Autocracy, Inc: Anne Applebaum and Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Conversation
An important conversation from July.
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum
Conspiracies
In a comment to a link to an essay by Kate Manne in The Nation urging that the Democratic Party launch an independent investigation into the Tara Reade's story of sexual harashment and sexual assult by the presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden, Shrinkrants wrote:
there is a whole network of rabbit holes to go down in looking into sexual predation and the oligarchy. Jeffery Epstein connections, the British royals, the Rothschilds… and so much of it sounds so plausible, and it’s also at the same time so Douglas Adams… curious what you make of all that kind of stuff.
I'm hardly qualified to opine on the subject, but want to anyhow.
Not directly related to Shrinkrant's query, I do not think that Tara Reade giving her story to reporters is an op. And although I have a rather low opinion of Joe Biden's character and political positions, I am quite prepared to vote for him in the presidential contest.
Phil Jones has pointed out that conspiracy theories are theories about networks. There are ample examples of crackpot, truly harmful and ridiculously wrong conspiracy theories. Lots of people disdain conspiracy theories in general. And it's wise to keep awful theories in mind while we in this connected age of screens speculate and attempt theories about networks.
The Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown did a year-long investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. Part of the reporting had an oddly familiar odor of parapolitics involving sexual abuse of minors. The punchline to the filthiest joke in the world is: The Aristocrats. It works because at some base level many of harbor the suspicion that the aristocrats are a perverse lot. At minimum we suspect that "the very best people" aren't so. I think these suspicions have roots in a sensitivity to power that come with being human.
I am not very well versed in the subject of pedophile conspiracies with a political dimension. My speculative take on them is that especially in Great Britain and in Europe networks which have enabled minors to be abused have existed as a means for political leverage. Apparently these networks have been associated with aristocrats. Aristocrats have been saving the royals' bacon for centuries. In theory royal personages held power, but wielding it is another matter altogether. The Rothschild family maybe who most people in the West think of when they think of aristocrats in relation to royalty. Oddly, while I do associate pedophile networks with aristocrats, I haven't read anything that implicates members of the Rothschilds in such pedophile networks. Perhaps I just have read enough conspiracy theories! Abuse of children is a very dark and evil means to wield power, but the exclusivity and secretiveness of networks which enable such abuse are dominant characteristics. There are other less dark and evil means to wield power that also benefit from exclusive and secretive networks.
Aristocratic networks are very old-school. Donald Trump's presidential victory draws attention to new networks with big data that bare some similarity to the old-school aristocratic ones, especially secretiveness and exclusivity. Both sorts of networks will be with us for a while, if not a long while. It seems imperative that we develop better theories of such power-wielding networks.
I suspect that the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the result of a conspiracy and that the network of conspirators were also involved win the Birmingham church bombing and the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner and other crimes. Whenever I have said as much in conversation, the response has been cold especially among people my age. The aversion to conspiracy theories is quite strong. I have not read enough, but I'm glad that scholars and legal scholars have done and published solid research on conspiracies against the Civil Rights Movement and the student-led movement against the War in Vietnam. My impression is that younger people, especially people who have come of age with the Internet are less adverse to conspiracy theories, but also feel swamped by so much bullshit. History can help inform our understanding of the current situation.
We need better conspiracy theories.
Undeterred by the uncertainty, anxiety and fear brought about by the steady deterioration of the neoliberal order over the last few years, the response from radical activists in Jackson, Mississippi has been to concentrate on building a radical anti-capitalist alternative from the ground up. Inspired by the rich history of struggle and resistance in Mississippi and committed to the vision of the Jackson-Kush Plan, these activists are building institutions rooted in community power that combine politics and economic development into an alternative model for change, while addressing real, immediate needs of the people.
Daraja Press on a book by Ajamu Nagwaya and Kali Akuno. Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi
There are two forms of wealth. You could be wealthy in terms of your capacity to agglomerate around your clients, family members, and so on. Or, you could be wealthy just by virtue of having accumulated a huge amount or quantity of things. So you see here a dialectics of quantities and qualities. And multiple forms of membership were always available. How is it that one belonged? Through what window is it that you can enter the house? There were multiple forms of membership, not rigid classifications where you are either a citizen or a foreigner. In between being a citizen and being a foreigner there was a whole repertoire of alternative forms of membership—building alliances through trade, marriage or religion, incorporating new commerce, refugees, asylum seekers into existing polities—that was the norm.
Achille Mbembe at Africa is a Country. The idea of a borderless world
The capacity to decide who can move, who can settle, where and under what conditions is increasingly becoming the core of political struggles.
With the building of these networks of social economy and solidarity, people are rethinking their ideas of how society could be more equitable.
Stacco Troncoso at P2P Foundation. Greece: Alternative Economies & Community Currencies Pt. 3 – FairCoop
It's more comfortable to talk about inequality and poverty outside the context of race. More than half the country thinks past or present discrimination is not a major factor in why black Americans face problems today. But in the past, it was OK to literally build a wall between a white neighborhood and black neighborhood. That was a lot easier to point at and say: Hey, that's racist. Now, those concrete symbols of racism are largely gone and what's left are their systemic effects. Sometimes, that makes it hard to be as outraged.
But in this country, we forced people into toxic neighborhoods based on the color of their skin, and it still plays an overwhelming role in which people gets a real shot to be healthy, happy, and hopeful. In other words, the walls are still there.
Alvin Chang at Vox. Living in a poor neighborhood changes everything about your life
As a typical millennial constantly glued to my phone, my virtual life has fully merged with my real life. There is no difference any more. Tinder is how I meet people, so this is my reality. It is a reality that is constantly being shaped by others – but good luck trying to find out how.
Judith Duportail in The Guardian. I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets
The dating app knows me better than I do, but these reams of intimate information are just the tip of the iceberg. What if my data is hacked – or sold?
Getting your data out of Tinder is really hard – but it shouldn’t be
“It is intriguing that shortly after the introduction of the first dating websites in 1995, like Match.com, the percentage of new marriages created by interracial couples increased rapidly,” say the researchers.
The increase became steeper in the 2000s, when online dating became even more popular. Then, in 2014, the proportion of interracial marriages jumped again. “It is interesting that this increase occurs shortly after the creation of Tinder, considered the most popular online dating app,” they say.
Emerging Technology from the arXiv at MIT Technology Review. Connectivity
First Evidence That Online Dating Is Changing the Nature of Society
Dating websites have changed the way couples meet. Now evidence is emerging that this change is influencing levels of interracial marriage and even the stability of marriage itself.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1709.10478 : The Strength of Absent Ties: Social Integration via Online Dating
But a leaf is a community of fungus, bacteria, protist, alga, nematode, and plant. Just as diagrams of human skin or gut usually omit the microbes that are essential components of human bodies, our images of plants, seemingly so objective, missed the essential nature of a leaf. A "maple" is not an individual made of plant cells, but a community of cells from many domains and kingdoms of life. Microbe-free plants likely do not exist in nature and, if they could be constructed, would quickly die for want of the vital connections that sustain life.
David Geroge Haskell at NPR. Life Is The Network, Not The Self
For the United States, the shape of future homeland conflicts will be asymmetrical, distributed, and heterogeneous, not a North vs. South duet. Like so much of our lives, conflict and power are being re-shaped along network topologies. As networks distribute power to the edges, this in turn shifts warfighting further away from a handful of monolithic forces and towards a diverse web of small actors.
Chris Arkenberg at Medium. A Second US Civil War?
An essay by Yonatan Zunger entitled “Trial Balloon for a Coup?”* is making the rounds. Such essays are frightening to many. And yet they must be read critically. I am equally taken by the argument that everything that Zunger identifies is evidence not of a deliberate planning by an aspiring authoritarian, but of the exact opposite: the weakness and incoherence of administration by a narcissist.
Tom Pepinsky. Weak and Incompetent Leaders act like Strong Leaders
Pepinsky is saying “read critically,” not “Zunger is wrong.” Most of us are trying to make sense of the patterns of events, as Pepinsky and Zunger are.
In seeking and depending on minimum liability, platforms leave gaping voids. For an example of how such a void can be filled, and exploited, look no further than the Breitbart of the 2016 election. It is a site that frequently flaunts its success on social-media platforms and appears amenable to the prevailing winds of change. “Breitbart Ranked #1 for Most Shared Facebook Content on Presidential Debate Day,” read one headline. “Media Firms Lose Control of News as Tech Platforms Rise,” read another from June. Another story from August begins, “Breitbart News has jumped to the 11th biggest presence on Facebook in terms of total engagements for the month of July,” a ranking of likes, shares and comments that placed the site between The Times and The Washington Post.
John Herrman in The New York Times Magazine. Who’s Responsible When Extremists Get a Platform?
There is no doubt that where we are now is a very bad place. But it’s we as a society who have jointly created this problem. And if we want to get to a better place, when it comes to having an information ecosystem that serves human rights and democracy instead of destroying it, we have to share responsibility for that.
Jonathan Albright quoted in an article by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian. Google, democracy and the truth about internet search
Tech-savvy rightwingers have been able to ‘game’ the algorithms of internet giants and create a new reality where Hitler is a good guy, Jews are evil and… Donald Trump becomes president
It is easy to dismiss people who believe in conspiracy theories as simply crackpots, but when these claims spread across a society, something more complicated is happening. In recent years sociologists who study right-wing political and social movements have been identifying specific ideologies, frames, narratives, styles, processes, methodologies, and triggers that shape how right-wing movements work.53 Sociologists especially look at how particular ‘frames’ of reference are used to take a political ideology and build collective action movements that seek a change in society.54
Sociologists use the term ‘narratives’ to discuss how stories are used in social movements to build group cohesion, and mobilize supporters to action. It does not matter if these stories are based on personal experiences or largely mythical.55 What matters is that movement participants believe them to be true, and shape their actions based on this belief.56
Chip Belet in Fédéralisme Régionalisme. Fears of Fédéralisme in the United States: The Case of the ‘North American Union’ Conspiracy Theory
They illustrate this illusion with a theoretical example: a set of 14 nodes linked up to form a small world network, just like a real social network (see picture above). They then color three of these nodes and count how many of the remaining nodes link to them in a single step.
Two versions of this setup are shown above. In the left-hand example, the uncolored nodes see more than half of their neighbors as colored. In the right-hand example, this is not true for any of the uncolored nodes.
But here’s the thing: the structure of the network is the same in both cases. The only thing that changes is the nodes that are colored.
This is the majority illusion—the local impression that a specific attribute is common when the global truth is entirely different.
Explosive percolation is a first step in thinking about control, according to D’Souza, because it provides a means of manipulating the onset of long-range connectivity via small-scale interactions. A series of small-scale interventions can have dramatic consequences—for good or ill.
Jennifer Ouellette in Wired. New Laws Explain Why Fast-Growing Networks Break Networks grow as individual nodes connect to one another. By tweaking the rules that govern when nodes connect, researchers can shape the network’s properties.