Weekly Picks

Weekly Picks – February 4, 2024

February 4, 2024 /

“We can’t have a decent society, we can’t have people with their own volition, we can’t have a society that progresses, we can’t have a society based on empathy or kindness, if people are being manipulated from some central source, no matter what type of source that is.”

– Jaron Lanier

 

Special comment: On the same day that I published this quick dive into the most popular virtual interfacing networks, the CEOs of Facebook, Tiktok, X, Snap, and Discord testified in front of the US Congress. On the docket was the companies’ response to the sharp rise of online sexual exploitation of children and youth. In attendance were families of youth who had self-harmed or committed suicide. There was even a surreal moment when Mark Zuckerberg was asked to “say something” and apologize to the families seated behind him. You could see his hesitation as he struggled with the Senator’s request – acquiesce and admit wrong, or stay put and appear inhuman? He landed somewhere in the middle, issuing about as appropriate an apology as you can get in such a setting, without accepting any ownership of responsibility.

My post was not planned to coincide with this event. And this is not the first nor the last time these online heads of states will be summoned to legislative assemblies to defuse tensions around growing crises relating to social media usage. As Jaron Lanier describes in the video I had shared, the fundamental architecture of these systems will ensure these outcomes. Modern tech moguls, many of them founders and builders of this fundamental architecture, are brilliant developers and marketers. But they are not saviors. To imbue them with power and expect them to “regulate culture” as Lanier puts it, is an abdication of public responsibility. The profit motive is hardly the stalwart steward of great philosophy, governance, and ethics. It will not safeguard society. That is the public’s task, to be undertaken free from invasive surveillance and ruined edifices.

Another video shared here for those interested in further exploration of the topics discussed in the post:

 
(12:28-18:52 is a succinct summary of the crux of the issue.)

This week’s collection:

  • A Circular Motion: Protest, what is it good for?
  • Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands
  • Trees struggle to ‘breathe’ as climate warms, researchers find
  • Can Divestment Campaigns Still Work?
  • Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash

Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

Further reading for those interested in social media, the tech industry’s power, or surveillance:

Notes on the ongoing Gaza conflict, and its interpretations:

1. A Circular Motion: Protest, what is it good for?

“In the history of the left, revolutions have been more often missing than not, or have arrived in forms alien or repulsive to those who most desired them. As Perry Anderson once remarked, the ‘hidden hallmark’ of Western Marxism is that ‘it is a product of defeat.’ The canon of revolutionary failures varies, but one might count 1914, 1919, 1926, 1956, 1968 and 1991. Each case offers difficult questions rather than clear lessons: how to produce systemic change in developed democracies; why people appear to vote against their best interests; how to respond to state violence and repression committed in your name; what to do when the basic parameters of class appear to change, or new identities acquire political significance; how to continue when you seem utterly defeated. The difficulty of such questions sometimes means that, rather than answers, we get self-consolatory defensive formations: fundamentalism and heresy-hunting, a redoubling of voluntarist commitment, apocalypticism, or a melancholic attachment to a lost past.

…

It is not​ an entirely depressing story…we can recognise that the Occupy Wall Street generation has had a persistent influence on US politics. Few have drifted into reaction or quietism, and they have helped force issues of race and climate to the fore, while remaining conscious of the need to consider mass appeal and electoral strategy. This generation is responsible for the two Bernie Sanders campaigns, for revivifying the Democratic Socialists of America and for a highly visible increase in labour organising.

…

The case studies are dispiriting. It’s true that right-wing populist victories have been narrow, just as left-populist failures have sometimes been tantalisingly close. The balance sheet is strikingly lopsided, although the conclusions to be drawn from this fact aren’t obvious. Left populists might believe it demonstrates a need to go harder, like a left-wing Trump or Farage. But the consistent failure of such a strategy might raise questions about whether the repertoire of the right is, in fact, equally available to the left. Despite the intermittent episodes of revolutionary rhetoric and press histrionics, left populists are essentially moderate when compared with their 20th-century predecessors, broadly at peace with the liberal democratic state and the institutions it superintends.”

2. Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands

A reminder that slavery continues to be legal in the US.

“A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.

Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.”

3. Trees struggle to ‘breathe’ as climate warms, researchers find

“Trees are struggling to sequester heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) in warmer, drier climates, meaning that they may no longer serve as a solution for offsetting humanity’s carbon footprint as the planet continues to warm, according to a new study led by Penn State researchers.

“We found that trees in warmer, drier climates are essentially coughing instead of breathing,” said Max Lloyd, assistant research professor of geosciences at Penn State and lead author on the study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “They are sending CO2 right back into the atmosphere far more than trees in cooler, wetter conditions.”

…

The results complicate a widespread belief about the role of plants in helping to draw down—or use—carbon from the atmosphere, providing new insight into how plants could adapt to climate change. Importantly, the researchers noted that as the climate warms, their findings demonstrate that plants could be less able to draw CO2 out of the atmosphere and assimilate the carbon necessary to help the planet cool down.”

4. Can Divestment Campaigns Still Work?

“Paxson is not unique in this regard: she is part of a chorus of university administrators around the country evading calls for divestment, either through outright silence, feigned helplessness, or promises to “do more research” that lead nowhere.

Things weren’t always this way. In the 1980s, when militant college students, fresh off the heels of the antiwar movement, got wind of just how much of their schools’ endowments were propping up apartheid South Africa, they vowed to hold their boards of trustees accountable—and did so with great success. They began to coalesce around divest-from–South Africa movements and leveraged the opportunity for massive stock buybacks from companies operating in South Africa—even those that promised to abide by (minimal and ineffective) nonsegregation requirements.

…

In the wake of the ongoing war on Gaza, U.S. students have pushed divestment as a means to leverage their universities’ financial ties, this time against Israel. Yet these students face an uphill battle utterly distinct from the one waged by Free South Africa organizers in the 1980s. What’s changed?”

5. Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash

“The fact that Wascher made a mistake was self-evident, as was the fact that that mistake led, more or less directly, to the deaths of 35 people. The media and the public began to question the fate of Ms. Wascher. Should she be punished? Should she lose her job? Did she commit an offense?

How the authorities choose to handle such a mistake says a lot about our society’s conceptions of justice, culpability, agency, empathy, and even vengeance, because the moral dilemma of what to do about Robin Wascher exists as a struggle between diverging values and, in fact, diverging value systems, rooted in the relative prioritization of individual and systemic responsibility.

…

In the aftermath of a disaster, our immediate reaction is often to search for some person to blame. Authorities frequently vow to “find those responsible” and “hold them to account,” as though disasters happen only when some grinning mischief-maker slams a big red button labeled “press for catastrophe.” That’s not to say that negligence ought to go unpunished. Sometimes there really is a malefactor to blame, but equally often there isn’t, and the result is that normal people who just made a mistake are caught up in the dragnet of vengeance, like the famous 2009 case of six Italian seismologists who were charged for failing to predict a deadly earthquake. But when that happens, what is actually accomplished? Has anything been made better? Or have we simply kicked the can down the road?

It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition.”