Category: Internet Page 2 of 4

I try not to write about topics about which a lot of other people have said what I’d say, or, indeed, written it better than I would. Musk’s takeover of Twitter is one of those topics. There have been plenty of excellent articles about what it means and about how Musk could really screw up Twitter by destroying the feeling of safety which advertisers require and by misunderstanding that the users are the product, not the customers.

I’ve been on Twitter since August of 2008 (@iwelsh). I visit it almost every day, and for many years, I spent a lot of time there. Nowadays, it probably takes up 30 to 45 minutes of my day. My account isn’t huge; I have something like over four thousand followers, and I follow about thirteen-hundred. (Following too many people is a sign of disrespect and twitter-gaming, because it means you don’t actually read them.)

For me, Twitter takes the place of the email lists I was on in the 2000s and which collapsed near the end of the decade. “Townhouse,” which some people may have heard of, was one, but only one of them. Emails on these lists would often include links to articles of interest and discussion of important topics of the day.

Each list would have a primary topic; I was on lists that focused on domestic US politics, foreign affairs, the tech industry, and so on. The lists acted as both a filter and a way to read people discussing topics in which I was interested — often, very well-informed and smart people. Because the lists were semi-private, there was some additional value: People could be frank.

These lists collapsed near the end of the decade, in part because of a series of leaks. A lot of the value was that it was “off the record.”

Twitter, frankly, isn’t quite as good for quality of discussion about controversial topics, simply because it is public. You can’t “let your hair down” and everything you say can and probably will be used against you. But it is still a venue where everyone talks about everything, and if you curate who you follow, you can still connect with people interested in specific topics discuss them and share article links and so on.

I don’t just follow political types; I follow book-twitter, archeology-twitter, a bunch of artists, a fair chunk of the crypto-crowd, some pagans and hermeticists, classicists, and so on.

A lot of what passes in my Twitter-stream is chuff, especially from the political junkies, but a lot is smart and interesting and seeing what the people I have chosen to follow think is worth talking about is useful in itself.

Twitter is a curated experience, and if Musk doesn’t fuck it up (his idea of not showing non-blue checks content would destroy its value — most of the best accounts I follow don’t have a blue check), it will remain useful because you choose who you follow. It’s just that simple. Turn the timeline to chronological so the algo doesn’t go all Facebook on you, and it’s much like early Facebook was before Zuckerberg screwed it up by trying to over-monetize it.

A timeline on Twitter is just people you chose to follow talking or re-tweeting something they like someone else wrote.

And frankly, at it’s base, that’s marvelous. If you don’t like your Twitter feed, well, you chose it, and you can change it.

This can easily be fucked up, of course. Facebook screwed this up with algos instead of just giving you a chronological timeline of people you chose to follow; Twitter has gone some way down that road, but it can still be made to work. Musk may screw that up, and if he does, I’ll leave. If he doesn’t, I’ll stay.

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ATMs and Debit Payments Go Down In Canada

By Ian Welsh

On July 8, 2022

7 Comments

So, I’m not sure if it’s all ATMs, but I know Interac (our debit) is down. This is also apparently affecting 911 (emergency) calls.

Canada has three providers of phone and internet, everyone else is either niche (satellite) or actually uses their networks. They are Bell, Telus and Rogers.

Rogers is down, with no ETA to being back up. I found out when I tried to call Canada’s tax people (the Canada Revenue Agency) and got “no network”.

The short term point here is to always keep some cash. I’ve got $25 in my pocket, which is less than it should be but at least I can buy some food and so on.

Cashless societies are bad. Not just because it’s easy for the infrastructure to go down for technical reasons or due to some disaster or war or terrorism, but because they are inherently totalitarian. The government or corporations can freeze people out of the economy any time they want. PayPal, Visa and Mastercard have done this repeatedly (many years ago it was Wikileaks, since it’s been people with the wrong political views.)

I didn’t much like the Trucker protests in Ottawa, Canada, but they should have been dealt with by the police, not by freezing people’s bank accounts. That’s tyranny. It was done, I’m fairly sure, because the Ottawa police were sympathetic to the truckers and politicians didn’t think they’d obey orders.

Likewise, many folks who use things like bitcoin don’t understand blockchain technology: it’s inherently totalitarian and its traceable. It’s a LOT harder to trace cash. If you want anonymity, cash is still king. Any society which removes cash is doing so for two reasons:

So they can track much more, micromanage what people spend and shut people and organizations they don’t approve out of the economy easily; and,
So that middlemen (corps, governments if they want to) can take a cut off everything.

I believe we should pay our taxes, but it’s not an absolute value. Black and especially gray markets exist for a reason, and it’s not always a bad thing. In particular, in many countries, including the US and Canada, you can’t always get a bank account. The cash economy allows those who can’t to survive; it allows those shut out to survive, and gray and black markets put a check on government power to say “absolutely not” to people things really want or need.

That’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

The more we love to e-cash only, the more our societies, intrinsically, are vulnerable to shocks, to authoritarianism and to rentierism.

Cash is worth keeping and I would go so far as to make it illegal for most businesses to not accept cash. Cash is, in a certain sense, freedom. In another deeper sense money based societies are anti-freedom, but that’s another argument and for another time. If we use money, we need cash that can’t go down and which isn’t inherently authoritarian.

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The Free, Diverse Internet In America Is Coming To An End

By Ian Welsh

On January 27, 2021

47 Comments

Matt Taibbi’s been covering who is being censored, and his latest is worth a read.

But basically the internet now runs thru a number of major content aggregators: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc… (many of these are owned by the same few firms.) Most people go to the major sites and find their media there, and those who don’t use Google as their search engine.

These platforms are private and thus, as we are told over and over again by fools, are not subject to the first amendment, which they seem to think means “it’s not censorship.” But when almost all of the media consumption on the internet goes thru sites owned by five or so large companies, the commons are owned private firms, and all that has happened is that private firms are doing the censoring.

These content aggregators are aggressively banning outlets, and there is effectively no appeal. The content producer Taibbi talks to had live-streams of events taken down because “guns”, but YouTube left up streams from large media outlets of the same content. They took down his stream of the Jan 6th protests beccause it included a bit of Trump lying about election fraud, but left up clips from large media outlets with that speech.

This all really took off after 2016, with RussiaGate hysteria and concerns over Cambridge Analytica’s program of targeted propaganda. It is now about to enter a new phase, and sweep internet aggregators of a vast number of independent voices.

Both the right and center are to blame for this. The right has been putting out straight up lies, in large quantities. Q-Anon was a funded operation, no one with sense will pretend otherwise. Lies are flooded into the discourse, and have led to real, and nasty effects, like the January 6th capitol attack, which as I pointed out at the time, was the right thing to do IF the election had really been stolen. (It hadn’t.)

The center wants only the discourse they approve of in the media. It’s not primarily about lies: after all, they aren’t pushing for the people who lie all the time in the mainstream press to be de-platformed; no one is screaming for the heads of those who spread the ridiculous Russian bounties on American soldiers story.

So the internet of free ideas and diverse ideas is about to take it in the neck. Some stuff that seems diverse will remain; a lot of identity politics, for example, because elites really really believe that women and minorities and gays and trans people should also be in boardrooms and oppress everyone else. It is important that representatives of every group bomb foreigners and so on. You can see this in the constant stories about people weeping in corporate meetings about how their company is about to publish someone nasty.

A lot of this won’t effect me much. When Google changed its algos after 2016 I lost a lot of traffic (aim right, hit left), but I don’t get much from any social media outlet. I’m glad that I never really engaged, except on twitter, which I don’t spend time on for traffic.

But the internet of truly diverse voices we dreamed of and, to some extent, created in the late 90s and early 2000s is dying; being strangled before our eyes. And it’s going to get worse.

The internet was a nice idea. Now it’s just a few large firms controlling most of the meaningful traffic. Some good remains: the vast information available without going to a library; email, and so on. But diverse politics and controversial ideas?

That time approaches dusk.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

Tech Platform Censorship & The Great QAnon Facebook Purge

By Ian Welsh

On October 8, 2020

36 Comments

So, Facebook has cracked down on QAnon, removing essentially all QAnon pages and groups.

BOOM.

Obviously QAnon is bunk. As I noted earlier it’s right in the broad sense: yes, we are ruled by pedophiles as any casual acquaintance with the Epstein case will tell you, no, Trump is not at war with them except in the sense that yeah, he’s opposed by some elite factions and some of them will be pedos. Of course, many people who support Trump are probably pedos. And it’s laughably wrong in specifics.

At one time the tech platforms mostly didn’t want to do censorship and content moderation. Of course, their algos mean they do: and there’s plenty of evidence that YouTube, for example, pushes a lot of right wing content hard, but they did it for greed, not out of any sense of political noblesse oblige or civic responsibility. Facebook played a role in at least one ethnic cleansing.

But really it was the hysteria about a possible Russian role in the 2016 election that started the censorship ball rolling.

It started with Google, who changed their algorithms. Strangely, that algorithm change hit the left much harder than the right.

(I actually noticed it myself, pages that had been on the first page of search results, like my ethics vs. morality article dropped off and never returned.)

So, you’re left wing and you hate the right (understandable) and you want them censored.

The problem is simple: once censorship gets going it doesn’t just stay with the people you want hit. Everyone who doesn’t have the power to protect themselves gets censored, and, children, people in power hate the left FAR more than the right. They can live with Fascism, authoritarianism and so on. Pinochet, Hitler, Mussolini, whoever—they were and are all good to corporations and rich people. They may be declasse and embarassing, but they don’t threaten most of the people with power or wealth. Left wingers, well, they might actually tax rich people and if you remember Bill Gates squeals during the primary at the idea of a wealth tax, well, you know that even “good” billionaires hate left wingers.

So, censorship is on the loose, the tech platforms are purging and maybe you’re happy.

But remember, it never stops with the people you hate.

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Facebook, Destroyer of Media

By Ian Welsh

On October 15, 2019

20 Comments

So, Facebook has been fined forty million dollars for inflating video statistics.

Sounds like a yawn, eh? Not a very big fine, for a not-very-big crime.

But it was a big crime. Newspapers, web sites, etc…pivoted to video. Facebook said that views were as much as 900 percent higher than they actually were (counting, among other things, three-second views as viewership.)

So companies hired video staff, got rid of writers and pivoted.

And revenues crashed, because there wasn’t actually viewership or a way to monetize that viewership.

Virtually the entire online humor industry, for example, went under.

Facebook and Google are parasites and predators. They don’t create sweet fuck all, but they take a huge share of the revenue that would go to actual content producers. They devastate entire industries. And in this case, Facebook did it by straight-up fraud. They made billions from their lies, and paid a tiny fine.

In other words, the fine is so small, that Facebook knows they should commit fraud again in the future.

This isn’t effective law, effective regulation, or anything approaching justice.

Facebook needs to be broken up into constituent parts, and they need to be regulated. As a place to connect to friends, with a chronological timeline, Facebook provides a genuine service. As surveillance capitalism and a gateway that skims actual producers’ profits, destroying producers wholesale, it’s a catastrophe.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Problem with Public Expertise

By Ian Welsh

On June 26, 2019

37 Comments

One of the talking points against the internet and social media is that it has led to the death of expertise.

The issue with this is that, when you move away from the hard sciences and engineering, which still leaves vast swathes of public policy, the experts aren’t much, if any, better than laypeople.

The majority of pundits got the Iraq war wrong. The majority of economists (the vast majority) did not see the housing/CDO bubble and did not expect the financial collapse.

The people that were the gatekeepers of the old media pick, suck. Almost all of them got wrong the two most important issues of 2000s.

So the idea that the internet and social media is worse seems questionable.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

As for fake news, I will point out, again, that the New York Times liked about the Iraq war. Fake news.

With devastating consequences.

This isn’t to say that no filters or regulation would be good, but I don’t trust this government or these social media companies to decide who gets to talk.

I think anyone who does is foolish.

The Forbidden Truth About Analog Technology

By Ian Welsh

On April 16, 2019

38 Comments

… is that a lot of it was, well, better, than digital technology.

I was remembering, the other day, library card catalogues.

Here’s a truth many will refuse to believe: They were faster to use, easier to use, and provided better results than modern computerized library terminals. You looked up the code for what you wanted, flipped that section of the cards, and not only did you usually find the book you wanted, you found a bunch of other books which were related, whether or not their title sounded like it.

Then you went to that section of the library shelves and found all sorts of books on the subject in which you were interested, along with related subjects.

Then, there were employment centers. They put the cards on walls. You walked in, looked at them, copied down the contact info for any in which you were interested. The process took minutes, especially on any follow up visits, as you’d recognize any old jobs.

When they were replaced by computers, I found the process took at least ten times as long.

Back in the late 90s, I worked on a huge auditing project. Some of the files were computerized, some were still entirely on paper. I can state for a fact that the paper files were faster to audit — about half the time, because I was doing both at the same time.

Having worked on both paper file systems and computer systems, I can say that, in general, paper file systems were faster. Further, each new iteration of computer technology has slowed things down. The old mainframe systems were faster than PCs, and as PC software went through generations, it became less and less efficient. Often this was because managers wanted control: They wanted workers to click buttons and confirm things were done, and enter extraneous information, and use pull down menus, and blah, blah…all things that slowed work down.

Other times, it was because the servers were no longer on site, they were some distance away. I remember when one employer moved the servers to IBM: It may have saved $$ on server costs, but each button click took half a second or so. I actually measured the loss of worker productivity (because management refused to believe it existed). It was about 30 percent and the better the worker, the more it was. The best workers were losing about half their productivity; the system could not keep up with their flying fingers.

Then there are things like answering machines and emails. These are ways for people to interrupt workers and demand they do something — often something “right now.” These interruptions slow workers down, interrupting work flow. Often, if the worker was left alone, whatever problem the caller or emailer wanted dealt with would have been taken care of, but constant interruptions destroy productivity.

That isn’t to say that PCs, the internet, and cell and smart phones never increase productivity. Sometimes they do, usually by allowing remote work, as long as that remote work is not closely supervised. Remote workers are usually more productive if doing skilled work.

The horror show side is where real-time telemetry is used to micromanage workers doing repetitive tasks. Amazon warehouses and call centers are both hell-zones due to this. This certainly improves efficiency, but it turns workers into drones and loses all benefits of worker initiative and innovation. If a manager doesn’t think of it, it doesn’t happen, and even low-ranked managers in these regimes are really just supervisors dancing to an algorithm.

All of this speaks to a dirty secret: With a few exceptions, the allaged productivity gains from the internet and late telecom revolution just haven’t shown up. This revolution is a control revolution. It allows finely-tuned control by bosses and the powers that be. It allows them to have access to fine-grained information that, in the past, required a Stasi-like state, without having to send someone to the basement for the file, and with algos doing the first-wave of sorting and analysis.

Information is what this is good for — information and data.

But information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to flow uphill to bosses, governments, and spies. Information allows levels of control which are, in effect, totalitarian.

Technologies are not neutral. They are better for some things than for others. And this tech revolution is a revolution whose main effect has been to allow closer control of humans. It is inherently authoritarian.

That’s not all it is — there have certainly been good effects — but it is not a utopian technology which makes everyone better off.

The reverse appears to be true, at least so far. Even in fields like social media (which are surveillance technologies masquerading as public forums), the studies are in, and they are clear: The more you use social media the worse it is for you.

Humans aren’t meant to be surveilled by anyone except their family, friends, and neighbours. Anything beyond that is inhuman and has negative effects on our well-being.

So, we have a technology which mostly hasn’t improved productivity, which is inherently authoritarian and which, the more it is used for certain major tasks, leads to reduced well-being.

Tech revolutions aren’t always good. So far, it looks like this one, on balance, is bad. (And I say this as someone who has personally benefited from this revolution.)

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The Problem with Banning Huawei 5G Tech

By Ian Welsh

On January 27, 2019

40 Comments

So, the Huawei saga rolls on. The executive arrested, the daughter of the CEO, will probably wind up released, as it’s been made clear this is a political arrest. (Trump has said so, and it’s over Iran sanctions. Breaking Iran sanctions is clearly political, and probably even the ethical thing to do in many cases.)

But something else is more important to note. Huawei genuinely has the most advanced net tech in the world. It’s that simple.

America no longer manufacturers telecom equipment – Cisco got out of the business several years ago – and Huawei’s two Scandinavian competitors are too little, too late, and too expensive…

the Shenzhen firm is spending $20 billion a year on R&D, about four times as much as either Ericsson or Nokia, its only important challengers in the telecommunications equipment market.

Huawei’s internal assessment holds that its technological lead in 5G mobile broadband is so wide that the competition has no effective chance of catching up. In late February, Huawei will introduce its Balong phone, with a chipset that can handle downloads ten times faster than the best 4G LTE speeds, while operating with 4G networks as well.

Or:

“China’s largest tech company makes high-quality networking gear that it sells to rural telecommunications operators for 20 percent to 30 percent less than its competitors do, says Joseph Franell, chief executive officer and general manager of Eastern Oregon Telecom in Hermiston…”

This is hopeless. It’s probably true that Huawei stole a lot of technology, especially in the 90s and the 2000’s. One of its victims was Nortel, Canada’s telecom giant, which makes me angry.

So what?

They have the technology. It’s cheaper and more advanced than anyone else’s and, hilariously, the US doesn’t even compete in this type of telecom equipment any more.

If this is a strategic matter, then the US has fallen down completely. If an industry is strategic, a country must make sure it, or a trusted ally, stays in the lead. Not only did the US not do that, but US policies from the 80s onwards effectively off-shored this sort of production and research, as a deliberate policy choice.

Now they cry?

5G is lost. If the US, or the US and its allies, want a shot at 6E they’d better figure out how to do industrial policy. That might, indeed, mean banning Huawei, but only if they’re willing to put up with worse, more expensive internet for a decade or so. (But then US and Canadian internet is already not nearly as good as the best.)

One of the key tenets of neoliberal economic policy is that it doesn’t matter where something is manufactured, or done. Let the cheapest domicile do it, and everyone will benefit.

This is bullshit, and always was. Making and designing new things is where economic strength, the good life and military power all come from.

Nations which forget this wind up in the dustbin. Free trade, as an ideology, is the deathknell of great powers, including Great Britain, and likely to include the US. It does work for smaller powers, and should be the default policy mode for all city states, but great powers are not small powers, let alone city states.

So, if the US wants to ban Huawei, it’d better figure out how it’s going to support Huawei’s competitors enough so that they at least catch up, or even consider making sure the US has its own telecom manufacturers. If it can’t do that, this is a band-aid on a wound.

(Oh, and there’s a reason the US, whose technology is used in most of the older telecom equipment, especially cables, thinks that China might use that to listen in. Mmmmm. What would that be?)

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