The hate-industrial complex
Perceptive essay by Umair Haque about what has replaced the military-industrial complex. Sample:
The hate industrial complex is made of four elements. The first is companies. The second is personalities — luminaries, celebrities, all of a certain bent. The third is ideologies. The fourth is a certain kind of attitude, a rhetorics. Let me illuminate each one in turn — so that we know what we are fighting.
Sensible people these days abjure Fox News. But the truth is that YouTube and Facebook and Twitter are much, much worse. As far as radicalizing people goes, Fox News basically tells your racist grandpa he’s right. It’s YouTube and Facebook (and Twitter and Reddit and so on) which turn lonely teenage losers into vengeful supremacist shooters. Which show no interest whatsoever in being decent members of a civilized society. So what reason do we have to let them go on being part of one?
In summary: How YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have become the New Fox News (But Worse)
Contemplation
Wicken Fen, March 31, 2019
Quote of the Day
”Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else”
Margaret Mead
Feeding station
Bird-feeding station, Wicken Fen.
Rose-tinted spectacles
Moral crumple zones
This morning’s Observer column:
This mindset prompts Dr Elish to coin the term “moral crumple zone” to describe the role assigned to humans who find themselves in the positions that the Three Mile Island operators, the Air France pilots – and the safety driver in the Uber car – occupied. It describes how responsibility for an action may be wrongly attributed to a human being who had limited control over the behaviour of an automated or autonomous system.
“While the crumple zone in a car is meant to protect the human driver,” she writes, “the moral crumple zone protects the integrity of the technological system, at the expense of the nearest human operator. What is unique about the concept of a moral crumple zone is that it highlights how structural features of a system and the media’s portrayal of accidents may inadvertently take advantage of human operators (and their tendency to become “liability sponges”) to fill the gaps in accountability that may arise in the context of new and complex systems.”
The Choice
God help us.
Seen in Waterstones in Piccadilly.
Why we are where we are
The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.
From Peter Mair’s Ruling the void: the hollowing out of Western democracy.
