disinformation

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Active Measures by Thomas Rid

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

“The desire for speedy, easily visible, and audible success sometimes makes the intelligence service the victim of its own propaganda and disinformation,” observed Bittman, the Czech defector, in the early 1970s.9 Forty years later, by the 2010s, data had become big, engagement numbers soared, and the hunger for metrics was more ferocious than ever. Yet disinformation, by design, still resisted metrics. If more data generally meant more reliable metrics, then the internet had the reverse effect on the old art of political warfare: the metrics produced by digital disinformation were, to a significant degree, themselves disinformation. The internet didn’t bring more precision to the art and science of disinformation—it made active measures less measured: harder to control, harder to steer, and harder to isolate engineered effects.

A society’s approach to active measures is a litmus test for its republican institutions. For liberal democracies in particular, disinformation represents a double threat: being at the receiving end of active measures will undermine democratic institutions—and giving in to the temptation to design and deploy them will have the same result. It is impossible to excel at disinformation and at democracy at the same time. The stronger and the more robust a democratic body politic, the more resistant to disinformation it will be—and the more reluctant to deploy and optimize disinformation. Weakened democracies, in turn, succumb more easily to the temptations of active measures.

In 1953, the main historical display in the study room at Soviet intelligence headquarters showed Feliks Dzerzhinsky, and the inscription under his portrait was devoted to the Trust.40 Operatsiya Trest, as one prominent Soviet defector reported, figured prominently in the active measures training at the Andropov Red Banner Institute, the First Chief Directorate’s academy of foreign intelligence.41 As late as 1997, the official Russian foreign intelligence history celebrated the disinformation operation as a towering success story. “The disinformation work carried out by MOTsR played a distinctly positive role,” the SVR’s official history recounted, and added that Soviet spies were able to confirm the effectiveness of the two-step ruse that fed disinformation to Polish, Estonian, and Finnish services, who in turn passed on the deceptive material to their partner agencies in France, Britain, Japan, Italy, and “in some measure” the United States. The adversaries of the USSR, taking the disinformation at face value, arrived at an “exaggerated notion of the Red Army’s military power,” the SVR concluded, which in turn led them to reject intervention against the USSR.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Roberts, “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument,” Harvard, April 9, 2017, https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf. 130 Marc Faddoul, Guillaume Chaslot, and Hany Farid, “A longitudinal analysis of YouTube’s promotion of conspiracy videos,” UC–Berkeley, March 6, 2020, https://farid.berkeley.edu/downloads/publications/arxiv20.pdf. 131 Renee DiResta, “The Digital Maginot Line,” Ribbonfarm, November 28, 2018, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/28/the-digital-maginot-line/. 132 Mark Scott and Laurens Cerulus, “Russian groups targeted EU election with fake news, says European Commission,” Politico, June 14, 2019, https://www.politico.eu/article/european-commission-disinformation-report-russia-fake-news/. 133 Davey Alba and Sheera Frenkel, “Russia Tests New Disinformation Tactics in Africa to Expand Influence,” New York Times, October 30, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/technology/russia-facebook-disinformation-africa.html. 134 Michael Schwirtz and Sheera Frenkel, “In Ukraine, Russia Tests a New Facebook Tactic in Election Tampering,” New York Times, March 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/world/europe/ukraine-russia-election-tampering-propaganda.html. 135 Alba and Frenkel, “Russia Tests New Disinformation Tactics in Africa to Expand Influence.” 136 Ibid. 137 Davey Alba, “How Russia’s Troll Farm Is Changing Tactics Before the Fall Election,” New York Times, March 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/technology/russia-troll-farm-election.html. 138 “America has always been hinged on hard-working people,” UMD Archive, September 23, 2016, https://archive.mith.umd.edu/irads/items/show/8941.html. 139 Alba, “How Russia’s Troll Farm Is Changing Tactics Before the Fall Election.” 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid. 142 Nicole Perlroth, “A Conspiracy Made in America May Have Been Spread by Russia,” New York Times, June 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/technology/coronavirus-disinformation-russia-iowa-caucus.html. 143 Joseph Menn, “Russian-backed organizations amplifying QAnon conspiracy theories, researchers say,” Reuters, August 24, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-qanon-russia/russian-backed-organizations-amplifying-qanon-conspiracy-theories-researchers-say-idUSKBN25K13T. 144 Nicole Perlroth, “A Conspiracy Made in America May Have Been Spread by Russia.” 145 Andy Greenberg, “Hackers broke into real news sites to plant fake stories,” Wired, July 29, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-broke-into-real-news-sites-to-plant-fake-stories-anti-nato/. 146 Charles Davis, “ ‘Grassroots’ Media Startup Redfish Is Supported by the Kremlin,” Daily Beast, June 19, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/grassroots-media-startup-redfish-is-supported-by-the-kremlin. 147 Albert Shuldiner, “Declaratory Ruling,” Federal Communications Commission, May 29, 2020, https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-20-568A1.pdf. 148 “Assessment on U.S.

In money laundering, illicit funds are frequently broken up into smaller amounts and deposited separately—a practice known as “smurfing.”93 Similarly, these shell accounts engage in “informational smurfing” to make the source of disinformation harder to trace. Many of the online voices amplifying false narratives are also engaged in layering, in which intermediaries are used to obscure the original source of disinformation and spread propaganda far and wide. An intermediary can be an organization that purports to leak secrets for the public benefit, like WikiLeaks. Or intermediaries can be unsuspecting users, serving as “useful idiots” parroting Kremlin propaganda. Either way, the additional layers complicate law enforcement and counterintelligence investigations, putting the disinformation further from its sketchy origins and closer to credible sources like your friends and favorite news sources.

Each government spread falsehoods that the virus was developed as an American bioweapon, that China had responded well, and that the U.S. economy was collapsing. The report was not released publicly, but according to Politico, it argued “that propaganda and disinformation narratives from those country’s [sic] governments have converged as coronavirus has spread.” A few months later, representatives from the Chinese and Russian foreign ministries held “consultations” on disinformation.162 The stated goal was ostensibly to “jointly combat disinformation,” but coordination was more likely on the agenda. More and more, the authoritarians’ online playbooks are drawing on and reinforcing each other—while we scramble to update our own defenses.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

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

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

They embody an open epistemic order, which enables an open and liberal political order; one cannot exist without the other.… Active measures [a Russian term for disinformation] erode that order. But they do so slowly, subtly, like ice melting. This slowness makes disinformation that much more insidious, because when the authority of evidence is eroded, emotions fill the gap.… The stakes are enormous—for disinformation corrodes the foundation of liberal democracy, our ability to assess facts on their merits and to self-correct accordingly.17 The study of propaganda and disinformation has a long and distinguished history, which I will not attempt to rehearse here. The basics are well established.

In fact, it was not the product of a “sad, sick sense of humor.” It was a disinformation experiment by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the infamous state-sponsored troll farm in St. Petersburg, whose humans and bots and algorithms worked around the clock to design and refine viral fakery. In 2015 an online disinformation campaign convinced millions of people—including the governor of Texas—that a routine federal military exercise might be an Obama administration plan to round up political dissidents. That, too, turned out to be a Russian dry run for the much larger disinformation campaign of 2016.14 Soon it became evident that countries around the world—big ones like Russia and Iran, small ones like Azerbaijan and Ecuador—were investing in what became known as state-sponsored trolling.15 This was a realm far removed from lulz.

See also professionalism Facebook: advertising shift to, 137; conspiracy theories and, 135; content regulation and, 144–47, 150–51, 240; disinformation campaigns and, 168; institutionalization of, 150–52 FactCheck.org, 152 facts and factuality: conservative media and, 176; disinformation campaigns and, 165–66, 169; fact-checking, 152–53, 169–70; law and, 102; methodology for establishing, 116–17, 151–52; reality-based communities and, 112, 115–17, 233–34, 262; Royal Society and, 67–68; Trump and, 169–71 Fairness for All Act (2020), 238–39 fake news: conservative media and, 177–78; pre-digital, 136–37; proliferation of, 120, 185; Trump and, 6, 180. See also disinformation; misinformation; trolls and trolling fallibilism: conspiracy theories and, 167; falsification and, 58–60; knowledge and, 58–60, 88–89; marginalizing bad ideas under, 258–60; Mill’s On Liberty and, 192; network epistemology and, 94, 95; as rule for reality, 88–92, 103; Trumpism vs., 182; Wikipedia and, 143 falsification, 58–60, 99 familiarity bias, 26 Faris, Robert, 164, 178–79 Fauci, Anthony, 241 Federalist Papers, 80–82, 84, 112, 119, 190–91 Federation of State Medical Boards, 66 Ferguson, Niall, 120 Fernbach, Philip: The Knowledge Illusion (with Sloman), 34, 72 Filloux, Frederic, 137 First Amendment, 12, 168, 198, 200, 201, 235, 237, 250 Fleming, Alexander, 67 Florey, Howard, 67 fluency bias, 26 Foer, Sam, 12–13, 19, 244 Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), 19, 243–44, 250 Founding Fathers, 112, 115, 156–57.


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

Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/why-crafty-internet-trolls-in-the-philippines-may-be-coming-to-a-website-near-you/2019/07/25/c5d42ee2-5c53-11e9-98d4-844088d135f2_story.html In Indonesia, low-level military personnel coordinate disinformation campaigns: Allard, T., & Stubbs, J. (2020, January 7). Indonesian army wields internet ‘news’ as a weapon in Papua. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-military-websites-insight/indonesian-army-wields-internet-news-as-a-weapon-in-papua-idUSKBN1Z7001 Taiwan is like a petri dish of disinformation: Zhong, R. (2020, January 16). Awash in disinformation before vote, Taiwan points finger at China. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/technology/taiwan-election-china-disinformation.html They’ve employed hackers-for-hire to target ngos.

They are feeling the pressure to react, and have taken several noteworthy steps to combat the plague of disinformation, including shutting down inauthentic accounts by the thousands, hiring more personnel to screen posts and investigate malpractice on their platforms, “down-ranking” clearly false information on users’ feeds, and collaborating with fact-checking and other research organizations to spot disinformation. These efforts intensified during the COVID pandemic. But in spite of these measures, social media remain polluted by misinformation and disinformation, not only because of their own internal mechanisms, which privilege sensational content, or because of the speed and volume of posts, but also thanks to the actions of malicious actors who seek to game them.191 For example, in spite of widespread revelations of Russian influence operations over social media in 2016, two years later researchers posing as Russian trolls were still able to buy political ads on Google, even paying in Russian currency, registering from a Russian zip code, and using indicators linking their advertisements to the Internet Research Agency — the very trolling farm that was the subject of intense congressional scrutiny and indictments by Robert Mueller.192 In similar fashion, despite all the attention given and promises made to control misinformation about COVID-19 on its platform, an April 2020 study by the Markup found that Facebook was nonetheless still allowing advertisers to target users who the company believes are interested in “pseudoscience” — a category of roughly 78 million people.

Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/world/americas/youtube-brazil.html An opportunity for climate change denialists to propagate disinformation: Ryan, H., & Wilson, C. (2020, January 22). As Australia burned, climate change denialism got a boost on Facebook. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahryan/facebook-australia-bushfires-climate-change-deniers-facebook Conspiracy theories circulated across social media: Knaus, C. (2020, January 11). Disinformation and lies are spreading faster than Australia’s bushfires. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/12/disinformation-and-lies-are-spreading-faster-than-australias-bushfires At least one prominent politician bought into it: Capstick, S., Dyke, J., Lewandowsky, S., Pancost, R., & Steinberger, J. (2020, January 14).


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

We also added a short editor’s note on the story page on our website, which would be the first sentence any reader would see: “This story was published on March 26, 2016.” But we decided not to do a full story about the operation on Rappler because we didn’t want to amplify the disinformation. In general, we struggled early on with how to balance getting out the information about manipulation, correcting the disinformation, and trying to limit its reach. We became better at this in the coming years, deciding that radical transparency, including publishing full geeky maps of the accounts taking part in disinformation networks, was the way to go: give as much information as the most detail-oriented reader might want. We continued our investigation of the case for many years.38 We found that the “man with a bomb” online network was connected to the core manpower of the Duterte campaign.

Step two was to use natural language processing, using computers to process large amounts of text to pull out the consistent messages of networks of disinformation. Doing that led us to step three, which was identifying the websites and other digital assets associated with those networks, including those profiting off the enterprise.22 Duterte had consolidated power and polarized the society by often using asymmetrical warfare, with small groups like us trying to stand up for the facts against the disinformation that was more likely to travel over pro-Duterte and pro-Marcos disinformation networks. One of the first times when there was a near-even split in our information ecosystem was when I was arrested on February 13, 2019.

For the American-owned platforms, the world’s new information gatekeepers, those activities created more engagement and brought in more money. The goals of the gatekeepers and the disinformation operatives aligned. That was the first time we became aware of information warfare tactics that would soon be deployed around the world, from Duterte to Brexit to Catalonia to Stop the Steal. Eight years later, on February 24, 2022, using the same techniques and the same metanarratives he had seeded to annex Crimea, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine itself. This is how disinformation, bottom up and top down, can manufacture a whole new reality. Less than three months later, the Philippines fell into the abyss.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

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

Facebook (along with Google and Twitter) has undercut the free press from two directions: it has eroded the economics of journalism and then overwhelmed it with disinformation. On Facebook, information and disinformation look the same; the only difference is that disinformation generates more revenue, so it gets much better treatment. To Facebook, facts are not an absolute; they are a choice to be left initially to users and their friends but then magnified by algorithms to promote engagement. In the same vein, Facebook’s algorithms promote extreme messages over neutral ones, disinformation over information, conspiracy theories over facts. Every user has a unique News Feed and potentially a unique set of “facts.”

The shared values that form the foundation of our democracy proved to be powerless against the preference bubbles that have evolved over the past decade. Facebook does not create preference bubbles, but it is the ideal incubator for them. The algorithms ensure that users who like one piece of disinformation will be fed more disinformation. Fed enough disinformation, users will eventually wind up first in a filter bubble and then in a preference bubble. If you are a bad actor and you want to manipulate people in a preference bubble, all you have to do is infiltrate the tribe, deploy the appropriate dog whistles, and you are good to go.

These and other sites would have been fertile ground for the Russian messages on immigration, guns, and white nationalism. They were also ideal incubators for disinformation. Renée explained that the typical path for disinformation or a conspiracy theory is to be incubated on sites like Reddit, 4chan, or 8chan. There are many such stories in play at any time, a handful of which attract enough support to go viral. For the Russians, any time a piece of disinformation gained traction, they would seed one or more websites with a document that appeared to be a legitimate news story about the topic. Then they would turn to Twitter, which has replaced the Associated Press as the news feed of record for journalists.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

bill_id=201720180SB1001; Thomas Sprankling, “California Enacts Nation’s First Anti-Bot Law,” WilmerHale, October 3, 2018, https://www.wilmerhale.com/en/insights/client-alerts/20181003-california-enacts-nations-first-anti-bot-law. 122misuses of AI-generated audio and video: Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron, “Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security,” California Law Review 107, no. 1753 (2019), https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38RV0D15J. 122“active measures”: Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 21, 2020), https://www.amazon.com/Active-Measures-History-Disinformation-Political/dp/0374287260. 122dezinformatsiya: Merriam-Webster, s.v. “disinformation,” n.d., https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinformation; Aristedes Mahairas and Mikhail Dvilyanski, “Disinformation – Дезинформация (Dezinformatsiya),” Cyber Defense Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 21–28, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26554993. 122bioengineered virus created by the U.S. military: Adam Taylor, “Before ‘Fake News,’ There Was Soviet ‘Disinformation,’” Washington Post, November 26, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/26/before-fake-news-there-was-soviet-disinformation/. 122Russia used fake online personas: Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online: Working with Tech to Find Solutions: Hearing of the Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 115th Cong. (2017) (statement of Clint Watts, Robert A.

Election. 122designed to “sow fear, discord, and paralysis”: “The Scourge of Russian Disinformation,” Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, September 14, 2017, https://www.csce.gov/international-impact/events/scourge-russian-disinformation. 122effects of disinformation campaigns were hard to measure: Craig Timberg and Tony Romm, “Forget the Russians. On This Election Day, It’s Americans Peddling Disinformation and Hate Speech,” Washington Post, November 6, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/11/06/forget-russians-this-election-day-its-americans-peddling-disinformation-hate-speech/. 122activities against U.S. politicians: Karoun Demirjian, “Ryan, Rubio May Have Been Targets of Damaging Russian Social-Media Campaigns,” Washington Post, March 30, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/ryan-rubio-may-have-been-targets-of-damaging-russian-social-media-campaigns/2017/03/30/bdf5f4fa-154f-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html?

Jackson, Global Economic Effects of COVID-19 (Congressional Research Service, updated July 9, 2021), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R46270.pdf. 74dictators who fall from power: For example, Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife were executed by firing squad after a perfunctory show trial in December 1989. 74“China’s Chernobyl”: Shawn Yuan, “Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Cover-Up,” Wired, May 1, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-early-days-of-chinas-coronavirus-coverup/. 75the West is “falling apart”: Zhou Bo, “Why the US and Europe Need to Draw Closer to China and Drop the Hubris,” South China Morning Post, April 24, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3081079/why-us-and-europe-need-draw-closer-china-and-drop-hubris. 75coercive diplomacy to pressure countries: Shahank Bengali and Alice Su, “‘Put on a mask and shut up’: China’s new ‘Wolf Warriors’ spread hoaxes and attack a world of critics,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-04/wolf-warrior-diplomats-defend-china-handling-coronavirus; Fergus Hanson, Emilia Currey, and Tracy Beattie, The Chinese Communist Party’s Coercive Diplomacy (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, September 1, 2020), https://www.aspi.org.au/report/chinese-communist-partys-coercive-diplomacy; Jamil Anderlini, “China Is Escalating Its Punishment Diplomacy,” Financial Times, September 22, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/e76a835b-27d5-4750-9749-04921d6bf1eb. 75requests that receiving governments praise China: Alexandra Ma, “China Is Attempting to Win Political Points from the Coronavirus With ‘Mask Diplomacy’—but It Mostly Isn’t Working,” Business Insider, April 18, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/analysis-china-coronavirus-political-points-mostly-not-working-2020-4. 75China’s “global disinformation campaign”: Michael Peel and Tom Mitchell, “China Warned EU 3 Times over Virus Propaganda Report,” Financial Times, April 26, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/a2f66f6a-50cb-46fe-a160-3854e4702f1c; Matt Apuzzo, “Top E.U. Diplomat Says Disinformation Report Was Not Watered Down for China,” New York Times, April 30, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/world/europe/coronavirus-china-eu-disinformation.html; Matt Apuzzo, “Pressured by China, E.U. Softens Report on Covid-19 Disinformation,” New York Times, April 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/world/europe/disinformation-china-eu-coronavirus.html.


pages: 277 words: 70,506

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

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

After the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, the Finnish government stepped up its defences against false news reports and online manipulation, establishing courses on disinformation for members of the public. In the first few years, thousands attended.87 Sweden, too, launched campaigns to tackle disinformation and has worked on a new government agency for the psychological defence of the country.88 We all need to stay alert to disinformation techniques. If you imagine that digital natives, those who grew up with the internet, are equipped to handle this environment, you are wrong. A Stanford study from 2016, which tested thousands of American students’ ability to spot fakery online, reported that ‘young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak. … In every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation.’89 Some 82 per cent of middle-school students could not tell a news story from an advertisement.

Moscow retaliated with expulsions of its own.4 At Bellingcat, we watched, awaiting a point of entry. Scattered around the globe, we are an online collective, investigating war crimes and picking apart disinformation, basing our findings on clues that are openly available on the internet – in social-media postings, in leaked databases, in free satellite maps. Paradoxically, in this age of online disinformation, facts are easier to come by than ever. A core team of eighteen staffers works with scores of volunteers, producing reports seen by hundreds of thousands, including government officials, influential media figures, and policymakers.

General Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and the NSA, recalled a turning point for American intel back in the mid-1990s, when espionage officials faced a question: try to dominate cyberspace, or to dominate the information sphere generally, including diplomacy, public affairs, disinformation, and more? ‘We had a sharp debate, and we finally decided that we’re probably in the cyber-dominance business,’ he recalled. ‘Now the important punchline here is that the Russians went to door number two. The Russians went to not just cyber-dominance, but information-dominance.’24 Less than an hour after MH17 went down, the Internet Research Agency – a notorious ‘troll factory’ based in St Petersburg, where desk workers are paid to spew out vast amounts of disinformation online – went to work. During those first three days, its Twitter accounts posted 111,486 times, a pace that it has never matched before or since.25 Most tweets were in Russian, starting with the claim that the downed plane had been a Ukrainian military aircraft, and was therefore a legitimate target.


pages: 372 words: 100,947

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

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

He was unsurprised when the figures he’d provided were immediately torn apart by academics and independent researchers who had long been studying Russia’s presence online. In San Francisco, disinformation researcher Renée DiResta reviewed the Facebook blog post from her apartment overlooking the bay. Almost immediately, she began texting researchers and amateur disinformation sleuths she had developed relationships with over the last two years. The number of people actively studying disinformation in the United States could be listed in one breath. DiResta, like the others, had chanced into studying the field. When researching preschools for her firstborn son in 2014, she discovered that a number of preschools in Northern California had lax rules on vaccinations.

Stamos and other members of the security team—working under what was known as an XFN, or “cross-functional,” group—continued to search for Russian interference and broadened their scope to look for disinformation campaigns affecting other countries. The security team had already found that governments were actively using the platform to promote their own political agendas. In a separate report produced by the XFN team, Stamos included flags from nations such as Turkey and Indonesia as examples of governments that had used Facebook to run disinformation campaigns to sway public opinion and elections in their countries or those in nearby states. Facebook needed to go on the offensive.

“It was a slow, slow process, but what we found that summer, the summer of 2017, it just blew us away,” recalled one member of Facebook’s security team. “We expected we’d find something, but we had no idea it was so big.” While over the years some Facebook employees had speculated that the IRA was focused on spreading disinformation in the United States, no one had thought to go looking for a professional disinformation campaign run by the organization. The security team had not believed the IRA audacious or powerful enough to target the United States. Facebook’s assurances to Senator Warner and other lawmakers that they had fully uncovered Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 elections were based on the assumption that they were looking for Russian military intelligence activity, but they had missed the forest for the trees.


pages: 407 words: 108,030

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

Robin Emmott, “Russia Deploying Coronavirus Disinformation to Sow Panic in West, EU Document Shows,” Reuters, March 18, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-disinformation/russia-deploying-coronavirus-disinformation-to-sow-panic-in-west-eu-document-says-idUSKBN21518F. 29. Allen Kim, “Nearly Half of the Twitter Accounts Discussing ‘Reopening America’ May Be Bots, Researchers Say,” CNN, May 22, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/tech/twitter-bots-trnd/index.html. 30. Eric Tucker, “US Officials: Russia behind Spread of Virus Disinformation,” AP News, July 28, 2020, https://apnews.com/3acb089e6a333e051dbc4a465cb68ee1. 31.

Indeed, according to the New York Times, the Russian government has been spreading science denial propaganda since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, up through Ebola, until today with numerous conspiracies about the cause of the coronavirus. William J. Broad, “Putin’s Long War Against American Science,” New York Times, April 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/putin-russia-disinformation-health-coronavirus.html; Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger, “Russian Intelligence Agencies Push Disinformation on Pandemic,” New York Times, July 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/us/politics/russia-disinformation-coronavirus.html. For more information and citations about Russian propaganda efforts, see chapter 8. 8    Coronavirus and the Road Ahead In early 2000, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa convened a meeting of experts to discuss HIV/AIDS.

“The Coronavirus Gives Russia and China Another Opportunity to Spread Their Disinformation,” Washington Post, March 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-coronavirus-gives-russia-and-china-another-opportunity-to-spread-their-disinformation/2020/03/29/8423a0f8-6d4c-11ea-a3ec-70d7479d83f0_story.html; Edward Wong et al., “Chinese Agents Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in U.S., Officials Say,” New York Times, April 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/coronavirus-china-disinformation.html. 32. Oliver Milman, “Revealed: Quarter of All Tweets about Climate Crisis Produced by Bots,” Guardian, February 21, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/21/climate-tweets-twitter-bots-analysis; Ryan Bort, “Study: Bots Are Fueling Online Climate Denialism,” Rolling Stone, February 21, 2020, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bots-fueling-climate-science-denialism-twitter-956335/. 33.


pages: 240 words: 74,182

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

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

They had originally described themselves as being concerned with ‘fake news’, but then found the meaning of those words was morphing to denote any content that someone didn’t like. They tried instead to differentiate between ‘disinformation’ (content designed to mislead) and ‘misinformation’ (content that misleads by accident). But many of the most pernicious campaigns I’d seen didn’t necessarily use ‘disinformation’. And even if ‘disinformation’ is identified, would, or indeed should, that make it illegal necessarily? What if one were to refocus ‘disinformation’ from content to behaviour: bots, cyborgs and trolls that purposefully disguise their identity to confuse audiences; cyber-militias whose activity seems organic but who are actually part of coordinated campaigns full of fake accounts; the plethora of ‘news’ websites which look independent but are covertly run from one source, all pushing the same agenda?

Fielding, Nick and Ian Cobain, ‘Revealed: US Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media’, Guardian, 17 March 2011; https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks. 16 DiResta, Renee, Kris Shaffer, Becky Ruppel, David Sullivan, Robert Matney, Ryan Fox, Jonathan Albright and Ben Johnson, ‘The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency’ (Austin, TX: New Knowledge, 2018); https://disinformationreport.blob.core.windows.net/disinformation-report/NewKnowledge-Disinformation-Report-Whitepaper.pdf. 17 Monaco, Nicholas and Carly Nyst, ‘State-Sponsored Trolling: How Governments Are Deploying Disinformation as Part of Broader Digital Harassment Campaigns’ (Palo Alto, CA: Institute for the Future, 2018); http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/images/DigIntel/IFTF_State_sponsored_trolling_report.pdf. 18 Wu, Tim, ‘Is the First Amendment Obsolete?’

Nor was busting drug crime Duterte’s only selling point: I have talked to supporters of his who were attracted by the image of a provincial fighting the elites of ‘Imperial Manila’ and the prim Catholic Church establishment. But P’s account of digital influence does echo some academic studies. In ‘Architects of Networked Disinformation’, Dr Jonathan Corpus Ong of the University of Massachusetts and Dr Jason Cabañes of Leeds University spent twelve months interviewing the protagonists of what Ong called Manila’s ‘disinformation architecture’, which was made use of by every party in the country.3 At the top were what he described as the ‘chief architects’ of the system. They came from advertising and PR firms, lived in sleek apartments in the skyscrapers and described their work in an almost mythical way, comparing themselves to characters from the hit HBO fantasy TV series Game of Thrones and video games.


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

Recall the KGB’s Operation INFEKTION, the Cold War claim that the U.S. military invented AIDS. During that era, Ladislav Bittman served alongside the KGB in its allied Czechoslovakian intelligence service’s disinformation department. In a 1985 book, he explained how “every disinformation message must at least partially correspond to reality or generally accepted views.” The AIDS disinformation campaign, for example, didn’t invent a new threat; instead, it leveraged people’s fears about a well-known but then mysterious disease. The internet, and especially its memetic elements, enables this further.

r=UK&IR=T. 102 “report acts”: “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System.” 102 you can lose access: Nguyen, “China Might Use Data.” 102 online matchmaking service: Celia Hatton, “China ‘Social Credit’: Beijing Sets Up Huge System,” BBC News, October 26, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-34592186. 102 Thailand: Michael de Waal-Montgomery, “Thailand Reportedly Close to Introducing Its Own China-Style Internet Firewall,” VentureBeat, September 23, 2015, https://venturebeat.com/2015/09/23/thailand-reportedly-close-to-introducing-its-own-china-style-internet-firewall/. 102 Vietnam: Ian Timberlake, “Vietnam Steps Up China-Style Internet Censorship,” Sydney Morning Herald, July 1, 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/technology/vietnam-steps-up-chinastyle-internet-censorship-20100701-zpg0.html. 102 Zimbabwe: Elin Box, “Zimbabwe to Implement China-Style Internet Censorship Regime,” Global Marketing News (blog), Webcertain, April 11, 2016, http://blog.webcertain.com/zimbabwe-internet-censorship-like-china/11/04/2016/. 102 Cuba: Mauricio Claver-Carone, “When Helping ‘the Cuban People’ Means Bankrolling the Castros,” Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB11021741326745413664304581020103630034440. 102 Putin has even gone: Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, “Putin Brings China’s Great Firewall to Russia in Cybersecurity Pact,” The Guardian, November 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/putin-china-internet-great-firewall-russia-cybersecurity-pact. 103 “It was difficult”: Katie Davies, “Revealed: Confessions of a Kremlin Troll,” Moscow Times, April 18, 2017, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/revealed-confessions-of-a-kremlin-troll-57754. 103 more than 200 blog posts: Ibid. 103 One story (possibly apocryphal): Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald J. Rychlak, Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism (WND Books, 2013), loc. 284, Kindle. 103 more than 10,000: Thomas Rid, “Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns,” testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence, March 30, 2017, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-trid-033017.pdf. 104 Operation INFEKTION: Thomas Boghardt, “Operation INFEKTION: Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign,” Studies in Intelligence 53, no. 4 (2009). 104 Indian newspaper Patriot: Ibid. 104 “well-known American scientist”: David Robert Grimes, “Russian Fake News Is Not New: Soviet AIDS Propaganda Cost Countless Lives,” The Guardian, June 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/jun/14/russian-fake-news-is-not-new-soviet-aids-propaganda-cost-countless-lives. 104 Lyndon LaRouche movement: Boghardt, “Operation INFEKTION.” 104 “Everyone shall have”: Constitution of the Russian Federation, art. 29.4. 105 “spoke in grave”: “1984 in 2014,” The Economist, March 29, 2014, https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21599829-new-propaganda-war-underpins-kremlins-clash-west-1984-2014. 105 A pop star garbed: Christine Friar, “Russia’s Using Pop Music on YouTube to Ridicule Millennial Protesters,” The Daily Dot, May 19, 2017, https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/russia-youtube-propoganda-pop-music/?

Air Force, 52 U.S. internet user, 118 U.S. military ARPANET, 27, 36–38 disinformation, Russian, 108–9 intelligence gathering, 79–82 ISIS and, 10–11 narrative, 160–61 Operation Neptune Spear, 53–55 Rolling Thunder campaign, 18 social media presence, 60 tactical operations center, 258–60 television, 34 transparency, 58–59 weaponization of information, 185 weapons tracking, 77 World War I, 182 U.S. National Intelligence Council, 51 U.S. presidential election (2016) authenticity in, 168–69 detox from, 222 disinformation campaigns, 241 fake accounts (botnets), 143 fake news, 131 Macedonian disinformation, 119 memetic warfare, 192 Pepe meme, 186–93 #Pizzagate incident, 127–28 real vs. fake news, 135 regulation, 251 Russian trolls, 111–14 transparency, 268 U.S.


pages: 388 words: 111,099

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

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

“They function not unlike Infowars, Breitbart, the infamous partisan sites that operated from Macedonia during the U.S. presidential campaign or, indeed, the Facebook pages created by Russian military intelligence, all of which produced hypercharged, conspiratorial, partisan news and outraged headlines that could then be pumped into hypercharged, conspiratorial echo chambers.”64 Many of Vox’s digital echo chambers pushed religiously tinged disinformation. Muslims wanted to take Spain back to the time of the Moors. Leftists were encouraging children to have abortions. Highly emotive messages about moral issues – especially those that spark feelings of fear – are a particularly effective way to spread disinformation. Similar tactics were used during the 2016 presidential election, when pro-Kremlin accounts appealed directly to Christian fundamentalists by sharing images that showed Hillary Clinton, devil horns protruding, arm-wrestling with Jesus.65 Religion, as digital expert Claire Wardle explained to me, “is one of the best ways to spread disinformation online

Similar tactics were used during the 2016 presidential election, when pro-Kremlin accounts appealed directly to Christian fundamentalists by sharing images that showed Hillary Clinton, devil horns protruding, arm-wrestling with Jesus.65 Religion, as digital expert Claire Wardle explained to me, “is one of the best ways to spread disinformation online.” * Digital disinformation and wealthy foreign donors are not the only sources of electoral interference. States often meddle in each other’s politics. Between 1946 and 1989, the US intervened in more than 60 international elections, mostly in secret without announcing their covert operations to the world.66 Britain and France routinely interfered in their former colonies. The Soviet Union funded communist parties around the world.

While they talk a lot about women’s wombs, theirs is a much wider political project, to support authoritarian societies led by ‘strongmen’.” * As this book has looked primarily at the effect of dark money and disinformation on Britain, this chapter has focused on examples of the nativist surge in some of the UK’s European neighbours: Italy, Spain and Hungary. In all three, nationalist appeals to religion and identity have been underpinned by international networks of political influence and digital disinformation. The effects of this can be seen most dramatically in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has shown how quickly supposedly liberal democratic norms and conventions can be defanged and dismantled.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Governments have been startlingly late in taking responsibility for combating misinformation. Only in 2018 did the UK government begin to set up a national security unit to tackle disinformation, and even then they were criticised for the slowness with which they proposed to do so.43 Meanwhile the US had, by the end of 2020, no coordinated counter-disinformation strategy steered by any branch of government.44 But if you think this means the future of conflict will be wholly online, you would be mistaken. Disinformation may soften an adversary, sowing doubt in the population; cyberattacks may weaken the day-to-day operations of their economy. But if that doesn’t achieve your objective, killing their soldiers might.

Howard, The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation, Working Paper 3 (Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda, 2019) <https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/posts/the-global-disinformation-order-2019-global-inventory-of-organised-social-media-manipulation/#continue> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 35 Diego Martin et al., Trends in Online Influence Efforts (Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, 2020) <https://esoc.princeton.edu/publications/trends-online-influence-efforts> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 36 Gregory Winger, ‘China’s Disinformation Campaign in the Philippines’, The Diplomat, 6 October 2020 <https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/chinas-disinformation-campaign-in-the-philippines/> [accessed 3 January 2021]. 37 Jack Stubbs and Christopher Bing, ‘Facebook, Twitter Dismantle Global Array of Disinformation Networks’, Reuters, 8 October 2020 <https://www.reuters.com/article/cyber-disinformation-facebook-twitter-idINKBN26T2XF> [accessed 24 March 2021]. 38 Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, ‘Russian Facebook Trolls Got Two Groups of People to Protest Each Other In Texas’, VICE, 1 November 2017 <https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kvvz3/russian-facebook-trolls-got-people-to-protest-against-each-other-in-texas> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 39 ‘How Covid-19 Is Revealing the Impact of Disinformation on Society’, King’s College London, 25 August 2020 <https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/how-covid-19-is-revealing-the-impact-of-disinformation-on-society> [accessed 3 January 2021]. 40 ‘Coronavirus: “Murder Threats” to Telecoms Engineers over 5G’, BBC News, 23 April 2020 <https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-52395771> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 41 Wesley R.

., Trends in Online Influence Efforts (Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, 2020) <https://esoc.princeton.edu/publications/trends-online-influence-efforts> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 36 Gregory Winger, ‘China’s Disinformation Campaign in the Philippines’, The Diplomat, 6 October 2020 <https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/chinas-disinformation-campaign-in-the-philippines/> [accessed 3 January 2021]. 37 Jack Stubbs and Christopher Bing, ‘Facebook, Twitter Dismantle Global Array of Disinformation Networks’, Reuters, 8 October 2020 <https://www.reuters.com/article/cyber-disinformation-facebook-twitter-idINKBN26T2XF> [accessed 24 March 2021]. 38 Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, ‘Russian Facebook Trolls Got Two Groups of People to Protest Each Other In Texas’, VICE, 1 November 2017 <https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kvvz3/russian-facebook-trolls-got-people-to-protest-against-each-other-in-texas> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 39 ‘How Covid-19 Is Revealing the Impact of Disinformation on Society’, King’s College London, 25 August 2020 <https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/how-covid-19-is-revealing-the-impact-of-disinformation-on-society> [accessed 3 January 2021]. 40 ‘Coronavirus: “Murder Threats” to Telecoms Engineers over 5G’, BBC News, 23 April 2020 <https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-52395771> [accessed 2 January 2021]. 41 Wesley R.


pages: 309 words: 79,414

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

The consequences are often severe: 63 per cent of victims reported severe psychological effects, 38 per cent said it led to self-censorship, 8 per cent lost their jobs and 6 per cent left their jobs as a result.28 Discrediting formerly respected news outlets and their reporters is just one part of the information battle. The other part consists in spreading disinformation. Disinformation doesn’t necessarily mean outright lying; it can also include information that is misleading.29 Inaccurate information, severe biases and logical fallacies often reinforce misleading narratives. In the tradition of the Soviet strategic-deception technique of dezinformatsiya, modern-day disinformation campaigns seek to obfuscate, distort or conceal facts.30 The founding counter-intelligence chief of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, claimed that their goal is to create an information landscape ‘where fact and illusion merge, a kind of wilderness of mirrors’.31 In October 2018, I enter a plain white house in Riga, Latvia that looks like a detached family home.

This experimental approach of direct online engagement with radicalised audiences illustrates the potential to further explore the use of social media analysis and messaging in deradicalisation programmes.3 Elves Versus Trolls Sharing pieces of disinformation or propaganda is not illegal but it doesn’t need to go unchallenged. The Baltics, where media manipulation by the Kremlin propaganda machine is a major concern, are currently leading the way in countering disinformation. The so-called Baltic Elves are made up of thousands of voluntary activists who spend their spare time dismantling the disinformation campaigns of Russian trolls – from exposing biased news pieces and misleading statistics to debunking fabricated stories and half-truths.

Available at https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/press-releases/article/ifj-survey-two-thirds-of-women-journalists-suffered-gender-based-online-attacks. 29Caroline Jack, ‘Lexicon of Lies: Terms for Problematic Information’, Data and Society Research Institute, 2017. 30Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (Public Affairs, 2014), and John Pollock, ‘Russian Disinformation Technology’, MIT Technology Review, 13 April 2017. Available at https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604084/russian-disinformation-technology/. 31David Robarge, ‘Moles, Defectors, and Deceptions: James Angleton and CIA Counterintelligence’, Journal of Intelligence History 3(2), Winter 2003, p. 31. 32Interview with Donara Barojan, deputy director of the NATO Digital Forensic Research Lab. 33Jon White, ‘Dismiss, Distort, Distract, and Dismay: Continuity and Change in Russian Disinformation’, IES Policy Brief, Issue 2016/13, May 2016. Available at https://www.ies.be/files/Policy%20Brief_Jon%20White.pdf. 34Chloe Colliver et al., ‘Smearing Sweden: International Influence Campaigns in the 2018 Swedish Election’, ISD, October 2018.


System Error by Rob Reich

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

This felt immediately tangible as it spoke to understanding a holistic system rather than just the problematic parts. If you want to improve something, you have to be able to measure it.” He went on to suggest that Twitter would try to take on that challenge. But his message came two years after Russian operatives had flooded the platform with disinformation during the 2016 US presidential election, paving the way for domestic disinformation campaigns in 2020. In one of our classroom conversations at Stanford, Nicole Wong, who had served as vice president and deputy general counsel at Google before joining Twitter as legal director of products and eventually being appointed deputy chief technology officer of the United States in the Obama administration, discussed the emphasis on user engagement in online platforms such as YouTube.

One major source of pollution in the information ecosystem is misinformation, “claims that contradict or distort common understandings of verifiable facts.” Misinformation can spread in a wide variety of ways: messages from political leaders; published articles, blog posts, and tweets; even advertising. Disinformation is the subset of misinformation that is deliberately propagated to deceive. The goal is to undermine the ability of people to make a choice or judgment with clarity about the verifiable facts. Concerns about the spread of disinformation on social media burst into public view with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Teenagers in the Macedonian town of Veles were paid up to $8,000 per month each to operate approximately a hundred pro-Trump fake news sites with innocuous-sounding names such as USADailyPolitics.com.

Russia’s Internet Research Agency, one of the “troll factories,” served as an industrial-scale manufacturer of disinformation. According to Twitter, the IRA operated 3,814 accounts, and individual operators were responsible for creating a high volume of content daily. According to one report, workers had to deliver up to fifty comments daily on new articles, up to six Facebook pages with multiple daily posts, or ten Twitter accounts with at least fifty daily tweets. Did the disinformation they produced actually register with the sites’ users? One team tracked more than 2,500 adults during the five weeks before the 2016 election.


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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

Sarah Sanders, White House press secretary, then shared a doctored video on Twitter seeking to justify Acosta’s dismissal for aggressive action. The video had been sped up and the reporter’s comments had been removed.38 The rapid proliferation of social media disinformation was expected, but rapid proliferation of social media disinformation from the White House was not. If America can’t count on the commander in chief to do the right thing, we most certainly can’t expect everyone else to do much better. The best disinformation peddlers in the future will have three distinct technological advantages over those that came before them. Cambridge Analytica demonstrated how the aggregation of user data provided deep insights for nimbly targeting and influencing selected audience members.

Machine learning applications will be able to pore over old data and current information feeds to design the perfect message for an entire preference bubble and the precise variant for each individual in the bubble, as well as when, how, and where to deliver it. Advertisers, political campaigns, and Russian disinformation peddlers would be handicapping themselves if they didn’t use this approach to push their products and ideas. Disinformation and misinformation have been easy to create and proliferate as the barriers to entry for these technological tools have lowered. False print stories and graphic memes have had a devastating effect. The latest dangerous technological dimension coming online now is falsified audio and video.

GOP sponsor of the bill Senator Lankford said the measure “helps the states to prepare our election infrastructure for the possibility of interference from not just Russia, but possibly another adversary like Iran or North Korea or a hacktivist group.”37 I can think of no time in American history when public and government attention and outrage have been so high without seeing any real progress toward solving the problem. Congress is unlikely to stem the tide against disinformation, and American elected officials have become the source of as much misinformation as authoritarians. Facebook’s public relations counteroffensive mirrors what I expected as I finished writing this book. Moving forward, the worst abusers of social media for nefarious influence will be public relations firms and political campaigns. The midterm elections of 2018 showed how Russia’s art would be quickly adopted by the most aggressive and best resourced. Russia didn’t push much disinformation to influence the 2018 elections, but even if they had, it would have been completely outpaced by the endless volumes of false information peddled by political campaigns and the White House.


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Zegart and Morell, “Spies, lies, and algorithms.” 86. Mike Isaac, “Facebook Finds New Disinformation Campaigns and Braces for 2020 Torrent,” New York Times, October 21, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/technology/facebook-disinformation-russia-iran.html. 87. Jessica Brandt and Torrey Taussig, “The Kremlin’s Disinformation Playbook Goes to Beijing,” Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/05/19/the-kremlins-disinformation-playbook-goes-to-beijing/ (accessed September 26, 2020); Mark Scott, Laura Kayali, and Laurens Cerulus, “Brussels Accuses China of Peddling Disinformation,” Politico, June 10, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/10/brussels-accuses-china-of-peddling-disinformation-311303 (accessed September 26, 2020). 88.

Stephanie Bodoni, “China, Russia are spreading virus misinformation, EU says,” Bloomberg, June 10, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-10/eu-points-finger-at-china-russia-for-covid-19-disinformation. See also “EEAS Special Report Update: Short Assessment of Narratives and Disinformation Around the COVID-19 Pandemic,” EUvsDiSiNFO, May 20, 2020, https://euvsdisinfo.eu/eeas-special-report-update-short-assessment-of-narratives-and-disinformation-around-the-covid19-pandemic-updated-23-april-18-may/; Kathy Gilsinian, “How China is planning to win back the world,” Atlantic, May 28, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/china-disinformation-propaganda-united-states-xi-jinping/612085/. 116. “Statement by NCSC Director William Evanina: 100 Days Until Election 2020,” press release, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, July 24, 2020, https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2135-statement-by-ncsc-director-william-evanina-100-days-until-election-2020; “Statement by NCSC Director William Evanina: Election Threat Update for the American Public,” press release, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, August 7, 2020, https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2139-statement-by-ncsc-director-william-evanina-election-threat-update-for-the-american-public; Robert Draper, “Unwanted Truths: Inside Trump’s Battles with U.S.

It took years to gain international attention.108 Now, Russian disinformation is designed to flood the zone, reaching millions within hours across every format (text, video, audio, photos) and information channel imaginable—social media, Internet websites, satellite television, and traditional radio and television.109 Volume is key. Twitter now estimates that Russia used more than fifty thousand automated accounts or bots to Tweet election-related content during the 2016 presidential campaign. Twitter and Facebook are the best-known disinformation superhighways, but there are many others. Russian officers have infiltrated everything from 4chan to Pinterest.110 Overt state-funded media outlets are used to amplify false messages.


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

They could just get the Americans to do it themselves, by clicking, liking, and sharing. Americans on Facebook did the Russians’ work for them, laundering their propaganda through the First Amendment. But this new era of scaled disinformation is not confined to the realm of politics. Companies like Starbucks, Nike, and other fashion brands have found themselves targets of Russian-sponsored disinformation operations. When brands make statements that wade into existing social or racial tensions, there have been several identified instances in which Russian-sponsored fake news sites, botnets, and social media operations have activated to weaponize these narratives and provoke social conflict.

In a rare moment of solidarity, government ministers and senior opposition members of Parliament sang as a unified chorus about Facebook’s negligence in failing to prevent its platform from becoming a hostile propaganda network for elections and the implications for Western democracies. The next wave of stories focused on Brexit, with the integrity of the referendum vote called into question. A collection of documents I provided to law enforcement revealed that the Vote Leave campaign had used secret Cambridge Analytica subsidiaries to spend dark money to propagate disinformation on Facebook and Google ad networks. This was determined to be illegal by the U.K.’s Electoral Commission, with the scheme ending up as one of the largest and most consequential breaches of campaign finance law in British history. The office of the U.K.’s prime minister, 10 Downing Street, descended into communication crisis as the evidence of Vote Leave’s cheating emerged.

After the hearing, the FBI, DOJ, SEC, and FTC launched investigations. The U.S. House Intelligence Committee, House Judiciary Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senate Judiciary Committee all wanted to talk to me. Within weeks, the European Union and more than twenty countries had opened up inquiries into Facebook, social media, and disinformation. I told my story to the world, and now every screen was a mirror reflecting it back at me. For two weeks straight, my life was chaos. Days would start with appearances on British breakfast shows and European networks at 6 A.M. London time, continuing with interviews on U.S. networks until midnight.


pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

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

Those who spend much of their time with those afflicted report that it is a long and arduous process to rebuild trust and normal relations with a loved one who has fallen into Q. One person who spends a huge amount of time reporting on those who have gone down that route is Marianna Spring, the BBC’s specialist correspondent covering disinformation and social media – in practice, essentially a QAnon/antivaxx/climate change disinformation beat. A key principle for her, she says, is to remember why conspiracy theories latch on to people. If they work thanks to emotion, why should we expect clinical and impassive facts to shift people’s views?10 ‘Conspiracy networks are so pervasive because they are very emotive and because they succeed in drawing people in,’ she says.

By putting a human face to this problem – the people who are impacted, the families that are torn apart, the people who are instigating and coordinating this – I think that that makes for more impactful investigative reporting alongside the fact-checking.’ Spring repeatedly praises her colleagues who work fact-checking online disinformation, but says her role is a very different one. Instead of trying to get into the truth or otherwise of each specific conspiratorial claim, her role is to tell compelling stories about the people drawn into those worlds, and the effects they have on the people close to them. It’s very much about … almost weaponising the very techniques that allow online disinformation to go so viral, and using them in a way of covering the topic that means that it has impact and is able to reach all kinds of different audiences.

It’s very much about … almost weaponising the very techniques that allow online disinformation to go so viral, and using them in a way of covering the topic that means that it has impact and is able to reach all kinds of different audiences. Because what often strikes me when I’m interviewing, particularly experts on the topic of anti-vaxxers, for example, or Covid disinformation, is that they will be very measured, very reasonable – and good scientists and good doctors have to be like that. And that’s a brilliant thing. But unfortunately, it means that the online disinformation space is dominated by people who talk in absolutes, and who make this kind of information very appealing, and very emotive and very frightening, very engaging. So I think that our reporting on this topic has to really draw people in and help them to understand the real world implications that it has and the people that effects rather than it seeming like this kind of abstract internet thing that they can’t relate to their own lives.


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

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

“Disclosing Networks of State-Linked Information Operations We’ve Removed,” Twitter Safety, June 12, 2020, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/information-operations-june-2020.html.   90.  Matt Apuzzo, “Pressured by China, E.U. Softens Report on Covid-19 Disinformation,” New York Times, April 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/world/europe/disinformation-china-eu-coronavirus.html.   91.  Mark Scott, Laura Kayali, and Laurens Cerulus, “European Commission Accuses China of Peddling Disinformation,” Politico, June 10, 2020, https://www.politico.eu/article/european-commission-disinformation-china-coronavirus/.   92.  Yang, “China’s Early Warning System.”   93.  Whittell, “The Disappeared.”   94.  Yao Yang, “Is a New Cold War Coming?

Most people around the world do not pay all that much attention to geopolitics, but in this case their lives were upended because of something that happened in China. Governments across the globe knew that they could not trust the information coming out of Beijing—now or in the future. SOWING DISINFORMATION China supplemented its so-called mask diplomacy with a massive global disinformation campaign. The centerpiece of this effort was to raise doubts about the virus’s origins. On February 27, Zhong Nanshan, a Chinese infectious disease expert, told a press conference, “The infection was first spotted in China but the virus may not have originated in China.”75 On March 8, China’s ambassador to South Africa tweeted: Although the epidemic first broke out in China, it did not necessarily mean that the virus is originated from China, let alone “made in China.”76 Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian, a particularly brash and assertive Chinese diplomat, tweeted out to his 300,000 followers on March 12: CDC was caught on the spot.

American intelligence agencies believe that in mid-March 2020, China actively pushed out false text messages telling Americans that a friend of a friend or a relative had confided that the federal government was about to shut down the entire country once they had the military ready to enforce it.84 This prompted a National Security Council tweet in response: “Text message rumors of a national #quarantine are FAKE. There is no national lockdown.”85 Trump, however, seemed unconcerned. When asked on Fox News about China’s disinformation campaign, he said, “They do it and we do it and we call them different things. Every country does it.”86 Laura Rosenberger, who was then leading the Alliance for Securing Democracy Project at the German Marshall Fund, described the disinformation strategy’s goals: “to deflect blame from Beijing’s own failings and to highlight other governments’ missteps, portraying China as both the model and the partner of first resort for other countries.”


pages: 342 words: 114,118

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

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

This nation’s new technologies proliferated like an uncontrolled virus before we understood their impact, transforming the way that human beings consume information; at first hopeful, the unifying allure of the Internet and social media segmented people back into lonely tribes where they could be more easily manipulated by propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theory. Somehow, after three decades of unchecked American capitalism, military power, and technological innovation, the currents of history had turned against democracy itself, bringing back those older forms of nationalism and social control in new packaging. To be American in 2020 was to live in a country diminished in the world, unwilling to control the spread of disease or face up to our racism, and looking over the precipice of abandoning the very democracy that was supposed to be the solid core of our national identity.

How the 2008 financial crisis had collapsed not only the global economy, but also confidence in the very fact of American-led globalization, opening the door to deeply familiar nationalist appeals. How the post-9/11 wars had also discredited American leadership while opening the door to a hypersecuritized politics of Us versus Them, one that could easily be repurposed to target an available Other in country after country. How the spread of social media had unleashed a flood of disinformation that undermined democracy while offering autocrats ever more powerful tools of social and political control. I saw this most clearly in three countries that were Communist throughout the Cold War and are at the center of the political forces remaking the world today. In Hungary, where the anticommunist liberal turned reactionary nationalist Viktor Orban took advantage of the 2008 financial crisis to create a model of authoritarian politics that is strikingly similar to the playbook that the Republican Party has run in America.

She rocketed to international attention in 1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down, by leading a democratic movement protesting the military government. By 2017, she was doing what she felt she needed to do to survive in a world where nationalism ran amok. Her own journey—from democracy icon to tacit collaborator in brutality fueled by Buddhist nationalism and rampant anti-Rohingya disinformation on Facebook—didn’t cut against the currents of history, it drifted in the wake of events in the wider world. In April 2017, I went to Milan with Barack Obama. He was there to speak about climate change a few weeks after Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement. The rhythm of the trip felt familiar: a private plane, a block of hotel rooms, Secret Service agents.


pages: 595 words: 143,394

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

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

Less than forty-eight hours after the release of the Veritas video, the New York Times’s coverage of the report began with this sentence: “A deceptive video released on Sunday by the conservative activist James O’Keefe, which claimed through unidentified sources and with no verifiable evidence that Representative Ilhan Omar’s campaign had collected ballots illegally, was probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort, according to researchers at Stanford University.”60 The headline was even more declarative: “Project Veritas Video Was a ‘Coordinated Disinformation Campaign,’ Researchers Say.”61 The article offered no proof that Project Veritas’s report was a “disinformation campaign.”62 The Times’s entire report was premised on speculation. Since Project Veritas’s report came out soon after a big New York Times report on President Trump’s leaked tax returns, the Times hubristically assumed the voter fraud report was released for the sole purpose of stealing the limelight from its own reporting.

“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said.7 There was already a mountain of facts suggesting Joe Biden was directly involved in his son’s corrupt deals, and the evidence on Hunter’s laptop confirmed that Biden was lying. When the New York Post dropped its first report on Hunter’s laptop in October 2020, major news outlets immediately labeled reports sourced to Hunter’s laptop “Russian disinformation.”8 They offered no proof to back up claims of disinformation, and ignored corroborating sources and evidence confirming the information from the laptop was accurate. The Biden campaign didn’t even deny that the emails and other laptop evidence were authentic. The media’s hysterical and hyper-partisan reaction to the reports emerging about Hunter’s laptop was all the excuse progressive social media companies needed to censor the news of the Biden family’s corruption.

That same day, the New York Times also reported, “Trump Said to Be Warned That Giuliani Was Conveying Russian Disinformation,” and, further, that Trump had “shrugged off” the warning about his aide who was involved in bringing the laptop story to light.79 These reports were naturally buttressed by more outspoken members of the “intelligence community.”80 The default media explanation for the laptop became—yet again—a Vladimir Putin–backed conspiracy, where the laptop was invented as part of a Russian disinformation campaign to meddle in American elections. By contrast, the notion that erratic Hunter Biden, who once left his drugs and crack pipe in a rental car, had forgotten to pick up his laptop at a computer repair shop a short distance from his house was deemed too far-fetched.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

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

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

• There will always be an attack against the weakest portion of the person’s rebuttal of the disinformation, then this will be used to imply that everything else they are saying must be equally as weak. • The disinformer will never, ever, admit that they are lying, so one should not even bother waiting for it. • Expect the disinformer to ferociously pushback over the top with a statement like “How dare you accuse me of lying about something as serious as this?”. The more enraged, vicious, and vocal; the bigger the lie they are trying to hide. [See Bill Clinton]. • Do not expect a professional disinformer to ever actually debate the real topic and actual heart of the lie, but rather to dismiss everything as being rumors, internet lies, baseless accusations, speculation, personal attacks against their character, or a hit piece by their opponents or rivals

• Disinformers will demand proof from those challenging their version of events, then if proof is presented, they will claim that the evidence is incorrect, irrelevant, or invalid. • It is not unheard of for disinformers to simply manufacture new lies to try and validate their old lies. Then create even more lies to back up the others. • Multiple streams of the same disinformation talking points will be activated and pushed into the corporate media at the same time to give the impression that where there is smoke, there must be fire. • Any good disinformation is 80% truth mixed with 20% lies. Just enough truth to check out factually to the casual observer, but not enough truth to actually be correct. • Disinformers will often try to act annoyed that they are even being questioned about a particular event as if the case has already been closed and the science settled while trying desperately to change the topic completely

• The percentage of age 65+ viewers that are now getting their news online jumped by an astounding 10% in just 12 months.174 Whether the reason is convenience or reliability, the numbers show that television news is in free fall, and they have no one to blame but themselves. Their Disinformation Business The intentional promotion of false stories and lies has always been a cornerstone of the CIA’s charter. Their job is to collect good information and keep it secret, and they use disinformation to muddy the waters in order to throw people off of their tracks. Disinformation is horribly damaging to a free society and a very effective tool for those in power to cover up for their criminal deeds. There is an art form to lying professionally, but once the tactics are exposed and people become aware of them, they become far easier to spot going forward.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT More than seventy countries Samantha Bradshaw et al., “Industrialized Disinformation: 2020 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” Oxford University Programme on Democracy & Technology, Jan. 13, 2021, demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/​research/​posts/​industrialized-disinformation. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The CIA, too, is no stranger See, for example, Krassi Twigg and Kerry Allen, “The Disinformation Tactics Used by China,” BBC News, March 12, 2021, www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​56364952; Kenddrick Chan and Mariah Thornton, “China’s Changing Disinformation and Propaganda Targeting Taiwan,” Diplomat, Sept. 19, 2022, thediplomat.com/​2022/​09/​chinas-changing-disinformation-and-propaganda-targeting-taiwan/; and Emerson T.

Soon these videos will be fully and believably interactive. You are talking directly to him. He knows you and adapts to your dialect and style, plays on your history, your personal grievances, your bullying at school, your terrible, immoral Westernized parents. This is not disinformation as blanket carpet bombing; it’s disinformation as surgical strike. Phishing attacks against politicians or businesspeople, disinformation with the aim of major financial-market disruption or manipulation, media designed to poison key fault lines like sectarian or racial divides, even low-level scams—trust is damaged and fragility again amplified. Eventually entire and rich synthetic histories of seemingly real-world events will be easy to generate.

Until now effective disinformation campaigns have been labor-intensive. While bots and fakes aren’t difficult to make, most are of low quality, easily identifiable, and only moderately effective at actually changing targets’ behavior. High-quality synthetic media changes this equation. Not all nations currently have the funds to build huge disinformation programs, with dedicated offices and legions of trained staff, but that’s less of a barrier when high-fidelity material can be generated at the click of a button. Much of the coming chaos will not be accidental. It will come as existing disinformation campaigns are turbocharged, expanded, and devolved out to a wide group of motivated actors.


pages: 525 words: 131,496

Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Jonathan Haslam

active measures, Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, falling living standards, false flag, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Valery Gerasimov, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, éminence grise

One promising institutional innovation was the special office for disinformation founded by Artuzov and subsequently taken up by Unshlikht. On January 11, 1923, the production of disinformation (deza) about Russia’s domestic and foreign policy “and also the state of its armed forces and the measures taken for the defence of the republic” was centralised.55 Faking Politburo minutes, departmental memoranda, and false orders of battle topped the list of priorities. These practices peaked under Nikita Khrushchev with the formation of A Directorate (disinformation) in the KGB buttressed by the Information Department of the Central Committee, which ballooned as the International Information Department into the 1980s.

On June 17, Stalin brusquely dismissed Fitin’s reports of imminent invasion as “disinformation.”57 Too late, covert information reaching the Soviet embassy in Berlin impressed even the usually indifferent Dekanozov, whose loyalty to Stalin could not be doubted. But even on the eve of invasion, as late as June 21, Beria, ever sensitive to Stalin’s state of mind and ever conscious of the fate of his predecessors, overreacted, demanding Dekanozov’s immediate recall and punishment for continually bombarding them with “disinformation” about an imminent German invasion—surely the nadir of Moscow’s intelligence assessment.58 Beria, utterly inexperienced but inebriated by overweening self-confidence, proved to be the most disastrous head of intelligence the Soviet Union ever had. 5.

—Russian proverb RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE IDIOM (SOVIET PERIOD) Agenturíst: operative responsible for running agents Aktívnaya razvédka/aktívka (active intelligence): terrorism and sabotage Aktívnye meropriyátiya (active measures): black propaganda, dirty tricks, etc. Boevýe shífry: working ciphers Bol’shói Dom (literally, the “Big House”): Comintern; later the Lubyanka Chertvyórtyi: the Fourth Directorate of the Staff/General Staff, later GRU Dezá (dezinformátsiya): disinformation Enkavedíst: employee of the NKVD (GUGB), state security Ente-eróvsev: scientific and technical intelligence operative Gámma: ciphering sequence/one-time pad Gebíst: state security operative Geberóvskii: state security operative Gereúshnik: GRU operative Kagebíst/kagebéshnik: KGB operative Kirpích (literally, “brick”): watchman on delegations abroad Komitétchik (literally, “committee man”): KGB operative Kontóra (literally, “office”): KGB First Main Directorate at Yasenevo Krokíst: counterintelligence operative, state security (OGPU) Krýsha (literally, “roof”): cover Lástochnik (swallow): female operative employed for seduction Lesá (the woods): KGB school, later the First Main Directorate at Yasenevo Lózung: a crib for breaking open a cipher Marshrútnyi agént: employee of state security handling communications Nevidímyi front (invisible front): secret intelligence Óboroten (literally, “shapeshifter”): turncoat/traitor Omsóvets: operative in Comintern’s department for international communications Opér: abbreviation for either Operatívnyi sotrúdnik/ofitsér or Operabótnik Operabótnik: KGB operative Operatívnyi sotrúdnik/ofitsér: GRU operative Opertékhnik: a technical operative Operupolnomóchennyi: one responsible for a particular operation Osobísty: GRU officers Osóbye meropriyátiya (special measures): assassination and other tasks approved only by the Politburo Osóbye zadáchi (special tasks): assassination and other tasks approved only by the Politburo Osvedomítel’: information operative Pe-eróvets: political intelligence operative Podkrýshnik: operative under deep cover Razvédupr’ (Razvedyvatel ’noe upravlenie): a generic term for military intelligence Rezident: chief of a secret intelligence station Rezidentura: secret intelligence station Sapogí (boots): KGB term for GRU counterparts S”em (literally, “removal”): seizure of a traitor Shifrográmma: ciphered telegram Svád’ba (literally, “wedding”): seizure of a traitor Tsereúshnik: CIA officer Verbóvshchik: operative specialising in recruitment Vorón (“raven”): male operative employed for seduction Zagrantóchka: overseas post PREFACE The role of secret intelligence in the history of international relations has long been a neglected one.


pages: 106 words: 33,210

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again by Richard Horton

Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, cognitive bias, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, Future Shock, global pandemic, global village, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, lockdown, nowcasting, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Slavoj Žižek, social distancing, South China Sea, zoonotic diseases

WHO became so worried about the effects of an infodemic that it established a new unit – the Information Network for Epidemics, or EPI-WIN – to counter its impact. But what is more sinister still is the part disinformation might have played in propagating false beliefs about COVID-19. Disinformation is that category of misinformation deliberately aimed to deceive. Those who propagate disinformation seek to amplify discord within societies. The European External Action Service has documented multiple examples of disinformation targeted at Europe and the European Union (EU). The intention behind these attacks is often to discredit the EU for the way it has handled the crisis, to suggest that the EU has failed to help its member states, and to show that other countries, such as China, have done more to help Europe than Europe itself.

The relationship between WHO and the US government is unlikely to be healed while both Dr Tedros and President Trump remain in their positions. One or both will almost certainly have to depart their roles before relations can be restored. * I have already discussed the many strange stories of disinformation – the infodemic – that emerged during the crisis of COVID-19. What was even more surprising and unexpected was that governments themselves resorted to political disinformation campaigns in order to defend their own roles in managing the outbreak. These efforts to rewrite the narrative of COVID-19 are important to document. Just as there has been a struggle to contain the outbreak, so there is a struggle to control the way the public views government management of the outbreak.

But, given the country’s overall limited testing capacity, a sparse public health workforce and certain challenging disease characteristics, including mild and asymptomatic cases and rapid spread, it is unlikely that states were able to reach the levels of operational excellence needed to control the outbreak fully. Nevertheless, there was an extraordinary response from sections of civil society. To fight fake news about the pandemic, the Indian Scientists’ Response to COVID-19 became a grassroots initiative to neutralise disinformation. States deserve much of the credit for the country’s partly successful response. There were important lessons for other countries to learn from India. One shortcoming of India’s COVID-19 response was the low rate of testing. Another constraint was an acute shortage of health workers, while yet another consisted of the large communities living in slums with no possibility for physical distancing.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

And these are acts of probably accidental suppression, carried out by corporate entities that only really take action when bullied into it by activists. Codified into law or placed under government oversight, the fight against “disinformation” could also ricochet back onto dissidents, this time with real legal repercussions. In March 2020, Ethiopia passed a law called the Hate Speech and Disinformation Prevention and Suppression Proclamation. On its face, the law was an attempt to combat social-media-based violence, like a series of ethnic conflicts that resulted in at least sixty-seven deaths after online rumors inflamed previous tensions in the country.

Authoritarian regimes aren’t the only ones contemplating a crackdown. Democratic US senator Elizabeth Warren made “fighting digital disinformation” a platform in her 2020 presidential campaign. Alongside potentially helpful proposals like publicizing company data and allowing users to opt out of social media companies’ opaque recommendation algorithms, her team included a suggestion to create criminal penalties 206 OFF THE EDGE for people who knowingly share disinformation about when and where to vote. Had Warren’s platform moved toward law, it would have likely run into a First Amendment challenge: Social media posts encouraging one’s political opponents to vote on the wrong day are obnoxious but are likely protected as free speech.

I Wasn’t,” Medium, May 23, 2020, https://fightfortheftr.medium.com/facebook-told-my-followersi-was-spreading-misinformation-about-government-surveillance-i-wasnt63622dd7ae56. 204 “harassment and bullying” Sam Levin, “YouTube Under Fire for Censoring Video Exposing Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones,” Guardian, April 23, 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/23/ youtube-alex-jones-sandy-hook-media-matters-video. 204 purge in 2019 Kelly Weill, “YouTube Crackdown on Extremism Also Deleted Innocent Videos,” Daily Beast, June 6, 2019, www.thedailybeast.com/ youtube-crackdown-on-extremism-also-deleted-videos-combating-extremism. 205 accidentally flagged factual content Jay Peters, “Facebook Was Marking Legitimate News Articles about the Coronavirus as Spam Due to a Software Bug,” Verge, March 17, 2020, www.theverge.com/2020/3/17/21184445/ facebook-marking-coronavirus-posts-spam-misinformation-covid-19. 205 Ethiopia passed a law “Ethiopia: Bill Threatens Free Expression,” Human Rights Watch, December 19, 2019, www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/19/ethiopia-billthreatens-free-expression; Simon Marks, “67 Killed in Ethiopia Unrest, but Nobel-Winning Prime Minister Is Quiet,” New York Times, October 25, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/world/africa/ethiopia-protests-prime-minister .html. 205 basis to arrest a journalist Edrine Wanyama, “Ethiopia’s New Hate Speech and Disinformation Law Weighs Heavily on Social Media Users and Internet Intermediaries,” Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa, July 22, 2020, https://cipesa.org/2020/07/ethiopias-new-hate-speechand-disinformation-law-weighs-heavily-on-social-media-users-and-internetintermediaries; “Ethiopian Journalist Yayesew Shimelis Detained Following COVID-19 Report,” Committee to Protect Journalists, April 1, 2020, https:// cpj.org/2020/04/ethiopian-journalist-yayesew-shimelis-detained-fol/. 205 leaked documents obtained by the Guardian Alex Hern, “Revealed: How TikTok Censors Videos That Do Not Please Beijing,” Guardian, September 25, 2019, www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/ revealed-how-tiktok-censors-videos-that-do-not-please-beijing. 206 when and where to vote “Fighting Digital Disinformation,” Warren Democrats, https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/fighting-digital-disinformation. 206 exclusive banner Kelly Weill, “Flat Earthers Call Trump’s Space Force Idea ‘Impossible,’ ” Daily Beast, August 10, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/ flat-earthers-call-trumps-space-force-idea-impossible.


pages: 439 words: 131,081

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

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

Its immigration stories were collectively shared more than twice as much as those of any other news outlet, a stunning figure considering it employed only a handful of reporters. Across platforms, discussion on immigration “gravitated more often to issues of identity threat,” the study’s authors found, naturally privileging far-right worldviews that center, by definition, on fears of identity conflict. The study concluded that “highly partisan media” pushing disinformation and “Facebook-empowered hyperpartisan political clickbait sites” were both endemic in 2016, a trend that “played a much greater role on the right than on the left.” If we’d wanted to know where that was leading us, all we had to do was look at Gamergate, which, as of summer 2016, had more or less declared victory in its culture war for gaming.

The warnings came from insiders who knew the technology and the platforms, who shared the Valley’s ideals and assumptions. One of them was DiResta. “I’m pretty sure your recommendation engine is driving people to this content,” she told contacts at the companies, hoping they would use their internal data-gathering tools to investigate the sudden rise in political disinformation and polarizing rumors. That summer, some at Google who had heard about her work tracking anti-vaccine groups asked her to speak at the company’s annual conference. Until then she had kept her broader concerns to private channels, but now she decided to go public, admonishing a hall of high-ranking engineers and managers that their products posed a growing danger to society.

Any tweak or upgrade at all that might make the product a little more engaging, a little more addictive. If he or his bosses considered the consequences of brain-hacking millions of Americans in the middle of the most contentious election in modern American history, at a moment when polarization and disinformation threatened to tear apart the fabric of society, he did not indicate it in his essay. “One glorious Monday that fall, I checked again—and saw that we’d hit a billion hours over the weekend,” he wrote. “We’d achieved the stretch OKR many thought was impossible.” Though he conceded there had been “unanticipated consequences,” he only mentioned one: increasing watch time had also driven up the number of visits per day.


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Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

We coupled our AccountGuard announcement with information about these new attacks and an explicit statement that the six websites had been created by “a group widely associated with the Russian government and known as Strontium, or alternatively Fancy Bear or APT28.”9 It marked the first time we had been this explicit in identifying Russia as the source of the attacks, a move that was followed within days by both Facebook and Google as they acted to take down disinformation and fake accounts from their sites. While this was hardly the end of our journey, it marked how far the tech sector had come since 2016. As the industry took new steps, the press began to urge the US government to match our efforts. It provided what we hoped would become a new foundation for broader and more collaborative action.

Cyber-based threats around hacking of campaigns and disruption of voting were barely on the radar screen a decade ago. Today they are real risks that spill into daily news reports. Just as democratic governments and industry worked together to win a world war in the 1940s, today they must develop a unified response to protect the peace. And as authoritarian regimes experiment with disinformation campaigns, even more complex challenges lie ahead. Chapter 6 SOCIAL MEDIA: The Freedom That Drives Us Apart In a museum in the center of Tallinn, Estonia, which sits on the edge of the Baltic Sea, a young woman and man spin in perpetual motion, perched on opposite ends of a long, narrow plank.

It sounds a common chorus of people around the world yearning for freedom. And most important, it examines the constant tension between freedom and responsibility that the museum’s pair of floating mannequins so elegantly display. When we visited Estonia in the fall of 2018, the US Congress’s investigation into disinformation campaigns on Twitter and Facebook was at full throttle. The world had awoken to this new set of challenges and was asking questions. How had this happened? Why had it happened? And why hadn’t we realized it sooner? One answer to these questions came to us on a Saturday morning at the Vabamu Museum, the brainchild of an Estonian turned American named Olga Kistler-Ritso.


Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

They just want our attention and will tell us whatever works to capture it. MISINFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION Social media facilitates the spread of misinformation—claims that are false but not deliberately designed to deceive. On social media platforms, the first outlet to break a story receives the bulk of the traffic. In the race to be first, publishers often cut any fact-checking out of the publication process. You can’t beat your competitors to press if you pause to rigorously fact-check a story. Being careful is admirable, but it doesn’t sell ads. Social media is also fertile ground for disinformation, falsehoods that are spread deliberately.

Social media posts are unconstrained by most borders. And they are shared organically. When social media users share propaganda they have encountered, they are using their own social capital to back someone else’s disinformation. If I come across a political leaflet or poster on the street, I am immediately skeptical. If my dear uncle forwards me a story on Facebook that he “heard from a friend of a friend,” my guard drops. Disinformation flows through a network of trusted contacts instead of being injected from outside into a skeptical society. In 2017, Facebook admitted that over the past two years, 126 million US users—half of the adult population and about three-quarters of its US user base—had been exposed to Russian propaganda on the site.

We seek multiple images from multiple vantage points. Society will adjust similarly to a world of deepfakes and whatever reality-bending technologies follow. There are three basic approaches for protecting ourselves against misinformation and disinformation online. The first is technology. Tech companies might be able to use machine learning to detect online misinformation and disinformation. While this is a hot area for research and development, we are not optimistic. Tech companies have been trying to do this for years, but the problem shows no signs of abating. Microsoft, Facebook, and others have recently started to release large data sets to academic researchers working on this problem; that suggests to us that the tech companies know that they need help.


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

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

“how to avoid a phishing attack, what bots are”: Sarah Perez, @sarahintampa, “Google’s New Media Literacy Program Teaches Kids How to Spot Disinformation and Fake News,” TechCrunch, June 24, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/​2019/​06/​24/​googles-new-media-literacy-program-teaches-kids-how-to-spot-disinformation-and-fake-news/; Google’s “Be Internet Awesome,” https://beinternetawesome.withgoogle.com/​en_us/. Bad News: “Fake News ‘Vaccine’ Works: ‘Pre-Bunking’ Game Reduces Susceptibility to Disinformation,” Science Daily, June 24, 2019, https://www.sciencedaily.com/​releases/​2019/​06/​190624204800.htm. the game reduced the perceived reliability of fake news: Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden, “Fake News Game Confers Psychological Resistance Against Online Misinformation,” Palgrave Communications 5, no. 1 (2019): 12.

To understand whether dystopia is our destiny, we have to understand how the Hype Machine works. To do that, we’ll need to go back to first principles, starting with a deep dive under the hood of the Hype Machine, followed by an examination of social media’s effect on our brains. *1 Disinformation is deliberate falsehood spread to deceive, while misinformation is falsehood spread regardless of its intent. Disinformation is a subset of misinformation. *2 Chris Bail and his team found no evidence that interactions with IRA Twitter accounts in late 2017 impacted political attitudes or behavior. But several limitations prevented them from determining “whether IRA accounts influenced the 2016 presidential election.”

The study he was referring to was one I published: Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” Science 359, no. 6380 (2018): 1146–51. cauldron of misinformation: Zeke Miller and Colleen Long, “US Officials: Foreign Disinformation Is Stoking Virus Fears,” US News, March 16, 2020; Brooke Singman and Gillian Turner, “Foreign Disinformation Campaign on Fake National Quarantine Trying to Cause Panic, Trump Admin. Officials Say,” Fox News, March 16, 2020. Google, Apple, and MIT developed Bluetooth-based contact tracing systems: Mark Gurman, “Apple, Google Bring Covid-19 Contact-Tracing to 3 Billion People,” Bloomberg, April 10, 2020; Kylie Foy, “Bluetooth Signals from Your Smartphone Could Automate Covid-19 Contact Tracing While Preserving Privacy,” MIT News, April 8, 2020, http://news.mit.edu/​2020/​bluetooth-covid-19-contact-tracing-0409.


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

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

In June 2020, the Biden campaign circulated a petition and open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, calling for “real changes to Facebook’s policies for their platform and how they enforce them” in order to “protect against a repeat of the role that disinformation played in the 2016 election and that continues to threaten our democracy today.”32 The social media companies have increasingly taken heed. And they’ve moved right along with the clever switch made over the course of the past several years from “fighting disinformation” to “fighting misinformation.” After 2016, the argument went, Russian “disinformation” had spammed social media, actively undermining truth in favor of a narrative detrimental to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. There was some evidence of this—although the amount of actual Russian disinformation on Facebook, for example, wasn’t overwhelming in the grand scheme of things.

Follow-on stories in the Post quoted Hunter Biden’s ex–business associate Tony Bobulinski accusing Joe Biden himself of lying about his knowledge of Hunter’s activities: “I have heard Joe Biden say he has never discussed his dealings with Hunter. That is false. I have firsthand knowledge about this because I directly dealt with the Biden family, including Joe Biden,” Bobulinski alleged.6 The Biden campaign and its media allies responded by calling the Hunter Biden story “Russian disinformation.”7 The story, needless to say, was not Russian disinformation; there was no evidence that it was in the first place. In fact, about a month after the election, media reported that Hunter Biden had been under federal investigation for years—CNN reported that the investigation began as early as 2018, and that it had gone covert for fear of affecting the presidential election.8 The Hunter Biden story never fully broke through into the mainstream consciousness.

Over two years. That’s an average of 1,243 engagements per post—an extremely low total.34 But put aside the relative success or unsuccess of the Russian manipulation. We can all agree that Russian disinformation—typically meaning overtly false information put out by a foreign source, designed to mislead domestic audiences—is worth censoring. Democrats and media, however, shifted their objection from Russian disinformation to “misinformation”—a term of art that encompasses everything from actual, outright falsehood to narratives you dislike. To declare something “misinformation” should require showing its falsity, at the least.


pages: 335 words: 100,154

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

I warned the staffer that Royce’s committee was the target of an active Russian disinformation campaign. He listened politely, promising to bring it up with the chairman. I’d experienced enough of these types of conversations to know that when a young staffer promises to bring it up with their boss, they have no intention of mentioning it to anybody. If I couldn’t get to Royce directly, I’d try getting to him indirectly. I decided to go to the National Review, a conservative magazine I was sure Chairman Royce read. I pitched them the story of how Royce, whose signature issue was countering Russian disinformation, had just fallen victim to exactly that.

“The New York Times is promoting Nekrasov’s film,” I said. She perked up. “What? How did that happen?” “I have no idea.” This shouldn’t have happened. The New York Times is the most reputable newspaper in the United States, and is known for having a rigorous process that prevents the paper from falling victim to any kind of disinformation. Besides, by that point, the Russians had lost all credibility with the Western press in relation to the Magnitsky case. They’d told so many verifiable lies, and made so many misstatements and exaggerations, that nobody believed a word they said. I had to find out how they’d managed to pull this off.

The two of us boarded a Virgin Atlantic flight from Heathrow to Dulles on June 12, the day before the screening. We checked into the Grand Hyatt and prepared for a full slate of meetings the following day with members of Congress, government officials, and journalists. Our hope was to inoculate anybody who might be susceptible to Veselnitskaya’s disinformation campaign. She and her team seemed to be just as busy. As I rolled out of bed the next morning, I learned that Rohrabacher’s office had been working late into the night, emailing screening invitations to every single member of Congress. Veselnitskaya’s team had also been reaching out to the media.


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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

TrickBot’s developers were now cataloging American municipalities they had access to, selling anyone who wanted it a paint-by-number approach to hacking our election. When it came to disinformation, Russia’s goal was still the same: divide and conquer. But this time, the Kremlin’s trolls didn’t have to spin up “fake news.” Americans—perhaps nobody more so than our president—were generating plenty of false, misleading, and divisive content every single day. In 2016, Russians spun up fictitious tales of Democrats practicing witchcraft. With Americans more divided than at any time in recent history, Russia’s trolls and state news outlets found it far more efficient to amplify American-made disinformation than create their own. This time they weren’t looking to go viral—that would draw too much attention—they simply searched for sparks wherever they flew and offered up a little kindling.

And when thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest the murders of African Americans at the hands of police, I watched those same Russian accounts retweet Americans, including the president, who dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as a Trojan horse for violent left-wing radicals. With each new campaign, it got harder to pinpoint where exactly American-made disinformation ended and Russia’s active measures began. We had become Putin’s “useful idiots.” And so long as Americans were tangled up in our own infighting, Putin could maneuver the world unchecked. “The mantra of Russian active measures is this: ‘Win through force of politics rather than the politics of force,’ ” is how Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who specializes in Russian disinformation, explained it to me. “What that means is go into your adversary and tie them up in politics to the point where they are in such disarray that you are free to do what you will.”

In the years following its implementation, researchers found that Japanese devices were better protected than other countries with similar GDPs. We will never build resilience to cyberattacks—or foreign disinformation campaigns, for that matter—without good policy and nationwide awareness of cyber threats. We should make cybersecurity and media literacy a core part of American curriculum. Too many cyberattacks rely on vulnerable American systems, running on software that is not up-to-date or which has not been patched. This is, in large part, an education problem. The same goes for information warfare. Americans are being coopted by disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories because Americans lack the tools to spot influence operations, foreign and domestic, in real time.


How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

Howard, Bharath Ganesh, Dimitra Liotsiou, John Kelly and Camille François, is the first major analysis of the Russian disinformation attack on the US, based on data provided by social media firms to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The Global Disinformation Order 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation, by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N Howard, gives information on how extensively these techniques are now being used around the world. For accounts of disinformation in the digital age see David Patrikarakos’ lively and important War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the 21st Century, from which the account of the Russian disinformation building is taken, and How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict, by Nina Jankowicz.

It was not effective in convincing many people outside of Russia or east Ukraine. But that was not the purpose. The aim was in fact two-fold. Firstly, it would give Moscow a spreadable narrative in which it could maintain its innocence. And secondly it would confuse people. It would smudge reality, sow doubt, churn out as much disinformation as possible and hope the noise cancelled out the facts. The Ukrainian disinformation campaign worked as proof-of-concept for Putin. He now turned his attention to his opponents in the West. Using the same tactics, he could try to achieve similar results in countries like Britain and the US. From the end of 2014, the proportion of English, as opposed to Russian, language tweets from Kremlin fake accounts started to increase dramatically.

Those who live under its shadow are therefore encouraged to process information according to their tribal identity rather than its veracity, to close themselves off from anything that might challenge their faith. The lies of the nationalist movement range from the gigantic to the trivial, from the systemic to the opportunistic. This disinformation is not just a means to an end. It is an end itself. It serves two distinct agendas. Firstly it attempts to redefine day-to-day events in whichever way most suits the nationalist narrative. Secondly it works to degrade the entire notion of empirical reality. If nationalists can lie without consequence, the concepts of truth and falsity fall into irrelevance.


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A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

Neither Musk nor anyone involved with the 2021 GameStop trading frenzy has been prosecuted. Spoofing is another hack that involves the dissemination of disinformation. Here, a trader places millions of dollars of orders, then cancels them after other traders have noticed and reacted to them. This, too, is illegal, and a few people have been convicted of it. Fake news—that is, deliberately deceptive reports masquerading as journalism—is another increasingly prevalent method of hacking the market through disinformation. This hack is most often used to misrepresent companies’ valuation, allowing hackers to profit from fluctuations in their share prices.

In the previous chapters, we’ve seen hack after hack that successfully limited one of the three aspects of that: information, choice, and agency. In these upcoming chapters, we’ll see them hacked directly—in our own minds. For example, disinformation is a hack that subverts our system of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This isn’t a new notion. Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, once said: “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.” Disinformation is also a hack that subverts many of the cognitive systems we will talk about: attention, persuasion, trust, authority, tribalism, and sometimes fear.

For example, in 2015, the SEC indicted two Ukrainian hackers who broke into Business Wire and PRNewswire’s networks and stole more than 100,000 unreleased press releases for publicly traded companies. These were then distributed to a network of traders, who used the advance knowledge to place informed bets on the authoring companies’ stocks, much like an insider trading scheme. The second type of hack involves the creation of disinformation. An old example is the pump-and-dump. Perpetrators buy a stock, preferably an obscure one. (The penny stock market is notorious for pump-and-dumping.) Then, they recommend the stock to others, using false and misleading statements about the potential profit to be made. If others fall for the scam and purchase the stock, it inflates the price and the perpetrators sell.


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

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

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Benjamin Weiser, “Anthony Weiner Gets 21 Months in Prison for Sexting with Teenager,” New York Times, September 25, 2017, New York, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/nyregion/anthony-weiner-sentencing-prison-sexting-teenager.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Andrew Rossi, dir., review of After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News,” HBO, Abstract Production, https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/after-truth-disinformation-and-the-cost-of-fake-news. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, and Peter Hermann, “Pizzagate: From Rumor, to Hashtag, to Gunfire in D.C.,” Washington Post, December 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html.

The shooting spurred a similar effort to change the nation’s gun laws, which Haas joined, participating in protests across the country. But she doesn’t recall any conspiracy theories or harassment. “The reaction to Virginia Tech was much the same as the reaction to Sandy Hook. That this could happen was beyond comprehension, that someone could shoot your children down in cold blood,” Haas told me. “We didn’t have the disinformation campaigns and the fuel that social media platforms generally give them.” In 2007, the major social media platforms hosted only a fraction of the users they did just five years later, when Sandy Hook ignited millions of posts pushing false claims. Facebook, by far the largest social platform, had twenty million global users in 2007, compared with more than a billion in December 2012.

In a now-familiar pattern, Sandy Hook conspiracies surfaced in isolated message boards and groups, then caught fire across social media, their spread fueled by algorithms that select what users see based on their past preferences and choices. John Kelly is a network sociologist and a pioneer in mapping online communities. A year after Sandy Hook, Kelly founded Graphika, a forensic digital investigations and digital marketing firm in Manhattan. He has written software that maps the flow of disinformation through online communities. People used to define “community” geographically. Now they view it in online terms. On this invisible terrain, community is determined “by how we get filtered and sorted based on all these little micro-decisions we make about what to like and who to follow,” Kelly said.


pages: 358 words: 93,969

Climate Change by Joseph Romm

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Climatic Research Unit, data science, decarbonisation, demand response, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, gigafactory, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge worker, mass immigration, ocean acidification, performance metric, renewable energy transition, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, the scientific method

In books and documentaries such as “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming,” historians and journalists have shown (1) that this misinformation and disinformation campaign goes all the way back to the tobacco industry’s campaign to cast doubt on claims that cigarette smoking is bad for your health and (2) that in some cases it involves the same exact people.49 In 2009, the New York Times documented that the Global Climate Coalition, an anti-action lobbying group backed by industries that profit from fossil fuels, ignored its own climate scientists during the 1990s while spreading disinformation about global warming.50 An internal report stating that the human causes of global warming “cannot be denied” fell on the deaf ears of Coalition leaders.

In July 2015, we learned that oil giant Exxon understood the scientific reality of climate change as far back as 1981, many years before climate change became a political issue that they tried to spread confusion about. Over the years, fossil fuel companies and their executives were documented to have funneled tens of millions of dollars into this disinformation campaign. For a long time, the leading funder was the oil company Exxon-Mobil. However, they have been overtaken by Koch Industries—a company with large fossil fuel interests, run by billionaires Charles and David Koch—which spent more $48.5 million from 1997 to 2010 to fund disinformation. A report concluded that “From 2005 to 2008, Exxon Mobil spent $8.9 million while the Koch Industries-controlled foundations contributed $24.9 million in funding to organizations of the climate denial machine.”

We have been headed for a tripling of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, and the dangerous consequences of doing so are widely understood and accepted by the world’s leading climate scientists and governments. The multidecade disinformation campaign funded by the fossil fuel industry is marked by a rejection of basic science and the constant repetition of flawed arguments that have been long debunked by scientists, even ones who were advising the fossil fuel industry. That disinformation campaign continues today with more money than ever. What are climate science deniers? The scientific community and leading governments of the world have repeatedly reported on the ever-strengthening body of research supporting our understanding of basic climate science.


pages: 1,744 words: 458,385

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

A letter check, as well as revealing details of Grosse’s espionage, also identified two of the intermediaries employed by Steinhauer to maintain contact with agents in Britain. Building on his experience of supplying bogus information to Duff during the Schultz case, Kell supplied more elaborate disinformation to Salter which Grosse passed on to Berlin. Grosse’s case officer was sufficiently pleased with the disinformation to forward a more detailed list of inquiries on wireless telegraphy, range-finding, naval guns and coal supplies. Grosse was, however, told that his report about ‘a floating conning-tower’ (apparently one of Kell’s less plausible inventions) was ‘surely imaginary’.

Even had the Müller deception continued for longer, however, its success would have been limited. Unlike the turned German agents of the Second World War, Müller was executed and therefore unable to add personal credibility to the disinformation sent to German intelligence in his name. The Double-Cross System also depended not on one individual but on a series of turned German agents as well as on the co-operation of the whole intelligence community to provide a mixture of information and disinformation capable of both impressing and deceiving the enemy for the remainder of the war. Unlike MI5 in the Second World War, MO5(g) lacked the regular flow of SIGINT (signals intelligence) which enabled it to monitor the impact of the deception.69 The discovery by German intelligence of the Müller deception made it difficult for MO5(g) to attempt a similar deception without arousing German suspicions.

Also sent information regarding the effects of the Zeppelin raids on London. In September, on MI5 instructions, COMO sent further disinformation on the military situation in England and likely movements on the Western Front. He told the Germans that the British were planning an attack on the Belgian coast on the 15th. COMO continued to pass on at irregular intervals details of the intelligence missions entrusted to him by the Kriegsnachrichtenstelle, and MI5 continued to channel disinformation through him. According to a post-war summary, COMO ‘was always quite honest and trustworthy and did some v[ery] valuable work for us, at the same time holding the German’s [sic] confidence’.


pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

In the days prior to the October 7 email dump, Trump’s friend Stone told an unnamed senior Trump campaign official and other Trump supporters that WikiLeaks would imminently dump many more embarrassing files, and would commence with weekly releases. After the release of Podesta’s emails, an unnamed associate of a high-ranking official in the Trump campaign texted Stone, “Well done.”50 Amplification By the tail end of the election cycle, the Russians’ focus was less on hacking additional systems and more on propaganda and disinformation. Perhaps this shift in approach was a response to the warnings from President Obama, including a hotline message a week before the election.51 More likely, however, it was the culmination of a multiyear effort to project and amplify divisive and pro-Trump messages inside the United States. This part of the Russian campaign both drew on and supported the hacking efforts.

They kept track of online group sizes, frequency of posts, and audience engagement, including comments and other responses. These operatives worked for a nebulous St. Petersburg-based organization known as the Internet Research Agency, the most well-known—but likely not the only—Russian group running disinformation campaigns in the United States.52 Internet Research Agency employees made several trips to the United States in mid-2014 under false pretenses. As early as May 2014, they began discussing the 2016 presidential election as a target.53 In 2016, they posed as Americans and communicated with political activists and organizers in the United States to get a better sense of American politics.

Their targets included the World Anti-Doping Agency, which had revealed Russian cheating in the Olympics; the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which had examined Russia’s poisoning of a former spy; and the investigation into Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which Russian forces had shot down in Ukraine.19 A network of outlets, including social media accounts and state propaganda platforms such as Sputnik, stand ready to push the Russian message.20 Iran and its supporters have used disinformation for their own purposes, too. Researchers found sprawling campaigns that relied on hundreds of fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter. These campaigns aimed to mislead individuals all over the world. One effort aimed to sow division in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. It included well-constructed fake news articles that revealed a sophisticated understanding of online media and politics in the targeted countries.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

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

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

The Swedish defense minister, touring the country in an attempt to discuss Sweden, NATO, and Russia, found himself being grilled about these fake stories. People were scared that these stories might be true, confused about what to believe, and unsure about how to deal with this flood of negative stories. Censorship by disinformation focuses on attention as the key resource to be destroyed and credibility and legitimacy as the key components necessary for a public sphere that can support dissident views—or indeed, any coherent views. Rand Corporation researchers refer to this phenomenon as the “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model.18 The primary goal is simple: “to confuse and overwhelm” the audience.19 As in many such cases, it is impossible to pin down responsibility for the campaign, but “numerous analysts and experts in American and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of the foreign policy of President Vladimir V.

However, these gatekeepers had normative standards to judge factual error, and many newspapers published investigations later about how they got the reporting in the run-up to the war so wrong. Their failures were recognized as failures, or at least as departures from standards they were supposed to uphold. However, these failures have contributed to declining trust in traditional media, making the public sphere even more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns. Our new era is marked by the multitude of people and institutions with the capacity to broadcast, each with different normative standards—and some with no concerns about accuracy even as a standard that is not always upheld—with a polarized public with little trust in any intermediary, and drawn to information that confirms preexisting biases.

The United States has often been accused of deliberately spreading misinformation against regimes it wanted to overthrow or destabilize in many countries. Politicians have been known to resort to starting rumors about their opponents. None of this is without precedent. However, what is more striking in the twenty-first century is that the disinformation campaigns are not necessarily carried out to persuade people or to make them believe any particular set of alleged facts. Instead, the goal is often simply to overwhelm people with so many pieces of bad and disturbing information that they become confused and give up trying to figure out what the truth might be—or even the possibility of finding out what is true.


pages: 592 words: 125,186

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

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

In the same period police in the UK recorded a 21 per cent increase in hate crimes targeting south and east Asians.29 Similar rises have been recorded across Europe, Australasia, Asia, Africa and the Americas.30 No science has yet confirmed a link between Trump’s divisive rhetoric and the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in the US. There are certainly alternative explanations, such as a rise in general online hate speech and disinformation targeting Chinese and Asian people. Online disinformation also singled out Muslims, Jews and the LGBTQ+ community for spreading the virus. Via clicks from Facebook, thirty-four websites known for spreading far-right conspiracy theories and hate received c.80 million interactions between January and April 2020. In comparison, via Facebook, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) website received just 6.4 million interactions, and the World Health Organisation website 6.2 million.31 Much of the far-right social media chatter came from ‘accelerationists’ who believe that the collapse of the state can be brought about by extreme violence against liberal, black, Muslim and Jewish people.

Human Rights Watch, ‘Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide’, 12 May 2020, www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide. 31. Institute for Strategic Dialogue, ‘Far-Right Exploitation of Covid-19’, London: ISD, 2020. 32. Institute for Strategic Dialogue, ‘Covid-19 Disinformation Briefing No. 2’, London: ISD, 2020. 33. A. Goldman, ‘Man Suspected of Planning Attack on Missouri Hospital Is Killed, Officials Say’, New York Times, 25 March 2020. 34. Institute for Strategic Dialogue, ‘Covid-19 Disinformation Briefing No. 2’. 35. M. L. Williams et al., ‘Hate in the Machine: Anti-Black and Anti-Muslim Social Media Posts as Predictors of Offline Racially and Religiously Aggravated Crime’, British Journal of Criminology 60 (2019), 93–117. 36.

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign hired Cambridge Analytica and the Leave.EU Brexit campaign hired Aggregate IQ to use artificial intelligence to ‘micro-target’ those who would be most vulnerable to messages designed to stir up fears of the ‘other’.3 During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media was flooded with far-right conspiracy theories and hate targeting Jewish, Muslim, Chinese and LGBTQ+ people for supposedly creating and/or spreading the disease (more on this in Chapter 10).4 Beyond organised campaigns, the everyday internet user also took to social media to post hateful messages, triggered by disinformation and careless phrases, like ‘Chinese virus’ and ‘kung flu’, coming out of the White House.5 What is most worrying about this trend is that the research shows divisive messages from public figures are directly linked to tipping some people into hateful violence on the streets. In January 2021 the world witnessed an unparalleled example of this when the US Capitol Building was stormed by Trump supporters who had been whipped up by his polarising rhetoric.


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing, urban planning

The attitude towards the public is revealed by what one Reagan official called “a vast psychological warfare operation” designed to set the agenda for debate over Nicaragua—a disinformation campaign called “Operation Truth”; Goebbels and Stalin would have been amused.10 Disinformation has been an Administration specialty since the earliest days, though the media and Congress always profess to be shocked when a new example is exposed, recently during the 1986 disinformation campaign concerning Libya (see chapter 3). In this case, the display of outraged surprise necessitated a slight case of amnesia; as early as August 1981, Newsweek had reported a government “disinformation program designed to embarrass Qaddafi and his government” along with assorted acts of U.S. terrorism within Libya to try to “demonstrate that Qaddafi was opposed by an indigenous political force.”

The plan was apparently activated in a secret National Security directive of January 14, 1983 (No. 77, Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security). Alfonso Chardy, “Secrets Leaked to Harm Nicaragua, Sources Say,” Miami Herald, October 13, 1986. 11. Newsweek, August 3, 1981. On the disinformation program concerning Libya, see chapter 3. On other disinformation programs and media cooperation, see my Turning the Tide; Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Bulgarian Connection (Sheridan Square, 1986). 12. Alfonso Chardy, Knight-Ridder Service, Boston Globe, October 28, 1986. 13. Robert Reinhold, “Ex-General Hints at Big Role as U.S.

“The press was forbidden to publish pictures of the destroyed plane, of the dead and the wounded,” Amiram Cohen observes in a detailed analysis of the Israeli reaction (undertaken after the KAL 007 atrocity), and “journalists were not allowed to visit the hospital in Beersheba and to interview survivors,” all part of a “disinformation” effort. The international reaction was dismissed by the Israeli press as yet another demonstration that “the spirit of anti-Semitism flourishes” in Europe, virtually a reflex response, in the U.S. as well, when someone dares to mention or criticize an Israeli crime. The Israeli press insisted that “Israel is not responsible” and that “one must blame the [French] pilot.”


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

(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 282–311. “conspirituality”: Charlotte Ward and David Voas, “The Emergence of Conspirituality,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 26, no. 1 (2011): 103–121. “the Disinformation Dozen”: “The Disinformation Dozen: Why Platforms Must Act on Twelve Leading Online Anti-Vaxxers,” Center for Countering Digital Hate, March 24, 2021. Christiane Northrup: Sam Kestenbaum, “Christiane Northrup, Once a New Age Health Guru, Now Spreads Covid Disinformation,” Washington Post, May 3, 2022 (updated May 9, 2022). “You can go eat deep-fried pickles”: Jessica Wallace, “Kamloops Gym Owners Explain Why They Remain Open Despite Public Health Order Mandating They Close,” Kamloops This Week, December 23, 2021.

I told myself I had no choice. That this was not, in fact, an epically frivolous and narcissistic waste of my compressed writing time or of the compressed time on the clock of our fast-warming planet. I rationalized that Other Naomi, as one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation about many of our most urgent crises, and as someone who has seemingly helped inspire large numbers to take to the streets in rebellion against an almost wholly hallucinated “tyranny,” is at the nexus of several forces that, while ridiculous in the extreme, are nonetheless important, since the confusion they sow and the oxygen they absorb increasingly stand in the way of pretty much anything helpful or healthful that humans might, at some point, decide to accomplish together.

Plenty of people in these fields are highly trained and extremely knowledgeable about human physiology and have taken Covid seriously; many owners of gyms and yoga studios have gone to great (and costly) lengths to keep their clients safe. The fact remains, however, that some of the most prominent figures in this lucrative sector have gone full-blown Covid-QAnon. When the Center for Countering Digital Hate issued its list of what it termed “the Disinformation Dozen,” a group of twelve individuals that its research found were collectively responsible for originating roughly 65 percent of the junk claims circulating about Covid and vaccines, the list wasn’t populated with well-known right-wing media stars, as one might expect. Instead, it had a chiropractor and three different osteopaths, including one in Florida with a booming supplement business; a couple that sells essential oils to cure cancer and DVD sets on “taking back” your health; the editor of Health Nut News, who posts anti-Semitic memes about how the Rothschilds and “the Global elite are running the show.… #NewWorldOrder #TruthTeller”; and the guru behind the newsletter GreenMedInfo, who posts memes about how Bill Gates is using the vaccine to depopulate the earth in between advice about healing yourself with superfoods.


pages: 412 words: 115,048

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

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

For Internet companies, and to the detriment of users in more tolerant jurisdictions, the price of doing business internationally is that censorship decrees in one country could apply elsewhere or worldwide. In the wake of the disinformation–saturated 2016 Brexit referendum and US election, European governments moved to force online Internet companies to purge disinformation from their platforms. A 2018 German law requires networks with more than two million members to take down fake news within twenty-four hours of notification or face fines of up to €50 million, and a 2018 French law allows authorities to order the deletion of false online information that could affect elections.

Bobby Allyn, “Researchers: Nearly Half of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots,” NPR, May 20, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/20/859814085/researchers-nearly-half-of-accounts-tweeting-about-coronavirus-are-likely-bots; Thor Benson, “Trolls and Bots Are Flooding Social Media with Disinformation Encouraging States to End Quarantine,” Business Insider, April 20, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/trolls-bots-flooding-social-media-with-anti-quarantine-disinformation-2020-4. 103. Shahbaz, “Freedom on the Net 2018.” 104. Boos v. Barry, 485 U.S. 312 (1998), citing Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988); FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978). 105. “Two Chinese Tourists Are Arrested for Making a Hitler Salute in Germany,” Economist, August 7, 2017, https://www.economist.com/gulliver/2017/08/07/two-chinese-tourists-are-arrested-for-making-a-hitler-salute-in-germany. 106.

The government censured a newspaper for publishing an advertisement that suggested too obviously the desperation caused by the diminished food supply: “Fat Dogs Wanted.”46 At times, news reports from France, Germany, and Austria were so heavily censored that nothing would appear of them in newspapers except blank spaces where the articles would have been. Some Austrian newspapers protested by inserting the word “Zensur” in the blank spaces, but in Germany such protests were forbidden, as they only highlighted the fact that information was being withheld. Censorship resulted in disinformation, either by omission—such as strict restrictions on casualty reports—or by affirmative falsehoods. The first day of the bloodiest defeat in British history, at the Somme on July 1, 1916, was framed as a victory. The report (by Gibbs, who was nowhere near the front lines and who relied on official sources) surely brought anxious families some relief as they read it over breakfast: Our troops, fighting with very splendid valor, have swept across the enemy’s front trenches . . . and have captured villages and strongholds which the Germans have long held against us.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

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

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

But pity the confusion in the general public’s mind as they try to understand the word ‘journalism’. DISINFORMATION It refers to intentionally disseminating mistaken information, sometimes covertly, in order to influence public opinion, obscure the truth, discredit an opponent or spread public cynicism, distrust or apathy. The culprit may mix truth with false conclusions and lies. It can be traced back to the Russian term dezinformatsiya (information designed to sow doubt and increase mistrust in institutions). Disinformation may not be a new thing, but the scale and speed at which information can be spread in the digital age is without precedent in history.

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 writer Peter Pomerantsev explored the odd-seeming behaviour of the Kremlin in choosing to crawl inside American protest movements online.

If journalism is trying to persuade sceptical readers that it is the safe harbour of reality, why would it handsomely reward and celebrate people for writing rubbish? We have seen in recent years some high-profile failings of journalism, not least the phone-hacking scandal, which rumbles on to this day. Equally, there are heroes and heroines of reporting as glorious as at any time in a century or more. There is now more disinformation put out into the world than ever before, much of it politically motivated. The owner of a media business can raise or corrupt it. And rarely is a paper all good, or all bad. So, it’s hard to write a book with a simple message about journalism and why it should be trusted. Much of it should; quite a lot shouldn’t.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

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

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

It was David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, and not John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist, who saw the future of the internet most clearly. But how has Duke’s vision been fulfilled, exactly? How do the online malls of social media politicize people? This is a matter of much complexity, and much confusion. Beyond the Bubble The popular version goes something like this: users are being brainwashed by disinformation. Disinformation is promoting polarization. It is disseminated primarily by foreign agents. It is designed to elicit strong emotions like anger so that it can spread more easily. It spreads more easily because social media sites are optimized for user engagement—capturing more user attention means collecting more advertising dollars—and content that provokes and enrages naturally gets more engagement.

Fox as one of the most popular US publishers on Facebook: Benedict Nicholson, “These Were the Top Publishers on Face-book in November 2020,” NewsWhip, December 9, 2020. “Trading up the chain”: Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online,” Data & Society Research Institute, May 15, 2017. 142, This messiness is manifest … Lack of evidence for “filter bubbles”: Peter M. Dahlgren, “A Critical Review of Filter Bubbles and a Comparison with Selective Exposure,” Nordicom Review 42, no. 1 (2021): 15–33; Axel Bruns, “Filter Bubble,” Internet Policy Review 8, no. 4 (2019). “Widespread heterogeneity …”: P. M. Krafft and Joan Donovan, “Disinformation by Design: The Use of Evidence Collages and Platform Filtering in a Media Manipulation Campaign,” Political Communication 37, no. 2 (2020): 195.

Shapiro, “Greater Internet Use Is Not Associated with Faster Growth in Political Polarization among US Demographic Groups,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 40 (October 3, 2017): 10616. See also Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020, and Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 296–339. 141, But the Right has immeasurably … The journalist Kevin Roose compiles the ten top-performing link posts by public US Facebook pages every day and publishes them on Twitter at twitter. com/FacebooksTop10.


pages: 295 words: 84,843

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

On YouTube, a video appeared of a man watching Arab TV, followed by masked ISIS members claiming responsibility. Even Wikipedia had already created a page about the catastrophe, and local and regional media were also reporting it on social channels. But it was all fake. Over the course of a few hours, dozens of phoney accounts churned out hundreds of tweets, pictures and staged videos as part of a disinformation campaign orchestrated from a troll factory in St Petersburg. The news triggered panic, with frightened residents calling emergency services and officials at the chemical plant. And that’s precisely what the young Russians had been told to do: create unrest and sow discord. Something similar happened after flight MH17 was shot down.

Over time, Prigozhin also scaled the hierarchy of the Kremlin. Then came 2017. Bloomberg News published an article about the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St Petersburg. ‘We were stunned,’ says Julio, looking back. The piece set out in minute detail how Russian online manipulation worked. How hundreds of young Russians were spreading disinformation from a tower block on the outskirts of St Petersburg (see also Chapter 9). But what really grabbed their attention, says Carlos, ‘was that the algorithm and accounts’ behaviour were identical to SNAP’. How was this possible, the two Spaniards wondered. Had someone stolen their software? They tried to figure it out, searching in public sources and doing their own research.

International experts, including the FBI, have said they suspect the IRA is using ‘foreign software’ to manipulate social media. And after the Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections, the FBI indicted Prigozhin for his involvement with the IRA. Julio admits, ‘Without meaning to, we created the perfect weapon.’ * The disinformation Julio and Carlos saw mostly originated in Russia and Venezuela – with a significant uptick around the referendum on Catalan independence. But it’s not only Russia and Venezuela that are using the weapon. In September 2019, researchers at Oxford University reported the use of ‘computational propaganda to shape public attitudes via social media’ in seventy countries.


Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, full employment, Howard Zinn, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, long peace, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing

The “United States” is thus deprived of means previously available to “cope with” enemies who are so deceitful as to operate within the law, and who are “politically dishonest by hiding one’s true political aims or knowingly planting lies and disinformation.” Prominent in this category are the church-based groups and others that opposed the Vietnam war and are carrying out similar “calculated political deception” with regard to our crusade for freedom in Central America. The “lies and disinformation” of these subversive elements in the service of their hidden agendas or foreign masters “may poison the marketplace of ideas and damage a democratic society more seriously than the overt advocacy of forceful overthrow.”

To illustrate, I have reviewed a few samples of the media’s contributions to the government project of “demonizing the Sandinistas” while praising the violent terror states backed or directly installed by the United States in the region. With all the skepticism I have personally developed through studying media performance over many years, I had not expected that they would rise to this challenge. When writing in 1985 about the Reaganite disinformation programs concerning Central America, I did not compare Nicaragua to El Salvador and Guatemala to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the charges (where they were not outright lies); that seemed an insult to the reader’s intelligence. Instead, I compared the allegations concerning Nicaragua with the behavior of the “model democracy” of Israel during the same period and that of the United States itself in wartime conditions, showing that the Sandinista record was respectable by these—admittedly, not very impressive— standards.3 But my assessment of the media was naive.

The media even permitted themselves to be duped by a transparent fraud, the well-timed “discovery” of a shipment of MiG fighter planes to Nicaragua, which predictably turned out to be fanciful and was later attributed to Oliver North’s shenanigans, but which admirably served its purpose of helping to efface the unwanted Nicaraguan elections. When it had become obvious that no MiGs had arrived, a new phase of disinformation began, shifting attention to the leak of secret information (that is, to the planned release of intelligence fabrications, so it appears), condemned as “criminal” by Secretary Shultz. The press again went along, taking the issue to be the alleged leak and not the propaganda exercise in which they had participated, even claiming that the MiG pretense had harmed the U.S. and anti-Sandinista groups.


Killing Hope: Us Military and Cia Interventions Since World War 2 by William Blum

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, kremlinology, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, trickle-down economics, union organizing

In the 1930s, and again after the war in the 1940s and '50s, anti-communists of various stripes in the United States tried their best to expose the crimes of the Soviet Union, such as the purge trials and the mass murders. But a strange thing happened. The truth did not seem to matter. American Communists and fellow travelers continued to support the Kremlin. Even allowing for the exaggeration and disinformation regularly disbursed by the anti-communists which damaged their credibility, the continued ignorance and/or denial by the American leftists is remarkable. At the close of the Second World War, when the victorious Allies discovered the German concentration camps, in some cases German citizens from nearby towns were brought to the camp to come face-to-face with the institution, the piles of corpses, and the still-living skeletal people; some of the respectable burghers were even forced to bury the dead.

In the Philippines it is customary for the local/regional government to get a 10 percent rake-off on all such enterprise and for national politicians to get another 10 percent. So the safe explanation becomes "Communist-inspired subversive insurgency." The word for this in the Philippines is Huk.24 The most insidious part of the CIA operation in the Philippines was the fundamental manipulation of the nation's political life, featuring stage-managed elections and disinformation campaigns. The high-point of this effort was the election to the presidency, in 1953, of Ramon Magsaysay, the cooperative former defense department head. Lansdale, it was said, "invented" Magsaysay.25 His CIA front organizations— such as the National Movement for Free Elections—ran the Filipino's campaign with all the license, impunity, and money that one would expect from the Democratic or Republican National Committees operating in the US, or perhaps more to the point, Mayor Daley operating in Chicago.

On the broadcasts of the CIA's "Voice of Liberation" the picture was different: The rebels were everywhere and advancing; they were of large numbers and picking up volunteers as they marched; war and upheaval in all corners; fearsome battles and major defeats for the Guatemalan army. Some of these broadcasts were transmitted over regular public and even military channels, serving to convince some of Arbenz's officers that the reports were genuine. In the same way, the CIA was able to answer real military messages with fake responses. All manner of disinformation was spread and rumors fomented; dummy parachute drops were made in scattered areas to heighten the belief that a major invasion was taking place.27 77 United Fruit Company's publicity office circulated photographs to journalists of mutilated bodies about to be buried in a mass grave as an example of the atrocities committed by the Arbenz regime.


pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

To understand what ended up happening in the 2016 presidential election, you have to understand this: When protests toppled the Ukrainian government, Putin interpreted that as the United States coming into Russia, akin to an act of war; when he launched his counterattack—annexing Crimea, creeping into eastern Ukraine—he weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie, using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus. Eventually, the Russians would come into America, as they believed we’d gone into Ukraine. They took advantage of the fact that we were worn down by decades of political polarization and the balkanization of our media. America’s antibodies to the sickness of Russian disinformation were weak, if they were there at all. * * * — IN APRIL 2016, WE landed in London for a hastily arranged trip to help David Cameron fight off a Brexit referendum.

There was a lingering unease, a palpable sense that the place was under threat. In a meeting, the Estonian president, Toomas Ilves, insisted to Obama that we had to take Putin at his word if he said he would take Kiev. Ilves had an academic manner, and he described methodically how Russia was using fake news and disinformation to turn Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority against Europe. Speaking in paragraphs, he tied together Putin, the emergence of right-wing political parties in Europe, and ISIL. These are people, he said, who fundamentally reject the legitimacy of the liberal order. They are looking for another form of legitimacy—one that is counter to our notion of progress.

It didn’t matter much that the shifting Russian explanations could be debunked. The investigation was going to take years; with their media capabilities and willingness to lie, the Russians could fill that space with all manner of false narratives. Since the protests had ousted Russia’s client leader in Ukraine in 2014, we’d grown accustomed to Russian disinformation. Sometimes it could be thuggishly personal. Jen Psaki, who was then our State Department spokeswoman, was a target. Russian media outlets—amplified by Russian bots—invented quotes from her to discredit our policies. In social media campaigns, her head was superimposed on the body of a model in a provocative pose to suggest that she was a crude, unserious person.


pages: 345 words: 100,135

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Dr. Paul Babiak, Dr. Robert Hare

business process, computer age, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, fixed income, greed is good, job satisfaction, laissez-faire capitalism, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, risk tolerance, twin studies

Specifically, their game plans involved manipulating communication networks to enhance their own reputation, to disparage others, and to create conflicts and rivalries among organization members, thereby keeping them from sharing information that might uncover the deceit. They also spread disinformation in the interest of protecting their scam and furthering their own careers. Being exceedingly clever and secretive, they were able to cloak their association with the disinformation, leading others to believe that they were innocent of manipulation. Secrecy is a key to a corporate con’s success. Impression Management, Deception, and Lies Impression management, deception, and lying are integral and necessary parts of social interactions.

Their often theatrical, yet convincing stories and entertaining explanations reinforce an environment of trust, acceptance, and genuine delight, leading most people to accept them exactly as whom they appear to be—and almost unconsciously excuse any inconsistencies they might have noted. If challenged or caught in a lie, psychopaths are not embarrassed. They simply change or elaborate on the story line to weave together all the misarranged details into a believable fabric. Well-practiced oral communication skills make this endless stream of disinformation seem believable, sensible, and logical. Some psychopaths are so good at this that they can create a veritable Shangri-la view of their world in the minds of others; a view that they almost seem to believe themselves. Surprisingly, psychopaths will lie even to people who already know the truth about what they are saying.

The psychopathic fiction, “I am the ideal employee,” created in the minds of his or her supporters can be easily transformed into a very believable “I am the ideal leader.” In this case, the internal psychopath will look much better than any but the most outstanding external candidate. Furthermore, the psychopath also has a clear advantage should the company compare him or her with internal candidates. Recall that corporate psychopaths spread considerable disinformation about their rivals (unbeknownst to the company or the rival), which leads to doubts and concerns, thus effectively knocking other candidates out of contention. This is a real problem for the company trying to fill a top-level job. The best defense for this type of systematic manipulation is to add more hurdles or screens, in the form of executive recruiters and formal succession planning.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

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

Its spies even have a name for this kind of subversion—“active measures”—and it’s an example of how shadow wars are fought by weaponizing information. One reason why RT is effective is that it blends legitimate experts and journalists with crackpots, offering a plausible version of events that is nested within a larger global disinformation campaign. Think of RT as strategic storytelling. The “Troll Factory” is another component of Russia’s active measures against the West, revealing the true power of cyberwarfare. It’s not sabotage, like Stuxnet—it’s disinformation. Located in Saint Petersburg and officially called the Internet Research Agency, it’s where Russian operatives hack into websites, create phony news sites, and pump out fake news and bogus social media messages.

The United Nations demanded a full inquiry, but armed Russian separatists blocked access to the crash site, so the UN gave up. The world erupted in outrage until a new scandal seized the news cycle, and everyone moved on. Without clear evidence, it’s hard to know truth from fiction. War is becoming a “he said, she said” affair with no meaningful consequences for liars. Russia has become a disinformation superpower, employing a “kill ’em with confusion” strategy. And it’s working. The evidence is everywhere: making a war in Ukraine invisible, hacking the 2016 US presidential election, stoking the Brexit vote, supporting fringe political groups, fueling right-wing nationalism in NATO countries, and spinning its dubious role in the Middle East.

RT features programming tailor-made for US and UK viewers, as well as offering services in French, Spanish, and Arabic. Its reach is global, broadcasting to some one hundred countries via satellite television and the internet. But no one should be fooled into thinking RT is a news outlet. RT is not a media company but an intelligence operation, and its purpose is not information—it’s disinformation. It offers “alternative facts” to seed doubt and change minds. Taking a page from the embattled spook’s handbook, its mantra could be: “Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counteraccusations.” The Kremlin funds RT’s $400 million annual budget to warp the truth for Russia’s strategic interests.


pages: 326 words: 48,727

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, defense in depth, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, peak oil, Port of Oakland, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, urban planning

Notwithstanding its studiously neutral name, the coalition would spend millions of dollars in the 1990s on a public disinformation campaign whose strategy and tactics recalled the tobacco industry's earlier efforts to persuade people that smoking cigarettes does not cause cancer. Indeed, Seitz and organizations he directed were paid more than $45 million for their work, first by tobacco and later by energy companies, as I'll describe later in this book. The goal of the disinformation campaign was to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," according to an internal strategy memo unearthed by journalist Ross Gelbspan, who exposed the campaign in his 1997 book The Heat Is On.

The Times editorial called the proposal "political hot air." It then disparaged the science of global warming by citing a Wall Street Journal opinion article by'S. Fred Singer—in retrospect, not a wise choice, for Singer would emerge in the 1990s as a recipient of funding from ExxonMobil and other energy companies that spread disinformation about climate science. In a final stab at wit, the Times chortled that if Sims and Laing really wanted to study the greenhouse effect, they should sprinkle a tomato patch with "steer manure," something they as politicians should have no trouble locating. But his parents had taught Sims long ago not to let what others say hold you back.

Although Ross Gelbspan and other journalists published occasional exposés of the coalition's funding sources and political agenda, the deniers' assertions were generally taken at face value in congressional hearings, news stories, and other public forums and ended up having considerable effect. "The goal of the disinformation campaign wasn't to win the debate," Gelbspan later explained. "The goal was simply to keep the debate going. When the public hears the media report that some scientists believe warming is real but others don't, its reaction is, 'Come back and tell us when you're really sure.' So no political action is taken."


pages: 137 words: 35,041

Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle

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

p.81‘people who are already hateful and prone to violence’: Gordon Danning, ‘“Hate speech” does not incite hatred’, Quillette (18 January 2018). p.81the current movement in the United States to see that hate speech is exempt: Writing in the New York Times, Emily Bazelon argues that the First Amendment is ill-equipped to deal with ‘the spread of viral disinformation’ in the digital age. See Emily Bazelon, ‘The problem with free speech in an age of disinformation’, the New York Times (18 October 2020). p.82Marantz’s strategy of recasting his argument as a ‘fact’: In Robby Soave’s rebuttal to Marantz’s article, he points out that rates of violent crime in the US have continually fallen since the 1990s, even though during that same period the Supreme Court has been increasingly insistent on upholding protections guaranteed by the First Amendment.

We have all heard of the ‘Streisand effect’, whereby attempts at censorship and suppression inadvertently draw more attention to the offending material. Whenever I hear demands for a book to be banned, my first thought is invariably: ‘How can I get hold of a copy?’ The same principle applies to disinformation. The term ‘fake news’ is now often deployed as a strategy to delegitimise alternative viewpoints. But even in cases where deception is unambiguously the motive, censorship usually has the unintended effect of accelerating the dissemination of the material in question. Many purveyors of ‘fake news’ rely on the narrative that they are brave truth-tellers fighting back against oppressive forces who would see them silenced.

Index A abuses of state power 67 academic freedom 60–3 Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (Williams) 63 Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin 21, 22 Almansor (Heine) 94 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 19, 93 Ancient Greeks 58 ‘anecdotal evidence’ 32 anti-censorship campaigners 17 anti-Semitism 18–19, 66, 80 Arendt, Hannah 72 Areopagitica (Milton) 3–4 ‘art’ 56 artists 55–8 Associated Press 50 Atwood, Margaret 26 Auschwitz 80 authoritarianism 89 avoidance of conflict 35–6 B Barrett, Lisa Feldman 70 ‘Battle of Cable Street’ 20 Benn, Tony 69 Berkeley, University of California 33 Bernstein, Eduard 97 big tech corporations 11–13, 45 ‘blackshirts’ 20 blasphemy 51 Boghossian, Peter 74 ‘bonfire of the vanities’ 55 books censors 4 destruction 94 humanistic culture 9–10 moral or immoral 83 Botticelli, Sandro 55 Boyle, Danny 84 Bradbury, Ray 11 Brexit 67 British Library 95 C cancel culture 25–30, 42–3, 63, 96 Cardozo, Benjamin 33 Catholic Church 9 Cato Institute 28 Cave, Nick 27 Censored (Coleman) 87 censorship and the censors 85 and criticism 16, 24 and the Internet 13 metaphor of sunlight 44 of printed texts 4 right-leaning tabloids 7 right-wing talking point 6 and social media 11, 45 tech giants 13 Charbonnier, Stéphane (‘Charb’) 50, 51, 53 Charlie Hebdo 50, 51–3 ‘Charter 77’ committee 3 Chomsky, Noam 26 Christakis, Erika 61 Christakis, Nicholas 61–2 ‘Clean Up TV’ campaign 83 Clinton, Chelsea 79 Coleman, Paul 87 College of Policing 88 comedians and comedy 49–50, 56 see also satire Communications Act 2003 (UK) 66, 89 Communications Decency Act 1996 (US) 12 concept creep 46–7, 68 consent 75 Cope, Edward Drinker 74 Cox, Jo 82 Crash (Cronenberg) 84 criticism 16, 24, 32, 57 Cronenberg, David 84 ‘crowded theatre’ argument 22–4 Crown Prosecution Service 88 ‘culture wars’ 2, 63–4 D Danning, Gordon 81 Darwin, Charles 74 Davis, Daryl 17–18, 69 ‘Day of Absence’ protests 62 debating defeated ideas 68 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 10 decolonising authors 96 ‘Decolonising Working Group,’ British Library 95 Defending My Enemy (Neier) 19 democratic accountability 11 ‘despotism of custom’ (Mill) 57 dictatorships 90 ‘direct-effects model’ 84 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) 88 disinformation 85 Dissertation on First-Principles of Government (Paine) 18 diversity 33 ‘dog whistle’ 16 Dorsey, Jack 12 dystopian fiction 11 E Eddo-Lodge, Reni 27–8 emotional and intellectual comfort 37 emotional pain 75 ‘The English People’ (Orwell) 59 Enlightenment 10 European Court of Human Rights 87 European Union referendum (2016) 59 Evergreen State College 62 F Facebook 12, 13 ‘fact-checking’ 13 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) 11 ‘fake news’ 12, 85 fascism 32–3, 67–8 feminism 71 First Amendment of the United States Constitution 10, 11 First Principles (Spencer) 43 forced conversions 43 Foucault, Michel 73 Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) 61 Founding Fathers 10, 11 France 50 Frankfurt School 83 ‘free speech crisis’ 89 ‘Free Speech Is Killing Us’ (Marantz) 81–2 French Revolution 10 Fritsch, Theodor 66 G Galileo 4 ‘gaslighting’ 25–6 gender identity 30 gender-neutral pronouns 89 gender self-identification 26, 71 Goebbels, Joseph 66, 80, 94 Gopnik, Adam 72 ‘gramophone mind’ (Orwell) 97 ‘grossly offensive’ online speech 89 H Haidt, Jonathan 70, 71 Hall, Radclyffe 84 Hardy, Thomas 75 Harper’s Magazine 26–7 Hate Crime Operational Guidance (College of Policing) 88 ‘hate crimes’ 88 ‘hate incidents’ 88 ‘hate speech’ 12, 19, 87–91, 96–7 ‘hate speech’ laws 22, 52–3, 66–7, 87 Havel, Václav 3 Hazlitt, William 43, 60 Heine, Heinrich 94 higher education 60–1 see also universities historical discrimination 33 Hitchens, Christopher 3 Hitler 10, 66 Hobbes, Thomas 6 Holland, Tom 73–4 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 22–3 Holocaust denial 68 House of Commons 82 humanistic culture 9–10 Humberside Police 1 Hutus 77 I identity issues 33–4 identity-obsessed activism 83 ‘identity quakes’ 74 inciting violence 77–85 Internet 13, 45, 96 see also social media Is Free Speech Racist?


pages: 462 words: 172,671

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin

business logic, continuous integration, database schema, disinformation, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, finite state, G4S, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, iterative process, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, web application

It results in a new version of the function: public List<Cell> getFlaggedCells() { List<Cell> flaggedCells = new ArrayList<Cell>(); for (Cell cell : gameBoard) if (cell.isFlagged()) flaggedCells.add(cell); return flaggedCells; } With these simple name changes, it’s not difficult to understand what’s going on. This is the power of choosing good names. Avoid Disinformation Programmers must avoid leaving false clues that obscure the meaning of code. We should avoid words whose entrenched meanings vary from our intended meaning. For example, hp, aix, and sco would be poor variable names because they are the names of Unix platforms or variants. Even if you are coding a hypotenuse and hp looks like a good abbreviation, it could be disinformative. Do not refer to a grouping of accounts as an accountList unless it’s actually a List. The word list means something specific to programmers.

Using inconsistent spellings is disinformation. With modern Java environments we enjoy automatic code completion. We write a few characters of a name and press some hotkey combination (if that) and are rewarded with a list of possible completions for that name. It is very helpful if names for very similar things sort together alphabetically and if the differences are very obvious, because the developer is likely to pick an object by name without seeing your copious comments or even the list of methods supplied by that class. A truly awful example of disinformative names would be the use of lower-case L or uppercase O as variable names, especially in combination.

Contents Foreword Introduction On the Cover Chapter 1: Clean Code There Will Be Code Bad Code The Total Cost of Owning a Mess The Grand Redesign in the Sky Attitude The Primal Conundrum The Art of Clean Code? What Is Clean Code? Schools of Thought We Are Authors The Boy Scout Rule Prequel and Principles Conclusion Bibliography Chapter 2: Meaningful Names Introduction Use Intention-Revealing Names Avoid Disinformation Make Meaningful Distinctions Use Pronounceable Names Use Searchable Names Avoid Encodings Hungarian Notation Member Prefixes Interfaces and Implementations Avoid Mental Mapping Class Names Method Names Don’t Be Cute Pick One Word per Concept Don’t Pun Use Solution Domain Names Use Problem Domain Names Add Meaningful Context Don’t Add Gratuitous Context Final Words Chapter 3: Functions Small!


pages: 319 words: 89,192

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

And when you think about Christopher Steele, the retired British intelligence agent calling his buddies who called their buddies in Moscow to get this information, the FSB is certainly capable of following those trails and polluting them with certain disinformation.” Shane went on to say that it was possible that Kremlin operatives, while focusing the brunt of their disinformation campaign against Hillary Clinton, might have hedged their bets by planting dirt about Trump and his associates. A former CIA spy on the same panel suggested that Shane had let his imagination run wild. “I mean anything is possible, you are absolutely right,” she said.

Russian intelligence operatives were likely monitoring the activities of Orbis Business Intelligence and Steele’s allegations about Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague could have been a plant, the report said. Steele was adamant that his memos hadn’t been contaminated by Russian disinformation. But if so, the other reason for its inaccuracies wasn’t particularly appealing. If the material wasn’t disinformation, there was only one alternative. It was shit information. TWO PEOPLE HAD REFUSED to be interviewed by investigators working on the Horowitz report—Glenn Simpson and Jonathan Winer, the lawyer who had arranged Steele’s State Department meeting.

AFTER ALLASON’S REPORT PUBLICLY emerged, Orbis Business Intelligence issued a statement dismissing it as a “politically motivated” piece of fiction and adding that Allason had no knowledge of Steele’s sources. But in time, another troubling theory about the dossier would begin to gain traction. It went like this: Russian intelligence operatives, aware that Steele was collecting information about Trump and the Kremlin, fed disinformation to his sources that then got incorporated into the dossier. One journalist who came to suspect that early on was Scott Shane, an experienced investigative reporter for The New York Times. It was Shane who had enraged Simpson by telling him that the paper decided to out Fusion GPS, though Simpson and Peter Fritsch soon forgave the paper and gave a copy of the dossier to a group of its reporters in Washington, D.C.


pages: 56 words: 17,340

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky

British Empire, declining real wages, disinformation, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker

There's a long history that goes back to the earliest modern democratic revolutions in seventeenth century England which largely expresses this point of view. I'm just going to keep to the modern period and say a few words about how that notion of democracy develops and why and how the problem of media and disinformation enters within that context. EARLY HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA Let's begin with the first modern government propaganda operation. That was under the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform "Peace Without Victory." That was right in the middle of the World War I.

It was backed by the Soviet Union, the United States, Europe, the major Arab countries, and the Arab oil producers. It couldn't defeat Iran. But all of a sudden it's ready to conquer the world. Did you find anybody who pointed that out? The fact of the matter is, this was a third-world country with a peasant army. It is now being conceded that there was a ton of disinformation about the fortifications, the chemical weapons, etc. But did you find anybody who pointed it out? No. You found virtually nobody who pointed it out. That's typical. Notice that this was done one year after exactly the same thing was done with Manuel Noriega. Manuel Noriega is a minor thug by comparison with George Bush's friend Saddam Hussein or George Bush's other friends in Beijing or George Bush himself, for that matter.

Notice that this is not all that different from what the Creel Commission when it turned a pacifistic population into raving hysterics who wanted to destroy everything German to save ourselves from Huns who were tearing the arms off Belgian babies. The techniques are maybe more sophisticated, with television and lots of money going into it, but it's pretty traditional. I think the issue, to come back to my original com ment, is not simply disinformation and the Gulf crisis. The issue is much broader. It's whether we want to live in a free society or whether we want to live under what amounts to a form of self-imposed totalitarianism, with the bewildered herd marginalized, directed elsewhere, terrified, screaming patriotic slogans, fearing for their lives and admiring with awe the leader who saved them from destruction, while the educated masses goose-step on command and repeat the slogans they're supposed to repeat and the society deteriorates at home.


Turning the Tide by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, failed state, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, land reform, launch on warning, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

The real fears of U.S. planners, and the duplicity of the media, are well illustrated by the brilliant exploitation of the speech by Sandinista commandante Tomas Borge cited in chapter 3, note 3. As noted, his call for Nicaragua to become an example that would be followed by others was converted by the U.S. disinformation system into the threat of military conquest, in pursuit of a “revolution without borders.” Though the fraud was at once exposed the device was too useful to abandon and Borge’s call for a revolution without borders” is now a staple of U.S. disinformation, with columnists regularly warning that “Sandinista Stalinism” may be serious about “waging a ‘revolution without borders’.”54 The most interesting use of this fraud was in Reagan’s speech on the eve of the House vote on contra aid in June 1986, considered as a triumph of “the great communicator.”

The President claimed in July 1983 that they had “literally made a contract to establish a true democracy” with the OAS before taking power in July 1979. This claim is without foundation; Roy Gutman observes that this charge, constantly reiterated by apologists for US atrocities, was concocted as part of a “successful U.S. disinformation campaign...According to the OAS, in a July 16, 1979, telex to then General Secretary Alejandro Orfila the Sandinistas said they planned to convoke ‘the first free elections in this century’ but made no reference to timing and said nothing about creating a ‘true democracy’.”71 But although the charge has no merit with regard to the Sandinistas, it does apply to Israel; with considerably more force, in fact.

Note that this account is one that can be checked against the historical record, a fact that a rational person will use in assessing the claims made without substantiation that constitute the government’s case. Use of the term “resistance forces,” with its favorable connotations (the resistance against the Nazis, etc.), to refer to the US proxy army attacking Nicaragua from its foreign bases is a neat piece of trickery by the state disinformation machine, quickly picked up by the loyal press, which sometimes even goes so far as to intimate that Nicaraguan officials refer to the terrorist forces in this way; thus we read that “President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua said yesterday his government suspended civil liberties last week to ‘guarantee’ his army’s defeat of US-backed resistance forces,” and that “he said, however, that defeat of the resistance forces could create an even more ‘dangerous situation”’ by prompting US invasion.98 Government claims rest primarily on alleged material evidence that is classified, not a very credible tale.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

As the US Deputy Attorney General told the press, “The Department of Justice will continue to hold accountable companies who in their bid for profits violate federal law and put at risk the health and safety of American consumers.”31 Information corruption has also been a continuous feature of the Facebook environment. The turmoil associated with the 2016 US and UK political disinformation campaigns on Facebook was a well-known problem that had disfigured elections and social discourse in Indonesia, the Philippines, Columbia, Germany, Spain, Italy, Chad, Uganda, Finland, Sweden, Holland, Estonia, and the Ukraine. Scholars and political analysts had called attention to the harmful consequences of online disinformation for years.32 One political analyst in the Philippines worried in 2017 that it might be too late to fix the problem: “We already saw the warning signs of this years ago.… Voices that were lurking in the shadows are now at the center of the public discourse.”33 The guiding principles of radical indifference are reflected in the operations of Facebook’s hidden low-wage labor force charged with limiting the perversion of the first text.

Whenever anything like that happens, we don’t want it to happen and we take responsibility for it.”48 Consistent with the aims of the adaptation phase of the cycle, Bloomberg Businessweek observed of Google, “The company is trying to fight fake news without making sweeping changes.”49 Although both Google and Facebook made modest operational adjustments to try to diminish economic incentives for disinformation and instituted warning systems to alert users to probable corruption, Zuckerberg also used his super-voting power to reject a shareholder proposal that would have required the company to report on its management of disinformation and the societal consequences of its practices, and Google executives successfully fought back a similar shareholder proposal that year.50 Time would tell whether the companies’ users and customers would inflict financial punishment, and if so, how sustained that punishment might be.

From this perspective the only rational objective is the pursuit of products that snare “everyone,” not “the best products.” A significant result of the systematic application of radical indifference is that the public-facing “first text” is vulnerable to corruption with content that would normally be perceived as repugnant: lies, systematic disinformation, fraud, violence, hate speech, and so on. As long as content contributes to “growth tactics,” Facebook “wins.” This vulnerability can be an explosive problem on the demand side, the user side, but it breaks through the fortifications of radical indifference only when it threatens to interrupt the flow of surplus into the second “shadow” text: the one that is for them but not for us.


pages: 319 words: 75,257

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

The gangster politics of Trump worked in great part because the conservatism that dominated US politics in the 1980s and 1990s lost its relevance to the America of later decades. The inherited political system left a lot of people stranded for meaningful answers at the exact same time that Facebook and YouTube lowered to virtually zero the cost of spreading mass disinformation. Socially disconnected young people, and especially young men, tumbled into their own social anti-knowledge systems, just as their elders were disinformed by Fox and Sinclair. These young men looked online for serious answers to big questions. They, too, often found bigotry and conspiracy theories instead. Yet even as American conservatism stopped meaning much to people under forty, the need for something like conservatism persisted.

The second most important television news type is cable, a medium of course dominated by Fox News, now reinforced by the new Fox-on-meth One American News Network (OANN). Next to television in importance are social media. About four in ten Americans say they get news from Facebook. About two in ten also get news from YouTube.19 Facebook and YouTube are the most important conduits for alt-Right and pro-Trump disinformation. Together, Fox News and the right-wing Daily Wire accounted for about 10 percent of the top ten thousand news stories on Facebook in the first quarter of 2019.20 The single biggest advertiser on Facebook in the summer of 2019, after the Trump campaign itself, was the Epoch Times, a far-right source of pro-Trump conspiracy theories and false news.21 Meanwhile, Twitter is in danger of becoming the Fox News of the Left, policed by pile-ons by angry Twitter mobs.

Despite the favorable economy, Trump’s approval rating among black voters tumbled to an amazing 6 percent in midsummer 2019 polls.25 By then, 80 percent of black voters described Trump as racist.26 Should Donald Trump be defeated in 2020, whether he leaves the White House under his own motor power or is hustled out by the White House ushers, Trumpism will not be so easily removed from American national life. Trump himself will rave and rage on Twitter and TV after a political defeat. He will sabotage anyone who tries to lead the Republican Party in a more hygienic post-Trump direction. He will muster all the suspicion and resentment of his former supporters; he will headline a campaign of disinformation and provocation on TV, radio, and social media. What do you imagine Fox News and your father-in-law’s Facebook feed will look like post-Trump? What kind of institution will the post-Trump Republican Party be? Trump transferred a brutal style of politics from right-wing media culture into electoral politics.


pages: 137 words: 36,231

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

It follows that when semantic content is false, this is a case of misinformation. If the source of misinformation is aware of its nature, as when John intentionally lied to the mechanic, one speaks of disinformation. Disinformation and misinformation are ethically censurable but may be successful in achieving their purpose: in our example, the mechanic was still able to provide John with the right advice, despite being disinformed by him about the exact cause of the problem. Likewise, information may still fail to be successful; just imagine John telling the mechanic that his car is merely out of order. The second advantage is that [DEF] forges a robust and intuitive link between factual semantic information and knowledge.

The reader may have already thought of several examples that illustrate the problem: someone's testimony is someone else's trustworthy information; A's responsibility may be determined by the information A holds, but it may also concern the information A issues; censorship affects A both as a user and as a producer of information; disinformation (i.e. the deliberate production and distribution of false and misleading contents) is an ethical problem that concerns all three `informational arrows'; freedom of speech also affects the availability of offensive content (e.g. child pornography, violent content, and socially, politically, or religiously disrespectful statements) that might be morally questionable and should not circulate.


Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott, Jonathan Marshall

active measures, air freight, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, trade route, union organizing

Rather than recount some controversial stories, we have steered away from witnesses whose credibility has come into serious question. A scandal like Iran-Contra inevitably produces a large number o f opportunistic superwitnesses, fantasizers, and conspiracy peddlers—not to mention conscious agents o f disinformation.24 If, despite our best efforts, history proves a few o f our assertions wrong, it will hardly overthrow the larger conclusions o f this study. The first half o f this work analyzes available evidence on the way corrupt military elites, Contra leaders, the CIA, and Washington policy-makers opened the door to the cocaine trade through Central America.

A State Department report to Congress in July 1986 stated flatly that “ there is no information to substantiate allegations” that Miami-based Cuban exiles had “been a source o f drug money for . . . any . . . resistance organization.”32 In response to further congressional inquiries, the Justice Department first withheld information, then insisted that allegations had been fully investigated and refuted. The CIA went even further, declaring that any reports o f Cuban exile involvement in weapons shipments, much less drug smuggling, were the result o f a disinformation campaign.33 FBI reports made public by the subcommittee exposed those official claims as outright lies. Far from having “no information” to back up the allegations, the FBI had direct substantiation in September 1984 from Jose Coutin, a Cuban American actively involved in the Contra support effort.

A related dummy company, which did business with the same bank, purchased arms for the Contras through Manzer al-Kassar, the Syrian arms and drug broker, who also dealt with leaders o f the Medellin Cartel.13 Noriega’s personal lawyer and business representative in Geneva also set up a front to establish an airfield in Costa Rica for supplying the Contras.14 Evidence gathered by Costa Rican judicial authorities suggests that Noriega’s intelligence operatives also helped the CIA and its allies in the Costa Rican security services obstruct the investigation o f an assassination attempt against Pastora by peddling disinformation about the main sus­ 68 / Narcoterrorism, the CIA, and the Contras pect’s background. The bombing o f Pastora’s press conference at La Penca on May 30, 1984, which killed several journalists and an aide to Pastora but missed the rebel leader himself, was most likely planned by hardliners in the Contra movement close to the CIA, according to an official Costa Rican probe.


The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

His response to an NKVD report from Schulze-Boysen on 16 June was the obscene minute: ‘You can tell your “source” in German airforce headquarters to go fuck himself. He’s not a “source”, he’s a disinformer. J. Stalin.’ Stalin also heaped abuse on the Fourth Department illegal Richard Sorge, posthumously recognized as one of the heroes of Soviet intelligence, who sent similar warnings from Tokyo, where he had penetrated the German embassy and seduced the ambassador’s wife. Sorge’s warnings of impending German invasion were denounced by Stalin as disinformation from a lying ‘shit who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan’.72 Even in marginal comments, Stalin almost never used obscenity.

By March 1943, twenty-eight of the captured Second World War spies had been turned into double agents feeding disinformation to Germany. ‘In addition’, according to a top-secret MI5 report, ‘twelve real and seven imaginary persons have been foisted upon the enemy as double-cross spies.’55 Stalin and Soviet intelligence were convinced that some of its British agents were also ‘double-cross spies’. ‘Our task’, the Centre instructed its London resident, Anatoli Gorsky, ‘is to understand what disinformation our rivals are planting on us.’56* The Centre tied itself in knots as it tried to explain why, despite the British Double-Cross, some intelligence from its British agents appeared to be genuine.

Berlin has no knowledge or solid opinion about the strategic future and therefore has to let the local generals and admirals make up their own mind by giving them prompt access to all the reports that come in.’73 Ironically, some of the intelligence about which the Abwehr was most confident was a product of the British Double-Cross System. It had, for example, no doubt whatever about the reliability and importance of the disinformation fed to it in the MINCEMEAT deception.74 In February 1944, following the defection to the British of an Abwehr officer in Istanbul,* Hitler abolished the Abwehr as an independent organization, placing it under the control of Himmler and the SD. The SD believed it had gained control of a major network of Abwehr agents in Britain. In reality, all were double agents, controlled by MI5, feeding disinformation to their German case officers. The SD, however, had one major genuine agent of its own: Elyesa Bazna (codenamed CICERO), the valet of the British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen.


pages: 288 words: 81,253

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

This is perhaps no more evident than in the rise in prominence of “fake news” and disinformation. The concept of “fake news,” an intentionally false story planted for financial or political gain, is hundreds of years old. It has included such legendary practitioners as Orson Welles, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst. Disinformation is different than fake news in that the story has some true elements, embellished to spin a particular narrative. Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent with the story generally won’t question the evidence. Disinformation is even more powerful because the confirmable facts in the story make it feel like the information has been vetted, adding to the power of the narrative being pushed.

Every bet we make in our lives depends on our beliefs: who we believe will make the best president, if we think we will like Des Moines, if we believe a low-fat diet will make us healthier, or even if we believe turkeys can fly. Being smart makes it worse The popular wisdom is that the smarter you are, the less susceptible you are to fake news or disinformation. After all, smart people are more likely to analyze and effectively evaluate where information is coming from, right? Part of being “smart” is being good at processing information, parsing the quality of an argument and the credibility of the source. So, intuitively, it feels like smart people should have the ability to spot motivated reasoning coming and should have more intellectual resources to fight it.

AARP, 185 accountability, 129, 130, 135–37, 149, 150, 176, 188, 199, 204 accuracy, 129, 130, 132–34, 136, 138, 139, 145, 150, 155–56, 158, 160, 161, 171 Adventures of the Mind, 243n After-School All-Stars (ASAS), 213–15, 217 age-progression technology, 184–87 agreement, 173–74 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 127–28, 132–33, 248n All In: The Poker Musical, 91 all-or-nothing thinking, see black-and-white thinking Alou, Moises, 98, 99 American Foreign Service Association, 139–40 Anguished English (Lederer), 90n approval, 132–34 Arbesman, Samuel, 67–68, 219 Ariely, Dan, 89 Armstrong, Scott, 143 Ascent of Man, The (Bronowski), 20 assent, 173 automobile accidents, 89–90, 101, 111–12 backcasting, 218–22, 225, 226 backgammon, 244n Back to the Future movies, 177 Bailenson, Jeremy, 185 baldness, 49, 51 Bank of America Merrill Lynch, 185 Bartman, Steve, 98–100, 114, 229, 247n baseball, 84 Bartman play in, 98–100, 114, 229, 247n Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), 146–48, 153, 154 behavioral economics, 11 behavioral research, 107 Belichick, Bill, 6, 48 beliefs, 43, 44, 47–72, 76–77, 115, 122, 130 abstract, 50–52, 65–66 accuracy of, 138 based on hearing something, 49–53, 65–66 betting on, 61–62, 64–67, 72, 79–80, 84, 209 confidence in, 67–72, 135, 169 confirmatory thought and, 128 as contagious, 168 expressing, 170 formation of, 49–55, 59, 61, 65–66, 80 information and, 49–53, 55–56, 59–61, 66, 70, 94, 138–39 and processing experience, 57–59 smart people and, 62–64 stubbornness of, 59–62 Believing Brain, The (Shermer), 11–12 Benghazi attack, 92 Berkshire Hathaway, 191–93 Berra, Yogi, 96, 247n bet(s), 111–14 accountability and, 135 on beliefs, 61–62, 64–67, 72, 79–80, 84, 209 decisions as, 3–4, 43–45, 67 definition of, 44 on future, 79–80, 209 against ourselves, 45–46 winning, 130 bias, 66, 124, 131–32, 139, 157, 181n, 207 blind-spot, 62–63, 125–26 confirmatory thought and, 128–29, 132, 141–48, 155 exploratory thought and, 128 hindsight, 10, 26, 212, 227–31 Rashomon Effect and, 157–58 self-serving, 89–96, 102, 103, 108, 110–12, 115, 132, 136, 194 Binion’s Horseshoe Casino, 101, 124n bin Laden, Osama, 140, 208–9 black-and-white thinking, 29–31, 34, 67, 94–95, 97, 105 blackjack, 194–96 blind-spot bias, 62–63, 125–26 Bosnia, 140 Bossypants (Fey), 250n brain, 11–15, 53, 107, 110, 116, 122, 132, 165, 183, 188, 191, 198, 219 brain tumors, 197 Brethren, The (Woodward and Armstrong), 143 Brexit, 31–32, 231, 245n Breyer, Justice, 143–44 Bronowski, Jacob, 20 Buddhist monks, 110 buddy system, 124, 178 Burger, Justice, 143 Burke, Brian, 6 business start-ups, 29, 35 “but,” 173, 207 Caldwell, Charley, 57 Camerer, Colin, 13, 242n Cantril, Hadley, 57–58 car accidents, 89–90, 101, 111–12 cardiovascular disease, 55, 164–65 Carroll, Pete, 5–7, 10, 11, 22, 33, 35, 46, 48, 165–66, 216–18, 229, 230, 241n–42n Carstensen, Laura, 185 Catching Hell, 99 Center for Retirement Research, 184 Central Park, 220 CEO’s president-firing decision, 8–11, 33, 43, 48, 158, 229–30 certainty: illusion of, 204, 206, 207 see also uncertainty characterizations, 205 chess, 20–23, 80, 86, 91, 219, 244n Chicago Cubs, 98–100, 229 children, 45, 175–76 Christie, Chris, 92–93, 110 CIA, 140, 170 Citizen Kane, 64–65, 68–69 Clinton, Hillary, 32–33, 92, 230–31, 245n Cocteau, Jean, 98 coelacanth, 67–68 coin flips, 24–26, 244n communication: of information, 166, 173 with world beyond our group, 172–76 communism, Mertonian, 154–60, 206 comparison and competition, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110, 123, 165 compassion, 102–3, 105, 113–14 self-, 206 ConAgra, 228–29 confidence in beliefs, 67–72, 135, 169 overconfidence, 204 confidence intervals, 72 confirmatory thought, 128–29, 132, 141–48, 155, 205 conflicts of interest, 164–69, 206–7 Conrad, Lauren, 119–21, 125, 161, 175, 205 consequences, 179–80 Constitution, 156 Crawford, Jarret, 146 Crystal Lounge, 2, 75, 90 CUDOS, 153–55 disinterestedness, 154, 155, 164–69 Mertonian communism, 154–60, 206 organized skepticism, 154, 155, 169–71, 206, 224 universalism, 154, 155, 160–64, 173, 205 Daily Princetonian, 57 Dartmouth-Princeton football game, 56–59 data interpretation, 63–64, 181n Dawkins, Richard, 92n, 103 D-Day, 208 debating, 168–69 decision groups (truthseeking groups), 124–27, 188, 205, 206, 225 accountability in, 129, 130, 135–37 accuracy in, 129, 130, 132–34, 136, 139 charters for, 128–31, 133, 150, 157 communicating with world beyond, 172–76 debating in, 168–69 diversity of viewpoints in, 137–41 rules of engagement for, 150–51, 154–55; see also CUDOS social approval in, 132–34 tilt and, 199–200 decisions, 2–4, 44, 231 as bets, 3–4, 43–45, 67 consequences of, 179–80 moving regret in front of, 186–89 in poker, 116, 167, 179, 180, 188, 196–98 decision swear jar, 204–7 deliberative mind, 12–14, 16, 181n, 183, 186 Dershowitz, Alan, 32 Des Moines, Iowa, 37–43, 46, 48, 62, 66, 79, 135 detail, 158–59 devil’s advocate, 170–71 diabetes, 55, 164 disinformation, 60 disinterestedness, 154, 155, 164–69 dissent, 128, 137, 139–40, 143, 145, 148, 160, 169–73, 212, 225 Dissent Channel, 139–40, 170 diversity of opinions, 60–61, 129–30, 137–42, 145, 147–48, 150, 171, 172n, 211, 225 doctors, 81, 96 dog-to-human age ratio, 49, 50, 53 Doubleday, Abner, 53 Dreber, Anna, 149 Dr.


The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 by Robert Service

Able Archer 83, active measures, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Chicago School, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

Casey, speech to Dallas World Affairs Council, 18 September 1985, pp. 1–17: RRPL, John Lenczowsky Files, box 1, Active Measures. 32. A. A. Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War: An Insider’s Account, p. xiii. 33. Chapter and verse was supplied in a USIA memo, ‘Soviet Disinformation Campaigns in 1987’, n.d., pp. 1–4: John O. Koehler Papers (HIA), box 16, folder: Eastern Europe, 1974–1995. See also ‘The USSR’s Disinformation Campaign’: Foreign Affairs Note, State Department, July 1987: Citizens for International Civil Society (HIA), box 89, folder 1. The Pravda cartoon appeared on 31 October 1986. 34. Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation, pp. 93–4. 35. Ibid., pp. 94–5. 36.

P. ref1 Sofaer, Abe ref1, ref2 Sokolov, Sergei ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Solidarity ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Solomentsev, Mikhail ref1, ref2, ref3 Solovëv, Yuri ref1 South Africa ref1, ref2, ref3 South African Communist Party ref1 South Korean passenger plane, shooting down of (1983) ref1, ref2 South Kuriles ref1 spies see espionage spy networks see espionage SS-20 missiles ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 SS-23 missiles (‘Oka’) ref1, ref2, ref3 Stalin, Joseph ref1, ref2, ref3 Stanishev, Dmitri ref1 Star Wars movie series ref1 Star Wars programme see Strategic Defense Initiative State Department (US) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26 see also Baker, James; Haig, Alexander; Shultz, George Stepanov-Mamaladze, Teimuraz ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Stockholm talks ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Stoph, Willi ref1, ref2 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15 and Bush ref1 and Gorbachëv ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15 attitude to among West European leaders ref1 hostility towards by other governments ref1 Reagan’s commitment to see Reagan, Ronald slacking of Soviet combativeness over ref1, ref2, ref3 Weinberger’s strident advocacy of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 working on rival programme by Soviets ref1, ref2, ref3 Štrougal, Lubomír ref1 summits (US–Soviet) Camp David (1990) ref1 Geneva (1985) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Helsinki (1990) ref1 Malta (1989) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Moscow (1988) ref1, ref2, ref3 Reykjavik (1986) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Washington (1987) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Suslov ref1, ref2, ref3 Sweden ref1 Syria ref1, ref2 Taiwan ref1, ref2 Tarasenko, Sergei ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Tbilisi massacre (1989) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 technological transfer, embargo system on ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 see also jamming, radio and TV telebridges ref1 Teller, Edward ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Teltschik, Horst ref1, ref2 Thatcher, Margaret ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 anticommunism ref1 and Bush ref1 and Chernenko ref1 and coup against Gorbachëv ref1 and German reunification ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Gorbachëv ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Gorbachëv’s meeting with (1989) ref1 and Kohl ref1, ref2, ref3 and Mitterrand ref1 and nuclear disarmament ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 opposition to providing financial credits to USSR ref1 reaction to Gorbachëv’s January 1986 declaration on nuclear weapons ref1 reaction to Reykjavik summit ref1 and Reagan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and Strategic Defense Initiative ref1, ref2, ref3 talks with Soviet leaders ref1 visit to Moscow (1987) ref1 visit to Poland (1988) ref1 Tikhonov, Nikolai ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Tito, Josip Broz ref1, ref2 travel permits (USSR) ref1, ref2, ref3 Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START) ref1, ref2 Trilateral Commission ref1 troop movements, inspections of ref1 Trudeau, Pierre ref1, ref2, ref3 Tsygichko, Vitali ref1, ref2 Tuczapski, Tadeusz ref1 Turkmenistan ref1 TV jamming, see jamming, radio and TV Ukraine ref1, ref2, ref3 independence (1991) ref1 Union Treaty ref1, ref2 United States and Afghan war ref1, ref2 balance of trade deficit ref1 and Baltic states ref1, ref2 congressional elections (1986) ref1 and Eastern Europe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 economy ref1 and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait ref1 military-industrial complex ref1, ref2, ref3 neoglobalism of ref1 refusal to give financial aid to USSR ref1 relations with China ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 relations with Japan ref1 relations with Russia ref1, ref2 relations with West Germany ref1 Soviet disinformation about foreign policy of ref1 trade relations with USSR ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 United States Communist Party ref1, ref2 United States Information Agency ref1, ref2 see also Romerstein, Herb; Wick, Charles Uno, Sōsuke ref1 USSR ‘1941 syndrome’ ref1 agriculture ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 anti-American propaganda and campaigns of disinformation about US policy ref1 biological weapons ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 censorship ref1 changes in society ref1 constitutional structure ref1 declaration of emergency (1991) ref1, ref2 disappearance of atomic submarines in Sargasso Sea (1986) ref1 discarding commitment to Central America ref1, ref2 dismantling of (1991) ref1, ref2 and Eastern Europe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and Eastern Europe revolutions (1989) ref1 economy and economic problems ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 and global communism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 human rights questions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 industrial espionage see espionage information technology industry ref1 invasion of Afghanistan (1979) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 landing of German Cessna in Red Square (1987) ref1 Law on the State Enterprise (1988) ref1 limits placed on numbers of foreigners visiting ref1 as a militarized police state ref1 military expenditure ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 military-industrial complex ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 military-technical collaboration with non-communist countries ref1 oil industry ref1 and Poland ref1, ref2 pre-Gorbachëv difficulties in ref1 preparations for nuclear war ref1 restrictions on movement of citizens ref1 spread of political volatility and demonstrations (1989) ref1 spy network ref1 technological gap between the West and ref1 telephone system and lifting of quarantine of communications ref1 trade relations with US ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and world communism ref1 Ustinov, Dmitri ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Vãduva, Ilie ref1 Vaino, Karl ref1 Van Cleave, William ref1 Varennikov, Valentin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Vatican ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 see also John Paul II, Pope Vatican Radio ref1 Velikhov, Yevgeni ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Vetrov, Vladimir ref1 Vietnam ref1, ref2, ref3 Vietnam War ref1 Voice of America ref1 Vorontsov, Yuli ref1, ref2, ref3 Votkinsk installation ref1 Waigel, Theodor ref1, ref2, ref3 Wałesa, Lech ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Warner, John ref1 Warsaw Pact ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 dissolution of (1991) ref1, ref2 Washington summit (1987) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Weinberger, Caspar ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 anti-rapprochement with Soviets ref1, ref2 character ref1 and Falklands War ref1 and Geneva summit ref1, ref2 and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty negotiations ref1, ref2 and nuclear disarmament ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 political career ref1 and Reagan ref1, ref2 reform of Defense Department (US) ref1 resignation (1987) ref1, ref2 on selling advanced technology to the USSR ref1 and Shultz ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and Strategic Defense Initiative ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and US–Russian relations ref1 wanting economic sanctions against USSR ref1 West German Defence Ministry ref1 West Germany ref1, ref2, ref3 demilitarized corridor between East Germany idea ref1 economic miracle ref1 and nuclear weapons ref1 Reagan’s visit (1987) ref1 relations with East Germany ref1 relations with Eastern Europe ref1, ref2 relations with US ref1 relations with USSR ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Shevardnadze’s visit (January 1988) ref1 Soviet gas pipeline proposal ref1 see also German reunification; Germany; Kohl, Helmut Western Europe, policy towards Eastern Europe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, United States ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 USSR ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Whence the Threat to Peace ref1 Whitehead, John ref1 Wick, Charles ref1, ref2 Will, George ref1, ref2 Wolf, Markus ref1 Workers’ Party of Ireland ref1 world communism ref1, ref2, ref3 subsidizing of by USSR ref1 World Peace Council ref1 Wörner, Manfred ref1, ref2 Wyman, Jane ref1 Yakovlev, Alexander ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16 advocate for drastic reform ref1, ref2 and Afghanistan ref1 appearance and character ref1 attacks upon ref1 background ref1 and Gorbachëv ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Lithuania ref1, ref2 political career ref1 rivalry between Shevardnadze and ref1 visit to Lithuania (1988) ref1 Yanaev, Gennadi ref1, ref2 Yavlinski, Grigori ref1 Yazov, Dmitri ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Yeltsin, Boris ref1, ref2, ref3 and Baltic states’ declarations of independence ref1 and coup against Gorbachëv ref1, ref2 and dissolution of Soviet Union ref1 and Gorbachëv ref1, ref2, ref3 political comeback ref1 resignation ref1 trip to United States (1990) ref1 and Vilnius massacre (1991) ref1 wins Russian presidency election (1991) ref1 Yugoslavia ref1, ref2, ref3 Gorbachëv’s visit (1988) ref1 Yurchenko, Vitali ref1 Zagladin, Vadim ref1 Zaikov, Lev ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 Zaikov Commission see Big Five Zakharov, Gennadi ref1, ref2 Zambia ref1 Zamyatin, Leonid ref1 Zarya villa (Foros) ref1 Zhao Ziyang ref1, ref2 Zhivkov, Todor ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Zia-ul-Haq, President ref1, ref2 1.

What’s to be said about these data? Of course it’s said there that the plan has been fulfilled. But that won’t be the truth because it’s the corrected plan that’s been fulfilled whereas the plan envisaged by the national-economic plan has not been fulfilled. This is how we get a situation here where we ourselves create disinformation.26 He was saying something that was general knowledge in the leadership. What was extraordinary was the fact that he brought it up for discussion. He would not have done this if he had not thought he had Andropov’s blessing. Andropov had plucked Ryzhkov from the State Planning Commission and promoted him to the Party Secretariat as soon as he became General Secretary.


pages: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

An organism that simply ignores distinctions that might mislead (damage the design of) another organism has not been misinformed, even if the distinction registers somehow (ineffectually) on the organism’s nervous system. In Stevie Smith’s poem, “Not Waving but Drowning” (1972), the onlookers on the beach who waved back were misinformed but not the seagulls wheeling overhead. We can’t be misinformed by distinctions we are not equipped to make. Understanding what disinformation is benefits doubly from our asking cui bono? Disinformation is the designed exploitation (for the benefit of one agent) of another agent’s systems of discrimination, which themselves are designed to pick up useful information and use it. This is what makes the Ebola virus’s design an instance of camouflage. Kim Sterelny (2015, personal correspondence) has raised an important objection: Humans are representational magpies—think of how incredibly rich forager fauna and floras are—much of their natural history information has no practical value.

That term has many uses. We live in the Information Age, say the pundits, and people seem to agree, but few notice that this term also has several different meanings. Which Information Age: The age of megabytes and bandwidth? Or the age of intellectual and scientific discovery, propaganda and disinformation, universal education, and challenges to privacy? The two concepts of information are closely related and are often inextricably intertwined in discussion, but they can be made distinct. Consider a few examples: 1.The brain is an information-processing organ. 2.We are informavores. (George Miller, psychologist) 3.

(Less often noted is the fact that issuing blanks to some shooters removes an option that might otherwise be tempting on some occasions: to rebel, turning one’s rifle on the officer in command. If you knew you had a live round, that opportunity would be available for informed rational choice. You can’t use information that you don’t have.) What about misinformation, which can also accrue, and disinformation, which is deliberately implanted in you? These phenomena seem at first to be simple counterexamples to our proposed definition, but, as we will soon see, they really aren’t. The definitions of “semantic information” and “design” are linked in circular definitions, but it’s a virtuous, not vicious, circle: some processes can be seen to be R&D processes in which some aspect of the environment is singled out somehow and then exploited to improve the design of some salient collection or system of things in the sense of better equipping it for thriving/persisting/reproducing in the future.


pages: 368 words: 102,379

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

Mercola also spoke Fifth International Public Conference on Vaccination, Video Briefs, National Vaccine Information Center, 2020, https://www.nvic.org/nvic-video-briefs/2020-conference.aspx. Erin Elizabeth The Disinformation Dozen: Why Platforms Must Act on Twelve Leading Online Anti-Vaxxers (London: Center for Countering Digital Hate, 2021). “Hydroxychloroquine was more thoroughly tested” Ibid. Married couple Ty and Charlene Bollinger Michelle R. Smith, “Inside One Network Cashing In on Vaccine Disinformation,” Associated Press, May 13, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/anti-vaccine-bollinger-coronavirus-disinformation-a7b8e1f33990670563b4c469b462c9bf. The couple claims to have sold Ibid. Sayer Ji and Kelly Brogan Pandemic Profiteers.

As the pandemic hit, Kennedy, with his famous surname and organization, became arguably the leading voice of the anti-vaccine movement. He helped spread, in addition to the Bill Gates computer chip and 5G conspiracies, the dangerous lie that “the flu shot is 2.4x more deadly than COVID-19.” The CCDH analyzed the pandemic activities of Kennedy and other members of the group they dubbed “the disinformation dozen” in a 2021 report: “Pandemic Profiteers: The Business of Antivaxx.” The group found that this dirty dozen account for about 65 percent of all anti-vaccine propaganda spread on Facebook and Twitter. Kennedy’s far from the biggest beneficiary of commoditized lies. That designation falls to an osteopath named Joseph Mercola.

Many of the big players in the misinformation racket collect fees by referring susceptible people to each other’s products and propaganda, just as Instagram influencers get a cut when people click through to products they endorse. Their interconnectivity goes well beyond business. Mercola’s partner, Erin Elizabeth, is also among the “disinformation dozen.” She’s responsible for spreading memes targeting worried mothers with claims such as “Hydroxychloroquine was more thoroughly tested than the vaccines they want to mandate on your baby.” Married couple Ty and Charlene Bollinger have made millions by producing and selling multipart documentaries directly to consumers.


pages: 299 words: 88,375

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

But it was during the Cold War that the Soviet Union turned espionage into an art form. Russian spymasters launched massive collection campaigns to recruit American moles from within the FBI, CIA, and NSA. At the same time, they were pioneering desinformatsiya practices that spread disinformation and disruption in order to shape American political decisions. These active-measure (aktivinyye meropriatia) disinformation campaigns included media manipulation; use of front organizations (like the US affiliate of the World Peace Council, a secret Soviet affiliate) to sway public opinion; kidnappings; and provision of funds, training, and support to terrorist organizations, to name a few.

The needle ceased its furious scribbling and found the center of the page. I passed. * * * The intelligence community initiates new members into a tyranny of secrets. It is within this mind-set that spies and counterintelligence operatives—those who hunt the spies before they can steal, disrupt, or spread disinformation—operate. The two most important rules for a spy: don’t get caught; and if compromised, lie. A counterintelligence operative follows a similar but far more difficult mandate: say nothing about your secrets. But just as in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, eating from the tree of knowledge can have unintended consequences, and a secret can corrode from within.

In his February 6, 1980, congressional testimony, John McMahon, the CIA deputy director for operations, stated that the Soviets’ active-measures network was “second to none in comparison to the major world powers in its size and effectiveness.” The 1980s saw a number of audacious—and highly successful—disinformation campaigns. One involved spreading rumors of CIA and FBI involvement in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Another seeded foreign newspapers with articles—purportedly written by American scientists—claiming that AIDS was the result of the Pentagon’s experiments to develop biological weapons.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

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

What steps did you take prior to, on, and following the November 3, 2020, elections and the January 6, 2021, attacks to monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans? Please describe each step that you took and when it was taken. Have you ever taken any actions against a channel for using your platform to disseminate any disinformation? If yes, please describe each action and when it was taken. Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN… both now and beyond any contract renewal date?

The congresspeople wrote: “Misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices, among other issues in our public discourse. Experts have noted that the right-wing media ecosystem is ‘much more susceptible… to disinformation, lies, and half-truths.’ Right-wing media outlets, like Newsmax, One America News Network, and Fox News all aired misinformation about the November 2020 elections…. Fox News… has spent years spewing misinformation about American politics. “These same networks also have been key vectors of spreading misinformation related to the pandemic.

Somehow, these companies have escaped scrutiny and entirely dodged this conversation. That should not be the case anymore. After Wednesday’s [January 6, 2021] incident of domestic terrorism on Capitol Hill, it is time TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories. After all, it was the very lies that Fox, Newsmax, and OAN spread that helped prime President Trump’s supporters into not believing the truth: that he lost an honest and fair election.81 “Yes, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin and others are responsible for the lies they peddle to their audiences.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

The sheer magnitude of articles and their technical or policy conclusions not only provided a valuable resource to the government bureaucracy; they swamped industry’s ability to react, as they had no chance of responding with the same number and quality. Hartkopf was disarmingly candid about the positive role of untruths and disinformation, or what he called “empty phrases” in pushing forward the environmental agenda. A widely used example was “ecological equilibrium,” which Hartkopf said was meaningless. More sinister was disinformation to obscure the reality of policy trade-offs. The claim that ecology and the economy were not in conflict was one of those. “I myself have made this claim, knowing it to be less than truthful,” Hartkopf admitted.

Thanks in part to the fertilizing effect of the nitrogen content of acid rain, later surveys showed an increase of around 25 percent in Norwegian forest growth.34 Acting in concert with Norway, Dahl’s aim was to brand Britain the dirty man of Europe. The Swedish National Environmental Board knew that this was disinformation. Its own data showed that in 1980, East Germany was emitting more sulfur dioxide than Britain and was increasing its emissions whereas Britain’s were falling.35 But Britain was the politically favored target for Dahl, who was from the left wing of the Social Democrats and a frequent visitor to East Germany and other Soviet bloc satellites.

Brezhnev (1982). In 2000, a senior agent in the KGB’s successor agency defected. According to the FBI, Sergei Tretyakov “literally held the keys to a Russian intelligence gold mine.”41 At the KGB’s Red Banner Institute, Tretyakov read dozens of case studies wherein the KGB had used propaganda and disinformation. There was one the KGB was most proud of: “It created the myth of nuclear winter.”42 After NATO’s double-track decision, Andropov ordered the Soviet Academy of Science to produce a doomsday report to incite more demonstrations in West Germany. Soviet scientists had been researching dust storms and found an “anti-hot house effect” due to dust particles shutting out the sun’s rays, a story which was duly picked up by the BBC.


pages: 407

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Following a spate of high-profile kidnappings, the Ministry of Defence sent an SAS team to Brazil to train local forces in close protection skills.25 This became a growing role for the SAS which remains important today.26 Meanwhile, SIS and the Foreign Office drew on their own skills to counter kidnappings. In May 1971, SIS launched what diplomats called a ‘covert campaign of disinformation’ against the Tupamaros in Uruguay. A leftist urban guerrilla group, the Tupamaros had kidnapped British ambassador Geoffrey Jackson in Montevideo in January and his colleagues back in London turned to black propaganda and disruption to secure his release. Disinformation aimed at sowing doubts among the fighters about the continuing value of holding Jackson.27 The IRD produced an article by a French journalist with a suitably authentic revolutionary background to promote self-criticism among the Tupamaros.

The information was often true, albeit selectively edited, but ­crucially the sponsor stayed hidden. In its 1950s heyday, grey propaganda exposed what Britain saw as Soviet, nationalist, and terrorist lies in an attempt to win hearts and minds around the globe. So-called ‘black’ propaganda was far more devious—and dangerous. It could contain disinformation and was either unattributable or falsely purported to come from a different author, often to discredit the target. Examples included forged material linking Communist Party officials to illegal slush funds and subversive activity against the Kremlin or material incriminating Irish republican leaders in embezzlement.

Targeting the Gulf and Aden, it sought to use unattributable propaganda disseminated by what officials called ‘untraceable methods’ to warn of the dangers of getting too close to Nasser.18 By this time, however, diplomats back in London put the brakes on anti-Nasser operations.19 Any kind of covert action risked spoiling recent efforts to resume diplomatic relations with him. The Sharq-al-adna radio station was handed over to the BBC and opted to play more bazaar music in a lighter approach to propaganda, which proved popular for years to come.20 In return, the Soviets inserted agents inside the United Arab Republic to channel disinformation produced in Moscow and Prague. Targeting America and, to a lesser extent, OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi 130 E n d of E m pi r e the UK, forged material implicated the West in subversive activities against Arab nationalism. Eastern bloc intelligence collected signatures of senior diplomats, which could then be used in forged documents, by sending out Christmas cards to the Whitehall and Washington elite and eagerly awaiting the replies.21 British covert action in the Middle East followed a remarkably similar pattern.


pages: 231 words: 71,299

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

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

Trolls learned to gamify their tactics, overwhelming selected targets with abuse or contacting en masse the ad sponsors of journalistic outlets that had the temerity to criticize them. As Becca Lewis, with coauthor Alice Marwick, put it in a 2017 report on GamerGate’s broader consequences for disinformation online, the movement was predicated on “retrograde populism”: “Gamergate participants asserted that feminism—and progressive causes in general—are trying to stifle free speech, one of their most cherished values. They are reacting to what they see as the domination of the world by global multiculturalism and the rise of popular feminism.

As one commenter on the gaming message board Escapist Forums put it, the movement was an expression of “anger at feminists and SJWs [Social Justice Warriors, a derogatory term for leftists] trying to dictate what’s in games and screeching when things don’t meet a ‘diversity’ quota”—and its end goal was a “crazy as all get out revolution.” It’s unsurprising that these scorched-earth tactics extended to racialized abuse of critics, and purposeful disinformation generated to blur the white, male nature of the movement. Shireen Mitchell, a black female activist, recalls the racist abuse that accompanied her outspoken stance against the harassment of women online at the time. “It was one of the most public racist and sexist displays,” she told me. Having received abuse and threats after planning to participate in a South by Southwest panel on online harassment, Mitchell was accompanied by a security detail while speaking at another event about online harassment.

It’s big business—YouTube monetization can be quite lucrative as YouTubers rack up more and more subscribers—and it’s an algorithmically aided rabbit hole that can lead someone, over weeks or months or years, from trying to catch up on the latest news to believing that communist Jews are actively working to take over the globe. It’s a digital complement to right-wing disinformation purveyors like radio personality Rush Limbaugh and the slate of miscreants at Fox News; while older viewers might be sucked in via basic cable, it takes only an internet connection to inculcate younger people into a world where salvation is white of skin, where feminists are sinister harpies, where everyone “other” is to be scorned and subjugated.


pages: 450 words: 144,939

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

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

Like millions of other young Americans, he grew despondent during the COVID-19 pandemic, which left him vulnerable to the darkest impulses created by his illness. Similarly, before the attempted coup of January 6 destroyed our fundamental expectations about the peaceful transfer of power in America, the norms of our constitutional democracy had already been overrun by years of political propaganda, social media disinformation, racist violence, conspiracy theorizing, and authoritarian demagoguery. When these underlying crises turned into the private and public traumas of suicide and violent insurrection, they demolished all the core assumptions I carried around with me each day—that my children would be healthy and alive, that they would let Sarah and me know if they needed anything, that no political party or power elite would try to overthrow our constitutional democracy, that the country would continue to successfully grow beyond its historic baseline of violent white supremacy and a racial caste system.

When he went sailing off on an anti-Chinese polemic and filibuster, I would seek recognition to recount at least nineteen different occasions on which Donald Trump lavishly praised the beautiful performance of General Xi and the Chinese autocratic government in the first five months of the COVID-19 crisis. But from a public policy standpoint, all of it was just spinning our wheels. Against the GOP propaganda machine, the White House, and Fox News, there was little we could do to hold back the flood of disinformation. Amazingly, the party that had invented and railed against mythical “death panels” in the Affordable Care Act was now defending Donald Trump and his monstrous mismanagement of COVID-19 that would come to cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths, according to Trump’s own COVID-19 point person, Dr.

Trump’s lethal recklessness and incompetence in confronting the pandemic took place against the background of an already violent, hateful, and polarized culture he was bringing into existence. Four years of increasing white supremacist violence, all the sneering derision directed at immigrants, all the deranged QAnon conspiracy theories, all the odd lying and disinformation about COVID-19, all the racial and ethnic poison injected into the social media—all of it combined to take a dark toll on public mental and emotional health. In the Trump period generally, and its last brutal year specifically, Americans reported huge jumps in anxiety, depression, and alcohol and substance abuse, especially the industry-facilitated addictive abuse of opioids, which in turn fueled a heroin addiction epidemic.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

On June 15, Fancy Bear created the Guccifer 2.0 persona on Twitter and Facebook to throw people off its track. It also created a fake website, DCLeaks.com, to disseminate the information. On July 6, Guccifer 2.0 used WikiLeaks to release the Clinton emails to a wider audience. While the FBI had never seen DDoSers use disinformation campaigns before, it made sense given the times. Disinformation was in the air. When Mirai was released, it spread like wildfire. In its first twenty hours, it infected sixty-five thousand devices, doubling in size every seventy-six minutes. Andrew McGill from The Atlantic magazine set up a fake smart toaster—a so-called honeypot—in his house to see how long it would take Mirai to infect it.

The simple explanation is that Guccifer 2.0 was a sock puppet, an online identity created by Russian intelligence for deception. His abrupt entrance was a hasty response to the exposure of the spying operation. According to security researcher the Grugq, “That’s how a blown operation was rapidly transitioned into an influence operation and a disinformation and deception campaign, which started to mitigate the blowback.” The Grugq also noticed that Guccifer 2.0 uses))), which is more common in Russia than:). The journalist Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (in bold, below) reached out to Guccifer 2.0 and tried to engage the hacker in Romanian: Ai vrea să vorbească în română pentru un pic?

Paras, Josiah, and Dalton were close to finishing their new botnet, and they were preparing to conquer, like European sovereigns in the early modern period. They eliminated rival botnets by having their bots use the Linux “kill” command to remove Qbots, including VDoS’s. They then sealed the devices by closing common ports so no other malware could get a toehold. Paras also prepared the battlefield by launching a disinformation campaign. He opened fake accounts on Facebook and Reddit under a new name, OG_Richard_Stallman. Richard Stallman is the father of open-source software and the person whose account Robert Morris Jr. used to release his worm. Paras would use this handle when trying to extort money from particular DDoS victims (though he continued to use Anna-Senpai when posting on Hack Forums).


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

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

Since these efforts are themselves part of the simulacrum, they slip easily back into the cycle of meaningless information. The more sophisticated propagandists recognize this, and instead work with the grain of the collapse of meaning. For example, the BBC alleges that Russian disinformation campaigns no longer bother to promote a single narrative, but instead flood the internet with so many competing versions of a story that no one knows what to think.70 It would be prudent to assume that all parties now involved in disinformation are using similar techniques. The problem is not that the internet is a web of lies. Of course it is. In 2016, a team of researchers published a study of online conduct which found that less than a third of users claimed to be honest about themselves on the internet.71 But the machine was invented to help us lie.

When Trump used the term, he was using it to describe media organizations publishing a document concerning his alleged relationships with the Russian state that, they admitted, they couldn’t verify. Moreover, this definition of ‘fake news’ would cover many stories critical of Trump. For example, the Washington Post alleged that Russian hackers had ‘penetrated’ the US electricity grid during the election, and that a range of left-of-Clinton websites were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Both stories, aggressively promoted by the Post, were later humiliatingly edited, their central claims withdrawn.22 Those bewailing ‘fake news’, overwhelmingly journalists from the legacy media, are also missing the real scoop. ‘Fake news’ is old news. After all, exactly when was the era of unalloyed truth-telling?

Dan Hind, The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim it, Verso: London and New York, 2008. 47. Now a similar rhetorical move . . . Kakutani, The Death of Truth, p. 45. 48. In surprise bestsellers . . . David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, Arris Books: Devon, 2004; Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, War on Truth: Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism, Olive Branch Press: Ithaca, NY, 2005; Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry, The Overlook Press: London, 2006. 49. As Emma Jane and Chris Fleming’s analysis . . . Emma A. Jane and Chris Fleming, Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid, Bloomsbury: New York and London, 2014 pp. 4–5.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

A decade ago he adopted the pseudonym Will Hart: See Will Hart, Alien Civilizations: Scientific Proof of Their Existence (Privately published: Createspace Publishing Platform, 2004). had identified Harry Rositzke of Operation Chaos: Don Schmitt, “William Moore: UFO Opportunist or Agent of Disinformation?” Open Minds TV, July 23, 2014, http://www.openminds.tv/william-moore-ufo-opportunist-agent-disinformation/29056. “infuses every engagement with both credibility and content”: See Dr. Rita Louise, business website, http://soulhealer.com. he described a visit he’d made to Mexico: “True Origins of Aliens,” Just Energy Radio, July 18, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Under Operation Edgar Allan Poe, the two Bills produced a theory attuned to their own paranoia and narcissism: that the Soviets were behind Palme’s killing and were now working hard to achieve their second objective: “laying the blame at the doorstep of the ELP [European Labor Party], as a first step in dismantling the LaRouche movement globally.” LaRouche liked this theory, because it was all about him. Their hefty report, A Classical KGB Disinformation Campaign, proved nothing about the assassination, but contained much evidence that the LaRouchians inhabited a Ptolemaic universe with themselves as its center. Legitimate press interest in the European Labor Party was “a coordinated wave of lies and innuendo” unleashed from Moscow. Journalists who described the party’s gruesome methods were subject to personal attacks.

In 1985 he had taken on the running of the Labor Committees Biological Holocaust Task Force, in which capacity he advocated putting AIDS patients into quarantine camps and insisted, against scientific evidence, that the disease could be spread by insect bites and casual human contact. (He made a panic-mongering tour of Europe, recycling stories about the synthetic nature of the virus, a theory born in a disinformation campaign by the KGB.) His most operatic act of fealty occurred in September 1990, when delegates from the Labor Committees took over the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, to listen to a speech recorded by LaRouche in his cell. During this period the organization decided, under the influence of LaRouche’s wife Helga, to make overtures toward right-wing Catholic organizations.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

Kang Sheng goes to Moscow At the beginning of 1933, Kang Sheng was sent to Moscow to join the Comintern leadership. The revolution in Europe was floundering with Hitler’s rise to power. It was imperative that it be revived in Asia. Kang was to be trained in new Soviet methods of state security and espionage. He was also involved in agitprop, as propaganda was called in those days. Agitprop, disinformation and deception were all weapons as important as intelligence-gathering. Towards the end of 1933, Kang published an article in the Comintern journal entitled “The 6th Kuomintang campaign and the victory of the Chinese Red Army”. Perhaps this was a straightforward analysis seeking to trigger worldwide proletariat solidarity with the Chinese revolution.

At least, that is how I imagined it forty years later on a guided tour of Dixia Cheng, the vast city beneath Beijing that Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao built during the Cultural Revolution as protection in the event of a nuclear or chemical attack ordered by the Kremlin. The launch of a vast KGB disinformation campaign in China led to a renewed burst of activity on this vast, secret project. A legendary Russian agent named Victor Louis was, unwittingly, the cause. He wrote regularly for the press in the West, publishing scoops from impeccable sources with the help of his friend Yuri Andropov, the new head of the KGB.

At that time, you were not even a member of the Central Committee.”3 The Soviets’ loathing of Kang Sheng was all the more intense because, like Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, he had once been an approved agent of the GPU, the KGB’s predecessor, from which he had learned everything he knew about espionage techniques: dissimulation, disinformation, manipulation—and, as was to become quite clear, how to turn a situation completely on its head. Many members of the Chinese leadership thought that Kang Sheng was pushing the anti-Soviet line too hard. But the purpose of these and subsequent attacks was to impress both Mao and Khrushchev; Kang was playing a game of both internal and international politics.


On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, land reform, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

In the original, Borge says that “this revolution transcends national boundaries,” making it clear that he means ideological transcendence and adding: “this does not mean we export our revolution. It is enough—and we couldn’t do otherwise—for us to export our example . . . we know that it is the people themselves of these countries who must make their revolutions.” This is the statement that was deformed and then exploited by the U.S. disinformation system—including the media, as we shall see—as proof that Nicaragua actually boasts of its planned “aggression.” Here we see a clear example of the switch between the two variants of the domino theory: the real concern of privileged elites over the demonstration effect of successful development becomes transmuted, for the public, into a pretended concern that the U.S. will once again be at the mercy of yellow dwarves with pocket knives, who will conquer everything in their path, finally stealing all we have, while the “bound and throttled giant” is unable to prevent this aggression.

And in fact that policy is being continued until today; so, for example, China supports Pol Pot who attacks Cambodia from bases in Thailand and this is part of the American alliance designed to make Cambodia and Vietnam suffer as much as possible. QUESTION: How is it possible that the intelligent elites of the U.S. are not the people in sympathy with the protest movements, considering that the common masses in the U.S. are victims of the Mass Media propaganda and disinformation in television, etc.? How can you explain this fact? ANSWER: We are mostly intellectuals, and intellectuals like to consider themselves as being very smart and enlightened. And of course intellectuals are the people who write history and do sociology. So the picture of the world that intellectuals present is that the stupid masses are ignorant and understand nothing while the intellectuals are fine, intelligent, ethical, and far-sighted people.

Particularly offensive are projects that would provide services to private farmers, since these would not only benefit the country economically but would also harm the propaganda image of a totalitarian state carefully crafted by the U.S. ideological system. These crimes are intolerable for the reasons that I have already discussed. It was necessary to respond in the usual manner: by international terrorism, embargo, pressures on international institutions and allies to withhold aid, a huge campaign of propaganda and disinformation, threatening military maneuvers and overflights as part of what the Administration calls “perception management,” and other hostile measures available to a powerful and violent state. Near hysteria was evoked in the U.S. government when Nicaragua accepted the draft of the Contadora treaty in 1984, shortly after Ronald Reagan had informed Congress that the purpose of the contra war was to compel Nicaragua to accept the treaty and Secretary of State Shultz had praised the draft treaty and denounced Nicaragua for blocking its implementation.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Finally, it’s essential to realize that search engines and social media platforms are the battlefield of an online war, with hostile attackers using the same tools that were originally developed by advertisers to track their customers, and then by scammers and spammers to game the system for profit. In addition to the Russian-sponsored social media disinformation campaigns, the Trump campaign’s Project Alamo used highly targeted disinformation to discourage Clinton voters from going to the polls. These posts were referred to as “dark posts” by Brad Parscale, who led the campaign’s social media efforts, private posts whose viewership is tightly targeted so that, as he put it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.”

All were cooked up by Macedonian teens out to make a buck. The story about the “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide”—also totally fake but shared half a million times—was the work of a Southern California man who started in 2013 to prove how easily disinformation spread, but ended up creating a twenty-five-employee business to churn out the stuff. Facebook users were not the only ones spreading these stories. Many of them circulated by email and on Twitter, on YouTube, on reddit, and on 4chan. Google surfaced them in Google Suggest, the drop-down recommendations that appear for every user as they begin to type a query.

Social media and its advertising business model has taken the process to its logical conclusion. Targeted social media campaigns will almost certainly be a feature of all future political campaigns. Online social media platforms—and society as a whole—will need to come to grips with the challenges of the new medium. The moment of crisis may come when we realize that the tools of disinformation and propaganda are the very same tools that are routinely used by businesses and ad agencies to track and influence their customers. It is not just political actors who have a vested interest in spreading fake news. Vast sums of money are at stake, and participants use every tool to game the system.


pages: 719 words: 209,224

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Garthoff has offered a suggestion, which remains unproven, that U.S. disinformation persuaded the Soviets that the United States was continuing work on biological weapons after the Nixon decision. According to Garthoff, the FBI fed disinformation to the Soviets that the United States was undertaking a clandestine BW program. See Garthoff, "Polyakov's Run," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 56, no. 5, September/October 2000, p. 37. It is known there was a disinformation campaign for chemical weapons, which is described by David Wise in Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War over Nerve Gas (New York: Random House, 2000). Details of a disinformation campaign on BW are not known.

Many others with imagination, determination, guile and conscience sought to rein in the danger. The goal of the book is to tell the story of how the Cold War arms race came to an end, and of its legacy of peril--and to tell it from both sides. Too often in the past, the history has been obscured by American triumphalism, which reflected only one side, or by secrecy and disinformation in Moscow, which masked what really happened inside the Soviet Union and why. With fresh evidence, it is now possible to see more clearly the deliberations that unfolded behind closed doors in the Kremlin during Gorbachev's tumultuous rule. It was there, in arguments, meetings, documents and phone calls, that Gorbachev, deftly maneuvering and cajoling, faced off against the entrenched and powerful forces of the military-industrial complex and began a radical change in direction.

The KGB agents in Bonn, Brussels, Copenhagen, London, Oslo, Paris, Rome and Lisbon were told to watch out for such things as "a sharp increase in the activity of all forms of intelligence," especially on the readiness of Warsaw Pact forces; possible positioning of agents to awaken sleeper cells in the East to "operate in wartime conditions;" closer coordination between the CIA and Western spy agencies; an "increase in the number of disinformation operations" against the Soviet Union and its allies; "secret infiltration of sabotage teams with nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons into the countries of the Warsaw Pact;" and expanding the network of sabotagetraining schools and emigres and setting up sabotage teams with them. The instructions strongly reflect the police state mentality of the KGB.


pages: 485 words: 148,662

Farewell by Sergei Kostin, Eric Raynaud

active measures, car-free, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, index card, invisible hand, kremlinology, Lao Tzu, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

Despite Ludmila’s vigorous denial and the absence of evidence, the “gift-taking” version was largely substantiated not only in the investigation documents, but also in the corridors at the PGU. Disinformation had always been the institution’s strong point. By firmly establishing Ludmila’s greed, they improved Vetrov’s image in the eyes of his colleagues. It came as a surprise to see how easily well-informed and rational men such as intelligence operatives accepted this version, which was a complete fabrication. Was it male solidarity? Rejected men, many of whom had courted Ludmila to no avail? It is plausible. The disinformation campaign launched within Directorate T seems to have succeeded. Today, its officers admit that Ludmila’s image had been made up following Vetrov’s case.

The French agency knew that its former target had been posted in Canada. Later on, when it received Vetrov’s offer to collaborate, the DST should have or could have asked its Canadian colleagues, under any pretext, for additional information about him. Nothing substantiates such an assumption. Could it be disinformation on the part of Peter Marwitz, cleverly concealed in the many relevant corrections he made to the text of Bonjour Farewell, after his correspondence with Sergei Kostin had become a friendly exchange? It is never pleasant to suspect somebody you like of having a hidden agenda, but it is the essence of the trade to be good at being likeable, at earning people’s trust, and to keep this trust even after a few little lies.

He could prolong his existence and partially redeem himself by participating in an intelligence game. Making the most of Vetrov, the PGU had a chance to deceive the DST and, through it, all of the West. “I grant you, the issue presented itself each time a mole was uncovered,” said Igor Prelin.5 “But not to disinform the other side. In this situation, it was extremely difficult to hide the fact that the mole was arrested; in time, the adversary was bound to find out. From a counterintelligence standpoint, the most severe blow dealt to the adversary, after an agent had been identified, was to catch the handler red-handed.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

conspiracy theories and 9/11 “truthers”: Zeynep Tufekci, “YouTube, the Great Radicalizer,” New York Times, March 10, 2018, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/YouTube-politics-radical.html. the profit from the clicks: Jonathan Albright, “Untrue-Tube: Monetizing Misery and Disinformation,” Medium, February 25, 2018, accessed August 21, 2018, https://medium.com/@d1gi/untrue-tube-monetizing-misery-and-disinformation-388c4786cc3d. “can just breed and multiply”: Sheera Frenkel, “She Warned of ‘Peer-to-Peer Misinformation.’ Congress Listened,” New York Times, November 12, 2017, accessed August 21, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/technology/social-media-disinformation.html. had a Democratic staffer murdered: Amanda Robb, “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” Rolling Stone, November 16, 2017, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877; Colleen Shalby, “How Seth Rich’s Death Became an Internet Conspiracy Theory,” Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-seth-rich-conspiracy-20170523-htmlstory.html.

Microtargeting is a superb tool for sowing division, because it means each gnarled, pissed-off group can get its own customized message affirming its anger. The spectacle appalls Ghosh. After he left Facebook, he wrote a report for New America arguing that “the form of the advertising technology market perfectly suits the function of disinformation operations.” Political misinformation “draws and holds consumer attention, which in turn generates revenue for internet-based content. A successful disinformation campaign delivers a highly responsive audience.” Adtech, the engine of rapidly scaling web business, is “the core business model that is causing all the negative externalities that we’ve seen,” he tells me. “The core business model was to make a tremendously compelling and borderline addictive experience, like the Twitter feed or Facebook messenger or the News Feed.”

In 2014, they began hounding female video-game writers and developers, in a campaign that became known as “Gamergate.” Meanwhile, noxiously racist harassment has followed many black celebrities or thinkers who’ve raised their voices on the service. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Twitter became—much like Facebook and YouTube—flooded with bots controlled by a Russian troll factory, intent on spreading disinformation often to prop up Trump and exacerbate partisan hatreds. Even Trump himself wielded Twitter like a club, singling out individual critics—including, once, a teenage girl—who’d then be harassed by Trump’s followers. Stone, Dorsey, and I were right, it turns out, about the power of Twitter to create new forms of joint behavior.


pages: 69 words: 15,637

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Danilo Kiš, disinformation, fake news, Milgram experiment, post-truth, Rosa Parks

If we have no control over who reads what and when, we have no ability to act in the present or plan for the future. Whoever can pierce your privacy can humiliate you and disrupt your relationships at will. No one (except perhaps a tyrant) has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive. The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation. Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification. What is worse, when media followed the email bombs as if they were news, they betrayed their own mission. Few journalists made an effort to explain why people said or wrote the things they did at the time.

Ukrainian and Russian journalists who sniffed the air in the Midwest said more realistic things than American pollsters who had built careers on understanding the politics of their own country. To Ukrainians, Americans seemed comically slow to react to the obvious threats of cyberwar and fake news. When Russian propaganda made Ukraine a target in 2013, young Ukrainian journalists and others reacted immediately, decisively, and sometimes humorously with campaigns to expose disinformation. Russia deployed many of the same techniques against Ukraine that it later used against the United States—while invading Ukraine. When Russian media falsely claimed in 2014 that Ukrainian troops crucified a small boy, the Ukrainian response was rapid and effective (at least within Ukraine itself).


Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

In a 1979 coup, Maurice Bishop and his followers had taken power in this island country of 110 thousand, and though their actual policies were not as revolutionary as Castro's, Washington was again driven by its fear of "another Cuba", particularly when public appearances by the Grenadian leaders in other countries of the region met with great enthusiasm. Reagan administration destabilization tactics against the Bishop government began soon after the coup, featuring outrageous disin-formation and deception. Finally came the invasion in October 1983, which put into power individuals more beholden to US foreign policy objectives. The US suffered 135 killed or wounded; there were also some 400 Grenadian casualties, and 84 Cubans, mainly construction workers. The invasion was attended by yet more transparent lies, created by Washington to justify its gross violations of international law.

He and his country would have to be put in their place. In 1981, US planes shot down two Libyan planes in Libyan air space. Five years later, the United States bombed one of Qaddafi's residences, killing scores of people. There were other attempts to assassinate the man, operations to overthrow him, economic sanctions, and a major disinformation campaign reporting one piece of nonsense after another, including conspicuous exaggera-tions of his support for terrorism, and shifting the blame for the 1988 bombing of PanAm 103 to Libya and away from Iran and Syria when the Gulf War campaign required the support of the latter two countries.

And no matter how cynical they've grown about electoral politics at home, few of them harbor any doubt that the promotion of free and fair elections has long been a basic and sincere tenet of American foreign policy. In light of this, let us examine the actual historical record. Philippines, 1950s Flagrant manipulation by the CIA of the nation's political life, featuring stage-managed elections with extensive disinformation campaigns, heavy financing of candidates, writing their speeches, drugging the drinks of one of the opponents of the CIA candidate so he would appear incoherent, plotting the assassination of another candidate. The Agency covertly set up an organization called National Movement for Free Elections, the better to promote its agenda, and trusting citizens joined up all over the country.


Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, clean water, David Brooks, disinformation, failed state, Farzad Bazoft, guns versus butter model, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

Furthermore, Washington can readily contrive non-compliance with the agreement on the part of Nicaragua, confident that its fabrications will be prominently displayed on the front pages, as frequently in the past. Familiar examples include the allegations about Sandinista support for Salvadoran guerrillas, a doctrinal truth presupposed as proven in media commentary despite the complete failure to provide credible evidence; and the disinformation operation with regard to Soviet MIGs timed carefully to overcome the (minimal) danger of honest coverage of the unwanted Nicaraguan elections of 1984—one of Oliver North’s capers, so it appears11—these elections being a non-event according to official doctrine and media commentary.12 Adherence to the agreement by the Reagan administration, in contrast, would be completely unverifiable, and as the hearings on which all eyes had been focused had demonstrated beyond any conceivable doubt, the administration could proceed as before, if it chose, to provide new armaments to its proxy forces and to direct continuing attacks against Nicaragua, whatever agreements were reached on paper.

In contrast, it is hazardous for Nicaragua to agree to the conditions of the Arias plan, or any other. If it lives up to them, the fact will be suppressed or converted by the U.S. propaganda system into a proof of their totalitarian nature, exactly as was accomplished in the case of the 1984 elections by the U.S. government disinformation system with the media meekly doing their duty.18 Furthermore, there is little reason to suppose that the U.S. will adhere to any formal agreement that is reached, so that subversion, economic pressures and the other measures available to a terrorist superpower are likely to continue, perhaps eliciting a Nicaraguan reaction that will violate the formal agreements and thus call forth still greater U.S. terror in retribution.

But at a deeper level, the immediate public response illustrates the insight of the 18th century European Enlightenment that the value and meaning of freedom are learned through its exercise, and that the instinctive desire of “all free peoples to guard themselves from oppression” (Rousseau) may be repressed among a subordinated population, effectively removed from the political system, disengaged from the struggle against state and other authority, and in general, objects rather than agents.2 In the absence of organizational forms that permit meaningful participation in political and other social institutions, as distinct from following orders or ratifying decisions made elsewhere, the “instinct for freedom” may wither, offering opportunities for charismatic leaders to rally mass popular support, with consequences familiar from recent history. The attitude of the state authorities towards the public is revealed still more clearly by what one Reagan official called “a vast psychological warfare operation” designed to fix the terms of debate over Nicaragua, a vast disinformation campaign called “Operation Truth”—Goebbels and Stalin would have been amused. The campaign was largely successful, along with similar operations with regard to Libya, international terrorism, the arms race, and numerous other matters. The pioneers of modern totalitarianism would also have nodded their heads in approval over the formation of a State Department Office of Public Diplomacy, reported to be controlled by Elliott Abrams under the supervision of the National Security Council, dedicated to such maneuvers as leaking “secret intelligence [that is, constructions of state propaganda disguised as intelligence] to the media to undermine the Nicaraguan government.”


pages: 497 words: 161,742

The Enemy Within by Seumas Milne

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, corporate governance, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, Etonian, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, union organizing, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, éminence grise

Meanwhile, a good part of MI5’s ‘counter-subversion work’ – which the security service itself claims to have abandoned – has been absorbed by the police, both in the form of the Special Branch and newer outfits such as the National Domestic Extremism Unit and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (both originally under the control of the opaque and unaccountable Association of Chief Police Officers). They have already become notorious for the infiltration of undercover agents and agents provocateurs into environmental, animal rights, anti-racist and other protest groups, as well as for disinformation campaigns, while evidence has grown of systematic Special Branch collaboration with private corporations to blacklist trade unionists. Of course, the global blanket surveillance of mobile phone, email and internet traffic by the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ – revealed by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 – is on another scale entirely from the then unprecedented operations they carried out against the British miners’ union and its international solidarity network in 1984–5.

He had acted for the NUM over its receivership imbroglio and then discovered in 1990 that he had not been told what was going on behind the scenes. ‘He got the wrong end of the stick. He was fond of Arthur, he liked all of them, but he felt betrayed and it made him act irrationally.’ Both Scargill and Heathfield think that Lightman was privately fed choice morsels of disinformation by his nameless informants, which shaped the nature of the report. ‘I always wonder in inquiries of this sort whether the establishment gets to these people,’ Heathfield mused in the final stages of the 1990 campaign. As time wore on, he became less philosophical about the matter. ‘I have nothing but contempt for Gavin Lightman,’ he said later.

Windsor himself traces his alienation from the NUM leadership to his Libyan mission and Scargill’s behaviour on his return, complaining that the publicity around the contacts made it almost impossible to get a mainstream job outside the union. They were ‘at Scargill’s mercy’, as Angie Windsor put it. But Libya also gave Windsor a powerful weapon, which he wielded to pulverizing effect – twice over.3 A CORNER-SHOP TERRORIST The NUM’s Libyan connection has been long buried in a morass of claim and counterclaim, lies and disinformation. At the centre of the affair is Mohammed Altaf Abbasi, a Kashmiri political exile and small-time businessman who came from Pakistan to live in Britain in the mid 1960s. At the time of the 1984–5 coal strike, Abbasi – a British citizen – was living a sort of double life in the style of Superman’s Clark Kent.


pages: 594 words: 165,413

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy

Ada Lovelace, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, financial independence, impulse control, LNG terminal, operational security, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, trade route, Upton Sinclair

Ryan had trained himself to be objective. He ran through the four alternatives he had considered, careful to examine each in detail. This was no time to allow personal views to intrude on his thinking. He spoke for ten minutes. "I suppose there's one more possibility, Judge," he concluded. "This could be disinformation aimed at blowing this source. I cannot evaluate that possibility." "The thought has occurred to us. All right, now that you've gone this far, you might as well give your operational recommendation." "Sir, the admiral can tell you what the navy'll say." "I sorta figured that one out, boy," Moore laughed.

These Alfas and Victors appear to be racing for our coast, almost certainly with the intention of establishing an interdiction force—effectively a blockade of our Atlantic coast." "Blockade," the president said, "an ugly word." "Judge," General Hilton said, "I suppose it's occurred to you that this is a piece of disinformation aimed at blowing whatever highly placed source generated this report?" Judge Moore affected a sleepy smile. "It has, Gener'l. If this is a sham, it's a damned elaborate one. Dr. Ryan was directed to prepare this briefing on the assumption that this data is genuine. If it is not, the responsibility is mine."

While one might recognize the inequities of life under Communism and yearn for justice, religious freedom, a chance to develop as an individual, another might simply want to get rich, having read about how greedy capitalists exploit the masses and decided that being an exploiter has its good points. Ryan found this interesting if cynical. Another defector type was the fake, the imposter, someone planted on the CIA as a living piece of disinformation. But this kind of character could cut both ways. He might ultimately turn out to be a genuine defector. America, Ryan smiled, could be pretty seductive to someone used to the gray life in the Soviet Union. Most of the plants, however, were dangerous enemies. For this reason a defector was never trusted.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

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

I later learned: Entous, “What Fiona Hill Learned in the White House.” left-wing political activities: Emily Tamkin, The Influence of Soros: Politics, Power, and the Struggle for an Open Society (New York: HarperCollins, 2020). was apologetic: Entous, “What Fiona Hill Learned in the White House.” traded in disinformation: Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,2020). “Soros conspiracy”: Hannes Grassegger, “The Unbelievable Story of the Plot Against George Soros,” BuzzFeed News, January 20, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hnsgrassegger/george-soros-conspiracy-finkelstein-birnbaum-orban-netanyahu.

When he decided to intervene in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he unleashed the Russian security services to use tactics abroad that they had already successfully deployed to quash Russia’s opposition and keep domestic political dissent and social protests in check. Russia’s intervention came right out of a Cold War “active measures” textbook of the kind I had studied since the 1980s. Russian operatives employed propaganda, disinformation, and deception. As later American government public and independent press reports would reveal, the Russians used a sophisticated combination of new cybertools, alongside the state-backed media, to hack the email messages of prominent American political figures, disseminate leaked documents, and amplify inflammatory news items.

I also got a card from the Hungarian ambassador, who realized things had gotten out of hand. Roger Stone, for his part, was completely unrepentant. I now knew at first hand that this was the way that Trump and some (although not all) of the people in his circle pressed their agendas. They traded in disinformation and weaponized it, just like the Soviets had during the Cold War and Putin still did in Russia. “Soros Mole” was a particularly useful label. Once applied, it could bring someone down. After the Infowars episode, I started to pay close attention to how “Soros Mole” was used. Others noticed too.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Science lost the battle because of the political influence of corporations that produce fossil fuels as well as of those firms that heavily consumed them. Many of these firms and their various trade associations had established effective disinformation campaigns involving so-called think tanks, while some politicians from regions that produced fossil fuels promoted distortions and outright lies about the science. In a situation where private interests were creating a public miasma of falsehoods and deception it was all too easy for the general public to discount the risks. Europe was less distracted and divided by disinformation campaigns from fossil fuel companies and emerged early on as a global leader on the climate issue. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a former research chemist, respected the scientific warnings and, also driven by her determination to break the power of the coal-mining unions, lent her support in 1989 to the concept of negotiating the UN Framework Convention.

And it has proved, in the words of Pope Francis, that ‘technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups’. These are heavy conclusions for people to accept. No one wants to admit to being duped by disinformation or blinded by a myth, and people in positions of privilege rarely examine the basis for that privilege. Perhaps, most deeply, the climate crisis breaks the promise of progress. And so, even today, many people who are not necessarily climate-change ‘deniers’ resist meaningful action, refuse to acknowledge just how broken our economic systems are, and deny how much damage industry disinformation has done. / People in positions of power and privilege refused to acknowledge that climate change was a manifestation of a broken economic system. 1.8 Tipping Points and Feedback Loops Johan Rockström Scientifically, it is now well established that Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where our globalized world constitutes the largest driver of change on Earth.

Naomi Oreskes When future historians ask, ‘Why didn’t people take action to stop the climate crisis when they had known about it for decades,’ a prominent part of the answer will be the history of denial and obfuscation by the fossil fuel industry, and the ways in which people in positions of power and privilege refused to acknowledge that climate change was a manifestation of a broken economic system. Scientists, journalists and activists have documented the many ways the fossil fuel industry spread disinformation about climate change to prevent action. Much of this work has focused on the industry Goliath ExxonMobil.In the 1970s and ’80s, Exxon’s own scientists informed them of the threat of climate change caused by their company’s products. However, from the 1990s onwards the company promoted a public message of high scientific uncertainty, insisting that policy action was at best premature and perhaps unnecessary.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

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

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

While the British government had initially denied any involvement by nefarious actors using platform tech to influence the referendum, a damning report released by the British Parliament in February 2019 found just the opposite.10 The report indicated that there was indeed a possibility that the Brexit vote had been influenced by Russian actors, and that at the very least there were big questions about the ongoing role of disinformation in elections, questions that might require a reworking of electoral law, which the committee in charge of the investigation found was “not fit for the purpose” of dealing with companies like Facebook, which “intentionally and knowingly violated both data privacy and anti-competition laws.” As MP Damian Collins put it, “Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalized ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day.

But Google was only marginally more responsive to those first signs of election manipulation in the wake of 2016, and it turned out to have played a major role as well. Its subsidiary YouTube was a host to much of the pre-election hate that was stirred up by actors both abroad (including the same Russian agents that were active on Facebook) and at home.7 The 2016 election, Brexit, and the continued role that Russia plays in online disinformation underscore the fact that the very cohesion of society is at stake in this new digital revolution. We are experiencing a crisis of trust in this country; we’ve lost faith in our institutions, our leaders, and the very systems by which society is governed. As tempting as it might be to point a finger straight at the White House, this is not all about the current administration.

Yet, if changing their business model compromised profits, then it was clear which road the platforms would choose. “It took me a very long time to accept that Zuck and Sheryl had fallen victim to overconfidence,” says McNamee.20 Even as evidence piled up, following the U.S. Senate’s election meddling report, that Facebook and other platforms had been used to spread disinformation and suppress votes, “I wanted to believe that [they] would eventually change their approach.” It wasn’t to be. Surveillance Capitalism on Steroids If election manipulation were the only way in which Big Tech was undermining democracy and civil liberty, it would be bad enough. But it’s not.


pages: 434 words: 117,327

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

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

It remains unclear whether Trump can take advantage of these divisions in order to consolidate his power, but the possibility cannot be dismissed. Can It Happen Here? An aspiring dictator would do best by pushing against all these margins rather than trying to crush the institutional barriers seriatim. Imagine that Trump simultaneously: (1) harasses only the toughest and most critical journalists while encouraging a squid cloud of disinformation that keeps the public in the dark about his mistakes and failures; (2) defies Congress only in carefully selected cases where his goals are popular and Congress is divided; (3) harasses agencies that pose a threat to his power (intelligence agencies?) while lavishing resources and attention on those that support him (immigration agencies?)

While a majority of Americans reported to Pew after the 2016 election that fake news had caused “a great deal” of confusion about current events, 84 percent described themselves as at least somewhat confident in their own ability to discern real from fake.1 This confidence may well be misplaced, as a dramatically altered media environment in the United States gives propaganda and falsehoods far greater scope for influence than at any time in our history. One possible source of our relative complacency now is that Russia’s attempts to meddle in our democracy proved largely unsuccessful during the Cold War. Back then, the short- and long-term aims of Soviet influence and disinformation operations—so-called active measures—were simple: discrediting, and weakening, countries with opposing political agendas. In 1982, just months before succeeding Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov told Soviet foreign intelligence officers abroad to more directly incorporate these “active measures” into their standard work.

Analogous efforts aimed at Margaret Thatcher during the UK’s 1983 general election had also come up short, as she, too, won reelection in a landslide. Reagan’s victory was obviously overdetermined, but, even had the US presidential election been close, the Soviet Union faced huge obstacles during the Cold War in influencing the American electorate—or voters in other democracies—with its propaganda and disinformation. Indeed, as historian Christopher Andrew and former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin observed in their definitive account of KGB activities in the West, Reagan’s landslide “was striking evidence of the limitations of Soviet active measures within the United States.”5 While it is not easy to quantify the impact of active measures, there is no question that foreign powers like Russia and China, or non-state actors like ISIS, today have a much greater ability to use “fake news” or “alternative facts” to influence a democratic electorate than they did during the Cold War.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

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

Thus, even protective plans can seem aggressive, as in the case of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Popularly known as Star Wars, SDI would have relied on lasers in space to shoot down Soviet missiles. Had it worked, it would have upset a fragile balance of deterrence (mutually assured destruction via nuclear annihilation). Now, LAWS, automated cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns threaten to disrupt long-settled expectations about the purpose and limits of international conflict. We must find new ways of limiting their development and impact. War may at first appear as a state of exception, where ordinary ethical reasoning is suspended (or at least radically circumscribed).

A failure among the de facto sovereigns of the internet to distinguish between stories on the real Guardian and the “Denver Guardian” is not simply a neutral decision to level the informational playing field. Rather, it predictably accelerates propaganda tactics honed by millions of dollars of investment in data, PR, and spin-doctoring. Shadowy quasi-state actors are well practiced in the dark arts of bias, disinformation, and influence.89 Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows. In our time, for better or worse, vast conglomerates like Facebook and Google effectively take on the role of global communication regulators. They must take responsibility for this new role or be broken up in order to make way for human-scale entities capable of doing so.

Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2314.html; Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online (New York: Data and Society, 2017), https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/DataAndSociety_MediaManipulationAndDisinformationOnline.pdf. 53. On the distinction between speech and conduct, see, for example, Claudia Haupt, “Professional Speech,” Yale Law Journal 125, no. 5 (2016): 1238–1303. 54.


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The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Eventually, the computer network operations were labeled “cyber,” in part due to the Clinton administration, to the eternal frustration of language purists. The Russians, however, never saw cyber war and propaganda as separate. From before the Russian Revolution, they had been masters at spying, deception, and disinformation. They had Russian words and phrases for their tools, such as maskirovka, disinformatia, and kompromat. It was literally part of their military’s checklist. The advent of computer networks just gave them another place to practice spying, deception, and disinformation when permitted by civilian authorities. Putin not only permitted, he ordered. In the words of Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former CSO, “Their [U.S. adversaries’] dream is when most Americans say [about the election], ‘I don’t have a choice in this.’”

Putin’s strategy is to divide us, so if you respond from a divided perspective, you really play into his hands.” Together, along with a team on both sides of the Atlantic, they created the Policy Blueprint for Countering Authoritarian Interference in Democracies, an action plan for defending against hybrid war. The ASD is transatlantic because the Russian cyber and disinformation operations haven’t just been directed at the United States. In fact, they had tested them extensively in Europe before bringing them to America. “Our European friends had been sounding the alarm for a long time and maybe, we thought, we should start listening to them in ways that we hadn’t been.”

To assure a minimum level of scrutiny, Congress should by law require social media to look for and delete bots and foreign entities pretending to be Americans. The Federal Trade Commission, which has a decent record of protecting consumers online, should rise to the challenge and issue regulations governing disinformation campaigns on the internet. While they are at it, Congress should take the minimal step of requiring online political ads to disclose who paid for them, and then ban foreign money from ads supporting candidates or causes. Simon Rosenberg would also have political parties and candidates sign a voluntary and public pledge that they will not use fake personas on social media or engage in the kind of bot and troll operations pioneered by the Russians.


pages: 198 words: 59,351

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

No, Facebook and the other big tech companies are, plainly, tearing the social fabric to threads, and pulling people apart. Just fire up your computer and marvel at the news of the day, at all the angry people behind the avatars, fighting with one another and with bots about the news, and about the meaning of the news. Witness how global and local politics have been corrupted into a form of unrelenting disinformation warfare. See organized trolling campaigns fomenting violence against minority groups throughout the world. Observe the mobbing of political dissidents by mass campaigns from below, and the repression of the same dissidents by state surveillance from above. Revisit 2016 and watch the technologies of the new big tech companies mobilize to propel a disreputable internet troll into the highest office of the most powerful country in the world.

In this short book we will range widely in topic and time, permitting ourselves to linger far from some of the questions that internet users and tech analysts today consider most pressing: the outsized power of the tech monopolies; the racism built into AI applications in security, social media, and credit-rating algorithms; the variations on the trolley problem to which self-driving vehicles give rise; the epidemic of disinformation and the corollary crisis of epistemic authority in our culture; internet mobs and the culture wars; and so on, ad nauseam. For the most part, this aloofness is intentional. This book does describe itself as a “philosophy” of the internet and, while there will be much disagreement about what that might mean, most of us can at least agree that a philosophy of something, whatever else it may be, has the right to zoom out from that thing and to consider it in relation to its precedents, or in relation to other things alongside which it exists in a totality.

It is, in short, a delayed achievement of the Enlightenment. How Wikipedia has managed to synthesize all these strands so successfully, without taking the same troubling turn that social media in general have taken (for Wikipedia’s open editing platform makes it a variety of social media) toward disinformation and a general muddying of the distinction between truth and rumor, remains an important question. As Jonathan Zittrain has observed, inverting the old line about Marxism, Wikipedia works well in practice, but not in theory.7 One of the keys to its success is that the openness of Wikipedia’s entries to editing, deletion, and expansion is not a free-for-all.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

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

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

Nelson and Harsh Taneja, “The Small, Disloyal Fake News Audience: The Role of Audience Availability in Fake News Consumption,” New Media & Society 20, no. 10 (2018): 3720–37; and for a review of the nuanced literature on social media and democracy: Joshua A. Tucker et al., “Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature,” Hewlett Foundation, March 2018, https://hewlett.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Social-Media-Political-Polarization-and-Political-Disinformation-Literature-Review.pdf. 96 For guidance on overcoming these limitations and building a more democratic digital public sphere, see Joshua Cohen and Archon Fung, “Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere,” in Digital Technology and Democratic Theory, ed.

What is at stake, therefore, is our ability, and our children’s, to think critically and decide for ourselves what we want and how to behave.40 History has taught us that preserving this ability is critical in the face of propaganda and power concentration. In the digital era, it is particularly crucial as we grapple with deep fakes, fake news, and coordinated disinformation campaigns aimed at altering the very basis of reality. Yet concentrations of power are not immutable. It is always up to us to agitate, innovate, and orchestrate to change the power hierarchy, as many Google employees have shown us. CURBING THE POWER OF BIG TECH In March 2018, it came to light that Google had entered into a contract with the U.S.

To begin with, increased surveillance can squash protest and dissent, as activists like Tope know all too well.93 Platform algorithms wired for profits spread controversial, inflammatory content to those most susceptible to engage with it94—content that is often blatantly false. By deciding what information we see and what opinions we hear, social media amplifies political polarization, while spreading disinformation and fake news.95 Unregulated and nascent, hostile and profit-driven, the digital public sphere today falls woefully short of its democratic potential.96 Though no simple prescription exists to counter these threats, one element is clear: While the world of business and the global economy have been drastically transformed in the past half-century, our democratic institutions have yet to catch up.


pages: 204 words: 61,491

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, classic study, disinformation, global village, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Lewis Mumford, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the medium is the message

It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world.

Allen Smith, John, Description of New England smoke signals Socrates Solomon Sontag, Susan Sophists Spectator sports “Star Itek” (TV show) Steele, Richard, Guardian Steinbeck, John Steiner, George Stiles, Ezra Story, Joseph Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Streep, Meryl Sullivan, Big Tom surgery, televised Swaggart, Jimmy Swain, William Swift, Jonathan, A Tale of a Tub Taft, William Howard Talbot, William Henry Fox Tale of a Ttib, A (Swift) Tatler Technics and Civilization (Mumford) technology and medium, distinctions between telegraph telephone television; as education; education for control of; as entertainment ; as epistemology; as junk; as myth; as politics; popularity of American programs abroad; as religion; as technology vs. medium television commercials ; as political discourse television news shows ; appearance and credibility of newscaster ; discussion following The Day After (ABC movie); as disinformation; music on ; “Now ... this” mode of discourse Tennent, William Teresa, Mother Terry, Reverend Thoreau, Henry David; Walden Thoth (Egyptian god) Tocqueville, Alexis de; Democracy in America “The Tonight Show” (TV show) Toyota transportationh-century Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, A (Edwards) “Trivial Pursuit” (game) Truman, Harry truth, media as Tumer.


pages: 546 words: 176,169

The Cold War by Robert Cowley

Able Archer 83, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transcontinental railway

Did that futility apply to the operation as a whole? Was the huge effort to record, transcribe, translate, categorize, cross-reference, and evaluate the sea of tapped material also for nothing? Or worse than nothing: Did the Soviets, as several agents later claimed, feed the taps with massive disinformation? Operation Gold seems cut to the current fashion of dismissing most espionage as a scandalously exorbitant con. Writing after examining the archives on their respective sides, many experts—from Markus Wolf to John le Carré to Phillip Knightley—concluded that the tunnel's practical value in the Cold War was extremely limited.

In that view, the massive tunnel adventure can be seen as a telling display of the futility of espionage in general and the CIA's efforts in particular. Former BOB officers disagree, as might be expected. Recovering from the Sniper's seemingly crushing revelations, they continued to sing the tunnel's praises. Denying that they were duped by disinformation fed through it, they cited selected Soviet evidence to bolster their rebuttal. In general, they say, the tunnel treasury—1,750 intelligence reports by September 1958, based on 90,000 translated messages or conversations—was a huge asset even two years after the taps were shut down. In 1957, for example, an East German BOB operative fired from her housekeeping job for General Pitovranov (during a Soviet security campaign to eliminate German employees) managed to land another job in Karlshorst, this one for East Germany's counterintelligence chief, General Karl Linke.

To protect its secret that it knew the American secret—thus shielding Blake as an intelligence source—the First Directorate willingly compromised other KGB departments, together with fellow intelligence services and the Soviet army in Germany. Not even General Pitovranov was told about the tunnel until Blake's reassignment, in a normal rotation, from London to Berlin's SIS station. Whether some disinformation was leaked into the torrent of genuine stuff coursing the cables may never be known. Whether it's true, as Markus Wolf believes, that his side never would have discovered the tunnel without Blake's tip-off is also a moot question. But Operation Gold does reveal some of espionage warfare's ironies.


pages: 891 words: 253,901

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, independent contractor, information retrieval, Internet Archive, land reform, means of production, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ted Sorensen

Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008), 368. 251Arbenz was showered with abuse: “Guatemala: Battle of the Backyard,” Time, Sept. 20, 1954. 252Hunt claimed that he had spread the word: Ann Louise Bardach, “Scavenger Hunt,” Slate, Oct. 6, 2004. 252“They were trying to break him down”: Author interview with Erick Arbenz. 253The agency’s disinformation campaign began immediately: See Roberto Garcia Ferreira, “The CIA and Jacobo Arbenz: History of a Disinformation Campaign,” Journal of Third World Studies 25, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 59–81. 254The tragedy was “trapped in his head”: Ibid. 254Hunt . . . continued to track closely the man: Ann Louise Bardach, “Scavenger Hunt.” 255Arbenz’s beloved daughter, Arabella: Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King (New York: Macmillan, 2012), 206. 256But Maria Arbenz always believed that her husband had been assassinated: Author interview with Erick and Claudia Arbenz. 257Jacobo and Maria Arbenz were the Kennedys of Guatemala’s fledgling democracy: Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–54 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 134–47. 259The powerful influence of the United Fruit Company: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 102–7. 260Foster made a discreet tour of Central America: Peter Chapman, Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), 84–85. 260a “Communist-type reign of terror”: New York Times, June 16, 1954. 261Dulles assembled his Guatemala task force in the White House: David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 49–51. 262an “opéra bouffe”: New York Times, June 22, 1954. 262Arthur Hays Sulzberger was extremely accommodating: New York Times, June 7, 1997. 263the CIA had no qualms about compiling a “disposal list”: Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh, eds., “CIA and Assassinations: The Guatemala 1954 Documents,” National Security Archive, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/. 264the CIA began pressuring him to purge Guatemala: Stephen M.

The CIA was afraid of him—an educated, articulate reformer who had stood up to the local elite and the U.S. government. He was a big threat to these powerful interests.” For the rest of the exiled Guatemalan leader’s life, the CIA was determined to strip away whatever shred of respectability still clung to him. The agency’s disinformation campaign began immediately after Arbenz’s downfall, with a stream of stories planted in the press—particularly in Latin America—alleging that he was a pawn of Moscow, that he was guilty of the wholesale butchery of political foes, that he had raided his impoverished country’s treasury, that he was sexually captivated by the man who was the leader of the Guatemalan Communist Party.

Meanwhile, the Trujillo regime spread the word that Galíndez was “suffering from a persecution complex” and had likely disappeared for personal reasons. Phony Galíndez sightings were reported throughout Latin America and as far away as the Philippines. At the same time, the CIA disseminated other disinformation about Galíndez to its friendly press assets, claiming that the missing scholar had absconded with more than $1 million of CIA funds, which the agency allegedly had given him to set up an anti-Franco underground in Spain. Other CIA documents, which circulated as high as Dulles’s office, tried to brand Galíndez as “a witting tool of the Communists.”


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

Well, it’s Kremlin-directed international terrorism. 15 This stuff was crafted from the first moment—and furthermore, it was all utterly transparent right from the very beginning, like I was writing about it as early as 1981. 16 The media pretend they don’t understand it, scholarship pretends it doesn’t understand it, but it’s been as predictable as a broken record: they put it on in 1981, and it’s still playing. The whole media campaign on terrorism started with a series of C.I.A. disinformation releases about Libya. In 1981 the C.I.A. leaked a story to the press about U.S. efforts to assassinate Qaddafi, in the hope that this would lead Qaddafi to some kind of erratic reaction which we could then use as an excuse to bomb him. Okay, that was exposed: the first reference to C.I.A. disinformation about Libya appeared in Newsweek in August 1981, when Newsweek stated that it had been subjected to a disinformation campaign by the government. 17 Since then, there have been about a half-dozen similar cases in which Washington floated some lunatic story about Libya and the media bought it, then discovered later that it was disinformation and pretended they were all surprised; I mean, at some point you’d think they would begin to ask what’s going on, but apparently not.

One interesting thing was put on the record, this famous 42-page document that they referred to; I don’t know if any of you saw that. 10 See, the government would not allow secret documents to appear, but they did permit a summary to appear, which the judge presented to the jury saying, “You can take this to be fact, we don’t question it anymore because it’s authorized by the government.” That doesn’t mean it’s not disinformation, incidentally; it means that this is what the government was willing to say is the truth, whether it’s true or not is another question. But this 42-page document is kind of interesting. It outlines a massive international terrorist network run by the United States. It lists the countries that were involved, the ways we got them involved.

Okay, that was exposed: the first reference to C.I.A. disinformation about Libya appeared in Newsweek in August 1981, when Newsweek stated that it had been subjected to a disinformation campaign by the government. 17 Since then, there have been about a half-dozen similar cases in which Washington floated some lunatic story about Libya and the media bought it, then discovered later that it was disinformation and pretended they were all surprised; I mean, at some point you’d think they would begin to ask what’s going on, but apparently not. And some of these cases were completely crazy—there was a story about Libyan hitmen wandering around Washington, S.W.A.T. teams on alert patrolling the White House, that kind of thing. It was all total madness. 18 Well, every one of these confrontations with Libya has been timed for some domestic purpose. The big one, the bombing of Libya in April 1986, was timed for the contra aid vote in Congress—the point was to build up a lot of hysteria beforehand, and it kind of worked: they rammed through a big aid package a month or two later. 19 It was all a complete set-up, totally prefabricated.


pages: 417 words: 109,367

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century by Ronald Bailey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climatic Research Unit, commodity super cycle, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic transition, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, energy security, failed state, financial independence, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Neolithic agricultural revolution, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, phenotype, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, rewilding, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, systematic bias, Tesla Model S, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, yield curve

As is usual with such confabs, the UN arranged for youth representatives to meet. At one such session, a young Kenyan announced his opposition to GMOs. Why? Because he had heard that GMOs weakened the immune systems of Africans so that they would more easily succumb to AIDS. From whom could he have gotten this disinformation? What could be more demoralizing than to believe that white scientists from rich countries had devised a technology that aimed to kill you? In 2003, I watched a Brazilian member of the Friends of the Earth repeatedly yell at a group of poor Mexican women to whom food made with biotech ingredients was being distributed that it was “contaminated” and “toxic” and would harm their children.

In 2013, some Filipino “farmers” rampaged through the fields where the IRRI was growing the Golden Rice variety. The “farmers” were later identified as anti-biotech activists who have worked with Greenpeace in the past to block other biotech crop varieties. Frankly, the scientific community has been far too passive for way too long in confronting the disinformation campaigns of anti-biotech groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. But the Golden Rice atrocity finally aroused researchers. In August of 2013, Science magazine published a strong editorial, “Standing Up for GMOs,” condemning activists for their anti-scientific attacks on crop biotechnology.

Despite this clear record of safety, the statement continues, “The anti-GMO fever still burns brightly, fanned by electronic gossip and well-organized fear-mongering that profits some individuals and organizations.” Hooray! It’s great that thousands of researchers have finally called out Greenpeace and other anti-biotech activist groups for peddling and profiting from their disinformation. In 2014, researchers in Germany and California published another study that calculated that the delay in getting Golden Rice into the fields of poor farmers in India has resulted in the loss of 1.4 million life-years in India that would otherwise have been saved. As the study noted, Golden Rice is “a cost efficient solution that can substantially reduce health costs.”


pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

When I spoke to former president Yushchenko on the phone later that year, he argued that Russia’s tactics, online and off, have one single aim: “to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, to make its government look incompetent and vulnerable.” He lumped the cyberattacks together with the Russian disinformation flooding Ukraine’s media, the terroristic fighting in the east of the country, and his own poisoning years earlier—all underhanded moves aimed at pulling Ukraine to the east or painting it as a broken nation. “Russia will never accept Ukraine being a sovereign and independent country,” he told me.

When Galeotti published his take on Gerasimov’s speech in July 2014, titling his post “The ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ and Russian Non-linear War,” he saw in the speech a prescient explanation of the strategy Russia had already used in the earliest months of its Ukrainian invasion. Even before any signs of a cyberwar had come to light, Russia was secreting troops across the border out of uniform, flooding the Ukrainian media with disinformation, and exploiting internal instabilities. But when the GRU’s meddling in the U.S. presidential election emerged two years later, it suddenly seemed to suggest an even more far-reaching and insidious example of the ideas Gerasimov described, now put into practice. As the frenzy around Russia’s election-related hacking grew in late 2016 and 2017, the Gerasimov Doctrine began to be referred to in mainstream Western media as the key to understanding all Russian warfare.

The notion was repeated widely enough that Galeotti himself felt the need to step back from it, pointing out that Gerasimov had hardly been the first to suggest waging hybrid wars that extended past the traditional military front—the Georgian war offered a clear example five years earlier—and that his “Gerasimov Doctrine” wasn’t even a formal or comprehensive doctrine so much as a momentary peek into the evolution of Russian military thinking. But in early 2018, after Sandworm had been connected directly to the Russian military, I couldn’t help but see how Gerasimov’s ideas explained Sandworm’s actions, too. The “informational confrontation” Gerasimov suggested wasn’t necessarily limited to disinformation or propaganda. In fact, both Galeotti and Giles emphasized to me that there is no distinction in common Russian vocabulary between “information war” and a concept of “cyberwar” that suggests disruptive or physical consequences of hacking. Both fall under the same term, informatsionnaya voyna.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Here’s a straightforward example of how it works. SUPREMELY FAKE “It’s not the tweets, it’s the retweets that get you in trouble.… You see something that looks good and you don’t investigate it.” In a social media world of fake news and political disinformation, those are wise words (and ironic ones, considering who said them). Political disinformation goes nowhere unless its recipients spread it to their friends, and they spread it to theirs, and so on—which makes it critical to short-circuit this process when it reaches us.8 One of Donald Trump’s first acts on assuming the presidency in 2017 was to nominate a successor to Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

Either justification would be valid, but when we think about the positive examples, it’s easier to think of reasons favoring them. There was no deception in the conventional sense in this study. The researchers presented true anecdotes about real founders, but those anecdotes were not representative or typical of company founders. Similarly, disinformation campaigns can be successful—and evade conventional attempts to “fact-check” deception—without containing explicit lies or fake news as long as they choose real examples selectively enough.15 THE POSSIBILITY GRID By now, it’s clear that we tend to make decisions using only information about the planes we see and rarely even think of the ones that didn’t come back.

Chabris, “The Most Successful and Influential ‘Outlier’ Americans Come from a Surprisingly Narrow Range of Elite Educational Backgrounds,” submitted to PLoS ONE, 2022. A list of “unicorns” in 2015 was published in S. Austin, C. Canipe, and S. Slobin, “The Billion Dollar Startup Club,” Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2015 [https://www.wsj.com/graphics/billion-dollar-club/]. 15. The philosopher Åsa Wikforss made this point in her chapter “The Dangers of Disinformation,” in The Epistemology of Democracy, ed. H. Samaržija and Q. Cassam (London: Routledge, 2023). 16. Browne’s conviction: J. Nickell, “Psychic Sylvia Browne Once Failed to Foresee Her Own Criminal Conviction,” Skeptical Inquirer, November–December 2004 [https://web.archive.org/web/20050727083155/http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_6_28/ai_n6361823].


pages: 415 words: 102,982

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

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

Russell Brandom, “Facebook Design Flaw Let Thousands of Kids Join Chats with Unauthorized Users,” Verge, July 22, 2019, www.theverge.com/2019/7/22/20706250/facebook-messenger-kids-bug-chat-app-unauthorized-adults. 68.  Samantha Murphy Kelly, “Facebook Says It’s Moving Forward with Instagram for Kids Despite Backlash,” CNN Business, July 27, 2021. 69.  “House Hearing on Combating Online Misinformation and Disinformation,” C-SPAN.Org, March 25, 2021, www.c-span.org/video/?510053-1/house-hearing-combating-online-misinformation-disinformation. 70.  Deepa Seetharaman, Georgia Wells, and Jeff Horwitz, “The Facebook Files: Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Its Research Shows—Internal Documents Show a Youth Mental-Health Issue that Facebook Plays Down in Public,” Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2021. 71.  

The best way to sell something is to convince potential buyers that you’re giving them what they need. People desperately wanted to believe that the government had the virus under control or that it would go away on its own—or better yet, that it didn’t really exist. Harms to children are collateral damage of the marketing techniques employed to spread disinformation about the coronavirus. While kids weren’t the intended audience, they certainly suffered. At a minimum, children’s lives were upended, their schooling interrupted, and their parents stressed. For many kids, the consequences were even more devastating—they lost parents and caregivers and descended into poverty.

That’s when Google launched Be Internet Awesome, school-based lessons and activities designed to teach the company’s version of “digital citizenship and safety” to third through seventh graders.55 The timing wasn’t coincidental. After coasting along on consumers’ love of all things digital, tech companies had begun facing unprecedented public criticism. The previous few years saw a significant uptick in concern about the industry’s culpability in promoting disinformation, scams, assaults on privacy, various digital addictions, cyberbullying, children’s exposure to pornography, and more. Google wasn’t the only Big Tech company receiving bad press (Meta, for instance, was under fire for enabling Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election). But in 2015, Google was the subject of three high-profile Federal Trade Commission complaints from advocacy groups.


Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline by Steven K. Kapp

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, book value, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, demand response, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, epigenetics, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Internet Archive, Jeremy Corbyn, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, slashdot, theory of mind, twin studies, universal basic income, Wayback Machine

Groups like the Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD) and the Lovaas Institute anchored the provision of therapy based in applied behavioral analysis designed to “recover” autistic children, alongside the parent-based advocacy organization Cure Autism Now (which the similar organization Autism Speaks absorbed that year). Meanwhile, groups such as Talking About Curing Autism (TACA) and Generation Rescue (both represented around this time by Jenny McCarthy, “Ph.D. in Google Research” [6]) spread potentially deadly disinformation including vaccine skepticism and chelation therapy. Amid this hostile climate, I decided to earn an actual Ph.D. (in educational psychology) at the heart of the medical model of autism research, the University of California Los Angeles, to learn the thinking and language of mainstream science to better critique them.

Indeed, Kathleen Seidel (Chapter 7) has hosted neurodiversity.com as a non-autistic parent, without significant protests that an autistic does not 1 Introduction 13 own the domain name (Chapter 7). The historic archives, posts by autistic and non-autistic guests on debates or issues, and Seidel’s counters to disinformation like false, dangerous treatments for and beliefs of causes of autism have demonstrated the movement’s alliance with like-minded parents and impactful commitment to science. Inspired by Sinclair’s Autreat, Autscape (Buckle, Chapter 8) provides the longest-running ongoing example of physical “autistic space”: an annual conference mostly by and for autistic people, which has demonstrated the possibilities and limits of inclusion.

And when the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (www.autisticadvocacy.org) demands “nothing about us without us,” they are taking their rightful seat at the head of the autism roundtable, rather than trying to bar the concerns and questions of non-autistic parents like me from those discussions entirely. I also had to confront flaws in my own thinking as my understanding of neurodiversity evolved. I fought against autism-vaccine disinformation because such statements are provably false. But neurodiversity activists like Emily Paige Ballou (chavisory.wordpress.com) helped me understand that not only do vaccines “have nothing to do with autism,” but framing autism as an “injury,” or even saying “don’t worry, vaccines don’t cause autism” is still making my son’s neurology into something to be feared rather than understood and accepted—and that is both stigmatizing and counterproductive.


pages: 572 words: 179,024

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, drone strike, Jim Simons, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, zero day

The CIA would learn from this experience: it could use the public’s preconceptions as well as the media’s desire to tell a story to its own benefit. Civilians could unwittingly propagate significant disinformation on the CIA’s behalf. In Central Intelligence Agency parlance, there are two kinds of strategic deception: cover and disinformation. Cover induces the belief that something true is something false; disinformation aims to produce the belief that something false is in fact true. In other words, cover conceals the truth while disinformation conveys false information. When the CIA disseminates false information, it is always intended to mislead. When the press disseminates false information that helps keep classified information a secret, the CIA sits back and smiles.

“Alarming news is coming from Cuba at present, news that the most aggressive American monopolists are preparing a direct attack on Cuba,” Khrushchev told the group. Barnes believes Khrushchev “may have been referring to our messing with them with our Hawk missiles homing in on their planes.” Were that the case, Khrushchev had a valid point. But the mercurial dictator had his own difficulties in sticking to the facts. Disinformation was a hallmark of the Soviet propaganda machine. To a roomful of Cuban diplomats, many of whom knew otherwise, Khrushchev falsely claimed, “What is more, [the Americans] are trying to present the case as though rocket bases of the Soviet Union are being set up or are already established in Cuba.

This wilderness, Angleton said, was the product of a myriad of KGB deceptions and stratagems that would one day ensnare, confuse, and overpower the West. Angleton believed that the Soviets could manipulate the CIA into believing false information was true and true information was false. The CIA’s inability to discern the truth inside a forest of Soviet disinformation would be America’s downfall, Angleton said. James Jesus Angleton allegedly had as many enemies inside the Agency as inside the KGB, but Richard Helms trusted him. Helms and Angleton had known each other since World War II, when they worked in the OSS counterintelligence unit, X-2. In the 1960s, in addition to acting as the liaison between the CIA and the FBI, Angleton controlled the Israeli “account,” which meant he provided Helms with almost everything Helms knew about Israel.


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Just six minutes after his first Tripathi tweet, Luke Russert tweeted again, saying, “It’s still early w unconfirmed reports, but if Redit [sic] was right with the Sunil Tripathi theory, it’s changed the game 4ever.” Reddit wasn’t right. Three years before social networks would fuel a vicious cycle of fake news—often aided by Russian disinformation outlets, domestic right-wing meme warriors, and politically minded propagandists—Reddit had seeded an entirely incorrect and highly damaging news cycle. Two hours later, around 5 a.m. the entire theory fell apart. NBC reported that Tripathi was not a suspect. All of the online speculation, of which Reddit was a primary hub, had indeed turned into what the moderators and the press had feared: a witch hunt

This sort of plotting happens in massive private-message threads on Twitter, in Facebook groups, on private chat servers such as Discord, and, very overtly, on 4chan’s /pol, a “politically incorrect” board that had been created by 4chan’s founder in 2011 to siphon off and contain the overtly xenophobic and racist comments and memes from other wings of 4chan. This mostly off-Reddit organizing then plays out on Reddit as vote brigading, or attempting to silence individual voices by downvoting them into oblivion. Other products were meme generation and dissemination, harassment campaigns, and propagation of disinformation, largely aiming to disseminate far-right viewpoints. Brigading had long been against the site’s rules, but this activity was difficult to track, and almost impossible to differentiate from regular Reddit activity due to the fact that it looked an awful lot like normal Reddit activity: Those taking part were coming from disparate IP addresses, mostly domestic, and most of which otherwise interacted typically with the site.

In it, he mostly delivered one-liners in his flamboyantly brash style about his love for “daddy.” He also called Ted Cruz a “weird amphibian loser” and referred to feminists as “obese.”) Another constituency growing around this time, it would later become known, was Russian propagandists, apparently in an effort to sow disinformation and discord among the American electorate. Reddit later identified 944 user accounts associated with a Kremlin-tied troll farm; the largest posters were active on The_Donald, using upvoting schemes to make their posts more popular. While most of the accounts’ efforts were ineffective, a few were successful; one posted a sex video that falsely claimed to include Hillary Clinton, and it received more than one hundred thousand upvotes.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

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

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

Indeed, as I gave talks about this book in the weeks after the election, I could only note in my many public talks that “as I’ve argued for years about the harm toward women and girls through commercial information bias circulating through platforms like Google, no one has seemed to care until it threw a presidential election.” Notably, one remarkable story about disinformation (patently false information intended to deceive) made headlines about the election results. This new political landscape has dramatically altered the way we might think about public institutions being a major force in leveling the playing field of information that is curated in the public interest. And it will likely be the source of a future book that recontextualizes what information means in the new policy regime that ensues under the leadership of avowed White supremacists and disinformation experts who have entered the highest levels of public governance.

In short, Daniels argues that using racial formation theory to explain phenomena related to race online has been detrimental to our ability to parse how power online maps to oppression rooted in the history of White dominance over people of color.12 Often, group identity development and recognition in the United States is guided, in part, by ongoing social experiences and interactions, typically organized around race, gender, education, and other social factors that are also ideological in nature.13 These issues are at the heart of a “politics of recognition,”14 which is an essential form of redistributive justice for marginalized groups that have been traditionally maligned, ignored, or rendered invisible by means of disinformation on the part of the dominant culture. In this work, I am claiming that you cannot have social justice and a politics of recognition without an acknowledgment of how power—often exercised simultaneously through White supremacy and sexism—can skew the delivery of credible and representative information.


pages: 241 words: 75,417

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

The massive and coordinated hacking operations used by Russia to interfere in American, French, and other European elections highlighted the vulnerability of Western democracies to clandestine attacks by clever adversaries. Although Macron believed that Trump was in fact correct in his frequent harangues about Europeans needing to spend more for their own defense, he realized that purchasing more troops, tanks, bombs, and submarines would not protect Europe from cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns. If Europe was ever going to achieve an enduring strategic partnership with Russia, there would have to be a greater level of cooperation and understanding with Moscow about the uses and abuses of advanced technologies in the future. As one of the West’s youngest and most consequential leaders, Macron felt comfortable thinking in terms of the next three decades, unlike most of his peers.

Putin and his military strategists have expressed amazement at how effective their methods have been in sowing discord and disarray across Europe. The Kremlin’s financial and political support for right-wing populist nationalist parties, such as France’s National Rally, the Northern League in Italy, Austria’s Freedom Party, Hungary’s ruling Fidesz Party, and the Alternative for Germany, has targeted voter resentments in its disinformation campaigns. Moscow has capitalized on the failure of mainstream parties in the West to respond effectively to public anxieties about the impact of immigration on national identity, the growing divide between rich and poor, and the frustrations of young people seeking sustainable employment. These social problems are exploited by Moscow’s social media campaigns in ways that elicit a sympathetic response from aggrieved groups in the West.

In the Baltic states, for example, Moscow has frequently used social media campaigns to stir up protests among ethnic Russians in Latvia and Estonia who complain about not being allowed to vote or receive full citizenship rights. Putin enjoys further leverage in his dealings with European leaders because of the importance of Europe’s trade with and investment in Russia, the levels of which are nearly ten times those of the United States. Russia’s disinformation strategy has generally sought to deepen political divisions across Europe by supporting the causes of both right- and left-wing populist parties against the ruling establishment, often through clever social media campaigns ahead of elections. When Macron and other Western leaders have vehemently objected to Russia’s actions, Putin has responded either by denying responsibility for any such attacks or by claiming that Russia is merely engaging in retaliation against Western propaganda.


Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America Into the Space Age by Robert Stone, Alan Andres

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, feminist movement, Gene Kranz, General Motors Futurama, invention of the telephone, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, out of africa, overview effect, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration

But this time the biological specimens died when the cabin depressurized during the return voyage, a detail unreported to the world press at the time. The reentry was equally problematic, ending with a parachute failure and crash landing. Nevertheless, the Russians made every effort to save face by celebrating Zond 6 as a success. The Soviet Union then commenced a disinformation campaign designed to convince the world that Russia would attempt a piloted circumlunar mission in December. In fact, no such plans were being considered. In addition, a KGB colonel stationed in the United States was instructed to plant rumors at Cape Kennedy that Apollo 8’s Saturn V had been sabotaged.

On East German television, a news program informed its viewers that space stations and unmanned satellites were far more important; the Moon was a pointless destination and Apollo little more than a symptom of capitalism’s failure. But, unlike some sensationalist American magazines that had made the case that the entire Soviet space program was, in fact, a clever propaganda hoax, there was no active Soviet disinformation campaign to spread rumors that the American government and media had faked the moon landing. Within the privileged inner circles of the Soviet scientific world, 16mm copies of the Apollo moon-landing film were studied and discussed. And among those with access to the film was Sergei Khrushchev.

Motivated by anger about the Pentagon’s deception in Vietnam, Kaysing decided to write something “outrageous,” hoping that it might prompt Americans to no longer blindly accept as truth the official word out of Washington, D.C. Ironically, this was one rumor the Soviet Union hadn’t tried to cultivate as part of their disinformation campaign against the United States. At the time of the moon landing, few voiced rumors of it being a hoax, although as early as 1968 just such a secret government conspiracy had served as part of the plot of a darkly satiric BBC television drama, The News-Benders. Author Norman Mailer may have sensed the growing paranoia when he joked a year after Apollo 11, “In another couple of years there will be people arguing in bars about whether anyone even went to the Moon.”


The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal by David E. Hoffman

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, IFF: identification friend or foe, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

The purpose of the seminar was to scrub his material for any signs of disinformation. Two and a half years had passed since Tolkachev’s first approach at the Moscow gas station, yet the intelligence agencies and the military still harbored skepticism. If Tolkachev was under the control of the KGB, if his documents were fabricated in order to send the United States off in the wrong direction, it would be calamitous to take the bait. The danger was certainly real; the KGB had a long history of skillfully using deception, disinformation, and misdirection. The United States had used the same methods against the Soviet Union.9 At the same time, the United States was eager for insight and intelligence about Soviet military plans and intentions.

The nature of the material from Tolkachev—the complex diagrams, specifications, blueprints, and circuit boards from airborne radars and the disclosure of Soviet military research and development plans stretching a decade into the future—was extraordinary. Two U.S. intelligence and military experts who examined thousands of pages of Tolkachev’s documents over a period of years said they never found a single page contaminated with disinformation, and they cross-checked the intelligence as far as they could with other sources.5 Tolkachev opened a window on Soviet intentions and capabilities, which were at the core of the CIA’s mission. For the leadership of the United States, it was vitally important to know Soviet priorities in military research and development, as well as capabilities—what they could do and could not do.

For an official account of the tunnel operation, see “The Berlin Tunnel Operation, 1952–1956,” Clandestine Services History, Historical Paper No. 150, June 24, 1968, declassified in part by the CIA in 2012, included as doc. No. 001-034, chap. 1, in the document collection accompanying Bird and Bird, “CIA Analysis.” Some previous accounts have claimed the intelligence take from the tunnel was contaminated with disinformation. In an authoritative account, Murphy, Kondrashev, and Bailey, Battleground Berlin, say the operation “did in fact produce a large amount of badly needed and difficult to obtain military intelligence” in a period before such material became available from the U-2 overflights and satellite imagery.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

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

The report went into detail about the GRU’s involvement, admitting that Facebook had yet to learn how deeply the Russians had cracked the code of using Facebook to spread propaganda. It included a number of screen shots of pages that his Threat Intelligence team believed were of Russian origin, not just involving the election but earlier forays into Ukrainian-related disinformation, and even propaganda regarding the Olympics. To emphasize this point, Stamos put the logos of the Russian intelligence agencies on his report. Attacks from a hostile super-state were not something that could be addressed by tweaking News Feed signals. It required deeper understanding—and direct involvement from Zuckerberg.

Fake news, they concluded, was really a problem of cutting off the money supply of malefactors, like the Macedonians in Veles, who were gaming the system. In a sense, they saw it as a similar situation to Facebook’s problem with spammy developers. Dealing with fake news, under that view, was not really much different from taming the excesses of Zynga’s Mark Pincus. “We understood some of the disinformation efforts had been traced to Russia [but] the fake news problem seemed larger,” says Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel. So, belying its name, Project P went hard on financially motivated fake news and gave propaganda a pass. While not disputing Project P’s conclusion, Stamos still felt that Facebook should sound an alarm about foreign interference on Facebook.

So while the thirteen-page white paper talked at length about how foreign interference might operate, it did not single out Russian involvement. In fact, the word “Russia” did not appear. “Facebook is not in a position to make definitive attribution to the actors sponsoring this activity,” the authors wrote. They also cautioned that state disinformation is but a small part of “false news” on Facebook. The one concession to acknowledging Russian involvement was a note about how nothing in the white paper contradicted a recent report from the US director of national intelligence—which was explicit that the Russians tried to screw up our election.


pages: 138 words: 43,748

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

Defending our political prerogatives by filling our heads with propaganda is not a virtue, and it certainly cannot be called conservative. As conservatives, we believe in the marketplace. If we aren’t confident enough to take our ideas to the people and confident enough that they’ll be heard, especially given the political hegemony we currently enjoy, then I am not sure that we deserve that hegemony. A reliance on mis- or disinformation betrays a lack of confidence in our defining ideas, a lack of commitment to our core principles, and it contributes to the decline of the country we love. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: We must get off this kick. A COUPLE OF MONTHS into the Trump administration, as word of factional tension began to spill out of the White House—between the hard-right advisors who had helped elect the president on one side and members of the president’s family on the other—Michael Gerson, the conservative writer and former senior aide to President George W.

Buckley was a conservative colossus, in whose debt every American who claims conservative pedigree remains to this day. He was every bit as courageous as Goldwater in advancing and defending conservative positions during a period when conservatism had been in retrenchment and decline. It is Buckley who taught us how a real conservative deals with extremism and paranoia and a burgeoning culture of disinformation in the ranks. The scale of what we are now experiencing is orders of magnitude different, because of the Internet, but it is not new. — In 1955, when Buckley founded National Review, there had never been anything like it in the country. Buckley’s magazine became the vibrant intellectual center of American conservatism, and in the late 1950s it not only championed Goldwater’s rise to lead the conservative movement (which would lead directly to Reagan’s rise over the next two decades) but also counseled Goldwater on how to handle the extremists in his party at the time, particularly the members of the shadowy John Birch Society, ardent anticommunists who were probably best known for their elaborate conspiracy theories of communist infiltration.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Misha cheerfully wrote on the group’s site, “We’re a neo-Marxist, anarcho-socialist guerrilla unit forged for the sole purpose of getting on TV.” The group considered what it was doing to be performance art. Back then, the truth didn’t seem as endangered as it does now, so muddying the waters for a cause struck them as ethically acceptable. “It’s one thing if you have a state sponsor of disinformation and propaganda that is trying to affect a particular political outcome, versus trying to raise consciousness of some issue that might not break through otherwise,” said one member of cDc. “The circumstances matter.” At the time, the group considered getting rid of its old bomb-making recipes out of a sense of social responsibility.

Technically, it was not a breach: it was a failure of basic advertising processes, where Stamos had no control. Instead, CEO Zuckerberg had to go before Congress to apologize and promise to give users more control over their data. Meanwhile, former Facebook and Google executives began condemning their former employers for allowing disinformation to thrive. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, formed the Center for Humane Technology and warned that Facebook and YouTube had let some of the world’s most powerful instances of artificial intelligence figure out how to keep people watching, and that the answer had been to show outrage and extremism.

“We intend to dominate and subvert the media”: This statement appeared in cDc website updates including this one: www.cultdeadcow.com/news/medialist.htm. “We’re a neo-Marxist, anarcho-socialist guerrilla unit”: Omega, “cDc Response to Newsday Magazine by Omega,” December 1, 1996, https://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/1996/12/cdcs-response-t.html. “It’s one thing if you have a state sponsor of disinformation”: This came from hacker Mike Seery, who used the handle Reid Fleming. Seery was an old friend of Misha’s and a longtime active cDc member credited by Misha for the neo-Marxist line. “public spectacle to affect the public debate”: The slogan is from a Yes Men page, http://yeslab.org/theyeslab.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

28 As Jarvis puts it, “Resistance is futile.”29 It is difficult to read these books and not look to the sky and thank one’s lucky star for having been put on the planet at this unprecedented glorious moment in history. The Skeptics The skeptics directly counter some of what the celebrants say, but to a certain extent the two sides are talking past each other. Shaheed Nick Mohammed, in his 2012 The (Dis)information Age, takes dead aim at the notion that the Internet is spawning greater levels of knowledge, “the notion that these technologies and their popular modes of usage necessarily lead to a more informed public.” He notes that the Internet works as much or more to promote ignorance as knowledge; hence survey research demonstrates little if any improvement in the knowledge levels of Americans between 1989 and 2007.30 Mark Bauerlein develops this point, noting that study after study confirms that young people today constitute “the dumbest generation,” shockingly ignorant of civics, history, geography, science, literature, the works.

Diamandis and Kotler, Abundance, 25. 27. Lund, Massively Networked, 141. 28. Rory O’Connor, Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media Are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012), 20. 29. Jarvis, Public Parts, 11. 30. Shaheed Nick Mohammed, The (Dis)information Age: The Persistence of Ignorance (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), ii, 8. 31. Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), inside flap, 13. 32. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010), 49–50. 33.

., 8, 27, 174, 223 Diamond, Jared, 25 Dickens, Charles, 79 “digital commons,” 102, 103 Digital Dead End (Eubanks), 10 digital journalism, 184–94, 212, 277n101. See also online nonprofit news media Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 124–25 digital music downloads, 141 digital photo repositories, 138 digital rights management (DRM), 124 digital television, 128, 139 digital video recorders. See video recorders Dionne, E.J., 226 The (Dis)information Age (Mohammed), 8–9 Disney, 120, 121, 131 dissidents, 126, 160, 163, 170, 194, 211. See also protests and demonstrations distribution costs. See production and distribution costs domestic surveillance. See government surveillance donations, 199, 212 Downes, Larry, 258n165 duopoly, 60, 112–13 Dylan, Bob, 80–81 eBay, 131, 137 e-books, 127, 131, 139, 246n28 ecological crisis.


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This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

And since the moment that he committed to handing over his instant messenger chat logs to the authorities, Lamo says he hasn’t doubted the conclusions of his moral calculus. Lamo’s lids fall to half-mast. “He wanted to make the world a better place. He just didn’t know what he was doing,” he intones flatly. “I wish there could have been some other resolution. I actually suggested to the agents that they keep him around and feed him disinformation. Instead, they chose to grab him.” This is the stranger, of all possible strangers, to whom Bradley Manning chose to confess a leak that may put him in prison for the rest of his life. When Manning sought out Lamo as a confessor and friend, he had some reason to believe that the older hacker was a kindred spirit.

The Cryptome founder responded with a series of increasingly angry and sarcastic e-mails, sent too fast to even allow responses from the other WikiLeakers. “The CIA would be the most likely $5M funder. Soros is suspected of being a conduit for black money to dissident groups racketeering for such payola,” he wrote bitterly, suggesting that WikiLeaks attempt to raise a hundred million dollars from the CIA instead. “Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy,” Young added, vowing to leak the entire mail list on Cryptome—which he soon did. He signed off, “In solidarity with fuck em all.” Assange responded shortly thereafter. “J., We are going to fuck them all.” Then he unsubscribed John Young from the list.

Whether by sniffing the Tor network, receiving it from a Tor-masked source, or through other untraced means, Assange and WikiLeaks obtained and published its first leak: It was a Somalian government document calling for the assassinations of leaders in two rogue Somali states. John Young, who at that point hadn’t yet broken off from the group, warned that the leak could easily be disinformation or a forgery. “This is not to suggest leaks are not to be trusted, just not blindly so, for they are now standard tools for lying, smearing and stinging by governments, corporations, persons of all demonics,” Young wrote on the WikiLeaks mail list. In the end, WikiLeaks did post the Somalian leak, but with a breathless disclaimer: “Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden?


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An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, disinformation, fake news, false flag, garden city movement, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, post-work, South China Sea, urban planning

The story of Sorge’s turbulent career as an agent for the Communist International, his apparent disgrace as that organisation was ruthlessly purged of all but the most slavishly loyal non-Russians under Stalin, of Sorge’s recruitment by Soviet military intelligence and the subsequent cycles of distrust and paranoia that led to Sorge’s gold-standard intelligence being dismissed as enemy disinformation, is told here for the first time. So is the inside story of Sorge’s desperate attempts to warn Stalin of the coming German invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1941 – a warning that was systematically suppressed by the top brass of the Red Army, terrified of contradicting Stalin’s fixed idea that Hitler would never attack him.

Worse, in the wake of the signing of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact, Stalin and the Defence Commissariat became even more critical of Soviet military intelligence than ever. Lieutenant Colonel Maria Poliakova, one of the few of Proskurov’s subordinates who had managed to survive the purges, recalled the director returning from a visit to the General Staff in a fury of frustration. ‘What do they take us for – fools? How could this be disinformation?’ Proskurov exclaimed. In May 1940, at a meeting with the deputy Commissar for Defence, Proskurov declared: ‘No matter how painful it is, I must say that no other army has such disorderliness and a low level of discipline as ours.’16 The operational consequence of this atmosphere of distrust from the top was Centre’s constant, nagging insistence on seeing primary documents rather than word-of-mouth information, however highly placed the source.

In the end, Schellenberg ‘agreed that I should protect Sorge from attacks by the [Nazi] Party, but only on condition that he included in his reports intelligence material on the Soviet Union, China and Japan … When I reported this to Heydrich he agreed, with the proviso that we immediately establish surveillance on Sorge. Heydrich was skeptical about the whole thing and warned that Sorge may be furnishing us with disinformation.’3 Schellenberg claimed, in effect, that he had agreed with no less a figure than the Reich’s security chief that Sorge be treated as a potential Soviet agent nearly a year before his eventual arrest by the Japanese. But this does not fit the facts. If Schellenberg was truly convinced that Sorge was a Soviet spy, leaving him with an office in the embassy, security clearance and the confidence of Ott, Thomas and the DNB would have been a grave security risk.


pages: 1,071 words: 295,220

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, operational security, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

When they reached Marseille, a heavily sedated Krug was placed on an El Al plane flying Jewish North African immigrants to Israel. The Mossad handlers told the French authorities he was a sick immigrant. At the same time, the Mossad launched a wide-ranging disinformation operation, with a man resembling Krug and carrying documents in his name traveling around South America, leaving a paper trail that indicated Krug had simply grabbed the money and run away from Egypt and his collaborators. Simultaneously, the Mossad leaked disinformation to the media saying that Krug had quarreled with General Khalil and his people and had apparently been abducted and murdered by them. In Israel, Krug was imprisoned in a secret Mossad installation and subjected to harsh interrogation.

“But Begin heard about the plan and he thought it was too diabolical and ruled it out,” said a senior member of the Salt Fish team. Interview with Dayan, April 18, 2013, and “Yoav,” December 2016. Once they even heard Arafat himself on the phone Interview with Dayan, June 4, 2012. He scattered disinformation around among his aides A Mossad document from July 1, 1982, shown to the author by “Matias,” said, “Salt Fish is taking extreme safety precautions and according to Junction sources, he gives his own people disinformation out of fear that some of them may be serving us.” “Arafat kept on breaking his routine” Interview with Moshe Yaalon, August 16, 2011. “He changes places all the time….From command post to command post, with all their communications systems, and their international communications…” Sharon report to cabinet, July 18, 1982.

The Palestinian leader understood that it was not a coincidence that bombs were repeatedly falling at places he had just entered or just left. He told his people that Sharon, in Beirut, was acting like a “wounded wolf” and wanted to kill him in revenge for the way the war was dragging on. He began taking more precautionary measures, arranging several meetings at the same time in different places. He scattered disinformation around among his aides, suspicious that one of them might be a Mossad agent, and he moved around all the time. “Arafat kept on breaking his routine,” said Moshe Yaalon, a Salt Fish officer. “There was no regular pattern in his behavior, nothing that could enable the preparation of a raid by land against a bunker or a house.”


pages: 148 words: 45,249

Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon tax, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, green new deal, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, the scientific method

When it comes to the United States, which has not deigned to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the unrestrained efforts of the fossil fuel industry, compounded by the ingratiating abetment of the Republican Party, to suppress scientific fact, confuse the public, and bribe politicians. The mustache-twirling depravity of these campaigns has left the impression that the industry always operated thus. But while the Exxon scientists and American Petroleum Institute clerics of the seventies and eighties were hardly good Samaritans, they did not initiate multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns, pay scientists to prevaricate, or try to brainwash elementary school children, as their successors would. The germ of this onslaught can be traced to Jim Hansen’s testimony before Congress on June 23, 1988. After Exxon’s Duane LeVine consulted on strategy with a public relations officer, he gave a presentation on the greenhouse effect to Exxon’s board of directors in February 1989, emphasizing “the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.”

Investments in persuasion peddling rose to the level of a line item during the run-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, where Bush refused for the final time to commit to specific emissions reductions. The following year, after President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax in the hope of meeting the goals of the Rio treaty, API’s number two, William O’Keefe, assumed control of the GCC and directed a $1.8 million API investment in a GCC disinformation campaign. Senate Democrats from oil and coal states joined Republicans to defeat Clinton’s tax proposal, which was widely blamed for the Democrats’ rout in the midterm congressional elections in 1994—the first time the Republicans had won control of both houses in forty years. Through the rest of the decade, the GCC spent at least $1 million a year to crush public support for climate policy.


pages: 163 words: 47,912

A Short History of Russia by Mark Galeotti

cuban missile crisis, disinformation, fake news, hypertext link, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, trade route

He began an era of conquest such as the world had never seen, and his successors would come to regard themselves as having a divine mandate to extend their rule across the world in the name of Blue Sky Tengri, the ruling deity of their shamanic faith. Settled peoples were conquered; other nomadic powers incorporated or destroyed. China, Central Asia, much of the Middle East, all would fall to this formidable steppe army, its savagery, its speed and also its capacity to wield diplomacy, disinformation and despair as effectively as bow and sword. By the early thirteenth century, the Polovtsians, who had displaced the Pechenegs, found themselves in the same invidious position, facing a newer, greater, sharper-toothed nomad threat from the east. Polovtsian Köten Khan fled to the court of Prince Mstislav the Bold of Galich, his son-in-law, with a stark warning: “Terrible strangers have taken our country, and tomorrow they will take yours if you do not come and help us.”

Support for pro-democracy and anticorruption activists in Russia, criticism of the deaths of outspoken journalists and politicians, and a series of risings against Moscow-friendly regimes in the Arab world and the post-Soviet states—especially the “Euromaidan” protests that brought down a corrupt regime in Ukraine in 2013–4—were all thrown together as evidence of a Western strategy to this effect. While the West became worried about Russian “hybrid war”—the use of subversion and disinformation to spread division and undermine political institutions—Moscow was equally concerned about facing a similar threat of its own. © Helen Stirling This nationalist turn made it easier for Putin to articulate a vision for his Russia, and one that he presumably hoped would inspire a people who, since his return to the presidency in 2012, had become increasingly disenchanted, tiring of fake politics, entrenched corruption and a stagnant economy that could no longer buy their tolerance.


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Physicists in Congress Calculate Their Influence. New York Times, June 10, 2008. DeCarlo, S., et al. America’s Largest Private Companies. Forbes Magazine, November 3, 2010. www.forbes.com/lists/2010/21/private-companies-10_land.html. DeMelle, B. Disinformation Database: David Legates. DeSmogBlog, n.d. www.desmogblog.com/node/2830. [blog] DeMelle, B. Disinformation Database: An Extensive Database of Individuals Involved in the Global Warming Denial Industry. DeSmogBlog, n.d. www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database. Dennis, J. A., et al. Epidemiological Studies of Exposures to Electromagnetic Fields: II.

Environment and Climate News, May 1, 2006. www.heartland.org/policybot/results/18971/Are_Polar_Bears_Dying.html 15. Legates, D. Climate Science: Climate Change and Its Impacts. Dallas: National Center for Policy Analysis, 2006. www.ncpa.org/pub/st285?pg=7. 16. Burnett. Are Polar Bears Dying? 17. DeMelle, B. Disinformation Database: David Legates. DeSmogBlog, n.d. www.desmogblog.com/node/2830. [blog] 18. Taylor, M. Last Stand of Our Wild Polar Bears. Toronto Star, May 1, 2006. http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20060505/20060505_17.html. [opinion] 19. Burnett, H. S. ESA Listing Not Needed for Polar Bears.

Harvard Crimson, September 12, 2003. www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/9/12/warming-study-draws-fire-a-study. 29. Editorial Staff. Guide for Authors: Conflict of Interest. Elsevier.com, n.d. www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/701873/authorinstructions#7000. 30. DeMelle, B. Disinformation Database: An Extensive Database of Individuals Involved in the Global Warming Denial Industry. DeSmogBlog, n.d. www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database. 31. Wahl-Jorgensen, K., ed. The Handbook of Journalism Studies. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2009. 32. Limbaugh, R. Global Warming Hoax: Polar Bears Are Just Fine!


pages: 432 words: 143,491

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

The report warned: ‘The magnitude of these numbers suggests substantial human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out. Heightened surveillance, prompt information-sharing and enhanced preparedness are recommended.’ At this stage, only 41 cases of illness from the virus had been reported in Wuhan and it was said to have caused just two deaths, which was an astonishing piece of disinformation by the Chinese authorities given the chaos that was taking place in the city’s hospitals at that very moment. The following Wednesday, 22 January, two days before the Cobra meeting, the government convened the first meeting of its Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) to discuss the virus.

He was busy hosting Barack Obama on only the second ever UK state visit by a US president.6 On each of those three occasions, the prime minister in question had clear and justifiable reasons for not attending. When we revealed in The Sunday Times in April that Johnson had missed all of the first five Cobra meetings, the government spin machine lurched into action. In an extraordinary 14-page error-strewn ‘blog’, the government’s new Covid ‘disinformation’ unit claimed that ‘it is entirely normal and proper for [Cobra] to be chaired by the relevant Secretary of State’, who in this case was Hancock. It argued that it was acceptable for Johnson to miss the first two Cobra meetings in January because, at that time, the WHO ‘had not declared Covid-19 a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”, and only did so on 30 January’.

But as we pointed out in the last chapter, experts – such as Richard Horton of The Lancet, and Professor Martin Hibberd of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the Sage committee member Sir Jeremy Farrar – were all saying on the day of the first Cobra meeting on 24 January that the coronavirus outbreak in China represented a serious threat to public health that may well become global. Horton argues in his book The Covid-19 Catastrophe that the ignorance excuse is government disinformation and does not hold water. He recounts how his own words were twisted in a ‘Kremlinesque way’ by the government’s blog rebuttal to our article in order to downplay his warnings. He then makes a reference to a televised address by the prime minister on 10 May. ‘Boris Johnson spoke to the nation,’ Horton writes.


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

Instead of fearing the open internet, Kremlin officials embraced it, using social media to smear the opposition and to release a firehose of propaganda intended to overwhelm citizens’ faculty for critical thinking.7 The emergence of networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Russia’s VKontakte in the 2000s and 2010s made disinformation easier to spread. The arrival of memes allowed eye-catching lies to be delivered via mobile phone, meaning users who lacked home computers could circumvent the internet entirely. Before I left academia for good, networked authoritarianism was my focus—not only because of its danger to citizens of authoritarian states, but because I could see the utility of the model in Western states that were experiencing a similar erosion of institutional trust.

* * * Trump was part of a wider movement of white supremacists and international kleptocrats seeking to dismantle Western democracy. I was one of the few American journalists to warn of this crisis in advance, and this unwanted distinction resulted in my being in great demand to speak on the issue abroad. In January, I was flown to the United Kingdom for a conference on press freedom and disinformation, where some Brits told me horror stories of Brexit while others assured me that they would figure it out, they would keep calm and carry on, this idiotic crisis surely would not undo a millennium of British sovereignty. I was not so sure. Brexit was a direct precursor of the US election, featuring not only the same largely unexpected result, but the same players behind the scenes.

See oligarchs; Putin, Vladimir; Russian mafia; Soviet Union Russian mafia expansion of and FBI Italian mafia compared with and Maxwell, Ghislaine and Maxwell, Robert money laundering and campaign contributions and Mueller investigation and 9/11 and Trump Tower and UK institutions See also organized crime Ryan, Paul Sapir, Alex Sapir, Tamir Sater, Felix Saudi Arabia autocratic kinship ties in and axis of autocrats and Epstein, Jeffrey and human rights violations and Khashoggi, Adnan and murder of Jamal Khashoggi and transnational criminal networks savior syndrome scandal, crime covered up with Scarborough, Joe Schiff, Adam Schlafly, Phyllis Schnurbusch, Dan Schwartz, Peter Schwartz, Tony Schweich, Tom Scott, Dred Seals, Darren September 11, 2001 events of and exploitation of fear impact on media industry political weaponization of Trump, Donald, on Sessions, Jeff Sessions, William sex trafficking Sherman, Brad Shiflett, Dave Sinquefield, Rex Snowden, Edward social media and Arab Spring authoritarian weaponization of and Brexit referendum corporate assets and disinformation Facebook #Ferguson and Ferguson uprising Gamergate Instagram #MeToo and Russia and toxic online culture and transnational criminal networks Twitter and 2016 presidential election VKontakte (Russia) and Wikileaks #YourSlipIsShowing Soviet Union and Cohn, Roy Cold War intelligence collapse of post-Soviet dictatorships and Red Scare samizdat (underground literature) and Trump, Donald See also Russia Spayd, Liz spectacle and pageantry Spitzer, Eliot Spy (magazine) St.


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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

Many used advanced tracking cookies that followed users around the web, advanced programmatic ad delivery and AI content optimisation to serve up more conspiracy theories to the so-inclined.34 It is increasingly clear that Russian president Vladimir Putin was engaged in this information war too. For some years, the Russian Government has known that covert media manipulation online can subtly shift public opinion in ways that promote its interests – supporting far-left and far-right parties across Europe and firing up campaigns of internet disinformation throughout the Ukrainian crisis. During the US election the Russian Government took these Cold War techniques up several notches. Thousands of paid content producers pushed out pro-Trump or anti-Hillary content, flooding feeds and overwhelming serious hashtags with nonsense, making them unusable.

According to former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, this now constitutes a ‘serious threat’ to democracy – not because it might decisively swing an election, but rather because it chips away at social cohesion and public confidence in the democratic system itself. The Kremlin doesn’t care what the US law is on gun control – but if the American people are arguing, the Russian government believes it is winning. The scale of the Russian disinformation effort was staggering, but hardly surprising. Democracies with free media, fair elections and an open internet are more subject to international meddling than closed autocracies (and if some of the projections I set out in the next chapter about future unemployment are correct, ‘paid content producer’ whose job it is to influence online opinion might one day be a very desirable position).


The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy by Brian Klaas

Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Steve Jobs, trade route, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

But it is to say that any positive aspects of these two models are overshadowed by serious drawbacks and shortcomings. Beijing and Moscow are aware of these flaws. That’s why most of China’s and Russia’s diplomatic methods for spreading their respective models rely on some form or propaganda or disinformation campaign. â•… If you switch on your television in just about any hotel room these days, you’ll be able to watch propaganda straight out of the Kremlin on Russia Today, now re-branded just as RT to subtly obscure its funding source. The programming is specifically designed to parry Western accounts of global news, spinning each story as Putin would hope to see it covered.

After all, its most popular YouTube videos include a 2010 clip of Vladimir Putin singing Fats Domino’s hit song Blueberry Hill and a series of overly graphic videos of live births.35 Nonetheless, RT’s existence is sufficient to provide an alternative Russo-centric nar€ 207 THE DESPOT’S ACCOMPLICE rative as global events unfold, and that is meaningful. RT’s disinformation has worked in the past and it will work again. â•… Take for example, the story of “Lisa,” a 13-year-old German-Russian girl living in Berlin who briefly went missing from her home and claimed that she had been raped in early 2016. Ivan Blagoy, a journalist working for RT, alleged on air that the German authorities were involved in a cover-up and that Lisa had been gang raped by Syrian refugees.

Federal Election Commission, 185, 188 City on a Hill, 10, 35, 179, 188, 189 Cleisthenes, 28 climate change, 209 Clinton, Hillary, 5–6, 112, 178, 190 Clinton, William “Bill”, 52, 92, 102, 112, 115–16, 184, 190 Cobra Gold, 201 Cold War, 1, 20, 35–6, 37–50, 55, 66, 75, 81, 93, 149, 150, 200–1, 204, 221 Colombia, 27, 33, 171, 189 Commonwealth of Independent States Observation Mission (CISEMO), 211 Communist Party of China, 208 of Moldova, 195 of Thailand, 199 Community College of Denver, 209 Confucius Institutes, 209 Congo, 20, 36, 38, 42–4, 47, 48, 95, 121 Congress, US, 32, 33, 35, 184, 194 Connecticut Compromise, 32–3 constitutions, 31–2, 150–1, 190, 197 Contadora Island, Panama, 117 COPPPAL (Conferencia Permanente de Partidos Políticos de América Latina y el Caribe), 211 Corner House, Riga, 147–8, 160, 225 corruption, 73, 82, 99, 107, 139, 260 170–1, 197, 200, 201, 209, 210, 219 Côte d’Ivoire, 3, 19, 104–10, 111, 119 2000 presidential election, 104 2002 outbreak of civil war, 104 2010 presidential election, 104–5; outbreak of violence, 105–6, 119; Gbabgbo offered asylum in the US, 111 2011 UN/French intervention, 106, 108–10; Gbabgbo extradited to ICC, 106, 109, 119 2015 presidential election, 110 Council of Europe, 84 Council of Five Hundred, 29 counterfeit democracies, 3, 6–9, 20, 23, 33–4, 52, 70, 73, 79, 82–90, 158–9, 173, 175, 204, 210, 216–17, 220, 223 Crimea, 64, 65 crisis of democracy, 180 Critias, 29 Croatia, 75 Cuba, 45, 49–50, 176 curse of low expectations, see Madagascar Effect Daily Show, The, 53 Dark Ages, 30, 219 Dayton, Mark, 186–7 DDoS (Distributed Denial-ofService), 168 death squads, 47, 114, 117 Delian League, 29 democracy deficit, 180 democracy promotion industry, 58–60, 138 democracy wars, 67, 69–79, 220 Democratic Party, 35, 58, 84, 92, 124, 142, 182–8 INDEX Democratic Republic of the Congo, see Congo demos, 27, 28 Deng Xiaoping, 206 Denmark, 77, 220 Denver, Colorado, 209 Department for International Development (DFID), 59 Department of Defense, 115 Detention Site Green, Udon Thani, 201 Development Alternatives Inc., 138 Development Assistance Committee (DAC), 58 Devlin, Larry, 43 Diamond, Larry, 171 Dictator’s Learning Curve, The (Dobson), 210 digital communications, 49, 125, 161–75, 207, 208, 221, 223 Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), 48 direct democracy, 28–9 disabled rights, 141, 144 disinformation, 207–8 Dobson, Will, 210 “Don’t Forget Me” (GooGoosha), 140 Dubai, 82 Duékoué, Côte d’Ivoire, 105 Dulles, Alan, 41 Durack, Western Australia, 29–30 Duvalier, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”, 114 Ebola, 184 echo chamber effect, 165 Egypt, 6, 9–10, 13–16, 27, 88, 155, 163–4, 225 1987 US aid payments begin, 14 2001 EU Association Agreement, 155 2008 Afifi exiled to US, 163 2009 Clinton describes Mubaraks as ‘friends of my family’, 6; Obama’s Cairo speech, 9–10, 218 2011 Tahrir Square protests begin, 10, 13, 163–4; Mubarak ousted, 13, 164 2012 Morsi elected president, 14; anti-Morsi demonstrations begin, 164, 247 2013 coup d’état; el-Sisi comes to power, 14–16, 88, 164; Saudi Arabia announces aid package, 15 Eid al-Kabir, 124 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 38, 43 elections campaign finance, 185–8, 238 foreign aid/intervention, 97–110, 143 “free and fair”, 8, 14, 88–90, 102, 159, 193 gerrymandering, 180–5, 188, 251 grade inflation, 88–9, 158, 159 inclusivity, 24, 129–31, 221 observation/monitoring, 8, 65, 81, 83–4, 88–90, 102, 158–9, 173–4, 178, 211, 223 polling, 174–6 respect for, 5, 37–48 rigging of, 22–3, 34, 61, 63–4, 70–1, 83–5, 87, 112, 158–9, 166, 210–11 short-term thinking, 26, 54, 56 turnout, 180, 184 Electoral Integrity Project, 189, 238 Elizabethville, Congo, 43 “emerging democracy”, 88 Emory University, 136 261 INDEX “End of History”, 163, 214 English Civil War (1642–51), 31 Ennahda party, 126–8 Equatorial Guinea, 6, 11, 121, 173, 220 Erdoggan, Recep Tayyip, 20, 161–3, 176 Eritrea, 11, 24 Estonia, 17, 149, 151 Ethiopia, 27 Eton College, Berkshire, 202 European Commission, 150 European Parliament, 84, 180 European Partnership for Democracy (EPD), 58 European Union (EU), 2, 3, 56, 61–3, 65–7, 84, 90, 100, 143, 145, 148–56, 160, 180, 195, 214, 223, 225, 247 1999 European Parliament elections, 180 2004 Eastern Bloc countries accede to Union, 148–9 2005 intervention in Palestinian election campaign, 100 2006 asset ban on Lukashenko government, 63 2008 aid given for Ghanaian election, 143 2009 Eurozone crisis begins, 180, 190 2013 endorsement of Azerbaijani election, 84; endorsement of Malagasy election, 90 2014 Riga designated European Capital of Culture, 148, 225 2015 Riga summit; Juncker slaps Orbán, 150 2016 Belarus sanctions suspended, 65, 67, 195; Zimbabwe sanctions suspended, 247; UK € 262 holds membership referendum, 1 Eurozone crisis, 180, 190 Facebook, 125, 161–3, 165, 168, 172, 223 Falls Church, Virginia, 163 famine, 24 Fatah, 99–102 Fats Domino, 207 Ferjani, Said, 125–33, 142, 156, 221, 224 Fidesz Party, 150–2 financial crisis (2008–9), 185, 206 FixMyStreet, 171 Florida, United States, 117 Forces Nouvelles, 106 Ford, Gerald, 45 Foreign Affairs, 53 foreign aid, 14–15, 47, 49, 52, 57, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 100–1 Fourteen Points (1918), 35 France, 2, 33, 44, 55–6, 58, 72, 89, 106, 108–10, 115, 129, 214, 225 “free and fair”, 8, 14, 88–90, 102, 159, 193 free speech, 94, 103, 161–3, 165, 188 free trade zones, 152–60 Freedom House, 139, 140, 189 Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 189 Front Populaire Ivorien, 105 FSB (Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti), 61 Fukuyama, Francis, 74, 163, 214 fungibilty, 95 Gaddafi, Muammar, 24, 76–9, 102, 113, 129 Gambia, The, 121 Gandhi, Jennifer, 136 INDEX Gaza, Palestine, 100–1, 240–1 Gbabgbo, Laurent, 105–10, 111, 119 General Motors, 48 Geneva Convention, 177 Geneva, Switzerland, 140 George III, King of the United Kingdom, 31 Georgia, 143 Geraldton, Western Australia, 30 Germany, 17, 23, 35, 44, 56, 58, 74–5, 103–4, 147–8, 165, 189, 201, 204, 208, 213, 223 Gerry, Elbridge, 181–2 gerrymandering, 180–5, 188, 251 Ghana, 17, 143, 144, 171 Ghani, Rula, 137 globalization, 153 Globe & Mail, 94 golden handcuffs, 111, 119–21, 154 golden parachutes, 19, 116–21 Gollum, 20, 161–3, 165, 176 Google, 164 GooGoosha (Gulnara Karimova), 140, 145 Government Organized NonGovernmental Organizations (GONGOs), 209–10, 212 grade inflation, 88, 99, 158, 159 Great Leap Forward (1958–61), 24 Greece, 20, 21, 22, 27–30, 31, 156, 230 Green Revolution (2009), 135–6, 166–8 gridlock, 184–5, 187 Guardian, 166 gun regulation, 186–7 gunboat diplomacy, 116, 118, 120 Gutiérrez, Luis, 182 Guyana, 171, 220 Guys and Dolls, 40 Hague, William, 77 Haiti, 114–21 Hamas, 99–104, 241 Harmodius, 28 Harvard University, 45 health care, 184–5 Henry IV “the Impotent”, King of Castile and Léon, 30, 231 Herodotus, 29 Higiro, Robert, 94 Hipparchus, 28 Hitler, Adolf, 23, 103–4, 165 HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), 116, 207 Hobart, Tasmania, 153 homosexuality, 12, 20 Hong Kong, 168–70, 176, 221 House of Representatives, 33, 181 human rights, 10, 11, 52, 54, 57, 64, 113, 118, 139, 209, 213 Humphrey, Hubert, 21 Hungary, 150–2, 160, 171 Hussein, Saddam, 63, 72, 73, 79, 124, 156–7 I Paid a Bribe, 170–1 Ibragimbekov, Rustam, 82 Iceland, 88 Iglesias, Julio, 140 “illiberal democracy”, 227 Illinois, United States, 182–3 Iloniaina, Alain, 222–3 imihigo program, 93 Immunization of the Revolution, 127 inclusion, 24, 129–31 India, 56, 98, 152, 156, 170–1, 172, 220 Indonesia, 27, 156, 218 Indyk, Martin, 102 insidious model effect, 46, 48 Inter-Commission Working Group 263 INDEX on International Cooperation, 211 Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), 52, 53 International Criminal Court (ICC), 106, 109, 118, 119 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 105 International Republican Institute (IRI), 58, 142 Internet, 49, 125, 161–75, 207, 208, 221, 223 iPad, 151 iPhones, 20, 83, 135–6, 145 Iran, 26, 30, 36, 38, 47, 48, 69, 98, 117, 135–6, 145, 208, 232 1951 nationalization of AngloIranian Oil Company, 38 1953 Operation Ajax; Mossadegh ousted, 38–42, 98, 208 1979 Islamic Revolution, 42, 117, 216 2009 intervention in Lebanese election, 98; presidential election; Green Revolution protests, 135–6, 166–8 2010 VOA announces “citizen journalism” iPhone app, 135–6, 145 2015 nuclear deal, 26 Iraq, 2, 5, 20, 49, 63, 67, 72–5, 77, 78, 79, 98, 124, 128, 129, 133, 156–7, 198, 213 1979 Saddam comes to power, 72, 129 1990 invasion of Kuwait, 156 2003 US-led invasion, 63, 72–3, 77, 84, 98, 156, 201, 234; de-Ba’athification campaign, 72, 77, 124, 128 2006 formation of al-Maliki government, 73 264 2015 IS execute election officials, 74 Ireland, 90, 217 Islam, 11, 12, 16, 99, 105, 123–6, 129, 131, 177, 218 Islamic State (IS), 74, 78, 131 Islamism, 99, 123–6, 129, 131, 177 Israel, 14, 99–104 Italy, 98, 192 Jackson, Peter, 162 Jammeh,Yahya, 121 Japan, 17, 24, 35, 56, 58, 74–5, 89, 112, 154, 156, 164, 204, 206, 217, 218, 220 al-Jazeera, 76 Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 172 Joan of Portugal, Queen consort of Castile, 231 Jobs, Steve, 151 Johnson, Boris, 202 Jordan, 18, 60, 155 Juncker, Jean-Claude, 150 Kabila, Joseph, 121 Kabul, Afghanistan, 70 Kagame, Paul, 6, 91–6 Kagan, Robert, 217–18 Kakul Military Academy, 53 Kallel, Abdallah, 124 Kant, Immanuel, 118 Karbala, Iraq, 201 Karegeya, Patrick, 94 Karimov, Islam, 139–40, 142, 154 Karimova, Gulnara, 139–40, 145 Karnataka, India, 170 Karoui, Nébil, 131 Karzai, Hamid, 70 Katanga, Congo, 43–4 Keane, John, 30 INDEX Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 11, 35–6, 55, 190, 192 Kenya, 220 KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), 3, 61–2, 147–8, 194, 225 Khan, Rana Sanaullah, 52 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 167 Kim Jong-un, 136, 181 Kingdom of Ebla, 28 Kipling, Rudyard, 69 Kissinger, Henry, 44–7, 214 knee-jerk reactions, 26, 55 Koch Brothers, 185–6 Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 58, 189 Kounalakis, Eleni, 151 kratos, 27 Kununurra, Western Australia, 30 Kuwait, 156, 229 Kyrgyzstan, 185 2011 NATO-led intervention, 76–7; death of Gaddafi, 76–7, 113 2013 Political Isolation Law, 77, 128 LINE, 164–5 Literary Digest, 174 lobbying, 186–7 local-level democracy, 3, 18, 169–73 locusts, 6–7 London, England, 132–3 long-term thinking, 4, 46, 48, 51–67, 138, 141, 234 Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 20, 161–3, 165, 176 “Luck Be a Lady Tonight”, 40 Lukashenko, Alexander, 61–7, 154, 193–5, 206, 222 Lumumba, Patrice, 42–4 Lumumbashi, Congo, 43 Lake, Anthony, 117 Landon, Alf, 174 Langouste (Ramakavélo), 87 Laos, 200 Latin Earmuffs, 182 Latvia, 147–50, 151–2, 154, 160, 225 League of Democracies, 152–60, 212 Lebanon, 98 Léon, 30–1, 231 Léopoldville, Congo, 43 Levy, Phil, 157 Libya, 2, 5, 20, 24, 49, 67, 69, 76–9, 102, 113, 128, 129, 133, 156, 213 1969 coup d’état; Gaddafi comes to power, 78, 113, 129 2008 Rice makes visit, 76 MacCann, William, 34 Madagascar, 3, 6–9, 17, 20, 59, 85–91, 96, 200, 220, 222–3, 234–5 1991 Panorama Convention, 87 1992 presidential election, 87 1993 population census, 89 2006 presidential election, 85–6 2009 coup d’état; Rajoelina comes to power, 6, 90 2012 Rajoelina announces capture of bandits’ sorcerer, 7 2013 general election, 8, 89–90, 211, 222–3 Madagascar Effect, 6–8, 17, 81, 96, 159, 204, 234–5 Madison, James, 31–2 Malaysia, 153, 218 al-Maliki, Nouri, 73–4 Mao Zedong, 23, 24 265 INDEX marketplace of ideas, 24, 219 Mauritius, 220 May, Theresa, 26 McCain, John, 77 McMahon, Michael, 83 McSpedon, Joe, 49 Megara, 156 Mejora Tu Escuela, 171 El Mercurio, 47 Merkel, Angela, 208 Mesopotamia, 28 Mexico, 27, 149, 155, 156, 171, 172, 178 MI6, 43 Miami, Florida, 117 Miloševicc, Slobodan, 98, 120 Minnesota, United States, 21, 186–7 Minsk, Belarus, 19, 61–2, 66, 192, 193 Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 119 Mobutu, Joseph-Desiré, 43–4 Mogadishu, Somalia, 116 Moghaddam, Ismail Ahmadi, 167 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, 39–42, 117 Moldova, 195–6 Mondale, Walter, 21 Mong Kok riots (2016), 169 Mongolia, 17, 30, 189 Morjane, Kamel, 130 Morocco, 155, 171 Morsi, Mohammed, 14, 15, 164, 247 Moscow, Russia, 210 Mossadegh, Mohammed, 38–42, 43, 232 Mosul, Iraq, 72, 73 al-Moubadara, 130 Mubarak, Hosni, 6, 13, 164 Mugabe, Robert, 112–13, 157–8 Mugenzi, Rene Claudel, 94–5, 189 € 266 Muhirwa, Alice, 93 Muñiz de Urquiza, María, 90 Munyuza, Dan, 94 Musharraf, Pervez, 51–7 Myanmar, 218, 225 Nasiri, Nematollah, 40 Nation, The, 198 National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), 197 National Democratic Institute (NDI), 58, 92, 142 National Endowment for Democracy (NED), 58, 60, 144, 247 National Rifle Association (NRA), 186–7 Native Americans, 32, 33 Nawabshah, Pakistan, 51 Nazi Germany (1933–45), 23, 44, 74–5, 103–4, 147–8, 165 Nepal, 98 Netherlands, 58, 89, 143 Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy, 58 New Stanford Hospital, Palo Alto, 26 NewYork Times, 71, 93, 185–6 New Zealand, 112, 156, 209 Nicaragua, 24, 98 Nidaa Tounes, 131 Niger, 185 Nigeria, 171, 172 Nixon, Richard, 44–7 Niyazov, Saparmurat, 25 Nobel Prize, 18, 24, 131, 156, 163 non-alignment, 43 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 58–60, 141–2, 144, 158, 209–10, 212, 238 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 45, 55, 77 INDEX North Carolina, United States, 183 North Korea, 4, 11, 136, 138, 144, 173, 176, 181 Norway, 24, 77, 205, 219 nuclear power/weapons, 26, 192 Nunavut, Canada, 153, 230–1 Nunn, Sam, 116 Nuristan, Afghanistan, 70 Nyaklyayew, Uladzimir, 61–2, 65 Nyamwasa, Faustin Kayumba, 94 Obama, Barack, 6, 9–10, 14, 49, 54, 55, 57–8, 76, 96, 111, 183, 204, 205, 218 Obiang, Teodoro, 6, 121 Odysseus, 22, 153 oil, 4, 11, 16, 24, 84, 192, 229 olive oil, 125 Operation Ajax (1953), 38–42, 98, 208 Operation Desert Storm (1991), 156 Operation Enduring Freedom (2001–14), 70 Operation Uphold Democracy (1994–5), 116 Orbán, Viktor, 150–2 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 64 Ortega, Daniel, 98 Orwell, George, 15, 101, 199 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 192 Ouattara, Alassane, 105–10, 119 Oxford University, 198, 202 OxfordGirl, 166 Pakistan, 18, 50–7, 70, 220, 233 Palestine, 99–104, 108, 240–1 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 99 Panama, 117 Panorama Convention (1991), 87 Papua New Guinea, 188 parliaments, 31 partisan engagement, 99–104 Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), 156 People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), 197, 202 Pericles, 29 Persia, 28 Peru, 153 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 33 Philippines, 218 Pinochet, Augusto, 47–8, 225 Piromya, Kasit, 204–5 Plateau Dokui, Abidjan, 107 Plato, 29 Poland, 201 Political Isolation Law (2013), 77, 128 polling, 174–6 Pomerantsev, Peter, 210 Pongsudhirak, Thitinan, 165 Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 117 Portugal, 218, 231 Pouraghayi, Saeedah, 167 Powell, Colin, 116, 120 Préval, René, 117 Price, Melissa, 30 Princeton University, 186 prisoner’s dilemma, 200 process engagement, 99–100 propaganda-industry tax, 209 protectionism, 177 proto-democracy, 28 Public Diplomacy of the Public Chamber of Russia Elections, 211 Pul-i-Charki, Kabul, 71 Putin, Vladimir, 63, 64–5, 194–5, 204, 207, 214 267 INDEX al-Qaeda, 18, 50, 52–3, 55, 78, 177, 234 Qatar, 155, 229 Qatif, Saudi Arabia, 11, 16 Queen, 121 racism, 176, 218, 250 Rajoelina, Andry, 6 Ramadan, 126 Ramakavélo, Desiré-Philippe, 86–7 Rao, Bhaskar, 170 Rassemblement des Républicains, 105 Ratchaburi, Thailand, 199 Ravalomanana, Marc, 6 Reagan, Ronald, 35–6, 55 realpolitik, 4, 45, 48, 98, 104 refugees, 208 representative democracy, 30–3 Republican Party, 39, 58, 79, 124, 142, 181, 182–8 Rever, Judi, 94 Riahi, Taghi, 39–40 Rice, Condoleeza, 76, 102 Riga, Latvia, 147–8, 150, 160, 225 rock lobster, 87 Rojanaphruk, Pravit, 198–9, 221, 223–4 Romania, 149, 209 Rome, Ancient (753 BC–476 AD), 21, 30 Romney, Mitt, 112 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 39, 174 Roosevelt, Kermit, 38–40, 208 Roosevelt, Theodore “Teddy”, 39 de Rosas, Juan Manuel, 34–5 Roskam, Peter 183 rule of law, 10, 27, 73, 77, 136, 159, 209, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 145 Russia Today (RT), 207–9 268 Russian Federation, 24, 27, 60–1, 63–5, 82, 106, 140, 149, 190, 191–6, 204, 205–12, 214, 221, 229 1996 Commonwealth with Belarus established, 194 2002 proposal for re-integration of Belarus, 194 2005 support for Moldovan opposition on Transnistria, 195–6; Russia Today established, 207 2010 Putin sings Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill, 207 2013 endorsement of Azerbaijani election, 211 2014 annexation of Crimea; intervention in Ukraine, 64, 65; RT reports “genocide” in Ukraine, 207; RT reports CIA behind Ebola outbreak, 207 2015 NED banned, 60; pressure on Belarus to host military base, 65, 195 2016 RT report on rape of “Lisa” in Germany, 208; Putin praised by Trump, 214 Rwanda, 6, 20, 91–6, 120, 185, 189, 215, 216 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), 91 San Diego State University, 209 sanctions, 52, 62–5, 67, 103, 106, 135–6, 145, 156–8, 160, 195, 247, 253 Sandinista National Liberation Front, 98 Sandy Hook massacre (2012), 186 dos Santos, José Eduardo, 112–13 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 108 INDEX SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), 25–6 Saudi Arabia, 5–6, 9–12, 15–16, 19–20, 85, 98, 138, 144, 200, 216, 229 1962 slavery abolished, 11 2009 intervention in Lebanese election, 98; children sentenced to prison and lashes for stealing exam papers, 11, 16; Jeddah floods, 172 2010 Indonesian maid mutilated by employer, 11, 12; arms deal with US, 10–12 2011 Qatif protests, 16 2013 aid package to Egypt announced, 15; purchase of US naval craft announced, 16; Badawi sentenced to prison and lashes, 16 Saudi Arabia Effect, 5, 9, 16, 85, 138, 200 Schneider, René, 45 School of the Americas, 115 Seattle, Washington, 77 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), 43 Sen, Amartya, 24 Senate, US, 32–3, 187 Senegal, 42, 121 September 11 attacks (2001), 18, 52–3, 55, 70 Serbia, 98, 120 Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 211 Sharif, Nawaz, 51–2, 233 Shinawatra, Thaksin, 196, 199, 201, 202, 205 Shinawatra,Yingluck, 198 short-term thinking, 3–4, 26, 46, 48, 51–67, 120, 138, 141, 234 Shushkevich, Stanislav, 192–3 Siberia, 147, 148 Sidick, Koné Abou Bakary, 107–9 Sierra Leone, 88, 171, 209 Singapore, 23, 24, 27, 93, 155, 215, 216, 217, 229 Siripaiboon, Thanakorn, 165 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 15 Skujenieks, Knuts, 148 Skype, 62 slavery, 11, 29, 32 social media, 49–50, 125, 161–70, 173, 176, 199, 207, 208, 223 Socrates, 29 Solon, 28 Somalia, 42, 116 Sophocles, 29 Sopko, John, 137 Sousse attacks (2015), 131 South Africa, 27, 94, 157, 189 South Korea, 17, 27, 112, 152, 156, 218 Soviet Union (1922–91), 1, 22–3, 35–6, 37–50, 61, 64, 82, 121, 147–8, 150, 160, 192–4, 201, 204, 206–7 Spain, 218 Sparta, 28, 29 St John’s College, Oxford, 202 Stalin, Joseph, 23 Stanford University, 171 State Department, 11, 15, 54, 202 state power, 27 Statkevich, Mikalai, 61–2, 65, 222 Stewart, Jon, 53 Sting (Gordon Sumner), 140 Stockholm Syndrome, 199 Sudan, 206 Sukondhapatipak, Werachon 198 Sundaravej, Samak, 197 Super PACs, 185 Supreme Court, US, 185, 188 Sweden, 92, 220 269 INDEX Switzerland, 118, 140, 205 Syria, 78, 120, 131, 198, 208, 217, 224, 225 Szájer, József, 151 Tahrir Square, Cairo, 10, 13, 163–4 Taiwan, 27, 218 Taliban, 18, 52, 56, 71, 138 tame democracy promotion, 59 Taming of Democracy Assistance, The (Bush), 59 Tarakhel Mohammadi, 70–1 Tasmania, Australia, 153 Tasting and Grumbling, 197 Tea Party, 185 terrorism, 11, 16, 18, 19, 20, 26, 52–3, 55, 63, 70, 78, 97, 100, 101, 131, 156, 201, 234 Tetra Tech, 138 Thailand, 3, 19, 27, 154, 164–5, 196–206, 212, 221, 223–4, 253 1973 pro-democracy uprising, 199 1976 student protests, 199 1982 launch of Cobra Gold exercises with US, 201 2003 troops dispatched to Iraq, 201 2006 coup d’état, 196, 197 2008 judicial coup, 196, 197, 202, 253 2010 protests and crackdown, 202 2014 NCPO coup d’état, 164, 196–206, 221; junta gives out free haircuts, 154; rail deal with China, 203; junta releases LINE “values stickers”, 164–5 2015 man arrested for insulting Tongdaeng, 165 270 2016 constitutional referendum, 197, 223 Thirty Tyrants, 29 Thucydides, 28, 29 time horizon, 55 Tobruk, Libya, 77 Togo, 170, 177–8 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, 20, 161–3, 165, 176 Tongdaeng, 165 torture, 11, 28, 43, 48, 52, 124–7, 132, 139, 141, 222, 224 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 153 Transnistria, 196 transparency, 26, 82, 170, 174, 212, 218 Tripoli, Libya, 77 Trojan War, 22 Trump, Donald, 1, 20, 25, 79, 178, 180, 187, 188, 204, 205 Tudeh Party, 41, 232 Tunisia, 12–13, 17, 18, 19, 27, 65, 77, 123–33, 142, 143, 144, 155, 156, 209, 218, 221, 224–5 1987 coup d’état; Ben Ali comes to power, 124, 126, 129 1991 Barraket Essahel affair, 123, 126, 224 1995 EU Association Agreement, 155 2010 self-immolation of Bouazizi; protests begin, 12, 126, 224 2011 ousting of Ben Ali, 13, 124–6, 130 2014 assembly rejects bill on political exclusion, 128; law on rehabilitation and recognition of torture victims, 224; presidential election, 130 2015 Bardo Museum and Sousse attacks, 131, 156; National INDEX Dialogue Quartet awarded Nobel Peace Prize, 18, 131 Tunisia’s Call, 131 Turkey, 20, 27, 39, 149, 161–3, 165, 176 Turkmenistan, 11, 25, 26, 138, 144, 154 Twitter, 49, 162, 163, 166, 168, 176, 199, 208 U2, 92 Udon Thani, Thailand, 201 Uganda, 166, 176 Ukraine, 2, 27, 64, 65, 171, 198, 207, 213 Umbrella Movement (2014), 168, 176, 221 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 229 United Kingdom (UK), 1–3, 31, 33, 38, 43–4, 56, 58, 71–2, 92, 94–5, 126, 129, 132–3, 156, 166, 171–2, 180, 189, 202, 214 1707 Acts of Union, 31 1947 Churchill’s statement on democracy, 22, 190, 215 1951 Mossadegh nationalizes Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 38 1987 Ferjani arrives in exile, 126 1999 European Parliament election, 180 2003 invasion of Iraq, 72–3 2009 OxfordGirl tweets on Iranian Green Revolution, 166; Blair meets with Kagame, 6, 92 2011 intervention in Libya, 77; Kagame appears on BBC radio; threat against Mugenzi, 94–5, 189 2012 launch of FixMyStreet, 171 2016 EU membership referendum, 1 United Nations (UN), 104, 105, 106, 108–10, 118, 130, 132, 140, 152 United States (US) 1787 Constitutional Convention, 31 1812 redrawing of Massachusetts senate election districts, 181–2 1869 Wyoming grants women vote, 33 1870 non-white men receive vote, 33 1913 Seventeenth Amendment enacted, 32 1917 Wilson’s “safe for democracy” speech, 35 1918 Wilson’s Fourteen Points, 35 1920 women receive vote, 33 1924 protections to ensure Native American voting rights, 33 1936 presidential election, 174 1948 CIA intervention in Italian election, 98 1953 Operation Ajax; Mossadegh ousted in Iran, 38–42, 98, 208 1960 plot to assassinate Lumumba with poisoned toothpaste, 43 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, 14–15 1962 Saudi Arabia pressured into abolishing slavery, 11; Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 1963 Kennedy’s Berlin speech, 35; assassination of Kennedy, 192 271 INDEX 1965 protections to ensure minority voting rights, 33 1973 ousting of Allende in Chile, 47 1982 launch of Cobra Gold exercises with Thailand, 201 1987 Reagan’s Berlin speech, 35; aid payments to Egypt begin, 14 1988 Reagan’s “city on a hill” speech, 10, 35, 179, 188, 189 1990 intervention in Nicaraguan election, 98 1991 launch of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, 156 1992 presidential and House of Representatives elections, 183–4 1993 Clinton assumes office, 115; Battle of Mogadishu, 116 1994 launch of Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, 116; Cessna crash at White House, 116; Cédras given “golden parachute”, 116–17 1997 USAID Cambodia claims to have “exceeded expectations”, 59 1999 Pakistan urged to return to democracy, 52, 53 2001 September 11 attacks, 18, 52–3, 55, 70; cooperation with Pakistan begins, 52–3, 55; invasion of Afghanistan, 70, 71, 84, 98 2002 Bush announces new approach for Israel/Palestine conflict, 99 2003 invasion of Iraq, 63, 72–3, 77, 84, 98, 156, 201, 234 272 2004 Belarus Democracy Act, 63, 194 2005 Senate vote on armorpiercing bullet ban, 187; intervention in Palestinian election campaign, 99–104 2006 Musharraf appears on The Daily Show, 53 2008 Afifi arrives in exile, 163, 247; Rice’s visit to Libya, 76 2009 Obama assumes office, 55, 57; Clinton describes Mubaraks as “friends of my family”, 6; Obama’s Cairo speech, 9–10, 218; military helicopter drops ballot boxes in Afghanistan, 70; Kagame receives Clinton Global Citizen award, 92 2010 VOA announces “citizen journalism” app for Iran, 135, 145; Citizens United v.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

At the time of writing, even traditional Republicans are wondering (1) how on earth Donald Trump was ever elected president, and (2) why so many people seem to fall prey to blatant disinformation and conspiracy theories. Trump’s manifestly a liar, someone who lies even when evidence disproving the lie is readily available. But here’s the bigger problem: in a world where trust has eroded sharply, where our government doesn’t work, and where companies that once guaranteed jobs for life are now either outsourcing them or hiring robots, Trump’s lies can seem minor in comparison to the more systemic breach of trust voters are feeling. Once-trusted news organizations are now thrust into competition with dubious online purveyors of disinformation, with both being accused of peddling “fake news.”

Any technology that reduces friction and makes such collaborations happen should benefit everybody, in other words. Still, there’s nothing to say this will assuredly play out in a way that’s best for the world. We’ve seen how the Internet was co-opted by corporations and how that centralization has caused problems—from creating big siloes of personal data for shady hackers to steal to incentivizing disinformation campaigns that distort our democracy. So, it’s crucial that we not let the people with the greatest capacity to influence this technology shape it to suit only their narrow interests. As with the early days of the Internet, there is much work to be done to make this technology sufficiently safe, scalable, and attendant to everyone’s privacy concerns.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

The natural villains are the oil companies—and in fact a recent survey of movies depicting climate apocalypse found the plurality were actually about corporate greed. But the impulse to assign them full responsibility is complicated by the fact that transportation and industry make up less than 40 percent of global emissions. The companies’ disinformation-and-denial campaigns are probably a stronger case for villainy—a more grotesque performance of corporate evilness is hardly imaginable, and, a generation from now, oil-backed denial will likely be seen as among the most heinous conspiracies against human health and well-being as have been perpetrated in the modern world.

Already, in the United States, courts are awash in a wave of lawsuits aimed at extracting climate damages—a bold gambit, given that most of the impacts they enumerate have yet to arrive. The most high-profile are the torts brought against oil companies by crusading attorneys general—public health claims, more or less, put forward by the public or at least in its name, against companies known to have engaged in disinformation and political-influence campaigns. This is the first vector of climate liability: against the corporations that have profited. Another kind of charge is made in Juliana v. the United States, also known as “Kids vs. Climate,” an ingenious equal-protection lawsuit alleging that in failing to take action against global warming, the federal government effectively shifted many decades’ worth of environmental costs onto today’s young—an inspiring claim, in its way, made by a group of minors on behalf of their entire generation and those that will follow, against the governments their parents and grandparents voted into office.

But one way we might manage to navigate that path without crumbling collectively in despair is, perversely, to normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much human pain over centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely. IV The Anthropic Principle What if we’re wrong? Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing. And in this test of the climate we have a sample size of just one. No one wants to see disaster coming, but those who look, do.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Once information networks become ‘social’, the implications are massive: truth can now travel faster than lies, and all propaganda becomes instantly flammable. Sure, you can try and insert spin or propaganda, but the instantly networked consciousness of millions of people will set it right: they act like white blood cells against infection so that ultimately the truth, or something close to it, persists much longer than disinformation. In fact, this quality of Twitter means, according to the South Korean authors of the first data-based study of it, that it is not really a ‘social network’ but more like a news service. Services like Flickr, MSN and Yahoo involve a high level of ‘reciprocity’, since about 70 per cent of relationships are two-way.

The general intellect has expanded Economists and business gurus have for two decades been grappling with the concept of ‘information capitalism’: what it means if the most valuable commodities in the market are ideas, rather than physical objects. One fact is clear: people know more than they used to. That’s to say, they have greater and more instant access to knowledge, and reliable ways of counteracting disinformation. Though academia has become obsessed with firewalling and commercializing the products of research, the info-revolution has massively expanded the primary sources of knowledge. Since 1665, when the first two scientific journals were started, researchers estimate that about 50 million scholarly papers have been published.

P. 127 cellphones 75–76, 133–34 Central Security (Egypt) 9, 11, 17 Challenge of Slums, The (UN) 198–99 Charles, Prince 51–52 Chávez, Hugo 33 China 38, 78, 108, 112, 121, 125; consumption 109; foreign currency reserves 107; monetary policy 123 Chomsky, N. 28–29 Chris (student demonstrator) 48 Cinco, Mena 196–98, 206, 206–9 Citigroup 67 civil disobedience 56 class struggles 131 Clegg, Nick 44 Climate Camp movement 1, 55 Clinton, Hillary 26 collaborative production 139–41 Coming Insurrection, The 189–91 commodity price inflation 120–22, 195 communes 189, 190 Communiqué from an Absent Future 38–39 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels) 174, 188–89 communists 80 computer gamers 136 Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition 44 consumption, and self-esteem 80–81 control 148 co-operatives 84 corruption, threat of 177–78, 205 creative destruction 106 credit crisis 106, 109 credit default swaps 99, 107 Critical Legal Thinking website 54 cross-border links 69–70 Cruz, Gloria 204 cultural stereotypes 27 culture: mass 29–30; popular 65, 176; transnational 69; working-class 72; youth 70 culture wars 178–84 currency manipulation 121–22 currency war 122–24 cyber-repression 78 Czechoslovakia 173 Darkness at Noon (Koestler) 128–29 Davies, Nick 148 Davos 17, 111 Dawkins, Richard 75, 150 Day X, 24 November 2010, London 41–42, 46–48 Debord, Guy 42, 46–17, 51 debt, toxic 110–11 default theory 111 deflationary slump 123 Deleuze, Gilles 46, 85 Delius, Frederick 127, 132, 152, 176 democratic counter-revolution 177, 188 demographics of revolt 66, 66–73; Athens, December 2008 uprising 73; students 66–71; the urban poor 70–72 Deptford 57 Detrick, Terry 154, 155–56, 156 devaluation 91, 122–23 @digitalmaverick 1–2 discontent, three tribes 68–69 disillusionment 68–69 disinformation, counteracting 146 disposable income 67 Dodd–Frank Act (USA) 167 @dougald 1 Dubstep Rebellion 48–52; blog 52; the Book Bloc 50–51; casualties 51; Fleet Street photographers 51; graffiti 51; marchers 49; police–student confrontation 50–51 durable authoritarianism 27, 30, 191 Durkheim, Emile 103–4 Dworkin, Ronald 46 eBay 74 e-commerce 81 economic crisis 3; revolutions, 1848 173 economic stagnation 191–92 economic theory 111 Economist, the 25 egoism 132 Egypt: bread prices 11; democratic counter-revolution 177; economic growth 119; economic indicators 119–20; elections, November 2011 177; Gini Index 119; inflation 120–21; opposition movement 10; organized workforce 72; police corruption 11; privatizations 17–18; unemployment 119–120; urban poor 71; working class 19–20 Egyptian revolution, the: the Army and 178; balance sheet 5; bread prices 11; casualties 17; chants 191, 211; counter-revolution 18; Day of Rage, 28 May 15–17; and Facebook 6, 10, 11, 12, 14; freedom 5; immolations 11, 71; Internet switched off 14; medical professions 20–22; military coup 17–19; numbers involved 13; outbreak, 25 January 10–14, 83; police violence 15; questions facing 23–24; Twitter blocked 14; Twitter feeds 13, 14; ultras 16–17; working class 20; on YouTube 11, 14, 15–16; zabbaleen riots 6–10 email 10 emancipated life 143–44 Engels, Friedrich 174, 188–89, 190 @eponymousthing 184 equity withdrawal 114 Estero de San Miguel, Manila 196–99, 205–6, 206–9 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The (film) 29 Eurobonds 113 Eurocrisis, the 111–13 European Central Bank 92, 98, 104, 112 European Financial Stability Facility 92, 104 European Financial Stabilization Facility 113 European monetary union 112, 113 European Union: response to Greek debt crisis 91–92, 96, 98–99, 104; sovereign debt crisis 104 Europe, revolutions, 1848 172 Eurozone 104; debt crisis 91–92, 99, 111–13 Execution of Maximilian (Manet) 53 exploitation 85 Facebook 74; Arab world growth of 135; and the Egyptian revolution 6, 10, 11, 12, 14; establishing connections with 75; ‘We are all Khaled Said’ page 11; and the Iranian revolution 34; and London trade-union demonstration, March 2011 57–58; Middle East usage 135; reciprocity 77; user numbers 135 Farewell to the Working Class (Gorz) 79–80 fatalism 30, 31 feedback loops 187 Feldstein–Horioka paradox 107 Feldstein, Martin 107 Fennimore and Gerda (Delius) 127, 132 First World War 128 Fisher, Mark 30 Flaubert, Gustave 171, 192 Flickr 10, 75 Food Price Index 121 Fordist era 28 Foucault, Michel 46, 84–85 fragmentation 80–81, 82 fragmented power 17 ‘Fragment on Machines’ (Marx) 143–44 France 173; Languedoc, 1848 174, 187; socialism 188; see also Paris freedom 27, 124; of expression 127; individual 127–30; Marx on 141–42; suppression of 131–33 Freeman, Richard 108 free-market economics 92, 188 Friedman, Milton 111 Fukuyama, Francis 30 G20 Summit, 2009 48, 122 Gaddafi, Muammar 25, 31 Gapan City, Philippines 193–96 Gates, Bill 23, 110 gay rights 132 Gaza 37; Israeli invasion of 33 Gaza City 31 Gaza Flotilla, May 2010 55 general intellect, the 144, 145–47 General Motors 39 Germany 113, 191; revolution of 1848 172; wages 108, 112 @Ghonim 13 Giddens, Anthony 31 Gide, André 127 Giffords, Gabrielle 182 Gini Index 119 Gladwell, Malcolm 81–82, 83 global capital flows 107–8 global financial crisis 31, 39, 66–67, 85, 110–11, 115, 191 globalization 69,72, 105, 108, 109, 122, 124, 149, 191 Golkar, Saeid 78 Googlebombs 78 Gorz, André 79–80, 143 graduate with no future, the 66–73, 96–97; disposable income 67; as international sub-class 69; life-arc 67; numbers 70; revolutionary role 72–73; and the urban poor 70–71 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck) 153, 155, 159, 163, 164 Great Britain: anti-road movement 56; benefit system 113–14; changing forms of protest 54–57; collapse of Labour 113–15; devaluation 123; Education Maintenance Allowance 47; end of winter of discontent 61–62; equity withdrawal 114; European elections, 2009 115; general election, 2010 43; the graduate with no future 96–97; Millbank riot 42–44; non-UK born workers 115; police failures 61; public spending cuts 54–55; radical tactics 54–57; spontaneous horizontalists 44–46; Strategic Security and Defence Review 124; student population 70; UK Uncut actions 54–55; university fees 44, 47, 50, 54; youth 41–42, 44, 53–54; youth unemployment 66 Great Depression, lessons of 123–25 Great Doubling 108 Great Unrest, 1914 175–76 Greece 37, 188; anomic breakdown 103–4; austerity programme 92–93, 102; bailouts 92, 96, 98, 113; cabinet reshuffle 96, 97–98; debt crisis 90, 91–92, 98–99, 112; GDP 91; general election, 2009 91; general strike 99; the left 100; media ownership 87; Medium Term Fiscal Strategy 91; model of capitalism 102; MP resignations 89; Papandreou government falls 96; political legitimacy lost 104; the salariat 101; tax evasion 97; tax revenues 92; tax system 91; see also Athens Greek Communist Party (KKE) 88, 90 Grigoropoulos, Alexandras 32 grime (music) 52 Grossman, Vasily 129 @GSquare86 69 Guindi, Ezzat 9 hackers 35 el-Hamalawy, Hossam, @3arabawy 10, 22, 71 Hardy, Simon 69 Hayek, Friedrich 111, 209 Henderson, Maurice 161–62 Hennawy, Abd El Rahman, @Hennawy89 12–13 Here Comes Everybody (Shirky) 138 Herman, Edward S. 28–29 hidemyass.com 14 hierarchy: erosion of 80–81; informal 83; predictability of 77 higher education market 67 Hill, Joe 176 historical materialism 131 Hogge, Becky 140 homelessness 159–63 Hoon, Geoff 114 Horioka, Charles 107 horizontalism 45, 55, 56, 62, 100 Huffington Post blog 184 human rights 143 Hungary 172 Ian’s Pizza, Madison, Wisconsin 184 Ibrahim, Gigi, @GSquare86 69 ideology 29, 149 immolations 11, 32, 71 impotence, zeitgeist of 29–30 impoverishment 209 Inception (film) 29 India 120–21 Indiana 116–17, 125 indignados, the 88, 100–1, 104 individual: freedom of 127–30; power of the 65, 79; rise of the 127–30 Indorama group 22 industrialization 192 Indymedia 74 inequality 209 inflation 109, 120–21 info-capitalism 148, 211 info-hierarchies 147–52 info-revolution, the 146, 149–50 informal hierarchies 83 information capitalism 145 information management 147 information networks 77 information tools 75 Inkster, Nigel 65 institutional loyalty 68 interest rates 67 International Labour Organization 19–20, 120 International Monetary Fund 92 Internet consciousness 136–38 Internet, the: access in slums 207; Arab world growth 135; and behaviour changes 131; and the Iranian revolution 35; out of reach for some 152; power of 29; shutdowns 14, 78; and the spread of ideas 150–51 investment, and savings 107 Invisible Committee, the 189–91 Iran 25; causes of failure of revolution 36–37; election, 2009 33–34; and the Internet 35; and the Middle East balance of power 178; rooftop poems 36; Twitter Revolution 33–37, 78, 178; on YouTube 34, 35 Iraq 25, 55 Ireland 92, 111, 112, 188 Islam 30, 37 Israel 26, 33, 179–80 Italy 104 Jakarta 33 James, C.


Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder

Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, index card, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Prenzlauer Berg, telemarketer, the built environment

He is fifty-seven years old, and the only Stasi man I have ever met who outed himself. A lieutenant colonel, he worked in one of the most secret divisions of the overseas spy service, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA). Herr Bohnsack was in Division X, responsible, as he put it on the phone to me, for ‘disinformation and psychological warfare against the west’. The HVA was the overseas espionage service of the Stasi. Its director, Markus Wolf, the son of a Jewish doctor and playwright, is intelligent and urbane, and was the model, apparently, for John le Carré’s spymaster Karla. Wolf’s HVA was subject to its minister, Mielke.

‘Because we were responsible for the west,’ Herr Bohnsack explained to me, ‘we could travel and we were quite different. Our diplomats could speak languages and were cultivated. We all scorned Mielke; we had our Wolf, the tall slim elegant intellectual.’ Herr Bohnsack trained as a journalist and worked for twenty-six years in disinformation. Much of Division X’s work was directed against West Germany. It collected sensitive or secret information from agents in the west and leaked it to cause harm; it manufactured documents and spliced together recordings of conversations that never took place in order to damage persons in the public sphere; and it spread rumours about people in the west, including the devastating rumour that someone worked for them.

p. 227 None of the torturers at Hohenschönhausen has been brought to justice. See Ritchie, p. 877. pp. 237 and 242 Articles on Herr Bohnsack include Der Spiegel 29/1991 pp. 32–34 (in which Bohnsack confirms that West German politicians’ votes were bought by the Stasi), and Der Spiegel 30/1991, pp. 57–58. On disinformation see also Der Spiegel 49/1991, pp. 127–30. Despite the Stasi vote-buying, Brandt’s term as chancellor was short-lived. Two years later Brandt fell when it was revealed that one of his closest advisers, Günter Guillaume, was one of Wolf’s agents. Acknowledgments My first debt of thanks is to the people who told me about their lives, most of all Miriam Weber, whose story was the impetus for finding the others.


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

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

Among Clinton voters, the most popular choice was CNN, with 18 percent naming it as their main news source, followed by MSNBC, which was the top choice of 9 percent. Among Trump voters, 40 percent named Fox News.10 The Pew findings mirror what other researchers have discovered. In “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” a study of media dynamics in the 2016 election, six Harvard researchers concluded: The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets.

Disentangling Party and Ideology in America,” American Political Science Review 113, no. 1 (Feb. 2019): 38–54, doi.org/10.1017/S0003055418000795. 9 Justin Amash, “Justin Amash on Trump, Impeachment, and the Death of the Tea Party,” interview by Jane Coaston, Vox, July 3, 2019, vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/3/18759659/justin-amash-trump-impeachment-gop-tea-party-republicans. 10 Jeffrey Gottfried, Michael Barthel, and Amy Mitchell, “Trump, Clinton Voters Divided in Their Main Source for Election News,” Pew Research Center, January 18, 2017, journalism.org/2017/01/18/trump-clinton-voters-divided-in-their-main-source-for-election-news. 11 Rob Faris et al., “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University, August 16, 2017, cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud. 12 Rush Limbaugh, “Climategate Hoax: The Universe of Lies versus the Universe of Reality,” Rush Limbaugh Show, November 24, 2009, rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2009/11/24/climategate_hoax_the_universe_of_lies_versus_the_universe_of_reality/. 13 Matt Grossmann and David A.

., 9–10 as influence on reasoning, 81–102 intelligence short-circuited by, 90–99 in legal challenges, 98–99 as mega-identity, 69–70, 72 misperception in, 94–95 negative, see negative partisanship political identity vs., 69–70 political vacillation in, 81–86 racism vs., 76–77 strengthening of, 176–81 voter awareness of, 16 Washington’s warning against, 11 “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation” (Harvard study), 235–36 Paths Out of Dixie (Mickey), 23 Paul, Rand, 177 Pauly, Mark, 81 peer review, 179 Pelosi, Nancy, 229 Pence, Mike, 177 Peretti, Jonah, 152–53, 154 “Perils of Presidentialism, The” (Linz), 201 Perry, Rick, 177 persuadable middle electorate, 172–73 persuasion, electoral influence of, 171–95 Peters, Ellen, 90 Peterson, Jordan, 123, 132 Phillips, Nathan, 167–68 podcasting, 141 polarization: approaches for managing of, 249–68 echo chamber theory and, 158–59 feedback loop of, xix–xx, 136–37 historical perspective of, 1–17, 203, 267 in identity politics, xx–xxiii issue-based vs. identity-based, 32–33 low ebb of, 34 Obama’s paradox of, 65–70 in political journalism, 163 political necessity of, 2–4 reinforcement of opposing viewpoints in, 158–63 Republican vs.


pages: 357 words: 99,456

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

To be clear, if Trump were being blackmailed by Russian agencies like the FSB or the GRU, if he had any kind of relationship with Russian intelligence, that would soar over the “overwhelming and bipartisan” standard, and Nancy Pelosi would be damning torpedoes for impeachment right now. There was never a real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.” Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is).

The piece claimed Russians were trying to divide Americans on social media after a mass shooting using Twitter hashtags like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. The Times ran this quote high up: “This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.” About a year after this story came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder reported that the same outfit, New Knowledge, and in particular that same Jonathon Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity in an Alabama Senate race.

“But as long as you got news from somewhere other than Rachel Maddow the case for skepticism was amply available as well.” These people all worked in organizations that either bungled Russia stories as MSNBC did, or shamelessly hyped fears to boost ad sales as MSNBC did, or both. Douthat’s New York Times outstripped Rachel’s act with its insane infographic series, Operation Infektion: Russian Disinformation from the Cold War to Kanye. (Kanye!) Maddow never described Russia, as this Times animation piece did, as a virus literally eating us alive at the cellular level. She was never so shameless as to blame Russia for your creeping sensation that the American media is not awesome at its job. From Infektion: “If you don’t know who to trust anymore, this might be the thing that’s making you feel that way,” the Times suggested, over graphics of red disease eating your cells.


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

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

It is a dangerous moment for any system of government premised on a common public reality.” Social media will become all the more powerful in establishing alternate versions of reality as artificial-intelligence-enabled “deepfake” videos become more ubiquitous. If you think there is a lot of disinformation now, what’s coming will be even worse. Synthetic media—audio or video recordings that are altered or doctored by technology—is becoming more and more convincing as technology puts the editing capacities of a Hollywood studio into the hands of individual actors. In 2018, Jordan Peele and BuzzFeed released a video of Barack Obama uttering obscenities that has been viewed millions of times to illustrate deepfake technology in action.

Victor Riparbelli, the CEO of a start-up that is generating synthetic media for commercial use, believes that synthetic video may account for up to 90 percent of all video content by 2025. But it’s already happening. In 2020, Oxford University researchers found evidence that the governments of seventy different countries practiced online disinformation, often via social media. Imagine a world where we are truly unable to differentiate fact from fiction, where you can show video recordings of anyone saying or doing something and they may simply deny that it happened. Nina Schick, the author of Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, suggests that this could be the end of representative democracy.

We could simply graduate most Americans to the ad-free versions of these platforms. Think about how this would transform the incentives and operations of the social media companies. No more harassing ads, no more need to track every bit of data to resell to advertisers, no more serving us up disinformation, less competition to maximize your time spent, fewer rabbit holes. They would modify their approach so that more casual users actually enjoy the service and don’t get annoyed. As long as you’re happy enough to not discontinue your subscription, they’re satisfied. And their incentives to fight commonsense measures to ameliorate abuses would go down overnight.


pages: 308 words: 97,480

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

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

Such is the seesaw reality of January 6. “No cops were hurt,” Riley said. More than 150 were. Five would die. In a video made at the Capitol, Riley claimed that after one battle involving pepper spray and a fire extinguisher, he and his comrades hugged it out with the police. Delusion? No—Riley’s smirk bespoke self-awareness. Disinformation? Too obvious for his taste. More like lucid dreaming: a deliberately surreal assault. I thought of a Telegram message one of the Proud Boy organizers sent on January 6: “I want to see thousands of normies burn that city to ash today.” It wasn’t their own crimes that thrilled them, it was the prospect of drawing the many into their boogaloo vision, their civil-war dreams.

Everybody seemed to know someone who’d participated (or, like Rob, had participated), and yet nobody believed it’d really happened. If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” such cognitive dissonance is the awful genius of our ecstatically disinformed age. “Pro-life.” “Free speech.” Athena, for instance, embraced fascism and yet bridled at the name. “They call me a Nazi,” she muttered, sitting stooped on a tall chair beside the pool table. “Just because of my German-flag tattoo.” Sometimes, she said, they told her to kill herself. She didn’t say who “they” were.

Nothing to do with Confederate anything, he said of the red flag, which belonged to his stepson. heritage not hate, it read, though in the dank heat only the latter word could be seen. He recited the right-wing rosary—borders, crime, stolen elections, stealing our guns, “our” guns—and added his own variation to my growing toxic bouquet of reproductive disinformation: man traps. The dark marriage plot. Abortion as “birth control,” he thought, allowed women too much leverage. He pitched his voice high: “ ‘I got pregnant because I wanted this guy to marry me’ ”—so many men I met discussed abortion by imitating voices they considered feminine—“ ‘and now he’s found out I’m pregnant and he doesn’t want to marry me.


pages: 196 words: 58,886

Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe

British Empire, disinformation, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Suez canal 1869, WikiLeaks

A true and unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace. The distortion or manipulation of history, in contrast, will only sow disaster. As the example of the Israel–Palestine conflict shows, historical disinformation, even of the most recent past, can do tremendous harm. This willful misunderstanding of history can promote oppression and protect a regime of colonization and occupation. It is not surprising, therefore, that policies of disinformation and distortion continue to the present and play an important part in perpetuating the conflict, leaving very little hope for the future. Constructed fallacies about the past and the present in Israel and Palestine hinder us from understanding the origins of the conflict.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Just as Kitov, Lyapunov, and Sobolev had done in their initial article by claiming that anticyberneticist Soviet philosophers had fallen victim to the machinations of a subtle pro-American disinformation program, Glushkov occasionally partook in that classic cold war move of blaming the cunning enemy for one’s internal problems. Glushkov, for example, once blamed an unnecessary political battle in the 1972 All-Union Conference on a “disinformation campaign skillfully organized by the American secret service, which was directed against the improvement of our economics.” No matter how fueled by the fumes of international conspiracy, such claims appeared to work at home.

See also Soviet cybernetics collapse of, 175 and command economy, 58–59 as corrupt corporation, 193–194 and cybernetic analogies, 54–55 economic and industrial growth of, 59–60, 185–186 economic corruption in, 188 five-year plans, 58, 166, 183 funding environment, 143 government of, 213–214 interministry competition, 183 knowledge base, 9 military-civilian divide, 89–90, 92–93, 159, 180, 214 military expenditures, 78–79 political economy, 60 political structure of, 213–214 population growth, 61 post-collapse era, 5 postwar science in, 29 and private interests, 201–202 public and private life in, 195–196 research institutes, 136 science under Stalin, 34 as state of exception, 3 universalization of science, 47 and U.S. disinformation, 169 Sovnarkhozy, 63 Space surveillance system, 83–84 Spencer, Herbert, 55 Sputnik I, 92 Stalin, Joseph, 4, 29, 31–34, 58–60, 62–63, 69, 75, 135, 199, 213 Starovsky, V. N., 147, 150–151, 160–162, 217 State as brain, 55, 120, 202 as nervous system, 202 Statistics, 84 Stavchikov, Aleksandr, 173–174 Stigler’s law of eponymy, 97 Stognii, A.


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

Allen ratcheted the propaganda machine up to a new level of paranoiac shrillness, declaring soon after his installation: “We must learn to distinguish the real facts of tobacco from unjustified emotional campaigns, based on the ‘health scare’—a technique that was not successful one hundred or three hundred years ago and, we are confident, will not be successful today.” If their hired mouthpieces were intemperate in operating their disinformation agencies, the industry’s own executives were even more confrontational. Howard Cullman, head of the Cullman Brothers cigar leaf business and the more polished and political brother of Joseph Cullman, Jr., whom he succeeded on the Philip Morris board upon Joe Junior’s death in 1955, denounced “recurrent attacks of do-gooders … announcing what they think should be our way of life… .”

The Tobacco Institute’s now monthly newsletter, Research Reports on Tobacco and Health, typically carried articles with headlines like “Human Virus Induces Animal Lung Cancers” and “Study Questions Accuracy of Death Certificates” and reprints of pro-industry articles like “Heavy Smokers with Low Mortality.” Amid this steady drumbeat of denial and disinformation, there was no cruder instance of reassurance to the industry’s customers than the one in a letter of rebuttal by the TIRC’s new president, W. T. Hoyt, in the February 1963 issue of The New Englander, in which he wrote: “Our scientific advisers tell us that the causes of lung cancer are still not known and that, as a matter of fact, recent research has tended to point up many new possible causes … .”

Shortly after winning the top job at AT, Walker dispatched his resident intellectual, former Forbes writer Robert Heimann, who held a doctorate in sociology from New York University and was later named executive vice president, to address the New York Society of Security Analysts. Heimann was a master dispenser of denial and disinformation. The health issue was a red herring, he asserted, “and clinical and experimental research do not bear out the anticigarette theory. … Nor has any substance been found in cigarette smoke in any quantity known to cause cancer in humans.” This argument glossed over the dire possibility that no single substance but a combination of substances lurking in the product was lethal over time and, furthermore, that nobody knew the threshold, if any, of carcinogenic activity for the substances in smoke.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Senior vice president at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington and Warsaw-based think tank with a list of donors that includes the US State Department and arms companies, Lucas runs its stratcom [i.e. propaganda] program, euphemistically described as an ‘on the ground effort to monitor, collate, analyze, rebut and expose Russian disinformation’ in ‘central and eastern Europe’.122 Given this outlook, it is hardly surprising that revelations about the reach of the US security and surveillance state since 2008 should not have perturbed the Economist. Obama’s unprecedented use of drones to assassinate suspected terrorists on his ‘kill lists’ – in Yemen, Somalia or Pakistan, where America was not at war, and without judicial oversight even when the targets were its own citizens – ‘do not undermine the rules of war’, though more could be done to ‘adapt’ a ‘potent new weapon’ to the constitution.123 When the US Army private then named Bradley Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of secret government documents related partly to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010, exposing war crimes committed by US mercenaries, the Economist insisted that both he and the ‘digital Jacobins’ at Wikileaks to whom Manning confided this cache be punished.

From the onset of the Cold War, it was an energetic side-car of that secret state in the battle against Soviet communism – with editors routinely accepting material from the Information Research Department, set up covertly for propaganda purposes out of the British Foreign Office in 1948. Between 1954 and 1980, Brian Crozier and Robert Moss spread ‘disinformation’ from a still wider array of sources, including MI6 and the CIA – not just in the intelligence gossip sheet they ran, Foreign Report, but directly in the Economist. Along with Brian Beedham, they attacked those – congressmen, journalists, whistle-blowers – who dared shine a light on the national security apparatus.

Democracy’ in 1971, The War for the Cities in 1972 – all retailed the idea that Che Guevara’s failure to raise a peasant revolt in Bolivia in 1967 prefigured a shift in tactics and terrain for left subversives from the countryside to the city: Robert Moss, The War for the Cities, New York 1972, pp. 7, 27, 241–48. 29.Crozier, Free Agent, p. 110. 30.‘Birth of a Civil War’, 11 March 1972. 31.‘Come off ITT’, 1 April 1972; ‘Who’s for Sweet-and-Sour Turkey’, 5 August 1972; ‘Ticket to Cuba’, 2 September 1972. 32.Fred Landis, ‘Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Right-Wing Disinformation’, CAIB, August 1980, p. 38. 33.Robert Moss, Chile’s Marxist Experiment, New York 1974, p. 190. 34.Ibid., p. i. 35.For the way Moss used CIA-invented stories while denying CIA involvement, a representative sentence: ‘The full extent of these preparations was not accurately known until after the September coup, when the military junta claimed it had discovered – in a safe in the office of the Communist under-secretary for the interior, Daniel Vergara – detailed plans for the assassination of hundreds of opposition leaders, senior officers, conservative journalists and businessmen.’


Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

However, the meeting concluded an attack could trigger devastating reprisals against 8,500 British troops based in Iraq and would certainly result in Iran cutting off oil supplies to the West. There would be an increase in suicide attacks on Israel, and it would also bring China and Russia into confrontation with the West. What had astonished Asgari was not that the details had been published in a respected London broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph—long ago he had learned that disinformation was an integral part of espionage. Was the report nothing more than that? His surprise was that it might be part of the ongoing process by MI6 to test him, to challenge the truth of his own judgment: that Iran was still “at least three years away from creating a nuclear bomb.” He knew that much would depend on his view being believed.

The harsh conditions in Latchmere House had led to several suicides in its cellblocks. Fifteen spies failed to pass Stephens’s grilling and were hanged or shot in the Tower. Fourteen agreed to become double agents, using their German radios to send false information to Berlin. Known as Operation Double Cross, it became the start of long-distance disinformation. Petrie also approved a plan for RAF planes to fly over the Channel and drop pigeons carrying false information in the hope they would fly back to dovecotes owned by Nazi sympathizers in France and spread confusion. Any bird flying back to Britain with its message faced the risk of being killed by one of the falcons of the Bird Interceptor Unit set up by MI5 on the south coast of England.

Cryptologists at Fort Meade, who had been placed on standby, began trying to decipher the messages, but there was no way they could break the codes. Allen and John Foster Dulles both concluded the volume of signal traffic could be the precursor of Israel asking for French support to be allowed to launch an attack on Jordan if the Iraqi army invaded the Hashemite kingdom. That possibility had been part of the Mossad disinformation campaign. By midnight, agreement had been reached in the château. Israel would launch a ground attack on Egypt across the Sinai Desert and aim to reach the Suez Canal within twenty-four hours, a promise Moshe Dayan had shortened to “if not sooner.” Britain and France would then issue an ultimatum to Nasser that he should allow their troops to enter the Canal Zone as temporary peacekeepers, after which the Israeli forces would withdraw to the Sinai side of the waterway.


pages: 396 words: 116,332

Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes) by Andrew M. Lobaczewski

anti-communist, corporate raider, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, false flag, information security, John Nash: game theory, means of production, phenotype, Project for a New American Century

However, it also provokes society to elaborate pinpointed, well-thought-out self-defense measures based on its cognitive and creative efforts. Pathocratic leadership believes that it can achieve a state wherein those “other” people’s minds become dependent by means of the effects of their personality, perfidious pedagogical means, the means of mass-disinformation, and psychological terror; such faith has a basic meaning for them. In their conceptual world, pathocrats consider it virtually self-evident that the “others” should accept their obvious, realistic, and simple way of apprehending reality. For some mysterious reason, though, the “others” wriggle out, slither away, and tell each other jokes about pathocrats.

Originally published online (www.cassiopaea.org), The Wave is a fully modern exposition of the knowledge of the ancients, with subjects ranging from metaphysics, science, cosmology, and psychology to the paranormal, UFOs, hyperdimensions and macrocosmic transformation. “The Secret History of the World” … and how to get out alive If you heard the Truth, would you believe it? Ancient civilisations. Hyperdimensional realities. DNA changes. Bible conspiracies. What are the realities? What is disinformation? The Secret History of The World and How To Get Out Alive is the definitive book of the real answers where Truth is more fantastic than fiction. Laura Knight-Jadczyk, wife of internationally known theoretical physicist, Arkadiusz Jadczyk, an expert in hyperdimensional physics, draws on science and mysticism to pierce the veil of reality.

She also cites the clear evidence that our planet undergoes periodic natural cataclysms, a cycle that has arguably brought humanity to the brink of destruction in the present day. For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core of the issue and its sheer audacity in refusing to be swayed or distracted by the morass of disinformation that has been employed by the powers that be to cover their tracks, 9/11: The Ultimate Truth can rightly claim to be the definitive book on 9/11 - and what that fateful day’s true implications are for the future of mankind. The new Second Edition of 9/11: The Ultimate Truth has been updated with new material detailing the real reasons for the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, the central role played by agents of the state of Israel in the attacks, and how the arrogant Bush government is now forced to dance to the Zionists’ tune.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

If it confused and divided his enemies at home, all the better. What is different now is the great amplifier of social media. Stalin would have loved Twitter. Skillful as he was as a propagandist, his transmission capability was primitive. “What’s new is not the basic model; it’s the speed with which such disinformation can spread and the low cost of spreading it,” American political scientist Joseph Nye, the man who invented the term “soft power,” wrote in describing how Russia was making use of “sharp power.” If soft power is the ability to win over other societies because of the attractiveness of your culture, economy, and civic discourse, sharp power is the ability to insert the knife, stealthily and surgically.

If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.” Nine days later Zuckerberg was in Peru, at a summit that President Obama was also attending. The president took him into a private room and made a direct appeal: He had to take the threat of disinformation more seriously, or it would come to haunt the company, and the country, in the next election. Zuckerberg pushed back, Obama’s aides later told me. Fake news was a problem, but there was no easy fix, and Facebook wasn’t in the business of checking every fact that got posted in the global town square.

Says Russian Hackers Penetrated Its Files, Including Dossier on Donald Trump,” New York Times, June 14, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/us/politics/russian-hackers-dnc-trump.html. A persona with the screen name Guccifer 2.0: Rob Price, “RESEARCHERS: Yes, Russia Really Did Hack the Democratic National Congress,” Business Insider Australia, June 21, 2016, www.businessinsider.com.au/security-researchers-russian-spies-hacked-dnc-guccifer-2-possible-disinformation-campaign-2016-6. said he was Romanian: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “Alleged Russian Hacker ‘Guccifer 2.0’ Is Back After Months Of Silence,” Vice, January 12, 2017, motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9a3m7p/alleged-russian-hacker-guccifer-20-is-back-after-months-of-silence. The transcript of Lorenzo’s interview with Guccifer 2.0 is viewable at motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yp3bbv/dnc-hacker-guccifer-20-full-interview-transcript.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

See Morris Fiorina, “Americans Have Not Become More Politically Polarized,” Washington Post, June 23, 2014, available at link #104; Morris P. Fiorina, “The Political Parties Have Sorted,” a Hoover institution essay on contemporary American politics, series no. 3, 2016. 66.Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 73–74. 67.Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda, 75-6. 68.Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 69.Hillary Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), Kindle edition, loc. 4048. 70.Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda, 17. 71.For a related view—that the media “must embrace their solemn duty and educate the population about our great challenges—ratings be damned”—see Rob Cohen, “TV News Is As Much to Blame for Democracy’s Decline as Trump Is,” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 2018, available at link #105. 72.Among the most comprehensive analysis of the news coverage during the 2016 campaign is that conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center.

Ridout, Political Advertising in the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2016), 13–40; Randolph Kluver et al., The Internet and National Elections: A Comparative Study of Web Campaigning (New York: Routledge, 2007); Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 367–68; Clifford A. Jones, “Campaign Finance Reform and the Internet: Regulating Web Messages in the 2004 Election and Beyond,” in The Internet Election: Perspectives on the Web in Campaign 2004, ed. Andrew Paul Williams and John C.

On the relative effect of the Leave versus Remain campaign, see Vyacheslav Polonski, “Impact of Social Media on the Outcome of the EU Referendum,” EU Referendum Analysis 2016, available at link #231. For the claim that fake news was spread and Russia almost certainly had some illicit hand, see “Disinformation and ‘Fake News,’” House of Commons: Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee, February 14, 2019, 72–77, available at link #232; Dan Sabbagh, “Facebook to Expand Inquiry into Russian Influence of Brexit,” Guardian, January 27, 2018, available at link #233. 53.Burson v. Freeman, 504 U.S. 191 (1991), upheld a ban on politicking within one hundred feet of a polling place.


pages: 210 words: 65,833

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

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

The mentality of this New Right is one that is hostile to the very idea of ‘neutral’ or ‘independent’ institutions as checks on power; they are viewed as sclerotic and self-interested. Much has been written about the philosophy of Dominic Cummings in this respect, but it was Michael Gove who elevated Cummings in the first place – and who is now sowing confusion and disinformation in the media as enthusiastically as anyone. The entire Conservative election platform hangs on the idea that Parliament and Whitehall are betraying ‘the people’ – that is, they are pursuing their own political agenda. In this view, everyone has already picked a side – and if you refuse to state your choice, you are marked as left-wing, probably a Remainer, and potentially disloyal to Britain.

Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Penguin, 1993, p. 250. 9 ‘Majority worldwide say their society is broken – an increasing feeling among Britons’, Ipsos Mori, 13 September 2019. 10 Y. Benkler et al., Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, Oxford University Press, 2018. 11 G. Blank, ‘The Myth of the Echo Chamber’, OII blog, 9 March 2018. 12 Ipsos.com, ‘Ipsos MORI Veracity Index 2019: Trust in Professions Survey’, November 2019. 13 M. Andrejevic, ‘“Framelessness” or the Cultural Logic of Big Data’, in M.


pages: 295 words: 66,912

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor by Glyn Moody

Aaron Swartz, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, connected car, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, non-fungible token, Open Library, optical character recognition, p-value, peer-to-peer, place-making, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, rent-seeking, text mining, the market place, TikTok, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

One German MEP, Daniel Caspary,509 even saw the protests as sinister, alleging that: “Now an attempt is apparently being made to prevent the adoption of the copyright law with bought demonstrators as well. Up to 450 euros are being offered by a so-called NGO for participation in the demo. The money seems to come at least partly from big American Internet corporations. When American corporations try to prevent legislation with the massive use of disinformation and bought demonstrators, our democracy is threatened.”510 In reality, as Emanuel Karlsten reports,511 the digital rights organisation EDRi512 awarded €450 in travel expenses to twelve activists who wanted to join the protests in Strasbourg. Moreover, the details of how such grants were made was available on a public Web site.513 The claim that the protestors were ‘bought demonstrators’ is indicative of the reflexive contempt that some supporters of the EU Copyright Directive had for ordinary citizens daring to express their views by taking to the streets.

The EU Copyright Directive has one element that needs to be added—freedom of panorama—and several parts that need to go. Article 15, the snippet tax, was introduced because of lobbying by some large press publishers despite all the evidence against it, and should be removed. It is biased in favour of major publishers and will lead to more disinformation circulating. Sites keen to spread their lies will impose no conditions on the reuse of their material, which will therefore circulate widely as it is re-used by other outlets looking for free stories. Meanwhile, much of the best, most professional journalism will be locked away behind paywalls, read by only those who can afford to do so.713 An analysis of legislative changes conducted in 2021 by two academics Martin Husovec714 and João Quintais,715 working respectively at the London School of Economics and the University of Amsterdam, showed that Article 17 is similarly biased in favour of larger players: “[The] licensing provisions in Art. 17, unless implemented through collective licensing at the national level, result in a direct advantage to large right-holders.


pages: 400 words: 121,708

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herman Kahn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear paranoia, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Yom Kippur War

The CIA directorate of intelligence decided that any attempt to play up the possibility of ‘war danger’ was simply a ploy to stop the deployment of Pershing II and Cruise missiles in western Europe and to deepen divisions within the Atlantic alliance, putting pressure on Washington for a more conciliatory line. It was all put down to part of a programme of Soviet disinformation to discredit the US and bolster opposition to the siting of American missiles in Europe.2 The US intelligence establishment remained adamant that there was nothing to be concerned about. In May 1984, analysts produced a Special National Intelligence Estimate entitled ‘Implications of Recent Soviet Military-Political Activities’.

This report outlined as its ‘central concern… the possibility of major Soviet initiatives to influence the November election’. The Soviets had identified the Reagan administration as ‘a more consistently hostile opponent of the USSR’s interests and aspirations than it has faced in many years’. Fears grew that the Soviets would spread rumours and disinformation to try to discredit Reagan and make him look like an aggressive leader whose actions would put the people of America at grave risk. The November 1983 war scare was once again presented as ‘hostile propaganda, which blames the United States for an increased danger of war’ in order to ‘excite opposition to Washington’s policies’ and to ‘undercut the President’s re-election prospects’.26 In reality, the Soviet Union was too weak and leaderless to exert any real influence upon the outcome of the US election.

It concluded unequivocally that in November 1983 ‘we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger’.13 In the mid-1990s the CIA decided to open its own investigation into whether it really had missed one of the most frightening moments of the Cold War. Were the Soviets actually about to launch a nuclear strike against the West? There was still controversy within the CIA over whether this was a real crisis or simply an example of Soviet disinformation. Robert Gates asked, ‘To what degree was our skepticism about the war scare prompted by the fact that our military didn’t want to admit that one of its exercises might have been dangerously if inadvertently provocative, or because our intelligence experts didn’t want to admit that we had badly misread the state of mind of the Soviet leadership?’


pages: 391 words: 123,597

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

I thought it odd, but it also showed efficiency, if nothing else, on Arron’s part. Still, it was strange, and when David and I visited the call center, we could see at once that it was the same one used for Eldon Insurance. As I later testified to the UK parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee in its “Disinformation and ‘fake news’” inquiry, sixty people or so manned the phones, at about five rows of desks, making outgoing calls to customers in what I was told was the Eldon database to ask questions about Brexit where they usually would be answering questions from their insurance customers. The manager of the call center was a young woman who looked to be about my age.

Her allegations against me had real collateral damage: I was subpoenaed by Mueller the next day, which she then printed nine months later, conveniently leaving out the date and touting it as though it had just happened, further confusing the world and obfuscating the truth. Even before those “articles,” in my opinion, Carole’s spread of disinformation was beyond shocking—especially on Twitter—let alone her lack of journalistic ethics, constantly leaving me without any right to comment before publication. Because this was typical of her behavior, I thought, why should I believe her now? Furthermore, it was hard to see Chris Wylie as reliable: he was a disgruntled employee whose current access to information had to have been limited, unless he had someone on the inside at SCL or CA serving as a kind of mole.

But not unlike the very people who were the targets of Cambridge Analytica’s devious and brilliant messaging, I, too, had been a perhaps unwitting victim of an influence campaign. As with so many others, something had made an impression on me, I clicked on it, and that had sent me through a wormhole of disinformation, and I made choices I never would have thought I was capable of making. It had happened as equally to me as to the country I was born in and the country I’d adopted as my own. I was a proxy for each of those nations, willingly hoodwinked, living in an echo chamber, and never even knowing it.


pages: 533 words: 125,495

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

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

Even before the Trumpian takeover, thoughtful Republican stalwarts had disparaged their own organization as “the party of stupid” for its anti-intellectualism and hostility to science.73 Since then, many others have been horrified by their party’s acquiescence to Trump’s maniacal lying and trolling: his game plan, in the admiring words of onetime strategist Steve Bannon, to “flood the zone with shit.”74 With Trump’s defeat, rational heads on the right should seek to restore American politics to a system with two parties that differ over policy rather than over the existence of facts and truth. We are not helpless against the onslaught of “post-truth” disinformation. Though lying is as old as language, so are defenses against being lied to; as Mercier points out, without those defenses language could never have evolved.75 Societies, too, protect themselves against being flooded with shit: barefaced liars are held responsible with legal and reputational sanctions.

., 82–83 validity vs. soundness, 83 loss aversion, 192–94 lotteries, 176–78, 182–83, 188–92 Lotto, Beau, 30 Love Story (film), 76–78, 263 lucky streaks, 148 Madison, James, 41 Madman Theory, 60–61, 236 Maduro, Nicolás, 23, 24 main effect, 273, 274, 275, 278 Maine, USS, 124, 125 The Maltese Falcon (film), 61–62 mañana fallacy, 101 Mao Zedong, 245 margins of error, 196 marshmallow test, 47–48, 50 Marx, Chico, 294–95 Marx, Karl, 90 Masons, 36, 40 mathematicians caution about mindless use of statistical formulas, 166–67 mansplaining, 18 paragon of rationality, 74 simulation vs. proof, 20 stereotype of, 20 Matthew Effect, 263–64, 354n21 Maymin, Philip, 342n17 Meadow’s fallacy (multiplying probabilities of interdependent events), 129–30, 131 media accountability for lying/disinformation, 313, 314, 316, 317 availability bias driven by, 120, 125–27 consumer awareness of biases in, 127 correlation confused with causation and, 256, 260, 353n13 cynicism bred by, 126–27 innumeracy of, 125–27, 314 negativity bias, 125–26 politically partisan, 296 rational choice portrayal by, 173–74 reforms for rationality, 127, 314, 316, 317 tabloids, 287–88, 306 and truth-seeking, 316 the Winner’s Curse and, 256, 353n13 See also digital media; entertainment; journalism; social media medical quackery, 6, 90, 284, 304, 321, 322 celebrity doctors, 305 COVID-19 and, 284 harms caused by, 322 hidden mechanisms posited by, 258 intuitive essentialism and, 304–5, 321 science laureates and, 90 medicine base-rate neglect in diagnosis, 155 Bayesian reasoning in, 150–51, 152, 153–54, 167, 169–70, 321 correlation and causation, 251–52 COVID-19, 2, 283 disease control, 325 drug trials, 58, 264 evidence-based, 317 expected utility of treatments, 192–94, 198–99 false positives, 169–70, 198 frequencies and, 169–70 randomized controlled trials and, 264 rational ignorance and, 57 rationality and progress in, 325–26 sensitivity of tests, 150, 154, 169, 352n10 signal detection and, 202, 211, 213, 220 specificity of tests, 352n10 taboo tradeoffs in, 63–64 See also health; mental health Meehl, Paul, 279, 280 Mellers, Barbara, 29, 219–20 memes, 144, 308–9 mental health, 251, 256, 276–77, 276, 280 Mercier, Hugo, 87, 291, 298–99, 308, 313 meteorology, 114, 127, 133, 220 The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), 27 military, 63, 220, 231, 295 Miller, Bill, 143 Miller, Joshua, 132 mind-body dualism, 304 miracles, Bayesian argument vs., 158–59 Mischel, Walter, 47 Mlodinow, Len, 143 modal logic, 84 modernity vs. ecological rationality, 96–98 vs. mythology mindset, 303–4 See also progress modus ponens, 80 modus tollens, 80–81 Molière, virtus dormitiva, 11–12, 89 money diminishing marginal utility of, 181–83, 247 dollar value on human life, 63–64 See also finances; GDP per capita money pump, 176, 180, 185, 187–88 monocausal fallacy, 260, 272–73 Montesquieu, 333, 335 Monty Hall dilemma, 16–22, 115, 342n33 morality of Bayesian base rates, 62, 163–66 discounting the future and, 51–52 God and, 67 Golden Rule (and variants), 68–69 heretical counterfactuals, 64–65 impartiality as the core, 68–69, 317, 340 marginal utility of lives and, 183–84 the mythology mindset and, 300, 307 relativism and, 42, 66–67 self-interest and sociality, 69 taboo tradeoffs and, 64 See also moral progress moral progress overview, 328–29 analogizing oppressed groups, 335 animals, cruelty to, 334–35 democracy, 335–36, 339 feminism, 336–37 homosexuality, persecution of, 333–34 ideas vs. proponents, 339–40 rationality as driver of, 329–30, 340 redistribution of wealth and, 182 religious persecution, 301–2, 330 sadistic punishment, 332–33 slavery, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339 war, 331 Morgenbesser, Sidney, 81, 82, 178 Morgenstern, Oskar, 175, 197, 228, 350n1 motivated reasoning, 289–92, 297, 298, 310.

See also Madman Theory reality as motivating, 41–42, 288, 298, 309, 320 reasoning about reasoning, 37–41, 70–71 rejection of the paranormal and, 309–10 as uncool, 35–36 winning arguments as adaptive function of, 87–88, 291 See also ecological rationality; goals; irrationality—crisis of; normative models; taboos —effects of overview, 319–20 life outcomes, 320–24 material progress, 324–28 moral progress. See moral progress —recommendations to strengthen accountability for lying and disinformation, 313, 314, 316–17 avoidance of sectarian symbolism, 312 educational curricula, 314–15 evidence-based evaluation, 312, 317 incentive structures, 315–17 in journalism, 314, 316, 317 norms valorizing, 311–13, 315 in punditry, 317 “Republican party of stupid,” 312–13, 357n73 scientists in legislatures, 312 in social media, 313, 316–17 viewpoint diversity in higher ed, 313–14 Rationality Community, 149–50, 312 Rationality Quotient, 311 Rawls, John, 69 realism, universal, 300–301 reality, motivating rationality, 41–42, 288, 298, 309, 320 reality mindset Active Open-Mindedness/Openness to Evidence and, 310–11, 324, 356–57n67 definition, 299–300 mythology mindset, border with, 303 as unnatural, 300–301 reason, in definition of “rationality,” 36 Rebel Without a Cause, 59, 236, 344n29 reciprocity, norms of, 5 recursion, 71, 108 reflectiveness Cognitive Reflection Test, 8–11, 50 definition, 311 intelligence correlating with, 311 openness to evidence correlating with, 311 and reasoning competence, 323, 324 resistance to cognitive illusions and, 311 unreflective thinking, 8–10, 311 of weird beliefs, 299 regression correlation coefficient (r), 250–51 definition, 248, 252 equation for, 272, 278–81 general linear model, 272 human vs., accuracy of, 278–80 instrumental variable regression, 267–68 multiple regression, 270–72, 271 regression line, 248–49, 253–54, 270 residuals, 249–50, 270–71 regression discontinuity, 266–67 regression line, 248–49, 253–54, 270 regression to the mean and bell curve distribution, 253 definition, 252–53 imperfect correlation as producing, 254 regression line, 253–54 scatterplots and, 253–54 as statistical phenomenon, 253 unawareness of, 254–56, 320, 353n13 regret avoidance, 17, 190 relativism and relativists argument against rationality, 39–40 as hypocritical, 42 morality and, 42, 66–67 religion argument from authority, 90 the cluster illusion and, 147 forbidden base rates and, 163–66 the Golden Rule in, 68–69 heretical counterfactuals, 64–65 monotheism, 40 the mythology mindset and, 301–2, 307 persecution of, progress against, 330–31 See also God Rendezvous game, 233–34 replicability crisis in science Bayesian reasoning failures and, 159–61 preregistration as remedy, 145–46 questionable research practices and, 145–46, 160, 353n13 science journalism and, 161–62 statistical significance and, 225 Texas sharpshooter fallacy, 144–46, 160 Winner’s Curse, 256 representativeness heuristic, 27, 155–56 Republican Party and Republicans calling Democrats socialists, 83–84 expressive rationality and, 298 Fox News and, 267, 268, 296 pizza classified as vegetable by, 101 politically motivated numeracy, 292–94 rehabilitating, 312–13, 357n73 See also left and right (political); politics reputation, 47, 237, 242, 308, 313 resistance to evidence.


pages: 956 words: 288,981

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 by Steve Coll

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, disinformation, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, index card, Islamic Golden Age, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

If the threat was against the U.S. embassy, they might consider a more targeted, secret alert to employees there. They issued dozens of such warnings in public and private in the weeks after the Africa attacks.5 They were aware that bin Laden and his leadership group were probably planting disinformation to distract them. They assumed that the more they closed embassies and issued alerts, the more they encouraged this disinformation campaign. Yet they could see no alternative. They had to collect as much threat information as they could, they had to assess it, and they had to act defensively when the intelligence looked credible. There was plenty that looked truly dangerous.

One of the largest units focused on the Abu Nidal Organization, which had claimed hundreds of civilian lives in multiple strikes during the 1980s. Clarridge and his colleagues decided to sow dissent by exposing the group’s financial operations and trying to raise suspicions among members. Abu Nidal had become a paranoid, self-immolating group on its own accord, but the agency helped accelerate its breakup through penetrations and disinformation. Abu Nidal faded as an effective terrorist organization within three years. There were other successes, especially in Germany and Italy, where the terrorists began to consume themselves, sometimes helped along by covert operations. Hezbollah, on the other hand, proved a very hard target. It was the new center’s first attempt to penetrate a committed Islamist terrorist organization that targeted American citizens.

For a full year after Hezbollah kidnapped and tortured the CIA’s Beirut station chief, William Buckley, beginning in 1984, the agency “had absolutely no idea” who had taken him or the other American hostages in Lebanon, Baer recalled. Meanwhile, the Counterterrorist Center had to deal with hoax after hoax—some mounted by Hezbollah as disinformation—about where the hostages were located.29 Clarridge wanted to attack. He sought to enlist U.S. Special Forces to launch an elaborate hostage rescue operation in Beirut. He rigged up special refrigerator trucks in Europe, disguised to look as if they belonged to Lebanese merchants; he hoped they could be shipped in and used to run Delta Force commandos into West Beirut.


pages: 1,118 words: 309,029

The Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Modeled on the KGB, it was given the lofty title of “Department of Defense of the Interests of Afghanistan.” Known and feared by its Dari acronym, AGSA, the new Afghan communist spy agency would grow into a huge Soviet-Afghan organization controlling domestic and foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, border security, covert action, several elite combat units, and disinformation capabilities.15 Soviet Communist Party advisers were tasked with guiding the PDPA in its transition from a political party out of power to one exercising a monopoly of power in Afghanistan. This required PDPA solidarity. Soviet advice to maintain Khalq-Parcham unity appeared to be honored in the immediate aftermath of the coup.

The uproar was finally squashed by a vote in which everyone agreed to accept everyone else’s delegates. On February 14, Mojaddedi led his contingent out of the shura for four days to protest Pakistani interference. In a confidential cable to Washington, the American embassy reported that “every faction in the shura is putting out its own version of, and disinformation about, all the backroom maneuvering that is going on. There are no neutral sources of information. Even the official press outlet for the shura, Afghan News Agency, is in fact controlled by one of the parties—Hezb Islami-Gulbuddin, and is distorting the news accordingly.”49 Rancorous debate over the lack of fair representation in the shura destabilized proceedings for several days.

“Your assessment about Afghanistan is wrong,” he volunteered. In many conversations during our three-year association in Beijing, Fedotov had proven to be well informed and straightforward. His rejection of the conventional wisdom that Najib was losing and the Afghan Mujahidin were winning troubled me. Was he spreading disinformation or was U.S. intelligence reporting behind the curve? The Pakistani ambassador to China, Akram Zaki, invited me to a reception honoring a visiting delegation of the recently formed Afghan Interim Government. It was headed by the AIG foreign minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The reception took place in Zaki’s spacious living room.


pages: 245 words: 72,893

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

News feeds could be targeted accordingly. It is hard to know if it made any difference. But the margin of Trump’s victory was sufficiently narrow – tens of thousands of voters in a few key states – to suggest that it just might have. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has rediscovered its appetite for bombarding Western electorates with disinformation, based on extensive data harvesting. Bots on Twitter that pretend to engage in democratic debate are being programmed to make debate impossible, by turning all political argument into a never-ending shouting match. Bots that are very bad at impersonating human intelligence can still be very good at impersonating angry voters.

., 12, 55 C Cambridge Analytica (firm), 156, 157, 159 capitalism, 196, 199 Carson, Rachel, 85, 87–8 Silent Spring, 82–3, 89, 90–91, 93 catastrophes, 6, 7, 85–6 environmental, 82–3, 85, 87–93; see also climate change nuclear, 83–4, 97 total, 100 Chicago: violence, 211 China and climate change, 174 Communist Party, 172–3 economy, 172, 208 foreign policy, 30–31 government model, 174 as a meritocracy, 175–6 nationalism, 172 pollution, 89 view of Trump, 173 Churchill, Winston, 8, 75–6, 168–9, 177 civil service, 41, 55–6; see also bureaucracies Clark, Christopher: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, 115 Clemenceau, Georges, 71, 75–6 climate change, 90–93 China and, 174 consciousness raising, 89, 92–93 conspiracy theories, 91–92 incremental nature of, 97 and risk, 101 support for, 108 and uncertainty, 96 see also global warming Clinton, President Bill, 54–5 Clinton, Hillary, 13–15, 16, 198 Cold War, 28–9, 67, 94, 95–6, 106–7, 108–9 communism 194; see also China: Communist Party; Marxism-Leninism; Stalinism consciousness raising, 85, 89, 92–3, 106 conspiracy theories, 60–71 climate change, 91–2 and division, 99 and fake news, 75 France, 69 India, 65–6 nuclear weapons, 96 Poland, 65, 66 and totalitarianism, 98 Turkey, 65, 66 United Kingdom, 62–3 United States, 62, 64–5, 67 and war, 77 conspiracy theorists, 153 Constantine I, king of Greece, 27, 28 consumerism, 166 Corbyn, Jeremy, 58, 94–5, 148–9, 150, 209 corporations, 129–32, 139, 166 coups, 3, 217 Algeria, 41–3 and catastrophes, 85 and clarity, 59 and conspiracies, 7, 60 and counter-coups, 56–7 Cyprus, 33, 38–9 economic conditions for, 31 in fiction, 57–8 Greece, 26–30, 27, 32, 33, 34–5, 38, 40, 45 Luttwak on, 41–2, 46 Turkey, 50–52, 53, 66 varieties of, 44–5 election-day vote fraud, 44 executive, 44 executive aggrandisement, 44, 52, 55 promissory, 44, 47, 50–51 strategic election manipulation, 44 Zimbabwe, 48 crises, 5–6 Cuban missile Crisis (1962), 107–8 mid-life, 5, 8, 169, 218 Cummings, Dominic, 179 currencies, 135 digital, 136 Cyprus: coups, 33, 38–9 D databases, 123 de Gaulle, General Charles, 41, 42 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 142, 187 death, 23–4, 204, 216–17 democracy appeal of, 6, 169–71 audience, 47, 117 direct, 35, 48, 143, 161, 162, 163 failure of, 50 obsolescence, 167–8 plebiscitary, 47 spectator, 47 spread of, 3 strong and weak, 59–60 threats to 6–7, 53–4, 108, 112; see also coups digital revolution, 152, 164, 200–201, 215, 219 dignity collective, 172, 173, 177 and elections, 170, 177 and loss, 175 disruption, 198–9 Dorsey, Jack, 137 Dreyfus, Alfred, 69 dystopias, 90–91, 113, 114, 118–19, 126, 220 E East India Company, 130–31 economic growth, 172, 192 accelerationists and, 200 and populism, 192 United States, 175 Western Europe, 175 Economist (journal), 133 Edgerton, David, 122 education, 109–10, 163–4, 183–4, 185 Eggers, David: The Circle, 139, 140, 141–2, 144 Egypt, 48–50 Eichmann, Adolf, 84, 85–6 elections 4, 218 and advertising, 158–9 computers and, 125 and coups, 44, 45 decision-making process, 188–9 and dignity, 170, 177 and disinformation, 156–7 Egypt, 48–9 France, 148 fraud, 44 Greece, 28, 29, 39, 40, 148 Italy, 148 manipulation of, 44 Netherlands, 148 online, 162 Turkey, 51 United Kingdom, 95 United States see under United States see also vote, right to elites, 75 and climate change, 91–2 corporate, 139 and nuclear disarmament, 95 and populism, 65 power of, 61 see also wealth environmentalists, 200 epistocracy, 178–9, 180, 181–8, 191, 205 equality, 202–3; see also inequality Erdogan, President Recep, 51–3, 66, 149, 213 Estlund, David: Democratic Authority, 185 Ethiopia, 154–5 European Central Bank (ECB), 33, 39, 116–17 European Union (EU) and corporations, 132 and Greece, 30, 32, 116–17 executive aggrandisement, 45–6 military, 55, 56 United States presidents, 92 experts see epistocracy; technocracy ExxonMobil, 92 F Facebook, 131, 132–3, 134–5, 136, 138–9, 140, 141, 145, 150, 157 fascism, 169 financial crash (2008), 79, 110, 116 Forster, E.


pages: 434 words: 77,974

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

“Pay-to-play”—paying a significant fee to be featured in a seemingly unbiased news story—is rampant in the cryptocurrency industry. One reporter reached out to cryptocurrency news sites and found many of them were willing to take money in return for favorable coverage. Sometimes these news outlets would request thousands of dollars for a positive story, which shows the kind of shadow market for disinformation that exists in the industry. Figure 6-11 shows the prices some outlets wanted to charge for a favorable story. Figure 6-11. Pay-to-play Social media can be a tool for news gathering, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. On Twitter, there are entire campaigns meant to influence thinking on bitcoin, XRP, and many other smaller cryptocurrencies.

Gox-Bitfinex multisignature wallet contracts, Multisignature Contracts-Multisignature Contracts N Namecoin, Altcoins naming services, Naming Services network hash rate, Block discovery networkscentralized versus decentralized versus distributed design, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized Corda, The Corda networknodes having visibility into transactions, Corda ledger DAG design, DAGs Libra's centralization challenge, Novi transactions confirmed by network on Bitcoin, Transaction life cycle New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation NiceHash, NiceHash Nightfall blockchain, Nightfall nodes, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralizedin Avalance consensus mechanism, Avalanche Libra, validator and full nodes, How the Libra Protocol Works Lightning, Lightning nodes and wallets in proof-of-stake networks, Proof-of-Stake nonces, The mining processin block discovery on Bitcoin, The mining process running out of nonce space or overflow, The mining process in Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, The Whitepaper noncustodial wallets, Wallet Types: Custodial Versus Noncustodial(see also wallets) nonfungible tokens, Fungible and Nonfungible TokensERC-721 standard for, ERC-721 Nothing-at-Stake problem, Proof-of-Stake Novi wallet, Novi NuBits, NuBits NXT blockchain, NXT O oligarchical model dominating the web, Web 3.0 Omni Core, Understanding Omni Layerlimitations of, Deploying and Executing Smart Contracts in Ethereum Omni Layer, Understanding Omni Layer-Adding custom logicadding custom logical operations to Bitcoin, Adding custom logic-Adding custom logic how it works, How Omni Layer works limitations of, Deploying and Executing Smart Contracts in Ethereum technical stack, overview of, Understanding Omni Layer Tether project built on, Tether opcodes, Gas and Pricing Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, The More Things Change operating system platform (EOS), Blockchains to Watch operators, ERC-777, ERC-1155 Optimistic Rollups, Other Altchain Solutions, Lightning nodes and wallets options, Derivatives OP_RETURN field, Adding custom logictranslation of metadata in, Adding custom logic Oracle, Blockchain Platform, Blockchain as a Service oracles, Important Definitionsmanipulation in Fulcrum attack, The Fulcrum Exploit order books, Order Booksthin, slippages and, Slippage over-the-counter (OTC) market, Slippage P paper wallets, Wallet Type Variations Parity, Parity Parity hack (2017), Parity participants, Participants passwordssecurity vulnerabilities, Zero-Knowledge Proof Thinbus Secure Remote Password protocol, Zero-Knowledge Proof pay-to-play, Tools for fundamental analysis payment channels, Lightningnode dropping or losing connection to, Lightning nodes and wallets opening by sending funding transaction, Funding transactions withdrawing funds from, Off-chain transactions payment systemsLibra, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains permissioned ledger uses of blockchain, Payments physical cash versus digital, Electronic Systems and Trust Permacoin, Alternative methods permissioned ledger uses of blockchain, Permissioned Ledger Uses-Paymentsbanking, Banking central bank digital currencies, Central Bank Digital Currencies gaming, Gaming health care, Health Care Internet of Things, Internet of Things IT systems, IT payments systems, Payments permissioned ledgers, Databases and Ledgers permissionless ledgers, Databases and Ledgers person-to-person trading of cryptocurrency, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin phishing attacks, Security Fundamentals Plasma implementation of sidechains, Other Altchain Solutions Ponzi schemes in cryptocurrency, Skirting the Laws PotCoin, More Altcoin Experiments precompilation of zk-SNARKs, zk-SNARKs preminingissues with, Litecoin premined altcoin, Ixcoin, Altcoins prices (gas), Gas and Pricing Primecoin, Altcoins privacyand censorship resistance with dapps, Use Cases Ethereum-based privacy implementations, Ethereum-Based Privacy Implementations future developments in blockchains, Privacy information security in decentralizing finance and the web, Privacy-Ring Signaturesring signatures, Ring Signatures Zcash, Zcash zero-knowledge proof, Zero-Knowledge Proof zk-SNARKs, zk-SNARKs insufficient anonymity on Bitcoin, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering paired with scalability, Mimblewimble blockchain protocol, Mimblewimble, Beam, and Grin privacy-focused blockchains, PrivacyMonero, Blockchains to Watch-How Monero Works Zcash, Zcash privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, Privacy-Focused CryptocurrenciesDash, Dash Monero, Monero Zcash, Zcash private blockchain networks, Privacy private blockchains, The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance private keys, Public/private key cryptography(see also public/private key cryptography) products/services, buying or selling, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin proof-of-history, Alternative methods proof-of-stake, Proof-of-Stake-Proof-of-StakeByzantine fault-tolerant algorithm, HotStuff, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains Casper algorithm in Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum Scaling proof-of-stake velocity, More Altcoin Experiments proof-of-storage, Alternative methods proof-of-work, Block Generation, Proof-of-Work-Confirmationsbit gold's client puzzle function type, Bit Gold block discovery, Block discovery confirmations by miners of blocks to include in blockchain, Confirmations criticisms of, Proof-of-Stake, Ripple and Stellar CryptoNote protocol, Monero Ethereum's Ethash protocol, Ethereum: Taking Mastercoin to the Next Level longest chain rule, The mining process mining process for block discovery on Bitcoin, The mining process mining process on Bitcoin, The mining process in Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, The Whitepaper transaction life cycle, Transaction life cycle use by B-Money, B-Money use by Hashcash, Hashcash X11 ASIC-resistant, Dash protocols, Electronic Systems and Trust pseudonimity, KYC rules and, KYC and pseudonymity public keys, Public/private key cryptography(see also public/private key cryptography) public/private key cryptographyBitcoin's use of, Public/private key cryptography examples of public and private keys, Naming Services generating keys, Generating keys private key storage for digital wallets, Authoring a smart contract private keys for wallets, Private Keys public and private keys in cryptocurrency systems, Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems-Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems unauthorized access to private key, Bitcoin Transaction Security use in controlling access to personal information, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking pull transactions, Bitcoin Transaction Security, ERC-777 push transactions, Bitcoin Transaction Security, ERC-777 Q Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), Blockchain as a Service Quorum blockchain, Quorum, JPMorgan R ransomware, CryptoLocker and, CryptoLocker and Ransomware rate limiting, Exchange Risk, Rate Limiting real estate transactions, using tokens on a blockchain, Tokens on the Ethereum Platform recovery seed, Recovery Seed recursive call vulnerability, Forking Ethereum and the creation of Ethereum Classic regulationof cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction FATF and the Travel Rule, The FATF and the Travel Rule FinCEN guidance and beginnings of, FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation-FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation regulatory challenges in cryptocurrency market, Regulatory Challenges-Basic Mistakes regulatory issues with ICOs, Tokenize Everything regulatory arbitrage, Avoiding Scrutiny: Regulatory Arbitrage-Crypto-Based StablecoinsICOs as example of, Initial Coin Offerings relational databases, Databases and Ledgers replay attacks, Replay attacksprotecting against, on Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, The Ethereum Classic Fork replication systems, Databases and Ledgers REST APIsEthereum network, Interacting with Code WebSocket versus, REST Versus WebSocket ring confidential transactions, Blockchains to Watch, How Monero Works ring signatures, Monero, Ring Signatures, Blockchains to Watchhiding public address of sender on Monero, How Monero Works Ripple, Other Concepts for Consensus, Rippleblock times, Float Configuration 2 Robinhood mobile app, Brokerages Rollups, Zero Knowledge (ZK) and Optimistic, Other Altchain Solutions, Lightning nodes and wallets Royal Mint, The Royal Mint S Santander, blockchain-issued bonds, Banking SAP, Blockchain as a Service, Blockchain as a Service satoshi, Gas and Pricing Satoshi Nakamotobitcoin address related to, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering efforts to establish identity of, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks identity, guesses at, Bahamas Satoshi's Vision group (Bitcoin SV), The Bitcoin Cash Fork whitepaper, The Whitepaper savings services (DeFi), Savings scalabilitycentralized versus decentralized exchanges, Scalability discontent over Bitcoin network's scaling, The Bitcoin Cash Fork EOS solution to blockchain issues, Tokenize Everything privacy paired with, Mimblewimble blockchain potocol, Mimblewimble, Beam, and Grin Scalable Transparent ARguments of Knowledge (STARKs), STARKs scaling blockchains, Scaling Blockchains-Other Altchain Solutions, The Scaling Problem-Ethereum ScalingAvalanche consensus mechanism, Avalanche DAG network design, DAGs Ethereum, Ethereum Scaling-Ethereum Scaling Lightning solution, Lightning, Lightning-Lightning nodes and wallets Liquid multisignature wallet, Liquid other altchain solutions, Other Altchain Solutions SegWit, SegWit sharding, Sharding sidechains, Sidechains STARKs, STARKs Schnorr algorithm, Privacy Scott, Mark, Skirting the Laws SCP consensus protocol, Stellar scripted money, Improving Bitcoin’s Limited Functionality Scrypt mining, Altcoins, Litecoin Secret Network, Privacy securitiestokens proposed in ICOs, Different Token Types unregistered securities offerings, Skirting the Laws Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation securityBitcoin transaction security, Bitcoin Transaction Security custody infrastructure for exchanges, Counterparty Risk detection of blockchain tampering with Merkle roots, The Merkle Root early vulnerability on Bitcoin, An Early Vulnerability exchanges taking care of private keys, Counterparty Risk flash loans exploiting vulnerabilities in DeFi platforms, The Fulcrum Exploit fundamentals for cryptocurrencies, Security Fundamentals-Recovery Seed identity and dangers of hacking, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking information security in decentralizing finance and the web, Privacy Lightning Network vulnerabilities, Lightning proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, criticisms of, Proof-of-Stake recursive call vulnerability, Forking Ethereum and the creation of Ethereum Classic replay attacks vulnerability, Replay attacks, The Ethereum Classic Fork sharding, vulnerabilities with, Other Altchain Solutions theft of cryptocurrencies in exchange hacks, Exchange Hacks-NiceHash theft of cryptocurrencies in other hacks, Other Hacks-Summary transaction malleability vulnerability, Lightning nodes and wallets security token offerings (STOs), Different Token Types security tokens, Token Economics seeds (recovery), Recovery Seedstorage of, Authoring a smart contract SegWit (Segregated Witness), SegWit, Lightning nodes and wallets self-sovereign identity, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking SHA-256 hash algorithm, Introducing the Timestamp Server, Hashes SHA256 and RIPEMD160 functions, Generating keys shadow market for disinformation, Tools for fundamental analysis sharding, Other Altchain Solutions, Shardingin Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum Scaling Shavers, Trendon, Skirting the Laws Shrem, Charlie, Skirting the Laws sidechains, Other Altchain Solutions, SidechainsLiquid technology and, Liquid Optimistic Rollups and, Lightning nodes and wallets Silk Road, Catch Me If You Cancriminal investigation tracking bitcoin address to operator, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering provision of bitcoin to users without KYC/AML, Skirting the Laws SIM swapping, SIM Swapping-SIM Swapping Singapore, regulatory arbitrage, Singapore single-shard takeover attacks, Other Altchain Solutions slashing algorithms, Proof-of-Stake slippage, Slippage smart contracts, Mastercoin and Smart ContractsDAML language for distributed applications, DAML for decentralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts, Custody and counterparty risk deploying and executing in Ethereum, Deploying and Executing Smart Contracts in Ethereum-Interacting with Codeauthoring a smart contract, Authoring a smart contract deployment, Deploying a smart contract-Deploying a smart contract Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), The Ethereum Virtual Machine executing a smart contract, Executing a smart contract gas and pricing, Gas and Pricing interacting with a smart contract, Interacting with a smart contract programmatically interacting with Ethereum, Interacting with Code reading a smart contract, Reading a smart contract writing a smart contract, Writing a smart contract deployment for dapps, Challenges in Developing Dapps EOS platform, Blockchains to Watch ERC-20 compliantevents supported by, ERC-20 example of, ERC-20-ERC-20 methods implemented, ERC-20 ERC-compliant, library of, Decentralized Exchange Contracts flash loanscreating the contract, Creating a Flash Loan Contract-Deploying the Contract deploying the contract, Deploying the Contract manipulation of oracles in Fulcrum attack, The Fulcrum Exploit steps in process, Flash Loans Libra support for, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains Omni Layer providing, Understanding Omni Layer publicly viewable record of method call to Uniswap smart contract, Custody and counterparty risk-Exchange rate sending tokens to via push and pull transactions, ERC-777 third-party auditors of, Fungible and Nonfungible Tokens Uniswap contract viewable on Ethereum, Infrastructure social media, campaigns to influence cryptocurrencies, Tools for fundamental analysis soft forks, Understanding Forks software development, changes from use of cryptcurrency and blockchain, Web 3.0 software forks, Understanding Forks software wallets, Wallets Solidcoin, Altcoins Solidity language, Authoring a smart contract South Korean exchanges, Regulatory Challenges speculation in cryptocurrency, Market Infrastructure, Tulip Mania or the internet?


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People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

The reason, to a large extent, is the handcuffs we put on ourselves, in our attempts to protect free speech. Even the US Supreme Court, well attuned to the principle of freedom of speech, has noted that one cannot cry fire in a crowded theater (Schenck v. United States, 1919). In this war for an informed public, to block the corrosive effects of those who would use disinformation to weaken our democracies, the measures we have described here are small compromises. Further actions may be needed. In the end, the market power and potential for abuse of a platform like Facebook may be simply too large for societal well-being. When Standard Oil became too large and powerful, we broke it up.

The discussions of new technologies have been particularly influenced by my coauthor Anton Korinek; on artificial intelligence, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Shane Legg of DeepMind, Mark Sagar of Soul Machines, and a dinner on AI at the Royal Society after my lecture there on the subject of work and AI. Yochai Benkler, Julia Angwin, and Zeynep Tüfekçi have contributed to my understanding of the special issues posed by disinformation. As I return to the issues of globalization, I need to thank Dani Rodrik as well as Danny Quah, Rohinton Medhora, and Mari Pangestu; and on the role of globalization in tax avoidance, Mark Pieth and the Independent Commission for Reform of International Corporate Taxation, chaired by José Antonio Ocampo, on which I serve.

Knopf, 2013). 40.In particular, the GDPR regulations referred to in note 27. 41.There are those who claim that since markets are essentially local, the value of global information will be limited. The marginal value of having information from multiple markets (from, say, China plus the United States plus Europe) would, in this view, be sufficiently small that we could ignore the “unfair” advantage deriving from different regulatory regimes. 42.Online disinformation presents a particular challenge, especially in a world in which the “truth-telling institutions” are under attack (see chapter 1). Discussing the appropriate policy response would, however, take us beyond this short book. CHAPTER 7: WHY GOVERNMENT? 1.Sir Isaac Newton in 1675 said: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” 2.I first articulated some of these ideas in a little book, The Economic Role of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 3.Or “Samuelsonian pure public goods,” after Paul A.


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Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

Internet Research Agency, Indictment, Case No. 1:18-cr-00032-DLF (D.D.C. Feb. 16, 2018), https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download, ¶¶ 32, 43. 147.Craig Timberg and Tony Romm, “New Report on Russian Disinformation, Prepared for the Senate, Shows the Operation’s Scale and Sweep,” Washington Post, December 17, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/16/new-report-russian-disinformation-prepared-senate-shows-operations-scale-sweep/. 148.See, e.g., Bundeskartellamt 2019 Background Paper. 149.Wheeler, The Root of the Matter, 8. 150.Wheeler, The Root of the Matter, 8. 151.Romain Dillet, “French Data Protection Watchdog Fines Google $57 Million under the GDPR,” Tech Crunch, January 21, 2019, https://tcrn.ch/2R0M8E9. 152.Graeme Burton, “Google Now Pays More in EU Fines Than It Does in Taxes,” The Inquirer, February 6, 2019, https://www.theinquirer.net/3070503/. 153.Bundeskartellamt 2019 Background Paper. 154.Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Rohit Chopra, In re Facebook, Inc.

., Bundeskartellamt, Online Advertising, February 2018, https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Publikation/EN/Schriftenreihe_Digitales_III.pdf, 8 (noting how “[s]ome even claim that the value of advertising is now first and foremost the value of the data and that the big platforms have huge market advantages on account of their combining reach with data depth”); Furman Report, 1.52, 1.73, 1.79, 1.136. 130.ACCC Preliminary Report, 80. 131.House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Disinformation and ‘Fake News,’ Final Report 2019–8, HC 1791 (February 14, 2019), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/1791.pdf, ¶ 116. 132.House of Commons 2019 Report, ¶ 96 (“From the Six4Three case documents, it is clear that spending substantial sums with Facebook, as a condition of maintaining preferential access to personal data, was part and parcel of the company’s strategy of platform development as it embraced the mobile advertising world.”); Sam Levin, “Facebook Documents Published by UK—the Key Takeaways,” Guardian (Manchester), December 5, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/05/facebook-documents-uk-parliament-key-facts. 133.House of Commons 2019 Report, ¶ 106. 134.House of Commons 2019 Report, ¶ 106. 135.Google Ads, “Grow Your Business with Google Ads,” accessed May 2, 2019, https://ads.google.com/home/ (“Your digital ads can appear on Google at the very moment someone is looking for products or services like yours”). 136.See, e.g., ACCC Preliminary Report, 87 (“Over the past two years, almost half of all complaints received by the ACCC about Google and Facebook from small businesses have been in relation to a lack of transparency in advertising services, including difficulties in disputes.”); see also Bundeskartellamt, Online Advertising: Advertisers often refer to online advertising platforms like those run by Google and Facebook as walled gardens, that is closed platforms or systems on which producers or operators impose user restrictions.


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Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

The covert projects would include ‘cyber assaults’ on Ablyazov and those close to him, ‘psyops’ based on a profile produced by psychologists, recruiting ‘agents of influence’ such as journalists, academics and politicians, suborning Ablyazov’s people wherever possible with ‘inducements of all kinds’, bugging and sabotage – ‘the specialists we use are “the best of the best”’ – as well as ‘staff infiltration’, liaising with ‘common enemies’ and ‘media manipulation globally’. Robertson was evidently a practised fake newsman. He knew that, rather than go straight to a reporter with a smear, it worked better if you first planted your disinformation online, say in some anonymously written blog. Thus ‘established’, such allegations ‘can legitimately be reported by the mainstream media’. They could say whatever they wanted about Ablyazov: ‘perverted sexual proclivities, allegations of extreme criminality, jihadi sympathies’. In another email on Kazaword, the nationalised BTA Bank agreed to pay Robertson’s firm $5 million.

They had the same taste in operatives. Trump selected as his top intelligence official a propagandist called Richard Grenell. ‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth even has a chance to get its pants on,’ was the quotation, misattributed to Winston Churchill, atop his firm’s website. The disinformation campaigns Grenell himself had orchestrated underscored the point. Before he served the president, he served private clients with a need for alternative facts – among them ENRC, the Trio’s corporation. As for enemies, Trump and Sasha’s approach suggested they concurred with Nazarbayev: ‘Those who agree with and accept his opinions and stick to the rules are in “his” group.

Vogel and Maggie Haberman, ‘Conservative website first funded anti-Trump research by firm that later produced dossier’, New York Times, October 27, 2017, nytimes.com/2017/10/27/us/politics/trump-dossier-paul-singer.html a propagandist: Josh Kovensky, ‘Grenell’s past foreign clients make him unprecedented choice to lead intel community’, Talking Points Memo, February 26, 2020, talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/grenells-past-foreign-clients-make-him-unprecedented-choice-to-lead-intel-community ‘A lie gets halfway’ . . . among them ENRC: Archived version of Capitol Media Partners website, services page, web.archive.org/web/20120620093013/http://capitolmediapartners.com/?page_id=7, and clients page, web.archive.org/web/20120620093019/http://capitolmediapartners.com/?page_id=9. The author emailed Capitol Media Partners to ask what Grenell did for ENRC but received no reply disinformation campaigns: Michael Ames, ‘How Trump’s new intelligence chief spread misinformation about Bowe Bergdahl’, Politico, March 11, 2020, politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/11/richard-grenell-smear-against-bowe-bergdahl-125157 he discovered: David Gerrard and Elizabeth Gerrard v Diligence, particulars of claim, September 6, 2019 Anna Machkevitch: Tabby Kinder, ‘Court date for Hirst collector’, The Times, June 15, 2019, thetimes.co.uk/article/court-date-for-hirst-collector-w2092w006 Benedikt Sobotka: Samuel Rubenfeld, ‘UK drops prosecution of mining executive’, Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2018, wsj.com/articles/u-k-drops-prosecution-of-mining-executive-1541532653 returned to private practice: ‘Former SFO senior prosecutor joins Cohen & Gresser’s London office’, Cohen & Gresser press release, September 2018, sites-cohengresser.vuture.net/8/108/september-2018/jwg-announcement-final.asp?


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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

In April 2019, Reed Hastings and Erskine Bowles, the former Clinton administration official who’d at times supported efforts to rein in Zuckerberg’s power, resigned from the Facebook board. The following March, Ken Chenault, the former CEO of American Express and another board member who’d raised concerns about Facebook’s unwillingness to stop disinformation, followed suit. Zuckerberg replaced those critics with his friends and business partners, including Drew Houston, the thirty-seven-year-old founder of Dropbox, and Peggy Alford, a PayPal executive who’d worked at his for-profit philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. By early 2020, the only board members whose tenure dated to before 2019, other than Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, were Thiel ally Marc Andreessen and Thiel himself

Earlier in the month, the Trump campaign had run ads that claimed that former vice president Biden had pressured Ukraine’s government to drop an investigation into the business dealings of his son Hunter Biden. This was a lie. CNN refused to air the ads, but Facebook allowed them, citing a policy of not fact-checking things that politicians say. Senator Warren called Zuckerberg out, describing Facebook as a “disinformation-for-profit machine.” She said it had “already helped elect Donald Trump once through negligence” and, by failing to fact-check the ads, was again putting its profits above any sense of civic duty. Zuckerberg responded with a speech at Georgetown University. “I know many people disagree, but, in general, I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians or the news in a democracy,” he said, citing Dr.

James O’Keefe, years earlier: Russell Brandon and Colin Lecher, “Facebook Says It Fired Leaker for Participating in Conservative Bias ‘Stunt’,” The Verge, February 27, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/27/18243097/facebook-leaker-project-veritas-moderation-documents; Steven Thrasher, “Conservative Facebook Investor Funded Anti-ACORN Videographer,” The Village Voice, September 22, 2009, https://www.villagevoice.com/2009/09/22/conservative-facebook-investor-funded-anti-acorn-videographer/. unwillingness to stop disinformation: Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, “Chenault Leaves Facebook Board after Disagreements with Zuckerberg,” The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chenault-leaves-facebook-board-after-disagreements-with-zuckerberg-11584140731. displayed copies of Xi’s book: Adam Taylor, “Why Would Mark Zuckerberg Want Facebook Employees to Read the Chinese President’s Book?”


pages: 420 words: 135,569

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

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

Outdoorsy people with practical suggestions for avoiding ticks. People who manage indoor sports and activity centers, like rock-climbing walls, spin studios, and indoor playgrounds. “Exit counselors,” or experts who specialize in helping people recover from false conspiracy theory addiction and disinformation campaigns, to deal with “Alpha Gals” conspiracy theories and disinformation. Whom else would you add to this list? Finally, how will you use your unique strengths to help others in this future? Think about the skills, abilities, knowledge, passions, communities, and values you identified as your own signature strengths. Can you imagine one or more of them being a springboard for action in this scenario?

Try to have a bit of balance in your list—at least one of the forces you pick should feel like a risk to you, and at least one should feel like an opportunity: the climate crisis post-pandemic trauma social justice movements increasing economic inequality social and political tensions caused by refugee crises and mass migration automation of work decreasing birthrates in Western countries and a “youth boom” in Africa shifting religious majorities and increasing theological diversity the global switch to renewable energy sources alternatives to capitalism and market-based economies social media–driven misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories rise of authoritarianism and loss of faith in democracy widespread adoption of facial recognition and surveillance technologies digital currencies, cryptocurrency, and programmable money universal basic income and direct cash transfers internet shutdowns mandated by government or law enforcement the “right to disconnect” movement and four-day workweeks lifelong learning and “reskilling” at the workplace job guarantees regenerative design and the circular economy genomic research and CRISPR genetic modification the Internet of Things augmented and virtual reality satellite networks and space internet If there’s something on the institute’s list above that you don’t know anything about at all, this is the perfect opportunity to go find your first clue.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

Alongside the layoff decisions, the issue of content moderation dominated Musk’s first week at Twitter. He had been waving the banner of free speech, but he was learning that his views were too simplistic. On social media, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. Disinformation was a problem, as were crypto scams, fraud, and hate speech. There was also a financial problem: jittery advertisers did not want their brands to be in a toxic-speech cesspool. In early October, a few weeks before he was due to take over Twitter, Musk had raised in one of our conversations the idea of creating a content moderation council that would decide these issues.

A few days earlier, he wrote a “Dear Twitter advertisers” letter promising, “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” But his Paul Pelosi tweet undermined that pledge by exemplifying what advertisers disliked about Twitter: it could be a cesspool of falsehoods and weaponized disinformation that people (including Musk) spread in impulsive and reckless ways. Advertising accounted for 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue. It was already declining due to an ad recession, but after Musk took over it began to fall much faster. It would tumble by more than half in the next six months. * * * Late that Sunday night, Musk flew to New York City to meet with Twitter’s ad sales team and try to reassure advertisers and their agencies.

Most notably, Taibbi included messages from 2020, when Yoel Roth and others at Twitter debated whether to block links to a New York Post story about what was purported to be (correctly, as it turned out) a laptop abandoned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The messages showed many of them scrambling to find rationales for banning mention of the story, such as claiming that it violated policies against using hacked material or might be part of a Russian disinformation plot. Those were flimsy covers for censoring a story, and both Roth and Jack Dorsey would later concede that doing so was a mistake. These and subsequent revelations by Taibbi were covered by some big press organizations, such as Fox News, but much of the traditional media labeled it, as one Twitter hashtag put it, a “#nothingburger.”


pages: 276 words: 81,153

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 wasn’t particularly candid when I asked him questions about what they do, but he was keen to tell me one thing: ‘The algorithms Facebook uses are criminal in my opinion, slanted and manipulated, and not always for the right reasons or to benefit the users.’ Apparently, it isn’t as easy as it used to be to spread racism, misogyny and intolerance on social media. Disinformation and fake news have become a prominent feature of all elections. Two days before the French presidential election in 2017, an online disinformation campaign took off around the hashtag #MacronLeaks. Computer hackers had broken into the Emmanuel Macron campaign’s email accounts and posted the contents online. On Twitter, the #MacronLeaks campaign aimed to make sure that people knew about the hack and to create maximum uncertainty about the contents of the leak.


pages: 266 words: 78,986

Quarantine by Greg Egan

cosmic microwave background, dark matter, disinformation, fudge factor, intermodal, pattern recognition, placebo effect, Schrödinger's Cat, time dilation, warehouse robotics

I mean, I couldn’t say to the fucking Director, “If you’re such a genius, you tell me how she does it. You tell me how to stop her.” ‘ I shake my head. ‘She didn’t do any of this. She can’t have. Somebody took her. All three times.’ ‘Yeah? Who? Why? What do you call the first two times—dry runs?’ I hesitate. ‘Disinformation? Someone trying to convince you that she could break out on her own, so that when they finally took her, you’d think—’Casey is miming severe incredulity, verging on physical pain. I say, ‘Okay. It sounds like a load of crap to me, too. But I can’t believe she just walked out of there, alone.’ * * * It takes me forever to get to sleep.

Apparently, the program loops endlessly once it finds the factors, repeatedly confirming the result… so either I’ve caused some permanent corruption which is making the machine consistently lie, or the whole audacious scheme has worked—and an independent check on a second computer will soon settle the issue. Just what our sceptical clients will make of this impossible feat, I don’t know; in their place, I’d suspect I was being set up for a torrent of disinformation. Maybe they’ll decode great slabs of genuine data, and assume that it’s all designed to mislead them. I glance up at a patch of cloudless blue sky, and laugh. Po-Kwai is on a rest day, but that’s no problem; I’ve used Ensemble successfully under these conditions three times before. The smeared Nick-and-(dreaming)-Po-Kwai clearly has it down to a fine art now, the requisite skills preserved between incarnations in some corner of my skull, or hers, or both.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Orchestrated by Vladislav Surkov—Putin’s personal advisor and, according to the Anglo-Russian writer Peter Pomerantsev, the “hidden author of Putinism”19—it’s a style of government intent on transforming politics into a tightly produced reality television show of innuendo, gossip, and menacing unreality. Surkov’s Putinism—not unlike, in many ways, the Trumpist spectacle produced by Stephen Bannon and Breitbart News in the United States—transforms politics into a real-time, always-on war of misinformation and disinformation. It is a definitively untrustworthy operation, run, to borrow some words from the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, by a party of “crooks and thieves.” And the internet, with its absence of curatorial authority and the anonymity of many of its users, has become the ideal medium for orchestrating this new type of war against truth.

It has been held responsible for interfering with the 2016 US presidential election.23 Things have got so bad in this onslaught of fake news that in 2015 the European Union set up East Stratcom, its own eleven-person team to defend the Continent against fake news. Recent online lies have included the Swedish government’s support of the Islamic State and EU’s plans to regulate snowmen. Created by the EU to address, in its words, “Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaigns,” East Stratcom has discredited twenty-five hundred stories in the sixteen months since its establishment.24 A year after I met Ilves, I was invited to speak at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, often dubbed the Russian Davos, on a panel about government policy toward data. The panel, which included two of Putin’s most senior advisors on digital policy, was addressing the question: “Is big data a natural asset or a commodity?”


pages: 326 words: 84,180

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, British Empire, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, disinformation, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, lifelogging, machine readable, mass incarceration, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, r/findbostonbombers, Scientific racism, security theater, sexual politics, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, US Airways Flight 1549, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Works Progress Administration

Of the scholars that have written about surveillance as it concerns black people, many have taken as their focus the FBI Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that ran from 1956 until 1971 and that saw individuals and domestic political organizations deemed subversive, or potentially so, come under investigation by the bureau with the aim of disrupting their activities, discrediting their efforts, and neutralizing their effects, often through infiltration, disinformation, and the work of informants. Sociologist Mike Forrest Keen’s study of the FBI’s surveillance of sociologists such as W. E. B. DuBois and E. Franklin Frazier, David Garrow’s The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr., Theodore Kornweibel on the FBI’s surveillance of the activities of Marcus Garvey and the United Negro Improvement Association through the use of informants and disinformation, or Carole Boyce Davies’s writings on the intense FBI scrutiny of Trinidadian activist, Marxist, and journalist Claudia Jones, for example, form part of this scholarly work.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

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

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

The problem is that most orchids are too dispersed through the jungle for the wind to carry pollen to them; they depend on insects or birds for this crucial service. But since they do not provide any food or other nutrients for these carriers, orchids have to trick them into perpetuating their species. It was taking care of the orchids and exposing Soviet double agents that made Angleton believe that ‘the essence of disinformation is provocation, not lying.’98 When denying the well-documented presence of Russian Special Forces in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, Putin was not lying. He was provoking, that is goading and needling and poking at the West to elicit a sub-rational, stammering response. He was trying to destabilize and demoralize the West by forcing it to confront the limits of its power.

Although the transformation of English into the global lingua franca once seemed like a signal example of America’s soft power, it now appears to have created a world in which America’s military dominance and economic success are undermined by cultural illiteracy, incurious parochialism and indifference.51 The problem is exacerbated by the tendency for State Department specialists who know the languages and cultures to be sidelined by Defense Department heavyweights who do not. In any case, lack of familiarity with the language, history and politics of other nations naturally engenders suspicion and fear of what one only dimly comprehends. It also raises the chances of being deliberately deceived by carefully tailored, agenda-driven disinformation. When American military personnel in Afghanistan or Iraq report about locals that ‘the only language they understand is force’, they are revealing more about their own monolingual provincialism and tunnel-vision than about the country in which they are stationed and whose domestic conflicts they struggle vainly to decipher.52 Failure to grasp how others think makes strategic action difficult, since strategy requires an ability to foresee how others are likely to react to one’s initiatives.


pages: 291 words: 85,822

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

Perhaps, in the end, truth is the oldest trick in the book. 7 FAKE NEWS Hoaxes, Hysteria, and the Madness of Crowds The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. —H. L. MENCKEN Whoever controls the media, controls the mind. —JIM MORRISON HOAXING Though they might seem similar, a Hoax is not a practical joke, nor is it a simple fraud. It’s a very specific type of con that involves either disinformation or misinformation, often both. A Hoax is undertaken with either malice or the intention to profit materially or situationally by propagating falsehood and successfully deceiving, at least temporarily, a great number of people. A Hoax is perpetuated by first identifying a target group of people; next manufacturing a falsehood that will uniquely frighten or appeal to them, in some cases manufacturing evidence; and then finally letting the falsehoods spread organically so as to have greater supposed credibility and therefore power.

It’s very possible that these two separate news stories—that the Great Wall would be torn down by Americans seeking trade with China and that Americans demanded the wall of Chinese tariffs and protectionism be torn down to facilitate trade—one literal and threatening, the other metaphoric and merely entitled, were conflated and confused by the time they reached the Chinese, who were already more than a little angry over numerous foreign encroachments and aggressions. In fact, this fiction, cooked up half a world away by a team of drinking buddies, was later alleged to have helped catalyze the Boxers rage into action and contributed to the Boxer Rebellion. Like every other Hoax, there was no curing this compelling disinformation with truth: according to a 1939 account of a lecture Bishop Henry Warren gave after returning from working in China, “The story was published with shouting headlines and violent editorial comment. Denials did no good. The Boxers, already incensed, believed the yarn and now there was no stopping them.


pages: 1,199 words: 332,563

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", bioinformatics, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, index card, Indoor air pollution, information retrieval, invention of gunpowder, John Snow's cholera map, language of flowers, life extension, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, speech recognition, stem cell, telemarketer, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

“Silent Collaborators”: Clandestine Cancer Research Financed by Tobacco via the Damon Runyon Fund 14. Ecusta’s Experiments 15. Consensus, Hubris, and Duplicity PART THREE. CONSPIRACY ON A GRAND SCALE 16. The Council for Tobacco Research: Distraction Research, Decoy Research, Filibuster Research 17. Agnotology in Action 18. Measuring Ignorance: The Impact of Industry Disinformation on Popular Knowledge of Tobacco Hazards 19. Filter Flimflam 20. The Grand Fraud of Ventilation 21. Crack Nicotine: Freebasing to Augment a Cigarette’s “Kick” 22. The “Light Cigarette” Scam 23. Penetrating the Universities 24. Historians Join the Conspiracy PART FOUR. RADIANT FILTH AND REDEMPTION 25.

We are encouraged to think of cigarettes as more like coffee or chocolate or a very fine brandy—and not like choking phlegm and a ghostly shadow life in the hospital with tubes up your nose. Smoking is not supposed to be like lead paint or toxic waste or the white-knuckled grip of addiction but rather like hope and peace and choice and the very satisfaction of life itself. 18 Measuring Ignorance The Impact of Industry Disinformation on Popular Knowledge of Tobacco Hazards After smoking Camel cigarettes for twenty-four (24) years, my lungs are as clean as a whistle. SYLVIA SINDELAR TO REYNOLDS, APRIL 28, 1958 Take old George Burns for example; he’s been smoking for (probably) 60 years now, and is probably healthier than average for a man of his age.

An equally misleading propaganda piece, titled The Answers We Seek, had been shown to 324,512 viewers by 1982, including tens of thousands of children.22 TESTIMONIALS OF SMOKERS: THE CONSUMER LETTERS Public opinion polls show that millions of Americans still do not appreciate many of the dangers of tobacco use.23 That is perhaps not surprising in a nation where huge swaths of the population don’t know that humans share a common ancestor with apes, or cling to the preposterous notion that Iraq—or the CIA or Israel—conspired to blow up the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center or that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. H. L. Mencken once observed that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public; of course the real issue is not lack of intelligence but rather the lingering effects from one of history’s most powerful disinformation campaigns. What can we say about knowledge, beyond what we’ve already learned from polls? The letters written to the tobacco companies are useful in this regard, since here we have the unfiltered testimony of consumers, or at least of those going to the trouble of writing and mailing a letter.


pages: 478 words: 149,810

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

Barr started talking to Hunton & Williams, a law firm whose clients—among them the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America—needed help dealing with opponents. WikiLeaks, for example, had recently hinted at a trove of confidential data it was holding from Bank of America. Barr and two other security firms made PowerPoint presentations that proposed, among other things, disinformation campaigns to discredit WikiLeaks-supporting journalists and cyber attacks on the WikiLeaks website. He dug out his fake Facebook profiles and showed how he might spy on the opponents, “friending” Hunton & Williams’s own staff and gathering intelligence on their personal lives. The law firm appeared interested, but there were still no contracts come January 2011, and HBGary Federal needed money.

Already, rumors were spreading that LulzSec had been founded by the same crew that had hit HBGary. Enemy hackers were posting documents filled with details they had dug up online about each member, much of it wrong but some of it hitting close to home. LulzSec’s members needed to switch their focus from finding targets to protecting themselves. Kayla suggested a mass disinformation campaign. Her idea was to create a Pastebin document revealing that Adrian Lamo owned the domain LulzSec.com; then to add details of other Jesterfags and claim they were members of LulzSec; then to spam the document everywhere. It was a classic social-engineering tactic, and it sometimes worked.

While Sabu was an informant, his lies were aimed at not only other hackers but also journalists. Together with his FBI handlers, he would lie to reporters who hoped for an online interview. Sometimes the reporters were speaking to federal agents, other times it was Sabu but with the agents looking over his shoulder. In the end, it was just another disinformation campaign. Throughout his volatile year with Anonymous, Sabu had proved himself to be a masterful liar. But there was one thing he could not seem to fabricate: his name. At one point in 2011, before his FBI arrest, Hector Monsegur dropped the nickname Sabu online and started trying to use the new nickname Kage or Kaz in private IRC channels.


pages: 224 words: 12,941

From Gutenberg to Google: electronic representations of literary texts by Peter L. Shillingsburg

bread and circuses, British Empire, computer age, disinformation, double helix, HyperCard, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, means of production, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Saturday Night Live, Socratic dialogue

Finally, Google’s method of costing and financing its services through user-fees for its advertisers based on hits rather than on licenses or product sales suggests a way to structure the finances of electronic knowledge sites that is significantly different from the sale of books or subscriptions to databases. Yet, web browsers, regardless of the sophistication of their prioritizing processes, have no scholarly refereeing system to vouch for the quality of information and disinformation accessed in a search. Web browsers are independent of concerted efforts to develop coherent bodies of knowledge, thus a search provides at least initially a disordered array of information sites where reliable information and accurate representations of foundation documents are undistinguished, and perhaps indistinguishable, from rumors and gossip.

Index abridgment 32 access to texts 85 open source 106, 108 adaptation 20, 85 aesthetic object 5, 169, 174–6, 178, 182, 186 author’s 174 editor’s 184 intended 174 aesthetics 22, 23, 188 agnosia, tonal 48 Altick, Richard 128 aphasia 47–8 archives 4, 34, 82, 85 CD-based 121 archivists 4, 12 Aristotle 29 artifacts 13, 24, 26, 169, 174–5, 178, 182, 186–7 assumptions 191 Austin, J.L. 46 Australian Colonial Texts Series 36 authenticity 23 author 6, 53, 174 commentary 158 European 186 function 53 German 176 literary 63 putative 34–6, 45 authoring 50 authority 6, 32, 174, 177 author’s 52 in script acts 56 mixed 182–4 unmixed 184 authorship 130 economics of 130 Barthes, Roland 60 Barwell, Graham 10, 141 Beardsley, Monroe 60 Beckett, Samuel Samuel Beckett project 108 Beowulf project 4, 108 Bernays, M. 170 Berrie, Phill 10, 91, 118, 124, 142 bibliographic codes 16–18, 72 Bickerton, Derek 42–3 Binder, Henry 84 biography 60 Birney, Earle 187 Blake, William 4, 142 book 12–14 ‘‘bookness’’ of’ 139 buyers 6, 135 electronic 1–2, 28–9, 65; complexity of 28; as distinguished from print books 29; quality of 29–30 physical condition of 129 as physical object 12, 49, 127, 135 print book 1, 65; advantages 29; as copytext 168; as distinguished from electronic books 29; survival rate 27 production 6, 64 virtual 141 book collecting 151 book historians 136 book history 158 goal of 135 Boorstin, Daniel 193 Bordalejo, Barbara 10 Bornstein, George 8, 16 Bowden, Ann 133–4 Bowers, Fredson 9, 25, 153, 185 Bradbury and Evans 36 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 147 Bradford, Robin 153 Bree, Linda 10 British Empire 131 Brown, Charles Brockden 164 Brown-Rau, Alexandra 108 Bryant, John 8–9 209 210 Index Burton, Anthony 123 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 16, 72, 185 Caldwell, Price 10, 75, 77 Calvin, William H. 43, 46 Cambridge, Ada 36 Carlyle, Thomas 161, 170 Carey, Peter 64 Caxton, William 179 censorship 33 Center for Editions of American Authors (see Modern Language Association) Cervantes 29 Chaucer, Geoffrey 4, 87, 179–84 Chaucer project 142, 144 The General Prologue on CD-ROM 87 Chesnutt, David 142 Chopin, Kate 36 Clark, Marcus 120 Cockran, Patti 142 codex 29, 85 Cohen, Morton 131 Colby, Robert 122 Cole, Gavin 10 collation Hinman Collator 110 historical 164 Lindstrand Comparator 110 sight 22, 110 software 107 Committee on Scholarly Editions (see Modern Language Association) communication 7, 41–2, 45 event 67 of determinate effects 63 theory 140 Communist Manifesto, the 16–18 compositors 181 computer files legacy research materials 109, 112, 115, 122; quality control 116 computer technology 26–8, 139 (see also software and markup) Contemporary German Editorial Theory 9, 169 context 31, 54, 66, 78, 146, 191 functional 67 generative 54 generic 55 historical 59, 130 matter 54 place 54 relevant 74 sense-making 73 thematic 55 time 54 contextualization 55 conventionality 41 conventions 50–1 copyright 139 copyright law 132 costing 2 Crane, Stephen 84 criticism, literary 12, 63, 83, 151 junk 75 Marxist 130 New 60, 75 Practical 60 psychological 60 reader response 45 textual (see textual criticism) critics literary (see criticism) textual (see textual critics) Cross, Nigel 127, 128 cultural engineering 163 deconstruction 51–3 Descartes, René 198 Dedner, Burghard 26 Deppman, Jed 10 Derrida, Jacques 43, 51, 60 de Saussure, Ferdinand 60 de Smedt, Marcel 91, 108 Dewey, John 196 Dickens, Charles Clarendon Dickens editions 134 Dickinson, Emily 4, 65, 75 Emily Dickinson project 142 Dijksterhuis, E. J. 192 discourse communities 23, 43 disinformation 2 documents 13, 14–15, 26, 180–1, 184 authority 182 foundation 2 paper 1 physical 5, 96, 174 source material 2, 19, 111 Donne, John John Donne Variorum 107 Dreiser, Theodore 83 Duggan, Hoyt 142 DVD movie 85 Eaves, Morris 142 Eco, Umberto 60, 192 editing 111, 145, 157, 179 as creative activity 7 electronic 1 Index French genetic criticism 9 German historical-critical 9, 169, 178 goals of 12 intentionalist school 56, 169, 185 as reconstruction 26, 52 as restoration 7, 26 scholarly 31, 44, 95, 109, 140, 152, 161–2, 174; computer-assisted 97; goal of 82, 170, 174, 81–2, 96; as literary criticism 144, 166; paradigm 81 textual 171 theory 11 edition CD-based 121 clear-text 18, 154, 172 customized 82 critical 156, 184 electronic 4–5, 16, 34, 38, 82, 98, 164; characteristics 89–90; creation of 94; design and construction of 94, 103, 114, 145; discussion of 92; limitations of 110; linking 156; The Literary Text in the Digital Age 141; navigation 98; ‘‘pulp texts’’ 140 electronic scholarly 50, 85, 88, 96–7, 103, 149; adaptations 102; bibliographical analysis 101; capabilities 101–2; collations.101; context presentation 93, 101; digital images 101, 107; document representation 92, 101; emendations 101; history of 141–2; industry standards 98, 99; intertextuality 102; linguistic analysis 102; methodology 93; reception history 102; textual analysis 101; transcriptions 101; user enhancements 102; uses for 93 failure of 157 first 129, 149 Historical-Critical 173 print 97; limitations of 110; as off-shoots of electronic editions 97–8; reprint 139–40, 149 print scholarly 117, 164 scholarly 7, 34, 84, 173; components 169; introduction 146 user 12, 82–3, 97 user-controlled 83 editors 82, 96–7, 144, 170 Anglo-American 173–6, 178, 182–4 controlling 83 function 99 German historical-critical 172–6, 181, 184 insight 169, 172 of new projects 111 presence in text 163 scholarly 56, 94, 109, 157, 168, 179, 180; responsibility of 171 Eggert, Paul 8, 10, 12, 26, 91, 141–2, 190 Eliot, George 148 Mill on the Floss 166–7 Eliot, Simon 128 error 15, 20, 30, 155, 184, 189 innocent 15, 30, 85 misprints 178 sophistications 15, 30–1 typographical 15, 30, 72 Essick, Robert 142 facts 191 Faulkner, William 180–1 Feltes, N.N. 131 financing 2, 103–4, 106, 112–13 Fiormonte, Domenico 4, 10 Firestone Library 146 Fitzgerald, F.


pages: 316 words: 91,969

Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America by William McGowan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, David Brooks, different worldview, disinformation, East Village, friendly fire, haute couture, illegal immigration, immigration reform, liberation theology, medical residency, microplastics / micro fibres, New Journalism, obamacare, payday loans, postnationalism / post nation state, pre–internet, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, yellow journalism, young professional

The Times cheered when President Obama released the so-called “torture memos” detailing previously classified information on CIA interrogation methods; “Memos Spell Out Brutal CIA Mode of Interrogation,” its front-page headline screamed. When Obama gave his May 2009 speech on terrorism and detention policy, the editorial board expressed “relief and optimism,” saying that for seven years “President George W. Bush tried to frighten the American public—and successfully cowed Congress—with bullying and disinformation.” Obama, said the editors, “was exactly right when he said Americans do not have to choose between security and their democratic values. By denying those values, the Bush team fed the furies of anti-Americanism, strengthened our enemies and made the nation more vulnerable.” Obama himself had sent a number of signals that while he would be breaking with certain Bush terror policies, there would be no retribution.

Martinez came in after the rough stuff, “the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English,” Shane reported. “He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers. A canny opponent, Mr. Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious.” They would have long talks about religion, comparing notes on Islam and Catholicism, one CIA officer recalled, adding another detail that no one could have predicted: “He wrote poems to Deuce’s wife.” The story of Martinez and KSM, suggested Shane and the Times, appeared to show that traditional methods alone might have elicited the same information or more from KSM than were obtained by waterboarding.


The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

By contrast, solutions that depend on voluntary action by a few small firms are untenable on their face. For firms that do want to limit their collection of private data, there is currently no solution to this prisoner’s dilemma. Strong regulation is the only way out of this catch-22. Public Discourse and Disinformation Evolutionary audiences create other vulnerablities, too: they provide novel and often insidious ways for states to influence public discourse. Recent work by Samantha Bradshaw and Phil Howard has catalogued the rapid emergence of “cyber troops”—organized government, military, or political party teams trying to shape public opinion on social media—in more than two dozen countries.39 Some states have developed and used these capabilities to constrain domestic media.

and, 1, 3 auctions, 3, 42, 86, 101 audience reach: attention economy and, 11–14; categories of content and, 165; churn and, 9, 84–85, 88–95, 100–101, 163–64, 167; compounded, 133; Darwinism and, 13, 136, 165–67, 169, 203n9; distribution of, 6, 12–13, 84–85, 88–100, 112, 114, 155, 167–69, 171, 179, 185; evolutionary model and, 164–67; false solutions and, 137–46; growth patterns in, 84, 88, 91, 95–96, 100; headlines and, 13, 32, 36, 38, 107, 147, 149–50, 154–57, 160–61; logarithms and, 88–96, 97, 100, 184–86; methodology and, 184–92; mobile devices and, 2–4, 13, 39, 69, 109, 137, 142–44, 147, 152, 160, 165, 167, 170, 179; nature of internet and, 162–80; news and, 104–18, 121–22, 126–30, 133–39, 142–49, 152, 154, 157–61, 169; overlap and, 67, 76–77, 108, 110; paywalls and, 132, 137–40, 147, 160; public sphere and, 10–11, 13–14, 99, 169; rankings and, 7, 25, 31, 54, 84–96, 100, 110–12, 136, 157, 186; recommendation systems and, 60 (see also recommendation systems); stability and, 165; traffic and, 83–96, 99–101, 104–11, 114–18, 121, 129, 134, 169, 186–89; unique visitors and, 87–88, 106–11, 128, 134 AWS, 153, 168, 203n28 Ayres, Ian, 3 Bagdikian, Benjamin, 171 Bai, Matt, 7 Bankler, Yochai, 12, 170 Banko, Michele, 51 Bank of America, 9 Barlow, John Perry, 162–63, 176 BBC, 32 Beam, Christopher, 35 behavioral targeting, 55–58 Being Digital (Negroponte), 38 Bell, Robert, 44–49 bell curve, 92–93, 95 BellKor, 44–49 Bellman, Steven, 34 Bell Telephone, 16–17 Berners-Lee, Tim, 3 Bezos, Jeff, 72, 139, 147, 150 Bieschke, Eric, 38 BigChaos, 47 BigTable, 21, 23 Bing: attention economy and, 3; economic geography and, 79; Experimentation System and, 28; experiments and, 24–25, 28, 31; market share of, 3, 30–31, 195n63; nature of internet and, 174; news and, 32, 61, 134; page views and, 24; revenue and, 24, 31, 70; tilted playing field and, 24, 28, 30–32 “Bing It On” (Microsoft campaign), 31 black box problem, 52 blogs: attention economy and, 7–9, 13; Darwinism and, 136; economic geography and, 77; methodology and, 189; nature of internet and, 169; news and, 121, 133, 136–37, 155–56, 159; personalization and, Index 45, 50; political, 136; tilted playing field and, 17, 25, 35; Webb and, 45 Boczkowski, Pablo, 70–71 Borg, 21, 23 Boston, 113–14 Bosworth, Andrew, 162 Bowman, Douglas, 25 Box, George, 64 Bradshaw, Samantha, 177 Branch, John, 152 Brand, Stewart, 164 branding, 28–32, 36, 86, 166 Brexit, 58 Brill, Eric, 51 Broadband penetration, 124, 126, 190 browsers, 2, 24–25, 34, 107, 143, 175, 195n63 budget constraints, 72, 181 Buffet, Warren, 102 bundling, 65–67, 76–77, 197n8, 198n10, 198n14 Buzzfeed, 137, 145, 149–51, 159–60, 168 Caffeine, 21, 23 Cambridge Analytica, 40, 58, 59 Campus Network, 35–36 capitalism, 20, 85, 162, 176 Census Bureau, 190 Center for Public Integrity, 140 Chancellor, Joseph, 58 Chandler, Alfred, 20 Chartbeat, 107, 149, 153 Chicago, 113, 141 China, 80, 177–78, 193n5 Christie’s, 42 Chrome, 24–25, 145 churn, 9, 84–85, 88–95, 100–1, 163–64, 167 Chyri, Iris, 130 CineMatch, 43–44, 46, 50 Clauset, Aaron, 184 clickbait, 150 click-through rates, 56–57 cloud computing, 34, 153–54, 168, 203n28 CNN, 9, 32, 39, 72, 107, 159 Colossus, 21, 23 Columbia Journalism Review, 119, 148 Comcast, 172 comment systems, 19 comparative advantage, 62–63, 80, 82 • 227 competition: attention economy and, 1, 3–4, 6, 9, 11, 13, 165–66; bundling and, 67; economic geography and, 64, 67, 74, 78; nature of internet and, 164–70, 173–75; news and, 104, 114–15, 135, 137, 146, 149, 159, 164–70, 173–75; personalization and, 40; political economy and, 40–53, 60; search engines and, 1; social networks and, 35–36; tilted playing field and, 16–17, 21–22, 26–37; traffic and, 83, 86–87, 101 comScore: attention economy and, 10; nature of internet and, 187–88; news and, 104–10, 113, 116, 119–22, 127, 128–29; traffic and, 87, 199n19 concentration: attention economy and, 2–9, 13; dispersion and, 6, 42, 100, 200n23; economic geography and, 63–64, 68, 78, 80–81; forces of, 5–8, 19, 30, 61, 64, 80, 184; lopsided understanding of internet and, 5–8; markets and, 9, 30, 68, 78, 85–88, 99–100, 104, 114–15, 122, 127–30, 171, 184, 199n15; methodology and, 184; nature of internet and, 164, 171–72, 179; news and, 104, 114–15, 122, 126–28, 130, 134; personalization and, 39, 61; revenue and, 2–4, 8, 68, 171, 179; tilted playing field and, 19, 30, 32; traffic and, 7–8, 30, 32, 63, 83–88, 96, 99–101, 104, 122, 171, 199n15 Congress, 104, 141–42 conservatives, 32, 48, 69, 72, 75, 131, 175 consumption: attention economy and, 6, 10; branding and, 28–32, 36, 86, 166; bundling and, 65–67, 76–77, 197n8, 198n10, 198n14; digital content production and, 71–80; economic geography and, 63–68, 70–76, 79; experience goods and, 29–30; methodology and, 181–84; models and, 181–84; nature of internet and, 164–65, 168, 172–75; news and, 110, 113, 122, 125–29, 143, 149; personalization and, 42–43, 50, 57–58; preferences and, 5, 8, 32, 43, 54, 63–65, 69–81, 181–84, 198n41; price discrimination and, 66, 139; switching costs and, 8, 34, 63, 72, 78–79, 164; tilted playing field and, 17, 22–26, 29–34, 37; traffic and, 86; unique visitors and, 87–88, 106–11, 128, 134 cookies, 107 cost per thousand impressions (CPM), 69 court system, 6, 129, 148 creative destruction, 84, 167 228 • Index CSS, 143 CU Community, 35–36 DailyKos, 75 Daily Me, The, 38–39, 61 Daily You, The (Turow), 39 Dallas Morning News, 118 dark fiber, 21 Darwinism, 13, 136, 165–67, 169, 203n9 data centers, 2, 12, 15–16, 20–23, 54 data mining, 59, 135 data packets, 22, 171 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A” (Barlow), 162–63 deep learning, 21 DeepMind, 23, 194n24 democracy, 7, 70, 103–4, 163, 175–78, 180 DeNardis, Laura, 171 Department of Justice, 115, 130 Des Moines Register, 136 Detroit, 83 digital content production model, 71–80 Dinosaur Planet, 46–47, 49 disinformation, 177–78 dispersion, 6, 42, 100, 200n23 distribution costs, 12–13, 155, 167–69, 179 diversity: economic geography and, 8, 63–64, 79; methodology and, 189, 191; nature of internet and, 180; news and, 104–5, 115, 118, 129–30, 149; personalization and, 53, 60–61 DNAinfo, 141 Dremel, 27 Duarte, Matias, 27 duopolies, 4, 30, 42, 68, 180 Earl, Jennifer, 169 Easterbrook, Frank, 175 eBay, 3, 26, 39, 42, 86–87, 175 economic geography: advertising and, 3–4, 63, 67–69, 80; agglomeration and, 9, 63, 82–83; aggregation and, 65–67, 76–77; Apple and, 79–80; apps and, 80; auctions and, 3, 42, 86, 101; audience reach and, 87, 104, 106–11, 114–18, 121, 129, 134, 169, 186–89; Bing and, 79; blogs and, 77; bundling and, 65–67, 76–77, 197n8, 198n10, 198n14; comparative advantage and, 62–63, 80; competition and, 64, 67, 74, 78; concentration and, 63–64, 68, 78, 80–81; consumption and, 63–67, 70–76, 79; customers and, 17, 24, 30, 33, 50, 57, 68, 149, 164, 172, 174; digital content production and, 71–80; dispersion and, 6, 42, 100, 200n23; distribution costs and, 12–13, 155, 167–69, 179; diversity and, 8, 63–64, 79; economies of scale and, 63–67, 74, 76, 79, 81; efficiency and, 63, 65, 67–68; Facebook and, 68, 79–80; Google and, 68–69, 79–80; government subsidies and, 133, 137, 140–42; hyperlocal sites and, 68, 77–78, 81, 101–4, 119, 121, 130–37, 164, 180; increasing returns and, 36–37, 63–64, 80–81, 181, 184; international trade and, 5, 62, 80; investment and, 73; journalism and, 78, 81; Krugman and, 6, 62–63, 80; lock-in and, 34–37, 61, 101, 173; long tails and, 8, 70, 84, 184, 199n15; markets and, 63–68, 74–75, 77–78; media preferences and, 69–71; Microsoft and, 65–66; models and, 63–65, 69–81, 198n27, 198n41; Netflix and, 70; networks and, 68–69; news and, 65–80; newspapers and, 65, 68–69, 78; page views and, 24, 87, 106, 108–18, 121, 125–29, 151, 157, 160–61, 188–89, 200n18; paywalls and, 107, 109, 132, 137–40, 147, 160; preferences and, 5, 8, 32, 43, 54, 63–65, 69–81, 181–84, 198n41; profit and, 73–77, 81; protectionism and, 174; quality and, 72–78, 81, 83–84; revenue and, 63, 65–68, 73–75, 79; search costs and, 8, 30, 34, 37, 41–43, 63, 72–74, 168, 181–82; search engines and, 64, 79–81; software and, 65–66; stickiness and, 74; subscriptions and, 65, 67; television and, 66, 70; traffic and, 63, 77–81; video and, 69, 76; Yahoo!


pages: 1,386 words: 379,115

Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton

car-free, complexity theory, disinformation, forensic accounting, gravity well, megacity, megastructure, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, restrictive zoning, trade route, trickle-down economics, VTOL

‘Speaking of which; are you absolutely sure Elaine Doi is a Starflyer agent?’ Bradley leant forwards over the table. ‘That wasn’t us.’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘A very well executed fake. I have to admit, the Starflyer is becoming quite sophisticated in its campaign against us. Physically, Bruce and his kind are causing a lot of expensive damage while disinformation like that shotgun is damaging our credibility. Just when we were starting to attract a degree of media interest, not to mention political support. Still, I blame myself, I should have anticipated such a move.’ Adam finally sipped some of the Gifford’s champagne to help wash down a scone. ‘You know, that might have been a dangerous move on their part.’

We are looking for any Starflyer connection among the Commonwealth political elite. She might well be the link.’ ‘Isabella as a Starflyer agent? That’s hard to swallow.’ ‘You said yourself there’s something wrong about her. That shotgun did a lot of damage to the Guardians’ credibility. It is logical to assume the Starflyer would use disinformation of that nature to damage its one true opponent. Her involvement would confirm her connection to its network.’ ‘But she’s only twenty-one, and she was going out with Kantil two years ago. How would she get mixed up in something like that so young? She spent most of her early life on Solidade.

As she said it, she realized how weak it sounded. ‘I should have absolute proof in a couple of days. That’s why I’m preparing the groundwork now.’ ‘They accused Doi of being a Starflyer agent. The President herself.’ ‘She’s not.’ Justine recalled the conversation she’d just had with Bradley Johansson. ‘That was part of a disinformation campaign to discredit the Guardians.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Your interest in revisiting the Sorbonne Wood weekend. That’s a part of this as well.’ ‘We were being manipulated.’ ‘Preparing us for war. Yes, I see now. Just as the Guardians claim.’ ‘You say it with such scepticism.’ ‘And did you blindly follow your father’s belief?’


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

In addition, the possibilities of disinformation as war-fighting had been part of Soviet military doctrine.17 Russian efforts used social media to spread false messages and create misleading impressions to weaken opponents, especially with their own public opinion. The EU spoke of ‘hybrid threats’ because it saw this as a form of activity that could help undermine security even at times of comparative peace. Evidence was found in the role, confirmed by the US intelligence community, played by Russia during the 2016 presidential election, employing disinformation and leaks of hacked emails, in undermining Democrat Party candidate Hillary Clinton.

And on the other, it takes on the other definition of “cool,” in that it involves the latest cutting-edge technologies in ways that are changing the paradigm of conflict to a much greater degree than any of those employed during the Cold War—which was, after all, about old-fashioned geopolitical jockeying for advantage in anticipation of potential old-school total warfare.15 The risks attached to major war and the reluctance to commit substantial forces to lesser conflicts have led major powers to search for ways, whether subversion of the political process, economic coercion, cyber-attacks, or brazen disinformation campaigns, to influence events while keeping their liabilities limited and risks managed. Again there was the difficulty that these methods were unlikely to bring much to a conclusion but instead encouraged niggling, persistent conflicts until at some point a way was found to sort out the underlying issues or else some spark moved them out of the grey zone and back into open warfare.


pages: 314 words: 101,452

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, disinformation, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, interest rate swap, Irwin Jacobs, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, nuclear winter, Ponzi scheme, risk free rate, The Predators' Ball, yield curve

The world of finance can, on occasion, involve us in the highest calling. From time to time we have had the opportunity to influence society in a favorable way." "He sounded like an elder statesman," coos the accompanying text. But the disinformation was not what bothered Dash about the book and the bowl. Once you knew the truth about the firm, you realized it was far better to disinform than to inform. And if our leaders were going to lie about their methods, they were almost by necessity going to tell a whopper. What bothered Dash was that Salomon Brothers had actually spent money to make these things. A book and a bowl?


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Exxon has always insisted that it has “tracked the scientific consensus on climate change, and its research on the issue has been published in publicly available peer-reviewed journals.”17 In any event the First Amendment preserves one’s right to lie, though in the fall of 2018 the New York attorney general, Barbara Underwood, filed suit against Exxon for lying to investors, which is a crime. In January 2019, the Supreme Court ruled the company had to turn over millions of pages of internal documents to the Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healey, so we will learn more. What is certain is that this disinformation campaign cost us the human generation that might have made the crucial difference in the climate fight. Alex Steffen, an environmental writer, coined the term predatory delay, “the blocking or slowing of needed change, in order to make money off unsustainable, unjust systems in the meantime.” Climate change, and the behavior of the oil companies, is the prime example.

It’s no longer possible, he insisted, “to live by the idea that there is something special, unique, or even sacred about living organisms.”2 Indeed, in the spring of 2018 a University of Washington professor proposed using CRISPR to create a “humanzee,” a human-chimp hybrid, specifically to prove that people aren’t special. “The fundamental take-home message of such a creation would be to drive a stake into the heart of the destructive disinformation campaign” holding that people are different from the rest of creation, he explained.3 This kind of self-loathing permeates the whole subculture. Robert Ettinger, the first man to start freezing his fellow humans so they could be revived in a century or two, looked forward to a golden posthuman age, one where, among other things, we would be reengineered to achieve the “elimination of elimination.”


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.[97] Disgusted by the “crap science” in Climate Research, Tom Wigley, a senior figure at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, proposed going “direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is being perceived as a medium for disseminating disinformation under the guise of refereed work.”[98] Wigley had in mind a sort of exorcism of the journal, including a purge of the editor who had allowed the offending paper. Mike’s approach to get the editorial board members to resign will probably not work – must get rid of von Storch too… I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.[99] Mann seemed particularly horrified by the fact that one of the authors of the contrarian paper had been a credentialed astrophysicist from Harvard.

Mike’s approach to get the editorial board members to resign will probably not work – must get rid of von Storch too… I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.[99] Mann seemed particularly horrified by the fact that one of the authors of the contrarian paper had been a credentialed astrophysicist from Harvard. This latest assault uses a compromised peer-review process as a vehicle for launching a scientific disinformation campaign (often vicious and personal) under the guise of apparently legitimately reviewed science, allowing them to make use of the “Harvard” moniker in the process.[100] The emails showed the world’s leading climatologists busily working to organize a research cartel. Peer review was a legitimate source of authority when the process supported their positions.


pages: 338 words: 101,967

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

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

You should not be able to inherit your refugee status and then blame Israel for this problem. Of course, this is not how BDS frames things on its website. Instead, they speak of Israeli atrocities, murder, apartheid, genocide, and systematic ethnic cleansing. The only problem is that it’s a giant pile of crap—misinformation, disinformation, manipulation, elimination of history, and flat-out lies. Here are a few examples of how critical factual historical information is left off of the official BDS website in order to achieve this magnificent manipulation upon unsuspecting, well-intentioned, and ill-informed Americans (and Roger Waters): Regarding the establishment of Israel.

“Investing in the future they are,” as Yoda would say. The BDS on campus operation works in two primary ways. The first is meetings, or “training and educational” sessions. BDS distributes flyers or Facebook invites for pro-Palestine or anti-Israel events in which a speaker will present their standard talking points—misinformation, disinformation, a skewed reality, and the convenient elimination of history or facts. They will share a rough personal story to create a one-sided narrative that would rightfully infuriate anyone with a beating heart. The second critical operation is political. When campus voting season comes around, representatives descend on college students in order to push anti-Israel resolutions or referendums at the university.


pages: 117 words: 31,221

Fred Schwed's Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: A Modern-Day Interpretation of an Investment Classic by Leo Gough

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, book value, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, disinformation, diversification, fixed income, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, short selling, South Sea Bubble, The Nature of the Firm, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, young professional

Insurance companies operate various kinds of complex savings-cum-insurance schemes that are poor value for many customers, and, in territories where regulation is lax, make very misleading claims about these schemes. Organisations that have the most to do with the public, like banks and building societies, produce misleading literature about the benefits of their savings accounts and actively promote disinformation to the less sophisticated sections of society. All this is true in every one of the 17 countries in which I have worked in the financial services industry, although the degree and nature of the abuses vary from country to country. Ok, maybe, just maybe, this kind of thing is no worse than what goes on in any industry.


pages: 357 words: 110,072

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine by Edzard Ernst, Simon Singh

animal electricity, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, false memory syndrome, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, germ theory of disease, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microdosing, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, sugar pill, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method

Judge Susan Getzendanner, who had presided over the case, ruled that the AMA had indeed acted unfairly against chiropractors: Evidence at the trial showed that the defendants took active steps, often covert, to undermine chiropractic educational institutions, conceal evidence of the usefulness of chiropractic care, undercut insurance programs for patients of chiropractors, subvert government inquiries into the efficacy of chiropractic, engage in a massive disinformation campaign to discredit and destabilize the chiropractic profession and engage in numerous other activities to maintain a medical physician monopoly over health care in this country. The AMA took the decision to the Supreme Court, but the appeal failed in 1990 and thereafter the AMA was forced to alter its attitude.

Also, correspondence between the Department of Health and the Foundation for Integrated Health (obtained by Les Rose under the Freedom of Information Act) clearly shows that the guide was originally meant to include reliable information on effectiveness. In any case, if a patient guide does not contain such information, what on Earth is it for? In a second example of British disinformation, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in 2006 took the shocking decision to allow homeopathic products to make claims on their labels based on homeopathy’s own theory of testing known as ‘provings’. As discussed in Chapter 3, these tests cannot demonstrate clinical effectiveness, and yet customers will now encounter labels based on provings and endorsed by the MHRA.


pages: 624 words: 104,923

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, British Empire, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Fellow of the Royal Society, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, placebo effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, trade route, two and twenty, V2 rocket, Vesna Vulović

Eating lots of carrots won’t help you see any better in the dark – all it will do, over time, is to turn your skin orange. During the Second World War, Group Captain John Cunningham (1917–2002) gained the nickname ‘Cats Eyes Cunningham’. His 604 squadron operated at night. The British government encouraged rumours that he was able see in the dark because he ate so many carrots. This was deliberate disinformation designed to cover up the fact that he was testing the newly developed (and top secret) airborne radar system. It seems highly unlikely the Germans were taken in, but it helped persuade a generation of British children to eat the one vegetable that remained in constant supply through the war.

W. 1, 2 Tutankhamun, curse of 1 Twain, Mark 1 Tyson, Mike 1 United Nations 1, 2 United States 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 advertising in 1 banning of Inuit 1 baseball in 1 basketball invented in 1 bison in 1 bra-burning legend 1 bubonic plague in 1 champagne and 1, 2 cockfighting in 1 concentration of tigers in 1 declarations of war 1 depression in 1 earthquakes in 1 egg industry in 1 first president 1 forest management in 1 founding of New York 1 guano-snatching 1 gypsum in homes 1 hailstorms in 1 Hokey Pokey, as dance 1 log cabins in 1 loofahs in 1 Mike the chicken in 1 military use of dolphins 1 most dangerous American 1, 2 names for citizens of 1 national motto 1 Native American languages 1, 2 nature of ‘biscuits’ in 1 number of states in 1 number thirteen in 1 sign language 1 suicide rate in 1 tall buildings (nineteenth century) 1 television watching in 1 see also Civil War (US) universe colour of 1 storage space in 1 Ursa Major 1 USSR cinemas in 1 Cold War 1 Vaaler, Johann 1 Van Gelder, Lindsay 1 Vatican 1, 2 Venezuela 1 venom 1, 2 ventriloquism 1 Vesalius, Andreas 1 Vespucci, Amerigo 1 Victoria, Queen 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 videocassettes, rival formats 1 Vietnam War 1, 2 Vikings 1 violin strings 1, 2 Viotti, Giovanni Battista 1 Virgil 1, 2 viruses, as distinct from bacteria 1 vitamin C 1 Vitruvius 1 volcanoes 1, 2, 3 Voltaire 1, 2 vomitoria 1 voodoo dolls 1 V-sign, origins of 1 Vulović, Vesna 1 Wagner, Richard 1 Waldseemüller, Martin 1 Wales 1, 2 Celts in 1, 2 equals sign from 1 Wallace, Lew 1 Wallace, William 1 Walpole, Robert 1 Warren, Robin 1 Washington, George 1 false teeth of 1, 2, 3 water colour of 1 direction down the drain of 1 and Earth’s mass 1 as electrical conductor 1 fresh water as ice 1 sterilised by silver 1 Waterloo, Battle of 1, 2 Webb, Jane Loudon 1 weightlessness, and flies 1 Welles, Orson 1 Wellington, Duke of 1 nationality of 1 whales 1, 2, 3 see also blue whales; sperm whales Wharton, Drs 1 whau tree 1 whips 1 whisky, origins of 1 white matter 1 Whyte, Major 1 Wilde, Oscar 1, 2 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 1 William, Prince 1 William the Conqueror, name of 1 Wilson, Woodrow 1 wind speeds 1 Wise Men 1 witchcraft 1 Wolfe, Tom 1 wood cannon ball splinters from 1 lightest 1 strongest 1 World Trade Center 1 World War I 1, 2 acronyms from 1 battlecruisers 1, 2 landing on aircraft carriers 1 uniforms made of nettles 1 World War II 1, 2, 3 carrier pigeons in 1 carrots as disinformation 1 Hawker Hurricane in 1 paperclips as resistance symbol 1 popularity of Spam 1 silence regarding 1 thumbs-up signal 1 year of its ending 1 worms 1, 2 as longest animal 1 in pearls 1 survive amputation 1 survive Shuttle disaster 1 wrens 1 wrestling, naked 1 Wright, Steven 1, 2 Wyss, father and sons 1 Yeager, Chuck 1 yellow fever 1 Yemen 1 Yorkshire terrier 1, 2 zenzizenzizenzic, as failed neologism 1 Zeus 1 Zheng He 1 Zoloft 1 Zoroastrianism 1 About John Lloyd and John Mitchinson QI first aired on BBC2 in September 2003 with John Lloyd producing and John Mitchinson masterminding the research.


pages: 422 words: 104,457

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

By the end of my experiment, I was refusing to have digital conversations with my close friends without encryption. I began using my fake name for increasingly trivial transactions; a friend was shocked when we took a yoga class together and I casually registered as Ida Tarbell. I didn’t want to live in the world that I was building—a world of subterfuge and disinformation and covert actions. It was a world based on fear. It was a world devoid of trust. It was not a world that I wanted leave to my children. I remember my parents expressing the same feeling about the two big threats of their generation—environmental damage and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

“The risk here is that eventually our trust will be so abused that we will pull back from the Web,” he told me. That was certainly a good description of my own behavior. In my investigation of dragnets, I had lost my trust in the institutions that stored my data. I had become a data survivalist, pulling my data back from the Web and stockpiling it at home. I had also become a disinformation specialist, overcoming my fear of lying to spread lies about my habits and myself. By fighting to protect my data, I had polluted the public square and sowed distrust. There had to be a better way to fight back against unfair dragnets. * * * One way to even the playing field would be for everyone to be in the surveillance business.


pages: 324 words: 106,699

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatizing impact—whose very existence—the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. After having spent roughly half that period as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how the collection and analysis of intelligence can inform the production of disinformation and propaganda, for use as frequently against America’s allies as its enemies—and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that knowledge, I still struggle to accept the sheer magnitude and speed of the change, from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and performative respect for dissent to a security state whose militarized police demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: “Stop resisting.”

I knew that the institutions I’d shamed would not relent until my head was bagged and my limbs were shackled. And until then—and perhaps even after then—they would harass my loved ones and disparage my character, prying into every aspect of my life and career, seeking information (or opportunities for disinformation) with which to smear me. I was familiar enough with how this process went, both from having read classified examples of it within the IC and from having studied the cases of other whistleblowers and leakers. I knew the stories of heroes like Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, and more recent opponents of government secrecy like Thomas Tamm, an attorney with the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review who served as a source for much of the warrantless wiretapping reporting of the mid-2000s.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

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

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

And while inoculation may help people develop critical thinking skills, I have to confess that a lifetime of training has not prevented me from occasionally falling foul of crank theories, especially when delivered by seemingly trustworthy sources. At this point, we have to accept that expecting or nagging citizens to develop perfect media literacy is a losing proposition, especially when well-funded state actors like Russia’s Internet Research Agency (a.k.a. the troll factory) churn out disinformation, to the extent of creating entire fake publications that paid real money to unwitting freelance reporters.47 Then there’s the question of who we assume possesses media literacy and who doesn’t. Dr. Francesca Tripodi, a sociologist at the Data & Society research institute, argues that groups suspected of lacking media literacy, like US conservatives and evangelicals, already consult a wide variety of original and alternative media sources to arrive at their opinions, rather than being “fooled” into their views by consuming fake news.48 As for digital literacy specifically, the idea it can help solve the fake news epidemic is like training people to run faster to dodge traffic rather than enforcing road safety and building pedestrian crossings—it’s not that it’s worthless, but it places the burden on individual citizens rather than addressing the larger societal problem.

The New York Times A/B tests its headlines with multiple variations to find out which will get the most readers; software engineer and blogger Tom Cleveland wrote a program to analyse which headlines attracted more readers and found it was the more spicy and dramatic ones.88 Right-wing publications and far-right groups that are willing to spread emotive disinformation can gain even more attention. That social media platforms amplify these messages is not a law of nature, though. It’s a choice stemming from a pursuit of advertising income, yes; but it also comes from a belief that ideas should be subjected to a kind of competition in which the truth will out, eventually.


pages: 404 words: 119,055

One Day in September by Simon Reeve

Boeing 747, disinformation, fear of failure, friendly fire, New Journalism, Seymour Hersh, two and twenty, white flight, Yom Kippur War

There are several versions of what happened next, but the most plausible account is that, just as two Mossad agents moved close to the hotel to begin surveillance of Salameh, their target slipped out of the hotel by a back entrance and disappeared.37 With Israeli agents hot on his trail, either Salameh began a masterful disinformation operation or the Israelis began following a trail of false leads. Some sources suggest that Salameh began spreading rumors that he had gone to live in Scandinavia, and Mossad began receiving reports from Geneva, Zurich, and Paris, all saying that Salameh had slipped out of their clutches and moved north.

In Munich the courts threw out the case because of a three-year statute of limitations. Not surprisingly, the families were livid. “We said, ‘How can you, even on the basis of statute of limitations, throw our case out after you hid all the documentation for twenty years?’”50 The families appealed on the grounds that the Germans had instigated a massive campaign of cover-up, disinformation, and deception to prevent the families and the outside world from knowing the full details of the Munich attack. The statute of limitations, said lawyers for the relatives, should start from the moment they received the documents. “And in that period of time we submitted our court case,” said Ankie.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Whereas Polish communism and Russian communism were both committed, at least in theory, to the universal interests of an international working class, Polish nationalism and Russian nationalism are by definition committed to opposing interests. As Putin’s rise sparks an upsurge of Polish nationalism, this will only make Poland more anti-Russian than before. Though Russia has embarked on a global campaign of disinformation and subversion that aims to break up NATO and the EU, it does not seem likely that it is about to embark on a global campaign of physical conquest. One can hope – with some justification – that the takeover of Crimea and the Russian incursions in Georgia and eastern Ukraine will remain isolated examples rather than harbingers of a new era of war.

Rather, these fake countries are the ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ and the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ that Russia has set up to mask its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.2 Whichever side you support, it seems that we are indeed living in a terrifying era of post-truth, when not just particular military incidents, but entire histories and nations might be faked. But if this is the era of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? In the 1980s? The 1950s? The 1930s? And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era – the Internet? Social media? The rise of Putin and Trump? A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country.


pages: 404 words: 113,514

Atrocity Archives by Stross, Charles

airport security, anthropic principle, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, defense in depth, disinformation, disintermediation, experimental subject, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, hypertext link, Khyber Pass, luminiferous ether, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, PalmPilot, pneumatic tube, Snow Crash, Strategic Defense Initiative, the medium is the message, Y2K, yield curve

Electricity, for ages the primary tool of the experimental vitalists, is now pretty much obsolete--but it's so well-understood that these ivory-tower types prefer to use it as a vehicle for their research, rather than trying more modern geometry engines based on light, which doesn't have any of the nasty side effects of electrical invocations. But that's the British school for you. Over in the States, when they're not dangling stupid "remote viewing" disinformation tricks in front of the press corps the Black Chamber is busy running experiments on the big Nova laser at Los Alamos that everyone thinks is for bomb research. But do we get to play with safe opto-isolated geometry engines and invocation clusters here? Do we, fuck: we're stuck with Dr. Volt and his thuggish friend Mr.

An open gate at the far end of the field and a trail of impressions in the ground completes the picture. "Hypothesis: open gate. Someone let Daisy in, walked her to this position near the herd, then backed off. Daisy was then illuminated and exposed to a class three or better basilisk, whether animate or simulated. We need a plausible disinformation pitch, forensics workover of the paddock gate and fence--check for exit signs and footprints--and some way of identifying Daisy to see which herd she came from. If any livestock is reported missing over the next few days that would be a useful indicator. Meanwhile, core temperature is down to under five hundred Celsius.


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

Among developed countries, Australia and South Korea (to my knowledge) maintain blacklists of websites that Internet users cannot access. These were pushed to "save the children": an easy sell to certain kinds of adults. In both cases, the blacklists grew wider and wider. Manipulation of content, where "sock puppet" contributors repeat disinformation, down-vote accurate stories, and up-vote their colleagues' lies. This is an old tactic that was first used by businesses like Microsoft who tried very hard to spread their view of reality across popular geek sites like Wikipedia by paying people to blog in their favor. Fear and uncertainty, where individuals are arrested for specific activities that may be more or less innocent.

It is also technically hard to sustain. In 2011, Bank of America hired three firms to attack Wikileaks. One of the firms, HBGary Federal, was hacked by Anonymous, and the plan was discovered. Emails and documents uncovered in the hack outline several proposed attacks on WikiLeaks: Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions of sabotage or discredit the opposing organizations. Submit fake documents and then call out the error. Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed not to be secure, they are done. Commit cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters.


pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

In May 2017, in a widely publicized: Royal Society for Public Health, “Instagram Ranked Worst for Young People’s Mental Health,” press release, May 19, 2017, https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/instagram-ranked-worst-for-young-people-s-mental-health.html. That month, research groups commissioned: “The Disinformation Report,” New Knowledge, December 17, 2018, https://www.newknowledge.com/articles/the-disinformation-report/. 12 | THE CEO In 2012, when Facebook reached: Leena Rao, “Facebook Will Grow Head Count Quickly in 2013 to Develop Money-Making Products, Total Expenses Will Jump by 50 Percent,” TechCrunch, January 30, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/30/zuck-facebook-will-grow-headcount-quickly-in-2013-to-develop-future-money-making-products/.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Of course, these figures do not take into account all the workers involved in datafication both inside and outside the social quantification sector, including part-time and freelance workers. But to put things in perspective, Walmart and McDonald’s each employ about two million people worldwide. Only Amazon comes close to that magnitude, with 541,900 employees as of October 2017. 59. Statista, “The Leading Companies in the World in 2016, by Net Income.” 60. Mejias and Vokuev, “Disinformation and the Media.” 61. Samaddar, Marx and the Postcolonial Age. 62. NASSCOM, The IT-BPM Sector. 63. Dvorak and Saito, “Tech Dominance.” 64. Sender and Mundy, “Walmart Nears Deal.” 65. The Economist, “China’s Internet Giants Go Global,” April 20, 2017. 66. Greeven and Wei, “China’s New Tech Giants.” 67.

Meiksins Wood, Ellen. “The Uses and Abuses of ‘Civil Society.’” Socialist Register 26 (March 1990): 60–84. https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5574. Mejias, Ulises Ali. Off the Network. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Mejias, Ulises Ali, and Nikolai E. Vokuev. “Disinformation and the Media: The Case of Russia and Ukraine.” Media, Culture & Society 39, no. 7 (2017): 1027–42. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Translated by Susan Gibson Miller. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. Meng, Bingchun. The Politics of Chinese Media. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.


pages: 127 words: 51,083

The Oil Age Is Over: What to Expect as the World Runs Out of Cheap Oil, 2005-2050 by Matt Savinar

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, clean water, disinformation, Easter island, energy security, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, invisible hand, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Rosa Parks, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Y2K

Today, we do need massive amounts of oil to come up with alternatives to oil. As oil prices rise, our ability to implement alternatives will be crippled. For these reasons, using the whale oil crisis of the 19th century as proof the market will solve the oil crisis of the 21st century is silly at best and disinformation at worst. 52 The Oil Age is Over 47. The oil companies are so greedy, they will come up with a solution to keep making money, right? Expecting the oil companies to save you from the oil crash is about as wise as expecting the tobacco companies to save you from lung cancer. Corporate officers are bound by law to do what is in the best interests of the corporation, so long as their actions are legal.


pages: 151 words: 39,757

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

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

http://time.com/3923651/meet-the-woman-helping-gamergate-victims-come-out-of-the-shadows/ 10. http://www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies 11. https://transequality.org/the-discrimination-administration 12. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/06/08/trump-on-god-hopefully-i-wont-have-to-be-asking-for-much-forgiveness/ 13. https://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/russians-used-bernie-bros-as-unwitting-agents-in-disinformation-campaign-senate-intel-witness/ 14. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/24/17047880/conservatives-amplified-russian-trolls-more-often-than-liberals 15. https://www.wired.com/story/how-trump-conquered-facebookwithout-russian-ads/ 16. Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s social media director, tweeted: “I bet we were 100x to 200x her.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

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

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

During the fifteen years of Cointelpro, agents spied on more than one million Americans, including Malcolm X, John Lennon, James Baldwin, Jane Fonda, Yoko Ono, Abbie Hoffman, and Muhammad Ali. Operatives broke into hundreds of homes. They sent unsigned, slanderous letters to activists’ employers, trying to get them fired. They infiltrated grassroots organizations, spreading disinformation to corrode trust between members, causing groups to splinter apart, actively promoting violence that sometimes led to murders. One especially poisonous technique was called “bad-jacketing” or “snitch jacketing.” Agents would single out an activist, then circulate rumors or plant evidence suggesting that person was an informant.


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

This encouraged idealistic spying so Stalin knew about the bomb before it was dropped. Moreover, the callousness of the bombing motivated other spies to help the Soviet Union, and they ended up providing the Soviets with detailed instructions as to how to produce the bomb. If the bomb had not been deployed, then disinformation could have been spread as to the bomb’s power and practicality. Spreading disinformation had been a well-used tactic during the war, particularly in support of hiding the extent of allied code breaking. Using the weapon on civilians made any campaign of misinformation futile. Its deployment made the USA vulnerable to nuclear attack for much longer than necessary while producing virtually no strategic benefit in the war with Japan.


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

For the Kurds, who stretch across several countries, this risk would be even more pronounced, as a Kurdish virtual-statehood campaign would be met with resistance from the entire neighborhood, some of whom lack Kurdish populations but would fear a destabilizing effect. No effort would be spared to destroy the Kurdish virtual institutions through low-grade cyber-meddling and espionage, like cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and infiltration. The populations on the ground would surely bear the brunt of the punishment. The governments would be aided, of course, by the massive amounts of data that these citizens produced, so finding the people involved or supportive of virtual statehood would be easy. Very few secessionist movements have the level of resources and international support that would be required to match this level of counterattack.

., 5.1, 6.1, 6.2 democracy, 2.1, 2.2 protests in wisdom of crowds in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, 3.1, 5.1 Der Spiegel, 179 developing countries development diasporas Dictator’s Learning Curve, The (Dobson), 2.1 Digicel DigiNotar digital activism digital currency digital marketing, 6.1, 6.2 digital textbooks digital verification digital watermarking, 2.1, 6.1 diplomacy, itr.1, 2.1 direct attacks disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) program discretionary power discrimination disease detection disinformation campaigns dissidents, 2.1, con.1 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS attacks), 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3n, 162, 6.1 DNA, 1.1, 2.1 Dobson, William J. document loss documents domain name system (DNS), 3.1, 3.2 Downey, Tom “driver-assist” approach driverless cars, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2 drones, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6 drugs, negative reactions to Dubner, Stephen J.


pages: 457 words: 126,996

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

Working together on IRC, Anonymous hackers penetrated the HBGary computer system and downloaded seventy thousand company emails, along with other files that included a PowerPoint presentation entitled “The WikiLeaks Threat.” The tactics suggested therein are strikingly similar to those practiced and perfected during COINTELPRO. The presentation outlines a set of strategies the firm claimed could be “deployed tomorrow”: Palantir Potential Proactive Tactics Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization. Submit fake documents and then call out the error. Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed to not be secure they are done. Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters.

This directly contradicts statements made by one of his handlers and reported by Jana Winter for Fox News. “About 90 percent of what you see online is bulls---,”21 said the handler, in reference both to posts from Sabu’s Twitter account and also “interviews” he gave to the press. Whether this is the truth or an even more elaborate, recursive disinformation campaign, the implication is that Sabu parroted whatever the FBI wanted him to say. There were some tweets—“If god forbid I am arrested, I’ll admit to my crimes, and take myself down. I do not believe in bringing others down for my own sins. Thanks”—that we now know were unadulterated nuggets of FBI-influenced BS.22 I barely got a word in edgewise, but I did manage to ask Sabu whether he met me at the behest of the FBI.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

Some countries, such as Russia, are already practicing war by “many means”—that is, where traditional military force is mixed with covert action, propaganda, and disinformation. The Russian doctrine of maskirovka has roots that go back to the fourteenth-century Battle of Kulikovo and was further developed more recently, beginning with its use in the Second World War. In a very basic sense, it involves the use of decoys and deception to distract and destabilize an enemy, though the doctrine of maskirovka has broad applications, stretching to disinformation, propaganda, and politically related tactics. A significant element of the thinking that reflects the new doctrine of warfare in Russia is that wars do not follow the same boundaries and time lines as they did historically.21 This means that they are not officially declared—in the way cyberattacks happen—and that they can rely on many different types of force (e.g., information, humanitarian, and media) and can rely on the subversion of states on a continual basis using mercenaries and special operatives.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

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

Civics was an integral part of the educational system, from nurseries all across the country up to the faculty lounges of the nation’s leading universities. As a result, most citizens had a better understanding of the practices and a deeper commitment to the principles of liberal democracy—making them far less likely to give credence to conspiracy theories based on lies or disinformation. This points to another important measure we can take: Unable to restrict the supply of attacks on the basic principles of liberal democracy through outright censorship, we have all the more reason to lessen the demand for them. While we cannot recreate the threat of communism or fascism, we can remember that civics education is an essential bulwark against authoritarian temptations.

“Wilders Warns Australia of ‘Dangerous’ Islam,” Al Jazeera, February 20, 2013, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2013/02/2013220145950228630.html. 26. Gavin Jones, “Insight: Beppe Grillo—Italian Clown or Political Mastermind?” Reuters, March 7, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-vote-grillo-insight-idUSBRE92608G20130307. 27. The party now relies on funds that come from fake news inspired by Russian disinformation—and so it is hardly surprising that, to give but one example, a recent video from a party-controlled news source claimed that Turkey and the United States are secretly conspiring to stop Russia from fighting ISIS. See Alberto Nardelli and Craig Silverman, “Italy’s Most Popular Political Party Is Leading Europe in Fake News and Kremlin Propaganda,” Buzzfeed, November 29, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardelli/italys-most-popular-political-party-is-leading-europe-in-fak?


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

It was autocratic and expansionary, having gone to war with Georgia in 2008, having rearranged the borders of Europe in 2014 and having sent its military into the Syrian conflict in 2015, blithely disregarding American admonitions not to do any of these things. Russia was also implementing new tactics of disinformation intended to destabilize Europe and the United States. It was actively ignoring the liberal international order, which came easily to Russia, for the Kremlin believed in a very different order—hierarchical, confrontational and subordinate to the power, the vanity and the interests of a few great powers.

Washington was responsible for stirring up chaos in Iraq, Georgia, Libya and Ukraine. At some point, Putin feared, the democratizing arrow of American foreign policy would be pointed at Moscow. When the West imposed sanctions to get the Russian military out of Ukraine, Putin initiated a campaign of disinformation and political interference across the West. In the race with the West, China is the disciplined long-distance runner and Russia the risk-taking sprinter. China and Russia are no longer geopolitical adolescents in a Western world, as they had been pegged in the 1990s. Together, China and Russia constitute a distinct and gathering challenge.


Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Updated Edition) (South End Press Classics Series) by Noam Chomsky

active measures, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, centre right, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, information security, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, public intellectual, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman

It concentrated on the shortcomings of professional journalists, but failed to understand that “the difficulties journalists encounter in covering a war as professionally as possible—and this was especially true of the war in Lebanon and Israel Television—are a direct result of the machinations of other professionals,” namely, those “involved in psychological and propaganda warfare,” organized by the Kremlin. “One participant hinted at this when he stated that the world press often falls victim to well-oiled systems of disinformation,” but this hint was not taken up properly. In fact, the Soviet leadership immediately launched “an extensive worldwide effort of psychological warfare” using “a classical strategy”: “First, to disqualify the Israeli military operation (‘bloody war,’ etc.); second, to provoke a vast reaction of disgust, triggering a peripheral pacifist reaction; and third, to search for ways of disseminating this pacifist reaction to vital Israeli centres, leading to a general paralysis and a closing of the options supposedly opened up by the operation itself.”

“These ‘active measures’ (a code word used by the Soviet leaders) were carried out through the vast network of organizations operated by the international section of the party and the International News Services of the Central Committee of the Communist Classics in Politics: The Fateful Triangle Noam Chomsky Peace for Galilee 500 Party of the Soviet Union,” abetted by an alliance with the powerful and nefarious organization Wafa (the official PLO news agency). “The outburst last summer of a campaign which is not simply one of intimidation or of disinformation, but which has steadily assumed the dimension of an actual broad-scale mass psychological war, gives rise to serious concern,” the director-general explains.257 The phrase “media pogrom” thus understates the scale of the aggression against Israel in the summer of 1982; it was a “psychological war.”* Now we can understand why the American and world press and television gave such an incredibly distorted picture of the war, one so unfair to Israel.

The number of campesinos (mainly Indians) killed from the March 1982 coup to October is estimated at 8000 by the Committee for Justice and Peace, a Guatemalan Christian group, and the Guatemalan Commission for Human Rights; Human Rights in Guatemala: No Neutrals Allowed, Americas Watch Report (New York, 1982). 256. Moshe Yegar, “Abuse of Freedom,” Jerusalem Post, Aug. 20. 1982. 257. Yochanan Manor, “Process of disinformation,” Jerusalem Post. Jan. 4, 1983. 258. Moshe Sharon, “No friend of Israel,” Jerusalem Post, Jan. 7, 1983; Yuval Elizur, Boston Globe, Aug. 6, 1982. Sharon’s article is accompanied by a picture of President Reagan with a rather uncharacteristic ugly leer, presumably showing the true face of America with regard to Israel, which Sharon has now exposed. 259.


pages: 897 words: 210,566

Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire, Brent Beardsley

airport security, colonial rule, disinformation, failed state, global village, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, land reform, risk/return, Ronald Reagan

I replied that unless I could get access to the presidential residence and the crash site, I could do nothing about itinternational inspectors had to be allowed in to do an independent investigation. He and Kambanda agreed and asked when the inspectors could come. I said they were waiting for my call. Lastly, I firmly decried the verbal abuse and disinformation being broadcast about UNAMIR and the Tutsis by RTLM. I wanted to go on air and tell my version of the situation. To my surprise, the minister agreed and said he would set it up for the next day. Shaking hands automatically, I left the small office and walked among the ministers and others on my way to my vehicle.

Colonel Theoneste Bagosora Chef de cabinet of the minister of defence, RGF, known Hutu extremist, currently awaiting trial, International Criminal Tribunal Rwanda Lieutenant Colonel Walter Ballis Belgian Staff Officer, employed as UNAMIR Deputy Chief Operations Officer JeanBosco Barayagwiza One of the heads of the extremist CDR party General Maurice Baril Canadian Military Adviser to the SecretaryGeneral of the UN and head of the Military Division of the DPKO Battalion Ideally, a homogeneous unit of 800 soldiers with a headquarters, an integral service support company and four rifle companies BBTG Broad-Based Transitional Government; was never installed due to political impasse Major Brent Beardsley Canadian Military Assistant to General Dallaire Commandant Mohammed Belgacem Tunisian Company Commander in NMOG, UNAMIR 1 and 2 Glossary 525 R, Jul 93-1 May 94, medically evacuated to Canada, did not return to mission e Bicamumpaka MDR Hutu extremist who was appointed foreign minister interim government and tried to spread disinformation and cover up the de in Europe and New York lamascene Bizimana Rwandan Ambassador to the UN in Sep 93, Member Security Council from Jan 94 tin Bizimana Minister of defence, extremist MRND, Hutu utenant Colonel Augustin Bizimungu Promoted Major General at the inning of the conflict, Chief of Staff RGF, assumed the position in late Apr 94 lacing Marcel Gatsinzi, who had replaced Deogratias Nsabimana, extremist d-liner.

See also Rwandese Patriotic attacks on, 488 of Burundi, 98, 114, 208 dangers of, 394-5 in Kigali, 476 of Rwanda, 47, 154-5, 463, 5 into Tanzania, 336 of Uganda, 153-4 of use by RGF, 464 into Zaire, 469, 471 , resettlement, 67, 74 in Rwanda, 387-93 kag and following, 101 and the French, 437 and Medecins Sans Frontieres, 454 and murder of children, 118 and reports of Belgian soldiers, 183-4 and humanitarian reasons, 229, 299 Rutaremara, Tito, 196, 265-6 125-6,222,240,292,398,410-1 426 Roberge, Lieutenant Colonel Guy (fatherinlaw), 31-2 Roman, Colonel Jean-Pierre, 182, 184-5, 303-4 Ross, Colonel Cameron, 75, 338 Roy, Major General Armand, 42-3 Roya122ieme Regiment (Vandoos), 9, 33 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Canada), 22 Royal Military College (RMC), Kingston, Ontario, 20-3 RTLM (hardline radio station), 142, 211 as anti-Belgium, 105-6, 240-1, 254 and attacks on Dallaire, 379-81, 421-2 Dallaire's interview, 349 disinformation, 330, 420 promoting genocide, 375 violent tone of, 123, 133, 261, 272, 277 Rudasingwa, Theogene, 330 Ruggiu, George, 349 Ruhengeri, Rwanda, 68, 200, 203, 271, 288 Ruheru refugee camp, 212 Ruhigira, Enoch, 77, 136-7, 148-9, 211-12 rules of engagement (ROE) in FLQ crisis, 24-5 rules of engagement (ROE) in Rwanda approval from UN, 99 changed own, 290 clarification of, 173 proposal for, 72 restriction of, 233, 264 and retaliatory fire, 406 R and unilateral force in self-defence, 144 Rusatira, Colonel Leonidas, 121, 238, 240, 38 469 Russia, 76 Rusumo, Rwanda, 336 RV85, 36 Rwabalinda, Lieutenant Colonel Ephrem, Restaurant P666 Mignon, 162 Richard, Captain Andre, 36 Rivero, Isel, 46, 81 Riza, Igbal.


pages: 153 words: 45,871

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, edge city, Future Shock, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Joi Ito, means of production, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, proxy bid, restrictive zoning, Snow Crash, space junk, technological determinism, telepresence, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog

Regardless of the number and power of the tools used to extract patterns from information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or another. A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what’s going on more quickly, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree about it any more readily. Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia.


pages: 509 words: 137,315

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, disinformation, industrial robot, Malacca Straits, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, South China Sea, VTOL, wage slave

Arbright stared at him for a moment. “You’re not really black, are you? Either that, or that’s not really your baby, fella.” “Huh?” David said. “Actually, uh, there’s this, uh, suntan lotion.…” Arbright cut the air with her hand. “It’s okay, I’ve been to Africa, and they tell me I look French. But Mali—that’s just disinformation. They’ve got no money and no motive, and it’s an old rumor.…” The limo came to a stop and interrupted her. “Oxford Towers, Miss Arbright.” “That’s our stop,” Emily said, putting her drink aside. “We’ll get back to you, Dianne.” Arbright sagged back into the cushions. “Look. I want those Grenada tapes.”

It would be so easy for them, not like Singapore. All he would have to do was show up and work hard and smile. She refused to read the prepared statement. The Inspector of Prisons looked at her with distaste. “You really think this defiance is accomplishing something, don’t you?” “This statement is disinformation. It’s black propaganda, a provocation, meant to get people killed. I won’t help you kill people.” “Too bad. I’d hoped you could send your loved ones a New Year’s greeting.” “I’ve written my own statement,” Laura offered. “It doesn’t say anything about you, or Mali, or the F.A.C.T., or your bombs.


pages: 556 words: 141,069

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

“No one on the engineering”: Bechtel partner Dennis Connell, quoted in ibid. “fiendishly hardworking” . . . “Their big reward” . . . “The old boy is asking”: Ibid. “Seemingly innocent disclosures”: Adrian Zaccaria, quoted in ibid. “twin themes”: Russ Hoyle, Going to War: How Misinformation, Disinformation, and Arrogance Led America into Iraq (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008), 26. “The same men”: Vallette, Kretzmann, and Wysham, Crude Vision, 2. “I would be surprised” . . . “Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein”: Shultz, quoted in Hoyle, Going to War, 83. “committed to moving”: Bob Herbert, “Ask Bechtel What War Is Good For: A License to Make Money,” International Herald Tribune, April 22, 2003.

New York: Random House, 1991. Hiltzik, Michael. Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century. New York: Free Press, 2010. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Hoyle, Russ. Going to War: How Misinformation, Disinformation, and Arrogance Led America into Iraq. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008. Ingram, Robert L. The Bechtel Story: Seventy Years of Accomplishment in Engineering and Construction. San Francisco: Ingram, 1968. (Official Company History.) _____. A Builder and His Family, 1898–1948: Being the Historical Account of the Contracting, Engineering & Construction Career of W.


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

“A glass of water was poured before the microphone in Yonkers; it sounded like a glass of water being poured and not, as in the ‘sound effects’ on ordinary radio, like a waterfall.” By such enthusiastic efforts Armstrong managed to convince a few like-minded people to found FM stations, and by 1941, yielding to the technological reality, the FCC allocated spectrum between 50 and 60 MHz.9 But, as mentioned, the disinformation campaign’s trump card was television, and the Radio Trust’s insistence that it, not FM, was the future. Many standard histories in fact ascribe the slow development of FM to the rise of television. Of course, there is no denying that television was the greater leap. But insofar as television never has supplanted radio, the Radio Trust was presenting a false choice.

And so, as the 1930s began, Sarnoff and his allies were simultaneously trying to discredit the Farnsworth television and to reproduce it—such was the perverse genius of the Sarnoff plan. The talk campaign was similar to the one he’d lodged against FM and Edwin Armstrong: Farnsworth’s invention, while of some scientific interest, did not work, and so his patents were invalid. The key audience for this disinformation was, of course, the investment community, and in 1935 RCA intensified the effort to keep them away from Farnsworth by means of what we now call a “vaporware” strategy. In 1935, Sarnoff announced that the company was commiting millions to build its own television, with its mighty industrial laboratories and its own resident genius, Zworykin.


pages: 349 words: 134,041

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Brownian motion, business logic, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, disinformation, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass affluent, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Salesforce, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, technology bubble, the medium is the message, the new new thing, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, volatility smile, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Secret intelligence Other than sheer luck, there are really only two ways to make money – inside information or overwhelming force. It is a truism that trading thrives on information – ‘information’, ‘disinformation’, ‘misinformation’, ‘inside information’. It has Trading thrives on always been that way. information – Financial news isn’t like normal news. With ‘information’, normal news, we are passive observers of the great, the good, the evil and Paris Hilton. Financial news ‘disinformation’, is about finding out information that affects busi‘misinformation’, ness: it shapes what traders buy and sell, the price ‘inside information’. they are willing to pay.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Imagine how this might work ten years from now, when digital, battery-operated minicams are as ubiquitous as telephones, and people can feed digitized images as well as words to the Net. 26-04-2012 21:46 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 27 de 36 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/9.html Information and disinformation about breaking events are pretty raw on the Net. That's the point. You don't know what to think of any particular bit of information, how to gauge its credibility, and nobody tells you what to think about it, other than what you know from previous encounters, about the reliability of the source.

The public sphere is also the focus of the hopes of online activists, who see CMC as a way of revitalizing the open and widespread discussions among citizens that feed the roots of democratic societies. The second school of criticism focuses on the fact that high-bandwidth interactive networks could be used in conjunction with other technologies as a means of surveillance, control, and disinformation as well as a conduit for useful information. This direct assault on personal liberty is compounded by a more diffuse erosion of old social values due to the capabilities of new technologies; the most problematic example is the way traditional notions of privacy are challenged on several fronts by the ease of collecting and disseminating detailed information about individuals via cyberspace technologies.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

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

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

He appeared on an RT segment to celebrate the network’s milestone of one billion YouTube views, praising RT for being “authentic” and not pushing “agendas or propaganda.” U.S. politicians disagreed. After Trump’s election, federal officials forced RT to register as a “foreign agent.” Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, called YouTube RT’s “go-to platform” and a “target-rich environment for any disinformation campaign.” YouTube, feeling the heat, removed RT from its premium slate and added labels for all state-backed media outlets. Yet just as pressure on YouTube mounted, Facebook tripped again. Four days after Wojcicki was grilled in Texas over conspiracies, the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.

“People might think we have this great AI that can drive cars and everything,” said Goodrow, the veteran YouTube engineering leader. “But I don’t think right now we could even simply identify what specific claims are being made within a video.” Even if it could, few outside the company agreed on the precise definitions of misinformation or disinformation, so debates on the matter typically circled into political stalemates. And, by and large, YouTube stayed out of the fray. Outrage in the press and halls of power usually focused on the social networks, not the video site. In 2021 President Joe Biden chastised tech platforms for promoting vaccine hesitancy, specifically accusing Facebook of “killing” people with lies.


pages: 165 words: 50,798

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

To manage them, we must address inputs, outputs, feedback loops, metrics, governance, and culture. Figure 1-4. Websites are part of organizational ecosystems. But that’s not enough. We should set our sights higher. Life is too short to focus solely on getting better at business. Society as a whole suffers from bad decisions and anxiety caused by misinformation, disinformation, filter failure, and information illiteracy. We can’t expect technology to save the day. While the Internet has delivered great change to consumers and industries, it hasn’t made as much progress in education, healthcare, and government. And we’ve begun to learn the cost of free. In recent years, we’ve begun to lose newspapers, bookstores, libraries, and privacy.


pages: 172 words: 48,747

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

—Originally published August 5, 2013 Iraq and the Reinvention of Reality The worst thing about the Iraq war was not that people got away with lying. It was that they did not—and it did not matter. The tenth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq was a week of media culpa. Every day a new journalist or pundit came forward to atone for supporting a war predicated on disinformation. “I was excitable and over-reacted,” wrote blogger Andrew Sullivan, explaining why he once argued that no “serious person” could doubt Saddam Hussein’s intent to use WMDs with his co-conspirator al-Qaeda. “I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense,” wrote journalist David Ignatius, noting that, in retrospect, it did not.


Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

British Empire, Charles Babbage, disinformation, financial independence, global village, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, paper trading, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, technoutopianism, undersea cable

In 1894, Sir John Pender, chairman of the company that had previously been the Gutta Percha Company and is known today as Cable & Wireless, suggested that telegraphy had "prevented diplomatic ruptures and consequent war, and been instrumental in promoting peace and happiness. . . . no time was allowed for the growth of bad feeling or the nursing of a grievance. The cable nipped the evil of misunderstanding leading to war in the bud." Well, sort of. But sometimes misunderstanding was deliberate. In 1898, the Fashoda Incident, a standoff between the British and French armies in Sudan, illustrated the new power of information—and disinformation. French forces led by Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand were crossing Africa with the intention of laying claim to land from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, while a rival British expedition led by Lord Kitchener was hoping to establish control over the whole of East Africa, from Cairo to the southern Cape.


pages: 191 words: 51,242

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

Exposure to pesticides strongly increases the risk of contracting cancers of the prostate and skin as well as neurodegenerative illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease.14 While the effects of toxic substances on health are now better understood, thanks to advances in medical research, and more effectively counteracted, thanks to new legislation and court rulings, further progress has been hindered by manufacturers that are able to invest massively in large-scale disinformation campaigns. The agrochemical giant Monsanto, however, has already been obliged to pay substantial fines in both France and the United States for deceptive advertising; in addition, thousands of lawsuits—many of which are still pending—have been brought against the company for past and present malfeasance.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Cleverly programmed algorithms turbocharge that process on the internet and social media.11 This means that often we have no idea what other people deeply value or think. Get offline and get to know your neighbors, people in the grocery line, or fellow commuters. Challenge your own assumptions, and be mindful of misinformation and disinformation. Share your hopes and fears in person, listen to others, and be honest and respectful. * * * — In 1990, after spending twenty-seven years in prison, Nelson Mandela was informed by President F. W. De Klerk that he would be freed in less than twenty-four hours. The following day Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison and into history.


pages: 901 words: 234,905

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The view that visual clichés shape beliefs is both too pessimistic, in that it supposes that people are helplessly imprisoned by received stereotypes, and too optimistic, in that it supposes that if you could change the images you could change the beliefs.47 Recognizing that we are equipped with sophisticated faculties that keep us in touch with reality does not entail ignoring the ways in which our faculties can be turned against us. People lie, sometimes baldly, sometimes through insinuation and presupposition (as in the question “When did you stop beating your wife?”). People disseminate disinformation about ethnic groups, not just pejorative stereotypes but tales of exploitation and perfidy that serve to stoke moralistic outrage against them. People try to manipulate social realities like status (which exist in the mind of the beholder) to make themselves look good or to sell products. But we can best protect ourselves against such manipulation by pinpointing the vulnerabilities of our faculties of categorization, language, and imagery, not by denying their complexity.

When demand for a commodity is high, suppliers will materialize, and if they cannot protect their property rights by calling the police, they will do so with a violent culture of honor. (This is distinct from the moral argument that our current drug policies incarcerate multitudes of nonviolent people.) School-children are currently fed the disinformation that Native Americans and other peoples in pre-state societies were inherently peaceable, leaving them uncomprehending, indeed contemptuous, of one of our species’ greatest inventions, democratic government and the rule of law. Where Hobbes fell short was in dealing with the problem of policing the police.

Therefore, it might seem, the theories that are most friendly to women are the Blank Slate—if nothing is innate, differences between the sexes cannot be innate—and the Noble Savage—if we harbor no ignoble urges, sexual exploitation can be eliminated by changing our institutions. The belief that feminism requires a blank slate and a noble savage has become a powerful impetus for spreading disinformation. A 1994 headline in the New York Times science section, for example, proclaimed, “Sexes Equal on South Sea Isle.”3 It was based on the work of the anthropologist Maria Lepowsky, who (perhaps channeling the ghost of Margaret Mead) said that gender relations on the island of Vanatinai prove that “the subjugation of women by men is not a human universal, and it is not inevitable.”


pages: 193 words: 55,721

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden

disinformation, Ronald Reagan

He carried dozens of newspaper ads for real estate with his notebooks, and was always buying and selling hideouts. That way, he was always home, even though he had no home. He moved with his collection of wireless phones. It didn't trouble him to know that the authorities listened whenever he spoke on the phone. It had been that way for years. He used the knowledge to feed disinformation, to keep his pursuers running in every direction but the right one. The game wasn't to avoid being overheard, which was impossible, but to avoid being targeted. It was evident from Escobar's phone conversations and letters he had written over the previous months how infuriated he was with his reduced circumstances, but clearly he also felt some pride.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

In addition, Western intelligence authorities claim that Russian intelligence operatives have engaged in trying to promote conflict in the US and other countries by helping whistle-blowers like WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden leak stolen or classified information and by bombarding carefully targeted audiences with Internet memes and ads. Let us stipulate that this is all true. It was also true in the 1950s that there really were a small number of communists in the US, including a few high-ranking government officials, who spied for the Soviet Union, as well as many more Soviet sympathizers. There were also genuine Soviet disinformation campaigns in the Cold War West. But only the lunatic fringe of the anticommunist right during the Cold War drew the conclusion that the president was a Soviet agent or that mainstream politicians were secret communists. In contrast, influential members of today’s American establishment, not only marginal conspiracy theorists, in order to absolve Hillary Clinton of blame for losing the 2016 election, have promoted the claim that the forty-fifth US president was installed by a foreign government and does its bidding.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

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

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

These fantasies are nourished by the politically homogeneous lives most of us live. Because of them, one side or the other (and sometimes, as in 2020, both) is perpetually shocked by reality. Elections never deliver the promised realignment—therefore, they have to be wrong and illegitimately won, by fraudulent ballots, foreign subversion, corporate dollars, viral disinformation, or by a vast conspiracy of politicians, officials, voting machine makers, judges, and journalists across the land. Anything but the will of the people! For the past twenty years, progressives have been waiting for a rising tide of younger, better-educated, more diverse voters to swamp white conservative America and lift them to victory.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

One check on this confederacy of optimists are professional shorts — people who look for companies with inflated reputations and stock prices, dig out the info, short the stock, and then leak the bad news to reporters eager for a hot tip. If the news takes, then the stock will suffer damage. Sometimes it doesn't matter whether the bad news is true; if the short can take a position and undertake a successful disinformation campaign, he or she can profitably cover the short. 35. For the "real" sector, however, borders still matter, and the "global assembly line" is a bit of an exaggeration. 36. The correlation coefficient is a measure of how tightly two sets of numbers are related to each other, ranging from -1 (a perfect mirror image) through 0 (no relation at all) to PLAYERS +1 (perfect lockstep).

It also means measuring performance over years, even decades, rather than months and quarters — impossible for professional portfolio managers, who are under constant short-term review, and difficult even for amateurs, who might be embarrassed to describe their strange preferences at cocktail parties. disinformation, noise, fads, and bubbles Efficient market theory depends on the universal, costless dissemination of accurate information about economic and corporate prospects. The uncritical stance of most Wall Street analysts and much of the financial press reviewed in Chapter 2 makes this a bit hard to take just on the grounds of MARKET MODELS daily evidence.


pages: 473 words: 154,182

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hindcast, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Isaac Newton, means of production, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, post-Panamax, profit motive, Skype, standardized shipping container, statistical model, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman

By comparing Moore to Barnum, I don’t mean to suggest that he’s a charlatan; I mean to suggest only that he plays his role exceedingly well. Now, in the information age, which is readily transforming into the disinformation age, if you wish to combat, as Moore does, the armies of corporate publicists waging endless ad campaigns, including green-washing campaigns of the sort devised by Keep America Beautiful, then you have to be media savvy, and like a guerrilla warrior on the information battlefield you have to exploit your adversaries’ weaknesses. The problem is that in the universal propaganda arms race that has manifested from the disinformation age, no one trusts anyone, and doubtful citizens are free to luxuriate in distractions, while overconfident citizens are allowed to pick and choose whichever factoids and sound bites confirm their self-serving predispositions.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

The assault on authority can liberate common women and men and invite them into deliberation, policy making (participatory budgeting), and a greater sense of ownership over government. Or it can unleash prejudice and the shameless promotion of straight-out lies. Epistemological anarchy. In other words, as Lee Siegel has argued, democratizing information can mean empowering disinformation.45 The web is a powerful tool, but it is not hard to believe with Siegel that “with the rise of participatory culture, pop culture has entirely merged into commercial culture.” And that “enchantment of the imagination has given way to gratification of the ego . . . welcome to the Youniverse,” Siegel’s version of a narcissistic Internet world.46 Critics such as Siegel are vindicated not only by the undeniable narcissism and commercialism of so much of what the new technology has yielded but by the fact that, for all the promise and all the promising, there is as yet no cyber commons, no digital public square, Google’s experiment in Hangouts notwithstanding.

See also Networks Interdependence Movement, 398n31 Intermountain Acoustic Music Association (IAMA), 290 International Association of Public Transport (UITP), 118–119 International City/County Management Association (ICMA), 118–119 International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), 6, 118–119, 131–135, 159, 165, 318–319 International Delphic Council, 293 International Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ISECO), 292 International Federation of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies (IFACCA), 289–290, 293 International financial institutions (IFIs), 311, 343–344 International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA), 118–119, 287, 288–289, 293 International Urban Development Association (INTA), 118–119 Internet: disinformation on, 265; and dissidence, 259; megacompanies, 254–256; ownership and control, 252–253; potential vs. reality, 248–249, 250–251; sharing vs. loss of privacy, 258; Web 2.0, 250, 387n3 Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), 312–313 Interpol, 125–127, 159, 373n17 Invisible capital, 228–230 Ipatinga, Brazil, participatory budgeting, 308 IPU (Inter-Parliamentary Union), 312–313 ISECO (International Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization), 292 ISPA (International Society for the Performing Arts), 118–119, 287, 288–289, 293 Israel, Kolleck of, 90–91, 268–270 Italy: mayors, 87; rural villages, 37–38, 69 Jacobs, Jane, 62, 65, 213, 219 Jefferson, Thomas, 34 Jenin.


pages: 539 words: 151,425

Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East by James Barr

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, false flag, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

‘Probabilities of sort of “coup de palais” in near future growing,’ he added, a prediction that showed either uncanny foresight or, more likely, inside knowledge.5 According to the CIA officer Miles Copeland, Nasser would claim later that Kim Roosevelt gave both Nabulsi and the head of the army, Ali Abu Nuwar, disinformation that convinced them that they could successfully launch a coup against the king. What is certain is that a month-long crisis began on 3 April when Nabulsi announced, apparently without forewarning Hussein, that Jordan would open diplomatic relations with Moscow. Four days later he presented the king with a list of court officials he wanted removed.

Macmillan wrote in his diary that the military operation had been ‘brilliantly conducted’, but from the diplomatic and political standpoint, the handling of the episode left much to be desired. Not only had the Americans proved hostile, so too had the British press. Its journalists were furious that they had been denied access to the frontline in Oman, and had spent the campaign cooped up in Bahrain where they were spoon-fed disinformation by the British political resident.8 In a series of editorials, The Times blasted the British government’s handling of the uprising, arguing that its unwarranted faith in the effectiveness of air power had led to a situation in which it was then obliged to put troops on the ground, a deployment that Nasser’s Voice of the Arabs mercilessly exploited.


pages: 469 words: 149,526

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine by Christopher Miller

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Bellingcat, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, false flag, friendly fire, game design, global pandemic, military-industrial complex, Ponzi scheme, private military company, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, special economic zone, stakhanovite, wikimedia commons

Meanwhile Yanukovych, being from Donetsk and still controlling most of the city through his vast “family” network of tycoons, local politicians, and goons, used his resources to quash the demonstrations there and keep them from taking hold like they had in Kyiv. Those in the east were predominantly Russian speakers and lived close to the border with Russia. Many of them regularly tuned into Russian television, which at best presented a distorted view of events and the people partaking in them, and at worst pushed blatant disinformation to discredit the uprising. It was true that not all Ukrainians supported Euromaidan and the revolution emerging from it. Three prominent Ukrainian pollsters found that in December 2013 between 45 per cent and 50 per cent of Ukrainians supported Euromaidan, while 42 per cent to 50 per cent opposed it.

But as Zelensky continued to play down the Russian threat, the Ukrainian capital and its more than three million residents kept humming along, not totally ignoring the Russian forces massing around them but choosing, it seemed, to believe they weren’t about to do the seemingly unthinkable. “In the morning people go to work. In the afternoon they are preparing for war. And at night people are going clubbing,” Liubov Tsybulska told me. She is the owner of two of the city’s hippest cafes who leads a double life as a Russian disinformation specialist and advisor to the government. As we sipped coffee inside Kometa, young Ukrainians in Carhartt beanies and platform shoes chomped on New York-style pizza and elaborate sushi rolls, as Unknown Mortal Orchestra blared from the sound system. We could have been in Portland, Brooklyn, London, or Berlin.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

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

What it conveys is cold feet about democracy. Trump’s ascendancy brought out the liberal technocrat in many people. ‘I love America. It’s Americans I hate,’ wrote Tim Kreider, an essayist and cartoonist, a few weeks after Trump won.42 ‘[They’re] pathetically dumb and gullible, uncritical consumers of any disinformation that confirms their biases, easy dupes for any demagogue who promises to bring back the factories and keep the brown people down . . . But I don’t believe all Trump voters are ignorant, or bigoted; most of them are just evil – evil being defined not as anything so glamorous as beheading journalists or gunning down grade schoolers, but simply as not much caring about other people’s suffering.’


pages: 215 words: 60,489

1947: Where Now Begins by Elisabeth Åsbrink

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, disinformation, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, Mount Scopus, trade route

In another telegram to the Secretary-General of the Arab League, he states that the Muslim Brotherhood sees no way to save Palestine other than by violence. He offers the Arab League 10,000 armed men ready for combat. The Brotherhood then sets up a number of recruiting offices for the defense of Palestine, and within two days over 2,000 men volunteer in Cairo alone. Moscow The Soviet Union is a secret, even to itself. The bureaucracy spreads disinformation among the powerful at various levels of the hierarchy, and few know exactly what the others are up to. The outsiders who call themselves “the West” know even less. They draw the erroneous conclusion that the USSR is still a long way off having an atom bomb of its own. Deep inside the country, the harshest times are finally giving way to change.


pages: 183 words: 59,209

Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War by Matti Friedman

Ayatollah Khomeini, disinformation, friendly fire, Mount Scopus, Yom Kippur War

No one could move anyway until the special operation, whatever it was, had taken place. A week went by, and then another. Finally we were informed that the operation had been called off. Then someone else said this wasn’t true and actually it had happened, but we hadn’t noticed, and we weren’t supposed to know because it was secret. It was all disinformation, apparently, but the army needn’t have bothered, because we didn’t care. We just wanted to go home. 39 WE ARRIVED BACK in a country no longer sure if the soldiers in Lebanon were heroes or victims. By this time you couldn’t avoid the stickers saying GET OUT OF LEBANON IN PEACE. Support for an immediate pullout, recently a fringe opinion, was now common.


Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns by Michael W. Covel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, disinformation, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, full employment, global macro, Jim Simons, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Sharpe ratio, systematic trading, the scientific method, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, Y2K, zero-sum game

How could one tell when a pool had started buying? Or had begun selling? These questions had no real fundamental answer, or at least none that was accessible to the average small trader in these markets. To be sure, there were newspapers, but how was one to know the truth of what was being reported? Even if there was no outright disinformation, surely the big Origins 225 speculators did not telegraph their intents so easily. They rather tried to hide their buying and selling. So, for the small trader, the question was a technical one, to be answered by observing who was doing the buying and selling— to whatever extent that was possible—or by watching the price action of the stock itself, and the volume.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

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

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

By Kevin Roose Futureproof Young Money The Unlikely Disciple About the Author Kevin Roose is a technology columnist for The New York Times. He is the host of the Rabbit Hole podcast and a regular guest on The Daily. He writes and speaks regularly about topics including automation and AI, social media, disinformation and cybersecurity, and digital wellness. Previously, he was a writer at New York magazine and the co–executive producer of Real Future, a TV documentary series about technology. He is the New York Times bestselling author of two previous books, Young Money and The Unlikely Disciple. He lives in Oakland, California.


pages: 333 words: 64,581

Clean Agile: Back to Basics by Robert C. Martin

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Boeing 737 MAX, c2.com, cognitive load, continuous integration, DevOps, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Frederick Winslow Taylor, index card, iterative process, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, remote working, revision control, scientific management, Turing machine

Achieving this balance of design and feature complexity is the goal of Simple Design. Using this practice, programmers continuously refactor the design of the system to keep it in balance with the requirements and, therefore, keep productivity maximized. Pair Programming The practice of Pair Programming has enjoyed a substantial amount of controversy and disinformation over the years. Many folks react negatively to the idea that two (or more) people can work productively together on the same problem. First of all, pairing is optional. No one should be forced to pair. Secondly, pairing is intermittent. There are many good reasons to code alone from time to time.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

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

Finally, as Joe Biden began staffing up with rather hawkish security advisors, Sam showed up on one of my messaging apps, scolding me for having stood up for the bloodthirsty establishment in my Tweets and articles. The coming bloodshed was on me. The children of red state people I don’t care about would now get maimed in unnecessary wars. I should “own that.” I felt as if consensus reality had fractured, and sucked my old friend into the abyss. Social media polarization and disinformation is a big part of it. But so is the totalizing quality of The Mindset as it determines the very landscape of our culture, economy, and society—the media environment in which we try to do our reasoning and basic cognition. This was the very takeover of humans by machines that Bannon claims to be fighting against.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

The donations paid off, from Scaife’s viewpoint, when they helped launch the careers of the conservative social critic Murray and the supply-side economics guru George Gilder, whose arguments against welfare programs and taxes had huge impacts on ordinary Americans. Fisher’s early collaborator in founding the Manhattan Institute was William Casey, the Wall Street financier and future director of the CIA. The early think tank was not a spy operation, but it was funded by wealthy men who had no objections to using pretexts and disinformation in the service of what they regarded as a noble cause. In fact, Scaife during this period was simultaneously funding a CIA front group. In his memoir, he acknowledges that in the early 1970s he owned a London-based news organization called Forum World Features that was in reality a CIA-run propaganda operation.

It used its youth-oriented front group, Generation Opportunity, to post online advertisements featuring a tasteless cartoon version of Uncle Sam jumping between the legs of a young woman undergoing a gynecological exam to spread fear about the government’s interference in private health-care matters. (The Kochs’ front group seemed to have no such qualms about government intrusion into reproductive health issues.) The organization also sponsored student-oriented protests at which mock Obamacare insurance cards were burned like draft cards during the Vietnam War. The disinformation campaign spread fear and confusion. News reports reflected a widespread belief, particularly in desperately poor areas, that the government was setting up “death panels.” In the summer and fall of 2013, as Meadows was gathering co-sponsors for his open letter, Americans for Prosperity spent an additional $5.5 million on anti-Obamacare television ads.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

Like Christians certain both that evolution is a phony theory and that God created people a few thousand years ago, conspiracists are simultaneously credulous (about impossible plots) and incredulous (about the confusing, dull gray truth). Conspiracists often deride arguments against their theories as disinformation cooked up by the conspirators—the way some Christians consider evolutionary explanations to be the work of the devil. Researchers and experimenters have repeatedly demonstrated this pinball effect, in which fantastical beliefs lead to other, disparate fantastical beliefs. Once people decide a particular theory is true, they’re apt to be open to another and another and another.

., became the movement’s star, repeating his line that U.S. government scientists were “involved in a massive fraud.” His big article on the subject was eventually retracted by both magazines that published it. Part of the corrupt cover-up! Among children born since thimerosal was removed from vaccines, autism-spectrum diagnoses continued rising. Lies, disinformation and lies! Still more studies appeared concluding vaccines are safe. If not the mercury, then some other toxin! If not autism, then asthma or juvenile diabetes! Their beliefs, like religious faith, are unfalsifiable by facts. The media did their part too. In 2002 The New York Times Magazine ran a long article called “The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory.”


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

A few nights later, ABC News reported that the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, “had met at least once with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.” The report kicked off a firestorm of related news articles, including some that confirmed the story of the Iraq link, some that discredited the story, and some that blamed the CIA for engaging in a disinformation campaign. Congress asked DARPA director Anthony Tether to brief the House Armed Services Committee on efforts currently being undertaken by DARPA with regard to its Biological Warfare Defense Program. Tony Tether had been DARPA director for only three months when the airplanes hit the buildings, but he had decades of experience in the Department of Defense and the CIA.

Apple, “A Nation Challenged: News Analysis; City of Power, City of Fears,” New York Times, October 17, 2001. 16 DARPA was asked: Interview with Michael Goldblatt, April 2014. 17 “a little bit of pride”: Ibid. 18 “There had been”: Quotes are from Cheney, 341. 19 “a virtually zero rate”: Vin LoPresti, “Guarding the Air We Breathe,” Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Quarterly (Spring 2003), 5, Science and Technology Review, October, 2003; Arkin, 288n. 20 “Go call Hadley”: Rice, 101. 21 In New York City: Cheney, 340–42. 22 “Feet down”: Rice, 101. 23 additive called bentonite: ABC News, World News Tonight, October 26, 2001. 24 “Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague”: ABC News, This Week, October 28, 2001. 25 disinformation campaign: William Safire, “Mr. Atta Goes to Prague,” New York Times, May 9, 2002. 26 indication of his significance: Anthony Tether, biography, AllGov.com. 27 five stages: Tether, Statement to Congress, March 19, 2003. 28 nearly three times: FY 2003 budget estimates, determined in February 2002. 29 “Kenneth Alibek”: “George Mason University Unveils Center for Biodefense: Scientists Kenneth Alibek, Charles Bailey to Direct,” press release, George Mason University, February 14, 2002. 30 “prototype biodefense products”: PRNewswire, Analex Corporation, May 1, 2002. 31 $60: “National Security Notes,” March 31, 2006, GlobalSecurity.org. 32 Al Qaeda spent: 9/11 Commission Report, 169.


After the Cataclysm by Noam Chomsky

8-hour work day, anti-communist, British Empire, death from overwork, disinformation, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, land reform, mass immigration, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

This fact alone might have suggested that this journal is hardly a trustworthy source, had the question been of any concern. 126. See chapter 2 of this volume, p. 29-30, for one of many examples. It is difficult to imagine that the CIA, with its long history of deception in Indochina, has suddenly ceased its disinformation campaigns. Ed Bradley of CBS news, asked on the MacNeil/Lehrer Report to comment on the “allegation that there is a disinformation network at work spreading these allegations” of Cambodian atrocities, responded: “I don’t have any doubts that there is some element of truth in it...,” a plausible surmise. The alleged “interview” is not found in the regular FBIS translations though it does appear in a special “For Official Use Only” supplement to the Daily Report for Asia and Pacific.


pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

In opposition to the theories ofthe ‘‘weakest link,’’ which not only were the heart ofthe tactics ofthe Third International but also were largely adopted by the anti-imperialist tradition as a whole, the Italian operaismo movement ofthe 1960s and 1970s proposed a theory ofthe ‘‘strongest link.’’ For the fundamental theoretical thesis, see Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), esp. pp. 89–95. 20. One can find ample and continuous documentation ofthese techniques of disinformation and silencing in publications ranging from Le Monde Diplomatique to Z Magazine and the Covert Action Bulletin. Noam Chomsky has tirelessly worked to unveil and counter such disinformation in his numerous books and lectures. See, for example, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988). The GulfWar presented an excellent example ofthe imperial management ofcommunication.


pages: 533

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

David Held, Models of Democracy (Third Edition) (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 237–42; Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 10–14. 3. See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). 4. See e.g. Robert Faris et al.,‘Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election’, Berkman Klein Center Research Paper <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers. cfm?abstract_id=3019414> (accessed 8 December 2017). 5. See Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the age of Social Media (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Alex Krasodomski-Jones, ‘Talking To Ourselves?’

‘Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube Announce Formation of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’. 26 Jun. 2017 <https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/06/ global-internet-forum-to-counter-terrorism/> (accessed 1 Dec. 2017). Fairfield, Joshua A. T. Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Faris, Robert, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler. ‘Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election’. Berkman Klein Center Research Paper <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_ id=3019414> (accessed 8 Dec. 2017). Farrand, Benjamin, and Helena Carrapico. ‘Networked Governance and the Regulation of Expression on the Internet:The Blurring of the Role of Public and Private Actors as Content Regulators’.


pages: 423 words: 126,375

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor, Donald Kagan, Frederick Kagan

Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, HESCO bastion, indoor plumbing, land reform, no-fly zone, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, zero-sum game

The Iraqi people, conditioned by thirty-five years of Ba’athist propaganda, know canned news when they see it. We caught the mood when our interpreters overheard one group of young men discussing the media. They were frustrated that imn news lacked specifics and danced around controversial topics. The broadcasters lacked personality and presented news in a stale, tired format. This allowed insurgent disinformation to cloud the coalition message. In the end, the land of Madison Avenue and Hollywood was trumped by the Arab media, leading one expert to exclaim, “If Ambassador Paul Bremer wants his views heard by the Iraqi people, he should buy time on Al Jazeera.”⁶ The lack of credible TV to compete with Arab satellite channels gave the insurgents a huge advantage in the information war, and therefore in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

Although located just outside the exclusionary zone, the mosque’s location approximately eight hundred feet south of the Husayn Shrine made any military maneuver in the area an extremely sensitive operation. Before the war the facility had been used to wash bodies before burial, but the previous fall Sadr’s forces had occupied the area and designated the facility a mosque in order to seek protected status against coalition searches. Sadr’s Karbala 315 disinformation campaign succeeded in making the new designation stick, and the coalition therefore needed the acquiescence of Iraqi authorities to search the premises. After consultations with the Iraqi governor of Karbala, who clearly understood the machinations of Sadr’s propaganda machine regarding the Mukhayem “Mosque,” Brigadier General Gruszka received Iraqi consent to conduct operations to seize the facility and eject Sadr’s militia from it.


pages: 506 words: 167,034

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, feminist movement, financial independence, Gene Kranz, invisible hand, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Potemkin village, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, space junk, space pen, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, your tax dollars at work

But the liftoff date—originally scheduled for spring 1986—was slipping to the right. The new Vandenberg launchpad and launch control center had to be finished and checked out. The State Department had to complete its negotiations to secure shuttle abort landing rights on Easter Island’s runway, a task being made more difficult by a Soviet Union disinformation campaign that shuttle operations would destroy the island’s stone figures. The Soviets understood that most of the payloads carried out of Vandenberg would be spying on them and were doing their best to lay down obstacles. STS-62A’s slippage provided time for me to pull other duties, including several missions as a CAPCOM.

He lifted the flowers to his mouth like a microphone and began to speak loudly into their blooms: “Mike, wasn’t that briefing about our new F-99 Mach 7 fighter really interesting?” Then he handed the vase to me. I joined in the fun. “Yeah, and to think Mach 7 is itssingle -engine speed.” The others at the table picked up on our disinformation campaign and the vase of flowers went from hand to hand while the rest of our group made even more outrageous claims about secret weapon systems we had recently seen or flown. Meanwhile, the humorless commie diners stared at us as if we were mad. Since we were talking into daffodil blooms, I could understand their bewilderment.


pages: 519 words: 160,846

One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution by Nancy Stout

back-to-the-land, disinformation, land reform, Mason jar, union organizing, urban planning

Rumors were everywhere, in open talk of invasion; insiders announced that they knew the exact date for Fidel’s arrival; that hundreds or even thousands of men were coming with him; that cargos of weapons had already arrived; that millionaire former president Prio, exiled in Florida, was funding Fidel and that tanks and planes had been provided. Such gossip was augmented by the military, which issued its own disinformation, fueling the fire to inspire the government forces to greater vigilance. The higher-ups knew from their informers in Mexico that something was in the offing. Even then, Duque de Heredia remembers, “We would see Frank in the red automobile, bought with movement funds, carrying out his grand activity, along with Pepito Tey and other well-known revolutionaries.

The M26 leadership seized on the idea that Fidel must become visible, alive and well, to the international press. Faustino Pérez had been sent to Havana to handle just this sort of thing. He sought contact with Ruby Hart Phillips, a stringer for the New York Times, offering an exclusive on Fidel’s story. In the days following the landing, Phillips and her editor had fallen for the army’s disinformation campaign, and the Times had printed Fidel’s obituary on its front page. Fidel was alive, and the Times should acknowledge the fact. MEANWHILE, EUTIMIO HAD STARTED to travel full-time with the guerrillas, as their mountain guide. But on January 28, he separated from them. He apologized to Fidel, leaving him and his fighters on their own only because his mother was ill, and pledging to return no later than the end of the week.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

You only need to log on to Facebook or Twitter these days to see that our hatred for ourselves—our distrust of each other—is leading us to doubt proud historical traditions, to question bedrocks of our democracy and long-standing principles about America’s role in creating a better world. The very online tools that a decade ago we hoped would usher in a new era of openness and participatory democracy have instead been turned into tools of hate that spread disinformation and stoke anger with ease. As one columnist recently put it, “Companies that are indifferent to democracy have acquired an outsized role in it.” Together, the combination of these six blurred lines has presented the United States—both its government and us as citizens and individuals—an unprecedented challenge.

We need something like a “Dead Man’s Switch” for our election system. A body like the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the group of career analysts who help issue consensus national intelligence assessments, could be designated in advance to analyze whether a foreign actor is seeking to interfere with an election—whether through disinformation campaigns, hacking candidates or political parties, or actual attacks on the election infrastructure. Then, on a certain date—say 100 days before a national election—that team and the intelligence community should be obligated to report to Congress whether they have witnessed any suspicious foreign interference and then issue a second report if they later do detect interference.


pages: 558 words: 175,965

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

To this day, Worden has maintained that the information warfare program may have been the United States’ best attempt at fending off terrorist threats. “The terrorists have to be persuaded that they don’t want to do terror,” he said. “You aren’t going to kill all of them.” But, he added, “People accused us of doing disinformation. That was rubbish, but it caused enough controversy. So I had the honor of being fired by the president. I got out of the air force as a brigadier general. Not too bad.” IN OCTOBER 2002, HOUSTON, TEXAS, played host to the annual International Astronautical Congress. The event dated back to the 1950s and brought together many of the leading space figures for the typical conference fare of speeches and seminars.

Modi’s government denied the claims and insisted that its strike had wiped out “a very large number” of terrorists. In the past, people in the region were left on their own to try to discern which government was telling the truth. Each side would push its version of events and accuse the other of spreading disinformation. Reporters would do their best to go to the site and speak with witnesses to the bombing raid, but their accountings of events would still be surrounded by doubts and doubters. Planet, however, had satellite images that clearly showed that India had missed its target. The bombs dropped by the Indian jets had fallen in empty fields.


pages: 218 words: 65,422

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A. O. Scott

barriers to entry, citizen journalism, conceptual framework, death of newspapers, disinformation, Evgeny Morozov, hive mind, Jacob Silverman, Joan Didion, Marshall McLuhan, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, sharing economy, social web, subscription business, TED Talk, the scientific method

• • • Formalism is thus less a theoretical mistake than a useful fantasy, a category error that helps to mark a crucial, contested, perpetually shifting boundary, the one between art and everything else. This distinction turns out to be anything but obvious. For one thing, the supposedly simple matter of what does or doesn’t count as art is a subject of endless debate, prejudice, disinformation, and plain idiocy. There are systems of social power that declare some activities and objects worthier of the name than others. There is also, in history (as in Robert Frost’s idea of nature), something that does not love a wall, a mysterious, implacable force that erodes such exclusionary categorical distinctions.


pages: 228 words: 68,880

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of by Mick Hume

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek, the scientific method, We are the 99%, World Values Survey

In which case the democratic system that gave them the chance to dictate to their betters must ultimately be at fault. There have been differences in the masses-bashing responses to Brexit and Trump. But three common themes stand out. All are attempts to delegitimise the results and the voters who produced them. The first theme is that the votes were a result of ignorance and disinformation in the age of ‘post-truth politics’. The second is that the voters must have been motivated by bigotry, racism and hatred. And the third is that, given the above, allowing the votes of the demos to determine important issues is a threat to … democracy. Let’s look at these excuses in turn. ‘Post-truth’ politics for ‘unqualified simpletons’ It has been widely argued and accepted that those voting for Brexit in the UK or Trump in the US must have been uninformed, ‘low-information’ people, emotionally gullible and easy prey to the lies of demagogues – now renamed ‘post-truth politics’.


pages: 241 words: 64,424

Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129 by Norman Polmar, Michael White

cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Maui Hawaii, no-fly zone, Seymour Hersh

Just the fact that they managed to build a ship of 60,000 tons of displacement, to install equipment to sustain such a [submarine] load, to make provision of how to accommodate the submarine under the ship and finally to lift it up. It seemed to us something unreal, fantastic, I can compare it with a mission to the moon in regard of technology and invested money. And another point—the ship was built in two years [sic] and we were fooled these two years—the disinformation was organized outstandingly.4 Thus did the “enemy” judge Project Azorian. That judgment was shared by many Americans, and was “made official” in July 2006 when the American Society of Mechanical Engineers awarded its prestigious Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark award to the Hughes Glomar Explorer.


On Nature and Language by Noam Chomsky

Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, complexity theory, dark matter, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, language acquisition, launch on warning, Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Turing test

The goal of Britain’s Ministry of Information was “to control the thought of the world,” and particularly the thought of American intellectuals, who could be instrumental, it was reasonably expected, in bringing the US into the war. To help achieve this goal, President Woodrow Wilson established the country’s first official propaganda agency, called the Committee on Public Information – which of course translates as “public disinformation.” Run by leading progressive intellectuals, its task was to turn a pacifist population into hysterical jingoists and enthusiasts for war against the savage Huns. These efforts had enormous success, including scandalous fabrications that were exposed long after they had done their work, and often persist even after exposure.


pages: 251 words: 66,396

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber

Alvin Toffler, business process, disinformation, Ford Model T, interchangeable parts, Silicon Valley

“But it’s important that you take it seriously. Because it most often is regarded by small business owners as merely ‘good common sense.’ And I have seen more often than not that the only definition of ‘good common sense’ is ‘my opinion.’ That most small business owners, suffering as they do from what I’ve come to call ‘willful disinformation,’ simply decide what they want to do without any information at all, without any interest in what’s true, and then simply do it. Stationery designed by the local quick-printer with a logo thrown in. Colors picked by their wives. Signs designed by the local sign guy whose experience is in painting signs, not in determining what colors and shapes are psychographically correct.


pages: 238 words: 46

When Things Start to Think by Neil A. Gershenfeld

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Bretton Woods, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, disinformation, Dynabook, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information security, invention of movable type, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, means of production, new economy, Nick Leeson, packet switching, RFID, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, the medium is the message, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, world market for maybe five computers

45 The Personal Fabricator 63 Smart Money 77 WHY Rights and Responsibilities 95 Bad Words 107 Bit Beliefs 123 Seeing Through Windows 13 7 viii + CONTENTS HOW The Nature of Computation 151 The Business of Discovery 169 Information and Education 185 Things That Think 199 Afterword 215 Index 217 Preface I have a vested interest in the future, because I plan on living there. I want to help create one in which machines can meet the needs of people, rather than the other way around. As more and more gadgets demand our attention, the promises of the Digital Revolution start to sound more like those of a disinformation campaign. A counterrevolution seeks to protect our freedom to not be wired. But rather than ask whether reading is better done with a book or a computer, I want to show how to merge the best features of each. This modest aim has radical implications, and regrettably little precedent. Putting ink on paper, and data on a CD-ROM, are separated by a divide between the old analog world of atoms and the new digital world of bits.


pages: 232 words: 67,934

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, death from overwork, dematerialisation, disinformation, George Santayana, laissez-faire capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nikolai Kondratiev, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, the scientific method

By the time Moura renewed contact with him on 29 July 1924 – Lockhart gives the date in his second book of memoirs, Retreat from Glory (1934) – he had left his wife and child and was involved with a married woman, the young third wife of a British peer, Lord Rosslyn, and under her influence had converted to Roman Catholicism. Lockhart never lost touch with the hidden parts of government. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 he joined the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. Later he was appointed Director of the Political Warfare Executive, which ran British disinformation operations throughout the war. In 1943 he was knighted. Lockhart’s life after the Second World War was a long decline. The relationship with Lady Rosslyn broke down; she entered a convent, and Lockhart married his wartime secretary (he had divorced his first wife in 1938). His melancholy only deepened.


pages: 274 words: 70,481

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Ascot racecourse, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, false flag, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Jon Ronson, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Skype

“They formed the most bizarre theories about me. They decided that because I had this group that I’d set up, and I had this blog that I’d set up, I was feeding the official story to the survivors, and I was somehow controlling them, and I was a government mouthpiece who’d been tasked with disseminating disinformation. They became very suspicious of me. They formed this theory that I was some kind of counterintelligence professional or security services covert operative. Some of them thought I didn’t even exist. They thought I was a team of men who had been tasked with creating this Rachel North persona and maintaining it as a means of what they called Psy-Ops—psychological operations—to control the population of the UK.”


pages: 255 words: 68,829

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing

Dave Paradi, author of a PowerPoint guide, reports on a survey of 688 people conducted on the Internet in 2007 and intended to identify the major sources of boredom when viewing a presentation.10 Far in front is the inept speaker who reads his slides (62 percent), followed by texts in small typefaces (46.9 percent), bad choice of colors (42.6 percent), and complete sentences in place of bullet lists (39.1 percent).11 This confirms, incidentally that the bullet point is indeed the soul of PowerPoint and that those who try to get away from this mode of exposition, whose perils we have seen, are in danger of missing their target. DISINFORMATION ABOUT A PANDEMIC Aside from the physiological conditions of visibility and readability, the use of visuals in PowerPoint, though the source of its success, poses deeper problems. The easy integration into PowerPoint of images and graphs can considerably alter the quality of the information, its validity, or even its credibility, especially in fields that require the greatest precision.


pages: 239 words: 68,598

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Garrett Hardin, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Northern Rock, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, quantum entanglement, short selling, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, Virgin Galactic

As oil runs out we will need to synthesize fuel for the mobile machinery of construction, transport and agriculture. This is not difficult to do from coal or nuclear energy but we need to start preparing for it now. We may even have to consider the direct synthesis of food from carbon dioxide, nitrogen, water and tissue culture. There will be a flood of anti‐nuclear energy disinformation from energy companies whose profitability is threatened and even from nations who see their power and influence lessened. Do not believe such tales as that the construction of a new nuclear power source takes ten to fifteen years. Construction takes the French less than five years and there is no reason why we should take longer, if we avoid the excessive time spent in planning agencies, courtrooms and at public hearings.


pages: 212 words: 69,846

The Nation City: Why Mayors Are Now Running the World by Rahm Emanuel

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, carbon footprint, clean water, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lyft, megacity, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

We worship together. We celebrate together. We grieve together. Our local governments and cities provide a place to satisfy our craving for a sense of community and our yearning to belong and be a part of something that is meaningful and bigger than ourselves. That intimacy should not be overlooked. The disinformation and the conspiracy theories that flood social media are almost all about national politics and politicians and not about local ones. There’s a reason for that: We know each other too well to fall for it. All mayors make mistakes—I made my share during my two terms in Chicago. But good mayors never shy away from addressing issues head-on.


pages: 245 words: 71,886

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

Researchers dropped their usual workloads and joined the international effort. Journals and preprint servers worked hard to build up a critical mass of reliable information and make it freely available at speed. Our knowledge about the virus evolved along with the virus itself, but the uncertainty allowed misinformation and disinformation to flourish. There was great science, which gave us vaccines; there was science that could have been better, like clinical trials, which mostly ended up being patchy and uncoordinated (with the notable exception of RECOVERY and Solidarity* trials); and there was bad science, including speculation, without evidence, that there would be no second Covid-19 wave.


pages: 233 words: 69,745

The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches From the Edge of Life by The Reluctant Carer

call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, disinformation, gig economy, Jeff Bezos, load shedding, place-making, stem cell, telemarketer, trolley problem

The alert-call system runs through the landline, as does the broadband which has vanished into the bargain. They both have basic mobiles but neither like nor especially understand them. The signal at the house is poor, too. We can’t leave them here with nothing. Neither, you might think, could the phone company, but no. Their clients’ vulnerability is no obstacle to the baroque opera of disinformation, institutionalized indifference and psy-ops-level bullshit that ensues as we attempt to get reconnected. Our first point of contact is an overseas call centre. Nothing against those per se, but in this instance they are evidently predisposed by the same corporate connivance and cost-cutting that engenders their existence to tell us lies.


pages: 232 words: 68,570

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar

anti-communist, disinformation, off-the-grid, Skype, Tunguska event

In the last two decades, some authors have suggested that the hikers had witnessed a top-secret missile launch—a periodic occurrence in the Urals at the height of the Cold War—and had been killed for it. Even self-proclaimed skeptics, who attempt to cut through the intrigue in order to posit scientific explanations, are spun into a web of conspiracy theories and disinformation. One heartbreaking fact, however, remained clear to me: Nine young people died under inexplicable circumstances, and many of their family members have since passed away without ever knowing what happened to their loved ones. Would the remaining survivors go to their graves with the same unanswered questions?


Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

air gap, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, cognitive bias, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Joan Didion, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Nelson Mandela, operational security, pre–internet, QAnon, Russian election interference, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, surveillance capitalism, WikiLeaks

One could find what appeared to be CNN photos and local news clips documenting the event, and a Wikipedia page referring back to these news clips, though there had been no explosion. If you had said then that government-backed Russians were behind this, and they were practicing for a much larger disinformation campaign that would aid in the election of a reality TV star with narcissistic personality disorder, you would have sounded deeply unwell. You probably would have been. A prophet of sound mind is no prophet at all. Just look at the can, is what I am saying. You cannot deny that that is a cross.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

“Punch” Sulzberger invited its president, Reed Irvine, to regular conclaves at the newspaper’s corporate suite—a courtesy extended to no other shareholder. The relationship soon advanced to a first-name basis: “Dear Punch,” Irvine wrote after a meeting in July, “One area that we did not get into to the extent that I had wanted was the defense that exists to protect the Times and its readers from the Soviet disinformation and propaganda operation.… We lost in Vietnam because of our inattention to this area.” Sulzberger dutifully delegated his second-in-command to ride herd on the paper’s Paris bureau regarding one of Irvine’s complaints. Executive editor Max Frankel fumed to Sulzberger, “I think it’s more fitting to tell such people to practice their judgement of us in their publication and to let us manage and write ours as we see fit.

Once, its supervisor spotted mounds covered by black tarps at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. He had a local check on them every single day. “It never moved!” he told an interviewer more than ten years later. “It may still be there!” No, the real jackpot came from the operation’s other wing: disinformation. It was run by an exceptionally well-connected and shrewd professional media manipulator named Robert Keith Gray, on leave from the Washington office of the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. The aim was to sow public suspicion that Carter would even sell out America’s security in order to win—so if the miracle actually happened, the public would suspect it all was a cynical ploy.

Gray’s first success might have come on August 18. Jack Anderson published the first of a series of columns claiming that Carter was planning an invasion of Iran, timed, for maximum political gain, in mid-October. This was not true. National Security Agency Iran hand Gary Sick came to believe it was the work of Gray’s disinformation team—a suspicion underlined by an utterance immediately afterward, as if in coordination, in which Reagan expressed his fear Carter might be “tempted to take reckless actions designed to reassure Americans that our power is undiminished.” The operation attempted to nest the hostage-cynicism narrative within a larger one: that Carter was no high-minded idealist, but actually a power-mad fiend.


pages: 612 words: 181,985

Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, death from overwork, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, military-industrial complex, operation paperclip, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, éminence grise

But Fleischer’s allegiance was to his colleagues, so he lied to Staver and said he had no idea what Staver was talking about. He pointed the finger at another colleague, an engineer and von Braun deputy named Dr. Eberhard Rees. Ask Rees, Fleischer said. He was the former chief in charge of the Peenemünde assembly line. When interviewed by Staver, Dr. Eberhard Rees played his own disinformation card, using Major Staver’s influence to help spring a third colleague from jail. Walther Riedel, chief of V-2 rocket motor and structural design, had been one of the four men honored at the Castle Varlar event the previous December. Now Riedel was receiving rough treatment in a jail eighty miles away, in Saalfeld.

There was valuable intelligence to be gained from these individuals, Philp learned, willingly or through coercion. But Philp also found that his officers lacked a greater context within which to interpret the raw intelligence being gathered from the Soviets. Russia had been America’s ally during the war. Now it was the enemy. The Soviets were masters of disinformation. Who was telling the truth? The Nazi prisoners claimed to know, and Colonel Philp began using several of them to interpret and analyze information from Soviet defectors. These Nazis were “experts in espionage against the Russians,” Philp later said. Two of them seemed particularly knowledgeable: Gerhard Wessel, who had been an officer in the German intelligence organization Abwehr, and Wessel’s deputy, Hermann Baun.


pages: 816 words: 191,889

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

An authoritative commentary on Xi’s 2017 National Security Work Forum cited Western reports to argue that “the most basic pillars of the Western world order are weakening. In the ‘post-truth’ era, ‘liberal democracies’ are vulnerable to misinformation.”38 The “information explosion” was causing “social tearing,” noted one Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS) scholar, all amplified by algorithms, targeted advertising, and disinformation that “accelerate the spread of global populism/nationalism” and cause “serious polarization.”39 Jin Canrong argued that the culmination of these trends was illiberalism and dysfunction: “the polarization of the rich and the poor leads to widespread dissatisfaction in the lower and middle classes.

And as this book has demonstrated, China has had a grand strategy to displace American order and build its own order at both the regional and global level. It now seeks to be the world’s leading state. Despite their popularity in Beijing, narratives on American decline are often incomplete. Declinists point to forces—such as inequality, polarization, disinformation, and deindustrialization—that are real and formidable in the United States, but they forget these same forces are also global in nature rather than uniquely American. At the same time, they overlook US advantages over China, which has a fast-aging population, enormous debt, slowing growth, and a currency still far from rivaling the dollar.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Measures that the French, the British, and other Europeans had developed over more than a century for military operations in tropical countries could have been adopted in Panama and would have reduced death rates by an order of magnitude. But this would have meant significantly less digging per year. Lesseps was warned in no uncertain terms about these risks, including during the Paris Congress. Yet he chose to regard all reports of ill health in Central America as disinformation spread by his enemies. From 1881 to 1889 the cumulative death toll was estimated at twenty-two thousand, of which around five thousand were French. In some years, more than half the people who came out from France died. One-third of the workforce may have been sick at any one time. People employed directly by Lesseps’s company were eligible to receive free medical attention, although this was a mixed blessing; conditions in the hospital included standing water that allowed mosquitoes to breed, and epidemics spread mercilessly in the wards.

These technologies helped Taiwan’s early and effective response to COVID-19, in which the private sector and civil society collaborated with the government to develop tools for testing and contact tracing. New forums for virtual participation can of course repeat the same mistakes that social media commits today, exacerbating echo chambers and extremism. Once such tools start being used extensively, some parties will come up with strategies to spread disinformation, whereas others might use such platforms for demagoguery. Sensational, misleading content may start spreading, and rival viewpoints can begin shouting each other down rather than deliberating constructively. The best way of avoiding such mistakes is to view pro-democratic online tools as a work in progress that needs to be updated continuously as new challenges develop, and also as a complement, rather than as a full substitute, to traditional, in-person civic engagement.


Gorbachev by William Taubman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Able Archer 83, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, haute couture, indoor plumbing, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade liberalization, young professional

He had hoped that the new presidency would inherit the party’s role as a “powerful political center for the country.”48 Instead, he now sat almost alone atop a still small presidential apparatus, presiding over what Shakhnazarov calls “a pseudo-businesslike bustling about combined with a monstrous amount of organization muddle.”49 Moreover, his administration was managed by Boldin, who inundated him with incriminating disinformation about democrats, including Gorbachev’s close ally Yakovlev, who the KGB insisted was a CIA “agent of influence.” According to Yakovlev’s later account, his phone was being tapped, eavesdropping bugs had been installed in his office, he felt he was being followed, his son had been shot at in a train by an unknown assailant, and someone had set fire to his daughter’s car.50 THE 1989 ELECTION CAMPAIGN for the new USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and the first sessions of that Congress, constituted the new, more democratic “game” that Gorbachev was still learning to play.

“If you keep this up,” Lukyanov said to Chernyaev and Petrakov, the Supreme Soviet will oust the government, the Congress of People’s Deputies will disband itself, and “you and the president will have to go.” Gorbachev played the peacemaker, but only up to a point. Ryzhkov demanded that the president meet with his group before Yavlinsky’s and that he do so almost immediately, before Yavlinsky could ply him with “disinformation.” Gorbachev changed the subject and, after leaving the terminal, called Petrakov from his car, summoning Yavlinsky’s group to the Kremlin at ten o’clock the next morning.96 The meeting, which several young economists attended in short-sleeved summer shirts (having had no chance to go home and change into jackets and ties), went swimmingly for several hours.

What if KGB provocateurs triggered that violence in order to justify a crackdown? If any of the demonstrators had been killed, Yakovlev said later, “all of Moscow would have been in the streets.” In the end, both sides showed restraint and the demonstration ended peacefully. Gorbachev was lucky, but not before he showed himself susceptible to the KGB disinformation that prompted him to issue the ban in the first place. Demonstrators were planning to storm the Kremlin walls using “hooks and ladders,” he was told, even though Moscow Mayor Popov later joked that given the shortages of nearly everything, there wouldn’t have been enough rope in the city to allow the attempt.17 Like the Vilnius bloodshed and the order for joint military-police patrols, Gorbachev’s ban on demonstrations backfired, intensifying liberals’ disillusionment with him without convincing hard-liners he was their man.


pages: 239 words: 77,436

Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It by John Yudkin

correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation

This recalls the qualifications of the man from Tate & Lyle who came to see me at Queen Elizabeth College nearly 20 years earlier to discuss our research. Having dealt with the biochemical and clinical matters relating to my article, the letter from British Sugar proceeds, ‘The sugar industry now recognizes its mistake in not effectively offsetting over the years the barrage of misinformation and disinformation fostered by individuals with a desire to profit from the credulity of the population. This is in the process of being corrected.’ I pointed out earlier that by no means every scientist agrees with my views about sugar. And there is nothing wrong with that: much of the material about which I have written still adds up to circumstantial evidence rather than absolute proof.


pages: 279 words: 72,659

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians by Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, Frank Barat

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, desegregation, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Islamic Golden Age, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, one-state solution, price stability, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail

The highly regarded political scientist and historian Shlomo Avineri offered an analysis of these “critical differences of opinion” between Israel and outsiders. Among the causes, he explained, were “the harsh images—a consequence of the firepower Israel used, as magnified by the media—as well as disinformation and, undoubtedly, plain old hatred of Israel.” But he discerned a deeper reason: “The name given to the operation, which greatly affects the way in which it will be perceived. Israelis associate the Hebrew for Cast Lead, as the operation was called, with a line written by poet Haim Nahman Bialik that is part of a Hanukkah song typically sung by cute little children.


pages: 258 words: 77,601

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet by Ian Hanington

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Day of the Dead, disinformation, do what you love, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, Exxon Valdez, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl

If this is the most “ethical” source of oil we can find, we need to ask other questions about the moral purity of our intensively processed bitumen. For example, if we sell the oil to countries with poor human-rights records, like China, does that affect the product’s “ethical” nature? And how “ethical” are the companies operating in the tar sands; for example, Exxon Mobil, well-known sponsor of climate-change disinformation campaigns; BP, responsible for the massive oily disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010; or Petro-China? There’s also the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on our children and grandchildren, which, to me, is an intergenerational crime. In this light, wouldn’t energy from technologies or sources that limit the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and that have minimal environmental and health impacts be far more ethical than fossil fuels?


pages: 266 words: 80,018

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

Someone in the US intelligence community had tipped off Washington that Morales had smuggled Snowden aboard his jet. An exemplary piece of real-time reporting! They had got him! The only problem was that Snowden was not on board. The White House had pressed the panic button with its European allies because of an intelligence blunder. This may have been the result of clever Russian disinformation. Or a classic CIA goof-up. In Vienna, the president of Bolivia and his defence secretary Ruben Saavedra sat on an airport couch, aggrieved that the US had had the audacity to humiliate a small sovereign nation. Asked whether Snowden had been smuggled aboard, Saavedra turned white. ‘This is a lie, a falsehood.


pages: 252 words: 72,473

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

Successful microtargeting, in part, explains why in 2015 more than 43 percent of Republicans, according to a survey, still believed the lie that President Obama is a Muslim. And 20 percent of Americans believed he was born outside the United States and, consequently, an illegitimate president. (Democrats may well spread their own disinformation in microtargeting, but nothing that has surfaced matches the scale of the anti-Obama campaigns.) Even with the growth of microtargeting, political campaigns are still directing 75 percent of their media buy, on average, to television. You might think that this would have an equalizing effect, and it does.


Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, disinformation, dual-use technology, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, military-industrial complex, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Reuters, NYT, Nov. 9, 1987, citing the CIVS report of November 8 and Latin American officials; Amnesty Law and Bill to suspend the State of Emergency, promulgated in November 1987, unofficial translation, Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry, given to me in December by Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto, who appeared genuinely to believe that the Accord would be permitted to survive. 111. Nov. 18, 1987. 112. Lindsey Gruson, NYT, Oct. 29; LeMoyne, NYT, Nov. 29, 1987. 113. Chris Norton, Globe and Mail, Feb. 10, 1988. 114. Chamorro, Packaging the Contras: A Case of CIA Disinformation (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987). 115. Harper’s, Oct. 1987. 116. Lindsey Gruson, NYT, Dec. 15, 1987. 117. Tad Szulc, Parade Magazine, Aug. 28, 1988. 118. Julia Preston notes that the Sandinistas have captured “state-of-the-art equipment, so modern that not even all U.S. units have them” (WP, Feb. 4, 1988), quite apart from the sheer mass of regular supply and the crucial assistance of U.S. aerial and naval surveillance.


pages: 266 words: 77,045

The Bend of the World: A Novel by Jacob Bacharach

Burning Man, disinformation, haute couture, helicopter parent, Isaac Newton, medical residency, messenger bag, phenotype, quantitative easing, too big to fail, trade route, young professional

If this whole shebang is such a goddamn secret, how come you can write a bunch of books about it? Ah, said Pringle. Fortunately, in a parallel time track, I have been able to convince my compatriots on the Project that the Winston Pringle self-modality who is writing the books is engaging in a necessary kind of disinformation. By telling a truth so strange it appears to be fiction, the true truth is obscured. The true truth, Helen said. The best kind, said Johnny. That’s what I was thinking, Helen said. I like this new girlfriend of yours, Johnny told me. She’s not my girlfriend, I said. I’m his boss’s girlfriend, she said.


pages: 233 words: 75,477

Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea by Robert D. Kaplan

Ayatollah Khomeini, citizen journalism, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, land reform, Live Aid, mass immigration, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, the market place

Moscow used its entrée to develop ties within the Somali officers' corp. In 1969 came General Siad Barre's coup, which the Kremlin very well may have had a hand in, and Soviet-Somali relations blossomed. Soon U.S. Peace Corps volunteers were being stoned in the streets of the Somali capital of Mogadishu thanks to a Soviet disinformation campaign. Between 1970 and 1975, the Somali army was increased from twelve thousand to twenty-three thousand soldiers. The Soviets supplied hundreds of tanks and fifty-five combat aircraft. The presence of ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia's Ogaden desert made Somalia an irredentist state, and the Soviets obviously were taking advantage of Siad Barre's dreams of conquest and a Great Somalia.


pages: 249 words: 77,342

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

Rudyard Kipling begins his coming-of-age classic, ‘If’, with the following stanza: If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise Keeping your head in an information age designed to help you lose it is the never-ending task of the behavioral investor. Cultivating principled contrarianism, an understanding of behavior and a familiarity with enduring empirical principles of finance may not come naturally, but they are the keys to weeding out disinformation en route to mastery of self and wealth. What’s the big idea? We tend to confuse ease of recall with probability. People think in stories, not percentages. We overestimate the likelihood of high-impact-low-probability scary events. Risk measures that fail to account for behavior are useless.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

Das offers an even harsher i critique of slum-oriented NGOs: 22 Diana Mitlin, "Civil Society and Urban Poverty - Examining Complexity," Environment and Urbanisation 13:2 (October 2001), p. 164. 23 Ruben Gazzoli, "The Political and Institutional Context of Popular Organizations in Urban Argentina," Environment and Urbanisation 8:1 (April 1996), p. 163. 24 Lea Jellinek, "Collapsing under the Weight of Success: An NGO in Jakarta," Environment and Urbanisation 15:1 (April 2003), p. 171. 25 Bayat in Roy and A1 Sayyad (eds), Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectivesfrom the Middle East, Eatin America, and South Asia, pp. 80-81. 26 Thomas, Calcutta Poor, p. 131. Their constant effort is to subvert, dis-inform and de-idealize people so as to keep them away from class struggles. They adopt and propagate the practice of begging favours on sympathetic and humane grounds rather than making the oppressed conscious of their rights. As a matter of fact these agencies and organizations systematically intervene to oppose the agitational path people take to win their demands.


pages: 259 words: 73,193

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

So does every church (with the exception of those promoting doomsday philosophies). If we can see the problem in a scenario like Heilman’s battle with Transcendental Meditation, which played out over just a few years and only a decade after Wikipedia’s invention, then what imperceptible changes might be wrought by such a system over centuries? (Disinformation—active deception—is far more damaging than simple errors.) What uncatchable, unnoticeable changes to human understanding would our collective, incorporated biases visit upon future generations? And one final bias to worry about is, of course, the gender bias. The “consensus” that Wikipedia arrives at turns out to actually be a male consensus.


pages: 289 words: 22,394

Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Gödel, Escher, Bach, joint-stock company, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy

A harsh if typical attitude from the rational, scientific community might be something like this: “I really pity those poor religious fools who run around like chickens with their *There’s even a fellow who travels the world lecturing about how the theory of the origin of species through evolution couldn’t possibly be true—sort of religious disinformation! I watched one of his lectures on television, enjoying the challenge of finding the holes in his logic. It went something like this: “Look at all the beautiful colors of birds! There’s no scientific reason for them! They’re just beautiful! Obviously the work of God!” “Look at how complicated the eye is!


pages: 241 words: 81,805

The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis by Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, Kevin Coldiron

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, currency risk, debt deflation, disinformation, distributed ledger, diversification, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, global reserve currency, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, negative equity, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk/return, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, yield curve

Cumulative Advantage Is What Perpetuates Itself Cumulative advantage is implicated in all forms of fads, fashions, crazes, trends—even market bubbles. As illustrated by the example of movie stardom, cumulative advantage is behind “superstar effects” across all cultural products: music, books, success as a “public intellectual,” and more. Cumulative advantage is likely behind the virulence of modern social media—Twitter mobs, disinformation, polarization—where visible numbers of likes, shares, and retweets show us collectively what is right (or safe) to say (or think), and thereby produce powerful feedback effects. Plausibly, cumulative advantage could be related to the persistence of social class, structural racism, and wealth inequality.


pages: 269 words: 79,285

Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, disinformation, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, fiat currency, Firefox, incognito mode, Julian Assange, litecoin, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, off-the-grid, operational security, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, power law, profit motive, Right to Buy, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, trade route, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

He had then become DPR 2.0, as well as some other Silk Road 2 staff members. Tellingly, both Defcon and ‘DrClu’ repeatedly made the same error of using ‘withdraws’ instead of ‘withdrawals’ that the post-August DPR had made (and the pre-August DPR had not). However, the suspected connection is by no means confirmed. The team at Silk Road 2.0 continued to spread disinformation designed to confuse. Journalist Ken Klippenstein, who interviewed some of the site’s staff members, wrote: Defcon, Silk Road’s interim leader, is a hacker whom staff describe as more technically capable than his predecessor [DPR 2.0]. Whether or not Defcon will don the black mask of ‘Dread Pirate Roberts 3.0’ is uncertain, though the site’s attitude about free access to drugs remains: ‘As you wish.’


pages: 263 words: 77,786

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

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

The heightened expectations of business bring CEOs new demands to focus on societal engagement with the same rigor, thoughtfulness, and energy used to deliver on profits.”23 Eighty-six percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “I expect CEOs to publicly speak out on one or more of these societal challenges, pandemic impact, job automation, societal issues, local community issues.” And 68 percent agreed that “CEOs should step in when government does not for societal impact.” Having said that, in a year when disinformation was rampant, people are feeling shell-shocked and questioning all institutions. I recall a few years ago when Edelman’s global chair of corporate practices, Kathryn Beiser, stated, “Business is the last retaining wall for trust.” That seems to still be true. But the retaining wall needs shoring up.


pages: 236 words: 73,008

Deadly Quiet City: True Stories From Wuhan by Murong Xuecun

Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, global pandemic, lockdown, megacity, Ponzi scheme, QR code, social distancing, TikTok

From that moment at the start of 2020, Xuewen began nagging people. ‘Whenever I met anyone, I’d say it, I’d say it to my family and friends, I’d say to taxi drivers: “Take adequate protection, wear a mask.” But no one paid me any attention.’ He shakes his head. ‘Chinese people believe government propaganda. Can’t do anything about it.’ The government’s disinformation that January – ‘no human-to-human transmission’, ‘preventable and controllable’, ‘no need to panic’ – causes countless people who could have avoided it, to be infected with a serious disease. It causes the whole world to be dragged down into an abyss. Although Xuewen senses danger, he does not fully realise the severity of the situation.


pages: 677 words: 195,722

Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945 by Leo Marks

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, disinformation, Dutch auction, full employment, mandatory minimum

Nick's next comment was so unexpected that I had to ask him to repeat it. 'We must consider the possibility that the escape's been engineered by the Germans.' He pointed out that Trumpet had sent two messages in September warning London that Sprout and Chive had been captured by the Gestapo, who'd turned them round and helped them to escape so they could spread disinformation. Before I could protest, he added that there was another reason for doubting their story. A cargo ship had recently been blown up in Rotterdam harbour, which could hardly have happened if the entire Dutch resistance was in enemy hands. At which point I also blew up. Pointing to my reports, I said that if they were worth anything at all then Trumpet was completely blown and when I'd read his denunciation of Sprout and Chive I'd taken it as a guarantee of their bona fides.

Although fair play in SOE was rare and usually the result of a lapse in concentration, I was hoping that both men would be given the benefits of whatever doubts existed in the minds of those purblind enough to have any. I should have known better. They'd arrived in London on 1 February and amplified their accounts of the German penetration, but their N section interrogators preferred to believe the warnings from Holland that the Gestapo had 'turned' them and allowed them to escape to spread disinformation; they'd been sent to a holding camp in Guildford under open arrest. By early March they were still incarcerated, and were likely to remain so until Giskes lost his creative flow. Nor did yet another change of leadership in N section enhance their chances of being released. Bingham had been dispatched to Australia (hopefully to the Outback), and Major Dobson of the Belgian section had taken his place.


pages: 341 words: 87,268

Them: Adventures With Extremists by Jon Ronson

Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, disinformation, friendly fire, Jon Ronson, Livingstone, I presume, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, the market place, Timothy McVeigh

said Jim. ‘You can tell by their demeanour,’ I said. ‘Here’s the plan,’ said Jim. ‘We leave the bar together. When we get within earshot of the chasers, I say, “I’m gonna meet my Bilderberg contact at the Tiny Bar.” You say, “Shhh.” Say it urgently as if you don’t want them to overhear. Feed them disinformation.’ ‘I’m not going to do that,’ I said. Jim and I left the bar together. ‘JON,’ said Jim loudly, ‘I’M GONNA MEET MY SECRET BILDERBERG CONTACT AT THE TINY BAR.’ I scowled and said nothing and marched ahead. ‘Very good,’ murmured Jim outside. We split up. I walked down to the beach and found a seafood restaurant.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

A slew of Web-savvy characters—the kind who appear on panels at South by Southwest (SXSW) and present at TED conferences—are peddling the same idea, their rhetoric spreading out from the tech world to infect other communities. As the online marketing pioneer Tamara Hunt put it, we are all “social capitalists”; the self must be packaged and publicized and invested in so you can cash out. “Personal branding is about managing your name—even if you don’t own a business—in a world of misinformation, disinformation, and semi-permanent Google records,” said Timothy Ferriss, who has made a name for himself advising people on how to make names for themselves using social media.57 The self-branding ideal puts full responsibility on the individual, who must live or die on his or her own in the open market. The corporate ethos that drives discussions of personal branding is fundamental to the architecture of social media.


pages: 398 words: 86,023

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

After more community pressure, Essjay finally posted a message called “My Response,” but was hardly contrite. The message only raised more ire in those who sensed he felt no remorse for deceiving a reporter and his fellow Wikipedians: I *am* sorry if anyone in the Wikipedia community has been hurt by my decision to use disinformation to protect myself. . . . I have no intention of going anywhere, because to do so would be to let the vandals, trolls, and stalkers win. Essjay had his supporters. Even skeptics appreciated his widely recognized good work in the community. But their trust had been violated. Scores of fellow users didn’t buy his cover story, and many started using Wikipedia’s years-deep database to comb through his past behavior, made possible because of Wikipedia’s belief in transparency.


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

A link’s name and its address must correspond. Wherever the user goes, there he or she must be. If the link’s name and its address do not correspond, then a more insidious type of discontinuity is in effect than even the 404 error could provoke. For while the flows have not been interrupted, they have been infected with disinformation. One flow has been substituted for another flow. Remove barriers. Each click that a user is forced to make on the Web is an unnecessary barrier to that user and will hinder his or her movement. All unnecessary barriers (splash pages, tables of contents, introductory pages) between the user and the content must be removed.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

Those on the right accused foreign powers of orchestrating the scandal, doubling down on the nationalist rhetoric. Trust in government and democratic institutions fell to a new low. In such a climate, is it any surprise that the young people of Veles should take wholeheartedly to a programme of disinformation, particularly when it is rewarded by the very systems of modernity they have been told are the future? Fake news is not a product of the internet. Rather, it is the manipulation of new technologies by the same interests that have always sought to manipulate information to their own ends. It is the democratisation of propaganda, in that ever more actors can now play the role of propagandist.


Toast by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

One caught my eye, at the bottom: a message from one of No Such Agency’s tame stoolpigeon academics, pointing out that the theorem hadn’t yet been publicly disclosed and might turn out to be deficient. (Subtext: trust the Government. The Government is your friend.) It wouldn’t be the first time such a major discovery had been announced and subsequently withdrawn. But then again, they couldn’t actually produce a refutation, so the letter was basically valueless disinformation. I prodded at the web site again, and this time didn’t even get the ACCESS FORBIDDEN message. The paper had disappeared from the internet, and only the print-out in my pocket told me that I hadn’t imagined it. It takes a while for the magnitude of a catastrophe to sink in. The mathematician who had posted the original finding would be listed in his university’s directory, wouldn’t he?


pages: 273 words: 86,821

Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History by Antonio J. Mendez, Matt Baglio

Ayatollah Khomeini, disinformation, false flag, Ronald Reagan

They could also be used for exfiltrations, false flag recruitment, entrapment, or crossing international borders. The forgeries sometimes were designed to discredit individuals and governments, just like the KGB did to us. Their program was called Special Measures. Our program had no name—we just called it covert action. Other documents that we produced could take the form of disinformation, letters in diaries, bumper stickers, or any other graphics item that could influence events of the day. We were able to reproduce almost anything that was put in front of us; the only restrictions were matters of statecraft, such as currency. Making the other guy’s money at that time was considered to be an act of war.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

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

On Wikipedia, users work to cull and create, unlike on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other digital public spaces owned by private companies. Those noxious plate tectonics manifest in the proliferation of content prioritized over the value of it; a post might be harassing another user, it might be espousing conspiracies or peddling disinformation, and yet commercial platforms can sell ads against it. But Wikipedia has none of these incentives. A Wikipedia page is not considered more valuable because more people visit it. More people edit the page for Justin Bieber than the page for Pascoag, Rhode Island, and Bieber’s page has more visitors, but that does not correspond with more revenue.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

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

‘It seems like we’re always apologising for everything, we still have this narrative of “we are contributing, economically, culturally”. We’re always trying to prove a point.’ Herein lies a conundrum for people trying to diffuse myths about immigration. The evidence that migrants contribute to the economy needs to be repeatedly remade because there’s so much disinformation out there that has proved so effective among the general public. For the people who are maligned as a drain on the economy, there is a deeply personal aspect to refuting such a persuasive anti-immigrant narrative that is such a far-cry from the lives they lead. But the ‘contributions’ line is a beginning, not an end point.


Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World by Lesley M. M. Blume

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clean water, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Norman Mailer

The death of an independent press can lead to tyranny and render a population helpless to protect itself against a government that disdains law and conscience. If Americans in 1945 were exhausted by years of demoralizing wartime news, many Americans today are comparably overwhelmed by the current news cycle and sheer volume of information (and disinformation) inundating them by the day, hour, and second. Yet succumbing to numbness and indifference will have disastrous consequences. No matter how exhausting and daunting the landscape, it remains imperative for Americans not to try to “escape into easy comforts” again, as Albert Einstein put it. Hersey and his colleagues likely would have seen the war on facts and assault on the free press in the United States today as one of the most alarming, high-stakes challenges of our times.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Some of the larger companies, despite knowing about the dangers of climate breakdown long before it was part of the public debate, have bankrolled politicians who have either denied the science outright or sought to obstruct meaningful action whenever possible. It is in large part thanks to their efforts that the international climate treaties are not legally binding, for they have lobbied vigorously against such a move. And they have waged an extraordinarily successful disinformation campaign that for decades eroded public support for climate action, particularly in the United States, the one country that could feasibly lead a global transition. Fossil fuel companies, and the politicians they have bought, bear significant responsibility for our predicament. But this alone doesn’t explain our failure to act.


pages: 291 words: 85,908

The Skripal Files by Mark Urban

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Jeremy Corbyn, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Skype

FORTHWITH had helped pinpoint GRU assets in the UK. Since no prosecution resulted we can only imagine that the individual(s) he unmasked as spying for Russia or subjects of cultivation by the GRU were disrupted in other ways: by being explicitly warned; professionally sidelined or dismissed; or fed disinformation by British intelligence to send back to Moscow. However, not all of Skripal’s CI leads were quite so valuable. Work on the information he had provided about his agent recruitments in Malta did not produce any prosecutions. Indeed it may only have revealed a couple of US military personnel who were actually counter-intelligence operatives leading the GRU man on.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

What was once considered the salvation of democracy is now more often seen as its gravedigger. Half of its critics are angry that too much content is censored; the other half are complaining that too little is deleted, allowing hate and lies to spread wildly. The Left thinks these are platforms for right-wing lunatics and disinformation, the Right thinks they are politically correct leftists who invented cancel culture. Many are angry at Apple for charging too much or at Facebook and Google for not charging (‘then you are the product’). At best, social media is just a stupid waste of time. At worst it is a machine that creates polarization, filter bubbles, loneliness and social pressure, and exists only to glue our eyeballs to ads.


pages: 773 words: 214,465

The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

battle of ideas, clean water, dematerialisation, disinformation, invisible hand, mass immigration, megastructure, quantum entanglement

Unfortunately, he could not afford distractions right now, however delightful. It had taken him decades to refine the animation programs and bestow a valid I-sentient personality on each solido. The three of them had shared the apartment during the Starflyer War, becoming involved in a famous disinformation sting run by the Starflyer. Isabella herself had been one of the alien’s most effective agents inside the Commonwealth, seducing high-ranking politicians and officials and subtly manipulating them. For a while after the war, to be “Isabella-ed” was a Commonwealth-wide phrase meaning to be screwed over, but that infamy had faded eventually.

It had been Catriona’s room, decorated in excessively pink fabrics and ornaments; a lot of the surfaces were fluffy, a very girly girl’s room that he was now used to. His parallel sensorium was coming from a twinning link to the solido of Howard Liang, a Starflyer agent who had been part of the disinformation mission. Howard was in the penthouse’s main bedroom, sharing a huge circular bed with the three girls. It was another aspect of the solidos that Troblum had spent years refining; now, whenever he wanted sex, the four characters would launch themselves eagerly into a mini-orgy. The permutations their supple young bodies could combine into were almost endless, and they could keep going as long as Troblum wanted.


pages: 669 words: 226,737

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

What held it together was "credibility"; and the Watergate affair, coming hard on the heels of the war in Vietnam—itself largely motivated by the need to maintain American credibility in the eyes of the world—seemed to indicate not merely that our public officials no longer cared about the truth but that they had lost even the capacity to distinguish it from falsehood. All that mattered was the particular version of unreality the public could be induced to "buy." Buying did not necessarily imply belief: if "disinformation," as it later came to be called, proved eminently marketable, it was because information itself was in pitifully short supply. -30- Disinformation monopolized the airwaves. It was not that Americans had become stupid or credulous but that they had no institutional alternative to the consumption of lies. Their only available defense was to turn off the television set, cancel subscriptions to newspapers and periodicals, and stay away from the polls on election day.


pages: 323 words: 95,188

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, call centre, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing

And so, on the morning of December 21, Nicolae Ceausescu stepped before the microphones and cameras set up on the balcony of the Central Committee on Palace Square. In his dark blue overcoat and fur hat, he shouted out to the one hundred thousand subjects in the square below. He told them that the reports of uprisings and killings in Timisoara were false, that they were efforts by foreign powers to corrupt and disinform the people. He counted on the mass of tame functionaries, beholden to him and his rule, to applaud and cheer on cue. Instead, from the fringe of the square, some students not part of the select assembly started shouting, “Ti-mi-soara! Ti-mi-soara!” Never had he heard anything like it. Never had he been so brazenly challenged.


pages: 267 words: 91,984

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

airport security, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Elisha Otis, out of africa, The Soul of a New Machine

The Centre for the Study of African Economies Working Paper Series, no. 162 (July 20, 2002). Pan African News Agency. “Britain Sues Recalcitrant Burundi Faction Leader.” November 29, 2002. Philbert, Nkanira, et al. Dusome: Igitabu c’umwaka wa gatatu. Nyakanga: B.E.R. Bujumbura, 1993. Pottier, Johan. Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Prunier, Gerard. “Burundi: A Manageable Crisis?” London: WRITENET (UK), October 1994. ___. “The Great Lakes Crisis.” Current History 96, no. 610 (May 1997). ___. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. London: C.


pages: 278 words: 93,540

The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins by James Angelos

bank run, Berlin Wall, centre right, death of newspapers, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, income inequality, moral hazard, plutocrats, urban planning

Furthermore, their offspring would not inherit the pensions. By using inexcusable falsities to make his case, Glezos certainly was not helping his cause. Glezos nevertheless had a considerable talent for appealing to people’s emotions, and I found myself vacillating between revulsion over such populist disinformation and shedding tears of sympathy for him. The night Glezos spoke in Galatsi, he was particularly energetic and emotional. It was the seventieth anniversary of the execution of his brother, and he began the night by dedicating the event to him. The speakers were turned up very high, and Glezos yelled with fervor into the microphone, his voice blistering the night air.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

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

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

TREATING LABOR AS CONSUMPTION: HOW UBER JUSTIFIES ITS MANAGEMENT PRACTICES The vocabulary of technology that Uber deploys to describe its drivers and its own practices has implications for labor: it treats drivers as end users of its software, rather than as workers at all. End users is a perfect example of the language of disinformation that distances drivers from employment. The term appears in court documents in lawsuits over Uber’s allegedly illegal employment practices and in company communications with the public. The rhetorical impact of that language is clever: as a society, we might be persuaded to care about workers, but who cares about end users?


There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

Now, following an eruption of post-truth and fake news all over the world over the past few years, we turn to the third value; the critical questions of truth and trust. If we are going to live well, humans need to raise their game in this area. The rising complexity of the issues and the rising flood of both information and misinformation, sometimes accidental and sometimes intentional, means that we need to get much better at cutting out the lies, disinformation and ‘fake news’. Both sides of the Atlantic are seeing worrying lurches in the wrong direction. The consequences will surely hit us before long, and I hope will give rise to a longer lasting counter-swing in the right direction. Is there even such a thing as ‘truth’ or ‘facts’? Perhaps skip this question if my using the words ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ doesn’t trouble you.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

Eberhard told Fortune that he had no issues with Tesla as a company but he did “have problems with Elon and the way he treats people.” Musk didn’t respond warmly. “I was too busy trying to fix the fucking mess he left,” he told the magazine, explaining why he hadn’t yet told his side of the story. “I will say, I have never met someone who is as capable of creating such a disinformation campaign as Martin Eberhard.” In November 2008, Eberhard told Newsweek that he thought Musk was a “terrible CEO.” Musk responded by saying that “Martin is the worst individual I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with.” The dispute culminated in a legal tangle. In May 2009, Eberhard sued Musk and Tesla for slander.


pages: 317 words: 98,745

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

(A similar assault had been inflicted on Estonia a year earlier, when that country’s leaders made the unpopular decision to relocate the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, an elaborate Soviet-era war memorial, along with the remains of Soviet soldiers.) Desperate to stem the attacks, and hoping to counter Russia’s disinformation campaign, the Georgian government censored access to all Russia-based websites. Accustomed to seeing Russian news online, and unaware of the decision taken by their government, Georgians in the capital city of Tbilisi panicked, fearing that the blackout presaged a massive Russian ground assault.


pages: 384 words: 89,250

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Although the toy maker Modine had sold pressed-steel toy versions of Flivver trucks and sedans in its Buddy “L”series for years, the 1925 version of the Tin Lizzie was commemorated in a larger, expensive, pressed-steel Tootsie-toy in a variety of contemporary colors.16 Unfortunately, the toy’s nationwide popularity was not refle ted in sales for theModel T itself,which continuedto decline. Tin Lizzie sales were undercut by the fact, now widely known, that Ford engineers were experimenting with newer models. Some of Ford’s press releases hostilely denied this, carrying headlines such as “Ford To Fight It Out with His Old Car.”17 The company’s joint policy of secrecy and disinformation only excited press enmity, costing Ford valuable credibility and good will. But the Model T’s designer and manufacturer was desperate to protect the declining market value of an enormous backlog of cars. In Ford’s secret half-formed plan, sales revenue from these automobiles would go directly into a war chest to pay for the expensive retooling to come.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Senator William King of Utah asked the same witness whether the Bolsheviks, “the males, rape and ravish and despoil women at will?” “They certainly do,” was the answer. They are, Simons said, “the dirtiest dogs” he had ever seen in his life.21 The testimony was as fantastic and absurd as the host of manufactured atrocity stories of German soldiers entering convents to rape nuns, but it and disinformation like it galvanized the country into political passivity. The later anticommunist witch hunts differed little in their simplicity or crudity. The Times summarized the committee’s eight months of investigations with the headline “Senators Tell What Bolshevism in America Means.” The newspaper reproduced from the report 29 “salient features which constitute the program of Bolshevism as it exists to-day in Russia and is presented to the rest of the world as a panacea for all ills.”


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

Having said that, I could never deny that social media – and Twitter in particular – has given power to those shut out of the conversation, and acts very often as a sort of vigilante that metes out rough but necessary justice. I could never deny that it is, at the moment, the only tool for myth busting and disinformation outside of mainstream media. It is good that when corporations fail to do their job and hire someone with terrible views that Twitter coalesces into a shifting shoal of small minnows with an awesome power as a body working in tandem, to unearth old tweets, blogs or interviews. It breaks, or tries to break, nepotistic networks.


pages: 265 words: 93,354

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

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

Despite the tragedies of Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and a long list of other school shootings, we don’t protect our students and restrict the kinds of guns that can be purchased because some people’s allegiance is to the Second Amendment and not to the safety of our youth. Hell, look at the national response to Covid-19 in America. We can’t even come together in the face of a global pandemic. After nine months of the federal government spreading disinformation, coupled with the nation’s “me first” mentality, which resulted in many people refusing to wear a mask and socially distance, more than three thousand people were dying per day, meaning that each day we were surpassing the total deaths on 9/11. So the notion that not having children is this grand disrupter to an otherwise idyllic civilization doesn’t hold water.


pages: 304 words: 95,306

Duty of Care: One NHS Doctor's Story of the Covid-19 Crisis by Dr Dominic Pimenta

3D printing, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, fake news, global pandemic, iterative process, lockdown, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, school choice, Skype, social distancing, stem cell

We did all we could. Even in failure, that brings a peace of mind and soul that Twitter threads never did. Looking ahead, the first wave was exactly that, only the first challenge we faced. The challenges to come – a second or even third wave, a global recession, climate change, mass misinformation and disinformation, and political and societal upheaval on a generational scale – will all require more from all of us if we hope to meet them. The challenge of our generation is not behind us, it is only just beginning. I plan to continue doing something about it, and perhaps now you do as well. So stay informed, stay safe and be kind. 1.


pages: 339 words: 92,785

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

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

Russia meanwhile invests far smaller amounts in both defence and AI research than the two dominant world powers, notwithstanding Vladimir Putin’s striking claim about AI mastery leading to world control. The USSR was slow to the computerised military revolution of the 1970s, and while it’s been very active in employing computers for intelligence gathering and disinformation, there’s been little evidence of any comparable AI acumen. Russia’s great challenge is translating its industrial-era defence base into a post-industrial one that thrives on rapid innovation and creativity. Still the efficiency logic is driving the acquisition of AI in China, Russia and elsewhere—such is the impact of autonomy on fighting power that no one wants to be left behind.


pages: 406 words: 88,977

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But there are things that each of us can do. Elect leaders who will take pandemics seriously and make good, science-based decisions when the time comes. Follow their advice about masking up, staying home, and keeping your distance when you’re out. Get vaccinated when you can. And avoid the misinformation and disinformation that flood social media: Get your information regarding public health practices from reliable sources, such as the WHO, the CDC in the United States, and its equivalent in other countries. Most of all, don’t let the world forget how awful COVID was. Do whatever you can to keep pandemics on the agenda—locally, nationally, internationally—so we can break the cycle of panic and neglect that makes them the most important thing in the world for a time, until we forget about them and go back to our daily lives.


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

He called climate change “mass neurosis” and “the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn’t bring.” He suggested that Hillary Clinton was compromised as secretary of state because of the Clinton Foundation. Once again he was ahead of his time, recognizing that on Twitter, salaciousness translated to followers, and followers amounted to power. Welch was at the vanguard of a disinformation revolution, but he was not alone. A year earlier, Trump had launched his Birther campaign, falsely alleging that Obama hadn’t been born in the United States, and was thus an illegitimate president. Together, Welch and Trump had come to understand just how powerful lies could be in the age of social media.


pages: 826 words: 231,966

GCHQ by Richard Aldrich

belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial exploitation, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, friendly fire, illegal immigration, index card, it's over 9,000, lateral thinking, machine translation, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, New Journalism, operational security, packet switching, private military company, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, social intelligence, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, undersea cable, unit 8200, University of East Anglia, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

The main problem for the KGB was that it did not know how many of its previous messages had been broken by the Venona project, and which of its agents had been exposed. This made it hard for it to warn specific agents. Venona also contributed to Soviet paranoia about double agents who might be planting disinformation. The KGB’s strange tendency not to wholly trust even its best sources, including the SIS officer Kim Philby, was one manifestation of this.33 In August 1949 Philby returned from a posting in Istanbul to London. He was preparing to take over from Peter Dwyer as SIS liaison officer with the CIA in Washington, and was briefed by Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS, together with two of his senior officers, James Easton and Maurice Oldfield.

There were many voices in London now arguing that Britain was putting its own forces at risk by passing too much information to NATO.34 The experienced MI5 representative on NATO’s Special Committee, Dick Thistlethwaite, had wanted to run Roussilhe as a deception agent ‘to confuse or reduce Soviet assessment’ of the information it had received. MI5 went so far as to propose a ‘NATO disinformation cell’ that would actually turn weak NATO security into an advantage. The British sensed an opportunity to repeat the fabulous achievements of the wartime Double-Cross Committee and the famous D-Day deception. However, this was blocked by the CIA, which disliked the sheer organisational complexities of doing such a thing in Brussels.


pages: 328 words: 100,381

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

They are also deeply involved with broader efforts to sway international opinion in line with American interests. Sometimes this involves ploys such as planted newspaper stories and political advertising campaigns for foreign leaders supported by the United States. Other operations have involved intentionally passing disinformation to foreign leaders or spies in highly classified deception operations. In most cases, American involvement is hidden. Using the address Arkin gave me for DPAO, and armed with a map that the building’s property managers had put online for prospective lessees, I worked my way through the confusing underground shopping complex and tunnels that link buildings leased to the federal government in Crystal City.


pages: 351 words: 96,780

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

Andrew Bacevich, American Empire (Harvard, 2003), pp. 200ff. 8. M. J. Crozier, S. P. Huntington, and J. Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York University, 1975), report to the Trilateral Commission. 9. Randal Marlin, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (Broadview, 2002). 10. For a discussion of this vast disinformation campaign, see my Culture of Terrorism (South End, 1988) and Necessary Illusions (South End, 1989), which draw particularly on the important but mostly neglected exposés by Alfonso Chardy of the Miami Herald and later official sources. 11. On the narrow limits of permitted discussion, see my Necessary Illusions.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

This results in far more video news content that takes fewer resources to produce. AI is used to spot patterns and anomalies in data, leading journalists to surface new stories in the public interest. Rather than aiding and abetting misinformation bots, AI can ferret out propaganda, misleading claims, and disinformation campaigns. Our democracies are stronger as a result. The G-MAFIA studied the Chinese cities where smart city initiatives were piloted—such as Rongcheng, Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai—and identified best practices to pilot in the United States. We now have a few American smart cities—Baltimore, Detroit, Boulder, and Indianapolis—that are testing out a wide range of AI systems and services.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

Unreported by the blindfolded eyes of the media, PR-managed initiatives are often signed into law and adopted as standard operating procedures while the public’s civic attention is diverted by the most current scandal, crime, or catastrophe. “The best PR is never noticed” is an unwritten slogan of an industry whose arsenal includes backroom politics, fake grassroots activism, organized censorship, and imitation news. The weapon of choice is a kind of stun gun that fires invisible bullets of disinformation. You can’t remember how you formed a certain opinion or belief, but you find yourself willing to fight for it. For example, a popular corporate strategy staged by contracted PR firms is to form citizen advisory panels. This technique makes people feel included rather than polluted. Citizens are carefully chosen to attend catered lunches around the corporate conference table to discuss community issues.


pages: 469 words: 97,582

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Ada Lovelace, Apple Newton, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Stephen Fry, the built environment, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549

The Finns christened them ‘Molotov’s cocktails’, the joke being that they were ‘a drink to go with his food parcels’. They used a government vodka distillery to produce more than 450,000 of them. Their fame spread and, by the end of the War, combatants on all sides knew them as ‘Molotov cocktails’. The disinformation about food parcels was typical of Molotov. He wasn’t a soldier; he was a bureaucrat, skilled in the use of propaganda. The Finnish war resulted from the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact that he had signed with the Nazis in August 1939. (Von Ribbentrop was Molotov’s opposite number, the German foreign minister.)


pages: 328 words: 97,711

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

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

After the Berlin Wall fell, East German spy chief Markus Wolf wrote in his memoirs that by the late 1980s we were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start. On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans. The supposedly meticulous Eastern Europe division, in fact, suffered one of the worst breaches of the entire Cold War. Aldrich Ames, one of the agency’s most senior officers responsible for Soviet counterintelligence, turned out to be working for the Soviet Union. His betrayals led to the capture—and execution—of countless American spies in Russia.


pages: 370 words: 99,312

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

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

Through online platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, contemporary political propagandists, both foreign and domestic, compete to mold the beliefs of ordinary citizens, most of whom lack equal access to either reliable information or political power in the imperfectly free institutions that actually exist in modern societies. Disinformation is easier than ever to disseminate to understandably suspicious, even paranoid, citizens over global communication networks. Along with the spread of government secrecy, these ever more sophisticated means of propagating lies and creating confusion form a standing threat to any modern democracy


pages: 319 words: 101,673

The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O'Sullivan

cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, epigenetics, meta-analysis, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, social contagion, traumatic brain injury

I did not find them to be weak or troubled. The outbreak in El Carmen was being driven forward by many people, least of whom were the girls themselves. To my mind, neither the cause nor the solution lay with them. A simple mass fainting episode had been turned into a protracted medical and social problem by fear-mongering and disinformation. It had also been stoked by poor communication of the diagnosis. They had been given the correct diagnosis, but had not understood it. How could the girls get better if they believed they had been poisoned? How could they accept a functional cause for their symptoms if that was taken to mean they were crazy?


pages: 296 words: 96,568

Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert, Catherine Green

Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, global pandemic, imposter syndrome, lockdown, lone genius, profit motive, Skype, social distancing, TikTok

After that there seemed to be something every month. There were reports in August that President Trump was going to ‘fast-track’ our vaccine.5 That created brief mayhem. In September, the trial was stopped because someone became ill and we had to look into whether it was because of the vaccine. Mayhem again. In October, the Russians launched a disinformation campaign, complete with images, memes and videos, aimed at convincing people that our vaccine would turn them into monkeys.6 The Science Media Centre – a charity whose philosophy is, brilliantly, ‘the media will do science better when scientists do the media better’ – became a crucial part of our lives.


pages: 347 words: 103,518

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

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

This was a time of quarantine, an economy that crumpled like a paper cup, limited in-person school and childcare, fear, anxiety, grief, soul-crushing monotony, traumatic levels of stress, and isolation. Plus white supremacist terrorist violence, historic antiracist protests, a failed coup and insurrection, rampant anti-science misinformation and disinformation pushed at the highest levels of government. New records in natural disasters, from fires to hurricanes to ice storms. The death of more than half a million Americans from a new virus in a single year (a number that just keeps growing). It also was a year that many children were able to spend at home with their families.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

., China, and Russia, North Korea’s nuclear expansion, the frightful military standoff on the border of Ukraine, the expanding pursuit of biological weapons, the coronavirus pandemic and the threat of future pandemics, unchecked emissions of greenhouse gases that caused global warming, a plague of toxic disinformation on the Internet that had persuaded millions of Americans that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was fraudulent, among a host of other existential risks—all put the world on the edge of a cliff. “The Clock remains the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse because the world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment,” the scientists wrote.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

Having anticipated protests for decades, the monarchy acted quickly, putting into place a contingency plan prepared years earlier. Deepfake videos and forged emails were released on government websites that “proved” the protests had been instigated by Shiite spies and provocateurs from Iran. A disinformation campaign about “pernicious Western involvement” followed soon after. Most people distrusted the official accounts enough to continue the fight, but those allied to the royal family understood that their interests lay in the status quo and so did nothing. Other countries, including the US, declined to officially intervene.


pages: 398 words: 105,032

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

Basically, if you were trying to create a supervillain, this would be a pretty good way to go. Dr. Bull, who had formerly considered himself a patriot of Canada, decided he was willing to work with anyone who would bring some version of HARP back. Things get a little murkier at this point, due to the secrecy and disinformation of many parties, but in the late 1980s, Dr. Bull shows up in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, working on a supercannon called Project Babylon. Let’s say that once more: Dr. Bull shows up in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, working on a supercannon called Project Babylon. This happened. Like, in real life.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Greece, Portugal and Spain, they warned, had ‘legacy problems of a political nature’: ‘The constitutions and political settlements in the southern periphery, put in place in the aftermath of the fall of fascism, have a number of features which appear to be unsuited to further integration in the region.’7 In other words, peoples who insisted on decent welfare systems in return for a peaceful transition out of dictatorship in the 1970s must now give up these things so that banks like JP Morgan survive. Today there is no Geneva Convention when it comes to the fight between elites and the people they govern: the robo-cop has become the first line of defence against peaceful protest. Tasers, sound lasers and CS gas, combined with intrusive surveillance, infiltration and disinformation, have become standard in the playbook of law enforcement. And the central banks, whose operations most people have no clue about, are prepared to sabotage democracy by triggering bank runs where anti-neoliberal movements threaten to win – as they did with Cyprus in 2013, then Scotland and now Greece.


pages: 385 words: 105,627

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester

Berlin Wall, British Empire, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of gunpowder, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Ted Kaczynski, trade route

Beria was to be executed soon afterward, once Nikita Khrushchev had won power and had started to reverse many of Stalin’s policies and to purge their architects. But however mundane or bizarre, the episode had a certain sweet relevance to Needham’s later reputation. The revealed telegrams showed that he had operated in China and Korea in perfectly good faith, and had been a victim of a very clever and adroitly organized campaign of disinformation. He was, in other words, much more of a fool than a knave—and in truth not too much of a fool, even then. His worst crime was to have taken at face value the word of a great number of Chinese bacteriologists, men and women whom he trusted and in whom he firmly believed. In professional terms Needham was after all an exceptionally honorable man, a scientist given to following the scientists’ code—hypothesis, theory, experimentation, observation, discovery, and proof—which at every step demands a commitment to honesty and integrity, and which holds as a moral certainty the idea that results can never, ever be fudged, manipulated, or falsified.


pages: 322 words: 107,576

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Asperger Syndrome, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, food desert, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, offshore financial centre, p-value, placebo effect, public intellectual, publication bias, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, systematic bias, the scientific method, urban planning

Not only were there more lung cancers among the people receiving the supposedly protective ß-carotene supplements, compared with placebo, but this vitamin group also had more deaths overall, from both lung cancer and heart disease. The results of the other trial were almost worse. It was called the ‘Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial’, or ‘CARET’, in honour of the high p-carotene content of carrots. It’s interesting to note, while we’re here, that carrots were the source of one of the great disinformation coups of World War II, when the Germans couldn’t understand how our pilots could see their planes coming from huge distances, even in the dark. To stop them trying to work out if we’d invented anything clever like radar (which we had), the British instead started an elaborate and entirely made-up nutritionist rumour.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

All this—to simplify slightly—because of a drop in the cost of producing books. So what is happening to us, now that the Internet has engulfed us? The Internet and its cybernetic creatures have dropped, by many more orders of magnitude, the cost in money, effort, and time of acquiring and publishing information. The knowledge (and disinformation) of the species is migrating online, a click away. To take just first-order consequences, we see all around us transformations in the making that will rival or exceed the printing revolution—for example, heating up the chain reactions of scientific, technical, and economic innovation by pulling out the moderating rods of distance and delay.


pages: 413 words: 106,479

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

The Bulletin of the College Art Association of America 1(3). pp. 65–68. Laughing at a racist: Ronald de Souza. 1987. “When Is It Wrong to Laugh?” In J. Morreall, ed. The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor. State University of New York Press. pp. 226–249. far-right discussion forums: Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis. May 15, 2017. “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online.” Data & Society. datasociety.net/output/media-manipulation-and-disinfo-online/. Erin McKean tweeted: Erin McKean. June 21, 2017. twitter.com/emckean/status/877711672684584960. It’s never been easier: An Xiao Mina. January 26, 2017. “How Pink Pussyhats and Red MAGA Caps Went Viral.”


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Guardian, www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook 27Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts and Ethan Zuckerman, 2017, Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda. Columbia Journalism Review, www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php 28Robert M. Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler, 2017, Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Paper, https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/33759251/2017-08_electionReport_0.pdf Chapter 11 1R.E. Smith and B.A. Dike, 1995, Learning Novel Fighter Combat Manoeuvre Rules Via Genetic Algorithms.


pages: 410 words: 103,421

The Martian by Andy Weir

8-hour work day, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, digital map, disinformation, lateral thinking, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, side project

Guo Ming asked. “Nine hundred and forty-one kilograms, sir.” “Hmm,” Guo Ming said, “I bet NASA could work with that limitation. Why haven’t they approached us?” “Because they don’t know,” Zhu Tao said. “All our booster technology is classified information. The Ministry of State Security even spreads disinformation about our capabilities. This is for obvious reasons.” “So they don’t know we can help them,” Guo Ming said. “If we decide not to help, no one will know we could have.” “Correct, sir.” “For the sake of argument, let’s say we decided to help. What then?” “Time would be the enemy, sir,” Zhu Tao answered.


The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz

affirmative action, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, different worldview, disinformation, facts on the ground, Jeffrey Epstein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Yom Kippur War

Chomsky said, “I am opposed and have been opposed for many years, in fact, I’ve probably been the leading opponent for years of the campaign for divestment from Israel and of the campaign about academic boycotts.” 6 He also declared it to be “wrong in principle” and “unprincipled.” 7 When asked why he signed the divestment petition in view of his principled opposition to divestment, the renowned linguist explained, “No one who signs a petition is expected to approve of every word, even of large parts, if the main thrust is appropriate and sufficiently important.” 8 But, of course, divestment is the main thrust of the petition—at least to many who agreed to sign it. But not to Chomsky, whose secret agenda— the delegitimation of Israel through the spread of disinformation—he did not share with the signatories. He kept his opposition secret from most of the signatories until after their signatures had been obtained. Although Chomsky eventually characterized the call for divestment as c30.qxd 6/25/03 8:37 AM Page 205 THE CASE FOR ISRAEL 205 “a big mistake,” he would not—as some professors have now done— remove his influential name from it, since he believes that its substantive demands are valid.


pages: 364 words: 104,697

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

I passed stores lit up with lawyers buying rugs from Ephesus or a first edition of Pensées. Ah! I’d go from gallery to gallery: but I knew no one. No lawyer. No journalist. No way to read Le Monde or anything on the left. Just The Economist, which can often seem like a branch of British intelligence, full of disinformation about the Continent. (“It’s going to collapse, etc.”) And yet, if I could talk to them, these French bankers and lawyers buying rugs from Ephesus could tell me the secrets of their socialism. I stood there: afraid to go up to anyone who’s not a woman, and afraid to go up to a woman most of all.


pages: 398 words: 107,788

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

The era of festive bewilderment was over, and it was replaced by a period of revelry as the dot-com boom also fueled the newfound discovery and celebration of the open-source phenomenon. Although Microsoft stated in its internal memos that it would not lead a campaign of fear, uncertainty, and doubt against open-source products, it feverishly implemented the well-worn corporate tactic of disinformation, using everything in the company’s powerful marketing arsenal to discredit the reliability of Linux. Launching a direct attack against the bulwark of F/OSS, the GPL, Microsoft representatives described this legal agreement with three of the most feared words in the United States: cancer, communism, and un-American.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Ironically, the democratization of publishing power afforded by many-to-many networks could spell the death of social cyberspace through a form of informational littering. When i-mode users were hit by “mobile spam” sent to their telephones by computerized autodialers, DoCoMo paid out a staggering $217 million in refunds.42 The lack of a “shadow of the future” creates a vulnerability for hit-and-run artists. At least the big global disinformation factories have an incentive to maintain a relationship with their customers. Spam, a classic tragedy of the commons problem, wastes every Internet user’s time and attention. People who care more about their personal gain than the value of the network or other people’s time broadcast commercial solicitations, many of them indecent, to hundreds of millions of people at a time.


The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World―and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, disinformation, Easter island, financial innovation, Google Earth, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, polynesian navigation, seigniorage, South China Sea, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

But he closed his treatise with a warning, “To wrap up the matter: the Armenian slaves are the worst of the whites just as the Zanj are the worst of the blacks.” Ibn Butlan reminds us that globalization often led to the greater circulation of information, but not all of the information that moved was accurate. Disinformation could travel long distances, too. Ibn Butlan’s book provides an unparalleled view of the geographic origins of the slaves coming into Baghdad, the primary distribution point for slaves throughout the Islamic world in the year 1000. He lists such African origin points as the Lake Chad region, northeastern Ethiopia, central Ethiopia, Nubia in modern Sudan, North Africa, and East Africa.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

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

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

New York University researchers published a report titled “False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim That Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives,” which calls for the Biden administration to form a new “Digital Regulatory Agency” to fight dangerous ideas such as the assertion that social media companies have anti-conservative bias.46 Remind you of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth? Well, it gets worse. According to the New York Times, we now have a “reality crisis.” The solution? Experts are calling for the administration to “put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar.’” Importantly, “This task force could also meet regularly with tech platforms, and push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems… it could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.”


pages: 428 words: 103,544

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

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

We’ll see what can go wrong. And by following the story behind Nightingale’s famous rose diagram, we’ll see how powerful data visualization can be when used clearly and honestly. * * * — Much of the data visualization that bombards us today is decoration at best, and distraction or even disinformation at worst. The decorative function is surprisingly common, perhaps because the data visualization teams of many media organizations are part of the art departments. They are led by people whose skills and experience are not in statistics but in illustration or graphic design.4 The emphasis is on the visualization, not on the data.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

In the months prior to the outbreak of civil war in Syria, I led a State Department delegation on a controversial trip to Syria that included a sit-down with Bashar al-Assad. Our intention was to muscle the Syrian dictator on a series of security issues in the field of technology. The weaponization of widely available consumer technology was making it easier to surveil, spread disinformation, and both develop and destroy political movements. Our delegation was there to apply political and economic pressure to try to get Assad moving in the right direction. The thing that made this delegation walking into Assad’s office different from any other was that it was not composed of diplomats or government officials from the Pentagon or CIA.


A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan

bank run, disinformation, fake news, Ford Model T, indoor plumbing, Scientific racism, traveling salesman, W. E. B. Du Bois

“We have a son who is too young to join the Klan, and with this new order he will be able to gratify his wishes to become affiliated with a strictly American organization.” Klan Klubs were established in high schools. Hooded teens soon had their place in yearbooks in Indiana, featured along with the Glee Club or the Debate Society among the accepted extracurriculars. Steve and Barr also launched poison squads, as they were known on the inside. This was a disinformation brigade—clucks and gossips, but the best-known clucks and gossips in every community, so that false stories could be plausibly true. The fake news originated at the top and was planted at the bottom. It might be a whispered suggestion over a neighbor’s fence that a Black family was planning to move nearby.


pages: 489 words: 106,008

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

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

In some cases the validity of information, often sensitive intelligence like an agent’s reporting, was dubious and, without a full contextual understanding of the situation, of limited value. In other cases, misinformation, intentionally crafted or manipulated, as in the case of propaganda or disinformation, increased the challenge of recognizing the reality, or, as soldiers would say, ground truth, of the situation. SYMPTOMS OF COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES Failure to Transmit. A failure to send information guarantees it won’t be received. But how often do we as individuals or organizations fail to share key knowledge?


pages: 383 words: 105,387

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

The industry is Arlit’s biggest employer, and despite health concerns a job there is valued. Greenpeace and other groups have done studies suggesting high levels of radiation in the area due to the spread of radioactive dust, leading to related illnesses. Areva denies such claims, saying they are based on ‘disinformation’. Hospitals in the town are owned by the company, and the population – whether employees or not – get free healthcare. The staff at the hospitals are also employed by the company, and senior management say there have been no cases of diseases linked to radiation at the mines. The French government points out that it has contributed $10 million to a fund aimed at helping African countries negotiate deals in the extractive industries.


pages: 1,028 words: 267,392

Wanderers: A Novel by Chuck Wendig

Black Swan, Boston Dynamics, centre right, citizen journalism, clean water, Columbine, coronavirus, crisis actor, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, fake news, game design, global pandemic, hallucination problem, hiring and firing, hive mind, Internet of things, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, oil shale / tar sands, private military company, quantum entanglement, RFID, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, supervolcano, tech bro, TED Talk, uber lyft, white picket fence

“It helped us predict a multistate measles outbreak that could’ve decimated the West Coast: It saw what we did not, which was that local vaccination rates had dipped—all thanks to parents falling prey to misinformation about vaccines.” He hmmed some small approval at that: These days, misinformation—or really, disinformation—seemed so ubiquitous, it suffused the air, as common as pollen in spring. Sadie went on: “It’s not just epidemics, either—not just viruses or bacteria. We stopped a bridge collapse in Philadelphia. An Iranian computer virus that would’ve ransomed bank records. We caught a domestic terror cell operating out of Oregon, and Islamic hackers trying to attack the power grid, and a Russian spy who had long integrated himself into Blackheart, the private military contractor.”

As he pressed himself against the ground, a bit of information—a memory—flitted through his head, uninvited, like a bat in the attic. Once upon a time he’d read somewhere, or heard on the radio, that the sound of ringing in your ears was the sound of ear cells dying, their last shriek before going dark and deaf. It was probably a lie. Some misinformation. Or disinformation. Most things seemed to be anymore. For a moment, his brain lied to him, told him that Autumn was here with him, that she was underneath him, that she had come with him from Innsbrook, but she hadn’t. He was alone. So goddamn alone. The man with the gun stood there. Only five feet away. The rifle pointed up in the air.


Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy

disinformation, fear of failure, low earth orbit, nuclear winter, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route

How odd, he thought, while looking up from his notes, that he often had to speak more openly to these paid foreign spies than to members of the Party Central Committee. Spies, exactly what they were ... They could be manipulated, of course, by a skilled man with a collection of carefully prepared disinformation--which was precisely what he was about to do. But on the whole they were a threat because they never stopped doing what it was they did. It was something the Foreign Minister never allowed himself to forget, and the reason he did not hold them in contempt. Dealing with them always held potential danger.

It is now too late to retreat. This is also a political question, Petya." "NATO is mobilizing," Sergetov said. "Too late, and too halfheartedly," replied the Director of the KGB. "We have split one country from the NATO alliance. We are working on others, and are hard at work throughout Europe and America spreading disinformation about the bomb attack. The will of the people in the NATO countries is low. They will not want to fight a war for German murderers, and their political leaders will find a way to disassociate themselves from the conflict." "But not if we slaughter civilians with gas." The Foreign Minister nodded.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

No one needs a scientist to make the moral point that war is not healthy for children and other living things, or the empirical point that some places and periods are vastly more peaceable than others and that we should try to understand and duplicate what makes them so. And no one needs the bromides of the Seville Statement or its disinformation that war is unknown among animals and that their dominance hierarchies are a form of bonding and affiliation that benefits the group. What could not hurt is a realistic understanding of the psychology of human malevolence. For what it’s worth, the theory of a module-packed mind allows both for innate motives that lead to evil acts and for innate motives that can avert them.

And to those in power, other people’s emotions are even more annoying—they lead to nuisances such as women wanting men as husbands and sons rather than as cannon fodder, men fighting each other when they could be fighting the enemy, and children falling in love with a soulmate instead of accepting a betrothed who cements an important deal. Many societies deal with these nuisances by trying to regulate emotions and spreading the disinformation that they don’t exist. Ekman has shown that cultures differ the most in how the emotions are expressed in public. He secretly filmed the expressions of American and Japanese students as they watched gruesome footage of a primitive puberty rite. (Emotion researchers have extensive collections of gross-out material.)


Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson

British Empire, centralized clearinghouse, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Islamic Golden Age, operational security, Potemkin village, Scramble for Africa, zero-sum game

Nevertheless, there was initially nothing about the evacuation of Jaffa to suggest it would be anything more than one of those little forgotten footnotes of war, another point of misery for a civilian population long grown accustomed to it. But in issuing his edict, Djemal Pasha unwittingly set in motion one of the most consequential disinformation campaigns of World War I. The first link in that chain of events occurred on the night of April 17, when a twenty-seven-year-old woman was helped aboard a British spy ship trolling off the coast of Palestine. IT WAS A poignant reunion. Aaron Aaronsohn hadn’t seen his younger sister Sarah in nearly a year, but there she was in Port Said, pale and weak but alive, having just come off the Managem from Athlit.

The cuts would make him travel to the railway on hands and knees, a journey of an hour, and his nakedness would keep him in the shadow of the rocks till the sun was low.” While the Circassian’s ultimate fate is unknown, the merciful aspects of leaving a naked and crippled man out in the Syrian desert in June might reasonably be debated. By the time the raiding party returned to Bair, Lawrence had every reason to feel confident. In response to their disinformation effort, the Turks had just dispatched a four-hundred-man cavalry unit to hunt down the phantom rebel force in Wadi Sirhan. Over the previous week, the Arabs had carried out a series of hit-and-run strikes across the length of southern Syria with no discernible pattern. By now, the Turks surely thought the next attack could come most anywhere, and were distracted from the still-distant target of Aqaba.


pages: 394 words: 112,770

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

Yet there were constant tropes in his own narrative: Bannon was about to be cast out, Priebus too, and Kushner needed his protection from the other bullies. So if Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were now fighting a daily war with one another, it was mightily exacerbated by something of a running disinformation campaign about them that was being prosecuted by the president himself. A chronic naysayer, he viewed each member of his inner circle as a problem child whose fate he held in his hand. “We are sinners and he is God” was one view; “We serve at the president’s displeasure,” another. * * * In the West Wing of every administration since at least that of Clinton and Gore, the vice president has occupied a certain independent power base in the organization.


pages: 391 words: 117,984

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz

access to a mobile phone, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business process, business process outsourcing, clean water, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, Kibera, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, market design, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, tontine, transaction costs, zero-sum game

In October 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a small but effective rebel army led by Paul Kagame, entered Rwanda from Uganda. The RPF’s stated mission was to remove Rwanda’s president and make it possible for exiled Tutsis to reclaim their citizenship. At the same time, the international community was pushing Rwanda for democratic reform. This marked the beginning of fear. And with fear began the disinformation campaigns, the lying, and the manipulation by Rwanda’s leaders to instill even more defensiveness—and paranoia—in an already insecure citizenry. For the next 5 years, the question would be asked over and over: “Are you a Hutu or a Tutsi?” As tensions between the two groups increased, a growing hatred began to permeate everyday life.


pages: 474 words: 120,801

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Josef Korbel, “The Decline of Diplomacy: Have Traditional Methods Proved Unworkable in the Modern Era? Worldview, April 1962. 45. Moisés Naím, “Democracy’s Dangerous Impostors,” Washington Post, April 21, 2007; Naím, “What Is a GONGO?” Foreign Policy, April 18, 2007. 46. Another example concerns Transdniestria; see “Disinformation,” Economist, August 3, 2006. 47. Cited by Naím, “Democracy’s Dangerous Impostors.” 48. On ALBA, see Joel Hirst, “The Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas,” Council on Foreign Relations, December 2010. 49. Joe Leahy and James Lamont, “BRICS to Debate Creation of Common Bank,” Financial Times, March 2012. 50.


pages: 379 words: 118,576

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service by Eric Thompson

amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, retail therapy, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

When it had been fitted to the submarine, she looked like a gigantic, one-armed lobster. Before dawn, she had sailed. I was not cleared to know about her operation – I did not need to know that – but I suspect her mission was to snatch some Soviet listening device for intelligence assessment. Intelligence gathering is one thing but disinformation is another. For amusement, I had a photograph taken of my Alsatian dog wearing earphones in a sonar operator’s training booth. When asked by the Base Photographic Officer why it had been required, I replied tongue-in-cheek: ‘We’re planning to replace sonar operators with dogs because they can easily be trained to recognise the sound of Soviet submarines and bark if they hear one, and dogs are much cheaper than sailors.’


pages: 359 words: 113,847

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

On October 5 and 6, with the president barnstorming the country in his now almost daily series of MAGA events in friendly stadiums, Kushner was left to get his friend MBS, as well as himself, out of the Khashoggi mess. In frequent contact with the Crown Prince, Kushner effectively became a crisis manager for him. To that end, he also become the White House’s most prolific leaker of Saudi conspiracy theories and disinformation. From White House sources came the Turkish plot: blaming MBS for Khashoggi’s “disappearance” was part of Erdoğan’s plan to reestablish the Ottoman caliphate and take control of Mecca from the Saudis. From White House sources came the UAE plot: the plane carrying the assassination squad departed from Riyadh but landed in Dubai on its way to Istanbul.


The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, centre right, computer age, disinformation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, power law, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, telemarketer

And so we wait for Kevin Mitnick to phone. Career Counseling The phone startles me, and I stumble out of bed to pick up the portable. It's Eric again, calling at about four in the morning on Thursday, the last day of March, 1994. "Be very careful about what you hear about my current activities, because I am in the process of disinformation," Eric threatens in a calm, even tone. "Everything that you hear about my whereabouts or activities may not be true." Eric may be a fugitive on the run, but when it comes to his story, he's in total control. He pauses a moment and then coolly orders, "Stand by. There's some movement here. . . ."


pages: 387 words: 120,092

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge by Ilan Pappe

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, disinformation, double helix, facts on the ground, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, one-state solution, postnationalism / post nation state, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

., Studies in Historiography, Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Centre, 1978, p. 202 (Hebrew). 6 Israel Kolatt, ‘On Research and the Researcher of the History of the Yishuv and Zionism’, Cathedra, 1 (1976), pp. 3–35 (Hebrew). 7 Almog, ‘Pluralism in the History of the Yishuv and Zionism’. 8 See Norman Finkelstein, ‘Disinformation and the Palestine Question: The Not-So-Strange Case of Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial’, in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, ed., Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, London: Verso, 1988, pp. 33–70. 9 D. F. Merriam, ‘Kansas Nineteenth-Century Geologic Maps’, Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, 99 (1996), pp. 95–114. 10 J.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Our ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, who was a Kennedy liberal type, was given the job of implementing the “soft line.” Here’s how he described his task: “to do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty.” That was the soft line. There was a massive destabilization and disinformation campaign. The CIA planted stories in El Mercurio [Chile’s most prominent paper] and fomented labor unrest and strikes. They really pulled out the stops on this one. Later, when the military coup finally came [in September 1973] and the government was overthrown—and thousands of people were being imprisoned, tortured and slaughtered—the economic aid which had been cancelled immediately began to flow again.


pages: 428 words: 117,419

Cyclopedia by William Fotheringham

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed-gear, flag carrier, gentleman farmer, intermodal, Kickstarter, Northern Rock, safety bicycle, éminence grise

They devised elaborate strategies against each other: Bartali detailed a teammate to watch Coppi’s legs and warn him the moment the vein behind his knee began pulsating, as that was a sign he was weakening. Coppi asked his teammates to take Bartali out on the town before the 1948 MILAN–SAN REMO, in the hope that they would have a long night out and the “old man” would be tired the next day. They sent spies to spread disinformation, Bartali would get a teammate to search his rival’s hotel room for drugs. ANQUETIL and POULIDOR had a different relationship: there was no bitterness, at least on Poulidor’s side, and the rivalry clearly served as an extra form of motivation for “Master Jacques.” In 1967, the night before the Critérium National one-day race, he was quaffing whisky at 3 AM with his manager Raphael Geminiani when “Gem” suggested they drink to Poulidor’s win the next day—Anquetil was not planning to ride—but the joke backfired.


pages: 448 words: 116,962

Singularity Sky by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological constant, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Extropian, Future Shock, gravity well, Higgs boson, Kuiper Belt, life extension, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, quantum entanglement, skinny streets, technological singularity, uranium enrichment

Captain Mirsky stared at him inquiringly; "I thought you were busy keeping an eye on that damned chinless wonder from the Curator's Office," he commented. "Sir!" Sauer sat bolt upright. "Permission to report a problem, sir!" "Go ahead." "Security violation." Sweat stood out on Sauer's forehead. "Suspecting a covert agenda on the part of the Terran diplomat, I arranged a disinformation operation to convince her we had her number. Unfortunately, we convinced her too well; she escaped from custody with the shipyard engineer and is loose on the ship right now. I've started a search and sweep, but in view of the fact that we appear to have armed hostiles aboard, I'm recommending a full lockdown and security alert."


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

It was an American Moonves: James Williams, “The Clickbait Candidate,” Quillette, Oct. 3, 2016. Twitter accounts: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018), 58. On spectacle, see Peter Pomerantsev, “Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors,” TG, April 9, 2015. Unlike Russians Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online,” Data & Society Research Institite, 2017, 42–43, sic passim. Tamsin Shaw, “Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind,” NYR, April 20, 2017; Paul Lewis, “Our minds can be hijacked,” TG, Oct. 6, 2017. 44% figure: Pew Research Center, cited in Olivia Solon, “Facebook’s Failure,” TG, Nov. 10, 2016.


Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, disinformation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, liberation theology, Plato's cave, precariat, scientific worldview, side project, traveling salesman, wikimedia commons

The writing of flyers aside, his work there consisted of reading reports in French newspapers, collecting quotes and adjusting their sense where necessary to render them useful to German military propagandists. Not an overly demanding job, but far from ideal for a firm European like Ernst Cassirer. This occupation gave him sufficient time in the afternoons to devote himself to his own projects and studies, and to counter his duties as a producer of disinformation by writing the aforementioned Freedom and Form, and the essay “On European Reactions to German Culture.” Come what may, Kant and Goethe should have been able to be proud of him. That was his maxim, and he had no intention of deviating from it. Not even on his grueling commute between his house in Berlin’s Westend and the city center, an hour and a half each way.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

The vast riches of Silicon Valley have corrupted politics, leaving elected officials genuflecting in the direction of tech billions in the hopes of replacing jobs disrupted out of existence with data centres, company headquarters, and the gig economy. Social media companies have refused to recognise their role as publishers and gatekeepers, allowing propaganda and malicious disinformation to propagate wildly on their platforms, spreading lies and hatred, radicalising millions and potentially even affecting elections. That we are reaching a breaking point is obvious. More and more voices are calling for regulation of the internet, for untrammelled tech power to be kept in check.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

That came out to almost a dollar per vote for Eduardo Frei, more than Lyndon Johnson spent in his own 1964 campaign.42 In addition to funds, the CIA also delivered a crude “scare campaign” to the Chilean people.43 The Agency made extensive use of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, and posters, and painted the walls of the cities. One red-baiting radio ad featured the sound of a machine gun operated by murderous communists, followed by a woman declaring, “They have killed my child!” There were up to twenty radio spots of this kind per day.44 The CIA also distributed disinformation and “black propaganda,” falsely attributing materials to the Communist Party.45 Chile had been a stable democracy since 1932, and Frei was no dictator. He initiated a modest land reform program, made efforts to bring regular people into the educational system, and made taxation a bit more progressive.


pages: 444 words: 118,393

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece by Ron Jeffries

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, business cycle, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, call centre, cloud computing, continuous integration, Conway's law, creative destruction, dark matter, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, Hacker News, industrial robot, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, Mars Rover, microservices, Minecraft, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, OSI model, peer-to-peer lending, platform as a service, power law, ransomware, revision control, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software is eating the world, source of truth, SQL injection, systems thinking, text mining, time value of money, transaction costs, Turing machine, two-pizza team, web application, zero day

Imagine (or recall, if you’ve been there) trying to debug a totally novel failure mode while also participating in a 5 a.m. (with no coffee) conference call with about twenty people. Some of them are reporting the current status, some are trying to devise a short-term response to restore service, others are digging into root cause, and some of them are just spreading disinformation. We sent a system admin and a network engineer to go looking for denial-of-service attacks. Our DBA reported that the database was healthy but under heavy load. That made sense, because at startup, each instance would issue hundreds of queries to warm up its caches before accepting requests.


pages: 500 words: 115,119

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

*3 As I wrote back then: “Here in Ljubljana Haider might be in his element,” referring to Jörg Haider, the late leader of the populist and vaguely neo-Nazi Austrian Freedom Party, who hailed from the province of Carinthia just over the border, and whose support was ultimately circumscribed by Austria’s own middle-class prosperity. *4 In the years following my visit, a far-right prime minister rose to power in Slovenia, Janez Janša, a devotee of the former American president Donald Trump and the right-wing populist leader in neighboring Hungary, Viktor Orbán. Janša traded in disinformation and with Orbán’s help built a propaganda network that garnered many followers. It was an example that we are truly at the end of the modern world and into the postmodern one, in which absurdity combines with globalization to produce unimaginable outcomes. It was humbling to see a country whose experts had impressed me with such probity now drift for a time into illogic.


Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

The man who has been working behind the scenes for the past ten years—in debate prep sessions and television network green rooms, in the halls of Congress and in state capitals across the country—playing my own small part in the Republican ascension and in the Democratic collapse.* Why have I gone there, into what some of my clients and many of my colleagues would consider enemy territory? More importantly, why do the Hollywood elite welcome me? How do they know I’m not part of some nefarious Karl Roveian disinformation campaign, plotting political pranks and electoral sabotage? The answer is simple: Although my political clients may come from one side of the aisle, what I do is fundamentally nonpartisan. The ideas and principles about effective language I was to share with them in Brentwood that afternoon apply equally to Democrats and Republicans.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

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

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

(remember this when you vote).” Support for Trump was common among FBI agents and across law enforcement. But after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, and Trump falsely blamed his loss on voting fraud, Mark’s posts became increasingly extreme. Undermining the bureau’s own efforts to stem the spread of disinformation, one of the posts linked to a YouTube video supposedly showing poll workers interfering with ballots. Facebook’s independent fact-checkers flagged the video as false. “We have been told that this election was the most secure election in American history,” Mark wrote on December 12, 2020. “That is a lie.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

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

At the time humans selected the articles, and many conservatives believed that the Facebook employees so tasked were, either intentionally or unintentionally, favoring “liberal” causes at the expense of conservative ones. In response to the criticism, Facebook replaced humans with algorithms, letting computer code make the decision of which topics to show. Soon far-right stories and disinformation were dominating the section. Later studies would help uncover why, as researchers found that false news spread much faster and farther on social media than true news. False news on Twitter, for example, was found to be 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true news. Facebook researchers found that a sizeable majority of people joining extremist groups on the site were doing so because of Facebook’s own recommendation tools.41 In the meantime, though, another hostile actor had its sights set on Facebook: Russian intelligence.


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

(News organizations in January 1992 reported the story of a computer virus introduced into an Iraqi air defense system via a printer.) My first reaction was one of amazement that the National Security Agency had pulled off such a stunt. But when I thought about it further it began to seem less and less reasonable and more and more likely that the whole thing was a piece of “disinformation.” There are three ways that the printer might have been attached to the mainframe: (1) Channel attached. If it was channel-attached then there is virtually no way that it could initiate an action that would cause the modification of software on the mainframe. A printer is an output device. It can only tell the computer stuff like, “I finished printing a line,” “I have a jam,” etc.

The company that created the CRT software might well have left a “logic bomb” in the software in case Saddam pulled a stunt like he pulled. The company probably does not want it to be known that they leave such bombs in their software, so the NSA wants, again, to protect them and divert attention. I think that the disinformation theory gains some credibility from the information that is presented in the stories that are circulating. We are told almost nothing about the technical details but we are told everything about the printer. How it came in, where it came from, the approximate timeframe, everything but the serial number.

True Colors (Autumn, 1993) By Billsf There still seems to be much confusion on the color coding scheme of various “Toll Fraud Devices” (TFDs). The mainstream media has confused colors, made many up, and most important of all, usually failed to properly describe their operation. There have been many papers posted by “phreaks,” which might be considered the same kind of unintentional (?) disinformation the mainstream has put out for years. Many of the world’s best phreaks are a generation younger than the “originals” and may simply not know the operation or history or even the color that was generally agreed upon for a particular device. The real list of colors is quite short, and their operation may come as a surprise to many.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

Then, as soon as it turned the bend, they stripped off their caps and smocks, dismantled the sets, and rebuilt them overnight further downstream. Since Catherine was Potemkin’s lover at the time, it is not possible to believe that she was ignorant of the ploy; the principal dupes were the foreign ambassadors. ‘Potemkin Villages’ has become a byword for the long Russian tradition of deception and disinformation.1 Force and fraud are the stock-in-trade of all dictatorships. But in Russia Potemkinism has been a recurring theme. On this subject, the views of a professional deceptionist may not be entirely irrelevant. According to a senior KGB defector, Western opinion has been skilfully and systematically duped ever since Lenin’s NEP.

Several of the alleged NKVD murderers were reported alive and well in Russia.7 In the USSR and in communist-ruled Poland, ‘Katyń’ remained a non-subject for exactly fifty years.8 A major Soviet memorial to Nazi barbarity was erected at a nearby Byelorussian village called Khatyń, to which millions of visitors were taken in a calculated policy of disinformation. The Black Book of Polish Censorship classed Katyń as an event which could not be mentioned, even to blame the Nazis.9 Possession of the Lista Katyńska, a roll-call of the victims published abroad, was a criminal offence.10 Throughout that half-century, ‘Katyń’ offered a litmus test for the professional honesty of historians and their grasp of the realities of the Grand Alliance.

Bezymenski, The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from the Soviet Archives (New York, 1968). (‘Bezymenski’ is probably a Russian pseudonym meaning ‘nameless’.) 5. Waite, ‘Hitler’s Guilt Feelings’, 236 ff. The subject of the Führer’s allegedly abnormal anatomy may ultimately derive from a secret disinformation campaign launched by SOE in the Arab countries in 1941: Independent, 5/6 Sept. 1994. 6. After ‘Fred Karno’s Army”, from Joan Littlewood, Oh What a Lovely War! (Theatre Workshop, London, 1976). BOGUMIL 1. See Steven Runciman, The Mediaeval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (Cambridge, 1947; repr. 1984). 2.


pages: 1,800 words: 596,972

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The Arab–Jewish struggle, from the conflicting British promises of Bill Fisk’s 1914–18 war—of independence for the Arab states, and of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine—to the establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian land following the Jewish Holocaust and the Second World War, is an epic tragedy whose effects have spread around the world and continue to poison the lives not only of the participants but of our entire Western political and military policies towards the Middle East and the Muslim lands. The narrative of events— both through Arab and Israeli eyes and through the often biased reporting and commentaries of journalists and historians since 1948—now forms libraries of information and disinformation through which the reader may wander with incredulity and exhaustion. As long ago as 1938, when the British still governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, the eminent historian George Antonius was warning of the dangers of too much reliance on the vast body of literature already in existence, and his words are no less relevant today: . . . it has to be used with care, partly because of the high percentage of open or veiled propaganda, and partly because the remoteness of the indispensable Arabic sources has militated against real fairness, even in the works of neutral and fair-minded historians.

To comprehend these new press laws, it was necessary to visit Marwan Kanafani, special adviser to the president—the president of Palestine, of course—who happened to be the brother of the militant (and murdered) poet Ghassan Kanafani. “We closed Al-Watan because of the report about the president,” he announced to me. “The editor was arrested for something else—he is under arrest, yes. He is being questioned. We have also closed Al-Istiqlal. They have been involved in disinformation.” And Kanafani glanced at his computer screen as if it contained the very law under which Imad al-Falouji, editor of the Hamas newspaper, was taken from his home the previous Saturday morning by plainclothes PLO security men. Al-Falouji’s sin, it seems, was to have carried a small news item on his paper’s back page which claimed to quote a report from The Independent that Yassir Arafat had sold to a French company the right to use the name of his newly-born daughter Zahwa on its products.

In the same month, the Israeli Housing Ministry announced the sale of land for 5,000 new Jewish homes inside existing colonies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that the Jebel Abu Ghoneim colony—its identity changed to Har Homa in Hebrew—would be matched by the construction of 3,015 houses for Palestinians was denounced as “disinformation” by human rights groups. They pointed out that 18,000 permits for Palestinian homes had been promised in 1980—yet not a single one had been honoured seventeen years later. Nor was this huge illegal colonial expansion—which continued throughout the Oslo “peace process”—without active encouragement from within the United States.


pages: 432 words: 128,944

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes

Apollo 11, colonial exploitation, Columbine, disinformation, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, friendly fire, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, music of the spheres

He arrived at Tours, with all the mail intact, by 4 p.m., and delivered his despatches to the government in exile. These included a special address to the nation from Léon Gambetta, which was printed in the next day’s newspapers throughout France. Gambetta announced that Paris was preparing ‘a heroic resistance’. All Prussian disinformation should be ignored. All political parties were united. The city could hold out all winter. ‘Let all France prepare herself for a heroic effort of will!’ By the next evening the news had begun to spread like wildfire. It was not just the arrival of private mail, or Gambetta’s public message. It was the fact that the siege of Paris had been broken by a balloon.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

In this instance the purchaser (the Dutch governor-general of New Netherland, Peter Minuit) tricked the sellers: the Natives simply made a mistake. Or perhaps not. Another version of the legend has the Natives getting the better of the deal, since they never owned Manhattan Island in the first place.10 In either case the trade was based on misinformation and disinformation. The notion that the market-place was a venue in which unscrupulous merchants robbed unwitting customers, and foreign trade a means of extracting wealth from foreigners, dominated economic thought from the days of Aristotle until the mid-eighteenth century. We might honour the seventeenth-century French economist and politician Jean-Baptiste Colbert as the champion of this doctrine, since many of his compatriots – along with Ruskin, whose grasp of economics was never strong, and more recent critics of commercial activity – adhere to it still.


pages: 403 words: 125,659

It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Easter island, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, foreign exchange controls, Kibera, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, out of africa, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, upwardly mobile, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Their very relentlessness provided a clue as to who lay behind the calls. It bore all the hallmarks of a scare-off operation by Kenyan intelligence. He did not mention these calls to Kibaki. It came with the territory, he reasoned – no point going whining to the boss. But within days, a campaign of systematic disinformation was being piled onto the death threats. The aim was to sully John's reputation to the point where his professional actions would have no public credibility. The shadowy figures who had set themselves the task of smearing him chose a classic route. John might have a girlfriend of four years' standing, the loyal Mary Muthumbi, but he was that rarest of creatures: a thirty-nine-year-old African bachelor.


pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Many people have tried many things to keep their identities secret: They worry over every little detail they may have released, or refuse to answer anything about themselves, making it very difficult to form any personal ties. Quite unfortunately, it simply isn’t possible to keep your details quiet: You will eventually say something that will lead back to you, and the stalkers will find it. My approach was different: I decided to be myself, to never hide my personality, to always be who I am, but to utilize disinformation with regard to what I consider unimportant details: age, location, occupation, etc. . . . I was actually under the impression that the stalkers and psychopaths were the only people who actually believed the story; a quick examination of the time I’ve spent here should lead to the conclusion that there’s no way I could be who the statistics said I was. . . .


pages: 414 words: 121,243

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, centre right, critical race theory, DeepMind, disinformation, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, kremlinology, liberal world order, light touch regulation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, the scientific method, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

Political cults create their own reality as effectively as the Scientologists or the Exclusive Brethren. Their leaders cannot allow members to take at face value evidence that contradicts their teachings. It has to be the result of a capitalist plot or a Jewish conspiracy or the machinations of Freemasons or a disinformation campaign by the security services. To maintain control the cult must blacken the world beyond its walls. Families are the most credible source of dissonant information. Parents, husbands, wives, lovers and children are the people whose cries of ‘Get a grip!’ or ‘Don’t be daft’ are most likely to hit home.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

They are the career State Department officers who have, naively or otherwise, argued that the Sandinistas pose no threat to the Americas and who have recently redoubled their efforts to appease the Leninists in Managua with various “peace plans.” They are the media . . . whose lies about Nicaragua are exposed in Requiem. They are the world’s masters of mis-and disinformation, the Soviet KGB and their Kremlin masters, who have much to gain from America remaining ignorant. As late as 1990, with the Warsaw Pact itself having rebelled successfully against the Soviets, the magazine was still insisting that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms were merely “strategic deception,” a clever trick staged to cause headaches for the Western “pro-defense consensus.”15 Ridiculous though this stuff seems today, the IFF had good reason to believe in a world in which grand conspiracies gulled the masses and public opinion was manipulated by the hidden hand of a foreign power.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

The 2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment describes the threat this way: Future cyber operations will almost certainly include an increased emphasis on changing or manipulating data to compromise its integrity (i.e., accuracy and reliability) to affect decisionmaking, reduce trust in systems, or cause adverse physical effects. . . . Russian cyber actors, who post disinformation on commercial websites, might seek to alter online media as a means to influence public discourse and create confusion. Chinese military doctrine outlines the use of cyber deception operations to conceal intentions, modify stored data, transmit false data, manipulate the flow of information, or influence public sentiments—all to induce errors and miscalculation in decisionmaking.


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Perhaps a more disturbing phenomenon is the journalist who ends up being an outrider for serving politicians. In 2008 Kamal Ahmed, the former political editor of The Observer, had to angrily deny accusations made by Guardian journalist Nick Davies that he had been a mere conduit for Alastair Campbell in the run-up to the Iraq War. Davies claimed that Ahmed had left readers ‘slowly soaked in disinformation’ as the newspaper helped build the case for the invasion. David Aaronovitch of The Times knows of several journalists who secretly wrote for New Labour figures when they were in office. He was himself approached by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘So he calls me in, there we are, sitting in the Treasury,’ he recalls, ‘and he says to me, “What we’re looking for is big things that can encapsulate what we are.”


pages: 436 words: 123,488

Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine by John Abramson

disinformation, germ theory of disease, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, p-value, placebo effect, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

I told him that during those years I learned that public information often cannot be taken at face value and that committed scholars and journalists could make the truth available for those who cared enough to seek it out. My awakening to the potential of critical scholarship as the antidote to public disinformation purveyed by vested interests was, ultimately, what led me to write this book. To be sure, there was an element of throwing caution to the wind in leaving my practice to write an exposé of American medicine. But, I explained to my host, I had no option: not writing Overdosed America would have left me forever knowing that I had been in a position, a privileged and somewhat unique position, to explain the commercial hijacking of my profession, but that I had lacked the courage to go forward.


pages: 414 words: 123,666

Merchants' War by Stross, Charles

British Empire, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, East Village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, operational security, packet switching, peak oil, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh

He didn't know where she'd gone after the battle-my guess is, with a Wu family locket, she's somewhere in New Britain right now-but that's not the point. She spoke to him. Let me assure you that hanging her cx-boyfriend would be exactly the most effective way to make her turn traitor. She grew up in America, remember. In my opinion, the least damaging option was to spin him a line of disinformation, let his leg fester a bit, then send him back. If we're really lucky, we've got ourselves a back channel all the way to the White House. And if not-well, let's just say, whoever debriefs him is going to get a usefully skewed view of our politics." (Pause.) "That will probably keep the council from demanding your head."


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

More muscular action was not possible, however: the Korean War absorbed the attention of the U.S. and Britain, and Soviet intervention in support of Iran was a threat. A more subtle approach was needed, and the CIA devised Operation Ajax, directed by Kermit Roosevelt. The first step was to create political turmoil to undermine Mossadegh’s political support: a CIA disinformation campaign worked overtime spreading rumors designed to split secular democrats from Islamic nationalists. Finally, the military made its move in August 1953, and Mossadegh was arrested, a new prime minister was appointed, the Shah was restored to power, and the oil industry was denationalized.


pages: 377 words: 121,996

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission by Steve Gibson

Adam Curtis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, John Nash: game theory, libertarian paternalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, unbiased observer, WikiLeaks

We usually conferred on the respective mood of the troops we had encountered, difficulties with roads, any encounters with narks or other agencies and whether or not we felt we had razzed up an area too much to make it more difficult for the next tour visiting. The Mission House was fully bugged. We simply assumed everything could be overheard and responded accordingly. Quite often we used it to our own ends, not for disinformation purposes but for getting much needed repairs and supplies on time by simply broadcasting discontent to the chandeliers and other light fittings. The Mission House was also a place to calm down before returning to West Berlin. Crews would have a quick wash and brush up, vehicles would be lightly cleaned to remove excessive mud and debris, not because we wanted to be presentable but to avoid unnecessary attention on the bridge.


pages: 419 words: 119,476

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

Looking back, the Financial Times columnist Simon Kupar wrote: ‘The public schoolboys focused the Brexit campaign on an issue many ordinary Britons do care about: immigration. To people like Johnson, the campaign was an Oxford Union debate writ large. Once again, their chief weapons were rhetoric and humour.’11 But there was also a sinister and dangerous side to the war of disinformation. The Vote Leave poster that stated that after Brexit the NHS should receive ‘the £350 million the EU takes every week’ was so toxic that it was disowned by Farage. His own anti-migrant poster, featuring a queue of migrants at the Croatia–Slovenia border accompanied by the words ‘BREAKING POINT’, was reminiscent of stills from a Nazi propaganda video, and was reported to the police with a complaint that it incited racial hatred and breached UK race laws.


pages: 413 words: 128,093

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

I had had some problems with a particular diplomat, exceptionally knowledgeable, who had lied to me on a story in the past. After that incident, we made up and agreed there would be no more lies. Particularly, we agreed that if there was something that he didn’t want to talk about, he would just decline to discuss it, rather than spin some disinformation tale. This time I invoked that agreement in advance. I said I had something highly sensitive related to the Zia crash. I didn’t want to be lied to about it, so if the diplomat found he couldn’t discuss it for whatever reason, I wanted him to just say so, and not make something up. I was told by the chief embassy public relations officer that this proposal had been transmitted and agreed upon.


pages: 475 words: 127,389

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

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

As psychologist Matthew Lieberman put it, “Our brains are built to ensure that we will come to hold the beliefs and values of those around us.”36 * * * Truth is another casualty of plague. Some of the most damaging and self-injurious responses to an epidemic are denial and lies. Deadly epidemics always drag along these sidekicks. Unfortunately, modern media technologies provide a bonanza of disinformation, the sort of thing that charlatans of earlier epochs could only dream of. In the case of coronavirus, the pandemic began with one particularly big lie that originated in China right at the start and lasted through the middle of January: the suppression of information about what was happening in Wuhan.


pages: 413 words: 120,506

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

All US diplomacy during the war flowed from that shared conviction. The PLO thus faced not only fierce military pressure from Israel, but also unremitting diplomatic coercion from Israel’s US ally. That coercion was intense and constant, and it was accompanied by Israeli and American campaigns of disinformation and deception about the course of the negotiations, designed to sap Palestinian and Lebanese morale and precipitate a quick surrender. Meanwhile, the United States also provided indispensable material support to its ally, to the tune of $1.4 billion in military aid annually in both 1981 and 1982.


pages: 1,117 words: 305,620

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

active measures, air freight, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, blood diamond, business climate, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Hangouts, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, information security, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, land reform, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, WikiLeaks

“Under a secret program code-named SCREEN HUNTER, JSOC, augmented by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and contract personnel, was authorized to shadow and identify members of the ISI suspected of being sympathetic to al-Qaeda,” Ambinder and Grady wrote. “It is not clear whether JSOC units used lethal force against these ISI officers: one official said that the goal of the program was to track terrorists through the ISI by using disinformation and psychological warfare.” Despite this incredible opportunity, neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan would be given top billing in the Bush administration’s war plan. Instead, the top-tier operators from JSOC and the CIA were again redirected to Iraq to confront the rapidly spreading insurgency, which had made a farce of the administration’s claims that US forces would be welcomed as liberators.

Nance believed that, given the clan-based power structure that ruled Somalia—and its repeated marginalization of foreign agents and widespread rejection of foreign occupation—the United States could have waged a propaganda war against the relatively small number of al Qaeda operatives around the Courts to “break their mindset, break their reason for being.” “Wouldn’t it be a lot more fun to brand al Qaeda as a non-Islamic cult? And to the point where people won’t sell them bread, to where when they go out in a battlefield, people will fight against them.” US intelligence, he asserted, should have run disinformation ops to portray them as “Satanists or people who are anti-Islam.” He added: “We should have gone after them that way, and that would have helped every dimension of breaking the organization.” The potential for any success from Nance’s proposed strategy is debatable, given the clan system in Somalia and the fierce opposition to outside influence.


Autonomia: Post-Political Politics 2007 by Sylvere Lotringer, Christian Marazzi

anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, business cycle, collective bargaining, dematerialisation, disinformation, do-ocracy, feminist movement, full employment, Great Leap Forward, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, social intelligence, wages for housework, women in the workforce

For further explanations, we advise journalists and all interested parties to address themselves to the Chief of Security Services' Emilio Santillo, who has a reputation as an expert in the field and as an infallible marksman: beyond clarification of a general nature, he can explain the operation of the Colt python 357 caliber Magnum, Which he always carries on him_ There was a great need for this, considering the confusion reining among the zealous directors of the disinformation newspapers. Lately, on several occasions, we have heard talk of a phantom "38 special". Well, this weapon no longer exists. It Is the product of the p'erverse l.magination of jQurnalists who confuse the trademark of a particular weapon (the Walther 38, the number 38 referring to the year of manufacture) with the 38 special, which is not a particular weapon or model, but a caliber, and, moreover, not a caliber used in semiautomatic pistols (like the Walther), but In revolvers.


Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

disinformation, Drosophila, failed state, Future Shock, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pneumatic tube, technological singularity, Vernor Vinge

“The world has changed, Robert. Nowadays, I can get answers in ways that would have been impossible twenty years ago. A hundred thousand people all over the world collaborated in my search, in little bitty parts of it that no one ever recognized. The biggest risk is that my results are simply bogus. Disinformation is king nowadays. Even when the lies are not deliberate, there are the various fantasy groups out there trying to torque reality around to their latest adventure game. But if we’re getting fooled, it’s not an ordinary con job. There are details and corroboration that come from too many independent sources.”


pages: 474 words: 130,575

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

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

“They drew on a wide range of resources: labor unions, advertising agencies, college professors, journalists, and student leaders.”36 In Munich, the CIA set up Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation From Bolshevism (later renamed Radio Liberty), which beamed propaganda in several languages via powerful antennas in Spain into the Soviet Union and Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. These stations had a combined annual CIA budget of $35 million—an enormous sum in the 1950s—but the agency’s involvement was hidden by running everything through private front groups.37 They broadcast a range of materials, from straight news and cultural programming to purposeful disinformation and smears aimed at spreading panic and delegitimizing the Soviet government. In some cases, the stations, especially those targeting Ukraine, Germany, and the Baltic States, were staffed by known Nazi collaborators and broadcast anti-Semitic propaganda.38 Although slanted and politicized, these stations provided the only source of unsanctioned outside information to the people of the Soviet bloc.


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

The Nobelist then noted, without having to name the name, that a “certain columnist, I’ve heard, had fresh boxers FedEx’d to himself every day.” 27 Take a look for yourself. This document and others at GregPalast.com/ VulturesPicnic. Warning: An IMF spokesman says, “Palast is the master of disinformation.” I didn’t write the documents. 28 That story and others, just too weird for print, are included in the interactive editions “extras” and at GregPalast.com/VulturesPicnic.com. 29 To cover their tracks on the election steal, Rove and Griffin fired United States Attorney (Captain) David Iglesias, who then gave me some of the skinny on the scheme.


pages: 476 words: 144,288

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had ever understood the intricacies of the Manhattan Project, only the military power it would give them. Until Hiroshima, Beria had been deeply sceptical that the bomb would work. All the intelligence reports from the atomic spies passed across his desk and as one of his aides at the NKVD, Anatoly Yatskov, said, ‘Beria suspected disinformation from these reports, thinking [the Americans and British] were trying to draw us into huge expenditure of resources and effort on work which had no future. Beria remained suspicious about the intelligence even when work on the atomic bomb was in full swing in the Soviet Union. Once when an agent was reporting . . .


pages: 566 words: 153,259

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

I care about kids.” In her e-mail to me, Fisher wrote, “As you know, character assassination in order to demonize and marginalize individuals or groups belonging to a minority in society is a classic form of propaganda. Historically, it has been used as a component in overt and covert political disinformation campaigns designed to neutralize individuals and groups dissenting from the majority opinion.” Then, citing the fact that Wired shares a corporate parent with Vanity Fair, where I am a contributing editor, she wrote, “I hope you understand why I cannot subject myself to another opportunity to have my position mischaracterized and my reputation further damaged by foolishly trusting again and cooperating with a journalist I don’t know, who works for Condé Nast.”


pages: 436 words: 125,809

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Then, he said that US laws were being used to the advantage of political elites. On the issue of left-leaning hacks he grew invigorated. You knew the media was lying, he shouted, because they still call themselves journalists. It was an intriguing finger to point. After all, the NRA are masters of the art of inflammatory disinformation. They talk about the ‘spillover’ of border violence and homicidal immigrants – without acknowledging the harm that US guns cause south of the border. They see the perceived threat of terrorism as underpinning the need for American citizens to bear arms,57 even though in 2013 only sixteen US citizens were killed worldwide from terrorism.58 The same year there were 32,351 firearm deaths in the US.59 Having said this: what do you expect?


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

“Unlikely Forum for Iran’s Youth.” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2008. “Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft Bing in the ‘Arabian Countries.’” OpenNet Initiative, March 4, 2010. opennet.net/sex-social-mores-and-keyword-filtering-microsoft-bing-arabian-countries. Snyder, Alvin A. Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War. New York: Arcade, 1997. Sola Pool, Ithiel De. “Communication in Totalitarian Societies.” In Handbook of Communication, edited by Ithiel De Sola Pool, W. Schramm, N. Maccoby, and E. Parker, 463-474. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973.


pages: 487 words: 139,297

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns

Berlin Wall, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, technology bubble, transfer pricing, unemployed young men, working-age population, éminence grise

At one point, the UN refugee agency suggested the number could be as high as 600,000, the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs said 439,500, while the U.S. general Edwin Smith put the figure at 202,000 and the Canadian general Maurice Baril at 165,000. Filip Reyntjens, The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996–2006 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 85–86. 3 Quoted by Johan Pottier, Re-imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 175. 4 Ibid., 175. 5 Beatrice Umutesi, Fuir ou mourir au Zaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 131. 6 Ibid., 147. 7 Forced Flight: A Brutal Strategy of Elimination in Eastern Zaire, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), May 1997, www.msf.org/msfinternational/invoke.cfm?


Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley Phd

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

(Perhaps surprisingly, the Drudge Report is the must-see Web site for top-ranked journalists, while the National Enquirer carries an excellent reputation among those same journalists for investigative reporting.)33 At high social levels, the game of “find the Machiavellian” can become a house of mirrors, because disinformation is always rampant. Each political party, which naturally includes its own Machiavellians, has a vested interest in characterizing the other candidates and parties as Machiavellian. At the same time, each party's followers can't help but reassure themselves that their candidate and party couldn't possibly be Machiavellian, aside, perhaps, from a cursory jot and tiddle.


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

In October 2017, Joris Luyendijk made a heartfelt plea to the English in the pages of Prospect magazine. Joris is a journalist who was born and brought up in the Netherlands, but who has lived in the UK since 2011. He specialised in reporting on British banking. He asked the following questions: Why would you allow a handful of billionaires to poison your national conversation with disinformation – either directly through the tabloids they own, or indirectly, by using those newspapers to intimidate the public broadcaster? Why would you allow them to use their papers to build up and co-opt politicians peddling those lies? Why would you let them get away with this stuff about ‘foreign judges’ and the need to ‘take back control’ when Britain’s own public opinion is routinely manipulated by five or six unaccountable rich white men, themselves either foreigners or foreign-domiciled?


pages: 458 words: 137,960

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Albert Einstein, call centre, dematerialisation, disinformation, escalation ladder, fault tolerance, financial independence, game design, late fees, Neal Stephenson, Pepsi Challenge, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, side project, telemarketer, walking around money, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

We told each other what movies we were currently watching and what books we were reading. We even began to exchange theories and to discuss our interpretations of specific passages in the Almanac. I couldn’t make myself be cautious around her. A little voice in my head kept trying to tell me that every word she said could be disinformation and that she might just be playing me for a fool. But I didn’t believe it. I trusted her, even though I had every reason not to. I graduated from high school in early June. I didn’t attend the graduation ceremony. I’d stopped attending classes altogether when I fled the stacks. As far as I knew, the Sixers thought I was dead, and I didn’t want to tip them off by showing up for my last few weeks of school.


pages: 462 words: 142,240

Iron Sunrise by Stross, Charles

blood diamond, disinformation, dumpster diving, Future Shock, gravity well, hiring and firing, industrial robot, life extension, loose coupling, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, phenotype, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, quantum entanglement, RFID, side project, speech recognition, technological singularity, trade route, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

It all happened too smoothly to notice by accident. Something in one of her pockets twitched, then began to recite brightly: “We provide a wide range of business services, including metamagical consultancy, stock trading and derivatives analysis systems, and a full range of communications and disinformation tools for the discerning corporate space warrior. If you would like to take advantage of our horizontally scalable—” Wednesday reached into her pocket and picked up her travel voucher by the loose skin at the scruff of its neck. “Just shut up.” It fell silent and drew its tail up, clutching it with all six paws.


pages: 520 words: 129,887

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

On September 7, 2002, Bush himself falsely claimed that the IAEA, the lead global agency in dealing with proliferation issues, had issued a report saying that Iraq was just six months away from developing a nuclear weapon.10 A few months later, on January 27, 2003, the director general of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the United Nations Security Council that there was no evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq and that the aluminum tubes that were a focal point of the U.S. disinformation program “would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges” needed to enrich uranium.11 ElBaradei, of course, was right. After the invasion, the U.S. military never found any nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But that didn’t stop the Bush administration from belittling the agency and ElBaradei.


Jennifer Morgue by Stross, Charles

Boeing 747, call centre, Carl Icahn, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, disintermediation, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, Etonian, haute couture, interchangeable parts, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, operational security, PalmPilot, planetary scale, RFID, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, stem cell, telepresence, traveling salesman, Turing machine

It'd be tedious at the best of times, but right now it's positively nightmarish; the plan has already run off the rails, and the worst thing of all is, I can't even yell at him. I'm committing this goddamn contract that we're never going to use to memory, seemingly at Angleton's posthypnotic command, but the shit has hit the fan and Ramona's a prisoner. I'd gnash my teeth if I was allowed to. I've got a feeling that Angleton's sneak strategy — use me to leak disinformation to the Black Chamber via Ramona, of course — is already blown, because I don't think Billington is serious about running an auction. If he was, would he be dicking around risking a murder investigation in order to push a line of cosmetics? And would he be kidnapping negotiators? This is all so out of whack that I can't figure it out.


pages: 452 words: 134,502

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Both of them, being Southern California Democrats, took massive amounts of money from Hollywood. Sherman took a populist line throughout the campaign, and at the debate he called SOPA “not well-designed.” Berman, still in thrall to Hollywood cash, described SOPA as a “property rights” issue, and chalked up the recent takedown of the legislation to a “disinformation campaign.” You couldn’t drive around the Valley without seeing Berman campaign material after that. Berman held fundraising events at the homes of just about every big donor in Hollywood. He was even a special guest when President Obama held a fundraiser at George Clooney’s house. They just finished the campaign.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Davis’s work was inconclusive, but Clear’s comment, which he later said was intended as a harmless joke, meant the Irishman was inundated with e-mails. He has since vehemently denied creating bitcoin and has pleaded with people to leave him alone. Convinced that Davis was caught out by a probable disinformation campaign by the founder—as if Nakamoto’s Britishisms and Times of London reference were planted to throw trackers off the scent—New York University journalism professor Adam Penenberg turned his attention elsewhere. In an article for Fast Company he pointed to three names who’d jointly filed cryptocurrency-relevant encryption patents around the time of bitcoin’s release: Neal King and Charles Bry, who both resided in Germany, and Vladimir Oksman, living in the United States.


pages: 468 words: 137,055

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

Bidzos felt in his bones that the silence resulted not from a failure of his sales prowess, but from clandestine pressure from Maryland. He even came to wonder about the nature of a relationship he had with a woman who for some reason spontaneously began giving him inside dope on the NSA. It had seemed plausible at the time, but later he wondered whether she was being paid to feed him disinformation. “I believe in the intelligence community they call it a ‘honey trap,’ ” he later said. It was ironic that from time to time people would still wonder whether Bidzos was some sort of double agent, putting on a charade of fighting the NSA while secretly implanting back doors in his company’s technology.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

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

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

She voted against deep budget cuts to the EPA, opposed Trump’s rollback of the Clean Power Plan, and voted to block him from withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. She and Carlos were among the first Republicans to call for the resignation of EPA director Scott Pruitt after multiple corruption scandals, and cosponsored the Honest Ads Act, which would combat foreign disinformation like the kind that helped get Trump elected. After the Trump administration ordered children to be separated from their parents at the border in 2018, Elise cosponsored the Family Reunification Act. When Trump forced a government shutdown to demand money for a border wall, Elise voted with Democrats to reopen the government.


pages: 1,149 words: 141,412

The Intelligence War Against the IRA by Thomas Leahy

disinformation, long peace, operational security

After poison was allegedly discovered in the loyalist wing, Hughes recalls ‘mad hysteria’. The IRA monitored all food and water. The plot thickened. Heatherington withdrew the original names he had provided and created a new list. Hughes was in disbelief: ‘he was playing with me. It was basic counter-intelligence disinformation that they were spreading’. Hughes added: ‘we were in total disarray … You didn’t know who was a tout, or who was going to poison you’. McGrogan and Heatherington were acquitted and left prison. The IRA abducted Heatherington and killed him in Belfast on 6 July 1976. The IRA killed Myles McGrogan later in the Lisburn area in April 1977.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

., GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History (Princeton University Press, 2014). 22 ‘Business Roundtable Members’, Business Roundtable, https://www.businessroundtable.org/about-us/members. 23 Milton Friedman, ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits,’ New York Times magazine, 13 September 1970. 24 ‘Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote “An Economy That Serves All Americans”’, Business Roundtable, 19 August 2019, https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans. 25 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Amazon execs labeled fired worker “not smart or articulate” in leaked PR notes’, Guardian, 3 April 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo. 26 Chris Smalls, ‘Dear Jeff Bezos, instead of firing me, protect your workers from coronavirus’, Guardian, 2 April 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/02/dear-jeff-bezos-amazon-instead-of-firing-me-protect-your-workers-from-coronavirus. 27 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Amazon execs labeled fired worker “not smart or articulate” in leaked PR notes’. 28 ‘AG James’ Statement on Firing of Amazon Worker Who Organized Walkout’, Office of the New York State Attorney General, https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2020/ag-james-statement-firing-amazon-worker-who-organized-walkout. 29 Brad Smith, ‘As we work to protect public health, we also need to protect the income of hourly workers who support our campus’, Microsoft, 5 March 2020, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/03/05/covid-19-microsoft-hourly-workers/. 30 See for example Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s bill in July 2019 to curb smartphone addiction by banning the ‘infinite scroll’ of social media feeds, and limiting an individual’s social media usage to thirty minutes a day across all devices, Emily Stewart, ‘Josh Hawley’s bill to limit your Twitter time to 30 minutes a day, explained’, Vox, 31 July 2019, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/31/20748732/josh-hawley-smart-act-social-media-addiction); or EU industry chief Thierry Breton’s warnings in February 2020 that should major tech platforms fail to adequately curb hate speech and disinformation, tougher rules and penalties would be forthcoming (‘EU threatens tougher hate-speech rules after Facebook meeting’, DW, 17 February 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/eu-threatens-tougher-hate-speech-rules-after-facebook-meeting/a-52410851). 31 ‘Camden Council tackles the climate crisis’, see video at: https://youtu.be/JzzWc5wMQ6s.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Joe Romm, “Obama Science Advisor John Holdren Schools Political Scientist Roger Pielke on Climate and Drought,” ThinkProgress, March 3, 2019, https://thinkprogress.org. Lindsay Abrams, “FiveThirtyEight’s Science Writer Accused of Misrepresenting the Data on Climate Change,” The New Republic, March 19, 2014, https://www.salon.com. 32. Joe Romm, “Why Do Disinformers like Pielke Shout Down Any Talk of a Link Between Climate Change and Extreme Weather?,” ThinkProgress, June 23, 2009, https://thinkprogress.org/. Joe Romm, “Foreign Policy’s ‘Guide to Climate Skeptics’ includes Roger Pielke,” ThinkProgress, February 28, 2010, https://thinkprogress.org. 33. Christina Larson and Joshua Keating, “The FP Guide to Climate Skeptics,” Foreign Policy, February 26, 2010, https://foreignpolicy.com. 34.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

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

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

Yet, during critical early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American masses were not the first to swear that the virus was not transmissible among humans, that masks and quarantines were of little utility, and that xenophobia, not health concerns, drove travel bans. Instead the experts of the World Health Organization promulgated such disinformation—often on the prompt and under the influence of the nontransparent communist Chinese government. Another shared trait of contemporary globalism is a thinly veiled desire to use an autocracy’s coercive means to enact progressive ends as defined by global standards. In the case of China, globalists praise Beijing’s supposed concern with global warming and its strong-arm ability to implement mass transit and vertical urban living.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Brand had an early inkling of some of the forces that would radically reshape the world three decades later when the cyberworld the WELL presaged became the world’s predominant communications channel. What would drive Brand away from the WELL foreshadowed on a microscale the online culture of trolls, filter bubbles, disinformation, surveillance, and censorship that has come to deeply trouble the entire world in the past decade. Brand’s disaffection was complicated by the fact that the WELL’s growth had been strong up until 1991 and then slowed visibly, and it was not clear whether the slowdown was due to the national recession or some other reason.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

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

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

But, significantly, nicotine is later added to achieve the desired nicotine content. By the mid-1950s, cigarettes were already under assault after a stream of disturbing reports linking smoking and lung cancer. As researchers, doctors, and public health officials tried to warn Americans that smoking can be lethal, Philip Morris joined an industry-led disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting critics. No evidence can be found in industry records indicating that McKinsey played a role in this deception, but for a company so deeply involved in Philip Morris’s business, it strains credibility to believe the consultants were not aware of it. One fact is undeniable.


pages: 495 words: 154,046

The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler

affirmative action, airport security, computer age, disinformation, facts on the ground, fudge factor, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, Mikhail Gorbachev, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, RFID, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, working poor, zero-sum game

During the postwar anxiety over communist infiltration, however, federal agencies evaded the law covertly, and their targets spread exponentially beyond suspected communists to political, labor, civil rights, and antiwar organizations that dared to push against the status quo. We know the details thanks mainly to Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who chaired a relentless investigation in 1976, collecting testimony and documents that exposed the remarkable breadth of the government’s surveillance, disinformation, and dirty tricks against legitimate and constitutionally protected political activity.43 Not only the FBI—through its infamous Counterintelligence Program called COINTELPRO—but also the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Internal Revenue Service, and army intelligence were secretly mobilized against dissident groups and individuals.


Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Columbine, content marketing, deskilling, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, game design, George Gilder, global village, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, no-fly zone, profit motive, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SimCity, slashdot, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, the market place, Y Combinator

Every week, the eagerly anticipated results are fodder for water cooler discussions and get reported as news, even on rival networks. Survivor is television for the Internet age—designed to be discussed, dissected, debated, predicted, and critiqued. The Survivor winner is one of television's most tightly guarded secrets. Executive producer M a r k Burnett engages i n disinformation campaigns trying to throw smoke i n viewers' eyes. Enormous fines are written into the contracts for the cast and crew members if they get caught leaking the results. A n d so a fascination has g r o w n u p around the order of the "boots" (the sequence i n w h i c h the contestants get rejected from the tribe), the "final f o u r " (the last four contestants i n the competition), and especially around the "sole survivor" (the final w i n ner of the million-dollar cash prize).


pages: 669 words: 150,886

Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power by Patrick Major

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Easter island, falling living standards, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-materialism, Prenzlauer Berg, refrigerator car, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine

All of this was captured by western cameras and the photograph of Fechter’s lifeless body being carried away became an icon of West German anticommunism.²²² Soviet vehicles were subsequently stoned by West Berliners as they passed through the checkpoint, and among eastern onlookers the Stasi reported ‘extremely negative discussions’.²²³ The regime was understandably keen to suppress news of such incidents, and East German trigger-happiness even led to calls for restraint from Soviet superiors.²²⁴ MfS disinformation campaigns denied any killings at the Wall. The wounded were held in isolation wards, and only close relatives of the dead were informed, sometimes with misleading death certificates, but never permitted to view the body, which was often pre-emptively cremated.²²⁵ By far the bloodiest years were the 1960s.


pages: 482 words: 161,169

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

It was discovered in 1990 to be the front for a covert assassination and espionage unit, used to eliminate enemies of the apartheid regime abroad.3 While in the CCB, Barlow, who is recognizable by his one green and one blue eye, was assigned to Western Europe. There, he was in charge of spreading disinformation against Nelson Mandela's African National Congre^ (ANC), for example, releasing propaganda in England that the ANC was working with IRA terrorists. He was also responsible for setting up front corporations to evade sanctions and sell South African weapons abroad. During this time, Barlow is suspected to have made many of his corporate world contacts that would later prove useful for EO.


pages: 488 words: 150,477

Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, colonial rule, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, one-state solution, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, three-masted sailing ship, Yom Kippur War

The "push the Jews into the sea" remark is recalled by Dalia and cited to me in many interviews by both Arabs and Israelis. For perceptions of the strength of the Israeli army, see Shlaim, pp. 239-40. Numerous Arab sources express skepticism that the "push them into the sea" comments were ever uttered. Heikel (p. 141) suggests this was "a remarkably successful piece of disinformation." He recalls that following Indian president Nehru's concerns about the quoted threat, "a committee consisting of senior officials from Yugoslavia, India and Egypt was set up to sift through all public remarks by Nasser and Egyptian ministers," and that they found "no trace of the alleged comment."


pages: 489 words: 148,885

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

"They are become almost as bad as AP and Reuters since they go public," she adds. "All these wire services! And they are, ah, stingy. The CIA does not understand that good news must be paid for at market rates if freelance stringers are to survive. They are to be laughed at. It is so easy to plant disinformation on them, almost as easy as the Office of Special Plans… " She makes a banknote-riffling gesture between fingers and thumb. By way of punctuation, a remarkably maneuverable miniature ornithopter swoops around her head, does a double-back flip, and dives off in the direction of the liquor display.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

It’s a sensitivity to class and to the political economy of digital media—its basis in surveillance, its reliance on user-supplied data, its erosion of privacy. With citizenship comes a growing sense that we are largely disenfranchised, that digital serfdom means not just producing data but producing data and content that is true. If we withhold information from the platform owner, or better yet, if we add disinformation to the mix and try to get it to spread through the usual viral channels, then we are acting against the platform owner’s desires. This isn’t violent insurgency, nor is it street protests on behalf of civil rights. The goals here may not be lofty, much less articulated. But these “willful acts of obfuscation,” as Leibovitz calls them, say a lot about the standards that platforms expect from us and how we might subvert them.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

This focus on form helps us clarify the significance (and also the limitations) of the RMA and the counterinsurgency strategies of asymmetrical conflicts. Certainly, especially at a technological level, the RMA dictates that the traditional military apparatuses use networks more and more effectively—information networks, communications networks, and so forth. Distributing and blocking information and disinformation may well be an important field of battle. The mandate for transformation is much more radical than that: the military must not simply use networks; it must itself become a full matrix, distributed network. There have long been efforts by traditional militaries to mimic the practices of guerrilla warfare—with small commando units, for example—but these remain at a limited scale and on a tactical level.


pages: 566 words: 151,193

Diet for a New America by John Robbins

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, clean water, disinformation, Flynn Effect, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, ocean acidification, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Review

Their goal has been to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,” according to an internal strategy memo unearthed by journalist Ross Gelbspan.17 Their motives are transparent. ExxonMobil made more money in 2006, 2007, and 2008 than any other company in the history of the world. Chevron was close behind. To some extent, this disinformation campaign has been successful. Many of us believe that considerable controversy about global warming still exists. Are scientists sure it is a reality? And even if the planet is warming, is the trend being caused by human activities or by natural events? But the consensus seems quite clear. In 2010, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 97 percent of scientific experts agree that it is “very likely that anthropogenic [human-caused] greenhouse gases have been responsible for most of the unequivocal warming of the Earth’s average global temperature in the second half of the twentieth century.”18 What about the 3 percent who remain unconvinced?


pages: 566 words: 144,072

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones

belling the cat, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, failed state, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, open borders, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, trade route, zero-sum game

Hekmatyar, who spoke excellent English, was renowned for his staunch Islamic views and a disdain for the United States that was surpassed only by his hatred of the Soviets. In 1985, on a visit to the United States, he had refused to meet with President Ronald Reagan—despite repeated requests from Pakistan’s leaders—out of concern that he would be viewed as a U.S. puppet. During the Afghan War, the KGB established a special disinformation team to split apart the seven mujahideen leaders, and Hekmatyar was one of its prime targets. Milton Bearden, who served as the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989 and worked with the mujahideen, described Hekmatyar as “the darkest of the Afghan leaders, the most Stalinist of the Peshawar Seven, insofar as he thought nothing of ordering an execution for a slight breach of party discipline.”


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

In the process, these simulacra ‘participate in the construction of a discourse of security which is self-fulfilling’.121 Multiple layers and circuits of simulation work collectively to evacuate the possibility of authenticating what might actually be ‘real’. ‘Since 9/11’, writes James Der Derian, ‘simulations (war games, training exercises, scenario planning, and modeling) and dissimulations (propaganda, disinformation, infowar, deceit, and lies) [have produced] a hall of mirrors, reducing the “truth” about the “Global War on Terror” to an infinite regression of representations that [defy] authentication.’122 Because the worlds of threat and risk are projected through this simulacral collective, the perpetration of state violence and colonial war emerge from the same collective as necessary, just and honourable.


pages: 509 words: 153,061

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Thomas E. Ricks

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Berlin Wall, classic study, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, interchangeable parts, It's morning again in America, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman

Integrity is critical to this fight. Don’t put lipstick on pigs. Acknowledge setbacks and failures, and then state what we’ve learned and how we’ll respond. Hold the press (and ourselves) accountable for accuracy, characterization, and context. Avoid spin and let facts speak for themselves. Challenge enemy disinformation. Turn our enemies’ bankrupt messages, extremist ideologies, oppressive practices, and indiscriminate violence against them. • Fight the information war relentlessly. Realize that we are in a struggle for legitimacy that in the end will be won or lost in the perception of the Iraqi people. Every action taken by the enemy and United States has implications in the public arena.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The Financial Services Authority issues large fines to banks and insurance companies that do not comply with its regulatory guidelines; the Press Standards Commission would have the same statutory powers over the accuracy of newspapers’ content to bring them into the same regulatory ambit as television and radio. The angling, slanting and sensationalising of news would become more obviously the preserve of the comment and opinion pages, and there would be faster redress over malicious disinformation. This would open the way to a significant relaxation of the libel laws. Before a libel case could be heard, plaintiffs would have to show that they had not received satisfactory redress from the Press Standards Commission. Thus the presumption would automatically shift from today’s guilt to innocence, and an initial hearing could be heard at a low-cost tribunal rather than in an expensive court.


pages: 438 words: 146,246

Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky by Oleg Gordievsky

active measures, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing, urban sprawl, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, working poor

Later, official corruption became ramp-ant, as the KGB, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Central Committee, Ministry of Defence and other bodies all put in their lists, and places went to the names on them, regardless of merit; in my time perhaps only 10 or 15 per cent were admitted because they had special connections. One such was the adopted son of General Agayants, a powerful KGB official. The father was a clever, imaginative Armenian, who founded and ran the Department of Disinformation, but his son had no brains or will to work. When I heard the answers he gave in his final exam in international law, in 1962, I could scarcely believe my ears: it was clear that in six years he had learnt nothing. He had evidently thought that because he was the son of somebody important he could cruise through college without making any effort.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

The increasing pressure on middle-class manufacturing and service jobs due both to technological advances and to competition from countries like China and India, the rise of spreading hate through social media, and high levels of refugee flows, all in the context of a major global financial crisis, have no doubt put pressure on elements of even nations with strong economic security policies. Part of the story in Sweden’s radical far-right rise is that as in numerous other Western democratic states, the rise of nativist sentiment has been fueled in part by an online disinformation campaign coming from Russian and American far-right entities.18 Indeed, the deep economic pain caused by a severe global financial crisis—and the resentment of remedies that were seen as protecting either wealthy financial culprits or undeserving fellow citizens—may have lit on fire these brewing economic pressures.


pages: 529 words: 150,263

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, biofilm, Black Swan, Boeing 747, clean water, coronavirus, disinformation, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, moral panic, Pearl River Delta, Ronald Reagan, Skype, the built environment, the long tail, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

There were other lessons, too. Perhaps the biggest was that for all that the internet and new web-crawling technologies had given the WHO the ability to monitor disease outbreaks occurring far from the eyes of prying international health officials, governments still had considerable powers to cover up outbreaks and spread disinformation within their own borders, especially where it was felt that transparency might be detrimental to their economic and political interests. Indeed, it was not until mid-April, when a Chinese whistleblower revealed the true numbers of SARS infections in Beijing, that the communist authorities owned up to the full extent of the outbreak and mobilized resources on a scale necessary to quell it.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

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

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

The Post published its article that night; in it, de Becker once again identified Sanchez as a possible culprit and charged that the leak was “politically motivated.” Michael Sanchez also spoke to the Post reporters, and battling charges of his own culpability, indiscriminately interjected another round of disinformation into the public domain. He suggested incorrectly that de Becker might have leaked news of the affair himself and also convinced the Post (and later, other papers) to report that the Enquirer had started investigating the affair over the summer of 2018—months before his initial outreach (there’s no evidence to suggest that was the case).


pages: 1,590 words: 353,834

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, book value, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, credit crunch, disinformation, dividend-yielding stocks, European colonialism, forensic accounting, God and Mammon, Index librorum prohibitorum, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, liberation theology, low interest rates, medical malpractice, Murano, Venice glass, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, power law, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

At 11 a.m. on Saturday, the thirty-four cardinals who had already arrived in Rome gathered in the enormous, gilded Sala Bologna, built in 1575 as a Papal dining room befitting a grand Pope-Monarch. None of them, other than Villot, knew the real story. Most speculated that Antico and Civiltà Cristiana were being duped by someone who wanted to plant a fake story to tarnish the church. A few, including Vienna’s Franz König, thought the false reports were part of a Soviet disinformation plot.108 Villot first addressed the burial date. The cardinals agreed on a funeral in five days, on the Feast of Italy’s patron saint, Francis. Then Cardinal Confalonieri brought up all the sinister whispers about John Paul’s death. Although he understood it violated church protocol, Confalonieri suggested an autopsy might best settle all suspicions.

During that trip, Marcinkus told the new Pope who he believed had planted the rumors about foul play in the death of John Paul I: the KGB, to create mischief in the church.34 For John Paul, a prelate who had fought for decades the communist efforts to destabilize the Polish church, it made sense. Had the KGB also fanned the rumors about the Vatican Bank and Sindona in order to hurt the church further? The two men had little doubt it was possible. John Paul assured Marcinkus that under no circumstances would he allow the KGB or any other disinformation effort to ruin the reputation of the IOR or Marcinkus.35 By the time they returned to Rome, Marcinkus was joking with the Pope, about how the Curia would soon punish him for not being servile enough. Marcinkus’s long-entrenched enemies were disappointed at the obvious friendship. The bishop from Cicero had lived to serve another day.36 His foes did not know that in March, Marcinkus received an inquiry from the FBI about the possible criminal misuse of a Vatican Bank account.


The Battle for Jerusalem, June 5-7, 1967 by Abraham Rabinovich

Boycotts of Israel, disinformation, invention of gunpowder, Mount Scopus, Yom Kippur War

After reaching the Scopus enclave, the reservists would be dropped off at an assembly point and the buses driven into a sheltered area, where they would be unloaded by the few members of the permanent garrison in on the secret. If reservists should learn of the presence of any of the secret arms caches, they would attribute it to one of the imaginary “smuggling routes” hinted at by the disinformation specialist of the permanent cadre. 䊏 For the garrison the boredom and isolation of Scopus duty were tempered only by a breathtakingly beautiful view. On one side of the hill was Jerusalem, on the other the Judean Desert. With binoculars, some of the men could see people going in and out of their own homes in Jewish Jerusalem.


The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, business climate, colonial rule, death from overwork, declining real wages, deliberate practice, disinformation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Gini coefficient, guns versus butter model, income inequality, income per capita, land bank, land reform, land tenure, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, new economy, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, systematic bias, union organizing

For discussion, see Chomsky, “The Pentagon Papers as Propaganda and as History,” in Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., v. V, Critical Essays. The same is true with regard to intelligence analyses. It is necessary to study the record to see how dominated the intelligence agencies were by the framework of propaganda that they themselves were helping to construct in their disinformation campaigns. To mention one striking example, the Pentagon Papers analysts were able to discover only one staff paper in a record of more than two decades “which treats communist reactions primarily in terms of the separate national interests of Hanoi, Moscow, and Peiping,” rather than regarding Hanoi simply as an agent of International Communism, directed from abroad.


pages: 631 words: 171,391

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs

air freight, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, global village, Google Earth, Herman Kahn, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, yellow journalism

Lippincott, 1966), 51. 20 According to Harvey's record: Chronology of the Matahambre Mine Sabotage Operation; Harvey memo on sabotage operation, October 19, 1962, JFKARC. 21 "I don't want that man": Reeves, 182. 22 America had "the Russian bear": Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball, 469. 22 As many as 70 million: Reeves, 175. 23 "These brass hats": O'Donnell and Powers, 318. 23 "the military always screws up": Stern, 38; Beschloss, 530. 24 Every aspect of the operation had:Author's interview with Pedro Vera, January 2006; Harvey memo to Lansdale, August 29, 1962, JFKARC; Cuban army interrogation of Vera and Pedro Ortiz, Documentos de los Archivos Cubanos, November 8, 1962, Havana 2002. 24 "the Farm":Also known by the code word "ISOLATION"; Chronology of the Matahambre Mine Sabotage Operation. 24 "You do it":Warren Hinckle and William Turner, Deadly Secrets (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992), 149. 25 "If the Americans see us": Malakhov reminiscences, Archives of Mezhregional'naya Assotsiatsia Voinov-Internatsionalistov, Moscow (hereafter MAVI). 25 the 79th missile regiment:V. I. Yesin et al., Strategicheskaya Operatsiya Anadyr': Kak Eto Bylo (Moscow:MOOVVIK, 2004), 381. Except where noted, all references to this book are to the 2004 edition. Some of the names of the missile regiments were changed for Operation Anadyr as part of the Soviet disinformation campaign. The 79th missile regiment was also referred to as the 514th missile regiment in Cuba. The CIA incorrectly reported that a missile site near San Cristóbal was the first to achieve combat-ready status. 26 given a special "government assignment": Sidorov's account of the deployment is contained in A.


The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947 by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Kwajalein Atoll, land reform, long peace, South China Sea

At one party, “right-wing KMT who had always thought of the Communists as something from a nightmare suddenly met and some found they were related, others had gone to school together.” At another, Communist officers jocularly pinned down a Nationalist official and forced liquor on him. Still, intrigue was never far from the surface. Chongqing remained “a city of rumors,” a playground for merchants of information and disinformation, for agents and double agents. Marshall was warned of a “lack of secrecy in all discussions,” and officials were on the lookout for frauds, worrying that, say, a Communist contact was actually a Nationalist stooge. Servants used false names, some for Americans’ ease (Wong was popular), some for murkier reasons.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In addition to cross-border trade and capital flows, many countries have had to figure out how to deal with economic migrants as well as refugees from conflict. Our ancestors also experienced trade, capital, and people coming from across the seas, though perhaps to a lesser degree. In addition, though, we have new sources of interconnections. As a result of the ICT revolution, information and disinformation now flows across borders in real time. With the possible exception of China, no country has found a way to filter or censor the information its citizens receive over the internet. Data too traverses borders in massive quantities—Google knows more about the use of Indian roads through its map app than does the Indian government, while fitness apps can reveal the location of secret military bases around the world, since military personnel are the few in remote areas who are fitness buffs.1 Cybercrime, where hundreds of millions of dollars can be stolen in seconds, is a whole new area of opportunity for the malevolently intelligent, as the ICT revolution has brought vast unprepared populations within easy reach of cyber villains.


Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting by Ashutosh Deshmukh

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AltaVista, book value, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, currency risk, data acquisition, disinformation, dumpster diving, fixed income, hypertext link, information security, interest rate swap, inventory management, iterative process, late fees, machine readable, money market fund, new economy, New Journalism, optical character recognition, packet switching, performance metric, profit maximization, semantic web, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply chain finance, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, warehouse automation, web application, Y2K

• Enterprise portal for investors: This portal provides information to investors and prospective investors. Information includes analyst estimations; financial calendar; stock information; newsletter subscriptions; and names, addresses and photos of the investor relations team. This portal can be useful in disseminating information, reacting to market information and disinformation, and damage control. The term specialist refers to functional specialists, such as people in accounting, marketing and finance. These packages deliver operational and analytical tools and functionalities appropriate for each department. Illustrative business packages for financials include customer credit management, financial queries and strategic enterprise management.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

Every possible measure to limit the effects of the pope’s visit was considered. Tens of thousands of police would be deployed in the course of the nine days. The SB informants who were involved in trip planning were advised, for example, to express worries about safety wherever possible (in the hope that this calculated disinformation would reduce the number of pilgrims). No effort was spared. In the event, 480 SB agents were deployed during the four days the pope spent in Kraków during the visit. Presumably because a large number of East German Catholics also expressed a desire to see the pope, the East German secret police, the Stasi, deployed hundreds of its own agents to cover the event.


pages: 549 words: 170,495

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

Conversely, during the Cold War, the valiant Afghanistani moujahidin (freedom fighters), Poland’s Solidarity movement, Nicaraguan “contras,” Angolan rebels, Salvadoran regulars—all of whom “we” support—left to our proper devices would be victorious with “our” help, but the meddlesome efforts of liberals at home and disinformation experts abroad reduced our ability to help. Until the Gulf War, when “we” finally rid ourselves of the “Vietnam syndrome.” These subliminally available capsule histories are refracted superbly in the novels of E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone, and mercilessly analyzed by journalists like Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, Seymour Hersh, and in the tireless work of Noam Chomsky.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

The message also accused Billpoint of misrepresenting PayPal’s new payment structure. “Billpoint uses a misleading chart comparing our straightforward Premier/Business account to their lowest fee account,” the PayPal team explained. PayPay used other volleys, too. David Sacks instructed Damon Billian to take to the message boards and correct “pricing disinformation,” and asked Reid Hoffman to appeal to his eBay contacts to correct their messaging. Sacks floated other ideas as well. Was it time, Sacks wondered, to send a legal “nastygram” to eBay and a preliminary injunction for anticompetitive pricing? Could Vince Sollitto, head of PR, do anything to “win public opinion without appearing weak?”


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

The threats to oranges and bananas illustrate the dilemma that all farmers and agricultural biotech business are now confronting: how to reassure the public that genetically modified, potentially gene-edited, fruits and crops are safe in an age of misinformation, fake news, and a legacy of anti-GMO disinformation. Some manufacturers have brazenly capitalized on this fear and ignorance by slapping “non-GMO” labels on all sorts of foods and fruits—even those that by definition cannot be genetically modified. Take water—an oxygen atom sandwiched between two hydrogen atoms—or salt, the simple union of sodium and chloride ions.


Uncontrolled Spread by Scott Gottlieb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, fear of failure, global pandemic, global supply chain, Kevin Roose, lab leak, Larry Ellison, lockdown, medical residency, Nate Silver, randomized controlled trial, social distancing, stem cell, sugar pill, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

Then in May, the same hackers were accused by US authorities of probing a California diagnostic firm that was developing coronavirus testing kits. 18.Julian E. Barnes, “Russia Is Trying to Steal Virus Vaccine Data, Western Nations Say,” New York Times, December 14, 2020. 19.Michael R. Gordon and Dustin Volz, “Russian Disinformation Campaign Aims to Undermine Confidence in Pfizer, Other Covid-19 Vaccines, U.S. Officials Say,” Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2021; and Denis Y. Logunov et al., “Safety and Efficacy of an rAd26 and rAd5 Vector-Based Heterologous Prime-Boost COVID-19 Vaccine: An Interim Analysis of a Randomised Controlled Phase 3 Trial in Russia,” Lancet 397, no. 10275 (2021): 671–81. 20.Bret Schafer et al., “Influence-Enza: How Russia, China, and Iran Have Shaped and Manipulated Coronavirus Vaccine Narratives,” German Marshall Fund, March 6, 2021; and Alexander Smith, “Russia and China Are Beating the U.S. at Vaccine Diplomacy, Experts Say,” NBC News, April 2, 2021. 21.Barnes and Venutolo-Mantovani, “Race for Coronavirus Vaccine Pits Spy Against Spy.” 22.Kenneth W.


pages: 635 words: 186,208

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

autonomous vehicles, cosmic microwave background, data acquisition, disinformation, gravity well, megastructure, planetary scale, space junk, sparse data, time dilation

They stood back as the robots died out. They’d have known enough to design a countermeasure, something that could be spread from robot to robot to disable the earlier weapon before it had a chance to go off. But doing that would have risked exposing them as the instigators of the neural bomb. Instead, they put about disinformation suggesting that the robots had been infected with something left behind by Priors.’ ‘How do you know all this, Hesperus?’ ‘Because I remained in contact with the machines, right through to the end. Even when they began to suspect what had been done to them, they maintained communication with me.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Older notions of the role of the “public intellectual” referred to someone who served to both personify and clarify positions of great import in public debate;143 but one of the signal contemporary postmodern developments has been the genesis and nurture of intellectuals poised and primed to muddy up the public mind and consequently foil and postpone most political action, and hence to preserve the status quo ante. This has been one of the objectives of the financial sector since the crisis, and economists are in the front lines of the disinformation project. John Dewey is most likely spinning in his grave, but the complex of neoliberal think tanks and corporations has sure control over what it is doing, and has sometimes even admitted its motives. The economists play along to maintain their untenable straddle between trusting the market and trusting the economists.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

On July 28, 2016, the Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, an expert on Eastern Europe, noted that President Vladimir Putin has evolved a “hybrid foreign policy, a strategy that mixes normal diplomacy, military force, economic corruption and a high-tech information war.” Indeed, on any given day, the United States has found itself dealing with everything from cyberattacks by Russian intelligence hackers on the computer systems of the U.S. Democratic Party, to disinformation about what Russian troops, dressed in civilian clothes, are doing in Eastern Ukraine, to Russian attempts to take down the Facebook pages of widows of its soldiers killed in Ukraine when they mourn their husbands’ deaths, to hot money flows into Western politics or media from Russian oligarchs connected to the Kremlin.


pages: 580 words: 194,144

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

British Empire, classic study, disinformation, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, Suez canal 1869, trade route

He learned, for instance, that until his arrival virtually nothing had been known in Kashgar of the British in India, let alone of their power and influence in Asia. Hitherto it had been thought that they were merely vassals of the Maharajah of neighbouring Kashmir – very likely a piece of Russian disinformation. He also learned at this time of the arrival in the town of two other travellers. One was his rival George Hayward, who had finally received permission to visit Kashgar, only to find that he had merely exchanged house arrest in Yarkand for house arrest there. Clearly Yakub Beg wanted to keep a closer eye on him.


pages: 603 words: 186,210

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time by Stephen Fried

Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, estate planning, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Ida Tarbell, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, indoor plumbing, Livingstone, I presume, Nelson Mandela, new economy, plutocrats, refrigerator car, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

(It’s unclear what kind of container it was in, but it may not have been anything elaborate—he had originally kept it in a wooden cigar box.) After finishing his meal, he transferred the plutonium to his suitcase for the ride back to Chicago on the Santa Fe. Once Oppenheimer even tried to use La Fonda as a gossip laboratory to spread disinformation. After reporters were found snooping around town asking about government weapons research, Oppenheimer chose Charlotte Serber, the very chatty wife of his protégé, theoretical physicist Robert Serber, to go spread some rumors at La Cantina that their research was electromagnetic in nature, not nuclear—so journalists and foreign spies would be thrown off track.


pages: 631 words: 177,227

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, capital asset pricing model, Climategate, cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demographic transition, disinformation, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, impulse control, language acquisition, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Nash equilibrium, nocebo, out of africa, phenotype, placebo effect, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, side project, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, ultimatum game

For example, Steve might try to convince you that his rival, John, is a scoundrel so that Steve can gain an advantage on John (suppose John is honorable). However, if you use conformist transmission in acquiring your beliefs about John, you would take input from many people in the community, most of whom would not be John’s rival. This would allow you to discard Steve’s disinformation and converge on a more accurate version of John’s reputation. Thus, our cultural learning mechanisms help prevent lying and deception from destroying the value of reputations.46 Nevertheless, the emergence of language would still have created opportunities for individuals, especially those who are successful and prestigious, to manipulate others into doing or believing things that would benefit the manipulator.


pages: 659 words: 190,874

Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan M. D.

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, disinformation, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Firefox, Gary Taubes, haute cuisine, impulse control, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral panic, mouse model, pattern recognition, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Simon Singh, smart cities, stem cell, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons

Would they have abandoned margarine production and gone back to making real butter, trading in the cash cow of margarine products for actual, milk-producing cows? Or rather, would the corn product freight train roar straight through the scientist’s warnings, and even pick up speed as agribusiness marketing engineers frantically shoveled disinformation into the firebox? We don’t have to guess at the answer, because there was such a scientist, and her findings were brought to Congress—way back in 1988—to warn of the dangers of trans fat, present in hydrogenated oils.257 We can only presume that the politicians who learned of Dr. Mary Enig’s research had little personal experience with cheap butter substitutes or the convenience foods that contain them.


pages: 589 words: 197,971

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Had the amateurish and frequently incompetent reports from David Greenglass, the Army machinist who ground sections of high-explosive cast into solid forms called lenses for the plutonium wrapper, been the only touchstone against which to compare the materials from Fuchs, the suspicion of Beria, and in turn that of Stalin, would have been that much greater and the agents in New York and those in Moscow doing the collating might have been more hesitant about passing on the fruits of the espionage. They knew that if they were being hoodwinked, their lives would be forfeited. Beria had said to one of his senior intelligence officers as he was being handed a report: “If this is disinformation, I’ll put you all in the cellar.” The cellar of the Lubyanka Prison was one of the places where torture and executions took place. Ted Hall made the difference. His was the sophisticated spying of another physicist and Fuchs’s information checked out against his. 13. “THE BALANCE HAS BEEN DESTROYED” Hiroshima woke up Stalin.


The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The president claimed in July 1983 that they had “literally made a contract to establish a true democracy” with the OAS before taking power in July 1979. This claim is without foundation; Roy Gutman observes that this charge, constantly reiterated by apologists for U.S. atrocities, was concocted as part of a “successful U.S. disinformation campaign.… According to the OAS, in a July 16, 1979, telex to then General Secretary Alejandro Orfila the Sandinistas said they planned to convoke ‘the first free elections in this century’ but made no reference to timing and said nothing about creating a ‘true democracy.’ ” But although the charge has no merit with regard to the Sandinistas, it does apply to Israel; with considerably more force, in fact.


pages: 637 words: 199,158

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

active measures, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, deindustrialization, discrete time, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, illegal immigration, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War

On the other hand, a state bent on aggression is likely to emphasize its peaceful goals while exaggerating its military weakness, so that the potential victim does not build up its own arms and thus leaves itself vulnerable to attack. Probably no national leader was better at practicing this kind of deception than Adolf Hitler. But even if disinformation was not a problem, great powers are often unsure about how their own military forces, as well as the adversary’s, will perform on the battlefield. For example, it is sometimes difficult to determine in advance how new weapons and untested combat units will perform in the face of enemy fire. Peacetime maneuvers and war games are helpful but imperfect indicators of what is likely to happen in actual combat.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

“Where you have to draw the line is to be very clear about where the uncertainties are, but to not have our statements be so laden in uncertainty that no one even listens to what we’re saying,” Mann told me. “It would be irresponsible for us as a community to not be speaking out. There are others who are happy to fill the void. And they’re going to fill the void with disinformation.” The Difference Between Science and Politics In practice, Mann’s street fight is between “consensus” Web sites like RealClimate.org and “skeptical” ones like Watts Up With That,107 and revolves around day-to-day scuffles about the latest journal article or weather pattern or political controversy.


pages: 762 words: 206,865

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Frederick Kempe

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, index card, Kitchen Debate, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, zero-sum game

There was only one problem: Bolshakov was a mere message carrier who could not know Khrushchev’s mind as well as Bobby knew that of his brother. The perils to the U.S. of the Bolshakov–Bobby Kennedy contact were deep and multiple. Bolshakov could deceive on Moscow’s behalf without knowing he was doing so, while Bobby was far less likely to engage in disinformation and, even if he had tried, would have been less skilled in doing so. Beyond that, Bolshakov almost undoubtedly was tailed by FBI agents. Reports back from field agents on their meetings could have increased FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover’s suspicions of the Kennedys. Finally, Bolshakov lacked Bobby’s license to horse-trade.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

As it turns out, the official was never HIV positive; rather, hackers changed the results on his medical tests, in retaliation for the undersecretary’s pursuit of international cyber villains, information that his doctor dutifully reported based on the data on his computer screen. The shame of the test results was too much for the conservative undersecretary, precipitating his suicide. This is the world of information warfare, where computer disinformation disseminated through an array of blinking screens carries real-world impact. The events depicted in the film are decidedly possible today. Police data systems have been successfully hacked globally, including in Australia, England, Italy, Memphis, Montreal, Hong Kong, and Honolulu. In 2013, the Danish police national driver’s license registry was breached, and it was believed the hackers made changes to the underlying law enforcement data systems.


Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

British Empire, disinformation, invisible hand, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, place-making, price mechanism

Jean-Claude was there again. "Good evening, Mr. Cantor, Professor Ryan," the DGSE officer greeted them both. "How's the op going?" "They are under radio silence," the Colonel replied. "What I don't understand is how they can do it the same way twice," Ryan went on. "There is a risk. A little disinformation has been used," Jean- Claude said cryptically. "In addition, your carrier now has their full attention." " Saratoga has an alpha-strike up," Marty explained. "Two fighter squadrons and three attack ones, plus jamming and radar coverage. They're patrolling that 'Line of Death' right now. According to our electronics listening people, the Libyans are going slightly ape.


The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

If the bloom was eaten: The experiment in 2012 was not George’s first foray into geo-engineering. As chief executive of a company called Planktos, he had proposed in 2007 a similar iron-fertilization project in the equatorial Pacific west of the Galápagos Islands, with the hope of selling carbon offsets. The project was canceled in 2008 after what George’s company called a “disinformation campaign” by environmentalists and others who made it impossible to attract investors. “You get on board”: I interviewed Frith by phone several times in 2017. While much of my reporting took me to derelict: To learn about crime on cruise ships, I read Curt Anderson, “ICE Dive Unit in Miami Targets Smugglers Using Freighter, Cruise Ship Hulls to Ferry Drugs,” Associated Press Newswires, Feb. 28, 2011; Robert Anglen, “Comprehensive Reports of Cruise-Ship Crime Made Public, Led by Phoenix Man,” Arizona Republic, Oct. 13, 2016; Donna Balancia, “Crew Member Sues Carnival,” Florida Today, Feb. 13, 2008; “Brazil ‘Rescues’ Cruise Workers from ‘Slave-Like Conditions,’ ” BBC News, April 4, 2014; Jonathan Brown and Michael Day, “Cruise Ship Limps In—but Costa’s Nightmare Goes On,” Independent, March 2, 2012; Michael Day, “Costa Concordia: Shipment of Mob Drugs Was Hidden Aboard Cruise Liner When It Hit Rocks off Italian Coast, Investigators Say,” Independent Online, March 30, 2015; Richard Foot, “Gangs Smuggle Passengers on Cruises,” CanWest News Service, Nov. 23, 2005; John Honeywell, “The Truth About Crime on a Cruise Ship,” Telegraph Online, June 5, 2017; Vincent Larouche and Daniel Renaud, “Three Quebecers Charged with Smuggling $30M in Cocaine on Cruise Ship in Australia,” Toronto Star, Aug. 30, 2016; Jim Mustian, “Feds Arrest Cruise Ship Crewmen in Alleged Plot to Smuggle Cocaine into New Orleans,” New Orleans Advocate, Jan. 10, 2016; Natalie Paris, “Cruise Lines Defend Treatment of Staff,” Telegraph Online, April 7, 2014; “Ten Individuals Charged with Importing Hundreds of Pounds of Cocaine, Heroin into United States Aboard Cruise Ships,” Hindustan Times, June 10, 2005; U.S.


pages: 795 words: 215,529

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

Compounds and solutions of these substances were accumulating in metal barrels, glass bottles, and cardboard boxes piled on the cement floors of storerooms. Uranium was combined with oxygen or chlorine and either dissolved in water or kept dry. Workers moved these substances from centrifuges or drying furnaces into cans and hoppers. Much later, large epidemiological studies would overcome obstacles posed by government secrecy and disinformation to show that low-level radiation caused more harm than anyone had imagined. Yet the authorities at the processing plants were overlooking not only this possibility but also a more immediate and calculable threat: the possibility of a runaway, explosive chain reaction. Feynman had seemed to be everywhere at once as the pace of work accelerated in 1944 and 1945.


Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy, Scott Brick

anti-communist, battle of ideas, disinformation, diversified portfolio, false flag, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information retrieval, operational security, union organizing, urban renewal

The Agency did worry about leaks—they were politicians, after all—but he'd never heard of a serious one off The Hill. Those more often came from inside the Agency, and mainly from the Seventh Floor… or from the White House's West Wing. That didn't mean that CIA was comfortable with leaks of any kind, but at least these were more often than not sanctioned, and often they were disinformation with a political purpose behind them. It was probably the same here, especially since the local news media operated under controls that would have given The New York Times a serious conniption fit. "One always wonders about them, Jack. So, anything new come in last night?" "Nothing new on the Pope," Ryan reported.


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

It was presented as a way to “empower” the slum dwellers, and it was, in fact, a way of perpetuating extreme differences—the existence of those places of exclusion, those contemporary ghettos. And, of course, to pave the way for the withdrawal of the state, which would be carried out more fully during the eighties. And, to oversee the state’s replacement by NGOs and other charitable organizations. As Mike Davis writes: Their constant effort is to subvert, dis-inform and de-idealize people so as to keep them away from class struggles. They adopt and propagate the practice of begging favors on sympathetic and humane grounds rather than making the oppressed conscious of their rights. As a matter of fact, these agencies and organizations systematically intervene to oppose the agitational path people take to win their demands.


pages: 1,520 words: 221,543

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941 by Alan Allport

Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Downton Abbey, hydroponic farming, imperial preference, lone genius, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, new economy, plutocrats, trade route, éminence grise

ASDIC had been fitted on RN destroyers starting in 1923, and by the outbreak of war there were 180 vessels equipped with it.16 Although the details of the system remained top secret, the Admiralty deliberately leaked hints about ASDIC’s amazing anti-submarine efficacy in the 1930s to discourage the Germans from bothering to build U-boats.17 There was an element of disinformation to this, but the Navy’s basic confidence in ASDIC was not feigned. In exercises in 1936, six out of ten ASDIC-guided destroyer attacks on submarines were judged to have been ‘decisive’.18 The Admiralty remarked the following year that ‘the submarine menace will never be what is was before […] we have taken effective steps to prevent that.’19 Churchill wrote a memorandum to Chamberlain in March 1939 claiming that ‘the submarine has been mastered’.20 This self-assurance encouraged complacency.


pages: 712 words: 212,334

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

always be closing, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, Laura Poitras, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical residency, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, tech billionaire, TED Talk, tontine, Upton Sinclair

But Bloodsworth’s flawed execution provided the company’s PR apparatchiks with the ammunition they needed, and they went after her, hard. One journalist, who was sympathetic to Purdue’s cause, wrote an article in Slate on the “myth” of the accidental addict, accusing Bloodsworth of spreading hysteria and disinformation and suggesting that, in reality, people who died from OxyContin were “just plain druggies.” Bloodsworth ended up resigning from the newspaper and eventually left journalism altogether. A spokesman for Purdue acknowledged the company’s satisfaction in having the opportunity to “set the record straight.”


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

In 1996 and 1997 the United States was joined in abstention by numerous allies, but beginning in 1999 it was joined consistently, either in abstention or in outright opposition, only by Israel, with the occasional addition of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, or Haiti.151 Also starting in 1981—and accelerated by US disinformation regarding the Strategic Defense Initiative, coupled with genuine as well as artificially inflated Soviet alarm at SDI and the space shuttle—the Soviet Union asked the UN General Assembly to place on its agenda a Soviet draft treaty that sought to prohibit stationing weapons “of any kind” in outer space.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

This all comes under the heading of “fascinating words.” Unfortunately, there are certain religious factions that spread gross disinformation about evolutionary theory. So I emphasize that many models within evolutionary theory make quantitative predictions that are experimentally confirmed, and that such models are far more than sufficient to demonstrate that, e.g., humans and chimpanzees are related by a common ancestor. If you’ve been victimized by creationist disinformation—that is, if you’ve heard any suggestion that evolutionary theory is controversial or untestable or “just a theory” or non-rigorous or non-technical or in any way not confirmed by an unimaginably huge mound of experimental evidence—I recommend reading the TalkOrigins FAQ11 and studying evolutionary biology with math.


pages: 934 words: 232,651

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

active measures, affirmative action, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, centre right, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, language of flowers, means of production, New Urbanism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Slavoj Žižek, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, work culture

At different times different German-language stations transmitted news out of Moscow as well as constant invitations to German troops to lay down their arms and overthrow Hitler. Mahle worked on a number of these stations, including some that pretended to be Nazi stations in order to broadcast disinformation.6 Wolf became an announcer and commentator, a job which brought him into close contact with Walter Ulbricht. His wife, Emmi—the woman who had once forced Leonhard into a humiliating public confession—walked up and down battlefields with a megaphone, shouting at German soldiers to lay down their arms.7 Though the National Committee was a Soviet front organization, its leaders were very careful not to appear “too communist,” particularly in 1943 and the first half of 1944 when they still hoped a putsch would overthrow Hitler.


pages: 722 words: 225,235

The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East by Abraham Rabinovich

Boycotts of Israel, disinformation, friendly fire, Mahatma Gandhi, Seymour Hersh, Yom Kippur War

Zeira and his chief aides were to demonstrate the ability of even brilliant men to adhere to an idée fixe in the face of mountains of contrary evidence. Explaining away every piece of information that conflicted with their thesis, they embraced any wisp that seemed to confirm it. This included disinformation leaked by the Egyptians that should have been suspect since it came through channels the Egyptians clearly knew AMAN to be monitoring, such as the Arab press. They clung to their view even though the Egyptian deceptions were contradicted by the evidence of war preparations that AMAN’s own departments were daily gathering.


pages: 887 words: 242,125

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe by Mark Mazower

classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Monroe Doctrine, éminence grise

If you are Rumeli Valesi (commander of Rumeli), I too am Rumeli Valesi, and if my government knew that we are talking together they would hang me and the fifteen thousand men with me at Elefsina.’ ‘What do you mean, they would hang you?’ ‘Can the Sultan not hang you if he wishes? Yes or no?’ ‘Indeed, because he is my monarch.’ ‘And I too can be hanged, because I have a queen [meaning Greece].’23 It was a typical bravura performance with a little disinformation slipped in, for the Greeks had nowhere near the 15,000 men Karaïskakis had boasted of. Despair, rancour and defeat were leading to desertions on a large scale, and Fabvier unilaterally took his remaining regulars off to Salamis. Karaïskakis faced a dilemma. Although the fighting at Haidari had shown that he lacked the men to confront the Ottoman army and break the siege of Athens directly, the alternative option of moving away to attack the Ottoman supply lines in the hills risked demoralizing the town’s defenders, and it was at all costs vital that the garrison not surrender.


pages: 944 words: 243,883

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, disinformation, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, kremlinology, market fundamentalism, McMansion, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart meter, statistical model, Steve Jobs, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

ExxonMobil’s opponents were guilty of lumping together the corporation’s support for small, havoc-making groups focused heavily on climate issues with ExxonMobil’s support for legitimate, well-established conservative and free-market research institutes such as the Cato Institute for Public Policy Research, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.7 What distinguished the corporation’s activity during the late 1990s and the first Bush term was the way it crossed into disinformation. Even within ExxonMobil’s K Street office, a haven of lifelong employees devoted to the corporation’s viewpoints and principles, an uneasy recognition gathered among some of the corporation’s lobbyists that some of the climate policy hackers in the ExxonMobil network were out of control and might do shareholders real damage, in ways comparable to the fate of tobacco companies.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

The arguments between the two sides, couched in the usual wooden language, became public, as each side tried to convince other Communist parties of the correctness of its view. The depth of the disagreements became clear abroad only in 1963, and even then they were sometimes dismissed as part of some game to fool the West, ‘disinformation’, but they were real enough, and even caused one of the Soviet-dominated parties to defect, that of little Albania, fizzing with resentment at the preferential treatment accorded by one and all to Tito in Yugoslavia, which contained its own Albanians. Khrushchev now tried to stop China’s development, and in July 1960 withdrew his specialists.


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

After a while former Nazi officials at the lower levels—those the Soviets decided not to put on trial—also found it remarkably easy to collaborate; the Communist ideas of planning were not, after all, that different from those of their former masters. Publicly, however, the new east German authorities held high the banner of anti-Fascism. They were the “good Germans”; the bad Germans, plenty of them, were all collaborating in the western occupation zones, or so German Communist propaganda claimed. Many Left-wing Germans fell for the disinformation, especially intellectuals and artists, some of whom moved east, including top names in German literature like Stefan Heym and Bertolt Brecht, who both moved there from wartime exile in the United States. In the spring of 1946 the Soviets and the German Communists forced the Social Democrats in the east into a Socialist Unity Party (SED), in which the Communists under Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht had full control.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

. … The relationship between development of one parcel and non-development of another is a disjointed, seemingly unrelated affair. … Conventional city form, Chicago-style, is sacrificed in favour of a non-contiguous collage of parcelised, consumption-oriented landscapes devoid of conventional centres yet wired into electronic propinquity and nominally unified by the mythologies of the disinformation superhighway.’ (1999: 81). Restructuring processes are nonetheless mediated by socio-cultural choice, by institutional structures and by pre-existing physical forms. The cities epitomising industrial (Chicago) and post-industrial (Los Angeles) urban form were relatively free from the constraints of earlier patterns.


pages: 908 words: 262,808

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis Hanson

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Kwajalein Atoll, means of production, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, plutocrats, RAND corporation, South China Sea, technological determinism, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It is a clinical issue more than a social one.”36 In this regard, the June 22, 1941, invasion of the Soviet Union was the most critical turning point in the history of the Jewish people since the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in AD 70. Had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union and not headed further eastward—absorbing all of eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and western Russia—it would have been impossible to carry out the full agenda of the Holocaust. The transport of Jews “to the East” was cloaked in disinformation. Had the death camps inside Poland been scattered throughout occupied France, for instance, the Holocaust would have been a nightmare far more difficult to disguise.37 ALL OF THE major powers of World War II built prisoner-of-war camps. But what distinguished the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, and Japan (which ran well over 250 major internment camps in Borneo, Burma, China, the Dutch East Indies, Formosa, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and smaller centers almost everywhere else under Japanese occupation) was that, in addition to captured soldiers, these powers interned, mistreated, and often killed an entire array of dissidents and ethnicities.


pages: 972 words: 259,764

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

He didn’t speak a word of German and drank so heavily that he served martinis in water goblets, but he pulled off one of the CIA’s most celebrated intelligence coups when he supervised the construction of a secret tunnel into East Berlin designed to tap into Soviet communications. Operation Gold operated for eleven months in 1955–56, producing warehouses full of intercepts. Only later did the CIA learn that the KGB, because of a mole in MI6, knew about the operation the whole time, raising the disquieting suspicion that the tunnel had been used to feed the CIA disinformation. But even if the Berlin tunnel, known internally as “Harvey’s hole,” was not quite the success it had seemed at first blush, its inglorious end did not hurt Harvey’s career. He returned to Washington in 1959 to become head of the CIA’s Division D, charged with breaking into foreign embassies to steal secret codes.60 Early in 1961, Harvey was approached by Dick Bissell, the CIA’s operations chief, and told to develop “Executive Action capability,” a euphemism for assassination.


pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

He was so confident he still held all the cards that even when intelligence reports were received from agents in Berlin, Rome and even Tokyo – in addition to warnings and signs from embassies in Moscow – that an attack was imminent, he simply dismissed them.11 His scathing attitude was perfectly summed up by his reaction to a report from a spy within the German air force headquarters just five days before the invasion was launched. ‘You can tell your “source” . . . to go fuck his mother,’ he scrawled. ‘This is not a “source”,’ he wrote, ‘it’s someone spreading disinformation.’12 Not all of those around Stalin were as blasé as the Soviet leader. German troop movements in early June led some to argue that the Red Army should be moved into defensive positions. ‘We have a non-aggression pact with Germany,’ Stalin replied incredulously. ‘Germany is tied up with war in the West and I am sure that Hitler will not dare to create a second front by attacking the Soviet Union.


Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques: Concepts and Techniques by Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, Jian Pei

backpropagation, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation coefficient, cyber-physical system, database schema, discrete time, disinformation, distributed generation, finite state, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, knowledge worker, linked data, machine readable, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, power law, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, search costs, semantic web, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, supply-chain management, text mining, thinkpad, Thomas Bayes, web application

., On power-law relationships of the internet topology, In: Proc. ACM SIGCOMM’99 Conf. Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication Cambridge, MA. (Aug. 1999), pp. 251–262. [FG02] Fishelson, M.; Geiger, D., Exact genetic linkage computations for general pedigrees, Disinformation 18 (2002) 189–198. [FGK+05] Fagin, R.; Guha, R.V.; Kumar, R.; Novak, J.; Sivakumar, D.; Tomkins, A., Multi-structural databases, In: Proc. 2005 ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symp. Principles of Database Systems (PODS’05) Baltimore, MD. (June 2005), pp. 184–195. [FGW01] Fayyad, U.; Grinstein, G.; Wierse, A., Information Visualization in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. (2001) Morgan Kaufmann .


pages: 1,002 words: 276,865

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

agricultural Revolution, bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, David Attenborough, disinformation, Eratosthenes, ghettoisation, joint-stock company, long peace, mass immigration, out of africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

The intention was not just to boost the morale of the Maltese, but to show the whole empire that Great Britain was making ineluctable progress towards final victory.26 There was further bleak news for the Axis. Greece descended into civil war, and resistance was building up in Yugoslavia.27 Within the Axis, suspicion grew that Sardinia was being targeted as the gathering point for a massed Allied invasion of Europe by way of southern France; Cagliari paid a high price for this disinformation, and the marks of allied bombing are still visible there. The real question was whether Mediterranean France or Italy was (to use Churchill’s phrase) ‘the soft underbelly’ of Axis Europe. In June 1943 the Allies captured their first piece of Italy: the small but strategically placed island of Pantelleria west of Malta, where 12,000 demoralized Italian troops succumbed to intense bombardment.28 When the Allies confounded earlier expectations by landing in Sicily, in July, a special meeting of the Fascist Grand Council turned on Mussolini.


Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

They are the ones who have formed identity, forged unity and forced the march of history. From time to time, therefore, for a page or two, we will take stock of how language has impelled progress, and at times impeded it. Progress and regress continue. Recent events, not least the ‘Arab Spring’ and its messy aftermath, have shown how words – slogans, chants, propaganda, mis- and disinformation, the old mesmerizing magic both white and black – still shape the course of the Arab world. Or, rather, the Arabic world, the Arabosphere. Language is still its defining feature and its genius, and ‘the Arabs’ are really arabophones. To call everyone from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Strait of Hormuz ‘the Arabs’ would be like calling all North Americans, South Africans, Australasians, Irish and British, regardless of origin, ‘the English’ – or even ‘the Angles’, another group of wandering clans whose language was to end up as the tide-wrack of a long-ebbed empire.


pages: 914 words: 270,937

Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, affirmative action, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, card file, disinformation, operational security

There were a number of well-paid and highly reliable informants throughout the American government, in Customs, DEA, the Coast Guard, none of whom had reported a single thing. The law-enforcement community was in the dark - except for the FBI Director, who didn't like it, but would soon go to Colombia… Some sort of intelligence operation was - no. Active Measures? The phrase came from KGB, and could mean any of several things, from feeding disinformation to reporters to "wet" work. Would the Americans do anything like that? They never had. He glowered at the passing scenery. He was an experienced intelligence officer, and his profession was to determine what people were doing from bits and pieces of random data. That he was working for someone he detested was beside the point.


pages: 939 words: 274,289

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H. W. Brands

California gold rush, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, industrial cluster, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, retrograde motion, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway

Sheridan did push and a month later delivered the decisive blow. His signal officers had broken the Confederate flagging code and they deciphered a message sent from James Longstreet to Early: “Be ready to move as soon as my forces join you, and we will crush Sheridan.” Sheridan wasn’t sure the message wasn’t deliberate disinformation, but he didn’t feel he could ignore it, and consequently when Halleck summoned him to Washington for consultation he initially refused. But Halleck assured him Longstreet couldn’t link up with Early imminently and insisted that he come ahead. Sheridan went to Washington, consulted quickly and headed back to the valley.


pages: 961 words: 302,613

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

always be closing, British Empire, business intelligence, colonial rule, complexity theory, Copley Medal, disinformation, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, music of the spheres, Republic of Letters, scientific mainstream, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route

Washington then began preparing his own troops for a dash south. A master of logistics and preparation, he personally mapped the march and tended to every imaginable matter of provisioning and transport. Clinton’s spies saw signs of motion in Washington’s camp, but the American general spread disinformation indicating that he was simply circling south to assault New York from Staten Island. He sent crews to repair roads and bridges on the Jersey banks of the Hudson. He even constructed a large oven to supply bread to the fictitious attackers. Not till too late did Clinton realize that the object of the preparations was not his army but Cornwallis’s.


pages: 950 words: 297,713

Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 by Charles Emmerson

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Etonian, European colonialism, Ford Model T, ghettoisation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

A hired journalist writes up Ford’s prejudices into long, superficially researched articles, finding new angles when the old ones get tired, playing on concerns about immigration, jobs and terrorism. After a few weeks, the Independent’s campaign is being picked up by other newspapers and magazines, just as planned. The spark has been provided. Now the fire is catching. Disinformation thrives on repetition. In July, the case of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is raised. Some Jews wonder if Ford himself can be personally involved in spreading such stuff, imagining that someone behind the scenes must be taking advantage of him. A few send in protest telegrams, hoping Ford will realise what is being perpetrated in his name.


The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

Press, ‘Overseas Investment and the Professional Advance of British Metal Mining Engineers, 1851–1914’, Economic History Review, New Series, 42, 1 (1989), 67–8; ‘The City and International Mining, 1870–1914’, Business History 32, 3 (1990), 98–119; J. J. van Helten, ‘Mining, Share Mania and Speculation: British Investment in Overseas Mining 1880–1913’, in J. J. van Helten and Y. Cassis, Capitalism in a Mature Economy (1990). 28. For a graphic description of the speculative and disinformational tendencies to be found in the City, see I. R. Phimister, ‘Corners and Company-Mongering: Nigerian Tin and the City, 1909–1912’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 28, 2 (2000), 23–41. 29. Checkland, ‘The Mind of the City’, pp. 265, 270, 278. For the outlook of bankers, see Y. Cassis, ‘The Banking Community of London, 1890–1914: A Survey’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 13, 3 (1985), 109–26. 30.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

“Shock and awe” would mean that the enemy’s perceptions and grasp of events would be overloaded, leaving him paralyzed. The ultimate example of this effect were the nuclear strikes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the authors refused to rule out as a theoretical possibility, though they were more intrigued by the possibility of disinformation, misinformation, and deception.11 The influence of such ideas was evident in the 1997 paper “Joint Vision 2010.” It defined information superiority largely in war-fighting terms as “the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary’s ability to do the same.”12 By means of “excellent sensors, fast and powerful networks, display technology, and sophisticated modeling and simulation capabilities,” information superiority could be achieved.


pages: 1,477 words: 311,310

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Whether one considers the rapid growth of Russian land- and sea-based strategic missile systems, the thousands of aircraft and tens of thousands of main battle tanks, the extraordinary developments in the surface navy and in the submarine fleet, the specialist activities (airborne and amphibious warfare units, chemical warfare, intelligence and “disinformation” activities), the end result is impressive. It may or may not have cost as much in real terms as the Pentagon’s own allocations; but it undoubtedly gives the USSR a range of military capabilities which only the rival American superpower possesses. This is not a twentieth-century military Potemkin village, ready to collapse at the first serious testing.161 On the other hand, the Soviet war machine also has its own weaknesses and problems, and certainly ought not to be presented as an omnipotent force, able to execute with consummate efficiency all of the possible military operations which the Kremlin might require of it.


pages: 1,041 words: 317,136

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, fear of failure, housing crisis, index card, industrial research laboratory, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment

If Bohr was convinced, then Oppenheimer too must have realized that the German physicists were in all likelihood far behind in the race to build a bomb. According to David Hawkins, Oppenheimer was told by General Groves at the end of 1943 that a German source had recently claimed that the Germans had abandoned their early bomb program. Groves suggested that it was hard to evaluate such a report; the German source might be passing on disinformation. Oppenheimer just shrugged. Hawkins recalled thinking to himself that it was too late—the men at Los Alamos “were committed to building a bomb regardless of German progress.” CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE “The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization” My feeling about Oppenheimer was, at that time, that this was a man who is angelic, true and honest and he could do no wrong. . . .


The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, cuban missile crisis, demand response, disinformation, false flag, financial independence, flag carrier, Herman Kahn, index card, mandelbrot fractal, operational security, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment

"General, I'm putting you on official notice. We have indications that your communications links are compromised." "And?" "And I will make that report to Congress and the President as well." "It's much more likely that there's someone at State who leaked this. Further, it is possible that you're the victim of disinformation. What does this agent give us?" the NSA Director asked. "Some very useful material - us and Japan." "But nothing on the Soviet Union?" Jack hesitated before answering, but there was no question of Olson's loyalty. Or his intelligence. "Correct." "And you're saying that you're certain this isn't a false-flag operation?


Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, book value, buttonwood tree, classic study, complexity theory, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, disinformation, Easter island, job satisfaction, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, margin call, New Journalism, oil shock, Silicon Valley, tulip mania, undersea cable

This morning, Koga thought with a grunt, checking his watch. "We're sure that it has to be standard-gauge track?" "You can resection the photos we have yourself," Betsy Fleming told him. They were back in the Pentagon headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office. "The transporter-car our people saw is standard gauge." "Disinformation, maybe?" the NRO analyst asked. "The diameter of the SS-19 is two-point-eight-two meters," Chris Scott replied, handing over a fax from Russia. "Throw in another two hundred seventy centimeters for the transport container. I ran the numbers myself. The narrow-gauge track over there would be marginal for an object of that width.


The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...) by Dan Richardson, Daniel Jacobs

Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, disinformation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Livingstone, I presume, satellite internet, self-driving car, sexual politics, Skype, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

The right-hand wall (all directions assume you’re facing the back of the temple) depicts the Battle of Qadesh on the River Orontes (1300 BC), starting from the back of the hall. Here you see Ramses’ army marching on Qadesh, followed by their encampment, ringed by shields. Acting on disinformation tortured out of enemy spies, Ramses prepares to attack the city and summons his reserve divisions down from the heights. The waiting Hittites ford the river, charge one division and scatter another to surround the king, who single-handedly cuts his way out of the trap.


pages: 1,266 words: 344,635

Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton

airport security, business process, company town, corporate governance, data acquisition, dematerialisation, disinformation, family office, illegal immigration, invention of the telescope, inventory management, plutocrats, stem cell, tech baron, the map is not the territory, undersea cable, VTOL

That was a specialist-built weapon, after all, and it was never found. So as far as we’re concerned she is still very much on probation.” An associate? He could almost hear Vice Commissioner Passam saying it, her slick political questions aimed at the Right Places, casting doubt and undermining facts. She could almost rival him when it came to disinformation techniques. “I understand perfectly. We’ll watch Tramelo.” “Thank you. I appreciate how difficult it is out there.” “How long before we get our additional Legionnaires?” “HDA has already issued a deployment order to the Paris barracks. Two hundred troops plus equipment. They’ll be through the gateway today.


pages: 1,234 words: 356,472

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

Apollo 11, carbon-based life, clean water, corporate governance, disinformation, Magellanic Cloud, megacity, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, operational security, plutocrats, random walk, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, the scientific method, trade route, urban sprawl

They couldn’t all contain secret sympathizers of Johansson’s cause. That just left her with the altogether murkier field of Grand Families and Intersolar Dynasties, the kind of power dealers who were always around. She’d done everything she could, of course: set traps, run identification ambushes, deliberately leaked disinformation, established unofficial communications channels, built herself an extensive network amid the political classes, gained allies at the heart of the Commonwealth government. So far the results had been minimal. That didn’t bother her so much, she had faith in her ability to work the case to its conclusion.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

The publication also blamed AIDS on 1959 Nobel Prize recipient Bertrand Russell, saying, “These globalists are responsible for unleashing the AIDS virus upon the world’s population, they would be guilty of mass murder at levels heretofore not even conceived of in the most imaginative of monster movies.” 207 U.S. Department of State, “The U.S.S.R.’s AIDS Disinformation Campaign,” Foreign Affairs Note, July 1987. 208 Peter Duesberg’s views have been so widely published that it is difficult to narrow a list to key sources. For Duesberg’s perspective, see B. Guccione, Jr., Interview, September 1993: 95–108; P. H. Duesberg, “Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome: Correlation But Not Causation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 86 (1989): 755–64; J.


Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health by Laurie Garrett

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biofilm, clean water, collective bargaining, contact tracing, desegregation, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, Drosophila, employer provided health coverage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Induced demand, John Snow's cholera map, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, profit motive, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, stem cell, the scientific method, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

After an hour’s standoff diplomats from several embassies intervened, convincing Zairois officials that the reporters could safely be released.28 The incident prompted greater attention to accreditation details on the part of Zaire’s Ministry of Information. The agency, which might better have been termed the Ministry of Bribery and Disinformation, welcomed money in exchange for accreditations for foreigners and rarely provided anyone— foreigner or citizen—with accurate news about anything, especially public health. Located in one of several decrepit, thirty-year-old government buildings at considerable distance form Kinshasa’s hub, the Ministry was on the nineteenth floor of a decaying structure with only one remaining, marginally functional elevator.


From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

According to former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who served as UN special reporter, “elected authorities who were moderates and who tried to prevent acts of violence were dismissed or replaced by Serbian extremists.”42 Thus a small minority dedicated to violence generated paroxysms of suffering, involving many bystanders in their campaigns, much resembling processes known from World War II, where small units of Ustashas, SS, and other outsiders injected violence into communities and made legions of victims into perpetrators, expanding in concentric rings to embrace community after community. But that is not the whole story. There is also the question of how people came to their knowledge of what was happening to their own ethnic group. The answer is: they relied on disinformation coming from nationalists of their own ethnicity, which tended to fuel desires for revenge and became a main cause of atrocities. With rare exceptions, the national media tended to present distorted news of the conflict and human rights violations. “Consequently,” Mazowiecki concluded, “the general public has no access to reliable, objective sources of information.”43 A new mentality took hold of the region, supplanting that of more peaceful times.


pages: 1,445 words: 469,426

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

In December 1940 Hitler issued Directive Number 21—Operation Barbarossa—ordering that preparations begin for an invasion of the Soviet Union. The Germans took care to give no public sign of displeasure to their Russian friend and, indeed, went out of their way to engage in an elaborate charade of deception and disinformation to lull Stalin into disbelief that the Germans might be contemplating such a strike. Warnings of the impending invasion came from many sources—Americans, British, other governments, his own spies—but Stalin resolutely refused to believe them. Scarcely hours before the invasion, a dedicated German communist defected from a German Army unit and slipped over to the Soviets with word of what was about to happen.


Executive Orders by Tom Clancy

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, card file, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, experimental subject, financial independence, flag carrier, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, one-China policy, operational security, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, power law, rolodex, South China Sea, the long tail, trade route

The negative commentary of the “defeat” of the Saudi army was, however, going out. That news, leaked in Washington, and studiously not commented on by the Pentagon, was being accepted as gospel. Jack was still worried, however amusing it might have been in the abstract that the media was doing disinformation without even being asked. “This evening. Maybe sooner,” General Mickey Moore replied. “Sunset over there is in three hours.” “Can we do it?” POTUS asked. “Yes, sir.” Wolfpack, FIRST BRIGADE, North Carolina National Guard, was fully formed now. Eddington took to a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter for a flyover of his forward units.