Here’s the crux: “We don’t take our other valuables with us when we travel—we leave the important stuff at home, or in a safe place. But Facebook and Google don’t give us similar control over our valuable data. With these online services, it’s all or nothing.”
Cegłowski’s proposal is for a timed “trip mode” during which our social media only allows us to access a few days’ worth of material. It would be irrevocable, so you couldn’t be ordered to disable it during a border crossing.
Google already does this, but only for googlers. The Google employees I know who travel to China say that when they go abroad, their managers and IT support arrange to constrain their accounts, so they can only see a subset of their email and access a subset of Google’s internal servers while traveling, typically with an otherwise blank Chromebook that is dropped in a shredder when they return to the USA.
Cegłowski is right that telling people to maintain monotonically perfect operational security is unrealistic; he’s right that being able to afford travel doesn’t mean you’re able to afford a spare laptop and phone; he’s right that lying to border guards is a radioactively bad idea; and that doing nothing potentially puts your friends and loved ones at risk. He discounts (seemingly out of hand) the possibility of putting curbs on government intrusion, possibly because fixing this in the USA still leaves us vulnerable at other countries’ borders – but of course, other countries often take their lead from the US in these matters.
Google already has internal procedures to protect its trade secrets while its employees travel – getting these measures in place for all of us would only be for the good. And as Cegłowski says, “If you want to put an always-on microphone in my home, then protect me at the border.”
1. Fold your paper plate in half “backwards” (with the bottom of the plate facing you, and the folded edges coming toward you).
2. Using small scissors trim away the outer edges of the plate in a sweeping arched “M” design on the top half and bottom half, which should leave it looking like the hinges on the jaw, and the “m” shaped bottom & top of the mouth. Look at pictures on Google of real shark jaws to get inspiration, if the craft-samples in the photos don’t help you visualize the outline.
3. Cut out a large oval from the middle, and then work from that center to cut out free-form teeth that follow the inside arc of the paper plate on the top and bottom. I just snipped away happily. Shark teeth are often quite irregular and jagged and not always parallel.
“Crafted from a 2-foot-long gummy worm, Haribo gummy bears, black licorice string, yellow sprinkles, and rock candy crystals! A scene from the great science fiction novel Dune by Frank Herbert. Here we see the giant gummy worm on the desert planet of Arrakis. Ridden by the powerful gummy bear Paul Atreides as he seeks to control the prescious “spice” melange, which gives those who ingest it extended life and some prescient awareness. Muad’Dib!“
Dale Beran’s been writing about 4chan, /b/ and Anonymous for years, and lurking on their message-boards, and he traces the rise of the self-professed “betas” who embody fragile, toxic masculinity and have been important bellwethers for many internet and real-world phenomena, linking them to Trump as “the loser who won”: “Someone who is all brash confidence and then outrageously incompetent at everything he does.”
But as you read Beran’s piece, be sure to read Belle Waring’s reaction, which talks about the proper role of empathy (understanding how fragile masculinity makes life miserable for men and women) and sympathy (not letting people off the hook for being cruel, sociopathic jerks) – an important gloss that Laurie Penny also applied in her outstanding piece on the followers of Milo Yiannopoulos.
Here’s Beran:
Trump is loserdom embraced.
Trump is the loser who has won, the pathetic little frog on the big strong body.
Trump’s ventures of course, represent this fantasy: this hope that the working man, against the odds dictated by his knowledge, experience, or hard work will one day strike it rich — Trump University, late night real estate schemes, the casinos. Trump himself, who inherited his wealth, represents the classic lucky sap. But Trump also equally represents the knowledge that all of that is a lie, a scam that’s much older than you are, a fantasy that we can dwell in though it will never become true, like a video game.
Trump, in other words, is a way of owning and celebrating being taken advantage of.
Trump embodies buying the losing bet that will never be placed.
He is both despair and cruel arrogant dismissal, the fantasy of winning and the pain of losing mingled into one potion.
For this reason, the left should stop expecting Trump’s supporters to be upset when he doesn’t fulfill his promises.
Support for Trump is an acknowledgement that the promise is empty.
And here’s Waring:
Wait, no. I don’t deny Beran is talking about something interesting, but this is wrong-headed. These guys have cornered themselves into their mother’s basements, a point he makes explicitly above in the section I quote. And laughing at people with dumb complaints about how chicks only want to sex up alpha males isn’t the same as denying that the patriarchy…hurts men too. Nor is their personal felt hurt unreal or null. It’s as if someone were reproaching critics of Dostoyevsky’s man of ressentiment by saying “your insistence that Lake Como isn’t in Rome is hurting him!” Lake Como isn’t in Rome. That his fantasies include ‘Lake Como being moved to Rome for the occasion’ is precisely what makes them fantasies; that he is miserable no one will deny; that it is in some important way his fault is clear; as is the fact that he will hurt others and may be unable to care. This article is brilliant right up until the point where it goes (analogously speaking) full “the Left is at fault for not convincing white Trump voters, and is wrong for labeling them racist assholes, and caring about trans people cost us the election. Also Bernie.” Because while it’s true that feminism could, in fact, save these people from this loathsome pit they are in, it doesn’t follow that it’s a failure on the part of the political Left that they are down in the pit to begin with. The kernel of a good point is that people hate to be mocked, and one is unlikely to accept a rope thrown down by someone laughing at you, but on another, more important level, no.
Jonathan Stray summarizes three different strains of propaganda, analyzing why they work, and suggesting counter-tactics: in Russia, it’s about flooding the channel with a mix of lies and truth, crowding out other stories; in China, it’s about suffocating arguments with happy-talk distractions, and for trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos, it’s weaponizing hate, outraging people so they spread your message to the small, diffused minority of broken people who welcome your message and would otherwise be uneconomical to reach.
But I’d never encountered the work he references on Russian propaganda, by RAND scholar Christopher Paul, who calls Russian disinformation a “firehose of falsehood.” This tactic involves having huge numbers of channels at your disposal: fake and real social media accounts, tactical leaks to journalists, state media channels like RT, which are able to convey narrative at higher volume than the counternarrative, which becomes compelling just by dint of being everywhere (“quantity does indeed have a quality all its own”).
Mixing outright lies with a large dollop of truth is key to this tactic, as it surrounds the lies with a penumbra of truthfulness. This is a time-honored tactic, of course: think of the Christian Science Monitor’s history of outstanding international coverage, accompanied by editorials about God’s ability to heal through prayer; or Voice of America’s mixture of excellent reporting on (again) international politics and glaring silence on US crises (see also: Al Jazeera as a reliable source on everything except corruption in the UAE; the BBC World Service’s top-notch journalism on everything except UK complicity in disasters like the Gulf War, etc).
In addition to this excellent taxonomy of propaganda, Stray proposes countermeasures for each strain: for Russia-style “firehoses of falsehood,” you have to reach the audience first with an alternative narrative; once the firehose is on, it’s too late. For Chinese quackspeak floods, you need “organized, visible resistance” in the streets. For pathetic attention-whores like Yiannopoulos, Stray says Tucker Max is right: you have to ignore him.
As I’ve written before, we’re not living through a crisis about what is true, we’re living through a crisis about how we know whether something is true. We’re not disagreeing about facts, we’re disagreeing about epistemology. The “establishment” version of epistemology is, “We use evidence to arrive at the truth, vetted by independent verification (but trust us when we tell you that it’s all been independently verified by people who were properly skeptical and not the bosom buddies of the people they were supposed to be fact-checking).”
The “alternative facts” epistemological method goes like this: “The ‘independent’ experts who were supposed to be verifying the ‘evidence-based’ truth were actually in bed with the people they were supposed to be fact-checking. In the end, it’s all a matter of faith, then: you either have faith that ‘their’ experts are being truthful, or you have faith that we are. Ask your gut, what version feels more truthful?”
One of the most insightful things I’ve heard about the epistemological crisis came from a recent episode of the hilarious News Quiz on BBC Radio 4: the people who support Trump do so tribally, like supporters of a sports team. If you hear that your sports team had three players thrown out of the game for breaking the rules and still won, you don’t rail against their cheating, you celebrate their victory in the face of the odds.
People who spent years, even decades, behind bars in California’s prisons before being exonerated are not entitled to any services or compensation, not even the normal reintegration counselling, funding and services made available to parolees and criminals who’ve served their time.
Instead, they’re dumped in bus stations without any money or help. They can then initiate proceedings which take at least a year, hoping to recover at most $140/day for the years they spent behind bars. The Victim Compensation and Government Claims Board – which takes as much as four years just to year a case – then requires the exonerated person to prove that they are “more likely than not” innocent. This process can also take years. Then the board can simply deny the claim. Simply attempting to get compensation can result in local DAs pressing fresh charges in acts of vindictive retaliation.
California is the worst offender when it comes to denying justice to the wrongfully imprisoned, but it’s not the only one. Many US states have systems that are nearly as unjust.
