfuscated with advanced financial techniques and the inner workings of
the fund are kept secret.
A
significant degree of sophistication is required to launder money in
plain sight via financial markets. Due to this sophistication, it’s
unlikely direct evidence will come to light without access to internal
records. However, by using other cases as a guide, the following mosaic of indirect evidence will likely be found:
• SOURCE Key people are connected to criminal organizations via one or more intermediaries.
•
TRANSACT An abnormally high rate of return that allows significant
amounts of money to be laundered in a short amount of time. Evidence of
buying and selling the same securities in different markets.
• COVER UP History of using financial engineering to hide the nature of transactions and a reputation for extreme secrecy.
medium | A
US Army document concedes the real interests driving US military
strategy toward Russia: dominating oil pipeline routes, accessing the
vast natural resources of Central Asia, and enforcing the expansion of
American capitalism worldwide.
The
Russians are coming. They hacked our elections. They are lurking behind
numerous alternative political movements and news outlets. Such is the
overwhelming chorus from traditional reporting on Russia, which sees the
United States as being under threat from fanatical Russian
expansionism — expansionism which has gone so far as to interfere
dramatically in the 2016 Presidential elections.
Russia
is certainly an authoritarian regime with its own regional imperial
ambitions. President Vladimir Putin and his cronies are responsible for
massive deaths and human rights violations against populations at home
and abroad (the latter in war theaters like Syria and elsewhere). Putin
has strengthened a system of oligarchical state-dominated predatory
capitalism which has widened extreme inequality
and concentrated elite wealth. And we will no doubt learn more about
what shenanigans Russia did, or did not, get up to in relation to US
elections.
For the
most part, these are not especially dangerous things to report on from
the comfort of the West. Somewhat lacking from conventional reporting,
on the other hand, is serious reflection on whether US policies toward Russia have contributed directly to the deterioration of US-Russia relations.
While
the bulk of the Western pundit class are busy bravely obsessing over
the innumerable evils of Putin, it turns out that the upper echelons of
the US military are asking some uncomfortable questions about how we got
to where we are.
A study
by the US Army’s Command and General Staff College Press of the
Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth reveals that US strategy toward
Russia has been heavily motivated by the goal of dominating Central
Asian oil and gas resources, and associated pipeline routes.
The remarkable document,
prepared by the US Army’s Culture, Regional Expertise and Language
Management Office (CRELMO), concedes that expansionist NATO policies
played a key role in provoking Russian militarism. It also contemplates
how current US and Russian antagonisms could spark a global nuclear
conflict between the two superpowers.
universal-tao | An introduction to the ancient Kung Fu practice designed to unify physical, mental, and spiritual health:
Describes the unique Iron Shirt air-packing techniques that protect vital organs from injuries
Explains the rooting practice exercises necessary to stabilize and center oneself
Includes guidelines for building an Iron Shirt Chi Kung daily practice
Long before the advent of firearms, Iron Shirt Chi Kung,
a form of Kung Fu, built powerful bodies able to withstand
hand-to-hand combat. Even then, however, martial use was only one
aspect of Iron Shirt Chi Kung, and today its other aspects remain
vitally significant for anyone seeking better health, a sound mind,
and spiritual growth.
In Iron Shirt Chi Kung Master Mantak Chia
introduces this ancient practice that strengthens the internal organs,
establishes roots to the earth’s energy, and unifies physical,
mental, and spiritual health. Through a unique system of breathing
exercises, he demonstrates how to permanently pack concentrated air
into the connective tissues (the fasciae) surrounding vital organs,
making them nearly impervious to injuries--a great benefit to athletes
and other performers. He shows readers how once they root themselves
in the earth they can direct its gravitational and healing power
throughout their bone structure. Additionally, Master Chia presents
postural forms, muscle-tendon meridians, and guidelines for developing
a daily practice routine. After becoming rooted and responsive,
practitioners of Iron Shirt Chi Kung can then focus on higher
spiritual work. Full Text.
DopamineHegemony | The team behind the discovery suggest the compartments may act as “shock absorbers” that protect body tissues from damage.
Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center
medics Dr David Carr-Locke and Dr Petros Benias came across the
interstitium while investigating a patient’s bile duct, searching for
signs of cancer.
They noticed cavities that did not match any previously
known human anatomy, and approached New York University pathologist Dr
Neil Theise to ask for his expertise.
The researchers realised traditional methods for examining
body tissues had missed the interstitium because the “fixing” method for
assembling medical microscope slides involves draining away fluid –
therefore destroying the organ’s structure.
Instead of their true identity as bodywide, fluid-filled
shock absorbers, the squashed cells had been overlooked and considered a
simple layer of connective tissue.
Having arrived at this conclusion, the scientists realised
this structure was found not only in the bile duct, but surrounding many
crucial internal organs.
“This fixation artefact of collapse has made a fluid-filled
tissue type throughout the body appear solid in biopsy slides for
decades, and our results correct for this to expand the anatomy of most
tissues,” said Dr Theise.
Nobody
knew this better than the kings of the ancient world. That’s why they
gave themselves an absolute monopoly on minting moolah.
They
turned shiny metal into coins, paid their soldiers and their soldiers
bought things at local stores.
The king then sent their soldiers to the
merchants with a simple message:
“Pay your taxes in this coin or we’ll kill you.”
That’s
almost the entire history of money in one paragraph. Coercion and
control of the supply with violence, aka the “violence hack.” The one
hack to rule them all.
When
power passed from monarchs to nation-states, distributing power from
one strongman to a small group of strongmen, the power to print money
passed to the state. Anyone who tried to create their own money got
crushed.
The reason is simple:
Centralized
enemies are easy to destroy with a “decapitation attack.” Cut off the
head of the snake and that’s the end of anyone who would dare challenge
the power of the state and its divine right to create coins.
Kings and nation states know the real golden rule: Control the money and you control the world.
And so it’s gone for thousands and thousands of years. The very first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang
(260–210 BC), abolished all other forms of local currency and
introduced a uniform copper coin. That’s been the blueprint ever since.
Eradicate alternative coins, create one coin to rule them all and use
brutality and blood to keep that power at all costs.
In the end, every system is vulnerable to violence.
newstatesman | It’s been said in some more breathless quarters of the internet that
this is the “data breach” that could have “caused Brexit”. Given it was a
US-focused bit of harvesting, that would be the most astonishing piece
of political advertising success in history – especially as among the
big players in the political and broader online advertising world,
Cambridge Analytica are not well regarded: some of the people who are
best at this regard them as little more than “snake oil salesmen”.
One of the key things this kind of data would be useful for – and what
the original academic study it came from looked into – is finding what
Facebook Likes correlate with personality traits, or other Facebook
likes.
The dream scenario for this would be to find that every woman in your
sample who liked “The Republican Party” also liked “Chick-Fil-A”,
“Taylor Swift” and “Nascar racing”. That way, you could target ads at
people who liked the latter three – but not the former – knowing you had
a good chance of reaching people likely to appreciate the message
you’ve got. This is a pretty widely used, but crude, bit of Facebook
advertising.
When people talk about it being possible Cambridge Analytica used this
information to build algorithms which could still be useful after all
the original data was deleted, this is what they’re talking about – and
that’s possible, but missing a much, much bigger bit of the picture.
So, everything’s OK then?
No. Look at it this way: the data we’re all getting excited about here
is a sample of public profile information from 50 million users,
harvested from 270,000 people.
Facebook itself, daily, has access to all of that public information,
and much more, from a sample of two billion people – a sample around
7,000 times larger than the Cambridge Analytica one, and one much deeper
and richer thanks to its real-time updating status.
If Facebook wants to offer sales based on correlations – for
advertisers looking for an audience open to their message, its data
would be infinitely more powerful and useful than a small (in big data
terms) four-year-out-of-date bit of Cambridge Analytica data.
Facebook aren’t anywhere near alone in this world: every day your
personal information is bought and sold, bundled and retraded. You won’t
know the name of the brands, but the actual giants in this company
don’t deal in the tens of millions with data, they deal with hundreds of
millions, or even billions of records – one advert I saw today referred
to a company which claimed real-world identification of 340 million
people.
This is how lots of real advertising targeting works: people can buy up
databases of thousands or millions of users, from all sorts of sources,
and turn them into the ultimate custom audience – match the IDs of
these people and show them this advert. Or they can do the tricks
Cambridge Analytica did, but refined and with much more data behind them
(there’s never been much evidence Cambridge Analytica’s model worked
very well, despite their sales pitch boasts).
The media has a model when reporting on “hacks” or on “breaches” – and
on reporting on when companies in the spotlight have given evidence to
public authorities, and most places have been following those well-trod
routes.
But doing so is like doing forensics on the burning of a twig, in the
middle of a raging forest fire. You might get some answers – but they’ll
do you no good. We need to think bigger.
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