The week's doomscrolling in review: Issue 2
Welcome to the second session of my favourite hits from this week's morning coffee doomscrolls, a mix of cyber threats, the ongling political fenestration in the U.S. and some notes on the various upheavals around the globe.
American shit show watch
"Trumpism needed new blood. It turned to the bros" — It's a Washington Post gift Link!
I'm tired of all the takes by pundits invoking "It's the economy stupid" bumper sticker explanations. They ignore how much hate that campaign relied on as well as leveraging, making sure to get into all the podcasts and vlogs of right-wing influencers that pander mainly to young white guys looking for reasons to be mad.
Ian Dunt
Hate speech spiked as soon as Trump captured the nomination, with a bunch of mysognistic targeting of women being the first out of the gate, with online campaigns echoing "your body my choice," "get back to the kitchen" and "repeal the 19th" (referring to the Constitutional amendment recognising women's right to vote in the U.S.). Tracking across platforms by The Institute for Strategic Dialogue found in just the 24 hours after the results that these terms had a 4,600% increase across online platforms like Reddit, X, and Youtube. ISD tabulated 64,000 incidents of mysoginistic oriented hate speech directed at prominent female political figures or TV personalities across platforms as well.
Technology will not save us, and tech bros are actively working on getting many of us killed
Justin Hendrix
This was my Sunday, folding-the-laundry listen. Greg Epstein is the 'humanist chaplain' at Harvard and MIT, and while I'm not exactly sure what that entails it seems like a good gig because it afforded the time to write stuff like Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World's Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation. Faith in technology may not be an absolute like-for-like comparison with other beliefs, but it shares many halmarks that are pointed out in this interview. Tech companies frequently position their innovations as remedies for problems anything from climate change to social inequality, and extol a belief in the potential of tools like AI that don't really live up to their technical abilities. It is interesting that a lot of Big Tech's leaders share with many evangelicals an affinity for a Trump presidency.
Meanwhile...
Speaking of technology not saving us, here's the podcast behind the phrase. If we can't trust corporate technology giants, there are also problems with concentration of power in the open source software ecosystem. Wordpress benevolent dictator Matt Mullenweg's battle with WP Engine has shown that just because software is open source, that doesn't mean it can't enshittify. This podcast gets into how the definition of open source is being stretched and may be in need of serious updates, especially as new open source AI systems are rolling out, in which the separation of data and code are becoming messier.
Dan Robinson
Your air fryer may be recording you and sending audio files to a server somewhere in China. It used to be that planting bugs was hard work. You had to sneak into a place, carefully install the microphone in the lamp and hope all the important conversations happen around it. Now you can flood the market with Internet of Things things. I don't know why people need an air fryer to have an app, but Aigostar and Xiaomi modes seem to want you to control them with mobile apps that then ask for access to all kinds of access permissions on the device. One of them wants to know your date of birth and gender to set up an online account that pings the company's trackers on Facebook, TikTok and elsewhere. How this helps whip up a batch of fries or a nice, less fat saturated chicken, I have no idea. In this situation of these kinds of things, I adopt the Admiral Adama maxim...
Happy birthday, Carl Sagan
Sagan would have been 90 years old on Sunday this week. He knew what we were in for, even not exactly when it was going to reach its fever pitch. Here's a segment from The Demon Haunted World, which is once again more relevant.
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
Release date for season 2 of Andor
We also need reasons to be glad, even if they are small, inane and geeky. Andor is more than a piece of Star Wars lore filler; it's political discourse on the nature of resistance, on being the minority, on both the power and gragility of popular uprisings. Tony Gilroy accepts the whole canon and yet breaks all the rules in reducing it to bring out the core messages of the whole run. Andor is Star Wars for adults, to be sure. Some episodes are just meetings, others are characters going through deep introspection. It's also got ghetto uprisings, prison labour, compromised heroes, and unhappy alliances between natural adversaries against a larger enemy. It's Frantz Fanon meets Thomas Paine meets George Orwell meets Hannah Arendt meets Che Guevara in a galaxy far, far away. Leftists can hate on it being a Disney property, but here we are, and that too is just emblematic of the fact that we live in morally compromised times.
April is going to be a perfect time for Andor's return. The U.S. will be deeper into its federal dismantlement and power consolidation phase and people are going to think every episode is an intentional allegory to current events regardless of how long ago they were scripted or filmed.
The best gift from Gilroy's Andor are the grandiose manifesto-type monologues. We'll leave this week's update with Karis Nemik's "The Trail of Political Consciousness."
And that's what I have time for this evening. Thanks for scrolling!
