Edward Snowden
It was a day.
January 7, 2021
Impeach and remove.
25th Amendment.
January 6, 2021.
Hurt people hurt people.
Misinformed people hurt people.
Cruel leaders hurt people.
“So anyway, that’s why disinformation is dangerous.” -Brooke Binkowski
L
O
V
E
big.
[Seane Corn]
We must try.
From The Nation:
“This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. “They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”
LA Times/KUSI TV in San Diego:
The woman shot and killed [seven other people were injured] inside the U.S. Capitol Building during a violent pro-Trump siege Wednesday was an Ocean Beach resident, according to her extended family and media reports.
Her husband confirmed to KUSI that the woman, whose shooting was captured on video, was 35-year-old Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt, and said she was a 14-year Air Force veteran.
Her final post on Twitter:
“Nothing will stop us…they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less that 24 hours…dark to light!”
From Richard Engel, NBC News Foreign Correspondent:
“Police seemed very chummy with the protestors (insurgents) who also seemed to know exactly where to go.”
From journalist Evan Osnos, The New Yorker:
“The moments that surprised me most were not the young thuggish types; that’s eternal. What made me wonder about the future of the country was the presence of the grandmothers.
As darkness approached, police fired a series of flash-bang grenades to shoo people down from the balconies and steps. A heavyset man in a white maga hat stood in a crosswalk, watching the crowd begin to move. He was happy. “They sent a message. That’s enough,” he said. He turned to walk away and added, “Of course, if we come back, it will be with a militia.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/mob-rule-in-the-capitol
Discussing social media and Capitol insurgence and attempted coup.
Clint Watts, former FBI special agent, and Roger McNamee, author of Zucked/Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe.
Thread from Andrew Yang, Thursday, January 7th:
There are 3 problems with our media that are fueling polarization: 1. The closing of 2,000 local papers, which are typically not very partisan; 2. Cable news maximizing audience share by adopting political stances (Fox); and 3. Social media’s supercharging of conspiracy theories.
The easiest one to address is reopening local papers. There is a bill in Congress – the Local Journalism Sustainability Act from Rep. David Cicilline, Rhode Island, and others – that would help support thousands of local publications. Congress should pass it immediately.
For Cable News we should revive the Fairness Doctrine which the FCC had on the books until 1985 that required that you show both sides of a political issue. It was repealed by Reagan. If there was ever a time to bring it back it’s now.
The most difficult and important is to overhaul social media. We need federal data ownership legislation mirrored after the CPRA in California. There should be ad-free versions of every platform. Section 230 should be amended to not include content that is amplified by algorithm.
The basic problem is that social media creators and companies are rewarded for having more extreme and untrue content. The goal should be to change or balance the incentives. Tech, government, media and NGOs need to collaborate on this to support fact-supported journalism.
There is an opportunity here to support artists, musicians and creatives as well whose work right now the market is ignoring. One element of this ought to be a degree of support for those whose work tries to elevate and inform rather than divide and denigrate.
The big tech companies are essentially quasi-governments unto themselves at this point – the problem is their decisions are driven by maximizing ad revenue, user engagement and profit growth. That’s not the set of incentives you want when deciding what millions regard as truth.
Our government is hopelessly behind on tech. Legislators haven’t had guidance since 1995 when they got rid of the Office of Technology Assessment. The average Senator is 62. Speeches won’t do much against trillions of dollars of financial incentives.
Edward Snowden, President Freedom of the Press:
Never forget that the Freedom of the Press is the very first part of the Bill of Rights. If you’re out on the street claiming to defend the Constitution, the way you do that is by protecting reporters, not attacking them. Even if you hate the media, anything less is un-American.
Outside the Capitol (on Wednesday), Trump supporters took all the equipment from a news media crew (hearing it was AP) and are looking for ways to set it on fire.
Snowden, Doctorow and Dystopia
May 11, 2017
“Is Doctorow’s fictional utopia bravely idealistic or bitterly ironic? The answer is in our own hands. A dystopian future is in no way inevitable; Walkaway reminds us that the world we choose to build is the one we’ll inhabit. Technology empowers both the powerful and the powerless, and if we want a world with more liberty and less control, we’re going to have to fight for it.”―Edward Snowden
The Verge
by Adi Robertson & @thedextriarchy
“Last night’s talk was part of a tour for Doctorow’s newly released novel Walkaway, which is set in a future where a groundswell of high-tech nomad “walkaway” communities fight oligarchs to subvert the status quo and develop a form of immortality. Snowden pointed out that the book is a mirror version of Atlas Shrugged: instead of a few ubermensch bringing down a misguidedly egalitarian society by leaving, it’s about a mass movement of the disenfranchised threatening a society controlled by the vastly wealthy. Or, as Doctorow put it, “This is the novel about all the people who, when Atlas shrugged, said ‘Good riddance!'”
Walkaway imagines a future shaped by the same problems and possibilities Doctorow’s been playing with for years: the threat of ubiquitous surveillance and artificial scarcity, and the promise that almost any technology can be repurposed and turned against its creator.
[…]
While the talk did cover dystopia and apocalypse, the last part of its title wasn’t a joke: both Snowden and Doctorow expressed cautious hopefulness about changing the world for the better. “One of the central struggles that we all face is not ‘can we save the world?’” Snowden said. “But ‘can we lay down a brick, a foundation upon which other people can place their brick, and together we can build a home?’”
To that end, one of Doctorow’s core themes in Walkaway is subverting what he described as the popular “man against man against nature” pulp plot. “That story of humanity’s barbarism in moments of extremis, it doesn’t actually line up well with reality,” he said. “When you really talk to people who’ve lived through crises, the stories that spring to mind for them are stories of people rising to the occasion in spectacular ways.” But if the darker story is our go-to scenario in times of crisis, we’ll preemptively react to others with hostility, instead of working together to rebuild.
And this extends to more recent, topical conversations, like those around xenophobia and Trump. “There are two possible theories about what just happened in 2016. One is that secretly, tens of millions of people were absolute bastards waiting for an opportunity to vote for an absolute bastard,” said Doctorow. “The other is that people have complicated natures.”
If the second scenario is true, then there’s room to shift the conversation and find common ground with people you disagree with. “You’re not changing what’s in their mind, you’re changing what they do about it,” said Doctorow. “You’re changing whether when they lose their temper, they take a deep breath or punch the guy in the nose. When they feel that the system is unfair, they blame their neighbor, or they tell themselves that it can’t be their neighbor’s fault — it’s a wider problem.”
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/4/15547314/edward-snowden-cory-doctorow-nypl-talk-walkaway