Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Media Page 4 of 8

Julian Assange Arrested for Violating Bail

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On April 11, 2019

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Update 2: So, we have a US extradition charge. This is a direct assault on the freedom of the press and those who say it isn’t are fools. The DOJ claim is that Assange didn’t just accept Manning’s documents, he encouraged Manning to go get more. Journalists do this all the time. Likewise, Assange is not American and Wikileaks is not an American institution, so the US is claiming extraordinary extradition rights.

So, it begins. The US put a ton of pressure on Ecuador to make this happen:

Julian Assange

In itself, this isn’t a big deal, though Ecuador’s caving is pathetic (if rather expected). The question is: What comes next? If Assange is extradited to the US, it will be a huge blow for freedom of the press. Since the Swedish sexual assault charges have been rescinded, if that doesn’t happen this all seems rather overblown.

This has nothing to do with Assange being something of a piece of work. It has to do with the fact that the information Wikileaks released with collateral murder, and even with the DNC leak, was legitimate journalistic information. The idea that journalists don’t accept info from state actors or don’t have political biases and preferences is hilariously wrong and stupid.

It’s also absurd to pretend that Assange has been treated as any other suspect. He hasn’t. His entire case has been politicized from the start, with pressure exerted that is not routine for the sort of sexual assault of which he was accused.

This is a political situation, from its start to its conclusion, whatever that might be.

Remember that Manning was just recently sent to prison on contempt charges because she refused to cooperate with a US grand jury on Wikileaks.

Assange isn’t a nice guy and that isn’t relevant to either his rights, or the bad precedent which will be set if he is prosecuted for releasing information, no matter what the source or reason.

Discuss below, and we’ll see how this plays out.

Update: video of the removal. Pathetic.

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The Problem with Banning Huawei 5G Tech

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On January 27, 2019

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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?)

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 Difference Between Compulsiveness and Happiness

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On November 23, 2018

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One of the most striking bits of research lately has been that every study I am aware of of social media finds a correlation between unhappiness and social media use. The more social media people use, the less happy they are. It’s really extraordinary.

I’ve been thinking about this recently. While ill recently I played some Civilization VI (the worst version  of Civilization in its history.)

I found it compulsive. I’d be sitting there, not enjoying myself, yet found myself playing “just one more turn.”

Social media feels much the same. You tweet or put up a Facebook post or comment, or an Instagram picture, or whatever, and then you wait to see if people respond. The responses are intermittent: you can’t entirely predict them, so it’s very strong reinforcement.

The feeling of posting on social media is compulsive. Like one has to check to see if there are responses: like on has to post something new.

It’s not a happy feeling, usually. Instead it feels like addictive behaviour. Perhaps mildly addictive in some case, perhaps seriously in others.

I find happiness, right now, for me, happens most often while listening to music. It isn’t compulsive at all. I enjoy it, I stop when I have something else to do. It’s relaxed.

Dopamine hits aren’t particularly enjoyable. They’re just demanding: compulsive. “Do more of this.”

Happiness is something else. Not compulsive. Optional.

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.

Why I’m Not Worked Up About “Fake News” and Why I Am

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On August 14, 2018

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So, there’s a lot of BS about fake news. Trump claims that most stories about him are lies (most of them aren’t, some of them are), the media claims that Russians are spreading fake news (yes, like everyone else), and so on.

And, I mean, this is bad. But I find it hard to get super-worked up about it.

Why?

Because…


This sort of thing is just routine. The vast majority of news stories about Corbyn either misrepresent or lie.

Meanwhile, the New York Times systematically lied about Iraqi WMD to justify the Iraq war.

In the 2004 election, the New York Times held back a story on mass surveillance because they were concerned it would cost George Bush the election. Given how close that election was, the New York Times probably helped ensure a Bush victory by withholding accurate information from voters.

They lie when it supports right-wingers and they withhold true information to protect right-wingers.

And, mostly, they just don’t cover stories they don’t want people to know about.

The media is owned by very rich people. The journalists who work for the media serve the interests of those very rich people.

It takes a special sort of stupidity to think that the media is immune from the rule that people who hire people expect their employees to serve their interests and make sure that they do.

If you want the media to have at least a chance of telling the truth, you need individual outlets to be small, you need there to be many, many outlets and it needs to be cheap to own and run one. In such circumstances, while it will still run towards serving the rich, it won’t serve the super-rich as much as it does today, when a few conglomerates control almost all the media.

Any sector which is a private sector oligopoly (like the media) will obviously serve the interests of the wealthiest in society.

The current conglomerates, online, include Facebook and Google, both of which need to be broken up, and the search engine industry needs to be rigorously regulated, since it decides who sees what. ISPs, without network neutrality, may also take on this role, and obviously network neutrality needs to be reinstated.

Since ISPs provide no value except as a pipeline, they should be regulated as utilities or simply bought by the government. If regulated, their profit should be fixed at 5%+central bank interest rate, or something similar, no stock options and other such nonsense should be allowed, and any profit over that number should simply be taken away by the government. (This will, indirectly, encourage them to build more infrastructure, but you can also do as was done to utilities in the 50s and 60s and specify how much is to be spent.)

ISPs should never be owned by other companies, if allowed to remain private.

Social media is likewise a commons, and should be regulated as such. The way they are currently engineered, they operate as dopamine depleters, and research shows that happiness decreases in direct proportion with engagement to social media. They will have to be forced to stop playing dopamine games, get rid of most of their algorithims, and give control over timelines explicitly to users.

All of this may seem like a lot of work, or an “intrusion,” but we can either control our own lives as voters and members of the public, through government, or we can allow private interests who care only about the benefit to a few people to do so.

So, while in one sense I’m not upset by “fake news,” on the other hand, I am. I’m upset by the control of a few major companies over who gets to spew what propaganda at the public.

Control the major media (and economic) actors, or they will control us.

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.

 

Books vs. the Internet

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On July 28, 2018

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One of the major changes in my life this last year has been that I’m reading a lot of books.

When I was young, I read a lot. For much of my childhood and most of my teen years I was reading about two books a day. During holidays I often read three a day or even four. Even into my twenties and early thirties, I maintained a book a day or so. I was one of those people who always carried a pocket book. Heck, I’d walk down the sidewalk, reading, the analog version of people staring at their smartphones.

Then along came the internet. A fair bit of my attention went to forums, but that didn’t slow down my book reading too much. Until I became a blogger, and somehow the internet ate my life.

A lot of that was good, especially from 03-08, but one casualty was book reading. I went down to one or two a week. I was intensely involved in political and economic issues, and paradoxically that made me hate reading books about economics and politics. I had trained myself, as a writer, to look for what people were (to my mind) wrong about, get angry about it (because it had real world consequences that were ugly), and then use that anger to write a post.

This made reading full books by people I disagreed with (almost all mainstream economists and political theorists of the time) really unpleasant.

This conditioning took a lot of time to overcome. But about a year ago I started really reading again, and today I’m up to about a book and a half a day. Buying a Kindle (yeah, Amazon, I know, but my experience with Kobo sucked) made this easy, and in general e-books are cheaper.

So I’ve been reading and reading, and I confirmed what I’d known, but put aside, that internet reading is not a substitute for reading books.

The vast majority of internet reading is too short. Even longer form articles and essays, which are becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of the internet anyway, just don’t match up to a decent book.

You don’t get enough information or argument or description. Even a five thousand word essay, which almost no one publishes on the internet anymore, and no one reads, does not allow the proper development of either the argument or the supporting facts as well as a good book. (Granted a lot of books are overgrown magazine articles, but that’s why I qualified with “good.”)

One gets pieces, on the internet, facts out of context, or arguments without all the facts. When learning about a new subject, one rarely gets all the context one needs: No essay is comprehensive enough.

Just recently, I spent a lot of time reading about the Chinese economy, and Chinese trade. I’ve kept a general eye on China for years, but I still didn’t know basic facts, like, for example, that China has the most decentralized government spending of any federal government in the world. (This is a fundamental and important fact, and explains much of why China succeeded.)

There is an idea, prevalent today, that one doesn’t really need to know things, because one can easily look them up.

This is not true if you want to understand anything, however. Your mind cannot work without facts and theories you don’t know. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know, and what you know you don’t know, you can then go study. If there’s important information you don’t know you don’t know, you can’t even take your ignorance into account.

Information outside your head can’t be used to improve your world and understanding, to make new connections, to understand more.

And disconnected facts and theories, not embedded within a fuller network of facts and theories; decontextualized, can be deeply misleading. They may make sense, but if you knew more you’d know they aren’t correct or don’t mean what you think they do. Equally you may think a theory or set of facts are bullshit, where if you knew more you’d understand whatever truth, or usefulness, they carry.

We thought the internet would be a huge boon, and in some ways it has been. But as with the research that shows that the more one uses social media the more unhappy and anxious one is, the fact of having so much information at our fingertips, while lovely, has also led to too much of it floating, almost context free, un-embedded in the networks of theory and meaning and additional facts necessary to make sense of it.

So, in general, while I think the internet has a lot to offer, I have to say that for those who want to understand the world, it should be used as little more than a reference library and news ticker; social media should mostly be avoided, with a careful calculus of whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, and one should spend most of one’s reading time with books, not online writing. (Er, of course, my blog is an exception. *cough*)

Books: Still better for actual understanding. And better for your happiness and your ability to concentrate as well.

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.

Assange, Wikileaks, and Shooting the Messenger

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On April 21, 2018

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Julian Assange

So, as you have probably heard, Ecuador, which is housing Julian Assange in its London embassy, has restricted all communication by him to outsiders, save his lawyers. No visitors, no phone, no email.

They have even gone so far as to install radio jammers.

The proximate cause of this is that Assange supported Catalan independence and Spain is furious.

The Intercept has a long piece on Assange’s silencing by Ecuador, and I’d appreciate it if you read it. (The debunking of the “Catalan independence is caused by Russia” is particularly necessary in these hysterical days.)

I’m aware that a lot of people, and especially these days, a lot of left-wingers who loved him when he was goring right-wingers other than Hillary Clinton, hate him, but this is ludicrous.

Catalan independence has a long history in Spain.

And, more to the point, it is legitimate to support people’s right to vote themselves out of countries they don’t want to be in. You may not agree with that, you may think people shouldn’t have the right of self-determination, but it’s a strongly ethical position with a lot of support.

To silence someone for speaking such an opinion is pathetic, and that it is done due to obvious political pressure doubly so.

Wikileaks has been a net positive for the world. A lot of people don’t believe this, but in almost all cases that comes down to disliking WHO Wikileaks has hurt with particular revelations.

Like it or not, the DNC leaks were legitimate news: The DNC interfered in the Democratic primaries to help one candidate, and people should know that–that information is in the public interest.

If you don’t want to be outed for doing shitty things against the public interest, don’t do them. And if doing shitty things against the public interest helps you lose an election you should have won, well, Jesus, do I have to spell this out further?

Meanwhile, the DNC has decided to sue Wikileaks for publishing the DNC material–material that was clearly in the public interest. (Also the Russian government, Trump, yadda, yadda).

Again, hate Wikileaks or not, publishing the material in question (and the DNC does not claim that Wikileaks participated in the hack) is a legitimate journalistic enterprise, well-covered by the freedom of the press.

Folks, rights do not belong only to people you like for ends with which you agree. That’s why they are rights.

As for the DNC and the Democratic party, their continued desire to blame everyone but themselves for their loss in 2016 bodes ill. Oh, they’ll be back in power in this years mid-terms, and possibly in 2020, but that will remain all they can do: Win when Republicans shoot themselves in the foot.

Remember that 2008 was Democrats to lose, Republicans were reviled. (And, though people forget it, for over a month towards the end of the campaign, Obama was behind. He did his best to lose it.) Then, while Obama stayed in power, Republicans took most State houses, governorships, and both the House and Senate.

Now I hear squealing about how Sanders shouldn’t run in 2020. The reason given is rarely just his age (which is a legitimate concern), it’s usually something like “some of his followers say nasty things” and “he’s divisive.” This is amusing, because he’s the most popular politician in the country; he regularly polls as beating Trump by the largest margin of any likely 2020 Democratic candidate, and yeah, if you care, he is more popular with blacks and women than he is with white males.

Assange is a side-issue. A bogeyman. And for all that Russia did some stuff, so is Russia. US pathologies originate in the US–at most they are taken advantage of by outsiders. The same is true of Spain.

Shoot the messenger, if you must, the message remains the same. Clean your house.

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.

Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and Inevitable Abuses that Inevitably Happen

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On March 20, 2018

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So, you’re probably aware of the furor over Cambridge Analytica. They scraped Facebook’s database and used the psychological information to craft their campaign. They have also been caught on tape admitting they do dirty tricks like honey traps, and propaganda (knowing lies).

And there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

First of all, it is essentially impossible that they are the first group to scrape Facebook’s database, as Atrios points out.

The data is there for the taking, and I am sure many others have done so, including both Democrats and Republicans.

Second, the techniques Analytica used against the US are extensions of techniques used against other countries regularly, and especially against the Muslim, Russian, and post-USSR world. To the extent that Russia is involved, they likely regard this is a fair play–they’re just doing what the West has done to them, post-USSR Republics, and their allies for many years.

Third, Facebook is a data-gathering organization, as is Google. What they do is create psyshological and life-event profiles so that advertisers can manipulate people to sell to them. This is hardly different from using the same data to manipulate people to sell candidates or policies.

Cambridge Analytica is just one part of an entire industry set up around this sort of information. Peter Thiel’s Palantir does much the same general sort of stuff, but Thiel is smart, and does it for the US military and spies, so he is protected, even though Palantir does far more evil.

There are certain doors that should not be opened. Collection of this sort of data is probably past one of these doors. The problem isn’t just scraping, the problem is that it will inevitably, and I do mean inevitably, wind up available to anyone. Every leak, every hack, is available, and so many records from so many companies have leaked that you have to simply assume your information is available to anyone who cares enough to plunk down a little money, or who is a little code savvy.

Just as information on who was what religion was used by Nazis to hunt and kill Jews, and just as when it was destroyed, it saved lives, this information will inevitably be abused. So one has to ask if the public good of knowing it and having everyone able to know it, is superseded by the public bad of knowing it, and having everyone able to know it.

As with moving from physical cash to electronic cash, I think the answer is no. (I know the answer is no with respect to cash.)

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.

And So Net Neutrality Ends in the US

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On December 14, 2017

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Not unexpected. This will make direct competition with entrenched players nearly impossible, as they will be able to buy access to customers, and upstarts won’t. The Internet as a place where anybody could start a new business will constrict.

Oligopoly and monopoly providers (and many areas effectively have only one ISP) will extract even higher profits (understand that high speed internet profits are about 100 percent already) and will either hold anyone who wants to get to customers hostage for access or will force retail customers to pay premium rates for relatively unfettered access.

The fight will continue in court, and can always be overturned by elected officials.

Public internet, by a heavily regulated utility provider, is one solution down the road. The other to do what was done in the days of dial up and force providers to let other companies sell access to the internet through their networks.

To a remarkable degree, the internet is a natural oligopoly. It doesn’t make sense to drive multiple wires or set up multiple sets of towers–that’s irrational. As such, it needs to be regulated as a natural monopoly, with forced upgrades, set levels of profits (a low, single-digit number, inflation-adjusted) and regulatory knee-breakers who are not allowed to work for industries they ever regulated. (Meaning, you can go from industry to regulation, but not vice versa.)

These are, as usual, mostly solved problems. The world has had public or regulated utilities for ages and we know how to make them work if we want to.

Right now we don’t. We want private actors to make unregulated monopoly profits and to shut down innovation and the creation of new work and jobs.

So be it.

(See also, How Internet Monopolies Are Destroying the Web.)

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.

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