There is no APR this morning, but my barbecue will be the Sars-Cov-2 safe sort (none at all), and I have these morning hours, I still have stuff that might entertain folks of a morning.
Disruption/tech
A staggering article at The Atlantic collates the sums of fears: “Democracy Is Losing Its Race With Disruption.” Written by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein, it argues that, with or without a conscious enemy or set of enemies, the generalized emergence of disruption in information, and its constant innovation, is mooting self-government.
In the 18th century, the British hooted at the idea of democracy because it would be “the mob” and “mob rule.” (See William Shakespeare’s thoughts in Julius Caesar, which can be read as a piece of pure anti-democratic propaganda. It opens with the mobile vulgus and moves on to the mob killing Cinna the Poet before suggesting that the Roman Republic was killed by appealing to the common people and their locust-like power.) The American answer was the educated citizen, with “citizen” reserved all sorts of ways (white, property-owning, male).
This article, though, is about so-called Big Tech in just the same way that my analogy was. First, we need a better term than “big tech,” because it doesn’t denote anything, and we don’t mean the things it can denote. Perhaps we should use Shoshana Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalists” or “affective prediction algorithm software services,” because what they, and we, usually mean is,
While tech platforms help keep people in contact with family and friends, they also rely on opaque algorithms that shape the content we see. . . . politicians appear uncertain whether to get cozy with the visionary leaders of Google, Apple, and Facebook—or to campaign against the pollution of the American information ecosystem, the amplification of hate speech and harassment, and the striking concentration of market power among a small number of companies.
These are no “social media” nor “entertainment companies” nor “publishers” nor even “data companies,” exactly. Even a vague term like “communications technologies” misses the particularity of the problem, but it captures the medium.
Democratic disruption would not be effectively solely with accumulation of data alone (STELLAR WIND, the government collection of information on American citizens, was evil, but our democracy did not strain under it). Advertising does not stop our democratic representation. Even the “echo” and “user group” model of hobbyist/activist talk (Usenet to Facebook) does not break us. Not until the emotion-studying and users-as-specimens projects come into being for new profits do we begin to fall apart, for only then do we have interests in spyware and division for commercial profit.
The article ducks and weaves the fundamental change in modality, but, in return, it does something I like to do: it shows that, if we ignore the fancy names and the radial buttons, the process and action in terms of society has been experienced already.
The race between technological disruption and democracy has been playing out in the United States for more than a century and a half. In the 1850s, the U.S. telegraph industry was intensely competitive. Twenty or so companies had laid more than 23,000 miles of wire, and multiple carriers served identical routes. Profits in this new business were low, triggering a period of consolidation that, by the late 1860s, left Western Union as the dominant provider of long-distance telegraph service. Despite some tentative early steps by the federal government to constrain Western Union’s power, the company’s monopoly lasted for nearly 50 years.
I point back to the newspaper. When it was brand new, the first thing that happened was that the political parties bought writers. Next, newspapers became party organs. I point to the emergence of copyright. It did not come about to protect authors, but to protect publishers; the idea of a publisher had to emerge before copyright law really developed. Only when Dutton in London needed to be protected from George Falkner publishing cheap paper editions of “his” books in Ireland did the English courts see ownership of words.
Ignore the flashing screen, the claim that “it’s a new way of banking!” the “but it’s a debit card for kids!” that “now you can send e-mails, which are a different kind of mail, with no postage, to anyone in the world” claims. Banking? Yes. Credit? Yes. Letters? No, apparently (our courts dropped it).
The authors are excerpting their new book, System Error: When Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot, and they walk us through the American 20th century history of laissez-faire expansion in new technologies, government reaction/regulation, and then somnolence. A cycle of disruption and reaction, they argue, that had seemed politically balanced until lately. They believe the shocks are too fast, the capital too large, and the public too dazed/divided to rely on the self-healing social processes.
Georgia
Moving right along, Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery appears to be Atlanta-based, because he reported on Raffles yesterday, and today he’s back with, “Georgia DA Interviews Witnesses About Trump’s Call to ‘Find’ Votes.” Note that this is sloppy headline writing, because it refers to the Fulton County DA, Fani Willis.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis previously revealed to The Daily Beast that she has spun up a new anti-corruption team to explore what state laws, if any, were broken when Trump and his allies tried to overturn election results there. But her office has been quiet about the matter in the five months since.
District Attorneys with grand juries empaneled do tend to be quiet about things, if they’re any good, and Fani Willis seems more press averse than most.
Her investigators have since interviewed at least four officials at the secretary of state’s office, asking questions that show a particular interest in Raffensperger’s separate phone conversations with Trump and U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, according to two of these sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
That’s two uses of “since” and no antecedent “when.” I don’t like to spend my off hours pointing at writing mistakes, but what we have here is a failure to communicate.
Fani Willis is interested primarily a call from Lindsay Graham to Raffensburger and the January 2nd call. On January 2, Trump called Raffenspurger from the White House, with Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani and Cleta Mitchell (a real favorite of the Trump wing, and a name to watch), while Raffenspurger had Jordan Fuchs and Ryan Germany on the line with him. This is when Trump said that all he wanted was for Raffenspurger to “find 11,780 vuts,” and he would be rewarded handsomely by the people. . . he imagined.
Daily Beast tried to get comment from Trump, Meadows. Giuliani, and Graham on Friday, but they were all preparing to celebrate labor unions in their own way. Cleta Mitchell, on the other hand, answered the phone:
Asked if investigators had made any effort to reach out to her in their ongoing probe, Mitchell simply said, “I don’t discuss that.”
People who were in the room for the Willis questioning of the Georgia SoS officials report that it was not very probing. She was simply trying to map out the customary operations of the office and what influence would look like.
The author has unnamed eminences who say that proving anything about Trump will be hard and that Willis is slammed by lack of budget and pressing concerns with rising crime and a backlog from her predecessor. Therefore, other eminences give him the right to say this:
In an effort that may turn out to be more fruitful, prosecutors appear to be building an easier case against Giuliani, who took a weeks-long post-election road trip through battleground states to cast doubt on ballot results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
As The Daily Beast has previously reported, prosecutors are eyeing “false statement” charges against Giuliani, who acted on Trump’s behalf when he spoke before Georgia’s state Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Dec. 3, 2020 and detailed his rigged election conspiracy. Giuliani lied that the state counted 96,600 “phantom votes,” repeating the same bonkers claim that fueled Sidney Powell’s so-called “Kraken” lawsuit—which was promptly tossed out by a federal judge.
Giuliani also presented fake evidence of voting machine flaws and “mystery ballot boxes.” And he repeated the claims a week later on Dec. 10 before the state’s House Governmental Affairs Committee.
Dogpile on Rudy! Dogpile on Rudy! I don’t think that will stop being fun.
Still, Trump and Meadows committed explicit, provable crimes in Georgia. It’s worth keeping the case hot. Fani Willis has the burden of standing in for five other cities that received similar strong arming but hadn’t the laws or the tapes to make the case.
CREW/ Unlaw
CREW is suing and filing: “CREW files ethics complaint against Kevin McCarthy & Marjorie Taylor Greene” is unsigned from the non-profit organization.
The Office of Congressional Ethics should investigate whether House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene violated House rules by threatening to retaliate against companies that comply with legal requests for documents from the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, according to a complaint filed today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Ayup.
Meadows was at least vaguely Mafiosi, saying, “Nice telecoms you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to them.” Greene, though, did something absolutely nuts. She said “We will shut you down.” That’s right, America: No more cellular service if you vote in a GOP House. No more 5-G or 4-G, no more Lily from AT&T pretending to be dumb.
McCarthy issued a statement threatening that “a Republican majority will not forget” and will hold the companies “fully accountable under the law” if they comply with the requests. Greene stated in a television interview that if the companies “go along with this, they will be shut down and that’s a promise.”
McCarthy knows enough to leave a door he can hide behind. We can imagine Speaker McCarthy saying, “We did everything under the law, and now we’re proposing laws to do more, but the bad Democrats are objecting.” Greene, though, beamed in a message from Planet Claire and swore vengeance.
Forget the reductio ad absurdum, though. The two just managed to perform genuine, in the moment, obstruction of justice. To obstruct justice, they only have to try:
“On January 6, we saw the gravest domestic attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” CREW President Noah Bookbinder said. “Blatant obstruction of the investigation could leave our nation even more vulnerable to a future attack.”
. . . Threatening retaliation for complying with legally valid document demands and preservation requests appears to violate 18 U.S.C. § 1505, which prohibits obstructing congressional investigations, and does not reflect creditably on the House.
At first it seemed as if Bushy, Bagot, and Greene were under threat and thus being protected by royal power, but now it seems as if McCarthy may have phone calls that are most damning, that they have misled the prince, and that this threatening violation of law and ethics is only about keeping the king’s favorites protected.
The Trump faction, and the House itself, keeps challenging the ethics committee to recommend removal. It’s time the latter does so.
Lin Wood is speaking. Something about Wal-Mart, maybe. Joe Patrice at Above the Law writes, “Lin Wood Has Some Thoughts About Walmart Using Fetuses To Help The Illuminati Or Something.” Patrice says the wheel is still spinning, but it’s clear that the hamster died.
Is Lin Wood in need of an evaluation or an intervention?
He doesn’t think so. He’s just telling his truth, in less than a minute:
And that “truth” is…. “Stop going to Walmart, stop going to Target,” Wood instructed. “Stop buying the food that they have been producing for years with fetal tissue parts to kill you!” Is there some kind of “super veal” I’m not aware of? Look, even though this is a bizarre and seemingly baseless accusation, I’ve got to be honest and say it would still beat eating carbs.
. . .
“John D. Rockefeller was a devil worshipper, part of the Illuminati.” What in the shitty Dan Brown sequel is this? Regardless, it’s not clear how we get from Target selling some new “superduper veal” to Standard Oil. If the goal was to call out people deserving a Sherman Act smackdown, it was just a hop and skip from the last sentence to Sam Walton, which is also absurd and no one actually thinks rig– uh oh.
“Do the research, connect the dots, Illuminati is real.”
Um, Westlaw red flags this statement for strong negative treatment.
This was all in one night. One person on Twitter said that it was conspiracy MadLibs. By the next morning, he was still manic after all those hours:
[Tweet]
Please get involved in Striking Back for Freedom Starting on September 11 and continuing until we bring the enemy to its knees!
. . .
And PLEASE go to the StrikeBack website and get actively involved. We need information on God-fearing, Patriot individuals and entities who We the People can trust so that we do not spend our bullets with the enemy!!! [RocketshipValentineUSFlag]
Patrice points to the obvious: Wood is going from the excitedly grandiose to the violent insurrection. He is grandiose, a self-selected target, and yet he’s rational enough to be data mining his dupes.
The context for all of this is that he was sanctioned by Michigan, and the Georgia Bar demands a mental evaluation that he refuses to submit to. Establishing that everyone is in cahoots against him doesn’t do much to allay those questions about his ability to represent clients.
He isn’t representing himself at all well.
Aperitif
At Current Affairs, check out “The Job Search Maze”: it’s an entertaining graphic.
*Hint: There is no solution to the job maze. The system is flawed and there is no hope.
Finally, before we go off the celebrate all our unions (except the police unions in their current formation, I guess), there is an article at Wonkette that seems to be almost primary reporting by Robyn Pennacchia: “Paste Eaters Beware: Ivermectin Is Coming For Your Sperms.” There are studies, it seems, that show ivermectin lowers sperm count and sperm motility in animals, and one study showing it does the same in human men being treated for river blindness. (They take a small dose compared to our neighbors following Facebook doctors.) So, maybe the weird sculpture in Elbert County, Georgia was put up by the folks behind the ivermectin push rather than the vaccine?
-—
This is my first time trying something like this. Consider it a fracture.
Happy Labor Day, and remember the Hay Market.