When Nigeria shifted trials to be held virtually, this was somehow the case they started with.
In theory, court proceedings over the internet should be more open and fair. The reality of access to justice will, of course, be much more complex.
Almost all of these are uniformly terrible an unusable and I miss them tremendously. See also the gallery of Audion faces and accompanying podcast episode.
Improv for InVision. Nifty!
Microsoft has dropped their bid to acquire the social media company of the moment and now it looks like Oracle will figure out a deal where they provide data services for U.S.-based distribution. It’s unclear what happens to the rest, and it seems like control of the product and algorithm are likely to remain with Bytedance, in China. There are, at least, a few good tweets.
Beyond the day-by-day news, two things strike me about where this is landing. The first is there are a bunch of takes that seem to imply that Oracle “won” this deal due to its coziness with the Trump administration. It’s clear there’s a quid-pro-quo happening here, but I’m not sure it’s as simple as Larry Ellison throwing a fundraiser so the government threw the deal their way. I’m sure Oracle is happy to provide cloud services for a hot startup, but there are plenty of reasons this deal makes no sense. What seems just as likely is Oracle is the one providing cover for Trump, who can then reassert himself as a very stable business genius, and in exchange Oracle gets a leg up on some lucrative government contracts.
What’s most distressing about that, beyond the clear oligarchical corruption, is in order to go through all this, Ellison and the top execs at Oracle must think there’s a good chance Trump wins re-election. I don’t think Ellison is any kind of a delphic sage (you’re welcome for avoiding the obvious pun here), but he is a smart fella with plenty of inside access. Let’s hope he’s wrong about which way the wind is blowing and this entire affair becomes a textbook example of why doing business with autocrats is thoroughly anti-American.
The other thing about this whole catastrophe is just how perfectly emblematic it is of everything that’s wrong with not just Trump’s genuinely terrible approach to government but also his entire worldview. I tend to agree there is a good reason to be skeptical of TikTok from a national security perspective based solely on the fact that it’s parent company is a de-facto part of the Chinese Communist Party1. Everything about else about this, though, truly sucks, as only it could when Trump is involved. But for Trump, that’s exactly the point — all of the drama, the needless posturing, the grossly transparent transactional hectoring between economic superpowers and trillion-dollar companies — it’s all good for Trump as long as he gets to be in the middle of it. What a disgrace.
I’m wary of TikTok for the same reason I’m wary of U.S.-based social media companies, particularly Facebook — the ownership at the top may be different, but the mechanisms that drive engagement and abuse are all the same. ↩︎
Among the more feverish (though increasingly mainstream) wings of conservative true believers, there has been a years-long, inchoate conspiracy theory that posits, among many other things, a group of global elites are at the center of a child trafficking ring. Pizzagate and QAnon are manifestations of this paranoid worldview, with QAnon metastasizing into a “collective delusion” (or even more terrifyingly a Nazi cult) particularly among broad swaths of Trump voters, administration officials, and members of congress. I doubt that Trump himself has thought very deeply about it, beyond what fragments pass through his fetid view during Fox News binge-fests or his ego-scrolls through twitter desperate to find something to retweet, but that hasn’t stopped the president from abusing his power to fuel our own Reichstag flames.
I mention this in the context of this Guardian piece because one of the many Trumpian psychoses we’ll spend years trying to recover from is projection and this story typifies it. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Trump supporters have convinced themselves that Hillary Clinton and George Soros are a part of some global child trafficking scheme when Trump himself spent decades at the center of a legalized system that saw girls as young as fourteen abused by rich and powerful men. At the very least, he profited from the pageants and agencies that facilitated obviously abusive behavior, he strolled through backstages where teenage girls where getting dressed, and he has been credibly accused of sexual assault by no fewer twenty five women, many of the assaults occurring during the time when he was running these shows.
None of these obvious facts matter to the cult of personality that will once again rise up to cast their vote for this man to lead the country because they have settled on their own truth. When I think through how we might begin to rebuild from the disaster of Trump’s illegitimate reign, this is the fact that stops me cold. Trump will some day no longer hold official office, though I’m certain that even when he does leave the White House he’ll refuse to abide by the unspoken rules of past presidents and will rally his supporters in a way that he’ll be able to maximally profit from no matter the damage it does to the country. Even if the Republican party continues its devotion to Trumpism, many of the policies he championed will be reversed and we will move forward with some progress.
Conspiracy theories have, of course, long preceded Trump and the right wing of American politics has suffered a paranoid style for generations. Every new form of mass media has further amplified an atavistic human need to make sense of the world and protect our own egos — QAnon is the natural outgrowth of information age reach being fueled by platforms like Facebook taking absolutely zero responsibility for what they’ve built. History suggests after this dark period, our understanding will adjust and we will shift and incorporate the new media reality; the continued existence and influence of Fox News reminds us the shift will not always be towards progress. The collective delusion is here to stay.
I’m not exactly a sports guy1 — I follow a few teams, and not very closely — and can’t say I got swept up in the comings and goings of Deadspin through the years, beyond a general interest in online media and the sphere of Gawker media properties. Still, I’m excited to see Defector launch as a directly reader-supported, collectively owned media property because it’s exactly what we need more of today, an antidote the platform-chasing link farms and VC-funded approaches that seem increasingly unsustainable. The new site by Alley is sharp as hell and they launched with 22,000 paying subscribers — exactly the type of strong niche that should thrive on the internet. And that style guide!
I, too, am afraid of the ball. ↩︎
The images from northern California and Oregon the past day have been otherworldly, despairing, literally unbelievable, and grim. Because we live in a time where the otherworldly can no longer be left to the imagination, we’re all accustomed to seeing some version of this in hi-def and metaphorical. Yet here it is. Capturing it all via drone and setting it to the music of Bladerunner feels a little too close to the bone, and yet it certainly evokes an emotional response.
Something about these images cuts to the hard truth of the world we live in now. I’ve known for decades now that climate change is a reality, but it’s always felt like a future reality – the world we leave to our children, etc. The charts and graphs, the “warmest year on record” (at least until the next), the satellite images of melted glacial fields, the superstorms – these have all felt like an abstraction. One that I very much want to avoid, but still. There’s no denying now the fire is here.
Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, argues hopefully that one of the legacies of 2020 may a true shift towards racial justice.
The conditions in America today do not much resemble those of 1968. In fact, the best analogue to the current moment is the first and most consequential such awakening—in 1868. The story of that awakening offers a guide, and a warning. In the 1860s, the rise of a racist demagogue to the presidency, the valor of Black soldiers and workers, and the stories of outrages against the emancipated in the South stunned white northerners into writing the equality of man into the Constitution. The triumphs and failures of this anti-racist coalition led America to the present moment. It is now up to their successors to fulfill the promises of democracy, to make a more perfect union, to complete the work of Reconstruction.
After our son was born, I found myself buying more books — actual physical books not just their kindle equivalents. I bought a used turntable (that I’ve never quite gotten to work like I’d like) and started picking up a few records. Despite the fact that I’d ripped and sold for scrap all my shiny disc media just a few years before, and that I’ve only ever lived in small apartments in big cities, I found myself wanting a physical manifestation of the ideas that are important to me, and fatherhood only heightened this genetic imperative for ideas.
I should say, like a good Gen X-er, I’ve always purchased media almost habitually. The Japanese gifted us the phrase tsundoku — the art of purchasing books one never has the intention of reading — and it speaks to me deeply, even if I have convinced myself I will absolutely read all of Dostoevsky some day.
Growing up, we always had books around our house — great long stretches of novels, textbooks, reference guides. These weren’t the piles of books you hear about from the children of academics or writers, but certainly a better than average collection to fill up the built-ins around the house. There was a complete World Book encylcopedia from 1989 that was sold to us by an actual traveling salesman, if memory serves. Dad would often, in an attempt to settle some lively debate around the dinner table, push back, go fetch the appropriate volume, and attempt to definitively answer whatever question was vexing us, often to sighs and eyerolls1.
To me, the crown jewel of my home’s childhood collection was several rows of yellow-spined National Geographics. My folks had been collecting them since around the time I was born, or maybe a few years after, but by the time I was old enough to start exploring, it seemed like there were more than I could ever consume in a lifetime — and they kept coming! Every month! I have this intense memory of a full-color double-truck spread featuring a praying mantis attacking and dismembering a hummingbird in some far-flug jungle. (One of my grandfather’s2 Christmas gifts to me every year was my own subscription to National Geographic Kids, which I also consumed voraciously.)
The idea of physically expressing ideas and knowledge certainly isn’t new in our age of information abundance, nor is the anxiety that comes with minimizing down to bits. The web as a serendipity engine was there from the very earliest days but it’s been co-opted by feeds and algorithms, Wikipedia rabbitholes being the best known and glorious exception. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade having the world’s knowledge a swipe and a tap away, yet something about the physicality of knowledge still draws me in. I’ll happily set myself in a less-than-ergonomic chair in the Rose reading room in lieu of the stark minimalism of steel, polished concrete, and glass that is so often envisioned as our places of work. Especially in my home, I want to create that environment of discovery, to pass something along beyond a streaming music subscription and a kindle full of books. I want rows of those yellow spines on a bookshelf to fill my own children’s heads with wonder.
Alas, because I can’t help solutinize this non-problem, here’s my idea. Let me pick a date — my birthday, say — and include the back catalog to my current subscription. In order to catch up, the old issues will need to arrive once a week or so, maybe two at a time. I don’t much care if they’re reprints or re-issues so much as I want that joy of a new issue showing up regularly. Sure, back issues exist, they’re even collected by enterprising types or on eBay, but just dumping a few hundred old issues on a shelf doesn’t strike me as that much better than a google search (or, worse, a tacky kind of nouveau riche flourish akin to organizing one’s books by the color of the spine3).
World Book or Brittanica could serialize their collection similarly, in neatly bound monthly topics showcasing how our understanding of the world has evolved over the past century. The biggest hurdle here may be legal — how extensive will the disclaimer need to be in order to guard against the inevitable social media call for cancellation when someone discovers humanity’s past views on, well, everything are not going to pass modern muster.
I’m reminded of the waning days of my senior year of high school, in the mid 90’s, when it was still possible to fully matriculate without an email address. Most of my friends weren’t online, even by the dial-up standards of the day, so the ‘net was still something of a novelty. I can’t remember why, but I gave a brief presentation about a project to digitize the oldest known copy of the epic Beowulf. These days, such projects are routine quotidian even, but at the time it felt novel and groundbreaking — in a few minutes of downloading some jpegs, anyone could read this ancient text it its original, indecipherable form! Literally not one of my classmates gave a shit, and honestly I didn’t really give a shit about Beowulf either, but I was enamored with the idea of something an ocean and several millennia away being available at a cool 56.6kbps.
I think that’s what’s always attracted me about the web, the endless infinity of it and the capacity to discover something new all the time. A digitized Beowulf (or 50 year old copy of The New Yorker, for that matter) was and remains compelling for opening up access and creating abundance of knowledge. Of course, that mass of human knowledge swallows us up like a black hole and we’re at the mercy of the opaque algorithms scattered along the event horizon. Maybe there’s some salvation in those back issues.
Because I’m my father’s son, these days I fight the urge to pull out my phone and instantly answer whatever question is making the round at my own dinner table. In part this is an exercise to work my own memory muscles, in part it’s a futile effort to resist the ever present pull of a screen. Inevitably, after trying ot work out the answer on our own, one of us will look up the answer and the conversation kind of dies off. ↩︎
My grandpop, dad’s dad, turns out to have been the genesis of this collecting. His Geographics went back further still! ↩︎
I’ve long maintained an addendum to John Waters’s brilliant aphorism about people who organize their bookshelves by fucking color. ↩︎
Technically, it’s not a heist, since technically it’s not illegal for a sitting president to load up Air Force 1 with a few baubles he’s pilfered while staying at a U.S. embassy in lieu of paying respects to soldiers who’d died a century earlier. It is, however, such a cheap and gaudy maneuver that could not be a better summation of the man. The art turned out — because how could it not — to be fake.