Steve Bannon

86 results back to index

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

“Speak in the vernacular”: Mike Davis, “Ten Immodest Commandments: Lessons from a Fumbling-and-Bungling Lifetime of Activism,” Truthout, November 20, 2011. “deplorables”: Steve Bannon, host, “Biden Chaos; Easy Money Destroys the Deplorable’s,” War Room: Pandemic (podcast), episode 1,517, December 28, 2021, posted on Rumble. “Never again will they be able to other you”: Steve Bannon, host, “Independence Day!!; Naomi Wolf’s Coup,” War Room: Pandemic (podcast), episode 1,506, December 23, 2021, at 17:30, posted on Rumble. his “community”: Bannon, “Independence Day!!,” at 19:53. “heads on pikes”: Dan Mangan, “Steve Bannon’s Podcast Barred from Twitter After He Made Beheading Comment About Fauci, FBI Director Wray,” CNBC, November 5, 2020.

…

Findings from the 2021 American Values Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute, November 1, 2021. “muscle memory”: Steve Bannon, host, deleted episode, War Room: Pandemic (podcast). “Step 3. Develop a thug caste”: Naomi Wolf, “Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps,” The Guardian, April 24, 2007. “Warrior Moms” … “Army of Moms”: Steve Bannon, host, “Parents Are Still Taking to the Streets,” War Room: Pandemic (podcast), episode 1,387, November 3, 2021, posted on Rumble; Steve Bannon, host, “Army of Moms Have Been Mobilized,” War Room: Pandemic (video), October 29, 2021, at 0:45. She warns him gravely … a president who forcibly separated: Bannon, “Independence Day!!

…

But while I was there, organizers asked me to give a short talk about the shock of the 2008 financial crisis and the raging injustices that followed—the trillions marshaled to save the banks whose reckless trades had caused the crisis, the punishing austerity offered to pretty much everyone else, the legalized corruption that all of this laid bare. These were the seeds of discontent that right-wing populists in dozens of countries would eventually exploit for a fiercely anti-immigrant and anti-“globalist” political project, including Donald Trump, under the tutelage of his chief advisor, Stephen K. Bannon. At the time, however, many of us still held out hope that the crash could catalyze a democratic revival and a new era of left power, one that would discipline corporate might and empower flailing democracies to address our many surging emergencies, including the climate emergency. That’s what my speech at Occupy was about.

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

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

were a problem for leftists: See Richard Hughes Seager, Buddhism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Chapter 3: The Jedi Master a sign of phoniness: David Von Drehle, “Steve Bannon Is a Swiss-Cheese Philosopher,” Washington Post, September 12, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/steve-bannon-is-a-swiss-cheese-philosopher/2017/09/12/3a45f43c-97e7-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html. “an adviser who hearkens back to Julius Evola”: “Steve Bannon at DHI,” Soundcloud (BuzzFeed News), 2014. https://soundcloud.com/buzzfeednews/steve-bannon-at-dhi. Chapter 4: Killing Time the hidden world of their own psyches: See Natalya Tamruchi, “Bezumie kak oblast svobody,” NLO 100 (2009), http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2009/100/ta33-pr.html.

…

v=blYxwdG8dBo. I have edited this translation of the speech. He had met with Eduardo Bolsonaro: “Steve Bannon Endorses Far-Right Brazilian Presidential Candidate,” Reuters, October 26, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-election-bannon/steve-bannon-endorses-far-right-brazilian-presidential-candidate-idUSKCN1N01S1. advising the Bolsonaro election campaign: “Brazil: Steve Bannon to Advise Bolsonaro Presidential Campaign,” Telesur, August 15, 2018, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Brazil-Steve-Bannon-to-Advise-Bolsonaro-Presidential-Campaign-20180815-0003.html. occultist magazine Planète: This magazine was founded by Louis Pauwels, who later collaborated with Alain de Benoist of the French New Right.

…

“not to criticize far-right activists”: Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, “Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist’s Ouster,” New York Times, August 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/politics/steve-bannon-trump-white-house.html. courageous refusal to bow to media: Jonathan Swan, “What Steve Bannon Thinks About Charlottesville,” Axios, August 16, 2017, https://www.axios.com/what-steve-bannon-thinks-about-charlottesville-1513304895-7ee2c933-e6d5-4692-bc20-c1db88afe970.html. critics blamed the incident on Bannon’s influence: Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Defends Initial Remarks on Charlottesville; Again Blames ‘Both Sides,’” New York Times, August 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-press-conference-charlottesville.html.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

“He was not a rebel”: Matt Viser, “Harvard Classmates Barely Recognize Bannon of Today, Boston Globe, November 26, 2016, https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/11/26/look-steven-bannon-and-his-years-harvard-business-school/B2m0j85jh5jRKzKbMastzK/story.html. Chapter Four: “A Dangerous Way to Look at the World” Bannon started a production company: Daniel Miller, “Inside the Hollywood Past of Stephen K. Bannon, Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief,” Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2016, www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-stephen-bannon-donald-trump-hollywood-20160830-snap-story.html. a shady, little-known Italian: David McClintick and Anne Faircloth, “The Predator: How an Italian Thug Looted MGM, Brought Crédit Lyonnais to Its Knees, and Made the Pope Cry, Fortune, July 8, 1996, archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/07/08/214344/index.htm.

…

,’” Breitbart.com, August 9, 2015, www.breitbart.com/video/2015/08/09/megyn-kelly-if-you-cant-get-past-me-how-are-you-gonna-handle-vladimir-putin/. “Mr. Trump is an interesting man”: Megyn Kelly, “Megyn Kelly Addresses Donald Trump’s Remarks,” The Kelly File, August 10, 2015, video.foxnews.com/v/4412819805001/?#sp=show-clips. “The Arrogance of Power”: Stephen K. Bannon and Alexander Marlow, “The Arrogance of Power: Megyn Kelly’s ‘Good Journalism,’” Breitbart.com, August 11, 2015, www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/08/11/the-arrogance-of-power-megyn-kellys-good-journalism/. “Roger Ailes just called”: Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, August 10, 2015, 8:35 A.M., twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/630764447716540417.

…

He’s like an organism that could have grown and blossomed only under a precise and exacting set of conditions—a black orchid. This book is the backstory of how those conditions came to be—it’s the part of the movie you haven’t seen. To understand Trump’s extraordinary rise, you have to go all the way back and begin with Steve Bannon, or else it doesn’t make sense. TWO “WHERE’S MY STEVE?” The Trump-Bannon partnership, like so much else in Trump’s life, has a bizarre and winding lineage that traces back to a lawsuit. In the mid-1990s, Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino mogul, was looking to move in on Atlantic City, New Jersey, a possibility that threatened the livelihoods of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, and other gambling establishments along Atlantic City’s Boardwalk.

Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Potemkin village, Quicken Loans, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. To the Memory of My Father Lewis A. Wolff Acknowledgments * * * Immediately after Fire and Fury was published, the president publicly and furiously broke with Stephen K. Bannon, the man arguably most responsible for making him president, over remarks he had made in the book. Donald Trump’s wrath helped cost Bannon the backing of his patrons, billionaire Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, and forced his departure from Breitbart News, the news site that Bannon led and the Mercers controlled.

…

My book Fire and Fury was the resulting account of the organizational chaos and constant drama—more psychodrama than political drama—of Trump’s first seven months in office. Here was a volatile and uncertain president, releasing, almost on a daily basis, his strange furies on the world, and, at the same time, on his own staff. This first phase of the most abnormal White House in American history ended in August 2017, with the departure of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and the appointment of retired general John Kelly as chief of staff. This new account begins in February 2018 at the outset of Trump’s second year in office, with the situation now profoundly altered. The president’s capricious furies have been met by an increasingly organized and methodical institutional response.

…

Donald Trump’s wrath helped cost Bannon the backing of his patrons, billionaire Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, and forced his departure from Breitbart News, the news site that Bannon led and the Mercers controlled. It is a measure of Bannon’s character that he stood by his remarks in Fire and Fury without complaint, quibbles, or hurt feelings. In all my years in this business, I have encountered few sources who, after revealing themselves, didn’t blame the person who exposed them. Steve Bannon, as the most clear-eyed interpreter of the Trump phenomenon I know, as the Virgil anyone might be lucky to have as a guide for a descent into Trumpworld—and as Dr. Frankenstein with his own deep ambivalence about the monster he created—is, in this volume, back again, and on the record, with my thanks for his trust and cooperation

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

This was originally conceived as an account of the Trump administration’s first hundred days, that most traditional marker of a presidency. But events barreled on without natural pause for more than two hundred days, the curtain coming down on the first act of Trump’s presidency only with the appointment of retired general John Kelly as the chief of staff in late July and the exit of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon three weeks later. The events I’ve described in these pages are based on conversations that took place over a period of eighteen months with the president, with most members of his senior staff—some of whom talked to me dozens of times—and with many people who they in turn spoke to. The first interview occurred well before I could have imagined a Trump White House, much less a book about it, in late May 2016 at Trump’s home in Beverly Hills—the then candidate polishing off a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla as he happily and idly opined about a range of topics while his aides, Hope Hicks, Corey Lewandowski, and Jared Kushner, went in and out of the room.

…

He’d had only a few conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s entire history with Trump consisted of a selfie taken with him at Trump Tower. But when the Mercers presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told the Mercers, “is so fucked up.” By every meaningful indicator, something greater than even a sense of doom shadowed what Steve Bannon called “the broke-dick campaign”—a sense of structural impossibility. The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire—ten times over—refused even to invest his own money in it.

…

Bob Woodward, who helped bring Nixon down—and who himself became a figure of unchallengeable presidential mythmaking—wrote a long shelf of books in which even the most misguided presidential actions seemed part of an epochal march of ultimate responsibility and life-and-death decision making. Only the most hardhearted reader would not entertain a daydream in which he or she was not part of this awesome pageant. Steve Bannon was such a daydreamer. * * * But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it. Not a single attribute would place him credibly in the revered circle of American presidential character and power. Which was, in a curious reversal of the book’s premise, just what created Steve Bannon’s opportunity. The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the more likely candidates.

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

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

“The idea,” he told Wired: Noah Shachtman, “How Andrew Breitbart Hacked the Media,” Wired, March 11, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/03/ff-andrew-brietbart/. That December Breitbart attended: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2017), 85–87. See also Joshua Green interview with Matthew Boyle, “Exclusive—A Devil’s Bargain: How Steve Bannon Met Andrew Breitbart, Then Put Conservatives on Path to Destroy Hillary Clinton Once and For All,” Breitbart, July 19, 2017, https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/07/19/exclusive-a-devils-bargain-how-steve-bannon-met-andrew-breitbart-put-conservatives-path-destroy-hillary-clinton-once-for-all/. From its very origin: “#WAR—Breitbart 1st Installment,” YouTube (video), 1:41, August 6, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

…

He quietly created Breitbart.com in the likeness of the Drudge Report in late 2005, just half a year after HuffPo’s launch, when BuzzFeed was still just a twinkle in Peretti’s eye. But Breitbart still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with it. That December Breitbart attended the Liberty Film Festival, where a film called Reagan’s War was set to debut. The young blogger was casting about for like-minded culture warriors. He saw in the film’s director, Stephen K. Bannon, a kindred spirit. As the audience filed out after the Q&A, he approached Bannon. “Brother, we’ve got to change the culture,” he said. “You’re one of us.” Breitbart liked to say that politics was downstream from culture, and as Joshua Green recounts in Devil’s Bargain, he and Bannon were in an upstream position at the moment, equipped to assert themselves at the center of a new right-wing media wave.

…

“I think Donald Trump”: Joy Behar Show, CNN (transcript), April 19, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1104/19/joy.01.html. Using a tool called Prism: Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html. Long before he would take: Scott Shane, “Combative, Populist Steve Bannon Found His Man in Donald Trump,” New York Times, November 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/us/politics/steve-bannon-white-house.html. A Columbia Journalism Review study: Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman, “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php.

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

Chapter 8 Delete Facebook On March 17, 2018, the New York Times and the Observer of London broke front-page stories about a company called Cambridge Analytica that had obtained profile information, records of likes and shares, photo and location tags, and the lists of friends of tens of millions of Facebook users. A whistleblower within the UK-based political consulting firm had brought the story to the news organizations with a stunning claim that the firm, funded by Trump supporter Robert Mercer and led by Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, had created a new level of political ad targeting using Facebook data on personality traits and political values. But the jaw-dropping detail was that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the Facebook data without users’ permission. “The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016,” the New York Times reported.1 The Observer wrote that the “unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election.”2 It was the latest breach of trust in Facebook’s repeated pattern of data privacy abuses.

…

And the article published as a result of those conversations, on the morning of Monday, May 9, 2016, delivered. Titled “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,”4 the bombshell story appeared to confirm suspicions long held by conservatives and long voiced by far-right political pundits like Glenn Beck and Trump campaign leader Steve Bannon. It claimed that Facebook and other gatekeepers of information on the internet were putting their thumbs on the scale. The piece had a controversial reception, with some questioning its agenda. And within Facebook, members of the Trending Topics team were furious at how the article portrayed their work.

…

They created numerous iterations of a single ad, changing colors and tweaking a word here and there to appeal to specific demographics and voters in microtargeted geographies. The Facebook ads were often responses to negative narratives about Trump in the mainstream media. His actual political rival was less important, Trump’s former senior adviser Steve Bannon had explained in a Bloomberg interview in February 2018. “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media,” he said. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Sandberg wasn’t taking part in Kaplan’s dinners. Her focus was on improving relations with other critics.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

Michael Shearer of the Post argued something similar: Like several other Senate candidates eyeing 2020, Warren has endorsed a suite of expensive policy proposals that have made some in the party nervous… For this reason, some Republicans have signaled that they would welcome a Warren run in 2020. Stephen K. Bannon, a former aide to Trump, dismisses Warren as “the weakest candidate the Democrats could put up.” The easiest way to predict what kinds of “electability” stories you’ll see in an election season is to look at the field of candidates and see which ones have a lot of lobbying and ad money behind them.

…

Shouldn’t we want the best qualified people to run government just as we want the best qualified to fly airplanes, perform surgery, design buildings, etc? Trump politically was and is a million miles from the ideals of the original Populists. However, in 2016, he constantly invited ridicule from smarty-pants national media figures of the Boot type, knowing it could only burnish his “populist” credentials. That August, with Steve Bannon as his campaign manager, Trump added a twist, selling himself to audiences as a savior of African Americans. “I thought about Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln is a pretty good Republican,” Trump cracked that day in Iowa. “It brings me to a subject that is important and personal for me. Nothing means more to me than making our party the home of the African-American vote…” Snickers shot through the press section.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

See also www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/news/arron-banks-nca-quote-17-19/; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 36 Alastair McCall and Robert Watts, ‘Five of UK’s richest men bankrolled Brexit’, Sunday Times, April 2017. 37 Ed Caesar, ‘The Chaotic Triumph of Arron Banks, the “Bad Boy of Brexit”’, New Yorker, March 2019. 38 ‘Arron Banks, Better for the Country and others referred to the National Crime Agency for multiple suspected offences’, The Electoral Commission, November 2018. 39 ‘Arron Banks faces Brexit referendum spending probe’, BBC, November 2018. 40 Arron Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London, 2017), p. 84. 41 Harry Davies, ‘Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users’, Guardian, December 2015. 42 Peter Geoghegan, ‘Brexit bankroller Arron Banks, Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon – explosive emails reveal fresh links’, openDemocracy, November 2018. 43 Arron Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London, 2016), p. 84. 44 Martin Shipton, ‘Controversial Ukip funder and Brexit supporter Arron Banks was Cardiff’s Honorary Consul from Belize’, WalesOnline, July 2018. 45 Arron Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London, 2016), p. 9. 46 Peter Geoghegan, ‘Brexit bankroller Arron Banks, Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon – explosive emails reveal fresh links’, openDemocracy, November 2018. 47 Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy, ‘Revealed: Arron Banks Brexit campaign’s “secret” meetings with Cambridge Analytica’, openDemocracy, December 2018. 48 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Revealed: how US billionaire helped to back Brexit’, Guardian, February 2017. 49 Elaina Plott, ‘Five Questions for Gerry Gunster, the DC Strategist Who Ran the “Leave” Campaign’, Washingtonian, June 2016. 50 Peter Geoghegan, ‘Brexit bankroller Arron Banks, Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon – explosive emails reveal fresh links’, openDemocracy, November 2018. 51 Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy, ‘Revealed: Arron Banks Brexit campaign’s “secret” meetings with Cambridge Analytica’, openDemocracy, December 2018. 52 Ed Caesar, ‘The Chaotic Triumph of Arron Banks, the “Bad Boy of Brexit”’, New Yorker, March 2019. 53 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Written testimony to the Fake News Inquiry’, House of Commons.

…

Chapter 10: Making Europe Great Again 1 Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli, ‘Matteo Salvini plans return as PM, wants alliance with Trump’, Politico, December 2019. 2 Jacob Bojesson, ‘Trump Does Meet And Greet With Italian Nationalist Party Leader, Mussolini Defender’, Daily Caller, April 2016. 3 Corinna Harrison, ‘Salvini meets Trump in Philadelphia’, the Italian Insider, April 2016. 4 Dan Mangan, ‘Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon hits Rome as far-right candidate runs for prime minister of Italy’, CNBC, March 2018. 5 SourceMaterial, Stefano Vergine and Claudia Torrisi, ‘The heretic in the Vatican: How Pope Francis became a hate figure for the far right’, Source Material, April 2019. 6 Steve Bannon, ‘Matteo Salvini’, Time, 2019. 7 Nandini Archer and Claire Provost, ‘Revealed: dozens of European politicians linked to US “incubator for extremism”’, openDemocracy, March 2019. 8 Claire Provost, ‘How the far right is weaponising “the family”’, The Face, April 2019. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Maya Oppenheim, ‘Verona protests: Tens of thousands of campaigners march against “medieval” anti-LGBT+ and anti-abortion conference’, Independent, April 2019. 12 Claudia Torrisi, Claire Provost and Mary Fitzgerald, ‘A deep dive into “dark money”’, The Face, August 2019. 13 ‘Up to 150 feared dead in “year’s worst Mediterranean tragedy”’, Al Jazeera, July 2019. 14 Nandini Archer, Claudia Torrisi, Claire Provost, Alexander Nabert and Belen Lobos, ‘Hundreds of Europeans “criminalised” for helping migrants – as far right aims to win big in European elections’, openDemocracy, May 2019. 15 Isobel Thompson, ‘Europe’s aristocratic elite in the fight against women’s and LGBT rights’, openDemocracy, March 2019. 16 Jason Horowitz, ‘The “It” ’80s Party Girl Is Now a Defender of the Catholic Faith’, New York Times, December 2018. 17 ‘The Guardian view on the rise of Christian-nativist populists: a troubling sign of things to come’, Guardian, December 2019. 18 Mattia Ferraresi, ‘How the Catholic Church Lost Italy to the Far Right’, New York Times, July 2019. 19 Tom Kington, ‘World Congress of Families: Russia plays happy Christian families with Europe’s populists’, The Times, March 2019. 20 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, ‘Ready to Fight Gay Marriage at Court Door’, New York Times, March 2013. 21 J.

…

Arron Banks, an insurance broker with interests in gold mines and a sprawling business empire registered in tax havens around the world, had become the biggest campaign donor in British electoral history. Banks was eventually investigated – and exonerated – by the National Crime Agency, amid concerns about the sources of his record Brexit contributions. The trail continued, stretching far beyond Britain’s shores – from Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon and leading figures in Donald Trump’s America to Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and Europe’s insurgent far right. There were corporate-funded think tanks and lobbyists with access to the highest levels of government and networks of keyboard warriors in suburban bedrooms churning out hyper-partisan news stories that spread like digital wildfire.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

At that time, a poll had shown that about seven in ten voters nationwide, including 52 percent of all voters said they would definitely not vote for him.15 I was fairly certain that he was a threat to neither CA’s other clients nor me. He would never win. Alexander agreed. That’s why we were in DC on June 16. We had come to see Steve Bannon, who, Alexander said, could help us get to Trump, a useful cash cow for commercial purposes, and an experiment for politics. The only thing I knew about Steve Bannon when I met him was that he was the guy who had founded CA with Alexander and the Mercers, and that he was “big” in media and film production. Alexander always spoke about “Steve” with such reverence: He was a power broker, the go-between for CA and Mercer money, the person who made campaigns happen.

…

Alexander had set up a meeting with Corey Lewandowski in June 2015, before the fateful day Trump descended that escalator in Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid. The two had been introduced by Steve Bannon, and the parties involved had known long before that some kind of campaign was coming. Regardless of whether Donald planned to run for president or build a bigger commercial empire, we followed the lead with steadfast efforts to get in there somehow. Over three months since June, we had gone back and forth with Corey, without confirming a meeting. But now Donald himself was asking aloud on Steve Bannon’s phone for us to come to Trump Tower and help him out. How could Corey say no to the boss? Corey Lewandowski could meet us at Trump Tower early the next morning, Trump told us.

…

What was the difference between the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica? Did they share information and resources? Why was a controversial American figure like Steve Bannon on the company’s board? Alexander took each question and fumbled it. The company wasn’t fear-based. It presented the clients it represented in the best light possible. It didn’t single out voters; it was selective to whom it sent messaging, in order not to be wasteful. It had an in-house legal team that was thorough in making certain the company observed laws in other countries. Steve Bannon had advised the company on how to work in America. Alexander then likened the circumstances with Leave.EU as a series of dates that hadn’t resulted in a “value proposition” leading to a marriage.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In examining all the complex relationships between all of these people and entities—Vote Leave, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, the Mercers, Russia, and the Trump campaign—Cadwalladr saw that I was right in the middle of all of them. Seeming to pop up everywhere, I looked like the Zelig of 2016 to her. At first, I didn’t want to talk to Cadwalladr. I had no interest in being at the center of some massive Guardian exposé. I was exhausted, I had been burned over and over, and I wished that I could just put the Cambridge Analytica ordeal in the past. On top of that, Cambridge Analytica was no longer just a company. My old boss Steve Bannon was now sitting in the White House and on the National Security Council of the most powerful nation on earth.

…

As the former director of research, I’ve brought with me evidence of how Facebook’s data was weaponized by the firm, and how the systems they built left millions of Americans vulnerable to the propaganda operations of hostile foreign states. Schiff leads the questioning. A former federal prosecutor, he is sharp and precise with his lines of inquiry, and he wastes no time getting to the heart of the matter. Did you work with Steve Bannon? Yes. Did Cambridge Analytica have any contacts with potential Russian agents? Yes. Do you believe that this data was used to sway the American electorate to elect the president of the United States? Yes. An hour goes by, then two, then three. I chose to come here of my own accord and to answer these questions about how a liberal, gay twenty-four-year-old Canadian found himself part of a British military contractor developing psychological warfare tools for the American alt-right.

…

But with the advent of the Internet, it became possible to create commodities out of our lives—our behavior, our attention, our identity. People were processed into data. We would serve as the raw material of this new data-industrial complex. One of the first people to spot the political potential of this new reality was Steve Bannon, the relatively unknown editor of right-wing website Breitbart News, which was founded to reframe American culture according to the nationalist vision of Andrew Breitbart. Bannon saw his mission as nothing short of cultural warfare, but when I first encountered him, Bannon knew that something was missing, that he didn’t have the right weapons.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

Carole Cadwalladr, “Revealed: How US Billionaire Helped to Back Brexit,” Guardian, February 25, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit. 15. Jane Mayer, “New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit,” New Yorker, November 17, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/new-evidence-emerges-of-steve-bannon-and-cambridge-analyticas-role-in-brexit. 16. Nigel Farage, “Farage: ‘Brexit Could Not Have Happened without Breitbart,’” interview by Alex Marlow, Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, December 20, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

…

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following photographs: 1: Courtesy of Lee Neuwirth © Lee Neuwirth 2: Courtesy of Seth Rumshinsky 3: Photo by Rick Mott, taken at the NJ Open Go Tournament, provided with permission, courtesy of Stefi Baum 4, 5: Courtesy of Brian Keating 6: Courtesy of David Eisenbud 7: Courtesy of Wall Street Journal and Jenny Strasburg 8: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images ISBN 9780735217980 (hardcover) ISBN 9780735217997 (ebook) ISBN 9780593086315 (international edition) Jacket design: Karl Spurzem Jacket image: (equations) Virtualphoto / Getty Images Version_1 CONTENTS Also by Gregory Zuckerman Title Page Copyright Dedication Cast of Characters A Timeline of Key Events Introduction Prologue PART ONE Money Isn’t Everything Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven PART TWO Money Changes Everything Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Epilogue Photographs Acknowledgments Appendices Notes Index About the Author To Gabriel and Elijah My signals in the noise CAST OF CHARACTERS James Simons Mathematician, code breaker, and founder of Renaissance Technologies Lenny Baum Simons’s first investing partner and author of algorithms that impacted the lives of millions James Ax Ran the Medallion fund and developed its first trading models Sandor Straus Data guru who played key early role at Renaissance Elwyn Berlekamp Game theorist who managed the Medallion fund at a key turning point Henry Laufer Mathematician who moved Simons’s fund toward short-term trades Peter Brown Computer scientist who helped engineer Renaissance’s key breakthroughs Robert Mercer Renaissance’s co-CEO, helped put Donald Trump in the White House Rebekah Mercer Teamed up with Steve Bannon to upend American politics David Magerman Computer specialist who tried to stop the Mercers’ political activities A TIMELINE OF KEY EVENTS 1938 Jim Simons born 1958 Simons graduates MIT 1964 Simons becomes code breaker at the IDA 1968 Simons leads math department at Stony Brook University 1974 Simons and Chern publish groundbreaking paper 1978 Simons leaves academia to start Monemetrics, a currency trading firm, and a hedge fund called Limroy 1979 Lenny Baum and James Ax join 1982 Firm’s name changes to Renaissance Technologies Corporation 1984 Baum quits 1985 Ax and Straus move the company to California 1988 Simons shuts down Limroy, launches the Medallion fund 1989 Ax leaves, Elwyn Berlekamp leads Medallion 1990 Berlekamp departs, Simons assumes control of the firm and fund 1992 Henry Laufer becomes full-time employee 1993 Peter Brown and Robert Mercer join 1995 Brown, Mercer achieve key breakthrough 2000 Medallion soars 98.5 percent 2005 Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund launches 2007 Renaissance and other quant firms suffer sudden losses 2010 Brown and Mercer take over firm 2017 Mercer steps down as co-CEO INTRODUCTION You do know—no one will speak with you, right?”

…

His efforts, while valuable, raise the question of whether one individual should enjoy so much influence. So, too, does the clout of his senior executive,* Robert Mercer, who is perhaps the individual most responsible for Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016. Mercer, Trump’s biggest financial supporter, plucked Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway from obscurity and inserted them into the Trump campaign, stabilizing it during a difficult period. Companies formerly owned by Mercer and now in the hands of his daughter Rebekah played key roles in the successful campaign to encourage the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.

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

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

Mike Pence: no one-on-one meals with female coworkers Jia Tolentino, “Mike Pence’s Marriage and the Beliefs That Keep Women from Power,” New Yorker, March 31, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/​culture/​jia-tolentino/​mike-pences-marriage-and-the-beliefs-that-keep-women-from-power. The Ranking of Human Life Steve Bannon and abuse allegations Santa Monica Police Department, crime report, January 1, 1996, http://www.politico.com/​f/​?id=00000156-c3f8-dd14-abfe-fbfbbe310001. Elizabeth Chuck, Ali Vitali, Andrew Blankstein, and Katie Wall, “Trump Campaign CEO Steve Bannon Accused of Anti-Semitic Remarks by Ex-Wife,” NBCNews.com, August 27, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/​politics/​2016-election/​trump-campaign-ceo-steve-bannon-accused-anti-semitic-remarks-ex-n638731. Hadas Gold and John Bresnahan, “Trump Campaign CEO Once Charged in Domestic Violence Case,” Politico, August 25, 2016, http://www.politico.com/​story/​2016/​08/​steve-bannon-domestic-violence-case-police-report-227432.

…

General Dynamics and Boeing to head the department of defense. And the Goldman Sachs guys for pretty much everything that’s left. The handful of career politicians who have been put in charge of agencies seem to have been selected either because they do not believe in the agency’s core mission, or do not think the agency should exist at all. Steve Bannon, Trump’s apparently sidelined chief strategist, was very open about this when he addressed a conservative audience in February 2017. The goal, he said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (by which he meant the government regulations and agencies tasked with protecting people and their rights).

…

If these kinds of protests spread, more developers could decide to de-Trump themselves. And it’s a fair bet that if his golden name starts disappearing off giant phallic symbols from Vancouver to Manila, Trump would not take it well, nor would his sons, who are reportedly already worried about the damage that senior advisors like Steve Bannon may have done to the family name. In a parallel tactic, when the White House closed down its call-in comment lines in January 2017, one group—whitehouseinc.org—suggested voters phone Trump hotels and resorts and tell whoever answered that they were upset about the president’s plans to take away their health insurance, or any other policy grievances they had.

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019 by Stewart Lee

Airbnb, AltaVista, anti-communist, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Ford Model T, imposter syndrome, Jeremy Corbyn, New Journalism, off-the-grid, Overton Window, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, white flight

If he had his way every politician would be slung in prison and given a taste of what they deserved’ (The Right Honourable Skinhead, Richard Allen, 1981).8 Indeed, Steve Bannon seems to be carrying vast sections of dialogue from The Right Honourable Skinhead around in his head, which spill unbidden from his careless face. Bannon said, off air, to the LBC presenter Theo Usherwood, who had queried his support for Tommy Robinson, ‘Fuck you. Don’t you fucking say you’re calling me out. You fucking liberal elite. Tommy Robinson is the backbone of this country.’9 And on page 103 of The Right Honourable Skinhead, the news magnate Steve Mannon, Robbie Tomlinson’s chief cheerleader, who differs only from Steve Bannon in that he is a Welsh born-again Christian, addresses radio presenter Leo Isherwood thus: ‘Flip you, boyo!

…

These aren’t the times for self-loathing liberals to seek to understand the leaders of the global far right, or their supporters. That ship sailed when Trump put Breitbart into the White House.8 We should be in crisis-management mode. It’s time to reassert a fundamental principle, namely that there’s no excuse for bigotry, whichever alt-right buzzword you get Boris or Steve Bannon to rebrand it with. And if that means no more free green-room bacon sandwiches on Sunday morning for me, then so be it. We are all going to have to make sacrifices. The role of a comedian is to entertain with humour, not to preach his politics in the misguided belief that they are anything other than a professional entertainer.

…

It did, but I have changed the names, and I have changed them to different names on different occasions. 7 Every Remain voter has observed evidence of the sudden shift in gear regarding what racists feel they can say in public since the referendum. Someone needs to compile some kind of archive of all this anecdotal material, so we can remember what we were like after Vote Leave uncorked the rage flask. It could be the Domesday Book of low-level anecdotal race hate. 8 In January 2018, just over twelve months later, Trump had Breitbart’s Steve Bannon removed from the White House for criticising him in the book Fire and Fury. As a result, Bannon was free to pursue his avowed intent of creating a global infrastructure for right-wing populism, which appeared to be based on his reading of Richard Allen’s 1970s Skinhead novels. My Paul Nuttalls routine has floated back up the U-bend 4 December 2016 I believe it was a frog who wrote, ‘Explaining a joke is like dissecting the American writer Elwyn Brooks White.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Bannon’s ideology and films: Ronald Radosh, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘A Leninist’ Who Wants to ‘Destroy the State,’ ” DB, Aug. 22, 2016; Jeremy Peters, “Bannon’s Views Can be Traced to a Book That Warns, ‘Winter Is Coming,’ ” NYT, April 8, 2017; Owen Matthews, “Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon’s Ideological Ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” NW, April 17, 2017; Christopher Dickey and Asawin Suebsaeng, “Steve Bannon’s Dream: A Worldwise Ultra-Right,” DB, Nov. 13, 2016. Bannon’s films were simplistic Bannon quotation: Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon.” Views: Radosh, “Steve Bannon”; Peters, “Bannon’s Views”; Matthews, “Alexander Dugin.” Bannon on the “treasonous” behavior of Manafort, Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr.: David Smith, “Trump Tower meeting with Russians ‘treasonous,’ Bannon says in explosive book,” TG, Jan. 3, 2018.

…

Bannon, David Bossie, and Citizens United: Michael Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots ‘An Entirely New Political Movement,’ ” Hollywood Reporter, Nov. 18, 2016. Bannon and Mercers: Matthew Kelly, Kate Goldstein, and Nicholas Confessore, “Robert Mercer, Bannon Patron, Is Leaving Helm of $50 Billion Hedge Fund,” NYT, Nov. 2, 2017. Bannon’s extreme-Right ideology Bannon quotation: Owen Matthews, “Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon’s Ideological Ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” NW, April 17, 2017. Bannon’s ideology and films: Ronald Radosh, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘A Leninist’ Who Wants to ‘Destroy the State,’ ” DB, Aug. 22, 2016; Jeremy Peters, “Bannon’s Views Can be Traced to a Book That Warns, ‘Winter Is Coming,’ ” NYT, April 8, 2017; Owen Matthews, “Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon’s Ideological Ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” NW, April 17, 2017; Christopher Dickey and Asawin Suebsaeng, “Steve Bannon’s Dream: A Worldwise Ultra-Right,” DB, Nov. 13, 2016.

…

Right down to the last, Manafort showed the touch of a true Russian political technologist, not so much denying the facts as changing the subject to a spectacular fiction. On the day the story of his cash payments broke, August 14, 2016, Manafort helped Russia to spread an entirely fictional story about an attack by Muslim terrorists on a NATO base in Turkey. Manafort was replaced as campaign manager by the right-wing ideologue and filmmaker Steve Bannon, whose qualification was that he had brought white supremacists to the mainstream of American discourse. As the director of the Breitbart News Network, Bannon made them household names. America’s leading racists, to a man, admired Trump and Putin. Matthew Heimbach, a defender of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, spoke of Putin as the “leader of the anti-globalist forces around the world,” and of Russia as “the most powerful ally” of white supremacy and as an “axis for nationalists.”

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

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

guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAD7POnjWq-aPJ8FxLdeplMTPn2tKzwIxqeEqeVywFBMl6GwkQEQc67pQNvFPNVdRH1pqFxJxv2l2AglC7g-Tw5wuk0cYkF1EuOuT8l8ilx_vbSuX78A3Kufu3hatRCURvz0qZdv75ViU-VripSv2bdvg5Oyc5t9g7vAcI7bbEnda [accessed on 25 July 2019] 116 ‘Don’t you fucking say you’re calling me out’: Sarah Marsh, ‘Steve Bannon calls for Tommy Robinson to be released from prison’ (Guardian, 15 July 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/15/steve-bannon-tommy-robinson-released-from-prison-trump-strategist-lbc-radio-interview [accessed on 25 July 2019] 116 ‘This is exactly the argument they like’: Mark Townsend, ‘#FreeTommy – the making of a far-right English “martyr”’ (Guardian, 29 July 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/29/tommy-robinson-far-right-resurgence-steve-bannon-us-support [accessed on 25 July 2019] 118 ‘free speech grifters’: Mari Uyehara, ‘The Free Speech Grifters’ (GQ, 19 March 2018), https://www.gq.com/story/free-speech-grifting [accessed on 25 July 2019] 118 ‘Given the myopic focus on liberals’: ibid. 119 ‘Free Speech University Ranking’: Tom Slater, ‘Free Speech University Rankings’ (Spiked Online, 24 February 2019), https://www.spiked-online.com/free-speech-university-rankings/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 119 ‘misleading, ill-informed and worryingly influential’: Carl Thompson, ‘Free Speech Rankings: misleading, ill-informed and worryingly influential’ (Times Higher Education, 17 February 2018) https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/free-speech-rankings-misleading-ill-informed-and-worryingly-influential [accessed on 25 July 2019] 119 ‘You’d have to have been living under a rock’: Tom Slater, ‘The poshos pushing campus censorship’ (Telegraph, 19 January 2016), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/12108340/The-poshos-pushing-campus-censorship.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 120 ‘Spiked received six figure donations from the Charles Koch Foundation’: George Monbiot, ‘How US billionaires are fuelling the hard-right cause in Britain’ (Guardian, 7 December 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/07/us-billionaires-hard-right-britain-spiked-magazine-charles-david-koch-foundation [accessed on 25 July 2019] 120 ‘… overall public support for free speech has in fact, risen over time’: Matthew Yglesias, ‘Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong’ (Vox, 12 March 2018), https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/12/17100496/political-correctness-data [accessed on 25 July 2019] 121 ‘There is no campus free speech crisis’: Jeffrey Adam Sachs, ‘There is no campus free speech crisis: a close look at the evidence’ (Niskanen Center, 27 April 2018), https://niskanencenter.org/blog/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 123 ‘… suicide by boycott tactic’: Stephanie Saul, ‘The Conservative Force Behind Speeches Roiling College Campuses’ (New York Times, 20 May 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/us/college-conservative-speeches.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 123 ‘… a perceived “chilling” of free speech on university campuses’: Rachel Pells, ‘Anti-terror laws “to blame for campus free speech concerns”’ (Times Higher Education, 11 January 2018), https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/anti-terror-laws-blame-campus-free-speech-concerns [accessed on 25 July 2019] 124 ‘… echoed Amos’: Benjamin Kentish, ‘Universities hit back at Government claims they are restricting free speech’ (Independent, 10 January 2018), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/university-free-speech-restrictions-hit-back-government-a8152376.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 124 ‘speaker disinvitation attempts have a higher success rate’: Sean Stevens, Campus Speaker Disinvitation Trends (Part 2 of 2) (Heterodox Academy, 7 February 2017), https://heterodoxacademy.org/campus-speaker-disinvitations-recent-trends-part-2-of-2/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 126 ‘Today this speech restriction, tomorrow the Inquisition’: Magdalena Jozwiak, ‘Internet, Freedom of Speech and Slippery Slope Argument – The Case of the “Right to Be Forgotten”’, (SSRN, 22 March 2018), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

…

He was aware that he would go to prison if he broke the law again. It was suicide by contempt of court. What ensued was a campaign for his release that was based on the lie that his freedom of speech had been violated. A petition drew half a million signatures and far-right European leaders came to his support. Steve Bannon, former Trump strategist and alt-right publisher, almost came to blows with a London radio journalist who challenged him on his support for Robinson. ‘Fuck you,’ Bannon barked. ‘Don’t you fucking say you’re calling me out. You fucking liberal elite. Tommy Robinson is the backbone of this country.’

…

Even David Duke, a KKK grand wizard (I repeat this point because it bears repeating) was scandalised by the suggestion that race had anything to do with his campaign. Allegations of racism were a ‘smear’, he responded to his supporters. ‘Remember,’ he told them at rallies, ‘when they smear me, they are really smearing you.’ There’s an uncanny echo of that in a speech by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, to a crowd at a French National Front rally in Lille almost thirty years later: ‘Let them call you racists,’ he said. ‘Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honour.’ Allegations of racism, according to Bannon, speaking to supporters of a far-right party that had proposed that jobs be first offered to ‘native’ French people before immigrants (a measure that is thought by constitutional experts to be unconstitutional and has been judged by French law to be unlawful), were just bad faith slurs.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

Jonah didn’t understand that the company’s reputation in media circles was, well, trashy, and that Kenny and Arianna were just humoring him in letting him carry on exploratory conversations with a rotating series of British executives whose names he never learned. (Jonah was awful with names.) His pitch: The Huffington Post and the Mail could “take over the English-speaking world.” He was proud when the Daily Mail seemed ready to invest. But Jonah was learning to tell a story. One person who was listening was Steve Bannon, a friend of his old partner Andrew Breitbart. Bannon, a banker turned right-wing activist with an interest in the internet, would be inspired by the angry stirrings and unhinged memes of Chris Poole’s 4chan. He had met Andrew back in 2004 and grown close to him, and now Bannon surveyed the left-wing media landscape for things to copy.

…

Andrew realized he’d “forgotten a most blatant missing puzzle piece,” and that hint, along with Weiner’s claim that he’d been hacked, prompted Andrew to publish a piece under the grand byline “publius” with the memorable lede “Hacked or hung?” A week later, Andrew was on the phone with Meagan Broussard, a Texas woman who was—it emerged—one of many with whom Weiner had exchanged lewd messages. As he paced the sidewalk in front of the offices his new friend Steve Bannon had rented for him, Andrew persuaded her to text him five photographs. They were unmistakably Weiner, and unmistakably sexual. He sprinted upstairs to the office of Breitbart lawyer Joel Pollak, whom he’d brought in to prevent another Shirley Sherrod mess, and gleefully pressed his iPad against Pollak’s glass door, laughing.

…

It seemed perfectly logical if you were working on the internet then, doing your best to make your own posts generate engagement and go viral. Trump wasn’t doing anything to game Facebook. He simply was what Facebook liked. A few weeks before the election, I got a lesson on this phenomenon in person from Steve Bannon, who had taken over breitbart.com when Andrew died, then left it to go chair Donald Trump’s campaign. He’d been interested in Jonah since his first glimpse at the business of The Huffington Post, so I’d been invited to Trump Tower to exchange notes with him. I walked past the golden escalator and rode an elevator up to an empty conference room to find the chairman alone, and not in any particular rush.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, chief data officer, cloud computing, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, low interest rates, machine readable, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Bannon, tail risk, the new new thing, uranium enrichment

They only ever rejected one person, Paul Manafort’s secretary.” The first time Donald Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team, led by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office, on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find the governor of New Jersey seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, actually yelling, You’re stealing my money!

…

The national security team inside the Trump transition—staffed with senior former military and intelligence officials—had thought that an especially bad idea. Flynn’s name wasn’t on the list. But here he was, in the meeting to decide who would do what in the Trump administration, and Ivanka was asking him which job he’d like to have. Before Christie could intercede, Steve Bannon grabbed him and asked to see him privately. Christie followed Bannon to his office impatiently. Hey, this is going to have to be quick, said Christie. It’s really quick, said Bannon. You’re out. Why? asked Christie, stunned. We’re making a change. Okay, what are we changing? You. Why? It’s really not important.

…

The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life. The surprise was that it was being done now, just when the work of the transition team was most critical. Only when Christie threatened to go down and tell reporters that Steve Bannon had fired him did Bannon concede, “It was Jared.” In the days after the election, the people in the building on Seventeenth and Pennsylvania were meant to move to another building in downtown Washington, a kind of White House-in-waiting. They soon discovered that the lists that they had created of people to staff the Trump administration were not the lists that mattered.

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

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

Their private beliefs about people from countries or cultures other than their own are demonstrably racist, they just don’t like being told so. I’m not sure why, and I suspect the next chapter in these ludicrous, social media-fuelled ‘culture wars’ will see more and more people take the advice that Donald Trump’s former consigliere, Steve Bannon, gave to French fascists to wear the accusation of racism with ‘pride’fn1. For now, the kindest thing you can do in the circumstances is invite them to say whatever they want with a promise that you won’t call them names. Three or four years after I first assumed the position behind the microphone, I was told by a caller from the London borough of Hounslow that he wasn’t allowed to say what he really thought about immigration because of political correctness.

…

Muslim listeners generally respond to calls like this by pointing out that they’re too busy doing the school run to be waging war against the kuffir. Or that they were going to do a bit of jihad, but something good dropped on Netflix. It is, for my money, the British way to respond to such misguided fury – with disarming humour, but Donald Trump and Steve Bannon have shown what a powerful political force that misguided fury can be when properly harnessed. James: And you think they’ll say yes. Frank: No. James: So what do we do with all the ones who say no? The ones who don’t cough immediately to being secret jihadists, hellbent upon destroying Western civilisation.

…

But Trump, for me, is more symptom than disease. His political success was made possible by creating an environment of fear and loathing into which he could insert himself as saviour and protector. Historians of the future will marvel at how the malign influence of ‘news’ sources like Breitbart, run by Trump’s consigliere Steve Bannon, could have gone unchecked for so long. They will point out that nobody really objected when Trump decried facts as ‘fake news’ but anointed the Infowars loon, Alex Jones, as reliable even after Jones had described the Sandy Hook school massacre as a hoax and the parents of dead children as hoaxers.

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

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

The move helped turn a tide of negative press and added to the coffers of a campaign that would buy a barrage of targeted Facebook advertisements as part of a voter suppression strategy designed to discourage potential Clinton supporters. After the election, Thiel was feted by Trump’s inner circle and given an office in Trump Tower, along with the latitude to install his allies in the new administration. “He was something unique,” recalled Steve Bannon, who became CEO of the campaign in August. He praised Thiel for bringing intellectual credibility and seriousness to a campaign that struggled at times to convey either. To Bannon and others on the Trumpist right, Thiel was a hero, a key enabler of Trump’s unexpected win. To the left, Thiel was uniquely villainous—a Silicon Valley power broker who’d helped hook Americans on a collection of tech services, then used his influence over those services to elect a candidate who promised to ban Muslims from entering the United States and to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

…

Despite the haughty-sounding name, the company had little to do with Cambridge University—in fact, its office was in London—but Nix’s plan had been to market ideas that had been developed at Cambridge about using people’s Facebook data to guess their personality type. He would raise money from Steve Bannon and the ultra-conservative Mercer family, led by the patriarch Bob, who’d gotten rich at a quantitative hedge fund, and his daughter Rebekah. The Mercers were backers of Bannon’s news outlet, Breitbart, and had invested in Nix’s pitch to adapt the Facebook concept for use in electoral politics, enabling political campaigns to scan someone’s social network profile, predict who they were going to vote for, and serve them ads to get them to show up to the polls.

…

He would suddenly have a chance to spend it. 15 OUT FOR TRUMP In his initial assessment of the jockeying for the Republican nomination for the 2016 presidential race, Thiel had thrown his weight behind Carly Fiorina, a well-known tech executive who’d been on the cover of Fortune magazine’s “Most Powerful Women” issue in 1998 when she was a senior executive at Lucent Technologies, the telecommunications equipment business spun off from AT&T, and who had later served as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. “She was the only one who understood what a fucking algorithm was,” said Steve Bannon. “That’s his kindred soul.” But Thiel hadn’t been entirely enamored of Fiorina. Her business career had ended disastrously in 2005, after she pushed HP to acquire Compaq, just as the personal computer industry was beginning to contract. The merger is now considered by many to be one of the worst business deals in modern history and coincided with several waves of layoffs.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

print=1. 12Tremblay, “Intro to Gender Criticism for Gamers.” 13Lien, “No Girls Allowed.” 14Torill Elvira Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate,” Games and Culture 13, no. 8 (2016): 787–806. 15Paulo Ruffino, “Parasites to Gaming: Learning from GamerGate” (paper, Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, Dundee, UK, 2016). 16Cherie Todd, “Commentary: GamerGate and Resistance to the Diversification of Gaming Culture,” Women’s Studies Journal 29, no. 1 (2015): 64. 17Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games,” 14. 18Jake Swearingen, “Steve Bannon Saw the ‘Monster Power’ of Angry Gamers While Farming Gold in World of Warcraft,” New York, July 18, 2017, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html. 19Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2017), 81. 20Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester: Zero Books, 2017); Matt Lees, “What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us about the ‘Alt-Right,’” Guardian, December 1, 2016, www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump. 21Robert Purchese, “ArenaNet Fires Two Guild Wars 2 Writers over Twitter Exchange with YouTuber,” Eurogamer, July 7, 2018, www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-06-arenanet-fires-two-guild-wars-2-writers-over-twitter-exchange-with-youtuber. 22Quoted in Keith Stuart, “Richard Bartle: We Invented Multiplayer Games as a Political Gesture,” Guardian, November 17, 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/17/richard-bartle-multiplayer-games-political-gesture.

…

In 2014, it became covered more widely in the media, which began to discuss a “culture war” taking place over videogames.16 The “Gamergaters” thus formed a virtual mob, directed against alternative voices, criticism, and new forms of representation in videogames. That Gamergate transpired highlights that “playing games is not an isolated event.”17 While these events made little sense to people outside of videogames, they did make sense to some of the people on the periphery of the industry. For example, Steve Bannon, who helped to run Breitbart News and then joined the Trump administration, developed a close knowledge of gamer culture through his involvement in the World of Warcraft gold-mining company Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE).18 The company employed Chinese workers to grind through repetitive tasks to earn ingame money and items, which would then be sold to wealthier players, mainly in the US.

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

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

It is perhaps the single biggest success story of right-wing alternative media, with celebrities like Milo, its editor Steve Bannon rising to the top of US politics and figures like Allum Bokhari rising from relative obscurity to having meetings with the president. Bannon himself described the site as a ‘platform for the alt-right’, though he undoubtedly meant this in the looser sense of a new anti-establishment right, aligned with the European populist right and the US Trumpian right. After the election, Buzzfeed published a transcript of a long interview Steve Bannon gave to the Vatican from 2004. Presumably thinking this was a ready-made hit-piece that would destroy his reputation, Bannon came across in the interview as darkly fascinating and, relative to many Buzzfeed listicle writers, as quite a serious and intriguing person.

…

But what few on the left were paying attention to in the years leading up to Trump’s election, and really throughout the entire Obama administration, was the alt-light building a multilayered alternative online media empire that would dwarf many of the above. This stretched from white nationalist bloggers in its sparsely populated corners to the charismatic YouTubers and Twitter celebrities in its more popular form. These included right-wing outsiders such as Steve Bannon who, through building a publication like Breitbart, became chief strategist to the US president. YouTube vloggers produced an abundance of popular commentary videos and ‘SJW cringe compilations’, while alt-light celebrities like Milo built careers from exposing the absurdities of the kind of Tumblr identity politics that had gone mainstream through listicle sites like Buzzfeed and anti-free speech safe space campus politics.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Katherine Bolan Forrest Yannick Losbar, “Ross Ulbricht Silk Road Trial Judge Facing Death Threats on Dark Net,” October 20, 2014, cryptocoinsnews.com; Rich Calder, “Judge in Silk Road Case Gets Death Threats,” October 24, 2014, nypost.com. His name became more familiar J. Lester Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” November 15, 2016, buzzfeed.com; Jason Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists,” February 10, 2017, nytimes.com. Dale Carrico Amor Mundi, “Anissimov’s Jolt to the Far Right,” March 5, 2014, amormundi.blogspot.com. Chapter VIII: Onward, Robot Soldiers Page invited Kurzweil to join the company David J.

…

He was the PayPal founder, Facebook board member, major shareholder in a CIA-funded company, Donald Trump delegate, distinguished Stanford alumnus, venture capitalist, and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Here was a rich, powerful man, regarded by many as a public intellectual, who, three years before White House adviser Steve Bannon declared war on “the administrative state,” was willing to say, regarding the “monolithic monstrosity” of government, that “breaking it down is probably an improvement.” Tech’s most dangerous billionaire was born in Germany to conservative Christian evangelicals. His father was a chemical engineer who worked for international mining companies.

…

A favorite of postwar fascist terrorist groups throughout Europe, Evola had written a book called Fascism Viewed from the Right, in which he argued that Hitler and Mussolini failed because they were not extreme enough, and too populist. Evola favored a return to aristocracy. His name became more familiar in the American mainstream after then Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon (who would go on to become Trump’s campaign strategist and White House adviser) mentioned the heretofore obscure writer’s name in a BuzzFeed interview. As one scholar of right-wing traditionalism later told the New York Times, “The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant.” It was more than significant—it was alarming.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-47335414. 11‘Trump supporter attacks BBC cameraman at El Paso rally’, BBC, 12 February 2019. Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47208909. 12See for example Sophie McBain, ‘What Steve Bannon Really Believes In’, New Statesman, 12 September 2018. Available at https://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2018/09/what-steve-bannon-really-believes. 13Betsy Woodruff, ‘The Secret Heiress Funding the Right-Wing Media’, Daily Beast, 13 September 2016. Available at https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-secret-heiress-funding-the-right-wing-media. 14Paul P. Murphy, Kaya Yurieff and Gianluca Mezzofiore, ‘Exclusive: YouTube ran ads from hundreds of brands on extremist channels’, CNN, 20 April 2018.

…

Around 4,000 protesters gathered outside the BBC headquarters in Manchester on a Saturday afternoon in February 2019 to watch his ‘Panodrama documentary’ and call for the BBC licence fee to be scrapped.10 Just days before the ‘Panodrama’ premiered, a Trump supporter attacked a BBC cameraman covering a rally in El Paso, Texas.11 Tommy Robinson is just one of many self-framed journalists who are confronting the ‘lying press’ with innovative and transgressive means. Alternative news outlets and right-wing YouTube vloggers are increasingly well networked – with initiatives like Steve Bannon’s The Movement attempting to empower and connect them,12 and right-leaning donors such as the Horowitz Foundation and the Mercer Family Foundation supporting them financially.13 But a big proportion of alternative media’s funding sources, as with all popular websites, comes from advertising.14 When German brand strategist Gerald Hensel sat down one Saturday morning in 2016 to pen a blog piece about brands buying ads and banners on far-right websites, he did not expect that this would set in motion a life-changing series of events.

…

Notes 1: whites only 1For analysis see Elisabetta Cassini Wolff, ‘Evola’s interpretation of fascism and moral responsibility’, Patterns of Prejudice 50(4–5), 2016, pp. 478–94. 2Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism: 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 3Richard Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 4Jason Horowitz, ‘Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Facsists’, New York Times, 10 Febuary 2017. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html. 5Ibid. 6Antonio Regalado, ‘2017 was the year consumer DNA testing blew up’, MIT Review, February 2018. Available at https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610233/2017-was-the-year-consumer-dna-testing-blew-up/. 7Aaron Panofsky and Joan M.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

Cast of Characters The Al Saud King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the kingdom’s founder and father of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud, Mohammed’s younger brother and former ambassador to the United States Sultana bint Turki Al Sudairi, King Salman’s first wife Fahdah bint Falah al-Hithlain, King Salman’s third wife and mother of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and briefly heir apparent Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Al Saud, King Salman’s nephew and a longtime antiterrorism official close to the US government King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and predecessor Prince Miteb bin Abdullah Al Saud, King Abdullah’s son and former chief of the Saudi Arabia National Guard Prince Turki bin Abdullah Al Saud, the seventh son of King Abdullah Prince Badr bin Farhan Al Saud, a prince from a distant branch of the family, minister of culture, and a longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman Prince Abdullah bin Bandar Al Saud, another prince and longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman and head of the National Guard Prince Sultan bin Turki Al Saud, the son of one of King Salman’s brothers, and an outspoken prince whose criticisms got him into trouble with more powerful members of the family The Palace Khalid al-Tuwaijri, the head of King Abdullah’s Royal Court Mohammed al-Tobaishi, King Abdullah’s chief of protocol Rakan bin Mohammed al-Tobaishi, Mohammed bin Salman’s protocol chief and the son of Mohammed al-Tobaishi The MBS Entourage Bader al-Asaker, a longtime associate of Mohammed who runs his private foundation Saud al-Qahtani, an advisor to Mohammed who specializes in quashing dissent Turki Al Sheikh, a longtime companion of Mohammed who has brought foreign sports and entertainment events to Saudi Arabia The Region Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi Tahnoon bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi national security advisor Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, former emir of Qatar Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, president of Egypt Saad Hariri, prime minister of Lebanon Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, president of Turkey Residents of the Ritz Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, a cousin of Mohammed and Saudi Arabia’s most prominent international businessman Adel Fakeih, a Saudi businessman who became minister of economy and planning Hani Khoja, a Saudi management consultant Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi, a Saudi businessman with holdings in Ethiopia Ali al-Qahtani, a general Bakr bin Laden, scion of the bin Laden construction family The Critics Jamal Khashoggi, newspaper columnist with a long history of working for and sometimes criticizing the Saudi government Omar Abdulaziz, Canada-based dissident who criticizes Saudi leadership in online videos Loujain al-Hathloul, women’s rights activist who violated Saudi law by trying to drive into the kingdom from the United Arab Emirates The US Government President Donald Trump Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and an advisor to the president Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil, later US secretary of state The Businessmen Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com David Pecker, CEO of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer Ari Emanuel, Hollywood agent and cofounder of Endeavor talent agency Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese tech investor SoftBank Rajeev Misra, head of SoftBank’s Vision Fund Nizar al-Bassam, Saudi deal maker and a former international banker Kacy Grine, independent banker and confidant of Alwaleed bin Talal A note on naming: In the Saudi convention, a man is identified through a patrilineal naming system.

…

Chapter 8 Little Sparta December 2016 Discarding his white robes for a buttoned-up dress shirt and aviator sunglasses, the muscled crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed, arrived for a secret meeting at Manhattan’s Trump Tower looking like an Arab James Bond. The group receiving him was unlike anything he’d seen in his years of diplomacy with the United States, his closest Western ally and protector. On one side was Steve Bannon, the former banker and right-wing media executive whose fraying fleeces over two or three layers of collared shirts, reddened cheeks, shaggy gray hair, and tendency to pontificate on the ancient past gave him the air of a rumpled, though deeply reactionary, professor. Then there was Jared Kushner, the trim real estate heir married to Ivanka Trump, who once told Bannon on a flight that he didn’t think experts with a deep understanding of the past were necessarily the best people to plot out the geopolitical future.

…

Skeptical Westerners were still writing with ridicule about Abdulaziz bin Baz, the former Saudi grand mufti who denied that the Earth orbits the sun until a Saudi, King Salman’s older son Sultan, returned from a voyage on a US space shuttle and assured bin Baz that the Earth does indeed rotate on its axis and revolve around the sun. Mohammed’s two willing partners in the remade US alliance would be the same men MBZ met in Trump Tower, Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. They realized they needed to erase the Islamophobia charge to get Arab support for their top Middle East priorities. For Bannon that was punishing Iran, while Kushner needed backing for a Palestine peace deal. The young real estate executive loved the idea that he could find a way to bring peace to the Middle East with old-fashioned business sense and horse trading.

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

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

The media whom Trump called his enemy acted like his best friend, airing his rallies in full, letting his lies linger, and treating the prospect of his win as a joke or a ratings boon. Throughout 2016, hate crimes rose as Trump rebranded racism as populism and recruited white supremacists from the dregs of the GOP (like Jeff Sessions) and the extreme right (like Steve Bannon) to join his campaign. All anyone needed to see Trump as a potential American autocrat were their own eyes. His desire to dismantle democracy was out in the open. He did not bother to hide his goals because he knew few believed he could achieve them. That sort of thing does not happen here, commentators scoffed, citing checks and balances and centuries of democratic stability.

…

In summer 2014, writers Shafiqah Hudson and l’Nasah Crockett launched the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing to expose accounts impersonating black users and making obnoxious political claims.16 Many of these accounts were later revealed to be Russian troll accounts seeking to map the US political landscape and prepare to influence the 2016 election.17 Other trolls were right-wing users in the United States linked to the Russian effort: Steve Bannon (then the editor of Breitbart) and Cambridge Analytica were experimenting with social media to see how social groups could be manipulated online for political gain. According to Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, Bannon asked employees to “test messaging around Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian expansion.”18 However, few in power paid attention—in part because social media companies almost never took seriously the most common targets, women of color.

…

New right-wing websites trafficked in racist propaganda, which was then echoed by the Tea Party at rallies and online. The website Breitbart, established in Israel in 2007 by the American libertarian Andrew Breitbart,27 became more bigoted and conspiracy-oriented after Breitbart died suddenly in 2012 and was replaced with future Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon. But the peddling of the birther myth was not limited to right-wing extremist sites. As I mentioned in chapter 2, in the early days of the internet most news sites were a replication of print. While flawed in many ways, this system still employed fact-checking as a standard practice. During the 2000s, print media and online media coexisted uneasily, with the latter often being dismissed as inherently unreliable.

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

, The Conversation, 14 November 2017 29 ‘Betsy DeVos Plans to Consult Men’s Rights Trolls About Campus Sexual Assault’, Slate, 11 July 2017 30 ‘The so-called “manosphere” is peopled with hundreds of websites, blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists in particular and women, very typically American women, in general’, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2012 31 ‘Steve Bannon: Five Things to Know’, ADL 32 ‘How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists’, Mother Jones, August 2016 33 ‘White Nationalists Rejoice Trump’s Appointment of Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon’ Southern Poverty Law Center, 14 November 2016 34 ‘The horror, the horror’, Tortoise, 3 April 2019 35 ‘Only a proper Brexit can spare us from this toxic polarisation’, Daily Telegraph, 15 April 2019 36 ‘Steve Bannon: ‘We went back and forth’ on the themes of Johnson’s big speech’, The Guardian, 22 June 2019 37 ‘MPs’ fury at Boris Johnson’s “dangerous language”, BBC, 25 September 2019 38 ‘Man arrested outside office of Labour MP Jess Phillips’, The Guardian, 26 September 2019 39 ‘Trump defends response to Charlottesville violence, says he put it “perfectly” with “both sides” remark’, USA Today, 26 April 2019 40 ‘Dominic Cummings: Anger at MPs “not surprising”, PM’s adviser says’, BBC, 27 September 2019 41 ‘Labour MP calls for end to online anonymity after “600 rape threats” ’, The Guardian, 11 June 2018 42 ‘Ukip MEP candidate blamed feminists for rise in misogyny’, The Guardian, 22 April 2019 43 ‘Police investigate Ukip candidate over Jess Phillips rape comments’, The Guardian, 7 May 2019 44 ‘Under Siege For His Comments About Rape, UKIP’s Star Candidate Carl Benjamin Has Recruited Milo Yiannopoulos To Join His Campaign’, BuzzFeed, 8 May 2019 45 ‘Steve Bannon Targeted “Incels” Because They Are “Easy To Manipulate,” Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Says’, Newsweek, 29 October 2019 46 ‘Reddit’s TheRedPill, notorious for its misogyny, was founded by a New Hampshire state legislator’, Vox, 28 April 2017 47 ‘Red Pill Boss: All Feminists Want to Be Raped’, Daily Beast, 29 November 2017 48 ‘New Hampshire State Rep Who Created Reddit’s “Red Pill” Resigns’, Daily Beast, 22 May 2017 49 ‘Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism’, New York Review of Books, 19 March 2019 50 ‘Op-Ed: Hate on Jordan Peterson all you want, but he’s tapping into frustration that feminists shouldn’t ignore’, Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2018 51 ‘Jordan Peterson: “I don’t think that men can control crazy women” ’, The Varsity, 8 October 2018 52 ‘Why Can’t People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?’

…

Some of these men are cashing in on trends driven by manosphere communities, perhaps without even realising who they are appealing to. For others, the decision to appeal to certain groups seems to be more deliberate. For political figures like Donald Trump and his advisers, such as former chief strategist Steve Bannon, there are gains to be made by issuing dog whistles to the alt-right and manosphere communities. Such rhetoric, like Trump’s derisive advice to four Democratic American citizens and congresswomen of colour to ‘go back’ to the countries from which they originally came, is greeted with wild applause across the masses frequenting extremist websites.1 But a buffer of plausible deniability is also important, in order to avoid alienating a more mainstream base: a feat achieved by publicly disavowing racism and white supremacy, even while his own statements seem to send a very different message.2 For many of the other figureheads idolised, quoted and supported by the foot soldiers of the manosphere, it is also richly profitable to maintain the sympathy and loyalty of these communities, while actually holding them (either genuinely or performatively) in contempt.

…

In particular, d’Ancona suggested a direct link between Bannon’s apparent strategic input and Johnson’s Islamophobic and misogynistic newspaper piece. Soon afterwards, d’Ancona later revealed, he was bombarded with angry calls from Johnson. ‘I stopped counting at 15 – though the calls continued,’ he wrote in an article for news outlet Tortoise.34 ‘Boris Johnson was furious with me for writing about his contact with Steve Bannon.’ Specifically, according to d’Ancona, Johnson was furious that the journalist had linked Bannon’s advice to his column. In other words, he seemed desperate to avoid the inference that Bannon’s input had led him to spout classic manosphere and alt-right rhetoric in the mainstream press. Writing in his column, Johnson bristled that claims of any association between him and Bannon were a conspiracy theory and a ‘lefty delusion’.35 ‘Of course I met Mr Bannon a couple of times when I was foreign secretary and he was Trump’s chief of staff,’ Johnson wrote, ‘but not since.’

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

., issued by the Department of Justice, March 2019 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Bookstore, 2019). 5.Jane Mayer, “The Danger of President Pence,” New Yorker, October 16, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/the-danger-of-president-pence, accessed September 23, 2021. 6.The phrase “deep state” was appropriated and then deployed by Steve Bannon while he was writing for Breitbart. Alana Abramson, “President Trump’s Allies Keep Talking about the ‘Deep State.’ What’s That?,” Time, March 8, 2017, https://time.com/4692178/donald-trump-deep-state-breitbart-barack-obama/, accessed September 23, 2021; Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, “Why Steve Bannon Wants You to Believe in the Deep State,” Politico, March 21, 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/steve-bannon-deep-state-214935/, accessed September 23, 2021. See also Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising (New York: Penguin Press, 2017). 7.Tom McCarthy, “Why Has Trump Appointed So Many Judges—And How Did He Do It?”

…

Ron Paul has published several short books outlining his political beliefs including The Revolution: A Manifesto (New York: Grand Central, 2008) and Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (New York: Grand Central, 2011). 29.Donald Trump would become a follower of Breitbart soon after it launched, and he was an amplifier in his speeches and tweets of its “reporting.” After Andrew Breitbart’s sudden and premature death in 2012, Steve Bannon became Breitbart’s guiding force. See Breitbart.com, passim; Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2017); David Carr, “The Provocateur,” New York Times, April 13, 2012, , accessed December 15, 2021; Rebecca Mead, “Rage Machine: Andrew Breitbart’s Empire of Bluster,” New Yorker, May 17, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/05/24/rage-machine, accessed September 8, 2021; James Rainey, “Breitbart.com Sets Sights on Ruling the Conservative Conversation,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2012, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-xpm-2012-aug-01-la-et-breitbart-20120801-story.html, accessed June 28, 2021.

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

That Friday, January 31, the White House announced it would bar entry of foreign nationals who’d visited China, a move pushed by Navarro. Navarro was not yet aware of what was happening with Bright at HHS and Bowen at Prestige Ameritech, but the three were on a collision course to becoming uneasy allies, for a time. The force that would bring them together? None other than Steve Bannon. Because of course Steve Bannon. By the first days of February, Bowen realized that his friend Bright didn’t have the sway needed to escalate the nation’s preparation effort. So he turned to the press, securing an interview with the New York Times, some broadcast interviews, and a write-up at Wired.com. As word of his travails spread, Bowen got a call from a producer at War Room, the podcast hosted by Bannon, a former top adviser to Trump who still held clout in the administration, despite leaving the White House in a delightful tizzy and saying on his way out that the president was “like an eleven-year-old child.”

…

Hatfill, at this point Navarro’s brain trust, helped negotiate the contract awarded to Phlow. This is remarkable because Hatfill did not work for or represent the federal government in any way. He was an adjunct professor at George Washington University, a private school, who frequently talked on the podcast by Steve Bannon, who just happened to be an ardent advocate of an antimalarial drug called hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID. Hatfill was given office space in the White House, where he coordinated with high-ranking officials and bragged to friends that he worked “an average of 10 hours a day, 7-days a week, unpaid, as the senior medical advisor to one of the President’s senior advisors.”

…

the White House announced it would bar “Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons Who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” White House, January 31, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-suspension-entry-immigrants-nonimmigrants-persons-pose-risk-transmitting-2019-novel-coronavirus/. “like an eleven-year-old child” Gabriel Sherman, “ ‘I Have Power’: Is Steve Bannon Running for President?” Vanity Fair, December 21, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/bannon-for-president-trump-kushner-ivanka. Bright presented to HHS and CDC officials Bright, Complaint. gained fame for being wrongly suspected Eric Lichtblau, “Scientist Officially Exonerated in Anthrax Attacks,” New York Times, August 8, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/washington/09anthrax.html.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

That was the legal backdrop, but the details of Tether’s executive team were also entertaining: Their public spokesperson was their Chief Technology Officer (CTO), a hotheaded Italian guy named Paolo Ardoino. One of Tether’s cofounders was a colorful figure named Brock Pierce. A former child actor, Pierce had starred in The Mighty Ducks films before segueing into various business ventures in online video and video games. Pierce worked alongside such notable corporate luminaries as Trump strategist Steve Bannon, as well as a guy named Marc Collins-Rector. Pierce was living with Collins-Rector in Spain in 2002, when the two men were arrested in a house that contained guns, machetes, and child pornography. Pierce was eventually released, but Rector pled guilty to charges of child enticement, spent time in Spanish prison, and registered as a sex offender.

…

While Brock had no current involvement with the company, we had heard from a source that he had at one point tried to buy back into Tether’s ownership group for the laughably low amount of $50,000. A source had also told us Brock dangled his political connections to the Trump White House in the hopes of getting back into the good graces of Tether executives like CFO Giancarlo Devasini. Brock had some Trump-world associations, having run a company, Internet Gaming Entertainment, with Steve Bannon, who succeeded Brock as CEO. That spring, people close to Bannon were now reportedly advising Brock on his Senate bid in Vermont. Some of these gambits were successful, others ended ignominiously. (The improbable run for Senate followed an unsuccessful 2020 presidential run in which he received a grand total of 49,764 votes.)

…

National Security Council and things . . .” I may have involuntarily laughed at that point. Obviously Brock Pierce would not have attended an NSC meeting! The whole ruse was absurd, a flashback to my Hollywood days. Here was a bullshitter practicing a craft he’d honed for years. Then again, Pierce was connected to former Trump aide Steve Bannon, and the Trump administration wasn’t exactly known for discretion or choosing the highest caliber of people. So who was to say? Could the source who told us Pierce dangled his relationship to the Trump White House to get back in business with the Tether guys actually be right? Had Brock Pierce, the former-child-actor-turned-crypto-insider, who was trailed by a disturbing list of easily googleable rumors and accusations, made inroads with the office of the Fraudster-in-Chief?

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Chapter 11: The Mindset in the Mirror 144   Klaus Schwab’s vision : Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset (Cologny, Switzerland: Forum, 2020). 145   “fixed traditional sentiments” : Robbie Shilliam, “How Black Deficit Entered the British Academy,” https:// robbieshilliam .wordpress .com /2017 /06 /20 /how -black -deficit -entered -the -british -academy /, retrieved June 19, 2019. 146   At the university level : Adam Kirsch, “Technology Is Taking Over English Departments,” New Republic , May 2, 2014, https:// newrepublic .com /article /117428 /limits -digital -humanities -adam -kirsch. 148   Feeling blamed for society’s ills : Adi Robertson, “The FBI has released its Gamergate investigation records,” Verge , January 27, 2017, https:// www .theverge .com /2017 /1 /27 /14412594 /fbi -gamergate -harassment -threat -investigation -records -release. 148   Gamergate : Michael James Heron, Pauline Belford, and Ayse Goker, “Sexism in the Circuitry,” ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society 44, no. 4: 18–29, https:// doi .org /10 .1145 /2695577 .2695582. 149   “He wanted to destroy” : Ronald Rodash, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘a Leninist,’ ” Daily Beast , April 13, 2017, https:// www .thedailybeast .com /steve -bannon -trumps -top -guy -told -me -he -was -a -leninist. 149   Bannon may believe : Jeremy W. Peters, “Bannon’s Worldview: Dissecting the Message of ‘The Fourth Turning,’ ” New York Times , April 8, 2017, https:// www .nytimes .com /2017 /04 /08 /us /politics /bannon -fourth -turning .html. 149   1960s science fiction novel : Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light (New York: Harper Voyager, 2010). 149   “In Silicon Valley” : Andy Beckett, “Accelerationism: How a Fringe Philosophy Predicted the Future We Live In,” Guardian , May 11, 2017, https:// www .theguardian .com /world /2017 /may /11 /accelerationism -how -a -fringe -philosophy -predicted -the -future -we -live -in. 150   “It’s a fine line” : Max Chafkin, QAnon Anonymous podcast, December 10, 2021. 150   “cognitive elite” : Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian , February 15, 2018, https:// www .theguardian .com /news /2018 /feb /15 /why -silicon -valley -billionaires -are -prepping -for -the -apocalypse -in -new -zealand. 150   Thiel also funded : Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (New York: Penguin, 2021).

…

Feeling blamed for society’s ills , hopelessly unemployed, sexually frustrated, yet armed with laptops and The Mindset’s propensity for remote attacks, this disparate network has always been ready to rumble and came to prominence during Gamergate , a series of highly coordinated online harassments against female game designers and journalists. While these young men may have been inscrutable to the establishment, the leaders of the emergent alt-right saw its members as the foot soldiers in their digital infowar against politics as usual. Steve Bannon, the media executive and political strategist who eventually served as an advisor to Donald Trump, welcomed the new population of discontents. Already skilled at meme creation, trolling, and pranking, the frustrated and shunned young men under Bannon’s thrall would be encouraged to experience themselves as a new clan of revolutionary tech bros, righting the wrongs of the castrating, politically correct left—as well the woman at their helm.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

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

The Guardian story opened with a bang: The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica—a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon—used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles.

…

In the world of market research, there is considerable doubt about how well psychographics work in their current form, but that issue did not prevent Cambridge Analytica from finding clients, mostly on the far right. To serve the US market, SCL needed to obey federal election laws. It created a US affiliate staffed by US citizens and legal residents. Reports indicated that Cambridge Analytica took a casual approach to regulations. The team of Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon financed and organized Cambridge Analytica, with Alexander Nix as CEO. The plan was to get into the market within a few months, test capabilities during the 2014 US midterm elections, and, if successful, transform American politics in 2016. To be confident that their models would work, Nix and his team needed a ton of data.

…

Kaiser transferred into Cambridge Analytica and went to work bringing in clients. Her early clients were in Africa, but in 2015 she and Nix shifted their focus to the United States in anticipation of the presidential election cycle. Kaiser asserted that Nix was not a political ideologue—unlike his patrons Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon—and hoped to create a “famous advertising company in the US market.” As quoted in The Guardian: “Corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of these large companies, are making tens or hundreds of billions of dollars off of monetising people’s data,” Kaiser says. “I’ve been telling companies and governments for years that data is probably your most valuable asset.

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again) by Nick Clegg

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, low interest rates, offshore financial centre, sceptred isle, Snapchat, Steve Bannon

Through articles and public platforms, such bodies63 have played a part in supporting and promoting the likes of Nigel Farage, far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and her Dutch counterpart, Geert Wilders. Following Donald Trump’s election as US President, this ideology now echoes strongly on both sides of the Atlantic. When Trump became President, he employed Steve Bannon as his White House Chief Strategist (he has since departed). Bannon previously ran the alt-right media outlet Breitbart in Washington and helped to set up its London branch, where he appointed one Raheem Kassam (later a chief of staff to Farage, and briefly a candidate to succeed him as UKIP leader) to edit the site.

…

Neilan, ‘Business Leaders to Push David Davis for Clarity Tomorrow at Chevening Meeting’, City A.M., 6th July 2017 63. Such groups include the Heritage Foundation, the Gatestone Institute and the David Horowitz Freedom Center 64. L. Kaufman, ‘Breitbart News Network Plans Global Expansion’, www.nytimes.com, 16th February 2014 65. J. Lester Feder, ‘This is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World’, www.buzzfeed.com, 15th November 2016 66. For the full transcript of the interview with Donald Trump, see www.thetimes.co.uk, 16th January 2017 67. J. Pickard and J. Garrahan, ‘Rupert Murdoch Secretly Sat in on Interview with Donald Trump’, Financial Times, 9th February 2017 68.

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

Sales were helped by an excerpt published before its release by Wolff’s old employer New York Magazine, which contained details such as Steve Bannon claiming that Trump didn’t trust John Bolton because of his moustache. Wolff had unprecedented access for Fire and Fury, which was said to be based on two hundred interviews with Trump and his senior staff. Although Trump tweeted that Wolff never had access to the White House, Sarah Huckabee Sanders admitted that Wolff had more than a dozen ‘interactions’ with officials at the White House, at the request of Steve Bannon. The White House quickly pushed back on the book, in which Bannon described Donald Trump Jr’s 2016 meeting with Russians at Trump Tower as ‘treasonous’ and ‘unpatriotic’ and called Ivanka ‘dumb as a brick’.

…

Otherwise, the next world war might begin with a grainy, contested image launched online from some distant and inaccessible outpost right onto the pages of a newspaper that has recently sacked all its journalists.’ ‘FLOOD THE ZONE WITH SHIT’ The phrase is attributed to the former head of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, who briefly had a role in the inner circle of the Trump White House. ‘The Democrats don’t matter,’ Bannon reportedly said in 2018. ‘The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.’ As explained by Vox’s Sean Illing: ‘The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices.

…

The hacking and leaking of internal Democratic Party communications during the 2016 US election were simply one high-profile symptom of the new warfare, which saw widespread covert political disinformation as well as the use of troll farms and bots to infiltrate and sway public debate. In some ways Putin’s agenda was not dissimilar from the tactics used by Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and other populists in seeking to undermine faith in any kind of evidence-based reality. If you can, for instance, convince enough people that the New York Times is completely fake, then (they imply) you might as well believe Bannon’s reality, and Trump’s alternative facts. The targets of disinformation are not always the obvious ones.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

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

This cultivated ambiguity, this hedging of a serious political agenda with statements ostensibly made just for the lulz, indicates where trolling could fit into the psychic and political economy of the alt-right. Breitbart, the far-right website which subsequently became Yiannopoulos’s regular outlet until his downfall, was also annexed to the Trump campaign. Steve Bannon, then chair of Breitbart News, signed up to the campaign after former Fox executive Roger Ailes became a Trump adviser. And it arguably pioneered a form of in-real-life trolling that serves its reactionary purposes, with its two best-known scoops: the sting against the liberal civil society organization, ACORN, and the framing of African-American Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod.

…

Notably, while much alt-right trolling reheats anti-communist paranoia along with traditional fascist ideas, pro-Trump trolling campaigns are often aimed at conservatives who are critical of the alt-right. When The Daily Beast reported that Breitbart incited ‘hate mobs’ to threaten and dox critics on the Right, then editor Steve Bannon disavowed any responsibility. Trolling is an effective weapon precisely because responsibility for it is diffuse and ambiguous. Nonetheless, Bannon gloried in the site’s reputation for thuggishness. When an insider described Andrew Breitbart as ‘the kind of people who, if you accidentally brushed against their shopping cart in the supermarket, their response is to burn down your house’, Bannon was delighted.58 He explained: ‘If a guy comes after our audience. . . we’re going to leave a mark.

…

On his trade war with China, he has raised tariffs, but the total levels still remain historically low. Much of what he has achieved required the connivance of Congressional Republicans, such as the standard Republican tax cut for the rich, or the promotion of a hard-right Federalist Society judge to the Supreme Court. Unsurprisingly, by the summer of 2017, Trump’s ousted ally Steve Bannon lamented that the presidency the far right ‘fought for, and won, is over’. The difficulty faced by the far right is that political success has outrun social and political organization. Historically, the far right has succeeded by building roots in thick networks of civic associations, from fraternal organizations in the US South to veteran and military clubs in Germany.55 It has, in this context, developed a ‘grass-roots’ paramilitary presence to control the streets.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Bendery, “John Boehner on Debt Ceiling: Let’s Pay China First, Then US Troops,” Huffington Post, May 8, 2013. 55. J. Cohn, “Don’t Blame the Tea Party for the Shutdown. Blame Boehner,” New Republic, September 30, 2013. 56. S. M. Burwell, “Impacts and Costs of the Government Shutdown,” White House archives, November 7, 2013. 57. R. Radosh, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘a Leninist,’” Daily Beast, August 22, 2016. 58. A. Crooke, “Steve Bannon’s Apocalyptic ‘Unravelling,’” Consortium News, March 9, 2017. 59. G. Steinhauser, “Europe Enjoys ‘Shutdownfreude’ over US Debt Troubles,” Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2013. 60. M. Hujer and D. Sander, “US Fumbling Puts China at Risk,” Der Spiegel, October 22, 2013. 61.

…

Levy, “Robert Lighthizer’s Global Trade Governance Critique,” Forbes, December 12, 2017. 108. “US Broadside Leaves WTO Meeting in Tatters,” Deutsche Welle, December 12, 2017. 109. K. McNamara, “Trump Takes Aim at the European Union: Why the EU Won’t Unify in Response,” Foreign Affairs, January 24, 2017. 110. E.-K. Symons, “Steve Bannon Loves France,” Politico, March 22, 2017, and C. Alduy, “The Novel That Unites Marine Le Pen and Steve Bannon,” Politico, April 23, 2017. 111. D. Frum, “Trump’s Trip Was a Catastrophe for US-Europe Relations,” Atlantic, May 28, 2017. 112. J. Henley, “Angela Merkel: EU Cannot Completely Rely on US and Britain Any More,” Guardian, May 28, 2017. 113.

…

The radical right wing of the Republican Party, xenophobic nationalists, many of them evangelical zealots, motivated by a worldview fashioned by the alt-right, or Pat Buchanan’s extreme America-first nationalism, a group whose hard core accounted for 10 percent of the House of Representatives, had threatened to paralyze the most important nation-state in the global system. As Steve Bannon, the editor of the Breitbart news site, a cheerleader of the Tea Party and a rising star of the alt-right, gushed to a Daily Beast journalist in November 2013: “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”57 For the likes of Bannon, the crisis of 2008 and the bailout had marked a fundamental caesura in American history.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

‘[The] new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull,’ writes Peter Pomerantsev. ‘Most [Russians] are happy with the trade-off: complete freedom for complete silence.’63 Short of martial law, the US media is highly unlikely to be silenced, or co-opted, by Trump. When Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior White House adviser, who helped pioneer much of the fake news that helped Trump to win, told Washington’s journalists to shut up, he was met with derision.64 Yet he was echoing a popular view in the heartland about an industry that has suffered an even steeper fall in its credibility than the political classes.

…

Part Three: Fallout 1 Jake Sherman, ‘Poll: voters liked Trump’s “America First” address’, Politico, 25 January 2017, <http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/poll-voters-liked-trumps-inaugural-address-234148>. 2 Dana Priest, ‘The disruptive career of Michael Flynn, Trump’s national-security adviser’, New Yorker, 23 November 2016, <http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-disruptive-career-of-trumps-national-security-adviser>. 3 J. Lester Feder, ‘This is how Stephen Bannon sees the entire world’, Buzzfeed, 16 November 2016. Transcript of a 2014 speech by Bannon via Skype to a conference in the Vatican in 2014: <https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world>. 4 I am indebted to Jonathan David Kirshner, of Cornell University, whose paper ‘Keynes’s Early Beliefs and Why They Still Matter’ (Challenge, 58:5 (October 2015)) brilliantly elucidates the evolution in Keynes’s thinking. 5 Graham Allison, ‘The Thucydides Trap: Are the US and China Headed for War?’

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

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

The idea was to figure out how to apply these techniques to politics – and especially to help the Republican Party, which Mercer felt had fallen behind the Democrats in their digital campaigning.9 Mercer invested a load of money into the new company. Cambridge was also part of a tight pro-Trump network: Steve Bannon, until recently boss of Breitbart and Trump’s first head of strategy, was also a board member of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the administration. From their inception Cambridge Analytica followed the Mercer bible. They built up a database of around 5,000 data points on some 230 million Americans.

…

Baldwin-Philippi (2017), ‘The myths of data-driven campaigning’, Political Communication, 34(4), 627-633. 23 Tamsin Shaw, ‘Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind’, New York Review of Books, 20 April 2017. 24 Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, (Profile, 2014). 25 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Vote Leave donations: the dark ads, the mystery “letter” – and Brexit’s online guru’, www.theguardian.com, 25 November 2017. 26 Tom Hamburger, ‘Cruz campaign credits psychological data and analytics for its rising success’, www.washingtonpost.com, 13 December 2015. 27 Matea Gold and Frances Stead Sellers, ‘After working for Trump’s campaign, British data firm eyes new U.S. government contracts’, www.washingtonpost.com, 17 February 2017. 28 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warefare tool’, Observer, 18 March 2018. 29 Nina Burleigh, ibid. 30 Lucy Handley, ‘Personalized TV commercials are coming to a screen near you; US marketers to spend $3 billion on targeted ads’, www.cnbc.com, 15 August 2017. 31 E. Goodman, S. Labo, M. Moore and D. Tambini, ibid. 32 Vyacheslav Poonski, ‘How artificial intelligence silently took over democracy’, www.weforum.org, 9 August 2017. 33 Jonathan Albright, ‘Who Hacked the Election?

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

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

Social media nations and their members will cast doubt on experts who oppose the hidden core, insulate themselves from challengers through clickbait populism, and unwittingly support policies detrimental to their own well-being. In some ways this has already happened, with companies like Cambridge Analytica and the propaganda machine of Steve Bannon coming together during the election of 2016 to convince poor, working-class southern and midwestern whites to vote for a New York City real estate developer and reality TV star named Donald Trump. The “hidden core” conducting social inception will win over key influencers by mapping their every purchase, chat, post, and picture, creating a targeting profile to nudge unwitting “useful idiots”—those enticed by money and ego—to advance scripted narratives.

…

Republicans already openly push for their own apps to bring supporters to an online world of their own design. The National Rifle Association, the pro-Trump political action committee America First, and Senator Ted Cruz’s Cruz Crew seek a conservative social media world similar to their Fox News television universe.43 Curiously, Cambridge Analytica cofounder and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon not only echoes these sentiments but called for nationalizing Facebook.44 For me, this seems like an odd position for a voracious capitalist who seeks the end of the administrative state. Taking down the tech giants opens enormous space for the strongest manipulators to take hold of unwitting minds; Bannon would be one of those best positioned to gain from their demise.

…

utm_term=.3446fd4e2ff3. 40. https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and-violence-in-india/. 41. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/22/election-security-bill-congress-437472. 42. https://www.politico.eu/article/internet-governance-facebook-google-splinternet-europe-net-neutrality-data-protection-privacy-united-states-u-s/. 43. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/technology/politics-apps-conservative-republican.html. 44. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/steve-bannon-big-data-facebook-twitter-google. About the Author CLINT WATTS is a Robert A. Fox Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East as well as a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at the George Washington University. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Lyft, Mikhail Gorbachev, NetJets, obamacare, offshore financial centre, post-materialism, proprietary trading, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, rolodex, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vision Fund, yield curve

The world’s oldest bank had been reduced to ruins, and Deutsche’s fingerprints were all over the wreckage. Chapter 32 Rosemary Is the Boss The American presidential campaign was entering its homestretch, and the man in charge of Donald Trump’s chaotic candidacy was happily anticipating the mayhem that would be unleashed if Deutsche continued to unravel. Steve Bannon, who had made a small fortune working at Goldman Sachs, was an unlikely populist, but he had watched with boiling fury as millions of people lost their homes and their savings during the financial crisis. His father was one of the victims, having seen his retirement fund wiped out. Triggered, Bannon recast himself as a fiery destroyer of the globalist order.

…

He added that he was eager for emails or documents related to Renaissance Technologies—the huge hedge fund that Deutsche had worked with to help save it billions in taxes. Simpson was especially curious about any materials on Renaissance’s enigmatic leader, Robert Mercer, who along with his daughter Rebekah had become a leading financier of Trump, Steve Bannon, and Breitbart News. “Be safe and I will see you tomorrow,” Simpson signed off. The weather in Saint Thomas was balmy, and Val and Glenn alternated between sifting through Bill’s files in a hotel suite and sitting at a picnic table on the beach, drinking beers and smoking cigarettes. Simpson was slightly manic, chattering constantly about Trump and Fusion’s financial struggles and the high likelihood that, at that very moment, they were under government surveillance.

…

Foundation’s yearly distribution had shriveled: Rachel Sanderson, “Siena Faces Life after 500 Years of Monte dei Paschi Largesse,” Financial Times, August 2, 2016. 32. Rosemary Is the Boss Interviews with Mike Offit, Tammy McFadden, other Deutsche employees and executives, and journalists who interviewed several characters (and related emails and transcripts). Bannon’s radicalization: Michael C. Bender, “Steve Bannon and the Making of an Economic Nationalist,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2017. Kushner’s biggest lending facility: Kushner financial documents, reviewed by New York Times. Kushner’s loan for old New York Times building: Will Parker, “Jared Kushner Looks to Be Still Tied Up in 229 West 43rd Street Retail Condo,” The Real Deal, March 6, 2017.

The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

In the novel “swarthy hordes” of Indian migrants, described as “grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta” who eat feces, invade France, force white women to work in brothels, and engage in orgies involving men, women, and children. The far-right French leader Marine Le Pen kept a dedicated copy in her desk. The former Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon considered the novel prescient and visionary. He suggested that the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea would create a similarly horrific social meltdown. He called it an “almost Camp of the Saints–type invasion.” Tanton’s organizations reconstructed the Fortress America55 that Grant and Osborn had built.

…

His Treasury secretary agreed: “He’s got perfect genes.” The Trump family, one of Trump’s sons said, subscribed to the “racehorse theory” of inheritance, which “places a high value on bloodlines.” They referred to the inferior biology of people of African descent, as Linnaeus had. “Some people,” noted Trump adviser Steve Bannon, in reference to black people shot by police, are “naturally aggressive and violent.” “Laziness is a trait in blacks,” Trump said. “Some people cannot, genetically, handle pressure,” he added. “Go out in nature,” said a Republican nominee for Illinois representative, “and you don’t find equality anywhere … I don’t believe in this doctrine of racial equality.”59 They implied that mixing biologically distinct peoples60 disrupted the natural order, as early twentieth-century eugenicists had. “ ‘Diversity’ is not our strength,” one of President Trump’s national security officials wrote.

…

Brower and a faction of anti-immigration activists Leon Kolankiewicz, “Homage to Iconic Conservationist David Brower Omits Population,” Californians for Population Stabilization, March 25, 2014, https://www.capsweb.org/blog/homage-iconic-conservationist-david-brower-omits-population. The Camp of the Saints Cécile Alduy, “What a 1973 French Novel Tells Us About Marine Le Pen, Steve Bannon, and the Rise of the Populist Right,” Politico, April 23, 2017; Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists”; K. C. McAlpin, “ ‘The Camp of the Saints’ Revisited—Modern Critics Have Justified the Message of a 1973 Novel on Mass Immigration,” Social Contract Journal, Summer 2017. Tanton’s organizations reconstructed the Fortress America DeParle, “Anti-Immigration Crusader”; Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists.”

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

The party establishment, used to weathering insurgent outsiders before getting its preferred candidate in place, was in shock. In July, at the Republican National Convention, Trump officially became the Republican nominee. Trump named Indiana governor Mike Pence, an evangelical, as his running mate and in August appointed Steve Bannon, head of the right-wing news website Breitbart, to run his campaign. Bannon, a former investment banker and media industry executive, moved in transnational right-wing circles by the 2000s. In 2007, he wrote an eight-page treatment for a documentary entitled Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Facism [sic] in America.

…

Though the alt-right had only limited reach, a less radical but more influential restrictionist elite emerged online and in the right-wing media. Popular right-wing bloggers like Ann Coulter or Mike Cernovich, with followers numbering in the millions, routinely flag violent incidents involving illegal Hispanic immigrants and Muslims. At the institutional level, Trump adviser Steve Bannon, though forced out of both Trump’s White House and Breitbart News, helped lay the groundwork for the new cultural nationalism. Bannon was influenced by Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic novel about a Third World immigrant invasion of France called The Camp of the Saints (1973) and was well versed in ‘counter-jihadist’ currents of European thought.135 All successful nationalist movements require cultural elites, and while the new online right is less anchored in class and institutions than the patrician Immigration Restriction League of Henry Cabot Lodge’s day it still constitutes a coherent network.

…

Trump argued that his comments reflected the fact that the far-right demonstration was legal while the counter-demonstration was not. Much of the media and many politicians struck back, claiming the counter-protesters’ cause was ethical while the far-right’s wasn’t, and this was an important difference. Moreover, the fatality was on the counter-demonstrators’ side. Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon was accused of being behind the strategy of drawing a moral equivalence between the rival groups.1 In polling conducted after the event, whites, by a 59–18 margin, blamed the far right for the violence; however those who backed Trump said by a 35–27 margin that the counter-demonstrators were at fault.2 A non-binary question discovered a more even picture: 31 per cent said both sides were responsible, 28 per cent said white supremacists were, and 10 per cent blamed the anti-fascist left.3 In this chapter we’ll observe what happens when left-modernism and a rising ethno-traditional nationalism collide.

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

If people had really believed what Trump said, would they have voted for him? That would have been a very brave act, given the risks of total civil breakdown. Maybe they voted for him because they didn’t really believe him? It took me about fifteen minutes to acclimatise to the idea that this rhetoric was the new normal. Trump’s speechwriters, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, had put no words in his mouth that were explicitly anti-democratic. It was a populist speech, but populism does not oppose democracy. Rather, it tries to reclaim it from the elites who have betrayed it. Nothing Trump said disputed the fundamental premise of representative democracy, which is that at the allotted time the people get to say when they have had enough of the politicians who have been making decisions for them.

…

His Secretary of Defense and Chief of Staff decide they have no alternative but to try to kill him, because all other options – resigning, refusing to obey or public denunciation – would simply make the problem worse, by giving the president an excuse to round on his enemies. In the meantime, the president’s chief strategist, loosely based on Steve Bannon, gets wind of the assassination attempt and decides to use it to frame an Islamist conspiracy, allowing for a further crackdown on anyone perceived as un-American. All of this happens behind closed doors, under the cover of the deafening chatter of the social media age. While members of the public are screaming conspiracy and coup from all sides, the real acts of subversion happen in the places social media cannot reach.

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

For decades, Turkish politicians who wished to push their country in more Islamic directions would be balked—or even sometimes overthrown—by Kemal’s heirs in the armed forces. Western political scientists adopted the term deep state to describe the power of the Kemalists after Kemal. Over time, the term was extended to describe other Third World societies with overmighty military and intelligence establishments, especially Pakistan. Steve Bannon absorbed the term somewhere and introduced it to Trump. Trump then diffused it through the conservative media, and especially to his pal Sean Hannity at Fox News. In Turkey and Pakistan, the term deep state described how those with secret power used clandestine means to thwart the regular government.

…

Americans are ready for reform, but they are left alienated and frightened by the Great Awokening that has seized activist progressives. Donald Trump cannot win reelection in 2020 by his own efforts. But the election can be thrown away by people who will not meet voters where they are. Trump and his supporters appreciate the potentially destructive power of the ultra-progressive Left better than anyone. When Steve Bannon praises Bernie Sanders and when Fox & Friends promotes Tulsi Gabbard, they are not expressing sincere admiration. They are grasping the life vest that can save them from the shipwreck. One credible poll has found that 12 percent of those who supported Sanders against Clinton in 2016 switched to Trump in the general election.23 If the ultra-progressives are thwarted from foisting an unelectable candidate upon the Democratic Party from the inside, perhaps they can be coaxed and manipulated to boost a Trump-rescuing third-party candidacy from the outside.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

Also in those first ten days, Trump issued various executive orders that demonstrated his mental inability to comprehend the following: what is and is not legal (the immigration ban); what he can and cannot do without getting funding approval from Congress (building a border wall with Mexico); and what is and is not in the best interest of our country’s security (Steve Bannon is in, and certain Cabinet-level officers are out). Trump alienated Mexico; alienated nations across the world with his immigration ban; displayed an inability to vet issues and actions with appropriate parts of the U.S. government before taking action; and displayed a total inability to anticipate (or even consider) the impact of his statements and actions.

…

Using his proposed federal budget as a lens, Jessica González-Rojas writes, “It outlines President Trump’s spending priorities and program cuts that make clear his utter contempt for communities of color, and it edges this country and its moral compass closer to the nativist vision espoused by the likes of White House advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions” (González-Rojas 2017). His mental health symptoms, including impulsive blame-shifting, claims of unearned superiority, and delusional levels of grandiosity, have been present in his words from his very first campaign speech: “They’re bringing drugs.

…

The fact that innocent people were being harmed, they said, was an unfortunate but necessary side effect. Conversely, a few Jewish patients I treat who are children of Holocaust survivors fear that another Holocaust is more likely because of Trump’s policies and his association with the likes of Steve Bannon. They are afraid that those in bed with white nationalists send a message to anti-Semitic people that it is safe to act out their racist and prejudiced agendas. I recently spent the Jewish holiday of Passover with my family at a resort where a conservative political writer had been hired to speak.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

(It was the smooth-talking Nix who was later caught in a Channel 4 undercover reporting sting where he was recorded offering a range of dirty tricks to discredit a political candidate.) Then, in 2016, CA took its social media campaigning to America. The firm first worked on Ted Cruz’s campaign to become the Republican presidential candidate. Mercer was so impressed with CA he became a major shareholder while Trump’s then chief strategist, Steve Bannon, joined the company board. Perhaps inevitably, given these connections, the Trump campaign ended up paying almost £5 million to the company to help it target swing voters. Buoyed by their initial success in the US presidential primaries, the firm had also turned its attention to the EU referendum.

…

As chair of Stop the War, Murray also played a crucial role in the largest political demonstration in British history, the 2003 rally against the war in Iraq. He stood down in June 2011 to be succeeded by Corbyn. After Labour’s surprising showing in the 2017 general election, when Corbyn clawed back Theresa May’s parliamentary majority, Murray, who was seconded from the Unite trade union, was described as the ‘hard-left’s Steve Bannon’. Both men are regarded as keepers of the flame of their respective ideologies who are able to rally great numbers to the cause. Murray’s daughter Laura was also an important figure in Momentum, building close links with Schneider and Corbyn’s sons Ben and Sebastian. Following a stint as a Labour political adviser covering the communities brief, she was made Corbyn’s ‘stakeholder manager’ in June 2017, giving her a key role connecting with groups linked to the Labour leadership.15 Lansman’s eldest son Max, a barrister, was also reported to have a key role with Momentum.16 Corbyn’s second son, Sebastian, worked on his father’s leadership campaign before becoming John McDonnell’s chief of staff.

…

His two other children with Ivana, Donald Trump Junior (Buckley School, New York) and Eric (Trinity School, New York), and his daughter by second wife Marla, Tiffany (Viewpoint School, California), all received equally privileged and expensive educations. The man most credited with influencing Trump the presidential candidate is the product of a very similar education. Steve Bannon, Trump’s trusty campaign director and former Whitehouse chief of staff, spent his formative years at a military academy in Richmond, Virginia called the Benedict College Preparatory. The school mixed monastic life with a strict military prospectus that echoed the Christian morality of the Victorian English public school.

Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

And while American watchdogs sought to make sure that Trump and his family were not using his presidency to benefit their businesses, that didn’t bother the Saudis. Their whole country bore the name of the royal family, and there had never been a clear line between family and state funds anyway. At one point, Steve Bannon, a Trump adviser who had run the Breitbart News Network, a website that often published anti-Muslim views, was caught chatting with a bearded cleric who happened to be the Minister of Islamic Affairs. A video spread online of a senior prince teaching Ivanka to jiggle her coffee cup so that the servers would stop refilling it, a Saudi tradition.

…

Wielding a Twitter account with more than a million followers, al-Qahtani emerged as a major force on the platform, celebrating his boss’s every move while marshaling attacks on enemies, from foreign news organizations, to Iran, Qatar, and Saudis who were insufficiently supportive of the prince. Al-Qahtani’s attacks spurred offensives by hundreds of sympathetic accounts that critics referred to as “electronic flies” because of how they swarmed their targets. His detractors called him “Saudi Arabia’s Steve Bannon” and the “Lord of the Flies.” After the Qatar boycott, al-Qahtani turned up the heat, spearheading a frenzied online McCarthyism. He announced an official hashtag, #The_Black_List, and called on his followers to suggest names for it. “Saudi Arabia and its brothers do what they say. This is a promise,” he wrote.

…

Dated July 1, 2015. https://wikileaks.org/​hackingteam/​emails/​emailid/​1118843 guy seemed paranoid: Ibid. “bad cop and lesser bad cop”: Author interview, Dennis Horak, Nov. 2018. “pro-active thought authoritarianism”: Author interview, Alexi Abrahams, Oct. 2018. “Lord of the Flies”: “Who is Saudi al-Qahtani, Saudi Arabia’s Steve Bannon,” The New Arab, Aug. 23, 2017. suggest names for it: Saud al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “al-hashtaaq ar-rasmi # al-qaaima as-sawda” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17. 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898265869368807424 “starting now”: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “as-sa‘udia wa ashiqaauha” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898259368696725504 would be punished or prosecuted: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “wa‘ad: santajalla al-ghimma ‘an al-khaleej” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898257245183463424 state could unmask them: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “hal al-ism al-musa‘aar yaHmeek” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 18, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898379274788491265 “the faithful crown prince”: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “wa ta‘taqid ani aqdaH min rasi” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898273541367451648 to guide their coverage: Author interviews, Saudi journalists, 2017–18, and American officials, May 2019.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

It is one thing for Kaczyński to say that migrants are bringing diseases into his country, however. It is another thing for Trump to say the same. It is one thing for Kaczyński to say to Orbán that ‘You have given an example and we are learning from your example.’48 It is much more significant and ominous for Steve Bannon to describe Orbán as a ‘hero’, an inspiration and ‘the most significant guy on the scene right now’.49 A non-negligible degree of sympathy with Orbán’s anti-EU politics can be found in almost every country of Western Europe. This is why critics of Brussels subsidies to Hungary and Poland blame the EU, to paraphrase Lenin, for giving Orbán and Kaczyński the rope with which to hang the West.50 The fact that politicians in the West are now adopting the xenophobic nationalism of the East contains a final vengeful twist.

…

Otherwise, as it transpired at the time with North Africa under the extinction of the ancient Christian culture, Italy would have been incorporated into the Islamic world.’ Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation (Telos Press, 2015), pp. 17–18. 47. Valerie Hopkins, ‘Hungary’s Viktor Orbán blasts “ United States of Europe” ’, Financial Times (16 March 2019). 48. Foy and Buckley, ‘Orban and Kaczynski’. 49. Jason Horowitz, ‘Steve Bannon Is Done Wrecking the American Establishment. Now He Wants to Destroy Europe’s’, The New York Times (9 March 2018). 50. Griff Witte and Michael Birnbaum, ‘In Eastern Europe, the E.U. faces a rebellion more threatening than Brexit’, Washington Post (5 April 2018). 51. Vaclav Havel, ‘Ce que j’ai cru, ce que je crois’, Le Nouvel Observateur (19 December 19, 2011). 52.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

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

Instead, it operated in an unfocused way against a perceived elite that was shutting gamers out of gaming. This was reinforced by Yiannopoulos and the right-wing media ecosystem that he plugged Gamergate into, most notably Breitbart, a far-right website launched by right-wing firebrand Andrew Breitbart, and which was helmed at the time by Steve Bannon, the man who went on to be Trump’s chief strategist and later convicted of various money laundering, fraud and conspiracy offences. Yiannopoulos’s Gamergate revelations told followers what they already believed: the gaming establishment was secretly coordinating against them. One headline read: ‘Exposed: The Secret Mailing List of the Gaming Journalism Elite’.

…

From the moment he emerged as a real candidate in the Republican primary, Donald Trump became the alt-right’s dream candidate – and then their dream president. The alt-right became his foot soldiers, creating pro-Trump memes, boosting his online image and increasingly staffing his campaign – which was run by none other than Breitbart’s former executive chair Steve Bannon. Breitbart had once sat on the fringes of US politics, providing a home for Gamergate and the alt-right while the establishment ignored it. Now its boss was running a presidential campaign and staffing it with his site’s former fanbase. In its early days, the rise of the online far right was largely ignored by mainstream observers, but there were some exceptions.

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

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

There seems little doubt that for many of Thatcher’s followers the free market experiment hasn’t gone far enough. As long as there is an NHS, a welfare state and a public sector that is more European than American in scale, we will never truly discover what the British people are made of, because they will never be forced to find out. Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, has often voiced the opinion that America’s only hope of moral cleansing lies in war. Tory Brexiteers tend not to go that far, but they may well be holding out for a milder version of the same idea, an extreme of economic hardship that means government is no longer capable of picking up the pieces.

…

A common thread linking ‘hard’ Brexiteers to nationalists across the globe is that they resent the very idea of governing as a complex, modern, fact-based set of activities that requires technical expertise and permanent officials. Soon after entering the White House as President Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon expressed the hope that the newly appointed cabinet would achieve the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’. In Europe, the European Commission – which has copious governmental capacity, but scant sovereignty – is an obvious target for nationalists such as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

If Trump’s presidency has a house publication, it will not be The New York Times, which Trump attacks regularly on Twitter and in press conferences. It will be Breitbart, a right-wing opinion and news website formed in 2007, which one former editor has described as ‘Trump Pravda’. Trump appointed the website’s executive chairman, Steve Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs banker, as his White House strategy chief. The fast-growing Breitbart opinion and news website has become a rallying point for Trump’s nationalist, sometimes racist and often angry, ‘alt-right’ support base. It campaigned hard for Trump throughout the primaries, waging war against the candidacy of the Florida senator Marco Rubio, before becoming Trump’s supportive voice during the presidential election.

…

. ______ POLITICAL PARTIES AND POLITICIANS / ADVISERS Tony Abbott: former Australian PM AfD Party: right-wing Alternative for Germany party Esperanza Aguirre: Spanish politician Jonathan Aitken: former Conservative MP Austrian People’s Party David Axelrod: adviser to Barack Obama Ed Balls: former Labour shadow chancellor Steve Bannon: Trump’s White House strategy chief Tony Benn: left-wing Labour MP Silvio Berlusconi: former Italian PM and leader of the Forza Italia party John Boehner: former Speaker of the US House of Representatives Willy Brandt: former German chancellor Gordon Brown: former PM George W. Bush: former US president Jeb Bush: Republican presidential candidate Jim Callaghan: former PM David Cameron: former PM Alastair Campbell: Tony Blair’s press secretary Gianroberto Casaleggio: co-founder of the Italian M5S party Mário Centeno: Portugal’s finance minister Jacques Chirac: former French president Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) Ken Clarke: former UK chancellor Nick Clegg: former deputy PM and Lib-Dem leader Bill Clinton: former US president Hillary Clinton: US presidential candidate Robin Cook: former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Corbyn: Labour leader António Costa: Portugal’s socialist leader and PM Jon Cruddas: Labour MP Ted Cruz: Republican presidential candidate Dominic Cummings: one of the architects of the victory in the Brexit referendum Danish People’s Party Alistair Darling: former UK chancellor David Davis: Brexit secretary Democratic Party (PD): Italy Democratic Party: US Bob Dole: US presidential candidate Bernard Donoughue: adviser to Jim Callaghan Iain Duncan Smith: former Conservative leader Recep Erdogan: president of Turkey Íñigo Errejón: Podemos’ political secretary Nigel Farage: former leader of UKIP Werner Faymann: former Austrian chancellor François Fillon: former French PM Five Star Movement (M5S): Italy Forza Italia party: Italy Norman Fowler: former Conservative minister Free Democratic Party: Germany Freedom Party (FPÖ): Austria Front National: France Colonel Gaddafi: former Libyan dictator Alexander Gauland: AfD politician Julia Gillard: former Australian PM Philip Gould: Labour adviser and guru Michael Gove: former Justice Secretary and leading ‘Out’ campaigner Green Party: Austria Beppe Grillo: founder of the Five Star Movement, Italy William Hague: former Conservative leader Joe Haines: press secretary for Harold Wilson Philip Hammond: UK chancellor Pauline Hanson: leader of the One Nation party in Australia Ted Heath: former PM Norbert Hofer: far-right-wing presidential candidate in Austria, Freedom Party François Hollande: French president Michael Howard: former Conservative leader and Home Secretary Tristram Hunt: former Labour MP Pablo Iglesias Turrión: leader of Podemos in Spain Diane James: briefly UKIP leader Roy Jenkins: former leader of the SDP Jobbik party: Hungary Boris Johnson: Foreign Secretary Lyndon B.

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

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

You can’t fight racism but excuse antisemitism, just as you cannot fight antisemitism while excusing and justifying racism or Islamophobia.”2 Subsequently, additional information about meetings of some leaders of the Democratic Party with Farrakhan have come to light. Here, too, the outrage has been strikingly muted.3 Progressives are not, of course, the only ones who have a less-than-stellar record of addressing racism in their midst. In the fall of 2017, details emerged regarding the far-right leanings of Steve Bannon and Breitbart News. There is no credible evidence that Bannon is himself an antisemite, but it is extremely distressing that right-wing Jewish groups that trumpet his support for Israel ignored the racism, anti-immigrant, and white nationalist views promulgated by Breitbart News when he ran it.4 He helped galvanize the emerging white nationalist movement.

…

Shachar Peled, “Bannon Addresses ZOA, Urges Jews to Join ‘Insurgency’ against Anti-Trump Republicans,” Haaretz, November 13, 2017. 5. Weisman, (((Semitism))), p. 144. 6. Joseph Bernstein, “Alt-White: How the Breitbart Machine Laundered Racist Hate,” BuzzFeed, October 15, 2017; Melanie Phillips, “The Alt-Right Smear,” MelaniePhillips.com, March 17, 2017; Lloyd Green, “The Zionist Leader Who Can’t Quit Steve Bannon,” Daily Beast, August 30, 2017; Armin Rosen, “ZOA President Meets with Top Trump Aide,” Tablet, January 26, 2017; “White Nationalist Richard Spencer Gives Israel as Example of Ethno-State He Wants in U.S.,” Haaretz, October 19, 2017; Weisman, (((Semitism))), p. 90. 7. Jack Moore, “Israel’s Netanyahu Hasn’t Condemned Hungary’s ‘Anti-Semitic’ George Soros Posters.

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

“There is a conspiracy of all the radical right-wing nationalists everywhere, apparently with the help of the Kremlin, or of oligarchs around the Kremlin, to disrupt this European Union,” said Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister and leading member of the European Parliament, on the eve of the European elections.22 The axis of illiberalism that threatens to destabilize Europe’s political order goes beyond Russia’s links with Europe’s populist nationalists and includes conservative political allies in the United States, including President Trump and the alt-right movement led by Steve Bannon, the president’s former adviser. Bannon has raised funds among ultra-conservative supporters in Europe and the United States to establish an “Academy for the Judeo-Christian West”—a far-right “gladiator school” housed in a thirteenth-century monastery not far from Rome for the purpose of grooming future right-wing political leaders across Europe.

…

As Europe suffers the consequences of its inaction, Macron hopes that his EU partners will start to recognize the need for Europe to shape a common approach to the outside world. He has openly challenged the intrusion of outside forces that he claims are seeking to disrupt Europe’s internal politics, citing the activities of Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon as an example. “For the first time, I see connivance between nationalists and foreign interests whose aim is to dismantle Europe,” Macron said. Bannon is not alone in trying to manipulate Europe’s constellation of forces. The governments of Russia, China, and the United States are all trying to shape Europe’s political course.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

“Mothers and children” from Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, Jan. 20, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural-address. “Outright war” and “spiritual and moral foundations” from Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s remarks to a Vatican conference in the summer of 2014, transcribed in J. L. Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” BuzzFeed, Nov. 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world. “Global power structure” from “Donald Trump’s Argument for America,” final television campaign ad, Nov. 2016, http://blog.4president.org/2016/2016-tv-ad/. Bannon is commonly credited with authoring or coauthoring all three. 2.

…

Examples are the European wars of religion (Pinker 2011, pp. 234, 676–77) and even the American Civil War (Montgomery & Chirot 2015, p. 350). 47. White 2011, pp. 107–11. 48. S. Bannon, remarks to a conference at the Vatican, 2014, transcribed in J. L. Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” BuzzFeed, Nov. 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world. 49. Nazis sympathetic to Christianity and vice versa: Ericksen & Heschel 1999; Hellier 2011; Heschel 2008; Steigmann-Gall 2003; White 2011. Hitler was not an atheist: Hellier 2011; Murphy 1999; Richards 2013; see also “Hitler Was a Christian,” http://www.evilbible.com/evil-bible-home-page/hitler-was-a-christian/. 50.

…

Baskin, “The Academic Home of Trumpism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2017; Lampert 1996. 119. Nationalism and counter-Enlightenment Romanticism: Berlin 1979; Garrard 2006; Herman 1997; Howard 2001; McMahon 2001; Sternhell 2010; Wolin 2004. 120. Rediscovery of early Fascists: J. Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists,” New York Times, Feb. 10, 2017; P. Levy, “Stephen Bannon Is a Fan of a French Philosopher . . . Who Was an Anti-Semite and a Nazi Supporter,” Mother Jones, March 16, 2017; M. Crowley, “The Man Who Wants to Unmake the West,” Politico, March/April 2017.

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

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

Le Bon himself saw war as a positive antidote to socialism and excessive democracy. Nationalists have long bemoaned the influence of pacifists, “liberal elites” and (more recently) “political correctness” for neutering the unity and fighting spirit of the people. Media executive, outspoken nationalist, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon holds a dim view of the moral fiber of American society, which he believes has been weakened by globalization and can only be repaired with war. “Is that grit still there,” he asks, “that tenacity, that we’ve seen on the battlefield?”15 The only way to rediscover it, in Bannon’s view, is to take to the battlefield once again.

…

The cultural and political divisions separating centers of expertise from other sections of their societies have created a situation with rhetorical echoes of the colonial one, in which the methods of science and expertise seem like an arm of some foreign Leviathan state. Modern bureaucratic government becomes represented as the enemy, with Steve Bannon (while still working in the White House) declaring that Trump’s cabinet would seek the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” and leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg accusing the British Treasury of “fiddling figures” to pursue its own political goals. The nativist idea that the nation needs reclaiming from the elites has echoes of the rhetoric of anti-colonial nationalism.

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

Politicians on the right often used the phrase “starving the beast” to describe their strategy toward the government. The anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist put it in even more pungent terms: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Steve Bannon, the ideologist of the Trump revolution, made clear that one of his central goals was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” For four decades, America has largely been run by people who openly pledge to destroy the very government they lead. Is it any wonder that they have succeeded?

…

In 1991, India, which had long practiced socialism and protectionism, faced an economic crisis that forced it to liberalize. The next year, with Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour,” China revived its stalled capitalist reforms. The financial crisis of 2008 began the process of reevaluation—on both right and left. Steve Bannon argues that the seeds of Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party were sowed by that crash. In the years since, the Right has veered away from its devotion to markets, instead espousing protectionism, subsidies, immigration controls, and cultural nationalism—ideas championed by Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, and other populists around the world.

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit by Aja Raden

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, intentional community, iterative process, low interest rates, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, sugar pill, survivorship bias, theory of mind, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa

These next chapters explore how and why we come to believe and whether it’s possible to reverse our capacity for self-deception by examining three very old cons and their very contemporary counterparts. In the first chapter, we’ll look at the impact and influence of the Guru Con, which exploits the softest of human weak spots—emotional need. From Rasputin to Steve Bannon, from Jim Bakker to Joel Osteen—there have always been, and will always be, willing sheep ready to be sheared … in exchange for promises of all kinds, particularly the intangible. It seems that to the right crowd (and we’re all the right crowd), hope is a commodity you can sell for almost any price.

…

Even though the provisional government he led following the Russian Revolution was quickly dissolved by the vicious, incompetent Bolsheviks—shortly after the Bolsheviks had murdered the vicious, incompetent Romanovs—Kerensky called it like he saw it: blaming the royal family’s Guru problem for the shocking state of the state. “Without Rasputin there would have been no Lenin” is an observation worth keeping in mind, particularly since there are no new lies, only new liars. And from playing at being a populist man of the people to being aggressively physically disgusting, Steve Bannon (an ironically self-professed Leninist) is a creepy Svengali in his own right. The story of his rise is illustrative of how the Guru Con works with politicians as well as holy men, because it’s really not about religion. It’s about control. And for big-league Gurus it’s about getting the ear of the right person (be that Trump, the Mercers, or the GOP) and convincing them that you have special abilities and are therefore both infallible and indispensable.

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

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

James had recommended me to run the Breitbart UK site after the regular guy Raheem Kassam had been seconded to work for Nigel Farage for the upcoming general election in 2015. He told me I’d be called at home one Sunday morning by the company’s chief executive, some American I’d never heard of called Steve Bannon. I looked Bannon up and learned that he was a former US Navy Lieutenant and banker for Goldman Sachs, as well as an executive producer in Hollywood. The more I read the more terrifying he sounded, the epitome of American aggression and kick-ass determination, and I was nervous about the call, even though they were courting me.

…

In recent years there has been a steep rise in the proportion of female students, especially in the humanities, so it would seem logical, therefore, that already heavily Left-leaning institutions filled with single women would be the perfect breeding ground for a progressive movement, one in which members are in competition to display their political zeal.19 In contrast, increasing numbers of men are moving into all-male worlds by dropping out of dating altogether, and the online Alt-Right grew out of a heavily male subculture, where angry single men made ideal recruits to a cause. This was something noticed long ago by Steve Bannon during his venture into World of Warcraft, when the future Breitbart boss said that ‘These guys, these rootless, white males, had monster power.’20 Men are less sociable on average than women, which explains why they are more willing to join political movements seen as beyond the pale. Across twenty-eight different countries, ‘men’s generally lower sensitivity to social cues makes them more likely to vote for stigmatized and small parties’ than women.21 Radical Right-wing groups do far better among men, the Sweden Democrats scoring 10 per cent more support among males, for instance.

…

lang=en. 15 https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2017/08/gen-z-is-wests-last-great-hope.html. 16 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/24/democrats-losing-millennial-vote-change-message. 17 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/24/democrats-losing-millennial-vote-change-message. 18 https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1012418245826109440. As Tablet columnist Wesley Yang suggested, ‘viral hate-read clickbait’ may have played a part. 19 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40504076. 20 http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html. 21 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/gender-differences-in-vote-choice-social-cues-and-social-harmony-asheuristics/DB58CD40104BABA70AF2917DD5C89AF4. 22 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/why-the-left-is-so-afraid-of-jordan-peterson/567110/. 23 https://www.wsj.com/articles/jordan-peterson-and-conservatisms-rebirth-1529101961. 24 http://quillette.com/2017/11/12/non-believers-turning-bibles/. 25 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7a6b/ad93d88b0158d449881e56749d5443b3ff80.pdf. 26 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/11/nature-or-nurture-debate-three-identical-strangers-film?

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

That was why, notoriously, they provoked both an anti-Islamic demonstration and a pro-Islamic counter-demonstration across the street from each other in front of an Islamic center in Houston.18 A good way to think about such attacks is as environmental. They attack not just individual people or facts but the whole information space. In a famous remark to the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018, Steve Bannon, the Breitbart News chairman who went on to become a senior strategist for candidate Trump and then President Trump, said this: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”19 Flood the zone with shit: although the formulation is crude, there could be no more concise and accurate summation of what modern information warfare is all about.

…

Like Limbaugh and Hannity and the rest, but even more brazenly, he savaged mainstream media, even encouraging physical attacks against journalists. He called the mainstream media “disgusting” and “a great danger to our country,” even “the enemy of the American people,” a sentiment with which almost two-thirds of Republicans agreed by August 2017.61 He organized his political messaging around the conceit that, as Steve Bannon had said, “The real opposition is the media.” He applied the label “fake news” to real news, and vice versa. “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” he told his supporters. “Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” By contrast, he praised and amplified internet trolls: “The crap that you think of is unbelievable,” he told them—intending “crap” as a professional compliment.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

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

Come and test all your crazy ideas.” Wylie, at twenty-four, was suddenly research director for the SCL Group. Later, he learned that his predecessor had died in a hotel room in Kenya under suspicious circumstances. It was a hint that SCL might have a shady side. Not long after, Wylie met hard-core conservative warrior Steve Bannon, then editing the notoriously partisan right-wing news site Breitbart. Somehow the gay nerd and the proto–white nationalist bonded. “It felt like we were flirting,” Wylie would later write about their data-wonky intellectual jam sessions. Soon they were hatching a plan for SCL to enter America.

…

Throughout the process, the matter never seemed to reach Sheryl Sandberg or Mark Zuckerberg. * * * • • • AS THE ELECTION season heated up in 2016, Cambridge Analytica was actively working for GOP candidates. After Ted Cruz dropped out, the company began working for the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica’s vice president, Steve Bannon, became a top adviser to the candidate himself. Cambridge had contracted with a Canadian company called AggregateIQ—reportedly a Wylie connection—to implement a set of software services to exploit Cambridge’s voter database, including the apparently undeleted profiles and personality summaries provided by Kogan.

…

promotional copy: This brochure was among a cache of documents that Wylie submitted to UK Parliament. Wylie also explains his background and involvement with Cambridge Analytica in his book, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America (Random House, 2019). “We’ll give you total freedom”: Carole Cadwalladr, “‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower,” Guardian, March 18, 2018. his predecessor had died: Wylie testimony to House of Commons, Digital, Culture Media and Sport Committee, March 27, 2018. The name came from Bannon: Wylie testimony. Obama campaign: Elizabeth Dwoskin and Tony Romm, “Facebook’s Rules for Accessing User Data Lured More Than Just Cambridge Analytica,” Washington Post, March 19, 2018.

This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore

Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, desegregation, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, immigration reform, liberal world order, mass immigration, Steve Bannon

From Killing Lincoln he moved on to writing “killing” books about people who hadn’t actually ever been killed. “O’Reilly’s vast carelessness pollutes history and debases the historian’s craft,” the conservative columnist George F. Will wrote in the Washington Post in 2015. But by then O’Reilly’s history books had already sold 6.8 million copies. Donald Trump’s onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon admired a dystopian 1997 book called The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. “This is a book that turns history into prophecy,” its authors boasted. That prophecy? The fourth turning “could mark the end of man,” or “the end of modernity,” or it “could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation,” or it “could find America, and the world, a much better place.”

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

You have to tell stories.”’ It was an analysis they would have done well to remember when May called her own election. Trump’s victory sent shockwaves through Whitehall and prompted hasty assessments of the damage he might do. Concern focused on his declaration that NATO was ‘obsolete’. Trump’s aide Steve Bannon, the alt-right theorist who ran Breitbart News before revitalising Trump’s campaign, was a vociferous opponent of the EU and had professed the hope that it would break up. EU foreign ministers called an immediate ‘panic meeting’ as if a war had broken out rather than democratic elections in a close ally.

…

In early October the foreign secretary had told a friend, ‘This is an election that is going to expose America’s primal psyche as never before. If it is Trump, it will be a victory of really base daytime TV Redneck America.’ Now the foreign secretary and his advisers had emerged as key contacts for Mike Pence and the ideological end of team Trump – Stephen Miller and chief strategist Steve Bannon – while Hill and Timothy dealt with Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, and Katie Perrior talked to Sean Spicer, her opposite number in the White House. Johnson’s advisers were keen to go to the US to meet the people they had been speaking to on the phone, but it was decreed they could not travel before Hill and Timothy.

…

The main issue for the British was to ascertain how Trump would approach global affairs and whether he was planning to tear up the international order to affect a new partnership with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. There were jaw-on-the-floor moments. When one of the Brits asked, ‘What do you give Russia to get them to the table?’ the reply astonished Johnson. ‘Steve Bannon being mischievous said if they want to move into some Baltic state, “We’re relaxed,”’ a source present said. To suggest that Russia be given carte blanche to march into a NATO state that both countries were sworn to defend on the pretext of protecting the Russian population was astonishing. Johnson leapt in, ‘What?

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (London: Allen Lane, 2015), 17. 36. Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Robert Mercer:The Big Data Billionaire Waging War on Mainstream Media’, The Guardian, 26 February 2017 <https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercerbreitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage> (accessed 1 December 2017). 37. Edward L. Bernays, ‘The Engineering of Consent’, ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250, no. 1 (1947), 113–20, cited in Zeynep Tufekci, ‘Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics’, First Monday 19, no. 7 (7 July 2014). 38.

…

Peter Martinez, ‘Study Reveals Whopping 48M Twitter Accounts Are Actually Bots’, CBS News, 10 March 2017 <http://www.cbsnews. com/news/48-million-twitter-accounts-bots-university-ofsouthern-california-study/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7e&linkId= 35386687> (accessed 1 December 2017). 18. Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Robert Mercer:The Big Data Billionaire Waging War on Mainstream Media’, The Guardian, 26 February 2017 <https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage> (accessed 1 December 2017). 19. See Leo Kelion and Shiroma Silva, ‘Pro-Clinton Bots “Fought Back but Outnumbered in Second Debate” ’, BBC News, 19 October 2016<http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37703565> (accessed 1 December 2017); Amanda Hess, ‘On Twitter, a Battle Among Political Bots’, New York Times, 14 December 2016 <https://mobile. nytimes.com/2016/12/14/arts/on-twitter-a-battle-among-politicalbots.html?

…

s e t = 6 0 3 5 8 5 & u t m _ c o n t e n t = bu f f e rd 5 a 8 f & u t m _ m e d i u m = social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer> (accessed 1 Dec. 2017). Cadwalladr, Carole. ‘Robert Mercer: The Big Data Billionaire Waging War on Mainstream Media’. The Guardian, 26 Feb. 2017 <https://www. theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-onmedia-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage> (accessed 1 Dec. 2017). Calabresi, Guido, and Philip Bobbit. Tragic Choices: The Conflicts Society Confronts in the Allocation of Tragically Scarce Resources. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Bibliography 445 Calvo, Rafael A., Sidney D’Mello, Jonathan Gratch, and Arvid Kappas, eds.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

The tech companies have won most of the cash that used to flow to newspapers for ads and subscriptions. Therefore, there are few genuine, high-integrity primary news sources, compared to antebellum days. There is almost no remaining local investigative reporting. There are occasional bloggers who accomplish real investigative work, but mostly they can only comment. Steve Bannon claimed that “if The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times … That was our opening.”6 He couldn’t have said this before the rise of the New Economy. The investigative press, which is distinct from the commenting class, used to be large and diverse.

…

Mayhem was also instigated with rather small amounts of cash, as chronicled in the other examples cited here. This is an example of how even insiders are still finding their way. The online world has become so murky that no one has a complete view. The strange new truth is that almost no one has privacy and yet no one knows what’s going on. 6.   http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-bannon-trump-tower-interview-trumps-strategist-plots-new-political-movement-948747 7.   Described earlier, in the section called “Birth of a Religion.” Netflix uses AI recommendations to create the illusion that the selection of things to watch is larger than it is. 8.   https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo?

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

Posted in the midst of Gamergate, this ornate otaku screed would likely have faded into oblivion were it not for a singular fact. It was one of the first articles published by an up-and-coming writer named Milo Yiannopoulos. Nobody knew who the thirty-year-old with the shocking bleach-blond coif was yet, but that was about to change, and fast. Yiannopoulos’s boss was a man named Steve Bannon, who believed that Breitbart could be more than just another news site. He wasn’t satisfied with being a website editor; he hungered to wield real political clout, to really change the dialogue—if only he could tap into the right network of people. “Rootless white males,” he called them. By rootless he basically meant otaku.

…

“Japanese culture enjoyed unique purchase”: Milo Yiannopoulos, “The Lost Franchise: Why Digimon Deserves a Glorious Renaissance,” Breitbart, November 20, 2014, https://www.breitbart.com/​europe/​2014/​11/​20/​the-lost-franchise-why-digimon-deserves-a-glorious-renaissance/​. “Rootless white males”: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising (New York: Penguin, 2017), 145. A Pew study: Richard Fry, “For First Time in Modern Era, Living with Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds,” Pew Research Center, May 24, 2016, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/​2016/​05/​24/​for-first-time-in-modern-era-living-with-parents-edges-out-other-living-arrangements-for-18-to-34-year-olds/​.

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The Brexit referendum gave an injection of energy to the Trump movement, and Trump’s election energized populists all over Europe – agitators and parties who claim that there is one true, united people whose general will is blocked by a corrupt elite. So did money and media assistance from Putin’s Russia, which is eager to show that Western liberalism is obsolete. Meanwhile Western anti-liberals look to Putin as a source of inspiration because he ‘is standing up for traditional institutions’, as Steve Bannon puts it.9 We can’t live without openness, but the question is whether we can live with it. In the second half of the book, I examine why openness is always under threat, historically and right now. I will argue that the modern world was not intended, it almost happened by accident. It happened because there were too many gaps in the control of princes, priests and guilds to stop people’s creativity entirely.

…

Had natives back then known that six of the eight judges on the present US Supreme Court had been raised as Roman Catholics (and the remaining two Jews), they would surely have concluded that we live in a tragic future where despotism has won. Had they known that the Irish would by 2020 have captured the vice presidency (Mike Pence), the Senate (Mitch McConnell), the House Republicans (Kevin McCarthy), and were represented among former and present advisors to the president (Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway), they would probably have assumed that there had been a hostile takeover of the Republican party by anti-American globalists. Anti-Irish sentiment back then were so strong that it spawned a briefly successful political party, the ‘Know-Nothings’, so named because its early adherents refused to answer questions about the party.

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

Here he is speaking at American University, part of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” of college campuses, where he holds forth against feminists, SJWs, and “cuckservatives.” A tense back-and-forth with a Black student makes this particular speech memorable, good YouTube fodder. Another student in a red Make America Great Again cap giggles at the spat. Steve Bannon had taken over Breitbart News after a meandering career as a Hollywood financier and video game executive. He used deputies like Yiannopoulos to “activate” an army of disaffected, extremely online supporters. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump,” Bannon told the journalist Joshua Green.

…

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Black YouTube animator: Viewers adored Thorne too, although he later confessed to YouTube brass that his videos with animated thumbnails did better than those showing his face. It seemed people clicked less on Black faces and the algorithm followed suit. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT told the journalist: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2017). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A later study: Bernhard Rieder, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, and Òscar Coromina, “From Ranking Algorithms to ‘Ranking Cultures’: Investigating the Modulation of Visibility in YouTube Search Results,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 24, no. 1 (January 10, 2018): 50–68.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

But while Trump may represent the negation of the liberal parts of this heritage, his accession also signals the renewal of an older version of Anglo-America which reaches back to the ethno-nationalism associated with the Anglo-Saxonist movement of the 1890s, and which regards both countries as linked by their shared ethnic and cultural origins. This, broadly, is the outlook promoted by the influential alt-right website Breitbart News and advanced by Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon. It coheres around support for stronger immigration controls, an aggressively anti-Muslim form of identity politics and greater protectionism for the jobs of the indigenous working class. Writing on the Breitbart site in 2016, James Pinkerton elaborated this position, invoking the Anglosphere as a potential alliance upon which an anti-Islamic Western order could be rebuilt.18 And, according to the former UKIP advisor (and one-time editor-in-chief of Breitbart News London) Raheem Kassam, ‘The whole Breitbart thing and the whole Trump narrative is about the Anglosphere, about free trade agreements with all the English speaking nations of the world.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

utm_term=.f857ac42b2e9; “Facebook: ‘No Evidence’ Conservative Stories Were Suppressed,” CBS News, May 10, 2016, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-no-evidence-conservative-stories-trending-suppressed-gizmodo/. 88. Josh Sternberg, “Layoffs and Local Journalism,” Media Nut, May 14, 2020, at https://medianut.substack.com/p/layoffs-and-local-journalism. 89. Rachael Revesz, “Steve Bannon’s Data Firm in Talks for Lucrative White House Contracts,” Independent, November 23, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cambridge-analytica-steve-bannon-robert-rebekah-mercer-donald-trump-conflicts-of-interest-white-a7435536.html; Josh Feldman, “CIA Concluded Russia Intervened in Election to Help Trump, WaPo Reports,” Mediaite, December 9, 2016, http://www.mediaite.com/online/cia-concluded-russia-intervened-in-election-to-help-trump-wapo-reports/. 90.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Between Trump’s election and the end of his first year in office, for example, Charles Blow published eighty-eight columns in the Times, fifty-six targeting Trump specifically. Of the remainder, most tore into various reprobates who fleetingly passed through Trump’s orbit, including Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Omarosa Manigault, and Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci. On those rare occasions when Blow refrained from going after Trump or his associates, he devoted himself to promoting the anti-Trump resistance, for which he served as a vocal cheerleader. Throughout, Blow’s tone was unremittingly contemptuous of the president and anyone in his employ.

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

A report on the tech website Gizmodo quoted a former Facebook “news curator” who said that conservative viewpoints were sometimes “black-listed,” which, if true, was a very disturbing allegation. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg denied the claim but, recognizing the seriousness of the issue, convened a roundtable in May 2016 with conservative media figures, including Glenn Beck, S. E. Cupp, Dana Perino, and Brent Bozell (Breitbart.com, then still run by Steve Bannon, was invited but declined to attend) to give assurances and seek solutions. Zuckerberg released a statement, which read in part: “To serve our diverse community, we are committed to building a platform for all ideas. Trending Topics is designed to surface the most newsworthy and popular conversations on Facebook.

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

Johnson’s Conservatives won the British election in 2019 on a platform of spending more on just about everything (just less than Jeremy Corbyn). At the end of June, Johnson delivered a speech comparing himself to FDR in his desire to “build, build, build.” In America Trumpism rejected decades’ worth of Republican orthodoxy on free trade and small government. Steve Bannon, the mastermind of Trump’s election victory, has long thought limited-government conservatism is old hat.16 For him the idea that you can remain dependent on China for vital goods like medical supplies while pushing back against that country’s geo-strategic ambitions is absurd. His former colleague in the White House, Peter Navarro, has declared that “never again should we have to depend on the rest of the world for our essential medicines and countermeasures.”17 Even conservatives are asking: what good was globalization in the crisis?

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

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

Donald Trump Solved It,” New York Times, April 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/magazine/cnn-had-a-problem-donald-trump-solved-it.html?_r=0. 19. See Wil S. Hylton, “Down the Breitbart Hole,” New York Times Magazine, August 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/magazine/breitbart-alt-right-steve-bannon.html; Michael M. Grynbaum and John Herrman, “Breitbart Rises from Outlier to Potent Voice in Campaign,” New York Times, August 26, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/business/media/breitbart-news-presidential-race.html; David van Drehle, “Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?” Time Magazine, February 2, 2017. 20. “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement,” Newsbreakshere, September 27, 2016, https://newsbreakshere.com/pope-francis-shocks-world-endorses-donald-trump-president-releases-statement. 21.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

This was one reason why Trump upbraided the Saudi crown prince when the latter visited Washington in the spring of 2018, telling Mohammad bin Salman that he should have increased his spending and that sums of several hundred million dollars ‘are peanuts to you’.6 Saudi Arabia is ‘a very great friend’, Trump said when receiving the crown prince, because it is ‘a big purchaser of equipment and lots of other things’.7 This explains why Saudi had been singled out for special treatment, as is clear from the fact that when Mike Pompeo was appointed CIA director in 2017 he lost no time in telling his hosts in Riyadh that his first overseas trip was to Saudi Arabia, just as President Trump’s had been.8 Trump’s visit to Riyadh in 2017 had certainly been memorable. Indeed, said the president later, it was ‘one of the most incredible two-day meetings that I’ve ever seen – that anybody has ever seen’. Those who saw Trump, secretary of state Rex Tillerson and his then chief strategist Steve Bannon attend exhibitions of sword-dancing and hop about uncomfortably as they took part in festivities alongside their Saudi hosts would agree.9 Trump’s alignment with Saudi has consequences for proposed arms sales elsewhere in the region. In 2017, visiting Qatar, the president had addressed the Gulf state’s leader and told him, ‘We are friends.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

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

Santelli implored the country to return to its bootstrap roots.46 On April 15, 2009, tax day, “Tea Party patriots” energized by Santelli’s speech held protests around the country demanding a return to fiscal conservatism. The Tea Party, like Occupy, spawned a cluster of new right-wing figures and movements that have their own systemic critique blending cultural, political, and economic factors. Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and briefly the chief strategist for the White House, calls for economic nationalism, infrastructure programs, and closing the borders to immigration to prevent the collapse of both capitalism and the “Judeo-Christian West.” Bannon’s worldview echoes that of the paleoconservative William Lind, who warns of a “fourth-generation war” in which, instead of being invaded by armies, the United States will be invaded by immigrants, sucked under by the “poisonous ideology of multiculturalism.”47 White supremacy has seen a resurgence, evidenced by the popularity of Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank.

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

His bosses had hoped his articles would inform Breitbart’s small, far-right readership on tech issues. Instead, they tapped into a new and much larger audience that they hadn’t even known existed—one that was only coming together at that moment. “Every time you write one of your commentaries, it gets 10,000 comments,” Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s chief, told Yiannopoulos on the site’s radio show. “It goes even broader than the Breitbart audience, all over.” Within three years, the angry little subculture Yiannopoulos championed would evolve into a mainstream movement so powerful that he was granted a keynote slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the most important event on the political right.

…

Berger, George Washington University Program on Extremism, September 2016. 11 “The trolls are winning”: “The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet,” Ellen Pao, Washington Post, July 16, 2015. 12 “Every time you write one of your”: “How Stephen Bannon Made Milo Dangerous,” Keegan Hankes, Southern Poverty Law Center, February 23, 2017. 13 “If rape culture was real”: Ibid. 14 “I realized Milo could connect”: Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising, Joshua Green, 2017: 147. 15 “Finally doing my big feature”: “Here’s How Breitbart and Milo Smuggled White Nationalism into the Mainstream,” Joseph Bernstein, BuzzFeed News, October 5, 2017. 16 “The alt-right is a movement”: “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart, March 29, 2016. 17 The portmanteau is thought to have originated: “Behind the Racist Hashtag That Is Blowing Up Twitter,” Joseph Bernstein, BuzzFeed News, July 27, 2015. 18 “They call it ‘meme magic’”: “Meme Magic: Donald Trump Is the Internet’s Revenge on Lazy Elites,” Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart, May 4, 2016. 19 “The unindoctrinated should not”: “This Is The Daily Stormer’s Playbook,” Ashley Feinberg, HuffPost, December 13, 2017. 20 “He has a character and a style”: Bokhari and Yiannopoulos. 21 a Harvard study later found: Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S.

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

At the height of New Labour’s success, Young even wrote an article in the Guardian taking the Labour leader to task and remaking his case with renewed urgency.32 The Best and the Brightest stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for thirty-six weeks and influenced a whole generation of young activists, who graduated from protesting against the Vietnam War to becoming Democratic Party stalwarts. His book also exercised influence in a surprising quarter: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist and one of the heroes of the global populist right, was spotted reading it in February 2017.33 A Theory of Justice became required reading not only in philosophy departments but also in law schools across the world, not least in Harvard Law School, which has educated a disproportionate number of America’s senior judges.

…

., pp. 85–6 29 Anthony Crosland, The Conservative Enemy (London, Cape, 1962), pp. 173–4 30 David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York, Random House, 1972), pp. 41, 44 31 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 15 32 Michael Young, ‘Down with Meritocracy’, Guardian, 29 June 2001 33 Marc Tracy, ‘Steve Bannon’s Book Club’, The New York Times, 4 February 2017 34 Michael Anthony Lawrence, ‘Justice-as-Fairness as Judicial Guiding Principle: Remembering John Rawls and the Warren Court’, Brooklyn Law Review 82 (2) (2016), https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol81/iss2/5/, argues that the Warren Court adopted many of Rawls’s basic principles before he wrote his book. 35 Peter L.

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

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

It had just one central cluster around the hyperpartisan platform Breitbart, which had been launched in 2005 (the year after Facebook) with the new media environment deliberately in mind. As founder Andrew Breitbart explained, “I’m committed to the destruction of the old media guard . . . and it’s a very good business model.” After Breitbart’s death in 2012, the organization was run by Steve Bannon, a former investment banker turned Hollywood producer, who intimately understood both markets and the power of a good viral headline. Bannon embraced social media as a tool to dominate the changing media marketplace, as well as to remake the right-wing. The modern internet wasn’t just a communications medium, he lectured his staff, it was a “powerful weapon of war,” or what he called “#War.”

…

Then there was the data archive of the Republican National Committee, which claimed to have nearly 8 trillion pieces of information spread across 200 million American voters. And, finally, came the massive data stores of a controversial company called Cambridge Analytica. A UK-based firm that Breitbart chairman and Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon had helped form in 2013, Cambridge Analytica had previously been active in conducting information warfare–style efforts on behalf of clients ranging from corporations to the “Leave” side of Brexit. It would later be reported to have provided to the Trump campaign some 5,000 data points on 220 million Americans.

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

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

Those who described themselves as Republicans in surveys were far more likely than supporters of the Democratic Party to favor shrinking the government. Trump tapped into these sentiments during his political campaign when he launched rhetorical attacks on the government apparatus and called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” This was a pet issue of Steve Bannon, one of his early policy advisers, but Trump fully embraced it. In 2018–2019, President Trump forced a government shutdown in a fight with Congress over the budget. It was another of his big shows. He figured that the federal government and its funding were easy political targets that would not elicit much public sympathy.

…

device to expel officials: Meredith McGraw, “White House transfers top national security aide after whisper campaign,” Politico, February 20, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/top-national-security-aide-anonymous-book-116325. trusted the federal government: “Little Public Support for Reductions in Federal Spending,” Pew Research Center, April 11, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/04/11/little-public-support-for-reductions-in-federal-spending/. Steve Bannon: Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Bannon vows a daily fight for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state,’ ” Washington Post, February 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-wh-strategist-vows-a-daily-fight-for-deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state/2017/02/23/03f6b8da-f9ea-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

Frustrated politicians and activists blame the deep state for undermining them, and people roll their eyes. The concept of the deep state has been around for years, but the term was unknown to most in the West and especially the United States until recently. President Trump’s alt-right defenders and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon have blamed the deep state for trying to delegitimize the president. Articles in Breitbart News, where Bannon served as executive chairman before and after working for Trump, have invoked the idea repeatedly. Critics balk at this accusation, reaching for tinfoil hats while lampooning alt-righters as paranoid weirdos.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

He brought with him a contradictory set of politics: a right-populist challenge to both NATO and the network of US-led free trade deals, on the one hand, and more traditional pro-business Republican pledges, on the other. The parts that got through, not surprisingly, were those that capital found more acceptable. Paul Ryan–backed tax cuts have been passed, but Trump’s more extreme protectionist plans have gotten stymied, and gone is Steve Bannon, along with his dreams of a massive jobs program built around deficit-financed infrastructure construction. If these are the pressures that rabidly pro-capitalist Trump was under, we can only imagine the forces that could be brought to bear on a President Sanders in 2021. For one thing, he would have to contend with a vicious media offensive—each new policy or proposal would be systematically smeared, with eager help from corporate Democrats.

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

He claimed that he could use ‘hundreds and thousands of individual data points on our target audiences to understand exactly which messages are going to appeal to which audiences’ and implied that the methods he had described were being used by the Trump campaign. The origins of Cambridge Analytica has all the ingredients of a modern conspiracy story. It involves Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, data security, the psychology of personality, Facebook, underpaid Mechanical Turk workers, big data, Cambridge University academics, right-wing populist Steve Bannon who sits on the board, right-wing financier Robert Mercer who is one of its biggest investors, one-time national security advisor Michael Flynn who has acted as consultant, and (in some less reliable versions of the story) Russian-sponsored trolls. I can imagine it as a film with Jesse Eisenberg playing a psychologist who gradually uncovers the true motives of the company he works for: to manipulate our every emotion for political means.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

But Alex Jones just believes in selling supplements, Donald Trump just believes in selling Donald Trump, and a remarkable amount of online extremism is a mix of irony memes and pranks and playacting, with anonymous trolls competing with very public grifters to exploit an aging society’s anxieties and a drifting youthful population’s appetite for stimulation. The reason that Steve Bannon achieved—for a brief spell—so much celebrity was that almost alone among Trumpian figures, he seemed to have a coherent philosophy beyond grifting, and I emphasize that “seemed” because there’s a possibility that all his name-checks of fascist intellectuals were part of the grift as well. The reason that the Antifa kids favor masks is that an awful lot of them are playacting their revolution, and they don’t want to put their names and faces to something that’s fundamentally just a game.

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Other measures would deliver a fleeting sugar high. Still others would have no impact at all, aside from appearances. But any single one of them might just be sufficient to produce the deadly phenomenon we know as Trump’s reelection, while knitting together the new, faux-proletarian Republican Party that Steve Bannon used to fantasize about, that he once dreamed would “govern for a hundred years.” Before you close this book, chuckle cynically, and take a sip of bourbon, think for a second about the cultural and political delusions a roaring economy and rising wages would surely generate—just as the tech mania of the late 1990s did, and just as the bull market of the 1980s did.

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

The power-hungry leaders of Free America used Trump’s presidency and his political failings to squeeze more plunder out of the economy and more breath out of government by the people. This describes what happened under Trump, but it doesn’t account for what made him new and powerful. He represented a social and political phenomenon that eludes standard left/right categories. Was he then a fascist with a Queens accent? Some of Trump’s advisors, like Steve Bannon, claimed inspiration from European reactionaries of the twenties and thirties. At times the cocked-chin Trump seemed to style himself after Mussolini or Franco. In 2017 he gave a speech before a rapturous crowd in Warsaw on the enemies of Western civilization, and you can almost picture him in a white uniform with gold braid and a red sash: “Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty.

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, different worldview, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, high net worth, illegal immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The website that Solov and Breitbart envisioned, Solov said, “would be unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel. We were sick of the anti-Israel bias of the mainstream media and J-Street.”3 Most American Jews were horrified by Trump’s victory and by the reports of the alleged anti-Semitic views of Steve Bannon, who had been Breitbart’s editor-in-chief and was now Trump’s chief strategist. But Ron Dermer, who knew Bannon, reported that he was “very pro-Israel.” To Netanyahu, that was all that mattered. Netanyahu and Bannon shared a unique historical belief. Both had been brought up—Bibi by his historian father and Bannon by his Catholic parents and teachers—to view the “Reconquista,” the fifteenth-century Christian victory over the Muslim Moors in Spain, as a key moment in history when “Western civilization was saved” from the Muslims.4 Benzion taught Bibi that this was the precedent for the return of the Jews to their land.

…

Hillary Clinton to Fareed Zakaria: Putin Indirectly Responsible for MH17,” CNN, July 27, 2014, http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/07/27/fmr-sec-hillary-clinton-to-fareed-zakaria-putin-indirectly-responsible-for-mh17. 2. Anshel Pfeffer, “The Collapsing Political Triangle Linking Adelson, Netanyahu and Trump,” Haaretz, November 8, 2016. 3. Larry Solov, “Breitbart News Network: Born in the USA, Conceived in Israel,” Breitbart, November 17, 2015. 4. Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 51. 5. Twitter, @amit_segal, December 12, 2016. 6. Monica Langley, “Trump in Exclusive Interview Tells WSJ He Is Willing to Keep Parts of Obama Health Law,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2016. 7. Barak Ravid, “Trump Declines to Endorse Two-State Solution, Calls on Netanyahu to Hold Back on Settlements,” Haaretz, February 16, 2017. 8.

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

Several GOP members and thinkers had actually floated the Twenty-Fifth Amendment as a solution for dealing with the looming dangers of the president’s final troubled weeks, when he came to realize that the party was over. This route did not have the fierce partisan sting of impeachment. Even Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon had raised it demurely at one point, suggesting that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment would become a greater danger to Trump than impeachment. Nonetheless, all we could do as Democrats was ask Pence and the Cabinet to get together and act, pressuring them to do the right thing. I resolved that I would suggest to Speaker Pelosi and Leader Hoyer that we pass a nonbinding resolution asking Vice President Pence to assemble the Cabinet and activate Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, to save us from any further violence and chaos.

…

They imagined that they had converged on Washington to destroy corrupt politicians of both parties, traitorous police officers, lying media, agents of George Soros, defenders of the Clintons and the Obamas, and other sinister, shadowy forces identified by conspiracy theorists in QAnon and by Trump’s authoritarian polemicists like Steve Bannon. Their foes were anyone who dared get in the way of the perpetual reign of Donald Trump, and their friends were anyone who joined in the festival of merciless violence called to restore Trump to his American throne. But, as we looked farther back in time and to a broader panorama, we could see that the violence was political in a second sense: it was a core part of Trump’s long-running strategic plan to maintain power, and on January 6, it became a specific tactical maneuver.

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

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

If their goal had all been to help elect Trump, then the Shadow Brokers had grown disillusioned with their candidate. Attached to their leak was a long list of political grievances: With the ease of a seasoned American pundit, the Shadow Brokers addressed Trump directly. They wanted the president to know they were upset about Steve Bannon’s recent removal from the National Security Council; the Pentagon’s strike on Syria one day earlier; the “deep state”; the Freedom Caucus in Congress; and white privilege. “TheShadowBrokers is wanting to see you succeed,” the Shadow Brokers told Trump. “TheShadowBrokers is wanting America to be great again.”

…

He spoke the words matter-of-factly but, given the truth famine we found ourselves in, they landed like the words of a renegade soldier, and Trump and his minions punished him for it. “Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia. They will both, plus others be able to interfere in our 2020 Election with our totally vulnerable Unsolicited (Counterfeit?) Ballot Scam,” Trump tweeted. Steve Bannon, the president’s far-right-hand man, later called for Wray—and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert—to be beheaded as a warning to federal workers who dared question the president’s propaganda. We had all spent the past four years worried what our foreign adversaries were planning.

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist lawyer, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, estate planning, fake news, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, power law, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon

Ahead of me on the show was Anthony Scaramucci, President Trump’s newest communications director, who, overnight, had gone on a tirade in an interview with the New Yorker. He’d called Trump’s then chief of staff, Reince Priebus, a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic,” and when the reporter suggested Anthony was being media-hungry, he replied, “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.” I’d known Anthony Scaramucci, a slick and voluble New Yorker, for a long time. I liked him too. After Red Notice was published, whenever I bumped into him, he’d cup his hands in front of his crotch like he was holding something heavy and say, “Dude, you got some brass fucking balls on you taking on Putin!”

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

George, according to alt-righters, is neither an English street nor a Muslim street—separation is necessary for distinctiveness.” Asked why he supported Trump, Milo replied, “Trump represents the best hope we have of smashing political correctness apart.… I want a new political re-alignment on libertarian-authoritarian lines rather than left and right.” And when Trump hired the CEO of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, to run his campaign, a Washington Post columnist noted that it represented “the dangerous seizure of the conservative movement by the Alt-Right.” But for Milo, Peter Thiel is a hero on par with Trump for funding the Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker. “With his lawsuit,” he wrote, “Thiel has perhaps done more than any man to liberate social media from the terror of left-wing public shaming that prevailed in the golden age of Gawker.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

Robert Proctor, a historian who has spent decades studying the tobacco industry, calls modern politics “a golden age of ignorance.” Much as many smokers would like to keep smoking, many of us are fondly attached to our gut instincts on political questions. All politicians need to do is persuade us to doubt evidence that would challenge those instincts. As Donald Trump’s former right-hand man Steve Bannon infamously told the writer Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”15 The history of another term associated with Donald Trump—“fake news”—is instructive here. Originally, it described a very specific phenomenon: websites publishing false articles in the hope of getting clicks from social media and thus advertising dollars.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game