What's more worrisome is how fervently anti-science the new administration is. Academics may eventually be persecuted in the US across the board - as they are already at the EPA, USDA etc - and regardless of citizenship.
I firmly believe anyone with a brain should begin making contingency plans to regroup somewhere like Australia or Japan, outside of the reaches of far-right populism. An Erdogan-style academic purge may be on the agenda and sooner than we think
This couldn't be farther from the truth. People branding the current administration like this are destabilizing the country. The media in this country is on an ideological witch hunt, and you are proliferating it.
Interestingly I had my moment of clarity when I realized my Circle of Control can be far larger than what I had believed it to be.
Most humans believe in your viewpoint, but the truth is power is gained from groups. We are all simply a node in a larger network. Accepting and embracing that is the key to growing the Circle of Control. Becoming part of the right network alters the Circle of Control of the individual.
I am surprised by the sheer volume of tech professionals who have been responding to this article today by unapologetically reinforcing it's primary position. The idea that the industry should have no accountability for it's actions seems to be the jarring consensus.
I want to believe that those of us who are opposed to the use of technology purely for greed and power still outnumber, but am starting to feel like maybe we are an island and a dying breed, giving way to a new callous generation of technologists who wish to wield the power of social technology for only individual ambitions over the democratic idealism of collaboration that it was founded on. This is a dark time indeed
Then you get into the "not my responsibility" paradigm. What do you actually do to help the people who's industry you've replaced? What CAN one company even do? The usual libertarian response seems to be that people need to look out for themselves and keep their skillsets fresh - ignoring the larger forces at play here. Maybe someone else has a more cogent argument for how a person can avoid getting caught up randomly in what amounts to a broader economic trend.
The "foreign intrusion" angle is a red herring. In my opinion, the assumption that a foreign hack would be the most likely vector for vote manipulation, which is being played up in tech circles, is the best evidence that the vote was in fact manipulated.
A tech worker or contractor with "alt-right" leanings could easily manipulate the vote without being detected. And there are plenty of them...
Play up the "Russia couldn't do this, you're insane" line and everyone assumes we're looking for outside intrusion by a foreign power, when in fact it is far more likely an intrusion would come from inside.
Why does it have to be a foreign government hacking?
An election tech worker or contractor with an agenda, could easily achieve the same results without having to go to the great lengths of breaking into the network using malware etc.
Many of the social media manipulation techniques used to spread disinformation right now, are things I experimented with in the early days of social media that I proudly discussed in public forums widely and were reproduced by others...
I feel as though the tech industry is collectively to blame for the global power grab that is taking place right now. I've devoted a significant amount of my time to trying to correct this, but it is so far beyond the capabilities of any single person or group at this point.. like a wildfire burning out of control and all I can do is sit and stare as it consumes everything around me
I think this is more of the "with us or against us" mentality. I'm definitely not on right yet I'm sticking up for them a lot lately because because all "the left" is doing is yelling at people about racism and misogyny, not to mention a lot of other crazy stuff like cultural appropriation.
Not to mention, a lot of the "alt right" is not particularly right wing at all, some (like protectionism) is even left wing.
Alt-right is just a meaningless catch-all term to describe someone who is sarcastic and "not-liberal."
Unfortunately, this isn't true. There definitely is movement afoot on the right side of the spectrum that distinguishes itself from the standard U.S. "conservative" camp of roughly the mid-1960s to present in many disturbing ways (open and enthusiastic embrace of race-baiting techniques, climate change denialism, and an abdiding belief that political correctness is basically the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced) that many traditional conservatives actually find quite ridiculous and/or outright repugnant.
The WP entry may not be the best, but for further research here are two fairly cogent descriptions you may consult, from two (otherwise, in a normal world) diametrically opposed sources -- NPR and Glenn Beck.
The wikipedia entry[1] is even worse. It literally lists the associated platforms as including: "white supremacism, Islamophobia, antifeminism, homophobia, antisemitism, ethno-nationalism". You'd swear these people, whoever they are, are the American ISIS.
helpfulanon: I think there are more people than you expected here who are willing to state that they lean right. (That's not the same as "closeted alt-right" by any means.) Some of those people are a bit strident right now. But there are a bunch of people who lean left who are pretty bitter, too. And I think that the only thing that changed was that we had an election. Those people who lean right, leaned right before the election. They didn't just come here in the past week to triumphantly throw their weight around.
newswriter99: According to your definition. I don't think that's the right definition, though. Wikipedia's definition seems pretty accurate: "The alt-right is a loose group of people with far right ideologies who reject mainstream conservatism in the United States." That's why they're "alt" - they reject the normal, mainstream right. So not everyone who voted Republican is alt-right. Trump, however, is certainly not a candidate who embraced normal conservatism, so it might be fair to call him an alt-right candidate.
The Wikipedia goes on to say (also, quoting Wikipedia as a source, kek) that there's no telling how many of the "alt-right" are trolling, how many are dead serious, and how many fall in between.
I repeat my previous statement: the term is meaningless.
One tell of someone who supports the goals of the alt-right is use of oddball terms like "kek." So you're not a disinterested bystander curious about the labeling of the alt-right, you are most likely a member of the alt-right, and as claimed above, attempting to extend the Overton window.
I've become beyond paranoid, there is clearly some secret IRC channel where the alt-right that are too sophisticated for 4chan are coordinating. The pile-on in HN has become like an intellectualized version of Facebook comments at this point
To be fair, the view that the modern Democratic party is center-right isn't one exclusively held by the alt-right, but something that's held by the progressive left as well. HRC didn't only lose because of a resurgence of the populist right, but because of an enormous drop-off in left-leaning political support.
Just the combination of the headline and the image below it are enough to get me to close the tab on this one. I'm getting really tired of the constant accusations of racism, and this immediately set off my 'upcoming bullshit' detector.
Sure there is. Posting an article that was contrived by hate groups, is hate speech. Convincing someone to commit suicide because of their sexual orientation, political views, is hate speech. It's not that hard
Is Black Lives Matter a "hate group?" What about Blue Lives Matter? What about an anti-BML group? Who decides? And once they're a hate group, according to you everything they publish is automatically considered "hate speech" and therefore banned. Seems overly broad.
Honestly yelling "it is just obvious" is very naive and unworkable. People have tried for years to come up with black and white definitions of these things and they've all failed. It often boils down to "when I see it, I know it" but that varies per individual.
That particular case looks cut and dry, but companies like that need to have a policy they can apply consistently and scalably.
Even there it is very hard to prove things. Was a particular message inspired by a particular post? People get bullied into suicide without there being a concerted effort and conspiracy, etc.
It is a tough issue and please don't frame it as left vs right because one thing history shows is that a law meant for one cause will be used for another. For instance, the "religious freedom" laws that boomed in the 1990s started as an attempt to legalize the use of peyote by the Native American Church. The association with anti-gay causes is entiely new. In reality, the biggest benefactor of those laws has probably been the Church of Scientology.
A popular uprising against Silicon Valley is coming. Already I hear it from people in my life, all over the country.
They blame social media for allowing the Trump memes to warp people's opinion. They're starting to put the pieces together on unemployment and blame tech automation for taking jobs and not offering a replacement, especially in the heartland. They're angry with Silicon Valley execs for not putting up any visible fight against Trump. They're starting to see how clustering all the best paying jobs in major cities leaves people outside of the bubble desperate, seeing desperate solutions. A tidal wave of rage against the election is about to be directed towards the tech industry, it's just a matter of time.
And sure, Facebook and Twitter played a part in this information aspect certainly. But companies like Salesforce that automate people out of work, these companies have zero accountability for the people who get laid off when eliminated with CRM workflows for example. There's no framework for understanding the consequences of who you eliminate when you automate. How are these people supposed to feed their families when you've automated them out of work?
As a tech worker, I've been responsible for eliminating far more American jobs, many in the heartland, than any Mexican immigrant ever has. What have I done to deal with the consequences of that? Many, many people have been laid off because of the things I've built in the last 15 years. I ignored them, told myself they weren't valuable anyhow. We owe these people solutions for basic income, we owe them more opportunities for jobs out in the red states, the red counties of america. We created this. All of it.
I agree this is likely. You know, it's a funny sort of thing - people work in the left-coast SV bubble-world making friendly-looking social media applications and suddenly they find they're being looked at by the Old Media crowd like they're a bunch of weapons dealers. I saw a surprisingly self-aware look at this the other day: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/political-me...
In short, former cool-kid Adbusters "meme warrior", accustomed to culture-jamming the elitist logics of "late capitalism", finds himself alarmingly surrounded by the shadowy Meme Magicians of Esoteric Kekism. Meanwhile the Hillary-friendly corporate media looks on, powerless to sink Trump with criticism, but equally unable to stop themselves from giving him free publicity. Suddenly, he finds the corporate mass media to be a "protective membrane between the public and overly toxic ideas."
How the turntables, as they say.
I think what's really interesting is the difficulty of discerning how effective this social media meme politics actually is, or to systematize its internal structure. This isn't a TV ad campaign or a stump speech, it's a distributed, continuous cacophony. So how can you tell whether it's what's boosting the campaign, or whether it's just an epiphenomenon of an already-successful campaign? This makes social media campaigning seem very threatening - when you can't tell how it works, who knows how powerful it might really be?
So true too. A long long time ago I was actually involved with Adbusters.. later on, in between stints of automating knowledge workers out of existence, I worked to help engineer some of the viral marketing techniques that were weaponized in this election. After Brexit, I went completely insane from knowing what would happen this week. There was no way to stop it.
The problem is that virtually everyone dramatically underestimates the power of viral manipulation. People believe that they have the power to make their own choices, that they have their own thoughts. But the truth is, they really don't. At all. Manipulating a tribe of humans to your cause is all just a matter of effort and patience. My worldview is shaped by the information I have. I just happen to spend a lot of time consuming complex information. Most people don't have that luxury. So they're completely vulnerable. Social media is powerful beyond the capabilities that I think anyone ever envisioned. And it's begun to take on a new life of it's own.
I tend to think that the effectiveness of advertisement and memery really depend on the context. When it comes to something where a choice has direct effects and costs - when buying a plane ticket or an appliance, for example - there is a strong incentive to discern true information and disregard advertising fluff. This is because one's own choice is the determining factor, and a poor choice has clear consequences. But in politics? A single vote is astronomically unlikely to influence anything - so voting is evaluated socially, expressively. Its benefits and costs are what it does for one's self-image, or group membership, or whatever. So there's not much incentive, for nearly everybody, to sort the real from the imaginary when considering politics. That's the kind of environment in which meme magic flourishes, because believing does make it real - real enough for its purposes. This also means that it's nigh-impossible to design or predict success in this sort of information distribution. When your content is made real or unreal by raw imagination and social dynamics, most of it is, I think, a case of people succeeding accidentally and claiming later that that's what they meant to do all along. So it can be powerful - but is almost impossible to control in an organized way.
Well, it's not just tech; it's any large corporation that gets coverage. Some people can only hear "we're making the world better" so much when by all appearances they are just making their own world better. I know it's not a fair assumption to make, but look at what gets reported (billion dollar companies that produce nothing with no profits, high level executives greatly rewarded for failure, and so on) versus the unknown companies that actually are trying to make things better with no coverage.
Certainly. But this is about information. There are a lot of people who increasingly understand the dynamics of how the information economy affects popular opinion, how it affects the workforce, how it has disrupted work and yet done nothing to solve the problems that came with the consequences of that disruption.
And many on the left outside of the valley bubble really thought that a boom in the left-leaning Bay Area meant that there were powerful people there who had their backs in all of this. They feel very hurt that tech seemed to sit on the sidelines through the election, and in some regards pretty much enabled and profited off the mass-dissemination of misinformation.
So it's not just about corporate greed this time. It's about information, disruption, workforce automation, and the responsibilities that come from building and wielding powerful information tools.
I firmly believe anyone with a brain should begin making contingency plans to regroup somewhere like Australia or Japan, outside of the reaches of far-right populism. An Erdogan-style academic purge may be on the agenda and sooner than we think