📡 – 2023-12-22
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See the end of this section for details on the end of this newsletter
and where we’re headed next
It is rare that a decision is so easy.
I’ve been following the Substackers Against Nazis open letter since the 14th, when it was mentioned in Tabs. Substack’s Nazi Problem is well documented, and so the moment at which it would have to actively choose to continue hosting hateful bullshit, or ban it – as opposed to continue skating by on the grace of inaction – has been approaching for while.
It arrived yesterday, when Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie published a statement confirming that there are Nazis on Substack, that Substack knows they’re writing Nazi Things, that Substack funnels money to them for doing so and they will actively choose to continue.
Hamish’s statement is a fascinating bit of rhetorical slight of hand, which a lot of the commentariat fell for. Substack positions itself as Atlas holding aloft the Globe of Internet Free Speech, seeming to take some principled stance in allowing “extreme views” because they “don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.”
This is plainly incorrect. The last few years have seen many, very high profile cases of banning and deplatforming (and related approaches like demonetizing, search blocking and shadowbanning ) effectively reduce harm done by bad actors, on particular platforms and to particular communities. As seemingly the entire English-speaking internet discussed when Richard Spencer got socked in the jaw: it was not through vigorous debate in the marketplace of ideas the Nazis were originally defeated. This is because the marketplace of ideas is a myth, it is fraudulent.
Hamish and the rest of the Substack brass know this. They know, at least, that demonetizing is not censorship; and they (almost certainly) know that content moderation isn’t either. But by framing their decision as one derived from a detached, high-minded realism (‘listen, we don’t like it either, but…’) they’ve ensured that the conversation stays focused on the unable-to-be-settled question of if Nazis should be allowed to post (“no” if you value the general functioning of society; “yes” otherwise) and not on why it is a company would choose to accept money from and funnel money to white supremacists. That has nothing to do with free speech, and everything to do with Substack’s business model, something they can very easily change and are well within their power and right to change whenever they like, for whatever reason, without triggering any (legitimate) questions about speech.
The bet, of course, is that it is more profitable to host Nazis than not. And we’ll see how that works out for them. For my part, at least, this will be last 📡 sent via Substack. If you would like to continue getting emails from me, you have two options:
If you remain subscribed here Substack, I will migrate you over to Buttondown, where 📡 will continue. The migration will happen next week, after which all posts here will be removed, and the subscriber roll purged. If you want to get ahead of that process and subscribe yourself, please do:
Since Buttondown costs money to operate, I’m going to turn on paid memberships there. If you wanna throw me a buck or two to cover the $9/mo Buttondown costs, that would be great (subscribe first, then it’ll ask if you want to “upgrade”) but I’m never gonna put this newsletter behind a paywall.You can also – or instead – sign up for my work-only email list. That’s relatively new and [even] more infrequent than 📡. I’ll send an email there about once every month or two, when there are new things I’m working on about to go public. And there are some of those coming in the next couple months.
Anyway! Enough about Nazis and emails. On to some stuff I liked…
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Michigan Radio project points to future of AI use in newsrooms
Michigan Radio project points to future of AI use in newsrooms - Current
"Our jobs will become less focused on analyzing data ... and more about structuring datasets," writes Dustin Dwyer of Michigan Radio.
It’s more than just relief, though. Watching the AI fail at a simple task, and understanding why it fails, points to an opportunity going forward.
It’s an opportunity we’ve been studying for a while at Michigan Radio through a project we call Minutes. The idea behind Minutes is to automate the process of creating transcripts from local government meetings and store those transcripts where journalists can skim and search to find story ideas.
We came up with the tool after struggling to keep track of all the meetings happening in the dozens of communities within our listening area. When I first started at Michigan Radio, we could rely on small community newspapers to cover the meetings and let our reporters know which ones were worth a follow-up. But many of those community newspapers no longer exist. Those that do are getting by with a fraction of the staff they once had. That’s why we need a tool like Minutes.
Rite Aid Banned from Using AI Facial Recognition After FTC Says Retailer Deployed Technology without Reasonable Safeguards
Rite Aid Banned from Using AI Facial Recognition After FTC Says Retailer Deployed Technology without Reasonable Safeguards | Federal Trade Commission
Rite Aid will be prohibited from using facial recognition technology for surveillance purposes for five years to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the retailer failed t
Preventing the misuse of biometric information is a high priority for the FTC, which issued a warning earlier this year that the agency would be closely monitoring this sector. Rite Aid’s actions subjected consumers to embarrassment, harassment, and other harm, according to the complaint. The company did not inform consumers that it was using the technology in its stores and employees were discouraged from revealing such information. Employees, acting on false positive alerts, followed consumers around its stores, searched them, ordered them to leave, called the police to confront or remove consumers, and publicly accused them, sometimes in front of friends or family, of shoplifting or other wrongdoing, according to the complaint. In addition, the FTC says Rite Aid’s actions disproportionately impacted people of color.
Mailchimp cancels podcast after refusing to work with union producers
Many of the producers who worked on Mailchimp projects in the past, or would take on a new branded series, were in the union. According to staffers present at the meeting, management gave them an ultimatum: sign a side agreement allowing the company to hire non-union contractors, or Mailchimp walks not only from the new series, but from the ads and existing show as well. Two days later at a follow-up meeting, Audacy reiterated that without the agreement, it would lose Mailchimp as a client. But creating a path around the union would defeat the point of organizing in the first place. The union refused to sign, and Mailchimp pulled its business.
Software Is Beating The World
What I am saying is that Andreessen Horowitz isn’t a “media company that monetizes through VC,” but a form of financial cult. The belief system that made the valley rich is the exact same one that is currently killing it, in part because Andreessen’s views and goals were anti-technological at their core. As I noted when digesting his “techno-optimist manifesto,” Andreessen is a deeply cynical man intent on spreading monetizable software into every crevice of the economy, building sickly, unsustainable companies that continually return to the carrier to relieve themselves of the disease. Andreessen’s focus on hyper-growth companies was not intended to make the world better, but to create more dependencies (like Uber and Lyft destroying local transit, or Doordash eating the margins of every restaurant it serves) under the auspice of “disruption.”
Adobe anticipates ‘significant penalty’ for complex cancellation practices
Adobe anticipates ‘significant penalty’ for complex cancellation practices | Computerworld
Adobe shares dropped about 5% in after-hours trading on Wednesday following the company’s SEC filing and Adobe’s announcement of lower revenue forecasts for 2024.
The Act mandates that subscription services must promptly honor cancellation requests, not limit cancellations to phone only, adequately staff customer service, simplify the cancellation process, and immediately accept and process cancellations before the next billing cycle.
Adobe did not disclose what specifically the FTC is targeting, but online forums are flush with people complaining that Photoshop and Premiere Pro have penalties for late cancellation.
E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance
https://www.fastcompany.com/90996547/e-books-are-fast-becoming-tools-of-corporate-surveillanceWhether you’re traveling for abortion care, legally accessing it at home, experiencing a miscarriage, or finding support resources for a loved one, worrying that reading a book might betray private medical information should be absurd. Yet in today’s post-Roe landscape of legal, social, and health threats around pregnancy, we need to be concerned that Big Publishing’s new hunger for reader data might put abortion seekers at risk of criminalization and violence.
Such 1984-esque threats woven into the lives of everyday people are particularly insidious. The average abortion seeker does not know how to navigate safely in a surveillance state—and knowing that they may be surveilled causes people to not access the reproductive or abortion care they need, to not seek the mental and emotional support they require, and to delay care until further into an unwanted pregnancy. All of these choices endanger a pregnant person.
Pinterest Is Having a Moment
Pinterest Is Having a Moment | WIRED
Millennials may have popularized Pinterest, but Gen Z is pushing the platform to new heights.
Social media apps have been under fire for potential harm to teens’ mental health. But Pinterest may function differently, says MaryLeigh Bliss, chief content officer of YPulse, a Gen Z and millennial market research firm. It’s a “place of solace,” instead of one of comparing and competing, she argues. “It’s a little bit stripped of all that algorithm competition,” she says. People can use Pinterest to find inspiration for hobbies, travel, decor, and style—without having to show themselves living out all those aspirational, and often expensive, trends, or images of their faces and bodies. “That really sets the platform apart,” says Bliss “There’s really nowhere else that they can do that.”
They view themselves as the rubble the war left behind
Miss Me Yet mixes archival footage of George W. Bush, dramatic and mundane, alongside footage of people around the world his wars devastated, all intercut with contemporaneous pop culture commercials in a way that I found compelling and weirdly hypnotic, albeit always downright terrible and unsettling. Specifically hard to watch was all the Islamophobia and racism of that era being used to justify "killing the terrorists" sounding very much like the same things we are hearing today as Israel continues its U.S.-blessed massacre and ethnic cleansing project in Gaza.
Algorithmic conspirituality: Explicating its emergence, dimensions, and persuasibility
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14614448231217425Algorithmic conspirituality is the belief that social media algorithms have the capacity to know users intimately and convey personally meaningful messages at the exact right moment to revelatory effect. Through a thematic analysis of TikTok videos, this study explicates this concept by identifying five distinct dimensions of its expression on TikTok—(1) relational, (2) injunctive, (3) personal, (4) spiritual, (5) conspiratorial—and explaining their relationship with the platform’s affordances—(1) connectedness, (2) personalization, and (3) social creativity. We then connect the emergence and impact of this phenomenon to the possibility for persuasion and behavior changes through normalization of messaging in areas such as mental health, smoking, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and body dysmorphia that could lead to positive and negative health outcomes.
Paying Attention
https://karthikecon.github.io/karthiksrinivasan.org/paying_attention.pdf
Humans are social animals. Is the desire for attention from other people a quantitatively important non-monetary incentive? I consider this question in the context of social media, where platforms like Reddit and TikTok successfully attract a large volume of user-generated content without offering financial incentives to most users. Using data on two billion Reddit posts and a new sample of TikTok posts, I estimate the elasticity of content production with respect to attention, as measured by the number of likes and comments that a post receives. I isolate plausibly exogenous variation in attention by studying posts that go viral. After going viral, producers more than double their rate of content production for a month. I complement these reduced form estimates with a large-scale field experiment on Reddit. I randomly allocate atten- tion by adding comments to posts. I use generative AI to produce responsive comments in real time, and distribute these comments via a network of bots. Adding comments increases produc- tion, though treatment efficacy depends on comment quality. Across empirical approaches, the attention labor supply curve is concave: producers value initial units of attention highly, but the marginal value of attention rapidly diminishes. Motivated by this fact, I propose a model of a social media platform which manages a two-sided market composed of content producers and consumers. The key trade-off is that consumers dislike low-quality content, but including low-quality content provides attention to producers, which boosts the supply of high-quality content in equilibrium. If the attention labor supply curve is sufficiently concave, then the platform includes some low-quality content, though a social planner would include even more.
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New Fun City! Will the team be able to save their closest ally Gabe from the most powerful foe they’ve encountered yet?
New RIP Corp about tantalum mining and a company you’ve probably never heard of: Fansteel:
The history of the commercial application of tantalum is a story of labor exploitation, suppressing militant organizing, state-backed development of global supply chains, the ups and downs of corporate raider capitalism, environmental damage and legal chicanery. It’s a story of technological development deeply bound up with, and used to perpetuate colonial violence. And it might have something to tell us about the current era of mineral supply chain anxieties in the United States. Our research into the history of the tantalum capacitor brought us to the U.S. National Archives, old electronics magazine collections, eBay, and ultimately to the subject of this episode: Fansteel
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That’s all I got for you! A pleasure, as always. See you on Buttondown, maybe. See you on the work email list, maybe. See you somewhere, sometime, on the internet, definitely. <3