Facebook’s libertarian business model, a threat to democratic movements everywhere

By now it should be obvious that Facebook’s so-called pro-democracy rhetoric has been fundamentally damaging to real democracies and to democratic movements around the world. It has also directly benefited authoritarian regimes, which have relied on the platform to spread untruths in order to control and manipulate their citizens. In the Philippines, as content moderators busily remove posts and pictures according to a bespoke metric developed by “mostly twenty-something-year-olds” in Menlo Park, California, the president, Rodrigo Duterte, is busy on Facebook too, using paid followers to spread falsehoods about his critics and his policies. The journalist Maria Ressa, whose news organization, Rappler, has been keeping a database of the more than twelve million Facebook accounts that have attacked critics of Duterte and have been traced back to the president, has been a target of those accounts as well, at one point getting as manmy as ninety hate messages an hour via Facebook—messages like ‘I want Maria Ressa to be raped repeatedly to death.

In countries like the Philippines and Myanmar, where the vast majority of people access the Internet through Facebook, not using the platform is likely not an option. Indeed, establishing an equivalence between Facebook and the Internet is one of the payoffs of Free Basics, an app Facebook created that provides purposefully limited Internet access—there is no stand-alone e-mail server and Facebook is the only social media platform—to people in developing countries who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to go online.

There was a special futility in my mailing my overseas ballot against Duterte in 2016 when I lived three minutes from Facebook’s East Palo Alto –gentrifying campus. Like even though I could well have been the only voter in the Philippine elections living in this historically disenfranchised American city still suffering from its legacy of redlining, racial segregation, crime, violence, and public neglect, the net contribution of my small neighborhood to my home country 7000 miles away was nothing less than the corrosion of its democracy.

Sophie Smith on ‘academic freedom’ (h/t Junho)

Hatred might not come into it for Finnis, but there is little doubt that hating, disliking, maligning gay people – and creating the conditions under which gay people come to loathe themselves – follow from his proposals

When I read my straight colleagues telling everyone else to give Finnis the ‘respect’ of engaging with his opinions, to ‘make arguments’ in response, I wonder how many times they have had to ‘make the argument’ for their happiness, for their home and their partner, for the life they’ve built with the people they love. At times, I’m not even sure what I am meant to be making the argument for. It does not matter if my gayness was innate or chosen, it is so deeply a part of me, such a root cause of any fulfilment that I feel and any good that I do, that it becomes clear that what really follows from Finnis’s view is that I should stop existing as me. I should retreat into some other Sophie, who lives without the woman who makes her a better teacher, listener, thinker. Finnis thinks my good would be actualised in an unhappy marriage with a man. But almost everything I know about the virtues, I learned from my experiences as a gay woman: courage, constancy, generosity, love. I can engage, certainly, I can make arguments in response, but there is also a sense, at a deeper level, in which there is nothing I can say.

Complements Amia Srinivasan on political epistemology, previoiusly linked here

Vice (2018), dir. Adam McKay

  • Didn’t like it
  • As with McKay’s The Big Short, the movie is defined by its narration, dark comedy, and hyper-stylized editing. I’m all for that and bought in the instant the trailer was released. It just wasn’t done nearly as well in the final product. Definitely some highlights, but if you take on Cheney and the neoconservative world order on this large a platform, you have a responsibility to do so thoughtfully. That’s not a criticism of the stylization or comedic take of the film; I just mean that if you’re going to take on this subject and license the recency, pain, and footage of real events, you should submit a product that demonstrates more effort went into its formulation. Everything about this felt unfinished.
  • For one thing, the two-hour movie couldn’t decide whether it was going to be a biopic or an exploration of the cruelty of the Bush-Cheney Iraq War. The first half runs through Cheney’s life, but he’s already a diabolical opportunist from the outset: early scenes include him unbothered by a colleague’s shattered leg and only choosing to identify as a Republican for its career advantages. This isn’t a character study then; he’s the same person the entire movie, there is no development which makes it hard to make a compelling narrative biopic.
  • Given the above, if the second half of the movie is supposed to be about the cruelty of the Bush-Cheney administration during the Iraq War, why did we spend the entire first half on a mostly-irrelevant overview of Cheney’s career path? The movie’s “Where Are They Now?” epilogue suggests McKay’s movie is ‘about’ the cost of the unnecessary Iraq War; if that’s the takeaway of the movie, then humanizing Cheney and spending time on anything more than the broad strokes of his non-political life story shouldn’t occupy nearly as much time as it did.
  • Also it used its ending monologue to accuse the audience of complicity in Cheney’s empowerment. That would be OK if there were any lead-up to it, but the movie showed he was unelectable whenever he ran at the front of a ticket and entered the private sector because of it. Cheney’s power came from unprecedented diminution of a president behind the scenes and away from public scrutiny. How then is Cheney’s foreign policy the public’s fault? Just felt completely out of left field for that to be presented as the message of the movie.
  • The narration is awful. It’s somehow indignantly sanctimonious and condescending while also not explaining enough what was wrong. It spent a lot of time re-emphasizing the same point about the Unitary Executive Theory—not that complicated a concept from what I can tell—while glossing over the exact details of how it was exploited. We had a very cool montage of Cheney installing his men in different sections of government, but we never actually see how he used the machine he built to create the war he wanted other than when they mention he had a lot of offices. Yes, we see that Halliburton influenced his Iraq policy—very subtle: on election night, Cheney reads his wife a text saying they got “double what we expected” as their exit bonus—but other than a map of oil wells and a spreadsheet of energy companies, we don’t know what the administration actually did for them in Iraq. At one point, Rumsfeld asks Cheney whether they’d be indicted and the audience doesn’t even really know what those hypothetical charges would be.
  • Sam Rockwell in the wake of last year’s Oscar win turns in a bad SNL impression as George W. Bush. Similarly lazy: at some point McKay asked himself how to convey Steve Carrell’s Donald Rumsfeld’s evil and decided the answer was to have someone ask him what his values are and have him laugh and shut the door on them. Come on now, how are you going to spend all that runtime on Cheney’s pre-political years but not spend time on Rumsfeld’s brand of evil?
  • “Vice” as in ‘vice president’ and “Vice” as in ‘bad’ because the vice president was bad
  • Rare instance where the Reddit comments are generally on point
  • All in all, my frustration stems from seeing an argument I sympathize with being made poorly and without focus or sense of story-telling. The movie is a correct opinion argued poorly, which can be more devastating to an argument than a good counterargument.
  • If you wanted a ridiculously over-the-top challenge to the moral corruption of the crony capitalist elite, the WWE did it better:

AFAIK, the first mainstream challenge to Kamala Harris’ prosecution record of this Democratic primary seasond

The conservative obsession with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they’ve been favored by the system. That poses a choice to those whose access to such cloistered communities is unquestioned: They can recognize that others might also succeed given the right circumstances, or they can defend the inequities of that system in an effort to preserve their self-image, attacking the new entrant as a charlatan or the group they belong to as backwards.

Spotify’s new revenue-sharing system is dumb

Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

No relevant link here but the third selection in our college book club. Also my first time reading Nabokov, which I learned I’ve been pronouncing wrong (but still better than Sting) .

Have aliens found us?

The interview is a mess but even more enjoyable when you imagine Dr. Avi Loeb as the scientist in a B movie whose calculations correctly predict an incoming alien invasion but everyone ignores him because his hair is messy and he keeps clumsily dropping papers of printed-out spreadsheets and then a high-ranking bureaucrat who’s in cahoots with the aliens sneeringly tells him that they’re cutting his funding and confiscating his desktop computer.

Conan O’Brien contemplating his legacy (h/t Junho)

The context is his late-night show was restructured from an hour to a 30-minute format

Calvin Coolidge was a pretty popular president. I’ve been to his grave in Vermont. It has the presidential seal on it. Nobody was there.

I had a great conversation with Albert Brooks once. When I met him for the first time, I was kind of stammering. I said, you make movies, they live on forever. I just do these late-night shows, they get lost, they’re never seen again and who cares? And he looked at me and he said, [Albert Brooks voice] “What are you talking about? None of it matters.” None of it matters? “No, that’s the secret. In 1940, people said Clark Gable is the face of the 20th Century. Who [expletive] thinks about Clark Gable? It doesn’t matter. You’ll be forgotten. I’ll be forgotten. We’ll all be forgotten.” It’s so funny because you’d think that would depress me. I was walking on air after that.

Relevant: his recent appearance on the Comedy Bang Bang podcast. The style of the podcast is often absurdist, fast pace, and highly improvisational. Associating Conan with the late-night monologuing format that I’ve long found trite, I was really impressed by his ability not just to keep up with host Scott Aukerman. It’s a strange duality that I frequently confront with Conan, Late Show-era Stephen Colbert, and the best SNL alumni: their undeniable innate talent and intelligence contrasted against the mediocrity of their TV shows.

Two-time Oscar-nominated actor-director Jonah Hill in conversation with Tony-nominated Broadway star Michael Cera

Apparently they know each other from a movie they were in as teenagers