John Harris: Is India the frontline in big tech’s assault on democracy? (Guardian)
Nice key-word: 'hyper-politics' ... Original to: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/big-tech-whatsapp-democracy-india Is India the frontline in big tech’s assault on democracy? John Harris, The Guardian, Mon 13 May 2019 Social media such as WhatsApp may enable voters, but encrypted messaging polarises them and blocks public scrutiny In 10 days’ time, two political dramas will reach their denouement, thanks to the votes of a combined total of about 1.3 billion people. At the heart of both will be a mess of questions about democracy in the online age, and how – or even if – we can act to preserve it. Elections to the European parliament will begin on 23 May, and offer an illuminating test of the rightwing populism that has swept across the continent. In the UK, they will mark the decisive arrival of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party, whose packed rallies are serving notice of a politics brimming with bile and rage, masterminded by people with plenty of campaigning nous. The same day will see the result of the Indian election, a watershed moment for the ruling Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata party, or BJP. Whatever the outcomes, both contests will highlight something inescapable: that the politics of polarisation, anger and what political cliche calls “fake news” is going to be around for a long time to come. WhatsApp has more than 300 million Indian users, and it is Modi and his supporters who have made the most of it In Facebook’s European headquarters in Dublin, journalists have been shown the alleged wonders of the “war room” where staff are charged with monitoring European campaigning – in 24 languages – and somehow minimising hate speech and misinformation put around by “bad actors”. But this is as nothing compared with what is afoot in the world’s largest democracy, and a story centred on WhatsApp, the platform Mark Zuckerberg’s company acquired in 2014 for $22bn, whose messages are end-to-end encrypted and thus beyond the reach of would-be moderators. WhatsApp is thought to have more than 300 million Indian users, and though it is central to political campaigning on all sides, it is Modi and his supporters who have made the most of it. The political aspects of this blur into incidents of murder and violence traced to rumours spread via WhatsApp groups – last week, the Financial Times quoted one Indian political source claiming that WhatsApp was “the echo chamber of all unmitigated lies, fakes and crap in India”. When I spoke to the UK-based Indian academic Indrajit Roy last week he acknowledged India’s “dangerous discourse” but emphasised how the online world had given a voice to people who were once outsiders. He talked about small, regional parties live-streaming rallies in “remote parts of north India”; memes that satirised “how idiotic and self-obsessed [Modi] is”; and people using the internet to loudly ask why India’s caste hierarchies held them back so much. But then came the flipside. In that context, he said, it was perhaps not surprising that Modi was now leading “an elite revolt against the kind of advances that have happened in the past five or six decades, whether it’s the rights of minorities, so-called lower castes, or women”. The fact that he and the BJP are using the most modern means of communication to do so is an irony evident in the rise of conservatives and nationalists just about everywhere. This, then, is an Indian story, but it chimes with what is happening all over the planet. With the help of as many as 900,000 WhatsApp activists, the BJP has reportedly collected reams of detailed data about individual voters and used it to precisely target messages through innumerable WhatsApp groups. A huge and belligerent online community known as the Internet Hindus maintains a shrill conversation about the things that its members think are standing in the way of their utopia: Muslims, “libtards”, secularists. There are highly charged online arguments about Indian history, often led by the kind of propagandists who never stand for office and thus put themselves beyond any accountability. Thanks to the Indian equivalent of birtherism, there are also claims that the Nehru-Gandhi family, who still dominate the opposition Congress party, have been secret followers of Islam, a claim made with the aid of fake family trees and doctored photographs. Partly because forwarded messages contain no information about their original source, it is by no means clear where the division between formal party messaging and unauthorised material lies, so Modi and his people have complete deniability. They benefit, moreover, from the way that the online world seems to ensure that everything is ramped up and divided. To quote Subir Sinha, an Indian analyst of society and politics based at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies: ”You can’t just be a nationalist; you’
The Unimaginables
A call for imagining alternatives is a good first step. Unfortunately I don't see the a sustainable force to implement the imagined, as proposed. It is telling that Morozov correctly identifies problem as political, not technical, but then invokes 'Rebel Tech' as a solution (Morozov's 'Rebel Tech' sounds like something from Star Wars fighting the Empire - but G. Lucas never revealed who is funding the rebels.) The reality is more depressing - Big Tech will end when capitalism ends, so the imagination muscle should be applied there first. [from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/11/big-tech-progressive-vision-silicon-valley ] It's not enough to break up Big Tech. We need to imagine a better alternative Evgeny Morozov As Facebook all but pleads guilty to a severe form of data addiction, confessing its digital sins and promising to reinvent itself as a privacy-worshiping denizen of the global village, the foundations of Big Tech’s cultural hegemony appear to be crumbling. Most surprisingly, it’s in the United States, Silicon Valley’s home territory, where they seem to be the weakest. Even in these times of extreme polarization, Trump, who has habitual outbursts against censorship by social media platforms, eagerly joins left-wing politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in presenting Big Tech as America’s greatest menace The recent call by Chris Hughes, Facebook’s co-founder, to break up the firm hints at things to come. Neither the Silicon Valley moguls nor financial markets seem to care though. The recent decision by Warren Buffet – one of America’s most successful but also most conservative investors –to finally invest in Amazon is probably a better indication of wait awaits the tech giants in the medium term: more lavish initial public offerings, more Saudi cash, more promises to apply artificial intelligence to resolve the problems caused by artificial intelligence. More than a year after the Cambridge Analytical scandal, the Big Tech debate is still mired in the same hackneyed categories of market efficiency, tax evasion, and odious business models that had launched it. If we are going to break up Facebook, shouldn’t we at least break it up for reasons other than its effects on competition or consumer welfare? The two ideological camps, despite their presumed convergence on the Big Tech issue, are unlikely to use this debate to reinvent their own political projects. Those on the right who hope to score electoral points by bashing Big Tech are still mum on what their preferred alternative future looks like. Furthermore, in as much as these movements pine for the return of a conservative and corporativist society ruled by forces seated outside of elected institutions, Silicon Valley, with its extensive digital infrastructure for permanent soft governance, is their natural ally. In the international context, this insistence on salvation by Big Tech acquires an extra twist as there’s so much more salvation – and, also, national development – to be meted out by those very technology giants. This prompts some populist leaders to fantasize about turning their entire countries into efficiently-run fiefdoms of some Big Tech overlord. Thus, the Bolsonaro government in Brazil has proudly announced that they “dream” of having Google or Amazon take over the national post office, soon to be privatized. Today’s crisis-prone Brazil reveals yet another consequence of surrendering the space formerly occupied by politics to the savior-industrial complex of Big Tech. The long-term effect of their supposedly revolutionary activity is often to actually cement the status quo, even if they do it by means of extremely disruptive solutions. Nowhere is this more evident than in how digital technologies are being used to deal with the most burning of social problems. Thus, as crime rates have skyrocketed, Brazil has become a hotbed of innovation in what we might call Survival Tech, with a panoply of digital tools being used to check on the safety of particular streets and neighborhoods and coordinate joint community-level responses. Thus, Waze, a popular Alphabet-owned navigation app, already alerts users in large cities like São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro that they are about to enter a risky part of town (the provenance of the data that is feeding such recommendations has been quite murky). Likewise, residents concerned with crime rates in their own neighborhoods increasingly use tools like Whatsapp to share tips about any suspicious activities in the area. As things get worse – and not just in Brazil – such Survival Tech, allowing citizens to get by in the face of adversity without demanding any ambitious social transformation, stands to flourish. The last decade, with its celebration of austerity, has been good for business as well. In fact, the entire technology boom that followed the 2007-08 financial crisis ca
Guy Standing's report on the Universal Basic Income for the UK Labour Party
Aloha, This looks like the definitive text for the moment, by the guy (sorry for the trite pun) who maybe nicknamed Mister Basic Income. Report was written at the request of Labour's shadow chancellor and vice-chair John McDonell, who would appear to be one of the very few current politicians interested in, and spending large amount of time on, 'content' ... https://www.progressiveeconomyforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/PEF_Piloting_Basic_Income_Guy_Standing.pdf Enjoy! p+2D! # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: The bane of (over) work
On 2019-05-06 16:30, Patrice Riemens wrote: > Aloha, > > Recent article in the NYT, with a title in the on-line edition much > more funky (and apt) than in the print one: "Women Did Everything > Right. Then Work Got ‘Greedy'’ (vs "Longer work hours widen gender > gap") > > https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/upshot/women-long-hours-greedy-professions.html > > (funky illustration too, btw) > > The article is about "how America’s obsession with long hours has > widened the gender gap". An utmost concerning issue and also a > classroom grade instance of 'Kaliyuga' (aka 'verschlimbesseren' in the > former GDR) in case you need one. > > Aside from the gender pay gap gone even worse than before I learned > two things: the moniker 'greedy professions' to describe the more edgy > - and egregious - trades spawned by neo-liberalism (in finance, law, > accountancy etc), but mostly that the phenomenon of excessively paid, > mandatory overwork is a phenomenon of the past two decades only. With > hindsight, this should come as no surprise. > > It comes even less as a surprise since mandatory overwork, this time > scantily - if at all - paid has long been the bane of the > cultural/artistic/voluntary sector. And it encroaches more and more in > other, all other, professions: a kind of pincer movement driven both > by the 'idealistic' as well as the 'materialistic' sectors. > > In both, it is all about a certain 'culture' (I surely wouldn't call > it an 'ethic') where all strands in the (hyper)modern world to come > together: individualism, deregulation, religious disaffection, > flexibility-precarity, to name a few, come together, and almost always > helped and abetted by peer pressure on the work-floor (or its current > equivalent). > > Excess being the curse of our time, there has been a lot of > discussions about possible tax measures to reign its most visible > aspect, disproportionate earnings. It should be possible in theory - > it has been done before - even though the outlook is pessimistic (and > never mind curbing disproportionate wealth). Now I am wondering if the > same sort of measures could be envisaged in terms of working time. > > Not long after the introduction of the law limiting the work week to > 35 hours in France, the Paris police irrupted in a boardroom and > arrested directors for illicit overwork. This incident (never > repeated) caused endless guffaws in France and abroad, especially in > the 'Anglo' realm. However I always thought that it was entirely > appropriate, and that laws limiting working time should not only apply > to the salariat, to protect it against exploitation, but possibly even > more so to the managerial and directorial classes, as they set both > the example and the norms. > > What does come as a surprise to me is that this approach has not been > discussed more - but maybe I have missed something. > > Cheers from Oslo, p+2D! > > > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission > #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: I have seen some coverage over the last few months about China's 996 culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system . Scary stuff. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
