George Floyd

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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

But Missy is also Black, and Black characters on an animated show should be played by Black people.” My God. What sacrifice. George Floyd was killed in the street, and an actor gave up a voice-over gig. George Floyd was killed in the street, and investment banks adopted new corporate sensitivity policies. George Floyd was killed in the street, and defense contractors updated their employee handbooks. George Floyd was killed in the street, and universities made their language codes for faculty even more stringent. George Floyd was killed in the street, and the term “BIPOC”—that’s Black and Indigenous people of color, to better highlight the most oppressed—replaced “people of color,” itself a replacement of older terms.

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If the police violate your civil rights, you can hope that the police themselves will enforce accountability, which is unlikely for obvious reasons; you can potentially see the prosecution of the police in the criminal justice system, which tends to happen in only the most spectacular abuses, such as with the police officers who murdered George Floyd; or you can sue. The doctrine of qualified immunity makes the latter very, very difficult, and is a big part of the reason that police officers so often act with complete impunity. Any meaningful reform of our criminal justice system must involve the end of qualified immunity. Discussion of the merits of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act is largely academic, as the bill died in Congress, though I hope it might be revived. In 2020, Republicans controlled the Senate, and the bill had no chance of passage; in 2021, Democrats held the Senate by the thinnest-possible majority, and the bill died in committee, despite passing the House and public endorsement by President Biden.

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But the inability of our political system to pass a bill that many activists saw as the bare minimum was notable, if for no other reason than to remind us of how hard change would be and that Republican power could not be wished away. Then again, perhaps the George Floyd Justice in Policing bill failed to attract much attention because it was overshadowed by the demand that became associated with the entire movement for justice that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s death, which became inescapable—“defund the police.” THE STRANGE LIFE OF DEFUND THE POLICE Defunding the police captured the public attention to a degree that I’ve really never seen before for a genuinely radical idea.

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

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. A Fortune-SurveyMonkey poll taken in May had revealed that Black adults were more than twice as likely to have been laid off or furloughed as a result of the pandemic. This stark reality was rolled into the other inequities the Black population faced. George Floyd seemed to underscore the systemic lack of equality and civil rights that Blacks and other people of color experience in their daily lives.

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But the CEOs who did speak out placed the focus not on Chauvin but on the future of racial justice. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tweeted, “Right now I’m thinking of George Floyd, his family and those who knew him. I hope this verdict brings some measure of comfort to them, and to everyone who can’t help but see themselves in his story. We stand in solidarity with you, knowing that this is part of a bigger struggle against racism and injustice.”14 General Motors’ Mary Barra weighed in: “While the guilty verdicts in the trial seeking justice for George Floyd are a step in the fight against bias and injustice, we must remain determined to drive meaningful, deliberate change on a broad scale.”15 From Microsoft president Brad Smith: “Today’s verdict is a step forward in acknowledging painful truths and for the continued cause of defeating racism and fighting discrimination.

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Our company remains committed to the continued path ahead.”16 Salesforce tweeted, “Today’s verdict was a defining & important moment. We recognize this does not make up for so much loss and injustice experienced by the Black community. George Floyd should be alive today. The work continues. We will keep taking action for racial equality and a more just world.”17 And from Starbucks: “George Floyd should be alive today. We still have work to do to address systemic racism and ensure everyone has an equal chance to succeed and thrive. Black lives matter, and we stand with our Black customers and partners.”18 Industry groups also talked about the verdict in the context of what remained to be done.

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

Jordan Hoffman, “Dave Chappelle Releases a Passionate and Raw Comedy Set, Making George Floyd Protests Personal,” VanityFair.com, June 12, 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/06/dave-chappelle-releases-a-passionate-and-raw-comedy-set-making-george-floyd-protests-personal. 40. Lorraine Ali, “Review: Dave Chappelle’s new special isn’t stand-up. It’s an anguished story of violence,” June 12, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-06-12/dave-chappelle-846-youtube-netflix-george-floyd. 41. David Sims, “Hillybilly Elegy Is One of the Worst Movies of the Year,” TheAtlantic.com, November 23, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/11/hillbilly-elegy/617189/. 42.

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Richard Read, “Attorney for Minneapolis police officer says he’ll argue George Floyd died of an overdose and a heart condition,” LATimes.com, August 20, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-20/george-floyd-derek-chauvin-defense. 2. “988 people have been shot and killed by police in the past year,” WashingtonPost.com, Updated January 26, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/?itid=lk_inline_manual_5. 3. “Groups March into Beverly Hills, Loot Stores on Rodeo Drive,” CBSLocal.com, May 30, 2020, https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/05/30/rodeo-drive-protest-looting-george-floyd/. 4. Jonathan Lloyd, “Dozens of Businesses Damaged at Flashpoint of Violence in the Fairfax District,” NBCLosAngeles.com, May 31, 2020, https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/fairfax-district-melrose-damaged-looting-grove-fire-natioal-guard-lapd/2371497/. 5.

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Ariel Zilber, “REVEALED: Widespread vandalism and looting during BLM protests will cost insurance $2 billion after violence erupted in 140 cities in the wake of George Floyd’s death,” DailyMail.co.uk, September 16, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8740609/Rioting-140-cities-George-Floyds-death-cost-insurance-industry-2-BILLION.html. 12. Lois Beckett, “At least 25 Americans were killed during protests and political unrest in 2020,” TheGuardian.com, October 31, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-killed-protests-political-unrest-acled. 13. Ebony Bowden, “More than 700 officers injured in George Floyd protests across US,” NYPost.com, June 8, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/06/08/more-than-700-officers-injured-in-george-floyd-protests-across-us/. 14. https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1267877443911778306. 15.

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

Barbara Sprunt, “The History behind ‘When the Looting Starts, the Shooting Starts,’ ” NPR, May 29, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/864818368/the-history-behind-when-the-looting-starts-the-shooting-starts. 14. Kathryn Watson, “Trump Calls George Floyd’s Death a ‘Terrible Thing,’ ” CBS News, May 29, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-calls-george-floyds-death-a-terrible-thing-2020-05-29/. 15. Scott Neuman, “Medical Examiner’s Autopsy Reveals George Floyd Had Positive Test for Coronavirus,” NPR, June 4, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/04/869278494/medical-examiners-autopsy-reveals-george-floyd-had-positive-test-for-coronavirus. 16. Akshita Jain, “George Floyd’s Killing Not a Hate Crime because It Was Systemic Not ‘Explicit’ Racism, Says Official,” The Independent, April 26, 2021, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/george-floyd-killing-hate-crime-b1837419.html. 17. “964 People Have Been Shot and Killed by Police in the Past Year,” Washington Post, July 2, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/. 18.

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“Full Transcript and Video: Trump’s News Conference in New York,” New York Times, August 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-press-conference-transcript.html. 7. Dareh Gregorian, “ ‘Justice Will Be Served!’: Trump Weighs in on George Floyd Case,” NBC News, May 27, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/justice-will-be-served-trump-weighs-george-floyd-case-n1216026. 8. Jemima McEvoy, “ ‘It’s Just Devastating’: Some Minneapolis Businesses Still Fighting to Survive a Year after George Floyd Unrest,” Forbes, May 25, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/05/25/its-just-devastating-some-minneapolis-businesses-still-fighting-to-survive-a-year-after-george-floyd-unrest/?sh=7a66db8c3f77. 9. Tony Daniel, “Minneapolis Rioters Burned One of America’s Most Beloved Independent Bookstores to the Ground,” The Federalist, June 1, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/01/minneapolis-rioters-burned-one-of-americas-most-beloved-independent-bookstores-to-the-ground/. 10.

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Peter Hermann, Sarah Pulliam Bailey, and Michelle Boorstein, “Fire Set at Historic St. John’s Church during Protest of George Floyd’s Death,” Washington Post, June 1, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/fire-set-at-historic-st-johns-church-during-protests-of-george-floyds-death/2020/06/01/4b5c4004-a3b6-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html. 60. Vandana Rambaran, “At Least 60 Secret Service Members Injured during George Floyd Protests in DC,” Fox News, May 31, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/us/more-than-60-secret-service-officers-injured-during-violent-george-floyd-protests-in-washington-d-c. 61. Paul LeBlanc, “Famed DC Monuments Defaced after Night of Unrest,” CNN, May 31, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/31/politics/dc-monuments-lincoln-memorial-defaced/index.html. 62.

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

This could also have been the fate of a lawsuit brought on behalf of George Floyd’s family. Qualified immunity never threatened Floyd’s family’s ability to recover money for his murder at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020. They settled their case with the City of Minneapolis for $27 million before a lawsuit was ever filed in which qualified immunity could be raised. This is likely because the city anticipated the blowback that would come from arguing that a Section 1983 case against Derek Chauvin should be dismissed because Floyd’s family could not point to a prior case with nearly identical facts. But if George Floyd’s case had not received the press scrutiny it did and had not inspired the same degree of public attention and rage, a lawyer for the City of Minneapolis could well have argued that qualified immunity shielded Chauvin from liability.

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And at least some members of Congress seem to have more appetite for change than does the Supreme Court. Bills to end qualified immunity, among other wide-ranging policing reforms, were introduced in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and were reintroduced in 2021. But after the House passed both bills, and after fifteen months of negotiations in the Senate, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was abandoned. Republican senators’ unwillingness to limit qualified immunity in any way was a significant stumbling block in their efforts to reach compromise. In the wake of intransigence at the federal level, states have stepped in.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Dallas police policy manual: Plaintiffs’ Response to Defendants’ Motion for Summary Judgment, Timpa v. City of Dallas, No. 3:16-cv-03089 (N.D. Tex. March 9, 2020). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A grand jury indicted: Ryan Mills, “Tony Timpa Suffered the Same Fate as George Floyd—but Received None of the Attention,” National Review, May 6, 2021, www.nationalreview.com/news/tony-timpa-suffered-the-same-fate-as-george-floyd-but-received-none-of-the-attention/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT disciplinary hearing: Cary Aspinwall and Dave Boucher, “Dallas Police Officers: Mocking Tony Timpa Was ‘Strategy,’ ” Dallas Morning News, Aug. 2, 2019, www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2019/08/02/dallas-police-officers-mocking-tony-timpa-was-strategy/.

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 1983: Glaeser and Gyourko, “The Economic Implications of Housing Supply.” CHAPTER 9: URBANIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS On May 25, 2020: Hill et al., “How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody.” Derek Chauvin: Barker and Kovaleski, “Officer Who Pressed His Knee on George Floyd’s Neck Drew Scrutiny Long Before.” In 2018 alone: Mapping Police Violence. 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.”

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Chauvin could never plausibly claim self-defense, because the bystanders’ videos show that Floyd was helpless and Chauvin was surrounded by other officers. Those videos turned George Floyd from a data point into a cause. As of December 1, 2020, the five most-watched videos of Floyd’s death had over fifty million YouTube views. The horror of those videos powered the protests that followed. Despite the risk of COVID-19, the streets exploded. Societies are more vulnerable to pestilence or natural disaster when they are already riven by conflict. Anger over the slaying of George Floyd brought people out even in the face of an airborne pandemic. We don’t know if the protests spread COVID-19, but in 1918, patriotic rallies were thought to do “little to end the war and much to spread the deadly flu.”

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But in 1994, he was a politician who was giving voters what they wanted: more punishment and less crime. This history presents a warning to the would-be avengers of George Floyd today. The activists who imposed the draconian laws that imprisoned so many young men were also fueled by an understandable rage. To them, no policy could go too far if it protected a future Diane Ballasiotes. Today, some protesters seem to think no policy can go too far if it protects some future George Floyd. Both perspectives are comprehensible. Unfortunately, both are wrong. We must find the middle ground that protects our children from both private violence and police malfeasance.

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

Brown, Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), p. 293. 11: Making a Splash: Edward Colston 1Manny Fernandez and Audra D. S. Burch, ‘George Floyd, From “I Want to Touch the World” to “I Can’t Breathe”’, The New York Times, 18 June 2020; ‘Before his deadly encounter with police, George Floyd had begun a new life in Minnesota’, Los Angeles Times, 28 May 2020. 2Dalton Bennett, Joyce Sohyun Lee and Sarah Cahlan, ‘The death of George Floyd: What video and other records show about his final minutes’, Washington Post, 30 May 2020. 3Frank Kitson, Prince Rupert: Portrait of a Soldier (London: Constable, 1994), pp. 132–7, 257–63; George Malcolm Thomson, Warrior Prince: Prince Rupert of the Rhine (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), pp. 76–81, 134–7.

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The sequence of acts by the Black Lives Matter protesters on that day engaged profoundly with the stories of Colston, Bristol and George Floyd, bringing them together in a statement against racism with global reverberations. Every phase in the protester’s actions was rich with historical and contemporary meaning. Pulling Colston’s statue down with ropes recalled the toppling of the statues of tyrants around the world – George III, Stalin, Trujillo – and put the power to do so literally in the hands of the people. The protesters who knelt on its neck for eight minutes paid a sobering and powerful tribute to George Floyd. When the statue was lobbed into the harbour, it recalled breathtakingly the fate of almost one quarter of the Africans whom Colston’s ships transported.

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, BBC News, 5 June 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52623151; BBC News, ‘Breonna Taylor: Police officer charged but not over death’, BBC News, 23 September 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54273317. 11Derrick Bryson Taylor, ‘George Floyd protests: a timeline’, The New York Times, 10 July 2020; @realDonaldTrump (verified account), Twitter, 29 May 2020. 12Quoted in Erik Ortiz, ‘“I chose my city”: Birmingham, Alabama, removes Confederate monument, faces state lawsuit’, NBC News, 3 June 2020. 13Andrew Buncombe, ‘“We’re not going anywhere”: Why Portland is still protesting 100 days after George Floyd’s killing’, Independent, 4 September 2020. 14‘George Washington Bush’, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/people/georgewashingtonbush.htm. 15Greg Nokes, ‘Black Exclusion Laws in Oregon’, Oregon Historical Society, Oregon Encyclopedia, https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/. 16Quoted in Latisha Jensen, ‘Portland man describes tearing down Thomas Jefferson statue: “It’s not vandalism”’, Willamette Week, 20 June 2020. 17Henry Wiencek, ‘The dark side of Thomas Jefferson’, Smithsonian Magazine, October 2012; Britni Danielle, ‘Sally Hemings wasn’t Thomas Jefferson’s mistress.

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

Andrea Blackstone, “Black-Owned Businesses Struggle at George Floyd Square, Plead for Financial Help,” Black Enterprise, April 23, 2021, www.blackenterprise.com. 10. “NewsNation Goes Inside Minneapolis ‘Autonomous Zone’ Called George Floyd Square,” NewsNation Now, March 17, 2021, YouTube video, 8:19, www.youtube.com. 11. “Man shot and killed near George Floyd Square in Minneapolis,” AP News, March 7, 2021, www.apnews.com; “NewsNation goes inside Minneapolis ‘autonomous zone’ called George Floyd Square”; Danielle Wallace, “FBI to monitor Minneapolis ‘autonomous zone’ in George Floyd Square amid Derek Chauvin trial,” Fox News, March 18, 2021, video, 4:44, www.foxnews.com; Jared Goyette, “Amid Complaints of Violence, Minneapolis Moves to Reopen Intersection Where George Floyd Was Killed,” Washington Post, March 18, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com. 12.

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Victoria Beach, interview by the author, January 7, 2021. 2. Audra D. S. Burch and John Eligon, “Bystander Videos of George Floyd and Others Are Policing the Police,” New York Times, updated May 29, 2020, www.nytimes.com. 3. “George Floyd: What happened in the final moments of his life,” BBC, July 16, 2020, www.bbc.com. 4. 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.

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“Just when we were working through all of that, COVID hit. Seattle is one of the first major agencies to have to deal with it. It was eighteen-hour days for days on end. There wasn’t no road map. We just had to work through it and figure it out. Then, the killing of George Floyd happened.”53 Because of COVID-19, Best said, “A lot more people had the availability to come out and to engage in what happened to George Floyd, which was quite beautiful.” But a small group of people within the crowd started to behave violently. “Within that large group of people who were there peacefully protesting there were groups there to create mayhem, throw rocks, bottles, and incendiary stuff, and point lasers at the officers.”

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

disparities of wealth: Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Exploding wealth inequality in the United States,” Equitable Growth, Oct. 20, 2014. 17. I CAN’T BREATHE “a big teddy bear”: Angelina Chapin, “If I Would Have Been Here, George Floyd Would Be Alive,” The Cut, June 2, 2020. the pandemic put him out: “George Floyd: What happened in the final moments of his life,” BBC, July 16, 2020. J. Alexander Kueng: Kim Barker, “The Black Officer Who Detained George Floyd Had Pledged to Fix the Police,” New York Times, June 27, 2020. Thomas Lane: Sachin Jangra, “Who Is Thomas Lane?” The Courier Daily, June 12, 2020. “stiffened up”: State of Minnesota vs.

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first white officer: Catherine Kim, “What we know about the officers involved in George Floyd’s death,” Vox, May 31, 2020. “very fine people”: “In Context: Donald Trump’s ‘very fine people on both sides’ remarks,” Politifact, Aug. 15, 2017. “Our profession is hurting”: Manny Fernandez, Richard Pérez-Peña, and Jonah Engel Bromwich, “Five Dallas Officers Were Killed as Payback, Police Chief Says,” New York Times, July 8, 2016. “We’re hiring”: “Dallas police chief to protesters: We’re hiring,” KCRA3, July 12, 2016. overreaction by the Dallas police: “After Action Report: George Floyd Protest, May 29, 2020 Thru June 1, 2020,” Aug. 14, 2020.

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Both are chronic problems among Black Americans, producing higher rates of strokes and heart attacks. The autopsy also noted the presence of fentanyl and methamphetamine, which could also be considered comorbidities, although they didn’t really factor into this case. The cause of death was a police officer’s knee on the neck. The man on the autopsy bench was George Floyd. According to the charging documents, “The autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.” This was to explain the decision to charge one of the four officers at the scene of the killing with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

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

“we are all terminal cases”: John Irving, The World According to Garp (New York: Ballantine Books; reissue edition, 1990), 609. 1: Mandingo to pay for the counterfeit bill: “Clerk Who Took Counterfeit $20 Bill from George Floyd Says He Feels Guilty,” CBS News, March 31, 2021, https://www.cbs17.com/news/national-news/clerk-who-took-counterfeit-20-bill-from-george-floyd-says-he-feels-guilty/. every two thousand police killings: David Leonhardt, “A Very Rare Conviction,” New York Times, April 21, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/briefing/chauvin-verdict-super-league-dementia.html. SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in his system: “George Floyd Was Infected with COVID-19, Autopsy Reveals,” Reuters, June 4, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-autopsy/george-floyd-was-infected-with-covid-19-autopsy-reveals-idUSKBN23B1HX.

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SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in his system: “George Floyd Was Infected with COVID-19, Autopsy Reveals,” Reuters, June 4, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-autopsy/george-floyd-was-infected-with-covid-19-autopsy-reveals-idUSKBN23B1HX. with falsifying evidence and murder: Aaron Barker, “Harris County DA Requests Posthumous Pardon for George Floyd in 2004 Drug Conviction,” Click2Houston, April 29, 2021, https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/04/29/harris-county-da-requests-posthumous-pardon-for-george-floyd-of-2004-drug-conviction/. closed by the COVID-19 pandemic: Maya Rao, “George Floyd’s Search for Salvation,” Star Tribune, December 27, 2020, https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-hoped-moving-to-minnesota-would-save-him-what-he-faced-here-killed-him/573417181/. the world’s incarcerated people: Steven Thrasher, “An Uprising Comes from America’s Viral Underclass,” Slate, June 10, 2020, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/black-lives-matter-viral-underclass.html.

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I BLAME I think maybe there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called capitalism. —BONG JOON-HO 1 MANDINGO (Racism) On May 25, 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin violently pressed his knee into the neck of a Black man named George Floyd, crushing him into the ground for some eight minutes and forty-six seconds. This ended Floyd’s life at just forty-six years of age, about thirty years younger than the average age a white man like Chauvin might expect to live in the United States. Floyd’s fatal encounter with the police began after he was accused of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at a convenience store.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

In the days that followed, I tried to collect my thoughts in a post I made on Medium, writing, These are heartbreaking times for the United States of America. The killing of George Floyd has given rise to a spasm of grief and anguish that has brought thousands to the streets to protest. George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor—they are just the latest names in a drumbeat of Black Americans whose lives were taken in brutal fashion. George Floyd’s death is the catalyst but his dehumanizing death before our eyes was the latest bloody sign that we have been failing far too many people for too long. Police mistreatment of Black Americans is both a reality and a moral stain that threatens to tear our country apart.

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Charles was disappointed but understood. Mike and his team—my former team—were thrilled. We announced the endorsement on May 22. Three days later, on May 25, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. When I saw the news, I didn’t want to watch the video, but I knew I would have to. Watching a man’s life get extinguished so casually was stunning and brutal. It was horrifying. I spoke to Black friends both publicly and privately. Whatever I felt upon watching George Floyd die, it hit Black men and Black parents ten times harder. They were angry and saddened. They were heartbroken for their children. The experience truly was dehumanizing.

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In chapter 6, I mentioned an MSNBC producer, Ariana Pekary, who publicly quit MSNBC in August 2020. When I spoke to her about the network’s decision making when it came to coverage, she told me that in her experience the network would gloss over more benign news events. “When there were peaceful protests for George Floyd, we would cut to something else,” Pekary told me. “If there were some fire or conflict, we would cut to that and show the footage over and over again.” In her impassioned farewell statement when leaving MSNBC, she wrote, The problem is the job itself. It forces skilled journalists to make bad decisions on a daily basis…The model blocks diversity of thought and content because the networks have incentive to amplify fringe voices and events, at the expense of others…all because it pumps up the ratings.

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

Ilya Somin, “Public Ignorance About the Constitution,” Washington Post, September 15, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/09/15/public-ignorance-about-the-constitution; general ignorance of US history and customs: Patrick Riccards, “National Survey Finds Just 1 in 3 Americans Would Pass Citizenship Test,” Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, October 3, 2018, https://woodrow.org/news/national-survey-finds-just-1-in-3-americans-would-pass-citizenship-test; statue toppling and defacing: Grant: Henry Olsen, “The Anti-statue Movement Has Taken a Turn into Absurdity,” Washington Post, June 22, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/22/anti-statue-movement-has-taken-turn-into-absurdity; Black Civil War veterans: Andrew Mark Miller, “George Floyd Rioters Deface 16 Boston Statues, Including Memorial Honoring Black Civil War Regiment,” Washington Examiner, June 4, 2020, www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/george-floyd-rioters-deface-16-boston-statues-including-memorial-honoring-black-civil-war-regiment; abolitionist: Lawrence Andrea, “Hans Christian Heg Was an Abolitionist Who Died Trying to End Slavery. What to Know About the Man Whose Statue Was Toppled in Madison,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 24, 2020, www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/wisconsin/2020/06/24/hans-christian-hegs-abolitionist-statue-toppled-madison-what-know/3248692001.

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Truly white supremacist states, such as the former apartheid government of South Africa, do not elect black presidents or vice presidents as does the United States, any more than Islamic supremacist societies like Iran or Saudi Arabia would ever allow a Christian or Jew to become their head of state.47 Even in the anguished age of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police while in custody, there has been, over the last two decades, an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes. Supposed victims of various awful oppressors come forward to suggest their own personal bouts with racial hatred reflect larger nationwide pathologies and call for reparatory measures to their own benefit.

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Soon, facing lawsuits and popular demonstrations, authorities relented and allowed stores to reopen, given that they never had offered a coherent reason for singling out arms sellers for closure. In late May 2020, major city police forces in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles stood down in the face of thousands of looters and arsonists who roamed streets and ransacked small businesses in the wake of the protests over the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis. A few owners who had access to legal semiautomatic rifles used them successfully to save their stores, while the establishments of others less fortunate in the vicinity burned or were destroyed.33 Three relatively recent developments have spurred these renewed progressive efforts to curb citizens’ rights to bear arms.

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

Though it certainly didn’t pass as quickly as many had hoped, the Silents’ reserve of resilience from their earlier years helped them cope. Still, 2020 and 2021 were an emotional roller coaster—for Silents and everyone else. Anxiety increased substantially between 2019 and April 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, even for Silents. Anxiety also showed significant peaks in June 2020 during the protests after the murder of George Floyd, in November 2020 around the presidential election, and in winter 2020–2021, when COVID-19 cases swelled (see Figure 2.17). Anxiety then declined steadily. Silents were getting by, just as they have always done—a clear example of generational differences winning out even as the generation faced down a killer virus.

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Even though most people didn’t agree that Obama’s election put an end to racism, the 2000s and early 2010s were still a quieter period for race relations, with less than 1 out of 5 high school seniors worried about Black-White race relations and less than 1 out of 10 believing race relations had gotten worse. After Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, racial tensions would rise again (see Figure 4.30, there’s more on post-2015 race relations in the Millennial chapter). After several years of simmering racial tensions in the late 2010s, we all know what happened next: George Floyd (b. 1973) was killed in Minneapolis in 2020, and racial reckoning was upon the country once more. By 2021, the number of high school seniors who believed Black-White race relations were worse reached an all-time high. Figure 4.30: Percent of U.S. 12th graders and incoming college students agreeing with statements around race and inequality issues, 1976–2021 Source: Monitoring the Future and the American Freshman Survey Notes: Gen X dominates the age group in the shaded years.

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The question on promoting racial understanding was asked of entering college students, and the questions on race relations of 12th graders. The 2020 12th grade data was collected in February and early March, before schools shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, and before the protests related to George Floyd’s death. Many of the writers and thinkers at the forefront of conversations on race in the post-2015 era were Gen X’ers. Like the rest of their generation, Ta-Nehisi Coates (b. 1975) and Nikole Hannah-Jones (b. 1976) never experienced segregation as the rule of law, yet in their influential works (Between the World and Me for Coates and The 1619 Project for Hannah-Jones), they observed pervasive inequality and questioned why it still existed.

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

One of my former executives, her eyes filled with tears, said, “Vivek, I had such high hopes for you. What happened?” Many of my employees were upset too, even as some of them privately emailed me to say they agreed with me. Yet there was a peculiarity about it too. Eight months earlier, my advisors and friends were impatient with me for a different reason. Following the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in the spring of 2020, they pressured me to do more to address systemic racism. They felt I hadn’t done enough to condemn it. Apparently, being a CEO required me to speak out about politics sometimes, yet other times it required me to stay silent. As CEO, I needed to effectively run a business focused on developing medicines without getting intertwined in political matters.

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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.”

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Dimon couldn’t have better summarized the motives of many CEOs who embrace stakeholder capitalism: it allows them to exercise quasi-political power without having to go through the hassle of getting elected. Yet that hassle is part and parcel of democracy itself. Jamie Dimon probably won’t ever get to be president. But by being CEO of one of the largest banks, in today’s world he still gets the social platform that he craves. Following George Floyd’s death last summer, Dimon broadcast a video of himself dramatically kneeling in his office to demonstrate his solidarity with the protesters in the street. He was widely praised for doing so. I couldn’t help but be amused. In a prior century, the founder of J.P. Morgan—John Pierpont Morgan—had once famously stated: “I owe the public nothing.”

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

Indeed, everywhere you look, people who once did not care much about the state have been turning to Leviathan to protect them—and, as Hobbes predicted, giving up their most cherished liberties, even the freedom to leave their own homes. We have allowed the state to regulate our every move. And when the state has let us down, we have broken into fury—most obviously on the streets of America, after the killing of George Floyd. The Coronavirus has made government important again. Not just powerful again (look at those once-mighty companies begging for help), but also vital again. It matters enormously whether your country has a good health service and competent bureaucrats. The arrival of the virus was like an examination of state capacity.

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In the United States, the teachers unions have a lock on the Democrats’ education policy: an old journalist’s trick when standing next to someone on the floor of the Democratic convention is simply to ask, “What school do you teach at?” Protecting jobs, rather than improving services, is the priority. After the killing of George Floyd, people rushed to see why so few American cops have been punished for brutality. They discovered that departments had been persuaded by unions to erase disciplinary records, some after only six months. Derek Chauvin, the man whose knee throttled Floyd, had faced at least seventeen misconduct complaints during his two decades with the Minneapolis police department but had suffered no consequences other than two reprimands.

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As early as March, Global Times, an English-language newspaper in Beijing, was crowing that China had outperformed the West because “western political systems lack such an ability to mobilize and organize on such a massive scale.”2 When protests broke out in America, crowing turned to ridicule, with the Chinese retweeting “I can’t breathe,” the last words uttered by George Floyd. Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, taunted the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, for encouraging the protests in Hong Kong. “Should Beijing support protests in the US, like you glorified rioters in Hong Kong?”3 The core of the autocracy argument is not just that China was better organized to protect its citizens but also that it was willing to add the mailed fist to the surgical glove, adopting methods that democracies shy away from.

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

White protesters joined others in immense numbers, flowing down Flatbush Avenue from Grand Army Plaza in a river of bicycles thousands strong to show concern for their Black compatriots—“White Silence = Violence,” “Black Trans Lives Matter.” There had never been anything like the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd. They were the largest in our history. The unrest took me by complete surprise. We were three months into the pandemic, and the 100,000th American had just died. It felt as if a long silence was suddenly broken by a cry of rage out in the street. 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.

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They sounded more like howls in an institutional void—as if every other lever had become useless and protest was a last resort when self-government no longer worked. The protesters were railing against a society that wasn’t cohesive enough to summon a response. Far from being oppressed by a powerful state, they were hammering on a hollow structure that was in danger of collapsing. That’s why the George Floyd protests, as inspiring as they often were, did not fill me with hope. They seemed at once utopian and nihilistic. After a few weeks the protests subsided. The most committed activists in places such as Minneapolis returned to the long work of changing how police departments treat Black citizens.

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These awakenings can take on the contours of religious experience, a particularly American one—sin, denunciation, confession, atonement, redemption, heresy hunting, book burning, and the dream of paradise. Moral awakenings leap backward over the worldly philosophers of the eighteenth century, the secular and rationalist Founding Fathers, to our origins in the Puritan ancestors. The passion and scale of the George Floyd protests gave some Americans the fervent belief that we were finally going to face our four centuries of crime and injustice. For conscious white people, this history remains saturated in collective shame and personal guilt, instantly revived by every viral video. The guilt comes in part from the knowledge of a permanent social class of Black misery that can be traced directly to the history.

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

It rose on the energy of young people demanding a better world and the pain and strength of mothers. Among his last words, later witnessed around the world, George Floyd called out for his mother, dead two years: “Mama, mama, I’m through.” One of the popular signs at the marches that followed read, “When George Floyd called out for his mama, he summoned all the mamas.” If you are a white reader of this book, let me say something to you, white person to white person: If you aspire to stand with all the mamas George Floyd summoned, it means reckoning in detail with how white supremacy is visited specifically on children. In lost jobs and household security.

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But the outright denial of services to so many, the adversarial system that drains everyone’s energy scrapping for scarce resources, and the toll on mothers in particular don’t sound like much of a model for the rest of the education system to follow. We’ll hear from Jonah’s family again in Chapter 6; things get even more complicated for them but also a little less lonely for Jonah. SUMMER 2020 5 RACISM These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you! —President Trump, via Twitter, May 29, 2020 June 1, 2020, US seven-day average of cases: 21,518 By May, Patricia Stamper’s toddler, Patrick, seemed increasingly uncomfortable.

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They determined he had an inguinal hernia, a symptom of his genetic disorder. He would need surgery. While they were dealing with this news, the neighborhood, the city, and the country exploded around them. On May 25, a white Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin murdered a forty-six-year-old Black man named George Floyd in broad daylight on a public street. Darnella Frazier, a seventeen-year-old girl who was out that day buying her nine-year-old cousin a snack, recorded the murder with her cell phone and posted it to social media. The video, which showed Floyd pleading for his life, spread like a grass fire.

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

Gould and Wilson, “Black Workers”; Nate Rattner and Tucker Higgins, “As New Data Shows Early Signs of Economic Recovery, Black Workers Are Being Left Out,” CNBC, June 5, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/05/coronavirus-recovery-black-workers-are-being-left-out-data-shows.html.   80.  Faith Karimi and Maggie Fox, “George Floyd Tested Positive for Coronavirus, but It Had Nothing to Do with His Death, Autopsy Shows,” CNN, June 4, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/health/george-floyd-coronavirus-autopsy/index.html.   81.  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.

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“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.  

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., “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.  

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

Short of a declaration from Byrd of murderous intent, this standard would make a conviction—of Byrd, or most other police officers charged with its violation—nearly impossible. Which was why the 2021 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act would have struck the word willfully from 18 U.S.C. § 242. But the same Republicans who asked, “Who killed Ashli Babbitt?” had no qualms about killing the George Floyd Act, an apparent contradiction that seems like evidence of hypocrisy only if you mistakenly believe that the question of who killed Ashli was ever meant to be answered. The believers stoked their own paranoia by arriving at no fixed point.

…

“It’s all over the internet.” He said he liked cops, except the cop who shot Ashli. “You feel like the cops are on your side?” I asked. “Obviously!” He swung his arms open like a ringmaster. “They’re here protecting me.” He turned to a woman beside him and asked for the name of the officer who killed George Floyd. Derek Chauvin. “And they only prosecuted him,” continued Riley, “because these people”—the protesters—“threw a fit.” A White cop’s knee on a Black man’s neck for nine minutes? “Somebody doing their job.” A Black cop’s split-second shot at a White woman leading a mob? Riley agreed with one of the other rally speakers: “assassination.”

…

“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. The two women sitting next to me, Jorge Riley’s girlfriend, Kelli Morgan, in a sun hat with a leopard-print band, and a friend in cutoff jeans bedazzled red-white-and-blue across her back pockets—she said her name was “Freedom”—screamed, “Criminals!” “Why don’t people know who Ashli Babbitt is?”

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

On energy politics more generally, see Helen Thompson, Oil and the Western Economic Crisis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and Helen Thompson, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 42.Evan Hill, Ainara Tiefenthäler, Christiaan Triebert, Drew Jordan, Haley Willis, and Robin Stein, “How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody,” New York Times, May 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html, accessed September 28, 2021. 43.Derrick Bryson Taylor, “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline,” New York Times, June 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-protests-timeline.html, accessed September 28, 2021; Audra D. S. Burch, Amy Harmon, Sabrina Tavernise, and Emily Badger, “The Death of George Floyd Reignited a Movement. What Happens Now?,” New York Times, April 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/us/george-floyd-protests-police-reform.html, accessed September 28, 2021; Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K.

…

Biden believed he had paid off part of his debt to African American voters by making Kamala Harris his running mate, thus giving her the opportunity to become the first African American vice-president in American history. But that was hardly sufficient, especially given the magnitude of the racial justice uprising triggered by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Floyd, an African American man, had been arrested that day for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 check at a convenience store. When four officers arrived on the scene, they subdued Floyd, and forced him to the ground. A white officer on the scene, Derek Chauvin, then used deadly force by placing his knee hard into the back of Floyd’s neck for an interminable nine minutes, ignoring Floyd’s repeated cries that he could not breathe.

…

,” New York Times, April 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/us/george-floyd-protests-police-reform.html, accessed September 28, 2021; 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, accessed September 28, 2021; Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, June 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html, accessed September 28, 2021. 44.Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns, and Thomas Kaplan, “Biden Walks a Cautious Line as He Opposes Defunding the Police,” New York Times, June 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/politics/biden-defund-the-police.html, accessed September 28, 2021. 45.Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 15, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/, accessed September 27, 2021; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations,” New Yorker, June 10, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/ta-nehisi-coates-revisits-the-case-for-reparations, accessed September 27, 2021. 46.Marantz, “Are We Entering a New Political Era?”

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

But we appear to have done it at the precise moment when words and ideas underwent a radical currency devaluation, a crash connected, in ways we have barely begun to understand, to the torrent of words in which we are swimming on those screens. A torrent that assiduously amplifies the most operatic forms of virtue performance and the most cynical forms of pipiking. Angela Davis, in the spring of 2022, put the tension of the historic post–George Floyd protests like this: “In many ways, nothing has really changed at all, but at the same time, everything has changed.” Beyond Blah, Blah, Blah These are difficult themes to write and talk about, because all we have are those very same cheapened words. Which is why I greatly appreciated Greta Thunberg’s various interventions during the 2021 climate summit in Glasgow, which essentially consisted of making fun of people saying things about climate change while doing very little about climate change.

…

It is difficult to imagine that these educated, upper-middle-class white mothers were unaware that their slogan echoed another—the cries of “I can’t breathe” that rose up from the streets in 2014 after a New York City police officer put Eric Garner in a chokehold and, after Garner uttered those fateful words, ended his life. They must have known that those same words roared up from the streets again in 2020, when George Floyd said them before he was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. Yet less than a year after the country was rocked by protests sparked by Floyd’s killing—and Ahmaud Arbery’s, and Breonna Taylor’s, and so many others before and after—here were those three words again, in only slightly altered form, being directed at public health policies designed to reduce transmission of Covid-19, which was still disproportionately ravaging Black communities.

…

Things grew only more ridiculous/serious when, in June 2022, three months after the Battle of Little Blue Bottle, Wolf staged a more successful publicity-seeking stunt while in Salem, Oregon. She found one of the only restaurants in the city that still required proof of vaccination for indoor dining—Epilogue Kitchen and Cocktails, a Black-owned business whose windows displayed portraits of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor as well as signs saying BLACK LIVES MATTER and NO PLACE FOR HATE. Despite having all the rest of Salem’s restaurants to choose from, and despite having a reservation elsewhere, Wolf strolled into Epilogue and staged a confrontation until she was asked to leave. She then filmed herself lecturing the restaurant’s Black manager, saying, “A lot of people in this nation’s history pushed boundaries like that.

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

Eugene Smolensky and Robert Plotnick, “Inequality and Poverty in the United States: 1900 to 1990,” Institute for Research on Poverty, Discussion Paper no. 998-93, University of Wisconsin–Madison, March 1993, https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/dps/pdfs/dp99893.pdf. 15. Andre M. Perry and Tawanna Black, “George Floyd’s Death Demonstrates the Policy Violence That Devalues Black Lives,” The Avenue (blog), Brookings Institution, May 28, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/05/28/george-floyds-death-demonstrates-the-policy-violence-that-devalues-black-lives/. 16. Angela Davis, “The Meaning of Freedom,” speech, Metropolitan State College, Denver, CO, February 15, 2008, Alternative Radio https://www.alternativeradio.org/products/dava013/. 17.

…

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. Its major backers include members of the Koch Network—which has hosted semiannual meetings for wealthy right-wing donors since at least 200621—like Richard Uihlein, a billionaire who backed Roy Moore’s candidacy for one of Alabama’s US Senate seats even after he was accused of sexual misconduct with underage girls.22 Rich white men like Uihlein stay out of the public eye while funding people like Owens and Kirk to do their dirty work.

…

The whole world doesn’t need to be upended for HBS to increase its appreciation for the value these students would bring. In 1969, the year after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, the number of Black students enrolled at HBS grew tenfold, to about sixty students.30 Over the past fifty years, Black enrollment has stayed around that same level. Then, after the uprisings following George Floyd’s murder, HBS immediately enrolled dramatically more Black students.31 Neither of these changes occurred because the K–12 system or corporate America was reformed overnight. They happened because those in power—the people who decided which students were worthy—altered their perspectives, or at least felt external pressure to walk back inequitable policies.

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

Simply put, summer 2020 was a gut-wrenching, soul-crushing, blood-boiling, debilitating, and scarring season that galvanized not just America, but the world. Racial uprisings happening against a backdrop of a global pandemic is something that no one should live through, and as heartbreaking as it was to have footage of George Floyd’s murder circulating all over social media and news outlets,* it created a collective fury. While the jury is still out on whether that passion will bring about substantive change, there’s no denying that it was a historic summer. 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.”

…

The point is my man likes to fix things, because that’s his love language, but even he knew his helpful nature was no match for what summer 2020 wrought. So he followed my lead. Held me when I wanted to cry. Reminded me to take breaks from the news for my mental health. Listened when I needed to vent and stopped talking when I told him that I couldn’t have any more discussions about George Floyd on a particular day. And, even though he couldn’t go to marches with me because of the potential of him getting arrested, which would lead to his automatic deportation, he would check in via text frequently to see how I was doing and if I felt safe. When he didn’t understand something, he wouldn’t burden me with the task to teach him, but instead looked up the information to fill in the blanks.

…

But it appeared these simple tasks were either inexplicably difficult for plenty of white people to do or, more accurately, were an option they lacked the presence of mind to realize even existed. Baekoff declined to participate in performative allyship, and that was a much-needed salve. Performative allyship or performative activism rose in popularity during the uprisings and protests following George Floyd’s murder, but the concept has been around for several decades. It was first featured in Barbara Green’s 1997 book about the Federation era of women’s suffrage in Australia, entitled Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage 1905–1938. Other notable mentions were in 2015 articles for Hyperallergic, a Brooklyn-based arts mag, and Atlas Obscura, another online magazine and travel company.

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

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. Clarence Thomas, “‘The Most Effective Way to Stop Police Terror Is Action at the Point of Production,’” interview by Eric Blanc, Jacobin, June 9, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/george-floyd-ilwu-work-stoppage-antiracism. 27. “ILWU Stands Down at West Coast Ports.” 28. Joe DeManuelle-Hall, “West Coast Dockers Stop Work to Honor George Floyd,” Labor Notes, June 11, 2020, https://labornotes.org/blogs/2020/06/west-coast-dockers-stop-work-honor-george-floyd; Thomas, “‘The Most Effective Way to Stop Police Terror’”; “ILWU Stands Down at West Coast Ports.” 29.

…

According to Strikewave, over twenty-eight thousand healthcare workers had participated in almost thirty strikes from March to September 2020. They’ve also founded more than one hundred new unions in twenty-two states.22 Given all he faced in 2020, it’s no wonder Chris Smalls ended up outside Jeff Bezos’s house in August with a personalized guillotine. 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.

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

calls for the arrests of the officers who killed her: Aja Romano, “‘Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor’: The power and the peril of a catchphrase,” Vox, August 10, 2020, https://www.vox.com/21327268/breonna-taylor-say-her-name-meme-hashtag. video was captured of George Floyd’s murder: Evan Hill et al., “How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody,” New York Times, May 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html. 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.

…

In 2020, America—and the world—was shocked and horrified when a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a Black man, by placing a knee directly on his neck. In March of that year, Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician, was shot and killed by police officers who had barged into her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. There were widespread calls for the arrests of the officers who killed her, and that became a rallying cry for many and on social media. 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.

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

In the years leading up to the pandemic, the nation had been grappling with the harsh reality that Black people were regularly killed at the hands of the police who were meant to protect them, with protests at times sweeping American cities. The nine minutes that helped to turn the reaction to that centuries-long drumbeat of injustice into an even more momentous movement came on Tuesday, May 25, 2020. That was the day that Minneapolis police arrested George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man who a convenience store clerk said had bought cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. A white officer named Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck until he died, a slow-motion killing that was captured on video and circulated across the internet. Hundreds of protesters flooded Minneapolis’s streets starting the next day, and by May 27 they were marching across major cities from Memphis to Los Angeles.

…

Hundreds of protesters flooded Minneapolis’s streets starting the next day, and by May 27 they were marching across major cities from Memphis to Los Angeles. Photos of people of all colors and creeds gathering in solidarity, holding posters emblazoned with the phrase “I Can’t Breathe”—George Floyd’s last words—dominated social media, alongside images of boarded-up storefronts and broken glass. The protests quickly became another partisan dividing line, with much of the left embracing them as some on the right painted them as disorderly riots. 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.

…

He had long been bothered by the fault lines dividing society in the twenty-first century, many of which were both economic and racial—so bothered, in fact, that he had years earlier launched an Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute to research the ways that the economy distributed its winnings. Much of its work mirrored research that was happening across the Fed’s twelve-bank system, but Kashkari was especially active in communicating that it was happening, drawing news coverage and stoking conversation on social media. In the tense early hours after George Floyd’s murder, as Kashkari watched the city around him react with shock and sadness and shared in the protesters’ outrage, he decided to talk about it on Twitter. On May 27, he posted a two-tweet series condemning police action. “It was as if they were saying: this is what we’ve been trained to do.

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

He turned everything into a learning adventure, and was obviously still outraged about the grisly killing of George Floyd. 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.

…

Protracted social isolation gave Americans the chance to witness and then really see the continuing brutal violence wielded by certain police officers and certain police forces against African American citizens. The defining event in our household, as in millions of others across America, was the ghastly murder of George Floyd by Officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. “Dad, watch this,” Tommy said. He was in our kitchen when he handed me his phone. I watched the excruciating scene of a sadistic white police officer pressing his knee on the neck of a prone, handcuffed African American man, George Floyd, until he was asphyxiated. Tommy looked heartbroken and astonished, as though his mind and heart could not assimilate the reality of so much viciousness and cruelty being densely concentrated in one man, a lawless agent of the state.

…

Tommy looked heartbroken and astonished, as though his mind and heart could not assimilate the reality of so much viciousness and cruelty being densely concentrated in one man, a lawless agent of the state. He was shell-shocked. I tried to comfort him, and we talked about what we might do in response. In the House Judiciary Committee, we went to work on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, legislation to ban chokeholds and strangleholds, require the use of dashboard and body cameras, establish a nationwide database of disciplined officers, forbid lethal force in all cases except to repel lethal force, and get rid of corrupt judge–made doctrines like “qualified immunity,” which made lawless cops essentially untouchable.

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

Every person who walked out today is an owner, and the owners say: Time’s up.” 46 That organizing was followed by demands, in the summer of 2020, that Google end its contracts with police departments. Tech workers joined in solidarity with protesters across the country, calling for defunding and abolishing policing after a Minneapolis officer killed George Floyd. A letter signed by more than 1,600 Google employees read, in part, “Why help the institutions responsible for the knee on George Floyd’s neck to be more effective organizationally?” Amazon programmers, meanwhile, had been organizing to support the company’s warehouse workers, protesting their dangerous working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. In both cases, the tech workers were taking their lead from those on the front lines. 47 Suddenly the tech industry no longer seemed so impenetrable.

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It was one of those moments, just a reminder that they see me as somebody who is obviously doing this work. ” Those connections were especially valuable to her students in the middle of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, during the coronavirus pandemic, and in the upswell of protest after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. For her, all of these issues were intertwined, and they all underlined the question of sanctuary at school. When the schools shut down to prevent further spread of COVID-19, Jimenez’s school managed to distribute a number of laptops to students, but, she noted, it was still incredibly difficult to translate classroom teaching to virtual learning.

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Kaepernick, like Muhammad Ali before him, sent a signal to the owners and to the world that they could not control him, and he has used his fame since then to give high-profile donations to social justice organizations and to hold “Know Your Rights” camps for young Black men in cities across the country. But Kaepernick said he wanted to keep playing, and the NFL still refused to let him. 48 In spring 2020, the eruption of nationwide protests at a scale never before seen, after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, vindicated Kaepernick. NFL owners and coaches tripped over themselves scrambling to apologize, plastering their social media accounts with “Black Lives Matter” statements. Jim Harbaugh, Kaepernick’s coach in San Francisco, said he was proud of the player (though he’d opposed the protest at the time) and called him a “hero,” comparing him to Jackie Robinson and Ali.

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

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. Millions gathered in weeks-long, city-by-city protests that were the culmination of on-the-ground organizing as well as a nationwide wellspring of moral outrage that had played out, to a significant degree, through social media. Sexual assault allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein had also prompted a cycle of escalating online outrage—first against him, then Hollywood, then the abusive men named in countless personal stories shared on Twitter—that became the MeToo movement.

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QAnon memes and references especially dominated militia pages, escalating their sense that violence would be both righteous and inevitable. In late May, Ivan Hunter, the Boogaloo member with whom Carrillo had texted about an “op,” drove with several others to Minneapolis, where protests were raging over the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. The men gathered outside a police precinct that had been taken over by a few hundred protesters. Hunter yelled, “Justice for Floyd,” raised a Kalashnikov-style rifle, and fired thirteen times into the building. No one was injured. He had likely hoped, as Boogaloos often wrote online, to spark violence between protesters and police that would escalate into war.

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Though the suit’s odds are poor, it represents a sense that Silicon Valley’s seeming complicity in the nation’s disintegration over 2020 could not be ignored—a sense that, within hours of Carrillo’s crime, had already begun extending into the companies’ own workforces. 3. Friction ON MONDAY, JUNE 1, one week after George Floyd’s murder and three days after Carrillo’s attack, a few hundred Facebook employees set out-of-office messages announcing that, for one day, they were refusing to work. Some signed petitions demanding personnel and policy changes from their bosses. Many, in a first, publicly condemned their employer.

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

So rather than writing, I spent the first months of the pandemic engaging with young children in live video chats with my puppet, Audrey Duck—figuring I could at least provide a respite for kids abruptly deprived of their peers and for stressed parents working from home or suddenly unemployed. The increasing evidence that Black and Brown people were disproportionately dying from COVID, the horror of George Floyd’s tortuous murder under the knee of a white policeman, and the wave of protests that followed only pulled me further away from writing. My concerns about immersing children in our hypercommercialized culture seemed so beside the point. But I was wrong. While out-of-control commercialism is not the root cause of the aforementioned problems, I came to realize that our marketing-saturated culture exacerbates these and other social ills.

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Jessica Guynn, writing in USA Today about the “three Black teenagers” results, framed the problem this way: With cuts to public education and increased reliance on technology to deliver answers, search engines wield more power than ever before in deciding what information is seen and what information is important. 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.

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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.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

A man named George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis when a white police officer pressed his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. The cop suffocated him in the middle of the street because he thought Mr. Floyd might have passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Mr. Floyd told the officers that he could not breathe. The pandemic-induced tinder box was set on fire when the Big D seemingly threatened protesters. He loves confrontation. When images of fires and destructive protests in Minneapolis hit the airwaves, the Big D tweeted: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen.

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Chapter 8 Economic Data Worse than the Great Depression May 2020 5/1/20—ISM manufacturing drops to 41.5. 5/1/20—FDA approves remdesivir for emergency use. 5/5/20—ISM nonmanufacturing declines to 41.8. 5/5/20—Fed eases liquidity requirement for banks participating in emergency lending facilities. 5/6/20—US reports 90K nurses contracted COVID-19, 260 dead. 5/8/20—Payrolls -20.5M; unemployment rate to 16%; “real” unemployment to 22.8%. 5/15/20—Fed loosens bank capital requirements again. 5/17/20—Germany and Japan enter technical recessions based on Q1 data. 5/27/20—US fatalities top 100K. 5/31/20—George Floyd protests increasing in major cities; looting and riots in some. Month-end: UST 10s at 0.65%; S&P +4.8%; Nasdaq +6.8%. I gotta get the fuck out of London. It’s probably two months behind the USA in terms of the virus, and it’s not going to open any time soon. I can’t wait another sixty days.

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

In fact, she might have gotten sympathy from the cops, and even appreciation for alerting them to a potential problem. Within her cohort, the suggestion that she was a racist might have seemed outlandish. That was her uncle, who dropped the N-word at Thanksgiving dinner, or the Minneapolis cop, Derek Chauvin, who clamped his knee on the neck of George Floyd and suffocated him—on the very same day as the Central Park bird-watching incident, as it happens. Those people were racists. But a person reporting a threatening man? In the past, that was seen as acceptable behavior.[*2] Yet now, thanks to changing norms, that same behavior turns her into a monster, with shame leveled at her from around the world.

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Others listed a progressive catechism, avowing support for immigrants, science, feminism, the LGBTQ community, and so on. Many of the people posting those signs no doubt felt that they had “passed” the racism test. They never used improper language. They voted for candidates committed to equality. Many went out into the streets and marched following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Given those post-racial credentials, it seemed safe to assume that they had overcome raw racism and moved past the performative victimhood of white fragility. Having acknowledged America’s race problems, these progressive urbanites appeared to have reached the acceptance stage.

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To understand the situation from other perspectives, we should hold calm and nonpartisan truth and reconciliation proceedings of our own. There are signs of movement in that direction. With the rise of the #MeToo movement, women have started to emerge from shame and victimhood to tell their stories. They’re testifying. And the protests following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd advanced what could become a national, and even global, discussion of race and justice. These are a promising beginning, though still far from delivering a thorough and unbiased analysis of the forces at play. Only with greater openness and disclosure will the blueprint of the shame machines come into focus.

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

The “American economy” that the protesters sought to defend was that of tattoo parlors, barbershops, tanning salons, bars, and gyms.2 Dark money of the Koch brothers played its part from offstage.3 This was a strange form of class struggle that aligned enraged petty capitalists and right-wing oligarchs against corporate liberalism. And then a far deeper wound in American society was torn open. On May 25 a police officer in Minneapolis handcuffed a Black man, George Floyd, forced him to the ground, and knelt on his neck until he died.4 It was not in itself an unusual event. 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.

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By the summer of 2020, both had taken a turn for the better. The labor market situation was less dire than in the spring. The stock market was bouncing back. Even the least well-off Americans saw a significant improvement in their situation through to July. In one jaw-dropping press conference, Trump invoked the spirit of the murdered George Floyd, who, he claimed, would have taken satisfaction from the good job numbers.23 After all it was Black men, historically, who benefited most from lower unemployment. There were gloomsters and doomsayers. The Trump entourage were once again taking potshots at Jerome Powell and the Fed. “I do think Mr.

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Levitz, “Corporate America Loves Increasing Racial Inequality,” Intelligencer, June 16, 2020. 9. L. Seligman, “Esper Orders Hundreds of Troops from 82nd Airborne Home from D.C. Area,” Politico, June 4, 2020. 10. A. Nally, “The Curfews in Place in US Cities and States After the Death of Black Man George Floyd,” ABC News, June 2, 2020. 11. F. Finchelstein, “Trump’s Mount Rushmore Speech Is the Closest He’s Come to Fascism,” Foreign Policy, July 8, 2020. 12. D. Choi, “G7 Countries Fail to Deliver a Joint Statement Because US Insists on Saying ‘Wuhan Virus’ for the Coronavirus,” Insider, March 25, 2020. 13.

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

But then it is also the case that significant change-oriented movements are not likely to emerge except during periods of economic and social instability.”53 If this seems familiar, it is. This strategy has also largely played out in America’s streets and politics, as Antifa, BLM, and other Marxist-anarchist groups exploited both the initial economic collapse due to the coronavirus and the death of George Floyd. These groups and others have been key in fomenting violent rioting mostly but not exclusively in the inner cities, militant confrontations with law enforcement, the destruction of public monuments and targeting of a federal courthouse and the White House, occupying parts of cities, and assaulting and threatening citizens at restaurants and other public places.

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However, even before the 1619 Project, the media embraced and promoted Critical Race Theory, setting the stage for the violent riots that have engulfed numerous cities. Zack Goldberg, a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgia State University, undertook what may be the most extensive examination of media reporting on race and racism in recent years. “In the wake of the protests, riots, and general upheaval sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis,” wrote Goldberg, “the United States is experiencing a racial reckoning. The response from America’s elite liberal institutions suggests that many have embraced the ideology of the protesters. Here, for instance, is a sampling of the titles of opinion pieces and news stories published over the past month by the country’s two most influential newspapers, The Washington Post and The New York Times: “When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs” “Black Activists Wonder: Is Protesting Just Trendy for White People?”

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Indeed, as the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund reports, “across major US cities, tangible de-policing occurred June 2020 through February 2021 after anti-police protests, officials’ statements, and policy decisions, and as arrests and searches plummeted—homicides soared in the months since the George Floyd incident…. Last year [2020], the United States tallied over 20,000 murders—the highest total since 1995 and 4,000 more killings than in 2019. Preliminary FBI data for 2020 points to a 25% surge in murders—the largest single year increase since the agency began publishing uniform data in 1960.”7 Police officers are leaving and retiring in droves.8 And major cities are depopulating as people are now leaving in unprecedented numbers due, in significant part, to the increase in crime.9 Especially pernicious is the American Marxist’s control over our public school and college classrooms, with the full support and active role of the two national teachers’ unions—the National Education Association (NEA)10 and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)11—where your children and grandchildren are being taught to hate our country and are brainwashed with racist propaganda.

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

Because of the inordinate power bestowed on law enforcement, these abuses cause immense damage to society. This is why tens of millions of Americans, and people around the world, marched in the streets in the summer of 2020—amidst a global pandemic—to call for an end to police killings of Black people, and a reimagining of public safety. The street demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man whose neck was knelt on by a Minneapolis police officer for over eight minutes because he was suspected of buying cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, were estimated to be the largest in the nation’s history. Without a doubt, Americans want fundamental change.

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Armstrong was steeped in the department’s recalcitrant culture in the early 2000s. But he became an active member of the Oakland Black Officers Association, a loyal opposition group that raised concerns about racism within the department. Twenty years later as chief, Armstrong showed a willingness to work with the police commission and bring the OPD into the post–George Floyd era. Unlike prior chiefs, he acknowledged when the department was wrong. Armstrong’s most stunning admission came one year after the protests and civil unrest of 2020. He apologized for making false statements that justified police use of tear gas against a youth-led march. There hadn’t been anyone at the June 1 protest preparing to lob Molotov cocktails at police.

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However, following research and interventions, Oakland cops have been able to steadily dial back their most problematic enforcement activities that result in the greatest racial disparities. As a result, Oakland is one of the only law enforcement agencies in America that could actually show (before the George Floyd protests) that it took action to reduce racial profiling. While the Oakland PD undertook these reforms, its officers showed that they could still effectively fight violent crime. The city’s Ceasefire program, while it received attention at the highest levels from the mayor and police chief, played a key role in intervening in the social networks where feuds created the majority of gun violence afflicting the city.

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.’

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

On May 29, 2020, Twitter took the unprecedented step of slapping a warning label on one of Trump’s tweets. At 1 a.m., the president had posted a message on his Facebook and Twitter accounts about the protests roiling American cities. Americans had taken to the streets in response to the death of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old Black man whose neck was pinned under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer for over nine minutes for the crime of purchasing a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Trump wrote that he was concerned about the protests and was in contact with Minnesota governor Tim Walz, to offer the assistance of the U.S. military.

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Anthony, 266 Fearnow, Ben, 70–73, 76 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Cambridge Analytica and, 153–154 Facebook’s Instagram acquisition and, 230–231 investigation into Facebook and monopoly power, 241 Open Graph and, 199 possible fines in 2019, 225–227 principles for self-regulating of behavioral advertising, 46 privacy fine of Google in 2012, 225 suit against Facebook, 1–3 2009 concerns about user data, 66–68 Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s testimony before, 295–296 Floyd, George, Trump’s comments about looting after death of, 268–273 Flynn, Michael, 144 Forbes, 229 Ford, Christine Blasey, 200 Fortify Rights, 185 France, election of 2017 and, 118, 124–125 Franzese, Derek, 38 freedom of speech issues Christchurch, New Zealand, shooting videos, 237 civil rights and, 232, 247–251, 254–255, 257, 259–260, 273, 275–277 election campaign of 2016 and, 11–17, 83–86 Facebook’s global expansion without oversight, 179–182 Facebook’s News Feed algorithms and prioritizing of posts, 182–185 genocide in Myanmar and, 85, 169–173, 176, 178–182, 185–187, 293–294 George Floyd’s death and Trump’s comments on looting and shooting, 268–273 Holocaust deniers and, 205–207, 276–278, 281, 283–285 manipulated video of Pelosi and, 236–240 QAnon and Kenosha Guard and, 278–281 Swisher’s interview of Zuckerberg and, 205–207 Trump’s accusations of voter fraud in 2020 election and, 273–275, 290 Trump’s incitement of violence in January 2021 and later banning of, 286–292, 294 U.S.

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See freedom of speech issues Hemphill, Scott, 229–232, 261 Hertz, Jessica, 297 Hoefflinger, Mike, 55 Holocaust deniers, Facebook policy and, 205–207, 276–278, 281 Holt, Lester, 257–258 Horowitz, Ben, 191–192 Hughes, Chris New York Times op-ed, 219–222 on origins of Facebook, 253 Wu and, 231–232 Zuckerberg’s “pivot to privacy” and, 224–227 Ifill, Sherrilyn, 255 Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, of UN, 186 Information Technology Industry Council, 165 Infowars, 204 Instagram, 7, 8, 166, 193–194, 221, 222, 253, 259, 295 Facebook’s “pivot to privacy” and, 222–224 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and, 68 interoperability of messaging apps and, 227–228 Russian Internet Research Agency and, 133 Trump and, 267, 288–290, 292 Wu and Hemphill’s evaluation of Facebook’s acquisition of, 230–231 Zuckerberg’s broken commitment to founders of, 2, 194, 227–229 International Association of Privacy Professionals, 64–65 International Criminal Court, 185–186 Internet Association, 241 Internet Research Agency (IRA), of Russia, 130–134, 137, 143, 144–145 Internet.org, 175–177 iSEC Partners, 101 James, Letitia, 1–2, 3 “JJDIDTIEBUCKLE” (leadership principle), 246 Jobs, Steve, 48, 51, 174 Jones, Alex, 82, 204–205, 206 Kalanick, Travis, 207 Kang-Xing Jin, 51 Kaplan, Joel, 197, 241, 260, 276, 278 Biden administration and, 297–298 Cambridge Analytica and, 150 election of 2016 and, 81, 108–109, 111–112, 123, 125 Kavanaugh hearings and, 200–203 manipulated video of Pelosi and, 236, 238 personality of, 14 political contributions and, 164–165 Sandberg and, 14, 87 Trump administration and, 161, 243–247 Trump and COVID-19, 267–268, 269 Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate speech issues, 11–15 Kaplan, Laura Cox, 200 Kavanaugh, Ashley Estes, 200 Kavanaugh, Brett, 200–203 Kaye, David, 174–175 Kellogg, Hansen law firm, 295 Kendall, Tim, 36–37, 51 Kennedy, John, 153 Kenosha Guard, 279–281 Kimmel, Jimmy, 166 King, Bernice, 254, 259 Kirkpatrick, David, 114–115 Klobuchar, Amy, 153 Kogan, Aleksandr, 152–153, 155 Koum, Jan, 194, 229 Kraff, Brian, 41 Krieger, Mike, 228–229 Kushner, Jared, 15, 243–244, 256 Kustomer, acquired by Facebook, 299 Le Pen, Marine, 118 Lean In (Sandberg), 79, 127, 157–158 Leibowitz, Jonathan, 67, 154, 199 Leone, Isabella, 131 Lewandowski, Corey, 112–113 Libra (blockchain currency), 241–242, 256–257, 300 LinkedIn, 175 London, Eric, 155 Losse, Katherine, 49, 50, 124 Lynton, Michael, 56 Ma, Olivia, 26 Mac, Ryan, 272 Macron, Emmanuel, 118, 124–125, 219, 221, 237 Martin, Jenny Beth, 81 Martin, Kevin, 80, 112 Mauer, Greg, 80, 112, 140 Mayer, Marissa, 102–103 McKinsey and Company, 41, 50 McNamee, Roger, 44, 232 Mercer, Robert, 149 MeToo movement, 150, 200–201, 203 Microsoft, 31, 165, 174, 175, 241 advertising and, 51, 53, 54 Modi, Narenda, 106 Montgomery, Kathryn, 58, 60 Moran, Ned, 95–98, 100–101, 105, 129–132, 147 Moskovitz, Dustin, 31 Mossberg, Walt, 43 Mosseri, Adam, 114, 228, 261 Moveon.org, 59 Mubarak, Hosni, 157 Mueller, Robert, 147 Murphy, Laura, 248, 249 Myanmar, hate speech against Rohingya and, 85, 169–173, 176, 178–182, 185–187, 293–294 Narendra, Divya, 21 “net neutrality,” 230 Netscape, 25, 52 New Republic, The, 287 New York Times, 88, 272, 285 Cambridge Analytica and, 149 Chester on behavioral advertising and, 59 Clegg’s op-ed in, 240 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and, 1 Hughes’ op-ed in, 219–222 Myanmar and, 186 Russian election interference and, 130, 215 New Yorker, The, 66 Newsom, Gavin, 266 Next One Billion project, of Facebook, 176–177 Nielsen, 56 Nuland, William, 147 Nuñez, Michael, 70–79 Oath Keepers, 287–288 Obama, Barack and administration of, 11, 67, 82, 118, 121, 138, 146, 184, 230, 236, 248, 251, 252, 255 Observer, 149 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 257 Oculus VR headset, 80, 81, 190 O’Donnell, Nora, 157–159 Olivan, Javier, 194, 195, 260 Onavo, 195–196, 260 O’Neill, Catlin, 140, 236, 297 Only the Paranoid Survive (Grove), 192 Open Society Foundation, 108 Option B (Sandberg), 79, 258 Overstock, 59–60 Page, Larry, 43, 44, 65, 192 Palihapitiya, Chamath, 51 Parakilas, Sandy, 152, 164 Parikh, Jay, 9, 10 Parker, Sean, 26, 28, 44, 221 Parscale, Brad, 15, 247 Pearlman, Leah, 62–63 Pelosi, Nancy, 233–234, 297 Facebook and manipulated video of, 234–240 Pence, Mike, 290 Philippines, 85, 106, 177, 291 Phillips Exeter Academy, 19–20 Pichai, Sundar, 198 “Pizzagate,” 278 Podesta, John, 100 politics, and Facebook Biden administration and, 286, 296–298 Clegg’s policy of not fact-checking political ads, 249–252 Facebook’s PAC for political contributions, 164–165 liberal favoritism at Facebook, 12–13, 74–75, 78 political ads on Facebook, 212–214 Trump administration and Facebook executives, 243–247 see also election of 2016; election of 2020; freedom of speech issues Price, Bill, 89–92 Pritchett, Lant, 41 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 182–183 Proud Boys, 288 Putin, Vladimir, 121, 123 QAnon, 278–279, 281 Red-State Secession group, 288 Reich, Robert, 226 Reynolds, Tom, 141, 145 Rice, Brian, 141 Robinson, Rashad, 249, 251, 276–277 Rose, Dan, 44, 45, 46, 51 Rosen, Guy, 195, 260, 285 Rosensweig, Dan, 43–44 Rubio, Marco, 161 Russian disinformation, on Facebook platform, 3, 282 Congressional interest in, 127–128, 133–134, 139–145 Facebook board of director’s interest in, 134–137 Facebook employees and, 190 Facebook public relations team and, 208–215 Facebook’s security team’s investigation of, 117–127 French election of 2017 and, 118, 121 Russian Internet Research Agency and, 130–134, 137, 143, 144–145 Sandberg and, 215–217 U.S. election campaign of 2016 and, 95–101, 105–109, 124–125, 248 Zuckerberg and, 196, 204, 215–217 Ryan, Paul, 78 Sai Sitt Thway Aung, 169 Sandberg, Michelle, 43, 44 Sandberg, Sheryl backlash to Lean In and, 157–158 behavioral advertising and data collecting, at Facebook, 2–3, 45–46, 51–56, 59, 60–63, 67, 87, 225 Biden administration and, 297 books by, 79, 127, 157–158, 258 Cambridge Analytica and, 153, 154–156, 159, 160–161 Capital Building storming in January 2021 and, 286–287 Congress and, 153, 170–171, 197–200 Couric’s interview of, 258–260 cyber security and, 97–98, 210 diversity and gender equity and, 50, 202–203, 273 education and professional positions before Facebook, 39–43, 46–47, 50, 52–53 election of 2016 and conservatives, 82–83 election security and, 210 Facebook and privacy, 67 Facebook’s earnings call in 2021 and, 298–299 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and, 45, 295, 296 Goldberg’s death and, 79–81, 233 hate speech issues and, 11–14, 275–277 Hillary Clinton and, 79, 111–112, 243–244 Instagram and WhatsApp and, 228–229 Kaplan and, 14, 87 Kaplan and Kavanaugh hearings and, 201–202 manipulated video of Pelosi and Facebook debates about, 234–240 meets Zuckerberg, 4 Nuñez’s reporting and, 79 organizational changes in 2018 and, 194 parents and siblings of, 41, 44 Pelosi and, 233–234 personal life of, 41, 43, 258, 295 personality of, 2, 45, 199–200 as protective of her image, 4 reaction to emotional contagion research, 183 response to criticisms of Facebook, 156–157 responsible growth and, 86 Russian disinformation investigation and, 118–119, 120, 121, 122–123, 126, 127–128, 134, 136, 139, 143–144, 147, 196–197 Schrage and, 87–88, 89–92 Stamos and, 10–11, 103–104 Zuckerberg hires, 43–48 Zuckerberg’s working relationship with, 54–57, 86–87, 190, 260–261 Sanders, Bernie, 100, 132, 140, 221, 226 Sandy Hook Elementary School, shooting at, 82, 157, 204–205 Sanghvi, Ruchi, 32, 34, 274 Saverin, Eduardo, 30 Scavino, Dan, 243 Schatz, Brian, 166, 236 Schiff, Adam, 140, 142–144 Schissler, Matt, 171–173, 177–182 Schmidt, Eric, 42, 44, 46, 62, 192, 207 Schrage, Elliot Definers Public Affairs and, 216–217 Russian disinformation and, 119, 123, 125–126, 134–135 Sandberg and, 87–88, 89–92 Schumer and, 66–67, 88 Trump’s 2015 anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate speech issues, 12, 13 Schroepfer, Mike, 194, 291 Schumer, Chuck, 66–67, 68, 88 Scott, Kim, 47 Secureworks, 98 Segall, Laurie, 160 Sidley Austin law firm, 295 Smith, Matthew, 185–187, 294 Snapchat, 240, 253 Snowden, Edward, 8 Sorkin, Andrew Ross, 156 Soros, George, 108, 156–157, 215–216, 226 South Park Commons, 274 Sparapani, Tim, 65, 66 Sperling, Gene, 248 Stamos, Alex background before Facebook, 101–103 election of 2020 and, 283–284 investigation and report on Russian meddling and disinformation, 97, 100, 103–107, 116, 117–127, 130, 132, 145–147 2015 report on security of user’s information, 7–11 2018 Facebook reorganization and, 194 as “warranty canary,” 103, 134, 145 Standard Oil, Facebook’s parallel with, 230 Steyer, Jim, 89, 91, 232, 261, 275–276 Stop the Hate for Profit, 275 “Stop the Steal” groups, 288, 292 Stretch, Colin Cambridge Analytica and, 150 Russian disinformation and, 97, 100, 107, 119–120, 125, 135, 144–145, 146, 147 Students Against Facebook News Feed, 34, 35 Sullivan, Joe, 103–104 Summers, Lawrence, 39-42, 47 Swisher, Kara, 29–30, 43, 203–208 Systrom, Kevin, 194, 228–229 Talking Back to Facebook (Steyer), 89, 91 TechCrunch, 64, 65 TechCrunch Disrupt conference, 88, 174 Thiel, Peter Facebook’s board of directors and, 30, 81, 86, 202 Gawker lawsuit and, 202 Zuckerberg and, 25, 29, 31, 206, 244, 256 ThreatConnect, 98 Tiger, Roi, 195 TikTok, 240, 245, 253 Tillery, Kristopher, 20 Time magazine, 127, 177 TPG Capital, 89 Traynham, Robert, 271 Trump, Donald J., 213, 221, 232 Access Hollywood tape and, 100 accusations of voter fraud in 2020 election and, 273–275, 283–285, 290 accused of inciting violence in January 2021 and banned from Facebook, 286–292, 294 anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate speech and, 11–17, 85, 249 comments after George Floyd’s death, 268–273 Facebook and COVID-19 and, 267–268 hackers and 2016 campaign, 105–106, 140 meeting with Facebook executives, 161, 243–247 number of Facebook followers and interactions with, 244, 283 Pelosi and, 234, 235 on Twitter, 232, 244–245, 268–271, 276 Zuckerberg and, 256 Twitter, 15, 37, 63, 75, 98, 231, 240, 253, 287 Cambridge Analytica and, 153 election interference and, 98, 142, 144–145 privacy and, 56, 63–64 Sandberg and, 197–198 Trump and, 232, 244–245, 268–271, 276 Ukraine, Bidens and, 251 United Kingdom, Brexit and, 154 Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 61 Vargas, Jose Antonio, 66 Verge, the, 272 Villarreal, Ryan, 73, 76 Vladeck, David, 199 Vox, 154, 166 Walk Away campaign, 292 Wall Street Journal, 1, 43, 47–48, 88 Walz, Tim, 268 Warner, Mark, 127–128, 132, 246 Warren, Elizabeth, 221, 226, 242, 259, 295 Washington Post, 24, 26–29, 30, 47, 84, 141, 164–165, 234, 236, 272 Wasserman Schultz, Debbie, 100 Waters, Maxine, 256–257 WeChat, 175, 245 Weedon, Jen, 108–109, 129, 147 Weibo, 175 Wexler, Nu, 83 What You Do Is Who You Are (Horowitz), 191–192 WhatsApp, 71–72, 166, 193–194, 221 data security and, 8, 222 Facebook’s acquisition of, 196, 295 Federal Trade Commission and, 68 interoperability of messaging apps and, 227 “pivot to privacy” and, 222–224 Wu and Hemphill’s evaluation of Facebook’s acquisition of, 230–231 Zuckerberg’s broken commitment to founders of, 2, 194, 227–229 Whetstone, Rachel, 204, 206–207 Wicker, Roger, 162 Williams, Maxine, 272–273 Willner, Dave, 92–93 WilmerHale law firm, 160, 197 Winklevoss, Cameron, 21 Winklevoss, Tyler, 21 Wirathu, Ashin, 172 Women@Google, 50 World Anti-Doping Agency, data stolen from, 99 Wu, Tim, 229–232, 261 Xi Jingping, 176 Yahoo, 8, 26–27 global expansion and, 42, 175 Goldberg and, 43–44 offer to buyout Facebook declined by Zuckerman, 30–32, 44 Stamos and, 101–103 Yang, Jerry, 42 Zients, Jeff, 297 Zuboff, Shoshana, 3, 61 Zucked (McNamee), 232 Zuckerberg, Ethan, 163 Zuckerberg, Mark Beacon feature and, 57–63 Black Lives Matter memo and, 71–73 Cambridge Analytica and, 16, 153, 154–156, 160, 204 coding at Phillips Exeter, 19–20 “company over country” and, 124 cyber security and, 97–98 decline of Yahoo’s buyout offer, 30–32, 44 earnings call in 2021 and, 298–299 election of 2016, 113–116 election security and, 210 employees’ internal conversations and, 70 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and, 295–296 free speech issues and, 74–75, 252–261, 263, 269, 281 goals of global expansion and end of economic inequality, 173–177 Goldberg’s death and, 79 hate speech and disinformation issues, 11, 193, 204–208, 275–277 hearing regarding Libra and, 256–257 Kaplan and Kavanaugh hearings and, 201–202 Kaplan’s organization of dinners with politicians, 243–247 manipulated video of Pelosi and, 236–240 meets Sandberg, 4 News Feed and apology for, 32–36 Nuñez’s reporting and, 79 personal privacy and image guarded by, 4, 65–66 personality of, 29–30, 45–46, 48–49 philanthropy of, 174, 262 “pivot to privacy” and reactions to, 222–227, 235 plans for Facebook’s future, 299–300 portrayed in attorneys general complaint, 2 public opinion and, 257–258 reaction to Hughes’ New York Times op-ed, 219–222 reaction to Stamos’ 2015 report on data security, 7, 8–10 reorganization of Facebook in 2018 and, 193–194 responsible growth and, 86 reversing of promises made when acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp, 2, 194, 227–229 Russian disinformation investigation and, 117, 118–119, 120, 121, 126, 134, 136–137, 139, 142, 147, 196, 204 Sandberg’s hiring and, 43–47 testimony before Congress, 150–151, 153, 160–167, 210 Trump banned by, 290–292, 294 “wartime” leadership philosophy and, 189–193, 207 working relationship with Sandberg, 54–57, 86–87, 190, 260–261 yearly goals of, 261–263 About the Authors Sheera Frenkel covers cybersecurity from San Francisco for the New York Times.

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

I’d catch glimpses of his goats, his turkeys, his horses, Willow’s daughter, the hay in the back of his pickup truck. The sun would flare into the picture and you’d know he was on the move, impatient, restless. Everyone else’s Zoom image was static, but Matt’s was a live-action video. I sat in my home office in New York and wished I were there. With the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis later that spring, things around the country got worse. New York was among the many cities rocked by protests starting at the end of May. My students joined some of the marches, as did journalist friends who got roughed up by police. A colleague watched as a peaceful march from Brooklyn “devolved into pandemonium” in lower Manhattan when looters swooped in.

…

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.

…

In addition to the deaths, it said there were 420 known infections in the six counties of the valley, 98 of which had resulted in people seeking medical care. I handed the phone to him, and he read it. “Okay, well, I believe you about this,” he said. But there was so much disbelief. A friend of the Grubers’ had shared a post on Facebook that purported to demonstrate that the George Floyd video was faked. There was broad support for Trump’s threats to send troops to cities such as Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, which had “lost control.” Matt Little, to my surprise, told me that the pandemic was intentional. Did he mean that China had released the virus on purpose? 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.

No One Succeeds Alone by Robert Reffkin

Albert Einstein, coronavirus, COVID-19, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, market design, pattern recognition, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, young professional

But in cases like President Trump’s executive order in early 2017 barring entry into the United States by people from certain countries with Muslim-majority populations, often called the “Muslim ban,” the White supremacist and neo-Nazi rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, the separation of immigrant children from their families at the border, and the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, I chose to share my personal views with the entire Compass community and the public. When I’m in that rocking chair in thirty years, I’m pretty sure I’ll be proud of those decisions to speak up. Twenty-two items from the bucket list I wrote at age twenty-two When I was having a hard time getting over the breakup with my college sweetheart, I decided to dream my way out of the pain by envisioning a positive future.

…

I wasn’t going to let anyone stop me from living my dreams. For two decades, because of the type of person that I am, that approach worked fairly well for me. No, it wasn’t always easy, but I was so focused on not being consumed by negativity that I learned to keep moving no matter what. Then George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis and the entire country saw that heartbreaking video. The protests that sprung up across the nation and the world, and the moral reckoning that followed, were unlike anything I’d ever seen in my life. For the first time, it felt like non-Black people finally saw that there was real racism in the world, that they genuinely cared about the suffering of Black people, and that they wanted to do something about it.

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

We are a country that killed hundreds of thousands of people through our own unique blend of incompetence and irrationality; a place where we condemned our children to a much lengthier period of trauma from their distorted and disorienting reality. A few months into the pandemic, a police officer in Minneapolis killed a forty-six-year-old Black man named George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for over eight minutes. Protests started to pick up around us. The COVID-shuttered shops on the main artery of our Venice neighborhood were boarded up. People painted murals and tributes on the shops, pictures of Black people who’d been killed by the police—George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin. I walked by the pictures with my masked daughters. My older daughter asked who the people were.

…

It felt, in that moment, as if I had completed some transformation that had been taking place over the last few years, a brief flicker of experience for a privileged person like me to learn what it feels like to hate the country where they live. The next day, I heard shouts outside my house and wandered in the direction of the same street where the soldiers had been. A march for Black lives was moving slowly, chanting the names of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. As I fell into the crowd, I felt my identity being subsumed into a collective, voices chanting in unison. I looked at the Black faces in the crowd, people who had far more reason than I did to be angry, to feel hatred when it came to America. What an extraordinary thing it is, I thought, that they are not simply giving up on this place.

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

Technology connected us during isolation, provided care and interaction for the elderly and the sick, assisted the transition to remote work, helped mobilize civil rights activism, kept live records of systemic abuse by law enforcement and private corporations, and made those records known. The mobile capture and widespread social media dissemination of the video of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minnesota police officer are but one example. Data mining also helped policymakers and scientists assess risks, monitor compliance with shelter-in-place ordinances, and accelerate the race for mass Covid-19 vaccination and herd immunity. When the application of technology fails—as with racially biased facial recognition algorithms, for instance—these failures can be better exposed than past wrongs that were hidden from sight and not recorded.

…

For example, in 2020, Goldman Sachs announced that it would not support companies in going public unless their boards are diverse, with a focus on women. Lampkin envisions this kind of diversity scoring as the equivalent of U.S. News and World Report’s annual college and university rankings. She says that since the killing of George Floyd in particular, and amid the twenty-first-century global movement for racial justice more broadly, employers have promised more diversity. But, strikingly, BlendScore found companies that have made statements about hiring more diverse employees to be less diverse than those that did not. Lampkin recently moved from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C., to be closer to public initiatives for more data collection and transparency.

…

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. In the month after Floyd’s death, 37 percent of Americans who use social media reported posting or sharing content about race or racial equality.5 With digital connectivity, organizers leading the movement have been able to reach and engage people around the world.

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

But to the extent that we can clear a path for the small, courageous act of moving to opportunity, we have an obligation to remove that barrier. 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.

…

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.

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

At worst, this results in the breakdown of social order as citizens question and wilfully break the laws officers are employed to enforce. At best, citizens disengage from the police – they refuse to cooperate with inquiries, to come forward as witnesses and to report crimes. Both of these responses were seen across the US in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020. Trust in police and the corresponding willingness to engage can shape the hate crime count. Even when someone knows they have been a victim of a hate crime, reporting it to the police is dependent on trust. In Russia, Alexei never reported the attacks he had suffered because he feared further persecution, and even if he had it is doubtful the police would have taken the report seriously.

…

Many cases have attracted widespread news attention, including those of Frank Jude Jr and Lovell Harris in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2004, Sean Bell in New York City, New York in 2006, Oscar Grant in Oakland, California in 2009, Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in 2012, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky in March 2020, George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May 2020, Tony McDade in Tallahassee, Florida in May 2020, and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Georgia in June 2020. Research by Professor Matthew Desmond and colleagues at Harvard, Yale and Oxford Universities noted that in the US there are clear racial disparities in police use of force.

…

A year later a Department of Justice investigation found the Ferguson Police Department had engaged in misconduct by discriminating against African Americans. As a result of the shooting, Obama committed to spend $75 million on police body-worn cameras to provide more evidence in future trials of this nature. The police killing of George Floyd by strangulation in Minneapolis in 2020 resulted in the officer concerned being charged with unintentional second-degree murder, and in violence-inciting tweets from President Trump, demonstrations globally, and the worst widespread civil unrest in the US since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968.

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

They feel the lack of protection from those sworn to defend them, and they recognize the conflict of interest between the media and the government. They are waking up to the disaster that people face with the destruction of the healthcare system. They know about the water in Flint, Michigan. They watched the video of Eric Garner being choked to death by a group of psychopathic cops. Then they watched the video of George Floyd being choked to death in exactly the same way – and being told that the cause of death was not asphyxiation. They look up and see the Chemtrails being sprayed on them. They know people that lost their houses to the banks after the crash in 2008 as they are losing their own homes now. They are in an ever-downward spiral of debt because of the continuous printing of dollars by the Federal Reserve Printing Press.

…

America has been turned against itself, just like Clower & Piven theorized that it would, but the amplification of the division by the corporate media was probably something that they could only dream of. And nowhere has it been more evident than in the convenient changing-of-the- narrative than circa May 2020; George Floyd’s death by Covid-19 and the start of The Great 21st Century Race War – turning family against family, friends against friends, and black & white against white & black. Division By All Means The clearest division of the public is through skin color and ethnicity, though these days the country is appearing more and more homogenized.

…

We’ve certainly practiced the scenario once or twice or a thousand times…Let’s shoot those who loot, they react and then we can accelerate the passing of gun control legislation to be followed by the abolishment of personal gun ownership and a campaign of gun confiscation. Want war? Create a martyr. It has worked for hundreds of years. And so George Floyd, martyr of the people, became a homicide victim three times over: First, his livelihood was murdered by the people who executed the Coronavirus plandemic when Minnesota’s governor issued a stay-at-home order causing him to lose his job as a bouncer at a restaurant. Then he was suffocated and silenced by the Controllers’ armed and dangerous police puppets.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Almost every important political, social, and economic movement began in a city. Even many of the most effective environmental groups were founded by city slickers—from the Sierra Club to Greenpeace. And it was in America’s cities that protesters gathered to demand policing reforms after the murder of George Floyd. Urbanization will continue apace in developing countries. In fact, by 2030, they will be home to some 80% of the world’s megacities. But in the developed world, urbanization has probably peaked. In the United States, the share of the urban population is currently 83%. It may creep up to 89% by 2050, but the share seems to be approaching a natural limit.

…

Most striking of all might be the emotional and psychological impact of this disparity: one-third of African Americans say they personally know someone who has died of Covid-19, compared to only 9% of Whites. Grief, despair, and growing awareness of the pandemic’s disproportionately harsh impact on Black America may have contributed to the upswell of activism after George Floyd’s killing. Racism’s contribution to inequality goes back centuries, but recent structural shifts are also fueling it. For one thing, the financial benefits of a college education have risen steadily as the economies of the industrial world become more digital and service-oriented. America has simply not found ways to move poor bright children up the educational ladder.

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

Amazon wanted to measure the temperatures of its workers. Amazon didn’t appear to violate US sanctions. But the Bureau of Industry and Security warned that “transactions of any nature with listed entities carry a ‘red flag’ and recommends that U.S. companies proceed with caution with respect to such transactions.”16 [ ] George Floyd’s death in May 2020 ignited hundreds of police brutality protests in Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Washington, DC, and elsewhere during the summer. In the middle of a public debate about how technology could fight a pandemic, the controversy accelerated over how police might be using it. American technology giants faced a public backlash and government concerns that these technologies were prone to discriminate against minorities, and were being deployed for nefarious means.

…

Selam Gebredikan, “For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power,” New York Times, March 30, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/world/europe/coronavirus-governments-power.html. 16. Krystal Hu, “Exclusive: Amazon Turns to Chinese Firms on U.S. 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.

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

Not only did Covid-19 change the way people went about their daily business, but the politics of the virus turned folks against one another in a way beyond partisanship—and how anyone could politicize an indiscriminate killer and crippler like this bug was beyond the understanding of most of the shipbuilders. 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.

…

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. They are hurting. I’ve received e-mails, and I know it’s not a good situation. I know that for many of them, they may not have somebody to talk to.

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

Indeed, “in March 2019 she pushed through a resolution that penalized educators who displayed racist behaviour towards Sheedi students,” the Shapers wrote,66 and “she is also leading a protest resolution in the provincial assembly against anti-Black racism in the US, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.” It seems quite obvious that Qambrani's fight against Sheedi discrimination, together with various grassroots movements will be a long one, with ups and downs, given the systemic nature of the discrimination they face. But one important lesson is that hers and other struggles for social justice are accelerated when minorities or other advocacy groups get a seat at the table.

…

Representatives can help point to the issues minorities or other groups face and help establish credibility in their fight for justice. Reuters, the international press agency, for example, in June 2020 reported on the protest resolution Qambrani submitted in the Sindh parliament against a “wave of racism” after the killing of African American George Floyd in the US. Similarly, our Shapers wrote an article for the World Economic Forum's Internet Agenda, again hailing Qambrani as a community leader and drawing parallels between the Black Lives Matter fight for social justice in the US and that of the Sheedi in Pakistan. In both cases, Qambrani's status as MP helped establish the credibility of the article and with it, the cause it was about

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

Indeed, “in March 2019 she pushed through a resolution that penalized educators who displayed racist behaviour towards Sheedi students,” the Shapers wrote,66 and “she is also leading a protest resolution in the provincial assembly against anti-Black racism in the US, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.” It seems quite obvious that Qambrani's fight against Sheedi discrimination, together with various grassroots movements will be a long one, with ups and downs, given the systemic nature of the discrimination they face. But one important lesson is that hers and other struggles for social justice are accelerated when minorities or other advocacy groups get a seat at the table.

…

Representatives can help point to the issues minorities or other groups face and help establish credibility in their fight for justice. Reuters, the international press agency, for example, in June 2020 reported on the protest resolution Qambrani submitted in the Sindh parliament against a “wave of racism” after the killing of African American George Floyd in the US. Similarly, our Shapers wrote an article for the World Economic Forum's Internet Agenda, again hailing Qambrani as a community leader and drawing parallels between the Black Lives Matter fight for social justice in the US and that of the Sheedi in Pakistan. In both cases, Qambrani's status as MP helped establish the credibility of the article and with it, the cause it was about

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

“But we have a modern-day image of what 20 percent unemployment looks like. It looks like Englewood on the South Side of Chicago.” It was in this context that a third crisis boiled over: broad social unrest broke out after a white Minneapolis police officer was videoed pressing his knee on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man who pled for his life before dying. Floyd’s May 25 death, which a jury would rule a murder the next year, led to protests across the country. Some turned violent. The wrenching divisiveness of 2020 overshadowed a surprisingly good jobs report that came out on Friday, June 5. Employers had added a record 2.5 million jobs, defying economists’ predictions of 8 million additional job losses.

…

The unexpectedly early turnaround in hiring was the shot in the arm his reelection bid desperately needed. After the meeting broke up, the advisers joined Trump under the hot sun at a Rose Garden ceremony lasting nearly an hour, where the president addressed the myriad crises facing the country. At one point, he bizarrely invoked the deceased George Floyd. “Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying, This is a great thing that’s happening for our country. This is a great day for him,” said Trump. “It’s a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality.” Date 2020 Covid-19 Cases Covid-19 Deaths Dow Jones Average VIX Fear Index Friday, June 5 1,895,109 105,128 27,111 (↑ 829) 24.52 (↓1.29) Back to the boardroom Four days later, on June 9, Powell sat down at the end of the massive table inside the Fed’s boardroom to open a two-day meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.

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

The consolidation of spatial carcerality through prisons and borders correlates with wealth concentration, dismantling of public services, and the simultaneous manufacturing and disciplining of surplus populations. Contemporary Black-led abolitionist uprisings in response to the cold-blooded police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others expose the crisis of legitimacy for the state, capitalism, and carceral regimes. Police, prisons, and borders operate through a shared logic of immobilization, containing oppressed communities under racial capitalism. Notably, the word “mob,” a criminalizing vocabulary used to link large groups of poor, racialized people to social disorder, including in inner cities and at the border, derives from the word “mobility.”7 Even as explicitly racist prohibitions on people of certain races or national origins have been removed from most states’ immigration policies in an era of alleged “color blindness,” mobility continues to be restricted and contained along color, class, and caste lines.

…

The entanglements of border formation in imperial expansion, anti-Black enslavement, and Indigenous elimination are mirrored in our contemporary moment with border agents patrolling alongside the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, policing Black neighborhoods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, repressing Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock, and using counterinsurgency tactics, including the snatching of protestors in Portland in July 2020, to suppress uprisings across the US after the cold-blooded police murder of George Floyd. War veterans, in fact, comprise one-third of Border Patrol agents.80 This is not a coincidence; there is a homology to domestic and foreign conquest. The formation of the US–Mexico border and immigration as a race-making regime cannot be analyzed outside the reciprocal processes of empire building and genocidal violence.

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

Breonna had been up late playing video games, like I had so many nights, trying to ward off stress. But she didn’t have the chance to wake up and reach for her phone on her nightstand like I had. What made even less sense was that, despite its incomprehensibility, the story faded from the news. Seventy-three days later, George Floyd was murdered in Minnesota when a police officer kneeled on his neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. This time, in part because the heinousness was caught on video, the story did not fade from the news. It seemed that because we’d been in the relative quiet of quarantine, we were finally able to make room for this kind of story.

…

Protests broke out around the world in opposition to the systemic racism that results in Black Americans’ dying at the hands of police at twice the rate of white Americans. It’s the same systemic racism that results in the percentage of incarcerated Black people being almost three times higher than their percentage of the U.S. population. For Hispanic people, it’s almost one and a half times higher. The day George Floyd died, a white woman in New York’s Central Park called the police to report that a Black man was harassing her. He was simply out bird-watching. Twitter lit up in outrage. In response, a herpetologist helped create #BlackBirdersWeek. It went viral; thousands of Black people posted pictures of themselves out in nature, binoculars in hand.

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

Sweeney would make regular trips down to the Bronx to run errands for him, and sometimes we’d go together, arriving home upstate ashen-faced and exhausted, and constantly feeling like we were awaiting his death. What does it matter to make something good, if it’s available to only a few? We were repeating the same sorts of structures that we’d decried. A suburb. A closed door. A pastoral exit. Then Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were murdered by the police, and the country rose up in protest. And because so many people didn’t have jobs at that moment, people made it their job to sustain the protest against police for as long as it would take. And maybe because so many people, some reluctantly, were finally watching the system they thought just might work reveal itself as the monster it always had been right in front of their eyes, this moment of emergency didn’t require that everyone protesting be on the same page, didn’t require that everyone have the same impetus and analysis, only the same enemy.

…

And when I say utopian thought, I guess, by this point, I just mean establishing modes of living that you think are alternatives to the death machine, for however long they last. Though “longevity has its place,” few things should ever last very long. In an essay by Keno Evol following the conviction of Derek Chauvin for George Floyd’s murder, which itself was immediately preceded by the police murder of Duante Wright, he says, “In organizing circles, one could say—and historians often do—that the history of the left is the history of failed utopias. To be a utopian thinker is to be one interested in the study of failure. The poet often has to say to the historian: There were friendships at that site of failure, at the rebellion that didn’t succeed.

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 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. And of course, for writers: not only by making it far harder for journalists to make a living, but by eviscerating a revenue source that once subsidized the birth of so many books.

…

While news co-ops have real potential to help journalism, we don’t think advertising should be the main funding source going forward. We alluded to its failures earlier—like the way brands, trying to avoid having their ads associated with “controversial” content, blocked terms like Black Lives Matter, protest, and anything involving queer and trans communities. A Vice investigation found news content relating to George Floyd’s death was monetized at a rate 57 percent lower than other news.9 In this environment, anodyne content pays much more than reportage on vital social issues, making the latter even harder to sustain. Subscriptions can’t provide the whole answer either. As Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson has pointed out, paywalls have been inadvertently contributing to the fake news epidemic: “The truth is paywalled but the lies are free.”10 One alternative is to squeeze news funding out of the platforms themselves.

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

By the end of the year it was clear that identity politics had become the consensus ideology of the left wing of the Democratic Party, not just the most extreme elements. Some of the Democratic candidates openly embraced identity politics. Others were more moderate and probably harbored reservations, but no major candidate for the nomination challenged identity politics aggressively. When the protests and riots over the death of George Floyd erupted in the summer of 2020, identity politics demonstrated how far it had spread and how much influence it wielded not only over the Democratic Party and academia, but over corporate America too, as famous companies scrambled to condemn their own White privilege and promised to make amends.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

And just as we saw that fear might offer some upside to pandemic response, I suppose denial might also offer some advantages—for instance, by allowing people to go about their lives despite the threat.61 A similar sort of wishful thinking emerged during the profound protests after the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. The forty-six-year-old black man was already handcuffed and on the ground when a police officer knelt on his neck until he died. This, coming on the heels of many similar cases, led to massive protests erupting around the nation.62 In large part, these were due to pent-up anger about racial inequality, but the high levels of unemployment, the long periods people had been cooped up at home, the emotionally demanding experiences (including deaths of loved ones) that many people had suffered, and the disillusionment with the president all surely facilitated the protests.

…

Segalov, “‘The Parallels between Coronavirus and Climate Crisis Are Obvious,’” The Guardian, May 4, 2020. 60 J. Bert, A Historical Relation of the Plague at Marseille in the Year 1720, trans. Anne Plumptre, London: Billingsley, 1721. 61 D.D.P. Johnson and J.H. Fowler, “The Evolution of Overconfidence,” Nature 2011; 477: 317–320. 62 D.B. Taylor, “George Floyd Protests: A Timeline,” New York Times, July 10, 2020; W. Lowery, “Why Minneapolis Was the Breaking Point,” The Atlantic, June 12, 2020. 63 D. Diamond, “Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance,” Politico, June 4, 2020. 64 M. Bebinger et al., “New Coronavirus Hot Spots Emerge across South and in California, As Northeast Slows,” NPR, June 5, 2020. 65S.

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

Yet 9/11 led to the creation of a new federal department, massive surveillance of citizens and hardening of public facilities, and two wars which killed more than twice as many Americans as the number who died in 2001, together with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.24 To take another low-death/high-fear hazard, rampage killings in American schools claim around 35 victims a year, compared with about 16,000 routine police-blotter homicides.25 Yet American schools have implemented billions of dollars of dubious safety measures, like installing bulletproof whiteboards and arming teachers with pepperball guns, while traumatizing children with terrifying active-shooter drills. In 2020 the brutal murder of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, by a white police officer led to massive protests and the sudden adoption of a radical academic doctrine, Critical Race Theory, by universities, newspapers, and corporations. These upheavals were driven by the impression that African Americans are at serious risk of being killed by the police.

…

Schelling 1960, p. 90; see also Tooby, Cosmides, & Price 2006. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 as public outrages: Mueller 2006. 28. Chwe 2001; De Freitas, Thomas, et al. 2019; Schelling 1960. 29. Baumeister, Stillwell, & Wotman 1990. 30. Hostility to data on public outrages: Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Mueller 2006; George Floyd killing, Blackwell 2020. 31. Made popular by the Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, but first used by the anthropologist Luther Gerlach. Thanks to Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations. 32. For an extended argument of this kind regarding terrorism, see Mueller 2006. 33. https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/919921745464905728?

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 news organizations that had already lost the majority of their advertising revenue to Silicon Valley were now losing what little remained as a result of the halt in commerce—to try to survive, many furloughed their entire newsrooms, on rotating shifts, leaving them understaffed to cover first one huge story, the pandemic, and then another, the protests over George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis. By August, things had grown so dire that one chain of papers, Tribune, announced it was shuttering its physical newsrooms for good at, among others, The New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel, and Allentown Morning Call, the newspaper that had broken the 2011 story about workers passing out from heat exhaustion at the local Amazon warehouse.

…

But then they adapted: Pencil Cup saw an unmet demand and started delivering janitorial and sanitation supplies to all the businesses and families encountering empty shelves in stores and price-gouging online. In Seattle, Katie Wilson and the other members of the Transit Riders Union were taking part in some of the city’s protests over George Floyd’s death, which eventually led to the creation of an “autonomous zone,” decreed to be free of police officers, in the heart of Capitol Hill, the hipster neighborhood near downtown. 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.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

McKinsey didn’t take out ads or sign any letters in support of the Hong Kong demonstrators, and likewise raised no public objections when Beijing extinguished Hong Kong’s democracy movement, and with it the city’s civil liberties, with a draconian new national security law. In contrast, when massive protests erupted across the United States after the murder of George Floyd, McKinsey was quick to ally itself with the cause. The firm was among the signatories of a full-page ad in The New York Times dedicated to Floyd’s memory. Sneader’s name appeared under the company’s logo. It was an inconsistency not lost on a young McKinsey associate in the United States who had spent time in China.

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., 255–56 ACA and, 62–65 accountability and, 16, 25, 28, 236–41, 277 addictive products and, 129, 278 Al-Elm Information Security and, 256–57 Allstate and, 192–203, 212 alumni network, 17–18, 22, 38, 93, 161, 272 Alzheimer’s drug approval and, 67–68 Aramco and, 243–44, 247–48 Arkansas Medicaid program and, 57, 60–62 Aspen Ideas Festival and, 149–51, 153–55 AT&T and, 48–49 at-risk contracts and, 232–34 Australian Green Team and, 159 autocratic states and, 25–28, 74, 108–9, 279 China, 92–109, 257 Russia, 108, 257 Saudi Arabia, 108, 243–57 Ukraine, 257, 279 auto industry and, 29, 32–33, 37 auto insurance and, 191–94 auto loans and, 172, 182, 182–84 Azar as HHS and, 146–47 banks as clients and, 172–89 matrix management, 175–79 securitization of credit, 182–89 BCG as rival of, 246, 248–49 Belt and Road strategy and, 101–3 Britain and Chairman’s Dinners, 262 “clubbable” consultants, 260–61, 275 Health and Social Care Act, 271–74 manufacturers in, 261–62 NHS cost-cutting, 259, 262, 264–75, 280 rail privatization, 263–65 steel privatization, 261 Budlender report and, 236–38 Buttigieg as consultant for, 26–27, 76 campaign contributions and, 65–66 carbon emissions and messaging by, 150–55, 159, 161–62, 164–70 CBP and, 83, 87 Centene purchase of AT Medics and, 274 Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and, 141–42, 145–46 Center for Societal Benefit Through Healthcare created by, 144 Chase as client of, 177–78, 180 Chevron and, 163 China and, 26, 46, 91–109, 165–66, 257, 279 consultants and, 95–103 financial crisis of 2007–10 and, 189 Muslim Uyghur detentions and, 105–6 SOEs and, 26, 91–93, 96–102, 107–8 Chinese copycat of, 99 client and billing lists and, 55, 107–8, 162–63, 168, 278, 280 client interests and, 18–19, 22, 24–25 clients and regulators both represented by, 22–23 clients competing in same market and, 22–23, 278, 281 client selection democracy index, 108–9 harms and, 25–28, 30–31, 143, 154, 161, 278 new oversight of 2019, 257 public-sector work, 242 values of, 18, 23–31, 108–9, 161–62 climate change and, 150–55, 166–69 CMS contract and, 70 coal-mining clients of, 28, 156–58, 160–69 companies acquired by, 30 compensation system of, 180–81 confidentiality and, 18, 22–23, 25, 28–29, 59, 66–67, 69–70, 83–84, 107–8, 168–69, 239, 278, 281 conflicts of interest and, 22, 35, 55–56, 59, 61–62, 66, 68, 74, 120, 123–29, 145–46, 238, 272, 278, 281 consultants advancement by, 21–22, 28, 38, 160 ability to do good, 20–21, 25 ability to opt out on ethical grounds, 28, 78, 158–60 China-based, 95–98, 103, 108 earnings and investments by, 180 number of, 22, 30–31 “on the beach” status, 22, 158–60 recruitment and training, 17, 19–22, 25, 28–31, 152–53, 161–63, 167, 249 up-or-out policy and, 38, 207 consultants’ dissent and, 24–28, 31, 278 disallowed in Saudi Arabia, 249–50 Edstrom, 160–62, 167 Elfenbein, 83–85, 88–90 ICE revelations and, 76–79, 83–90 Naveed, 169–70 opioid work and, 148 polluting clients and, 155–63, 167–70 Continental Illinois collapse and, 177–80, 186 corporate downsizing and, 33, 36–39 COVID-19 and, 71–73, 274–75 data analytics and, 204–22 athlete injury prediction, 210–12 Houston Astros, 204–6, 212–22 prescriptions, 130–31, 139–40 Davos and, 149–50 Disneyland and, 9–16, 281 Earth Day and, 168 Elixir bought by, 249–50 employee layoffs by clients of, 27–29, 34, 37–41, 44–46, 48–49 Enron and, 25, 42, 173, 187, 190, 204–9 environmentally focused work of, 152, 158–61, 165, 170 Eskom and Trillian and, 231–37, 239–42 executive compensation vs. worker wages and, 32–35, 41–43, 50, 180–81, 194, 198 FARA filings and, 246 FDA as client of, 22, 66–70, 145–46, 281 cigarettes and, 73, 120–22 contracts awarded 2008–2021, 145–46 e-cigarettes and vaping, 122–29 fees, 66, 68, 120, 145–46 no-bid contracts, 69–70 opioids and, 132, 134, 137, 141–42, 144–47, 280 pharmaceutical clients and, 22, 66–69, 141, 145–47, 281 federal contracts COVID-19, 71–73 GSA, 69–70 health-care industry, 65–72 ICE, 74–90 Federal Reserve report on, 186 financial industry and, 171–90 deregulation, 171–74 financial crisis of 2008–10 and, 173–74, 176–77, 188–90, 265 Financial Institutions Group, 180 financialization and, 180, 194, 196–97 foreign governments as clients of, 18 Britain, 258–75 corruption and, 25–28, 279 secrecy and, 239 Saudi Arabia, 108, 243–57, 279–80 South Africa, 223–42 fossil fuel companies and, 26, 156–59, 162–64, 166, 168 founding of, 3–4, 19, 159 Gary, Indiana, and, 1–9 George Floyd protests and, 107 globalization and, 41, 43, 189 Global Energy and Materials team, 166 global reach of, 18, 20, 39, 43, 94, 97, 189–90 GM and, 32–33, 37, 260 gold-mining clients of, 162 greenwashing and, 162, 165, 169 GSA on federal contracts with, 69–71 health-care benefits by clients of, 45–47 health-care industry clients of, 61–66, 148, 280 ACA and, 62–65 Centene, 274 NHS overhaul and, 259, 262, 264–75 state and federal clients and, 51–73, 280 home mortgage lending and, 181–82, 187–89 homeowners’ insurance, 194, 199–200 human rights and, 31, 99–101, 104–7 Chinese Uyghurs, 100, 104–6, 160 Hong Kong protests, 106–7 Moscow protests, 31 ICE and, 26, 74–90, 279 Illinois Medicaid program and, 51–57, 61 inequality and, 27–28, 32–50, 147–48, 278 influence and status of, 17–23, 28, 30, 64, 199, 278 insurance claims payouts and, 180, 191–203 Interior Department contract and, 70 job security and loyalty downplayed by, 37–38, 44–45 Johnson & Johnson as client of, 133–35 Juul as client of, 123–29 Khashoggi murder and, 253–54, 256–57 Made in China 2025 and, 102–3 maintenance cuts advised by, 1–16, 264, 280–81 Malaysia and, 26, 102 management philosophy and, 2–3, 17–18 shift to strategic planning, 36–37 management structure and style of, 26, 121, 278 managing partners Barton, 63, 86, 99, 101–2, 106, 165, 238, 241, 257, 272 Bower, 19, 32–33 Daniel, 98, 181 Davis, 98, 241, 249 Gupta, 39, 206 Sneader, 29–31, 74–75, 86, 90, 106–7, 143, 168, 239, 241, 254, 255, 257 Strenfels, 127–30, 168–70 Marshall Field’s and, 34 Massachusetts future of work study and, 148 matrix management and, 175–79, 260 media exposés of, 23, 25–28, 74–76, 79–85, 107–8, 133, 146, 148, 168–69, 257 Missouri Medicaid program and, 57–61 MLB review by, 221 Monitor as client of, 266–69 multinationals and, 95–96, 98–99 New York City contracts and, 225 New York Knicks and, 211 NOAA contract and, 70 nondisclosure agreements and, 27, 278 oil and gas companies and, 155–58, 162–64, 166 Aramco, 156, 243–44, 248 BP, 164 Chevron, 163–64 China and, 99 Enron and, 206–9 ExxonMobil, 20, 156–57, 163 Gazprom, 163, 257 PDVSA, 156 Pemex, 156 Royal Dutch Shell, 156, 163, 260–61 Texaco, 156–57 outsourcing and offshoring and, 33, 39–46, 49–50 partners compensation of, 18, 135 election of, 22 number of, 30 Peters’s critique of, 27–28, 36–37, 179 pharmaceutical companies and, 20, 22, 73, 281 FDA and, 66–69 opioids and, 26–27, 74, 109, 130–48, 280 opioid settlement and, 143, 148 polluters as clients of, 162, 164–70, 278 profit maximization and, 35–39, 198 public scrutiny of, 25–28, 74, 107, 148, 277–78 public-sector practice begun, 94 Purdue Pharma and, 109, 131–45, 148, 280 QuantumBlack bought by, 210–12 Railtrack maintenance and, 263–64 revenues and profits of, 24, 242, 257 Rice as consultant for, 224 Russia and, 26, 31, 108, 257 Saudi Arabia and, 108, 243–57, 279–80 consultants hired in, 248 ministries as clients of, 243–45, 249–51, 256 NEOM project and, 247, 256 purge of 2017 and, 250 sentiment analysis and, 251–57 “Saudi Arabia Beyond Oil” report and, 247–48 Saudi Center for International Strategic Partnerships and, 247 Seafirst and, 177–78, 180 secrecy and, 18, 25, 27, 54–58, 107, 111–12, 120, 136, 162, 168, 256–57, 277–78 securitization of credit and, 172 Enron and, 187, 207–9 financial crisis and, 188–90 launched by Bryan, 182–87, 189–90 Shanghai urban planning and, 99 shareholder profits and stock prices and, 24, 27–28, 36, 38–39, 42–43, 49–50, 198 shell companies and, 18 smart cities and, 103–4 South Africa and, 26, 30, 74, 223–42, 250, 257, 279–80 state capture investigations and, 236–42 South African Airways and Regiments and, 239–40 sovereign wealth funds and, 18, 165, 257 sports and, 209–22 steel industry and British, 261 coking coal and, 164–66 maintenance and safety in, 1–9, 280–81 U.S. steel, 1–10, 16, 280–81 St.

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

But as the year progressed, the company had to reckon with this question again. 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.)

…

She devoured YouTube’s full madness, its stuff that “no gatekeeper would ever permit,” she said. “I loved that.” In 2020 one of YouTube’s most chaotic stars surprised everyone with a political gesture. Early in June, Logan Paul uploaded footage of his podcast Impaulsive on YouTube; since his debacle in Japan, the Gen-Z Adonis had added podcasting and boxing to his YouTube repertoire. George Floyd had just been murdered. Paul titled this video “America Is Racist” and went straight to his point: “I’m embarrassed that it has taken me twenty-five years to realize this: it is not enough to be ‘not racist.’ You have to be antiracist.” Paul read off a script but delivered his lines passionately.

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

Then came more deaths: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York City; and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, all three in 2014. Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, and Jeremy McDole in Wilmington, Delaware, both in 2015. Philando Castile in St. Anthony, Minnesota, in 2016. Emantic Bradford, Jr., in Hoover, Alabama, in 2018. Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky; George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Georgia; Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York; and Jonathan Price in Wolfe City, Texas, all five in 2020. Dominique Williams and James Johnson in Takoma Park, Maryland, and Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, all in 2021. A poll conducted in April 2021 showed that two-thirds of white Americans approve of how police operate; two-thirds of Black Americans do not.

…

“Activists picked places like Birmingham and Selma because there were these police chiefs with a hair trigger for violence who would engage in brutal repression in front of cameras,” he observes. “That would shock the conscience of these otherwise indifferent or even hostile actors outside the South. It changed public opinion.” So, he continues, “If you’re an activist on the ground thinking about and angry about this injustice against George Floyd and a long history of police violence in this country against African Americans, if you want to put that at the center of the national conversation, it’s important to be thinking about this: Is what we are doing on the ground elevating the justice frame or elevating the riots frame?” Having the discipline to emphasize justice, Wasow says, expands the base of support, while violence tends to drive away the wavering.

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

In early 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the Bay Area, Marcus Books was forced to temporarily close its doors. And like a lot of businesses, it faced an uncertain future. But its community rallied behind it, starting a GoFundMe page and raising money to keep the store in business. Then, in May, George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed by police in Minneapolis. Protests filled the streets of America’s cities, and orders started pouring into Marcus Books from all over the country from people who wanted to support its mission. It’s selling five times as many books as it was before the pandemic, and its GoFundMe donations ballooned to $260,000, more than enough to keep the store afloat.

Re-Educated: Why It’s Never Too Late to Change Your Life by Lucy Kellaway

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, lockdown, Martin Wolf, stakhanovite, wage slave

Before I started teaching I didn’t think much about racism. I told myself that things had got a lot better in the UK during my lifetime and I assumed they’d continue to improve. The answer was to provide good education to every student and then all races would live happily ever after. That was before the murder of George Floyd. It was also before I judged a public speaking competition open to all secondary schools in Hackney. Every school entered two 15-year-olds who each gave a speech on any topic they wanted to talk about. On the night I sat on the judges’ table in an assembly hall and listed to two dozen teenagers do something that I hadn’t known how to do when I was in my 40s, project my voice and speak from the heart, without notes.

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

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. But it has also popularized critical race theory, an ideology that was incubated on American campuses from the late 1960s onwards, and which provides the intellectual underpinnings of a succession of successful books, such as Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (2017), Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility (2018) and Ibram X.

…

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.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

“Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s in the interests of an autocrat that the only real bond among his supporters should be their support for him. On those occasions when synchronized action does pierce through the isolation, as during the worldwide demonstrations that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, it’s not unusual to hear protesters describe experiences that call to mind William McNeill’s “strange sense of personal enlargement”—a feeling of time thickening and intensifying, tinged with a kind of ecstasy. Like our other troubles with time, our loss of synchrony obviously can’t be solved exclusively at the level of the individual or the family.

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

I just don’t necessarily need him by my side every moment that I’m awake. Sometimes it’s enough to press my ear against the living-room floor of the upstairs apartment and faintly hear him practicing piano down below, frowning at the keys, I suspect, and at the music before him, a boy again. So determined to get it right. Fresh-Caught Haddock When George Floyd was killed and seemingly overnight all of New York came to smell like fresh plywood, I thought of Schenectady. “Why there?” my sister Amy asked. She was with Hugh and me on the terrace of our apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. From where we stood, we could hear the roiling cauldron twenty stories below us: sirens, shouting, the distant sounds of breaking glass—all blended together into a furious, muffled roar.

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Several years ago, a group from Walmart, including the CEO, traveled to the South to learn more about Black history. People of color are overrepresented in low-paying jobs, and Walmart is the largest private employer of Black Americans in the country. McMillon has been taking executives on these tours for many years—long before the murder of George Floyd caused one corporation after the next to proclaim a commitment to diversity and inclusion. Bland, who has had friends and relatives who’ve worked at Walmart, enjoyed her time with McMillon. Sitting with him in Montgomery, she found him to be all the things he is: curious, humble, caring, sincere.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fear of failure, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, impulse control, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, zero-sum game

An effective response would have entailed a call for unity, but Donald requires division. It is the only way he knows how to survive—my grandfather ensured that decades ago when he turned his children against each other. I can only imagine the envy with which Donald watched Derek Chauvin’s casual cruelty and monstrous indifference as he murdered George Floyd; hands in his pockets, his insouciant gaze aimed at the camera. I can only imagine that Donald wishes it had been his knee on Floyd’s neck. Instead, Donald withdraws to his comfort zones—Twitter, Fox News—casting blame from afar, protected by a figurative or literal bunker. He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own.

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

He and Tamika, his partner at NMH to whom he is now married, taught me about what it felt like to be Black in white America; the subtle racism you were sure to endure – and the risks you took – merely by leaving the city; the nagging, recurring fear of being casually arrested, hurt or killed by police officers. After the brutal murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed, we hopped on Zoom. To them, what was happening in the US was hardly surprising. It was what happened when the institutionalised violence, racism and injustice of slavery and genocide the country was founded upon was multiplied by a factor of Covid-19. The most momentous travel experience of my youth took place when I was eighteen.

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

As corporations have begun to focus on greater female board representation, they have also looked to add ethnic minorities and to ensure that diverse ideas and thinking are represented on the board. In this regard, many of the tools used to recruit diverse talent apply to all underrepresented groups. The demonstrations in May and June 2020 triggered by the death of George Floyd awakened long-standing concerns and frustrations around racial injustice and inequity, including in the corporate world. The demonstrations yielded a strong response from the private sector, with corporations swiftly conveying that they would not stand for racial injustice, and that they would actively work—unilaterally and in concert with others—to give racial minorities more access and opportunities.

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

For example, within a month of the World Health Organization designating Covid-19 a pandemic in March 2020, Bellingcat produced a range of material to involve citizens in online sleuthing on the subject, including a guide to debunking coronavirus disinformation; an article on scammers exploiting the disease on Facebook and YouTube; and a video segment on applying open-source tools to studying a world gone still during lockdown.96 When a police officer in Minneapolis killed an African-American suspect, George Floyd, setting off protests across the United States and beyond, we produced an explanatory article on the Boogalo movement that hoped unrest would degenerate into a second American civil war; we compiled an exhaustive list of attacks on journalists, geolocated and plotted onto an interactive map to involve the public in absorbing the dimensions of the efforts to suppress information; and we sought to inform citizens of our techniques via a new podcast, BellingChat.

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

And one final piece of advice: the people closest to us may have a lot of information, but a few of them are also the most biased. 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.

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

The job of officers was now to knock on the doors and introduce themselves; talk about citizens’ concerns and offer to help. The police began pop-up neighborhood parties, where they’d rock up with Mister Softee ice-cream trucks, grill hot dogs, play basketball with kids, and get to know the residents. 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.

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

Which of our choices are ethical and which should we revisit? Those moral codes will form the base from which the machines will learn. 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.

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

A mother and adjunct professor of Chicana studies put it like this, “The funny part is now all of a sudden you have upper-class families talking about mutual aid.” She continued, “The term mutual aid is not radical! It’s, like, last semester, dude.” By that summer, some of the mutual aid-ers were thinking of ways to expand their group’s purview. For example, during the protests around George Floyd’s killing, Crystal Hudson shifted the focus of our neighborhood’s mutual aid group to include questions of race and policing. Hudson’s dream was that New York Police Department resources would be reallocated to programs like her grocery shopping efforts. As of this writing such dreams had not been realized.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

CONCLUSION TWO AI FUTURES AS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CONTINUES TO ADVANCE AND EXTEND its reach into ever more facets of our lives, the risks associated with the technology will demand urgent attention. The intersection of the coronavirus crisis and widespread social upheaval in 2020 brought developments that suggest at least some of these issues are beginning to take a prominent place within public discourse. In the wake of the nationwide protests surrounding the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May, awareness of racial bias in facial recognition technology came to the forefront, and Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on sales of its Rekognition system to law enforcement agencies in order to give the U.S. Congress time to consider regulations on the technology.

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

The Thirteenth Amendment may have banned slavery, but four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans set foot in Virginia, the myth of White supremacy still shapes American institutions, from the overrepresentation of Black people in the criminal justice system to their underrepresentation in corporate boardrooms. Black people in the United States are more likely to be politically disenfranchised, economically impoverished, and casually brutalized at the hands of the police. The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the spring of 2020 were a stark reminder of the long history of violence, injustice, and trauma that Black people continue to suffer in the United States. Slavery, dynastic rule, systemic racism, and gender inequality: All are supported by the same kind of scaffolding, power hierarchies that have proven resistant to change.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

In the United States, long considered the gold standard of economic opportunity, about a quarter of Americans live below the poverty threshold.25 Even before the devastating effects of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, the United States had already slipped to position number 27 in the global ranking of social mobility.26 Nobody should be surprised that the 2020 killing of George Floyd by police sparked such emotion among those fed up with economic and social injustice. Imagine, though, when one hundred years old is considered no more than “middle-aged.” Just think how much more money the “haves” will be able to amass! This was exactly what the Luggnaggians, of Gulliver’s Travels, feared.

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

On 3 June 2020, Son would go on to tweet: ‘Racism is a lamentable thing. The SoftBank Group will be setting up a 100-million-dollar fund so Black and Latinx entrepreneurs can find their way out of an unjust world and be successful.’ The United States have been very good to both Son and Claure. So, in a time of crisis such as the protests caused by the murder of George Floyd, they were not in a position to follow trends but tp lead by example. Across all the major news networks like CNN, most business leaders regardless of the sector – seemed to trot out the same line: ‘we stand with the Black community.’Claure comments on this, stating ‘What does it really mean to stand with someone though?

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

“We don’t want people to feel that way, at least that’s not our hope for what they’re gaining out of us. We want them to actually feel good that we’re more visible in the area in which they live.” It may be that some residents of that particular block will feel safer by having police come through more often. But for many, especially after the deaths of Oscar Grant, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others, that’s unlikely to be the case. The objective function doesn’t benefit everyone. Professor Brantingham says the point of PredPol isn’t more arrests, just disrupting what the algorithm predicts will happen by exhibiting police presence. “It’s been known for quite a long time that there’s something called residual deterrence, a police officer shows up in a location, and when they leave, their effect persists for quite a long time.”

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

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.’”

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

In 2019, the Anti-Defamation League found that antisemitic incidents reached an all-time high since it began tracking them in 1979, with a 56 percent increase in assaults.20 In Charlottesville, white supremacists chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” proudly and without even covering their faces, and in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, eleven people were shot dead. There’s been an uptick in killings, harassment, vandalism, assault, and fatalities of Jews in the US. In the incredible social justice demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd, people spray painted “Jews we’re coming for you” at a park by my apartment. And, of course, there are the millions of posts and tweets about how the Jews are the ones who actually created COVID-19. Jews are only 2 percent of the United States population, but they are the target of 50 percent of national religion-based hate crimes.

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

Findings from genetics, Gilroy argued, should undermine the very idea of “race,” leading to “a gradual withering away arising from growing irrelevancy.”15 Science and technology have not brought us a quick fix to the problem of racism. White privilege has not gone away. With the recent rise of white nationalism and the national protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, Gilroy’s optimism about the disappearance of racial thinking now seems dated. The fix to a racialized society is not “skin deep.” Many people already alter their skin color with existing cosmetic treatments, but this has not brought about a color-blind utopia. The Twitter storm that erupted with the hashtag “#transracial” in 2015 anticipates some of the questions that will emerge in the United States if David Ishee or someone else manages to turn race into a genetic fashion.

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.

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

In 2017, Chicago police sergeant Khalil Muhammad shot an unarmed, Black Autistic teenager named Ricardo Hayes. Muhammad claimed he felt threatened by Hayes, but an investigation revealed Hayes had been harmlessly jogging along the side of his street, and didn’t show any aggression toward Muhammad.[45] Five days after the murder of George Floyd, an Israeli police officer in Jerusalem City shot and killed Eyad Hallaq, an Autistic Palestinian man who was profoundly intellectually disabled and unable to speak or comprehend instructions.[46] In April 2021, a Chicago police officer shot and killed thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo, who had his hands in the air.

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

“As this report is being finalized, the United States is in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, with deaths already exceeding 180,000 from COVID-19, and an associated economic collapse,” Litterman wrote in the foreword to the 196-page report. He noted the similarities between the pandemic and global warming, including the fact that delaying addressing both problems “can be devastating.” The report, released in the midst of the 2020 presidential election, ongoing fear about the pandemic, and nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd, attracted almost no attention. Litterman wasn’t surprised. But he hoped it would serve as a blueprint for future approaches to solving the problem. He also believed the fossil fuel giants on the CFTC committee were sincere when they said they wanted to help. Many were publicly calling for a carbon tax, although none condoned a tax remotely close to the $100 a ton recommended by the EZ model.

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

It’s a real blind spot.’ But even then those with honest intent will confront the hard decision British editors have historically encountered: balancing the potency of xenophobia as a brand component and commercial driver with the social harm that results. The global anger aroused by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 led to a period of intense reflection about the lack of diversity in the western media. But more than one commentator expressed scepticism about companies which had hitherto done little to promote diversity suddenly embracing the optics of being seen to say the right thing.

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

Kennedy’s dealings with Cuba, diversity of thought is crucial in situations of great risk and uncertainty. Finally, we will argue—by exploring the topic of fusion cells in the Middle East and the United States—how the diversity of capability must be sought in order to have the best posture to identify, assess, and mitigate risk. Protests against racial injustice following the death of George Floyd in 2020. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images) SYMPTOMS OF DIVERSITY CHALLENGES Stale Preservation of the Status Quo. People who have similar thoughts and abilities recommend the same actions—often sustaining the status quo. Finger-pointing. When balls are dropped because new angles haven’t been considered, organizations that lack diversity point fingers inward rather than look for fresh perspectives from the outside.

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

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.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

Users are coordinated through “missions” for which they earn points, badges, and prizes; according to The Forward, top users can win prizes including a congratulatory letter from a government minister.39 Though Act.IL is a private project of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, the Israeli-American Council, and the Maccabee Task Force, its founder Yarden Ben Yosef told The Forward that the Israeli military and domestic intelligence service had requested their help in removing videos from Facebook that called for violence against Jews or Israelis (Ben Yosef later retracted his statement, saying they were only in regular informal contact).40 Act.IL has few users—only a few thousand downloads from the Google Play Store as of November 2021—but it’s claimed credit for convincing Pitzer College to retain its study abroad program in Israel, and for the revision of a proposed ethnic studies curriculum for California public schools it said was antisemitic.41 Other propaganda is much easier to spot, like Hezbollah’s Special Force video game series in which players fight the Israel Defense Forces, or a game in which Iran’s Basij militia rescues George Floyd from being killed by US police.42 Proposed in 2020 by a commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it would be one way to “take back cyberspace” from the US.43 It would have an uphill climb, though: the US has had a commanding lead in government-funded gamified propaganda since 2002 with its ongoing America’s Army video game series.

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.

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

Indeed, so successful have they been that they have truly established themselves as utilities comparable to water and electricity and they will thus surely come to be subject to some of the same degree of regulation as the traditional utilities. But that is another story. In the meantime, I think there are some grounds for optimism emerging from the crisis. In our open, fractious societies, divisions and disagreements have noisily continued—not least in the reaction to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis—yet below the surface, there has also been a greater sense of common destiny than usual, in Europe if not the United States. Arguments between liberals and conservatives, and left and right, will continue, as they should, yet I think there is a decent chance that one legacy of the crisis will be to acknowledge a wider range of human aptitudes in our allocation of reward and prestige—and thus a better balance between Head, Hand, and Heart.

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

Another believed the general-entertainment approach of packing fifteen thousand hours in led to an unfocused offering. “If we were guilty of one thing, it’s that we just threw too much stuff at the wall programming-wise to see what stuck,” the person said. Some of the “classics” hadn’t aged particularly well. Gone with the Wind got entangled in the racial equity movement sparked by George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. Filmmaker John Ridley penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times calling on HBO Max to hit pause on the film, which romanticizes the Confederacy. “It is a film that glorifies the antebellum south,” he wrote. “It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color.”

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

It’s an important question to ask, especially at a time when democracy, this celebrated Athenian invention, seems to be in retreat. The shelves in any bookstore chart our collective angst, with titles such as How Democracies Die, How Democracy Ends, Surviving Autocracy, and On Tyranny outselling their competitors. The social mobilization that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd and many other Black Americans at the hands of the police surfaced longstanding concerns about whether communities of color can expect equal treatment under the law. The disastrous responses of some governments to the COVID-19 pandemic also appear inseparable from failures of democratic institutions, with the United States, Brazil, and India leading the world in deaths from COVID-19 and the European democracies not faring especially well, either.

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.

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

Whether Starmer’s leadership sticks to those commitments remains an open question. 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.

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