Waging war with disinformation

In the superb BBC Radio 4 documentary on Marshall McLuhan, by Douglas Copeland, one of McLuhan’s comments (from half a century ago) that really struck home with me was that in the electronic, networked, instant media age there will be “ways of being evil that we don’t understand yet”. How astonishingly prescient of the man who invented media studies. I think we are beginning to understand what at least one of those ways might be: destroying the trust that keeps a society together. We can see this happening all around us as the internet and social media are creating entirely new opportunities for “influence operations" (IO) and the mass manipulation of opinion.

It seems that (yet again) McLuhan was spot on. The era of mass manipulation is indeed upon us and it is aided and abetted by social media. The well-known example of Jenna Abrams (@jenn_abrams) illustrates the general case perfectly well. Jenna was an “alt-right” blogger with 80,000 followers on Twitter, and her tweets were cited by Buzzfeed, the NY Times and other news agencies. It subsequently turned out that “she” was a creation of Russia's Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.

This emergence of this kind of directed, industrial-scale trolling isn’t just about using mass media for propaganda purposes. That’s hardly new. But the scale and intimacy of social media make the misuse of them, as McLuhan predicted, a new and different kind of evil. The impact of this evil is not to convince the general public that some particular thing is true, but to undermine the general public’s trust of anything at all. Or, as noted in the Boston Review, the most toxic consequence of this kind of social media manipulation “[is] existential distrust".

It’s really hard to know what to do about this. In the past, new technologies (eg, rather obviously, printing) have come along and it has taken generations for society to evolve “political, cultural, and institutional antibodies to the novelty and upheaval” of the information revolutions set in motion by those technologies (remember the instructions manuals telling people to say “hello” when they pick up the telephone). However, the accelerating rate of technology-induced change is creating a shock wave, just as an airplane flying ahead of the speed of sound creates a shock wave (that we hear as the sonic boom).
Now that we’ve detected the shock wave, we have to respond. We have to change either democracy or social media.

We should all care about how social media platforms play a part in our democratic process. Because unless it’s addressed it will happen again. The midterms are in 8 months. We owe it to our democracy to get this right, and fast. https://t.co/aM3pRrZW4J

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton)
February 27, 2018

Whatever  you think about Hillary, she is right that the issue needs to be addressed. I think she is thinking about fixing social media, but given that, for the time being at least, democracy is under our control and social media is not, we instead need to think hard about reinventing democracy in the McLuhan age. But how? At the conceptual level, it seems obvious that someone who thinks the moon landings never happened should not be allowed to participate in any decisions that impact the rest of us. But what about someone who thinks the government spends more on foreign aid than it does on the NHS?  What about the one in five British voters who think that Sherlock Holmes was a real person? These people exist in social media echo chambers that are impermeable to reason and therefore never participate in the discourse that the rest of us depend on to learn about the world and set our opinions in response.

If we don’t take action, then a generation from now the rule of President Kardashian will make us rue the day the universal franchise was conceived.

Films for Planes Review: Wizard of Lies

The Wizard of Lies ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️

Now this is a great example of a film that is just right for a plane journey. It has an interesting story with interesting characters and you want to keep watching to see what happens next even though you sort of know what is going to happen next. It’s the story of uber-fraudster Bernie Madoff and how he made millions and millions of dollars by pretending to invest money for clients but really paying their imaginary investment gains from new investors. This is what is known as a “Ponzi scheme”, like social security, where the early investors do OK and can withdraw gains because there are enough later investors coming into to cover it but eventually it collapses because you run out of new investors (or younger taxpaying workers).

It’s too long, which meant it was a little boring in places, and I would have preferred a little more detail about how exactly the fraud was perpetrated (I still don’t understand how more people were not suspicious) but it was interesting and enjoyable. The acting of the central character and his wife, played by Robert de Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, is superb by the way - they are both wholly convincing.

Rating System

In case you’d forgotten, I use a five sun rating system. It works like this:

1. Movie gets one sun for interesting story with good acting.

2. Movie gets one sun for not having an English villain.

3. Movie gets one sun for not being too dark or having lots of special effects, so you can enjoy it properly on an airplane screen.

4. Movie gets one sun if I watched all the way to the end without falling asleep or turning over because I was bored.

5. Movie gets one sun if it doesn’t have Kate Winslet in it.

So any movie I watch on a place gets at least one sun, and if they pull out all the stops they can get five.

Movie Review: Equity

I’ve almost perfected my new rating system for movies on planes. It’s a five point scheme, and it works like this:

1. Movie gets one sun for interesting story with good acting

2. Movie gets one sun for not having an English villain

3. Movie gets one sun for not being too dark or have lots of special effects, so you can enjoy it properly on an airplane screen

4. Movie gets one sun if I watched all the way to the end without falling asleep or turning over because I was bored

5. Movie gets one sun if it doesn’t have Kate Winslet in it

What do you think? I think this could make me bigger than Barry Norman, or whoever it is that does film reviews on the BBC nowadays.

So here we go with the first review under the new system.

Equity ☀️☀️☀️☀️

On my last flight I watched the rest of season two of Gomorrah, the Italian mafia drama series that I love. If you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it, except to say that it is a Shakespearian effort. The characters are wonderfully drawn and rounded, the acting is excellent and everyone is much better dressed than they are in English crime dramas. I never got into the Sopranos, so this was the first organised crime series that I’d seen for while.

Then I watched Equity, which was about disorganised crime (i.e., investment banking). In Dungeons & Dragons terminology, the mafia are lawful evil whereas investment bankers are chaotic evil. The mafia, like the Assassin’s Guild, have a code. Investment bankers don’t: they will stab anyone in the back for a couple of points. No-one trusts anyone, there is no loyalty up or down and anyone could betray anyone else as the drop of hat.

This made it a good movie, although it probably should have been called “Equity by Bloomberg” since they feature prominently through the film. It was different, because it was largely from a female perspective, which meant that it had a couple of subplots that I found more interesting than I might have otherwise. It had a nice dramatic arc of tragedy through betrayal. I thought that one of the lead characters was a little unreal and I found that slightly distracting, and I don’t see why two of the mean characters had to be English, but I watched all the way to end without nodding off even once. It’s about investment banking, by the way, and one of the companies that is a focus of the bankers’ efforts is privacy-enhancing social network (this doesn’t give anything away).

Summary: wouldn’t bother going to the cinema to see it and will almost certainly never watch it again on cable or computer, but it’ a good movie to watch while having your dinner on a plane.

History lessons

Unusually (weekends are not a terribly relaxing time for me at the moment) I had nothing to do for a while last Sunday. After doing the football run, the play rehearsal run, the shopping run etc, I sat down with a cup of tea and the rest of yesterday's paper. Feeling tired, I decided to put my feet and watch TV for a while. I flipped on the History Channel, thinking that I might relax and learn something interesting. Guess what was on: something about the French revolution maybe, or perhaps an old episode of Time Team, maybe a David Starkey programme? No. It was a "documentary" about Nostradamus. When I check in later on, there was something about Roswell. Now, the only reason that I can see for having these programmes on would be to remove the name of anyone viewing them from the electoral roll, but since it's not against the law to show patent rubbish to a credulous populace I suppose I should simply shut up.

But it bothers me. It's distressing enough to live in a society that shows programmes purporting to communicate with the dead, photograph ghosts and contact UFOs, but it's even more distressing to see this claptrap presented as factual rather than as mindless entertainment (even though they are not in the least entertaining). Note that I'm not being grumpy about people paying for demonstrably false services. Since I'm of a broadly libertarian bent, I go along with Brian Dunning from Skeptoid:

Most of the time, people who buy paranormal products or services — be it goddess worshipping seminars, homeopathy, acupuncture, or psychic readings — are buying completely harmless services that P.T. Barnum would have been happy to sell... The customer is happy, the peddler is happy, nobody is hurt, everybody involved is enriched by the transaction. This is their choice. They don't have a problem with it, why should you? It's none of your business.

[From Ethics of Peddling the Paranormal]

Yet I'm not completely comfortable with this laissez-faire attitude. As society becomes stupider, the populace more gullible and our scientific base crumbles, that will affect all of us negatively, not just the goddess worshippers. It's a bit like leaving the Taliban alone and then, when they ban vaccinations as being un-Islamic (as they in fact have done), saying "oh well, it's their culture, it's racist to interfere" but accepting the fact that you are now more likely to get polio.

I wonder just what it would take to get the History Channel to show some actual history? Oh wait, I apologise. Right now they are showing "Eat like a King", a show about Henry VIII's diet, so fair enough. But I am a tad concerned about the forthcoming Nostradamus 2012, which is being trailed. Here's the blurb...

Could we be facing a massive cosmic collision, a global environmental disaster, or an Armageddon on December 21st 2012? Throughout history, prophets including Nostradamus have independently produced these doomsday predictions pointing to the year 2012. Could they be right?

[From March Season | Nostradamus: 2012]

No, of course not. It's total bollocks, and a pretty poor advertisement for their "Award-winning history site combining professional articles on historical events people and places, as well as study aids for GCSE and A-Level students." Is it any wonder that the lack of historical knowledge in Britain is so shocking?

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth. And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist... Meanwhile, 58 percent thought Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Holmes actually existed; 33 percent thought the same of W. E. Johns’ fictional pilot and adventurer Biggles.

[From Winston Churchill a Myth, Sherlock Holmes Real]

There's a toxic cloud of stupidity steadily spreading out across our once-great nation.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

And the Oscar for most bored listener goes to...

I don't care about things like the Oscars, and reacted very badly to a radio report I heard the other day which had either an actor or director (I didn't catch who it was) talking about "British" success at the Oscars (I haven't actually seen "The Reader", the Kate Winslet film about underage sex, so I don't know how British it actually is) whilst simultaneously calling for more public money for the film industry. Why we should be subsidising rich people to make films I don't know -- if they want more money for films they should ask Kate Winslet for it, not me -- but the person on the radio seemed to think that wealth transfer from me to Kenneth Brannagh is a natural state of affairs and that only a churlish philistine would object to it.

Well I do. Although I like films, just as everyone else does I suppose, I'm not really that interested in them or the actors. I can remember years ago talking to someone about Alien, which is one of my all-time favourites, a film that I've seen countless times. They asked me something about one of the actors in it, and I hadn't got a clue, because I didn't pay any attention to them outside of their characters in the film, if you see what I mean. My all-time favourite film is the original Australian cut of Mad Max, and my opinion of that film wasn't changed one iota when I found out that Mel Gibson is an anti-semitic nutter, because I wasn't interested in him in beyond the context of the film. I'm not saying the Oscars should be banned -- I don't feel that strongly about them one way or the other -- but I do wonder what they are really for.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]