Black Lives Matter

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pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Vandana Rambaran, “Dean fired after saying ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS’ in email,” FoxNews.com, July 2, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/us/dean-fired-after-saying-black-lives-matter-but-also-everyones-life-matters-in-email. 13. Dunja Djudjic, “B&H Employee ‘removed’ after publicly opposing Black Lives Matter movement,” DIYPhotography.net, June 11, 2020, https://www.diyphotography.net/bh-employee-removed-after-publicly-opposing-black-lives-matter-movement/. 14. Jemimi McEvoy, “Every CEO and Leader That Stepped Down Since Black Lives Matter Protests Began,” Forbes.com, July 1, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/07/01/every-ceo-and-leader-that-stepped-down-since-black-lives-matter-protests-began/?sh=595688765593. 15.

Dan Wolken, “Opinion: LeBron James undermines values he’s espoused in most disgraceful moment of career,” USAToday.com, October 15, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/dan-wolken/2019/10/14/lebron-james-daryl-morey-china-hong-kong-tweet/3982436002/. 64. Paul P. Murphy, “Baseball is making Black Lives Matter on Opening Day,” CNN.com, July 24, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/23/us/opening-day-baseball-mlb-black-lives-matter-trnd/index.html. 65. Associated Press, “Baltimore Ravens’ Matthew Judon blasts NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ speech,” USAToday.com, June 15, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/ravens/2020/06/15/roger-goodells-black-lives-matter-speech-blasted-matthew-judon/3196057001/. 66. Scott Polacek, “NFL Plans to Include Social Justice Messages in End Zone Borders for Week 1,” BleacherReport.com, July 27, 2020, https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2901950-nfl-plans-to-include-social-justice-messages-in-end-zone-borders-for-week-1. 67.

Employees at Cisco lost their jobs after writing that “All Lives Matter” and that the phrase “Black Lives Matter” fosters racism;10 Sacramento Kings broadcaster Grant Napear lost his job for tweeting that “all lives matter”;11 Leslie Neal-Boylan, dean of University of Massachusetts Lowell’s nursing school, lost her job after stating, “BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS”—which, after all, is the hallmark of nursing;12 an employee at B&H Photo lost his job for writing, “I cannot support the organization called ‘Black Lives Matter’ until it clearly states that all lives matter equally regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or creed, then denounces any acts of violence that is happening in their name.


pages: 211 words: 78,547

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

“Individual donors and independent philanthropic”: Ann Brown, “$10.6B+ Was Given to Black Lives Matter Causes: Where Did the Money Go?,” Moguldom Nation, December 16, 2020, https://moguldom.com/323339/10-6b-was-given-to-black-lives-matter-causes-where-did-the-money-go/. A January 2022 investigation by New York: Sean Campbell, “The BLM Mystery: Where Did the Money Go?” New York, January 31, 2022, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/black-lives-matter-finances.html. the same reporter later discovered: Sean Campbell, “Black Lives Matter Secretly Bought a $6 Million House,” New York, April 4, 2022, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/black-lives-matter-6-million-dollar-house.html?

I will discuss the particular organizational difficulties of Black Lives Matter later in this volume. For now it’s enough to say that, as billions of dollars poured in to support the cause, the lack of a central organization that ensured transparency and accountability meant that there was no clear direction for the movement to go. Without an organization, there was no vehicle for arriving at specific goals and working toward them. Many lists of demands were written, but no group had sufficient influence or authority to determine the demands. Meanwhile, an understandable desire to defer to Black Lives Matter left other progressive organizations in a kind of limbo.

For example, in 2020 attendees of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the largest professional gathering of educators and administrators who work in college writing, developed a list of demands for how language should evolve in the classroom in light of Black Lives Matter, including “We demand that teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm, which reflects white mainstream English!” and “We demand Black linguistic consciousness!” (The list was titled “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” From the perspective of a few years later, it certainly appears to have been just another statement.) We should take care not to underestimate the achievement of the Black Lives Matter protest movement itself; whatever their distance from the opinion of the average Black voter, and however we might question what has happened since, the Black-led protest movement really did shake the entire world, for a time.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

They had a constructive agenda for reforming law enforcement: an end to the “broken windows” philosophy of policing, which had seen many city kids jailed for minor offenses; reform of the bail system; and the introduction of dashboard cameras and other technology to put the police on watch. That did not make the Black Lives Matter movement irresponsible, Gitlin insisted. “Contrary to what white racists and police like to say, the spirit of ‘Black Lives Matter’ does not mean ‘Only Black Lives Matter,’ ” he wrote. “. . . It’s the third term in a syllogism that goes like this: 1. All lives matter. 2. Black lives are lives. 3. Black lives matter.” That is what a 1960s radical wished Black Lives Matter to mean, to the point that he was willing to tar as racist anyone who disagreed with him. Problem was, the leaders of Black Lives Matter addressed Gitlin’s syllogism explicitly and repudiated it outright.

Their posts were the equivalent of Rick Santelli’s 2009 “rant,” which introduced the concept of a Tea Party before there was one. Indeed, Black Lives Matter could be considered a youthful, mostly minority counterpart to the aging, mostly white Tea Party. The Tea Party had launched an insurrection against Barack Obama and what it held him to represent, and now Black Lives Matter was entering that fray on the other side. Infuriated inner-city residents, idealistic college students, hip-hop musicians, billionaire managers of foundations, criminals and prison inmates, athletes—Black Lives Matter brought together these establishment and anti-establishment elements in an extraordinary ferment.

One of them, the former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, attending a Netroots Nation conference in Arizona, was booed for saying “All lives matter.” Days later, Joseph Curtatone, the mayor of Somerville, Massachusetts, flew the Black Lives Matter banner and spent several days sparring with local police, who wanted him to hoist an “All Lives Matter” banner instead. The very name Black Lives Matter, once it changed from a hashtag to a political movement, implied that there was a group of people in American society who did not believe in the right to life of a significant part of the population. It was an incendiary accusation: Who did Black Lives Matter believe these people were, indifferent to others’ lives, who had supposedly sprung up at a moment when the races had never been more equal or mixed?


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Dizard, “Lamberth finds EPA in contempt for e-document purge,” GCN, July 25, 2003, https://gcn.com/articles/2003/07/25/lamberth-finds-epa-in-contempt-for-edocument-purge.aspx (April 25, 2021). 67 Melissa Quinn, “21 states sue Biden for revoking Keystone XL pipeline permit,” CBS News, March 18, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/keystone-pipeline-21-states-sue-biden/ (April 25, 2021). 68 Teny Sahakian, “NY Times ignores 18 deaths, nearly $2 billion in damage when bashing GOP bills targeting rioters,” Fox News, April 23, 2021, https://www.foxnews.com/us/ny-times-ignores-18-deaths-nearly-2-billion-dollars-in-damage-when-bashing-gop-bills-targeting-rioters (April 25, 2021). 69 Josh Gerstein, “Leniency for defendants in Portland clashes could affect Capitol riot cases,” Politico, April 14, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/14/portland-capitol-riot-cases-481346 (April 25, 2021). 70 “Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Hallmark Anti-Rioting Legislation Taking Unapologetic Stand for Public Safety,” Office of the Governor press release, April 19, 2021, https://www.flgov.com/2021/04/19/what-they-are-saying-governor-ron-desantis-signs-hallmark-anti-rioting-legislation-taking-unapologetic-stand-for-public-safety/ (April 25, 2021). 71 “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Law,” Justia.com, https://www.justia.com/criminal/docs/rico/ (April 25, 2021). 72 Meira Gebel, “The story behind Thousand Currents, the charity that doles out the millions of dollars Black Lives Matter generates in donations,” Insider, June 25, 2020, https://www.insider.com/what-is-thousand-currents-black-lives-matter-charity-2020-6 (April 25, 2021). 73 Morrison, “AP Exclusive: Black Lives Matter opens up about its finances”; “Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation,” Influence Watch, https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/black-lives-matter-foundation/ (April 25, 2021). 74 N’dea Yancy-Bragg, “Americans’ confidence in police falls to historic low, Gallup poll shows,” USA Today, August 12, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/08/12/americans-confidence-police-falls-new-low-gallup-poll-shows/3352910001/ (April 25, 2021). 75 John R.

Fox News, May 4, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/world/what-is-china-social-credit-system (April 9, 2021). 73 Ibid. 74 President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, “The 1776 Report,” January 2021, https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVzW5NfySnfTk7ucdEoWXshkNUXn3dseBA7ZVrQMBfZey (April 9, 2021). 75 Ibid. 76 MSNBC, January 19, 2021. 77 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 154, 155. 78 Patrisse Cullors, “Trained Marxist Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter BLM,” YouTube, June 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1noLh25FbKI (April 9, 2021). 79 https://www.dailywire.com/news/fraud-blm-co-founder-patrisse-cullors-blasted-over-real-estate-buying-binge. 80 Mike Gonzalez, “To Destroy America,” City Journal, September 1, 2020, https://www.city-journal.org/marxist-revolutionaries-black-lives-matter (April 9, 2021). 81 Ibid. 82 Scott Walter, “A Terrorist’s Ties to a Leading Black Lives Matter Group,” Capital Research Center, June 24, 2020, https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-terrorists-ties-to-a-leading-black-lives-matter-group/ (April 9, 2021). 83 Gonzalez, “To Destroy America.” 84 Laura Lambert, “Weather Underground,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Weathermen (April 9, 2021). 85 “Celebrating four years of organizing to protect black lives,” Black Lives Matter, 2013, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0pJEXffvS0uOHdJREJnZ2JJYTA/view (April 9, 2021). 86 Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marxists.org), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm (April 9, 2021), chapter 2. 87 Lindsay Perez Huber, “Using Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LATCRIT) and Racist Nativism to Explore Intersectionality in the Education Experiences of Undocumented Chicana College Students,” Educational Foundations, Winter–Spring 2010, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ885982.pdf (April 9, 2021), 77, 78, 79. 88 Ibid., 79, 80. 89 Ibid., 80, 81. 90 Jean Stefancic, “Latino and Latina Critical Theory: An Annotated Bibliography,” California Law Review, 1997, 423. 91 Rodolfo F.

Both of the nation’s largest teacher unions support the Black Lives Matter organization, with the National Education Association specifically calling for the use of Black Lives Matter curricular materials in K–12 schools. This curriculum is ‘committed’ to ideas such as a ‘queer-affirming network,’ which have nothing to do with rigorous instructional content, and promotes racially charged essays such as ‘Open Secrets in First-Grade Math: Teaching about White Supremacy on American Currency.’ As of 2018, officials in at least 20 large school districts, including Los Angeles and Washington, DC, were promoting Black Lives Matter curricular content and the organization’s ‘Week of Action.’


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New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“Prospective chapters must submit”: Jelani Cobb, “The Matter of Black Lives,” The New Yorker, March 14, 2016. “The other piece of this involvement”: Monica J. Casper, “Black Lives Matter / Black Life Matters: A Conversation with Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore,” truthout, December 3, 2014. “Black Lives Matter affirms the lives”: Black Lives Matter, “About the Black Lives Matter Network,” July 2017. www.blacklivesmatter.com. Jackson found himself booed: Cobb, “The Matter of Black Lives.” “If it is a protest”: Alicia Lu, “Did Al Sharpton ‘Monopolize’ Black Lives Matter Protests for His Own Gain?,” Bustle, December 21, 2014. “the phenomenon around DeRay”: Alicia Garza, in discussion with the authors, October 30, 2017.

But what is most notable, and important, about Black Lives Matter is its commitment to radical inclusivity. This is a movement that wants to have lots of leaders, and it is committed to shifting the spotlight onto those who had not typically been cast in that role, and who have been the most marginalized. “The other piece of this involvement is: how does Black Lives Matter really push the narrative that all Black lives matter?…So the nature of the work is about shaping, trying to shape this network politically,” Cullors says. As the women lay out in the “About Us” section of their website: “Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.

The three women—working as always in partnership with others—quickly organized the Black Lives Matter “Freedom ride,” where activists from around the country piled into buses and rode to Ferguson to support local organizing efforts and the community there. This iconic moment inspired many more. Three months later, in December 2014, a Black Lives Matter banner stretched across the crowd at the Millions March NYC. This 50,000-strong march was initiated by twenty-three-year-old Synead Nichols and nineteen-year-old Umaara Elliott, who had never organized a protest before. From its start in a Facebook post, Black Lives Matter exploded across the country, grabbing national headlines and growing into a cluster of organizations, local chapters, and loose-knit swarms of organizers.


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Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial rule, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Donald Trump, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Earth, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

This would become a national, then international movement of loosely aligned groups advocating for justice and against racial discrimination. It was not long before Black Lives Matter protests began in New Orleans. On 30 November 2014, in response to the decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, activists marched on Lee Circle. Around 300 protesters formed a ring around Lee’s statue, holding signs that said ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Free Hugs’. ‘Monuments like these poison the democratic minds of the people,’ one activist, Leon Winters, said to the crowd.

Edward Colston’s statue reconsidered’, Open Democracy, 29 August 2016; Ellie Pipe, ‘New Plaque on Colston statue declares Bristol slavery capital’, Bristol 24/7, 17 August 2017; Martin Booth, ‘Colston statue given ball and chain’, Bristol 24/7, 6 May 2018; Tristan Cork, ‘100 human figures placed in front of Colston statue in city centre’, Bristol Live, 18 October 2018. 26Quoted in Tristan Cork, ‘Theft or vandalism of second Colston statue plaque “may be justified” – Tory councillor’, Bristol Live, 23 July 2018; for the golliwog story, see David Ward, ‘Golliwog stunt leaves Tory in a jam’, Guardian, 6 September 2001. 27For a longer discussion of this, see Roger Ball, ‘The Edward Colston “corrective” plaque: Sanitising an uncomfortable history’, published by the Bristol Radical History Group, n.d. [2019], https://www.brh.org.uk/site/articles/the-edward-colston-corrective-plaque/. 28Tristan Cork, ‘Second Colston statue plaque not axed and will happen but mayor steps in to order a re-write’, Bristol Live, 25 March 2019. 29Catherine Shoard, ‘John Boyega’s rousing Black Lives Matter speech wins praise and support’, Guardian, 4 June 2020. 30Twitter: @beardedjourno: ‘Historic scenes in Bristol as protesters kneel on the neck of the toppled statue of Edward Colston for eight minutes. blacklivesmatter’, 7 June 2020, 3:13 p.m. Photograph included in tweet. See also Luke O’Reilly, ‘Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol topple statue of slave trader Edward Colston’, Evening Standard, 7 June 2020. 31Twitter: @icecube, 7 June 2020, 5:09 p.m.; @MomentumBristol, 7 June 2020, 16:05 p. m.; TikTok: rhianna_jay, ‘bristol really ran up on edward colston’; Twitter; @DrFuck_, 8 June 2020, 9:22 a.m.. 32Twitter: @sajidjavid, 7 June 2020, 5:36 p.m.; 10 Downing Street statement quoted in ‘Edward Colston: Bristol slave trader statue was “an affront’”, BBC News, 8 June 2020; statement by the Society of Merchant Venturers, 12 June 2020, https://www.merchantventurers.com/news/statement-from-the-society-of-merchant-venturers/. 33Councillor Richard Eddy quoted in Tristan Cork, ‘Edward Colston was “a hero” for Bristol says outraged Tory councillor’, Bristol Live, 9 June 2020; Robinson quoted in Joel Golby, ‘A bat signal has gone out to Britain’s proud patriots: save our statues’, Guardian, 10 June 2020; Will Heaven, ‘Why Edward Colston’s statue should have stayed up’, The Spectator, 7 June 2020. 34David Olusoga, ‘The toppling of Colston’s statue is not an attack on history.

Hesitate no longer; buy this book’ Suzannah Lipscomb, author, award-winning historian and broadcaster By Alex Von Tunzelmann Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean Reel History: The World According to the Movies Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace About the Book A hugely entertaining and informative narrative on one of the key arguments raging across the globe. In 2020, statues across the world were pulled down in an extraordinary wave of global iconoclasm. From the United States and the United Kingdom to Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, Bangladesh, and New Zealand, Black Lives Matter protests defaced and hauled down statues of slaveholders, Confederates, and imperialists. Edward Colston was hurled into the harbour in Bristol, England. Robert E. Lee was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. Christopher Columbus was toppled in Minnesota, beheaded in Massachusetts, and thrown into a lake in Virginia.


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Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

Louis Police Captain Killed in Looting,” Fox News, June 9, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/us/hundreds-honor-david-dorn-retired-st-louis-police-captain-killed. 35. “Race Relations,” Gallup, n.d., https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx. 36. Scott Walter, “The Founders of Black Lives Matter,” First Things, March 29, 2021, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/03/the-founders-of-black-lives-matter. 37. Ibid. 38. Mike Gonzales, “To Destroy America,” City Journal, September 1, 2020, https://www.city-journal.org/marxist-revolutionaries-black-lives-matter. 39. “What We Believe” Black Lives Matter, archive.com, n.d., https://archive.vn/X4efm. 40. “The Movement for Black Lives,” Movement for Black Lives website, n.d., https://m4bl.org/. 41.

According to data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), from May 24 through August 29 there were 11,541 “civil-society incidents,” which encompass Black Lives Matter protests. Of those events, 1,101 devolved into some form of violence or rioting, and 933 of the violent incidents directly involved events affiliated with BLM.66 The media’s spin on ACLED’s report on the summer of violence was predictable, if still insulting. “The vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests—more than 93%—have been peaceful, according to a new report,” wrote Time.67 There really is no denying that, whatever its stated intentions, Black Lives Matter was an especially violent social movement. Further, the statistics didn’t begin to give a full sense of the tragedy—at least twenty-five people were killed as a result of the violence.

Tristan Justice, “Washington Redskins Deliberate Name Change to Appease Woke Mobs,” The Federalist, July 3, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/03/washington-redskins-deliberate-name-change-to-appease-woke-mobs/. 53. Sean Neumann, “WNBA Players Want Atlanta Co-Owner Sen. Kelly Loeffler Out after She Opposed Black Lives Matter,” Yahoo, July 8, 2020, https://www.yahoo.com/now/wnba-players-want-atlanta-co-164857843.html. 54. Evita Duffy, “WNBA Players Call for Sen. Kelly Loeffler to Step Down as Team Owner Over ‘Black Lives Matter’ Remarks,” The Federalist, July 10, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/10/wnba-players-call-for-sen-kelly-loeffler-to-step-down-as-team-owner-over-black-lives-matter-remarks/. 55. Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris), “If you’re able to, chip in now…,” Twitter, June 1, 2020, 4:34 p.m., https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1267555018128965643. 56.


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The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The Washington Times, August, 23, 2014, washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/23/ferguson-protesters-confront-jesse-jackson-when-yo/. “I wanted to be a part of it.”: Charlotte Alter, “Black Lives Matter Protest in New York Attracts New People,” TIME, July 10, 2016, time.com/4400211/black-lives-matter-new-york-protest/. 58 percent of millennials approved: Susan Page and Karina Shedrofsky, “Poll: How Millennials View BLM and the Alt-right,” USA Today, October 31, 2016, usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/10/31/poll-millennials-black-lives-matter-alt-right/92999936/. than their black peers: Cathy J. Cohen, et al., “The ‘Woke’ Generation?” Millennial Attitudes on Race in the US,” GenForward, October 2017, genforwardsurvey.com/assets/uploads/2017/10/GenForward-Oct-2017-Final-Report.pdf.

She thought of her brother, Joey, who was almost young enough to be Trayvon’s age. “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter,” she wrote. “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Garza’s post was shared by her friend and fellow activist Patrisse Cullors, whom she had met on a dance floor in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2005. Cullors reposted it with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. Cullors and Garza reached out to a third young activist, Opal Tometi, who set up the #blacklivesmatter Twitter and Tumblr accounts. The hashtag began to go viral. Twitter was to Black Lives Matter what Tumblr had been to Occupy—the living manifesto of the movement.

According to the ACLU, black students were suspended or expelled three times more than white students, and more than 30 percent of kids arrested in school were black. Those young teens were often fed directly into the criminal justice system. All this had been happening for decades: Black Lives Matter just gave people a vocabulary to describe it. Until 2013, movements for racial justice in the United States tended to coalesce around small groups of black men, or what The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb called “the great-black-man theory of history.” But Black Lives Matter activists were more interested in what they called a “leaderful” movement, like Occupy Wall Street, where no single person called the shots. There was such a distaste for what Garza called “the model of the black preacher leading people to the promised land” that when Rev.


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Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi came up with a profound yet simple rallying cry for dignity: Black Lives Matter. By the end of the night, the three women made the decision to start a movement, one that would seamlessly blend online and on-the-ground strategies. I met Cullors (whose story is featured in Chapter 5) and Garza at Demos’s gala in 2015, where we honored all three women with a Transforming America Award (Tometi was not able to attend). By one estimate, there were more than one thousand Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations around the globe between June 2014 and October 2015.9 The demonstrations erupted after the murders of unarmed black men, teenagers, and children by police officers, from Michael Brown in Ferguson to Eric Garner in Staten Island to Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and sadly, many more black men and black women are killed with each passing month.

Like the civil rights movement a half century ago, Black Lives Matter is a broad demand for freedom from political and economic oppression. But unlike the earlier movement, Cullors, Garza, and Tometi have purposefully put black women in the forefront of the movement and emphasized the voices of queer, transgendered, and disabled black people. Alicia Garza explained to me why it’s so important that this movement not simply replicate the leadership and strategies of its predecessors. Her analysis about why there is a need to proclaim that “black lives matter” today, a half century after the civil rights act was passed, lies in part in what can now be seen as the flawed strategies pursued back then.

This is about saying that black folks come in all different sizes, all different shapes. We’re very different and complex as a people, and that deserves to be celebrated. And the humanity of all of us deserves to be affirmed, and that we all have value.” She and the codirectors of Black Lives Matter are determined to make sure that every single presidential candidate formulates a concrete position on what he or she will do to make black lives matter in this country. And they expect that answer to go far beyond criminal justice reform. “For us, it’s less about endorsing candidates than it is to build the kind of coalition that can hold whoever is elected accountable to meeting the needs and dreams of our communities.”


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The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

For an edited version of the interaction in an extraordinary video, see: Now This Politics (Producer). (2017, September 8). This unexpected moment happened when Black Lives Matter activists were invited on stage at a pro-Trump rally [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/NowThisNews/videos/1709220972442719 83. Hains, T. (2017, September 20). “Black Lives Matter” leader wins over Trump supporters: “If we really want America great, we do it together.” Real Clear Politics. Retrieved from https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/09/20/black_lives_matter_leader_wins_over_trump_supporters_if_we_really_want_america_great_we_do_it_together.html Chapter 4: Intimidation and Violence 1.

Now they were coming back around. People cheered. Someone in the crowd shouted, “All lives matter!” which is usually intended as a rebuke to those who say that “black lives matter.” But Newsome responded in the tradition of Pauli Murray, by drawing a larger circle around everyone in the crowd: “You’re right, my brother, you’re right. You are so right. All lives matter, right? But when a black life is lost, we get no justice. That is why we say ‘black lives matter.’ . . . If we really want to make America great, we do it together.” The crowd cheered and chanted “USA-USA . . .” In an instant, the two groups were no longer “us” and “them.”

YEAR MAJOR NEWS STORIES RELATED TO SOCIAL JUSTICE 2009 Inauguration of Barack Obama 2010 Tyler Clementi suicide (raises awareness of bullying of LGBT youth) 2011 Occupy Wall Street (raises awareness of income inequality) 2012 Killing of Trayvon Martin; reelection of Barack Obama; Sandy Hook elementary school massacre (raises interest in gun control) 2013 George Zimmerman acquitted of murder in the death of Trayvon Martin; Black Lives Matter founded 2014 Police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; police killing of Eric Garner in New York City (with video); Black Lives Matter protests spread across America; lead in drinking water in Flint, Michigan, raises awareness of “environmental justice” 2015 Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage; Caitlyn Jenner publicly identifies as a woman; white supremacist Dylann Roof massacres nine black worshipers in Charleston, South Carolina; Confederate flags removed from state capitol in South Carolina; police killing of Walter Scott (with video); universities erupt in protest over racism, beginning at Missouri and Yale, then spreading to dozens of others 2016 Terrorist Omar Mateen kills forty-nine in attack on gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; police killing of Alton Sterling (with video); police killing of Philando Castile (with video); killing of five police officers in Dallas; quarterback Colin Kaepernick refuses to stand for national anthem; North Carolina requires transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates; protest against Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock Indian Reservation; nomination and election of Donald Trump 2017 Trump inauguration; Trump attempts to enact various “Muslim bans”; women’s march in Washington; violent protests against campus speakers at UC Berkeley and Middlebury; Trump bans transgender people from military service; Trump praises “very fine people” in Charlottesville march, during which a neo-Nazi kills Heather Heyer and injures others by driving a car into a crowd; fifty-eight killed in largest mass shooting in U.S. history in Las Vegas; start of the #MeToo movement, to expose and stop sexual harassment and assault 2018 (through March) Nikolas Cruz, expelled student with history of emotional and behavioral disorders, kills seventeen at high school in Parkland, Florida; students organize school walkouts and marches for gun control across the United States Important, terrifying, thrilling, and shocking events happen every year, but the years from 2012 through 2018 seem like the closest we’ve come to the intensity of the stretch from 1968 to 1972.


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Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

It was as though they had all hired the same PR consultant to copy and paste the same text for different clients. The pressure to publicly support BLM started to weigh heavily on me personally. My peers pressured me to be courageous enough to do the same thing that, well, everyone else was doing. Of course I believed that black lives mattered. But I definitely didn’t believe in the stated goals of the Black Lives Matter organization—for example, “disrupting the nuclear family structure.” Wouldn’t that harm black families? So I chose to take a different approach and sent the following email to the company: Dear Roivant team, I enjoyed seeing all of you at the townhall on Friday.

Of course, “diversity and perspectives” is different from a diversity of perspectives.7 Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, issued an open letter to CEOs describing a “Sustainability Accounting Standards Board” that would tackle issues ranging from labor practices to workforce diversity to climate change. Scores of others followed. If the turn of the decade was a tipping point, then the murder of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer in May 2020 broke the dam. Companies ranging from Apple to Uber to Novartis issued lengthy statements in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In a surprising about-face, L’Oréal rehired a model it had fired for her comments about “the racial violence of white people.” Well-respected companies like Coca-Cola implemented corporate programs teaching employees “to be less white” and that “to be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble” and that “white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white.”8 Starbucks said it would mandate anti-bias training for executives and tie their compensation to increasing minority representation in its workforce.

Khosrowshahi stated that Uber was donating millions to fight racism and that “Uber stands in solidarity with the Black community and with peaceful protests against the injustice and racism that have plagued our nation for too long.”1 The company announced that it would promote black-owned businesses on its ride-sharing app and tie executive pay to “diversity goals.” Lastly, Khosrowshahi wrote, “Let me speak clearly and unequivocally: Black Lives Matter.” In the weeks later, he pledged that Uber would be an “anti-racist company.” Meanwhile, at the exact same time, he was aggressively lobbying California to pass Proposition 22, which permits Uber to classify its drivers as independent contractors rather than as employees. Uber said it would go out of business if it had to reclassify drivers as employees, pleading unprofitability even as it doled out millions to BLM.


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Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

According to NAACP statistics, the rate of killings by police has not gone up drastically in the past decade (or even when it is compared with earlier years). However, there has been a great shift in the amount of attention paid to these killings, thanks to a movement that was fueled by digital technologies, now often called Black Lives Matter in reference to the hashtag that the movement rallied around.24 Until Black Lives Matter came on the scene, formal organizations like the NAACP had not been able to make the topic part of the national conversation. Instead, most mainstream politicians endorsed “tough on crime” policies, often involving heavy mandatory sentences applied in the absence of judicial discretion, without any discussion of police accountability (or of the fact that crime rates have been falling for a long time).

One poll showed a striking twenty-one-point jump in the number of young people—most of whom were more heavily engaged in social media than their elders—who thought that police were unfair to black people in the year after the death of Travyon Martin (from 42 percent to 63 percent).27 A 2015 poll showed that almost half of all Americans now thought that racism was a problem, compared with about 28 percent three years before that.28 Such big jumps in opinions are rare, and the fact that the shift was mostly confined to young people (under age twenty-nine) as the issue gathered so much attention first on social media strongly suggests at least a partial cause of this change. Black Lives Matter has exhibited great narrative capacity, and like the Occupy movement’s success in highlighting inequality, it has changed the public conversation. The Black Lives Matter movement is young, and how it will develop further capacities remains to be seen. Crucially, social media allowed the movement to take local events, like a police killing in Ferguson, and make them nationally salient.

Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “First Nation in Cyberspace,” Time, December 6, 1993, http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/outerspace/internet-article.html. 35. Sidney G. Tarrow and J. Tollefson, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 36. “Voters Tell Prosecutors, Black Lives Matter,” New York Times, March 18, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/opinion/voters-tell-prosecutors-black-lives-matter.html. 37. The Obama 2008 and 2012 campaigns were run quite differently in terms of digital tool use and other dimensions as well. See Micah L. Sifry, The Big Disconnect: Why The Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet) (New York: OR Books, 2014). 38.


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Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

Black Lives Matter, gentrification, Kickstarter, off grid, place-making, sexual politics, Snapchat

“Well, I was thinking I could pitch something about how it would be great to see all the liberal white women who were tweeting fervently from the women’s march at a Black Lives Matter march?” I said. “I beg your pardon?” Gina asked me. “Well, all of these white women in the office seem to bleat about going to the women’s march, but I was at a Black Lives Matter march yesterday and I didn’t see anyone I recognized.” “Bit of a combative attitude, don’t you think?” Gina asked, frowning. “Rework what you’re saying, and come along to the pitch meeting at four.” * * * “. . . so I just think that we could use that argument to shine more of a light on Black Lives Matter, and if we do this in the context of the women’s march, we make it more ‘palatable’ for our readers,” I said to the room, hoping that I’d managed to deliver my pitch and mask the fear in my voice with what I hoped was conviction.

” * * * “. . . so I just think that we could use that argument to shine more of a light on Black Lives Matter, and if we do this in the context of the women’s march, we make it more ‘palatable’ for our readers,” I said to the room, hoping that I’d managed to deliver my pitch and mask the fear in my voice with what I hoped was conviction. “All that Black Lives Matter nonsense,” scoffed an older man I recognized from the review supplement. “All lives matter.” “What?” I asked, blinking. I took a secret deep breath. “What about the lives of Latinos, of Asians, the lives of—I’m white, does my life not matter?” he continued. “I’m not . . . suggesting that the lives of other ethnic groups do not matter,” I explained, gobsmacked that I had to explain. “I don’t think that any part of Black Lives Matter even hints that other lives are disposable?” “Well, when you put the lives of some and not all on a pedestal, what else are you doing?”

“At one point he asked if I agreed that young black women got pregnant just so they could get council houses, to which I obviously asked if he’d taken something—” “Tell me you’re joking, fam.” “I wish I was. He said all sorts of things that made me want to set his house on fire!” Kyazike clenched her fist. “And do you know what, this all began when he accused me of being a ‘Black Lives Matter girl.’ ” “This is making me so fucking mad—do you want me to get some black boys to run up in his house, raid the ting?” Kyazike offered. “No, no!” “ ’Cause then he’ll know that black lives matter, trust me.” “No, that’ll give him justification to keep on thinking that we’re all aggressive. But thank you.” I patted her on the hand. “I just don’t know where it came from. All of his texts were so tame!”


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An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

he wrote to Nuñez and attached what looked like a Facebook post written by Zuckerberg. It was a memo to all employees that had been posted on the general Workplace group.2 In the post, Zuckerberg addressed the brewing scandal at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters over the defacement of Black Lives Matter slogans written on the walls of its office buildings. “‘Black Lives Matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t,” he wrote, pointing out that the company had an open policy of what employees could write on the office walls or put up in poster form. But “crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s.”

And for nearly six months, some employees shared their grievances with reporters, passing on internal memos, speeches, and emails. Executives were furious; Boz in particular ranted about how Facebook was a trusted family and that a small group of outsiders was corrupting and corroding its values. After a story headlined “Mark Zuckerberg Asks Racist Facebook Employees to Stop Crossing Out Black Lives Matter Slogans”1 appeared on the tech site Gizmodo that February, the senior leaders turned to Sonya Ahuja, a former engineer whose internal investigations unit hunted down everything from harassment and discrimination complaints to leakers and whistleblowers. Ahuja’s department had an eagle’s-eye view into the daily workings of Facebook employees, with access to all communications.

He asked some editors, and they decided that readers would be intrigued by insights into Facebook’s internal culture. The story, published on February 25, at 12:42 p.m., did not look good for Zuckerberg.3 His own words were being used to go after his employees, painting a picture of Facebook employees as privileged elitists out of touch with the Black Lives Matter movement. The call went down to Ahuja, the so-called rat catcher, to find the Facebook employee responsible for the leak. Ahuja’s team searched email and phone records of Facebook employees to see who might have been in contact with Nuñez. The group could easily view messages written on Facebook, but few employees were likely to have been naïve enough to message a member of the press from their own Facebook pages.


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Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

“I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter,” she wrote. “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Fellow activist Patrisse Cullors (b. 1983) replied in the comments with a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter. “I thought it was a pound sign!” Garza said later. “She broke down what hashtags are to me. And that’s how #BlackLivesMatter was born.” Cullors and Garza then reached out to activist Opal Tometi (b. 1984), who further publicized the hashtag on social media and began to set up accounts in the name of the movement. Thus Black Lives Matter was founded by three Millennials, its creation spurred by social media.

Figure 5.65: Percent of U.S. White political independents who oppose or support the Black Lives Matter movement, 2017–2022 Source: CIVIQS poll of registered voters Notes: “Neither support nor oppose” and “unsure” not shown. Support was high and relatively unchanged among Blacks of all parties and White Democrats, and low and relatively unchanged among White Republicans. There are some signs that the protests of 2020 created backlash—or at least a swing back to previous attitudes. Support for the Black Lives Matter movement, which had increased markedly among White political independents during the initial protests after the death of George Floyd in late May 2020, declined over the next two years (see Figure 5.65).

In a 2021 Pew Center poll, 71% of Millennials: Alec Tyson, Brian Kennedy, and Cary Funk, “Gen Z, Millennials Stand Out for Climate Change Activism, Social Media Engagement with Issue,” Pew Research Center, May 26, 2021. “The BLM ride was organized in the spirit of the early 1960s interstate Freedom Riders”: Isabella Mercado, “The Black Lives Matter Movement: An Origin Story,” Underground Railroad Education Center, Jordan Zarkarin, “How Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi Created the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Biography.com, January 27, 2021. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country”: Steve Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem,” NFL.com, August 27, 2016.


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The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The fact that teachers like Annie Tan largely went into the classroom when they were called underlines that the core intention of teachers in opposing reopening was to use their leverage to make schools safer for both themselves and their students. And perhaps, to seize the pandemic pause as a chance to reconsider just whose interests public schools had been serving in the years prior to 2020 and whether they could be made to do better. BLACK LIVES MATTER AND SCHOOL REOPENING The Black Lives Matter uprising of the summer of 2020 influenced the school reopening debate. Black, Latinx, and Asian American families were more reluctant to return to school in person. Teachers, who are primarily white women, pointed to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black and Brown people in arguing against opening schools.

The election results were not certified until the wee hours of the morning. “Why are they doing this?” Ruby wanted to know. The Black Lives Matter protests had made sense to her, but this kind of destructiveness she couldn’t fathom. Jeannie regretted that her daughter had to see her so upset, with no answers to give. Other people in her community did have answers. Jeannie’s ex-husband’s coworkers at the feed mill said that the Democrats had dropped off the protesters, that they were impostors there to make Trump look bad; and in the same breath they’d say, if Black Lives Matter protests were all fine, then the insurrectionists were fine, too, just expressing their First Amendment rights.

SURVIVAL PENDING REVOLUTION One other group was crucial in getting free school lunches funded: the Black Panther Party. Bobby Seale and Huey Newton met as students at Merritt Community College in Oakland, California, and founded the group in 1966. While they’ve long been caricatured as violent militants, the Black Panthers’ legacy is being reconsidered lately in light of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, in the Oscar-winning 2021 film Judas and the Black Messiah. There’s more attention these days to the group’s mutual aid and direct action work, which Newton called “survival pending revolution.” It included a network of free clinics, a school, and the Free Breakfast for School Children Program that first opened its doors at St.


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Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Black Lives Matter, classic study, colonial rule, COVID-19, critical race theory, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

“start to think about themselves”: Quoted in “Protests in Perspective,” 3. “laid the foundation”: “Freedom Summer,” Movement for Black Lives, m4bl.org/freedom-summer. Woodly traces the roots: Deva Woodly, Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements (Oxford University Press, 2022), 136. “Black Lives Matter has struggled”: Clayton, “Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights Movement.” “Activists picked places like Birmingham”: Quoted in Sujata Gupta, “What the 1960s Civil Rights Protests Can Teach Us About Fighting Racism Today,” ScienceNews, June 5, 2020. See also Omar Wasow, “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Blacks Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting,” American Political Science Review 114, no. 3 (August 2020).

Deva Woodly, a professor of politics at the New School and author of a thorough study of the Black Lives Matter movement, concludes that the purpose of political organizing is to help people “start to think about themselves … as the kind of people who can act” to bring about democratic change. That is what was happening, she says, with the millions of people who demonstrated against police brutality in 2020. It also, of course, was a major purpose of the Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964. So it is no surprise that the Movement for Black Lives—a coalition of more than fifty groups, including the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation—features on its website a section about Freedom Summer, stating that it “laid the foundation for the electoral-justice and political-organizing efforts of progressive organizations today.”

: Alicia Garza, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (One World, 2020), 110–11. Then came more deaths: Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2018), 101. two-thirds of white Americans: Bob Harrison, “Policing in the Post-Floyd Era,” Rand Review, July–August 2021, 7. “It’s easy to be reactive”: Quoted in Andrew Marantz, “How to Stop a Power Grab,” New Yorker, November 23, 2020. there are some major differences: The details here are from Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter, 46, 106–107. “Movement people will sometimes say”: Quoted in “That Movement Responsibility: An Interview with Judy Richardson on Movement Values and Movement History,” in Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement, ed.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

By the end of the 1970s, the economic and social crises coalesced into a severe political crisis in the US, encapsulated in Carter’s 1979 “crisis of confidence” speech and an emergent bipartisan elite consensus to abandon Keynesianism. See Aschoff, “America’s Tipping Point?,” 305–25. 31. King, “#blacklivesmatter.” 32. King, “#blacklivesmatter.” 33. Meyerson, “The Founders of Black Lives Matter.’” 34. King, “How Three Friends.” 35. For a detailed review of these policies, see “Policing and Profit,” Criminal Procedure, Harvard Law Review, June 6, 2019. 36. For a deeper discussion of the Movement for Black Lives, see Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter; Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter. 37. Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter, 162. 38. Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter, 19. 39. McCarthy, “Americans Maintain a Positive View of Bernie Sanders.” 40.

We see a big-picture critique of a system that has enabled elites to capture unimaginable wealth and power while ordinary people have struggled to achieve a secure, dignified, and fulfilling life. Moreover, because these movements are digitally connected, they see themselves in each other. Modern-Day Revolt Black Lives Matter is an example of a modern-day revolt against capitalism’s violent, racist status quo—a digital-analog movement, or as BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors calls it, “a social media/all out in the streets” organizing effort.31 The term “digital-analog” is a shorthand that captures the unique characteristic of modern-day movement building, which occurs on both digital and corporeal planes simultaneously.

Sunrise members are high-schoolers and college students scattered across the country, yet the organization has succeeded in starting a conversation about the sustainability of our forprofit system that the Democratic Party can’t ignore. The digital-analog quality of these movements also ties them to each other and to millions of ordinary people. These ties are visible in the movements’ networks of support and inspiration. Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders were both vocal supporters of the Standing Rock protests. Young members of Sunrise cite Occupy, BLM, March for Our Lives, and United We Dream, a youth-led immigration justice organization, as sources of inspiration.41 Congresswoman Alexandria OcasioCortez of New York was inspired to run for elected office by a visit to the Standing Rock camp and is a champion of Sunrise.


pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

They’re not representing Black Lives Matter. This is a whole other whatever. This has got to end.’ The [CHOP] crowd was 98 or 99 percent white. They don’t even live in Seattle! They hit a police officer in the back of the head with a baseball bat, and the one who did it goes, ‘I wish he didn’t have a helmet on.’” As a representative of the Capitol Hill community, Vickie felt compelled to stand up to the anarchists. “You’re not going to do this in my neighborhood!” she shouted. “How dare you disrespect George Floyd and his family! We don’t protest like this. Stop using Black Lives Matter to tear up the city.”

The share of civilians killed while fleeing from police declined from 39 percent of all legal intervention homicides in the sixties to just 12 percent by the late 1980s.83 Some departments need more accountability.84 City governments, for their part, can demand more transparency in the operation of police departments,85 and more training for officers,86 particularly related to working with mentally ill and substance-abusing homeless people.87 Rosenfeld felt the Black Lives Matter movement had the potential to improve policing. “It’s the existence and persistence and pressure brought about by social movements that keeps these issues on the front burner,” he said. “Just as the women’s movement and the victims’ rights movement kept the issues of the victims of sexual assault and the victims of intimate partner and family violence on the policy front burner.” “But then you need Black Lives Matter to be making a very different demand than ‘defund the police,’ right?” I asked. “Of course, you do,” he said.

Rebecca Tan et al., “Protesters Paint ‘Defund the Police’ Right Next to D.C.’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural,” Washington Post, June 7, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com. 5. Chase DeFeliciantonio, “George Floyd Protest Briefly Shuts Down Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 6, 2020, www.sfchronicle.com; Matthias Gaffni, Matt Kawahara, Tatiana Sanchez, “Protesters Block Bay Bridge After Peaceful Day Filled with Marches,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 15, 2020, www.sfchronicle.com. 6. Rusty Simmons, “Black Lives Matter Protests Continue Around Bay Area for Fourth Weekend,” San Francisco Chronicle, updated June 22, 2020, www.sfchronicle.com 7.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Some Experts Say Reward C.E.O.s for It,” Peter Eavis, The New York Times, July 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/business/economy/corporate-diversity-pay-compensation.html. 62 “Starbucks Ties Executive Pay to 2025 Diversity Targets,” Heather Haddon, The Wall Street Journal, October 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/starbucks-ties-executive-pay-to-2025-diversity-targets-11602680401. 63 “Black Lives Matter—for Pakistan's Sheedi Community Too,” Zahra Bhaiwala, Neekta Hamidi, Sikander Bizenjo, World Economic Forum Agenda, August 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/black-lives-matter-for-pakistans-sheedi-community-too/. 64 Global Shapers Community, World Economic Forum, https://www.globalshapers.org/. 65 “Meet the First African-Pakistani Lawmaker,” The Diplomat, September 2018, https://thediplomat.com/2018/09/meet-the-first-african-pakistani-lawmaker/. 66 “Black Lives Matter—for Pakistan's Sheedi Community Too,” Zahra Bhaiwala, Neekta Hamidi, Sikander Bizenjo, World Economic Forum Agenda, August 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/black-lives-matter-for-pakistans-sheedi-community-too/.

The fact that worker wages haven't gone up in a commensurate way in the United States for decades led to a less cohesive and resilient society, which was ill-prepared for once-in-a-century events such as COVID-19 or the disruption of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And it may have been at least partially the result of exclusive social and political policy choices as well, as was brought to the fore by the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. After decades of facing discriminatory government policies and actions, many rose up to decry this situation. The lessons from countries such as Malaysia, where inclusive policies have been a focal point for policymakers, shows that a more inclusive approach to government could have and can still avoid such unequal outcomes.

Those rules were supposed to help all workers on zero-hours contracts, as well as domestic workers and on-demand drivers or couriers.59 But as labor economists such as Valerio Di Stefano of the University of Leuven pointed out,60 they fell short in providing similar rights and benefits to others freelancers, such as the IT workers from countries such as Ukraine, Serbia, Pakistan, or India I described earlier. Advocacy Groups A final segment of civil society whose concerns should be heard in the stakeholder model are the newly formed advocacy groups and other movements asking for social justice. Whether it concerns Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights groups, men and women advocating the equal treatment of genders on the work floor, or any other group asking not to be left behind, everyone in a leading position should seek to converse with these newly emerging civil society groups. They are often led by new generations of citizens and workers, whose concerns will only grow over time and whose pulse is, therefore, closer to the future direction of any society.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Some Experts Say Reward C.E.O.s for It,” Peter Eavis, The New York Times, July 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/business/economy/corporate-diversity-pay-compensation.html. 62 “Starbucks Ties Executive Pay to 2025 Diversity Targets,” Heather Haddon, The Wall Street Journal, October 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/starbucks-ties-executive-pay-to-2025-diversity-targets-11602680401. 63 “Black Lives Matter—for Pakistan's Sheedi Community Too,” Zahra Bhaiwala, Neekta Hamidi, Sikander Bizenjo, World Economic Forum Agenda, August 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/black-lives-matter-for-pakistans-sheedi-community-too/. 64 Global Shapers Community, World Economic Forum, https://www.globalshapers.org/. 65 “Meet the First African-Pakistani Lawmaker,” The Diplomat, September 2018, https://thediplomat.com/2018/09/meet-the-first-african-pakistani-lawmaker/. 66 “Black Lives Matter—for Pakistan's Sheedi Community Too,” Zahra Bhaiwala, Neekta Hamidi, Sikander Bizenjo, World Economic Forum Agenda, August 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/black-lives-matter-for-pakistans-sheedi-community-too/.

The fact that worker wages haven't gone up in a commensurate way in the United States for decades led to a less cohesive and resilient society, which was ill-prepared for once-in-a-century events such as COVID-19 or the disruption of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And it may have been at least partially the result of exclusive social and political policy choices as well, as was brought to the fore by the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. After decades of facing discriminatory government policies and actions, many rose up to decry this situation. The lessons from countries such as Malaysia, where inclusive policies have been a focal point for policymakers, shows that a more inclusive approach to government could have and can still avoid such unequal outcomes.

Those rules were supposed to help all workers on zero-hours contracts, as well as domestic workers and on-demand drivers or couriers.59 But as labor economists such as Valerio Di Stefano of the University of Leuven pointed out,60 they fell short in providing similar rights and benefits to others freelancers, such as the IT workers from countries such as Ukraine, Serbia, Pakistan, or India I described earlier. Advocacy Groups A final segment of civil society whose concerns should be heard in the stakeholder model are the newly formed advocacy groups and other movements asking for social justice. Whether it concerns Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights groups, men and women advocating the equal treatment of genders on the work floor, or any other group asking not to be left behind, everyone in a leading position should seek to converse with these newly emerging civil society groups. They are often led by new generations of citizens and workers, whose concerns will only grow over time and whose pulse is, therefore, closer to the future direction of any society.


pages: 308 words: 97,480

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

As she began, an Antifa chant of “BLACK LIVES MATTER” ricocheted off the Capitol behind her, at the entrance to which this morning she’d erected a banner: Ashli’s big grin on the left, Ashli flashing a shaka sign on the right. “I miss her every day,” said the mother. “There are things I want to tell her.” Her voice wobbled. “Questions I want to ask.” She paused, then let it in: the fury. “My daughter was publicly executed!” She gathered herself, torn between rage and her desire for dignity. “Everybody knows Breonna Taylor,” she said. From the back: “BLACK LIVES MATTER!” “Everybody knows George Floyd,” Ashli’s mother said.

Why wouldn’t the media say her daughter’s name? (They did, but the mother thought they said it wrong, as if her daughter had not died a hero.) Antifa: BLACK LIVES MATTER! “Let your representatives know,” pleaded the mother, her voice wavering. “Over, and over, and over.” (Know what? She didn’t say.) Antifa: NO MORE NAZ-EES! The mother stopped. Pulled the microphone close: “ASH-LI BAB-BITT!” The same up-down, up-down cadence as “Black Lives Matter.” She shouted it again. “ASH-LI BAB-BIT!” The crowd cheered. Kelli and Freedom hollered. They came for the rage, and now at last, four syllables like four fingers squeezing into a fist, it was here.

Now he flew the boys to rallies to spread the word. “The tweets?” I asked. “Yes. They matter. They mean things.” He pointed. There: one of their shirts. And there, up in the seats. Another shirt. And there, and there, and there, as if repetition itself was proof. “It’s not a joke?” I asked, since the shirts were also a mockery of Black Lives Matter. “No!” Dave wasn’t offended. “It’s like—” He looked for a word. “Scripture?” “Yes,” he said with a youth pastor’s approving grin. “Like Scripture.” Every tweet, every misspelling, every typo, every strange capitalization—especially the capitalizations, said Dave—had meaning. “The truth is right there in what the media think are his mistakes.


pages: 318 words: 73,713

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, data science, delayed gratification, desegregation, don't be evil, Edward Jenner, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, microbiome, microdosing, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pre–internet, profit motive, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Streisand effect, TikTok, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, working poor

See also racism and racial justice the Central Park birdwatching incident and Karen shaming, 109–14, 116 incarceration inequities, 42–43, 89 urban poverty and welfare-cheat narratives, 60, 61 vaccine skepticism among, 162 Black Codes, 73 Black Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter protests, 116–17, 119, 122, 124–25, 184, 205 Blackmon, Douglas, 73 blackpilling, 140 blame. See individual choice/personal responsibility tropes; stigmatization and blame Bloomberg, Michael, 158 body shame, 77–88.

In this way, the author prodded society to shift its norms—to redirect shame from the victims of abusive relationships to the perpetrators. His motive was not to push Hester Prynne to conform to the Puritanical standard, but instead to redraw shame’s boundaries. These same dynamics drive social movements today, from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. These shifting borders stoke heated conflicts in our society, because people whose behavior once seemed to conform—from ass-pinching CEOs to Daughters of the Confederacy—find themselves newly splattered with shame. This hurts. To protect themselves, people tend to take refuge with like-minded allies or to strike back.

To be deemed a Karen, and to have your moment of white privilege blasted across the internet, is to undergo intense and widespread shaming. Within hours of Susan Schulz’s call to the police, dozens of neighbors and activists in Montclair were demonstrating outside her home, chanting and holding signs that read not here!, black lives matter, and white entitlement is violence. Amy Cooper, the Central Park dog walker, faced a much larger wave of shaming on TV and social media. She issued a contrite apology. But it was too late. The following day her employer, Franklin Templeton, fired her, effective immediately.[*1] “We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton,” the company tweeted.


pages: 392 words: 112,954

I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Ken Thompson, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Snapchat, War on Poverty

Regardless of what preceded the shooting, the picture of Brown’s body encapsulated in one unshakable image the dichotomy in attitudes toward black and white life. It was hardly a surprise that the Ferguson case reignited the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. This had begun two years before with the shooting death of unarmed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman. Like the competing interpretations of the events in Ferguson, the very term “Black Lives Matter” was destined, absurdly in many respects, to become the locus of a furious nationwide controversy. Black Americans may have hoped that the name would simply express the degree to which they felt a gap in basic respect, empathy, and rights.

“Members of the warrant squad have made persistent threatening phone calls,” he said. “He was very scared. There were further issues about articles in the press about unnamed police sources indicating he was suicidal. He is very active in the Black Lives Matter movement, Your Honor.” He gestured in the direction of the judge and smiled. It was unclear what effect the words “Black Lives Matter” had on the judge, but they certainly got her attention. “Bail in this case is improper,” Perry went on. “This case isn’t going anywhere. It will disappear.” Nuñez looked at Perry and sighed. She did not appear to relish dealing with a case with this kind of profile.

The relatively simple ask from black Americans was that white Americans take a moment to recognize what it feels like, say, to be told your son has been killed, but not told why or how, as happened with Trayvon Martin, or to watch a pregnant woman put in a chokehold over a backyard barbecue, as happened to twenty-seven-year-old Rosan Miller in New York nine days after Garner’s death. They asked white people to consider what it felt like to have your son’s bleeding corpse left in the street for four long hours. But the request implicit in the name “Black Lives Matter” quickly flipped around into an absurd overreaction. A growing population of Middle American conservatives (and even a sizable chunk of privately grumbling blue-state liberals) was getting good and ready to be open about how tired they were of being accused of racial insensitivity. After Brown’s death, tensions exploded onto the streets of Ferguson, where tens of thousands of people rallied for day-and-night protests.


pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

The richest four hundred Americans have the same amount of wealth as all black people in the United States plus one-third of all Latinos! Black lives matter. But in the United States, black lives are not valued equally to white lives. Not in the streets, not in the courts, not in our work places, not in our halls of government, not in our schools, not even in our progressive movements for change. Making change requires more from white people than simply saying “black lives matter” (though that’s an important start). Alicia Garza, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, suggested a way forward. Writing in The Nation on what’s next for the movement that almost elected Bernie Sanders to the White House, she called for our political revolution to “authentically engage and be led by people of color and immigrants” and to hold the Democratic Party accountable for its “epic failure to address the needs of the majority of people in this country.”

This is a problem, and it’s killing people. It’s part of the reason why in July of 2015, in the run-up to the launch of the July 29th kick off events, a group of Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted a candidate town hall at the annual Netroots Nation political conference. Two of the three Democratic candidates for president were on stage—Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. Hillary Clinton, perhaps wanting to avoid likely protests, elected not to attend. O’Malley’s offensive reply came first: “Black lives matter. White lives matter. All lives matter.” It’s worth noting that Clinton had just a month before provoked a backlash by suggesting “All lives matter” when addressing an audience at an African American church in Missouri.

In this new economic reality, there are openings to organize whites—as Garza also calls us to do—to join a multiracial movement with a vision for an economy that truly works for everybody. The problem we have to solve is not just that not enough white people believe that black lives matter. It’s that not enough white people who say black lives matter are taking action to help dismantle racist structures. White people need to understand that supporting black liberation in a material way is an essential part of any political revolution. We also need to understand that white supremacy is at the heart of the problem—not just a racially associated economic inequality.


pages: 151 words: 39,757

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

It’s as if Facebook is saying, “Pay us or you don’t exist.” They’re becoming the existential mafia. BLACK LIVES MATTER After a dramatic series of awful killings of unarmed black citizens by police in the United States, the initial reaction from sympathetic social media users was for the most part wise, stoic, and constructive. It must be said that we might not even have heard much about these killings, their prevalence, or their similarities without social media. At first, social media engendered a universal sense of community. The slogan “Black Lives Matter” initially struck me as remarkably knowing and careful, for instance.

The slogan “Black Lives Matter” initially struck me as remarkably knowing and careful, for instance. Not a curse, not a swipe. Just a reminder: our children matter. I suspect that a lot of people got the same impression, even though many of them would come to ridicule the same slogan not long after. “Black Lives Matter” appeared and gained prominence during the typical honeymoon phase of BUMMER activism, and, as always, that early phase was hopeful and felt substantial. BUMMER was giving black activists a new channel to influence and power. More money and power for the BUMMER companies, for sure, but also more empowerment for new armies of BUMMER users. Win/win, right? But during that same honeymoon, behind the scenes, a deeper, more influential power game was gearing up.

BUMMER was gradually separating people into bins and promoting assholes by its nature, before Russians or any other client showed up to take advantage. When the Russians did show up, they benefited from a user interface designed to help “advertisers” target populations with tested messages to gain attention. All the Russian agents had to do was pay BUMMER for what came to BUMMER naturally. “Black Lives Matter” became more prominent as a provocation and object of ridicule than as a cry for help. Any message can be reframed to incite a given population if message vandals follow the winds of the algorithms. Components F and A, locked together. Meanwhile, racism became organized over BUMMER to a degree it had not been in generations.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Davidson, “In Racist Screed, New York Times 1619 Project Founder Calls White Race Barbaric ‘Devils,’ ‘Bloodsuckers,’ Columbus ‘No Different Than Hitler,’” The Federalist, June 25, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler; M. Gonzalez, “To Destroy America,” City Journal, September 1, 2020, www.city-journal.org/marxist-revolutionaries-black-lives-matter; K. Rahman, “Will Anti-Semitism Undermine the Black Lives Matter Movement?,” Newsweek, July 24, 2020, www.newsweek.com/anti-semitism-derail-black-lives-matter-movement-1519728; J. Salo, “New York Times Reporter Says Destroying Property Is ‘Not Violence,’” New York Post, June 3, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/06/03/ny-times-reporter-says-destroying-property-is-not-violence. 11.

Coleman, “Why We’re Capitalizing Black,” New York Times, July 5, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html; A. Franks, “Rutgers English Department to Deemphasize Traditional Grammar ‘in Solidarity with Black Lives Matter,” College Fix, July 20, 2020, www.thecollegefix.com/rutgers-english-department-to-deemphasize-traditional-grammar-in-solidarity-with-black-lives-matter; cf. D. Petraeus, “Take the Confederate Names Off Our Army Bases,” The Atlantic, June 9, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/take-confederate-names-off-our-army-bases/612832. 12. Shoshy Ciment, “People Are Slamming Chick-fil-A’s CEO for Shining a Black Man’s Shoes Onstage in a Bizarre Display of Repentance and Shame,” Business Insider, June 22, 2020, www.businessinsider.com/chick-fil-a-ceo-criticized-shinin-black-mans-shoes-repent-2020-6. 13.

In the twenty-first century we are reversing course, a little more than a half century after the successful civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr.’s former dream of judging black Americans by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin has given way to “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand” and, more recently, “Black Lives Matter.” The civil rights movement finally killed off the dangerous vestiges of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the latter’s few incoherent remnants are starting to recombobulate in the era of diversity to supposedly preserve their “white” identity by professing a right to emulate the tribal chauvinism of other racial groups.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

And yet even if every one of these resistance fights is victorious—and we know that’s not going to be possible—we would still be standing in the same place we were before the Far Right started surging, with no better chance of addressing the root causes of the systemic crises of which Trump is but one virulent symptom. A great many of today’s movement leaders and key organizers understand this well, and are planning and acting accordingly. Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, said on the eve of Trump’s inauguration that after five years of swelling social movements, whether it be Occupy Wall Street, whether it be the DREAMers movement or Black Lives Matter…there’s a particular hope that I have that all of those movements will join together to become the powerful force that we can be, that will actually govern this country. So that’s what I’m focused on, and I hope that everybody else is thinking about that too.

We Were on a Roll It can be easy to forget, but before Trump’s election upset, regular people were standing up to battle injustices represented by many of these very industries and political forces, and they were starting to win. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly powerful presidential campaign, though ultimately unsuccessful, had Wall Street fearing for its bonuses and had won significant changes to the official platform of the Democratic Party. Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name were forcing a national debate about systemic anti-Black racism and militarized policing, and had helped win a phase-out of private prisons and reductions in the number of incarcerated Americans. By 2016, no major sporting or cultural event—from the Oscars to the Super Bowl—could take place without some recognition of how the conversation about race and state violence had changed.

During this same period, young Black men continued to be shot and killed by police at an obscene rate (five times higher than white men of the same age bracket, according to a study by the Guardian), their murders often captured on video and seared into the imaginations of still-developing young minds. It is against this backdrop that Black Lives Matter has become this generation’s civil rights movement. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, writes: “The Black political establishment, led by President Barack Obama, had shown over and over again that it was not capable of the most basic task: keeping Black children alive.


pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

Within weeks, decals began appearing on street signs, lampposts, water bottles, and refrigerators around the East Bay featuring a design of a jumpsuit-clad Mehserle behind bars. Two succinct words were at the bottom of a black-and-white sticker: “Riots Work.” The movement that rose up for Oscar Grant was, in retrospect, the genesis of what would eventually be named Black Lives Matter, a cause rooted simultaneously in the intricacies of local struggles around police violence and accountability but also connected through the web, where social media would create the conditions for viral death, instant outrage, and the decentering of traditional news media. But before any of these changes could gel, another horrific shooting would rock Oakland and elicit a countermovement

Not long after, the practice became so ingrained that 95 percent of patrol cops were activating their recording devices during use-of-force incidents.69 Police behavior during protests changed under Whent. When angry, chaotic demonstrations erupted in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for murdering seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, and the following autumn during the first national cycle of Black Lives Matter protests, the OPD acted with unusual restraint, particularly during freeway takeovers and vandalism in downtown Berkeley and Oakland. While Berkeley police and California Highway Patrol fired less-lethals into crowds and clubbed protesters, Oakland cops held back, moving in to make arrests only when they could target someone who clearly broke the law.70 Internal Affairs complaints, which rose to an all-time peak of 1,200 in 2012, plummeted under Whent.

Just like Jerry Brown fourteen years earlier, Schaaf vowed to cut crime, this time by 80 percent, a number she would never come close to reaching.83 And just like Brown, Schaaf’s inauguration was protested by those who feared her public safety plan would give police license to abuse. Schaaf walked a fine line, expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement, but promising to invest more in the police. Her political position depended entirely on the police department’s progress with the court-mandated reforms. Schaaf pointedly spent her entire first day on the job with OPD officers. Showing up at the Police Administration Building at six thirty in the morning and staying for all three shifts through midnight, she toured each floor of the PAB, meeting with officers before their patrol shifts and answering their questions behind closed doors.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

In May, George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck long after he had stopped breathing. As many as twenty-six million people are estimated to have joined the thousands of Black Lives Matter protests across the country that followed that summer—there was a protest in 40 percent of US counties. July 6, the peak day of protest, dwarfed the three million who clogged the arteries of cities nationwide for the Women’s March in 2017. Black Lives Matter became the largest protest movement in post-Vietnam America. Heads rolled only metaphorically during the nationwide protests that summer, but street skirmishes with police and right-wing counterprotesters meant the movement took a more aggressive stance than many liberal onlookers were comfortable with.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Did Last Summer’s Black Lives Matter Protests Change Anything?,” New Yorker, August 6, 2021, www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/did-last-summers-protests-change-anything. 25. “ILWU Stands Down at West Coast Ports for Historic Juneteenth Action to Honor Black Lives,” ILWU, July 13, 2020, www.ilwu.org/ilwu-stands-down-at-west-coast-ports-for-historic-juneteenth-action-to-honor-black-lives/; Peter Cole, “The Most Radical Union in the U.S. Is Shutting Down the Ports on Juneteenth,” In These Times, June 16, 2020, https://inthesetimes.com/article/juneteenth-ilwu-dockworkers-strike-ports-black-lives-matter-george-floyd. 26.

This is about all of us.”3 Chris’s firing and the leaked memo attracted widespread condemnation from activists and politicians, including New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Bernie Sanders, who called the firing “disgraceful.”4 It also engendered support from other social movements. Smalls, who is Black, soon became not only a leader of a national worker movement but also key in building the bridge from the workplace to the streets as a Black Lives Matter activist. By the time I caught up with Smalls, he had been unemployed for several months yet was busier than ever. He spent almost every waking moment organizing against Amazon across the country and helping to advise its employees in other countries. “When I signed up for this job it said I needed a GED and I had to lift 50 pounds—that’s it.


pages: 206 words: 64,212

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

airport security, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, defund the police, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, index card, McMansion, Minecraft, pre–internet, QAnon, Skype, social distancing, Transnistria

and, occasionally, “Black Lives Matter!”—but strangely, in the singsongy way a fishmonger might call, “Fresh-caught haddock!” I came upon a bike march one Saturday afternoon, the last day of spring, at around five o’clock. People lined Third Avenue, most raising their phones to shoot pictures and videos, or to turn their backs on the cyclists and take selfies. Beside me stood two white girls in their early twenties, both frantically texting. Both had tans. “Where can we get bikes?” one asked the other. She tugged down her mask and commenced filming herself. “Black Lives Matter!” she shouted. “Wooooo!”

And chips and Cheetos and dried fruit slices. “Are you sure I can’t give you a little something to eat?” asked a dogged young snacktivist. I reckoned there were maybe three hundred people in the park. Signs included WHITE SILENCE NO MORE, DEFUND NYPD, NO EXCUSE 4 ABUSE, and BLM, an abbreviation for Black Lives Matter. A person I couldn’t see was beating a drum, and while it felt like something should kick off, nothing did. Every so often applause would break out, though I was never sure why. “It’s just a gathering, really,” the young woman standing next to me explained. She had a ring in her nose, and like most everyone around us, she was white.

I’m not sure how I feel about that one. Is someone performing fellatio on you really the greatest punishment you can imagine? I wanted to ask. I was thinking they might change it to “NYPD, kiss my ass,” but that has its place as well. “Eat me out”? “Drink my piss”? Anything sexual is going to step on someone’s toes. “Black Lives Matter!” followed “Suck my dick!” and then we were back to “Whose streets? Our streets!” It’s always interesting to watch a chant die, like a match going out. Some can burn for decent stretches of time, but with this crowd there appeared to be a strict forty-five-second policy. Everyone seemed to have their phones out, and I noticed a lot of people taking selfies.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

Student Cheyenne McLaren spoke of her anger and frustration with the unequal conditions in the schools. She was a member of a group called Students Deserve—led by students, with parents and teachers like Jimenez as allies—that was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement to fight racism in the schools. It was from them that the demand to end random searches came, and also the desire for more community schools. “We really have been inspired by Black Lives Matter and their framework of divesting and investing. Divesting from policing and from other things that police our schools and students and communities and investing in things that see our students as fully human and provide them what they need to really thrive,” Jimenez said.

“We were just not in the place—our union wasn’t and the world wasn’t and all unions were not in a place to fight back in the way that we are now,” she said. But now, with a strong union and a strong coalition in the city, the teachers were preparing to use their power once again. One point in that fight was likely to be over the police budget. Even before the protests began in May 2020, Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and other organizations had been pushing for a People’s Budget that would cut police funding—54 percent of the city’s discretionary budget had been set to go to the police department—and reinvest in public services. UTLA also backed a successful push to cut the budget for the school police—a separate department—by $25 million, or 35 percent. 49 Jimenez took on some new roles after the strike.

Daniel, whose foundation does make grants to organizations led by women and transgender people of color, noted that “it’s far easier for a young affluent white man who has studied poverty at Harvard to land a $1 million grant with a concept pitch than it is for a 40-something black woman with a decades-long record of wins in the impoverished community where she works to get a grant for $20,000.” 41 In movement moments like the one that began in the spring and summer of 2020, as the cries of “Black Lives Matter” rang once again from streets around the world, the question of who gets funded to do the work is particularly important. An incredible outpouring of support—donations in small amounts, $5 and $10 and $20—flowed into bail funds and grassroots organizations like Reclaim the Block and the Minnesota Freedom Fund in Minneapolis, organizations that had been working for years.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

Roudabeh Kishi and Sam Jones, “Demonstrations & Political Violence in America: New Data for Summer 2020,” Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, 2020, https://acleddata.com/acleddatanew/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/ACLED_USDataReview_Sum2020_SeptWebPDF_HiRes.pdf.   84.  “Protests Worldwide Embrace Black Lives Matter Movement,” Reuters, June 6, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-global/protests-worldwide-embrace-black-lives-matter-movement-idUSKBN23D0BO; Jen Kirby, “‘Black Lives Matter’ Has Become a Global Rallying Cry Against Racism and Police Brutality,” Vox, June 12, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/6/12/21285244/black-lives-matter-global-protests-george-floyd-uk-belgium; Anne-Christine Poujoulat, “Protests Across the Globe After George Floyd’s Death,” CNN, June 13, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/world/gallery/intl-george-floyd-protests/index.html.   85.  

Eliott McLaughlin, “How George Floyd’s Death Ignited a Racial Reckoning That Shows No Signs of Slowing Down,” CNN, August 9, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/09/us/george-floyd-protests-different-why/index.html.   82.  Audra Burch et al., “How Black Lives Matter Reached Every Corner of America,” New York Times, June 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/13/us/george-floyd-protests-cities-photos.html; Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html.   83.  Roudabeh Kishi and Sam Jones, “Demonstrations & Political Violence in America: New Data for Summer 2020,” Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, 2020, https://acleddata.com/acleddatanew/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/ACLED_USDataReview_Sum2020_SeptWebPDF_HiRes.pdf.   84.  

“Protests Worldwide Embrace Black Lives Matter Movement,” Reuters, June 6, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-global/protests-worldwide-embrace-black-lives-matter-movement-idUSKBN23D0BO; Jen Kirby, “‘Black Lives Matter’ Has Become a Global Rallying Cry Against Racism and Police Brutality,” Vox, June 12, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/6/12/21285244/black-lives-matter-global-protests-george-floyd-uk-belgium; Anne-Christine Poujoulat, “Protests Across the Globe After George Floyd’s Death,” CNN, June 13, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/world/gallery/intl-george-floyd-protests/index.html.   85.  Kim Kyung Hoon, “Black Lives Matter Protesters March Through Tokyo,” Reuters, June 14, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-japan/black-lives-matter-protesters-march-through-tokyo-idUSKBN23L0FZ.   86.  Repucci and Slipowitz, Democracy Under Lockdown, 13.   87.  Repucci and Slipowitz, Democracy Under Lockdown, 1. CHAPTER 12: VARIANTS AND VACCINES     1.  Jonathan Corum and Carl Zimmer, “Bad News Wrapped in Protein: Inside the Coronavirus Genome,” New York Times, April 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/science/coronavirus-genome-bad-news-wrapped-in-protein.html; Jonathan Corum and Carl Zimmer, “Coronavirus Variants and Mutations,” New York Times, last modified March 22, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/health/coronavirus-variant-tracker.html.     2.  


pages: 50 words: 15,155

Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard

Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, feminist movement, glass ceiling, knowledge economy, Saturday Night Live, wikimedia commons

So should we be optimistic about change when we think about what power is and what it can do, and women’s engagement with it? Maybe, we should be a little. I’m struck, for example, that one of the most influential political movements of the last few years, Black Lives Matter, was founded by three women; few of us, I suspect, would recognise any of their names, but together they had the power to get things done in a different way. 26. There is no need for those who make a difference to have celebrity status. Few people know the names of the women founders of Black Lives Matter: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. But the picture overall is rather more gloomy. We have not got anywhere near subverting those foundational stories of power that serve to keep women out of it, and turning them to our own advantage, as Thatcher did with her handbag.

(Bottom) Hillary Clinton as Medusa. Both are internet memes 24. Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa revised showing Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton respectively. Photo: internet meme 25. Gerald Scarfe’s ‘Handbagging’, showing Margaret Thatcher swotting Kenneth Baker, MP © Gerald Scarfe, with permission 26. Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi attend Glamour Women Of The Year 2016, Los Angeles, California. Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images 27. cover of Charlotte Perkins Gilman sequel to Herland, With Her in Ourland, originally serialised by chapter, monthly, in The Forerunner (magazine), in 1916.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

It wasn’t the cry I expected—it wasn’t fury at leaders, starting with Trump, who had contributed to mass suffering and shocking racial disparities in rates of hospitalization and death. The protests took us back to the time before the pandemic, when videos of violence against Black people created a new movement called Black Lives Matter. It had receded somewhat during the nonstop chaos of Trump’s presidency, but the killing of Floyd and others in early 2020 was a reminder that the violence continued, horrifying enough to start a popular rising. The protests released the repressed energy of quarantine and freed people, especially young people, to be together in the streets for a just cause.

The protests seemed like an escape from what had become unbearable, into something else unbearable. It was that kind of year. Thousands of doctors declared their solidarity and extended their indulgence. It had not been OK at all for Trump supporters to converge on state capitols in opposition to the lockdown, but it was OK for Black Lives Matter supporters to fill city streets in opposition to police brutality. The difference, according to the experts, was the cause. Racism actually endangered public health (but so did unemployment). A former director of the CDC, who had become an urgent voice for the lockdown, tweeted: “The threat to COVID control from protesting outside is tiny compared to the threat to COVID control created when governments act in ways that lose community trust.

It led to few concrete ideas for helping disadvantaged Black people and a slogan (“defund the police”) that created endless confusion and antagonism. Instead of a political agenda and strategy, it pursued a mystical vision that freezes us all in the ice of our own identity and makes ordinary communication with one another nearly impossible. In a memoir, Alicia Garza, who is credited with originating the term “Black lives matter,” criticized the movement for being too insular, too intolerant, too ready to pursue trivial causes and avoid high-stakes politics. The protests were another part of the “social fact” of America—a country too incoherent to talk about its hardest problems in a way that begins to solve them. The last major protest of the summer happened at the end of August, while the political parties were holding their conventions.


pages: 484 words: 155,401

Solitary by Albert Woodfox

airport security, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, full employment, income inequality, index card, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, means of production, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, side project

Because of his actions, taking a knee has come to mean something different now. Another bright spot for me was to see how Black Lives Matter had spread: to meet youth in London and Paris who told me they are part of the Black Lives Matter movement in their countries, and to learn that the movement had spread to Brazil, South Africa, and Australia, among other places around the world. I can’t tell you how proud I was to meet Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, at a panel discussion. I was heartened to hear that, as a result of the civil lawsuit that Herman, King, and I filed, there is now an oversight board that reevaluates decisions made by the reclassification board at Angola.

After we talked about our court cases, King and I forced ourselves to keep it like old times. We talked about Black Lives Matter, the civil rights movement that was just beginning to grow out of the injustice around the murder of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager who was shot and killed in broad daylight while walking home to his dad’s house after buying candy at a store. Trayvon’s killer, George Zimmerman, had just been acquitted of murder by a Florida jury. Herman spoke about how we had to protect Black Lives Matter. But he was also confused, talking about the past as if it was the present, talking about LSU games that happened years before.

As the weeks passed I felt drained of energy. I stopped taking my hour out of the cell. The guard would come and ask me if I wanted yard and I’d say, “Nah, not today.” In my cell, I watched CNN. I’d been watching the news about police shootings of unarmed black people and following the Black Lives Matter movement. It hurt me to see organizers of Black Lives Matter painted as being racists. It hurt me to see black people needing to state the obvious: that we mattered. I thought of the black sanitation workers who went on strike in Memphis in 1968; black workers wore placards that read I AM A MAN. Fifty years later, and the humanity of a black person is still in dispute?


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

If dragged into the daylight and subject to sustained challenge, it is evidently indefensible. There was thus a deep logic to the coincidence of the pandemic with the huge political upheaval of Black Lives Matter over the summer of 2020. As the movement so powerfully demonstrated, a single life taken illegitimately can trigger a giant political movement. When a death becomes a martyrdom, it has huge force. Black Lives Matter fed off a deep well of historic injustice. It tied the present to the past. It linked the killing on May 25, 2020, to centuries of injustice that preceded it. That was powerful, and all the more so because in the context of a runaway pandemic, anger and indignation over the past were compounded by fear of the future.29 In light of the inequities of 2020, how many more Black Americans would become victims of violence, discrimination, and poverty?

Finally, there was the “induction effect,” by which problems in one region indirectly incited sympathetic reaction and imitation in another region, often feeding off preexisting unresolved problems.31 Though presented in the wooden style of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen’s list has an uncanny fit with the experience of 2020. The virus was an example of backflow on a huge scale, from the Chinese countryside to the city of Wuhan, from Wuhan to the rest of the world. Politicians in the West, as much as in China, struggled with convergence, layering, and linkage. The Black Lives Matter protest movement was a giant demonstration of the power of magnification and induction, generating resonances around the globe.32 Indeed, if you ignore its original context, Chen’s checklist for the party cadres could even be read as a guide to our private lives, a self-help manual for the corona crisis.

Black men often die at the hands of America’s police. But this incident triggered an amplification effect in an extraordinary upsurge in protest across the country. America’s Black population suffered disproportionately from the pandemic. Floyd’s killing compounded the deep sense of injustice. The mobilization around Black Lives Matter served as a rallying point for an entire coalition of radical and progressive forces. It was by no means confined to the left. By early July, somewhere between 15 and 26 million people are estimated to have taken part in BLM demonstrations of one kind or another.5 Liberal-minded police chiefs marched with the protesters.


pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

He and Justus abandoned the van, which was later found filled with guns and bomb-making equipment. To the extent that Carrillo’s motives were coherent, he had apparently hoped his attack would be mistaken as the work of Black Lives Matter and set off more violence. Thanks to social media’s partisan-affirming tendencies, he got at least his first wish. Police had not even yet publicly identified Carrillo when pro-Trump Facebook pages won hundreds of thousands of interactions by blaming the Oakland officer’s death on Black Lives Matter “riots,” “left-wing domestic terrorists,” and “another poorly managed Democrat city.” They described it as the latest in a wave of violence stoked by “national Democrats, corporate media & Biden staffers,” an extension of the tyranny of “Democrat lockdowns” and out-of-control minorities.

Any justice system has biases, blind spots, and excesses. The Coopers demonstrated that we had all come under a new system layered atop the old ones, without anyone consciously designing it, opting into it, or even really understanding it. There are times when that system is positively transformative. Black Lives Matter activists leveraged it to attract attention to violence that mainstream outlets tended to gloss over. Christian Cooper’s video resonated so powerfully in part because those activists had primed millions of people to see its significance. That same day, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of a Black man named George Floyd for nearly nine minutes, killing him.

In Myanmar, social media platforms indulged the fears of the long-dominant Buddhist majority who felt, with democracy’s arrival, a shift in the status quo that had long privileged them. In India, it was the Hindu majority, on similar grounds. In 2018, BBC reporters in northern Nigeria found the same pattern, the Fulani majority pitted against the Berom minority, all on Facebook. In America, social media had tapped into white backlash against immigration, Black Lives Matter, increased visibility of Muslims, cultural recalibration toward greater tolerance and diversity. The most-shared rumors, Santamaría pointed out, often had to do with reproduction or population. Sri Lanka and sterilization pills. America and a liberal plot to replace white people with refugees.


pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Her boyfriend, David Michael Kalac, was arrested after a brief police chase and charged with murder. If further proof that the anti-PC taboo-breaking culture of 4chan is not just ‘for the lulz’ is needed, after the November 2015 shooting of five Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis, a video emerged of two of the men involved, wearing balaclavas and driving to a Black Lives Matter protest, saying: ‘We just wanted to give everyone a heads up on /pol/… Stay white.’ Just a few years ago the left-cyberutopians claimed that ‘the disgust had become a network’ and that establishment old media could no longer control politics, that the new public sphere was going to be based on leaderless user-generated social media.

If you watched a live stream of the tour the live comments section quickly filled up little walls, swastikas and references to Harambe. These videos were viewed typically hundreds of thousands of times, as he visited US and UK universities criticizing political correctness, feminism, Islam, Black Lives Matter and Western liberalism in general. Through courting online controversy and campus activists constantly trying to ban him, he was made into a kind of martyr figure, with devoted crowds of fans chanting ‘Milo! Milo! Milo!’ His ban from Twitter aided his career in much the same way. As for genuine non-ironic white supremacists on the alt-right, he insisted: ‘There’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.’

He can barely go a few sentences without mentioning his homosexuality, anal sex jokes, and what sounds like a multitude of black sexual partners and boyfriends. Joking with Ann Coulter on his podcast, he said that he liked the idea of getting caught in bed with black drug-dealer boyfriends when he was rebelling against his parents. In one of his campus talks he dressed up as a camped up S&M cop to antagonize Black Lives Matter and had penis-shaped props. In response to criticisms of his intentionally cruel bullying attacks on others, he simply shrugged them off as examples of fabulous catty gay male behavior. 4chan is also more of a product of the sexual revolution than of conservatism. From the start it was teeming with weird hardcore pornographic images and discussions – gay, straight, transgender and everything in between – and a culture of relish transgressing any and all moral codes when it comes to sexuality.


pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

“expectancy has ever been”: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, “US Racial Inequality May Be as Deadly as COVID-19,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117, no. 36 (September 8, 2020), https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/21854. at a fundraiser: Sophia Tesfaye, “I’m Not a Superpredator, Hillary!: Black Lives Matter Protestors Confront Clinton at South Carolina Fundraiser,” Salon, February 25, 2016, https://www.salon.com/2016/02/25/im_not_a_superpredator_hillary_black_lives_matter_protestors_crash_clinton_south_carolina_fundraiser/. New York Times’s coronavirus tracker: “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count,” graph, New York Times, last modified January 14, 2021, https://drive.google.com/file/d/12YyqzSOp5H8TnCsZ8QWqQl3crCui0Yc3/view?

Cases of tuberculosis, HIV, HCV, and influenza are high in jails, affecting not only those who are arrested but also their families and social networks upon their release. While even those who have been convicted don’t deserve this kind of death penalty, in November 2020, 80 percent of the 230 people who died of COVID-19 in Texas correctional facilities had never been convicted of any crime. Long before the Black Lives Matter movement made famous the use of community bail funds to get people out of jail who might not have family who could afford to bail them out, Chase and Lorena started the Lorena Borjas Community Fund to spring Lorena’s girls as quickly as possible. Often, they succeeded. According to the New York Times, their fund raised more than forty-five thousand dollars, helping more than fifty people get out of jail.

They don’t want to see mentally ill people. They don’t want to see scary older disabled people.” And when the viral underclass has already been erased from public view, it’s hard to get the public to care about what happens to them. “Reform is not the answer,” Alice said of the system, noting how the Black Lives Matter movement exploding across the country from where she was in San Francisco to where I was in New York had been demanding abolition of prisons. “Abolition applies not just to prisons but to nursing homes, detention centers, youth juvenile facilities—ICE facilities,” she says. “Every type of congregate setting.”


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

For example, Facebook once ironically censored the ACLU’s (American Civil Liberties Union) page over a post about censorship, deleting an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from the Vietnam War for violating its standards. It has often seemed perverse in its handling of ‘hate speech’. Though eager to align itself with Black Lives Matter in its publicity, it suspended Shaun King, the Black Lives Matter activist, for sharing an experience of racist abuse. Yet its moderators regularly allow obvious racist abuse to stand. Often, social industry platforms are gulled into acting against a user by ‘report trolling’ – in which trolls submit false reports about their targets and incite others to do the same.

Yes, and no’, The Verge, 15 July 2015. 43. For most of us, it is completely ineffectual . . . Sarah Jeong, The Internet of Garbage, Forbes: New Jersey, NJ, 2015, pp. 69–90. 44. Nor did ‘free speech’ prevent Facebook from . . . Levi Sumagaysay, ‘Facebook hangs “Black Lives Matter” sign at its headquarters’, SiliconBeat (www.siliconbeat.com), 9 July 2016; Sam Levin, ‘Facebook temporarily blocks Black Lives Matter activist after he posts racist email’, Guardian, 12 September 2016; Issie Lapowsky, ‘It’s Too Easy for Trolls to Game Twitter’s Anti-Abuse Tools’, Wired, 13 May 2016; Glenn Greenwald, ‘Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments’, The Intercept, 30 December 2017; Russell Brandom, ‘Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram surveillance tool was used to arrest Baltimore protestors’, The Verge, 11 October 2016. 45.

The social justice warrior’s injunction, #stayinyourlane, suggests we can never transcend identitarian boxes. The era of the platforms has witnessed an explosion in identity-talk. There are some good reasons for this. Much of what is described as identity politics addresses long-standing injustices, impacting on people precisely because of how they’re identified, from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo. Beyond this, however, the internal politics of the medium is itself a politics of identity, because it compels us to dedicate more and more of our time to performing an identity. The self that the social industry engages is ephemeral in the sense described by Lasch: trapped in a continuous, distracted response to stimuli.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Who would do that? I had no answer. The flood of inappropriate images continued, and it gnawed at me. More troubling phenomena caught my attention. In March 2016, for example, I saw a news report about a group that exploited a programming tool on Facebook to gather data on users expressing an interest in Black Lives Matter, data that they then sold to police departments, which struck me as evil. Facebook banned the group, but not until after irreparable harm had been done. Here again, a bad actor had used Facebook tools to harm innocent victims. In June 2016, the United Kingdom voted to exit the European Union.

Communication matters, but so does thoughtful consideration of facts, of candidates, and of policy options, none of which is easy on Facebook. When it comes to democracy, Facebook does a few things very well. It enables communication of ideas, as well as the organization of events. We have seen Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, Indivisible, and the March for Our Lives all leverage Facebook to bring people together. The same thing happened in Tunisia and Egypt at the start of the Arab Spring. Unfortunately, the things Facebook does well are only a small part of the democracy equation. According to Stanford professor Larry Diamond, there are four pillars of democracy: Free and fair elections; Active participation of the people, as citizens, in civic life; Protection of the human rights of all citizens; Rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.

At least a third of the US population identifies with ideas that are demonstrably untrue, and a far larger number have no regular interaction with people who disagree with them or have a radically different life experience. I do not see how technology can fix that. Somehow we have to change our culture to make civic engagement a priority. If Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, Indivisible, and the March for Our Lives are any indication, the process has already begun. Unfortunately, these important efforts in activism address only a portion of the political spectrum, and their success to date has hardened resistance on the other side. * * * — WHEN THE TECH INDUSTRY finally had enough processing, storage, memory, and bandwidth to deliver seamless, real-time video, audio, and texts, it transformed the nature of digital experiences.


pages: 164 words: 44,947

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Airbnb, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Kickstarter, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, profit motive, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

If you want to get a flavor of what really interested the attendees at the conference, aside from singing the praises of Marx and Lenin, here’s a list of some of the conference sessions: • Black Lives Matter at School • A World Without Borders? Marxism, Nations, and Migration • Capitalism and the Gender Binary • The Rise of Red Power and the American Indian Movement • Artists Against War • Gender and Disability • Whose Clinics? Our Clinics! Defending Abortion rights • What Do Socialists Say About White Privilege? • All Eleven Million: The Fight for Immigrant Rights • From TrumpCare to Medicare for All: The Growing Movement for Single-Payer Health Care • Socialism and Women’s Liberation • Athletes in Revolt: Black Lives Matter in Sports Today • U.S.

I told them I was writing a book on socialism and asked if they’d mind answering some questions so that I could better understand what attracts younger people to socialism. They readily agreed. I asked them why they attended the conference. An attractive, well-dressed woman answered first. “The urgency is because of Trump, immigrant rights, Black Lives Matter, indigenous rights.” Her friend said she “wanted to meet a lot of comrades.” The third woman had a streak of green dyed into her hair and unshaved legs. She told me she was “new to socialism, and here to learn with my best friend, but also for the solidarity of it all.” I asked them to describe the essence of socialism.

For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function. 1984 (Orwell), 102 2008 financial crisis, 2 A Abkhazia, 113 Absher, Sam, 113 AccorHotels, 72, 77 After War (Coyne), 135 Airports Council International, 63 Alger, Horatio, 17 Allende, Salvator, 123 Anti-Hero IPA, 130 Arab Spring, 15 Argentina, 17 Argo (beer), 103 Armenia, 103 Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE), 119 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 100 Auburn University, 6 Ayn Rand Institute, 81, 100 Azerbaijan, 103 B badrijani, 116 Bahia (beer), 20, 26 Bangladesh, 3 Batumi, 107 Beijing, 71–72, 77, 80–83, 134, 150 Belarus, 99–100 Belgian beers, 5, 12, 64, 130 Belgium, 5 Bendukidze Free Market Center, 99, 117 Bendukidze, Kakha, 99, 106–108, 117 Bengals, 7 Berlin Wall, 120 Black Book of Communism, The, 89–90, 150 Black Lives Matter, 129 Black Sea, 103, 107 black-market prices, 37 BlazeTV, 141 Bolívar, Simón, 17, Bolívarian Socialism, 17 Bolshevik Revolution, 104, 139 Bolsheviks, 89–90, 93–94, 96, 115 Bosporus Straits, 103 Boston, 6–7, 15 bourgeoisie, 76, 88, 92 Broken Bridge, 67 Brook, Yaron, 81 Bruenig, Elizabeth, 140 Bucanero (beer), 35 Buchanan, James, 8–9 Bush, George H.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

By the measure of Wall Street, the company wasn’t doing well. The user-base wasn’t growing quickly enough. The $14 billion-or-so valuation wasn’t enough to satisfy investors’ monopolistic expectations, especially not those who’d bought in when the valuation was closer to $40 billion. Tell that to the users, though. From Black Lives Matter activists to Donald Trump, Twitter has become a vital public square, truly a network of its people (and its many bots). It’s also a network of networks; TV news anchors show their Twitter handles next to their names on-screen. The company has even been on-and-off profitable—pretty good by internet standards.

Lumumba’s friends found it hard not to be on edge. He had come to office in a Southern capital on a platform of black power and human rights. He built a nationwide network of supporters and a local political base after decades as one of the most outspoken lawyers in the black nationalist movement. At the time, Black Lives Matter was still nascent, more a hashtag than an on-the-ground movement. DeRay Mckesson was still working for the Minneapolis Public Schools between sending off tweets. But those paying attention were coming to see Jackson as a model, the capital of a new African American politics and economics, a form of resistance more durable than protest.

According to Ben Allen’s email signature at the time, “downtown redevelopment is like war.”28 The forces that kept #BlackLivesMatter trending after the hashtag first appeared in 2013 were not exactly what one might expect from the headlines of black men killed by police. In reality, it was frequently a queer- and women-led uprising. The leaders were not afraid to use the word capitalism, and they did so derisively. (The “Black Lives Matter” slogan originated with Alicia Garza, a labor organizer with the National Domestic Workers Alliance.) They believed that black lives will not matter without a different system for determining what and who matters, and cooperative economics figured prominently in the movement’s policy proposals.


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Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

How the power-disadvantaged use the resources at their disposal to influence others to disrupt the status quo is just as critical as their decision to join forces. What exactly must collective movements do to pull off a seemingly impossible feat and successfully disrupt the power hierarchy? We turn to that question next. Chapter 6 Agitate, Innovate, Orchestrate Black Lives Matter, the Hong Kong protests, #MeToo, the French Yellow Vests, the Arab Spring: These are just a few of the social movements that have risen to prominence in the past decade, propelled by the sustained commitment of large numbers of people seeking social change.1 Perhaps because they were amplified by the ascent of social media they may seem like a novel phenomenon.2 They are not.

In particular, social media make it simple for people to engage in “click activism,” in which individuals are encouraged to “click,” “like,” or “share” items on social media in support of change.43 Yet as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci notes, “Modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march… However, with this speed comes weakness.”44 Without the long and grueling work of movement building, participants risk having shallow connections and little experience in collective decision-making, strategizing, communicating, and organizing, all of which play a critical role in ensuring a movement’s resilience and effectiveness. In The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, Alicia Garza, the cofounder of Black Lives Matter, goes to the heart of this challenge: “You cannot start a movement from a hashtag. Hashtags do not start movements—people do. Movements do not have official moments when they start and end, and there is never just one person who initiates them. Movements are much more like waves than they are like light switches.

In 2013, as traditionally powerful institutions and players were losing clout to nimbler grassroots entities, journalist and scholar Moisés Naím declared that the end of power was upon us: “In the twenty-first century,” he wrote, “power is easier to get, harder to use—and easier to lose.”1 In a similar vein, five years later, entrepreneur and political activist Jeremy Heimans and social impact executive Henry Timms argued that connectivity has brought forth a new form of power: networked, informal, collaborative, transparent, and participatory. It is the kind of power that lives through the energy of the crowd, the kind #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have harnessed. Its opposite, the two authors say, is “old power”: closed, inaccessible, and mostly hierarchical.2 Whether the end of power or the emergence of new power, both analyses aptly describe important shifts in where power is located and how it can be exercised today. But as you will see, power itself hasn’t changed.


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Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays by Phoebe Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, defund the police, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joan Didion, Lyft, mass incarceration, microaggression, off-the-grid, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois

Some older white men didn’t do much better: They protested the quarantine orders and wanted to carry on leaving their homes for any and all nonessential reasons, such as purchasing Miracle-Gro for their grass. Really?! Huh. Remember the days when marching and being politically disruptive meant you were reacting to injustices such as oh, I don’t know, racism (Civil Rights Movement; Black Lives Matter), corruption within the Communist Party (1989 Tiananmen Square protests), homophobia (Stonewall Uprising), inmate rights (Attica prison riot), economic inequality (Occupy Wall Street), family detention centers and deportation (2018 pro-immigration rallies across America), gun violence (Million Mom March), oppressive regimes and low standards of living (Arab Spring), and violent crimes against women (Take Back the Night), just to name a few?

A groundswell of outrage, marches, and demands to defund the police mixed with a “Well, the world is on fire, so I gotta do something” energy was a chaotic combination that birthed something no one expected and very few wanted: social justice “warriors.” These weren’t the sjdubs of the past or recent past—Kimberlé Crenshaw (professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School), Alicia Garza (cofounder of Black Lives Matter), Rashad Robinson (president of Color of Change), and Marsha P. Johnson (trans activist and one of the prominent figures in the Stonewall uprisings) just to name a few—but a new breed. A breed that was comprised of many who were for the first time acknowledging systemic racism’s existence and/or that antiracism is not just labor to be done by Black people, but work that everybody needs to participate in, and boy, did they participate.

Point is that chaotic, throwing-anything-at-the-wall-and-seeing-what-sticks mindsets are kind of how some of these reactions to 2020’s social uprisings came off. Nothing but frazzled energy and barely formed ideas and solutions driven by a slight desperation to not get caught “making a mistake,” and this concern, of course, overshadows what should be the focus: Black. Lives. Mattering. In all the ways. In case you don’t remember, here’s a sampling of what we got: Corporations released carefully constructed statements of “committing to diversity” and sent out newsletters with JPEGs of Black people in them. Uhhh . . . Black people had to die in order for y’all to dump some Shutterstock pics of them looking at pie charts in a Mailchimp newsletter template about the company ecosystem?


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Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

The affirmation of all Black lives at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement has helped to bridge class divides and to mobilize an extraordinary cross-section of people to fight against police brutality, end mass incarceration, and build strong and loving communities. The movement’s founders, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors, are clear that the movement condemns all state violence, not just police violence. As part of its reparations platform, The Movement for Black Lives—a collective of 50 organizations including the Black Lives Matter Network—calls for the establishment of an unconditional and guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people.

As part of its reparations platform, The Movement for Black Lives—a collective of 50 organizations including the Black Lives Matter Network—calls for the establishment of an unconditional and guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people. But despite the expansive view of Black Lives Matter, the interventions that have attracted the most public attention have been those focused on violence committed against Black bodies, minds, and souls by the criminal justice system. Similar surveillance of brutality and dehumanization in public assistance, homeless services, and child protective services must take their rightful place at the center of our social justice work. As my colleague, Mariella Saba of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, always reminds me: it’s vital to keep our eyes on the badge.

Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. ACLU Adams, Richard Adequate Income Act Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) affordable housing. See also public housing African Americans Black Lives Matter and child welfare and Civil Rights movement and criminal justice system and digital poorhouse and eugenics and exclusion and housing Movement for Black Lives and poorhouses and public relief and scientific charity movement and welfare and Welfare rights movement Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) and “employable mother” rule history of See also Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and eligibility rules history of and New York and Nixon administration and Reagan administration replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) statistics and welfare rights movement Alexander, Carmen Alexander, T.C.


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Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

We’re very grateful to them for allowing us to plug straight into their application process online to help our colleagues find work there if they want to work during their furlough.” CRISIS UPON CRISIS The nation hobbled into June 2020, still not having a handle on COVID-19 as it spread across the US. And then, as if to underscore that the foundations of the system were unstable, a racial justice crisis stormed to the forefront of public attention, and Black Lives Matter, the nascent civil rights movement, achieved new prominence. There had been other high-profile incidents of police violence against Blacks in recent years, but the tragic death of forty-six-year-old George Floyd, a Minneapolis Black man, became a tipping point. On May 25, Minneapolis police officers arrested Floyd after a convenience store clerk claimed he’d passed a counterfeit $20 bill.

Such corporate actions shifted to conversations about Black representation in companies, underscoring the importance of diversity—one of the signature platforms of stakeholder capitalism. It’s worth noting that only six years earlier, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, had shot and killed Michael Brown in the middle of the street, witnessed by many bystanders. The event sparked large protests and fed the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. But big company CEOs were, for the most part, silent. Their reaction following George Floyd’s death was different, indicating how much business leadership had changed in the few intervening years. Many CEOs had conversations with their employees about race for the first time. The intersection of BLM with the pandemic created a striking new awareness.

“I think we’re seeing the whole forest now, not just the individual trees of representation or minority content in our supply chain, but seeing how this extends to our communities. And that to me is the major difference.”10 AVOIDING MISSTEPS In the days after George Floyd was killed, there was a range of responses from the business community. Public statements of support for Black Lives Matter were issued from major brands. Public promises were made about doing better to incorporate diversity and inclusion in their own ranks. But even early on, what everyone was looking for was how the words would be followed up with actions. To help us get our minds around the tricky issue of corporate engagement in social issues, Ellen McGirt brought in Dr.


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Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

A movement such as Black Lives Matter gives a glimpse of the sort of political movements that will likely dominate the twenty-first century, aimed at highlighting inequalities in the defense of life itself. The central claim of Black Lives Matter is brutally simple: the American Leviathan does not deliver on its function of protecting all lives equally. It is almost certain that the number and scope of such political demands is going to multiply in the coming years, especially as climate-related mass migration increases. Threats to life do not need to be as direct as those publicized by Black Lives Matter in order to be politicized.

Equally, the foundational purpose of Occupy was not to criticize Wall Street, debate financial regulation or to lobby for alternative economic policies, but, as the name says, to occupy physical space—to use human bodies to render a political movement unavoidable. Activists in other contemporary protest movements, such as Black Lives Matter and Greenpeace, jam strategically important infrastructure (airports and highways for example) with their bodies. Mass silence, such as the monthly silent walks organized to mourn those lost in London’s Grenfell Tower fire, makes a powerful statement of compassion simply through being physically together.

A/B testing, 199 Acorn, 152 ad hominem attacks, 27, 124, 195 addiction, 83, 105, 116–17, 172–3, 186–7, 225 advertising, 14, 139–41, 143, 148, 178, 190, 192, 199, 219, 220 aerial bombing, 19, 125, 135, 138, 143, 180 Affectiva, 188 affective computing, 12, 141, 188 Agent Orange, 205 Alabama, United States, 154 alcoholism, 100, 115, 117 algorithms, 150, 169, 185, 188–9 Alsace, 90 alt-right, 15, 22, 50, 131, 174, 196, 209 alternative facts, 3 Amazon, 150, 173, 175, 185, 186, 187, 192, 199, 201 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 24 American Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 American Pain Relief Society, 107 anaesthetics, 104, 142 Anderson, Benedict, 87 Anthropocene, 206, 213, 215, 216 antibiotics, 205 antitrust laws, 220 Appalachia, 90, 100 Apple, 156, 185, 187 Arab Spring (2011), 123 Arendt, Hannah, xiv, 19, 23, 26, 53, 219 Aristotle, 35, 95–6 arrogance, 39, 47, 50 artificial intelligence (AI), 12–13, 140–41, 183, 216–17 artificial video footage, 15 Ashby, Ross, 181 asymmetrical war, 146 atheism, 34, 35, 209 attention economy, 21 austerity, 100–101, 225 Australia, 103 Australian, 192 Austria, 14, 60, 128, 153–75 Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), 153–4, 159 authoritarian values, 92–4, 101–2, 108, 114, 118–19, 211–12 autocracy, 16, 20, 202 Babis, Andrej, 26 Bacon, Francis, 34, 35, 95, 97 Bank of England, 32, 33, 55, 64 Banks, Aaron, 26 Bannon, Steve, 21, 22, 60–61 Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Beck Depression Inventory, 107 Berlusconi, Silvio, 202 Bernays, Edward, 14–15, 16, 143 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud), 110 Bezos, Jeff, 150, 173 Big Data, 185–93, 198–201 Big Government, 65 Big Science, 180 Bilbao, Spain, 84 bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 127 Birmingham, West Midlands, 85 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 Blackpool, Lancashire, 100 blind peer reviewing, 48, 139, 195 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 blue sky research, 133 body politic, 92–119 Bologna, Italy, 96 bookkeeping, 47, 49, 54 Booth, Charles, 74 Boston, Massachusetts, 48 Boyle, Robert, 48–50, 51–2 BP oil spill (2010), 89 brainwashing, 178 Breitbart, 22, 174 Brexit (2016–), xiv, 23 and education, 85 and elites, 33, 50, 61 and inequality, 61, 77 and NHS, 93 and opinion polling, 80–81 as self-harm, 44, 146 and statistics, 61 Unite for Europe march, 23 Vote Leave, 50, 93 British Futures, 65 Brooks, Rosa, 216 bullying, 113 Bureau of Labor, 74 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 77 Bush, George Walker, 77, 136 cadaverous research, 96, 98 call-out culture, 195 Calvinism, 35 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, 85 University, 84, 151 Cambridge Analytica, 175, 191, 196, 199 Cameron, David, 33, 73, 100 cancer, 105 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 74 capital punishment, 92, 118 car accidents, 112–13 cargo-cult science, 50 Carney, Mark, 33 cartography, 59 Case, Anne, 99–100, 102, 115 Catholicism, 34 Cato Institute, 158 Cavendish, William, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, 34 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Center for Policy Studies, 164 chappe system, 129, 182 Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 34, 68, 73 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Chelsea, London, 100 Chevillet, Mark, 176 Chicago School, 160 China, 13, 15, 103, 145, 207 chloroform, 104 cholera, 130 Chongqing, China, 13 chronic pain, 102, 105, 106, 109 see also pain Churchill, Winston, 138 citizen science, 215, 216 civil rights movements, 21, 194 civilians, 43, 143, 204 von Clausewitz, Carl, 128–35, 141–7, 152 and defeat, 144–6 and emotion, 141–6, 197 and great leaders, 146–7, 156, 180–81 and intelligence, 134–5, 180–81 and Napoleon, 128–30, 133, 146–7 and soldiers, number of, 133–4 war, definition of, 130, 141, 193 climate change, 26, 50, 165, 205–7, 213–16 Climate Mobilization, 213–14 climate-gate (2009), 195 Clinton, Hillary, 27, 63, 77, 99, 197, 214 Clinton, William “Bill,” 77 coal mining, 90 cognitive behavioral therapy, 107 Cold War, 132, 133, 135–6, 137, 180, 182–4, 185, 223 and disruption, 204–5 intelligence agencies, 183 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 nuclear weapons, 135, 180 scenting, 135–6 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 space race, 137 and telepathy, 177–8 colonialism, 59–61, 224 commercial intelligence, 152 conscription, 127 Conservative Party, 80, 154, 160, 163, 166 Constitution of Liberty, The (Hayek), 160 consumer culture, 90, 104, 139 contraceptive pill, 94 Conway, Kellyanne, 3, 5 coordination, 148 Corbyn, Jeremy, 5, 6, 65, 80, 81, 197, 221 corporal punishment, 92 creative class, 84, 151 Cromwell, Oliver, 57, 59, 73 crop failures, 56 Crutzen, Paul, 206 culture war, xvii Cummings, Dominic, 50 currency, 166, 168 cutting, 115 cyber warfare, xii, 42, 43, 123, 126, 200, 212 Czech Republic, 103 Daily Mail, ix Damasio, Antonio, 208 Darwin, Charles, 8, 140, 142, 157, 171, 174, 179 Dash, 187 data, 49, 55, 57–8, 135, 151, 185–93, 198–201 Dawkins, Richard, 207, 209 death, 37, 44–5, 66–7, 91–101 and authoritarian values, 92–4, 101–2, 211, 224 bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 and Descartes, 37, 91 and Hobbes, 44–5, 67, 91, 98–9, 110, 151, 184 immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 life expectancy, 62, 68–71, 72, 92, 100–101, 115, 224 suicide, 100, 101, 115 and Thiel, 149, 151 death penalty, 92, 118 Deaton, Angus, 99–100, 102, 115 DeepMind, 218 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Delingpole, James, 22 demagogues, 11, 145, 146, 207 Democratic Party, 77, 79, 85 Denmark, 34, 151 depression, 103, 107 derivatives, 168, 172 Descartes, René, xiii, 36–9, 57, 147 and body, 36–8, 91, 96–7, 98, 104 and doubt, 36–8, 39, 46, 52 and dualism, 36–8, 39, 86, 94, 131, 139–40, 179, 186, 223 and nature, 37, 38, 86, 203 and pain, 104, 105 Descartes’ Error (Damasio), 208 Devonshire, Earl of, see Cavendish, William digital divide, 184 direct democracy, 202 disempowerment, 20, 22, 106, 113–19 disruption, 18, 20, 146, 147, 151, 171, 175 dog whistle politics, 200 Donors Trust, 165 Dorling, Danny, 100 Downs Survey (1655), 57, 59, 73 doxing, 195 drone warfare, 43, 194 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 74 Dugan, Regina, 176–7 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 e-democracy, 184 Echo, 187 ecocide, 205 Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (Mises), 154, 166 economics, 59, 153–75 Economist, 85, 99 education, 85, 90–91 electroencephalography (EEG), 140 Elizabethan era (1558–1603), 51 embodied knowledge, 162 emotion and advertising, 14 artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and crowd-based politics, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 21, 23–7 Darwin’s analysis, 8, 140 Descartes on, 94, 131 and experts, 53, 60, 64, 66, 90 fear, 11–12, 16–22, 34, 40–45, 52, 60, 142 Hobbes on, 39, 41 James’ analysis, 140 and markets, 168, 175 moral, 21 and nationalism, 71, 210 pain, 102–19 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 and war, 124–6, 142 empathy, 5, 12, 65, 102, 104, 109, 112, 118, 177, 179, 197 engagement, 7, 219 England Bank of England founded (1694), 55 bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 civil servants, 54 Civil War (1642–51), 33–4, 45, 53 Elizabethan era (1558–1603), 51 Great Fire of London (1666), 67 hospitals, 57 Irish War (1649–53), 59 national debt, 55 Parliament, 54, 55 plagues, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 208, 218 tax collection, 54 Treasury, 54 see also United Kingdom English Defense League, ix entrepreneurship, 149, 156, 162 environment, 21, 26, 50, 61, 86, 165, 204–7, 213–16 climate change, 26, 50, 165, 205–7, 213–16 flying insects, decline of, 205, 215 Environmental Protection Agency, 23 ether, 104 European Commission, 60 European Space Agency, 175 European Union (EU), xiv, 22, 60 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit and elites, 60, 145, 202 euro, 60, 78 Greek bailout (2015), 31 immigration, 60 and nationalism, 60, 145, 146 quantitative easing, 31 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 Exeter, Devon, 85 experts and crowd-based politics, 5, 6, 23, 25, 27 Hayek on, 162–4, 170 and representative democracy, 7 and statistics, 62–91 and technocracy, 53–61, 78, 87, 89, 90 trust in, 25–33, 63–4, 66, 74–5, 77–9, 170, 202 violence of, 59–61 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, The (Darwin), 8, 140 Exxon, 165 Facebook, xvi, 15, 201 advertising, 190, 192, 199, 219, 220 data mining, 49, 185, 189, 190, 191, 192, 198, 219 and dog whistle politics, 200 and emotional artificial intelligence, 140 as engagement machine, 219 and fake news, 199 and haptics, 176, 182 and oligarchy, 174 and psychological profiling, 124 and Russia, 199 and sentiment analysis, 188 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186 and Thiel, 149, 150 and unity, 197–8 weaponization of, 18 facial recognition, 13, 188–9 failed states, 42 fake news, 8, 15, 199 Farage, Nigel, 65 fascism, 154, 203, 209 fear, 11–12, 16–22, 34, 40–45, 52, 60, 142 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 feeling, definition of, xii feminism, 66, 194 Fifth Amendment, 44 fight or flight, 111, 114 Financial Times, 15 first past the post, 13 First World War, see World War I Fitbit, 187 fixed currency exchange rates, 166 Florida, Richard, 84 flu, 67, 191 flying insects, 205, 215 France censuses, 66, 73 conscription introduced (1793), 127 Front National, 27, 61, 79, 87, 92 Hobbes in (1640–51), 33–4, 41–2 Le Bon’s crowd psychology, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 38 life expectancy, 101 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), see Napoleonic Wars Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Paris Commune (1871), 8 Prussian War (1870–71), 8, 142 Revolution (1789–99), xv, 71, 126–9, 141, 142, 144, 204 statistics agency established (1800), 72 unemployment, 83 Franklin, Benjamin, 66 free markets, 26, 79, 84, 88, 154–75 free speech, 22, 113, 194, 208, 209, 224 free will, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 14, 44, 107, 109–10, 111, 112, 114, 139 Friedman, Milton, 160, 163, 166 Front National, 27, 61, 79, 87, 92, 101–2 full spectrum warfare, 43 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 140 futurists, 168 Galen, 95–6 Galilei, Galileo, 35 gambling, 116–17 game theory, 132 gaming, 193–4 Gandhi, Mohandas, 224 gate control theory, 106 Gates, Sylvester James “Jim,” 24 Gavotti, Giulio, 143 geek humor, 193 Gehry, Frank, 84 Geller, Uri, 178 geometry, 35, 49, 57, 59, 203 Gerasimov, Valery, 123, 125, 126, 130 Germany, 34, 72, 137, 205, 215 gig economy, 173 global financial crisis (2007–9), 5, 29–32, 53, 218 austerity, 100–101 bailouts, 29–32, 40, 42 and gross domestic product (GDP), 76 as “heart attack,” 57 and Obama administration, 158 and quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 and securitization of loans, 218–19 and statistics, 53, 65 and suicide, 101 and unemployment, 82 globalization, 21, 78, 84, 145, 146 Gonzales, Alberto, 136 Google, xvi, 174, 182, 185, 186, 191, 192 DeepMind, 218 Maps, 182 Transparency Project, 198 Government Accountability Office, 29 Graunt, John, 67–9, 73, 75, 79–80, 81, 85, 89, 127, 167 Great Fire of London (1666), 67 great leaders, 146–8 Great Recession (2007–13), 76, 82, 101 Greece, 5, 31, 101 Greenpeace, 10 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 Grillo, Beppe, 26 gross domestic product (GDP), 62, 65, 71, 75–9, 82, 87, 138 guerrillas, 128, 146, 194, 196 Haldane, Andrew, 32 haptics, 176, 182 Harvey, William, 34, 35, 38, 57, 96, 97 hate speech, 42 von Hayek, Friedrich, 159–73, 219 health, 92–119, 224 hedge funds, 173, 174 hedonism, 70, 224 helicopter money, 222 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 heroin, 105, 117 heroism and disruption, 18, 146 and genius, 218 and Hobbes, 44, 151 and Napoleonic Wars, 87, 127, 142 and nationalism, 87, 119, 210 and pain, 212 and protection, 202–3 and technocracy, 101 and technology, 127 Heyer, Heather, 20 Hiroshima atomic bombing (1945), 206 Hobbes, Thomas, xiii, xvi, 33–6, 38–45, 67, 147 on arrogance, 39, 47, 50, 125 and body, 96, 98–9 and Boyle, 49, 50, 51 on civil society, 42, 119 and death, 44–5, 67, 69–70, 91, 98–9, 110, 151, 184 on equality, 89 on fear, 40–45, 52, 67, 125 France, exile in (1640–51), 33–4, 41 on geometry, 35, 38, 49, 56, 57 and heroism, 44, 151 on language, 38–9 natural philosophy, 35–6 and nature, 38, 50 and Petty, 56, 57, 58 on promises, 39–42, 45, 148, 217–18 and Royal Society, 49, 50, 51 on senses, 38, 49, 147 and sovereign/state, 40–45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 60, 67, 73, 126, 166, 217, 220 on “state of nature,” 40, 133, 206, 217 war and peace, separation of, 40–45, 54, 60, 73, 125–6, 131, 201, 212 Hobsbawm, Eric, 87, 147 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 221 holistic remedies, 95, 97 Holland, see under Netherlands homeopathy, 95 Homer, xiv Hungary, 20, 60, 87, 146 hysteria, 139 IBM, 179 identity politics, 208, 209 Iglesias Turrión, Pablo, 5 imagined communities, 87 immigration, 60, 63, 65, 79, 87, 145 immortality, 149, 183–4, 224 in-jokes, 193 individual autonomy, 16 Industrial Revolution, 133, 206 inequality, 59, 61, 62, 76, 77, 83, 85, 88–90 inflation, 62, 76, 78, 82 infographics, 75 information theory, 147 information war, 43, 196 insurance, 59 intellectual property, 150 intelligence, 132–9 intensity, 79–83 International Association for the Study of Pain, 106 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 64, 78 Internet, 184–201, 219 IP addresses, 193 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 Ireland, 57, 73 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 43 “Is This How You Feel?


pages: 398 words: 96,909

We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation by Eric Garcia

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, defund the police, Donald Trump, epigenetics, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, Internet Archive, Joi Ito, Lyft, meta-analysis, neurotypical, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, phenotype, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

Jacob Blake’s shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin: Christina Morales, “What We Know About the Shooting of Jacob Blake,” New York Times, September 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/jacob-blake-shooting-kenosha.html. Black Lives Matter: Michael Tesler, “Support for Black Lives Matter Surged During Protests, But Is Waning Among White Americans,” FiveThirtyEight, August 19, 2020, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/support-for-black-lives-matter-surged-during-protests-but-is-waning-among-white-americans/. 5 percent of them had been arrested: Julianna Rava et al., “The Prevalence and Correlates of Involvement in the Criminal Justice System Among Youth on the Autism Spectrum,” Journal of Autism Developmental 47, no. 2 (February 2017): 340–46, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27844248/.

The fact that he was shot while police were responding to a Latino man was terrifying because it meant that those who were even in proximity to autistic people were also not safe. I knew that Black and brown people were more vulnerable to police violence. I had graduated from college a few months before police officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which led to widespread protests and cemented the chant of “Black lives matter” in the public consciousness. Only a few days before the Kinsey shooting in north Miami, Philando Castile, a Black man in Minnesota, was shot and killed by a Hispanic police officer. But until Kinsey’s shooting, I hadn’t considered how autism factored into the epidemic of police brutality. I didn’t think that autism, which sometimes makes it difficult for me to make eye contact or requires stimming to calm down, could be seen as a threat.

The fact that video was captured of George Floyd’s murder and, later, Jacob Blake’s shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, seemed to finally make white Americans see that their Black countrymen and women were not being hyperbolic when they said they feared police. The protests, demonstrations, and occasional damaged property triggered President Trump to tear-gas demonstrators in front of the White House but also seemed to shift national opinion in favor of Black Lives Matter, which was not the case when the phrase entered the public lexicon in 2014 (though support among white Americans began to decline after a summer of protests). But in this shift in public opinion, it is essential for the public to remember how vulnerable Black, Latino, and otherwise marginalized autistic people are to police violence.


pages: 166 words: 52,755

Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade

affirmative action, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, clean water, Donald Trump, white flight, white picket fence, working poor

Worn paths weave through the lot filled with empty liquor bottles and Swisher Sweet cigar wrappers toward the parking lot. In the corner of the parking lot, next to a busy intersection, two older white men are hawking T-shirts from beneath an assembled white tent. “FUCK TRUMP” shirts hang next to “Black Lives Matter in America” and “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” shirts. Both men walk along the sidewalk, both wearing “Black Lives Matter” shirts, trying to sell them to stopped traffic. They are the only white men in the neighborhood beyond the police passing by now and then. Everyone ignores them, too busy with kids, or getting groceries, or lost in their own thoughts.

One man, still dirty from work, soda in hand, walking past on the way to his apartment, gives them a nasty look. “Look at that. Just trying to make a buck off of us. Hell. We at a low point right now, nothing is going to fix this. Like we are in a third-world country. It is 2016, and we still discussing race? Black Lives Matter, but it shouldn’t be that. It should be All Lives Matter. We in the hood have suffered enough. Why we going to get everyone all riled up against the police?” Another man, sitting on the stoop of his apartment, getting ready to grill, is smoking. He sees me and asks why I am here. I explain, and he smiles.

He had been playing with a plastic toy gun the police said they mistook for a real gun. The memorial is filled with balloons, candles, posters, flowers, stuffed animals—all in various states of decay and rot. There are political flyers taped up from a variety of groups, some stating simply “Stop the violence” or “Black lives matter,” others filled with long essays in tiny print. I had visited the memorial every day, and although the park and rec center were always busy, the memorial was always empty. Now a black man in a shirt proclaiming “Tamir Rice” is standing in the gazebo, holding flyers, lecturing loudly. He continues for twenty minutes, uninterrupted and with no audience.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

But Bush’s hubris reveals not just the flaws of a man but, also, the unassailable prestige of neoliberal principles, an influence that Barack Obama’s election in 2008 initially did little to change. Two final chapters consider the political explosions that issued from the Great Recession of 2008–2009 (the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders) and that pushed the neoliberal order to its breaking point. The neoliberal order was already fragmenting when the 2020 pandemic delivered the coup de grace. This book tells the whole of the neoliberal order’s story from its origins in the 1970s and 1980s, through its dominance in the 1990s and 2000s, and ending with its fragmentation and decline across the 2010s.

Young people of different races who discovered that the Great Recession had vaporized the economic opportunities they had thought would be theirs took over a small park in lower Manhattan, announcing they had come to occupy Wall Street; they stayed for months and triggered a national protest against economic inequality. Finally, black anger at the brutal effect of a burst housing bubble and police violence in their communities hardened into the defiant slogan and uprising, Black Lives Matter (BLM). None of these insurgencies, on its own, was as large or as impactful as either the civil rights or anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s (or the labor movement of the 1930s) had been. But the three, in combination, profoundly convulsed American politics, fueling the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, leading in 2016 to one of the more remarkable election campaigns in American history.

Less than a week later, an injured and tied-up Freddie Gray of Baltimore died after being thrown repeatedly against the hard metal surfaces and edges of a police van in which he had been locked up as officers were transporting him to jail.72 These killings led to the eruption of a new protest movement, “Black Lives Matter.” Ferguson, Missouri, the site of Michael Brown’s death, became ground zero for this movement. The heated protests, confrontations with police, and sit-ins modeled on Occupy Wall Street attracted activists from all over the country and gained national and international attention. BLM protesters were young, militant, and uncompromising.


pages: 318 words: 82,452

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, citizen journalism, Columbine, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, equal pay for equal work, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, ghettoisation, hiring and firing, Housing First, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Laura Poitras, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral panic, Occupy movement, open borders, open immigration, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, white flight

It was captured on video. The singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, like most others, was appalled by what he saw and initiated a campaign to train the next generation of civil rights activists: the Gathering for Justice, which in turn created the Justice League, an important force in the Black Lives Matter movement. At the core of the group’s demands is a call to end the criminalization of young people in schools.1 “School Resource Officers” Over the last twenty years there has been an explosion in the number of police officers stationed in schools—one of the most dramatic and clearly counterproductive expansions of police scope and power.

Those who were arrested were subjected to interrogation about their political beliefs, organizational affiliations, and social networks. After the New York Civil Liberties Union exposed the practice, the NYPD voluntarily agreed to stop it.26 However, in 2015, activists arrested as part of the Black Lives Matter movement reported similar standardized political interrogations.27 In 2010, the ACLU found hundreds of incidents of police spying on legal political and protest activity in thirty-three states since 2001.28 In 2003, Oakland police infiltrated an anti-police-brutality organization and played an active role in planning and coordinating events, including the route of a march.

American democracy has been continually undermined by concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of wealthy donors and corporate interests; contentious protest activity will increase as long as there is the freedom for it to do so. When normal political channels are closed off, street politics become more common. This can be seen in the rise of the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter, all of which expressed profound alienation from existing political arrangements and took to the streets as an alternative. Decisions about the granting of permits and the plans for deploying police should be largely removed from police control. Police may share their views about traffic management and serious security risks, but decisions should be in the hands of elected leaders operating within legal frameworks that protect the right to dissent.


pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

‘Leftist’ is a handy shorthand for anything conservatives dislike, while ‘Marxist’ bears no relation to Karl Marx or anything he wrote. For this particular crowd, socialism, communism, Marxism and leftism are all interchangeable terms for what’s bad.5 A Republican judge appointed by George W. Bush could just as easily qualify as a socialist as a Black Lives Matter activist.6 The genre of Q influencer and explainer videos became a whole micro-industry of its own, capitalising on the speculation format familiar to conspiracy theorists and mainstream YouTube fans alike. Few took their efforts nearly so far, though, as Dutch filmmaker Janet Ossebaard, who – inspired by Q – created a ten-part online documentary entitled Fall of the Cabal.

One man, though, did far more – Native American rapper and model Scotty ‘the Kid’ Rojas, who helped propel #SaveTheChildren into the Instagram mainstream.16 From June 2020 onwards, Rojas revealed he had been following QAnon and said the claims it was a conspiracy were from those ‘too lazy to do their own research’. Rojas went on to wonder whether the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and accompanying movement had been orchestrated as a distraction to the ‘real’ issue of mass child abuse. Soon afterwards, Rojas announced on Instagram that he would hold a march on Hollywood in late July to ‘save the children’ – believed to be the beginning of that movement. Posters for the event included a ‘WWG1WGA’ logo – an initialism of QAnon’s ‘Where We Go One, We Go All’ mantra.

QAnon was now influencing geopolitics as well as multiple countries’ internal affairs, at least to the extent of giving Russia’s extraordinarily malleable information operations a new line to push for a few days. (Of course, Russia likely played a role in playing up QAnon, too – just as it pushes division in Western countries around Black Lives Matter, Antifa, hijab-wearing and any other issues it can find.)55 Inevitably, of course, some QAnons detected Trump’s hand in things, with some suggesting he was working with Putin to destroy Fauci’s Ukrainian labs by targeting them with shelling,56 despite the massive evidence to the contrary. However, the broader biolabs idea predictably – given the platforms it was aired over – won some people over.


pages: 430 words: 111,038

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

It happened around the time of Stephen Lawrence’s death, when the Metropolitan Police was declared institutionally racist, and the establishment had a dark night of the soul. It happened around the Windrush scandal of 2018, when there was widespread outrage that black Britons were being deported from a country that had been their home for decades, and to which some had come as citizens. And it happened in 2020 around the Black Lives Matter movement, and around the coronavirus crisis when the public suddenly seemed to appreciate that BAME staff not only accounted for a disproportionate segment of NHS medical staff (44 per cent, when the 2011 Census puts the BAME population in England and Wales at 14 per cent) but were dying at seven times the rate of white colleagues.

The common Brexiteer accusation, following Brexit, that Britain has become ‘far too addicted’ to using workers from overseas echoes an economic tradition that goes back centuries, with slave labour, and then indentured labour from Asia, propping up the imperial economy (albeit not in Britain itself). As a result of the self-examination inspired by the Black Lives Matter campaign, a bunch of companies have come forward to announce that they would make amends for their role in the slave trade. They include the insurance giant Lloyd’s of London and the brewer Greene King, the former’s connection to slavery being through Simon Fraser, one of its founding subscribers, who owned at least 162 enslaved people and ran the Castle Bruce estate in Dominica, and the latter company being founded by Benjamin Greene, who operated sugar-cane plantations in the West Indies and owned at least 231 slaves.14 Other institutions which have proffered apologies have included the Bank of England, Lloyds Banking Group, RBS, the law firms Freshfields and Farrer & Co., the University of Glasgow and All Souls College Oxford.

If we don’t confront the reality of what happened in British empire, we will never be able to work out who we are or who we want to be. 12. Working Off the Past It has been surreal and exciting to see my concerns, towards the end of my journey into imperial history, inspire national news stories and debate. As the Black Lives Matter movement has encouraged a re-evaluation of imperial monuments, mainstream programmes like the BBC News at Ten have run items on how British empire explains racism not only in Britain but in the USA too, there have been debates across the British media about the economic legacies of empire, and major institutions like the National Trust and the Bank of England have started to assess their colonial heritage out loud.


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

Chauvin was arrested and charged for Floyd’s death on May 29, the same day that Trump posted on Twitter that the Minneapolis protesters were “thugs” and warned that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”[7] The phrase, which had a racist history tracing back to the 1960s Civil Rights movement, was widely slammed for glorifying violence.[8] * * * — The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were an important moment for America. At the Federal Reserve, which had been slowly evolving to fit a changing nation, they marked a sort of tipping point. From his home office setup in Minneapolis, the very epicenter of the unfolding social action, Kashkari was watching the events play out with dismay.

Even so, George Floyd’s death was a bright-line moment, one that took the Fed’s growing openness and increasing role in a national conversation about fairness and crystallized them. The Fed had sometimes sided with the political left on divisive but clear-cut issues by 2020 (its officials took the virus seriously and advocated wearing a mask), but it had never weighed in full-throatedly on any button quite as hot as 2020 racial equity discussions and the Black Lives Matter protests would prove to be. Kashkari’s colleagues across the Fed system released their own statements of either condemnation for what had happened in Minneapolis or support for the Black community. Mary Daly in San Francisco wrote on Twitter that “hate thrives when people stay quiet. So, it’s important for all of us to use this moment to speak up.

“Powell’s success runs counter to the populist political narrative of our era: The Fed’s wonky technocracy has succeeded while the theoretically more politically accountable arms of our government have failed,” Josh Barro wrote for New York magazine.[16] Opinion polling showed that people were less satisfied with their lives than they had been in nearly a decade, almost rivaling Great Recession–era lows.[17] Then came the 2020 presidential vote, and something subtle but fundamental shifted. * * * — Washington was tense in the days leading up to election Tuesday, prepared for anything after a summer of Black Lives Matter protests and counterprotests and riots that had seen curfews imposed and left local businesses boarded up with graffitied plywood. President Trump had already broadcast that he planned to legally challenge election results as early votes pointed to a Biden victory. Results were inconclusive on Election Day, but it looked bad for Trump from the outset.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Nonetheless, almost all feel duty bound to participate in creating their own digital doubles on social media (as do I). One student shared that she had gotten off Instagram because the pressures to perform an idealized version of herself, and the inundations of images of others doing the same, were ravaging her mental health. But then came the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. “My friends all told me I had to get back on Instagram and post pro-BLM,” she said, “or everyone would think I was racist”—this despite the fact that she had been participating in all the protests in her area, albeit in a quiet, behind-the-scenes way. She logged back on and posted, but reluctantly; she knew there was something wrong with a culture that valued public performances of a virtuous self over more tangible solidarities and relationship building.

What many of us who were cringe-following Wolf at the time missed was the extent to which her new messaging had struck a chord—not only with Fox’s audience but also with a sizable cohort of people who identify as leftists or progressives and were terrified of the Black Mirror surveillance world she was describing. Her “slavery forever” video was personally forwarded to me by several sources. One was a known conspiracy theorist who urged me to “study” it and said we had to fight the new threat “with every last ounce of our strength.” One asked if I had advice for deprogramming a loved one, a Black Lives Matter–supporting alternative health practitioner who had taken Wolf’s words as gospel and was in a QAnon-like spiral about this being the last frontier in the fight for “freedom versus slavery.” I went back and looked at the nearly one thousand comments under Wolf’s “slavery forever” YouTube post, bracing for the usual misogynist bile for which the platform is notorious.

Of course, it was a bait and switch—Trump filled his administration with former Wall Street executives, made mostly minor changes to trade policy, escalated tensions abroad, and lavished the rich with tax cuts. Of his populist campaign rhetoric, all that really survived was the race baiting—against immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protesters, and anything having to do with China. It was enough to hold on to his base, but not enough to win reelection, certainly not after his murderous mismanagement of Covid-19. At the time my doppelganger started appearing on War Room, less than three months into the Biden presidency, Bannon was getting serious about sculpting his new MAGA Plus coalition.


pages: 434 words: 117,327

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

Thus, identitarian communities have framed the Breitbart News Network as a source of malicious stories and destructive policies far outside of mainstream American conservatism.29 Likewise, nativists have lambasted Black Lives Matter as a movement inimical to the US civil rights tradition and a threat to decent whites.30 Many tolerant Americans find both the Breitbart News Network and Black Lives Matter to be extreme. Second, the illiberal activities of intolerant communities can antagonize potential recruits; people sympathetic to their core substantive objectives, whether racial justice or protecting domestic jobs, may find their tactics unacceptable.

The third ground for alarm, in 2017, is that any well-financed actor—including not only Super PACs but foreign governments—can harvest data on its target audience, personalize its message to suit the taste of the citizens it aims to reach, and employ this customized propaganda to try to skew a contemporary political debate. The Kremlin-linked Facebook ads reached millions of Americans, and some were geographically directed.34 Many of the Russian ads also appear to have been designed and targeted to influence specific audiences, such as those that stoked fears about Black Lives Matter or highlighted Muslim support for Clinton’s candidacy.35 Senior US intelligence officials have even cited evidence of Russia using algorithms to target the social media accounts of particular reporters and slanting the message in line with what they assess to be the reporters’ political stances.36 An electorate that in the Cold War would have been hard to differentiate today comprises individuals whose particular likes and dislikes are intimately understood by big business, technology companies, and political campaigns—and, seemingly, well-resourced foreign entities with an interest in impacting public opinion.

As explained elsewhere (Stenner 2005), this is not to say that authoritarianism is necessarily expressed in a fundamentally different manner depending on race/ethnicity, or majority/minority status, than among whites across Europe and the US. It is just that the demarcation of ingroups and outgroups, and delineation of the norms and authorities to which one owes allegiance, might vary. We would not expect, for example, any authoritarianism among African-American leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement to propel them toward a vote for Donald Trump, nor North African Muslim immigrants in France to be attracted (by any predisposition to authoritarianism) to the National Front. Excluding non-whites left us a sample of 11,161 respondents from twenty-nine countries, with 3,202 of those of special interest in our present search for a common dynamic in populist voting across the US (n=661), UK (n=1,256), and France (n=1,285).


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Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

For the arts, because there’s little ability to cover any but the biggest books and productions (Scott Timberg, author of Culture Crash, points out that “there are NFL wives who get more mainstream media coverage than every living jazz artist put together”19). For social causes, like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, which get less nuanced coverage than they need and deserve (this is exacerbated by fears around brand safety, which see advertisers increasingly sheer away from content deemed controversial—including by blocking their ads from being served on content that mentions terms like “Black Lives Matter,” “George Floyd,” and even “Black people”20). For the planet, with too few reporters to do justice to cataclysmic climate change, the biggest, slowest-moving story to ever break.

The Beatles’ first EMI deal came with no advance and royalties of just a penny per record (from which they had to pay their manager, then split the rest four ways).10 Radiohead’s deal, signed in 1991, gave them 12 percent.11 A few artists achieve the stratospheric success that gives them the power to renegotiate exploitative old contracts. But most don’t. As a result, huge numbers of heritage artists, including leaders in jazz, R&B, disco, soul, and hip-hop, remain bound to their terrible original deals, even though their labels now pay far less for manufacture and shipping. When record companies professed support for the Black Lives Matter movement in mid-2020, professor and author Josh Kun called out the hypocrisy: if they really wanted to support Black lives, he said, they could “start with amending contracts, distributing royalties, diversifying boardrooms, and retroactively paying back all the black artists, and their families, they have built their empires on.”12 One way in which they could do that is by universally raising all royalties on digital exploitations.

Change can be made—as when recording artists worked together to roll back a change the recording industry had snuck into law to steal away their rights. (Keep reading—we dig into that incredible story in the chapter that comes next!) But while top creators use their political and media platforms to support any number of important causes (world peace, world hunger, climate, Black Lives Matter) it’s less common for them to throw their weight behind improving conditions for their less-advantaged brethren. There are plenty of examples where the interests of famous artists happen to coincide with the less well off, like when Bryan Adams advocated for a new reversion right in Canada, but these have an obvious whiff of self-interest.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

I’d Blush If I Could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills Through Education (Paris: UNESCO and EQUALS Skills Coalition, 2019), 15, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416. 5. Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, and Monica Anderson, “Amid Protests, Majorities Across Racial and Ethnic Groups Express Support for the Black Lives Matter Movement,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2020, https://www.pew research.org/social-trends/2020/06/12/amid-protests-majorities-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups-express-support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement. 6. “Successful Campaigns,” Coworker.org, last accessed January 3, 2022, https://www.coworker.org/petitions/successful. 7. Jason Sockin, Aaron Sojourner, and Evan Starr, “Non-Disclosure Agreements and Externalities from Silence,” working paper, August 30, 2021, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

Social media serves as a bridge between grassroots activism and policy reform. For the feminist and racial justice movements in particular, digital access has been invaluable. The #MeToo movement gained momentum through the internet and by the famous hashtag that is now synonymous with the cause. The same is true for the Black Lives Matter movement, along with many others. In the early days of social media, men outnumbered women, but participation has increased and women now outnumber men. This altered ratio changes the narrative we’re accustomed to: the more women and other historically underrepresented groups speak up, connect, and share their accomplishments, initiatives, stories, and concerns through hashtags like #MeToo, #TimesUp, #HeForShe, #OscarsSoWhite, and #BLM, the more the world—with its 3.6 billion social media users—is inspired to bring about change.

In solidarity, UN Women’s #HeForShe movement has engaged billions of users worldwide in support of advancing gender equity. In the United States, the Women’s March on Washington became the largest globally coordinated public event of all time, born from the 3-million-member Facebook group Pantsuit Nation. Black Lives Matter—with its hashtag #BLM—similarly brought people together, organizing protests and calling for reforms with the support of online campaigns. A bystander’s video of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 spread over social media, sparking outrage and inspiring tens of millions of Americans to take to the streets in protest.


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Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

To the extent that zoning has made it exponentially more difficult for Americans to move to these hubs of activity—for a software engineer to relocate to San Jose, or for a medical researcher to relocate to Boston—we are all poorer as a result. Even beyond so-called “superstar cities,” zoning shapes American life in many subtle but nefarious ways. As the Black Lives Matter movement has thrown into stark relief, America still has a long way to go in providing equal opportunity for all. And yet, few American cities recognize the fact that their zoning codes were drafted with the express intention of instituting strict racial and economic segregation. To this day, “the wrong side of the tracks” is not merely a saying but a place that is written into law as a zoning district drawn on a zoning map.

CHAPTER 5 Apartheid by Another Name Over the summer of 2020, the United States underwent a long-overdue reckoning in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. Across virtually every city in the country, an estimated fifteen to twenty-six million Americans protested the continued mistreatment of Blacks by the criminal justice system.1 Whether the Black Lives Matter movement will translate into meaningful policy reform remains to be seen. If nothing else, the movement signals an encouraging willingness of many Americans to continue to right past injustices and build a more equitable republic. And yet, for all the good intentions, America remains a profoundly segregated place.

NBER Working Paper Series (July 2017), https://www.nber.org/papers/w23609. 26. For a robust defense of growth, see Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2018). CHAPTER 5: APARTHEID BY ANOTHER NAME 1. Larry Buchanan, Quotrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. 2. Jessica Trounstine, Segregation by Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 94. 3. As Rothstein, Color of Law notes, a majority of the committee that drafted the Standard Zoning Enabling Act, as well as many early zoning framers, were vocal segregationists. 4.


pages: 450 words: 144,939

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin

2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, defund the police, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, George Floyd, hindsight bias, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lyft, mandatory minimum, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem

Banks had been trashing the idea of a select committee, saying that we should instead look at the violence that broke out around the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020—giving us a preview of the diversionary diatribes he would bring to the committee. (Much of the violence he referred to came from right-wing sources, like Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old vigilante from Antioch, Illinois, who traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an assault rifle and allegedly shot and killed two people participating in a Black Lives Matter protest.) Jordan, of course, was a political intimate of President Trump’s and was present in at least one strategic session with the White House to plan the January 6 offensive.

“Are there enough police to stop them?” Tabitha asks me. I hesitate because of the size and apparent volcanic energy of the crowd, but assure her it will be fine. From our window, it looks chaotic, but I tell her that our officers are armed and “ready for this kind of thing.” I think back to a Black Lives Matter protest in DC on June 2, when masked and helmeted National Guardsmen in camouflage massed on the steps of the Capitol in a formidable and awesome display of force. I have not yet seen the National Guard today, but I tell myself that they must be here somewhere, or else they have got to be on the way over.

We drove down to Lafayette Square and found lots of elaborate Trumpian military fencing under construction as COVID-safe masked crowds of nonviolent youthful protesters gathered to chant support for the sweeping reforms contained in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The homemade signs were vivid: “If You Don’t Like Wearing Your Mask Every Day, Try Breathing While Black,” “Black Lives Matter/Black Votes Matter,” “Who Do You Call When a Cop Is the Murderer?” and “George Floyd Mattered.” We wended our way through the crowd in our masks, trying to maintain social distance as best as we could, even as we warmly greeted constituents who were excited to bump into me there. There was no organized program happening when we arrived, so we just milled around and talked to people.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

In the wake of 9/11, the center challenged local police departments’ overzealous surveillance of Muslim communities and federal agencies’ efforts to have Muslims spy on their own communities. The center also partnered with a newer civil rights group, Color of Change, to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security, demanding documentation of how the government monitored Black Lives Matter activists. In the fall of 2019, Color of Change, which boasts some 1.4 million members, won a major victory when Google booted payday lenders — notorious for targeting low-income Americans with high-interest, predatory financial products — from its app store. And the ACLU, a century old in 2020, continues to add to its storied history of shining a light on institutions that abuse the public trust.

p. 144 Amnesty International ranking of tech companies: “Amnesty Int’ls Digital Privacy Assessment on 11 Companies’ Messaging Apps Ranks Facebook and Apple Top and Tencent Last,” Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, Businesshumanrights.org. p. 145 anti-gay witch hunt: “The Egyptian Government,” All Out, https://go.allout.org/en/a/egypt. p. 145 Color of Change: George Joseph and Murtaza Hussain, “FBI Tracked an Activist Involved with Black Lives Matter as They Travelled across the US, Documents Show,” Intercept, March 19, 2018. pp. 145–6 ACLU and doorbell cameras: Jacob Snow, “Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door,” ACLU, December 12, 2018. p. 146 Natasha Singer: Natasha Singer, “The Government Protects Our Food and Cars.

See also Alexa Amazon Echo, 98–9, 102, 104, 105, 131 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 42, 47, 84, 145–6; Mobile Justice App, 142 Amnesty International, 144–5 Apple Computer, 48, 94, 144–5; iCloud, 136 Ardito, John “Buster,” 15 Assange, Julian, 10, 16, 17, 129–30 Astro Noise, 19, 65 Baker, Stewart A., 6 Baron, Marty, 41–2 Barr, William P., 136–7 Bentonville, Arkansas, 104 Bertash, Kate, 142–3 Bezos, Jeff, 104 Biden, Joe, 11 Bill of Rights, 83, 84, 90, 108, 129–30, 134 Binney, William, 18, 49–50, 134 Black Lives Matter, 145 Black Panther Party, 87 Blaze, Matthew, 6 Bloom, Michael, 128 Bork, Robert, 91 Bralow, David, 127, 129 Brandão, Rodrigo, 129 Brown, Michael, 111 The Burglary (Medsger), 86 Cambridge Analytica, 102 Cameraperson (Johnson), 65 Carter, Jimmy, 57, 91 Census Bureau. See US Census Bureau Center for Constitutional Rights, 145 Central Intelligence Agency.


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Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brené Brown

Black Lives Matter, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, false flag, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, place-making, Sheryl Sandberg, TED Talk

Dehumanizing works because people who speak out against what are often sophisticated enemy image campaigns—or people who fight to make sure that all of us are morally included and extended basic human rights—often face harsh consequences. An important example is the debate around Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and All Lives Matter. Can you believe that black lives matter and also care deeply about the well-being of police officers? Of course. Can you care about the well-being of police officers and at the same time be concerned about abuses of power and systemic racism in law enforcement and the criminal justice system?

In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery. Is there tension and vulnerability in supporting both the police and the activists?


pages: 147 words: 42,682

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, centre right, correlation coefficient, critical race theory, Donald Trump, feminist movement, gentrification, George Floyd, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, invention of agriculture, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, publication bias, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty

., rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults), arrests for murder, and shootings that did not result in an arrest. Once again, the arrest data are the most conservative estimate of the racial disproportions, with the single exception of Latin suspects in reported violent offenses. The New York database of shootings is also useful as a counterweight to much of the rhetoric from the Black Lives Matter movement. Of course they matter, no matter what the race of the shooters in the New York database may be. That is my final point for this discussion. Many African lives have been taken by violence, but of the 1,906 African deaths in the New York shootings database for which the race of the perpetrator is known, 89 percent were killed by Africans.

So far, this effect has been masked because the strategy has worked so well with White elites. Ordinarily, you can’t insult people into agreeing with you, but White guilt is a real thing. In the summer of 2020, many White college students and young adults agreed that they had sinned, even though they hadn’t realized it until now, and joined in Black Lives Matter marches. The New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC gave sympathetic coverage to the protests and, to varying degrees, downplayed the riots and looting. Meanwhile, many middle-class and working-class Whites have not been insulted into agreement. They’re just insulted, and to their minds unfairly insulted.

abolitionism achievement tests; bias or predictiveness in; comparative results; g-loading in; longitudinal studies; and school reform; see also cognitive (IQ) tests ACT test; comparative results affirmative action; and anti-Asian discrimination Albuquerque, NM American Community Survey (ACS) American creed American Dilemma, An (Myrdal) American Psychological Association AncestryDNA antidiscrimination law; Civil Rights Act (1964) Armed Forces Qualification Test Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery arrest rates; calculation of; for murder; for property crime Asheville, NC Bailyn, Bernard Baltimore, MD. Bell Curve, The (Herrnstein/Murray); controversy over; and outliers; and Red Book data Bennet, James Bias in Mental Testing (Jensen) Biden, Joe Black Lives Matter protests (2020); and White guilt Black-White Test Score Gap, The Bobko, Philip Bush, George W. California Bar Association Capitol siege (Jan. 6) Census Bureau Center for American Progress Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam Chandler, AZ Charleston, SC Chetty, Raj Chicago; crime rates in childcare workers churches Civil Rights Act (1964) civil rights movement Civil War Clinton, Bill cognitive (IQ) tests; bias or predictiveness in; comparative results; interpretation of; see also achievement tests; IQ Coleman, James S.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

In the past few years—with the middle class being squeezed, trust in government eroding, technological change hastening, the economy getting Uberized, and a growing body of research on the power of cash as an antipoverty measure being produced—it has vaulted to a surprising prominence, even pitching from airy hypothetical to near-reality in some places. Mark Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, the Black Lives Matter movement, Bill Gates, Elon Musk—these are just a few of the policy proposal’s flirts, converts, and supporters. UBI pilots are starting or ongoing in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, and Kenya, with India contemplating one as well. Some politicians are trying to get it adopted in California, and it has already been the subject of a Swiss referendum, where its reception exceeded activists’ expectations despite its defeat.

I heard from philosophers convinced that our understanding of work, our social contract, and the underpinnings of our economy were about to undergo an epochal transformation. The more I learned about UBI, the more obsessed I became with it, because it raised such interesting questions about our economy and our politics. Could libertarians in the United States really want the same thing as Indian economists as the Black Lives Matter protesters as Silicon Valley tech pooh-bahs? Could one policy be right for both Kenyan villagers living on 60 cents a day and the citizens of Switzerland’s richest canton? Was UBI a magic bullet, or a policy hammer in search of a nail? My questions were also philosophical. Should we compensate uncompensated care workers?

Over the past three decades, the average net worth of white families has climbed more than 80 percent, three times the rate for black families, a study by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation for Enterprise Development has found. Were that pattern to continue for the next three decades, white households would gain $18,000 in wealth a year, with black households gaining just $750. The racial wealth gap would never close. The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the growing calls to end mass incarceration, the sunset of the Obama presidency, the start of the Trump presidency, the furious marching of Nazis and racists on the streets: all of these trends have coalesced as the UBI conversation has come to the fore. In his essay “The Case for Reparations,” the Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates made a moral argument for trying to repair these injustices.


pages: 231 words: 71,299

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In Columbus, Ohio, a man the Anti-Defamation League identified as a member of the National Socialist movement attended a protest, bearing a sign with a Jewish star, a caricature of a Jew, and the slogan THE REAL PLAGUE. Weeks later, during a national uprising over police brutality in June 2020, “Boogaloo” proponents nimbly shifted to menacing protesters with the Black Lives Matter movement. These often-armed incursions were an overt attempt to escalate protest into war. The name Boogaloo is a prime example of the way extremist rhetoric works online, and in its spillover into real-life rallies: Naked desire for violence buried in tongue-in-cheek, memeified rhetoric, spreading among irony-saturated young men.

A racist caricature of a black “thug” stood beside her, grabbing his crotch; next to him marched a tattooed, switchblade-wielding man with the word LOCO tattooed on his forehead, meant to represent Latinos as dangerous criminals. Communists, gay-rights advocates, and hippies marched under signs that read “end white pride,” “stop white oppression” and “black lives matter.” At the front of the crowd a hairy woman in a gimp mask with tape-covered nipples bore the words “punish me” on her sagging belly; an obese man chomped on a hamburger; and an antifa flag soared beside a sign that read, “open borders 4 everyone.” Over all this presided the spidery Jew—the architect of what was represented as a scene of chaos, degeneracy, and social disorder.

Gun culture on the American right is premised on the idea of having the right to resist “tyranny”—but what, precisely, that tyranny will look like is often left vague. At the heart of conservative culture is an innate respect for soldiers and law enforcement. After the 2013 protests against the killing of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests broadened in scope and intensity the following year after police officer Darren Wilson shot unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Conservative backlash rose up in the form of a competing pro–law-enforcement movement that called itself “Blue Lives Matter.”


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

The movement was at once trollish, silly, and dangerously extreme. Members of the movement flirted with racism and even Nazism—anything to provoke liberal outrage—and its leaders used social media to attack anyone they saw as part of the center-left mainstream—which included Democratic Party figures, Black Lives Matter activists, and a number of Gawker writers. Thiel proclaimed himself disgusted by this crew. “These people,” he told Holiday. “It’s not that they are willing to do anything in the name of the ideology . . . The similarity is the nihilism: a mask for no ideology at all.” Holiday noted that Johnson had sued Gawker, too, but described him as one of several “people who have nothing to do with Peter Thiel.”

Senator Ted Cruz, and John Yoo, the lawyer who’d advocated on behalf of the Bush administration for torture during the Iraq War, all provided quotes endorsing it. He eventually started his own site, GotNews, a sort of Gawker for the right, where he stoked a backlash against Michael Brown, the eighteen-year-old Black man who was shot while unarmed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, setting off a wave of Black Lives Matter protests. Johnson sued St. Louis County for any juvenile court records it might have on Brown—the request was denied because, the judge said, no records of serious felonies existed—and collected screenshots that purported to show the slain man’s “violent streak.” He claimed he had sources that said Brown was a member of a gang.

Cernovich, who’d adopted positions on date rape roughly in line with those expressed by Thiel and David Sacks in The Diversity Myth, later deleted the tweet and moved on to politics. Thiel was pleased enough with Johnson’s brand of activism to provide him with financial support. After Johnson was banned from Twitter for suggesting that he was going to raise money for a project aimed at “taking out” DeRay Mckesson, the Black Lives Matter organizer, he started WeSearchr, a crowdfunding company that, unlike Kickstarter, promoted itself as unregulated and, as a result, was open to alt-right content. (Johnson told me he was speaking metaphorically about Mckesson; he said he was planning on publishing a story about the activist.)


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

We will have to weigh the potential benefits of creating widespread access to this new form of visual power against the potential harms of a creeping encroachment of drones into our everyday, private lives. I found myself holding this tension in my mind on April 20, 2021, the day that Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of the murder of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd. This crime, which catalyzed a year of global protests as part of the growing Black Lives Matter movement, was documented on video by then seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier. Her courage to press record and bear witness changed history, leading to the first moment of meaningful accountability for systemic racist violence in US law enforcement. And her access to a technology of visual power was essential to this historic moment.

Sometimes described as a “megatrend,” a “driver of change,” or a “macro force,” it usually starts off as a small signal of change—and then it picks up strength over a period of months, years, or decades. Anything with the potential to change the world can be a future force. It might be a quickly advancing area of scientific research, like human genetic modification or artificial intelligence. It might be a social movement, like Black Lives Matter. It might be a new technology entering the mainstream, like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It might be an increasingly popular policy idea, like lowering the voting age to sixteen. It might be a shift in consumer behavior, like the rise of plant-based diets. It might be a growing threat documented by experts and researchers, like sea-level rise from climate change or the impact of noise pollution on mental health.

What identities will bring us together instead of dividing us? How can music, storytelling, and the arts help us forge these new identities? How can we start to see ourselves in ways that will put us all in the same group, and all on the same side? Preexisting Condition #4: Racial Injustice In the summer of 2020, Black Lives Matter protesters around the world held up signs reading “Racism is the real pandemic.” This message was a searing commentary on the unequal risks and disproportionate suffering that people of color in the United States and ethnic minorities worldwide experience every day. The pandemic put this injustice in the spotlight: people of color and ethnic minorities, everywhere in the world, contracted and died from COVID-19 at far higher rates than their white or ethnic-majority counterparts.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

But it is already gaining traction not just in the ivory tower but also in influential public-policy circles. The criticism comes from a wide range of different sources – from elite academics as well as angry populists. It feeds on some of our most profound anxieties about everything from racial injustice to the psychological strains of hyper-competition. The Black Lives Matter movement is one of the most powerful protest movements of recent years. Its prime target is brutality, particularly police brutality towards African-Americans – it was ignited by the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 by a member of the neighbourhood watch and then re-ignited, on an even larger scale, by the killing of George Floyd by a police officer, in 2020.

The Trump presidency also radicalized the left to a degree that hasn’t been seen since the late 1960s, with Bernie Sanders making a prolonged bid for the Democratic nomination and young radicals such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trying to set the tone of the Congressional Democratic Party. The killing of an unarmed African-American, George Floyd, by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, on 25 May 2020 provoked angry riots across America, particularly in the big cities, and turned Black Lives Matter into one of the most powerful forces in the country. The movement pointed out that by all sorts of measures America’s racial disparities were no better than they were when LBJ launched the Great Society – and were in some ways worse. Both the wealth gap and the income gap between blacks and whites are the same as they were in 1968: black households still earn 60 per cent as much as white households.

Both the wealth gap and the income gap between blacks and whites are the same as they were in 1968: black households still earn 60 per cent as much as white households. The incarceration rate for African-Americans has more than tripled since 1960. Why continue to pursue the policies of the civil rights era when they had so obviously failed? As well as mobilizing thousands of people on the streets, Black Lives Matter popularized a new cohort of black intellectuals such as Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X. Kendi and a new set of political terms such as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’ and ‘unconscious bias’. These intellectuals were as hostile to the idea of meritocracy as conservative populists were. They drew on many of the ideas that had been generated in the heat of the 1960s – the emphasis on the ‘social construction of reality’ and the preoccupation with group rights and experiences – and supercharged them with an unyielding focus on power.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

But for that day they controlled the streets of Midtown Manhattan. They flooded Columbus Circle, dancing beneath the gates to Central Park, poured onto Broadway, marched to Times Square. Singing and cheering, they said their names aloud.5 Bleu Rainer and hundreds of fast-food workers marched wearing “Black Lives Matter: I Can’t Breathe” sweatshirts, tying the movement for higher wages to the struggle against police violence—highlighting the last words uttered by Staten Island street vendor Eric Garner as he was choked to death by police a year earlier. “It’s the same struggle,” says Rainer. “We are the same people.

Living-wage marchers in New York wore shirts emblazoned with the last words of Eric Garner, father of six, killed by the NYPD that summer. “We’re the same people,” says Rainer. “We have to hold down three jobs, and when we are done and tired, walking home from work, then we are abused by police, raided by immigration cops.” Sanders says, “I was a Black Lives Matter activist before I was born.” He is the nephew of Chicago Black Panthers who were close to Fred Hampton, the young Panther leader murdered by the FBI and Chicago police in 1969. Sanders’s uncle was in the apartment with Hampton the night he was killed. He grew up on those stories. Police violence, government crackdowns, and charges of corruption also fueled worker protest around the world at the end of 2016.

North Carolina minister William Barber and other progressive clergy have linked racial justice to the living-wage campaign. Barber and other clergy fasted with Denise Barlage and Tyfani Faulkner in front of Alice Walton’s building. CLUE (Clergy & Laity United for Economic Justice) have energetically supported Walmart workers’ organizing. Fight for $15 and Black Lives Matter have been thoroughly intertwined. These broad coalitions are a hallmark of twenty-first-century worker justice struggles, distinguishing them from what Durazo calls “institutional unionism.”2 Some argue that social movement unionism is a product of Asian, African, and Latin American labor struggles, but US activists believe that the idea is just as strongly rooted in American labor history.


pages: 391 words: 106,255

Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge by Ted Conover

autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fixed income, gentrification, George Floyd, McMansion, off grid, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, place-making, social distancing, supervolcano

No, he meant that unnamed global elites had released it expressly to “start a race war” so they could impose further lockdown restrictions “and martial law,” leading to gun confiscation. The evidence was always just something people had read on Facebook. There were some surprises, though. Whereas I had expected people who opposed the Black Lives Matter protests to be pro-police, many were not—including, in their Facebook posts, Frank Gruber and Luke Kunkel. Both, I knew, had spent time locked up, and neither thought police power was the answer. All the same, Luke objected to the message of “Black lives matter.” “Don’t all lives matter?” he asked me. I was reflexively about to tell him that of course all lives mattered, but the protests were about anti-Black racism, not about saying white lives don’t matter, when Luke added some nuance: Black people, in his view, “aren’t just looking for equality, they’re looking for superiority.”

Or there will be more riots. Signed, The only Black man in Alamosa, Calvin Brown.” Of course, Calvin Brown was not the only Black man in Alamosa—the mayor was a Black man; Zahra had Black sons—but you could understand how there were times when he might have felt that way. I was not surprised to learn that a Black Lives Matter protest was planned for Alamosa three days later—such demonstrations were happening everywhere. It was to be in the town’s main intersection, where some less-organized sign waving about Floyd’s murder had already taken place. People who attended the protest told me what happened, and I was also informed by two long articles published in the Valley Courier by Susan Greene, a seasoned Denver-based journalist who lent her expertise to small-town newspapers when important stories came up.

Rather, they had seen aggrieved posts from Pruitt’s family and supporters. It was as though the pandemic had ushered in a new, expanded role for virtual communities: not only did the fight that brought Marshall and Pruitt together have roots on Facebook, it was now the scene of the aftermath. Ever since George Floyd had been killed and Black Lives Matter protests had begun, I had noticed on social media that the blocking of roads by protestors, the impeding of travel, hit a particular sore spot among conservatives.[*1] Chants like “Whose streets? Our streets!” upset them. At Troy’s annual Fourth of July potluck, I played devil’s advocate a little bit, broaching the idea that Pruitt’s aggressive driving might have contributed to his fate, but this was always rejected.


pages: 349 words: 114,914

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

“They felt—and I think many of our members felt—there wouldn’t be the depth of discussion that they wanted to have,” Tometi told me. “And if there wasn’t that space to have a real heart-to-heart, and if it was just surface level, that it would be more of a disservice to the movement.” Tometi noted that some other activists allied with Black Lives Matter had been planning to attend the meeting, so they felt their views would be represented. Nevertheless, Black Lives Matter sees itself as engaged in a protest against the treatment of black people by the American state, and so Tometi and much of the group’s leadership, concerned about being used for a photo op by the very body they were protesting, opted not to go.

” But I found myself again talking about Baldwin and the beauty of what he’d done in The Fire Next Time. I talked about how I’d read the book in one sitting and the challenge I imagined of crafting a singular essay, in the same fashion, meant to be read in a few hours but to haunt for years. I told him we were in an extraordinary moment—the era of a black president and Black Lives Matter—much like Baldwin had written amid the fight for desegregation. Here he offered this admonition—“The road is littered with knockoffs of The Fire Next Time.” But he still encouraged me to try. To invoke the name James Baldwin, these days, is to invoke the name of both a prophet and a God. More than his actual work, Baldwin, himself, has been beatified.

The notion that a president would attempt to achieve change within the boundaries of the accepted consensus is appropriate. But Obama is almost constitutionally skeptical of those who seek to achieve change outside that consensus. — EARLY IN 2016, OBAMA invited a group of African American leaders to meet with him at the White House. When some of the activists affiliated with Black Lives Matter refused to attend, Obama began calling them out in speeches. “You can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position,” he said. “The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved.


pages: 422 words: 114,817

Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable by Joanna Schwartz

Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, George Floyd, Jeffrey Epstein, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, Ronald Reagan

Politicians and advocacy groups from across the political and ideological spectrums agreed something needed to change. Important reforms got traction at the federal, state, and local levels. But then the nation’s unity and sense of urgency began to slip. Protests died down. Proposed reforms were voted down or abandoned. The Black Lives Matter murals painted in bright colors on city streets began to fade. We cannot wait for another viral video to restart our national conversation about police violence and reform. And we must foreground the realities of civil rights litigation when we do. Myths about the dangers of making it too easy to sue police have made a mess of our system.

In 1994, Congress gave the Department of Justice authority to investigate police departments for patterns and practices of unconstitutional policing, and the Department of Justice used that power to unearth evidence of systemic misconduct in cities across the country and oversee important changes in those cities’ police departments. In the 2010s, killings of Black people prompted the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, refocused national attention on the problem of police violence, and inspired the convening of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. In 2020, the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor prompted ambitious police reform proposals in Congress and statehouses across the country.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT police officers are criminally charged: For data about the frequency with which police are criminally prosecuted, and the decisions by officers, prosecutors, and jurors that lead to low rates of prosecution and conviction, see Kimberly Kindy and Kimbriell Kelly, “Thousands Dead, Few Prosecuted,” Washington Post, April 11, 2015 (noting the scarcity of charges against police officers despite thousands of deaths at their hands between 2005 and 2015), www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/04/11/thousands-dead-few-prosecuted; German Lopez, “Police Officers Are Prosecuted for Murder in Less Than 2 Percent of Fatal Shootings,” Vox, April 2, 2021, www.vox.com/21497089/derek-chauvin-george-floyd-trial-police-prosecutions-black-lives-matter. The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database, which tracks prosecutions of police officers and is relied upon by Lopez, can be found at policecrime.bgsu.edu/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT conducting shoddy investigations: For research about the shortcomings of police internal investigations, see Rachel Moran, “Ending the Internal Affairs Farce,” Buffalo Law Review 64 (2016): 853–68; Joanna C.


pages: 173 words: 52,725

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, clockwatching, collective bargaining, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, fake news, game design, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, plutocrats, post-industrial society, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, young professional

And they do it while claiming to be somehow on the side of tolerance and freedoms, claiming that ‘you can’t give offence, you can only take it’, without realising that they spend their lives being offended by just about everything. Some of this escalating of tensions is deliberate. For example, pretending not to understand that the Black Lives Matter movement seeks a society where black lives matter to law enforcement officers as much as white lives do. Some of it is accidental, such as when stories that appear to support the narrative of censorship and suppression and whatever is meant by ‘cultural Marxism’ achieve currency without being properly examined or understood.

Gays, ethnic minorities, Muslims, transgender activists and, most of all, women are apparently favoured by modern society’s structures to an unbearable degree. The ‘traditional’ male, who wants nothing more than sex on demand, the right to determine his partner’s access to contraception and abortion and his dinner on the table when he gets home from work is, in the modern world of equality, feminism and Black Lives Matter, a man indubitably more sinned against than sinning. As a straight, white man I find this completely absurd, but I no longer find it funny. On 23 April 2018, a 25-year-old computer studies graduate called Alek Minassian drove through Toronto trying to kill people with his van. The terror attack left 10 dead and 16 more seriously injured.


pages: 101 words: 24,949

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City by Jack Brown

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Etonian, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, knowledge economy, lockdown, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, post-war consensus, quantitative easing, remote working, Richard Florida, sceptred isle, superstar cities, working-age population, zero-sum game

Nor is anti-Londonism really limited to London. London-based national cultural institutions dominate the national conversation by virtue of being national, rather than being London-based. When a national organisation such as the Premier League or the National Trust takes a ‘liberal’ stance on an issue, as seen recently during the Black Lives Matter movement, it is accused of metropolitan, liberal bias. But it is also possible that these decisions are the result of senior people thinking long and hard and coming to their own conclusions – not simply because they breathe ‘London air’. Indeed, breathing such air did not stop supporters of Millwall FC booing their own players when they ‘took a knee’ in support of racial equality before a game in December 2020.26 As for the National Trust, its headquarters are in Swindon, and yet its decision to review the links between its properties and slavery has led Conservative MP John Hayes to accuse it of being run by an ‘out of touch, bourgeois elite’ which ‘bears no relationship to the sentiments of its members’.27 This may not be an attack on the capital as such, but it certainly rhymes with one.

Sandbrook, ‘His policies fill me with dread. But this is what you get when a smug metropolitan elite treat the people with contempt’, Mail Online, 24/5/14. 26.‘Millwall 0–1 Derby: Game overshadowed by fans booing players taking a knee before kick-off ’, BBC, 6/12/20. 27.C. Hope, ‘National Trust faces anger after chairman defends Black Lives Matter movement’, Telegraph, 6/11/20. 28.J. Brown, ‘London, UK’, op. cit. 29.A. Gimson, R. Jolley, S. Katwala, P. Kellner, A. Massie & R. Miranda, ‘This Sceptred Isle: Pride not prejudice across the nations of Britain’, British Future, 5/21. 30.M. Smith, ‘Where is London most and least popular?’


pages: 339 words: 92,785

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Project Maven caused a stink among employees at Google, which was working with the Pentagon on it. Google eventually pledged not to renew its Maven contract with the military. The protest was a concrete illustration of tensions emerging between concerned researchers in the private sector and the national security apparatus. In 2020, as the Black Lives Matter protests spread through America, more followed. Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and others pledged not to work on facial recognition, or at least to pause it pending rigorous legislation about how it could be used. Amnesty International and other campaign groups called for an outright ban on the technology.

This transnational ‘epistemic community’ of like-minded scientists might mobilise itself—influencing what companies and research institutions that fund them choose to work on. We already saw Google employees protesting their employer’s decision to support the Pentagon’s work on Project Maven. More recently, we saw companies including IBM, Amazon and Microsoft step away from facial recognition AI, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests. This isn’t inconsequential: norms matter and can act powerfully to shape cultures of national security. They are a key driver of how violence gets used—that’s why states see assassination by poison as odious, even though it’s feasible and highly discriminate. Even where there is no legal prohibition, norms have real world consequences.

A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games


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The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

After years working in supply chain management with the Department of Defense, Boeing, and Airbus, Boursiquot grew tired of the judgment she faced as a young, Black woman in an overwhelmingly white, male industry. As she shopped for everyday goods and looked to support Black entrepreneurs with her dollars (especially after the rise of Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020), she saw an opportunity to help these Black businesses with her expertise in logistics. “When we say ‘Black-owned business,’ what does that really mean?” Boursiquot asked rhetorically, noting that the expectations for these businesses were mixed. On the one hand you felt good buying from them, but on the other you assumed that because they were small and independent, prices would be high, shipping would be slow, and the shopping experience would require a sacrifice.

If race was an artificial creation that propped up this injustice, what did that say about the “races” we felt an identity with? Just because we benefitted unjustly from being born into a “dominant caste,” as Wilkerson put it, did that invalidate everything each of us had achieved in our lives? The careers we built? The homes we bought? What did we really think about Black Lives Matter? How far should a society go to right slavery’s historical wrong? How far was too far? We talked about this, and about Trump, and over the course of that night we got right down to the heart of it. But we never raised our voices. We never accused each other of anything. We spoke as friends and respected one another, so by the end of the night, when we were tucking into Toby’s sweet potato pie (God bless Americans) and warming ourselves with hot toddies, everyone there felt that the first bit of healing had begun after the past four years of chaos.

The weekend before we spoke, Riley, who is Black, had traveled to visit his brother in San Diego. One night during dinner, Riley’s brother’s father-in-law, who was white, got into a conversation with Riley about the recent racial justice protests around the United States following the high-profile death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. “All that Black Lives Matter stuff is crap,” the father-in-law said. “All lives matter!” Rather than get angry or defensive or walk away, Riley did his best to make this man see his perspective and empathize with him. “I said, ‘Lemme walk you through the history of everything Black people went through in this country, and systematically how it worked.’”


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The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

On the Tea Party, see Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 1 (2011): 25–43, 28. On Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, see Monica Anderson and Paul Hitlin, “Social Media Conversations about Race,” Pew Research Center, August 15, 2016, http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2016/08/PI_2016.08.15_Race-and-Social-Media_FINAL.pdf; Bijan Stephen, “Social Media Helps Black Lives Matter Fight the Power,” Wired, November 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/10/how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/; Michael D. Conover, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini, “The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 5 (2013); and Munmun De Choudhury, Shagun Jhaver, Benjamin Sugar, and Ingmar Weber, “Social Media Participation in an Activist Movement for Racial Equality,” paper presented at the Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Cologne, May 2016. 14.

As Clay Shirky argued in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, even in countries like the United States the power of many-to-many communication made it much easier for activists to coordinate.12 In the wake of the financial crisis, this greater ease of organizing seemed to play out in myriad forms. On the right, the Tea Party was inspired by a viral rant on CNBC, and made heavy use of online tools from meetup.org to email lists. On the left, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter heavily relied on social media to assemble and coordinate a loose network of activists all over the country. On both sides of the political spectrum, a reenergized public seemed to testify to the democratizing potential of social media.13 The potential of social media to both deepen and spread democracy seemed beyond doubt—and its boosters began to make ever more ambitious claims about its potential.

See Dictatorships Automation, 37–38, 157–158, 219 Baghdad, Iraq, 204 Bahamas, 223 Bailouts, 12 Bangladesh, 219 Bankruptcy: corporate, 159; national, 12, 198 Banks: central, 59–60, 67–70, 77, 92–94; regulation of, 64, 66, 95 Bannon, Stephen, 94 Barro, Robert, 69 BBC, 44, 62 Beck, Glenn, 43 Belgium: ethnic minorities in, 212; EU headquarters in, 8, 11–12, 76, 86, 197, 243 Berlin, Germany, 170, 243 Berlusconi, Silvio, 32, 90, 115, 191 Bern, Switzerland, 32 Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser, 246 Bible, 57 Big Brother, 58 Bilingual education, 178 Black Lives Matter, 142 Blagojevich, Rod, 80 Blame, casting of, 7–8, 181 Border controls, 37–38, 176, 213–214, 217 Bots (robots), 239 Breitbart, 144–145 Bretton Woods system, 69–70 Brexit, 25, 46, 120–121, 166, 198, 216–217 Britain, 24, 36, 55, 66, 159, 193, 196–197, 224; attitude toward democracy, 106–107; bureaucrats in, 63; central bank in, 69; Constitution, 71–72; democracy in, 54–55, 110; ethnic minorities in, 212; and European Union, 25, 46, 120–121, 166, 198, 216–217; housing in, 225–226; immigration in, 165; income inequality in, 152; income distribution in, 152–153; judiciary in, 46, 71–73; media in, 44, 46, 90; Parliament in, 46, 54, 61–62, 64–65, 72, 78–79, 87, 90, 241; political radicalism of youth, 121; populism in, 7–8, 50; support for authoritarian leader, 112; support for military rule, 110–111; and tax havens, 223; youth vote, 122–123 British Americans, 200 Brooke, Heather, 138–139 Brooks, David, 250 Brown v.


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Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Game theory: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Binmore, K. 2008. Do conventions need to be common knowledge? Topoi, 27, 17–27. https://doi-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.1007/s11245-008-9033-4. Blackwell, M. 2020. Black Lives Matter and the mechanics of conformity. Quillette, Sept. 17. https://quillette.com/2020/09/17/black-lives-matter-and-the-mechanics-of-conformity/. Block, W. 1976/2018. Defending the undefendable. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. Bloom, P. 2003. Descartes’ baby: How the science of child development explains what makes us human. New York: Basic Books.

Respondents judged that it was likelier that Linda was a feminist bank teller than that she was a bank teller: once again, the probability of A and B was judged to be higher than the probability of A alone. The dated vignette, with its baby-boomer “Linda,” backhanded compliment “bright,” passé protests, and declining occupation, betrays its early-1980s vintage. But as any psychology instructor knows, the effect is easily replicable, and today, highly intelligent Amanda who marches for Black Lives Matter is still deemed likelier to be a feminist registered nurse than a registered nurse. The Linda problem engages our intuitions in a particularly compelling way. Unlike the selection task, where people make errors when the problem is abstract (“If P then Q”) and get it right when it is couched in certain real-life scenarios, here everyone agrees with the abstract law “prob(A and B) ≤ prob(A)” but are upended when it is made concrete.

Abelson, Robert, 299 abortion, 79, 100–101, 295, 311 academia academic freedom in, 41 ad hominem fallacy and, 91 argument from authority and, 90 confidence in, sinking, 313–14 critical race theory, 123 informal fallacies and intellectual life of, 92–93 left-wing monoculture, 297, 313–14 suppression of opinions in, 43, 313–14 viewpoint diversity, lack of, 313–14 See also education; universities accidental deaths, 120–22, 139–40, 199 Achilles, 38 Active Open-Mindedness, 310–11, 324 See also openness to evidence ad hominem fallacy, 19–20, 90–91, 92–93, 291 adversarial collaboration, 29 Aeneid, 302 affective fallacy, 92–93, 291 affirming the antecedent, 80 affirming the consequent, 83, 85, 139 Afghanistan, US invasion of, 122, 124 African Americans Black Lives Matter, 26, 124–25 as percentage of population, 120 police killings of, 123, 124–25, 141 See also racism; slavery AI. See artificial intelligence algorithm, as term, 346n34 Allais, Maurice, 188 Allais paradox, 188–90 all-or-none causation fallacy, 260, 269 alternative medicine, 258 analytic vs. synthetic propositions, 94 anarchism, 244 and, as logical connector, 75–76 See also conjunction animals, cruelty to, 334–35 anti-vax movement, 284, 287, 304, 304–5, 310, 311, 321 appeal to emotion, 92 a priori–a posteriori confusion.


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There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The Russian president declined the offer, but later appointed the factory foreman to be his official presidential representative to the Urals region. It was a spectacular piece of political populism. It was also strikingly reminiscent of President Trump’s efforts to solicit support from the far-right Proud Boys militia, who would violently confront Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020. After public outcry on that occasion, Trump called on the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” instead of asking them to cease and desist their activities. They would not stand by for long: on January 6, 2021, in the waning days of Trump’s presidency, the Proud Boys would be among the militia groups and other Trump supporters who stormed the U.S.

As in the case of all populists, Trump’s politics were framed around “us” against “them.” With the help of Fox News and other pro-Trump media outlets, enemies were fabricated in the broadest possible brushstrokes: a mishmash of Democrats, liberals, globalists, radical socialists, Communists, Antifa leftists, the Black Lives Matter movement, the “mainstream media,” the billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros, various other bogeymen and -women, deep-state bureaucrats, and even congressional Republicans who were loyal to their party rather than to Trump personally. Often it was hard to keep up with the list.

Floyd’s death, his neck pressed beneath the knee of a police officer during a heavy-handed arrest, sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and highlighted the continued persecution of Black Americans decades after the civil rights movement. The United Kingdom was also swept up in the Black Lives Matter protests, as a younger generation of Brits contemplated the integral role the UK had played in the Atlantic slave trade and its own history of racism and heavy-handed policing. Again I was struck by how inadequate the government-level responses were to address this painful and complex issue, especially against the backdrop of the coronavirus, which hit Black and other minority communities hard in both countries.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The protests stirred Katie’s activist spirit, but she had suffered too much disappointment at the hands of powerful opponents to get her hopes up. “It’s cool,” she said, “but it’s not the revolution.” In Washington, D.C., the huge protests around the city drew, among others, Amazon’s Jay Carney, the head of the public relations operation. He tweeted a selfie of himself near the White House, wearing sunglasses, a face mask, and a Black Lives Matter T-shirt. * * * In Baltimore, a twenty-six-year-old woman named Shayla Melton was trying to decide whether to go back to work at Amazon. She had been working as a picker at the Broening Highway warehouse, where the GM plant used to be, until she had her baby, her second child, just as the pandemic was arriving.

For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. activism/protests: Amazon Day Expo; Amazon walkout; antitrust law investigations fueled by; Athena coalition; AWS and Dominion Power; Dayton, Ohio, Trump; for Floyd; for Gray; Housing for All coalition; Institute for Local Self-Reliance; Tax Amazon Town Hall; Washington, D.C., Black Lives Matter; workers against robots; see also big-business tax African Americans: Baltimore population of; migration to Seattle; police killings of; Seattle housing discrimination against; Seattle income inequality for; Sparrows Point discrimination fought by; Washington, D.C., gentrification devastating to; see also Carver Road community; Central District Africatown Albuquerque, New Mexico Allen, Mike Allen, Paul: Microsoft co-established in Seattle by; Microsoft co-founded by; South Lake Union campus and All States Amazombies Amazon: annual sales growth at; antitrust law investigations involving; career day; convenience of; coronavirus pandemic and necessity of; coronavirus pandemic benefiting; coronavirus pandemic worker precautionary measures; counterfeit goods sold on; delivery and transportation expansion; drug testing at; employee nondisclosure agreements; employment growth at; on failure; financial institutions compared to; gatekeeper fees collected by; hiring events and introduction for workers; injury report rates; last leg delivery handled by; lobbying spending by; market valuation of; minimum wage announcement; office of economic development; origins of; power and influence of; PR push; public sector division; railroad giants compared to; renewable energy investments of; retail job losses due to; RFPs; Ring doorbell cameras; STAR method for decision-making; start-up ideas for; streaming media service; tax avoidance strategies of; trust and respect for; unions blocked by; wage and working condition concerns at; warehouse expansion nationwide; war zone analogy; worker discontent; as world’s highest-valued company; see also specific locations; specific topics Amazon Associate Virtual Job Tryout Amazon Day Expo: Collins involved in; Gandara, T., protesting; goal of; Grubbs attending; introductions and parameters for; Lee involved in; Marin involved in; naming of; trade-off discussion at; Westin supporting Amazon HQ2 headquarters: arguments for selecting location of; Baltimore bid for; bidding war; bidding war winners; career day for interest in new; Crystal City location; finalists for; need for; public competition for location selection of; resistance to New York City; Rubenstein interest in; secrecy around bids for; victims of selection process for; Washington, D.C., benefiting from new; see also Arlington, Virginia Amazon Web Services (AWS): Columbus, Ohio, as interest of; Columbus, Ohio, suburbs establishment of; Columbus, Ohio, suburbs selected for; community nondisclosure agreements; creation of; in Northern Virginia; Northern Virginia communities protesting; Public Sector Summit; secrecy of; at Virginia Data Center Leadership Awards; Worldwide Public Sector antitrust law hearings/investigations: activism fueling; Athena coalition on; Bezos testifying at; Cicilline speaking at; Congress presiding over; Jayapal speaking at; Khan on; Mitchell on; ruling on; Sutton testifying at; on third-party seller online sale fees antitrust prosecution Apple: antitrust law investigations involving; coronavirus pandemic benefiting Argote, Israel Espana Arlington, Virginia: as Amazon HQ2 headquarters selection; Crystal City in; donations toward housing affordability in; housing prices rising in; National Landing outside; Washington, D.C., benefiting from new site in Armitage, James Art of the Deal, The (Trump) Athena coalition Autor, David Autry, Clint AWS, see Amazon Web Services Baker, James III Ballard, Brian: Amazon hiring; Florida governor campaign work by; Trump support from Baltimore, Maryland: African American population in; Amazon arrival in; Amazon delivery van death near; Amazon employee homicides in; Amazon HQ2 headquarter bid from; Brick + Board company in; brick industry in; Bryant of; coronavirus pandemic in; corruption of city government; demolitions in; discrimination battles improving; drug overdoses in; Gray protests in; heart-pine flooring from; homicide rate in; Humanim in; income decline in; Jackson on demolition in; JLL in; Johnson, D., post-demolition work in; Package Rescue business in; Pollock of; population decline in; post-demolition work in; rail transit line proposal in; road trip from; robotic pickers in; salvage market in; tornado hitting; Washington, D.C., bricks from; Washington, D.C., compared to; see also Bodani, William Kenneth, Jr.; Sparrows Point Baltimore Brick Company bankruptcy: Bethlehem Steel filing for; the Bon-Ton filing for Baron, Marty Barry, Bill Bent, Luther Bethlehem Steel: anti-steelworker union propaganda; bankruptcy filed by; Bodani, W.

., home renovation by; The Washington Post bought by Biden, Joe big-business tax: Hanauer on; Herbold supporting; Mosqueda supporting; Mother’s Day compromise for; opposition to passing of; opposition to proposed; proposals for; protester standoff; public opinion shift on; Sawant supporting; Schutzler on repeal of; Tax Amazon Town Hall rallying around; vote in favor of; vote to repeal; Wilson on public opinion shifts around; Wilson on repeal of; Wilson supporting big-business threat bin Laden family Black Lives Matter protest Bloomberg, Michael Blue Origin space-exploration company Blum, Andrew Bodani, Francis Bodani, William Kenneth, Jr.: Amazon hiring; Amazon job quit by; asbestosis diagnosis for; Baltimore move for family of; Bethlehem Steel employment positions of; Bethlehem Steel hiring; Bethlehem Steel injuries of; Bethlehem Steel multi-craft team participation of; Bethlehem Steel retirement of; Bethlehem Steel work enjoyed by; birth of; discrimination toward; forklift driver responsibilities of; forklift training by; grandfather of; health conditions of; in Navy SEALs; relocation to Sparrows Point Amazon facility; reminiscence about Sparrows Point; of Retirees United Local 9477; at Star of Bethlehem ceremony; union literature passed out by; wages at Amazon; work breaks at Amazon; work shifts at Amazon Boeing, William Boeing Company the Bon-Ton: bankruptcy filed by; Charity Day; claw back incentives; e-commerce operation; employee and customer policies; expansion of; in golden era of department stores; Great Recession impacting; Grumbacher, M., managing; Grumbacher, Tim, managing; Grumbacher, Tom, managing; liquidation of; May Company competing with; origins of; perseverance of; public offering from; secondary public offering from The Bon-Ton Family Boetto, Tony Bowser, Muriel Brandt, Richard L.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Moreover, it makes criminalization, social reform, and incarceration the purview of technical experts. AI Now’s work on predictive policing exemplifies this turn. AI Now represents the more progressive wing of corporate-backed AI commentary, and it cultivates a critical image. In discussing policing, for instance, the institute has approvingly cited Black Lives Matter and the Marxist cultural theorist and activist Stuart Hall. And unlike many of its corporate sponsors and partners, AI Now doesn’t outright promise to eliminate all bias from computing systems.19 Through this progressive veneer, AI Now offers a critique of policing that nonetheless reaffirms and ultimately calls for the expansion of the carceral system.

Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Open Media Series (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 77.   64.   Apart from their alliances with academia, various platform companies have appropriated imagery from social justice movements. Fred Turner describes how, when used by Facebook, “images of Dolores Huerta and Black Lives Matter marchers have been hollowed of the hard work of movement organizing. On Facebook’s walls they suggest that the company is so powerful that it can render political dissent into just another mode of self-expression. They make it harder to see the ways in which Facebook’s power continues to depend on the same kinds of contracts and secrecy that characterized the corporate giants of the industrial era.

See also rationalistic tradition anthropometry, 7, 160, 278n19, 279n26 AnyVision, 276n45 apartheid, 114 Apple, 68, 71, 74, 285n65 Armer, Paul, 244n37 army, 44, 133, 219, 251n104, 295n55, 299n77 Arpaio, Joe, 179 artificial intelligence (AI): alternatives to, 11, 14, 185–88, 203–10; autonomy of, 52–53, 58–59, 247n72; coining of term, 3, 22–23, 241nn8–9; dissenting views of, 33–34, 44–48, 193–94; expert industry around, 2–3, 9–10, 66–74; as a foil for neoliberalism, 70–78, 119–22, 166, 226–27; “hype” about, 33, 208, 238n17, 255n14; and models of the self, 5–7, 10, 27–32, 154, 157, 165–67; as a site of imperial struggle, 60–61; individual and institutional investment in, 7–11, 20, 79–81, 154, 167–72, 182, 229; militaristic frame of, 35–38, 45–47, 50–59, 245n44; nebulous and shifting character of, 2–3, 5–6, 10, 22–27, 33–38, 42, 45, 52–55, 63–70, 154–55, 164–67; springs and winters of, 4, 48; sponsorship of, 24–26, 59; rebranding of, 12, 65–70, 80–81; relation to psychology and biology, 5, 21; “technical” narratives about, 2–4, 66–68, 261n43; as a technology of whiteness, 8–11, 155, 172, 181–82 artificial life (ALife): and bio-inspired computing, 210, 296n60; and racial narratives, 159, 277n12–14; relation to AI, 159, 277n11 Artificial War, 212–13 ARPA, 24, 96, 249n85; and Behavioral Sciences Program, 98, 265n11 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 5, 23, 37–38 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 23 Atlantic, The, 61, 104 automata studies, 241nn8–9 automation: and automated systems, 141, 169–70; of industrial production, 25–26, 34, 74–75, 78; of warfare, 43–44, 57–59 autopoiesis, 194–96: and neoliberalism, 201–2; and war, 213 Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha, 300n1 Azoulay, Roger, 15, 300n1 Baldwin, James, 93 Barbrook, Richard, 156 Baudrillard, Jean, 151 Baupost Group, 263n57 Beer, Stafford, 25, 193, 290n30 Belfer Center, 260n40 Bell Labs, 22 Bell, Trudy E., 246n58 behaviorism, 119, 121–22, 166, 267n46, 269n49, 269n51 Benjamin, Ruha, 285n67 Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, 66, 260n39, 261n42 bias. See algorithmic bias big data, 12, 67–71, 79–80, 254n3 Black Lives Matter, 138, 284n64 Black in AI, 173–74 Black radical tradition, 173, 178, 181 Black Skin, White Masks, 175, 180–81 Blackstone Group, 81–84, 86, 88 blood quantum, 162, 279n26 Blumenbach, Johann F., 160, 278n18 Boden, Margaret, 259n24 Boeing, 260n39 Bolsonaro, Jair, 82–83 Bostrom, Nick, 76 Brand, Stewart, 293n43 Brazil, 82–83, 86 Bridges, Ruby, 113, 115 Brooks, Fred P., 270n54 Brooks, Rodney, 44, 207–8, 295nn52–53, 296n60 Brown, Michael, 137 Buolamwini, Joy, 175–80, 284n61, 285n65, 285n67 Bush, George W., 58, 131, 209, 216 California Institute of Technology, 242n19 Cameron, Andy, 156 capitalism: and anticapitalism, 45; and capitalist visions of AI experts, 9–10, 35, 65, 74–78, 81–88.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

A few months after I left Ukraine, it wasn’t the Russian attacks in Ukraine that stuck in Americans’ memory, but the country’s role in Trump’s looming impeachment. We seemed to have somehow forgotten that, in addition to Russia’s disinformation campaign in 2016—the dumping of Democratic emails, the Russians who posed as Texan secessionists and Black Lives Matter activists to sow discord—they had also probed our back-end election systems and voter registration data in all fifty states. They may have stopped short of hacking the final vote tallies, but everything they did up to that point, American officials concluded, was a trial run for some future attack on our elections.

The IRA used their fake personas to communicate with Trump campaign volunteers and grassroots groups who supported his cause. They bought pro-Trump and anti-Clinton Facebook ads and churned out race-baiting and xenophobic memes, aimed at suppressing minority voters’ turnout and steering them toward third-party candidates like Jill Stein. The Russians put up Black Lives Matter pages and Instagram accounts with names like Woke Blacks that tried to convince African Americans, a crucial Clinton demographic, to stay home on Election Day. “Hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary,” their message read. “We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils.

But with the 2020 elections fast approaching—and evidence piling up that the Kremlin was back to its old tricks—you had to wonder who in the White House would confront Putin this time. In the four intervening years, the Kremlin only grew more emboldened—albeit stealthier. In 2016 Russia’s influence operation stood out for its brazenness. Social media posts were written in broken English. Facebook ads were paid out in rubles, and self-proclaimed Texas secessionists and Black Lives Matter protesters logged into servers from Red Square. Now Russians were setting up offshore bank accounts, paying real Facebook users to rent their accounts, and obscuring their real locations using Tor, the anonymizing software. Inside IRA headquarters in Saint Petersburg, Russian trolls had far greater command of America’s politics.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

New, neoliberal conceptions of individual freedoms (especially in the realm of technology use) are oversupported in direct opposition to protections realized through large-scale organizing to ensure collective rights. This is evident in the past thirty years of active antilabor policies put forward by several administrations47 and in increasing hostility toward unions and twenty-first-century civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter. These proindividual, anticommunity ideologies have been central to the antidemocratic, anti-affirmative-action, antiwelfare, antichoice, and antirace discourses that place culpability for individual failure on moral failings of the individual, not policy decisions and social systems.48 Discussions of institutional discrimination and systemic marginalization of whole classes and sectors of society have been shunted from public discourse for remediation and have given rise to viable presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, someone with a history of misogynistic violence toward women and anti-immigrant schemes.

See advertising companies; algorithms; search engines; Twitter Bitch, 4, 181 Black, Diane, 135 Black feminism, 29–33, 92–93; antipornography rhetoric and scholarship, 100 black feminist technology studies (BFTS), 171–72 Black Girls (rock band), 69 Black Girls Code, 26, 64–65 ‘black girls’ search results, 17–21, 31, 49, 64, 66–68, 103, 160, 192n5; Chicago Urban League, 191n73; first search results, 3–4, 5; improvements, 10, 181–82; pornification, 11, 86 Black Lives Matter, 165 Black Looks (hooks), 92–94 Black Scholar, 11 Blanchette, Jean-François, 125, 128 Brandeis University report, 167 Brin, Sergey, 37, 38, 40–41, 44, 47 Brock, André, 17–21, 91, 151 Brown, Ronald, 104 Cabos-Owen, Julie, 119 Chicago Tribune, 134 Chicago Urban League, 191n73 Chin, Denny, 157 classification schemes, 150; Eurocentrism, 141; misrepresentations of women and people of color, 5, 138; racial classification, 136–37, 149.

See also Google telecommunication companies, traffic-routing discrimination, 156 Tettegah, Sharon, 168 Thompson, Myra, 110 Toffler, Alvin, 198n25 transparency, 50, 104; data removal in Google, 130–31; the imagine engine, 180–81; requests to be forgotten, 130–31 Treitler, Vilna Bashi, 79–80 Trump, Donald, 166, 183 Twitter, 80, 110; bias in automated tweets, 29; #Black Lives Matter, 11; #DropTheWord, 135; #NoHumanBeingIsIllegal, 135; “professional/unprofessional hairstyles for work,” 83; racist trolling, 163; “three black teenagers” or “three white teenagers” post, 80 United Nations, 15 universal humanity, 61–62 Urban League, 55 USA Today, 65–66, 80, 119, 134 U.S.


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

House of Representatives from Minnesota; when he was elected attorney general, he became the first Black person elected to statewide office in Minnesota, and the first Muslim elected to statewide office anywhere in America. Derek Chauvin became the first white officer in Minnesota to be charged with the death of a Black civilian. * * * — Dr. Ebony Jade Hilton joined a Black Lives Matter protest in Charlottesville on June 7. Hundreds of people marched from the Freedom of Speech Wall on the Downtown Mall to the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, carrying homemade placards saying “Let My People Breathe.” Three years before, Charlottesville had been the site of a “Unite the Right” rally.

If you think about that number, that’s what leads Black people to say it’s worth me dying and going out to this protest and saying enough is enough. Police brutality is almost like a pandemic, a generational pandemic. It’s a feeling—I’m going to die anyway, so I might as well risk this virus that I can’t see, to speak about the virus of systemic racism that I can.” * * * — In 2016, during a Black Lives Matter march, a sniper killed five Dallas police officers on downtown streets. Seven other officers and two civilians were injured by the shooter. He intended to kill as many white officers as he could in retaliation for police killings of Black men. The killer was a supporter of the New Black Panther Party, which has encouraged violence against whites and especially Jews.

They also considered kidnapping Virginia governor Ralph Northam, who had been similarly targeted by Trump, who also had tweeted “LIBERATE VIRGINIA!” Adam Fox and most of his followers were answering the president’s summons. On the other hand, one of the gang was an anarchist who called the president a tyrant, and another attended a Black Lives Matter protest because he was upset about police killings. What united them was a combination of weakness and grand delusions. The plotters squeezed into Fox’s basement to sort out their plan. Fox made them surrender their cell phones to prevent any monitoring, but two FBI undercover operatives had already penetrated the group, and there were a couple of informers as well, so their schemes were secretly recorded.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Here was a rich white man who, I imagine, felt he was doing something extraordinary, even radical: he was trying to build a new, more egalitarian country. Yet two and a half centuries later, wives like mine are still pleading with rich white men like me to see their lives and perspectives as equally valuable. America has made real progress, but in important ways, little has changed. As much as I like to think of myself as an advocate for Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements, I’m embarrassed to say that, in some ways, I am still struggling to value even my own spouse’s life equally. Enough is enough. Change can be scary, but it’s time for us men to chart a new path. CHAPTER 5 INTERSECTIONAL ADVANTAGE We’re throwing down a fat party THIS SUNDAY.

“We talk about how many women were raped last year,” Katz emphasizes, “not how many men raped women.”18 Since rich white men understand that there can be backlash if we engage in victim blaming personally, many instead amplify fringe voices within a marginalized group that aligns with our worldview. That includes people like Candace Owens, a conservative Black activist whose platform has been amplified by rich white men who deny that anti-Black racism exists. These rich white men relish Owens’s claims that Black culture is “broken,” Black people are “pretending to be oppressed,” and Black Lives Matter activists are “domestic terrorists.”19 Owens is a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit organization led by Charlie Kirk, a wealthy white man who has called George Floyd a “scumbag” and characterized Democratic immigration policies as “diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.”20 Turning Point’s board of directors is composed exclusively of rich white men.

Taking that seriously, as I understand it, requires that the Advantaged 1 Percent put our wealth and power behind the leadership of the Marginalized 1 Percent and those working in close solidarity with them. That includes efforts like the Movement for Black Lives—which from the beginning has had transgender Black women in its leadership and been reminding the public that trans Black lives matter—and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit movement. If even a small percentage of rich white men supported institutions, campaigns, and movements led by such people—with our time, skills, financial resources, and full collaboration as unpaternalistic partners—I’m confident that progress toward equity in the United States would greatly accelerate.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

This resistance could lead to escalating confrontation and even violent conflict, which, in turn, could bring heightened police repression and private vigilantism—in the name of “law and order.” For a sense of how such a crackdown might be framed, watch recent NRA recruitment videos or listen to how Republican politicians talk about Black Lives Matter. Such a nightmare scenario isn’t likely, but it also isn’t inconceivable. It is difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities gave up their dominant status without a fight. In Lebanon, the demographic decline of dominant Christian groups contributed to a fifteen-year civil war.

In addition, whereas a narrow (urban, secular, progressive) anti-Trump coalition would reinforce the current axes of partisan division, a broader coalition would crosscut these axes and maybe even help dampen them. A political movement that brings together—even if temporarily—Bernie Sanders supporters and businesspeople, evangelicals and secular feminists, and small-town Republicans and urban Black Lives Matter supporters, will open channels of communication across the vast chasm that has emerged between our country’s two main partisan camps. And it might help foster more crosscutting allegiances in a society that has too few of them. Where a society’s political divisions are crosscutting, we line up on different sides of issues with different people at different times.

Both Bernie Sanders and some moderates argued passionately that Democrats must win back the elusive blue-collar voters who abandoned them in the Rust Belt, Appalachia, and elsewhere. To do this, many opinion-makers argued, the Democrats needed to back away from their embrace of immigrants and so-called identity politics—a vaguely defined term that often encompasses the promotion of ethnic diversity and, more recently, anti-police-violence initiatives, such as Black Lives Matter. In a New York Times op-ed, Mark Penn and Andrew Stein urged Democrats to abandon “identity politics” and moderate their stance on immigration to win back white working-class votes. Though rarely voiced, the core message is this: Democrats must reduce the influence of ethnic minorities to win back the white working class.


pages: 303 words: 81,071

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

“It’ll be the protest.” “What protest?” Rush turns to look at him, slightly incredulous. “You’ve not heard? It’s all over the timelines.” “Ah, I never check them.” He smiles. “Got my algos to do that.” Rush shakes his head, lets out a reluctant chuckle, then instantly feels guilty. “It’s a Black Lives Matter march. They’re protesting the shooting of a seventy-eight-year-old woman in Queens.” “Jesus. What’d she do?” “Nothing.” Rush grits his teeth. “That’s the whole fucking point. She didn’t do anything. Cops got a tip-off from their predictive software that there was a mugging in one of the housing projects in Flushing.

I’m so pleased to see you. I was hoping I was going to bump into you, man. I owe you big.” It is clear that Brad is fucking hyped about something. Hyped and loud. “You changed my life. Thank you!” Brad is aware that the other customers in the line are backing away from them. “I—” “The protests, man! Prescience! Black Lives Matter!” “You—you went to the protests?” “Ah shit, no, no. I didn’t go. Can’t do crowds. But after the party I went home. Stuck on the news, checked my feeds. Shit was crazy. And I started looking into Prescience, the company?” “Okay…” “Man.” Brad pauses, takes a breath, tries to calm himself but fails.

Beyond that there’s an almost infinite list of friends and people who helped me, influenced me, paid me, bought me lunch, or encouraged me along the way—of which this is (in no particular order) just a tiny selection: Simon Ings, Liam Young, Kate Davies, Lydia Nicholas, Sumit Paul-Choudhury, Brian Merchant, Brendan Byrne, Black Lives Matter, Ingrid Burrington, Frank Swain, Justin Pickard, Craig Willingham, Mike Wolf, Cory Doctorow, Jack Womack, Alan Tabrett, Bobi Richardson, Forsaken, Superflux, Jonathan Wright, Urmilla Deshpande, the crew of the Maersk Seletar (July 2014), Veronica Goldstein, Daniel Vazquez, everyone at FSG. And the people of Brooklyn and Bristol.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

See also investment banks; Wall Street bailout of Bill Clinton and blue states and deregulation of Hillary Clinton and McCain and microlending and mortgage crisis and Obama and subprime lending and too big to jail Barkan, Al Barofsky, Neil Bateman, Milford Baucus, Max Begala, Paul Bell, Daniel Benton, Thomas Hart Bernanke, Ben Bernstein, Carl Beta Boston Bezos, Jeff Biden, Joe Biewald, Lukas big data Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation bipartisan consensus Black Lives Matter Blueprint blue states Blumenthal, Sidney Bono Born, Brooksley Bosnia Boston Globe Boston University Bowles, Erskine Bowles-Simpson Commission Breuer, Lanny Brint, Steven Brock, David Brooks, Clem Brooks, David Brown, John Bruni, Frank Bryan, William Jennings Bukowski, Charles Bull Run (Gross) Bush, George H.

Bush, Jeb Callahan, David Canada Caribbean Free Trade Initiative (CAFTA) Carney, Jay Carter, Ashton Carter, Jimmy Caterpillar CEO compensation Changing Sources of Power (Dutton) charter schools Chicago Christensen, Clayton Citibank Citicorp Foundation Civil Rights Act (1964) Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice Clinton, Bill appointees and big government and change and consensus and counter-scheduling and crime bill and deficit and deregulation and DLC and economy and education and election of 1992 and election of 1996 and GOP attacks on health care and impeachment of Martha’s Vineyard and meritocracy and microlending and NAFTA and Social Security and tax cuts and Wall Street and welfare reform and Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Hillary Arkansas career of Bill Clinton presidency and Black Lives Matter and Clinton Foundation and health care and inequality and Iraq War and mass incarceration and meritocracy and microlending and presidential campaign of 2007–8 and presidential campaign of 2015–16 and as Secretary of State Senate career of Wall Street and welfare reform and women’s rights and Clinton Foundation Clinton Presidential Library Cluetrain Manifesto, The (Locke) Coca-Cola cocaine-crack disparity colleges and universities Commerce Department Commodities Futures Trading Commission Commodity Futures Modernization Act (2000) complexity Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Cool Cities Initiative COPE Council of Economic Advisers counter-scheduling Cowie, Jefferson Craig, Gregory cramdown creative class credit-default swaps crime.

* According to a 2014 study of the age of mass incarceration, big increases in sentence length have “no material deterrent effect” on crime and do not reduce the crime rate. See The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, a study by the National Research Council of the National Academies, 2014, p 140. Additionally, the violent-crime rate peaked in 1991 and was already on its way down by 1994. * A Black Lives Matter activist, confronting Hillary Clinton about her husband’s crime policies in August of 2015, used the unfortunate words “unintended consequences” to describe mass incarceration. In fact, it was widely known at the time that the consequence of the crack/cocaine sentencing disparity was the mass incarceration of black drug users.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

Three black community organizers, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors, founded the movement as an online campaign in response to the injustice of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin, and it germinated into demonstrations against other instances of police brutality, such as the killings of Eric Garner and Mike Brown in 2014. Black Lives Matter activists coordinated online and offline protests; networks of people connected through the hashtag could also unite in activism on the street. The murder of Mike Brown was particularly galvanizing, because the Black Lives Matter movement would not let anyone forget. Moreover, legacy media could no longer ignore police brutality in America, as social media, newly dominant in the lives of everyday Americans, provided constant reminders.

These users had to go through intense check-ins with Facebook customer service, sending in passport photos and other official documents, an absurd overreach from something that was not a government body, but a private internet company run by a dude in a hoodie. Notice which communities were singled out when the platform cracked down on “inauthenticity.” Facebook had no similar hard line against the widespread practice of law enforcement creating actual fake profiles as a tactic to infiltrate activist communities like Black Lives Matter. The real names policy was a tool for harassment, but this harassment was structural, too. White supremacist groups flagged Native Americans and others for deletion as a form of abuse, but the platform’s indifference bore out the consequences of this harassment. “Facebook workers—particularly those who live outside of the United States and Canada—may not be familiar with Native naming conventions.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

This, for example, is how Buterin conceptualizes human sociation: “In general, a human organization can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property.” Here is where the danger of trying to reconstruct the furniture of the world from first principles becomes clearest. Because as it happens, that’s not at all how a great many human organizations are defined. Consider contemporary movements like 15M, Occupy, or Black Lives Matter, each of which has surely been able to make some increment of change occur in the world without property or a formal membership register; consider all of the many groups, as various as ACT UP and Alcoholics Anonymous, that have historically been able to operate effectively without recourse to these things.

The geographer Ben Anderson makes this uncomfortably plain in his account of the way these systems work: “Certain lives may have to be abandoned, damaged or destroyed in order to protect, save or care for life” that is considered to be more valuable.43 This is an explosive thing to admit, especially at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement is bringing sustained attention to bear on issues of structural injustice, reflexive overpolicing of communities of color, state violence, and impunity for state actors implicated in that violence. We can be sure that in no society will the terms of this bargain ever be spoken aloud by the parties proposing it, and certainly not in so many words.

We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do”; Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times, October 17, 2004. 73.Alex Tabarrok, “The Rise of Opaque Intelligence,” Marginal Revolution, February 20, 2015. 74.Travis Mannon, “Facebook Outreach Tool Ignores Black Lives Matter,” Intercept, June 9, 2016. 75.This is easier to do than it is to explain. See rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/. 76.August C. Bourré, Comment, Speedbird blog, May 28, 2014, speedbird.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/weighing-the-pros-and-cons-of-driverless-cars/#comment-23389. 77.David Z. Morris, “Trains and Self-Driving Cars, Headed for a (Political) Collision,” Fortune, November 2, 2014. 9Artificial intelligence 1.Jeff Hawkins, keynote speech, “Why Can’t a Computer Be More Like a Brain?


pages: 420 words: 126,194

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, high net worth, illegal immigration, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, open borders, post-industrial society, white flight

For instance, in Britain it might have been thought that since the 1980s at least, racial divisions have significantly diminished. Yet thanks to the internationalising of societies, nobody can predict the consequences of events happening anywhere in the world and their effect on domestic politics. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement that started in the United States in 2012, as a result of a number of killings by police of unarmed black men, eventually spread to Britain and other European countries. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the BLM movement in America, almost none of the circumstances for such a movement exist in Britain.

Houellebecq) here, here Australia here, here Austria here, here, here, here Aznar, José María here baby name statistics here Bacho, Aras here Baksh, Abdul Qadeer here Ban Ki-moon here banlieues riots here, here Bardot, Brigitte here Bascilica Cathedral, Saint-Denis here, here Bataclan theatre, Paris here Battle of Tours (AD 732) here Bawer, Bruce here BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) here, here, here, here, here, here Belgium here, here, here, here, here, here, here Belloc, Hilaire here Benedict XVI, Pope here, here benefits, state here, here, here, here, here see also welfare states, European Bergh, Lise here Bible here bin Laden, Osama here bin Zayad, Tariq here birth rates here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Black Lives Matter here Blair, Tony here, here, here blasphemy, Islamic here, here, here, here, here Bloomberg here boats, abandoned here, here Böckenforde, Ernst-Wölfgang here Bolkestein, Frits here border agreements, European here, here, here Bosnians here Boufarkouch, Mohamed here Boumedienne, Houari here Bouyeri, Mohammed here, here Bradford, West Yorkshire here, here, here Brecht, Bertolt here Britain 20th century discrimination here, here, here 20th century immigration here, here acceptable levels of ‘diversity’ here, here action against illegal immigrants here, here baby name statistics here birth rates here, here Black Lives Matter here Bradford here, here, here Calais migrant camp here colonisation of India here cost of immigration (1995-2011) here demographic predictions here English Defence League (EDL) here female genital mutilation here historically static population here, here immigration under New Labour here liberal rights here London car bombs (2007) here London Transport terror attacks (2005) here loss of Christian faith here Luton here, here, here as ‘mongrel nation’ here, here murder of Lee Rigby here, here national identity here, here, here net migration figures (post-2011) here opinion polls here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here parallel communities here, here population of London here, here, here, here protests at Danish Embassy here ‘punished’ for history here British Future think tank here British National Party (BNP) here, here British Nationality Act (1948) here British Union of Fascists here Bruckner, Pascal here Bulgaria here Burke, Edmund here burkinis here ‘burnout,’ German here Calais migrant camp here Cameron, David here, here, here, here, here Camp of the Saints (J.

Houellebecq) here, here Australia here, here Austria here, here, here, here Aznar, José María here baby name statistics here Bacho, Aras here Baksh, Abdul Qadeer here Ban Ki-moon here banlieues riots here, here Bardot, Brigitte here Bascilica Cathedral, Saint-Denis here, here Bataclan theatre, Paris here Battle of Tours (AD 732) here Bawer, Bruce here BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) here, here, here, here, here, here Belgium here, here, here, here, here, here, here Belloc, Hilaire here Benedict XVI, Pope here, here benefits, state here, here, here, here, here see also welfare states, European Bergh, Lise here Bible here bin Laden, Osama here bin Zayad, Tariq here birth rates here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Black Lives Matter here Blair, Tony here, here, here blasphemy, Islamic here, here, here, here, here Bloomberg here boats, abandoned here, here Böckenforde, Ernst-Wölfgang here Bolkestein, Frits here border agreements, European here, here, here Bosnians here Boufarkouch, Mohamed here Boumedienne, Houari here Bouyeri, Mohammed here, here Bradford, West Yorkshire here, here, here Brecht, Bertolt here Britain 20th century discrimination here, here, here 20th century immigration here, here acceptable levels of ‘diversity’ here, here action against illegal immigrants here, here baby name statistics here birth rates here, here Black Lives Matter here Bradford here, here, here Calais migrant camp here colonisation of India here cost of immigration (1995-2011) here demographic predictions here English Defence League (EDL) here female genital mutilation here historically static population here, here immigration under New Labour here liberal rights here London car bombs (2007) here London Transport terror attacks (2005) here loss of Christian faith here Luton here, here, here as ‘mongrel nation’ here, here murder of Lee Rigby here, here national identity here, here, here net migration figures (post-2011) here opinion polls here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here parallel communities here, here population of London here, here, here, here protests at Danish Embassy here ‘punished’ for history here British Future think tank here British National Party (BNP) here, here British Nationality Act (1948) here British Union of Fascists here Bruckner, Pascal here Bulgaria here Burke, Edmund here burkinis here ‘burnout,’ German here Calais migrant camp here Cameron, David here, here, here, here, here Camp of the Saints (J.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

In a place with abundant demand, more space requires only the elimination of the land-use regulations that prevent the construction of taller, denser buildings. But there are sources of urban strife other than constraints on urban space. Many of these are battles between insiders and outsiders. In chapter 9 we turn to two conflicts that do not have the same simple legislative solution as the gentrification wars: policing and schools. The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 were motivated by police brutality, but this requires executive reform, not a simple legal fix like defunding the police. We need police protection, but we also need respect for all. The solution lies in a robust reform program that embraces two policy goals: safety and accountability for civil rights.

As of December: Taken from the YouTube website, December 1, 2020. “little to end the war”: “The Flu in Boston,” PBS. “in the eight”: Valentine, Valentine, and Valentine, “Relationship of George Floyd Protests to Increases in COVID-19 Cases Using Event Study Methodology.” “no evidence that urban”: Dave et al., “Black Lives Matter Protests and Risk Avoidance: The Case of Civil Unrest During a Pandemic.” Mistrust of the police: Murphy, “Police Forcibly Eject Man without Face Mask from SEPTA Bus.” friends Raj Chetty: Chetty et al., “Where Is the Land of Opportunity?” Children who grow: Chetty et al., “The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility.”

“Maecenas and the Poets” Phoenix 10, no. 4 (Winter 1956): 151–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/1086017. Daschle, Tom, Scott S. Greenberger, and Jeanne M. Lambrew. Critical: What We Can Do about the Health-Care Crisis. New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2009. Dave, Dhaval M., Andrew I. Friedson, Kyutaro Matsuzawa, Joseph J. Sabia, and Samuel Safford. “Black Lives Matter Protests and Risk Avoidance: The Case of Civil Unrest During a Pandemic.” NBER Working Paper Series 27408, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, June 2020. Revised January 2021. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27408. Davenport, Romola J. “Urbanization and Mortality in Britain, c. 1800–50.”


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

For example, two days before the election, supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement were drawn to voter suppression memes that encouraged them not to vote. The account @woke_blacks posted a meme to its Instagram account that read, “The excuse that a lost Black vote for Hillary is a Trump win is bs. Should you decide to sit-out the election, well done for the boycott,” while @afrokingdom_ posted that “Black people are smart enough to understand that Hillary doesn’t deserve our votes! DON’T VOTE!” New Knowledge estimated that 96 percent of the Instagram content linked to the Internet Research Agency focused on Black Lives Matter and police brutality, spreading “overt suppression narratives.”

They amassed a following, coordinated with other accounts, rooted themselves in real online communities, and gained the trust of their followers. Then they created fake news intended to suppress voting and to change our vote choices, in large part toward Republican candidate Donald Trump and away from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The fake news included memes about Black Lives Matter, the mistreatment of American veterans, the Second Amendment and gun control, the supposed rise of sharia law in the United States, and well-known falsehoods like the accusation that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C. (known as “PizzaGate”).

It analyzed the performance of these activities by tracking the size of the audiences they reached, the engagement they produced (e.g., likes, comments, shares, reposts), their virality, and their correlation with marketing activities, like the channels they used (e.g., Facebook versus Twitter), the communities they engaged (e.g., Black Lives Matter), the accounts they promoted (e.g., Heart of Texas), and their content specifications (e.g., the ratio of text to images in persuasive messages). In my research, I study how these kinds of influence campaigns change behaviors and how these behaviors spread through society with the help of social media.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The City of Baltimore, the State of Illinois, and the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission, among other, bigger victims of foreclosures, sued the notorious lending institutions whose high-risk lending fueled the Great Recession—institutions like Wells Fargo—and settled for hundreds of millions.13 Predatory lending practices targeted racial minorities during the subprime boom, highlighting the role of finance in social injustice. Emergent social movements that advocate for social equity, like Occupy Wall Street, organized activists with a common desire to re-center society around a moral economy. While Occupy Wall Street activists formed a tent city in Zuccotti Park on Wall Street, members of Black Lives Matter were staging protests across the country to advocate a political agenda that could address the root causes of inequality.14 Soon, more voices joined the chorus, this time from the top. Facebook cofounder and philanthropist Chris Hughes dedicated his intellectual thought leadership to promoting a universal basic income,15 and Mark Zuckerberg, his former roommate, mentioned it in the commencement speech he gave at Harvard.16 This quasi-moral solution to income inequality—and to expanding the definition of equality for this generation—finds its strongest American proponents in Silicon Valley.

Ted is an Uber and Lyft driver whose license plate on his car doesn’t match the identification I have for his car in the passenger app. I double-check his driver app to ensure I’m the correct passenger before we depart. “Why are you visiting? Are you Mormon?” he asks, before launching into a tirade of conspiracy theories about black supremacy, Black Lives Matter riots, and illegal aliens, whom he asserts comprise 90 percent of the employees in factories. With a practiced mental calm, I gently meet his provocations with light, curious inquiries and answer questions he has about socialized medicine in Canada. Ted generously concedes it must work better in its Canadian form, though he’s aggressively derisive of Obamacare.

See also algorithmic technology Atlanta, Georgia, 1, 12, 40, 42, 43, 45, 59, 61, 71, 84, 85, 144, 197, 212, 219, 220n17 Attoh, Kafui, 68 Austin, Texas, 80, 88, 91, 175–76, 181, 205, 223n17 Australia, 156 automobile insurance, 4, 26, 45, 65, 66, 169 autonomous technology. See self-driving cars autonomy, 25, 31, 58, 83, 85, 102, 106; and control, 92; illusion of driver, 9, 91–98 Baltimore, Maryland, 23 bathroom challenges, 82, 193 Bhuiyan, Johana, 14 Black Girls Code, 189 Black Lives Matter, 23, 194 bloggers and blogs, 33, 51, 55, 81, 83, 85, 164, 235n12. See also online driver forums; The Rideshare Guy (blog) Bloomberg, 105, 164, 221n1 Brazil, 111–12, 205 Bryant, Kimberly, 189 Burch, Jessica, 228n48 Buzzfeed, 28, 45, 61 California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, 175 California Department of Motor Vehicles, 173–74 Calo, Ryan, 16, 121 Campbell, Harry, 83, 122, 220, 231n73, 232n3.


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

He believes that ‘feminism is a cancer’ and that ‘rape culture is a myth’. In 2016, he was permanently banned from Twitter for conducting a coordinated abuse campaign against US actor Leslie Jones. ‘With the cowardly suspension of my account,’ Milo stated, ‘Twitter has confirmed itself as a safe space for Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter extremists, but a no-go zone for conservatives.’ In 2017, Milo was offered $250,000 to write a book for the publisher Simon & Schuster. When faced with public outcry, the publisher defended its decision by releasing a statement in which it described Milo as simply someone with ‘controversial’ opinions, who will take his place among their stable of other authors, many of whom are also ‘controversial’, who appeal to ‘many audiences of readers’.

The entire existence of a functioning society is predicated on the business of drawing lines and distinctions between things where there are only shades of difference, often in extremely complicated and emotive areas. But somehow, according to the freedom of speech crisis logic, our ability to do so will collapse when trying to draw a line between the KKK and Black Lives Matter. The slippery slope is also often presented as a ‘what if’ hypothetical, as opposed to pointing out something that has already happened (which would be helpful in validating the premise). If so many freedom of speech transgressions are already being made (and according to some, this has been happening for decades), then surely a very clear slippery slope example should be evident?

He adds, ‘White Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power and opportunity.’ A white identity is a trust fund, and its currency is grievance that is stolen from others. The tool – universalism If there was a pithy way to summarise the damaging identity politics myth, it would be with the anti-Black Lives Matter slogan, ‘All Lives Matter’. Like the heavily memed ‘economic anxiety’ trope, ‘All Lives Matter’ has become facetious shorthand, an eye-roll, calling out logic that swerves the issue by using whataboutery. This is the tool of universalism. It sidesteps specific concerns by dismissing them as special treatment tantrums, thus avoiding engaging with, or invalidating them.


pages: 172 words: 50,777

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

Race identity also took centre stage during the first wave of the pandemic, triggered by the death of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter as a campaigning force, which included a challenge to existing workplace culture in many institutions, not just the police. In the summer of 2021, Dame Vivian Hunt, a senior partner of McKinsey and one of the most prominent black women in business, reposted a quote on LinkedIn by seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier who filmed the police attack on George Floyd and tagged it with the stark prediction: ‘Change come fast and change come slow but change come.’ Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, is right when she says that ‘identity politics hold us accountable to ask more questions about for whom progress is being made’.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Campaigning as outsiders, this appeal is likely to mobilize Labour Party members favoring Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders supporters in Democratic primaries, voters for Jean-­Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the Five Star Movement in Rome, and community activists engaged in Pablo Iglesias’ Podemos in Spain.28 Political parties usually attract older voters, but by adopting digital tools, some like the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, have succeeded in attracting a relatively young membership.29 At the same time, levels of youthful enthusiasm are rarely translated into equivalent levels of voting turnout at the ballot box.30 The Millennial generation in the US and Europe are more likely than their elders to participate in direct protest politics, community volunteering, new social 44 The Cultural Backlash Theory movements, and online activism, but they are usually far less engaged through conventional electoral channels such as voting.31 Libertarian-­ Populist parties seeking the support of younger, college-­educated voters therefore face stiff competition from social movements championing the progressive agenda on issues such as environmental protection and climate change, LGBTQ rights, gender equality, Black Lives Matter, the ‘Me-­too’ movement against sexual harassment, gun control, immigration rights, human rights and democracy, international development, and social justice. Populists advocating a socially liberal agenda also face competition at the ballot box from mainstream center-­left parties and from Green parties, which have became established throughout Western Europe, such as Groen!

Data are from the WVS-­6 (2010–2014) in the following seven post-­industrial societies: Australia, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and United States. Source: World Values Survey 2010–2014, Wave 6. N. 10,576. LGBTQ rights to employment in the military, adoption, and same sex marriage; civil rights for minorities like the Black Lives Matters movement; feminist networks with global mobilization on behalf of gender quotas in elected office; anti-­domestic violence, and anti-­sexual harassment, international assistance for humanitarian disasters and economic development, and human rights around the world.24 Drawing on data from seven post-­ industrial societies from the World Values Survey (6th wave), Figure 4.2 shows the strong association between socially liberal attitudes, as measured on scales monitoring tolerance of homosexuality, abortion, divorce, and pre-­marital sex, with the 12-­item scale of post-­material values.

Several economists have argued that globalization, in particular the effects of the import of cheap Chinese goods in electronics and textiles, has had a devastating effect upon employment in American factories and mills, and that communities most affected by the loss of economic opportunities swung decisively toward populist leaders such as Trump.39 Social individualization and fragmentation have eroded the grassroots membership of traditional collective organizations, social networks, and mass movements that once mobilized workers’ cooperatives and trade unions.40 Collective movements and organized labor, which in the past mobilized the expression of working-­ class grievances, have found their negotiating powers undermined by open labor markets and multinational corporations. Movements like Black Lives Matter have mobilized strongly around issues of social justice, including the appropriate use of police violence – but this has divided poorer communities around issues of race. The Democratic Party has found its traditional electoral base depleted by the shrinking numbers of industrial workers in the Rust Belt states, forcing them to widen their electoral appeals as catch-­all parties to attract public-­sector professionals and liberal coastal communities focused on issues such as environmental protection.41 Socially disadvantaged groups are most prone to blame ethnic minorities and migrant populations for deteriorating conditions, loss of manufacturing jobs, and inadequate welfare services.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

* * * • • • AFTER THE TRENDING Topics fiasco, Kaplan suggested that Facebook invite a slate of right-wingers to Menlo Park so the company could convince them that it was giving them a fair shake. Some Facebookers found this an insulting contrast to the virtual snub Facebook had given Black Lives Matter some weeks earlier. Members of the civil rights group had asked for a meeting to air out issues, including Facebook Live’s streaming of violent crime and police killings. Another sticking point: that February at Facebook HQ, employees had crossed out the words “Black Lives Matter” from a graffiti wall and replaced it with “All Lives Matter,” a response associated with racism. Zuckerberg had condemned the action. But neither Zuckerberg nor Sandberg attended the session in the DC office.

Nor did Joel Kaplan, the top policy person in the office. Facebook sent Monika Bickert, who was in charge of Content Standards; a Facebook policy director who works with Democrats; and an African American staffer whose work wasn’t relevant to the subject matter. (Higher Facebook executives, including Sandberg, have met with Black Lives Matter at other times.) In contrast, Facebook was treating a motley lineup of right-wing pundits like rock stars, flying them out to Menlo Park to listen to Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s explanation of how respectfully their posts were treated, even the shrill conspiracy charges from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

On the day: Heather Kelly, “Facebook Ditches Humans in Favor of Algorithms for Trending News,” CNN, August 26, 2016. “anti-Kelly fan fiction”: Abby Ohlheiser, “Three Days after Removing Human Editors, Facebook Is Already Trending Fake News,” Washington Post, August 29, 2016. “All Lives Matter”: Jessica Guynn, “Zuckerberg Reprimands Facebook Staff Defacing ‘Black Lives Matter,’” USA Today, February 26, 2016. the thought was: Thompson and Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years.” “home run”: “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Philippines a Successful Test Bed for Internet.org Initiative with Globe Telecom Partnership,” Globe Telecom, February 25, 2014. Maria Ressa: The definitive story on Facebook, the Philippines, and Maria Ressa is from Davey Alba, “How Duterte Used Facebook to Fuel the Philippine Drug War,” BuzzFeed, September 4, 2018.


pages: 394 words: 57,287

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Paul Revere earned glory by tearing through the Massachusetts countryside, but the real plot point in leadership history is what happened next, the men and women who stepped out into the streets of Lexington and Concord to determine their own destinies.d We believe you can trace a line from their courage to the hundreds of civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, to the thousands who lined up behind Gandhi and marched for self-rule, to the millions of global supporters of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and their assertions of a universal right to dignity, regardless of who you are. What will be the focus of your own leadership story? Will it be about the power you stockpiled and protected? Or about how much more you achieved by using that power to unleash the people around you? This book is about choosing the second path, unapologetically.

INDEX absence leadership, 131–132 culture and, 165–192 strategy and, 135–163 Adams, John, 3 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), 62 after-action reviews, 79 agony of the super smart (ASS), 40 AirBnB, 102 “A” leaders, 132 Amazon, 158 Anheuser-Busch, 107–108 Apple, 113, 143 Aristotle, 34 attribute maps, 137, 139–140 auftragstaktik, 17 authenticity in digital age, 52–54 triggers, 52–53 trust and, 34–37, 47–54, 57 Average You, 139 Azzarello, Patty, 139 “balanced slates,” 103–104 Basch, Michael, 165–166 Bee, Samantha, 102–103 belonging, 12, 13, 87, 89–127 Bezos, Jeff, 158 bias, 47, 92, 93, 115, 116 Bird, Larry, 45 Black Googlers Network, 5 Black Lives Matter, 24 black working moms, 126–127 Blendoor, 103 blind submissions, 102 bro culture, 180 Brown-Philpot, Stacy, 5, 148–152, 161 Bummer You, 139 Burns, Ursula, 101 Carlzon, Jan, 159–160 change beginning, 90–91 to culture, 167, 182–185, 186–190 managing, 152 resistance to, 92–94 Chouinard, Yvon, 42 Coleman, Debi, 77 common information effect, 48–49 communal workspaces, 40 communication of change, 152 of devotion, 82–84 directness in, 22–23 effective, 45–46 of strategy, 156–161 communication triangle, 46, 56 compensation, 121–122, 146–148 constructive advice, 75–76 Corning, 80–81 Costco, 44 cultural fit, 102–104 cultural values, 166–172 at Netflix, 168–169, 172 at Riot Games, 124, 181 at Uber, 32, 55 culture, 12–14, 132, 165–192 changing, 167, 182–185, 186–190 defined, 166–169, 172 examining your, 176–178 humor and, 170–172 of inclusion, 104–108 problems, 172–182 role of, 165–166 Culture Change Playbook, 182–185 culture of inclusion, creating, 104–107 culture warrior, 168, 177, 182 Curl-Mix, 157 deeply/simply communication, 158 #deleteUber, 31 DeLong, Tom, 90–91 Dempsey, Martin, 16–17 development, 109, 112–114 devotion, 62–67, 72–73, 74, 81, 82–84 diverse teams, 48–49 diversity, 89–90 attracting diverse talent, 95–104 celebrating, 105, 107 cherishing, 105, 107–108 Doukeris, Michel, 107–108 Drucker, Peter, 132 Drybar, 157 Dunaway, Cammie, 96–97, 102 Duolingo, 96–97 Dweck, Carol, 72–73, 74, 191 Edmondson, Amy, 107 1844 organization, 96 empathy constructive advice and, 75 future of work and, 42–44 trust and, 34–41, 51, 57 empathy wobble, 39–41, 42 employees attracting diverse, 95–104 development of, 109, 112–114 firing, 84, 85–86 investment in, 44, 55–56 outside lives of, 83–84, 100–101 promotion process for, 114–115, 116 retaining, 120–122 selection of, 102 supporting queer, 110–113 toxic, 123 wages of, 146–148 empowerment leadership, 4–5, 10–15, 18–21 in action, 16–18 belonging and, 90 commitment to, 116 development of, 71–87 getting started with, 22–23 Endeavor, 121 equal opportunity, 104–114 equal pay, 121–122 Escobari, Marcela, 43–44 exit interviews, 175 Facebook, 102 FedEx, 165–166 feedback giving effective, 22–23 positive, 73–76 fidelity, 61, 63, 64, 66, 73 firing, with respect, 85–86 forgiveness, 123 Fowler, Susan, 31, 174 Franco-Prussian War, 17 Freire, Paulo, 44 Gandhi, Mohandas, 24 Gelb, Scott, 124–126 gender bias, 117–118 gender equity, 91, 115 gender identities, 110–112 gig economy, 148 GLAAD, 110 good jobs research, 147–148 Google, 5, 79 grace, 123, 124–126 Grace Hopper Celebration, 96 Gross, Terry, 82 growth mindset, 72–73, 191 Hannenberg, Emily, 17–18 Harvard Business School, 91, 115, 122, 186–190 Hastings, Reed, 169, 172 high standards, 77–81 hiring quotas, 104 Hoffman, Reid, 9, 11 Hogan, Kathleen, 116, 191 Holder, Eric, 51 homogenous teams, 48–49 Hoobanoff, Jamie, 98 HP, 139 Hsieh, Tony, 146 Huffington, Arianna, 7, 32 human resources life cycle, 90 Human Rights Campaign, 110 humor, 170–172 identity gender, 110–112 letting go of, 71–72 implicit bias, 116 improv, 20–21 inclusion, 50, 89–91 attracting diverse talent and, 95–104 commitment to, 116 culture of, 104–108 dial, 104–105 equal opportunity to thrive and, 104–114 growth and, 124 levels of, 104–108 promotions process and, 114–115, 116 of queer people, 110–112 resistance to, 92–94 at Riot Games, 124–126 talent retainment and, 120–122 working toward full, 126–127 inclusive hiring, 97 inclusive meetings, 108–109, 112–114 inclusive teams, 49, 89 “indignities” list, 101 informal development, 112–114 information common information effect, 48–49 learning from new, 54 Innova Schools project, 69–70 Intel, 79 Intercorp, 67–70 Isaac, Mike, 172–173 Isaacson, Walter, 77 JetBlue, 44, 167 Jobs, Steve, 77, 80–81 Johnson, Claire Hughes, 14 jokes, 170–172 Jordan, Michael, 3 Joyce, Meghan, 31 justice, 60–61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 71, 87, 122–123 Kalanick, Travis, 31–32, 51, 54, 172–176, 178–179 Kelleher, Herb, 136–138, 161 Khosrowshahi, Dara, 55, 56, 178–179 Krause, Aaron, 157 Landit, 14 language, “I” vs.


pages: 334 words: 109,882

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Glenn Whitaker

BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, fixed income, impulse control, incognito mode, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, medical residency, microaggression, microbiome, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, Rat Park, rent control, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Torches of Freedom, twin studies, WeWork, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

What I didn’t quite know was exactly how I would do that, or that this revolution would become stronger with the strands of activism and energy woven into other major social forces: fourth-wave and intersectional feminism, the reaction to the Trump election, the legalization of marijuana in several states, the Black Lives Matter movement, the opioid crisis, and the growing and vocalized dissent against a very racist, classist, imperialist—and failed—War on Drugs. This journey has been an evolving one. At first, it was the story of a dead woman walking, of all the women in this world who try to conform to a life they are told they should want—one that looks good on paper.

At the same time our democracy is crumbling, our collective sense of power is erupting. Civil rights movements that have been going on for centuries, decades, years, started by radical activists on the margins of society—from Sojourner Truth to Rosa Parks to Sylvia Rivera at Stonewall to Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, who started the Black Lives Matter movement—finally crashed into the mainstream. Women of privilege are finally waking up en masse to their collective oppression, and their anger has gone viral. The last few years have seen many things, from the #MeToo movement (a second wave of a movement started by Tarana Burke) to our vocalized outrage during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to the election of our first Muslim woman to Congress, and an unprecedented number of women, people of color, and LGBTQIA folks elected to positions of power throughout the country.

As I became more educated, I couldn’t help but stitch these issues together on social media, something white women applauded me for as I spoke in the wake of the 2016 election about misogyny and rape and its ties to alcohol-centric culture. I got little to no pushback as I posted Rebecca Solnit quotes, or my own #MeToo story, or spoke about alcohol as a rape drug, but when I started to learn more about the racism inherent in the War on Drugs, or about restorative justice, or Black Lives Matter, or racism at all, and talk about those issues on social media, I found that some of the same women who applauded me for making connections between the alcohol industry and rape culture could not abide me talking about racism or white privilege. Some white women voiced their displeasure at my taking what seemed to be a hard right turn from addiction: “I wish you’d stick to sobriety.”


pages: 322 words: 106,663

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

If I posted a photo of a fancy brunch or frothy green smoothie, I’d reach tens of thousands of people. But if I shared my thoughts about white supremacy, the post’s reach would be cut by half or more. The only difference? The algorithm decided that my audience would rather see the delectable eats than the calls to stand with the Black Lives Matter movement. I was, as they say on the interwebs, shadowbanned.VIII Ultimately, nobody—except for the robotic mechanism running the algorithm from the shelter of Silicon Valley—knew why certain accounts and posts were favored over others. Perhaps the best explanation is that, “The Instagram algorithm is designed for one thing: [to] convince more people to spend more time [on the app] so Instagram can show more ads and make more money.”IX Every attempt I made to outsmart this system felt not just like a business failure, but a personal one: building an income stream dependent on the behavior of a privately owned app with its own fiscal aims was a swift path both to losing money and to betraying my own core values and interests.

They didn’t give me an answer when I asked why. Whether it was the result of my outspokenness itself or that the outspokenness meant decreased engagement on Instagram, I’ll never know. * * * All of this, of course, happened before the summer of 2020, when millions took to the streets for months of Black Lives Matter uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s brutal murder. Before the meme activism of #BlackOutTuesday and the tidal wave of white tears shed by influencers and businesses suddenly committed to being actively antiracist. It happened before it was cool to be political on social media, before the algorithm (and corporate responsibility) rewarded whiteness for taking accountability for its privilege.

But the truth was that I felt sick: my toes pressed into the plastic shoes, my earlobes burning, the beaded acrylic sweater, the kind I knew required a human to do the handiwork, brutally hot in the July sun. And then the question, again, ringing like a siren in my mind: Should I be selling this? * * * I continued to model, but at night I became an activist. I went to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protests. I organized artists and for a few years edited an indie publication aimed at bringing media resources to marginalized storytellers. Rarely did my activism and fashion careers intersect. When I was asked to speak at the launch of a fashion development initiative, an effort to invest in burgeoning garment industries in ten different countries, I was conflicted.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

People view Google as an unassailable source of credible and reliable information. Yet, what’s often missing in search results that are not curated by a thoughtful hand, say a librarian or teacher: awareness of gender stereotypes and racial biases.19 Like so many companies responding to George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, Google put out a statement touting its commitment to “racial equity” and detailing its plan to achieve it. The plan included admirable goals like increasing minority hiring, committing funds to antibias education, and creating products that will be useful to the Black community. Missing from the statement, however, is any mention of how Google will ensure going forward that its search algorithms do not perpetuate or encourage racism.20 Meredith Broussard, an AI researcher at New York University, said it so well in the New York Times: “Computers are excellent at doing math, but math is not a social system.

The company has introduced a new feature claiming to help them learn to read.23 Of course, search engines aren’t the only platforms where algorithms have been found to encourage and inculcate racism. Social media sites are also culpable. Take Meta, which also owns Instagram and has sometimes been lauded for promoting social justice movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter.24 Yet the company has also been under fire for its long history of encouraging hate speech and perpetuating the growth of white supremacy groups.25 Within a week of George Floyd’s murder, a video claiming that his murder was faked reached 1.3 million Facebook users—mostly in groups run by avowedly white supremacists.26 To understand how the racism promoted by social networks and other popular tech platforms is linked to commercialism, we need to remember that algorithms governing what content we see and don’t see are created by people who, in addition to having their own biases, often work for huge conglomerates whose primary priority is to generate profits for their stockholders.

(American Speech-Language-Hearing Association), 238 Beanie Babies, 84 BEGIN (early learning tech company), 136 behavioral advertising, 46, 136, 195 Benford, Criscillia, 44n, 46n, 183–84 Benjamin, Ruha, xv Bequelin, Nicholas, 68 Bernays, Edward, 168–69 Bezos, Jeff, 77 Biden, Joe, 203 Big Food, 198. See also food industry Big Tobacco, 198 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 233, 234 Bill of Rights Institute, 172 Billboard charts, 90 Bisiewicz, Amy, 245n Black Barbie, 157 Black Lives Matter movement, 150, 152 The Bluest Eye (Morrison), 155 Bollywood films, 157 Boninger, Faith, 197 Bookis, Deborah, 245n books. See e-books; reading books boredom the “Alexa, I’m bored” feature, 139–40 providing opportunities to generate tech-free solutions to, 224–25 Boss Baby (film), 139 Boston Children’s Hospital, 3, 27–28 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 132 boyd, danah, 221 BP (British Petroleum), 165, 171 Brand Strategy (magazine), 47 branding, 5, 13–14, 57–76, 89 brand-licensed children’s products and toys, 13–14, 29–30 brand-loyalty, 66–68, 134, 164, 165, 172, 184 churches/religious institutions, 71 corporate-financed advertising in schools, 164, 165, 172, 184 differentiating brand impression from reputation, 66 and edtech, 71, 184 presidential, 67, 69–7 social media and brand tribes, 63–65 social media and self-branding, 5, 72, 76, 219 social media influencers, 72 Toys “R” Us marketing, 58–61 young children and, 89–90 Bratz dolls, 59, 85 Brazil, 160–61 Britain adoption of Age-Appropriate Design Code, 200–201, 203 Quakers’ efforts to end of slavery, 230 screen time recommendations, 21 studies of touch screen-use by babies and toddlers, 42 British Food Journal, 116 British Medical Journal, 103 Bronfenbrenner, Urie, 65, 91 Broussard, Meredith, 150 Brown, Pat, 175 Buffett, Warren, 174 Bush, George H.W., 69 Bush, George W., 69, 91 BuzzFeed, 74 campaign finance reform, 199 Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), 3.


pages: 223 words: 60,909

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Why do they care so much about shoving skulls and Frankensteins into our lives at awkward or sad moments? Why do they want us to relive funerals and tragedies? Why do we need to constantly be congratulated along the way? Why won’t our technology just leave us alone? CELEBRATE THE WORST TIMES On July 9, 2016, DeRay McKesson, one of the most prominent activists in the Black Lives Matter movement, was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was there to protest the death of Alton Sterling, a thirty-seven-year-old black man who had been held down by police in front of a convenience store and shot at close range just a few days before. McKesson—perhaps best known as @deray, the Twitter handle he uses to communicate with his several hundred thousand followers—had spent the day tweeting from the protests.

Abler, Erin, 32–33 Acxiom data brokers, 104 advertising and collection of gender information, 65–66 Facebook’s selections for users, 10 and filtering, 65 and proxy data, 110–112 and Reddit, 162 and value of user data, 96 Airbnb, 20 Alciné, Jacky, 129–130, 132–133, 135, 137–138 alcohol use, 17–18 algorithms biases in, 144–145, 176 and clean design aesthetic, 143 and COMPAS, 120–121, 125–129, 145 and debiasing word-embedding systems, 140 described, 121–123 and edge cases, 137 and Facebook’s use of proxy data, 112 and Friends Day Facebook feature, 84 and Google, 123, 136, 144 and neural networks, 131–133 and News Feed Facebook feature, 168 and social media trends, 10 and training data, 145–146, 171 and Trending Facebook feature, 149, 166–167, 169 and Yelp, 123–125 Allen, Paul, 182 AltaVista, 2 alt-right movement, 153, 164 Apple and emoji suggestions, 80 iPhone location settings, 105–108 and Siri’s female voice, 36 and Siri’s responses to crises, 6–7, 7 and Siri’s teasing humor, 88–89 smartwatches from, 13 and use of personas, 27 and workforce diversity, 19–20 artificial intelligence and failure to understand crises, 6–7 and loss of jobs, 192 Siri as, 88–89 word-embedding systems, 139–140 Automattic, 183 “average” users, 38–44, 47 Barron, Jesse, 114–115 Batman, Miranda, 57 Bawcombe, Libby, 40–42 Beyoncé, 55 bias. See also gender bias; political bias; racial bias in algorithms, 144–145, 176 in default settings, 35–38, 61 of Facebook’s creators, 168–172 of Twitter’s creators, 150, 158–160 binary choices, 62 Black Lives Matter movement, 81 Bouie, Jamelle, 61 Brown, Mike, 163 Brown Eyes, Lance, 54 Butterfield, Stewart, 190–191 BuzzFeed, 157, 165–166 cares about us (CAU) metric, 97 caretaker speech, 114–115 celebrations. See misplaced celebrations and humor COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), 119–121, 125–129, 136, 145 computer science, and tech industry pipeline, 21–26, 181–182 Cook, Tim, 19 Cooper, Sarah, 24 Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), 119–121, 125–129, 136, 145 Costolo, Dick, 148 Cramer, Jim, 158 Creepingbear, Shane, 53–56 Criado-Perez, Caroline, 156 criminal justice and COMPAS, 119–121, 125–129, 136, 145 predictive policing software, 102 sentencing algorithms for, 10 culture fit, 24–25, 25, 189 curators, of Trending Facebook feature, 165–169, 172 daily active users (DAUs) metric, 74, 97–98 Daniels, Gilbert S., 39 Dash, Anil, 9, 187 data.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Black People Don’t,” Washington Post, August 24, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/08/24/white-people-in-new-orleans-say-theyre-better-off-after-katrina-black-people-dont/; Richard Florida, “How Natural Disasters Can Spur Gentrification,” Citylab, February 12, 2019, www.citylab.com/environment/2019/02/gentrification-causes-new-orleans-natural-disasters-hurricane-katrina/582499/. 53.Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 135. 54.Black Alliance for Just Immigration, The State of Black Immigrants: Black Immigrants in the Mass Criminalization System, State of Black Immigrants, http://stateofblackimmigrants.com, 15. 55.Alex Anfruns, “1996–2016: 20 Years after the Harshest Immigration Laws Ever Approved in the US,” Investig’Action, June 22, 2016, www.investigaction.net/en/1996-2016-20-years-after-the-harshest-immigration-laws-ever-approved-in-the-us/. 56.Juliana Morgan-Trostle, Kexin Zheng, and Carl Lipscombe, The State of Black Immigrants, NYU Law School and Black Alliance for Just Immigration, January 22, 2016, www.stateofblackimmigrants.com/assets/sobi-fullreport-jan22.pdf. 57.Jamila Osman, “Do Black Lives Matter in the Immigrant Rights Movement?” Al Jazeera, December 10, 2017, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/black-lives-matter-immigrant-rights-movement-171210095207677.html. 58.Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2007), 6. 59.Ju-Hyun Park, “The Alien and the Sovereign: Yellow Peril in Pandemic Times,” Evergreen Review, Spring 2020, https://evergreenreview.com/read/the-alien-and-the-sovereign-yellow-peril-in-pandemic-times/. 60.Nikhil Pal Singh, “The Pervasive Power of the Settler Mindset,” Boston Review, November 26, 2019, http://bostonreview.net/war-security-race/nikhil-pal-singh-pervasive-power-settler-mindset. 61.Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). 62.Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra!

Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine, “The 1969 Marijuana Shortage and ‘Operation Intercept,’” in Licit and Illicit Drugs (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1972). 8.Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019). 9.Ana Raquel Minian, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 10.Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2015). 11.David Harvey, “Neoliberalism Is a Political Project,” interview by Bjarke Skærlund Risager, Jacobin Magazine, July 2016, www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/david-harvey-neoliberalism-capitalism-labor-crisis-resistance/. 12.Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 13.Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 101. 14.National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/. 15.Victoria Law, Resistance behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 165. 16.Jenna M.


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Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

In May 2020, Zuckerberg, looking to placate one of his best advertisers, said that Twitter was wrong to fact-check Trump’s patently false posts, adding that digital platforms should not act as “arbiters of truth.”70 The following month, under the pressure of an advertiser boycott as well as employee discontent and threats from legislators, Facebook added additional measures to police content. But while it took down pages connected to a network of Trump-supporting racist insurrectionists, it did not remove a post by Trump himself about shooting Black Lives Matter marchers.71 Even if it had, though, the same issues driving harmful content would remain. “The architecture of [Facebook]—its algorithmic mandate of engagement over all else, the advantage it gives to divisive and emotionally manipulative content—will always produce more objectionable content at a dizzying scale,” writes Warzel.72 This is true across all major platforms.

AFTERWORD As this book went to press, censorship-related news—information lockdowns worldwide about the coronavirus; agitation by members of the US Republican Party against social media platforms for “censoring” conservative voices; China’s co-opting of the Zoom communications platform to stifle dissent outside its borders; torrents of misinformation unleashed to confuse the American electorate about the Black Lives Matter movement; and more—was coming in so fast and furious that this book would never have been finished if I hadn’t called an arbitrary halt to the intake of information. That is quite something for a work that begins with a Roman execution and includes Byzantine iconoclasm, the American Civil War, and the suppression of gay- and Communist-themed films during the Weimar Republic.

See also Constitution (US) Bird’s Head Haggadah, 19 birth control, censorship of literature on, 10, 35, 145, 152, 162–63 The Birth of a Nation (film), 239 The Birth of Venus (Botticelli), 63 Black, Hugo, 212 Black Consciousness Movement (South Africa), 203–4 “Black Hawk Down” incident, 199–200 Black Lives Matter, 224, 253 Blackstone, William, 83–84, 91 blasphemy, 18, 95, 126–27, 129–30. See also religious censorship Blyth, Herbert, 161 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 62 Bolsonaro, Jair, 217, 223 Bond, Julian, 210 “bonfires of the vanities,” 62–63 Boniface VIII (pope), 61 book burning: in Ancient Greece, 24–25; in Ancient Rome, 10, 31–34, 36, 40, 48, 50–51; in Brazil, 203; in Chile, 203; in China, 1–2; in early Christianity, 42–44; in England, 88, 94, 101, 152; of Florentines, 61–63; in France, 90; in Germany, 187; of Jewish texts, 15–16, 30, 58–60, 73, 188; by Roman Catholic Church, 69, 72; in US, 87–88, 160.


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Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

Olive Branch was beginning to shift the way officials treated people with SUD in western North Carolina’s foothills. In 2016, Hickory named a new police chief just as syringe exchange became legal in the state. Years before, Mathis and Lowe trained local police to carry and use naloxone, the overdose antidote. At the same time, Black Lives Matter–led protests were drawing attention to the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott in nearby Charlotte, and Mathis was organizing Unity in the Community gatherings around the state to facilitate discussions between law enforcement and marginalized groups. Mathis told the new police chief that Olive Branch planned to expand services in light of the state’s new needle exchange law.

Social change typically starts on the periphery and picks up steam by way of close ties—not via chance encounters or geographic proximity but through what University of Pennsylvania sociologist Damon Centola calls “complex contagions.” It can take decades before an idea eventually gathers enough support to cause a full-throated shift in social norm. But when that shift finally takes place, it often seems to have occurred overnight. Think of the acceptance of same-sex marriage or growing support for Black Lives Matter—both movements took years before change-makers mustered enough support for their ideas to become mainstream. Centola has calculated that ideas reach such a critical mass not when a majority or 51 percent of minds are changed—as economic theorists had long claimed—but when just 25 percent of people are committed to changing the status quo.

Curtis Wright, the FDA medical review officer who approved OxyContin, reportedly had a web camera that directly connected him to Purdue’s Stamford headquarters and pledged to “go to bat” for Purdue—two years before tripling his salary by going to work for the company. Boston-based AIDS historian Dr. Joe Wright believed that the West Virginians’ best bet was to draw upon parallel movements shepherded by coal miners’ unions and Black Lives Matter organizers. But he worried that the recovery movement was too geographically and philosophically splintered, especially among twelve-steppers who remained opposed to bupe. “It can’t just be the moms of the dead leading the way—you also need the credibility of lived experience,” said Wright, who directs addiction treatment for Boston Healthcare for the Homeless.


pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

It came from my sense—widely reflected, I think—that we’re tearing each other apart. That realization hit me on a precise date: February 25, 2016. Late in 2015, I’d started a speaking tour on college campuses, heading first to the University of Missouri. That campus exploded into the national news after Black Lives Matter protests against the administration; the football team vowed not to take the field for a scheduled game, despite the administration’s overzealous response to vague reports of isolated racist incidents, some of which were completely unsubstantiated. Student protesters declared a hunger strike, formed an encampment, and refused access to journalists.

., 216 Bacon, Francis, 77–79, 107, 111, 165, 170 Bacon, Kevin, 16 Bacon, Roger, 69 Baumeister, Roy, 207 Beauvoir, Simone de, 198 Becket, Thomas, 63 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 216 Benedict, Saint, 64 Bentham, Jeremy, 110 Bible, 5, 7, 9–10, 20, 24, 27–31, 34, 36–37, 47, 65, 81, 87–89, 101, 103, 106, 123, 133, 160, 180–82, 212, 216 Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia, 91 Bismarck, Otto von, 145–46 Black Lives Matter, xix Black Panther Party, 198 Black Power (Carmichael and Hamilton), 198 blacks, xiv, xvi–xvii, 93–94, 187, 189, 198–201, 203, 206 Blackstone, 123 Bloom, Allan, 50 Boethius, 64 Boniface VIII, Pope, 74 Boreing, Jeremy, xx Bouie, Jamelle, 203 Branden, Nathaniel, 195 Brandt, Karl, 156 Breitbart News, xxii Britain, 121, 127 Brookhiser, Richard, 11 Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoyevsky), 116 Browder, Sue Ellin, 168 Brubaker, William Rogers, 129 Buck v.


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Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

And once you surround yourself with those people, then you get what you deserve. I mean, you get what you want. * On January 1, 2009, at the Fruitvale BART Station, Oscar Grant was handcuffed by the police, forced to lie facedown, and was shot in the back. His death sparked protests throughout the Bay Area, anticipating the Black Lives Matter movement. † A measure passed in 2002, sponsored by then Mayor Gavin Newsom, that cut direct cash assistance to the homeless in favor of funding shelters and other programs. PART V IF WE CAN MERGE THE TWO WORLDS “Tech” is not a monolith, the public sector is not a single body, and those who fight for social justice do not speak in a common voice.

Many of the solutions that will bring about racial-social justice, put an end to police violence, do those kinds of things—need to have, at their root, technology. Technology, to scale. Technology, for accessibility. Technology, for low-cost solutions and low barriers to entry. Technology in and of itself is going to be a critical part of the movement. Twitter itself has been a critical part of bringing Black Lives Matter to the forefront. That was in spite of what Twitter thought it was doing! This is the place where stuff is scalable, where we will start to build apps that are about access to clean water and not delivering food to my doorstep. This is the moment when we can merge the amazingness of Silicon Valley technology and the Bay Area’s roots in protest politics and social justice.


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Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Shapiro, even found that polarization—defined here as a composite of eight measures, from how ideologically consistent someone’s views are to how rarely they split their votes across the two parties—has “increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use the Internet and social media,” which is to say, people older than sixty-five. The polarization frame has a further problem: it evokes a false equivalence between Left and Right. It is certainly true that left-wing movements have benefited from social media. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the candidacies of Bernie Sanders probably wouldn’t have reached the scale they did without Twitter and Facebook. The power shift from traditional media to the more distributed informational worlds of social media has created more room for social- democratic, socialist, and abolitionist ideas to circulate.

The advertising materials in the campaign for Proposition 22 struck a similar note, promoting the narrative that gig companies offer economic opportunities to Black and Latino workers; see Levi Sumagaysay, “Race Has Played a Large Role in Uber and Lyft’s Fight to Preserve Their Business Models,” MarketWatch, October 19, 2020. 133, On a spring morning … Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, 17. 134, In the 1990s, the idea … Television commercials: Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002), 87–99. Prominent pundits: Ibid., 13, 106–7. “Ours is a world …”: Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 134, Yet it was abundantly clear … “It wasn’t a question …”: Charlton McIlwain, Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 96. See ibid., 95–97, for a discussion of racism on Usenet. There is also the notorious case discussed by journalist Julian Dibbell in his piece “A Rape in Cyberspace,” initially published in the Village Voice in December 1993 and later included in revised form in My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998).


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Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

A wiry older man in a black suit with a red tie holds up a sign, “KKK FOR TRUMP,” and flips it over to reveal, “TRUMP, DUKE FOR 2016.” At first I think he is a protestor, but looking at his face more closely, surmise he’s KKK. He flicks a security guard away with his arms but is finally escorted out. Black Lives Matter protestors also appear, having marched in along with other protestors whose signs say things like: “THIS VET IS NOT 4 TRUMP”; “SMALL HANDS, SMALL HEART”; “NO TRUMP, NO KKK, NO FASCIST USA.” Seeing these, Trump orders security, pointing to a man, “Get that guy out. Get him out.” Others in the crowd point to the dissenter.

In speeches to large, excited crowds, over the days to come, Trump tells his fans what he offers them. “I’ve been greedy. I’m a businessman . . . take, take, take. Now I’m going to be greedy for the United States” (wild cheers). He also draws a clear dividing line between Christians, to whom he promises the return of Christian public culture on one hand, and Muslims and protestors holding Black Lives Matter signs on the other. Some protestors he refers to as “bad, bad people. . . . They do nothing . . . you hear that weak voice out there? That’s a protestor. . . . They aren’t protestors. I call them disruptors.” In other speeches Trump said, in reference to a protestor, “I’d like to punch him in the face” (February 23, 2016).

People of the right tend to empathize with the rich; those of the left, with the poor worker (Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders being favorites). During the summer of 2015, I found the Facebook pages of my right-wing interviewees to be filled with positive stories of white police officers, and those of my Bay Area friends to be discussing the Black Lives Matter movement. Each side has its own empathy map. See “Empathy Maps” in my book, So How’s the Family? and Other Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012 [1983]). 633 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered “yes” Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 3 (2014): 45; Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76, no. 3: 405–31. 6partyism, as some call it, now beats race Cass R.


Policing the Open Road by Sarah A. Seo

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, jitney, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, strikebreaker, the built environment, traffic fines, War on Poverty

Although Bland was not killed during the traffic stop, in 2015, the year of her death, 27 percent of police killings of unarmed citizens began with a traffic stop, according to one survey. Bland herself had been increasingly vocal on social media against police abuse and violence against African Americans, especially when the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum after a police officer fatally shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. It turned out that what had happened in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, was part of a larger trend. The US Department of Justice opened an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department and found “a pattern of unconstitutional policing” that skewed along racial lines.

Journalists and policymakers have already announced the decline of the car’s central role in American life as younger generations prefer urban lifestyles and Uberization. Concerns about the arbitrary policing of Everyman sound out of touch with a racialized War on Drugs, Driving While Black, and Black Lives Matter. Public discussion is now focused on discriminatory policing.1 Although the concerns of the past may seem distant today, we are still grappling with the fallout from developments that occurred in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In response to the automotive revolution, American society shifted to policing as a mode of governance and updated its laws to sanction police discretion.

See Common law of arrests; Search incident to arrest Associational governance. See Voluntarism Automobile exception, 137–140. See also Carroll v. United States Beat policing, 104–106, 110 Beck, James, 114–115, 124, 127, 269 Berkeley Police Department, 31, 64–68, 81, 98 Black drivers, 31–32 Black Lives Matter, 5–6, 267 Black on Black, 214–216 Blackmun, Harry, 152–153, 253 Bland, Sandra, 5–7 Boyd v. United States, 125, 136 Brandeis, Louis, 17, 18, 130–132, 136 Brennan, William, 194, 251–252 Bright-line rules, 226, 242–243, 250–252 Brinegar v. State, 232–236, 247, 252, 254, 261, 262 Brinegar v.


pages: 276 words: 71,950

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Cass Sunstein, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fixed income, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, Oklahoma City bombing, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Both were described as “forms of racial supremacy” that are merging “seamlessly.” During the protest, the participants chanted: “No justice! No peace! No war in the Middle East! No Zionists, no KKK, resisting fascists all the way.”1 In April 2017 at the University of Michigan, a group of students associated with Black Lives Matter hung posters on campus decrying an array of prejudices. There was no mention of antisemitism. This absence was not lost on Jewish students, who had been targeted by antisemitic incidents earlier that year. In a sad bit of irony, that night a local (probably nonstudent) white nationalist, alt-right group tagged the posters with Happy Merchant stickers.

PROGRESSIVISM AND ZIONISM: ANTISEMITISM BY SUBTERFUGE? 1. Matthew Stein, “Students for Justice in Palestine Defends Violence against Pro-Israel Groups, Calls Them ‘Fascists,’ ” College Fix, September 17, 2017. 2. Colin Beresford and Alon Samuel, “White Nationalist Group Puts Up Anti-Semitic Stickers on Black Lives Matters Posters,” University of Michigan Daily, April 26, 2017; Tilly Shames, Director, University of Michigan Hillel, email, April 19, 2018. 3. Diane Lederman, “More than 200 UMass Students Call for Free Education, $15 Minimum Wage, Greater Diversity at Rally,” Mass Live, November 12, 2015. 4.


pages: 232 words: 78,701

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual by Luvvie Ajayi

affirmative action, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, clean water, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Skype, Snapchat, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, upwardly mobile

Being able to move and navigate in the world unaware of how race impacts people of color must give life a rosy tint that makes it easier to deal with. However, it makes it harder for those of us who do not have that setting. It’s the well-meaning, yet offensive aunty of the “All Lives Matter” crew, the folks who have to respond with that anytime we say “Black Lives Matter.” We know all lives should matter, but ALL lives cannot matter until Black lives matter, too. I’m not sure who I side-eye more, though: Team I Don’t See Color or Team Let Me Honor You by Painting My Face Black for Halloween. One group thinks they’re laudable for not acknowledging racial differences, and the other thinks being represented by face paint should make us feel appreciated.


pages: 302 words: 73,946

People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams by Jono Bacon

Airbnb, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bounce rate, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, content marketing, Debian, Firefox, gamification, if you build it, they will come, IKEA effect, imposter syndrome, Internet Archive, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, lateral thinking, Mark Shuttleworth, Minecraft, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, planetary scale, pull request, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Scaled Composites, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Virgin Galactic, Y Combinator

He felt his work didn’t have meaning. We need our work to have meaning, and the communities that succeed the most are clearly able to draw a connection between the work of their members and the broader mission of the overall community. This is why activist groups such as Amnesty International, the Sierra Club, and Black Lives Matter generate so much devotion: their members feel their work has much broader meaning. Somewhat magically, when we do feel our work has meaning, it gives us a turbo boost of confidence to step up and have impact. This is where the big, brave ideas come from, emboldened by the respect we now have in the community.

Index Abayomi, 1–3, 7, 9, 19, 35, 278 abuse of system, 158, 217, 233, 234 access, 7–8, 16–17, 54–55, 225, 226 accountability, 139, 146, 148, 149 actions, tracking, 158–59 active participation, 109 adaptability, 176–77, 268–69 Adobe, 244 advertising, 195–96 advocacy, 23–24, 49, 111 Airbnb, 57 ambiguity, 155–56 American Physical Society, 139 Amnesty International, 18 Anderson, Chris, 46, 47 Android platform, 65 Ansari XPRIZE, xviii Apache, 6, 26 Apple, 6, 58, 128 approachability, 69–70 Ardour, 44, 52, 66 Areas of Expertise, 172–75 Ariely, Dan, 17 assets, building, 68–69 assumptions, 137, 271 asynchronous access, 54 attendance, 157 attendees, summit, 247–49 audience personas, 100, 108–19 in Bacon Method, 33 choosing, 109–12 content for, 194–95 creating, 114–16 examples of, 116–19 on Incentives Map, 230–32 On-Ramp Model for, 131, 135–38 Participation Framework for, 130 prioritizing, 112–13 productive participation by, 162–67 and relatedness, 107 audience(s) access to, 7–8 assumptions about, 137 and community strategy, 13 irrational decision making by, 101–8 for local communities, 5 surprising, 73–74 understanding your, 33, 99–100 authenticity, 75, 111, 183, 224 authority, 55–56, 200–201 Author persona, 166–67 automated measuring of condition, 217–18 autonomy, 105–6, 123 awareness, 22–24, 59–61, 192 Axe Change service, 14 Axe-Fx processors, 49–50 backlog, 150–51 Bacon Method, 32–34 Bahns, Angela, 47 Bassett, Angela, 237 Battlefield, 24, 128, 228 behavioral economics, 102–4 Bell, Alexander Graham, 153 belonging, sense of, 15, 18, 20, 143, 187, 215 Bennington, Chester, 183, 184 Big Rocks, 33, 88–96 and cadence-based cycles, 168–70 in community strategy, 94–95 and critical dimensions, 157, 161 defined, 88–89 departmental alignment on, 263 examples of, 91–94 format and key components of, 89–91 and Quarterly Delivery Plan, 34, 145–46, 148, 149 realistic thinking about, 95–96 Black Lives Matter, 18 blocked (status), 147 blogs, 193, 275 Bosch, 13 brand awareness, 24, 59–60 brand recognition, 85 Branson, Richard, 190 Buffer, 214 Build Skills stage, 132, 136, 137 business cards, 241–42 buy-in, 67, 85 cadence, operating on, 34, 264–66 Cadence-Based Community Cycle, 167–70, 264 Canonical, 1, 121, 151, 167, 245 capabilities, persona, 114, 116–18 Capital One, 13 career experience, 83 CasinoCoin, 244 Casual members, 129, 140–42 advancing, 196–97 engagement with, 198–99 incentivizing, 219, 221, 226–27 maturity model for, 166 mentoring, 203 CEOs, reporting to, 260 certainty, 105 Champions model, 49–52, 63–64, 66–67, 113, 260 chat channel, 250 check-ins, 267 civility, 187 clarity, 69–72, 138–39, 234 closing party, 250 coaching, 82–83, 205–6 Coca-Cola, 57 Coffee Bean Rewards app, 145 Colbert, Stephen, 73–74 collaboration, 8–9, 74–75, 185–86 Collaborators model, 52–56, 64–67, 86, 260, see also Inner Collaborator community; Outer Collaborator community commitment, 122 communication, 121 Community Associate, 255 Community Belonging Path, 16–20 community building, 14 additional resources on, 274–76 Bacon Method of, 32–34 as chronological journey, 127–28 consultations on, 276–77 continuing to learn about, 272–74 defining your value for, 77–78 end-to-end experience in, 125–26 fundamentals of, 15–16 getting started with, 37–38, 62 key principles of, 67–74 monitoring activities related to, 206–8 risks associated with, 154–55 tools for, 8 see also successful community building community–community engagement, 157 community culture, 30–31, 70–72, 179–88 Community Director, 254–58, 260 Community Engagement Model(s), 49–67 in Bacon Method, 33–34 Champions model, 49–52 Collaborators model, 52–59 and Community Value Statement, 80 Consumers model, 45–48 importance of selecting, 43–45 and marketing/public awareness, 59–61 scenarios for selecting, 61–67 Community Evangelist, 255 community(-ies) defined, 13–15 digital, 2–3, 5–13, 237 experimenting in, 123 foundational trends in, 7–9 future of, 35, 277–79 local, 3–5 power of, 7 social dynamics of, 15–16 value generated by, 20–29 Community Launch Timeline Template, 191 Community Leadership Summit, 179, 239 community management staff, 254–61 Community Managers, 78, 125, 126, 195, 255–56, 260–61 Community Mission, 40–43, 169 Community Mission Statement, 42, 80, 113 Community On-Ramp Model, 33–34, 130–38 community overview cards, 241–42 Community Participation Framework, 128–45 building community based on, 151–52 and building engagement, 138–44 Community On-Ramp Model in, 130–38 described, 128–30 engagement strategy to move members along, 196–206 focusing on creativity and momentum in, 209 incentives and rewards in, 145 incentives on, 211–13 incentivizing transitions in, 218–22, 226–27 mentoring in, 202–6 Community Personal Scaling Curve, 184 Community Persona Maturity Model, 163–67 Community Promise, 70–71 Community Specialist, 255 community strategy, 30 Big Rocks in, 94–95 changing, 96, 208 control over and collaboration on, 74–75 Core members’ contributions to, 201 execution of, 253–54 importance of, 13 integration of, in organization, 261–68 learning from implementation of, 268–69 planning, 39 Regular members in, 143 risks with, 29–32 and SCARF model, 105–8 variability in, 30 community summits, 245–51 finalizing attendees and content for, 247–49 follow through after, 250–51 running, 249–50 structure for, 246–47 community value, 164–67 Community Value Proposition, 175 Community Value Statement, 80–88 and Big Rocks, 89, 95 in cadence-based cycle, 169 maintaining focus on, 97 and on-ramp design, 135–36 prioritizing audience personas based on, 113 updating, 83–84, 87–88 value for community members in, 80–84 value for organization in, 84–88 company–community engagement, 157 competitions, 194 complete (status), 147 CompuServe, 5 conditions, for incentives, 216–18, 230–32 Conference Checklist, 241 conferences, 194, 195, 239, 240–43 connection(s) desire for, 9 for Regular members, 200 constructive criticism, 122–23 consultations, on community building, 276–77 Consumers model, 45–48, 62–63, 260 content for community summits, 247–49 in Growth Strategy, 192–95 for launch, 189 as source of value, 82 Content Creators (persona), 110–11, 113–15 content development in Champion communities, 49–50 in Collaborator communities, 52–56 by communities, 26–27 as source of value, 82, 86–87 contests, 194 contributions, to communities, 17, 19 control over community strategy, 74–75 over Regular members, 143 co-organizing events, 239 Core members, 129, 140 advancement for, 196–97 characteristics of, 143–44 at community summits, 242 engagement with, 201–2 incentivizing, 215, 219–20, 222, 227 maturity model for, 165, 166–67 mentoring for, 203, 205 percentage of, 141 creativity, 209 critical dimensions, 156–58, 161 criticism, 122–23, 176 cross-functional communities, 88 crowdfunding, 23–24 Cruz, Ted, 73–74 culture, community, see community culture Culture Cores, 181–88 customer engagement, 20–22 customer growth, as source of value, 85 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, 21 Cycle Planning, 168 Cycle Reviews, 268 dashboards, 160–61 data analysis, 207, 208 Davis, Miles, 182 Debian, 6, 26 decision making irrationality of, 101–8 pragmatism about, 184 SCARF model of behavior, 104–8 System 1 and 2 thinking, 102–3 unpopular decisions, 186 decision paralysis, 38, 106 dedicated events, organizing, 239–40 delayed (status), 147 delivery commitment to, 263–64 successful, 162, 167–70 delivery, as critical dimension, 157 delivery plans, see Quarterly Delivery Plan demonstrations, 194, 244 departmental alignment, 263–64 developer community, Big Rocks for, 93–94 Developer Relations personnel, 255 Developers (persona), 111, 114, 115 Diamandis, Peter, 40 Dickinson, Emily, 211 difficulty, of condition, 217 diffusion chain, 54 Digg, 12–13 digital communities early, 5–7 evolution of, 9–13 foundational trends in, 7–9 in-person events for, 237 as local and global communities, 2–3 digital interaction, and in-person events, 251 digital training, 243–44 dignity, 17 discipline, for community building, 31 Discourse, 66, 228, 233, 267 discovery, in gamification, 233 discussion forums, 49 Disney, 128 Docker, 12, 56 documentation, 274 domain expertise, 256, 257 Dreamforce conference, 22 Drupal, 204 Early Adopter program, 189–90 Editorial Calendar, 192–95 education (about product or service) in communities, 24–25 as source of value, 82 efficiency, as critical dimension, 157 ego calibration, 234–35 empathy, 186–87 employees openness for, 182–83 training and mentoring for, 266–68 empowerment, 55–56, 222 end-to-end experience, 59, 125–26 engagement as Area of Expertise, 174 Big Rocks related to, 93–94 with community, 72 in Community On-Ramp Model, 133–34, 136, 137 and Community Participation Framework, 138–44 in Community Participation Framework, 129 at conferences, 242 critical dimensions related to, 157 customer and user, 20–22 and Growth Strategy, 192 positivity and, 185 quality of, 159 rules for engaging with community members, 119–22 and submarine incentives, 226 and understanding audience, 99–100 Engagement Strategy, 181, 196–206 engineering department, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 equal opportunity, in Collaborator communities, 55, 58–59 estimated units, on Incentives Map, 231, 232 Event Evolution Path, 238–40 Event Organizers (persona), 111, 114–15, 117–18 events in-person, see in-person events online, 193 Everett, Noah, 224 execution of community strategy, 253–54, 268 successful, 162, 167–70 expectations clear, 70–72 in gamification, 234 in great experience, 127 related to Big Rocks, 95–96 experience, of audience persona, 114, 116, 118 experimentation, 123, 171 to build organizational capabilities, 206–8 with events, 251 expertise of community leadership staff, 256, 257 of community members, 28 in digital communities, 8 as source of value, 83 Exploding Kittens game, 24 extrinsic rewards, 214, 215, 216 on Incentives Map, 231 submarine incentives for, 224–25 Facebook, 13, 24 failure, as opportunity for improvement, 151 fairness in SCARF model, 107–8 of submarine incentives, 225 Fans as audience persona, 110, 113 community model for, 44, 62–63 fears, of audience persona, 114–15, 117, 118 Fedora, 66, 264 feedback about audience personas, 116 on Big Rocks, 94–95 from communities, 72–73 and community culture, 186 from Core members, 202 on mission statement, 41 on Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model, 176 in peer-based review, 204 from Regular members, 143, 200 Figment community, 10 Final Fantasy, 128 financial commitment, and creating value, 96 Firefox, 23, 209 Fitbit, 139, 145 focus for community building, 31 on Community Value Statement, 97 follow through after community summits, 250–51 after conferences, 242–43 formal experience, 114 forums, 91–92, 158 founders, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 Four Rules for Measuring Effectively, 156–61 Fractal Audio Systems, 14–15, 49–50 freeloaders, 54 fun, in community experience, 84 gamification, 232–35 Garmin, 190 GitHub, 24 global communities, digital communities as local and, 2–3 Global Learning XPRIZE Community, 189 GNOME, 26 GNU community, 6 goals for community summit sessions, 249 of Core members, serving, 202 for employee participation with community, 267 in incentives, 214 on Incentives Map, 230–32 for new hires, 259 Google, 13, 57, 58, 65, 128 Gordon-Levitt, Dan, 11–12 Gordon-Levitt, Joseph, 11–12, 219 governance, in Inner Collaborator communities, 66 gratification, 120, 127 group dynamics, 100, 119–22 group experiences, referral halo for, 61 grow, willingness to, 257 Growth (Area of Expertise), 174 growth, as critical dimension, 157 Growth Strategy, 181, 188–96 growth plan, 192–96 launch plan, 189–91 guest speakers, 238–39 habits, building, 142, 267 HackerOne, 69–70, 194, 214 Harley Owners Group, 132 help asking community members for, 120, 144 as source of value, 82 high-level objectives, see Big Rocks hiring, 27–29, 256 hiring away approach, 258–59 HITRECORD, 11–12, 219 Hoffman, Reid, 152 HomeRecording.com community, 81 humility, 187, 257 hypothesis testing, 207–8, 271–72 IBM, 6 idealism, 153–54 IGN (Imagine Games Network), 47–48 Ikea Effect, 101–2 impact in Community Belonging Path, 18 and Engagement Strategy, 199 multiplying, with communities, 2, 3, 9 imperfections, 188 imposter syndrome, 142 inauthentic participation, 233 incentives, xvii–xviii, 197 in Community Participation Framework, 145 on Community Participation Framework, 211–13 components of, 213–18 in Growth Strategy, 196 maintaining personal touch with, 235 in Outer Collaborator communities, 65 power of offering, 213–18 stated vs. submarine, 218–27 Incentives Map, 34, 229–32 Incentive Transition Points, 218–19 stated incentives for, 221–22 submarine incentives for, 226–27 incentivization building engagement with, 140 in Community Participation Framework, 130 Incubation stage, 171, 172 independent authenticity, 111 Indiegogo, 23 individual value, 164–67 influence, psychological importance of, 71 Influencing phase (Product Success Model), 52 information in community, 121 in digital communities, 8 infrastructure, for launch, 189 Inner Collaborator community, 56–58, 65–67, 86, 229 Inner Developers (persona), 111 in-person events community summits, 245–51 conferences, 240–43 and digital training vs. training workshops, 243–45 Event Evolution Path and strategy for, 238–40 fusion of digital interactions and, 251 in Growth Strategy, 195 launch, 190–91 in local communities, 4–5 managing, 237–38 value of, 77–78 in progress (status), 147 insight, from communities, 28, 72–73 intangible value, 78–79, 83 Integration stage, 171–72 Intel, 57 intentionality, 39, 69–70, 187 Intention stage, 171, 172 internal communities, 13 Community Engagement Model for, 66–67 importance of culture for, 180 personal interaction in, 185 value of, for community members, 83 Internet, 5–7, see also digital communities Internet Explorer, 23 intrinsic rewards, 215, 224–25 involved teams, on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 147, 148 Iron Maiden, 39 Jeep, 139 Jenkins, 26 job candidates, community members as, 27–29 job descriptions, community leadership staff, 258 Jokosher, 199 jQuery, 204 Kahneman, Daniel, 102 karma (Reddit), 228 Key Initiatives, for Big Rocks, 90, 91–93 keynote addresses, 245–47 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), 90–94 cadence-based cycles for delivery of work on, 169, 170 on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 146, 148–50 tracking progress on, 159–60, 160–61 Kickstarter, 12, 23 Kubernetes, 26, 53, 66, 134, 204 labor, community members as source of, 120 The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (television series), 73–74 launch event, 190–91 launch plan, 189–91 leaders, community, 3, 4 leadership as Area of Expertise, 174 and autonomy in organizations, 123 clear and objective, 69–70 in community culture, 186 community involvement by, 262 by Core members, 144 in Inner Collaborator communities, 66 leadership value, 165, 167 lead generation, 28–29 A League of Their Own (film), 39 learning about community building, 272–74 from community strategy implementation, 268–69 Learning phase (Product Success Model), 51 Lego, 9, 10 Lego Ideas, 10 Lenovo, 57 Leonardo da Vinci, 37 Lindbergh, Charles, xvii Linkin Park, 183 Linux, 6, 26, 273–74 Linux Foundation, 26, 74 live stream, 250 local communities decline of, 3–5 digital communities as global and, 2–3 The Long Tail (Anderson), 46 Ma, Jack, 77 Ma Jian, 125 Make:, 195 Management (Area of Expertise), 173–74 marketing, 22–24 audience personas in, 108–9 and Community Engagement Model, 59–61 as source of value, 85 marketing department, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 Mastering phase (Product Success Model), 51–52 Mattermost, 214 maturity models, 34 Community Persona Maturity Model, 163–67 Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model, 171–76 meaningful work, 9, 17–18, 27, 41 measurable condition, 217 measurable goals, 160 measurable value, in Community Persona Maturity Model, 164–65 measuring effectively, rules for, 156–61 meeting people, as source of value, 82 meetings after conferences, 242–43 with conference attendees, 241 in local communities, 4–5 Meetup.com, 133 meetups, organizing, 239 mentoring for Casual members, 142 for community-building employees, 267–68 for community leadership staff, 256 by community members, 29 in Community Participation Framework, 202–6 of new hires, 259 as source of value, 82–83 meritocracy, 55 message boards, 5–6 Metal Gear Solid, 128 Metrics (Area of Expertise), 175 Mickos, Mårten, 69–70, 74, 262 Microsoft, 6, 13, 23 Minecraft, 25 Minecraft Forum, 25 Minecraft Wiki, 25 Minimum Viable Product, 68–69 mission statements, 32, 42, 80, 113 momentum, in Engagement Strategy, 198 momentum effect, 209 in Growth Strategy, 188, 195 in marketing and brand/product awareness, 60–61 motivations for audience persona, 114, 117, 118 for community members, 119–20 Mozilla, 23 MySpace, 12–13 NAMM music show, 239 need, for community, 30 networking, 28–29, 242 New York Times, 23 Nextcloud, 134 niche interests, 45–47 Nintendo, 9, 228 norms, cultural, 70, 130, 180, 182 notification, 147, 148 not started (status), 147 objectives, see also Big Rocks objectivity, of leadership, 69–70 onboarding, 107 in Community Participation Framework, 129 Community Persona Maturity Model for members in, 164, 165–66 gamification for, 233 importance of, 130–31 in Outer Collaborator communities, 65 online events, 193 On-Ramp members, incentivizing, 218–19, 221, 226–27 openness, 182–84 open-source code, 26, 53 open-source communities, 57–58, 261 Open Source community, 10 OpenStack, 26 optimization, in Engagement Strategy, 199–200 Optimizing phase (Product Success Model), 51 organizational capabilities building, with communities, 27–29 cadence-based cycles for building, 265–66 executing strategy to build, 253–54 experimentation to build, 206–8 success in terms of building, 162, 171–76 organizational experience, of community members, 122 organizational values, and community culture, 182–88 organizations community members as labor for, 120 identifying value for, 84–88 integration of community strategy in, 261–68 internal communities at, 13 leadership and autonomy in, 123 Orteig Prize, xvii Outer Collaborator community, 56–59, 64–65, 86 Outer Developers (persona), 111–12, 136–37 Owner of Big Rocks, 90, 91 in cadence-based cycles, 168–69 on Incentives Map, 231, 232 on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 147, 148 Participant Rewards Peak, 215–16 participation active, 109 audience personas and types of, 109 by Casual members, 142 in Consumer communities, 48 inauthentic, 233 productive, 162–67 PayPal, 13, 57 Pebble Smartwatch, 23 peer-based review, 203–5 peer-review process, 55 peer support, 139–40 peer value, 164–67 Peloton, 133, 233 Penney, James Cash, 253 people person, 256–57 perfection, 268–69 performance review, community engagement in, 262 permanence, of communities, 14 personal interaction, 184–85, 199 personal touch with incentives, 235 and submarine awards, 222–26 personal validation, 120, 224–25 personas, audience, see audience personas Photoshop “Magic Minute” videos, 244 PlayStation, 233 podcasts, 194 Pop!


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Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

Commodifying the language of Eastern and Indigenous spiritual practices for an elitist white audience while erasing and shutting out their originators might not seem “culty”—it might just seem commonplace, which is exactly the problem. For years, CrossFit HQ denied any suggestion that its culture was unwelcoming to Black members. But during the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, Greg Glassman shot off a series of racist emails and tweets (in one, he responded to a post about racism as a public health crisis with “It’s FLOYD-19”), prompting white CrossFitters to finally start coming around to what many Black folks had known for decades: The place was not really “for everyone.”

It very well might bring you fulfillment and connection for forty-five minutes at a time, but you’d still be you without it. You’re already blessed with all you need. Part 6 Follow for Follow i. It’s June 2020, one of the most contentious months in contemporary American history, and my Instagram algorithm is on the fritz. Amid posting about the global COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter, while keeping up with all the New Age swamis, MLM recruiters, and conspiracy theorists I’ve followed over the past year, my Explore page can’t seem to tell whether I’m a social justice warrior, a Plandemic truther, an antivaxxer, a witch, an Amway distributor, or just really obsessed with essential oils.


pages: 502 words: 132,062

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

To say nothing of the existential dread imposed by a system freeze, malfunction, or loss of data, or of the vast amounts of heat, carbon dioxide and manufacturing wastes pumped into the atmosphere. This continuity between technology, the body and the biosphere – this ecology – is perceptible in language, as it is in culture, sociality and our relationships with one another and the more-than-human world. One of the impacts of the Black Lives Matter movement has been a reassessment of computational language. Back in 2003, the County of Los Angeles asked that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stop using the terms ‘master’ and ‘slave’ on computer equipment. The request followed a discrimination complaint by a county employee who objected to seeing such terms being applied to machines – in this case, a videotape replicator.21 Historically, such terms have been used by computer scientists to designate primary and secondary repositories of stored data.

In 2020, the debate gained renewed attention when Regynald Augustin, a Black engineer at Twitter, pushed for the platform to change its coding guidelines after receiving an email notifying him about an ‘automatic slave rekick’. Twitter also dropped the use of the term ‘blacklist’ to denote banned users or terms, partly in response to pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement.22 The software-development platform GitHub, with 50 million users, and the ubiquitous database system MySQL, among others, followed suit. While changes to language are often dismissed as performative at best, and pointless at worst, they come from meaningful origins and have meaningful consequences.

Ross 181–3, 185 aspens 77 astrobiology 87 atomic bomb 224–5 Augustin, Regynald 156 Australopithecus 88 Author of the Acacia Seeds, The 169–71 automatic machine see Turing machine Autonomous Trap 26–7, 26, 204 autonomous vehicles 23–6, 65, 275 avocados 108 Babbage, Charles 30 baboons 32, 52–55, 64, 74 bacteria 17, 87–8, 104–10, 236–7, 248, 300 badgers 291 Barabási, Albert-László 81 Barad, Karen 84–6, 130, 249 Basilicata 138, 140–43 bears 1, 89–90, 92, 266, 290–91, 293–4 beavers 256 BeeAdHoc (computer programme) 262 beech 125, 142 Beer, Stafford 184–91, 211, 214–15, 230 bees 145, 187, 258–62 Bergson, Henri 279 Berners-Lee, Tim 81 birch 60, 118, 124, 138, 279 Black Language 168 Black Lives Matter 155 Blake, William 16 Blas, Zach 208 Boeing X-37 136 Bonner, John Tyler 238–9 bonobos 37, 50, 98 Boran (people) 146 Bornmuellera tymphaea 309 Boulez, Pierre 229 Boulle, Marcellin 90 Bouvet, Joachim 234 bow-wow theory 148 Brainfuck (programming language) 161–2 Brassica juncea 310 Bruniquel cave 92 buen vivir 268 cacti 64, 235, 294 Cage, John 227–35, 241, 242, 312 Cambridge Analytica 155 cantu a tenòre 148 capuchin monkeys 163 Caputo, Francesco 143 Caputo, Matteo 143 caribou 120 Carrol, Lewis 180 Carson, Rachel 12, 15 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de 18 caterpillars 65 Cecilia (chimpanzee) 265 cedars 138 cephalopods 47–51 CERN 81 Charlotte (gibbon) 32 Chassenée, Bartholomew 252 Chaucer, Geoffrey 152 Chernobyl 293 Chesapeake Bay Model 202, 203, 204 chestnuts 61, 118 Children of Time 49 chimpanzees 36–37, 50, 55–6, 88, 98, 145 choice machine see oracle machine Christ Stopped at Eboli 140 Christmas Island 293, 295 Chua, Leon O. 194 Chucho (bear) 266 Churchill, Winston 18 Citizens’ Assembly 243–5 Clarke, Arthur C. 158 climate change 5–6, 121–4, 242–5, 282, 301–2 climate modelling 78–9 Cloud (computing) 111–12, 158–9 Cochran, William 285, 297 cockatoos 163 Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot see Roachbot cockroaches 212, 258 cognitive diversity 246–8 Colossus (computer) 220 ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ 29 Conway’s Game of Life 161 corn 75 Corraro, Rosina 143 cougars 290 Covid-19 114 cows 140, 143, 149, 265, 302 crabs 48, 195–7, 256, 293, 293–5, 293, 307, 312 cuckoos 118 cuttlefish 47, 49 Cybernetic Factory 185, 186, 189–90 Cybernetic Serendipity 231 cybernetics 181–90, 214 Dallol see Danakil Depression Danakil Depression 86–8, 104 Daphnia 188–9, 191, 198 Darwin, Charles 12, 34–6, 72, 89, 127–30, 129, 235, 239 Darwin, Francis 127–30, 129 De Anima 122 de Martino, Ernesto 141–2 de Waal, Frans 39 Debord, Guy 24 decentralization 49, 208–10, 213, 280 DeepMind 8, 275 deer 65, 77, 258, 290–93, 298–9, 299 Delphi 174, 177 demilitarized zone (DMZ) 292 Denisova Cave 96 denisovans 96–8, 100 Denny (denisovan) 97, 100 Descartes, René 16 Descent of Man, The 36 Dimkaroski, Ljubem 90 ding-dong theory 147 Dinkinesh (Australopithecus) 88 distributed computing 209 Divje Babe 90–91, 91 DNA 95–7, 103–7 dodder vine 75 dogs 147–8, 163, 302 spinal dog 184, 212 Dolphin Embassy 165–6, 165 dolphins 37–8, 41–2, 145, 166, 170, 263, 286 Doolittle, Ford 109–10 Duchamp, Marcel 128–31, 129 ducks 256 earthquakes 302–3 Ebonics 168 EDVAC (computer) 223, 230 Eglash, Ron 156 elephants 34, 38–9, 40–44, 41, 64, 250–51, 263–5, 278, 291–2, 296, 312 Elmer (robot tortoise) 180 Elsie (robot tortoise) 180 email apnea 155 Emojicode (programming language) 161, 173 endosymbiosis 108 ENIAC (computer) 225, 230 Epirus 1–5, 308–9, 311 Epstein, Jean 138 ERNIE (computer) 220–22, 221, 222, 226, 236 Euglena 188–91 Euler, Leonhard 81 European Green Belt 292 evolution 12, 54, 67, 71, 96, 102, 146, 164, 235, 241, 247, 311 of computers 222 convergent evolution 42, 51, 231, 262 Darwin’s theories 36, 89, 128, 132, 235, 256 process 107–12 randomness 235–40 tree of evolution 47, 50–51, 96, 100 Explanation of Binary Arithmetic 234 Facebook 154, 275 ethics 277 gender categories 111–12, 208 language applications 167–9, 173 Fensom, Harry 220 finches 132, 235, 239 firs 60, 142, 279 Flowers, Tommy 220 Folding@home 209 Forte, Giovanni 143, 144 fossil fuels 3–6 Franklin, Benjamin 248 Fredkin, Edward 195 Frisch, Karl von 259 fungi 11, 17, 60–63, 78–82, 106–8, 128, 192, 290 Gagliano, Monica 71–5, 127, 303, 319 Gaia (goddess) 174, 190, 215 Gaia theory 190 Gallup, Gordon G., Jr 36, 39 Ganges River 266 gannets 132 Gates, Bill 8, 275 Gaup, Ingor Ántte Áilu 150 Gebru, Timnit 277 geese 164, 170 General Morphology of Organisms 11 ghost populations 88, 98 gibbons 32–4, 33, 38–9, 42, 52, 64, 312 goats 1, 140, 143, 148, 293, 302 Göbekli Tepe 93–4, 93 Godfrey-Smith, Peter 50 Gombe Stream National Park 55 gomphotheres 108 Goodall, Jane 55–6, 263 Google 8, 111, 154, 211, 241, 269, 275 ethics 156, 277 oil and gas applications 5–6 language applications 163, 167, 169 gorillas 44–7, 44, 98 Grant, Peter 236 Grant, Rosemary 236 graph theory 81 Great Chain of Being 123 Greece 1–5, 114, 216 Greenpeace 5 Griffith, Frederick 105 grouse 150 Grumpy (elephant) 40 Guantánamo Bay 296 Gudynas, Eduardo 268 gulls 133, 256 habeas corpus 41, 264–6, 270, 296 Hadza (people) 146 Haeckel, Ernst 11–12, 105, 239–40, 240 Hagenback, Karl 254 Half-Earth Project 305–6 Happy (elephant) 39–41, 41, 263–5, 273, 296 Haudenosaunee see Iroquois Confederacy Hawira, Turama 267 hawks 256 hawthorn 118 Heritage Foundation 277 Herodotus 3 Hertz, Garnet 212–13 Hilbert, David 178 Hiller, Lejaren 230–31, 233 Hofstadter, Douglas 262 Holmes, Rob 203 homeostat, 181–3, 182, 187, 206, 215 honey 143–6 honeyguides 143–6, 164 horizontal gene transfer 105–7 hornbeam 118 Hotbits 222 HPSCHD (composition) 230–32 Hribal, Jason 253–5 Hubble Space Telescope 135 HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee 154 Humboldt, Alexander von 239 Huxley, Aldous 113, 208 hyenas 257 hyperaccumulators 308–10 I Ching 228–231, 228, 234, 242 IBM 4–5 ICARUS (animal tracking) 284, 300, 302–3 ICHING (computer programme) 230–31 iguanas 296 ILLIAC (computer) 230 IM see instant messaging Inky (octopus) 48 instant messaging 152–3, 172–3 Institute of Contemporary Art 231 International Meridian Conference 116 International Space Station (ISS) 284 internet 80–82 Iroquois Confederacy 248 Island (novel) 113 Israeli Defense Forces 295 jackdaws 163 jaguars 294 jaguarundi cats 294 James Webb Space Telescope 135 jellyfish 180 Jenny (orang-utan) 34–6, 35 joik 149–50, 312 Keyhole (satellite) 136 Khan-Dossos, Navine 140 khoomei 149 Kidder, Tracy 117 King, William 89 King Solomon’s Ring 163 klepsydra 216–17, 217 klerotereion 218–19, 243 Koko (gorilla) 44, 45, 47 Konstantinou, Maria 309 Kowalsczewski, Bruno 91 Kropotkin, Peter 256–7, 279 Kunstforum der Natur 239, 240 Lack, David 132–3, 285 Land Art 203 Landsat 137, 137–9, 139 lapwing 256 laurel 174 Lavarand 222 Le Guin, Ursula 13, 169–71 Leakey, Louis 56 Lederberg, Esther 105 Lederberg, Joshua 105 Legg, Shane 8, 275 lemurs 163 Leptoplax emarginata 309 Levi, Carlo 141 lichens 107, 171 Liebniz, Gottfried 234 Lindauer, Martin 259–60, 284 lions 77, 257 Lord, Rexford 285, 297 Lorenz, Konrad 163–4 Lovelace, Ada 30 Lovelock, James 190 LUCA (last universal common ancestor) 103 Lucy (Australopithecus) see Dinkinesh Lukyanov, Valdimir 199–200, 199 lynx 290 macaques 42–4, 64, 254 machine learning 30, 63 Mandelbrot, Benoit 102 mangroves 138 Mansfield, Lord (William Murray) 264 Margulis, Lyn 108, 110, 112 Marino, Lori 38 Marsham, Robert 118 Marsham record 118–21 Matera 140 Maxine (elephant) 39 Maxwell, Sarah 301 McLuhan, Marshall 18 memristors 124–5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 150 Metropolis, Nick 225 mice 187 Michael (gorilla) 45, 47 Microsoft 5, 8, 154 Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, A 226, 226 mimosa 71–4, 127–8, 192, 195, 303 Mimosa pudica see mimosa Ministry for the Future, The 282 mirror test 36–46, 181 Mississippi Basin Model 201–2, 204 Mondrian, Piet 161 MONIAC 205, 205–7 Monte Carlo 225–7, 242 Moore, Michael 135 Morgan-Mar, David 161 moths 180 mouse-eared cress see rock cress Muir, John 11 Müller, Max 146–8 Müller, Urban 161 Museum of the Ancient Agora 216–18 Musk, Elon 8, 158, 275 Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution 256 mycorrhiza 60–62, 77–9, 81–2, 194 mynah birds 113 NASA see National Aeronautics and Space Administration Nasser, Ramsey 160–61 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 135, 137–9, 284, 286 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 137–8, 286 National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) 135 neanderthals 89–92, 94–8, 100 network theory 81 neural networks 24–5, 25, 82, 166, 275, 312 NEXRAD (Next-generation radar) 133, 134 Niassa National Reserve 143 nightingales 118 nightjars 118 non-binary activism 208 computing 208–9, 213, 312 identity 112 Nonhuman Rights Project 41, 263–5, 296 nutation 128, 197 oak 118–19, 124 ocelots 294 octopuses 111, 47–51, 73, 197, 209 oil industry 4–6 oleander 174 On the Origin of Species 11, 36, 89 Ook!


pages: 445 words: 135,648

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

A 2019 study reported that from 2001 to 2017 the suicide rate for African American girls ages thirteen to nineteen skyrocketed 182 percent, and 60 percent for boys the same age. There was an increasing amount of blatant racism online during this time, on top of the continued systemic racism and police brutality which led to the 2013 founding of the Black Lives Matter movement by three young Black women. I should have asked Alyson more about what she was going through. I wish I had. I couldn’t stop crying for a couple of days after she died. I couldn’t think, couldn’t hold a conversation. Zazie and I lay next to each other in bed, just holding each other.

“First of all, it was like 80 percent white people. Like ghetto white people looking for some jungle fever. My inbox was flooded with white dudes saying things like, ‘I got four Black baby mamas. Wanna be the fifth?’” She frowned. “They think that’s what Black people are like,” said Bianca. “It’s bad.” In June of 2020, Bianca organized a Black Lives Matter protest in Plainfield. Jaylin and Bree were there, as well as nearly a hundred others in the mostly white community. * * * Online dating can be bad for people in the LGBTQ+ community as well, as we heard from other characters in the film. At UC Santa Cruz, when I spoke to Vin, who identifies as bisexual, nonbinary, and trans, they told us about the harassing messages they routinely received on dating apps.

So I agreed to get on another call with a hot young writer, someone whom a certain producing team was considering to be the creator and showrunner of the show about my life. He was in his late twenties. Hollywood’s track record on hiring women is abysmal, especially women of color. Which makes it—even to this day, in a feminist wave, amid global protests for Black Lives Matter—a highly sexist and racist industry. Which is all the more troubling considering the outsized influence it has on the way people think and act. The statistics are shocking: Of the one hundred top grossing films of 2019, women made up only 12 percent of the directors, 20 percent of the writers, 2 percent of the cinematographers, and 26 percent of the producers (a small sample of industry jobs overall).


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Ingrid Nilsen, who sat in the audience, had grown more worried about online invective. No one had doxed her yet, but it seemed like only a matter of time. “YouTube just didn’t have an answer,” she recalled. “They knew the mess was a really big one.” * * * • • • Milo: “Milo Yiannopoulos denies Black Lives Matter protester special mic privileges.” April 27, 2016. 3:30. Milo Yiannopoulos, a Brit with frosted tips and a tired shtick as a gleeful troll, worked for Breitbart News. Here he is speaking at American University, part of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” of college campuses, where he holds forth against feminists, SJWs, and “cuckservatives.”

When it did, those affected by the answer, as usual, found it capricious and unfair. Others felt it came far too late. * * * • • • America’s tense summer began when a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck and took his life, igniting the nation’s largest mass protests since Vietnam. YouTube attempted to rise to the occasion. It put “Black Lives Matter” on its home page and managers spoke to the historic moment. (Sometimes clumsily: in one company meeting about the protests a white executive recruited to lead Trust and Safety told staff that he loved John Legend and that one of his groomsmen was Black.) The company earmarked $100 million for Black creators.

See also problematic/troubling content “bad baby” videos, 304, 307, 308–9, 312 banner ads, 73, 197, 200 Bannon, Steve, 263 Barberini, Ed, 334–35 Bardan, Tala, 291–93, 359–60, 380–81 Bardin, Ariel, 252–53, 258, 339, 392 Barlow, John Perry, 37 BBC, 87, 109, 299, 307–8, 323 beauty gurus, 188–89 Beckett, Miles, 41, 42 Benator, Max, 181 Benjamin, Carl (Sargon of Akkad), 223, 264, 294–95, 299, 378–79 Bennett, Graham, 323–24, 384, 392–93 Berg, Jeben, 112–13 bestiality videos, 7 Biden, Joe, 387, 397, 398, 399 Bieber, Justin, 56, 57, 108 Big Boys (website), 21 Big Frame, 158–59 bigoted content, 86 billion-hours-of-viewing goal, 228, 270 Bisognin, Marzia, 218 Black Americans “Black Lives Matter,” 378 as creators, 261–62, 293, 338–39, 378 and recommendation engine applied to racism, 235 and Yiannopoulos, 263–64 Black Ops project, 132–34 blip.tv, 78 Blitzer, Wolf, 137, 141 Blogger, 84 blogging, 58 BluCollection, 167 “Blurred Lines” (Thicke), 143–44 board of YouTube, 28, 30, 108 Bock, Laszlo, 179, 199, 203, 212–13, 349 bodybuilders, 256 boh3m3, 67 Bohner, Kate, 59 Bohrman, David, 89 Bolsonaro, Jair, 366, 371 Boorstin, Bob, 92, 143 borderline footage, 32, 309, 310, 368, 398.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

Imagine what would happen to the creative and iconoclastic character of the city—and the nation—without these populations. As Rebecca Solnit wrote, “A city without poets, painters, and photographers is sterile. . . It’s undergone a lobotomy.” The system today is such that even the most compassionate young queer poet—imagine her: dedicated to social justice, organizing with Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, working as a barista in the feminist cooperative bookshop—even she finds herself with little choice but to be a gentrifier, moving to a low-income neighborhood because that’s what she can afford and her social network is there. And what about me? I’m a white, educated, middle-class professional.

and waved signs that read “I ♥ Immigrant NY.” Once again, the insurgent heart of the city has a beat. And so, as I write this in unstable and uncertain January 2017, I dare to hope. Today’s violent convulsions may be signs that the New Gilded Age is thrashing in its death throes. Over the past few years, the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, and Bernie Sanders have energized a new generation of activists. The mainstream media finally started talking about economic inequality. Even the International Monetary Fund, a major champion of neoliberalism, admitted that free-market policies hinder growth, concluding, “The evidence of the economic damage from inequality suggests that policymakers should be more open to redistribution.”

., 27 Auletta, Ken, 105 AVA High Line, 240, 242–43 AvalonBay Communities, 91–92, 240, 242 Avalon Bowery, 91–92 Avalon Chrystie Place, 91–92 Baby Dee, 25, 360 Baby strollers, 230, 329–30 Baccarat Hotel & Residences, 182–83 Bachom, Sandi, 127 Bacon’s Rebellion, 61 Badalucco, Michael, 29 Badillo, Herman, 77–78 Bagatelle, 190–91 Bailey, Marlene (“Hot Dog”), 25 Balazs, André, 94 Baldwin, James, 65, 66 Ballarò, 21–22 B&H Dairy, 31 Bank of America Tower, 266 Banksy, 403 Barad, Ulo, 275–78 Barclays Center, 352, 353–54 Bard, Stanley, 216, 223 Barnes, Djuna, 130, 140 Barnes & Noble, 18 Barney, Matthew, 187 Barrison, Steven, 283 Barron, James, 51 Barry, Dan, 95, 167, 264–65, 364 Bartkoff, Regina, 51 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 87, 95 Baum, Dan, 74 Bay Ridge, 354, 355 Beame, Abraham, 76, 78, 249–50 Beast of the Feast, 126, 146 Beatrice Inn, 143 Becker, Serge, 87–89 Bedford-Atlantic Armory, 347 Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), 161, 343–45 Bellafante, Ginia, 256 Bella’s Luncheonette, 121 Bellevue South, 22 Bendix Diner, 219 Benepe, Adrian, 252 Berger, Joseph, 394 Berman, Marshall, 131, 392 Berrigan, Ted, 86 Bike lanes, 324, 340 Bill’s Gay 90s, 146 Biography Bookshop, 174 Blackburn, Paul, 358 Black Lives Matter, 325, 416 Blandalism, 232 Blarney Cove, 26 Bleecker Street, 171–76 Blesh, Rudi, 88 Bliss, George, 88 Blockbusting, 68–69 Bloomberg, Michael, 7, 8, 39, 155–67, 179, 205 Bronx and, 393–94 Brooklyn and, 337, 344, 346, 348, 350, 352, 354, 367–68 creative talent recruitment and, 324 de Blasio and, 169 East Village and, 21 Harlem and, 296–99, 308, 310, 313 homelessness and, 204 Hudson Yards and, 244–45 Lower East Side and, 53 luxury vision of city, 2, 37, 159–60, 200, 220 nanny state and, 166–67 Queens and, 376–77, 382, 384–85 rezonings and, 159–62 September 11 attacks and, 115, 137, 156–58 term limits and, 165–66 Times Square and, 265–66, 273–74 tourism and, 118, 250–52, 254, 258 West Chelsea and, 236, 239 Bloomberg Associates, 169 Bloomberg’s New York (Brash), 105, 115, 158–59 Blue & Cream, 92, 99–100 Blue Residential Tower, 50 Bobby’s Happy House, 299–300, 301–2 Bohemianism, 57–58, 60, 140–41, 142, 152–53 Boissevain, Jeremy, 257 Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe), 392 Bono, Jake, 382–84 Bono Sawdust Supply Company, 382–84 Bookmarc, 174–75 Borowitz, Andy, 167 Boulud, Daniel, 92–93 Bourgeois, Louise, 352 Bouwerie Lane Theater, 94 Bowery, 81–102 Bowery Bar, 87–90 Bowery Hotel, 93 Bowery House, 95 Bowery Residents’ Committee (BRC), 82 Bowery Wine Company, 92, 96 Bowles, Paul, 252 Bowman, David, 17 Boyer, M.


pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

People frequently lie—to themselves and to others. In 2008, Americans told surveys that they no longer cared about race. Eight years later, they elected as president Donald J. Trump, a man who retweeted a false claim that black people are responsible for the majority of murders of white Americans, defended his supporters for roughing up a Black Lives Matters protester at one of his rallies, and hesitated in repudiating support from a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The same hidden racism that hurt Barack Obama helped Donald Trump. Early in the primaries, Nate Silver famously claimed that there was virtually no chance that Trump would win. As the primaries progressed and it became increasingly clear that Trump had widespread support, Silver decided to look at the data to see if he could understand what was going on.

See Jews anxiety data about, 18 and truth about sex, 123 AOL, and truth about sex, 117–18 AOL News, 143 art, real life as imitating, 190–97 Ashenfelter, Orley, 72–74 Asher, Sam, 202 Asians, and truth about hate and prejudice, 129 asking the right questions, 21–22 assassinations, 227–28 Atlantic magazine, 150–51, 152, 202 Australia, pregnancy in, 189 auto-complete, 110–11, 116 Avatar (movie), 221–22 Bakshy, Eytan, 144 Baltimore Ravens-New England Patriots games, 221, 222–24 baseball and influence of childhood experiences, 165–69, 165–66n, 171, 206 and overemphasis on measurability, 254–55 predicting a player’s future in, 197–200, 200n, 203 and science, 273 scouting for, 254–55 zooming in on, 165–69, 165–66n, 171, 197–200, 200n, 203 basketball pedigrees and, 67 predicting success in, 33–41, 67 and socioeconomic background, 34–41 Beane, Billy, 255 Beethoven, Ludwig von, zooming in on, 190–91 behavioral science, and digital revolution, 276, 279 Belushi, John, 185 Benson, Clark, 217 Berger, Jonah, 91–92 Bezos, Jeff, 203 bias implicit, 134 language as key to understanding, 74–76 omitted-variable, 208 subconscious, 132 See also hate; prejudice; race/racism Big Data and amount of information, 15, 21, 59, 171 and asking the right questions, 21–22 and causality experiments, 54, 240 definition of, 14, 15 and dimensionality, 246–52 and examples of searches, 15–16 and expansion of research methodology, 275–76 and finishing books, 283–84 future of, 279 Google searches as dominant source of, 60 honesty of, 53–54 importance/value of, 17–18, 29–33, 59, 240, 265, 283 limitations of, 20, 245, 254–55, 256 powers of, 15, 17, 22, 53–54, 59, 109, 171, 211, 257 and predicting what people will do in future, 198–200 as revolutionary, 17, 18–22, 30, 62, 76, 256, 274 as right data, 62 skeptics of, 17 and small data, 255–56 subsets in, 54 understanding of, 27–28 See also specific topic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 255 Billings (Montana) Gazette, and words as data, 95 Bing (search engine), and Columbia University-Microsoft pancreatic cancer study, 28, 30 Black, Don, 137 Black Lives Matter, 12 Blink (Gladwell), 29–30 Bloodstock, Incardo, 64 bodies, as data, 62–74 Boehner, John, 160 Booking.com, 265 books conclusions to, 271–72, 279, 280–84 digitalizing, 77, 79 number of people who finish, 283–84 borrowing money, 257–61 Bosh, Chris, 37 Boston Globe, and A/B testing, 214–17 Boston Marathon (2013), 19 Boston Red Sox, 197–200 brain, Minsky study of, 273 Brazil, pregnancy in, 190 breasts, and truth about sex, 125, 126 Brin, Sergey, 60, 61, 62, 103 Britain, pregnancy in, 189 Bronx Science High School (New York City), 232, 237 Buffett, Warren, 239 Bullock, Sandra, 185 Bundy, Ted, 181 Bush, George W., 67 business and comparison shopping, 265 reviews of, 265 See also corporations butt, and truth about sex, 125–26 Calhoun, Jim, 39 Cambridge University, and Microsoft study about IQ of Facebook users, 261 cancer, predicting pancreatic, 28–29, 30 Capital in the 21st Century (Piketty), 283 casinos, and price discrimination, 263–65 causality A/B testing and, 209–21 and advertising, 221–25 and Big Data experiments, 54, 240 college and, 237–39 correlation distinguished from, 221–25 and ethics, 226 and monetary windfalls, 229 natural experiments and, 226–28 and power of Big Data, 54, 211 and randomized controlled experiments, 208–9 reverse, 208 and Stuyvesant High School study, 231–37, 240 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 57 Chabris, Christopher, 250 Chance, Zoë, 252–53 Chaplin, Charlie, 19 charitable giving, 106, 109 Chen, M.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

But today’s protests, at least so far, occur mostly within the law, with exceptions that are notable precisely because they are so rare. A disgruntled teenager might lunge at a cop in a moment of frustration and imprudence, a crowd might even burn down a pharmacy, but in neither case are participants likely to join a public group dedicated to a violent revolution to overthrow the capitalist system. “Black Lives Matter” is notable for avoiding any particular kind of political endorsement, and it is also more positive than destructive in its orientation. It favors inclusiveness, gender equality, and justice and peace rather than revolution. It’s possible that the 2016 police officer shootings in Dallas may signal a change, but so far we’ve seen a pretty peaceful version of protest for a considerable period of time.

See also health care Airbnb Allen, Woody Amazon.com Andreessen, Marc antidepressants anti-establishment insurgence assortative mating. See also matching attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) Attica prison riots Austen, Jane authenticity automation Babcock, Kendrick Charles Baltimore riots bank bailouts Bausum, Amm behavioral economics Bell, Daniel big data Birmingham Children’s March Black Lives Matter Black Panthers book sellers Bowling, Julia Brexit Brin, Sergei building restrictions business morale Canada capital services car culture Carter, Jimmy change and the Complacent Class and crime decelerating and dynamic society and education and gay culture and global affairs and government and higher education and innovation job switching and matching and mobility and politics and race relations resistance to and segregation and social protest chaos.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

But I believe that while there are ways to ameliorate gentrification under lightly restrained capitalism (which is what I’d call the current US economic system), there will be no solution to the crisis without true economic and racial equality. As I wrote this book, tremendous strides were being made in that fight. The Black Lives Matter protests made police violence and continued racial oppression a daily topic in the news. Movements for queer and trans rights have recentered gender and sexuality at the forefront of social justice conversations. Even mainstream politicians are beginning to preach racial and economic justice.

See also public housing demolition of, 52 lack of government support for, 21, 134, 169, 179 land banking and, 211 in New Orleans, 29 in New York City, 145, 169, 173, 179–180, 190, 199–200, 203–204, 212 racial segregation and, 110 in San Francisco, 131–134=135 SROs as, 135 Airbnb, 61–62, 134, 136, 211 Angotti, Tom, 210 Aristil, Tim, 129 Atlantic Yards (Brooklyn), 174, 202 Back to the City Conference, 32 Baker, Richard, 53 Baldwin, James, 168 ballot initiatives, 211 Beame, Abraham, 191–192 Berlin, 142–143, 184, 214 Berni, Ryan, 43 Bigard, Ashana, 19–23, 26–30, 64 Bing, Dave, 83 Black Lives Matter movement, 214 Blanco, Kathleen, 18, 26, 48–49, 50 de Blasio, Bill, 144, 170, 175, 187–188, 202–203 gentrification and, 201 zoning laws and, 190 Bloomberg, Michael, 41, 169–170, 179, 201–204 Bolaños, Annabelle, 131, 144, 148 Boston, MA, 107 Boyd, Alicia, 198–200, 207, 210 Brash, Julian, 215 Bratton, Bill, 175 Brinkley, Kenny, 103–104 Broder & Sachse, 74, 76 “broken windows” policing, 175 Brooklyn, NY, 8, 176–180, 197–198, 217.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

In its original sixteenth-century, Middle French context, to dismantle meant ‘to tear down the walls of a fortress’. It can signal an assault on our security or a raid against the seat of power, or both. On the progressive Left, dismantling is the framing device in the fight against oppression. In an article for USA Today, scholar Sirry Alang urged her readers to support Black Lives Matter and similar activism, in order to ‘help expose and11 dismantle structural racism’. The recent proliferation of the #MeToo movement has seen its aims both celebrated and contested, with some arguing that it ‘does little to dismantle the underlying problem’ of sexual abuse. Many others, meanwhile, cheer its attack on that ancient fortress of misogyny.

These various collisions and mergers between the real and the unreal are definitive of our times. But they are also creating promising kinds of disenchantment and disillusionment. As what we might once have confidently called everyday life comes to seem increasingly unreal, our incredulity can be harnessed into progressive forms of scrutiny. Radical movements – such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too, to name just two – are rising from perspectives that have always stood in some way at odds to the mainstream view. They are demanding the resolution of those blurred skulls that have always been central to our social orders. We’re learning to stand at new angles in relation to our everyday normalcy, to question its assumptions and our place within it.


pages: 301 words: 85,126

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

But for many people the alarm bells started to go off in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, when it became clear just how cleverly Russia had exploited Facebook’s ad-targeting system to sow discord among American voters. Russian agents, for example, zeroed in on a group of users who’d gone on Facebook to express solidarity with police officers in the wake of protests by the Black Lives Matter movement. They targeted these users with an ad containing a picture of a flag-draped coffin at a policeman’s funeral, along with the caption: “Another gruesome attack on police by a BLM movement activist. Our hearts are with those 11 heroes.” They targeted a group of conservative Christian users with a different ad: a photo of Hillary Clinton shaking hands with a woman in a headscarf, together with a caption rendered in pseudo-Arabic script, “Support Hillary.

See robot cars availability heuristic Baidu base-rate neglect Bayes’s rule coin flips and discovery of as an equation investing and mammograms and medical diagnostics and robot cars and search for Air France Flight 447 and search for USS Scorpion and usefulness of Bayesian search essential steps of posterior probabilities prior beliefs and revised beliefs prior beliefs and search for USS Scorpion prior probabilities Bel Geddes, Norman Belichick, Bill Bell Labs BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos Berglund Scherwitzl, Elina Bernoulli, Johann big data. See data science; data sets birth control. See contraception and birth control bisphosphonates Black Lives Matter Borges, Jorge Luis: “The Library of Babel” Bornn, Luke brachistochrone curve Brooklyn Nets Buffett, Warren cancer bisphosphonates and breast cancer colorectal cancer esophageal cancer lymphoma medical imaging skin cancer surgery targeted therapy car accidents Cardwell, Chris Carnegie Mellon University cars.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Vaughan Robinson and Jeremy Segrott, Understanding the Decision-Making of Asylum Seekers, Home Office Research Study, vol. 243, London: Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate, 2002, p. viii; Heaven Crawley, Change or Choice? Understanding Why Asylum Seekers Come to the UK, London: Refugee Council, 2010. 41. Nicholas De Genova, ‘The “Migrant Crisis”’ as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 41, issue 10, 2018, pp. 1765–82. 42. For instance, see Harmit Athwal, ‘Roll Call of Deaths of Asylum Seekers and Undocumented Migrants, 2005 Onwards’, irr.org.uk, 29 October 2010, last accessed 24 June 2019. 43. ‘Nottingham Asylum Seeker Fell from Balcony “After Taunts”’, BBC News, 5 October 2011; Corin Faife, ‘Modern Times: Osman Rasul – In Memory’, Ceasefire, 3 August 2010. 44.

When I interviewed Professor Gurminder Bhambra she made this point about the relationship between borders and anti-colonial movement. 19. Toni Morrison, Black Studies Center public dialogue, Portland State, Special Collection: Oregon Public Speakers, 30 May 1975, available at pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/orspeakers/90/, last accessed 25 May 2019. 20. Nicholas de Genova, ‘The “Migrant Crisis” as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 41, issue 10, p. 1778.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Seven years later, when American cities were up in flames, literally, over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and protesters chanted “Defund the police,” Camden was cited as a success story. Murders were down 60 percent, crime had almost halved, and complaints of excessive force by police had fallen by a stunning 95 percent. The reframing had worked. A symbolic moment came in June 2020. A new Camden police chief, Joseph Wysocki, not only authorized a big Black Lives Matter street protest—he asked the organizers if he could join them at the head of the procession. It made national news. The television cameras framed an indelible image of what a new mental model of policing can look like. A New Way of Seeing the World Whether they plunder their repertoire, repurpose a frame from elsewhere, or reinvent an entirely new frame, all successful reframers share certain things in common.

She profiled the “intellectual dark web” of non-mainstream thinkers and denounced the censorship, microaggressions, and safe spaces that typify the culture wars. Her work generated animosity on both sides of the aisle. Jewish, she was labeled a Nazi by trolls. In June 2020, after the op-ed section published a piece calling on Trump to use the military to quell incidents of looting and rioting that were happening alongside some of the Black Lives Matter protests, a staff insurrection forced out Bennet, the op-ed editor who had recruited Weiss. The heat on her increased, and she left five weeks later. “My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views,” she wrote in her resignation letter.


pages: 290 words: 82,220

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

biofilm, Black Lives Matter, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Graeber, Easter island, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, megacity, off-the-grid, rent control, the built environment, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

The tall grass around my ankles was blinking with fireflies, and the air was cool. Below me I could see the clean ground of the Great Plaza, emptied of its ancient public. Across the river were the lights of St. Louis, a city whose citizens recently rose up to protest police brutality in Ferguson during the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protesters walked over Cahokian land whose Great Mound had been torn down over a century before, but they continued the Mississippian tradition of questioning authority. The thick air smelled like damp soil and farmland. With my feet atop an ancient megalopolis and my eyes on distant skyscrapers, it felt as if cities were almost a natural product of this place.

See also specific locations Aspara National Authority, 187–88 assimilation, 62 astronomy, 217 Atakuman, Çigdem, 36, 37–38 Augustales, 95, 101–2, 137 Augustus, 92–93, 101, 113 aurochs, 29, 30, 36, 46 authoritarianism, 259, 261 Aymonier, Étienne, 173 Ayutthaya, Thailand, 196 Baires, Sarah, 9–10, 227–33, 242, 246, 247, 248, 249 Baltus, Melissa, 9–10, 227–33, 241, 242, 246, 247, 248, 249 barley, 219–20 Bar-Yosef, Ofer, 39, 64 Battambang, 157–58 Bay of Naples, 83, 90, 102, 103, 127, 133, 136 Bayon temple, 190–92 BBB Motor Site, 219, 221, 222, 249 “beaded burial,” 243–45 Beng Melea, 178–81, 197 Benz, Marion, 33, 34, 35, 36 Biehl, Peter, 39 Big Mound, 228 “Birdman,” 244 birds, 29 Birger figurine, 219, 220–21 “Black Drink,” 215, 231 Black Lives Matter movement, 254 bones, 45–46, 243 of ancestors, 45, 49, 57, 61, 74, 216 “lick check” and, 233 borrow pits, 9, 208, 212, 225, 235, 242, 245–46, 248 bricks, 56, 74, 86–87, 102 Buddha, 154, 190 Buddhism, 158, 192, 199 Mahayana, 198 Building of Eumachia, 95 buildings, “closing up,” 224–25 bulls, 37 burial, of ancestors, 32, 243, 250 burial mounds, 243–45, 252 Cahokia, 8–10, 12, 13, 204–61 abandonment of, 210, 225, 241–54 astronomy and, 217 celebrations in, 224–25 centralized belief system in, 250 Classic Cahokia, 234 “closing up” in, 224–25 collapse hypothesis and, 236–40, 250 compared to Angkor, 211–12 cooking in, 220, 251 courtyard neighborhood layouts in, 208, 229, 230–31, 234–36, 247–48 decentralization in, 248–50 democratization of, 233–36 environmental crises in, 249–50 expansion of, 225, 250 farming in, 218–24, 251 farmlands of, 218, 223–24, 249 figurines from, 219, 220–21, 251 fragmentation of, 248–50 granted World Heritage status, 228 heterarchy in, 242 immigrants in, 215, 217–18, 223, 224 Lohmann phase, 234 migration and, 250–54 monuments in, 208–9, 210 (see also specific monuments and kinds of monuments) Moorehead phase, 234, 235–36, 239, 248 mounds in, 208–10, 211–12 organized around nonmarket principles, 237 paintings in, 251 phases of, 234–40, 239, 247, 248 political struggles in, 245 public life in, 253 “rejuvenation period” in, 248–50 return to old practices in, 248–50 return to small-town life in, 260 revitalization of, 248–50 revival in, 227–40 ridge top mounds in, 243 rise and fall of, 209–10 rituals in, 224–25, 243–48 shift in layout of, 229 Siouan tribes and, 250–54 social change in, 229, 234–35, 237 social movements in, 210, 249–50, 253 social structure in, 242 souvenirs from, 213 spirituality in, 212–13, 222–23, 242. 253 Stirling phase, 234, 235, 247, 248, 249 survivance in, 250–54 transformative power of water in, 245–46 transition in, 229, 234–35, 237 urban plan of, 212–13, 229, 234, 243 Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, 228 Caligula, 93 Cambodia, 1–4, 5, 145, 156, 158, 198 climate extremes and, 147, 161 France and, 183 Campania, 134, 137 Campbell, Stuart, 73, 75 Carston, Janet, 38 Carter, Alison, 157–58, 175, 181, 197 Carthage, 86, 131 Çatalhöyük, 5–7, 10–13, 15–75, 16–17, 104, 124, 137, 148–50, 155, 160, 198, 209, 257, 260, 261 8.2k event in, 62–66, 73 4040 excavation, 22, 25, 42, 44 abandonment of, 60, 61, 64, 68–71, 73, 103, 250 afterlife of, 129 cemeteries at, 60 change in, 36, 59–60, 61, 66–71, 73, 258 as city, 71–72, 73 climate change in, 63–66, 73, 258 “closing up” houses and buildings in, 224–25 collapsing structures in, 72 cooking in, 42, 54, 61 crisis points in, 59–60 Death Pit in, 71–75 doorways in, 31–32 drought in, 258 egalitarianism in, 66–68, 69–70, 75 farming in, 61, 73 final phase of its occupation, 62–66 food insecurity and, 73 founding of, 27 graves in, 22–23 hierarchy in, 66–71, 72 housebuilding in, 24 as mega-village, 66 migration within, 62–63 mobility and, 70–71 privacy in, 31–32 private property in, 66 as proto-city at best, 71, 73 sea level rise and, 63 signs of inequality in, 70 skyline of, 42–43 social change in, 66–71 social stratification in, 66–71, 75 social structure in, 66–71 stamps in, 36–40, 70–71 trade and, 71 urban design of, 22, 31, 66–68 urban grid of, 22, 66–67 urbanism and, 40 wall art in, 56 Çatalhöyük dig, 21, 32 Çatalhöyük Dig House, 21 Catlin, George, 275n9 cattle, 65.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

“There’s really no other word to use other than ‘self-made,’” she said, defining herself, ignoring how illusory the category was, “because that is the truth.” By 2020, however, the tide had turned. The girlbosses had an unapologetic relationship to wealth and luxury. In the wake of a wave of activism led by Black Lives Matter, their actions were suddenly exposed to greater scrutiny (and, admittedly, often a far closer examination than men occupying the same station would receive). As a result, a number of the women associated with girlboss-ery fell—or were pushed—off their perches. Their number included Gelman, Aflalo, and Girl, Wash Your Face author Hollis, the archetype that specialized in obliviousness toward others’ realities, to the point at times of being exploitative toward employees, fans, and even consumers.

., 9–11, 69, 133, 158, 219–20, 251n election of, 74, 78, 245n Billionaires Club, 243n, 254n, 260n birth circumstances, x, 5, 11, 40, 48, 84, 170–71 inborn privileges and, 33, 55–56, 72, 76, 129, 230 “success” and, 4, 8–9, 35, 60–62, 69, 217, 223 Black collectives, 186–90, 212, 223 Black landlessness, 33–34, 184–90, 241n Black Lives Matter, 63, 82, 162–63, 175–76 enslavement and, 14, 19, 28, 33, 83–84, 124, 185–86, 237n Bliss, Eula, 253n Bloomberg, Michael, 40, 60, 161 Boebert, Lauren, 218 bonobo apes, 173–74, 257n bootstrap ideology in Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), 191–95, 258n vs. community, 10, 174, 209, 222–25, 228–30, 259n as corporate mindfulness, 86–99 counternarratives, 133, 141–42, 147–48, 167, 218, 231, 260–61n defined, ix, 3–4 deservedness and, 4–5, 15, 55–60, 197, 236n, 261n influencers, 29, 35, 39–50 as ludicrous myth, 5–6 in politics, viii, 9–10, 19, 28, 59–60, 73–78, 247n in Trumpism, 7, 13, 36, 74, 78–81, 243n as victim blaming, 42, 57, 65–66, 83, 96, 203, 244n vs. women, 122–25, 127–29 bootstrapped.


Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Higher numbers merely translated into higher perceived confidence in assessments, thus creating an even more seductive illusion of metrics. “Measuring the actual impact of trolling and online influence campaigns is probably impossible,” said Kate Starbird, one of the world’s leading researchers of online disinformation campaigns, who examined the influence of digital disinformation on the Black Lives Matter movement. “But the difficulty of measuring impact doesn’t mean that there isn’t meaningful impact,” she added.11 Online engagement figures can be staggering, and new bureaucratic politics can make these figures even more staggering. One New York Times headline in late 2017 stated, “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone.”12 In reality the preelection reach of the Internet Research Agency was far less, for two reasons: only about 37 percent of Facebook’s number of “impressions” were from before November 9, 2016 (the rest was after), and “impressions” are not engagements, only what a user may have scrolled past, perhaps absentmindedly.

Berecz, János Berlin Airlift Berliner Zeitung Berlin Operations Base (BOB) Berlin Tunnel Bernadsky, Gregory Berry, Frank Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation BfV Biedenkopf, Kurt Bigot, Yves Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 Bit.ly Bittman, Ladislav; on AM; defection of; on disinformation; NEPTUN operation and; as painter; on Strasbourg cigar box bomb; on Who’s Who in CIA Black Boomerang (Delmer) Black Lake Black Lives Matter movement BlackToLive (sock puppet) Bleep the Police (sock puppet) Blitz BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) BOB (Berlin Operations Base) Bogdanov, Peter Bohnsack, Günter Boiko, Arkady Boston Globe, The Brandt, Willy Brattain, Steven Michael Bräunig, Werner Breaking3Zero Breedlove, Philip Breuer, Klaus Brezhnev, Leonid Bronze Soldier conflict BStU Buckley, William F., Jr.

., and; ZEUS operation of Deriabin, Peter Dethloff, Walter DEVASTATION operation Devil and His Dart Devil’s Lake DGI (Dirección General de Inteligencia) DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) digital leaks: AM and; Assange on Clinton’s emails and; Crimea annexation and; Cryptome and; CyberBerkut and; CyberGuerrilla and; DCLeaks and; DNC hack and; EU and U.S. exposed in; forgery and; Guccifer 2.0 and; journalism and; Malaysia Airlines disaster and; Merkel and; of NSA hacking tools; Panama Papers and; Podesta’s emails and; Protsyk’s forged emails and; Schneier on; of Shadow Brokers; Snowden and; Ukraine and Russian-orchestrated; WikiLeaks and; see also Anonymous; hacking operations Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI) disinformation: accurate information in; Artuzov and; Bittman on; Black Lives Matter movement and; data and; East and West divide on; election interference of 2016 and; emotion and; four waves of; goals of; HVA’s focus on; imperfection of; KgU and; learning from past; misconceptions about; oral; passage of time and; postmodernism and; self-; skill set for; targets of; see also active measures DNC (Democratic National Committee) Dobbert, Andreas Dobbins, Jim Dobrynin, Anatoly Dodd, Thomas Dönitz, Karl DOUBLEPULSAR “double-track decision” Drummond, Roscoe DTLINEN Dulles, Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles Memorandum Dumov, Aleksei Dunne, Kenneth Durenberger, David Dzerzhinsky, Feliks Dzhirkvelov, Ilya E economic inequality Economist, The Edwards, Bob Eichner, Klaus Eisenhower, Dwight D.


pages: 91 words: 24,469

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Gordon Gekko, It's morning again in America, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior

I am not a black male motorist and never will be. All the more reason, then, that I need some way to identify with one if I am going to be affected by his experience. And citizenship is the only thing I know we share. The more the differences between us are emphasized, the less likely I will be to feel outrage at his mistreatment. Black Lives Matter is a textbook example of how not to build solidarity. There is no denying that by publicizing and protesting police mistreatment of African-Americans the movement mobilized supporters and delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. But there is also no denying that the movement’s decision to use this mistreatment to build a general indictment of American society, and its law enforcement institutions, and to use Mau-Mau tactics to put down dissent and demand a confession of sins and public penitence (most spectacularly in a public confrontation with Hillary Clinton, of all people), played into the hands of the Republican right.


pages: 307 words: 88,745

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, school choice, side project, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides—on many sides.” President Donald Trump’s statement came from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, shortly after the events in Charlottesville unfolded. And instead of focusing his criticism on the white nationalist protesters, he widened the lens to also condemn leftist counterprotesters, Black Lives Matter and Antifa (Anti-Fascist Action) in particular. That was more than people like Richard Spencer would have hoped to hear from previous presidents. It was unbelievable. And after a period of near silence amid heated outcry over the weekend, Trump offered extended commentary the following Tuesday during a press conference held in Trump Tower in Manhattan.

See also Breitbart News; nationalism; Traditionalism alt-right movement and, 208–12, 213–23 autobiography of, 80 background of, 19–27, 30–32 on Bagley, 262–65 Brazilian government and, 127, 163–71, 256–57, 275 (see also Carvalho, Olavo de) Cambridge Analytica and, 34, 60–63, 75 characterization of, 5, 29–30, 76, 163–64, 273–74 on China, 94–96, 154, 155, 160–61, 173, 192–93, 275–76 Dugin’s meeting in Rome (2018) with, 1–3, 92–96, 153–61, 213, 274–75, 295n “gladiator school” (Italy) of, 94, 213, 262 Guénon followed by, 27 on immigration, 84, 187–99, 261–62 Jorjani and, 14–16, 199, 265–67 Morgan’s interest in, 87–89 NSC ouster, 225–34 on Spencer, 266, 267 on time cycle concept, 109–24 (see also time cycles) on Traditionalism, 5–8, 16–18, 30, 34–38, 92, 279 as Trump’s campaign manager, 71, 73–75, 80–81 White House ouster, 170–71, 235, 241–43 on Williamson, 282 Bannon & Co., 31–32 Baranyi, Tibor, 58, 64–68, 292n Beattie, Darren, 164, 166, 199 Benoist, Alain de, 144, 231–32 Bergson, Henri, 111 Bismarck, Otto von, 95 Black Lives Matter, 239 Blackwater, 205–6 Blavatsky, Helen, 26 Bolsonaro, Eduardo, 127 Bolsonaro, Jair, 125–29, 163–71, 185, 250, 255 Brant, Gerald, 164–65, 167 Brazil. See also Carvalho, Olavo de Bannon and government of, 127, 163–71, 213, 275 Bolsonaro’s election, 125–29, 250 Bolsonaro’s visit to D.C., 170–71 China’s alliance with, 250, 253, 257 education and culture funding by, 255 military of, 254 Olavo appointed minister of education, 163–70 Olavo’s tariqa in, 138–40 Breitbart News alt-right movement and, 211, 215, 241, 304n Bannon as CEO, 34 Bannon on alt-right and, 241, 304n Bannon’s departure from, 155 Breitbart (Andrew) and, 32 Charlottesville rally and, 241 Burke, Raymond, 295n Bush, George W., 40 Cambridge Analytica, 34, 60–63, 75 capitalism.


Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Millions and millions flowing through the hands of these organizations in the name of Mike Brown yet we don’t see any of it coming into our community or being used to help our youth. I’ve been calling out this shit for months. People see this as an opportunity to not only build a name but make bank at the expense of the lives of people like me.”22 Seals complained about how out-of-town NGOs and online celebrities associated with Black Lives Matter had gained attention off the Ferguson brand, used that attention to raise money, and then left with the resources meant to help St. Louis—a slight St. Louis regional activists, who had suffered severe psychological and economic hardship as a result of the protests, never forgot, as it devastated their community even further.

Abramovich, Roman academia Access Hollywood tape Acosta, Alexander Afghanistan Agalarov family Ailes, Roger Akin, Todd Allen, Woody al-Qaeda “alternative facts” American exceptionalism danger of definition of and The End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama) illusion of and normalcy bias Andrew, Prince, Duke of York Apprentice, The Arab Spring Arendt, Hannah Arif, Tevfik Arpaio, Joe Assange, Julian authoritarianism adult children of authoritarian leaders American authoritarianism asylum seekers from and conspiracy narratives and digital media and fear in former Soviet republics in Hungary and the judiciary and kinship rivalries networked authoritarianism and pageantry of branding and protest scholars of and Trump, Donald and voice of individual conscience See also autocracy; dictatorship autocracy abdication of vigilance as bedrock of and The Apprentice autocratic consolidation and black Americans and climate change definition of expecting versus accepting and hope in Hungary international axis of autocrats and Karimov, Islam and kleptocracy in Kyrgyzstan and loss of sense of time and nepotism predictability of and propaganda and the Republican Party in Russia state recovery from and technological change traits and warning signs transition to and transnational criminal networks and Trump, Donald and writers See also authoritarianism; dictatorship Bannon, Steve Baquet, Dean Barak, Ehud Barr, Donald Barr, William Barrett, Wayne “battleground states” Bayrock Group Ben-Menashe, Ari Bezos, Jeff Biegun, Stephen “Big Lie” (Third Reich technique) Billy Bush Principle bin Laden, Osama Black, Charles Black Lives Matter Blavatnik, Len Bloom, Lisa Bloomberg, Michael Blunt, Matt Blunt, Roy Bogatin, David Bogatin, Jacob “both-sidesing” Bouazizi, Mohamed Boyle, Matthew Breitbart (website) Breitbart, Andrew Browder, Bill Brown, Julie K. Brown, Michael Brzezinski, Mika Buchanan, Pat Burnett, Mark Bush, Billy Bush, George W.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Publishers should do their best, BuzzFeed counseled, to accentuate the “emotional” elements of stories and to showcase controversy and scandal whenever possible. News stories often had this kind of emotional charge. As an example, BuzzFeed pointed to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, one of the early cases that fueled the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement among young people. In the aftermath of the tragedy, BuzzFeed flooded the zone with posts like “10 Reasons Everyone Should Be Furious about Trayvon Martin’s Murder” (sub-headline: “Get Angry”) by Stopera. Another Stopera post spotlighted a Florida state representative’s “emotional speech about Trayvon Martin’s shooting.”

Anderson Cooper had cornered Trump with K-File footage of him supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2002, contrary to his claim throughout the campaign that he opposed it. Then Don Lemon put the screws to Clinton by citing the 1996 clip surfaced by the K-File in which she labeled young men who join gangs “super-predators.” The “super-predators” line would figure into Russia’s efforts to defeat Clinton and be recycled by various fake Black Lives Matter sites to depress the black vote in battleground states like Michigan. For the Republican National Convention, held in Cleveland in July 2016, BuzzFeed planned a party that would do their 2012 mermaid bash one better. The rooftop soiree, geared toward similarly banned publishers, was called “Red, White & Blacklisted” and brought together the leading lights of the new-media vanguard; in the words of Gawker’s correspondent at the event, “It felt like every single person I follow on Twitter was together in one room.”

Petersburg, had been powering an array of Facebook interest groups, strategically using psychographic intel to exacerbate preexisting fissures between American political groups. A sampling of the groups’ posts revealed the malicious potential of targeting technology. One Russian-made Facebook group, called Blacktivist, for example, had amassed a following larger than the authentic Black Lives Matter group it intended to imitate and was, in the eleventh hour, calling upon its supporters to break with Clinton and vote for third-party candidate Jill Stein instead. As the revelations broke on Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg announced in his earnings call that he would invest in the site’s security with a vengeance.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

US Department of Agriculture, 3 Dec. 2012, www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2012-december/rising-concentration-in-agricultural-input-industries-influences-new-technologies.aspx#.Vxf2yzArKM8. Chapter 16: The Myth of Boomer Goodness 1. Mamet, David. The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. Penguin, e-books edition, 2001, pp. 281–282. 2. Bradner, Eric. “Bill Clinton Spars with Black Lives Matter Protesters.” CNN, 8 Apr. 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/04/07/politics/bill-clinton-black-lives-matter-protesters/index.html. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. 570 U.S. __ 2013, Docket No. 12–96. 6. Serwer, Adam. “Chief Justice Roberts’ Long War Against the Voting Rights Act.” Mother Jones, 27 Feb. 2013, www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/john-roberts-long-war-against-voting-rights-act; see also Rutenberg, Jim.

Rising debt, melting ice sheets, crumbling freeways, and faltering schools are just small-minded entries in a spreadsheet with no cell large enough to contain Boomer goodness. If anything, the sociopaths believe it is we who should be thanking them, our betters, without the ungrateful backtalk. In 2016, when young Black Lives Matter protestors dared to question Bill Clinton about his 1994 crime bill, legislation whose carnage was covered in Chapter 14, Clinton lashed out. Not only were the protestors wrong, Clinton argued, they were “defending the people who killed the lives you say matter.”2 In Clinton’s view, he was the savior, and the protestors just confused apologists for the sort of scum Hillary Clinton referred to in 1996 as “super-predators.”


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks,” PNAS 111, no. 24 (2014): 8788–90. 162 “emotional contagion”: Ibid. 163 “Our lives matter”: Elazar Sontag, “To This Black Lives Matter Co-founder, Activism Begins in the Kitchen,” Washington Post, March 26, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/to-this-black-lives-matter-co-founder-activism-begins-in-the-kitchen/2018/03/26/964ec51a-2df1-11e8-b0b0-f706877db618_story.html?utm_term=.150be2273ebc. 163 adding the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter: Jon Schuppe and Safia Samee Ali, “Cities Don’t Want Justice Department to Back Off Police Reforms,” NBC News, April 5, 2017, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cities-dont-want-justice-department-back-police-reforms-n742661. 163 “trolling for MiGs”: Andy Bodle, “Trolls: Where Do They Come From?

As counterprotesters poured into the streets to oppose what became a vivid expression of hate and white nationalism, a far-right terrorist drove his car into the crowd, killing one young woman and wounding three others. When public sentiment turned against President Trump (who claimed “both sides” were to blame for the violence), Dixson furiously leapt to his defense. “Dems and Media Continue to IGNORE BLM [Black Lives Matter] and Antifa [anti-fascist] Violence in Charlottesville,” she tweeted, including an image of demonstrators with the caption “DEMOCRAT TERROR.” In the days that followed, her tweets grew even more strident, publicizing supposed cases of left-wing terrorism around the country. But none of the cases were real—and Dixson wasn’t either.


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Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

The Hoya observed that these words ringing out of Rome were reverberating on campus. A Jesuit priest and political science professor named Matthew Carnes, with whom Cohen would soon work on a philanthropic project, told the newspaper that longtime critics of inequality on campus felt “vindicated” by the pope. And in the summer before Cohen’s senior year, Black Lives Matter was born, drawing many of her classmates into one of the more trenchant critiques of inequality in modern American history. As Cohen’s graduation neared, a little-known French economist named Thomas Piketty published the surprise bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century—a two-and-a-half-pound, 704-page assault on inequality.

Starting companies and pursuing socially minded businesses like Toms Shoes or impact investment funds were more respected in her circles. While Cohen had trouble with this view, she didn’t exactly resist it either. After the Hill, she interned at an educational technology company. Then, in the summer before senior year, as Black Lives Matter was getting under way, she followed many other aspiring do-gooders to a summer job as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. It might seem an improbable choice for someone aspiring to help people. But it was not at all an unusual one in her circles. Cohen was hardly the first person to be impressed by an oft-heard view, espoused by firms like Goldman, that the skills they teach are vital preparation for change-making of any sort.


pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

American- and European-looking accounts among the troll army gained momentum, increasing their organic following among real Americans. Heckler accounts pounced on any issue, liberal or conservative, always taking a divisive tack—fomenting divides between rich and poor, black and white, immigrants and non-immigrants, and all those harboring antigovernment angst. If a Black Lives Matter protest broke out in a U.S. city, the trolls were there, pushing a mix of true and false messages with a conspiratorial bent. Remnants of the Occupy movement or conservative gun owners—it didn’t matter to the trolls; they repurposed existing inflammatory messages or helped seed new conspiracies tearing down the U.S. government.

And we were watching—the “Jewish Asshole” Weisburd, the “Loud Shaytan” Berger, and I, “Big Watty Kafir.” Similar to how Soviet intelligence had exploited race issues during the Cold War to divide American audiences, Russian influence efforts showcased violence and chaos all across the United States in the summer of 2015 as protests against police brutality broke out. Black Lives Matter demonstrations would be promoted and simultaneously scorned by the troll army, increasing distrust among the populace, law enforcement, and the government. Allegations of government misconduct might be seeded to agitate antigovernment groups. Government standoffs at the Bundy ranch, in Oregon, Jade Helm 15, and abortion protests all were showcased to fuel contempt among competing American factions.


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climategate, collapse of Lehman Brothers, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, immigration reform, microaggression, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, obamacare, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, source of truth, systems thinking

The answer, attested to in mountains of studies and visible everywhere in our politics, is this: change of this magnitude acts on us psychologically, not just electorally. It is the crucial context uniting the core political conflicts of this era: Obama’s and Trump’s presidencies, the rise of reactionary new social movements and thinkers, the wars over political correctness on campuses and representation in Hollywood, the power of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, the fights over immigration. There is nothing that makes us identify with our groups so strongly as the feeling that the power we took for granted may soon be lost or the injustices we’ve long borne may soon be rectified. “An identity is questioned only when it is menaced,” wrote James Baldwin, “as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger’s presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself.”11 Demographic change, and the fears and hopes it evokes, is one of the tectonic forces shaping this era in American life.

The connective tissue of the “intellectual dark web”—the anxiety that has made a coalition of new atheist Sam Harris, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, and others—is fear that the boundaries of acceptable discourse are being narrowed, that PC culture and identity politics are choking free speech. There’s a whole subgenre of punditry arguing that Trump’s rise is a regrettable, but predictable, backlash to political correctness, and thus the blame for his emergence properly belongs to campus activists and Black Lives Matter protesters. These fears can seem bizarre at first glance. Given all the other things available to worry about in the world, who cares what happened at this or that college? But the speed with which these clashes go viral on Twitter and Facebook, the enthusiasm with which they’re covered on cable news and traffic-hungry websites and celebrated podcasts, all reflect the reality that something deeper and more fearful in us is being activated.


pages: 328 words: 97,711

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, crack epidemic, disinformation, Ferguson, Missouri, financial thriller, light touch regulation, Mahatma Gandhi, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Ponzi scheme, Renaissance Technologies, Snapchat

The interlude began in the late summer of 2014, when an eighteen-year-old black man named Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. He had just, allegedly, shoplifted a pack of cigars from a convenience store. The next several years saw one high-profile case after another involving police violence against black people. There were riots and protests around the country. A civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, was born. For a time, this was what Americans talked about. Perhaps you remember some of the names of those in the news. In Baltimore, a young black man named Freddie Gray was arrested for carrying a pocket knife and fell into a coma in the back of a police van. Outside Minneapolis, a young black man named Philando Castile was pulled over by a police officer and inexplicably shot seven times after handing over his proof of insurance.

For Walter Scott, see Michael Miller, Lindsey Bever, and Sarah Kaplan, “How a cellphone video led to murder charges against a cop in North Charleston, S.C.,” Washington Post, April 8, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/08/how-a-cell-phone-video-led-to-murder-charges-against-a-cop-in-north-charleston-s-c/?utm_term=.476f73934c34. “Good morning…and still be killed”: “Sandy Speaks—April 8th 2015 (Black Lives Matter),” YouTube, April 8, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIKeZgC8lQ4. Confrontation between Cortés and Montezuma: William Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (New York: Modern Library, 1980). “When we saw so many cities”: Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1928), p. 270, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.152204/page/n295.


pages: 370 words: 99,312

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

Recall the hopes for a wider and more direct popular participation in politics briefly raised in the presidential election of 2008, when Barack Obama rallied previously indifferent voters on a platform of social change—and then recall the rapid fading of these hopes, and the subsequent rise of grassroots movements that saw themselves as battling for more democracy, such as the Tea Party on the right and the Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives Matter movements on the left, climaxed by the populist revolt in 2016 against the established political elites led, improbably enough, by the billionaire showman Donald J. Trump. What is at stake in these contradictory and often controversial political developments? What, if anything, do modern representative democracies have in common with the dictatorial democracies of contemporary communist regimes, or with such avowedly direct democratic movements as Occupy Wall Street or Spain’s Indignados?

Anonymous (hacker collective) Antigone (Sophocles) Antipater antiwar movement antiwar protesters, Huntington reviled by Apprentice, The (TV show) Arab Spring Arendt, Hannah aristocracy, in ancient Athens Aristotle; Athenian political institutions described by; democracy criticized by; on elections vs. lotteries arms race Athenian democracy; Aeropagus in; Aristotle’s criticism of; Aristotle’s description of; Assembly (Ekklesia) in; civic tribes in; Cleisthenes and, see Cleisthenes; as community of self-governing citizens; concept of human rights as lacking in; conformity emphasized in; Council of 500 in; criteria for citizenship in; decline of; election of generals in; election of treasurers in; festivals in; in fourth century; jury system in; lotteries as defining feature of; Mytilene revolt and; nativism and; ostracism in; Pericles and, see Pericles; Plato’s criticism of; presupposed norms of; slavery and; Thucydides’ criticism of; as tyranny of the majority Athens, ancient: as aggressive regional power; aristocracy in; City Dionysia in; compulsory military service in; hegemony of; infantry of; military reforms in; naval powers of; plague in; population of; slaves in; Solon’s reforms and; Thirty Tyrants regime in; tyrants in; women in Atlantic Charter Attwood, Thomas Augustus, emperor of Rome Azoulay, Vincent Babeuf, Gracchus Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality (Buonarroti) Bakunin, Mikhail bandwagon effect Barber, Benjamin Barère, Bertrand Bartels, Larry Bastille; fall of Beaumont, Gustave de, at Albany Fourth of July celebration Berlin Wall, fall of Bernays, Edward; on public opinion Bernstein, Eduard Birmingham, England, Chartist Convention in Birmingham Political Union Bismarck, Otto von Black Lives Matter Blanqui, Auguste Blight, David Bodin, Jean Bolsheviks; soviet executive committees takeover by Bonaparte III, emperor of France Boston, Mass., French Revolution celebration in bounded rationality bourgeoisie Bowen, Sayles Jenks Brecht, Bertolt Brexit Brissot, Jacques-Pierre Brown, John Brunswick Manifesto Brussels Bryce, James Brzezinski, Zbigniew Buonarroti, Philippe Burckhardt, Jacob bureaucracies, power of Bush, George H.


pages: 338 words: 101,967

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, Burning Man, centre right, COVID-19, disinformation, epigenetics, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial engineering, George Floyd, haute couture, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, post-work, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Again, this is not by mistake. The boycott movement uses intersectionality as a tactic to co-opt legitimate social grievances and win public legitimization by association. Following the horrific shooting of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman, an incredible grassroots movement emerged: Black Lives Matter. After another shooting shocked the nation, that of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, BDS activists reached out to the BLM leaders and offered to lend their support. After all, they said, Palestinian Lives Matter as well. BLM welcomed those BDS activists, to the shock and disappointment of people in the know, not to mention the American Jewish community, which by and large is a huge supporter of BLM.

Abbas, Mahmoud, 170, 181–82, 187 Abdullah I, King of Jordan, 111 Ables, Otto, 84 Abraham Accord (2020), 134, 136 Abu-Bakar, 32 Abu Srour, Mohammad, 120 Abu Toameh, Khaled, 208 Act for Israel, 14–15 Ahmed, Salim “Dahoum,” 39–40 Ajyal, 253 Alami, Musa, 106 Al-Aqsa, 139 Al-Aqsa Mosque, 134 Alexander II, Tsar of Russia, 58 Alexander the Great, 30 Alexandra, Tsarina, 51–52 Algeria, 40, 113, 129, 130 aliyah, 65, 301 Alkalai, Rabbi, 69 Allenby, Edmund, 42 Aloba, Abiodun, 275 Alon, Yigal, 154–55 Alon Shavut settlement, 155 Altalena, bombed by Ben-Gurion, 109 Altneuland (An Old/New Land) (Herzl), 65–66, 267 American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), 213–15 Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation (AJP), 214–15 Amnesty International, 278 Annan, Kofi, 272 Anti-Defamation League, 279 Antiochus III, 30 Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Judaism outlawed by, 30 Antipater, 23–24 Antiquity of the Jews, The (Josephus), 279 antisemitism, 29, 57–59, 104, 205–6, 277–82, 299 see also Holocaust anti-Zionism, 57, 276–81, 299 see also Zionist movement, Zionists Aqaba, 42, 84 Arab Higher Committee, 204 Arab-Israeli conflict, 12, 26–36, 105, 126–36, 141, 299 Bi-Communal Conflict in (1860–1948), 126 Interstate Conflicts in (1948–1973), 126–27 “no further demands” issue in, 138–39, 141 Non-State Actor Conflict in (1973–present), 127 Palestinian right of return as issue in, 89, 137–38, 141, 200 religious underpinnings of, 163–66 Two-State Solution for, 135–36 Arab League, 119, 134, 140, 204–5 Arab Liberation Army (ALA), 107 Arab Peace Initiative (2002), 134 Arabs, in British Mandate of Palestine, 89, 94–95, 105, 106 displaced during Israeli War of Independence, 110–13, 137, 200, 203, 296; see also Palestinian refugees UN granting of state refused by, 12, 97, 100, 104, 108, 110, 112, 153, 201, 266, 283, 296 see also Palestinian people Arabs, in State of Israel, see Israel, State of, Arab citizens of Arab Spring, 26, 173, 249 Arafat, Yasser, 115, 132, 140–41, 159, 185 and Camp David Summit, 134, 158–60, 298 see also Palestine Liberation Organization Artzi, Fania, 51–56, 69, 83, 94, 141, 142, 146, 189 as member of Degania kibbutz, 4, 75, 79–82 in move to Jaffa, 56–57, 69, 77–78, 89 Artzi, Isaac (Aki), 80, 142, 145, 291 Artzi, Joel, 80 Artzi, Roni, 80 Artzi-Krystal, Michal, 142 Artzi-Padan, Mira, 80, 124, 142 Ashkenazi Yahadut Ha’Torah party, Israeli, 237 Assad, Bashar al-, 249–50 assimilation, 30, 60, 61, 225, 228 Assyrian Empire, 29 Austria, and onset of World War I, 41 Bahrain, Israeli peace deal with, 136, 146, 162, 210 Balfour Declaration, 42, 103, 138 Ban Ki-moon, 271–72 Barak, Ehud, and Camp David Summit, 133–34, 158 Barghouti, Omar, 199, 205, 206, 210 Bar Giora, Simon, 245, 246, 247 Barhoum, Masad, 250–51 Bar Kokhba, Shimon, 169 Bar Shalom, Adina, 239–40 Bashar, Lamiya Haji, 252–53 Bashrat, Nabil, 209–10 BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, 197–221, 200–203, 205–13, 264, 281, 282 elimination of Israel as goal of, 207, 208, 212, 216, 221, 299 pro-terrorist funders of, 213–16, 299 Bedouins, 38, 227 Begin, Menachem, 109–10, 130–31, 140, 155–56, 162, 233–34, 285 Beham, Mordechai, 100 Beit Surik, 187 Ben-Gurion, David, 85, 98–99, 100–102, 104, 105–6, 109, 236, 256, 272 assimilation agenda of, 227–31 Mapai Party of, 98, 108–9 Ben Zvi, Itzhak, 98 Bergman, Ronen, 178, 180 Berkowitz, Hans, see Yavor, Hanan Bible, see New Testament; Old Testament; specific books Birnbaum, Daniel, 209 Birnbaum, Nathan, Zionism term coined by, 60 Black Lives Matter, 219–20 Black Panthers, Israeli, 233 Bolsheviks, 51–52, 54–55 British Mandate of Palestine, 33, 45, 86, 93, 103, 184, 295 Arab boycott of Jewish businesses in, 204–5 Arab emigration to, 89 Arab population in, 94–95, 104, 171, 189–90 Bi-Communal Conflict in, 126 end of, 95, 97, 99, 100, 104 first Zionists in, 88–89 Holocaust survivors’ migration to, 93–95 Jewish emigration to, 104, 272–73 UN Partition Plan for, see United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine Brunei, Sharia law in, 270 Bunche, Ralph, 107, 220 Caesar, Julius, 23 Caesarea, 23, 31 Camp David Accords (1978), 130–31 Camp David Summit (2000), 133–34, 158 Canaanites, Canaan, 27, 34, 170, 296 Carchemish archaeological site, 39, 40 Carter, Jimmy, 130–31 Catch-67 (Goodman), 219 Catherine II “the Great,” Empress of Russia, 57–58 “Changing East, The” (Lawrence), 48 Charedi Academy (Jerusalem), 239 Charedim, 226, 235–42 China, 270 Christianity, Christians, 26, 163 Church of the Holy Sepulcher, 32 Clinton, Bill, and Camp David Summit, 133–34, 157–58 Cold War, 127 Congress, US, 88, 212 Constantine, Emperor of Rome, 32 Constitution, US, 282 Corbyn, Jeremy, 57, 198 Crosby, David, 224 Crusades, Crusaders, 32–33, 35, 86, 116 Cunningham, Alan, 100 Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, 29–30 Daher Al Omar, Sheikh of Galilee, 126 Dahri, Noor, 159 Daoudi, Mohammed Dajani, 208–9 David, King, 27–28 Davidowitz, Harry Solomon, 100 Declaration of Independence, Israeli, 100, 101–2, 112, 174 Declaration of Independence, US, 100 Degania kibbutz, 4, 71–72, 74, 80, 87, 123–24 author’s summers in, 75–77, 123–24 Fania Artzi as member of, 4, 75, 79–82 Dreyfus, Alfred, 61 Druze community, 176, 226, 227 East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel, 154 Eban, Abba, 115–16 Egypt, 40, 204 Gaza Strip and, 129, 297 Israeli peace deal with, 140, 146, 298 in Israeli War of Independence, 103, 107 Jews expelled from, 113 Sinai Peninsula and, 129, 131, 162, 297, 298 in Six Day War, 128–29 in War of Attrition, 129–30 in Yom Kippur War, 130, 297 Egyptian Army, Fedayeen unit of, 128 Egyptian Islamic Jihad, 131, 141 Eitan, Rafael, 285 Elazar settlement, 155 Elect (organization), 240 Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, 57–58 el-Zoubi, Seif el-Din, 174 Enlightenment, Age of, 59, 236 Enlightenment, Jewish, 59, 60 Eretz Israel (Ben-Gurion and Ben Zvi), 98 Eshkol, Levi, 155 ethnic cleansing, 111, 112, 200, 201, 206, 283–84 Etzel, 99, 109, 110–11 Europe, 40, 41, 47, 59, 235–36 antisemitism in, 61, 90, 93–94, 104; see also Holocaust Ezra, Book of, 29 Facts on the Question of Palestine (Husseini), 114 Faisal I, King of Iraq 43–44 Lawrence and, 41, 42, 43–44 Fatah, 115 Fertile Crescent, 26 First Intifada (1987–1993), 131, 186 First Jewish-Roman War (66–73), 86, 242–48 First Lebanon War (1982), 131 First Zionist Congress, 63–65, 96, 103 Flexigidity (Grinstein), 235 Floyd, George, 279 Ford, Henry, 58 Foundation for Defense of Democracies, 212 France, 39, 40, 128 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, assassination of, 41 Freedland, Jonathan, 57 French Mandate of Syria and Iraq, 33, 45 Friedman, Thomas, 173 Fritzlan, David, 118–19 Froman, Hadassah, 166 Froman, Menachem, 164–65 Galilee, province of, 24 Galilee Medical Center, 250–51 Gandhi, Indira, 75 Gaza Strip, 108, 132, 177–84, 193, 200, 206 Hamas coup in, 182–83, 188, 285, 298 Israeli and Egyptian blockades of, 13, 182, 193, 202, 299 Israeli occupation of, 131 Jewish settlements in, 162 in Second Intifada, 134 and Six Day War, 129, 297 Geneva Convention, 153, 185 Ghana, 17, 274–75 Golan Heights, 76, 129, 297 Goodman, Micah, 219 Great Britain, 40–41, 95, 128 see also British Mandate of Palestine Green Line, 108, 128, 152, 184–85, 186–87, 296 Grinstein, Gidi, 61, 68, 235, 241, 282 Gulf War (1990–91), 132 Gunness, Chris, 120 Günsberg, Osher, 24, 31 Gush Emunim, 155–56, 164 Gush Katif, 162 Hadassah, 275 Hadid, Mohammad, 118 Hadrian, Emperor of Rome, 169 Haganah, 99, 110, 112, 302 Ha-Halootz (The Pioneer), 53 Ha’Kohen, Yosef Ben Matityahu, see Josephus, Titus Flavius Hamas, 16, 127, 164, 179, 200, 203, 206, 214, 219, 271, 298 charter of, 13, 179–80 Gaza coup of, 181, 182–83, 188, 193, 201, 298 Iran’s support of, 183, 299 rockets launched into Israel by, 13, 182, 201–2, 203, 286, 298 terrorist attacks of, 133, 174, 180 Haqa’iq an Qadiyat Falastin (Facts on the Question of Palestine) (Husseini), 114 Harris, Sam, 278 Hashomer Hatzair, 253 Hasmonean dynasty, 24, 30–31, 35 Hebrew language, 55, 65 Hebrews, 27, 170 Hebron, 106, 150–51 Hejaz desert, 33, 44, 89, 103, 171 Helena, 32 Herod the Great, 23–24 Herter, Christian, 119–20 Herzl, Theodor, 73, 96, 267, 282 and Zionist movement, 60–66, 98, 103, 265 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 220, 282 Hess, Moshe, 59 Hezbollah, 114, 127, 134–35, 292, 299 hijabs, 11, 176 Hilltop Youth, 164 Hinkle, Ari, 71 Hinkle, Ross, 71, 188 Hirsch, Baron, 62 Hizb-ut-Tahrir, 278 Holocaust, 12, 33, 66, 94, 104, 106, 109, 203 denial of, 67–68, 279 Holy Land Foundation (HLF), 215 Hussain-McMahon Correspondence, 42 Hussein, King of Jordan, 133, 147, 184–85 Hussein, Saddam, 132 Husseini, Mohammed Amin al-, 114, 171, 267 Ibenbuim, Racheli, 240 ibn al-Khattab, Omar, 32 Ibrahim, Hisham, 175 IMPACT-se, 121 Inbar, Buma, 147 “Incidents, The,” 106 India, 30, 41, 95, 251, 254 indigenous rights, 34 Indursky, Estee Ryder, 240 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 159 Iran, 136, 165, 178, 204, 270 terrorism supported by, 183, 299 Iraq, 29, 33, 103, 107, 113, 128–29, 130, 132, 204 ISIS, 219, 252–53 Islam, Muslims, 33, 163, 170, 176, 226 Jerusalem as third holiest city in, 26, 139 jihad in, 178–80, 202, 302 radical extremist, 13, 156, 158, 166, 177–79, 203; see also specific groups Sharia law in, 177–78, 193, 201, 206, 214, 270, 278, 298 Shia, 46, 127, 176, 178 Sunni, 46, 177 Islam and the Future of Tolerance (Nawaz and Harris), 278 Islamic Association for Palestine, 215 Islamic Resistance Movement, see Hamas Islamic Theology of Counter Terrorism, 159 IsraAID, 252–53 Israel, ancient kingdom of, 27, 295 archaeological remains of, 28, 295 conquered by Assyrian Empire, 29 Hebrews in, 27 twelve Jewish tribes in, 27 see also Judea Israel, land of: archaeological richness of, 24–25 British control of, see British Mandate of Palestine Caliphate renaming of Judea, 32 foreign conquerors of, 29-33 granted to Jews by UN, see United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine Hasmonean period of, 30–31 Jewish people as indigenous to, 34 Jews exiled from, 29, 31, 296 Ottoman period in, see Ottoman Empire, Palestine province in Roman rule in, 24, 31, 35, 169, 242–48, 295, 296 Roman renaming of, 295 see also Palestine region Israel, State of, 10–12, 61–62, 73 Arab citizens of, 112, 167–69, 173–76, 193, 199–200, 201, 226, 227, 283–84, 299 Arab political parties in, 12, 176, 284 attacked by surrounding Arab countries, see War of Independence, Israeli; Yom Kippur War “brand” of, 263–64 countries recognizing, 102–3 early assimilation agenda in, 227–31 Egyptian peace deal with, 140, 146, 298 established as secular, culturally Jewish democratic state, 101, 166, 236 establishment of, 33, 89, 100–102, 104, 126 freedom of religion in, 101, 166, 262, 264 Holocaust survivors’ emigration to, 109 humanitarian efforts of, 251–54 Jordanian peace agreement with, 133, 146, 298 naming of, 99 natural resources lacking in, 26 population of, 173, 226, 228, 237 as refugee state, 12, 225, 283 security as constant concern in, 137, 140 in Sinai War, 128 size of, 25–26, 153 technological and medical innovation in, 256–60 terrorist attacks on, 134, 156; see also Hamas; Hezbollah UN resolutions against, 268, 271 water desalination in, 26 world economic contributions of, 254–56 Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 14–15, 16, 98, 109–10, 159, 185, 211, 250, 302 Arabs serving in, 175, 201, 227, 284 author’s service in, 3, 4–5, 149–51 Charedim exempt from service in, 237 roof knock policy of, 202 service in, as mandatory for most Israelis, 4, 143 Israeli American Council, 16 Israeli Antiquity Authority, 25 Israeli identity, 223–48 Sabra, 234–35 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see Arab-Israeli conflict Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Services, 147 Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, 178–79, 181–82 Jabari, Ahmed al-, 16 Jabotinsky, Ze’ev, 85, 161–62 Jarjora, Amin-Salim, 174 Jerusalem, 33, 43, 47, 82, 143, 171, 227, 239, 260 archaeological findings in, 25, 28 Black Panthers movement in, 233 Church of the Holy Sepulcher in, 32 destruction of First Temple in, 29 destruction of Second Temple in, 31, 139, 246–47, 248, 295 First Temple in, 28, 235 Old City of, 129, 154 Roman control of, 31–32, 242–48 Second Temple in, 30, 242 in Six Day War, 129, 154 terrorism in, 137 as third holiest city in Islam, 139 in War of Independence, 107 Zion as second name of, 60 see also East Jerusalem Jerusalem’s Traitor (Seward), 247 Jewish Agency, 83, 97, 98, 111 Jewish National Fund, 71 Jewish State, The (Herzl), 62–63 Jewish Wars, The (Josephus), 245 Jews: assimilation of, 60–61 conversions forced on, 30, 32, 33 discriminations and persecutions against, 30, 57–57, 63, 94, 126, 204, 220, 280, 296; see also antisemitism; Holocaust expelled from Arab countries, 109, 113, 203, 232, 297 Faisal and, 44–45 in first exile from Judea, 29 first Zion Return of, 30 as indigenous to land of Israel, 34–35 Lawrence and, 43–45, 49 in migration to British Mandate of Palestine, 88–90, 94–95, 104, 105 in migration to Ottoman Palestine, 103, 105 Mizrahi, 232–34, 239 and Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 58–59, 287 racism among, 231–35 resiliency of, 235, 241, 282 under Roman rule, 242–48, 296 in second exile from Judea, 31 secular, 19, 101, 161, 226, 237, 238, 239–40, 243, 248; see also Zionist movement, Zionists terrorism against, see Hamas; Hezbollah two thousand year exile of, 62 ultra-Orthodox, see Charedim UN granting of state to, 12, 33, 96–98, 104, 201, 203, 266, 296; see also Israel, State of in West Bank, 208, 209 see also Judaism jihad, 178–80, 202, 302 John of Giscala, 245, 246, 247 Jordan, 103, 107, 128–29, 130, 184, 204 Israeli peace agreement with, 133, 146, 298 West Bank and, 108, 129, 150, 152, 297 Jordan River, 45, 76 Jordan Valley, 75 Josephus, Titus Flavius, 31, 242–48, 279 Josephus Permutation, 244 Judah the Maccabee, rebellion led by, 30 Judaism, 26, 30, 31, 61–62, 129, 163, 243, 246 culture of debate and dissent in, 20, 241–42, 281 resilience of, 235 see also Jews Judea, 23–24, 29 Jews exiled by Nebuchadnezzar from, 29 name changed to Syria Palaestina by Hadrian, 169 Judea Mountains, 150, 164 Justinian I, Byzantine emperor, 32 Kaaba, Faras, 177 Kafkafi, Yaron, 19, 24, 25 Karine A, 158 Karra, George, 173, 175 Katznelson, Berl, 79 Kfar Etzion kibbutz, 155 Kfar Etzion settlement, 155 Kfar Maccabi kibbutz, 272 Kfar Yasif, 217 Khamenei, Ayatolla Ali, 277 Khayyal, Abdullah al-, 119–20 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 165, 178 kibbutzim, 4, 12, 72, 73–75, 80, 105, 106 see also specific kibbutzim KindHearts, 215 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 220 Kings, Second Book of, 28 Kiryat Arba settlement, 150 Knesset, 174–75, 176, 237, 303 Kook, Zvi Yehuda, 155, 164 Kuntar, Samir, 174 Kushner, Jared, and Trump Peace Plan, 135–36 Kuwait, invaded by Iraq, 132 Labor Party, Israeli, 79, 98, 156, 227, 229, 232, 234 Labor Party, UK, 57 Landmark Education, 144–45 Land of Peace, 164 Lapid, Yair, 176 Lawrence, T.


pages: 302 words: 100,493

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar, Bill Carr

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business logic, business process, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, microservices, Minecraft, performance metric, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, web application, why are manhole covers round?

This director’s insightful solution provides a great example of how simple enhancements to the hiring process can improve outcomes without damaging the core principles that it was designed to protect. It’s also a good reminder to always be on the lookout for those places where bias can go undetected and undermine your results. Bar Raiser and Diversity As of the completion of this book (June 2020), the Black Lives Matter movement is bringing issues of racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion to the forefront of our national conversation in unprecedented ways. Achieving a diverse workforce that operates in an equitable and inclusive manner has become one of the most important goals for any company or institution today.

See being Amazonian Andon Cord Andrulevich, Robin annual planning process OP1 OP2 S-Team goals Anthony, Felix application program interfaces (APIs) Amazon Product API Amazon Seller API definition of dependencies and Green Corp. example two-pizza teams and Are Right, A Lot leadership principle Baker & Taylor Bar Raiser (Amazon’s hiring process) Behavioral Interviewing Debrief/Hiring Meeting diversity and Hire and Develop the Best leadership principle and hiring at Amazon before Bar Raiser history and origins of In-House Interview Loop Job Description (JD) Offer Through Onboarding Phone Screen purpose of Reference Check resistance to Résumé Review STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) interviewing method steps in variations on Written Feedback See also hiring process, conventional Bar Raiser Core Bar Raisers Barnes & Noble Behavioral Interviewing being Amazonian Amazon Web Services and anecdotes and exception reporting Bar Raiser (hiring process) and budgets and company culture and compensation and controllable input metrics and core competencies customer obsession Day One mentality and flywheel and Just Do It Award leadership principles and long-term thinking morale and operational excellence patience and PowerPoint and pricing and Prime and “relentlessly” single-threaded leadership and S-Team goals and “strong general athlete” (SGA) suggestions for getting started “Unless you know better ones” “unreasonably high” willingness to invent Working Backwards and Bell, Charlie Best Buy Bewkes, Jeff Bezos, Jeff on Amazon as “invention machine” on “Amazon flywheel” Amazon Web Services and application program interfaces (APIs) and Colin as Jeff’s shadow on corporate culture on Day One mentality feedback given by Fire Phone and hiring process and job descriptions written by Kindle and on long-term thinking metrics and on missionaries origins of Amazon origins of Amazon Leadership Principles on perfection and high standards Press Release/Frequently Asked Questions process and Prime and Prime Video and single-threaded leadership and S-Team and on tenets two-pizza teams and on underpromising and overdelivering Working Backwards and Bezos, MacKenzie. See MacKenzie Scott Bias for Action leadership principle Black Lives Matter movement BlackBerry Blu-ray player Brethes, Thierry brick-and-mortar stores Brown, Alan Butterfield, Stewart Buy Now button Career Choice cashierless stores Child, Jason click-to-ship cognitive biases confirmation bias personal bias urgency bias Collins, Jim compensation as foundational mechanism of Leadership Principles long-term equity structure long-term thinking reinforced by misalignment and performance and confirmation bias Contribution Profit (CP) corporate culture Customer Connection Customer Obsession leadership principle customer service Dalzell, Rick Day One mentality DB Cabal (review team) Debrief/Hiring Meeting (Bar Raiser step) decision-making 262 Deliver Results leadership principle delivery services, third-party dependencies definition of example of New Project Initiatives (NPI) and organizational dependencies Press Release/Frequently Asked Questions process and relational database single-threaded leadership and software code technical dependencies two-pizza teams and Digital Media.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

He began working with a renegade chemist who attended AIDS conferences, took pictures of new drugs’ chemical structure and formula, and then showed the HIV activists how to re-create the compounds. Matt Sharp joined the San Francisco chapter of ACT UP. The activist group was a leaderless collective, pioneering an organizational structure that was later adopted by Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. The AIDS activists could see that diseases impacting the mainstream were garnering the lion’s share of research dollars. A “war on cancer” had been declared by Richard Nixon in 1971, and the disease was enjoying ongoing government support at the National Cancer Institute. When Matt Sharp flew to Washington for the “Storm the NIH” event in May 1990, the goal was to demand more government support for HIV research.

.; Jain, Lochlann; Lee, Sharon Heijin; Maggic, Mary; Martin, Emily; Pertamina, Tamara; Rapp, Rayna; Roberts, Dorothy; Roof, Judith; science fiction; Thompson, Charis; Uretsky, Elanah; Wong, Alice; Wray, Britt Ferrell, Ryan (consultant to Jiankui He) Firestone, Shulamith (feminist writer and activist) Floyd, George (Black Lives Matter icon) follistatin (muscle-enhancing hormone). See also myostatin Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Frankenstein (Shelley) Franklin, Rosalind (chemist) Franklin, Sarah (sociologist) Fuentes, Agustín (anthropologist) Fuller, Buckminster (futurist) Fu Manchu (fictional mad scientist).


pages: 375 words: 102,166

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Instead, if we are interested in making our commitment to racial equality “genetics-proof,” I think we must dismantle the false distinction between “inequalities that society is responsible for addressing” and “inequalities that are caused by differences in biology.”35 The mistaken idea that genetic causes operate as a boundary for social responsibility was evident in Sam Harris’s comments toward the end of our podcast conversation. We were speaking in the middle of a summer rocked by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, with Black Lives Matter protests happening in cities around the world. The books White Fragility and So You Want to Talk about Race topped the New York Times bestseller list,36 signs of a national conversation that was happening about racial disparities in policing, housing, health care, education, wealth, and political power in America.

INDEX 23andMe, 114 Affordable Care Act (ACA), 244–245 Ainsworth, Mary, 97 ancestry and race, 72–73, 93–95; antiracism and responsibility in postgenomic world, 89–93; common ancestors of today’s people and, 73–75; differences between, 77–82; Eurocentric bias of GWAS and, 84–85; genealogical versus genetic ancestors, 76–77; genome-wide association study (GWAS) and, 82–84, 94–95 Anderson, Elizabeth, 18, 213, 227 anti-eugenic policies, 232–233; and luck in meritocracy, 246–251; to stop wasting time, money, talent, and tools, 234–235; structuring society to advantage of those least advantaged, 251–255; using genetic information for equity, not exclusion, 242–246; using genetic information to improve opportunity, not classify people, 235–242; veil of ignorance and, 251–255 anti-eugenic project, 20 antiracism, 89–93, 232 Appelbaum, Paul, 197 attachment, 97 autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), 27–28, 63, 228–229 Awad, Germine, 221 bacteria, 31 Barth, Daniel, 41–43, 44 Bell Curve, The, 16–17, 18, 78, 123 Belsky, Dan, 43, 127, 188 Benjamin, Ruha, 175, 179, 233 Bessey, Sarah, 255 Bezos, Jeff, 7 Binet, Alfred, 216 bioannotation, 136–137 bioethics, 213–215 bioRxiv, 22 Black Lives Matter, 92 Bliss, Catherine, 236 Blueprint, 15 Bourdain, Anthony, 50 Bowlby, John, 97 Box, George, 44 Bradley, Shawn, 38, 42, 63, 222 brain: bioannotation and, 136–137; executive functions and, 138–140 Brigham, Carl, 80 Bronfenbrenner, Urie, 106–107 Buck, Carrie, 14, 15 Buck v. Bell, 14 California Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (CalGINA), 244 candidate gene study, 51–53 Carlson, Jedidiah, 21–22 Case, Anne, 171–172, 254, 255 causation, 96; counterfactuals and, 99–100; genetic, 103–108; long causal chain of inequality, 170–172; observing what could have been, 101–103; random genes and, 109; sex education example, 180–183; thick and thin, 108–109 CFH gene, 31–32 CFTR gene, 83 children, attachment and deprivation in, 97–98 Clinton, Bill, 19 Clinton Foundation, 183 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 218–219 Cokley, Kevin, 221 colorblindness, 232 Columbus, Christopher, 19 Conley, Dalton, 159, 188 cookbook-wide-association study, 53–57 Coop, Graham, 75 counterfactuals, 99–100; observing what could have been, 101–103 COVID-19 pandemic, 255–256 criminal behavior, 193–194; factors blamed for, 197–199, 207–209; genetics of, 194–197; identical twins and free will coefficient, 200–202 cult of the smart, 6 Dangerous Idea, A, 155 Darwin, Charles, 12 datafication of injustice, 175 Davenport, Charles B., 13 Deaf in America: Notes from a Culture, 223 deafness, 222–227, 229 Deaton, Angus, 171–172, 254 deBoer, Freddie, 6 DeJarnette, Joseph, 14 Dennett, Daniel, 202 depression, 52–53, 63 designer babies, 224 determinism, 22, 105, 133–135, 171, 186 Diversity Delusion, The, 205 DNA, 31, 40, 42; ancestry and, 76–77; in genetic recipes, 48, 49; genome-wide association study (GWAS) and, 57–58; identity by descent, 113–114 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 129, 155 Domingue, Ben, 188 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 141 Down’s syndrome, 108–109 Draper, Wickliffe Preston, 15 Duchesneau, Sharon, 223–224 Duckworth, Angela, 141 ecological fallacies, 85–89 education: free will coefficient in, 202–204; greater transparency in, 167–170; kindergarten, 3–4; Montessori, 3; sex, 180–183; for unskilled versus skilled jobs, 5–6, 209; word gap and, 183–184 educational attainment: bioannotation and, 136–137; causation in, 96; equity versus equality and, 159–164; executive functions and, 138–140; family expectations of, 130–131; genetic variants associated with, 46; inequalities in, 5; intelligence tests and, 16–17, 18, 89; interactions among people and, 144–148; non-cognitive skills and, 141–144; polygenic index and, 9–10, 63–71; timing of gene activation and, 137–138; when the worst environments produce the most equal outcomes, 156–159 egalitarianism, 11; genetics and, 16–20 egg donation, 34–35 environmental racism, 220 epilepsy, 27 equality, 21, 23.


pages: 456 words: 101,959

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, emotional labour, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, impulse control, independent contractor, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, phenotype, QAnon, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, theory of mind, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income

She closed her store and pared down her partnerships to just a few key collaborators. She and her husband separated, and she came out as queer. She started boxing, and getting more muscular, and began dressing in baggy, masculine clothing more often. On Instagram her follower count dropped. She started posting about Black Lives Matter, her struggles with depression, and her queerness, and more followers disappeared. Many of the white, straight women who loved Moorea’s old brand were put off by the real her. The more Moorea embraced her true self, the more she lost. But it didn’t exactly feel like a loss. She had gained a greater understanding of who she really was.

See defining Autism terminology, 46–50 use of term, 46, 67 Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), 42 Autism National Committee, 225 Autism Speaks, 6, 225, 229 Autistic brains, 20–23, 70, 114, 206–7 Autistic identity, 44, 85–88, 139–40 identity-first language, 46–47 integration and, 254–62 Autistic life, building an, 164–90 divergent design, 168–73 doing your own thing, 179–82 Mariah’s experience, 168–69 Marta Rose’s experience, 168–70, 171, 173, 177–78 Moorea Seal’s experience, 164–67, 170 radical visibility, 183–90 reimagining success and time, 173–78 Rhi’s experience, 180–81 Rory’s experience, 179–80 Sue’s experience, 173–74 Autistic relationships, cultivating, 191–228 communicating clearly and honestly, 207–13 cultivating unmasked friendships, 200–207 finding and making your community, 218–28 James Finn’s experience, 191–93, 195 letting go of neurotypical expectations, 213–17 Reese Piper’s experience, 213–14, 224–25 self-disclosing, 195–200 standing up for yourself, 190, 191–93 Tisa’s experience, 218–19, 223–24 Autistics Against Curing Autism, 28, 85, 86, 221–22 Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), 83, 85, 86, 87, 222, 225, 236 awkwardness, 5, 20, 39, 51, 57, 93, 94, 102, 107, 148, 158, 174, 185, 186, 194, 195, 219 B Baron-Cohen, Simon, 77 belief systems, adherence to, 112, 129–33, 159, 229 Andrew’s experience, 129–30 Bobbi’s experience, 52 warning signs of high-control groups, 132–33 biases, 24, 40, 43, 56–57, 134, 186, 195, 239–40 Big Bang Theory (TV series), 4, 37, 133, 134 biological markers, 20–23 Bipolar Disorder, 55, 73, 113 Bird, Geoff, 126 Black Autistics, 9, 36, 60–67, 194, 197, 232, 240, 246–47 Anand Prahlad’s experience, 49, 53, 65–66, 67 Catina Burkett’s experience, 63, 64, 67 Mariah’s experience, 64, 168–69 racial disparities in diagnosis, 33, 36–37, 40, 61–62 Timotheus Gordon’s experience, 28, 65–66, 68, 86, 92–93, 94, 97, 222–23, 247 Black Lives Matter, 166 Bleuler, Eugen, 46, 67 Blume, Harvey, 30 Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), 9, 29, 53, 55, 75–77 bottom-up processing style, 24–25, 114 Braille signs, 231, 234, 235–36 brain injuries, 11, 30, 80 Bridges, Dorian, 119–20, 121, 123 brown Autistics, 36, 40, 60–67, 194, 222, 246–47 Burkett, Catina, 63, 64, 67 burnout, 3, 11, 18, 75, 176, 199, 238 Burns, Pete, 150–51 C calorie restriction, 55, 108, 110 camouflaging, 15–16, 39, 96–98, 108, 140, 163, 167–68 ABA therapy and, 100–103 as an overcorrection, 104–5 gender and, 8, 57 Thomas’s case, 119, 128 capitalism, 81–82, 85, 152, 177 chewelry, 141, 187 child development, 21, 32–33 childishness, 93–94, 102, 107, 124, 145, 148 Cliffe, Nicole, 7, 196 clothing and radical visibility, 183–89 cluelessness, 57, 89, 107, 139, 148 code switching, 63–64 cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), 74, 118 cold and unfeeling, 63, 68, 102, 106, 147, 192 collaborative contact, 238–40 collectibles, 170–71 coming out, 32, 145, 195–200 communication needs, 207–13, 208–9 community, finding your place in, 85–88, 218–28 Community Emergency Services and Support Act (CESSA), 222–23, 247 comorbid conditions, 72–81 compensation, 37, 96–98, 100, 108, 140, 163, 167–68, 179, 182 ABA therapy and, 100–103 connective tissue disorders, 28 conspiracy theory groups, 129, 131 cooking, 214, 217 costs of masking, 109–38 adherence to rigid rules and belief systems, 112, 129–33 Andrew’s experience, 129–30 Angel’s experience, 123–24 detachment and dissociation, 111, 123–28 Dorian Bridges’s experience, 119–20, 121, 123 eating-disordered behavior, 111, 119–23 fawning and compulsive people pleasing, 112, 133–37 problematic coping strategies, 111–12, 112 problem drinking and substance use, 111, 113–19 Thomas’s experience, 109–10, 113–14, 118–19 courage, 158, 259 standing up for yourself, 143, 147, 190, 191–93, 259, 260 COVID-19 pandemic, 183, 210–11 “crazy,” 30, 115, 125, 252–53 “creepiness,” 57, 181, 185 criminal justice system, 246–47 crying, 34, 55, 92, 93, 114, 165 Cubacub, Sky, 183–84, 186–87 cults, 108, 110, 129–30, 130, 132–33 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 4 D Dale, Laura Kate, 59–60 Deaf people, 46, 212, 230–31, 288n defining Autism, 19–32 bottom-up processing style, 24–25 deliberative processing style, 23–24 diversity, 31–32 neurodivergence, 29–31 neurological markers, 20–23 repetitive behaviors, 26–27 risk factors, 28–29 touching every part of Autistic person’s life, 25–26 deinstitutionalization, 239 deliberative processing style, 23–24 depression, 11, 23, 29, 55, 72–73, 118 detachment, 111, 123–28 diagnosis, 9, 39–46, 244 access to, 9, 33, 40–41, 44–45, 53, 62 gender and racial disparities in, 6–7, 33, 35–39, 53–54, 61–62 identifying specialists, 41–42 misdiagnosis, 53, 62, 75–78 positive experience with, 41, 42–45 questions to ask, 41 rate, 40, 40–41, 244 white Autistic boys, 6–7, 35–39 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 27, 82–83, 151 disability accommodations and benefits, 43, 234–38, 242, 245 comorbid and overlapping conditions, 72–81 medical model of, 229–30 social model of, 230–31 use of term, 46–47, 48 “disability first” language, 47 discernment, 125, 146, 193 discounting, 197 discrimination, 42–43, 234–38 dissociation, 111, 123–28 Angel’s experience, 123–24 distractibility, 21, 31, 70, 72, 78, 114, 144, 170, 175, 179, 236 divergent design, 168–73 Mariah’s experience, 168–69 Marta Rose’s experience, 168–70, 171, 173, 177–78 diversity of Autism, 31–32 domestic abuse, 110, 129, 136 drinking.


pages: 319 words: 102,839

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

Then, a White police officer in Minneapolis named Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of a Black man named George Floyd for eight minutes and forty-six seconds on May 25 while Floyd lay handcuffed on the ground in custody, at least two minutes after he stopped breathing—all of this captured on iPhone video, which every media outlet in the country, if not the world, broadcast by that evening. After that, the world outside the shipyard gates seemed to shift into a whole new higher gear of crazy. Around the country—and then the world—city streets erupted in protests led by Black Lives Matter, opposed by counterprotesters of self-appointed “militias.” Addressing the naval community through self-recorded video about the death of George Floyd and the subsequent unrest, CNO Admiral Michael Gilday on June 3 said, “We need to listen. We have Black Americans in our Navy and in our communities that are in deep pain right now.

Even though Sunderland had paid no dues to Local 8888 for about a year, the union still sent a rep to quietly sit in on the meeting between the worker and the HR official. The local rep wanted to ask the yard to give Sunderland another chance but was told the Trump supporter didn’t want that. Spivey never wanted to see anybody fired over these kinds of things, and the yard had been cracking down—supervisors told another steelworker to turn a Black Lives Matter shirt inside-out. As for Sunderland, the fifty-five-year-old had no regrets about sticking to his guns. His story made the national news. He was featured on Fox and even wound up talking to the White House. Spivey wanted to file a grievance and possibly get Sunderland’s job back, but the union didn’t hear back from him on those offers either.


pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

A philosophical map, then, would chart the ephemeral events of everyday life and invest them with new significance, documenting experiences and increasing the possibility of their communication. That sounds a lot like social networks at their best, right? Marginalized communities are more able than ever before to map their lives online and document the things people in power wish to deny or erase. Platforms like Twitter have been critical to the growth of movements like Black Lives Matter. In the wake of the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, people used Twitter to organize on the ground, share their locations with one another, and broadcast evidence of systemic injustice to the nation. Similarly, hashtags like #DisabledAndCute and #BlackGirlMagic empower members of disenfranchised communities to do more than just document their trauma and pain—they are ways of mapping and sharing their joys with a world that is less inclined to tell those kinds of stories.

“That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over in hopes of getting some fleeting sensation—some momentary rush of recognition, flattery, or rage.” Driven in our posting by what algorithms reward, even our digital “downtime” can sometimes leave us feeling the opposite of renewed—like life in digital space is about always doing, rather than existing. I am reminded of a story a friend told me about being engaged in Black Lives Matter organizing. She is also a Christian involved in a faith community, and she described friends of hers who do not have a faith or philosophical community—who are “nones” or, more specifically, “nothing in particulars”—finding their sense of community, belonging, and identity in activism instead.


pages: 137 words: 35,041

Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle

Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, defund the police, disinformation, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, microaggression, Overton Window, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, Streisand effect, zero-sum game

This was misinterpreted as racist because he was replying to a black Twitter user, even though it was a phrase he had used previously in conversation with white people. In June 2020, Nick Buckley, the founder of charity organisation Mancunian Way, which is committed to helping young people from ethnic minority backgrounds to find work, was ousted for criticising the radical politics of the Black Lives Matter movement (most notably their calls to defund the police and abolish capitalism). Although Buckley’s opposition to racism was never in doubt, the charity capitulated to pressure from online campaigners who smeared him as racist and demanded his dismissal. It was only after a petition and counter-campaign that the decision was reversed.


Belgium - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture by Bernadett Varga

Airbnb, Black Lives Matter, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, high-speed rail, lockdown, Peace of Westphalia, trade route, women in the workforce, work culture

Former foreign minister Louis Michel, appointed a European Commissioner in 2004, has tried to atone for the colonial past by helping to reactivate the economy of the Democratic Republic of Congo and its neighbors Rwanda and Burundi, and to support the resolution of Central Africa’s ongoing conflicts. In 2002 he formally acknowledged Belgium’s share of the moral responsibility for the killing in 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the father of Congo’s independence. In 2020 the Black Lives Matter movement reached Belgium and protests spread across Brussels, where a crowd of about 10,000 people demonstrated against racism. This was followed by a letter from the Belgian king to the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo expressing his deepest regrets over his country’s exploitation of the DRC.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

As one activist put it, “Getting something on Twitter means that people are talking, they are conscious. And that consciousness can lead to action.”25 Freelon and his coauthors found that social media posts played a large role in spreading identifiable narratives and accounts of killings by the police. The Black Lives Matter movement had a significant impact on both opinion and action in many cities as well as at the national level. #BlackLivesMatter mattered. Similar polarization can be seen with the use of #AllLivesMatter, a hashtag whose purpose was to offer a competing narrative to that reflected in #BlackLivesMatter, to the effect that it is partisan or parochial, or even racist, to single out “black lives” for special emphasis.

., 243–44 Berners-Lee, Tim, 183 best practices, 223–25 bias: appropriately slanted stories and, 62–63; citizens and, 169; confirmation, 123; cybercascades and, 123–25, 135; elitism and, 151–53; Facebook and, 15, 123; freedom of speech and, 205; general-interest intermediaries and, 148; groupism and, 63–68; homogeneous society and, 135; magazines and, 152; newspapers and, 151–52; polarization and, 63, 92, 97; prejudices and, 43; radio and, 64; scandals and, 43; social media and, 135; spreading information and, 148, 151–53, 155; television and, 64, 151–52 biased assimilation, 92, 97 bicameralism, 47 Big Brother, ix, 257 Bill of Rights, 50–52 bin Laden, Osama, 234, 239 Black Lives Matter movement, 59, 79–80, 154, 259 blogs: conservatives and, 231; cybercascades and, 124; decline of, 22–23; diversity and, 231; improving, 231; liberals and, 231; microblogs and, 22; polarization and, 63, 79; popularity of, 22–23; spreading information and, 154–55 Bobadilla-Suarez, Sebastian, 127 Bohnett, David, 60 bombs, 192, 235–37 books, Amazon and, 22, 31–33, 150, 188, 222, 229; consumption and, 3, 19, 27, 31–33, 98, 104, 118, 140, 150, 153, 171, 192, 256–57; long tail and, 171; public sphere and, 153; shared experiences and, 140 Bosnia, 239 boyd, dana, 81 Brandeis, Louis: constitutional doctrine and, 52–56, 145, 203, 220, 228, 247–48, 250–51; freedom of speech and, 55–56, 203–4, 248; inert people and, ix, 56, 145, 204, 261; on sovereignty, 52–57 Brave New World (Huxley), x, 21 Brexit, 7, 11 British Broadcasting Network, 64 browsing habits, 5, 21–22, 116, 124 Bush, George W., 93–94, 104 campaign finance, 193–94 Carnegie, Dale, 160 CBS, 19, 152, 179–81, 185, 197–98, 228 censorship: authoritarianism and, 11; China and, 160–62; citizens and, 160–61, 164; regulation and, 6, 11, 34, 160–61, 164, 200, 208, 246, 248, 256, 261 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), 183 chance encounters, 7–8, 19, 24, 32 Chechnya, 239 checks and balances, 11, 46–47, 51 Chicago school of economics, 151 child-support issues, 133 China, ix, 63, 107, 137, 139, 159–62 choice architecture, 7 Christians, 185 citizens: behavior and, 160–62, 167–68; bias and, 169; Bill of Rights and, 50–52; Colorado experiment and, 68–70, 77; communications and, 157–60, 163–64, 166, 168–70, 175; conservatives and, 162; constitutional doctrine and, 157; consumers and, 25, 115–16, 157–62, 166–75, 223, 231, 256–59; crime and, 172; deliberative democracy and, 169; discrimination and, 167, 175; echo chambers and, 163; education and, 167, 170; Facebook and, 163; filtering and, 157; freedom of speech and, 159, 164; general-interest intermediaries and, 166; Internet and, 158, 160, 164, 169, 171–74; judgment and, 167, 169–70; limited options and, 164–67, 174; majority rule and, 169–70; must-carry rules and, 215, 226–29; preferences and, 157–60, 162–70, 174–75; producers and, 171; public forums and, 13, 34–44, 58, 84, 88, 142, 156, 166, 204–5, 226–27, 256–57, 267; radio and, 165–66; shared experiences and, 158; social media and, 157, 160–65, 168; television and, 158, 165–66, 169, 173; terrorism and, 163; Twitter and, 162, 166; unanimity and, 169–70 Citizens United case, 193–94 civic virtue, 5, 23, 46, 260 civility, 217–18 climate change: cybercascades and, 97, 107, 127–31; environmental issues and, 1, 3–4, 7, 9, 11, 35, 42, 57, 67, 74, 96–97, 99, 107, 127–31, 217; global warming and, 68–69, 88, 217; greenhouse gases and, 9, 127, 130–32, 218 Clinton, Bill, 104, 109 Clinton, Hillary, 15, 59, 75, 117 CNN, 62, 64–65, 115, 126, 228–29 Cole, Benjamin, 237 Cole, Jon, 237 Colorado experiment, 68–70, 77 commercial speech, 193, 205, 207 common experiences, 7, 34, 140–41, 144–45, 147, 214, 254 communications: advertising and, 28 (see also advertising); baseline for, 23–24: citizens and, 157–60, 163–64, 166, 168–70, 175; consumer sovereignty and, 260; curation and, 1; cybercascades and, 119, 134–35; deliberative democracy and, 228; disclosure policies and, 215, 218–23; diversity and, 18, 23, 214; evaluating market of, 53–54; fairness doctrine and, 84–85, 207, 221, 227; FCC and, 84, 179, 198, 219–20, 227; fewer shared experiences and, 144–46; filtering and, 6, 28 (see also filtering); forms of neutrality and, 207–10; fragmentation and, 5, 7, 11, 13, 16, 23, 51, 57, 64, 77, 83–86, 98, 140–41, 146, 149, 151–55, 213, 221, 230, 253, 259, 266n14; freedom of speech and, 193–98, 204, 207, 209; free society and, 18; future of, 261; gated, 8; improving, 214–15, 219–20, 223, 226–28; Internet and, 19 (see also Internet); Jacobs on, 12–13; legal issues and, 177–79, 220, 227; manipulation and, 17, 28–29, 95, 164; mass media and, 19 (see also mass media); must-carry rules and, 226–29; net neutrality and, 29; opposing viewpoints and, 71, 84, 207, 215, 231–33, 255; overload and, 63–68; personalized market for, 1, 155–56, 257, 259; plethora of options in, 5; polarization and, 25, 60, 63–64, 70, 75, 84–86, 89–92; politics and, 54; President’s Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters and, 196–98; producers and, 28, 215; public forums and, 13, 34–44, 58, 84, 88, 142, 156, 166, 204–5, 226–27, 256–57, 267; Putnam on, 267n2; Red Lion Broadcasting v.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Local residents welcomed reporters, instead of regarding them as hostile intruders. The lack of British media diversity was painfully highlighted by the sight of so many white reporters suddenly visible in one of the most ethnically and culturally mixed areas of the capital (and reinforced all over again by the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020). The discovery by reporters that the residents of Grenfell were, and had been, pillars of the community – artistic, altruistic, working in key parts of London’s economy, skilled, thoughtful and organised – was treated as a revelation. To people from BAME and working-class backgrounds this was a given.

‘From the broadsheets to the BBC, the British press has stoked racism and xenophobia, cynically exploited them for clicks and eyeballs – or hidden behind cowardly equivocation about the sacred right of racists to be heard in weekly columns. And everyone involved is still getting away with it. Editors who happily published Katie Hopkins are today cheerleading for wokeness; others are still working with people who think Black Lives Matter has “a racist agenda”, and telling themselves free speech requires nothing less.’ There was a degree of soul-searching in many companies. Within weeks of Floyd’s murder Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, emailed her staff, acknowledging that ‘It can’t be easy to be a Black employee at Vogue’, and that the magazine had ‘not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators’.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Instead, law enforcement can turn to data and technologies provided by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the intelligence group Palantir, who have become such big users of data tools that the reality of data-driven crime fighting in the United States has come to mirror dystopian science fiction. Facebook ad tools, for example, have been used to gather data on people who expressed an interest in Black Lives Matter, data of the sort that—as the ACLU has exposed—was then sold to police departments via a third-party data-monitoring and sales company called Geofeedia.21 This is far from unusual; the collection and sale of data from not only Big Tech firms but myriad other companies via third-party data brokers is a common practice—indeed, it’s the fastest growing part of the U.S. economy.22 A 2019 report from the Democratic strategy group Future Majority found that “thousands of companies gather personal information that their customers or clients provide in the course of doing business with them, and then sell their information to large data brokers, such as credit bureaus.23 In turn, those data brokers analyze, package and resell the information, often as personal profiles.

Further, the new generation of wifi-based home devices that respond to people’s voice commands—led by Amazon’s Alexa, Echo, and Dot, and Google Nest and Google Home—can capture not only personal information about the people who buy and install them but what they say in the range of those devices.”24 In short, the American surveillance state isn’t science fiction—it’s already here. The fact that Silicon Valley companies portray themselves as uber-liberal and praise groups like Black Lives Matter while also monetizing their surveillance is a rich and dark irony, but by no means the only one. Consider Amazon’s Orwellian-sounding Rekognition image processing system, which the ACLU recently called upon Jeff Bezos to stop selling to law enforcement officials, saying it was “primed for abuse in the hands of government.”


pages: 268 words: 35,416

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

Sign up to Mortified’s newsletter to get advance notice of upcoming events before tickets sell out. g Spoken Word g Contents Google Map MANNY’S Map 4; 3092 16th Street, The Mission; ///noon.rested.coherent; www.welcometomannys.com A nightly calendar of Q&As with politicians, activists, journalists, and thought leaders – past speakers include Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garzer and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi – draws a mixed bunch of hippies and hipsters to this civically minded spot. By day, it’s MacBooks and macchiatos; by night, spirited debates on hot-button issues like colorism and homelessness. Entry to events is free, but register on the website beforehand. » Don’t leave without trying the food: the kitchen is run by Farming Hope, who train up the homeless and formerly incarcerated.


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

Anti-capitalist movements like Occupy are only mentioned in passing because there are plenty of books written about them, and although important, they don’t have a monopoly on the channels of frustration.* Other significant movements are absent because I wasn’t sure I could do them justice, such as those that mobilise on identity markers—sexuality, race, gender—for example, Black Lives Matter. But I’ve tried to follow a wide variety of contemporary radical thinking I think is both interesting and important. I approached each group with the intention of assessing them as honestly and objectively as I could. To listen to their ideas and immerse myself in their worlds in order to tell their stories as faithfully as possible.

See artificial intelligence Aktionsanalytische Organisation (AAO), 203–204 Alentejo, Portugal, 189–190 Allied Irish Bank, 65 Alpert, Richard (Ram Dass), 104 Amazon, eBay and, 299–300 Amici di Beppe Grillo (Friends of Beppe Grillo), 159–160 anarcho-capitalists, 271, 275, 281, 292, 314 Anderson, David, 136 Andrews, Lori, 38 Annas, George, 38 anti-ageing research centre, 33 anti-fascism, 66, 70–76 Antifascistisk Aktion (AFA), 67–70, 74, 81–82 anti-fracking movement, 258 Cuadrilla lawsuit and, 255, 263 Nanas, 255–257, 260–263 US, 259–260 anti-Islam movements, in Europe, 49, 52–53, 55–56, 59, 65–66, 88 media portrayal of, 83 See also English Defence League; Pegida-UK arrests, 248 Jedlicˇka, 269–270 Robinson, 87 artificial intelligence (AI), 36–38, 308 Asimov, Isaac, 11 al-Assad, Bashar, 129 Austria, Pegida-Graz event in, 89 ayahuasca, 97, 106 Bachmann, Lutz, 50, 51, 52, 74 Baillie, Douglas, 206–207 Benyahia, Rasheed, 129–130 Berlusconi, Silvio, 159, 163–164, 166 bio-hacking Grinders, 22–23 lab, 20–27 organizations and movement, 22–23 biology, Grinders approach to, 24 Birmingham, Pegida-UK demonstration in, 86–93 bitcoin, 282, 287, 291 mining, 288 Bitnation, 285–286 citizenship, 290–292 reputation system of, 293–294 Black Lives Matter, 6 Black Mirror (Brooker), 293–294 Blair, Tony, 133, 180 Blake, William, 95 blindness, Lee’s technology for, 23 Bloc Against Islam (Blok protiislámu), 55–56, 59, 88 blockchains, 288–290, 299, 308 blog, of Grillo, 159, 163, 178 staff and control of, 181–184 The Book (Watts), 100, 110 border police, 283, 295 Bostrom, Nick, 12 Bottici, Laura, 168 Boxer, Barbara, 46 Bradbury, Paul, 295 brain mapping, 34 Breivik, Anders, 75–76 British Muslims laser focus on, 147–148 Prevent and, 136, 138, 147 Prevent classes for, 139 UK nationals drawn to Syria or Iraq, 129–130 British National Party, 62 Brooker, Charlie, 293–294 Busher, Joel, 73 Byrne, Liam, 81 CAGE, 145–146 Cameron, David, 150, 254 capitalism anarcho-, 271, 275, 281, 292 Marx predictions about, 8 carbon dioxide, 232 cars, self-driving, 36 Casaleggio, Gianroberto, 158–160, 182, 183 Cataldo, Fabio Massimo, 173 Centre for Experimental Culture Design, 194–195 Channel Panel, 140–144, 148, 149, 150 Chicago Journal of International Law, 278 children, in Tamera commune, 195 Christian Climate Action, 248 citizenship, Bitnation, 290–292 civil disobedience, 264–265 climate change Paris deal and, 236 predictions, 231–232 radicalism and, 308–309 climate-change activism, 229–230, 231, 241–242 civil disobedience and, 264–265 Climate Camps, 234–237, 240 journalists and, 237 moots and gatherings, 236, 237 paradox, 234 undercover police problem in, 238, 239 Clinton, Bill, 176, 180 Clinton, Hilary, 43, 180 coal, 252, 264 fracking compared to, 254 coal mines direct actions against UK, 252 open-cast, 247–248, 249 See also Ffos-y-fran coal mine Collins, Matt, 138, 141, 144 Colombian government, FARC and, 210, 213 communes, 206 control and coercion issues in, 217, 218–219 failure of, 223 of 1970s, 205 size of, 226 thought-conformity trait of, 218–219 See also Tamera commune confirmation bias, 73 CONTEST, as UK response to al-Qaeda, 132, 134 conveyor-belt model, of radicalisation, 137–138 Copenhagen, demonstration in, 67–70, 74, 81–82 Corbyn, Jeremy, 260, 261–262, 306 Corrao, Ignazio, 169–173 counterculture movement, psychedelics and, 104 Countering Violent Extremism, 132, 147 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, 135 counter-terrorism strategies, 131–134 as cottage industry, 134, 147–148 See also Prevent Cowell, Simon, 33 Craxi, Bettino, 158, 159, 163, 165 Grillo’s TV show banned by, 177 Croatia, 268, 270, 296, 298–299 war with Serbia, 269 Cryonic Institute, 33 CTIA Super Mobility 2015, 26–27, 29, 30–36 Cuadrilla, 255–257, 262, 263 cultural framing, of activists, 257–258 cultural hegemony, in activist dictionary, 243 Cyber Party, 46 Cyphernomicon (journal), 284 Czech Republic, 56, 57–59 Velvet Revolution in, 54–55 Däbritz, Siegfried, 54 Dakota Access Pipeline, 265–266 decentralisation, radical, 289–290 democracies checks and balances in, 186 decline of, 4 direct, 154, 160–161, 187 Grillo’s blog and, 182–183 liberal, 131, 151, 312, 313–314, 316 nation-state model and, 300 received wisdoms of Western, 3 Tarkowski Templehof on, 292 See also Western democracies Democrat Party, 5 demonstrations Paris Climate Talk, 241–242 Reclaim Australia, 88 demonstrations, Pegida-UK, 88–89 in Birmingham, 86–93 in Copenhagen, 67–70, 74, 81–82 Denmark, anti-Islam movement in, 66–67 Department of Homeland Security, 132 Descartes, René, 110 Di Battista, Alessandro, 166 digital politics direct democracy as enabled by, 154, 160–161, 187 emotions and, 178 Grillo on, 155 Meetups and, 167–168 problem with, 185–186 prophets, 178 rise of, 156–157 Trump and, 179–180 digital populism, 156–158 digital reputation systems, 293–294, 299–300 direct democracy, Internet as enabling, 154, 160–161, 187 direct-action activism, 233, 263 culture of secrecy, 237 decision making, 244–245 demographic of, 241 diversity issue for, 241–242 End Coal Now, 238–246 right wingers disdain of, 245–246 against UK coal mines, 252 See also Ffos-y-fran coal mine divorce, UK and US rates, 221 DIY biology.


On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

When the Ku Klux Klan and other white segregationist and nationalist groups held a ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 – in a row over a statue of the military leader of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee – they fought a bloody pitched battle with liberal protestors, one of whom was killed. Hawk Newsome, who leads the New York chapter of the campaign group Black Lives Matter, was there. He described the scene to me. ‘When we went to protest, we saw men in camouflage gear with huge guns, and neo-Nazis with signs saying “Kill Jews”, “Kill Niggers”. The Ku Klux Klan and skinheads had shields, sticks, guns, knives, pepper spray, goggles – they were prepared. I looked down at my phone and – boom!

INDEX Aaron, Hank, 105 ABC, 102 Abedin, Huma, 188 Abernathy, Ralph, 155 abortion, 119, 175, 176, 203–4, 204, 265, 274, 276–7 Abourezk, James, 80 Abramsky, Jenny, 110 Accidental American, The, 143 Afghanistan, 112, 132, 159, 258 Agnew, Spiro, 44, 49, 51 al-Qaeda, 132 Alda, Alan, 45 Alexander, Bobby and Gloria, 175, 176 All the President’s Men, 57 Allen, Gavin, 155 Allen, Woody, 16 Amash, Justin, 199 America, vi, 280 American Conservative Union (ACU), 146, 197 American Enterprise Institute, 98 American Spectator, 120 America’s Crisis of Leadership, 111, 113, 114 Ames, Aldrich, 93 Andy (student), 24 Annan, Kofi, 131 anthrax scare, 139 anti-communism, 38, 98, 145 anti-Semitism, 14, 16, 216 Apprentice, The, 177 Arafat, Yasser, 115 Assange, Julian, 290 assassination, 49, 71, 72, 78, 82, 198, 202, 219 assimilation, 9–10, 15 Associated Press (AP), 34 Atlanta Constitution, 56 The Atlantic, 81–2, 202 Audacity of Hope (Obama), 154 automaticity, 141 Baker, Howard, 42 Baker, James, 126 Baltimore Sun, 56 Balz, Dan, 82 Barenboim, Daniel, 95 Barnum & Bailey, 62 BBC, 38, 50, 63, 106–12 passim, 115, 122, 154, 155, 169, 183, 241, 271, 280 M Street offices of, 116, 191–2, 299 Naughtie joins, 5 Radio 4, 5, 75, 95, 110, 111–12, 125, 153 Radio 5 Live, 111, 154 World Service, 50, 241 Beach Boys, 78, 79 Beame, Abe, 32 Bear Stearns, 158–9 Beck, Glenn, 176 Becker, Daniel, 104–5 Begin, Menachem, 69 Benenson, Joel, 190 Benn, Tony, 84 Berkowitz, Mr and Mrs, 16 Berle, Milton, 15 Berlin Wall, 95–6 Bernstein, Carl, 38, 57, 80 Bernstein, Leonard, 31 Bess (dog), 207 Biden, Hunter, 291 Biden, Joe, 168, 269, 291 Bingham, Joan, 83 Birch, John, 98 Black Lives Matter, 216 Blair House, 84, 122 Blair, Tony, 120, 121, 122, 129–33, 141–3, 147–51 Blitzer, Wolf, 121 Bluestone, Irving, 89 Blumenthal, Sidney, 120, 124 Bobbitt, Phil, 215–16 Bolton, John, 143, 144, 146 Borscht Belt, 9, 14, 15, 20 Boston Globe, 56 Bradlee, Ben, 79, 80–1 Breasted, Mary, 134, 299 Brexit, 197, 242 Broder, David, 42, 87–8, 120 Brooks, Mel, 15 Brown, Gordon, 120 Brown, Jerry, 88, 205–7, 208–9 Brunson, Doyle, 173–4 Buckley, William F., 98 BUNAC, 6, 10–11 Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, 203 Burke, James Lee, 6 busboys, 12, 13 Bush, Barbara, 108, 181 Bush, Billy, 275 Bush, George H.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

In our globalised world of easyJet and Erasmus, Facebook, foreign holidays and fusion food, people have an increasingly wide range of international connections. Politics too now cuts across borders, and not just through international institutions such as the EU and the UN. ‘Climate strikes’ now mobilise schoolchildren across Europe, North America and the world. Black Lives Matter protests have erupted around the globe. Facebook groups bring together people with common passions from all over. People follow on Twitter, and are followed by, people in different countries. Their favourite pop stars and footballers are often foreign. People increasingly join chosen communities based on common values and interests that cut across national borders.

Welfare systems can also be reformed to increase incentives to work and tie some benefits more closely to previous contributions. Overall, then, the picture tends to be mixed but improving. Immigrants and even more so their children tend to fit into society and are accepted by many locals. As the global Black Lives Matter protests have highlighted, racism is still far too prevalent; at the same time, it is not as bad as a few decades ago. Economically, the children of immigrants typically do much better than their parents. But of course societies can do much better. A good place to start is by persuading more sceptics of the merits of immigration and diversity.


pages: 495 words: 114,451

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald

23andMe, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Floyd, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, microbiome, mouse model, ocean acidification, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Skype, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, TED Talk, the scientific method, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

They are also words that characterize the future for so many who will contend with the worst that climate change has in store if we don’t address it. The people affected will be disproportionately people of color. Coral bleaching is visible evidence of climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels—problems in no way disconnected from the Black Lives Matter movement. Ocean justice is inextricably bound to social justice. During Isy’s stay in residential treatment, the doctors said they weren’t sure Isy had PANDAS. And maybe she didn’t. But what is a mental disorder if not an autoimmune disease, the body turning against itself? What is racism if not humanity turning against itself?

See also Great Barrier Reef Australian Institute of Marine Science, 42, 262 autoimmune disease, 76–77 axial polyps, 168 B baboons, 45 bacteria and coral farming techniques, 187 and cryopreservation of coral, 192 and living rocks, 95 and settlement of coral larvae, 213 and stony coral tissue loss disease, 102 strep infections and PANDAS, 76, 78–79 and symbiosis with corals, 79–82, 161, 213 Badi (Indonesian island), 135, 142 Bahamas, 5, 186, 216–19, 225, 231 Bali, Indonesia and coral bleaching events, 64 and coral restoration efforts, 146, 155, 164–65, 169–70, 176, 286 and coral trade, 164–65, 166–71 earthquake, 174–75 family trip to, 125, 174–77 and Indonesian Through Flow, 131 Bali Aquarium, 165 Bay, Line, 18, 271–75 Bayahibe, Dominican Republic, 193, 204–5, 208, 211, 212 “Beat It (the Heat): Combating Stress in Coral Reefs” (symposium), 71–74 Belize, 12–13, 93, 103, 181–82 Ben (son) attitudes on environmental issues, 250 diving trips, 291–92 family travels, 104, 174–75 and Isy’s struggles with OCD, 214–15, 251–52 and onset of COVID-19 pandemic, 254, 256 benefits of corals and aquarium trade, 94–97, 123, 130, 159–65, 171–73 economic value, 7, 11, 159–65, 181–82, 185, 238 “ecosystem services” approach to determining, 126–27 environmental, 7, 11, 184, 285 fishery support, 15, 123, 135–38 flood and storm protection, 7, 11, 104, 126, 171, 218–19, 241–42 Bermuda, 184 Biden, Joe, 288 biodiversity and Acropora genus, 167 and aesthetic value of corals, 7 and algal symbiosis, 69 and aquarium trade, 159 in Caribbean, 93–94 in Coral Triangle, 42, 117–18 and cryopreservation of corals, 188–92 in Dominican Republic, 202 and economic value of coral reefs, 127 ethnic diversity parallels, Scott on, 266 and 50 Reefs study, 231, 233 of Florida reef, 22 of Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, 292–93 and genetic mixing, 44 and Indonesian Through Flow, 131, 167 and land restoration projects, 185 and Low Isles expeditions, 59–60 measuring reef health, 143 monoculture threat, 96 and stony coral tissue loss disease, 225 Black, Kristina, 265 Black Lives Matter, 267 Blanco, Macarena, 188, 193, 204–5 blast fishing, 23, 139–42, 232, 240, 313n141 bleaching of corals, 6–7 in Arabian Gulf, 62 and bacterial infections, 80–81 and Chasing Coral, 84 and Coral Reef Watch, 253 early research on, 55–60 etymology of term, 267, 268 in Florida and Caribbean, 62–63, 65, 94 at Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, 292 and genetics research, 273–76, 277 global bleaching events, 6–7, 25, 64–67, 132 Great Barrier Reef, 11, 65, 66, 254, 258, 259–60 Gulf of Mexico, 107 in Hawai`i, 61–66 origins of research on, 61–66 patchiness of, 270 in Red Sea, 65 and reef acoustics, 146 satellite imagery, 233 in Seychelles, 240 and storm damage, 218 Bloomberg Philanthropies, 231 blue bonds, 237, 239–40 bluehead wrass (Thalassoma bifasciatum), 196 BNP Paribas, 284, 322n284 Bonaire, 88 Bontasua, 135–38, 148–54 boulder corals, 60, 64, 93, 96–98, 143, 199–200 BP, 288 branching corals and aquarium trade, 161, 164 and changing environmental conditions, 60 and coral farming, 168–69 and Indonesian restoration sites, 138, 143 and natural history collections, 42 propagation by fragmentation, 96 and reef tract disease, 21 and restoration projects, 182 and storm damage, 218 varied morphology of, 43–44 See also elkhorn corals; staghorn corals branding programs, 25–27, 147, 226 Brandt, Karl Andreas Heinrich, 67, 305n67 BRCA gene, 273 Brown, Margaret “Molly,” 235 Bruckner, Andrew, 101 Buddy Dive Resort, 181 Bugis people, 128–29 bumphead parrotfish, 176 C cactus coral (Mycetophyllia lamarckiana), 209 calcium carbonate, 50–52, 65, 86 Caldiera, Ken, 250 Cannery Row (Steinbeck), 116 carbon emissions and algae/coral symbiosis, 38 author’s offset practices, 300n9 and cloud-brightening proposals, 20 and coral bleaching, 7, 73 and geoengineering proposal, 248–50 impact of COVID-19 pandemic, 262 methane compared with, 247 Montreal Protocol on, 300n9 and ocean acidification, 50–53 and Paris Climate Accords, 288, 322n284 reduction efforts, 14 and Tragedy of the Commons model, 116 Caribbean and coral bleaching, 62, 64, 65 and evolution of corals, 93–94 reef damage in, 5–6, 94, 218–19 and tourism industry, 181–82 and tropical storms/hurricanes, 216–17 white band disease, 94 Carnegie Institute, 55 Cayman Islands, 65, 108–9 Center for Tropical Island Biodiversity Studies, 266 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 87, 256 Chalias, Vincent, 165, 166–71, 314n171 Chasing Coral (film), 24, 26, 27, 84 Chasing Ice (film), 26 China, 119, 162 chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), 300n9 chlorophyll, 36, 38, 39, 68 chloroplasts, 82 Chozin, Muhammad, 141 Cladocopium, 69–70 clams, 52 Clean Air and Water Acts, 62, 116 climate change and global warming and coral bleaching, 6–7, 25, 64–67, 132 and coral genetics research, 34–35 Coral Reef Watch program, 253 and coral spawning, 131 and coral symbionts, 70 and ethical issues of coral restoration, 230 and 50 Reefs study, 231 financial impacts of, 240–42 and geoengineering proposals, 9, 18–20, 247–55, 258–59, 261–62 and Great Barrier Reef damage, 17 and heat waves, 291 and lessons of coronavirus pandemic, 287–88 and prioritization of environmental efforts, 131–32, 226–28, 234–35, 285, 289 and Reef Futures meeting, 9 and reticulated evolution, 45 See also carbon emissions climate change mitigation, 12, 18–20 cloud brightening and dust storms, 281–82 initial testing program, 251, 252–54, 258–59, 261–62 promise of, 300n17 and Reef Futures meeting, 19–20 viability of, 249–50 Wadhams on, 247–49 clown fish (Amphiprioninae), 143, 196 Club Méditerranée (Club Med), 203 Cocos Island, 48 Coles, Steve, 62, 66 Colombia, 64 colonialism, legacy of, 140–41, 203, 266 Columbia University, 273–74 Columbus, Christopher, 202 conservation ethic, 110 container ships, 99 continental drift, 47–48, 93 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), 162–64 Cook Islands, 64 coral atolls, 47–49, 52, 57, 134, 240 coral farming, 166–73 and aquarium trade, 159–65 and hospitality industry, 181–84, 204 and Reef Futures meeting, 12, 14, 20 and reef restoration, 94–98 and spawning, 205–9 See also aquarium trade Coral Probiotic Hypothesis, 80–82 Coral Reef Conservation Program, 102 Coral Reef Watch program, 253 Coral Restoration Consortium, 10–16 coral restoration efforts algae’s role in, 149, 188, 212–13 at Bontasua, 135–37, 148–51 and climate change, 231 cost of, 127 criteria for, 15 and financial innovations, 239–42 and genetics research, 35 Indonesia’s advantages, 131–32, 167, 176 and Mars, Inc., 122–24, 128–32 and measuring reef health, 143 and Reef Futures meeting, 11–12, 28–30 scale of, 17–22 and tetrapod structures, 211–14 See also coral farming; funding for coral research and restoration Coral Restoration Foundation, 96, 98, 225, 228, 284 Coral Sea, 253 coral trade.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

On January 6, 2021, rioters urged on by Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in a deadly attempt to disrupt the joint session of Congress assembled to formalize Biden’s victory. In a post that he “borrowed from a friend who stole from a friend,” Mark equated the assault on the citadel of American democracy to the Black Lives Matter protests that had swept the country the previous summer. In a comment on the post, one of Mark’s Facebook friends raised a question. “Any possibility antifa was involved today?” the friend wrote, referring to far-left protesters whom Trump had blamed for inciting violence. “Very good chance,” Mark replied.

Augenbaum, Scott Augustine, John Aunt Beast autism AXA Babuk backdoors bait files Ballod, Christopher Baltimore, Md. Baltimore City Information & Technology (BCIT) Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) banking Trojans Bates, Jim Baum, L. Frank Beazley Bendersky, Eduard Benge, Terry Beverwijk Biden, Joe Binary Defense bitcoin tumblers Bitdefender BitPaymer Black Lives Matter BlackMatter Blanch, Beth Hall Blanch, Bobby Blanch, Rita BleepingComputer; DDoS attack on; founding of; Maze and; TeslaCrypt and block ciphers BloNo (Bloomington-Normal metropolitan area) BloodDolly Blount, Joseph BlueVoyant Blundell Brown, Nicky Bonczoszek, Noel Botezatu, Bogdan botnets Bottoms, Keisha Lance Boyce Technologies, Inc.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Facebook and other social networks had steadily eroded our realms of individual privacy. Companies now had access to enormous caches of information about more or less everyone, and they were using those caches for more and more purposes. In 2016, a news report came out that a group had gathered data on Facebook users expressing interest in Black Lives Matter and then sold it to police departments (the group was later banned). ProPublica found that Facebook’s advertising options allowed property owners to discriminate based on race and gender in violation of the Fair Housing Act (the Department of Housing and Urban Development later sued Facebook over the practice).

Fortunately, there was no violence that day, but for several hours, around a dozen Confederate-flag-bearing citizens and a slightly larger group of Muslims and their supporters shouted at each other from opposing sidewalks. Other Russian accounts targeted other minority groups. One account, Blacktivist, shared content intended to outrage its audience, posting videos of police violence against African Americans. The page was more popular than the official Black Lives Matter page. It also encouraged its followers to vote for the third-party candidate: “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein,” one post read. “Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”42 In the end, after a long and bruising campaign, Trump won a shock victory over Clinton. All the polls had suggested that Clinton had a strong lead, and, in fact, Clinton won more total votes than Trump.


pages: 134 words: 41,085

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

Mill, Autobiography, 156, Project Gutenberg e-book (first published 1874, this edition 2003). 19.Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 558. 20.Speech to the House of Commons, March 19, 1850; https://www.gladstoneslibrary.org/news/volume/a-statement-from-gladstones-library-black-lives-matter. 21.Gimson, Gimson’s Prime Ministers, 133–34. 22.William Ewart Gladstone (by H.C.G. Matthew), Dictionary of National Biography, 22:389. 23.Martin Daunton, State and Market in Victorian Britain: War, Welfare and Capitalism (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 73–74. 24.A. V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relations Between Law and Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1920), 430–31. 25.Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1872–1914 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), 1:107. 26.Quoted in W.


Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

Like any necessary task neglected for so long, this won’t be easy. Current centres of political and economic power extend beyond the nation state, as does the urgent issue of climate change. The alter-globalisation and international protest movements of the past few decades, from the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 to Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the numerous movements against environmental destruction, have played an important role in making visible the crisis’ global scale. Additionally, the organisational capacity of working people has been disrupted by decades of direct attacks on trade unions and privatisation of industries, and by the shift in the labour market towards casualised and precarious employment and the gig economy, meaning that established ways of defending jobs and conditions are decreasingly effective, or even possible.3 However, as shown in the resurgence of autonomous and non-traditional unions like the IWW and IWGB, and their inclusion of many traditionally non-unionised sectors and workers including young people and migrants, these conditions can be met by adapting methods of organising and pressure rather than by giving up.


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The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

From this content it learned how to converse with humans online in a light-hearted way (improvisational comedians assisted in the design of its code). Tay began its first day with the tweet ‘hellooooooo world!!!’, followed with a raft of polite messages, avoiding political issues that were prevalent online, such as Black Lives Matter. But it wasn’t long before Tay gave up the cute and daft posts for the racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic. Only sixteen hours after its launch Tay was taken offline. Microsoft claims its AI was targeted by Twitter trolls who fed it with hateful content, not helped by the seemingly unpoliced ‘repeat after me’ feature that enabled users to dictate the bot’s exact words, resulting in some of the most offensive tweets.

Abdallah, Abdalraouf, 1 Abedi, Salman, 1, 2, 3, 4 abortion, 1, 2 Abu Sayyaf Group, 1 abuse, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 accelerants to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 accelerationists, 1 addiction, 1, 2, 3, 4 Admiral Duncan bar, 1 adolescence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 advertising, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 African Americans, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 afterlife, 1, 2 age, 1, 2 aggression: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; false alarms, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; identity fusion, 1; mortality, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2 AI, see artificial intelligence Albright, Jonathan, 1 alcohol, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 algorithms: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; filter bubbles and bias, 1, 2; Google, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Tay, 1, 2; tipping point, 1, 2; YouTube, 1 Algotransparency.org, 1 Allport, Gordon, 1, 2, 3, 4 Al Noor Mosque, Christchurch, 1 al-Qaeda, 1, 2 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), 1 alt-right: algorithms, 1, 2; brain and hate, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; counter-hate speech, 1; definition, 1n; Discord, 1; Facebook, 1, 2, 3; fake accounts, 1; filter bubbles, 1, 2; red-pilling, 1, 2; social media, 1, 2; Trump, 1, 2; YouTube, 1 Alzheimer’s disease, 1 American Crowbar Case, 1 American culture, 1 American Nazi Party, 1, 2 Amodio, David, 1n amygdala: brain and signs of prejudice, 1, 2; brain tumours, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; hate and feeling pain, 1, 2; and insula, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1n, 2, 3, 4; parts that edge us towards hate, 1; parts that process prejudice, 1; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1, 2; processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; recognising facial expressions, 1n, 2; stopping hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 anger, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 anonymity, 1, 2 anterior insula, 1n Antifa, 1, 2n, 3 anti-gay prejudice, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 anti-hate initiatives, 1, 2 antilocution, 1 anti-Muslim hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 anti-Semitism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 anti-white hate crime, 1 Antonissen, Kirsten, 1, 2 anxiety: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; harm of hate speech, 1; intergroup contact, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2 Arab people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Arbery, Ahmaud, 1 Arkansas, 1, 2 artificial intelligence (AI), 1, 2, 3, 4 Asian Americans, 1, 2 Asian people, 1, 2, 3, 4 assault, 1, 2, 3 asylum seekers, 1, 2, 3, 4 Athens, 1 Atlanta attack, 1 Atran, Scott, 1, 2 attachment, 1 attention, 1, 2, 3 attitudes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Aung San Suu Kyi, 1 austerity, 1 Australia, 1 autism, 1 averages, 1, 2 avoidance, 1, 2, 3 Bali attack, 1 Bangladeshi people, 1 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 1, 2, 3 behavioural sciences, 1, 2 behaviour change, 1, 2, 3 beliefs, 1, 2, 3 Bell, Sean, 1, 2 Berger, Luciana, 1 Berlin attacks, 1 bias: algorithms, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; filter bubbles, 1; Google Translate, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4; police racial bias, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; stopping hate, 1, 2, 3; unconscious bias, 1, 2, 3, 4 Bible, 1 Biden, Joe, 1 ‘Big Five’ personality traits, 1 biology, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Birstall, 1 bisexual people, 1 Black, Derek, 1, 2 Black, Don, 1, 2, 3 blackface, 1 Black Lives Matter, 1 Black Mirror, 1n black people: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; brain and signs of prejudice, 1, 2; brain parts that edge us towards hate, 1; brain parts that process prejudice, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; Duggan shooting, 1; feeling pain, 1; Google searches, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; police relations, 1, 2; predicting hate crime, 1, 2; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; pyramid of hate, 1, 2, 3n; recognising facial expressions, 1, 2; South Africa, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; trauma and Franklin, 1, 2, 3, 4; trigger events, 1, 2, 3; unconscious bias, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1, 2; white flight, 1 BNP, see British National Party Bolsonaro, Jair, 1 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1, 2 bots, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Bowers, Robert Gregory, 1 boys, 1, 2 Bradford, 1 brain: ancient brains in modern world, 1; author’s brain and hate, 1; beyond the brain, 1; the brain and hate, 1; brain and signs of prejudice, 1; brain damage and tumours, 1, 2, 3, 4; brains and unconscious bias against ‘them’, 1; brain’s processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; defence mechanisms, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; figures, 1; finding a neuroscientist and brain scanner, 1; group threat detection, 1, 2; hacking the brain to hate, 1; hate and feeling pain, 1; locating hate in the brain, 1; neuroscience and big questions about hate, 1; overview, 1; parts that edge us towards hate, 1; parts that process prejudice, 1; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; recognising facial expressions, 1; rest of the brain, 1; signs of prejudice, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; tipping point to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trauma and containment, 1, 2; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1; where neuroscience of hate falls down, 1 brain imaging: author’s brain and hate, 1; beyond the brain, 1; the brain and hate, 1; brain and signs of prejudice, 1, 2; brain injury, 1, 2; Diffusion MRI, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; finding a neuroscientist and brain scanner, 1; fusiform face area, 1; locating hate in the brain, 1; MEG, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1, 2, 3; parts that process prejudice, 1; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; unconscious bias, 1 brainwashing, 1, 2 Bray, Mark, 1n Brazil, 1, 2, 3 Breivik, Anders, 1, 2 Brexit, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Brexit Party, 1, 2 Brick Lane, London, 1 Britain First, 1, 2 British identity, 1, 2 British National Party (BNP), 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5 Brixton, 1 Broadmoor Hospital, 1, 2 Brooker, Charlie, 1n Brooks, Rayshard, 1 Brown, Katie, 1, 2 Brown, Michael, 1, 2 Brussels attack, 1 Budapest Pride, 1 bullying, 1, 2 Bundy, Ted, 1 burka, 1, 2, 3 Burmese, 1 Bush, George W., 1 Byrd, James, Jr, 1 California, 1, 2n, 3 Caliskan, Aylin, 1 Cambridge Analytica, 1, 2 cancer, 1, 2 Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), 1, 2, 3, 4 caregiving motivational system, 1 care homes, 1, 2 Casablanca, 1 cascade effect, 1, 2 categorisation, 1, 2, 3, 4 Catholics, 1 Caucasian Crew, 1 causality, 1, 2 celebrities, 1, 2, 3, 4 censorship, 1, 2 Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta, 1 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 1 change blindness, 1 charity, 1, 2, 3 Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4 chatbots, 1, 2, 3 Chauvin, Derek, 1 Chelmsford, 1 Chicago, 1 childhood: attachment issues, 1; child abuse, 1, 2, 3; child grooming, 1; child play, 1; failures of containment, 1, 2, 3, 4; group threat, 1, 2; intergroup contact, 1, 2; learned stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; predicting hate crime, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; trigger events, 1, 2; understanding the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1, 2, 3 China, 1, 2, 3, 4 Chinese people, 1, 2, 3 ‘Chinese virus,’ 1, 2 Cho, John, 1 Christchurch mosque attack, 1 Christianity, 1, 2, 3 cinema, 1 citizen journalism, 1 civilising process, 1 civil rights, 1, 2, 3, 4 class, 1, 2 cleaning, 1 climate change, 1, 2 Clinton, Hillary, 1, 2 cognitive behavioural therapy, 1 cognitive dissonance, 1 Cohen, Florette, 1, 2 Cold War, 1 collective humiliation, 1 collective quests for significance, 1, 2 collective trauma, 1, 2 colonialism, 1n, 2 Combat 1, 2 comedies, 1, 2, 3 Communications Acts, 1, 2 compassion, 1, 2, 3 competition, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 confirmation bias, 1 conflict, 1, 2, 3, 4 conflict resolution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Connectome, 1 Conroy, Jeffrey, 1 Conservative Party, 1, 2, 3 conspiracy theories, 1, 2, 3 contact with others, 1, 2 containment: failures of, 1; hate as container of unresolved trauma, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1, 2, 3 content moderation, 1, 2, 3 context, 1, 2, 3 Convention of Cybercrime, 1 cooperation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Copeland, David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 coping mechanisms, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Cordoba House (‘Ground Zero mosque’), 1 correction for multiple comparisons, 1, 2n ‘corrective rape’, 1, 2 cortisol, 1 Council of Conservative Citizens, 1n counter-hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 courts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2, 3 Cox, Jo, 1, 2, 3 Criado Perez, Caroline, 1 crime, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Crime and Disorder Act 1998, 1n crime recording, 1, 2, 3, 4 crime reporting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), 1 criminal justice, 1, 2, 3 Criminal Justice Act, 1, 2n criminal prosecution, 1, 2 criminology, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 cross-categorisation, 1 cross-race or same-race effect, 1 Crusius, Patrick, 1, 2 CUBRIC (Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre), 1, 2, 3, 4 cultural ‘feeding’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 cultural worldviews, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 culture: definitions, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; tipping point, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 culture machine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 culture wars, 1 Curry and Chips, 1 cybercrime, 1 dACC, see dorsal anterior cingulate cortex Daily Mail, 1, 2 Dailymotion, 1 Daily Stormer, 1, 2n Daley, Tom, 1, 2 Darfur, 1 dark matter, 1 death: events that remind us of our mortality, 1; newspapers, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; religion and hate, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2 death penalty, 1, 2 death threats, 1 decategorisation, 1 De Dreu, Carsten, 1, 2, 3, 4 deep learning, 1, 2 defence mechanisms, 1 defensive haters, 1, 2 dehumanisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 deindividuation, 1, 2 deindustrialisation, 1, 2, 3, 4 Democrats, 1, 2, 3 Denny, Reginald, 1 DeSalvo, Albert (the Boston Strangler), 1 desegregation, 1, 2, 3 Desmond, Matthew, 1 Dewsbury, 1, 2, 3 Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Diffusion MRI), 1, 2 diminished responsibility, 1, 2 Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), 1 disability: brain and hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; intergroup contact, 1; Japan care home, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1; profiling the hater, 1; suppressing prejudice, 1; victim perception, 1n Discord, 1, 2, 3, 4 discrimination: brain and hate, 1, 2; comedy programmes, 1; Google searches, 1; Japan laws, 1; preference for ingroup, 1; pyramid of hate, 1, 2, 3; questioning prejudgements, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 disgust: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; group threat detection, 1, 2, 3; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2; Japan care home, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2 disinformation, 1, 2, 3 displacement, 1, 2 diversity, 1, 2, 3 dlPFC, see dorsolateral prefrontal cortex domestic violence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Doran, John, 1, 2, 3 dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), 1n, 2, 3 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, 1 drag queens, 1 drugs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Duggan, Mark, 1 Duke, David, 1 Dumit, Joe, Picturing Personhood, 1 Durkheim, Emile, 1 Dykes, Andrea, 1 Earnest, John T., 1 Eastern Europeans, 1, 2, 3 Ebrahimi, Bijan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 echo chambers, 1, 2n economy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 EDL, see English Defence League education, 1, 2, 3, 4 Edwards, G., 1 8chan, 1, 2 elections, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 electroencephalography, 1n elites, 1 ELIZA (computer program), 1 The Ellen Show, 1 El Paso shooting, 1 Elrod, Terry, 1 Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, 1 Emanuel African Methodist Church, Charleston, 1 emotions: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events and mortality, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 empathy: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1 employment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 English Defence League (EDL), 1, 2n, 3 epilepsy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Epstein, Robert, 1 equality, 1, 2 Essex, 1 ethnicity, 1, 2n, 3, 4 ethnic minorities, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ethnocentrism, 1 EU, see European Union European Commission, 1, 2 European Digital Services Act, 1 European Parliament, 1, 2 European Social Survey, 1 European Union (EU): Brexit referendum, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5; Facebook misinformation, 1; group threat, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1 Eurovision, 1 evidence-based hate crime, 1 evolution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 executive control area: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1, 2; extremism, 1; recognising false alarms, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1 exogenous shocks, 1 expert opinion, 1 extreme right, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 extremism: Charlottesville and redpilling, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1; online hate speech, 1; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; quest for significance, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Facebook: algorithms, 1, 2; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; Christchurch mosque attack, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1, 2; how much online hate speech, 1, 2; Myanmar genocide, 1; online hate and offline harm, 1, 2, 3; redpilling, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 facial expression, 1, 2, 3, 4 faith, 1, 2 fake accounts, 1, 2; see also bots fake news, 1, 2, 3, 4 false alarms, 1, 2, 3 Farage, Nigel, 1, 2 far left, 1n, 2, 3, 4 Farook, Syed Rizwan, 1 far right: algorithms, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain injury, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4; COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2; Facebook, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1, 2; gateway sites, 1; group threat, 1, 2; red-pilling, 1; rise of, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; terror attacks, 1, 2, 3; tipping point, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4n; trigger events, 1, 2; YouTube, 1 fathers, 1, 2, 3 FBI, see Federal Bureau of Investigation fear: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; mortality, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Federation of American Immigration Reform, 1 Ferguson, Missouri, 1 Festinger, Leon, 1 fiction, 1 Fields, Ted, 1 50 Cent Army, 1 ‘fight or flight’ response, 1, 2, 3 films, 1, 2 filter bubbles, 1, 2, 3, 4 Finland, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Finsbury Park mosque attack, 1, 2, 3 first responders, 1 Fiske, Susan, 1 Five Star Movement, 1 flashbacks, 1 Florida, 1, 2 Floyd, George, 1, 2, 3 Flynt, Larry, 1 fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 football, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 football hooligans, 1, 2 Forever Welcome, 1 4chan, 1, 2 Fox News, 1, 2 Franklin, Benjamin, 1 Franklin, Joseph Paul, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Fransen, Jayda, 1 freedom fighters, 1, 2 freedom of speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 frustration, 1, 2, 3, 4 functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 fundamentalism, 1, 2 fusiform face area, 1 fusion, see identity fusion Gab, 1 Gadd, David, 1, 2n, 3, 4 Gaddafi, Muammar, 1, 2 Gage, Phineas, 1, 2 galvanic skin responses, 1 Gamergate, 1 gateway sites, 1 gay people: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2; Copeland attacks, 1, 2; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; filter bubbles, 1; gay laws, 1; gay marriage, 1, 2, 3; group associations, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; hate counts, 1, 2, 3, 4; physical attacks, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1; Russia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Section 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2; why online hate speech hurts, 1; see also LGBTQ+ people gay rights, 1, 2, 3, 4 gender, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Generation Identity, 1 Generation Z, 1, 2 genetics, 1n, 2, 3 genocide, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Georgia (country), 1 Georgia, US, 1, 2, 3, 4 Germany, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Gilead, Michael, 1 ginger people, 1 girls, and online hate speech, 1 Gladwell, Malcolm, 1 Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, 1 glucocorticoids, 1, 2 God, 1, 2 God’s Will, 1, 2 Goebbels, Joseph, 1 Google, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Google+, 1 Google Translate, 1 goth identity, 1, 2, 3, 4 governments, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Grant, Oscar, 1 gravitational waves, 1 Great Recession (2007–9), 1 Great Replacement conspiracy theory, 1 Greece, 1, 2 Greenberg, Jeff, 1, 2, 3 Greene, Robert, 1 grey matter, 1 Grillot, Ian, 1, 2 Grodzins, Morton, 1 grooming, 1, 2, 3 ‘Ground Zero mosque’ (Cordoba House), 1 GroupMe, 1 groups: ancient brains in modern world, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; childhood, 1; feeling hate together, 1; foundations of prejudice, 1; group threat and hate, 1; identity fusion, 1, 2, 3; intergroup hate, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; tipping point, 1, 2, 3, 4; warrior psychology, 1, 2, 3; what it means to hate, 1, 2 group threat, 1; beyond threat, 1; Bijan as the threatening racial other, 1; context and threat, 1; cultural machine, group threat and stereotypes, 1; evolution of group threat detection, 1; human biology and threat, 1; neutralising the perception of threat, 1; overview, 1; society, competition and threat, 1; threat in their own words, 1 guilt, 1, 2, 3, 4 guns, 1, 2 ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 Haines, Matt, 1 Haka, 1 Halle Berry neuron, 1, 2 harassment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 harm of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Harris, Brendan, 1 Harris, Lasana, 1 Harris, Lovell, 1, 2, 3, 4 hate: author’s brain and hate, 1; the brain and hate, 1; definitions, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1; foundations of prejudice and hate, 1, 2, 3; group threat and hate, 1; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2; hate counts, 1; hate in word and deed, 1; profiling the hater, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; rise of the bots and trolls, 1; seven steps to stop hate, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; tipping point from prejudice to hate, 1; trauma, containment and hate, 1; trigger events and ebb and flow of hate, 1; what it means to hate, 1 hate counts, 1; criminalising hate, 1; how they count, 1; overview, 1; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; police and hate, 1; rising hate count, 1; ‘signal’ hate acts and criminalisation, 1; Sophie Lancaster, 1; warped world of hate, 1 hate crime: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; definitions, 1; events and hate online, 1; events and hate on the streets, 1, 2; the ‘exceptional’ hate criminal, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; foundations of prejudice and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; hate counts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; laws, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5; number of crimes, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; predicting hate crime, 1; profiling the hater, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; understanding the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3 hate groups, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hate in word and deed, 1; algorithmic far right, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4; extreme filter bubbles, 1; game changer for the far right, 1; gateway sites, 1; overview, 1; ‘real life effort post’ and Christchurch, 1; red-pilling, 1 HateLab, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hate speech: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; filter bubbles and bias, 1; harm of, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; Japan laws, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; Tay chatbot, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3; why online hate speech hurts, 1 hate studies, 1, 2 ‘hazing’ practices, 1 health, 1, 2, 3, 4 Henderson, Russell, 1 Herbert, Ryan, 1 Hewstone, Miles, 1 Heyer, Heather, 1 Hinduism, 1, 2 hippocampus, 1, 2, 3, 4 history of offender, 1 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 HIV/AIDS, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 hollow mask illusion, 1, 2 Hollywood, 1, 2 Holocaust, 1, 2, 3, 4 Homicide Act, 1n homophobia: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; evidence-based hate crime, 1; federal law, 1; jokes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; Russia, 1, 2; Shepard murder, 1; South Africa, 1; trauma and containment, 1; victim perception of motivation, 1n Homo sapiens, 1 homosexuality: author’s experience, 1; online hate speech, 1; policing, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; Russia, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; see also gay people hooligans, 1, 2 Horace, 1 hormones, 1, 2, 3 hot emotions, 1 hot-sauce study, 1, 2 housing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Huddersfield child grooming, 1 human rights, 1, 2, 3 humiliation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 humour, 1, 2 Hungary, 1 hunter-gatherers, 1n, 2 Hustler, 1 IAT, see Implicit Association Test identity: author’s experience of attack, 1; British identity, 1, 2; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; children’s ingroups, 1; group threat, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1, 2 identity fusion: fusion and hateful murder, 1; fusion and hateful violence, 1; fusion and self-sacrifice in the name of hate, 1; generosity towards the group, 1; tipping point, 1, 2; warrior psychology, 1, 2, 3 ideology, 1, 2, 3, 4 illegal hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 illocutionary speech, 1 imaging, see brain imaging immigration: Forever Welcome, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; hate counts, 1n, 2; HateLab Brexit study, 1; identity fusion, 1; intergroup contact, 1; negative stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1; Purinton, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; YouTube algorithms, 1 immortality, 1, 2 Implicit Association Test (IAT), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 implicit prejudice: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; online hate speech, 1, 2 India, 1 Indonesia, 1 Infowars, 1, 2 Ingersoll, Karma, 1 ingroup: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; child play, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; HateLab Brexit study, 1; identity fusion, 1, 2; pyramid of hate, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Instagram, 1, 2, 3 Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 1 institutional racism, 1 instrumental crimes, 1 insula: brain and signs of prejudice, 1, 2, 3; facial expressions, 1, 2; fusiform face area, 1; hacking the brain to hate, 1; hate and feeling pain, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5; parts that edge us towards hate, 1; parts that process prejudice, 1; processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2 Integrated Threat Theory (ITT), 1, 2, 3 integration, 1, 2, 3, 4 intergroup contact, 1, 2, 3 Intergroup Contact Theory, 1, 2, 3 intergroup hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 internet: algorithms, 1, 2; chatbots, 1; counterhate speech, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; filter bubbles, 1, 2, 3; Google searches, 1; hate speech harm, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; online news, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; rise of the bots and trolls, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; tipping point, 1, 2, 3; training the machine to count hate, 1; why online hate speech hurts, 1 interracial relations, 1, 2, 3, 4 intolerance, 1, 2 Iranian bots, 1 Iraq, 1 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 1 ISIS, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Islam: group threat, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Islamism: group threat, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; profiling the hater, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Islamophobia, 1, 2, 3, 4 Israel, 1, 2, 3 Italy, 1, 2 ITT, see Integrated Threat Theory James, Lee, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Japan, 1, 2, 3 Jasko, Katarzyna, 1 Jefferson, Thomas, 1 Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, 1 Jewish people: COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1; Google searches, 1, 2; group threat, 1; Nazism, 1, 2; negative stereotypes, 1 2 online hate speech, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; ritual washing, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and Franklin, 1, 2, 3 jihad, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 jokes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Jones, Alex, 1 Jones, Terry, 1 Josephson junction, 1 Judaism, 1; see also Jewish people Jude, Frank, Jr, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Kansas, 1 Kerry, John, 1 Kik, 1 King, Gary, 1 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 1, 2 King, Rodney, 1, 2, 3 King, Ryan, 1 Kirklees, 1, 2 KKK, see Ku Klux Klan Kuchibhotla, Srinivas, 1, 2, 3, 4 Kuchibhotla, Sunayana, 1, 2 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7 Labour Party, 1, 2, 3 Lancaster, Sophie, 1, 2 language, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), 1 Lapshyn, Pavlo, 1 Lashkar-e-Taiba, 1 Las Vegas shooting, 1, 2 Latinx people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 law: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; criminalising hate, 1; hate counts, 1, 2, 3; Kansas shooting, 1; limited laws, 1; online hate speech, 1; pyramid of hate, 1 Law Commission, 1 Lawrence, Stephen, 1 learned fears, 1, 2, 3 Leave.EU campaign, 1, 2 Leave voters, 1, 2, 3n Lee, Robert E., 1, 2, 3 left orbitofrontal cortex, 1n, 2n Legewie, Joscha, 1, 2, 3, 4 lesbians, 1, 2 Levin, Jack, 1 LGBTQ+ people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17; see also gay people LIB, see Linguistic Intergroup Bias test Liberman, Nira, 1 Liberty Park, Salt Lake City, 1, 2 Libya, 1, 2, 3, 4 Light, John, 1 Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB) test, 1 Liverpool, 1, 2 Livingstone, Ken, 1, 2 Loja, Angel, 1 London: author’s experience of attack, 1; Copeland nail bombing, 1, 2; Duggan shooting, 1; far-right hate, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1, 2; Rigby attack, 1; terror attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 London Bridge attack, 1, 2, 3 London School of Economics, 1 ‘lone wolf’ terrorists, 1, 2, 3, 4 long-term memory, 1, 2, 3, 4 Loomer, Laura, 1 Los Angeles, 1 loss: group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; tipping point, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 love, 1, 2 Love Thy Neighbour, 1 Lucero, Marcelo, 1, 2 Luqman, Shehzad, 1 ‘Macbeth effect’, 1 machine learning, 1 Madasani, Alok, 1, 2, 3 Madrid attack, 1, 2 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): Diffusion MRI, 1, 2; functional MRI, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 magnetoencephalography (MEG), 1, 2, 3 Maldon, 1 Malik, Tashfeen, 1 Maltby, Robert, 1, 2 Manchester, 1, 2 Manchester Arena attack, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 marginalisation, 1, 2 Martin, David, 1 Martin, Trayvon, 1, 2 MartinLutherKing.org, 1, 2 martyrdom, 1, 2, 3, 4n masculinity, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 The Matrix, 1 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 1n, 2n Matz, Sandra, 1 Mauritius, 1 McCain, John, 1 McDade, Tony, 1 McDevitt, Jack, Levin McKinney, Aaron, 1 McMichael, Gregory, 1 McMichael, Travis, 1 media: far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; stereotypes in, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events, 1 Meechan, Mark, 1 MEG (magnetoencephalography), 1, 2, 3 memory, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 men, and online hate speech, 1 men’s rights, 1 mental illness, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 mentalising, 1, 2, 3 meta-analysis, 1 Metropolitan Police, 1 Mexican people, 1, 2, 3, 4 micro-aggressions, 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5, 6 micro-events, 1 Microsemi, 1n Microsoft, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 micro-targeting, 1, 2 Middle East, 1, 2 migration, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; see also immigration Milgram, Stanley, 1 military, 1 millennials, 1 Milligan, Spike, 1 Milwaukee, 1, 2, 3 minimal groups, 1 Minneapolis, 1, 2, 3 minority groups: far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; police reporting, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2 misinformation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 mission haters, 1, 2, 3 mobile phones, 1, 2, 3 moderation of content, 1, 2, 3 Moore, Nik, 1 Moore, Thomas, 1 Moores, Manizhah, 1 Moore’s Ford lynching, 1 Moradi, Dr Zargol, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Moral Choice Dilemma tasks, 1, 2, 3 moral cleansing, 1, 2, 3 moral dimension, 1, 2, 3, 4 moral outrage, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Moroccan people, 1, 2 mortality, 1, 2, 3 mortality salience, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Moscow, 1 mosques, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Moss Side Blood, 1 mothers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 motivation, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Mphiti, Thato, 1 MRI, see Magnetic Resonance Imaging Muamba, Fabrice, 1 multiculturalism, 1, 2, 3, 4 murder: brain injury, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3; hate counts, 1; identity fusion and hateful murder, 1; police and hate, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Murdered for Being Different, 1 music, 1, 2, 3 Muslims: COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; Google searches, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; negative stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1, 2; Salah effect, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and Trump, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6n Mvubu, Themba, 1 Myanmar, 1, 2 Myatt, David, 1 Nandi, Dr Alita, 1 National Action, 1 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 1 national crime victimisation surveys, 1, 2 National Front, 1, 2, 3 nationalism, 1, 2 National Socialist Movement, 1, 2, 3, 4 natural experiments, 1, 2 Nature: Neuroscience, 1 nature vs nurture debate, 1 Nazism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 NCVS (National Crime Victimisation Survey), 1, 2 negative stereotypes: brain and hate, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; tipping point, 1 Nehlen, Paul, 1 neo-Nazis, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Netherlands, 1, 2 Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (NetzDG) law, 1 neuroimaging, see brain imaging neurons, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 neuroscience, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Newark, 1, 2 news, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 newspapers, 1, 2, 3, 4 New York City, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 New York Police Department (NYPD), 1 New York Times, 1, 2 New Zealand, 1 n-grams, 1 Nimmo, John, 1 9/11 attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 911 emergency calls, 1 Nogwaza, Noxolo, 1 non-independence error, 1, 2n Al Noor Mosque, Christchurch, 1 Northern Ireland, 1 NWA, 1 NYPD (New York Police Department), 1 Obama, Barack, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Occupy Paedophilia, 1 ODIHR, see Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights Ofcom, 1 offence, 1, 2, 3, 4 Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), 1, 2 Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, 1 office workers, 1 offline harm, 1, 2 Oklahoma City, 1 O’Mahoney, Bernard, 1 online hate speech: author’s experience, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; hate speech harm, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; individual’s role, 1; law’s role, 1; social media companies’ role, 1; steps to stop hate, 1; tipping point, 1, 2; training the machine to count hate, 1; trigger events, 1 Ono, Kazuya, 1 optical illusions, 1 Organization for Human Brain Mapping conference, 1 Orlando attack, 1 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1 Osborne, Darren, 1 ‘other’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Ottoman Empire, 1 outgroup: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; child interaction and play, 1, 2; evolution of group threat detection, 1; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; HateLab Brexit study, 1; human biology and threat, 1; identity fusion, 1; prejudice formation, 1; profiling the hater, 1; push/pull factor, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; society, competition and threat, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; tipping point, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 outliers, 1 Overton window, 1, 2, 3, 4 oxytocin, 1, 2, 3, 4 Paddock, Stephen, 1 Paddy’s Pub, Bali, 1 paedophilia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 page rank, 1 pain, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Pakistani people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Palestine, 1 pandemics, 1, 2, 3, 4 Papua New Guinea, 1, 2, 3 paranoid schizophrenia, 1, 2 parents: caregiving, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Paris attack, 1 Parsons Green attack, 1, 2 past experience: the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; the ‘exceptional’ hate criminal, 1; trauma and containment, 1 perception-based hate crime, 1, 2 perception of threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 perpetrators, 1, 2 personal contact, 1, 2 personality, 1, 2, 3 personality disorder, 1, 2 personal safety, 1, 2 personal significance, 1 perspective taking, 1, 2 PFC, see prefrontal cortex Philadelphia Police Department, 1 Philippines, 1 physical attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 play, 1 Poland, 1, 2, 3 polarisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 police: brain and hate, 1, 2; Duggan shooting, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; and hate, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; police brutality, 1, 2, 3, 4; predicting hate crime, 1; recording crime, 1, 2, 3, 4; reporting crime, 1, 2, 3; rising hate count, 1, 2, 3; ‘signal’ hate acts and criminalisation, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; use of force, 1 Polish migrants, 1 politics: early adulthood, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2; filter bubbles and bias, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1, 2; seven steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Trump election, 1, 2 populism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pornography, 1 Portugal, 1, 2 positive stereotypes, 1, 2 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 poverty, 1, 2, 3 Poway synagogue shooting, 1 power, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 power law, 1 predicting the next hate crime, 1 prefrontal cortex (PFC): brain and signs of prejudice, 1; brain injury, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; feeling pain, 1; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; prejudice network, 1; psychological brainwashing, 1; recognising false alarms, 1; salience network, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1, 2 prehistoric brain, 1, 2 prehistory, 1, 2 prejudgements, 1 prejudice: algorithms, 1; author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and signs of prejudice, 1; cultural machine, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2; filter bubbles and bias, 1; foundations of, 1; Google, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; human biology and threat, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; parts that process prejudice, 1; prejudice network, 1, 2, 3, 4; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; releasers, 1, 2; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; tipping point from prejudice to hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Trump, 1, 2; unconscious bias, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 prepared fears, 1, 2 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1 profiling the hater, 1 Proposition 1, 2 ProPublica, 1n, 2 prosecution, 1, 2, 3 Protestants, 1 protons, 1 psychoanalysis, 1 psychological development, 1, 2, 3, 4 psychological profiles, 1 psychological training, 1 psychology, 1, 2, 3, 4 psychosocial criminology, 1, 2 psy-ops (psychological operations), 1 PTSD, see post-traumatic stress disorder Public Order Act, 1 pull factor, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Pullin, Rhys, 1n Purinton, Adam, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 push/pull factor, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 pyramid of hate, 1, 2 Q …, 1 al-Qaeda, 1, 2 quality of life, 1 queer people, 1, 2 quest for significance, 1, 2, 3 Quran burning, 1 race: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and signs of prejudice, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; Google searches, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; hate counts, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; race relations, 1, 2, 3; race riots, 1, 2; race war, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6; trigger events, 1, 2; unconscious bias, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 racism: author’s experience, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Kansas shooting, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1n, 2, 3; Tay chatbot, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Trump election, 1; victim perception of motivation, 1n; white flight, 1 radicalisation: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1 rallies, 1, 2, 3; see also Charlottesville rally Ramadan, 1, 2 rape, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rap music, 1 realistic threats, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Rebel Media, 1 rebels, 1 recategorisation, 1 recession, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 recommendation algorithms, 1, 2 recording crime, 1, 2, 3, 4 red alert, 1 Reddit, 1, 2, 3, 4 red-pilling, 1, 2, 3, 4 refugees, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rejection, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 releasers of prejudice, 1, 2 religion: group threat, 1, 2, 3; homosexuality, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; predicting hate crime, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; religion versus hate, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1n, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; victim perception of motivation, 1n reporting crimes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 repression, 1 Republicans, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 research studies, 1 responsibility, 1, 2, 3 restorative justice, 1 retaliatory haters, 1, 2, 3 Reuters, 1 Rieder, Bernhard, 1 Rigby, Lee, 1 rights: civil rights, 1, 2, 3, 4; gay rights, 1, 2, 3, 4; human rights, 1, 2, 3; men’s rights, 1; tipping point, 1; women’s rights, 1, 2 right wing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; see also far right Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, 1 riots, 1, 2, 3, 4 risk, 1, 2, 3 rites of passage, 1, 2 rituals, 1, 2, 3 Robb, Thomas, 1 Robbers Cave Experiment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Robinson, Tommy (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), 1, 2, 3, 4 Rohingya Muslims, 1, 2 Roof, Dylann, 1, 2 Roussos, Saffi, 1 Rudolph, Eric, 1 Rushin, S,, 1n Russia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Russian Internet Research Agency, 1 RWA (Right-Wing Authoritarianism) scale, 1 Rwanda, 1 sacred value protection, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Saddam Hussein, 1 safety, 1, 2 Sagamihara care home, Japan, 1, 2 Salah, Mohamed, 1, 2, 3 salience network, 1, 2 salmon, brain imaging of, 1 Salt Lake City, 1 same-sex marriage, 1, 2 same-sex relations, 1, 2, 3 San Bernardino attack, 1n, 2, 3 Scanlon, Patsy, 1 scans, see brain imaging Scavino, Dan, 1n schizophrenia, 1, 2, 3, 4 school shootings, 1, 2 science, 1, 2, 3 scripture, 1, 2 SDO, see Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scale Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), 1 search queries, 1, 2, 3, 4 Second World War, 1, 2, 3 Section 1, Local Government Act, 1, 2, 3 seed thoughts, 1 segregation, 1, 2, 3 seizures, 1, 2, 3 selection bias problem, 1n self-defence, 1, 2 self-esteem, 1, 2, 3, 4 self-sacrifice, 1, 2, 3 Senior, Eve, 1 serial killers, 1, 2, 3 7/7 attack, London, 1 seven steps to stop hate, 1; becoming hate incident first responders, 1; bursting our filter bubbles, 1; contact with others, 1; not allowing divisive events to get the better of us, 1; overview, 1; putting ourselves in the shoes of ‘others’, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; recognising false alarms, 1 sexism, 1, 2 sexual orientation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 sexual violence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sex workers, 1, 2, 3, 4 Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, 1 shame, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 shared trauma, 1, 2, 3 sharia, 1, 2 Shepard, Matthew, 1, 2 Sherif, Muzafer, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 shitposting, 1, 2, 3n shootings, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ‘signal’ hate acts, 1 significance, 1, 2, 3 Simelane, Eudy, 1 skin colour, 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7 Skitka, Linda, 1, 2 slavery, 1 Slipknot, 1 slurs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Snapchat, 1 social class, 1, 2 social desirability bias, 1, 2 Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scale, 1 social engineering, 1 socialisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 socialism, 1, 2 social media: chatbots, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; filter bubbles and bias, 1; HateLab Brexit study, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; online news, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events, 1, 2; see also Facebook; Twitter; YouTube Social Perception and Evaluation Lab, 1 Soho, 1 soldiers, 1n, 2, 3 Sorley, Isabella, 1 South Africa, 1 South Carolina, 1 Southern Poverty Law Center, 1n, 2 South Ossetians, 1 Soviet Union, 1, 2 Spain, 1, 2, 3 Spencer, Richard B., 1 Spengler, Andrew, 1, 2, 3, 4 SQUIDs, see superconducting quantum interference devices Stacey, Liam, 1, 2 Stanford University, 1 Star Trek, 1, 2, 3 statistics, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 statues, 1 Stephan, Cookie, 1, 2 Stephan, Walter, 1, 2 Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth, Everybody Lies, 1 Stereotype Content Model, 1 stereotypes: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; cultural machine, group threat and stereotypes, 1; definitions, 1; feeling hate together, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4; homosexuality, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; study of prejudice, 1; tipping point, 1; trigger events, 1 Stoke-on-Trent, 1, 2 Stormfront website, 1, 2, 3 storytelling, 1 stress, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 striatum, 1, 2, 3n, 4 subcultures, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 subcultures of hate, 1; collective quests for significance and extreme hate, 1; extremist ideology and compassion, 1; fusion and generosity towards the group, 1; fusion and hateful murder, 1; fusion and hateful violence, 1; fusion and self-sacrifice in the name of hate, 1; quest for significance and extreme hatred, 1; religion/belief, 1; warrior psychology, 1 subhuman, 1, 2 Sue, D.


pages: 444 words: 124,631

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Nick and Gabi Molnar were expecting their second child in August, so they had returned from the United States, which was being ravaged by the virus, to be closer to family. This made it tougher for Nick to manage Afterpay’s US staff, who were becoming restless as COVID-19 spread like wildfire. Then the country erupted after the killing by police of George Floyd, which had triggered massive Black Lives Matter protests. In mid-June, Molnar, Eisen and the Afterpay board dialled in to a briefing, where staff in San Francisco demanded that Afterpay support the movement by ensuring its US workforce become more diverse. ‘The US is obviously going through a difficult time at the moment,’ Molnar said. ‘We have people in the business who are vocal about what they expect … It became very clear our team in the US wanted to have a conversation.

Morgan 53, 120, 162, 251 Juul Labs 237–8 Kardashian, Kim 189 the Kardashians 188 Karzis, Sophie 116 Kassabgi, Damian 196, 207, 299, 304, 322 Katsalidis, Nona 57 Kaufman, Lilly 1–2 Kaufman, Susie 2, 3 Kaufman, Zoltan 1, 2 Kell, Peter 144, 163, 202, 207 Kelly, Rachel 129, 130–1, 135, 136 Khalifa, Mia 311 Kidman, Matthew 18, 95 King, Phil 185 Kingston, Beverley Basket, Bag and Trolley 45 Kitney, Damon 194 Klarna 81, 133, 187, 245, 279, 284, 291, 316, 317 Commonwealth Bank and 247–8, 337–8 United States launch 190 Kohler, Alan 209 Laffont, Philippe 234–5, 257, 258, 295, 335 Langley, Ron 83 Latitude Financial 118, 256–7 Lau, Sarah 128 Lawrence, Martin 149 lay-by 41, 44, 45, 46–7 costs to retailer 48–9 digitising of 47–8 Leeser, Julian 304 Lehman Brothers 177 Leibovich, Gabby Catch of the Day 89 Leigh, Andrew 287, 288 Lennie, Nadine 116 Lenton, Shane 88 Letts, Darren 175, 176 Levchin, Max 81, 190, 284, 312 Levis, Justin 87 Levis, Rod 87, 88 Lew, Solomon 129, 133, 270 Lindenberg, Brad 131, 279 Lipski, Simon 8 Little, Jason 11 Liu, Jun Bei 160 Livewire 240, 292 Lone Pine Capital 235, 236, 281, 295, 311 Loton, Brian 71 Lowde, Rebecca 289 Lowe, Philip 204, 205, 206, 260, 261, 266, 301, 341 Lowy, Frank 6, 7, 9, 31, 174 Lowy, Hugo 6 Lu, Janet 95 Lululemon 161 Lustig, Ted 9 McAllister, Jenny 146, 329 McBain, John 85 McCann, Edwina 305 Macaulay, Louise 142 McClelland, Colin 309 McCrohan, Sharon 197–8 McGarry, Ben 261, 267, 289–90 MacGraw, Beth 305 MacGraw, Tessa 305 McKenzie, Mark 262 McNamara, Peter 205, 206 Madden, Steve 191 Malek, Ron 23 Mandel, Steve 236, 295 Marshall, David 83 Mastercard 46, 108, 219, 220, 255, 263, 302, 339 Masters of the Market 18, 31 Matrix 157, 172, 173, 242, 331–2 Mawhinney, Simon 292 Maxsted, Lindsay 258 Maxwell, Robert 28 May, Rob 48–9 Mayne, Stephen 258 Medcraft, Greg 142, 144 Melbourne Jewish community 5 Melvin Capital 308–9 Meriton 6 Messara, Mike 127 Mickey Mouse report 148–51, 167, 227 millennials, Gen Z, Gen X 208–9, 331 credit cards and 40, 41, 52, 73, 208, 217, 222 trend makers, as 308, 311 Mitchell, Jacob 177 Mitchell, James 275 Mitchell, Paula 87 Moar, Max 9 Molnar, Michele 4, 13, 40, 76, 134 Molnar, Nick 3, 4, 11, 38, 73, 194 Afterpay see Afterpay Banking and Wealth Summit 2020 303 bar mitzvah 12 Eisen, meeting 39–40 fortune, personal 277, 333 Ice Online see Ice Online marriage and family 88, 194, 210, 277, 303 online jewellery sales 13, 14, 38–9 real estate purchases 343 rugby 11, 12, 13 Senate inquiry appearance 210–11 Shmuel Gniwisch 14, 16, 40, 172 TEDxYouth@Sydney 2017 171 United States expansion 172–3, 187, 190, 188, 226, 244–5 Molnar, Ronald 3–4, 12, 38–9, 108, 134, 168 Molnar, Simon 4, 13, 40 Ice Online see Ice Online Molnar, Vivian 3, 4 Montgomery, Roger 181, 182 Moore, Daniel 291 Mordant, Simon 23, 117 Moreno, Antonio 244 Morgan Stanley 97, 282 Moriah War Memorial College 4, 5–6, 10, 100, 131, 343 Morrison, Scott 145, 225, 226, 250, 260 pro-fintech position 250, 302–3 Mott, Jonathan 252, 255 Mulcahy, Julian 136, 336 Mumbrella 153 Murdoch, Rupert 126 Musk, Elon 176–8, 309, 311 Myer 44 MYOB 24, 30, 34, 96 Nadella, Satya 302 Nagley, Harold 4, 5, 10 Narev, Ian 217–18, 247 Nasdaq index 101, 102, 180, 232–3 National Australia Bank Afterpay financing 108–10, 121, 123, 168, 216, 251 Hayne Royal Commission 141, 142, 216 National Consumer Credit Protection Act 146, 203, 205, 212, 223, 326 National Debt Helpline 144, 201 National Press Club 260 Netflix 182 Ng, Jeffery 84 Ng, Wendy 58, 116, 117, 159, 267 Nguyen, John 55 Ngwe, Donald 244 Nixon, Blake 28, 31 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria 310 O’Connor, Debbie 153 O’Dwyer, Kelly 143 O’Halloran, Xavier 151 O’Neil, Clare 146 online classified platforms 126, 127 Openpay 251 Ord Minnett 175, 246, 251 Orr, Rowena 141 Ovienrioba, Oghosa 319–20 Ownership Matters 148–51, 167, 241, 242 Paatsch, Dean 149, 150–1 Packer, James 126 Packer, Kerry 27, 126 Padley, Marcus 160, 192, 282–3 Pagantis 286 Pape, Scott The Barefoot Investor 154 Paulson, Hank 302 payday lending 146, 212, 320 PayPal 54, 77, 166, 172, 187, 285, 302, 314 Peloton 313–14 Phillpot, Rob 155 Pichai, Sundar 302 Piper, Tim 315 platform companies 128, 240, 263 Plotkin, Gabe 308, 310 Portnoy, Dave 278, 309, 310 Poseidon bubble 96 Powell, Jerome 186, 207 Press, Danielle 202 Princess Polly 76, 77, 79, 106 property development 7, 20 Prunty, Chris 128, 129 Quadpay 131, 187, 270, 315 QVG 128 rag trade 9, 19 REA Group 126, 127 Rechtman, Andrew 76 Redrup, Yolanda 156 regulation of BNPL sector 201 ASIC inquiry 137, 140, 144, 145, 148, 191 ASIC reports 202–4, 297, 298, 299 Reserve Bank 206, 254, 296 Bragg inquiry see Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology Senate inquiry see Senate Economics References Committee inquiry United Kingdom 288, 320–2 regulators, role 287, 296, 297, 298, 300–1 research analysts 252, 253, 280 risk-averse 271 Reserve Bank 206, 254, 295, 302, 341 bond-buying program 269 no-surcharge rules 254, 255, 262, 295, 301, 302, 341 Richardson, Tom 311, 316 Roberts, Matt 251 Robertson, Hugh Walter 58, 67, 133 Afterpay 78, 84, 90, 93, 99 background and early career 70 private investors 71, 72, 84 Touchcorp IPO and 67, 72–3, 85 Robertson, Julian 232 , 233, 235, 245, 295 Robinhood trading app 278, 310 Rose, Nicole 228 Rosenberg, Cliff 84, 90 Rosenblum, Rupert 12 Roth, Mike 94 Rubin, Elana 67, 116, 229, 262 Rudd, Kevin 134, 196, 205, 226, 326 Ryan, Tony 28, 29 Saadat, Michael 139, 143, 144, 202, 212, 213, 221 Afterpay role 229, 248 code of conduct 324–6, 328 Salt, Bernard 208 Sams, Lauren 306, 307, 311, 312 Samson, James 241–2 Samway, Tim 156 Saunders, John 6, 7, 9, 174 Saville, Duncan 63, 65, 68, 84 Afterpay Touch shareholding 118, 175 Scheinberg, Albert 9 Schulman, Daniel 314 Schwarz, Stephanie 10–11, 343 Seafolly 8 SEEK 126 Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology 249 Afterpay presentation to 262–3 report 286–7, 296, 297 Senate Economics References Committee inquiry 145–8, 154, 186 hearings 209, 210–12 report 223 scope 200–1 Serjeant, Tim 187 Sezzle 131, 175, 187, 267, 285, 315 ASX listing 246, 247 share market banks and mining, dominance of 91, 92 day traders 278–9, 308–10 dual-class share structure companies 102 founders, sale of shares by 156, 281, 333 short-sellers 156, 165, 167, 175, 176–7, 185, 186, 276, 289, 308–9 tech companies 96, 101 value 91 Shein, David 90 Sher, Steve 84 Shervington, Laurie 65 Shipton, James 142, 143 Shopify 282, 284, 313 Shorten, Bill 139, 145, 198, 225, 226, 249 Showpo 95 Shulman, Gabi 86, 88 Sidereal Holdings 83, 117 Siemiatkowski, Sebastien 190 Simmonds, Julian 287 Singer Sewing Machines 42 Skamvougeras, Paul 84 Smith, Steve 197 Snapchat 98 Solution 6 23, 24 Soros, George 232, 233 Sotiriou, Lafitani 113, 121, 133, 162, 164–5, 166, 224 Spiro, Dov 24 Splitit 246 Stadnik, Andrei 282 Stalder, Dana 157, 172, 187, 242, 243 Stevens, Chris 289 Stockland Trust 9 Stocks Down Under 276, 284 Stouffer, Tracy 133 Strachman, Daniel 233 Strasser, Nicole 5 Sugar, Brian 188 PopSugar 188 Sullivan, Angus 338 Summers, Larry 249 superannuation 182, 270 Surowiecki, James 47 Surry Hills 19–20 Swanson, Eleanor 272, 292 Sydney Jewish community 3, 5, 7–8 Sydney Morning Herald 40 Sykes, Trevor 29, 30 Tabakoff, Nick 23 TAFMO 61, 63, 64, 84 Tagliaferro, Anton 291 ‘tap and go’ payments 120 Tate, Diane 325, 326, 329 Taub, Stephen 295 Taylor, Mike 114 tech-stock bubble 15, 16, 23, 98, 180, 183, 232–3 Telstra privatisation 21, 22 Temple Emanuel 4 Tencent 274–6, 280, 289 Ters, Jason 36, 83 Tesla 176–8, 268, 275, 295 Textor, Mark 340 Thiel, Peter 122, 176, 284 Thompson, Sarah 168 Thorburn, Andrew 141, 216 Thread Together 307, 308 Tiger Cubs 233, 234, 235, 236, 239, 258, 275, 295, 311 Tiger Global 234, 282, 295, 311 Tiger Management 228, 232, 233, 235 TikTok 307 Touch Payments 82 Touchcorp 54, 58, 59 Afterpay payment platform 54–5, 59 Intellect and 62 Touchcorp Holdings Pty Ltd 64, 66, 104, 116 Afterpay, merger with see Afterpay Touch (APT) IPO 58, 59, 67–8, 84 Treasury 296, 297, 300, 301 ‘responsible lending’ laws 326–7 Triguboff, Harry 6 Trump, Donald 112 Turnbull, Malcolm 140, 145, 197, 213, 225, 249 Twitter 98, 102 Tyabji, Hatim 63–4, 66 Tyler, Chris 23 Uber 140, 196, 242, 263, 289, 299 UBS investment conference 2016 110, 111 October 2019 report 252, 253, 255–6 ‘unicorn’ status 120, 183 United Kingdom Afterpay expansion into 184, 224, 264 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) 320, 321, 323 regulation of BNPL sector 288, 320–2 United States Black Lives Matter 277 election 2016 111–12 expansion into 157–8, 173–4, 190, 243–4, 265 fashion market 158 Federal Reserve COVID-19 response 273 regulatory risks in 267 Uphold & Recognise 304 Valmorbida, Val 57 van den Berg, Stefan 184 van Dongen, Yvonne 27 Vanguard 293, 294 venture funds 98, 99 Veronika Maine 107, 111, 113 Verrender, Ian 152 Verwer, Peter 302 VGI Partners 186–7 Visa 46, 108, 219, 220, 246, 263, 279, 302, 339 WAAAX stocks 182 Waislitz, Alex 71, 112, 183, 274, 342 Walburgh, Fetzie 55 Walker, Gavin 35 The Wall Street Journal 295 Wallis, Stan 220 Walsh, Michael 110 Warner, David 198 Warren, Elizabeth 310 Waters, Tony 128, 129 WeChat 275 The Weekend Australian 194 Weiss, Gary 17, 18, 19, 24, 35, 63, 125 background 25–6 ClearView 36 Coats acquisition 31–2 GPG see Guinness Peat Group (GPG) Industrial Equity Limited (IEL) 26 Westfield 6–7, 90, 174, 306–7, 310–11 Westpac Banking Corporation 51, 247, 327 Afterpay Money and 290–1, 338, 339, 340 anti-money laundering breaches 258–9 White, Richard 97, 281 Whitlam Turnbull bank 18 Whittaker, Marc 240 Wilson, Geoff 18, 94, 125, 225 Future Generations fund 125, 126 Wilson, Matthew 336 Wilson, Tim 225 Wilson Asset Management 93, 94, 125, 251 Wilson HTM 67, 68, 72, 93, 113, 184 Winkler, Craig 34 Winters, John 101 WiseTech Global 97, 182, 281 Women’s Wear Daily 188, 226 Wonga pay day loan scandal 322 Woodson Capital 238–9, 295, 311 Woolard, Christopher 320, 321, 322 World Health Organization 261 World Maccabiah Games 12 World War II 1 Wran, Neville 18 Wylie, John 13, 22, 39 Xenita, Natalie 307 Xero 34, 96, 182 Xu, Nesta 55 Yahoo!


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Egypt, Russia, Syria, and even the United States—millions downloaded Signal, and it became the communication app of choice for those who hoped to avoid police surveillance. Feminist collectives, anti–President Donald Trump protesters, communists, anarchists, radical animal rights organizations, Black Lives Matter activists—all flocked to Signal. Many were heeding Snowden’s advice: “Organize. Compartmentalize to limit compromise. Encrypt everything, from calls to texts (use Signal as a first step).”130 Silicon Valley cashed in on OTF’s Internet Freedom spending as well. Facebook incorporated Signal’s underlying encryption protocol into WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in the world.

Gerry Smith, “How Police Are Scanning All of Twitter to Detect Terrorist Threats,” Huffington Post, June 25, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/25 /dataminr-mines-twitter-to_n_5507616.html. 13. In 2014, police departments all across the country used it. Indeed, at the same time that Oakland was trying to push through the Domain Awareness Center, the city’s police department purchased a Geofeedia license and used it to monitor protests, including the Black Lives Matter movement. “Social media monitoring is spreading fast and is a powerful example of surveillance technology that can disproportionately impact communities of color,” warned the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained a copy of Geofeedia’s marketing materials to law enforcement. “We know for a fact that in Oakland and Baltimore, law enforcement has used Geofeedia to monitor protests.”


Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

The results were paradoxical: although black and Hispanic people were over 50 per cent more likely than white people to have non-lethal force used against them during arrests, it was the opposite way round for lethal force: ‘blacks [were] 23.8% less likely to be shot by police, relative to whites.’80 The preprint reached public attention via a front-page article in the New York Times (‘Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but Not in Shootings’), which quoted Fryer saying it was ‘the most surprising result of my career’.81 It quickly became a talking point for conservative commentators displeased with the Black Lives Matter movement, which campaigns against police violence. One wrote that Fryer’s study ‘proves’ that the movement was ‘built on lies’.82 Fryer’s 23.8 per cent figure was based on a straightforward look at the raw data. There was a lot more to the study than just the raw data, but this sadly became lost in the media coverage – especially after Fryer himself had highlighted that very specific number to journalists.

ABC News abortion Abu Ghraib prison abuse (2003) accidental discoveries Acta Crystallographica Section E acupuncture Afghan hounds Agence France-Presse AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) Alchemist, The (Bega) Alexander, Benita Alexander, Scott algorithms allergies Alzheimer, Aloysius Alzheimer’s Disease Amazon American Journal of Potato Research Amgen amygdala amyloid cascade hypothesis anaesthesia awareness Fujii affair (2012) outcome switching Anaesthesia & Analgesia animal studies antidepressants antipsychotics archaeology Arnold, Frances arsenic artificial tracheas asthma austerity Australia Austria autism aviation Babbage, Charles Bacon, Francis bacteria Bargh, John Bayer Bayes, Thomas Bayesian statistics BDNF gene Before You Know It (Bargh) Bega, Cornelis Begley, Sharon Belgium Bell Labs Bem, Daryl benzodiazepines bias blinding and conflict of interest De Vries’ study (2018) funding and groupthink and meaning well bias Morton’s skull studies p-hacking politics and publication bias randomisation and sexism and Bik, Elisabeth Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Biomaterials biology amyloid cascade hypothesis Bik’s fake images study (2016) Boldt affair (2010) cell lines China, misconduct in Hwang affair (2005–6) Macchiarini affair (2015–16) meta-scientific research microbiome studies Morton’s skull studies Obokata affair (2014) outcome switching preprints publication bias replication crisis Reuben affair (2009) spin and statistical power and Summerlin affair (1974) Wakefield affair (1998–2010) biomedical papers bird flu bispectral index monitor black holes Black Lives Matter blinding blotting BMJ, The Boldt, Joachim books Borges, Jorge Luis Boulez, Pierre Boyle, Robert brain imaging Brass Eye vii British Medical Journal Brock, Jon bronchoscopy Broockman, David Brown, Nick Bush, George Walker business studies BuzzFeed News California Walnut Commission California wildfires (2017) Canada cancer cell lines collaborative projects faecal transplants food and publication bias and replication crisis and sleep and spin and candidate genes carbon-based transistors Cardiff University cardiovascular disease Carlisle, John Carlsmith, James Carney, Dana cash-for-publication schemes cataracts Cell cell lines Cell Transplantation Center for Open Science CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) chi-squared tests childbirth China cash-for-publication schemes cell line mix-ups in Great Famine (1959–1961) misconduct cases in randomisation fraud in chrysalis effect Churchill, Winston churnalism Cifu, Adam citations clickbait climate change cloning Clostridium difficile cochlear implants Cochrane Collaboration coercive citation coffee cognitive dissonance cognitive psychology cognitive tests coin flipping Colbert Report, The Cold War collaborative projects colonic irrigation communality COMPare Trials COMT gene confidence interval conflict of interest Conservative Party conspicuous consumption Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) ‘Coping with Chaos’ (Stapel) Cornell University coronavirus (COVID-19) Corps of Engineers correlation versus causation corticosteroids Cotton, Charles Caleb creationism Crowe, Russell Csiszar, Alex Cuddy, Amy CV (curriculum vitae) cyber-bullying cystic fibrosis Daily Mail Daily Telegraph Darwin Memorial, The’ (Huxley) Darwin, Charles Das, Dipak datasets fraudulent Observational publication bias Davies, Phil Dawkins, Richard De Niro, Robert De Vries, Ymkje Anna debt-to-GDP ratio Deer, Brian democratic peace theory Denmark Department of Agriculture, US depression desk rejections Deutsche Bank disabilities discontinuous mind disinterestedness DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) domestication syndrome doveryai, no proveryai Duarte, José Duke University duloxetine Dutch Golden Age Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research Dweck, Carol economics austerity preprints statistical power and effect size Einstein, Albert Elmo Elsevier engineering epigenetics euthanasia evolutionary biology exaggeration exercise Experiment, The exploratory analyses extrasensory perception faecal transplants false-positive errors Fanelli, Daniele Festinger, Leon file-drawer problem financial crisis (2007–8) Fine, Cordelia Fisher, Ronald 5 sigma evidence 5-HT2a gene 5-HTTLPR gene fixed mindset Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Frequency Questionnaires food psychology Formosus, Pope foxes France Francis, Pope Franco, Annie fraud images investigation of motives for numbers Open Science and peer review randomisation Freedom of Information Acts French, Chris Fryer, Roland Fujii, Yoshitaka funding bias and fraud and hype and long-term funding perverse incentive and replication crisis and statistical power and taxpayer money funnel plots Future of Science, The (Nielsen) gay marriage Gelman, Andrew genetically modified crops genetics autocorrect errors candidate genes collaborative projects gene therapy genome-wide association studies (GWASs) hype in salami-slicing in Geneva, Switzerland geoscience Germany Getty Center GFAJ-1 Giner-Sorolla, Roger Glasgow Effect Goldacre, Ben Goldsmiths, University of London Golgi Apparatus good bacteria Good Morning America good scientific citizenship Goodhart’s Law Goodstein, David Google Scholar Górecki, Henryk Gould, Stephen Jay Gran Sasso, Italy grants, see funding Granularity-Related Inconsistency of Means (GRIM) grapes Great Recession (2007–9) Great Red Spot of Jupiter Green, Donald Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Gross, Charles ground-breaking results groupthink ‘Growth in a Time of Debt’ (Reinhart and Rogoff) growth mindset Guzey, Alexey gynaecology h-index H5N1 Haldane, John Burdon Sanderson Hankins, Matthew HARKing Harris, Sidney Harvard University headache pills heart attacks heart disease Heathers, James height Heilongjiang University Heino, Matti Henry IV (Shakespeare) Higgs Boson Hirsch, Jorge HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) homosexuality Hong Kong Hooke, Robert Hossenfelder, Sabine Houston, Texas Hume, David Huxley, Thomas Henry Hwang, Woo-Suk hydroxyethyl starch hype arsenic life affair (2010) books correlation versus causation cross-species leap language and microbiome studies news stories nutrition and press releases spin unwarranted advice hypotheses Ig Nobel Prize images, fraudulent impact factor India insomnia International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology Ioannidis, John IQ tests Iraq War (2003–11) Italy Japan John, Elton Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology Journal of Environmental Quality Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine Journal of Personality and Social Psychology journals conflict of interest disclosure fraud and hype and impact factor language in mega-journals negligence and Open Science and peer review, see peer review predatory journals preprints publication bias rent-seeking replication studies retraction salami slicing subscription fees Jupiter Kahneman, Daniel Kalla, Joshua Karolinska Institute Krasnodar, Russia Krugman, Paul Lacon, or Many Things in Few Words (Cotton) LaCour, Michael Lancet Fine’s ‘feminist science’ article (2018) Macchiarini affair (2015–16) Wakefield affair (1998–2010) language Large Hadron Collider Le Texier, Thibault Lewis, Jason Lexington Herald-Leader Leyser, Ottoline Lilienfeld, Scott Loken, Eric Lost in Math (Hossenfelder) low-fat diet low-powered studies Lumley, Thomas Lysenko, Trofim Macbeth (Shakespeare) Macbeth effect Macchiarini, Paolo MacDonald, Norman machine learning Macleod, Malcolm Macroeconomics major depressive disorder Malaysia Mao Zedong MARCH1 Marcus, Adam marine biology Markowetz, Florian Matthew Effect Maxims and Moral Reflections (MacDonald) McCartney, Gerry McCloskey, Deirdre McElreath, Richard meaning well bias Measles, Mumps & Rubella (MMR) measurement errors Medawar, Peter medical research amyloid cascade hypothesis Boldt affair (2010) cell lines China, misconduct in collaborative projects Fujii affair (2012) Hwang affair (2005–6) Macchiarini affair (2015–16) meta-scientific research Obokata affair (2014) outcome switching pharmaceutical companies preprints pre-registration publication bias replication crisis Reuben affair (2009) spin and statistical power and Summerlin affair (1974) Wakefield affair (1998–2010) medical reversal Medical Science Monitor Mediterranean Diet Merton, Robert Mertonian Norms communality disinterestedness organised scepticism universalism meta-science Boldt affair (2010) chrysalis effect De Vries’ study (2018) Fanelli’s study (2010) Ioannidis’ article (2005) Macleod’s studies mindset studies (2018) saturated fats studies spin and stereotype threat studies mice microbiome Microsoft Excel Milgram, Stanley Mill, John Stuart Mindset (Dweck) mindset concept Mismeasure of Man, The (Gould) Modi, Narendra money priming Mono Lake, California Moon, Hyung-In Morton, Samuel Motyl, Matt multiverse analysis nanotechnology National Academy of Sciences National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Institutes of Health National Science Foundation Nature cash-for-publication and cell line editorial (1981) impact factor language in Obokata affair (2014) Open Access and open letter on statistical significance (2019) replication research Schön affair (2002) Stapel affair (2011) Nature Neuroscience Nature Reviews Cancer NBC negligence cell line mix-ups numerical errors statistical power typos Netflix Netherlands replication studies in Stapel’s racism studies statcheck research neuroscience amyloid cascade hypothesis collaborative projects Macleod’s animal research studies replication crisis sexism and statistical significance and Walker’s sleep studies neutrinos New England Journal of Medicine New York Times New Zealand news media Newton, Isaac Nielsen, Michael Nimoy, Leonard No Country for Old Men Nobel Prize northern blots Nosek, Brian Novella, Steven novelty Novum Organum (Bacon) Nuijten, Michèle nullius in verba, numerical errors nutrition Obama, Barack obesity Obokata, Haruko observational datasets obstetrics ocean acidification oesophagus ‘Of Essay-Writing’ (Hume) Office for Research Integrity, US Oldenburg, Henry Open Access Open Science OPERA experiment (2011) Oransky, Ivan Orben, Amy Organic Syntheses organised scepticism Osborne, George outcome-switching overfitting Oxford University p-value/hacking alternatives to Fine and low-powered studies and microbiome studies and nutritional studies and Open Science and outcome-switching perverse incentive and pre-registration and screen time studies and spin and statcheck and papers abstracts citations growth rates h-index introductions method sections results sections salami slicing self-plagiarism university ranks and Parkinson’s disease particle-accelerator experiments peanut allergies peer review coercive citation fraudulent groupthink and LaCour affair (2014–15) Preprints productivity incentives and randomisation and toxoplasma gondii scandal (1961) volunteer Wakefield affair (1998–2010) penicillin Peoria, Illinois Perspectives in Psychological Science perverse incentive cash for publications competition CVs and evolutionary analogy funding impact factor predatory journals salami slicing self-plagiarism Pett, Joel pharmaceutical companies PhDs Philosophical Transactions phlogiston phosphorus Photoshop Physical Review physics placebos plagiarism Plan S Planck, Max plane crashes PLOS ONE pluripotency Poehlman, Eric politics polygenes polyunsaturated fatty acids Popper, Karl populism pornography positive feedback loops positive versus null results, see publication bias post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) power posing Prasad, Vinay pre-registration preclinical studies predatory journals preprints Presence (Cuddy) press releases Prevención con Dieta Mediterránea (PREDIMED) priming Princeton University Private Eye probiotics Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences prosthetic limbs Przybylski, Andrew psychic precognition Psychological Medicine psychology Bargh’s priming study (1996) Bem’s precognition studies books Carney and Cuddy’s power posing studies collaborative projects data sharing study (2006) Dweck’s mindset concept Festinger and Carlsmith’s cognitive dissonance studies Kahneman’s priming studies LaCour’s gay marriage experiment politics and preprints publication bias in Shanks’ priming studies Stanford Prison Experiment Stapel’s racism studies statistical power and Wansink’s food studies publication bias publish or perish Pubpeer Pythagoras’s theorem Qatar quantum entanglement racism Bargh’s priming studies Morton’s skull studies Stapel’s environmental studies randomisation Randy Schekman Reagan, Ronald recommendation algorithms red grapes Redfield, Rosemary Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (Babbage) Reinhart, Carmen Rennie, Drummond rent-seeking replication; replication crisis Bargh’s priming study Bem’s precognition studies biology and Carney and Cuddy’s power posing studies chemistry and economics and engineering and geoscience and journals and Kahneman’s priming studies marine biology and medical research and neuroscience and physics and Schön’s carbon-based transistor Stanford Prison Experiment Stapel’s racism studies Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic life study reproducibility Republican Party research grants research parasites resveratrol retraction Arnold Boldt Fujii LaCour Macchiarini Moon Obokata Reuben Schön Stapel Wakefield Wansink Retraction Watch Reuben, Scott Reuters RIKEN Rogoff, Kenneth romantic priming Royal Society Rundgren, Todd Russia doveryai, no proveryai foxes, domestication of Macchiarini affair (2015–16) plagiarism in salami slicing same-sex marriage sample size sampling errors Sanna, Lawrence Sasai, Yoshiki saturated fats Saturn Saudi Arabia schizophrenia Schoenfeld, Jonathan Schön, Jan Hendrik School Psychology International Schopenhauer, Arthur Science acceptance rate Arnold affair (2020) arsenic life affair (2010) cash-for-publication and Hwang affair (2005) impact factor LaCour affair (2014–15) language in Macbeth effect study (2006) Open Access and pre-registration investigation (2020) replication research Schön affair (2002) Stapel affair (2011) toxoplasma gondii scandal (1961) Science Europe Science Media Centre scientific journals, see journals scientific papers, see papers Scientific World Journal, The Scotland Scottish Socialist Party screen time self-citation self-correction self-plagiarism self-sustaining systems Seoul National University SEPT2 Sesame Street sexism sexual selection Shakespeare, William Shanks, David Shansky, Rebecca Simmons, Joseph Simonsohn, Uri Simpsons, The skin grafts Slate Star Codex Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute Smaldino, Paul Smeesters, Dirk Smith, Richard Snuppy social media South Korea Southern blot Southern, Edwin Soviet Union space science special relativity specification-curve analysis speed-accuracy trade-off Spies, Jeffrey spin Springer Srivastava, Sanjay Stalin, Joseph Stanford University Dweck’s mindset concept file-drawer project (2014) Prison Experiment (1971) Schön affair (2002) STAP (Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency) Stapel, Diederik statcheck statistical flukes statistical power statistical significance statistical tests Status Quo stem cells Stephen VI, Pope stereotype threat Sternberg, Robert strokes subscription fees Summerlin, William Sweden Swift, Jonathan Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Sydney Morning Herald Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (Górecki) t-tests Taiwan taps-aff.co.uk tax policies team science TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) Texas sharpshooter analogy Thatcher, Margaret theory of special relativity Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman) Thomson Reuters Tilburg University Titan totalitarianism toxoplasma gondii trachea translational research transparency Tribeca Film Festival triplepay system Trump, Donald trust in science ‘trust, but verify’ Tumor Biology Turkey Tuulik, Julia Twitter typos UK Reproducibility Network Ulysses pact United Kingdom austerity cash-for-publication schemes image duplication in multiverse analysis study (2019) National Institute for Health Research pre-registration in Royal Society submarines trust in science university ranks in Wakefield affair (1998–2010) United States Arnold affair (2020) arsenic life affair (2010) austerity Bargh’s priming study (1996) Bem’s precognition studies California wildfires (2017) Carney and Cuddy’s power posing studies Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion climate science in creationism in Das affair (2012) De Vries’ drug study (2018) Department of Agriculture Dweck’s mindset concept Fryer’s police brutality study (2016) image duplication in Kahneman’s priming studies LaCour affair (2014–15) Morton’s skull studies Office for Research Integrity Poehlman affair (2006) pre-registration in public domain laws Reuben affair (2009) Stanford Prison Experiment Summerlin affair (1974) tenure Walker’s sleep studies Wansink affair (2016) universalism universities cash-for-publication schemes fraud and subscription fees and team science University College London University of British Columbia University of California Berkeley Los Angeles University of Connecticut University of East Anglia University of Edinburgh University of Hertfordshire University of London University of Pennsylvania unsaturated fats unwarranted advice vaccines Vamplew, Peter Vanity Fair Vatican Vaxxed Viagra vibration-of-effects analysis virology Wakefield, Andrew Walker, Matthew Wansink, Brian Washington Post weasel wording Weisberg, Michael Wellcome Trust western blots Westfall, Jake ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’ (Ioannidis) Why We Sleep (Walker) Wiley Wiseman, Richard Wolfe-Simon, Felisa World as Will and Presentation, The (Schopenhauer) World Health Organisation (WHO) Yale University Yarkoni, Tal Yes Men Yezhov, Nikolai Z-tests Ziliak, Stephen Zimbardo, Philip Zola, Émile About the Author Stuart Ritchie is a lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

In 2017, Soros transferred $18 billion of his fortune into his Open Society to fund his dystopian fantasies, and through his foundation, $11 billion has already been spent to shape global society in a way that he sees fit, like financing uprisings like the Arab Spring, and the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of displaced Libyans into Europe.215 In the United States, Soros was the financial backer for Black Lives Matter and other social movements meant to appear organic in nature but clearly had his fingerprints all over them. Part of the problem that these foundations create is that they are desperate to make the social uprisings appear to be authentic and real, when they usually are not, then use the organizations to change society in a way that suits them.

Democracy Alliance donors have long maintained an air of secrecy, and little is known about most of them. Major Democratic donors who have been identified as members include Soros and Tom Steyer, hedge fund magnate Donald Sussman and technology entrepreneur Tim Gill. Those are the ones that can be proved. Is Soros the only boss brain behind Black Lives Matter? Of course not. But he does fund the #BLM movement and riots every time the globalists decide they need a new race war started. Trump blamed Antifa by name for the violence, along with violent mobs, arsonists, and looters. As The President Who Holds The Record For The Most Tweets In The World (not really, but he should), he also tweeted that the US will designate the movement as a terrorist organization.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

I’m calling it re-tribalisation. There is a very natural and well-documented tendency for humans to flock together – but the key thing is that the more possible connections, the greater the opportunities to cluster with ever more refined and precise groups. Recent political tribes include Corbyn-linked Momentum, Black Lives Matter, the alt-right, the EDL, Antifa, radical veganism and #feelthebern. I am not suggesting these groups are morally equivalent, that they don’t have a point or that they are incapable of thoughtful debate – simply that they are tribal. What transforms a group of like-minded people into a motivated, mobilised tribe is a sense of shared struggle and common grievance.


pages: 517 words: 155,209

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, clean water, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, land tenure, mental accounting, microdosing, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, off grid, off-the-grid, Right to Buy, Skype, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Guy referred to the annual tradition of “the March of Flags” as “the March of Hate.” He’s an activist with Ta’ayush (it means “living together” in Arabic), a group that uses nonviolent direct action to fight for Palestinian rights. Earlier this year he was arrested in connection with his activity, and spent some time in jail. As with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, filming unethical behavior is one of Ta’ayush’s most effective tactics in battling state-sanctioned violence. We trekked past Prime Minister Netanyahu’s residence on Balfour Street, winding our way through the thickening crowd toward the nerve center of the Old City.

Then he directed his lens at a unit of armed Israeli border police who’d blocked off a street entrance to an Arab neighborhood with a tank that would use its cannon to spray their bodies and homes with “skunk water” if they dared try exiting to protest the march. Skunk water is a putrid-smelling form of nonlethal crowd control developed in Israel to keep demonstrations in check. (Several police departments in US cities, including Saint Louis, are reported to have recently bought it in the wake of protests organized by the Black Lives Matter movement.) “That’s the smell of the occupation,” said Guy. “It’s worse than a skunk. It stinks like raw sewage and rotting corpses. It doesn’t go away for days. It can make you sick. The term Israel uses for this is sanitize.” I thought of the fire hoses police targeted on nonviolent protestors, including children, in Birmingham in 1963.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Stenner, in her book The Authoritarian Dynamic, defined authoritarianism not as a personality type but something triggered by ‘normative threats’, things that threaten the moral order: ‘authorities unworthy of respect, nonconformity to group norms or norms proving questionable, lack of consensus in group values and beliefs and, in general, diversity and freedom “run amok”’.3 The behaviour of anti-Trump campaigners, whether it was Black Lives Matter, campus activists or actors getting naked to encourage people to vote against him, all seemed designed only to reinforce this not entirely irrational fear. There is also good evidence that the sort of radical activism seen on campus increased support for Trump, pushing away more people than it attracted.4 But then politics comes down to who’s on your side, or as former political strategist Kevin Phillips said, ‘knowing who hates who’.5 Negative partisanship, defining oneself in opposition to another party or group, is very important to how we vote.6 As America’s upper-middle class became far more radical on issues of race and culture in the 2010s, and far more hostile to the lower class and rural whites, so more people have pushed towards the other side in response.

Norton, 1979). 25 http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2018/06/centrists-find-politics-boring-wish-it.html. 26 https://medium.com/@ryanfazio/politics-are-not-the-sum-of-a-person-378102f25334. 27 Burton Egbert Stevenson, The Macmillan Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Famous Phrases (London: Macmillan, 1948) INDEX 28 Days Later (2002) 185 Abbott, Jack 121 abortion 166, 168, 202, 217, 241, 363 Abortion Act 217 Abramson, Lyn Yvonne 30 academia 7–8, 12, 16–17, 136–8, 319–26 activism 7, 316–17, 326 actors 186–7 Adam 33, 219 Adam, Corinna 18 Adams, Henry 90–1 Adams, John 281 Adams, Samuel 281, 331 Adorno, Theodor 135 The Authoritarian Personality 104–7, 143 Aesop’s Fables 260 Africa 15 Agamemnon 187 Agnew, Spiro 154 agnostics 216 agreeableness 108 Aids 125 Ailes, Roger 313, 346 al-Qaida 13, 125, 201 al-Sahaf, Mohammed Saeed 353 alcohol consumption 112–13, 133 Aldred, Ebenezer 61 Alexander, Scott 118, 315–16, 342–3 Allen, William 92 Allen, Woody 102 Alloy, Lauren 30 ‘Alt-Right’ 345, 347 Altemeyer, Bob 107, 333 American Beauty (1999) 106, 184 American Civil Liberties Union 201–2 American constitution 345 American independence 53, 55, 305 American National Election Studies 303 American Political Science Association 300 ‘American Religion’ 222 American Revolution 55, 280–1 Amnesty International 99, 201, 202, 212 ANC 16, 89, 189 ancien régime 178, 333, 358–9 Andrews, Helen 176 Anglicanism 13, 37, 64, 65, 202, 214, 222 Communion 220 High Church 50, 51 norms 79 supremacy 292 anti-apartheid movement 16 anti-Catholicism 232 anti-communism 22, 211 anti-humanitarianism 74 anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) 163 Antichrist 64 Antonia, Lady Fraser 42 apartheid 89, 174 Apollo 29 Aquinas, Thomas 326 Arabs 362 Arbuthnot, Norman 312 aristos 31 Arnold, Matthew 279 art, degenerate 98 Arts Council 197 Aryans 89 ASBOs see anti-social behaviour orders Ashley Madison website 107 Asquith, Robert 168 atheism 52–3, 214–16, 292, 294 see also New Atheism Athelstan, King 126 Athens 31 Atlantic magazine 341, 348, 366 Attenborough, David 195 Attlee, Clement 175 Attlee era 177 Augustine of Hippo 31–3, 35, 349 Augustine, St 110, 291 Auschwitz 98 authoritarian personality 104–7, 118, 334 authoritarianism 140, 148, 208, 262, 329–30, 333–4, 338, 350 autism 138 Ayres, Bill 236 Babeuf, François-Noël 60–1 baby boomers 44, 83, 131, 155 Bad Religion 102 bad-thinkers 144–5, 146, 150, 152 Baldwin, Alec 24 Balfour, Arthur 265 Bank of England 331 Bannon, Steven 152, 309, 347 Baptists 59, 145 barbarism 65, 66, 84 barbarians 12, 131 Bargh, John 115 Barlow, Joel 109 Baron-Cohen, Sacha 333 Barrès, Maurice 95 Basics, Baxter (Viz character) 86, 267 Bastille, storming of the 55, 59, 331 Batbie, Anselme 274 Batek 131 BBC 3, 149, 165, 186, 190–7, 265, 266, 313–14, 337 Beatles 166, 287 beatnik poetry 127 Becker, Ernest 115 Beeching Axe 285 Belgium 303 Belle Époque era 126, 175, 184–5 Benedict, St 373 Benedict XVI, Pope 218, 232, 233 Benn, Tony 18, 21, 42 Bentham, Jeremy 78, 92, 223–4 Berenger, Tom 110 Berlin 20–1, 23, 41–2 Berlin Wall 21, 22, 23, 86 Betjeman, John 285 Bevan, Nye 230 Beyoncé 24 Beyond the Fringe 191 Bible 50, 219, 229, 294 Bible Belt 228 Big Five personality traits 108–13, 137, 363 ‘Big Sort, The’ 295 Bill of Rights 305–6 biological determinism 139 birth control 364 birth rates 362–4 Bishop, Bill 295 Black Death 34–5 Black Lives Matter 338 Black Wednesday 154 Blackadder 331 Blair, Tony 21, 24, 79, 153, 156, 158–61, 163–4, 183, 189, 192, 213, 266–7, 270 Blair era 167, 203–4, 205, 281 ‘Blob, the’ 271 Bloom, Allan 98 Bloom, Paul 321 Bloomsbury 18 ‘blue wave’ 2006 274 Blumenberg, Hans 67 Boas, Franz 133–4 ‘Bobo’ (bohemian bourgeois) 244, 308 Bogart, Humphrey 24 Bolshevik Revolution 303 Bolshevism 226, 246 Borat 333 Bosnia 214 bourgeois 132, 246 bourgeoisie 9, 97, 127, 135 see also Ruling Class Boy Scouts 197 Bradbury, Malcolm 39 brain 116–17 Brando, Marlon 24, 341 Brazil 164 Brecht, Bertolt 186 Breitbart (website) 308, 309, 314, 315, 317–18, 347 Breitbart, Andrew 181, 308 Brennan, Mr 47 Brent, David 192 Brexit 4, 26–7, 103, 186, 195, 270, 346, 353–60, 365, 370 Brexit Referendum (2016) 3, 173, 222, 270, 275, 302, 354–5, 357, 359 Brief Encounter (1945) 162, 168 British Army 9 British Empire 57 British National Party 87 British Potato Council 203 ‘broken windows’ theory 69 Brook 241 Brooke, Heather 298 Brooker, Charlie 249 Brooks, Arthur 82, 191, 299 Who Really Cares 237 Brooks, David 244 ‘brotherhood of man’ 71, 100 Brown, Dan 213 Brown, Gordon 203, 265, 281 Brown era 203–4 Bruinvels, Peter 194 B’Stard, Alan 89 Buchanan, Pat 154–9, 313 Buckley, William F. 68, 295–6, 313 Bullingdon Club 267 Burke, Edmund 47, 53–5, 57–9, 61–3, 65, 66, 68, 70–2, 82, 89–90, 159, 163, 181, 190, 191, 198, 230, 274, 279, 280, 345, 365 Burleigh, Michael 88 Bush, George, Sr 86, 156 Bush, George W. 27, 201, 236, 248, 313 buttons 34–5 Byrne, Liam 266 C2DE social class 5 cable TV 311 Cafod 233 California 4, 320 Calvin, John (Jean) 48, 49, 293 Calvinism 45, 49, 64 Cambridge 49 Cambridge University 52, 55, 145, 151, 326, 348 Camden Labour Party 18 Cameron, David 237, 265, 266, 267, 270, 272, 359 Cameron faction 266, 270, 359 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 81 Campbell, Alistair 159–60 Camus, Albert 226 Canada 178, 201 capitalism 15, 64, 78, 93, 97, 280, 339 Caplan, Bryan 275 Capra, Frank 123 Captain America comics 237 Carlson, Tucker 365 Carlyle, Thomas 41, 75, 76 cars 285–6 Cash, Johnny 24 Cassandra 28–9, 62, 373 Catharism 254–5 Cathedral, the 202–3, 271 Catholic Church 48, 116, 212, 212–14, 217–18, 232, 233, 269, 333 Catechism 137 Catholic Emancipation Act 289 Catholic Herald (newspaper) 212, 213, 216, 219, 233, 241, 272, 307, 339 Catholicism 11–13, 33, 37, 41–3, 45, 49, 51–2, 54, 57, 62, 64, 75, 134–5, 142, 155, 158, 176, 199, 202, 211–13, 217–18, 222, 230–1, 241, 243, 272–3, 291–2, 294, 296, 339, 363 see also anti-Catholicism Cato Institute 324 Cavaliers 53, 57 Ceauşecu 46 censorship 148, 166, 188–9, 290, 331 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 61 ‘centrist dad’ 8 Chagnon, Napoleon 147 Change 3 Change UK 3 Channel 4 168, 232 charities 57, 199–202, 233, 237 Charles I 49, 55 Charles II 36, 37, 52 Charles-Roux, Fr Jean-Marie 210–11 Chartists 175 Chelsea FC 47 Chesterton, G.


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Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

“Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible, make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.” Zapolsky, who said he didn’t know Smalls’s race at the time, later went to considerable lengths to apologize publicly for the remark, including sending out an email to his staff expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement that gained momentum from the murder of George Floyd that May. “I should never have let my emotions get to me,” he told me. “I shouldn’t have used that characterization for any Amazon employee. It was incredibly regrettable.” But the company’s opposition to anything that even whiffed of union organizing was now cast starkly into the open, in cynical and arguably prejudicial terms.

., 304, 305 Bennet, Susan, 30 Berkshire Hathaway, 16, 128, 320, 379 Berman, Craig, 41, 106–7, 120 Betas, 142 Bezos, Christina (sister), 162, 244 Bezos, Jackie (mother), 5, 162, 244, 266, 325 Bezos, Jeff Amazon founded by, 5–6, 322 awards won by, 297, 343 biological father of, 12, 329 childhood home visited by, 161–63, 263 Congressional testimony of, 369–71 divorce of, 16–17, 318–21, 334, 345, 346, 349 fame of, 244, 249, 323, 324 homes of, 132–33, 135, 306, 322, 323, 347, 405 image makeover of, 15–16, 116, 244–45, 323 leadership style of, 10–12, 21–22, 167 musical tastes of, 31 National Enquirer story on Sanchez’s relationship with, 17, 319, 328–42, 344 phone hacking incident, 321, 344–45 portrait of, 1–2, 382 salary of, 112 Sanchez’s meeting of, 326 Sanchez’s relationship with, 17, 283, 318–19, 321, 324, 326–28, 344–47 as science fiction fan, 23, 30–31, 52, 266, 274 shareholder letters of, 6, 12, 22, 24, 39–41, 68, 182, 206, 268, 356, 373–77 60 Minutes interview with, 233 technical advisors to, 23–25, 71 transition to executive chairman position, 17, 405 wealth of, 2, 11, 15, 19, 95, 108, 112–13, 159, 163, 244, 245, 249, 263, 266, 282, 285, 288, 299, 306, 323, 346, 349, 355, 357, 384, 401, 404 Bezos, George, 161–62 Bezos, MacKenzie (wife), see Scott, MacKenzie Bezos, Mark (brother), 162, 244, 245, 322 Bezos, Mike (father), 5, 162, 215, 244, 266, 275, 325 Bezos, Preston, 1, 382–83, 384 Bezos Day 1 Fund, 49, 324, 406 Bezos Earth Fund, 402–4, 406 Biden, Joe, 110, 354–55, 402 Big Billion Day, 78 Big Little Lies, 154 big tech companies, 401 government scrutiny of, 366–67 mergers of, 378 suspicion of and backlash against, 290, 305, 349–53, 364, 380 see also antitrust issues Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 403 Bing, 193 bin Laden, Osama, 117, 118 Birkenstock, 180 Blackburn, Jeff, 136, 139, 147, 152, 155–57, 251–53, 322, 402 Black Friday, 84, 104, 105, 226 Black Lives Matter, 395 Black Ops Aviation, 283, 310, 326 Blizzard Challenge, 29 Bloomberg, Bloomberg News, 95, 187, 223, 295, 360 Blue Origin, 16, 17, 120, 130, 244, 245, 264–83, 288, 310, 326, 327, 346, 387, 406 Bezos’s funding of, 278 Blue Moon project of, 279 budget of, 276–77 employees of, 265, 274–76, 278, 280–81 fuel mixes and, 269, 270 Kármán line and, 273, 282 Kent headquarters of, 264, 274–75, 277, 281 motto and coat of arms of, 268 New Glenn rocket of, 264, 272, 274, 277–79 New Shepard rocket of, 264, 267, 269–71, 273, 274, 276, 278, 280, 283, 288, 310, 327 as philanthropic enterprise, 269, 281–82 secrecy at, 268 test rocket failure of, 270 Texas ranch facilities of, 275, 281 Welcome Letter for new employees at, 267–70, 277, 278, 281 Blumenthal, Richard, 214 Boeing, 270–71, 272, 280, 290, 293, 294, 309 Bon Jovi, Jon, 325 Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, 401 Borders, 169, 188 Borders, Louis, 188 Bork, Robert, 365 Bosch, 143 Bourdain, Anthony, 131 Bowden, Courtney, 397 Bowen, Sam, 23 Boyle, Sean, 249 Boys, The, 158, 401 Bradlee, Ben, 133 Branson, Richard, 6 Bray, Tim, 398–400 Brazil, 110, 231 Brennan, Megan, 358 Breuer, Lanny, 368 Brin, Sergey, 359 Brown, Dan, 34 Brownstein, Carrie, 154 Buffett, Warren, 128, 186, 320, 345 burgers, 206–9 Burgess, Tim, 290, 291 Burnett, Mark, 145 Burnett, T Bone, 136 Burnham, John, 149 Business Council, 16 Business Insider, 240 Business Today, 78 Businessweek, 99 Buy Box Experts, 377 BuzzFeed, 154, 237, 240 Bystander Revolution, 323–24, 346 Callamard, Agnes, 345 Campfire, 153–55, 324–25 Canada, 80 Cape Canaveral, 272, 280 carbon emissions, 2–3, 381 Carlson, Teresa, 359, 362 Carnegie Mellon University, 29 Carney, Jay, 110, 118–20, 208, 263, 297, 311, 314, 315, 339, 351, 356, 357, 369, 390, 391 Carr, Bill, 138–40 Carrefour, 190 Catz, Safra, 360 CBS This Morning, 126, 144 CCDev, 270–71 Cengiz, Hatice, 347 Center for Investigative Reporting, 224 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 394 Chapman, Gary, 64 Charlie Rose, 94 Chatham Asset Management, 331 Cheng, Albert, 157 Chicago, Ill., 303 China, 13, 70–73, 75–76, 78, 82, 86, 95, 104, 170, 189, 379 Communist Party in, 73 Marketplace sellers based in, 171–81, 183, 248, 254, 260, 287 Christensen, Clayton, 10 CIA, 359–60 Cicilline, David N., 366–69, 371, 377 Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, 235, 293 Clarkson, Ian, 188 Clarkson, Jeremy, 145 Clancy, Tom, 149 Clark, Dave, 193, 194, 213–18, 221–35, 239–43, 355, 387–89, 392, 397, 399, 402, 405 Clark, Leigh Anne, 217 Clarke, Arthur C., 23 Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, 403 climate change, 2–4, 17, 381, 402–4 Climate Pledge, 2, 17, 381–82, 388 Clinton, Hillary, 1 cloud computing, 4, 13, 14, 22, 24, 25, 55, 96–98, 102 Amazon’s original products for, 97 Defense Department’s JEDI contract for, 351, 359–63, 381 see also Amazon Web Services Cloudtail, 77, 88 CNET, 67 CNN, 353 Coca-Cola, 260 Coen, Joel, 135 Cohen, Michael, 331, 335 Collins, Doug, 367 Columbia Pictures, 141 Comcast, 139–40 Comic-Con, 145 Communications Decency Act, 379 computer speech recognition, 28, 36, 55 in Alexa, 28, 33, 36, 37 computer-synthesized speech, 28–29 computer vision, 13, 54–55, 57–58, 62–64, 68 Conscious Capitalism (Mackey), 185 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 353 ContextLogic, 171 Cook, Tim, 132, 345, 359, 369 “cookie licking,” 233 Corden, James, 2 Cornell, Brian, 231 Costco, 185, 192, 198 Coulter, Kristi, 60, 65 Covid-19 pandemic, 1, 4, 18, 348, 367, 369, 385–402 Amazon Pharmacy and, 404 Bezos’s public prominence during, 387–88 Bezos’s wealth and, 18, 401 customer demand during quarantine, 380, 387, 388, 391 essential item sales during, 389, 391, 392 face shields and masks during, 388–89 grocery delivery and, 68, 243, 391 labor unions and, 316, 392, 394 S-team and, 386–87, 390 testing and contact tracing in, 390, 396–97, 400–401 vaccines in, 402 Whole Foods and, 390, 391, 397 Covington & Burling, 368 Cox, Braden, 312–14, 316 Crisis in Six Scenes, 13, 149 Crow, Bill, 298 Cruise, Tom, 168 Cucinelli, Brunello, 346 Cunningham, Michael, 154 Cuomo, Andrew, 306, 310, 314–15 Curry, Stacey Hayes, 237 Daily Beast, 336, 342 Dallas, Tex., 292, 295, 296, 299–302, 308 Damon, Matt, 135, 325 databases, 97–99 see also cloud computing Daudon, Maud, 290, 304 Da Vinci Code, The (Brown), 34 Davis, Alicia Boler, 402 Days Inn, 290 Deadline, 136 Dead of Winter Productions, 327 de Becker, Gavin, 64, 323, 334–39, 341, 342, 344, 346–47 de Blasio, Bill, 306, 310, 313–15 De Bonet, Jeremy, 63 Defense Department, U.S., 359, 361 JEDI contract with, 351, 359–63, 381 Deliveroo, 260 Delrahim, Makan, 366 Delta Air Lines, 301 democracy, 124, 133, 365 De Niro, Robert, 152 DePalo, Joe, 102 D.


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American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

And the police called this ‘reasonable.’ I think that one affected me the most because I have a little brother who is thirteen. He was twelve at the time, same as Tamir.” She’d been following stories about the Black Lives Matter movement that had been growing in the wake of more police shootings. She’d been reading tweets with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter on Twitter. The Black Lives Matter movement, which would prove to be so effective in the coming months, was begun by three black women—community organizers and activists Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors—as an online campaign. “And that’s another thing about social media, okay?”


pages: 574 words: 148,233

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

As news cameras whirred, Riches knelt among the flowers, candles, and homemade cards on the sidewalk, as if to pray. Riches landed back in jail. By then his Newtown YouTube video had circled the world. Released three years later, he has scammed press attention by impersonating a “Muslim for Hillary,” wearing a MAGA cap at a Trump rally, and protesting in support of both sides during Black Lives Matter demonstrations. In 2021 he traveled with groups mobilizing in support of Trump’s election lies. * * * — The self-styled investigators toured Newtown with cameras, showing up outside the firehouse and the fenced-off, guarded, and empty school. Their presence was a factor in the town’s decision to demolish Sandy Hook Elementary.

While misinformation, menace, and calls to violence circulate among the hundreds of millions of videos viewed each day on Google’s YouTube, the company accepted plaudits for building “global community.”[13] Twitter publicly celebrated its role in linking activists during the pro-democracy Arab Spring protests and the nascent Black Lives Matter movement in the early 2010s while racist and misogynist attacks skyrocketed. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” former chief executive Dick Costolo wrote in an internal memo in 2015.[14] A year later, Charlie Warzel, then a senior tech writer for BuzzFeed, investigated Twitter’s abuse problem in an article titled “ ‘A Honeypot for Assholes’: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure to Stop Harassment.”[15] Several women and people of color had left the platform in 2016, amid torrents of abuse and threats, including Leslie Jones, then at Saturday Night Live.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

By exploiting the media technologies of the day—printing handbills and declarations, writing threatening letters, adopting a meme for a figurehead—the Luddites were able to make their uprising seem limitless. Think of modern decentralized movements animated more by an idea than a leader: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter. That the Luddites were faceless and monolithic helped excite people about their program; they really were a Robin Hood phenomenon. They also offered a mechanism for joining in, if you shared their grievances. After all, Luddism was based not on a specific platform or a list of demands (though there certainly were demands), or a charismatic leader.

“Not for a nicer Silicon Valley. No, Silicon Valley is rotten to the core. The problem is structural. Which necessitates a Luddite response.” That Luddite response is bubbling up in ways that are not always recognized. TMK cited the yellow-vest movement in France, where participants smashed surveillance cameras. And the Black Lives Matter movement, which erupted into a series of some of the most momentous days of civil unrest in recent American history, in the summer of 2020, saw both orderly, peaceful protest and the burning of police departments and smashing of department stores. “That stuff is really important; we need stuff that legitimatizes vandalism as a form of political action,” Sadowski said.


pages: 226 words: 58,341

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

, Arts and Humanities Research Council. 27 James Heale and Chris Hastings, ‘Outrage at BBC Horrible Histories Brexit show for “trashing Britain” with song that says “your British things are from abroad and most are stolen” on day UK left EU’, Mail on Sunday, 1 February 2020. 28 ‘The Londoner: I’m not afraid of “kill whitey” joke critics, says Sophie Duker’, Evening Standard, 21 October 2020. 29 Craig Simpson, ‘Exclusive: British Library’s chief librarian claims “racism is the creation of white people”’, Daily Telegraph, 29 August 2020. 30 Adam White, ‘British Museum removes bust of slave-owning founder Sir Hans Sloane: “We have pushed him off the pedestal”’, The Independent, 25 August 2020; ‘Let’s create: strategy 2020–2030’, Arts Council England; David Sanderson, ‘Staying neutral impossible after Black Lives Matter, says National Gallery chief’, The Times, 3 November 2020; Craig Simpson, ‘William Hogarth out of favour as British cartoon museum says its displays are over-represented by “white, cisgender men”’, Daily Telegraph, 13 December 2020; ‘Tate vision 2020–25’, The Tate; Jack Malvern, ‘Kew Gardens plant signs will acknowledge links to slavery’, The Times, 11 March 2021. 31 ‘Britain’s choice: common ground and division in 2020s Britain’, More in Common, October 2020.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

And those of us who don’t bear the burden of code switching and room reading should try to cultivate these skills in other ways, because we’ll need them. Resting One of my favorite social media follows is an Instagram account called “The Nap Ministry.” It’s run by Tricia Hersey, a Black performance artist and poet from Atlanta, Georgia. Several years ago, while studying in divinity school during the early days of what became the Black Lives Matter movement, Hersey found herself exhausted and worn down by both her studies and the well-publicized videos of police brutality against Black people. She decided to start taking daily naps. And after observing the effect these naps were having on her mental health, she dubbed herself the “Nap Bishop,” and started The Nap Ministry, with the goal of teaching other people—and especially other emotionally exhausted Black people—about the transformative potential of taking naps.


pages: 169 words: 61,064

Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl From Somewhere Else by Maeve Higgins

Black Lives Matter, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, imposter syndrome, Jon Ronson, Lyft, place-making, quantum entanglement, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat

In 2015, a white supremacist named Dylann Roof hoped to start a “race war” by murdering nine black people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a two-hundred-year-old church that played an important role in the history of South Carolina throughout slavery, the Civil Rights movement, and the more recent Black Lives Matter movement. I used to think that the early days of immigration to the U.S. happened during a “different time,” but hatred unchecked has a way of collapsing time, trapping us all until we deal with it. I still go home for the holidays. I call Ireland home, but America is my home too. In 2016 I stood on the darkening quayside in Cobh on Christmas Eve, and looked at a statue of Annie there.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

“Nine hundred and sixty-five people were shot by cops [in 2015]. [Only] four percent of them were white cops shooting unarmed blacks. Half the homicides in this country are committed by (and against) black people. Last year there were fourteen thousand homicides. Ninety-six percent of them were black-on-black. Where are the Black Lives Matter people on that?” He added: “In Chicago, in 2011, twenty-one [black] people were shot and killed by [white] cops. In 2015 there were [just] seven. [Chicago’s population] is a third black, a third white, and a third Hispanic, yet seventy percent of the homicides are black-on-black, so the idea that a racist white cop is a peril to black people is total BS.”


pages: 279 words: 71,542

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

In some cases, Jennifer will deploy a desktop tool called TweetDeck to aid this process. TweetDeck allows them to perform sophisticated searches to better understand Twitter trends. One important search function provided by this tool, for example, is thresholding. Here’s how Jennifer explains it: I can search for a certain topic, say Black Lives Matter, and then set a threshold in TweetDeck that allows me to listen to this topic, but only see tweets with 50 likes or retweets. I can then refine this and say just show me the verified accounts. Thresholding is just one type of advanced search allowed by TweetDeck, and TweetDeck is just one tool among many that allow this style of more advanced filtering (for this purpose, big companies often rely on expensive software suites that integrate with their customer relationship management systems).


pages: 213 words: 70,742

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

Example: in the immediate aftermath of the civil unrest in Baltimore, a website called The Prepper Journal posted an article whose title posed the presumably rhetorical question “What Would a WROL World Look Like?” If the photograph that appeared on top of the post could be taken as its own kind of answer, a WROL world would look like a group of young black men, hooded and masked, jumping on the roof of a police cruiser. The article itself never mentioned Baltimore or Freddie Gray or the Black Lives Matter movement, but the photograph’s provenance was obvious. (The side of the police car, for one thing, bore the words “Baltimore Police.”) Farther down the page was another lawlessness-themed photo, depicting a hooded black man in the act of hurling an unseen object, behind him a parked car engulfed in flames.


pages: 210 words: 65,833

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

And yet by summer 2020, with public trust in government’s handling of the crisis plummeting (especially in the honesty of their information), the scale of the social, economic and racial crises across British – and especially English – society was more than government propaganda could hide.1 As Johnson and his band of Brexiteers set about attacking the institutions of the liberal establishment, they themselves had precious few alternative grounds for legitimacy, beyond the best efforts of a desperately struggling print media industry. In the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the accompanying reckoning of historic institutions and wealth, brought an extraordinary flowering of political expression and criticism. Surreally, in the context of an ongoing lockdown of much of the economy and public space, new protest movements filled the void, where previously there were the rigours and routines of everyday capitalist society.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

But the largest chunk, by far, would seem to be dead, victims of heart disease and diabetes and the worst epidemic of all, homicide, which may have accounted for a sobering two hundred thousand dead black men in the age bracket demographers rightly call “prime age.” The median black woman in America is likely to live in a community in which there are only forty-three men for every sixty-seven women. The gender gap is worst, the Times discovered, in Ferguson, Missouri—the same community that became the locus of the Black Lives Matter movement after a police officer killed an unarmed black teenager in 2014. The gap is also greater in North Charleston, where the police killed an African American suspect, Walter Scott, also unarmed, as he tried to run away. Taking so many people out of circulation cripples communities that are often already facing challenges to their schools, businesses, and social structure.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

No wonder the life expectancy of black Americans is four years less than that of whites. Together with a number of shootings of unarmed black men in recent years, these stark figures have caused unrest and protests across the country – for example the riots in Ferguson in 2014 – and have given rise to movements such as Black Lives Matter. And with the reactions of both officials and communities under great scrutiny in the aftermath of each incident, this has become an increasingly divisive issue. The stats highlighting the problems are easy to find. Explaining their cause is more difficult, but it is clear that racism still plays a part in American society.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

The flag is still sometimes used to express the belief that there is something rotten in the state as well as something great. For example, in May 2016 anti-Donald Trump activists burnt the Stars and Stripes outside a Trump rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and several have been desecrated at ‘Black Lives Matter’ rallies. But to reconcile these different aspects is not so difficult: there are many positives to the American way of life. Like people everywhere, the flag’s unique symbolism, its aspirations, speak to Americans, as national flags do to people everywhere; just because the country, the world, is not perfect, it doesn’t mean you can’t dream.


pages: 240 words: 74,182

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

When authoritarians create their own versions of protests, the effect is almost satirical, taunting and undermining the originals. Two could play at people protests, Moscow seemed to be saying. In America one of the tricks of the St Petersburg troll farm was to take on the personas of American civil liberties campaigns – Black Lives Matter, for instance – and then use them to raise the vote for the more pro-Russian presidential candidate, Donald Trump, or depress it for his rivals. The troll farm even organised protests in US cities, both for and against Trump, each chanting against the other. One protest in particular reminded me of a really crap copy of Srdja’s political street theatre: when a troll posing as a Donald Trump supporter in a fake Facebook group called Being Patriotic convinced a woman in Florida to hire an actor to wear a rubber Hillary Clinton mask and then lock the actor in a makeshift jail cell and wheel them about as if in a carnival procession.19 And it’s when the Kremlin’s efforts are unveiled that they have perhaps their most significant effect.


pages: 250 words: 75,151

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

Biteback (2019). 2 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-emigrants-europe-continental-brexit-deal-latest-leave-uk-a9166136.html 3 https://bibliothek.wzb.eu/pdf/2020/vi20-102.pdf 4 The eighteen-year-old, unarmed African American whose death after being shot by police in Fergusson, Missouri, led to prolonged unrest and the national recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement. 5 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/opinion/sunday/the-next-great-migration.html 5. Get Out! 1 ‘The Best Hope for France’s Young? Get Out.’ New York Times (29 June 2013). 2 See also Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason, ‘Population Aging and the Generational Economy – A Global Perspective’. 3 As in ‘all about the Benjamins’ – the face of Benjamin Franklin adorns American hundred-dollar bills; Mao Zedong’s adorns hundred-yuan bank notes. 4 ‘India is not being overrun by immigrants.’


pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

And there is a credible sense that the frequency of corporate mishaps and malfeasance in the years following the 2008 financial crash has far surpassed that of the previous decade. This backdrop has galvanized a growing sense that global businesses are self-interested, corrupt, and do not work for much of society. The anti-corporate spirit has inspired employee revolts and environmental activism, and it has even influenced movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, the latter of which is estimated to have ousted over four hundred high-profile executives within an eighteen-month period. The last two decades of business history are littered with examples of challenged and even disgraced companies. Boeing, Enron, General Electric, Kmart, PG&E, Theranos, the Weinstein Company, WeWork, and WorldCom are just a handful of the many corporations left in ill repute, their financial value decimated and the reputations of their leaders indelibly stained.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

From first discussions in April, it was launched on 1 June and had posted 100 articles summarising a vast amount of old research and new Covid19-related research by mid-August. Similar co-operative initiatives occurred across the global economics profession. What about the internal challenges, described in the Introduction? The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 put real energy into the debate, both about the lack of diversity among economists and the monoculture of the top journals and departments. But the energy will need to be sustained to bring about significant and lasting culture change. As I have argued through this book, economics and economists shape the economy and society through their ideas and their influence on policy decisions.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Both Facebook and Twitter, a social platform originally designed for 140-word “microblog” status updates, became powerful mechanisms for political organizing and communication during the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements of 2011. Twitter swiftly gained a disproportionate number of African American users and “Black Twitter” became a powerful platform for both civic activism and cultural exchange; the most powerful racial justice movement of the century’s second decade, Black Lives Matter, began as a Twitter hashtag. And in the 2008 and 2012 presidential races, candidates used social networking as a powerful tool to reach sharply targeted groups of likely voters, as well as providing the ultimate free-media platform for unfiltered campaign messaging.27 Few did this earlier and better than Barack Obama.

Heather Brown, Emily Guskin, and Amy Mitchell, “The Role of Social Media in the Arab Uprisings,” Pew Research Center, November 28, 2012; Benjamin Gleason, “#Occupy Wall Street: Exploring Informal Learning About a Social Movement on Twitter,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 7 (2013): 966–82; André Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (2012): 529–49; Russell Rickford, “Black Lives Matter: Toward a Modern Practice of Mass Struggle,” New Labor Forum 25, no. 1 (2016): 34–42. 28. Joshua Green, “The Amazing Money Machine,” The Atlantic, June 1, 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/the-amazing-money-machine/306809/, archived at https://perma.cc/V67S-PX4W; Brian Stelter, “The Facebooker Who Friended Obama,” The New York Times, July 7, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html, archived at https://perma.cc/U74U-XQ7Z [inactive]. 29.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

They make up 4 percent of venture partners, even though they account for 17 percent of the workforce and 11.4 percent of financial managers.[24] Not only is this inequitable; it constrains economic progress. Talented people are being denied an opportunity to contribute to innovation. On one reckoning, U.S. GDP would be more than 2 percent higher if this failing were addressed.[25] In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, a few venture leaders promised to do better. Andreessen Horowitz set up a program to train and fund a small number of founders from atypical backgrounds. “Being equal before the law, but unequal before law enforcement, is atrocious,” the partnership said firmly.[26] First Round Capital, one of the seed investors that backed Uber, declared that its next partner should be Black.

See also Amazon Google, 179–80, 184, 186 Kalanick and Uber, 353 power law and, 7 Trump’s criticism of, 402 Big Tech, 15, 380, 388 Bill, Jobs., 82 BlackBerry, 331 Black Lives Matter, 385 “blitzscaling,” 357, 362, 364, 385–88 Blue Box, 110–11 Bochner, Steve, 329 Boeing, 12, 395 Bohemian Grove, 92 Bolger, John, 116 Bonderman, David, 358, 360, 362–63, 367 Bono, 19, 20 “book value,” 47.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Complementing the existing US Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG), which primarily promotes research and information, the NCBI has been set up as a ‘527’ organization under the US tax code, which enables it to engage in direct political action with the aim of building political coalitions to influence elections and policymaking.3 The former US trade union leader Andy Stern has also mused that political pressure could be built up by the equivalent of the Townsend Clubs that mobilized support for Social Security in the 1930s.4 And he hopes that some city mayors or state governors will ask for federal waivers to stage pilots. A report by the National League of Cities, which represents 19,000 US cities and towns, has recommended that cities investigate basic income.5 Meanwhile, a newly influential movement, Black Lives Matter, allying over fifty organizations, issued an ‘official platform’ in August 2016 that included a demand for a universal basic income (UBI). It also argued for an additional amount (a sort of UBI+) to be paid to black Americans as reparation for the harms of colonialism, slavery and the mass incarceration of mainly young black men in modern times.


pages: 296 words: 78,112

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

Perhaps even more favorable-looking right now than some other places we’ve been on TV.” Clinton’s plan all along was to reactivate the same coalition of Democratic-leaning groups that had twice delivered Barack Obama to the White House: young people, minorities, and suburban women. That’s why she embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and vowed to protect from deportation a larger segment of the illegal immigrant community than Obama had. And if she could also carry states like Arizona that Obama hadn’t won, then her electoral mandate would be that much bigger. — The reason Clinton’s moves so puzzled the Trump campaign is that just before she traveled to Arizona, Trump’s data analysts had become convinced, based on absentee ballots and early voting, that the people who were going to show up on Election Day would be older, whiter, more rural, and more populist than almost anyone else believed—so they re-weighted their predictive models to reflect a different electorate.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

In the United States, the presidential election of 2016 was an especially disturbing example of political polarization, and the long campaign exposed social chasms far deeper than even the most worried experts had recognized. The language of red and blue states seems too weak to describe America’s splintered cultural and political geography. The oppositions are not merely ideological, and the divisions run deeper than Trump vs. Clinton, Black Lives Matter vs. Blue Lives Matter, Save the Planet vs. Drill, Baby, Drill. Across America, people complain that their communities feel weaker, that they spend more time on their devices and less time with one another, that schools and sports teams and workplaces have become unbearably competitive, that insecurity is rampant, that the future is uncertain and in some places bleak.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Governments and doctors are making contraception easier to obtain, and use of the morning-after pill has increased substantially in recent years.335 Growing affluence among African Americans could also be a cause. Many studies report that teens delay sex and practice it more safely if they feel close to their parents. That means they have a stable situation at home, and that suggests financial security. Even as controversy surrounds police shootings of African Americans and the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement, life for black Americans has been getting steadily better.336 We don’t want to overstate the case. The net worth of an average black family is 6 percent of that of the average white family, largely because black families are more likely to rent than to own, and home ownership is how Americans typically accumulate much of their wealth.337 The black unemployment rate is twice that of whites.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Taking advantage of its loose structure, ordinary criminals used a group protest of Sony Corporation policies to break in and steal credit card numbers. Russia also had a substantial presence in Anonymous. In retrospect, it is interesting that some Anonymous members would later go on Moscow’s payroll. One of them, Cassandra Fairbanks, moved from real-world Anonymous demonstrations, to attending and writing about Black Lives Matter protests, to avidly supporting Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries. With more than a hundred thousand Twitter followers, she then took a job at the Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik and switched to full-throated support for Trump through the 2016 general election and afterward. Just before the November vote, she appeared on Alex Jones’s YouTube conspiracy channel, saying it was “pretty likely” that emails hacked from Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s Gmail account contained coded references to pedophilia.


pages: 444 words: 84,486

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, G4S, high net worth, information asymmetry, Kim Stanley Robinson, license plate recognition, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, old-boy network, public intellectual, satellite internet, six sigma, Social Justice Warrior, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit

They were just hinting now, not giving DamFool the hard sell. That would come after Tommy’s demise. Right now, they were just getting him in position. Joe had seen the playbook before. It was his cue to dive in with a highly symbolic and largely ornamental bid to save his soul. Joe just couldn’t. He’d been reading these op-eds by Black Lives Matter activists about the official neglect that people with sickle cell anemia endured, stories about agonized teenagers being tied to hospital beds and told to stop shouting if they wanted to get untied. The general tenor was that the whites who’d suddenly decided that the health-care system was too sick to live were late to the party, and by the way, let me tell you a little story about the Tuskegee airmen.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In the course of writing this book I’ve been introduced to dozens of cases and cultures that deserve to be recognized, and I’m convinced that there are hundreds (or even thousands) more out there. So if you know of, or participate in an Evolutionary Organization, I invite you to visit BraveNewWork.com and share your story with the rest of us. Evolutionary Organizations AES Askinosie Chocolate Automattic Basecamp Black Lives Matter Blinkist Bridgewater Buffer Burning Man Buurtzorg BvdV charity: water Crisp David Allen Company dm-drogerie markt elbdudler Endenburg Elektrotechniek Enspiral Equinor Evangelical School Berlin Centre Everlane FAVI Gini GitLab Gumroad Haier Handelsbanken Haufe-umantis Heiligenfeld Hengeler Mueller Herman Miller HolacracyOne Ian Martin Group / Fitzii Incentro John Lewis Joint Special Operations Command Kickstarter Lumiar Schools Medium Menlo Innovations Mondragon Morning Star Nearsoft Netflix Nucor Orpheus Chamber Orchestra Patagonia Phelps Agency Pixar Premium-Cola Promon Group Red Hat School in the Cloud Schuberg Philis Semco Group Spotify stok Sun Hydraulics Treehouse USS Santa Fe Valve Whole Foods W.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Church attendance rates declined dramatically across the 1960s, mostly driven by Catholicism’s crisis after the Second Vatican Council; they have declined at most marginally since the 1980s, and Protestant churchgoing has not declined at all. Against these backdrops, the similarities between the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation fight in 1991 and the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight, between the current Black Lives Matter moment and the O. J. Simpson– and Rodney King–era debates about police brutality in the mid-1990s, between abortion debates in 1990 and the abortion debate today—even between the sexual scandals of Donald Trump and the sexual scandals of Bill Clinton (albeit with the parties supporting the priapist reversed)—are not coincidental.


pages: 442 words: 85,640

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help by New Scientist, Helen Thomson

Abraham Wald, Black Lives Matter, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Flynn Effect, George Floyd, global pandemic, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lock screen, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, TED Talk, TikTok, ultra-processed food, Walter Mischel

This is especially true of your parents: when it comes to their opinion of you, take anything they say with a large pinch of salt. HOW TO AVOID UNCONSCIOUS BIAS The death of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020 shook the world to attention and gave a new impetus to the Black Lives Matter movement, but it was no isolated incident. Every day there are stories of people being treated with suspicion – or far worse – based on their skin colour while going about their daily lives. This is in spite of the fact that, for the past 40 years, opinion polls show a steady decline in racist views in the United States, the UK and other countries.


pages: 280 words: 82,393

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

Atul Gawande, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, data science, different worldview, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture , zero-sum game

Police–civilian encounters are often tense and can quickly become confrontational, which is why de-escalation is considered an increasingly important skill. To find out how it is taught I travelled to Tennessee, where the Memphis police department, under its African American director, Michael Rallings, has been leading the way. In 2016, a Black Lives Matter rally blocked a bridge in Memphis for several hours. Rallings persuaded them to clear the way without the threat of force, linking arms with protesters as they left. For three days, I shared a room at the Memphis Police Academy with around twenty cops, most of them experienced officers. They were a mix of white, African American, and Asian American men and women, all of them eager to learn.


pages: 297 words: 83,528

The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, driverless car, family office, glass ceiling, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, index card, lockdown, microdosing, nudge theory, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, the High Line, TikTok

We have been offered money at sky-high valuations, and when people cotton on to the fact that Cyrus is not swayed by money, they start bigging up their other forms of cred. We are now up to 2 percent, Woke VC tells us proudly. A full 2 percent of their funds go to minority women. They donate to Black Lives Matter. They’re all Democrats. Some of them are even socialists. Would Cyrus like to meet AOC? Cyrus is still busy doing Cyrusy things. He attends the Mami Wata Society the first Friday of the month. The Athena Club every alternate Saturday. He has become friendly with a group of Shinto priests. Comic-Con is a big commitment, because so many people on the platform ask for superhero rituals.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

Lee meant his film to be a sardonic reply to this event, where marchers notoriously announced their fear of identity theft by chanting ‘Jews will not replace us!’93 But the rallying cry that best summarizes the populist attack on political correctness in America is ‘White Lives Matter’. A mirror-image of the Black Lives Matter slogan used to protest repeated police killings of young black males, it is a classic example of racism mimicking anti-racism for racist ends.94 The left’s perceived coddling of marginalized minorities apparently triggered a counter-reaction among many economically distressed voters who claimed victim status for their own white nationalist identity in turn.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

So, for example, the British government elected in 2019 has suggested that it will accelerate investments in mass transit in larger English cities outside London, where its lack had probably been reducing agglomeration benefits. It remains to be seen whether the government will make good on this promise, but it certainly seems that it has decided to commit more political capital to the issue than previous governments did. Equally, the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, which have cast light on the power of police unions and the extensive legal protections that some police forces enjoy, may have the effect of mobilising enough opposition to have them reduced. As the case for improving city institutions strengthens, politicians may be more willing to spend political capital on it.


pages: 257 words: 80,698

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

With brains like his, he could succeed at almost anything, but he devotes himself exclusively to helping the very rich to escape the consequences of their actions, while earning a nice living – over and above his salary – from their tips. Over the last few years Britons have taken to arguing about who should represent us and, by extension, who we should be proud of. Imperialist Cecil Rhodes has attracted the most attention thanks to a statue in Oxford, but he is only the beginning. When Black Lives Matter protesters threw a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour, far right activists stood guard around statues of Winston Churchill, Robert Peel and other long-dead politicians. The BBC has erected a statue to George Orwell outside its headquarters to commemorate a different kind of Britain, one of scepticism and progressive values, although that provoked an argument over whether he was too left wing.


pages: 259 words: 84,261

Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World by Mo Gawdat

3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, AlphaGo, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, OpenAI, optical character recognition, out of africa, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

The focus of humanity, especially in advanced societies, has shifted away from adhering to the moral code to adhering to the legal code, or simply to getting away with it. So the killing of George Floyd, among thousands of other offences against people of colour, becomes the norm as long as it is not caught on camera. And the looting by angry protestors during the Black Lives Matter protests shows that if you’re masked and won’t be caught, it becomes easier to justify to oneself that stealing from the rich guy is okay. Sadly, we try to forget that . . . . . . being legal is not always ethical. I am certain that my little rant here will not change humankind any time soon.


pages: 263 words: 86,709

Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs by Jamie Fiore Higgins

Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, glass ceiling, messenger bag, money market fund, short selling, zero-sum game

“So, these make up a story about your life at work?” Beth observed. I peered into the box at the stack of the other journals and smiled. “Yeah, that’s what they are,” I said. “The story of when I worked at Goldman Sachs.” EPILOGUE I left Goldman Sachs in 2016, before the “Me Too” movement, Black Lives Matter, and other progress we’ve made in society. Some readers might consider that an eternity ago, and say, “Well that was then, and this is now.” But that would be naïve. While cases of misogyny and racism and inequality might not be as overt as they used to be, I’m sure the underlying culture has not changed much.


Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Jimmie grew up in Ferguson, Missouri, four decades before the small suburb of St. Louis made international headlines after white police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in 2014, sparking nationwide protests and contributing to the modern-day beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. Jimmie’s father was emotionally and physically abusive toward him, behavior Jimmie specifically pins as a reaction to his not fulfilling traditional ideals of masculinity from an early age. He was the sensitive, short, chubby kid with glasses, he tells me, and his father loved to ridicule him for it in front of others.


pages: 712 words: 212,334

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

always be closing, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, Laura Poitras, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical residency, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, tech billionaire, TED Talk, tontine, Upton Sinclair

As a consequence, the film is “fundamentally flawed,” Wright concluded, “because there is something incredibly fraudulent about that, and deceptive.” When O.G. premiered, Madeleine made an appearance on the red carpet in an elegant all-black ensemble and was celebrated at parties. She posed for photographs with the former Obama administration official and CNN personality Van Jones and with the Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King. Before the premiere, Wright had sent Madeleine an email, praising the “honesty and openness” of the men in her documentary. But there is an “elephant” in the room, he wrote. “You’ve provided a tremendous gift to those men. Something the likes of which they’ve rarely, if ever, been given.”

But they would not make any statements on the record expressing even the slightest criticism of the business decisions of the other branches of the family. After this new wave of publicity, that changed. Elizabeth Sackler, who had endowed the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and maintained a Twitter feed full of urgent exclamations about the perfidy of Donald Trump and her allegiance to Black Lives Matter, belatedly made a statement in which she distanced herself from her cousins. In an interview with the website Hyperallergic, she said that Purdue’s role in the opioid crisis “is morally abhorrent to me.” Her father died in 1987, she pointed out, long before the introduction of OxyContin, and she and her siblings had agreed to sell their one-third stake in Purdue to her uncles soon thereafter.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The last chapter of this book examines the sources of the Great Recession that began in 2007, and the structural features that continue to widen the income and wealth gaps in the United States. As middle-class people fell farther behind, discontent manifested in the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left of the political spectrum, but also in the Tea Party movement on the right and the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement about class and opportunity as well as about race. During the 2016 presidential race, the Republican candidate Donald Trump advocated policies he claimed would promote prosperity for American workers, like immigration restriction and protectionism. Given the long history of inequality in the United States, and the polarization of legislative politics at every level, the prospect for reform seems dim, but proposals have included criminal justice reform, a basic income guarantee, free college education, or the government as the employer of last resort.


pages: 257 words: 90,857

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson

23andMe, Airbnb, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, feminist movement, Firefox, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, retail therapy, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft

But my hunch is “zaddy” came about because there are folks, myself included, who don’t like calling men “Daddy” in a sexual manner, so a “z” was slapped on as a replacement to make things better, kind of like when Michelle Williams replaced LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett in Destiny’s Child or the creation of Smartfood Delight, which is allegedly a healthier version of Smartfood popcorn that somehow tastes just as good. #LolForever #FakeNews * Yes, “woke” is omnipresent thanks to exemplary people such as Black Lives Matter and LGBTQIA+ activists working to make the world better, but there’s a subset of wokeness that’s not talked about as much—“diet woke.” A d-dubs person is usually #TeamDoGooder in the sheets (thanks, social media warriors) and #TeamThisIsGonnaInconvenienceALittleBit #HmmLemmeGetBackToYou in the streets.


How to Work Without Losing Your Mind by Cate Sevilla

Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, emotional labour, gender pay gap, Girl Boss, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, lockdown, microaggression, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Skype, tech bro, TED Talk, women in the workforce, work culture

You can even create a ‘Head of D&I’ position and send emails about what you stand for, or tweet about the gender pay gap, and ‘celebrate’ International Women’s Day in the office – but it’s your actions that matter. It’s the things you say, and the way you say them, when nobody other than your team is around to hear you. Do you say you care about Black Lives Matter and diversity but consistently hire cis, white, straight people while claiming, ‘It’s just really hard to attract diversity in this industry’? Do you place a symbolic rainbow somewhere in the office or suggest sponsoring a Pride float in your local parade, but forget to use the correct pronouns for the non-binary person on your team, or don’t change the toilets to gender neutral as has been requested several times?


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

Blacklist to Meet Thermal Camera Needs,” Reuters, April 29, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-amazon-com-cameras-idUSKBN22B1AL. 17. Sam Biddle, “Police Surveilled George Floyd Protests with Help from Twitter-Affiliated Startup Dataminr,” Intercept, July 9, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/07/09/twitter-dataminr-police-spy-surveillance-black-lives-matter-protests/. 18. IBM, “IBM CEO’s Letter to Congress on Racial Justice Reform,” June 8, 2020, https://www.ibm.com/blogs/policy/facial-recognition-sunset-racial-justice-reforms/. 19. Amazon, “We Are Implementing a One-Year Moratorium on Police Use of ReKognition,” June 10, 2020, https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/we-are-implementing-a-one-year-moratorium-on-police-use-of-rekognition. 20.


The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

Oracular power – the ability to speak believably about the boundaries of ignorance and knowledge – tends in practice to be controlled by people in positions of political or economic leverage who are able to espouse a narrow history that reinforces the inevitability of a future they wish to create. When challengers point out this narrowness, the dominant group often reacts violently to the new knowledge, even when it is true. Especially when it is true. Consider the example of Black Lives Matter and affiliated global protest movements who have called for the removal of statues that commemorate racist figures from history: people like Cecil Rhodes, the British colonizer, and John A. Macdonald, the Canadian leader who oversaw the starvation of native groups. White people have often reacted angrily and violently to this effort, leading to the death in 2017 of an American woman named Heather Heyer, who was intentionally struck by a car at a rally organized by neo-Nazis.


pages: 295 words: 89,441

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

At this meeting there were heavy discussions with several billion dollars at stake and so Claure got on the line to Son, asking if he had a minute to chat about goings-on. Son replied, ‘I trust you. I know you’ll do what’s best for the company in the circumstances.’ It was the highest possible praise for Braure. As a response to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, Claure has set up his own Opportunity Growth Fund. When the movement first began gathering pace, Claure got on the line to Son, stating they had a duty to do something to help and they had to find a way for Black and Latinx entrepreneurs to access investment and support.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

But his life was changed forever: even if he goes through a lengthy and difficult process of having his record expunged, his arrest could still come up in any future background search or job-application paperwork. It turns out anyone who has ever posted their face on social media has essentially fed it into a public database for the police to use. The same month I spoke with Williams, New York activist Derrick Ingram joined a Manhattan Black Lives Matter protest on the occasion of Donald Trump’s birthday. Ingram, who goes by D-Wreck, had regularly protested in high school, then fell out of the habit in his early twenties. Now he was back, with powerful feelings and a bullhorn. “That passion and anger came out on the megaphone that day,” he told me from the courtyard of his apartment building.


pages: 319 words: 103,707

Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif

1960s counterculture, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, fixed-gear, income inequality, informal economy, Joan Didion, managed futures, Norman Mailer, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, Ronald Reagan, technoutopianism, telemarketer, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, white flight

Admittedly, it took a strange form—even derisory: It doesn’t sound good to ask what practicing Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di” had to do with the first American president of African descent. I hope it will take other forms. Obama’s silence over these eight years has inspired other black speech, I think, unveiling what he couldn’t say—in Black Lives Matter, most powerfully. Maybe I’ll have new chances to learn. I have some friends who are very sophisticated political thinkers; I think I’m a simple one. For me, I often think the only real political question is “Whose side are you on?” and I have to struggle always to remember it, as everything flows from that


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

As more people interacted with her, Tay started spiraling. Here are just a few of the conversations she had with real people: Referring to then President Obama, Tay wrote: “@icbydt bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. Donald trump is the only hope we’ve got.” On Black Lives Matter, Tay had this to say: “@AlimonyMindset niggers like @deray should be hung! #BlackLivesMatter.” Tay decided that the Holocaust was made up and tweeted: “@brightonus33 Hitler was right I hate the jews.” She kept going, tweeting to @ReynTheo, “HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG!” and then “GAS THE KIKES RACE WAR NOW” to @MacreadyKurt.21 So what happened?


pages: 305 words: 101,743

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, financial independence, game design, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Norman Mailer, obamacare, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QR code, rent control, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, wage slave, white picket fence

Because of the internet’s tilt toward decontextualization and frictionlessness, a person on social media can seem to matter as much as whatever he’s set himself against. Opponents can meet on suddenly (if temporarily) even ground. Gawker covered the accusations against Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby years before the mainstream media would take sexual misconduct seriously. The Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline challenged and overturned long-standing hierarchies through the strategic deployment of social media. The Parkland teenagers were able to position themselves as opponents of the entire GOP. But the appearance of a more level playing field is not the fact of it, and everything that happens on the internet bounces and refracts.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

There was some thought given to Miguel taking over as chief product officer, getting his hands back into the physical design of WeWork’s spaces, but Miguel didn’t want to go back to his old job. In June of 2020, Miguel announced that he was leaving WeWork. He had become especially moved by the Black Lives Matter movement that had reached a new fervor that spring. “I am complicit in and benefit from structural racism,” he wrote on Instagram. He promised to do more to fight broader injustice. WeWork, however, was giving up on pushing cultural transformation. Miguel’s chief culture officer position would not be filled.


pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

The only things that seemed clear were that I would not be reading Scammer anytime soon, nor would I be able to get a satisfying reason why. Despite claiming separately in March, June, July, and August that the book was finished and set to ship by the end of the month, Calloway had also acknowledged in June that she would be taking a break from writing it to observe the Black Lives Matter movement and later, in August, announced she planned on completely rewriting it to better reflect the events of 2020. Meanwhile, Calloway had confusingly begun selling access to what she promised would be a three-part essay called “I Am Caroline Calloway.” Although no one asked, she promised that each part would be comprised of fifteen thousand words, using some text from the Scammer book she still hadn’t written.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

In a September 2020 article titled “The Turbulent Twenties,” sociologist Jack Goldstone and scientist Peter Turchin predicted that a confluence of structural factors in America would lead to more and greater societal instability and “the highest level of vulnerability to political crisis seen in this country in over a hundred years.” Disruptions such as the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic “are occurring at a time of extreme political polarization, after decades of falling worker’s share in national income, and with entrenched elite opposition to increased spending on public services.” “We are already well on our way,” they wrote. “But worse lies ahead.”


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

The national and international media portrayed the protests as being about race-based police brutality. Those of us in Baltimore knew it was about more, though. While the triggering event was the death of a 25-year-old African American man in police custody, the protesters themselves consistently rooted their cause and rallying cry of “Black Lives Matter” in more than police brutality. It was about the hopelessness that came from growing up poor and black in a community that had been laid to waste with the loss of Baltimore’s industrial and manufacturing base and then gone ignored. Black working-class families had effectively been globalized and automated out of jobs.


pages: 370 words: 107,791

Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sexual politics, side project

My initial belief in the importance of this story was reinforced after I returned to the U.S. and recognized an ominous echo in developments in my own country: mass surveillance on a scale the Stasi could only have dreamed about, the widespread use of insidiously pliable charges like “failure to comply with a lawful order” to make arbitrary arrests, the struggle of protest movements such as Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and #NoDAPL in the face of a complacent or even hostile society. In the West, we tend to harbor smug, simplistic views of the old Soviet Bloc and to dismiss out of hand comparisons of our system to authoritarian regimes like the one in East Germany. It’s worth noting, however, that East German police—unlike our own—could not murder people in the street with impunity.


pages: 413 words: 106,479

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

Oldenburg also points out how third places have been essential to forming the kinds of large, loose-knit social groups that are the core of new social movements, such as the agora in ancient Greek democracy, taverns around the American Revolution, and coffeeshops during the Age of Enlightenment, which parallels how Twitter was used for the Arab Spring or the Black Lives Matter protests. You can’t fit enough dissenters in your living room to make a revolution out of close ties alone: you need the larger, looser network of a third place. Third places have been hacked into existence from the very early stages of using computers to talk with each other. Pretty much as soon as email became possible—long before the internet as we know it—people started sending messages to multiple people at once.


pages: 300 words: 106,520

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

I loathe the demonisation and mocking of the young that’s become the hallmark of a protected and petrified older generation. Like Paul Mason, who originally wanted to call his new book ‘The Snowflake Insurrection’, I think the young people of today are showing courage by taking on the great injustices of our age, from Extinction Rebellion to Black Lives Matter. But there’s another dimension here that I’m going to warily explore. Anyone of my vintage and gender who dares say that there may be something deeper and more meaningful in that phrase ‘snowflake’ than just a pat swipe risks opening up a front in the culture wars Mason refers to. But I think there is something there, and it’s at the crux of what this book is about.


pages: 375 words: 105,586

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

But I doubt they can, and I’m not ready to withdraw my analysis yet. As this book is going to press, tensions between municipal, regional and national politicians in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world concerning not only the COVID-19 pandemic but also worldwide protests arising from the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States suggest on the contrary that the balancing act is already getting harder, even before the political, economic and ecological blowback of present crises is fully apparent. So in supersedure situations, state centres can still direct resources outwards to serve their interests, but they’re limited in their ability to fully organise their peripheral zones.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

If we economists want people to understand economics, we must first engage their interest. What is true of economists is equally true for scientists, social scientists, historians, statisticians, and anyone else with complex ideas to convey. Whether the topic is the evolution of black holes or the emergence of Black Lives Matter, the possibility of precognition or the necessity of preregistration, the details matter—and presented in the right way, they should always have the capacity to fascinate us. * * * — Awaken our sense of wonder, I say to my fellow nerd-communicators. Ignite the spark of curiosity and give it some fuel, using the time-honored methods of storytelling, character, suspense, and humor.


Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

Put another way, Japan represented something of a neatly packaged fantasy in and of itself: an easy-to-understand, miniaturized version of the world at large, a nation-sized virtual reality, which made the fantasy-delivery devices its citizens clung to as survival tools all the more relevant abroad. Which is why, if one were to draw a Venn diagram of shared interests—with circles for Japan’s otaku and netto uyoku net-rightists, for the far-left Antifa and the alt-right, for Gamergaters and YouTubers and edgelords who define themselves by outraging others, for Black Lives Matter supporters and for LGBT activists—the overlap would center, improbably, on things Japanese: manga, anime, and the idea of Japan as a fantasyland in and of itself. * * * — LOOKING BACK, IT’S easy to scoff at the utopian ethos that colored 4chan’s earliest years, as seen in the Otakon presentation promising that total anonymity would discourage cliques and promote truly open discussion.


pages: 368 words: 108,222

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Columbine, crisis actor, gun show loophole, impulse control, Lyft, megaproject, side project, Skype, Snapchat, uber lyft

Five days later, Tyah-Amoy joined a group of eight African American Douglas students conducting a press conference outside the school to chastise both MFOL and the media for ignoring them. “I am here today with my classmates because we have been sorely underrepresented and in some cases misrepresented,” Tyah-Amoy said. “The Black Lives Matter movement has been addressing the topic since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and we have never seen this kind of support for our cause. We surely do not feel that the lives or voices of minorities are valued as much as those of our white counterparts. The media have neglected us, our peers have neglected us, though they are doing great work.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

That so outlandish an idea attracted significant support, much less hundreds of endorsements, smacked as much of fear as ideology; sure enough, when The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf interviewed signers, he found that “multiple signatories are vehemently opposed to the demand beneath which they put their names.”15 Around the same time, I heard from a worried professor at another university that faculty in his department were circulating a proposal to embed anti-racism (as defined, again, by the activists themselves) in every aspect of the curriculum. The proposal included “the development of anti-racist curriculum within each course,” integrating “anti-racist policy activism” into the internship program, holding “a ceremony that ritualizes our program’s commitment to anti-racism,” and “insert[ing] the Black Lives Matter symbol into our website and onto the cover of our student handbook.” Rituals and ceremonies? Iconic symbols? Short of sacrificing a goat in the dean’s office, a clearer demand to convert a curriculum into a cult would be hard to imagine. Yet the professor who contacted me feared opposing the proposal.


pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

Racial tensions were high after a slew of similar shootings. But when local activists in Minnesota started asking questions about ‘Don’t Shoot’, they received some strange and cryptic answers from the administrators of the group’s Facebook page. “They were completely making up everything that they had been saying,” one Black Lives Matter activist later said. ‘Don’t Shoot’ faded from memory until, almost a year and a half later, long after the presidential election, CNN revealed that the page had actually been set up and run by trolls at the Internet Research Agency, 4,000 miles away in St Petersburg. Russian social media accounts had even organised rival pro-Trump and anti-Trump demonstrations, including one in Florida in which someone was paid to portray Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform while standing in a cage built on a flatbed truck.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

In fact, they had a pretty good idea by April that “Fancy Bear,” the Russian group directed by the GRU, was behind some of the Facebook activity. The company turned much of the evidence about ads over to Senate investigators in September. But it was wasn’t until the Senate published some of the juiciest examples—from ads designed to look like they were part of the Black Lives Matter movement to another in which Satan is shown arm-wrestling Jesus and saying, “If I Win Clinton Wins!”—that the company was forced to admit how much propaganda ran on its site. “The question was, how had we missed all this?” one Facebook executive told me. The answer was complex. The ads amounted to very little money—a few hundred thousand dollars—and it was not obvious they were coming from Russia.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

‘Information wants to be free’ was always more about the freedom of companies to make money than the ability of users to share information without fear or restriction. Companies that warn of government censorship should they be more stringently regulated often tightly restrict how their own users can express themselves. Facebook has censored LGBTQ people, Black Lives Matter activists, and breastfeeding mothers.16 YouTube has long been accused of overzealously enforcing copyright, taking down legitimate parodies or videos that fall under ‘fair use’ protections.17 There are already worrying signs that the fallout from the great fake news panic of 2016 will be the increased censorship and marginalisation of minority voices, particularly those on the political fringes, as platforms such as Facebook and Google attempt to litigate which sites constitute a legitimate news source.18 As this book went to print, news emerged that Google had been developing a secret app for the Chinese market, codenamed Dragonfly.19 According to journalist Ryan Gallagher, who broke the story, the Android search tool would automatically identify and filter websites blocked by the Great Firewall, and it had been demonstrated to officials within the Chinese government.


pages: 390 words: 115,303

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business intelligence, Citizen Lab, crowdsourcing, David Strachan, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, forensic accounting, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Live Aid, messenger bag, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype

Bratton: Leena Kim, “A Night Out with NYC’s Former Police Commissioner,” Town & Country, October 30, 2016. 8 laughing with Jay-Z: Ashley Lee, “Weinstein Co. Sets Exclusive Film and TV First-Look Deal with Jay Z,” Hollywood Reporter, September 29, 2016. 9 “About to forward some creative”: Harvey Weinstein quoted in Zaid Jilani, “Harvey Weinstein Urged Clinton Campaign to Silence Sanders’s Black Lives Matter Message,” Intercept, October 7, 2016. 10 raised hundreds of thousands of dollars: Ashley Lee, “Harvey Weinstein, Jordan Roth Set Star-Studded Broadway Fundraiser for Hillary Clinton,” Hollywood Reporter, September 30, 2016. 11 Sara Bareilles sat bathed in purple light: Robert Viagas, “Highlights of Monday’s All-Star Hillary Clinton Broadway Fundraiser,” Playbill, October 18, 2016. 12 “Harvey Weinstein, the Comeback Kid”: Stephen Galloway, “Harvey Weinstein, the Comeback Kid,” Hollywood Reporter, September 19, 2016. 13 represented Al Gore: James B.


pages: 364 words: 119,398

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, anti-bias training, autism spectrum disorder, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, deplatforming, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, off grid, Overton Window, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech bro, young professional

Instead, he faced federal hate-crime charges.17 After FBI agents found bomb-making materials at Cole Carini’s home, as well as the note referring to the ‘heroic’ massacre of ‘hot cheerleaders’, he was only charged, at the time of writing, with the crime of lying to FBI agents.18 A 2019 analysis of US federal prosecutions since 9/11 concluded that ‘the Justice Department has routinely declined to bring terrorism charges against right-wing extremists, even when their alleged crimes meet the legal definition of domestic terrorism: ideologically motivated acts that are harmful to human life and intended to intimidate civilians, influence policy, or change government conduct’.19 Critics have pointed out that this glaring omission results from a lack of any US law covering domestic terrorism. But it is not only legal hurdles that impact our public idea of who does and doesn’t qualify as a terrorist. In 2020, for example, Donald Trump, on a telephone call with state governors, described those involved in the Black Lives Matter protests that swept America in the wake of George Floyd’s death as ‘terrorists’.20 Media coverage of mass violence is similarly problematic. After Brenton Tarrant carried out the Christchurch shootings, the Daily Mirror’s front page featured a photograph of him as a rosy-cheeked pre-schooler, with the headline ‘Angelic boy who grew into an evil far-right man killer’, followed by an article describing him as a ‘likeable and dedicated personal trainer, running free athletic programmes for kids’.21 The piece also reproduced portions of Tarrant’s manifesto, including his own description of himself: ‘I am just a regular white man, from a regular family.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

At the other end of the spectrum many people desperately want to enjoy their old freedoms, including the freedom to treat our fellow citizens with normal indifference. Some predict not so much a gentler, more caring society emerging from the crisis but a wilder and angrier one, a new roaring twenties. Perhaps the Black Lives Matter eruption was a premonition of that. But the care economy has been at the center of the crisis, and that in itself is likely to prompt some reevaluation of mainstream economic and political thought. Just as old attitudes to large-scale government debt, and even printing money, have had to be revised even by conservative-minded politicians, so we may be pushed to reconsider our attitudes to productivity and even the very idea of the economic sphere.


pages: 424 words: 114,820

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

At Sky, inclusion is everyone’s responsibility.’ Paul speaks of where we are in considering inclusion, and why we cannot go back to where we were. ‘In 2021, I have seen a shift in the inclusion approach of organizations participating in the Inclusive Top 50 UK Employers List. The disruption of Covid-19 followed by the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement has truly shone a light on the power of inclusive leadership and prompted employers to examine inadequacies internally. Companies featured on this year’s list have felt the importance of ensuring individual voices are heard and standing up as responsible employers against inequality, injustice and intolerance.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

The pledge could also include an obligation to report publicly and to social media platforms when the candidates or their organizations become aware of such operations. The third solution set is intelligence and law-enforcement reporting of foreign cyber and information operations in near real time. It is interesting to know now that Facebook and Twitter posts allegedly from Black Lives Matter groups saying not to vote for Clinton were actually being posted by very white people in Russia, not black people in Chicago. It would have been useful to know that before the election. The same goes for the posts telling Americans to vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party because “Hillary is going to win anyway.”


pages: 358 words: 118,810

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Cement trucks. City workers? At the far edge of the lot is a white curlicue railing against a staircase that brings you up to street level with the bridge. It’s bright blue today—and, ah, there is the stadium! The sky! I walk and take pictures. Pass Colonel Charles Young park, Thurgood Marshall school, BLACK LIVES MATTER on the small marquee of St. Matthew’s Baptist Church. Delis, beauty shops, laundry—no ballrooms. In 2012 there was a successful “reoccupation” of the old grounds of the Rockland Palace—a tent was put up, a Kiki ball was thrown—mostly Black and Latinx LGBTQ youth. They pulled it off, reoccupied the space as it was once used, and then it was gone.


Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Netflix, 2020. Freeberg, E. A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement. New York: Basic Books, 2020. Gent, T. C., et al. “Thalamic Dual Control of Sleep and Wakefulness.” Nature Neuroscience 21, no. 7 (2018): 974–84. Giurfa, M., and M. G. de Brito Sanchez. “Black Lives Matter: Revisiting Charles Henry Turner’s Experiments on Honey Bee Color Vision.” Current Biology, October 19, 2020. Goodall, J. “Tool-Using and Aimed Throwing in a Community of Free-Living Chimpanzees.” Nature 201 (1964): 1264–66. Grandin, T. Temple Grandin’s Guide to Working with Farm Animals.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Former New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly contends that stop-and-frisk, a tactic employed by his department during the crime crackdown, saved about 7,000 African American and Hispanic lives, via the portion of the Big Apple homicide reduction that is attributable to confiscation of illegal weapons discovered during pat-downs. In 2016, Bill Clinton was jeered by Black Lives Matter activists when he defended the 1994 crime bill: Clinton responded by noting the legislation’s leading impact was to save black lives, since African American are more likely to be murdered than whites. Not all steps taken against the homicide wave were harsh. The crime reporter Joseph Goldstein has noted that homicide has declined by a third in hard-bitten Camden, New Jersey, helped by a “Hippocratic ethos” of policing in which officers are tasked to protect suspects as well as victims.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

To take a random example, the famous March on Washington in 1963, at which Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, was officially called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: demands included not just antidiscrimination measures but also a full-employment economy, jobs programs, and a minimum-wage increase” (Touré F. Reed, “Why Liberals Separate Race from Class,” Jacobin 8.22.2015, www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-civil-rights-movement/), accessed June 10, 2017. 9. David Sirota, “Mr. Obama Goes to Washington,” Nation, June, 26, 2006. 10. Of course, some might argue that Obama was being disingenuous here, and downplaying the political power of the private health industry, in the same way that politicians justified bank bailouts by claiming it was in the interest of millions of minor bank employees who might otherwise have been laid off—a concern they most certainly do not evince when, say, transit or textile workers are faced with unemployment.


pages: 677 words: 121,255

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

., Judge, 72 Beale, Howard, 88 Beckner, Stephen, 300 belief pluralism case for, 81–85 beliefs cognitive biases and, 23–24 believability bias, 24 Bentham, Jeremy, 139 Bentley, Alex, 86 Berg, Alan, 30 Berger, Victor, 2 Berkman, Alexander, 2 Berlin Wall, 217 Berra, Yogi, 289 Bible, 224–225, 317 Big Bang, 121 Big Five personality traits, 260–261 Big Questions Online (BQO) program, 103 bigotry historical influences, 30–31 Bill of Rights, 143 bio-altruism, 106 Biography Bias, 262 birth order personality and, 261–262 Black Lives Matter movement, 132 Black Swan events, 29, 162 Blackburn, Simon, 287 Bligh, William, 156–159 Bod, Rens, 225–226 Boemeke, Isabelle, 74 Boko Haram, 34 Bolt, Robert, 8, 22 boom-and-bust cycles, 121 Boone, Richard, 298 Boonin, David, 44 bottom-up self-organization, 203–205, 215–217 Bouchard, Thomas, 289 Boudreaux, Donald, 212–213 Brandeis, Louis, Justice, 41, 44 brane universes, 123 Breivik, Anders Behring, 29, 165–166 Brexit, 153 Brin, David, 153 Brin, Sergey, 260 Bronowski, Jacob, 299 Brooks, Arthur C., 89, 212 Browne, Janet, 288 Browning, Robert, 160 Bruruma, Ian, 282 Bryan, William Jennings, 48 Buckholtz, Joshua W., 168 Buffett, Warren, 211 Burke, Edmund, 153 Bush, George W., 138 Calhoun, John C., 14 Callahan, Tim, 115–116 Calvin, William, 289 Camus, Renaud, 30 Carlson, Randall, 314 Carroll, Sean, 117, 118, 121 Cassidy, John, 212–213 categorical imperative (Kant), 240 censorship, 1–9arguments against, 19–27 college students’ responses to controversial subjects, 64–78 hate speech, 28–37 Holocaust denial, 38–43 Principle of Interchangeable Perspectives, 78 Ten Commandments of free speech and thought, 7–8 trigger warnings and, 66–67 Center for Inquiry (CFI), 269, 271 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 250–251 Change.org, 33–34 Christakis, Nicholas, 154–156 Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre responses to, 28–37 Christian, Fletcher, 156–159 Christian values v. the US Constitution, 81–85 Churchill, Ward, 41 civilization free trade institutions, 249–251 how to get to Civilization,1.0, 251–253 influence of political tribalism, 243–246 pre-financial crisis world, 243 Types of civilization, 246–247 Clark, Kenneth, 299 classical liberalism, 136case for, 138–144 Clinton, Bill, 83, 253 Coase, Ronald, 201 Cockell, Charles S., 150–152 Coddington, Jonathan, 59 cognitive biases, 23–24 cognitive dissonance, 95–96 Colavito, Jason, 321 collective action problem, 198–201 college faculty political bias among, 75–76 college students consequences of left-leaning teaching bias, 75–76 drive to censor controversial subjects, 64–78 Free Speech Movement of the late 1960s, 64–65 Generation Z and how they handle challenges, 64–65 microaggressions, 68–70 provision of safe spaces for, 67–68 trigger warnings, 66–67 views on freedom of speech, 64–78 colleges avoidance of controversial or sensitive subjects, 25 causes of current campus unrest, 71–76 disinvitation of controversial speakers, 25 lack of viewpoint diversity, 75–76 speaker disinvitations, 70–71 ways to increase viewpoint diversity, 76–78 Collins, Francis, 60 Collins, Jim, 263–264 Columbine murders, 169 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), 271 communication microaggressions, 68–70 competitive victimhood, 132 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 280, 283 confirmation bias, 24, 316–318 conjecture and refutation, 8, 23 conscription as slavery, 1–2 conservatism, 134–136 conservatives Just World Theory, 255 Strict Father metaphor for the nation as a family, 193–197 consistency bias, 24 conspiracy theories Intelligent Design advocates, 55–63 contingency influence on how lives turn out, 258–264 Copernican principle, 120 Core Theory of forces and particles, 118 correspondence theory of truth, 305, 306 Cosmides, Leda, 238 Costly Signaling Theory, 208 Coulter, Ann, 13 Cowan, David, 263 Craig, William Lane, 104, 108–109 Craig’s Categorical Error, 109 Creation Science, 50 creationism freedom of speech issue, 44–54 level of support in America, 46 question of equal coverage in science teaching, 50–54 variety of creationist theories, 50–52 view of Richard Dawkins, 293–294 why people do not support evolution, 47–50 Cremo, Michael, 316 Crichton, Michael, 123 Cruise, Tom, 100 cry bullies, 77 cults Scientology as a cult, 96–98 culture of honor, 73 culture of victimhood, 73 Darley, John, 317 Darrow, Clarence, 52–53 Darwin, Charles, 280connection with Adam Smith, 203–205 development of the theory of evolution, 44–46 impact of the Darwinian revolution, 44–47 on science and religion, 90 On the Origin of Species, 104–105 problem of the peacock’s tail, 200 skepticism, 270, 287–288 Darwin Awards, 207 Darwin economy, 199–201 Darwinian literary studies, 306 Darwinian universes, 122 Darwinism misinterpretation for ideological reasons, 60–61 neo-Darwinism, 62 scientific questioning, 61–63 Dawkins, Richard, 55, 61, 87, 89, 104at the Humanity 3000 event (2001), 289–291 influence of, 287–289 on creationism, 293–294 on pseudoscience, 292–294 on religion, 287–289, 293–295 scientific skepticism, 291–295 sense of spirituality, 295–296 Day-Age Creationists, 51 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 139 Debs, Eugene V., 2 Declaration of Independence, 27, 72 Defant, Marc, 314 Del Ray, Lester, 95 delegative democracy, 149 Dembski, William, 49, 55, 63, 280 democracy delegative democracy, 149 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 freedom of speech and, 26 impact of cyber-technology, 153 representational democracy, 149 Dennett, Daniel, 87, 287 Denying History (Shermer and Grobman), 38, 42, 78 Descartes, René, 230 Deutsch, David, 287 devil what he is due, 8–9 who he is, 8–9 Diamond, Jared, 147–148, 208–209, 228, 314, 321, 322 Diderot, Denis, 270 direct democracy, 149–150, 153 Dirmeyer, Jennifer, 215 District of Columbia v.


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

A living political system should be constantly adjusting, moving, listening, rebalancing. In recent years, we’ve seen the young losing faith in democratic politics in greater numbers than any other age group.1 We’ve seen growing evidence of the rise of direct action in politics, often from the young. Equalities groups like Disability Rights UK, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have drawn attention to inequality and injustice in their own fields. Voices are being heard more often, and quite rightly too, frustrated after years of fighting to be heard. These groups appear to be different, but there are similarities. They see no reason to accept standards that previous generations endured; they see a world that has leapt into the future and a political system stuck in the past; they’re frustrated by the lack of listening and slow pace of change; unsurprisingly, they see the political system itself as the problem; they want a more modern approach.


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

Those who decide to stay members of the Labour Party should certainly fight to ensure that they do. But the struggle for change does not simply take place within the confines of political parties. Following the police killing of George Floyd in the United States at the end of May 2020, global Black Lives Matter protests against systemic racism exploded. Extra-parliamentary struggles – mass movements in the streets that are impossible for the powerful to ignore – must surely take centre stage, whether the cause be workers’ rights, the climate emergency, public investment, the welfare state or peace.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Forty percent of the IRA’s Instagram accounts were what marketers consider “micro-influencers” (over 10,000 followers), while twelve accounts—including ones like “blackstagram” and “American.veterans”—were full-blown “influencers” (more than 100,000 followers).44 The Russians were even on Pokémon GO, the popular mobile game that uses augmented reality to enable players to collect fantastical creatures.45 On each of these platforms, Putin’s digital combatants sought to sow division and doubt. The trolls posted about Black Lives Matter and Confederate history, about feminism, immigration, and Syria. They heckled and harangued, pitting Christians against Muslims; Bernie Sanders and third-party candidate Jill Stein against Hillary; Hillary against Trump.46 When there were opportunities to elevate WikiLeaks or tear down James Comey, they seized them.


pages: 424 words: 123,180

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

As we milled about, our numbers multiplying, and began to march, we made mass democracy happen and tried to make American democracy better. As the crowd continued to gather, a person in a button-down shirt passed among the assembled with a clipboard and paused to talk to a group of older men wearing Malcolm X T-shirts. The buttoned-down one said that Black Lives Matter advocacy work meant getting everyone counted in the census. He pitched completing the census form as its own act of protest, or at least an act of democratic action. I overheard this conversation and thought about the two aggregates then forming: one a statistical mass, the other a moving, masked, chanting mass of flesh.


pages: 494 words: 121,217

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

“Chainalysis is actively looking to identify any additional extremist payments and activity and will keep our customers updated,” the blog post read. Gladstein describes himself as a progressive, but he nonetheless pointed to that tracing after January 6 as evidence of Chainalysis’s capabilities to surveil social movements. “I have no doubt that if Trump continued for a second term that Black Lives Matter protesters would absolutely be using Bitcoin to raise money and their bank accounts would be frozen,” Gladstein said. Would Chainalysis be used to follow racial justice protesters’ cryptocurrency, just as it was used to follow the money of the January 6 rioters? And what did Gladstein make of Chainalysis’s unequivocally good work, like in child sexual abuse cases?


pages: 411 words: 122,655

The Awoken: A Novel by Katelyn Monroe Howes

Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, clean water, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, life extension, lock screen, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Silicon Valley, stem cell

In the void, my two lifetimes blended together. I found myself riding the blurred border that spanned a century. Sometimes I’d look over to see Max or my best friend, Andy, sitting next to me in the Canadians’ van. And even stranger, sometimes Eliza would be with me at Jessica DeWhitt’s campaign rally, chanting “Black Lives Matter.” I tried hard to hold on to reality and then convinced myself that, in that moment, reality was unimportant. In reality, I was full of cancerous tumors, cold, alone, and scared. My brain was simply doing what it could to self-soothe. The two vans met up at sunrise for a final rendezvous before entering the city, and I used every ounce of determination to drag my consciousness into the present.


pages: 438 words: 126,284

Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage by Jeff Guinn

Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

.… Trump’s victory, though, did pose a threat to the militia movement, because, until Trump took office, the movement had largely sustained and energized itself through its opposition to the federal government.” New enemies were needed. The ADL study stated that “the first substitute enemy to emerge were the left-wing protesters who took to the streets immediately following Trump’s election.” Next came antifa, “state-level gun control measures, state-level pandemic-related restrictions and Black Lives Matter protests.” Throughout, Southern Poverty Law Center analyst Rachel Carroll Rivas says, “Waco is the one [cause] that has continued. It is still this topic that people talk about. It is still there.” Younger militia movement members may not always reference it directly, she points out, but leaders of prominent organizations, such as Stewart Rhodes of Oath Keepers, cut their movement teeth on rage resulting from Mount Carmel.


pages: 412 words: 121,164

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

Alongside new ways to recycle water and generate power, there is an urgent need for new thinking about how we live and what it means to be human. Change is needed. We need to tread with a lighter footprint, and those of us who live in cities need to find a better way of relating to the world beyond the city limits. But before we can understand who we are and what we might become, we need to know who we have been. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and other movements are suggesting ways of looking over the walls and beyond old entrenched assumptions, constructs and prejudices to tell the histories not only of white men, but also of women and BAME and indigenous people. We also need to know the histories of those who have lived on the move, because without that, we cannot understand how human wandering has shaped who we are now.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

In April 2019, before the pandemic, they organised a conference on the subject in Oxford. They asked what love means, how love might bring about stronger societies, how it fits with anger and conflict and how it relates to various forms of oppression. In the context of all that has happened since – the coronavirus crisis, the groundswell of support for Black Lives Matter, the horror of watching as India, the world’s largest manufacturer of coronavirus vaccines, became overwhelmed by new strains of Covid-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – positing love as a political concept is more important than ever. By which I mean civic love, love as a political emotion.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

The immensely portable high-quality camera has given rise to citizen journalism on an unprecedented scale. Documentation of police brutality, criminal behavior, systematic oppression, and political misconduct has ramped up in the smartphone era. Mobile video like that of Eric Garner getting choked by police, for instance, helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement, and it has in other cases provided crucial evidence for officer wrongdoing. And protesters from Tahrir to Istanbul to Occupy have used iPhones to take video of forceful suppression, generating sympathy, support, and sometimes useful legal evidence in the process. “Nobody even talks about that at Apple,” says one Apple insider who’s worked on the iPhone since the beginning.


pages: 470 words: 137,882

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, Gunnar Myrdal, mass incarceration, microaggression, Milgram experiment, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, social distancing, strikebreaker, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

And we could see on Twitter or cable news the office workers and undergraduates splayed together on the tile floor at the cosmetics counters at Macy’s or at Grand Central Terminal or the University of Michigan Medical School, the die-ins as they were called, under the tragically obvious rallying cry of Black Lives Matter. By June of 2015, the first black president was delivering a eulogy at the funeral of the pastor killed in the Charleston church massacre. The president, looking grim-faced and stricken, sought to bring the country to a hoped-for redemption by leading the sanctuary through the refrain of “Amazing Grace,” the song itself a quest for absolution by the captain of a slaving ship.


pages: 575 words: 140,384

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

Above all else, Kilar wanted HBO Max to have an impressive presence on TikTok. He convened one meeting after the next to discuss the topic. His idea was to hire a group of young interns to make their own videos inspired by HBO and Warner Bros. programming. Facing a nearly endless list of emergencies—COVID, Black Lives Matter, programming and technical upgrades to HBO Max—Kilar devoted many hours on the initiative. “It just depends on do you think the internet is a big deal or not?” Kilar says. “I think it distills to that.” Finally, a handful of paid college interns got HBO Max up and running on TikTok. By the end of the summer, they were making videos riffing on the makeup styles of HBO’s teen drama Euphoria and getting ready for a big Halloween marketing push for the coming fall.


pages: 521 words: 136,802

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B Stewart, Rachel Abrams

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, estate planning, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Michael Milken, power law, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, éminence grise

It was creating its own content in direct competition with Viacom’s Paramount Pictures and CBS television. The new world of direct-to-consumer streaming and cable cord-cutting called for a radical change in strategy at every traditional media company. The workplace was also undergoing radical change—not just from #MeToo but from a reinvigorated Black Lives Matter movement and ongoing advances in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. The chief executive as autocrat was giving way to a more plural, democratic governance model that recognized the competing interests of diverse customers, employees, and communities as well as shareholders. All these forces played out in Redstone’s media empire.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

Le Pen, Brexit, and Trump provided alternative narratives for those who were left behind by economic change. They were told it wasn’t their fault. These were the people who were bypassed by the march of progress, globalization, and technology. The elites told them they were ignorant, racist bigots. They needed to get with the program and to get with gay marriage and affirmative action and Black Lives Matter. Arguments in the United States over LGBTQ bathrooms were the last straw. Everyone in their town thought Hillary Clinton was a crook. It was the fault of immigrants, job-killing regulations, Muslims, trade deals, TPP, NAFTA, and the EPA. The mainstream media, what Rush Limbaugh calls the “drive-by media,” and their fake news were culpable.


pages: 772 words: 150,109

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Many of the leading agencies and organisations involved in discussing gene editing have recognised that even if such developments were possible, they would encourage the growth of inequalities and should therefore be forbidden. In the world of 2020, where COVID-19 was amplifying the differences between rich and poor, both within and between countries, and where social justice had become increasingly significant in rhetoric if not reality following the explosion of Black Lives Matter, the idea of advocating that a tiny minority should profit from some spurious upgrade seemed completely off-message. This could be seen in the way that the Joint Commission of the National Academies of Science and of Medicine and the Royal Society used the COVID-19 pandemic and the struggle against racial injustice to frame their 2020 report on what they called heritable human genome editing (HHGE):ii These twin upheavals have underscored that we live in an interconnected world, where what happens in one country touches all countries, and that science occurs in a societal context.


Lonely Planet Belgium & Luxembourg by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, centre right, charter city, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Peace of Westphalia, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, three-masted sailing ship, urban renewal

Further regional autonomy is granted in 2012. 2010–11 Elections leave Belgian politicians unable to form a coalition government for nearly 18 months. 2018 Belgium’s soccer dream team reaches the semifinals of the World Cup. 2019 Luxembourg greenlights the country’s first floating solar plant. Set in a former steel-producing site, the plant is completed two years later and becomes a model for future renewable energy projects.. 2020 As the Black Lives Matter movement spreads, King Philippe becomes the first Belgian royal to express regret for its brutal colonial rule, and statues of King Leopold II are taken down. 2020 Some 652 days after the collapse of the previous government, Flemish Liberal Alexander De Croo is sworn in as Belgium’s new Prime Minister. 2021 Record rainfall across Europe causes one of the greatest natural disasters ever to strike Belgium.


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

He is the co-founder of the Ebroji company and Ebroji mobile app, a popular cultural language and GIF keyboard. He’s also a partner and board member of Scholly, a mobile app that has directly connected students to more than $70 million in unclaimed scholarships. He executive-produced the documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement. Jesse co-hosts the sports and culture–themed podcast Open Run on Lebron James’ and Maverick Carter’s Uninterrupted network. He is founder of the production company farWord Inc. and the executive producer of “Question Bridge: Black Males,” a series of transmedia art installations. Jesse gained international attention for his 2016 BET Humanitarian Award acceptance speech


pages: 816 words: 191,889

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

Campbell and Rush Doshi, “The China Challenge Can Help America Avert Decline,” Foreign Affairs, December 3, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-12-03/china-challenge-can-help-america-avert-decline. 9Huntington, “The U.S.—Decline or Renewal?” 10Ruchir Sharma, “The Comeback Nation,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 3 (2020): 70–81. 11David Pilling, “‘Everybody Has Their Eyes on America’: Black Lives Matter Goes Global,” Financial Times, June 21, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/fda8c04a-7737-4b17-bc80-d0ed5fa57c6c. 12Jill Lepore, “A New Americanism,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 2 (2019): 10–19. 13John F. Kennedy, “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at Municipal Auditorium, Canton, Ohio” (Canton, Ohio, September 27, 1960), https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/canton-oh-19600927.


pages: 676 words: 203,386

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, fake news, feminist movement, friendly fire, global village, Golden age of television, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, period drama, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship

I am being kind of ordered to do that.’ ” He laughs. On the eve of the 2015 PBS silver-anniversary rebroadcast of his most famous documentary, Burns reflects, “There’s something extraordinarily topical about showing The Civil War right now. Because whether we’re debating the Confederate flag, whether we’re debating ‘Black Lives Matter,’ whether we’re debating ‘Driving While Black,’ it’s all there.” Scheduled over nine episodes on PBS in 1990, The Civil War set ratings records for public television and won Emmy, Peabody, and Television Critics Association Awards. The writer-producer-director, Ken Burns, the writer-producer Ric Burns, and the writer Geoffrey C.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

The Facts About Platform Manipulation on Twitter,” May 18, 2020, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/bot-or-not.html; “Automation Rules,” Twitter Help Center, updated November 3, 2017, https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-automation. 142Positive uses of bots: Rajat Sharma, “25 Best Twitter Bots You Should Follow,” Beebom, January 6, 2020, https://beebom.com/best-twitter-bots/; Leanne Tan, “8 Ways Twitter Bots Are Actually Useful,” Hongkiat, April 14, 2021, https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/using-twitter-bots/. 142accounts linked to influence operations from both state and non-state groups: “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior,” about.fb.com, 2021, https://about.fb.com/news/tag/coordinated-inauthentic-behavior/; “Information Operations,” Twitter Transparency, 2021, https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/information-operations.html. 1424.1 billion users worldwide: Simon Kemp, “Social Media Users Pass the 4 Billion Mark as Global Adoption Soars,” We are Social, October 20, 2020, https://wearesocial.com/blog/2020/10/social-media-users-pass-the-4-billion-mark-as-global-adoption-soars. 1432.7 billion active users: Facebook, “Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2020 Results,” news release, October 29, 2020, https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2020/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter-2020-Results/default.aspx. 143half of American households: Edwin Diamond, “Anchor Wars: Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw,” Rolling Stone, October 9, 1986, https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/anchor-wars-dan-rather-peter-jennings-and-tom-brokaw-104856/. 143George Floyd: Darnella Frazier, “They killed him right in front of cup foods . . .” Facebook (story), May 26, 2020, https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1425401580994277&id=100005733452916. 143#BlackLivesMatter: Aleem Maqbool, “Black Lives Matter: From Social Media Post to Global Movement,” BBC News, July 10, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53273381. 143dangerous conspiracy theories: Kevin Roose, “What Is QAnon, the Viral Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory?” New York Times, September 3, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-qanon.html; Jana Winter, “Exclusive: FBI Document Warns Conspiracy Theories Are a New Domestic Terrorism Threat,” Yahoo!


Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

This is an area where political organizing and social activism communities can learn from the engineering world. Many activist communities have difficulty sustaining activist energy. Deep divides have grown between communities, organizations, and individuals, in part as a result of the high stakes in the quest for social justice. Francis Lee writes:11 Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza gave an explosive speech to a roomful of brilliant and passionate organizers. She urged us to set aside our distrust and critique of newer activists and accept that they will hurt and disappoint us. Don’t shut them out because they don’t have the latest analysis on oppression, or they aren’t using the same language as us.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Think of the recent extreme increase in inequality in India, despite serious attempts since independence in 1947 to promote social opportunities for disadvantaged caste members via the constitution (1950, drawn up by Ambedkar, himself born a Dalit), which, in turn, facilitated affirmative action by way of ‘reservations’18 – and also despite efforts to build a welfare state à la Beveridge, which, unfortunately, ended in a deep gulf between a protected ‘formal’ and an unprotected ‘informal’ sector.19 In the US, too, affirmative action, as pleaded for by James Baldwin, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, is a long way from delivering the desired result, as the Black Lives Matter movement does not fail to emphasize. Think, too, of post-apartheid South Africa, but also of Brazil, another example where the legacy of slavery (abolished just 130 years ago) looms large. The strongest example, of course, is the stubborn prevalence of value systems favouring inequality – despite utterances to the contrary – in the oil-rich states of the Arab world.20 Thus far, an inner circle of (especially male) citizens has shared at least a minimal number of rights to work and fair compensation.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Marc Levin, Freeway: Crack in the System (Al Jazeera America, Blowback Productions, Continental Media, 2015). 30. U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Inspector General, “CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice Department’s Investigations and Prosecutions,” December 1997, part VI. 31. Charlton D. McIlwain, Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 148. McIlwain notes that some California engineer(s) combined their passions and came up with a cocaine gadget called the höt böx, which measured purity. 32. Michael S. Malone, The Big Score: The Billion-Dollar Story of Silicon Valley (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 409. 33.