At The Baffler “Salvos” feature, Rafia Zakaria writes—The Military Messaging Complex. An excerpt:
ON MARCH 26, 2016, a terror attack on a children’s playground in Lahore, Pakistan left scores of young children and their parents dead, toys and small shoes strewn like rubbish among body parts and burnt shreds of clothing. Thousands of miles away in Palo Alto, California, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg logged on to his Facebook profile, which commands millions of followers in his social media empire. Moved by news of the Lahore massacre, Zuckerberg noted that the Facebook team had to activate its “Safety Check” feature—designed for users to alert their friends and followers that they’re out of harm’s way when a lethal attack or natural disaster occurs—all too often in recent months. Zuckerberg cited terror attacks that had lately convulsed Turkey and Belgium, in addition to the Lahore bombing. He cemented his resolve to face down these evils in a closing burst of trademark feelspeak:
I believe the only sustainable way to fight back against those who seek to divide us is to create a world where understanding and empathy can spread faster than hate and where every single person in every country feels connected and cared for and loved—that’s the world we can and must build together.
In the months that followed, Zuckerberg moved on to other things: an initiative to “cure all diseases” (yes, people will still get inconveniently sick, but Zuckerberg will see to their most efficient possible treatment) and, by June of 2017, a visit to Iowa to explore a rumored presidential run. But later that month, Zuckerberg returned to the task of tackling terrorism. Ganging up with Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube, Facebook announced an initiative quite different from the blossom-scented plea for empathy that Zuckerberg had lofted the year before. The social media giants would focus on developing technology that would curtail the use of their networks by terrorist groups—and the software colossus Microsoft (which did not issue a separate statement) would likely expand its speech-monitoring protocols via a series of NGO partnerships it had formalized in May.
The new, multi-platform anti-terror initiative, formidably titled “Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism,” promised to advance technology for detecting terrorist material and create best practices for countering extremism and hate, with the four collaborating mega-platforms sharing information about “counter-speech tools.” Love and empathy, it appeared, were no longer in the picture; nor was their any evident remnant of the techno-realism that a year ago had prompted the brain trust at Twitter to declare that there was no “magic algorithm” for identifying terrorist content on the internet.
The Virtual Blackwater
And indeed, since the comparatively staid announcement, the four contracting parties of the Global Internet Forum have yet to conjure forth anything remotely close to a magic terror-defying algorithm. But the relevant innovation here was never to be rendered in code anyway: the emergence of the Global Internet Forum signals a sinister expansion of social media and content-sharing platforms into the state-sponsored prosecution of the War on Terror.
Like past initiatives to privatize the terror wars, the prospective symbiosis here is likely to make things worse on all fronts. Governments will be freed to pursue various intrusions on privacy and free expression under conditions of enhanced impunity, while social media platforms can firmly adhere to statist protocols—and funding sources—to secure their existing global monopolies. As was notoriously the case with Blackwater—the private company whose mercenaries carried out interrogations, renditions, torture, and civilian massacres under the U.S. invasion of Iraq—the counter-terror offshoots created by the Global Internet Forum can operate safely outside of anything resembling robust public oversight, free of the irksome public-sector mandates of public transparency and reporting. The information they gather can be secretly shared with a government—or indeed, more than one government—which can then be fully empowered to target, prosecute, and persecute any citizens ensnared within these data searches according to their own political agendas. [...]
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QUOTATION
“Valid criticism does you a favor.”
~Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2004—US of A headed for economic armageddon?
If you’re like me, you take economic prognostications with a salt shaker (and a back-up) close at hand. Whether it’s ultra-optimist Harry Dent explaining in The Roaring 2000s how to get rich as the Dow climbs to 35,000-41,000 by 2008, or uber-bear Robert Prechter explaining in Conquering the Crash how to get rich while everybody else is in the soup line, I’m skeptical that – for all their expertise - either these guys or a bunch of others just like them really knows what’s going on.
In some cases, of course, blind ideology of left or right directs many economists – amateur and pro - to their conclusions. Supply-siders and paleo-Marxists both suffer from the same disease: our theory says this is the way things should be, so, despite contrary evidence, this is the way things will be.
Less ideologically encumbered players do what they can with the tools they’ve got. But modeling the interwoven global economy is akin to modeling the details of climate change. We know what causes a rise in average temperatures or a burst of inflation, but predicting exactly when, how much and all the consequences is, let us say, less than a precise science.
With all these caveats in mind - and fresh off reading about the growing U.S. debt, plus recent news (recounted in some Diaries) about China's attitudes toward the U.S. economy - I was not heartened by this:
Economic 'Armageddon' predicted
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, it’s another all-new episode, post-T-Day! This time, more on Trump-Russia, but closer to the heart of the matter. That is, the “real” estate money laundering. Hope Hicks! How did she do it? Plus listener contributions from Eric Posman and David Raatz!
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