Dilip Simeon's blog

The great thing about history is that it often repeats itself – though not necessarily as Marx envisaged it. Here’s a story about the tech industry that illustrates the point. Act one begins in the spring of 1993, when Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina released the first graphical browser for the emerging world wide web. They called it Mosaic and it was a runaway success because it was the thing that enabled ordinary people to understand what this internet thingy was for. In 1994,  Andreessen and Jim Clark set up a company that eventually became Netscape and in October that year released a new, improved browser called Netscape Navigator, which in three months had 75% of the nascent browser market. In August 1995, Netscape went public in a frenzied IPO that triggered the first internet boom. As their company thrived, Andreessen and co started to muse about an even brighter prospect. If web browsers really were the future, they reasoned, and since the operating system (OS) of...

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt  published an essay  in  The Atlantic  in which he sought to explain, as the piece’s title had it, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anyone familiar with Haidt’s work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality—Facebook’s Like and Share buttons, Twitter’s Retweet function—have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones. “What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision...

Jordan Peterson is an academic, an internet personality, and  a big fan of beef . A man of many accomplishments, he’s most famous for writing a bestselling book called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos while simultaneously living what can only be described as an  incredibly chaotic  life. The latest Peterson drama comes to us via Twitter, which the academic has just dramatically announced he will be “ departing ” forever. Don’t worry, he’s not going to go quietly into that tweetless night; Peterson has  promised  us all a long article explaining his problems with the platform soon. For now, however, he wants us all to know that Twitter is a hellhole which makes your life infinitely worse. “The endless flood of vicious insult [sic] is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else,” Peterson  tweeted on Monday , “If I have something to say I’ll write an article or make a video. If the issue is not important enough to justify that then per...

Social media platforms are devised by a Californian tech scene committed to competition and social hierarchy. Twitter’s protocols treat us as wannabe celebrities, striving to produce storms of admiration and rage. It is a complex evolutionary system that selects the vacuous grandstanding and sniggering boorishness of adolescent personalities... So much the better if, like Musk, they have a record of sociopathic behavior... What Twitter has done is (to) automate this tendency...  A public sphere dominated by this lurid publicity mechanism is structurally committed to stupidity.  And in that world, Musk is king...   users are not citizens of a representative democracy, but lab rats governed by incentives and controls: Musk is simply the first such rodent to take over the laboratory. No plutocrat has ever so drastically de-sublimated his own mystique as has Musk, merely by tweeting his thoughts into the eternal void. His online persona -variously dull, boorish, self-pitying,...

Even while hammering out the final details of his £35bn ($44bn) purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk took some time out this weekend to tweet. He likes tweeting, does the world’s richest man, usually from what he calls his “porcelain throne” (that detail disclosed on Twitter, naturally enough). This one was a  photo of Bill Gates , zeroing in on the 66-year-old’s modest paunch and placing it next to a cartoon of a pregnant man. To that ensemble, Musk added this sentence of supreme wit: “in case u need to lose a boner fast”… https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/26/elon-musk-king-of-trolls-purchase-twitter-dangerous Elon Musk, master of the ill-advised tweet? by Marina Hyde Quite where we’ll be in six months’ time as far as Twitter is concerned remains tantalisingly unclear, but it seems difficult to imagine it will be either a more or less pleasant space. It’s a social media platform. I’m not sure what further evidence humanity needs before we cotton on to the idea that such...

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas , Gal Beckerman Reviewed by Kit Wilson Radical change, as any good historian will tell you, never just comes out of nowhere. Even the most seemingly unexpected shifts in history can, with hindsight, be traced back to specific material, intellectual and political preconditions - even if, often, we only notice the accumulated pile of tinder once it’s finally been set alight. Why, though, do some moments in history produce no more than a wisp of smoke, while others erupt into revolution? In  The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas , Gal Beckerman, the  Atlantic ’s senior books editor, attempts to give an answer. Telling the lesser-known backstories of ten pivotal moments from the last four hundred years, Beckerman pays particular attention to the specific media that were, he believes, in each case crucial to effecting change: chartist petitions in Victorian Britain, anti-colonial newspapers in p...

TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized... Bill Gates wheels a hefty metal barrel out onto a stage. He carefully places it down and then faces the audience, which sits silent in a darkened theater. “When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war,” he begins. Gates is speaking at TED’s flagship conference, held in Vancouver in 2015. He wears a salmon pink sweater, and his hair is combed down over his forehead, Caesar-style. “That’s why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water,” he says. “When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel.” Now that he is an adult, Gates continues, it is no longer nuclear apocalypse that scares him, but pestil...

  https://scheerpost.com/2022/01/10/mans-godgle-search-for-meaning/

The documents, including an internal post-mortem and one document showing in real time countermeasures Facebook employees were belatedly implementing, paint a picture of a company that was in fact fundamentally unprepared for how the Stop the Steal movement used its platform to organize, and that only truly swung into action after the movement had turned violent. Asked by CNN about Sandberg's quote and whether she stood by it, a Facebook spokesperson pointed to the greater context around Sandberg's quote. She had been noting that Jan. 6 organization happened largely online, including but not limited to on Facebook's platforms, the spokesperson said. The documents were provided by  Facebook whistleblower Frances Hauge n as evidence to support disclosures she made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen's legal counsel. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of 17 US news organizations, including CNN…. h...

In recent days, Frances Haugen , a former member of Facebook’s “civic integrity team”, has launched a deft and professional public assault on the company. Unlike previous Facebook whistle-blowers, like  former Facebook data scientist  Sophie Zhang, Haugen managed to capture the interest and attention of policy leaders and journalists around the world. We have to ask why Haugen has had so much traction and impact when Zhang, who was fired for raising objections within the company to Facebook’s human rights problems, did not. The most straightforward answer is that Haugen pushed forward a problem that strikes the concerns of many – if not most – parents in the developed world: Instagram’s influence on the prevalence of eating disorders, self-harm and suicide among teenaged girls. This was an issue that Americans, especially, understand and recoil against… https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/08/facebook-frances-haugen-whistleblower-pr-catastrophe-yet Is Facebook th...

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! - Karl Marx, Capital , volume 1, Chapter 24, Sec 3.    It might, as one senator put it, be remembered as “the big tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth”. The truth-teller was former  Facebook  data scientist Frances Haugen, appearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to testify that the online platform knowingly harms children, just as cigarette makers did before they were brought to heel. The whistleblower’s inside knowledge and clear, crisp answers to senators’ questions – with elaborate hand gestures for emphasis – was all the more damning because of her measured tone and lack of hyperbole. “Facebook knows that they are leading young users to anorexia content,” she said in a voice of authority that may prove a tipping point in government efforts to curb the power of big tech. She was clearly preaching to the converted as senator after senator joined her in scathing criticism of  Mark Zuckerberg , the founder...

All social media both feeds and feeds on narcissism, but Twitter’s capacity to mirror the world and its users’ neuroses in discrete verbal and visual units, at least in certain corners of the site, elevates self-regard to a formal principle. What makes Twitter so axiomatically hellish?  It’s a place where even the most well-intentioned attempts at intellectually honest conversation inevitably devolve into misunderstanding and mutual contempt, like the fruit that crumbles into ash in the devils’ mouths in book 10 of  Paradise Lost.  It amplifies our simultaneous interdependency and alienation, the overtaking of meaningful political life by the triviality of the social. It is other people.  But mostly Twitter is Hell because we - a “we” that, in Twitter’s universalizing idiom, outstretches optimistically or threateningly as if to envelop even those blessed souls who have never once logged on - make it so. It’s our own personal Hell, algorithmically articulated and give...

In April 2020, Facebook  purchased  a 10-percent stake in Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio, the telecommunications arm of the Reliance empire. In addition to dominating telecom, Reliance is the largest player in petrochemicals and in retail. When its latest acquisition is complete, the company will control  40 percent  - a large plurality - of India’s organised groceries sector. That could make it the biggest buyer of farmers’ products and, therefore, the biggest beneficiary of the right to negotiate directly…. Facebook, one of the world’s most powerful companies, is no one’s puppet. But through its partnership with Reliance, the social-media giant could substantially gain from the agricultural laws. Facebook owns WhatsApp, which has  more than fifty crore  users in India. It is currently rolling out WhatsApp Pay, a feature that will allow WhatsApp users to complete digital transactions without leaving the application. And it is  integrating  Relian...

Sometimes... silence makes a lie begin to take on the shimmer of truth...    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a detailed essay about the conduct of young people on social media “who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion”, who she says are part of a generation “so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow”. Titled It Is Obscene, the essay was published  by the Nigerian novelist and feminist on her website  on Tuesday night.  IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS It attracted so much attention that her website temporarily crashed. The essay goes into her interactions with two unnamed writers who attended Adichie’s Lagos writing workshop. Both later criticised her on social media for her comments about transgender people and feminism in a 2017 Channel 4 interview,  saying “a trans woman is a trans woman ”. At the time, Adichie rejected the claim tha...

Late last month, an “unknown hill in the Chinese desert” was blanketed in scores of large red and white banners, flapping vitriol in the breeze. “I hope you die, bitch,” said one. “Little bitch, screw the feminists,” said others.  They were all actual messages sent to women, a direct act of harassment anonymised by social media. They were sent during weeks of intense debate about the treatment of women on platforms such as Weibo, sparked by the abuse of Xiao Meili who posted video of a man who threw hot liquid at her after she asked him to stop smoking… https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/13/chinas-feminists-protest-against-wave-of-online-abuse-with-internet-violence-museum HAMNA ZUBAIR - Qandeel Baloch is dead because we hate women who don't conform / When it comes to honour killing, India is neck and neck with Pakistan Modi blows hot air at China in a rally in Arunachal Pradesh - forgetting Vajpayee's surrender in 2003 The Return of the Show Trial: China’s Televised ...