Michael Hayden on working for Trump

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Very interesting and sobering NYT OpEd by the former head of the NSA and the CIA, Michael Hayden. I was particularly struck by this passage:

A few months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, I got a call from a colleague who thought he might be on a very short list for a very senior position. He asked my opinion. I told him that three months earlier I would have talked to him about his duty to serve. Now I was telling him to say no. “You’re a young man,” I said. “Don’t put yourself at risk for the future. You have a lot to offer. Someday.”

When asked for counsel these days by officers who are already in government, especially more junior ones, I remind them of their duty to help the president succeed. But then I add: “Protect yourself. Take notes and save them. And above all, protect the institution. America still needs it.”

Zuckerberg for Pope?

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Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor who has been sounding the alarm about the social media giant since the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, is not letting up.

In an interview with the Mercury News, McNamee talked about why he thinks Facebook should be reined in — and possibly broken up.

“It is no exaggeration to say that the AT&T consent decree planted the seed for Silicon Valley,” McNamee wrote. “One of the many fundamental patents in AT&T’s huge portfolio was the transistor. The combination of freely licensable patents and restrictions on AT&T’s ability to enter new markets enabled entrepreneurs to create today’s semiconductor, computer, data communications, mobile technology and software industries, among others.”

McNamee told this news organization that the changes Facebook is making now don’t go far enough, and that “nobody can make them” enact change that would truly address the myriad problems with the platform, including possible manipulation of Facebook’s massive number of users.

“There are 2.2 billion people on Facebook each with their own ‘Truman Show,’ ” McNamee said. “Everybody has their own set of facts.”

In addition, he takes issue with the attitudes of Facebook’s top executives.

Facebook is “almost the same size as Christianity,” McNamee said. “When you are presiding over the largest interconnected organization in the world, that gets to your head after a while.”

Zuckerberg for Pope?

The nauseating White House Press corps

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I’ve always been revolted by the annual dinner of the White House Press Corps, but never more than this year — after the pompous umbrage the hacks have taken to the scathing monologue delivered at the dinner by comedienne Michelle Wolf.

The Economist‘s US correspondent is no admirer of the event, either, and has written an equally scathing commentary on it. Extract:

Calls for press-corps civility are in fact calls for servility, and should be received with contempt. Some might argue that insults do not deserve the same protection as investigative journalism, but that is a distinction without a difference. Anyone who wants to outlaw or apologise for the former will end up too timid to do the latter.

In open societies, self-censorship—in the name of civility, careerism or access preservation—is a much greater threat to the media than outright repression. The only person owed an apology here is Ms Wolf, for being scolded by the very people who invited her to speak, and who purport to defend a “vigorous and free press.”

Right on! But there’s a serious point here. Trump and his acolytes treat serious journalism with contempt. (See Jay Rosen’s splendid NYRB essay). Given that, why should they be entitled to civility or respect?

Facebook: stay tuned for more disclosures

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That’s the message they’re giving to investors.

“We anticipate that our ongoing investments in safety, security, and content review will identify additional instances of misuse of user data or other undesirable activity by third parties on our platform.”

Well, well. Maybe Cambridge-Analytica is just the thin end of an interesting wedge.

How people get things wrong — and then murder innocent people

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I’ve been thinking and lecturing recently on disinformation and about what we might do about it. One of my heroines, danah boyd, gave a very thoughtful talk about it recently — starting with the (liberal) proposition that ideas like greater ‘media literacy’ might help. (She doesn’t think it will, and neither do I.) But I was particularly struck by one passage in her talk:

In 2012, it was hard not to avoid the names Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, but that didn’t mean that most people understood the storyline. In South Carolina, a white teenager who wasn’t interested in the news felt like he needed to know what the fuss was all about. He decided to go to Wikipedia to understand more. He was left with the impression that Zimmerman was clearly in the right and disgusted that everyone was defending Martin. While reading up on this case, he ran across the term “black on white crime” on Wikipedia and decided to throw that term into Google where he encountered a deeply racist website inviting him to wake up to a reality that he had never considered. He took that red pill and dove deep into a worldview whose theory of power positioned white people as victims. Over a matter of years, he began to embrace those views, to be radicalized towards extreme thinking. On June 17, 2015, he sat down for an hour with a group of African-American church-goers in Charleston South Carolina before opening fire on them, killing 9 and injuring 1. His goal was simple: he wanted to start a race war.

It’s easy to say that this domestic terrorist was insane or irrational, but he began his exploration trying to critically interrogate the media coverage of a story he didn’t understand. That led him to online fora filled with people who have spent decades working to indoctrinate people into a deeply troubling, racist worldview. They draw on countless amounts of “evidence,” engage in deeply persuasive discursive practices, and have the mechanisms to challenge countless assumptions. The difference between what is deemed missionary work, education, and radicalization depends a lot on your worldview. And your understanding of power.

Great talk — worth watching in full. And she helpfully includes the transcript below it for those who are cash-rich but time-poor!

So are the Democrats ready to unfriend Facebook?

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Nice Observer piece by Thomas Frank, reminding us of how Obama & Co drank the Facebook Kool-Aid:

Seated with a panel of entrepreneurs from around the world, the president [Obama] lobbed his friend Zuckerberg an easy question about Facebook “creating this platform for entrepreneurship around the world”. In batting it out of the park, the Facebook CEO, clad in his humble costume of jeans, T-shirt and sneakers, took pains to inform everyone that what animated him were high-minded ideals. “When I was getting started,” he burbled, “I cared deeply about giving everyone a voice, and giving people the tools to share everything that they cared about, and bringing a community together …”

No rude senator spoke up to interrupt this propaganda. Instead, Zuckerberg went on to describe his efforts to connect everyone to the internet as a sort of wager on human goodness itself.

“It’s this deep belief that you’re trying to make a change, you’re trying to connect people in the world, and I really do believe that if you do something good and if you help people out, then eventually some portion of that good will come back to you. And you may not know up front what it’s going to be, but that’s just been the guiding principle for me in the work that we’ve done …”

That’s how it works, all right. Gigantic corporate investments are acts of generosity, and when making them, kind-hearted CEOs routinely count on Karma to reward them. That’s the “guiding principle”.

Reader, here is what the president could be heard to say as Zuckerberg ended this self-serving homily: “Excellent.”

Read on

What Facebook’s monopoly means for developing countries

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This morning’s Observer column:

The most significant moment in the US Senate’s interrogation of Mark Zuckerberg came when Senator Lindsey Graham asked the Facebook boss: “Who’s your biggest competitor?” It was one of the few moments in his five-hour testimony when Zuckerberg seemed genuinely discombobulated. The video of the exchange is worth watching. First, he smirks. Then he waffles about Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft “overlapping” with Facebook in various ways. It’s doesn’t look like he believes what he’s saying.

Eventually, Senator Graham cuts to the chase and asks Zuckerberg if he thinks Facebook is a monopoly. “It certainly doesn’t feel like that to me,” the lad replies.

Laughter ripples through the room, as well it might. Here, at last, was something that every senator at the hearing understood. What’s less clear is whether they grasped the scale of the problem the company poses to society…

Read on

So what is Facebook for, exactly?

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What’s astonishing to me is the vacuity of Zuckerberg’s cant about connecting the world and creating a ‘global community’. This is his cover story for the real goal — to paint a target on every human’s back so that advertisers can hit them accurately. But then I’m just a cynic. And then I read this tweet by Benedict Evans, who’s a serious, perceptive and open-minded observer of these things:

Apple will make smart glasses, cars, contact lenses and neural implants. Google will make search, discovery and recommendation 10x better. Amazon will do 5 minute drone delivery and take half your retail spending. What about FB, though? They ‘connected’ half the world. What next?

Why Trump is winning the battle with the media

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Very thoughtful — and depressing — NYRB piece by Jay Rosen. He describes it as a “short course in how the campaign to discredit the American press operates”. Midway through, he turns to what is at risk because of it. Here’s one:

There is a risk that one third of the electorate will be isolated in an information loop of its own, where Trump becomes the major source of information about Trump, because independent sources are rejected on principle. That has already happened. An authoritarian system is up and running for a portion of the polity. Another way to say this is that before journalists log on in the morning, one third of their potential public is already gone.

Yep.