moral panic

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How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The United States has such a requirement for both domestic and foreign works.10 While there are things individual countries can and should do on their own, a comprehensive approach to formalities requires a revision to treaties, including the Berne Convention. This page intentionally left blank TEN The Moral Panic over Fair Use The term “moral panic” comes from sociology. It was made popular in the early 1970s in describing wildly exaggerated reactions to changing mores.1 Examples of moral panics include the Salem Witch trials, marijuana during the “Reefer Madness” period of the 1930s,2 the comic book Congressional hearings in the 1950s,3 McCarthyism, and the events that gave rise to the coining of the term: the Mods and Rockers battles, in the UK during the midto late-1960s. I use moral panic here to refer to the trumped-up creation of an alien threat.

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Sam Ricketson, WIPO Study on Limitations and Exceptions of Copyright Related Rights in the Digital Environment at page 4, Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, 9th Session, Geneva, June 23 to 27, 2003, SCCR/9/7 (April 5, 2003). Chapter 11 1. Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars (2009, Oxford University Press). My title for this book was Metaphors, Moral Panics, and Folk Devils in the Copyright Wars. 2. See references in Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars at 44–45. 3. Colin Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor 3 (1962, University of South Carolina Press). 4. These are different points: hard copy works can be scanned or made available for sale in hard copy form online. 5.

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I do not exaggerate by using “alien”: in 2005, the then-Attorney General of Australia, Philip Ruddock, referred to fair use as alien to the Australian legal tradition,4 apparently unaware that the fair use factors were already contained in the Australian copyright act.5 The rhetorical device of turning fair use into a moral panic is made by those who oppose adapting copyright to the digital era. 212 HOW TO FIX COPYRIGHT Fair use thus serves as a classic moral panic: an effort by vested interests to preserve the status quo through creating a false enemy whom, we are told, must be vanquished for the alleged good of society as a whole. What is this evil fair use? I will discuss below the technical details of the doctrine, but at its heart, fair use is a way to ensure that the goal of furthering creativity is not impeded by an overly restrictive view of exclusive rights.

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City by Tony Roshan Samara

conceptual framework, deglobalization, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, illegal immigration, late capitalism, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, structural adjustment programs, unemployed young men, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, working poor

When the city deliberated on the need for a now established municipal police force, street children and vagrants who “make people fearful” were cited as primary reasons by security experts for the need for such a force.54 The emerging politics of urban renewal in the CBD and the menace of street children seemed to once again rest on the specter of a black menace in the heart of downtown. The resulting moral panic marked a crucial point in the wider social conflict over urban resources and the use of urban spaces that continued to scar the postapartheid city. Sociologist Jeremey Seekings, in his work on media representations of black youth during the negotiations, explicitly refers to white anxiety during that period as constituting a moral panic and notes that South African historians have often used the concept to describe urban and rural white anxieties about black masses. The concept of a moral panic employed by Seekings and others is informed by the work of criminologist Stanley Cohen.

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This process relied heavily on the image of the criminal street child, who, his “performance” in the public eye now complete, recedes into invisibility.71 In the following section we turn to this process and look more closely at how the governance of security developed alongside and through the moral panic around street children in the rarified urban space of the CCID. Neoliberal Governance and the Reproduction of the Fragmented City Behind the ideological and racial formations of moral panic lie the more mundane practices and policies that do the work of shaping urban space on a day-to-day basis. During and just after the moral panic years, seven different law enforcement bodies patrolled the CBD, and CCTV of Children in the Streets╇ ·â•‡ 81 the area was continuously monitored by armed rapid response units.

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This new crop of media representations of street children is, therefore, neither new nor independent of much deeper currents in South African society. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, since 2002 the moral panic around street children has subsided, and the reclamation of the city center is complete, as is reflected in the change of coverage between 2004 and 2005.70 The lasting impact of the moral panic has, however, been institutionalized in the form of “quality of life” municipal bylaws that proscribe behavior associated with the urban poor. Through the physical demarcation of valuable space, with the creation of the CCID, and the deployment of private security to police the uses of that space, “order” and “security” have been established in the city’s heart.

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

These descriptions played into belief systems of target audiences who were desperate to believe young people were simply lazy, drug-addled, spoiled monsters. In fact, the Mods and Rockers both were mostly undereducated and working class. In 1972, Cohen would publish a book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, that described all of this. Moral panic has as a result become a permanent part of our lexicon. “Folk devils” were what Cohen called the targets of these instant manias. Not a reporter, Cohen nailed many of the techniques that make journalism work. Thanks to Christopher Nolan, pop audiences now know magicians rely upon a basic premise of a pledge, turn, and prestige, i.e. a promise to change something ordinary into the extraordinary.

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The mystery of your suddenly aloof child’s brain, your child as tyrant who needs a hell of a spanking (think of the “corporal punishment” letters in Cohen’s study), and, of course, your child as potential rifle-toting mass murderer are other popular themes. Moral panics were once very likely to involve a “something is corrupting your otherwise angelic youth” theme. The “Dungeons and Dragons” terror of the early eighties was an example. Some of us are old enough to remember the absurd scare flick Mazes and Monsters, starring an early version of America’s most dependable moral-panic frontman, Tom Hanks. Often the panic came hand in hand with a ready legal solution. Tipper Gore’s “Parents Music Resource Center” freakout over heavy metal lyrics was an eighties re-hash of Mod-Rocker fear.

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There were constant variations on “techno-panic” themes, suggesting new technologies would addict children to profanity, violence, peeping, sexual deviancy, and other terrors. Moral panics tended to have the most profound consequences for “folk devils” who were politically underrepresented. The War on Drugs has arguably been the most devastating ongoing panic of all, dating back to the unintentionally comic Reefer Madness. It would be impossible to calculate how many unnecessary years in jail have been handed out to dealers and users thanks to blunt moral-panic stunts like George H. W. Bush holding up a bag of crack supposedly bought outside the White House (the offender had actually been lured from across town).

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

Yet by the end of the 1960s, the social and political shock waves unleashed by these molecules seemed to dissipate. The dark side of psychedelics began to receive tremendous amounts of publicity—bad trips, psychotic breaks, flashbacks, suicides—and beginning in 1965 the exuberance surrounding these new drugs gave way to moral panic. As quickly as the culture and the scientific establishment had embraced psychedelics, they now turned sharply against them. By the end of the decade, psychedelic drugs—which had been legal in most places—were outlawed and forced underground. At least one of the twentieth century’s two bombs appeared to have been defused.

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A couple of years later, the television personality Art Linkletter began campaigning against LSD, which he blamed for the fact his daughter had jumped out of an apartment window, killing herself. LSD supposedly had something to do with the Manson murders too. By the early 1970s, when I went to college, everything you heard about LSD seemed calculated to terrify. It worked on me: I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked. I also had my own personal reason for steering clear of psychedelics: a painfully anxious adolescence that left me (and at least one psychiatrist) doubting my grip on sanity. By the time I got to college, I was feeling sturdier, but the idea of rolling the mental dice with a psychedelic drug still seemed like a bad idea.

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Griffiths’s landmark paper, “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” was the first rigorously designed, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical study in more than four decades—if not ever—to examine the psychological effects of a psychedelic. It received a small torrent of press coverage, most of it so enthusiastic as to make you wonder if the moral panic around psychedelics that took hold in the late 1960s might finally have run its course. No doubt the positive tenor of the coverage owed much to the fact that, at Griffiths’s urging, the journal had invited several of the world’s most prominent drug researchers—some of them decorated soldiers in the drug war—to comment on the study, giving the journalists covering the study plenty of ideological cover.

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

One conservative commentator, Roger Kimball, identified the problem as university administrators ‘falling over themselves in their rush to replace the “white Western” curriculum of traditional humanistic studies with a smorgasbord of courses designed to appeal to various ethnic and radical sensitivities’. Like all good and effective myths, the political correctness crisis is a moral panic that appears to be a response to a current and aggressive assault on a variety of shibboleths, but is in fact a rehashing of themes that are decades old. The themes all frame a challenge of male, white and heteronormative power as a subversion of the natural order of things. (Later, in Chapter 4, we examine how default identities absolve themselves from having identity-based agendas.)

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They are attempts at negotiating the parameters of respect in a diverse society. The picture of a coherent creep is painted to stigmatise reform and to monetise fear. And so readers return to buy and to click in order to have their fear and prejudices watered and reaffirmed. It is the Fox News model of indoctrination, where PC is now such an established genre of moral panic that it has been deployed to cover everything from defending antisemitic tweets by entertainers (‘it makes no sense ever giving up your own taste in art to meet the expectations of your fellow partisans’ says a Fox News op-ed by Chris Stirewalt) to suggesting that gay marriage paves the way for bestiality.

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Harris later came to an epiphany, believing that his dismissal of Charles Murray’s views that genetic IQ difference between races was merely a fact was born out of groupthink, and decided to rectify his error by hosting Murray on his podcast. ‘Unfortunately,’ Harris concluded, ‘the controversy over The Bell Curve did not result from legitimate, good-faith criticisms of its major claims. Rather, it was the product of a politically correct moral panic that totally engulfed Murray’s career and has yet to release him.’ Once Harris summoned political correctness, he immediately cast himself as a lone crusader pursuing a pioneering and taboo subject, ‘forbidden knowledge’ he calls it. But in fact, as Ezra Klein of the Vox news website observed: ‘this isn’t “forbidden knowledge.”

The Diet Myth: Why America's Obsessions With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health by Paul Campos

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, feminist movement, longitudinal study, moral hazard, moral panic, profit maximization, Saturday Night Live, upwardly mobile

Saguy has undertaken a long-term research project to study the social construction of “obesity” as a health and/or political issue in contemporary America. See, for example, Saguy and Riley, “Fat Attack: Scientific and Political Debates over Obesity” (forthcoming). “ ‘Moral panic’ is a term coined by Stanley Cohen in the 1960s . . .” See Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (2002). “American history is rich with examples of moral panics.” On the drug war, see Michael Massing, The Fix (2000). On sexual abuse in schools and day care centers, see Dorothy Rabinowitz, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times (2003).

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We may drive environmentally insane SUVs that dump untold tons of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere; we may consume a vastly disproportionate share of the world’s diminishing natural resources; we may support a foreign policy that consists of throwing America’s military weight around without regard to objections from our allies— but at least we don’t eat that extra cookie when it’s offered to us. All of which is to say that the current panic over fat is in part a traditional search for societal scapegoats. Indeed, as UCLA sociologist Abigail Saguy suggested to me, our current hysteria about weight can be understood as a moral panic. “Moral panic” is a term coined by Stanley Cohen in the 1960s to describe a recurrent social pattern. First, a group or behavior is classified as dangerously deviant. The deviance is characterized as both a serious threat to societal welfare and as a symptom of deep social ills. The media whips up public concern on the subject by focusing rapidly increasing amounts of attention on it, often in an alarmist fashion that exaggerates the extent of—and the danger presented by—the behavior and those who engage in it.

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Today epidemiological regression analyses have largely taken the place of the sorts of exhortations once represented by Jonathan Edwards’ eighteenthcentury sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Nevertheless, as Part III will make clear, the motivating impulses behind such apparently dissimilar texts turn out to have a number of things in common. At bottom, the obesity myth is both a cause and a consequence of what sociologists call a “moral panic.” It is a particularly tenacious example of the same sort of impulse that fueled hysteria about demon rum, reefer madness, communists in the State Department, witches in Salem, and many other instances of our eternally recurring search for scapegoats, who can be blamed for the decadent state of American culture in general, and of the younger generation in particular.

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

If we’ve found ourselves addicted to social media, in spite or because of its frequent nastiness, as I have, then there is something in us that is waiting to be addicted. Something that social media potentiates. And if, with all these problems, we still inhabit the social media platforms – as over half the world’s population does – we must be getting something out of it. The dreary moral-panic literature excoriating ‘the shallows’ and the ‘post-truth’ society must be missing a vital truth about their subject. Those who enjoy the social media platforms tend to like the fact that they give them a shot at being heard. It weakens the monopoly on culture and meaning formerly enjoyed by media and entertainment companies.

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Individually, their responsibility for the total situation was often homoeopathically slight, and thus this indulgence of their darker side, their more punitive, aggressive tendencies, was minor. Yet, incentivized and aggregated by the Twittering Machine, these petty acts of sadism became monstrous. As the trolling slogan has it, ‘None of us is as cruel as all of us.’ IX. The risk, in appealing to such outré examples, is that it can legitimize a form of moral panic about the internet, and therefore dignify state censorship. This would be the traditional answer to the Oresteian Furies: domesticate them with the ‘rule of law’.34 It is predicated on upholding a traditional hierarchy of writing, at the top of which is a written constitution or sacred text from which written authority flows.

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The McCarthyite witch-hunts of mid-twentieth-century America showed that political paranoia could easily be disseminated through the workings of the liberal state.35 What is happening now, however, is that the digitalization of capitalism is disturbing these old written hierarchies, so that the spectacles of witch-hunting and moral panic, and the rituals of punishment and humiliation, are being devolved and decentralized. The spectacle, which the French Situationist Guy Debord defined as the mediation of social reality through an image, is no longer organized by large, centralized bureaucracies.36 Instead, it has been devolved to advertising, entertainment and, of course, the social industry.

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Corn Laws, credit crunch, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, oil shock, open economy, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, éminence grise

Most agreed that the English empire in France should be regained, not only to vindicate the king’s historic rights but also to deny the enemy a base from which to attack England.13 In order to do this, the mistakes of the Lancastrian dynasty would have to be rectified. Culturally, Englishmen would have to become less effeminate and more martial, perhaps the first instance of what was to become a long tradition of linking foreign-policy crises to domestic moral panic. Taxes would have to be paid on time – in other words, the nation as a whole should take responsibility for the reconquest of France – but in return the king would have to listen to the counsel of Parliament and seasoned advisors. Above all, the English would have to close ranks at home, not least through the act of confronting the enemy abroad.

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Many were still smarting at the loss of the French empire one hundred years before – a wound inflamed by generations of Tudor chroniclers and which would be reopened at the end of the century by Shakespeare in his three historical plays about the reign of Henry VI – and history seemed to be repeating itself. Now, as Henry’s war effort on the continent stagnated, they succumbed to moral panic and social malaise. Englishmen, it was argued, had gone soft by neglecting their archery skills and spending too much money on fashion and gambling. Worse still, many were convinced that the overall population of England was steadily declining: the shrinking military muster rolls seemed to suggest this.

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England had lost control of the Narrow Sea. In a coruscating speech to Parliament a year later, the Lord Keeper lamented that there had not been ‘a greater loss in honour, strength and treasure, than to lose that place’, which had ‘bred throughout Europe an honourable opinion and report of our English nation’.33 Once again, moral panic set in. ‘What tenderlings the great part of our young gentlemen are,’ one observer lamented, ‘preferring fine clothes to lusty horsemanship.’34 There were also furious allegations that Philip had not done enough to help the embattled garrison. To add insult to injury, Philip’s chief minister, Cardinal de Granvelle, remarked that ‘One would like to see more spirit, more resentment about Calais, and more memory of the ancient virtues of their fathers.’35 The port, which Mary famously said would be ‘lying in her heart’ after death, had been England’s last outpost on the continent, and vital to the defence of the south coast.

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

Teens from less-privileged backgrounds seemed likely to be drawn to MySpace while those headed towards elite universities appeared [to] head towards Facebook.” She also noticed a race and ethnic division between platforms—black and Latino teens tended to use Myspace, and white and Asian teens flocked to Facebook. Among the factors for this switch was the number of moral panic stories about child predators on Myspace. People who didn’t worry about their kids meeting older men in hotel rooms in the nineties—either because their kids weren’t old enough then, or they weren’t online—had new fears over Myspace riffraff. Facebook, associated with the university where every helicopter parent dreams of sending their kids, had none of that stigma.

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Those with comfortable legacy media perches as staff writers and editors might have used the internet, but they did not identify as users—at least not in the way that someone posting a grievance online would be. The pain that was exhibited in hashtag campaigns like #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen was “not perceived”—at least not yet. Collective grievance was conflated with mob behavior and moral panics online. The many grades and variations of power were brushed aside to condemn internet outrage as an oversize threat. As a classic example of this conflation, Jon Ronson, while promoting his 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, routinely stated that internet users are collectively “worse than the NSA.”

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The danah boyd quote on Myspace and Facebook comes from “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook,” which appeared in Race After the Internet (ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White, Routledge, 2012, 207). The Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz attributes the moral panic around Myspace to Facebook’s success. On Twitter, he wrote that “the ‘tech was good and now it’s bad’ narrative is misrepresenting the past. There have always been quite negative stories about tech. Facebook was successful in part due to rampant 2004 fears about child predators on Myspace. Tech is/was good AND bad” (twitter.com/moskov/status/942470488017850369, December 17, 2017).

Who Are We—And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, call centre, David Brooks, equal pay for equal work, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, feminist movement, financial independence, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, Steven Levy, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey

The report acknowledged that, while the United States would remain the single most powerful force in the world, its relative strength and potential leverage are waning. This downward trajectory was, in no small part, aggravated by failed wars against predominantly Muslim countries that followed terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists and that also sparked something close to a moral panic among the Right at home. A national furor was sparked by plans to build an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan. There were protests against the “9/11 mosque.” But this was not about either 9/11, which had taken place almost a decade earlier and several blocks away, or a mosque, given that no such thing was being built.

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On the other hand, the ways in which we are unalike matter. For all that is common in the human experience, the differences are stark and, in some respects, getting starker, and it is these differences that are increasingly creating the framework for political activity, public anxiety and, at times, moral panic. In Britain the English Defence League, an extreme right-wing party with a history of violence, had a gay chapter whose members wore pink triangles. “This is the symbol gay people were made to wear under Hitler,” explained one. “Islam poses the same threat, and we are here to express our opposition to that.”

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The trouble is that the pervasiveness of French racism means that even those non-white French people who choose to take it find themselves constantly knocked back. Even those who like Britain—and I would count myself among them—don’t necessarily really feel fully part of it. Latif always thought of himself as Pakistani. “I know what Islam is,” he says. “I have no idea what British is.” Latif stands at the epicenter of a moral panic in Europe. Thanks to acts of war abroad and terror at home, not to mention rioting and the rise of the extreme Right and religious fundamentalism, the European intelligentsia has been obsessing over Islam for at least a decade now. With Muslims constituting sizable minorities in many European cities from Marseilles to Malmö, their presence has sparked fear among those who perceive their presence as both a potential existential and essential threat to European democracy and culture.

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

Systems hurriedly assembled as a response to headlines can prove to be blunt and inefficient tools, unnecessary or counterproductive. Many institutions are hampered by the bureaucratic legacy of some long-forgotten scandal that demanded something be done. Britain’s Vetting and Barring Scheme is a child of just such a moral panic: a textbook case of how media storm and political expediency combine to demand reform that later appears disproportionate or simply daft. The saga began in the summer of 2002. That August, like every August, news desks were searching around for stories to fill their papers and bulletins. With Parliament on holiday and little else happening, an appalling child abduction story from Cambridgeshire dominated the front pages.

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It was politically inconceivable to deny there was a problem – that would leave his party exposed to the charge that they were callous and complacent. So a knife-crime ‘summit’ was held at Number Ten Downing Street. There was the promise of a ‘crackdown’ and ‘tough measures’. It was a classic sequence: moral panic, hurried political reaction, futile (probably counter-productive) response. On this occasion, part of the response was the unveiling of a new acronym – TKAP. The Tackling Knives Action Programme demanded that police resources in high-crime areas across England and Wales should be targeted at young men who carried blades.

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With urbanisation and industrialisation, the job prospects for working-class boys had worsened: traditional craft apprenticeships disappeared while domestic service increasingly became the province of women. The end of the Napoleonic Wars saw demobilisation of thousands of soldiers, adding to the army of bored and troubled young men wandering city streets. Britain suffered its first moral panic about youth crime at around this time. In London in 1815, the Society for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis was set up. The committee identified ‘the improper conduct of parents, the want of education, the want of suitable employment, the violation of the sabbath and habits of gambling in the public streets’ as explanations for the youth problem, ‘causes of crime’ that in revised form are still trotted out today.

Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield

Adrian Hon, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, behavioural economics, Boris Johnson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer age, credit crunch, game design, invention of writing, longitudinal study, moral panic, publication bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, upwardly mobile

Equally, those in government and the media had little sense of what a game was like to play, rather than to watch from a distance, and those within the industry felt, rightly enough, that they were operating within a field more or less sealed off from mainstream discourse, where the only meaningful thing to do was to keep their heads down and go on making their products. All of this has provided both the ideal breeding ground for moral panic and for the widening of the divide between those who play and those who don’t. It’s a division that is still largely generational. When a medium as new and as rapidly evolving as video games first arrives, there is little ability for different generations to share or learn lessons from one another.

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Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums’, Rolling Stone, 7 December 1972; <http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html> Byron, Tanya, ‘Safe Children in a Digital World: The Report of the Byron Review’, June 2008; <http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/byron review/> Castronova, Edward, ‘Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier’, The Gruter Institute Working Papers on Law, Economics, and Evolutionary Biology, 2001, Volume 2, Article 1; <http://www.bepress.com/giwp/default/vol2/issl/artl> Castronova, Edward and Fairfield, Joshua, ‘Dragon Kill Points: A Summary White Paper’, January 2007; <http://ssrn.com/abstract= 958945> Chatfield, Tom, ‘Rage Against the Machines’, Prospect magazine, June 2008; <http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2008/06/ragea-gainstthemachines/> Chatfield, Tom, ‘Screen Test’, New Statesman, 30 April 2009; <http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/05/video-games-industry-art-film> Chatfield, Tom, ‘Videogames Now Outperform Hollywood Movies’, Observer, 27 September 2009; <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/sep /27/videogames-hollywood> Ellis, Hilary; Heppell, Stephen; Kirriemuir, John; Krotoski, Aleks; McFarlane, Angela, ‘Unlimited Learning: Computer and Video Games in the Learning Landscape’, September 2006; <http://www.elspa.com/assets/files/u/unlimitedlearningtheroleof-computerandvideogamesint_344.pdf> Ferguson, Christopher John, ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly: A Meta-analytic Review of Positive and Negative Effects of Violent Video Games’, Psychiatric Quarterly, December 2007, Volume 78, Number 4; <http://www.springerlink.com/content /66217176984x7477/fulltext.pdf> Ferguson, Christopher John, ‘The School Shooting/Violent Video Game Link: Causal Link or Moral Panic?’, Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, December 2008, Volume 5, Issue 1-2: <http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgibin/fulltext /121556773 /PDFSTART> Gentile, Douglas A, ‘Pathological Video Game Use among Youth 8 to 18: A National Study’, Psychological Science, 22 September 2008;<http://www.drdouglas.org/drdpdfs/Gentile_Pathological_VG_Use_in_press.pdf> Goldsmith, Jeffrey, ‘This Is Your Brain on Tetris’, Wired, May 1994; <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.05/tetris.html> Jo Kim, Amy, ‘Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software’, Google Tech Talks, January 2009; <http://www.youtube.com/watch?

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(world’s first true computer game) 16–18, 37 speakers 51 Spider-Man 3 (film) 29 Spielberg, Steven 14, 137–8 sports 2, 91 Star Trek series 113 Star Wars (film series) 7, 17, 46 Star Wars Force Trainer 159 Star Wars Galaxies 7, 139–40 Starcraft 81 stem cell research 59 Sundance Film Festival (2008) 143, 144 surface texturing 116 team games 100 television 58, 85, 114, 227 Baer and 19 console-based service 218–19 family entertainment 20, 59 and interaction 79, 136 user expectations 136 and virtual reality 160 and younger children 64 ‘tetriminoes’ 40 Tetris 40–42, 50, 122 text adventures x thatgamecompany 120 Thompson, Mark 226–7 Tolkien, J R R 45 Toy Story (film) 117 training 153, 157 emergency medicine games 197–9 military 188, 189, 190, 193 see also education; learning transnational relations 107–8 TripAdvisor 211 Triumph Studios 119 Trubshaw, Roy 45 Tunnel 228 show 133–4 Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London 132 Twitter 89, 208, 212 Ultima Online 7, 100, 148 universities 225 University of Southern California 121, 186 Up (film) 117 US Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS) 176 US Congress 182 US Department of Education 68 US Marine Combat Development Command 188 US Marines: First Recon unit 192 US military 187–8, 191, 194, 195 US Secret Service 68 value 151–2, 179–80 video arcades 87, 88 video game designer, as a career 37–8 video games addiction to 71–8 and art 117–34 big-budget 214, 222 born in a technology institute 15–18 a business devoted to miracles 14–15 and children 58, 62, 63–5 compared with other games 5–6 complexity 9, 11, 39, 42, 50, 72, 73, 130, 171, 214 consumers 61–2 creation of 114–17 education 199–208 equality 103 and the family 89, 91 feedback 9 and films 137 first icons 20 games-based vs. real-life interactions 91–3 the hero’s journey 46–7 and human behaviour 165–79 leadership in 98, 99, 101 as learning engines 6–7 as mainstream media activity 89 market for 22–3 military games 187–97 miniature games 126–9 mix of freedom and constraint in 102–3 moral panic 59 and music 135–6 nostalgia industry 52 perceived as played by adolescent males 87–8 players/non-players 59 power of 57–8, 223 progress by gaining experience 6 questions raised by 59–60 raising awareness 181–7 rapidly evolving 59 reviews 75 rules 6, 11 safety 58 as a social outlet 78–81 start of their commercial life 20 suitability for the digital age 28 teenage players (US) 90 time spent playing 29 two-player 88 and violence 60–61 and virtual theft 60–61 ‘visceral’ thrills 9–10 Villiers, Justin 112–13, 114 violence in games a minority interest 37, 82–3 regulation of 62, 224 and violence in life 65–71, 223 virtual currency 145–9 virtual economies 167, 169 virtual environments 142, 154, 172, 175 virtual epidemic 174–6 ‘virtual life’ simulations 83 virtual reality 14, 138 goggles 141 and the Wii 160 virtual screens 14 virtual voting system 225 virtual worlds 33, 45–7, 59, 95, 103, 141, 146, 154, 155, 160, 166, 168, 170–73, 210, 211, 223, 225, 226, 233 war games 188 watches 28 Watts, Peter 133 Wells, H G 45 Wii Play 83 WILL Interactive Inc. 196 wireless control 14 women players 61 word processing 155, 157 work virtual work 139–45 work/play separation 2–3, 5, 145 World of Warcraft (WoW) xii, 30, 93–102, 105, 147, 149, 174, 175, 176, 217 Wortley, David 153–4, 156, 157, 160, 161 Wright, Evan: Generation Kill 191–2 writing, origin of 57, 111, 228 Xbox 360 games console 14, 215 XEODesign 49 Yahoo!

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

Suddenly it turns out that in the face of twenty-first century problems, at least, it’s completely inefficient. The second thing that nobody really remarked upon is that this—that the crisis of the rise of robots and the fear of automation has happened before. It happened in the 1930s, but then, right at the end of the 1960s there was another enormous moral panic. I know one person (Win McCormack) who was taking part in think tanks at the time, and he told me that all the Ivy League schools in America were organizing, “what are we going to do when all the jobs are gone, and the working class is thrown out of work.” The Player Piano scenario felt quite imminent at that time.

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It’s a bit ironic that he used the term “accelerative thrust” though because in fact that particular indicator hit its high water mark just around the time he was writing the book, then abruptly stopped: the fastest speed a person has ever achieved was achieved in 1969, with Apollo 10, and we have never gone faster since. Most of his trends started slowing down at just that moment. Nonetheless, there was a general moral panic at the time, and a lot of it took the form of a very conservative fear of the social consequences of too much wealth, leisure, and rapid technological advance. (It’s not insignificant that Toffler himself became a darling of the neocons.) Much of it was explicitly anti-feminist: “What is going to happen to the patriarchal family and when we are all test tube babies?”

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One policy result, which can be observed around that time, was a vast shift of research and development away from the “space age” and futuristic technologies popular at the time and towards medical, information, and military technologies—that is, largely to things that were useful for social control. One could make the argument they also started working to reign in the welfare state around that time: anyway, that’s what eventually started happening. Somehow we are at that moment of moral panic again, but this time, with somewhat different ground rules. As I mentioned, the idea that machines are going to throw us all out of work and that this will be a disaster goes back well before the 1960s or even before Vonnegut; it harkens back at least to the Depression; even arguably to the Victorian age.

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

affirmative action, bank run, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, job automation, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, open borders, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Brussels Effect, too big to fail, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

In this sense, a major impact of the refugee crisis on European politics is the moral panic that it has provoked, a sense that the situation has spiraled out of control. The myriad acts of openness toward refugees fleeing war and persecution that we saw in 2015 in places like Germany or Austria are today overshadowed by their inverse: a raging anxiety that these same foreigners, warmly welcomed a year ago, will compromise Europe’s welfare model and historic culture and that they will destroy our liberal societies. Fear of Islamic terrorism and a general anxiety over the unfamiliar are at the core of Europe’s moral panic. In January 2017, the polling firm YouGov found that 81 percent of French, 68 percent of Britons, and 60 percent of Germans expected a major terrorist attack to take place in their country over the next year.25 The prospect of a future in which the European Union’s borders are constantly stormed by refugees or migrants erodes the trust Europeans have placed in their political system.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

“Every time a Napster enthusiast downloads a song, it takes money from the pockets of all these members of the creative community,” Ulrich said, remarking that the “touted new paradigm that the Internet gurus tell us we must adopt sounds to me like good old-fashioned trafficking in stolen goods.”59 Ulrich’s position was clear: file sharing victimized songwriters, musicians, and record companies and threatened the survival of the entire music industry. In Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, the copyright scholar William Patry astutely noted that the mainstream culture industries operate on a mildly coercive “push marketing” model in which companies use advertising and promotions to create consumer demand for the products they want to sell, and the formats in which they want to sell them.

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8 Webster to William Leete Stone, December 21, 1837, in Webster, Letters, 511. 9 Ford, Notes, 1:16–31. 10 Kendall, Forgotten Founding Father, 50. 11 Ford, Notes, 1:38. 12 He eventually studied law on his own and in 1781 was admitted to the Connecticut bar. 13 Noah Webster, “Introduction to ‘Blue-Back Speller,’ in Autobiographies of Noah Webster, 75. 14 Webster to Joel Barlow, November 12, 1807, in Ford, Notes, 2:31. 15 Webster to John Canfield, January 6, 1783, in Ford, Notes, 1:58. 16 Micklethwait, Noah Webster and the American Dictionary, 4. 17 Scudder, Noah Webster, 152. 18 Tim Cassedy, “ ‘A Dictionary Which We Do Not Want’: Defining America Against Noah Webster, 1783–1810,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 2 (April 2014): 229. 19 Noah Webster, “On the Education of Youth in America,” in Collection of Essays, 24. 20 Charvat, Profession of Authorship, 18–34. 21 Charvat, Literary Publishing, 42. 22 Wolcott to Noah Webster, September 19, 1807, in Ford, Notes, 2:27. 23 James N. Green, “The Rise of Book Publishing,” in Gross and Kelley, Extensive Republic, 78. 24 Letter from Joel Barlow to the Continental Congress, January 10, 1783, in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), eds. L. Bently and M. Kretschmer, https://www.copyrighthistory.org. 25 Patry, Moral Panics, 192. 26 Williams, “Significance of the Printed Word,” 43. 27 Noah Webster, “Origin of the Copy-Right Laws in the United States,” in Webster, Collection of Papers, 173. 28 Ibid., 174. 29 It is unclear how much credit, if any, Webster deserves for the Connecticut law; as David Micklethwait has demonstrated, Connecticut was already considering a statewide copyright law by the time the state legislature received Webster’s appeal. 30 Noah Webster, “Memoir,” in Autobiographies of Noah Webster, 143. 31 Noah Webster, “Diary,” in Autobiographies of Noah Webster, 222. 32 Smith, Colonial Days, 284. 33 Ford, Notes, 1:103. 34 Webster, “Diary,” in Autobiographies of Noah Webster, 219. 35 When George Washington married Martha Custis in 1759, Custis already had two children from a previous marriage.

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Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Washington, DC: Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing, Association of Research Libraries, 1995. Overhage, Carl F. J., and R. Joyce Harman, eds. INTREX: Report of a Planning Conference on Information Transfer Experiments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Patry, William. Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Peek, Robin P., and Gregory Newby, eds. Scholarly Publishing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Putnam, George Haven, ed. The Question of Copyright. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891. ———. George Palmer Putnam: A Memoir. New York: G.

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Schmidt is one of [the foundation’s] many individual donors when speaking or writing.”79 But while there are many donors, Schmidt is the only chairman of the foundation’s board. Another writer with some influence on the debate over copyright is William Patry, a prolific scholar who now works for Google as a senior copyright lawyer. In Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, Patry argues that the media business has deceptively framed copyright as a moral issue by using words like “piracy” and “theft.” (That may be true, but the use of the word “piracy” in this context predates the Statute of Anne, and “file sharing” isn’t exactly neutral language either.)

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I hired a local reporter to take notes on this event and checked Losey’s and Doctorow’s quotations against a video of the speech. 77. Ibid. 78. Tim Wu, “YouTube as Video Store,” Slate, January 29, 2010. Wu, “The Apple Two,” Slate, April 6, 2010. 79. Wu responded to questions via e-mail. 80. Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, p. 15. 81. Ibid., p. 17. I took the sales numbers from Take-Two Interactive’s 2010 second-quarter results. If Patry’s mistake sounds reasonable, think for a moment about that number: ninety-five million. There aren’t even that many video game consoles that can play Grand Theft Auto IV. 82.

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Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV. 2nd ed. White Plains, N.Y.: York House Press, 2008. Passman, Donald S. All You Need to Know About the Music Business. 7th ed. New York: Free Press, 2009. The ultimate reference book by one of today’s smartest music lawyers. Patry, William. Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Poundstone, William. Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It). New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. A fascinating look at why things really cost what they do. Reback, Gary L. Free the Market! Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive.

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

Even as this narrative was being proposed, researchers were starting to question it: one study of college students in the early 2000s found that there was no significant difference in their ability to do things like edit a spreadsheet or create a digital photo, between the twenty-year-old students and the mature students over forty. A critical review of the evidence for and against digital natives describes it as a myth, “the academic equivalent of a ‘moral panic.’” That is, when a group or activity is perceived to be a threat to society, but sensationalist media is far more prominent than any actual evidence for it. Not to mention that not everyone fits neatly into a parent/child dichotomy, or that a decade or two of daily practice can make even the most floundering of digital arrivals reasonably adept.

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., Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe. Novus Forlag. pp. 145–160. Christa Dürscheid, Franc Wagner, and Sarah Brommer. 2010. Wie Jugendliche schreiben: Schreibkompetenz und neue Medien. Walter de Gruyter. only 2.4 percent: Crispin Thurlow. 2006. “From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in the Print Media.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(3). pp. 667–701. What the teens were doing: Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis. 2008. “Linguistic Ruin? LOL! Instant Messaging and Teen Language.” American Speech 83(1). pp. 3–34.

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Even as this narrative was being proposed: Ruth Xiaoqing Guo, Teresa Dobson, and Stephen Petrina. 2008. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: An Analysis of Age and ICT Competency in Teacher Education.” Journal of Educational Computing Research 38(3). pp. 235–254. “the academic equivalent of a ‘moral panic’”: Sue Bennett, Karl Maton, and Lisa Kervin. 2008. “The ‘Digital Natives’ Debate: A Critical Review of the Evidence.” British Journal of Educational Technology 39(5). pp. 775–786. An article reminiscing: Melissa McEwen. November 13, 2017. “The Teenage Girl’s Internet of the Early 2000s.” Medium. medium.com/@melissamcewen/the-teenage-girls-internet-of-the-early-2000s-ffa05702a9aa.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

By his own admission, his call for the expansion of leisure ‘shocks the well-to-do’, who have historically doubted the ability of the poor to use their leisure time wisely (Russell, 2004c: 8). It was commonly thought that the poor were unworthy of leisure, and that more free-time would lead to widespread boredom and vice. (At Russell’s time of writing, there was a significant moral panic around growing cinema attendance, which bourgeois society believed was corrupting the young.) Maybe more concerning, from the perspective of those in society’s most powerful positions, was the prospect that increased leisure time might lubricate the political consciousness of the poor, or leave people with more time for collective action.

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If many have spoken out against work, Chapter 4 showed how dissenting voices have been suppressed and humiliated by the media’s tendency to discuss acts of resistance in a language of deviance and individual pathology. If critics of the work dogma want to join this linguistic battle, they had better turn up armed. For example, how about responding to the moral panic around today’s so-called ‘culture of entitlement’ by developing a critique of today’s more prevalent ‘culture of gratitude’? It is the culture of gratitude that thrives when, buckling under the pressure to survive, people begin to hurl themselves into any form of work that promises to boost their career profile, whether the work in question is paid or unpaid, suitable or unsuitable.

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Index * * * A achievement, social, measured through work, 15 Adam, a former computer programmer, 120, 127–8, 138–41, 170, 180 Adorno, Theodor, 69–72, 75, 76–7, 162; ‘Free Time’, 69 advertising, 85–8, 171; spending of industry, 88 affluence, ideals of, 181 agoraphobia, 152, 153 Alan, a former office administrator, 157–8 alienating tendencies, use of term, 62 alienation, 9, 48, 50, 61, 62, 63, 90, 93, 126, 146, 178, 200, 230; in Marx, 46, 47; normalisation of, 52; use of term, 51 alternatives: experimenting in, 223; utopian, 145 altruism, 113 Amazon, working conditions at, 51 anger management techniques, 53 Anne, a photographer, 127, 170; co-founder of Idlers’ Alliance, 207–8 anti-consumerist ethics, 163 anxiety, 13, 148, 151, 152, 164, 200; about education, 79; in face of consumer choices, 168 apricots, cultivation of, 79 Arendt, Hannah, 24, 39 Aristotle, concept of good life, 4 art of living, 4 Ashton, John, 229 ATOS company, 104; scandal regarding, 152 autonomous activities, 20 autonomous self-development, 36; right of, 35 autonomously organised production, 112 autonomy, 10, 29, 64, 91, 113, 141, 142, 150, 198, 205, 210–37; in work, limits to, 61–6; moral, 155; of workers, 69 B bakeries, production process in, 51–2 Basic Income, 225; as personal entitlement, 226; universal and unconditional, 225 Bauman, Zygmunt, 73, 159–60, 169–70 Beck, Ulrich, 73 being, mode of being, 79–80, 166 ‘being yourself’’ in work, 59–60 Bell, Daniel, 26 Ben, husband of Cheryl, 178, 179 benefit fraud, claimed costs of, 101 benefits, conditionalities of, 104 Berardi, Franco, 54–5, 81 Berger, Peter, 125, 128, 130, 144; with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 125 Beveridge, William, 28 Billig, Michael, 231 binary dichotomies in society, 99 biomedical labels: adoption of, 151–2; resistance to, 152, 153 black working class, rebellion of, 115 Black, Bob, The Abolition of Work, 206 Black, Carol, 108 Blauner, Robert, 48, 62 body, starts shouting, 149 see also broken body books: from libraries, 206; on subject of work, 206–7; reading of, 175, 195 boredom at work, 12, 140 Bowring, Finn, 116, 171 Braverman, Harry, 48 breakpoints, 125, 128, 129, 141, 142, 154, 216; causes of, 129; relating to personal health issues, 148 Brennan, Teresa, 148 Bridge, Angela, 189–90 broken body, 147–54 Brown, Philip, 42 Bruce, a former care home worker, 137, 146, 148–51, 200, 202, 203, 204 ‘bullshit jobs’, 40 bureaucracy at work, 132; intensification of, 133 Burroughs, William, 206 C ‘Californian ideology’, 59; boundaries of, 60 call centres, labour practices in, 50–1 calmer life, living of, 151 Calvin, John, 25 Cameron, David, 99 Cannon, David, 154–5, 233 capitalism, 24, 37, 44, 48, 64, 65–6, 147; as production of needs, 85; development of, 25–6, 29, 39–40; fixated on work and consumption, 3, 4; industrial, 30; insecurity in, 73; potential reduction of working time in, 32–3; resistance to, 188; spirit of, 25–6 career, concept of, 127 Casey, Catherine, 16–17, 56–7, 58, 212 casual labour, 28 Cederström, Carl, and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working, 55 Chaplin, Charlie, in Modern Times, 49 character assessment of workers, 56 cheese, buying of, 169 Cheryl, an interviewee, 120, 165–7, 176–7, 178 child-friendly policies, 116 childcare, 155, 206, 211 children, a factor in decision-making, 161 chirpiness, required in job, 136 Christmas, celebration of, 145, 186 cinema attendance, moral panic regarding, 96 Citizens Advice Bureau, 153 city spaces, privatisation and commercialisation of, 222 claimants, viewed as wasters, 99 claiming benefits, viewed as game, 135 Clive, an interviewee 201 clubbing together to get something done, 22 cognitive labour, 54–5 Cohen, Stanley, 126, 127, 129, 210 Cole, Matthew, 106, 205 collaborative forms of work, 64 Collinson, David, 213 colonisation of life: by economic demands, 9, 93; by work-related demands, 67–94 commodification, 92 commodity-intensive lifestyle, questioning of, 164 commons, abolition of, 186 commuting, costs of, 178 company people, creation of, 56 computerisation, of bakery, 51–2 computers, 50, 61, 72, 139–40, 172, 175, 177; gaming, 177 conditions of work, 226, 233 ‘constantly on call’, 72 consumer motivation, theories of, 88–91 consumer satisfaction, 85 consumer society, 26–7 consumerism, 40, 83–4, 91, 162–3, 169, 214, 228, 231; costs of, 160; depends on exploitation, 167; ethically conscious, 87; motivation for, 85, 178 consumers: needs of, exaggerated, 92; persuasion of, 86 consuming less, 172, 187 consumption: de-spiritualisation of, 176; gospel of, 82–94; growth of, 94; ostentatious, 186; replaces self-production, 92; therapeutic, 180 convenience, need for, 178–9 convenience commodities, consumption of, 91 conversation, love of, 137–8, 141 conviviality, as valued good, 116 cooking of meals, 145; pleasures of, 176–7, 187 coping strategies at work, 11 Coupland, Douglas, Generation X, 114 Cremin, Colin, 58, 76 customer complaints procedures, 54 CVs, preparation of, 75 cynicism, 12, 212–13 D Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, 115 dead end, experience of, 141 death, witnessing of, 130 debt, of students, 81 decentralisation of work, 32 deindustrialisation, 107 ‘delusions’ of workers regarding work, 21, 22 democracy, 215; engagement in, 222; in the workplace, 13 denaturalisation of work, 17, 216 Department of Trade and Industry (UK), work–life balance study, 218 dependency, alleged culture of, 100 depression, 148, 152 de-reification, 128, 144 desires, consumerist, pursuit of, 170 deskilling of work, 42, 48 diet, simplicity of, 136 dignity, 137, 193 disabilities see people with disabilities disability allowances, 152, 153 discipline at work, 28 discreditable, 200–1 dis-ease, feeling of, 130 disengagement from work, 47–52 dis-identification, 213 dissatisfaction, organised creation of, 85 distribution of income, 14 Dittmar, Helga, 88 division of labour, 28, 29, 48, 133, 146; gendered, 229–30 ‘doing nothing of value’, 141, 190, 233 domestic work, 19 see also outsourcing of domestic work downshifter, use of term, 120 downshifter study in USA, 165 Dubi, Steve, 46 Duncan Smith, Ian, 102 E eating together: pleasure of, 143, 144, 147; whittled away, 176 economic growth, 34, 37 education, 78; aims of, 80; anxiety context of, 79; as certification for work, 69; as socialisation, 15; broad, value of, 79; investment in, 42 eight-hour day, 71 Eleanor, an interviewee, 120, 124, 129, 144, 161–2, 167–8, 182, 183, 207 Emma, an interviewee, 196–7, 198–9, 202–3 emotional conduct, management of, 62 emotional investment, in office work, 136 emotional labour, 52–3, 57, 137 emotions, management of, 53–4 employability, 6, 9, 15, 16, 81, 82; discipline demanded by, 77–8; pressure of, 73–82 employee appraisals, 54 employers, 76–7 Employment Support Allowance (ESA), 148, 153 employment, paid see paid employment encirclement by the market, 92 ‘end of work’, argument, 33, 35, 36, 82 Engels, Friedrich, 74 entitlement, alleged culture of, 100, 103, 232 environmental awareness, 168 escapes, 129; construction of, 12 escapism, 10, 27, 210–37 ethical reflection, need for, 217 ethically dubious work, 135 see also worthwhile ethic eudaemonia, 4 Euro May Day movement, 115 exclusion, social, 161 extra hours, working of, 57 F Facebook, 88 factories, closure of, 106–8 family, work as, 56–7 family life: importance of, 230; prioritising of, 218 feminism, 22; interest in shorter working hours, 229; second-wave, 114–15 Fevre, Ralph, 106 Ffion, an interviewee, 145, 167, 170, 177, 181 Fisher, Mark, 214, 229 five-day week, 97 Fleming, Peter, 59–61, 64, 212–13 Fletcher, Harrell, 189 flight attendants, working conditions of, 53 ‘flow state’ condition, 12 Ford, Henry, 95 Ford assembly line, 48 foreign encounters, power of, 144 four-day week, recommended for public health reasons, 229 Fourier, Charles, 30–1 France, 35-hour week legislation in, 223–4 Frankfurt School, 2, 35 Franklin, Benjamin, 28 free choice of work, 31 free-time, 29, 33, 39, 40, 69–72, 123, 155, 157, 221, 228; as continuation of work, 72; as valued good, 116; authentic, 82; ‘excessive’, 83; experience of, 162; fragmentation of, 71, 73; increase of, 38; preservation of, 24; reabsorption of, 84; scarcity of, 41, 173, 175 freedom from work, 38 freelance work, 155 friendliness, simulation of, 54 Fromm, Erich, 79, 80, 166 Fryer, D., 109 full-time working, 90, 110–11, 141; resistance to, 28, 29 fun, culture of, in work, 59–60, 62, 213, 232 G Galbraith, J.

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

We dispense with that at our peril. Get rid of trolling and we might lose something else, too. The line between criminality, threats, offensiveness and satire is another very fine one. Trolls like Old Holborn do occasionally cast a satirical eye on society’s self-importance, expose the absurdity of modern life, moral panics or our histrionic twenty-four-hour news culture. One branch of trolls, called ‘RIP memorial trolls’, target people who post messages to online memorial pages of the recently deceased. According to Whitney Phillips, an academic who wrote her Ph.D. on trolls, they usually target what they call ‘grief tourists’: users who have no real-life connection to the victim and who could not possibly be in mourning.

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The first erotic stories Usenet group, rec.arts.erotica, was created in May 1991, which was quickly followed by a number of spin-offs and subgroups catering for every predilection, including one titled alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated. Although statistics about how much pornography is on the net are usually marked by exaggeration and moral panic, there has certainly always been a lot of it about. One pornographic Bulletin Board System earnt 3.2 million dollars in 1993 by selling hard-core images and videos to thousands of subscribers. By 1997 there was somewhere between 28,000 and 72,000 porn sites online. Porn is now estimated to comprise between 4 and 30 per cent of all websites.

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USE OF WORDS SUCH AS: HACKING, PHREAKING (OR ANY WORDS WITH ‘PH’ REPLACING ‘F’) LACK OF INTEREST IN SELF AND APPEARANCE OR INDICATIONS OF LACK OF SLEEP (WHICH MIGHT INDICATE LATE NIGHT MODEM-PLAY) COMPUTER AND MODEM RUNNING LATE AT NIGHT (EVEN WHILE UNATTENDED) STORING OF COMPUTER FILES ENDING IN: PCX, GIF, TIF, DL, GL (THESE ARE VIDEO OR GRAPHIC IMAGE FILES AND PARENTS SHOULD KNOW WHAT THEY ILLUSTRATE) NAMES ON COMMUNICATIONS PROGRAMS WHICH SEEM SATANIC OR PORNOGRAPHIC, OBSESSION WITH FANTASY ADVENTURE GAMES (DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS, TRADE WARS, SEXCAPADE, ETC.). This misunderstanding and moral panic typically accompanies most new technologies. p.8 ‘Whether actual or perceived, anonymity . . .’ ‘The Online Disinhibition Effect’, CyberPsychology and Behaviour 7 (3). This article was published in 2004, but Suler had set out his thesis before then, in 2001: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/1094931041291295 & http://users.rider.edu/~suler/vita.html.

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, citizen journalism, Columbine, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, equal pay for equal work, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, ghettoisation, hiring and firing, Housing First, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Laura Poitras, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral panic, Occupy movement, open borders, open immigration, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, white flight

Do these approaches encourage sexual commerce by giving it the patina of legitimacy? Perhaps. But if the central social concerns of coercion and disease are being managed more effectively than under prohibition, isn’t that a success? We should embrace these approaches as a starting point for policies that directly address social harms rather than moral panics. While commercial sex work will always have harm attached to it, so do legal sweatshops. In fact, the subordinate position of women in our economy and culture is the real harm left unaddressed by prohibition. Despite the lofty goals of abolitionists, as long as they are denied equal economic and political rights and equal pay for equal work, women will be forced into marginal forms of employment.

…

States passed antimarijuana laws, giving police a legal pretext to search and question migrants and create a climate of fear. In the North, marijuana was criminalized after becoming more popular among African Americans in the big cities. Its close association with jazz and black culture led to a moral panic. These twin forces came together nationally with federal prohibition in 1937. Intensive drug prohibitionism was tied to conservative nativist politics. Johann Hari describes the exploits of the nation’s first drug czar, Harry Anslinger, who from 1930 to 1962 waged a never-ending battle focused primarily on immigrants and people of color.6 He was personally involved in arresting and harassing jazz legend Billie Holiday and may have directly contributed to her death in police custody in 1959.

…

As part of an effort to maintain funding, they spend a lot of their time speaking to community groups about the threat gangs pose and the need for more suppression efforts. This tends to be one-way communication; these units rarely take input from communities about where and how to carry out their activities. Instead, it is usually part of a self-serving effort to win more resources and keep up the moral panic about youth violence and gangs, as well as to channel all related concerns into continued aggressive policing. There are a lot of misunderstandings about the nature of gangs, which have come to play a role in the way that police handle them. Strategies that seek to “eradicate” gangs often fail to consider exactly who the targets for such action are, or the effect on those targeted and on the community.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

There was still this idea, relentlessly pushed by the marketing teams of Silicon Valley—as well as certain academics, some of whom were discreetly funded by tech—that social media was always harmless and fun and socially progressive, and any criticism of it in regard to how kids used it amounted to a moral panic. But when I talked to girls, I heard a different story. “Social media is destroying our lives,” said a sixteen-year-old girl in LA. “So why don’t you go off it?” I asked. “Because then we would have no life,” she said. What was most troubling to me about these conversations I had started having with girls was what I was hearing about how social media was changing the power dynamic in dating, intensifying old sexist attitudes as well as generating new kinds of misogynistic behavior.

…

What Tinder’s tweetstorm did, I think, was manufacture a backlash to my story. In the media, there were suddenly several takes which misrepresented my reporting and the concerns I was trying to raise about how dating apps had changed the experience of dating, especially for women. Slate called my piece a “moral panic.” Salon said it “reads like an old person’s fantasy of Tinder.” The Washington Post said that I had “naïvely blamed today’s ‘hookup culture’ on the popularity of a three-year-old dating app,” Tinder—when, in fact, my piece clearly described the collision of a long-trending hookup culture with technology: “Hookup culture,” I wrote, “has been percolating for about a hundred years.”

…

* * * My book American Girls came out in 2016, and I was happy with all the attention it got, and the many good reviews. I was grateful for the chance to challenge some notions that had been taking hold in recent years: for example, that social media was harmless; that sexualization was empowering; that porn was an acceptable form of sex ed for kids; that raising concerns about predators online was an overblown moral panic. It felt like my book was shifting the conversation so that people were talking more about sexism in the lives of girls, and that felt good. A writer should probably never argue with her critics, and yet we do it all the time. I was determined never to, even after Zazie and I traveled to the Brontë museum in Haworth, England, that summer of 2016, and I saw there a letter from Charlotte Brontë throwing tremendous shade on one of her critics, which made me smile.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

(More than 80 percent of the company’s trade was devoted to calico at the height of the craze.) But the news was not as encouraging for England’s native sheep farmers and wool manufacturers, who suddenly saw their livelihoods threatened by an imported fabric. The craze for cotton was so severe that by the first decade of the next century it triggered a kind of moral panic among the rising commentariat, accompanied by a series of parliamentary interventions. Hundreds if not thousands of pamphlets and essays were published, many of them denouncing the “Calico Madams” whose scandalous taste for cotton was undermining the British economy. “The Wearing of printed Callicoes and Linnens, is an Evil with respect to the Body Politick,” one commenter announced.

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Le Bon Marché and its peers hinted, for the first time, that the service industry would soon become a cornerstone. — Women, of course, were at the epicenter of this new industry, as they had been during the dawn of the cotton revolution two centuries before. Increasingly, women were working in these new department stores, not just enjoying them as consumers. And just as cotton had unleashed a moral panic over the traitorous desires of the Calico Madam, Le Bon Marché triggered a similar crisis in Parisian society. In this case, it was not women buying luxury items that caused the outrage; it was the even more startling fact that women were stealing them. Shortly after the arrival of grands magasins like Le Bon Marché, the Parisian authorities and other interested parties began noticing a marked uptick in the number of women caught stealing items from the stores, apparently motivated by some kind of deranged pleasure in the act.

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His “Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee Houses” described the threat in decisive terms: Where it is most apparent that the multitude of coffee houses of late years . . . and the great resort of idle and disaffected persons to them have produced very evil and dangerous effects, as well for that many tradesmen and others do herein mis-spend much of their time which might and probably would be employed in and about their lawful calling and affairs, but also for that in such houses, divers false, malitious, and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the defamation of His Majestie’s Government . . . His Majesty hath thought it fit and necessary that the said coffee houses be (for the future) put down and suppressed . . . You can hear beneath that formal syntax the guttural cry of moral panic that would echo for centuries every time new leisure spaces emerged to scandalize older generations: from the department stores of the nineteenth century, to the pool halls of the early twentieth, to the video-game arcades of the 1980s. Charles might have “thought it fit and necessary” to suppress the coffeehouses, but the citizens of London thought otherwise.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

As Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University, put it when we spoke: “What is our strange commitment to seeing care as a purely private individual act rather than one embedded in the larger community?” Day care itself is also specifically stigmatized, a holdover from the conservative backlash against working women of the 1980s, when day care became a Satanic straw man for so many societal evils. As Richard Beck argues in We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, the sexual abuse trials against day-care center workers in that decade stemmed from a reactionary fear of feminism and of women working outside the home—with the concomitant need for day care—as well as the usual fear of crime. The scapegoating of day care also stemmed from societal dismay over what many perceived as the dissolution of the traditional family, with mothers waiting at the school gates for pickup and fathers home by six, taking their seat at the head of the table.

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My dearest thanks of all go to my husband, Peter Maass, and my daughter, Cleo Quart Maass. Loving you both made me want to tell the stories of other families, and our story, a little, as well. Bibliography Baraitser, Lisa. Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption. London: Routledge, 2009. Beck, Richard. We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. New York: PublicAffairs, 2015. Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Viking Press, 1953. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Bianchi, Suzanne, Nancy Folbre, and Douglas Wolf. “Unpaid Care Work.” In For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States, edited by Nancy Folbre, 40–65.

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News & World Report, 55 Valencia College Peace and Justice Institute, 105 Vanity Fair, 211 Very Hungry Caterpillar (Carle), 7 Wages for Housework, 129–30 Wage stagnation, 9, 60–61, 243 Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 177 Wayne, Christina, 219 “Wealthies” vs. selfies, 216 “Wealthy Hand-to-Mouth, The” (study), 96–97 Weather Underground, 89 We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s (Beck), 75 Weber, Max, 60 Weeks, Kathi, 242 Weldon, Fay, 291n Westwood College, 41 WeWork, 38–39 Wharton, Edith, 94 Whitehall Studies, 96 Who Cares Coalition, 254 Wilkinson, Will, 213 William Cullen Bryant High School, 144–45 Williams, Joan, 29 Williams, William Carlos, 40 “Will to education,” 133 Wire, The (TV show), 217 Wolcott, James, 211 Women Have Always Worked (Kessler-Harris), 112–13, 123–24 Worker cooperative movement, 157–60, 259–60 Work-life balance, 13–14, 251 Work schedules, 5, 68–72 extreme day care and, 64–66, 68–74, 78–79 remedies, 84–86 Workweek, 73–74, 84–85 of average American adult, 65, 71 rise of 24/7 day care, 64–65 World Economic Forum (WEF), 227–28 World of Homeowners, A (Kwak), 128 Xanax, 45, 62 Yale University, 48 YouTube, 214, 222 Zelizer, Viviana, 77 Zimmerman, Martín, 218 Zūm, 70 Zunshine, Lisa, 48 Zutano, 257 About the Author ALISSA QUART is the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit with Barbara Ehrenreich.

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

The swift and protocol-busting ban on the new drug in the UK did nothing to eliminate it here or in the EU or the US; it simply handed the market to grateful gangsters who added the drug to their repertoire, and prompted greater innovation in the chemical underground. Following the intense media attention that mephedrone attracted, and the ensuing moral panic, the new chemical craze of so-called ‘legal highs’ gained full-spectrum media dominance in a matter of weeks. Newspapers and legislators were shocked, but the situation was as predictable as it was inevitable – if you knew where to look and what you were looking for, and if you’d been looking for long enough.

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How these substances achieve this in neurological terms is hotly debated, but the latest research suggests that when flooded with serotonin the mind dampens down brain activity, rather than increasing it, as had long been thought. (These descriptions deliberately and necessarily simplify the interaction between drugs and the brain, since each category of drugs actually acts on both systems at once, and each system is far too complicated for any non-scientist to describe – or read about.) As the social taboos and moral panics around psychedelics started to build, Dow found itself the uneasy holder of patents for powerful psychedelics such as DOM – a designer drug created by Shulgin and popularized following the outlawing of LSD. This potent drug flooded the streets of Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and is said to have caused many traumatic episodes as tablets containing guaranteed overdoses of the chemical circulated in their thousands.

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Leaving aside the fact that no toxicology reports were available at the time of that report, and that no bath salts type drugs are anything remotely like LSD, the source for these allegations was flimsy at best – neither the doctor nor the policeman quoted in the early stories had first-hand knowledge of the case, reported Reuters’ Jack Shafer.13 It is complex enough untangling the facts in news stories that involve novel psychoactive substances without media hype confusing the picture so completely that it seems almost wilful. Each generation has its drugs moral panic, whether it comes in the guise of LSD users jumping from buildings in the 1960s, PCP-crazies in the 1980s, superhuman crackheads in the 1990s, or Meow-frenzied and entirely fictional schoolkids taunting their teachers with their bags of legal highs in the early twenty-first century. As Alasdair Forsyth, of Glasgow Caledonian University’s Institute for Society and Social Justice Research, told me, ‘There was a cartoon in Punch a few years back depicting two farmers looking at a huge scarecrow with the caption: “To have any effect I find I have to make it more scary every year”.’

Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet by Linda Herrera

citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, decentralized internet, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Google Earth, informal economy, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, WikiLeaks

A twenty-five-year-old Egyptian university graduate illustrates this difference when he says, “I mainly associate the state with the horrible experience of having to go the police station to get my [national] ID.” To better understand how this wired generation started to coalesce into a counter-power requires going back to the era of technological opening. The high-tech revolution arrived in Egypt with a combination of excitement, moral panic, and desire. No one could predict how technology would change people and society, or how people would alter the technology. Liberalization Egyptian Style The Egyptian government, historically reluctant to allow the spread of technologies that would loosen its grip on its citizenry, nevertheless opened its doors to information and communication technologies (ICT) and the liberalization of the media.

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The icon of Mohamed Bouazizi, however, did not appeal to some Egyptians, who found an ethical conflict in his act of suicide. When news spread that apparent copycat self-immolation suicides were taking place in Egypt—by an elderly man from Cairo, a desperately poor mother who committed the act in front of her children, and two unemployed men—a moral panic ensued. The two idioms of martyrdom and suicide were getting conflated in ways that proved troubling and complicated, and that brought ethics to the surface of the Khaled Said page. A member of the 6th of April Movement, twenty-six-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz, came forward to ease concerns about suicide/ martyrdom and to rally people to take to the streets on January 25.

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945 by Pat Thane

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gender pay gap, longitudinal study, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, old-boy network, pensions crisis, Russell Brand, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

There was now an 96 U N E Q UA L B R I TA I N opportunity to effect real change, with an effective and respected lobbying organization active (the TLRP), increasing levels of legal awareness among travelling communities, and strengthened human rights and race relations legislation in place. What followed, however, was a full-blown moral panic over ‘problem’ Gypsy and Traveller sites.113 In November 2004, the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) called for the reintroduction of the statutory duty on local authorities to provide sites, and expressed concern that the new regional planning system would take too long to deliver results: There must be a national response with a duty imposed on all local authorities based on assessment of need at regional level.

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A study of the national press coverage found: ● a widespread failure to capitalise ‘Gypsies’ and ‘Travellers’ as proper nouns, in defiance of guidelines published by the National Union of Journalists and the CRE ● a tendency by the right-wing tabloids to question Gypsies’ and Travellers’ ethnic status, implying that they were not ‘real’ ethnic minorities and that to consider them as such was ‘political correctness gone mad’ ● the use of terms that were, at best, mildly offensive and, at worst, racist, ranging from ‘itinerants’ and ‘tinkers’ through to ‘gyppos’ and ‘pikies’ ● routine stereotyping of all Gypsies and Travellers as threatening, G Y P S I E S A N D T R AV E L L E R S ● ● ● ● 99 dirty and lazy, with the over-riding message that they were invading and destroying the countryside through the stealthy and deliberate development of ‘illegal’ and unwanted sites some use of the binary stereotype of the good/bad and real/fake Gypsies to excuse racist reporting routine stereotyping of the settled community as law-abiding, decent and hardworking, drawn together by the Express newspapers under the ‘Middle England’ label, to sharpen the contrast with Gypsies and Travellers many of the hallmarks of a moral panic, including the portrayal of the Gypsy ‘problem’ as national rather than local, ‘calls for action’ in some newspapers, predictions the problem would snowball, and linking with other social problems as evidence that Britain was ‘going to the dogs’ very few voices, including that of the CRE, challenging the stereotypes or criticising the abuse of Gypsies and Travellers.130 Ironically, all political parties claimed to agree that the solution to the tensions was to increase the number of authorized public and private Gypsy and Traveller sites and to clamp down on unauthorized ones.

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This page intentionally left blank Index Page numbers in bold refer to figures and tables. 9/11, see September 11th, 2001 abortion 58, 105–6, 110, 114, 140, 202 activism and activist groups, see campaigning Age Concern 7, 10, 14, 17–19 AIDS 127, 150–5 anti-Semitism 1, 45, 53, 56–8 Ashley, April 142–3 assimilation 54, 56, 68, 75–6, 82, 86 Bangladeshi community 2, 21, 37, 39, 41–2, 44, 65, 189 BCODP (British Council of Organisations of Disabled People) 164, 170–2, 174 Begum, Shabina 54, 64 Beveridge, William 7, 9–12, 18 birth control 58, 116, 130, 139 birth rates 4, 9, 13, 23, 108, 116, 119 bisexuality 127–9, 132, 145, 151, 154–5, 161 Blasphemy Act 53, 60–1, 66 British Federation of Business and Professional Women (BFBPW) 109–10 British National Party (BNP) 30, 38, 54 British Social Attitudes Survey 43, 119 British Union of Fascists 56 Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) 145–6, 148–9, 159 campaigning and definition of mental illness 178 and disabled people 166, 168–9, 172 and ethnic minorities 37, 45–6 Gypsies and Travellers 71, 81, 102 and homosexuality 157, 161 and older people 9, 17–18, 21 and overcoming inequalities 189–90 and poverty 14–15 and religious minorities 66 and trans people 3, 159 and women 2, 107, 113, 121, 123 CARD (Campaign Against Racial Discrimination) 29, 34–5, 44, 60 Caribbean community 32–4, 36–7, 39, 41–3, 179–80 Catholic community 53, 55–8, 61, 67–9, 81, 158 child care 108, 116 Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) 14 children and mental disability 163, 175–7, 187 Chinese community 21, 41 Christian denominations, membership of 69 Church of England 53, 55, 66–7, 141 Church of England Moral Welfare Council (CEMWC) 135–6 Church of Scotland 69, 141 CJPOA (Criminal Justice and Public Order Act) 90–2, 126–7, 150, 157 Cowell, Roberta 125, 142–3 CRC (Community Relations Commission) 29, 36–7, 47 CRE (Commission for Racial Equality) establishment of 30, 37–8 and Gypsies and Travellers 94, 98 and religious discrimination 59 and women 115 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, see CJPOA cross-dressing 129, 147–8 culture, changes since 1945 5 DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) 164–5, 171–3, 178 DED (Disability Equality Duty) 165, 173 depression 3, 163, 166, 173, 175 disability definition of 166, 171, 173 learning 165, 172, 179, 181–2, 186 mental 3, 166, 175, 179, 181–2, 185, 187 physical 3, 166 Disability Information and Advice Line (DIAL) 164, 169 disabled people activism of 169, 172 benefits for 168–9, 173, 183 historical perception of 165 inequalities since 1945 3 and pensions 11 public attitudes to 174, 181 registered 184–5 226 disabled people (continued) responsibility for 167–8 and retirement 16 services for 170, 172, 176–9, 182, 186–7 and education, see education, and disabled people and employment, see employment, and disabled people and poverty, see poverty, and disability Disablement Income Group (DIG) 14, 163, 168 discrimination against disabled people 169–70 against gay people 158 against Gypsies and Travellers 98 against trans people 127, 160–1 against women 113 age 1, 8, 15, 18–19, 21–2 indirect 30, 37, 60–1, 112 legislation against 35–7, 41, 46, 53, 65, 170–1, 174 racial 29, 35–6, 54 religious 54, 59–62, 64, 67 in Scotland 121–2 divorce 4, 23, 105, 116, 119, 123, 132, 135 DPI (Disabled Peoples International) 170, 174 DRC (Disability Rights Commission) 165, 172, 174, 181, 190 education changes since 1945 4 and disabled people 163, 165–6, 173, 187–8 and ethnic minorities 4, 37, 42–3, 118 of Gypsies and Travellers 81–2 and older people 22 and religious identity 57, 63 and women 109, 117–18 employment and Bangladeshi community 189 changes since 1945 4 and disabled people 171, 173 discrimination in 32–3, 36 INDEX and ethnic minorities 4, 37, 39, 42, 50 and older people 4, 8, 12–13, 16, 18, 20–1, 27 and women 4, 108, 111–13, 116–20, 122–3 equality age 8, 22 legal 2–3, 60, 68, 159–61 Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and age equality 8, 22 and disabled people 174 and sexual orientation 128 establishment of 45, 47 foundation of 30 ongoing role of 190 ethnic minorities before 1945 31–2 and British politics 46 in British politics 30, 32–4, 37, 40 census data on 49 deaths in police custody 30 Gypsies and Travellers as 71–2, 81, 94 and homosexuality 145 and income 51 inequalities since 1945 2, 37 language and 43–4 and media 44 and mental disability 179 older people in 14–16, 21, 42 organizations of 33–4, 40–1 takeup of benefits 189–90 and trade unions 38–9 and volunteering 18 women in 38, 40 and education, see education, and ethnic minorities and employment, see employment, and ethnic minorities and poverty, see poverty, and ethnic minorities European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 72, 90, 94, 126, 157 European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) 94–5, 126–8, 149–50, 157, 160, 162 European Declaration on Human Rights 64 families, lone-parent 119 gay men and AIDS 151–3 inequalities since 1945 2 lifestyles of 134, 144–5 as politicians 127, 157 Gay News 53, 61, 66, 126, 145–7 gender identity 125, 128–9, 159, 162 gender roles 160–1 generational interdependence 21 GLC (Greater London Council) 30, 34, 40, 115 GLF (Gay Liberation Front) 126, 144–5, 147–8 Grant, Bernie 30, 40 Greater London Action for Racial Equality (GLARE) 40 Gypsies and Travellers and housing 76 and pensions 11, 20 and political action 76–7 and retirement 16 and welfare provision 75–6 benefits for 168 caravan sites 72–4, 77–8, 80, 82–97, 99–100 continuing inequality of 189, 191 evictions of 71, 78–82, 90–3 inequalities since 1945 2, 73–5, 100–1 legal protection of 94–5 number of caravans 103 occupations of 83 organizations for 92 problems with statistics for 101–2 public attitudes to 44, 47 welfare provision for 71 Gypsy and Traveller Law Reform Coalition (G&TLRC) 72–3, 93, 97 Gypsy Charter 71, 77–8, 83 Gypsy Council 71, 81, 84–5, 88 Gypsy Lore Society (GLS) 71, 74, 76 Haire, Norman 130, 132–3 Help the Aged 13, 17 Hindu community 58–9, 62, 64 HIV, see AIDS HLRS (Homosexual Law Reform Society) 125, 137, 140–1, 144, 148 INDEX homophobia 2, 140–2, 147, 150, 154, 158–9 homosexuality decriminalization of 126, 132, 139–40 depictions of 138–9 during World War II 131–2 legal status of 126, 128–9, 132, 135–6, 139–40, 146, 148–50, 153–4, 156–8 as mental illness 178 public attitudes to 133–4, 137–8, 147, 153–4, 158, 159, 162 and religion 66, 141–2 Human Rights Act (HRA) 54, 64, 66, 72, 94, 97, 157, 160 language 43–4, 128, 134, 166 Lawrence, Stephen 30, 41 learning difficulties, see disabilities, learning lesbians and gay liberation 145–6 inequalities since 1945 2 legal status of 125, 136, 140–1 organizations of 141 persecution of 130, 132 as politicians 127, 157 public perception of 130–1, 138 life expectancy 4, 9, 23, 24 Little Kinsey 125, 133–4 London bombings, July 2005 45, 64 illegitimacy 4, 108, 131, 135 immigrants after 1945 4, 32–3 from Commonwealth countries 48 and pensions 20 and religious discrimination 67 and religious diversity 56 restrictions on 34–6, 39, 45, 56 impairments 169, 171, 173, 175, 177 Indian community 21, 42 Indian Workers’ Association (IWA) 29, 32, 34–5 inequalities health 181 income 21 since 1945 1–2, 189 integration 46, 54, 56, 65, 68, 176, 179 Irish community 31, 33, 45–6, 55, 62, 179–80, 190 Irish Travellers 72, 74, 80–1, 84–5, 94, 102 Islamophobia 62 MCB (Muslim Council of Britain) 54, 62–3, 65 media and disability 182 and ethnic minorities 44–7 and Gypsies and Travellers 74, 88, 93, 96–9 and homosexuality 133, 142, 150–2, 162 and mental illness 163–4, 175 ongoing role of 190 and religious minorities 63–4, 68 and women 123 MENCAP 163, 166, 172, 175, 181 mental hospitals 163, 165, 175–8 mental illness 164, 166, 171, 175, 177, 180 middle classes 4, 108, 110 MIND (formerly National Association for Mental Health) 163, 172, 175–6 moral panics 96, 99 multiculturalism 38, 40, 60, 65, 68 multiple sclerosis 166, 168, 171 Muslim community and British politics 54 and domestic partnership 116 and employment 59 and equality legislation 60 and ethnic identity 59–60, 62 growth of 58 Jewish community 1, 29, 31–2, 45–6, 53, 55–9, 64, 146, 189–90 JRF (Joseph Rowntree Foundation) 170–3, 179 Kinsey, Alfred 125, 132–3 Labour Party 12, 34–5, 40, 106, 111, 114, 120–2, 139, 153 227 inequalities after 9/11 1, 43, 45, 47 integration of 65, 68 legal recognition of 63 organizations of 61–2, 64 portrayal of 65 National Federation of Old Age Pensioners Associations (NFOAPA) 9, 12–15 National Federation of Retirement Pensions Associations (NFRPA) 9–11 National Front (NF) 38, 145 National Insurance 7, 11, 75 National Pensioners’ Convention (NPC) 15–16 National Spinsters’ Pensions Association (NSPA) 7, 9 New (Age) Travellers 72, 84, 88–9, 102 NF (National Front) 38, 145 NHS (National Health Service) 12, 23, 33, 109, 159–60, 163, 173, 175, 181 Northern Ireland 61, 126, 141, 146, 148, 150 Notting Hill Carnival 30, 34 Old Age Pensions, see pensions, state Old Age Pensions Association (OAPA) 9, 17 older people activity of 28 before 1945 8–9 campaigning by 22 and health 12 historical changes in inequalities 1, 13, 23–4 militancy of 8 physical condition of 19–20 use of term 19 and education, see education, and older people and employment, see employment, and older people and poverty, see poverty, and older people Pension Credit 20, 190 pensions campaigning for 7, 9–11 and disabled people 11 228 pensions (continued) occupational 11, 21 private 8, 11, 16–17, 20 state 7–11, 14, 16–18, 20, 160 and trans people 160 and women 7, 9, 116 police, attitude to ethnic minorities 30, 39, 41, 45 ‘political correctness’ 43, 96–7 population ageing of 8, 13, 16, 22, 25–6 changes since 1945 4 poverty changes since 1945 4 and continuing inequality 191 and disability 167–8 and ethnic minorities 46 and immigrants 31, 41 and older people 7, 11, 14, 22–3, 26–7 and women 11, 116, 119 pregnancy 23, 116 Press for Change (PfC) 127, 129, 159, 161, 221 prostitution 125, 129, 135–7 race, concept of 60 racism 1, 34, 38, 43–4, 46–7, 62, 94, 96, 100, 144–5 institutional 39, 41 rape 110, 114 religious minorities 54–6, 59–60, 65, 67–8 size of 69–70 retirement 7, 10–11, 13, 16–18, 21, 23, 28 riots 29–30, 39–40, 54, 57 RRB (Race Relations Board) 29, 35–7 The Satanic Verses 54, 60–2, 66 schizophrenia 164, 178–9 SCOPE (formerly Spastics Society) 164, 172, 177 Scotland Gypsies and Travellers in 75 homosexuality in 141–2, 148–50 and women politicians 121 Scottish Homosexual Rights Group (SHRG), see SMG Scottish Union of Mental Patients (SUMP) 164, 176 INDEX SDA (Sex Discrimination Act) 105, 113, 115, 122, 169 September 11th, 2001 1, 43, 45, 47, 64, 68 sex education 125, 133–4, 153 Sex Education Society 130, 132 sex reassignment surgery (SRS) 142 sexuality and identity 129, 132 survey results on 156 Sharia law 54, 65–6 Sikh community 53, 58–9, 62–3, 66–7, 69 SMG (Scottish Minorities Group) 126, 145–6, 148–50 social class 4, 42 Somali community 65 stereotypes 19, 74, 86, 99–100, 123, 190 Tatchell, Peter 127, 152–4 Telephone Legal Advice Service for Travellers (TLAST) 92 Terence Higgins Trust (THT) 126–7, 151, 153 terrorism 30, 57, 65 Thatcher, Margaret 39, 106, 115, 121, 147, 152, 155 TLRP (Traveller Law Reform Project) 73, 93, 95–6 TLRU (Traveller Law Research Unit) 72, 92 trade unions 8, 11–12, 15, 30, 34, 38–9, 85, 106, 111–12, 115, 145–6 trans people and campaigning 161 and gay communities 145, 155 inequalities since 1945 2–3 legal status of 159–60 organizations of 147–8 public attitudes to 142–4, 162 use of term 129 transvestism, see cross-dressing travel, changes since 1945 5 TUC (Trades Union Congress) 8, 15, 38, 111–12 Turing, Alan 135 United States 15, 43, 64, 118, 130, 132, 147 violence, domestic 38, 114–15, 119, 122 volunteers 17–18 Wales 31, 38, 64, 73, 79, 94, 102, 121, 159 West Indian community 29, 32, 34, 36 West Indian Standing Committee (WISC) 34–5 White, Florence 9 Whitehouse, Mary 53, 61, 126, 146, 149 Wilde, Oscar 125, 129 WLM (Women’s Liberation Movement) 38, 105, 107, 110–11, 113, 115, 145 Wolfenden Committee 125, 136–9, 141–2, 147 women black 113–14 earnings of 118 equal pay for 105, 107–13, 118–19 in ethnic minorities 38, 40 and government institutions 120, 123 Gypsies and Travellers 84, 110 and health 21 historical inequality of 107 inequalities since 1945 2 lesbian and bisexual, see lesbians and marriage 75, 108, 110–11, 116–17, 122–3, 168–9 and mental illness 180 and motherhood 108, 116–17, 119 Muslim 60, 65 organizations for 109–12, 114–15 in Parliament 110, 114, 120–1 and pensions 7, 9, 116 as percentage of population 106 and religion 66 and retirement 16 and education, see education, and women and employment, see employment, and women and poverty, see poverty, and women

Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

The most widely shared stories on this platform were pro-Corbyn and anti-Tory, accentuating Corbyn’s celebrity support and polling improvements, thus undermining the demonisation taking place in the traditional print and broadcast media. Labour understood this advantage and invested more energy in posting and sharing social media content than all of its rivals.16 Some journalists and centre-right politicians have responded to this change with unavailing moral panic about ‘online abuse’ and ‘fake news’. As with all moral panics, they express real tendencies, but in a way that distorts, exaggerates, and scapegoats. Certainly, the emerging attention economy has allowed sensationalist websites and sources of infotainment to exert influence and claim advertising revenue, but neither sensationalism nor infotainment are original products of online media.

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The media which have indulged in what Diane Abbott, herself one of the major targets of online abuse, called the ‘politics of personal destruction’ are in no position to lecture. And all too often, politicians have muddied the waters by qualifying any mildly intemperate political criticism as ‘abuse’, invariably with the wry rider: ‘so much for the new kinder, gentler politics.’ The moral panic is a substitute for appropriate journalistic curiosity about complex new developments. Particularly striking is the complete lack of interest in learning anything about Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, who have instead been demonised, condescended to as silly and dangerous fanatics uninterested in wielding real power, and subject to gossip and red-baiting.

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

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

Many conservative men like to view themselves as sort of modern-day cowboys, independent-minded tough guys who value freedom and a rugged independence, and yet we are by nature more scared of the world. Indeed, a key component to conservative thought through the ages is fear, both physical fear and a terror that society is in permanent decline. In the 1970s sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the phrase ‘moral panic’ to sum up a strand of socially conservative thinking about the way things are always getting worse and young people in particular are more badly behaved than their predecessors. Middle-aged people have always complained about the younger generation, but during the 1950s and 1960s, with the invention of the ‘teenager’ and more widely reported acts of criminality and juvenile delinquency, as well as changing sexual mores and more promiscuity, this accelerated.

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The 1960s ethic was and is still very strong, and adolescence was supposed to be all about rebellion against the older generation and the Man, yet things had changed a lot since that earlier decade’s glorious explosion of youthful energy and music. Conservatives certainly have a tendency towards moral panic, and yet society had got considerably less safe and my adolescence coincided with the most violent period in modern British history. The Hollard Park kids would regularly prey on their neighbours on the way home, and muggings were common; indeed, street robbery, which numbered around 400 a year in England and Wales during the 1930s, was so bad by the end of the century that there were 8000 in just one London borough in a single year.10 Violence had hugely increased and one of the boys in our year, out of about a hundred, was murdered when we were in our teens.

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Many US colleges now have full speech codes stating with some detail what is permissible to say on campus, so that the University of California states that such statements as ‘America is a land of opportunity’ should be avoided because it would insult minorities or women. The idea of academia being a place of open exchange is clearly in decline, and this has implications for society in general, beyond Right-wing clickbait articles about snowflakes. Arguing that colleges have never been bastions of free speech, and this was a moral panic, one Vox article quoted a college statement of student responsibilities from the 1960s, which warned that any behaviour that ‘offends the sensibilities of others (whether students, faculty members or visitors) . . . will result in disciplinary action . . . vulgar behavior, obscene language or disorderly conduct are not tolerated’.31 Yet institutions have always had rules about behaviour, and against bringing ‘scandal’ to the organisation; what is different now is the belief that ideas and speech are offensive, while in contrast people with protected ideas or identities are allowed to behave exactly as they like.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Removing spam is censoring content; it just happens to be content that nearly all users agree should go. Nearly all users agree that spam should be deleted—which means nearly all users agree that platforms should moderate. See Brunton, Spam. 23Ingraham and Reeves, “New Media, New Panics”; Marwick, “To Catch a Predator?”; McRobbie and Thornton, “Rethinking ‘Moral Panic’ for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds.” 24Fiss, Liberalism Divided; Heins, Not in Front of the Children; Streeter, Selling the Air. 25Giulia Segreti, “Facebook CEO Says Group Will Not Become a Media Company,” Reuters, August 29, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-zuckerberg-idUSKCN1141WN. 26Napoli and Caplan, “When Media Companies Insist They’re Not Media Companies and Why It Matters for Communications Policy,” 2016. 27Pasquale, “Platform Neutrality.” 28Twitter, “The Twitter Rules,” https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311. 29Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms.’” 30McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook, “Birds of a Feather.” 31In this I enjoy a privilege that some users do not.

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“The Social Construction of Scale.” Progress in Human Geography 24 (2): 219–42. MARVIN, CAROLYN. 1990. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. MARWICK, ALICE E. 2008. “To Catch a Predator? The MySpace Moral Panic.” First Monday 13 (6). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2152. ———. 2015. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2017. “Are There Limits to Online Free Speech?” Data and Society Research Institute. https://points.datasociety.net/are-there-limits-to-online-free-speech-14dbb7069aec.

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“Regulating Swish: Early Television Censorship.” Media History 19 (3): 354–68. MCPHERSON, MILLER, LYNN SMITH-LOVIN, AND JAMES M. COOK. 2001. “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (1): 415–44. MCROBBIE, ANGELA, AND SARAH L. THORNTON. 1995. “Rethinking ‘Moral Panic’ for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds.” British Journal of Sociology, 559–74. MCVEIGH-SCHULTZ, JOSHUA, AND NANCY K. BAYM. 2015. “Thinking of You: Vernacular Affordance in the Context of the Microsocial Relationship App, Couple.” Social Media + Society 1 (2): 2056305115604649. MEDEIROS, BEN. 2017.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Significantly, it was at this time, in 1904, that the American psychologist Stanley Hall defined adolescence as a separate life-stage, a period of ‘storm and stress’ prone to perversion and vice.128 Troublesome youths were nothing new in history, but it was now that they were diagnosed as a distinct problem: juvenile delinquents. Moral panic was fuelled by an awareness of the growing independence of youth, in terms of both money and mobility. Scavenging for tin cans, bottles, paper and discarded furniture and selling the loot to the local junkman gave city kids new freedom as consumers. Rising wages freed adolescent workers from parental control.

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In Moscow, young men flâneured up and down the left side of Gorky Street – Broadway or simply ‘Brod’ to them – in extra-long jackets, tight trousers with wide flares and thick-soled shoes that could weigh up to 2.5kg. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, authorities, journalists and cultural elites voiced the same moral panic: youth was in crisis.117 These confrontations had particular local ingredients; West Germans, for example, worried about how to build a new army with young rebels. But it is helpful to see things in the round. How consumption redefined generations is a theme that will be explored in greater depth in a later chapter.

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In the Eastern Bloc there were also signs of a new age-specific culture of pleasure, separate from the demands of work and politics. In a Russian underground publication, a writer charged the older generation: ‘You propose to spit on the operetta, study only [Friedrich Engels’] Anti-Dühring? and discuss politics? How boring are your ideals . . . How can a person live without jazz, funny songs, dance and laughter?’127 The moral panic about young consumers was so sharp because of related concerns about sexual promiscuity and a loosening of class and gender hierarchies. Sex was becoming an ‘obsessional activity’, of ‘purely animal satisfaction’, Seebohm Rowntree wrote in 1951.128 Such fears drew on an earlier association between the temptations of the flesh and the lust for things, especially among the weaker sex.

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

The 1925 description by the historian Dorothy George that “it would be hardly possible to exaggerate the cumulatively disastrous effects of the orgy of spirit-drinking between 1720 and 1751” seems itself to be an exaggeration.45 And contemporary accounts of widespread ruin and death as a result of gin-drinking are surely examples of moral panic based on a fragile interpretation of verifiable events. Be that as it may, it is clear that the production and consumption of spirits did increase dramatically in some parts of England (especially in London) during the first half of the eighteenth century, and that this must have had implications for the health and well-being of many individuals and for the social order more generally. It is difficult, however, to assess the scale of the phenomenon and its consequences and to understand why they provoked a moral panic. The popularity of gin in England was kick-started by a shortage of brandy, which by the late seventeenth century was being imported from France in substantial volumes: 2 million gallons a year by the 1680s.

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Gin was said to be much stronger than brandy and to be, as such, a much “hotter” beverage that could “overheat” its consumers. If excessive brandy-drinking in the morning led to the abuse of wine and beer in the afternoon, the risk was that much greater when grain spirits were involved. Warnings about the potential dangers of spirits seemed to be justified by a number of moral panics in the early eighteenth century, the most dramatic and best-documented of which was the “gin-craze” that was believed to have taken hold in parts of England between 1700 and 1750. (“Gin” was a generic term for a wide range of distilled spirits, and it was not specifically the juniper-flavored spirit that was at issue here, but all grain-based alcohol.)

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The second major alcohol issue associated with young people, binge-drinking or heavy episodic drinking, refers to drinking significant volumes of alcohol in a short period with the primary purpose of getting drunk. Concern for binge-drinking (the term is rejected by some alcohol policy-makers) has some of the characteristics of a moral panic, an inflated assessment of some form of behavior, such as the gin-craze of early eighteenth-century England might well have been. At that time, middle- and upper-class men deplored—and undoubtedly exaggerated—the extent of public drinking by women, workers, and the poor, even though they themselves might have regularly drunk themselves into oblivion in the privacy of their homes and clubs.

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

And yet, that was the message the ABC News story was trying to convey—as were other news outlets (like CNN and the Associated Press), when they unethically and uncritically repeated their competitor’s story without doing any original reporting of their own: COVID-19 was being driven by the solipsism of genocidal college students. The story was a case of moral panic, meant simplistically to assign blame for complex social problems that were politically inconvenient for the ruling class. Stories like the one about COVID-19 parties aren’t just shoddy journalism; they are useful mythmaking for the ruling class agenda. As Americans fell into poverty and begged for relief in the pandemic, the federal government could have taxed the wealthy more, taxed corporations (whose wealth is built by workers), and printed money to send to people to keep them from falling into starvation or homelessness.

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., New York Times, April 20, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html. 2: The Infinite Weight of Zero “who gets the virus first”: Bill Hutchinson, “Alabama Students Throwing ‘COVID Parties’ to See Who Gets Infected: Officials,” ABC News, July 1, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/alabama-students-throwing-covid-parties-infected-officials/story?id=71552514. Such contests never happened: In a separate example of a COVID party moral panic in 2020, a local TV station retracted their reporting on COVID parties. See Neil Fischer (@NeilFischerTV), tweet, Twitter, May 7, 2020, 8:46 p.m., https://twitter.com/NeilFischerTV/status/1258558984522350593. But with the Tuscaloosa story, major news organizations did not address its holes, even after media critics like me, on Twitter and in Wired, pointed out the lack of evidence.

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mining industry minjung protests Minneapolis Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District Missouri Department of Corrections Missouri HIV transmission law (1988) Missouri Supreme Court Missouri v. Michael L. Johnson Mitchell, Elise MMR vaccine Molldrem, Stephen moral failing moral panic mortgage foreclosure crisis mosquitoes mumps. See also MMR vaccine Murrow, Edward R. Mustanski, Brian mutual aid “my body, my choice” Myles, Otha NAACP naloxone Nation National Black Justice Coalition National Football League National Health Service (U.K.) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) nationalism National Junior College Athletic Association Wrestling Championships National Park Service Native Americans nativism Nature Nazi Germany Nebraska necropolitics neoliberalism New Deal New Democrats New Jersey “new Jim Crow” New Orleans New Republic Newsom, Gavin New York City New York City Council New Yorker New York Police Department (NYPD) 85 New York Post New York State New York State Senate New York Times Magazine Nguyen, Kimarlee Nixon, Jay norovirus Norplant North Carolina Nott, Josiah Clark nursing homes Oakland Obama, Barack Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Ohio OKCupid Olivarius, Kathryn Onassis, Aristotle Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy On the Origin of Species (Darwin) opioid crisis organized abandonment othering overdoses ownership mentality Oxfam International OxyContin (oxycodone) Palestinians Parasite (film) parasites, defined Paris Paris Is Burning (film) Pasteur, Louis Patel, Rupa Pathogen Research Database Patient 31 Patient O (“outside”) patient zero “Patient Zero”.

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

Paul, Minnesota Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 323–24; AP, April 19, 1978; Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 223–26, 215–17. Wichita, Kansas Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 322–23; Fred Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic: The Origins of America’s Debate on Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 161, 173–75. Eugene, Oregon Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic, 175–76; Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 322. Florida Citrus Commission Gannett News Service, January 22, 1978. “done the most damage” Jackie M. Blount, Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 147.

…

In Minnesota Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 324–36; Fred Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic: The Origins of America’s Debate on Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 173. “we have been attacked” Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 223–26, 218. State Senator John Briggs Ibid., 219. Mayor Connie Kennard ABC News, May 8, 1978, VTVNA. The reverend leading UPI, April 29, 1978. shocking 83 percent Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic, 174. White House public liaison “Wichita Repeals Homosexual Law,” NYT, May 10 1978.

…

On May 15 AP, May 16, 1978. “Wichita and St. Paul” Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic, 177. Burlington, Vermont Christopher Hewitt, Political Violence and Terrorism in Modern America: A Chronology (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 118. angry letters “Principle of Nonviolent Opposition,” Burlington Free Press, May 25, 1978. United Presbyterian Church UPI, May 6, 1978; AP, May 23, 1978. Jerry Falwell preached Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 152. Eugene voted Fejes, Gay Rights and Moral Panic, 177. Milk had enjoyed Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street, 220–21.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

They were expected to live their entire lives effectively as unfinished human beings.31 Inevitably, many began to rebel, give up on the interminable waiting, and began marrying early, abandoning their masters to set up cottages and families of their own—which, in turn, set off a wave of moral panic among the emerging employing class very reminiscent of later moral panics about teenage pregnancy. The following is from The Anatomie of Abuses, a sixteenth-century manifesto by a Puritan named Phillip Stubbes: And besides this, you shall have every saucy boy, of ten, fourteen, sixteen, or twenty years of age, catch up a woman, and marry her, without any fear of God at all . . . or, which is more, without any respect how they may live together, with sufficient maintenance for their callings and estate.

…

This in turn led to a renewed backlash of moralizing about work as a value in itself of the sort we’ve already encountered in chapter 6—at the same time as an export of many factory jobs to poor countries where labor was cheap enough it could still be performed by human beings. It was in the wake of this reaction to the sixties counterculture, in the seventies and eighties, that the first wave of managerial feudalism, and the extreme bullshitization of employment, began to make itself felt. The latest wave of robotization has caused the same moral crises and moral panics as the sixties. The only real difference is that, since any significant change in economic models, let alone property regimes, is now treated as definitively off of the table, it’s simply assumed the only possible result will be to convey even more wealth and power to the 1 percent. Martin Ford’s recent The Rise of the Robots, for example, documents how, after making most blue-collar workers redundant, Silicon Valley is in the process of taking aim at health care, education, and the liberal professions as well.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

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

In their landmark study Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd described a similar moment of flux: 1920s America and its emergent love affair with the automobile.3 By the end of the roaring twenties, the automobile had become central to the lives of “Middletown” (actually, Muncie, Indiana) residents, an “accepted essential of normal living” and an “important criterion of social fitness.”4 Homes built during the period no longer contained formal parlors because unmarried daughters now socialized with their beaus on unchaperoned “dates” out in the car—a source of both fierce disagreement between parents and children and growing moral panic over “sex crimes” committed in automobiles.5 Young men whose families didn’t own a car were excluded from social clubs, and families were rumored to purchase cars to help their children fit in. Walking for pleasure or bicycling marked one for abuse from young boys known to shout, “Aw, why don’t you buy a machine!”

…

Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”37 On the Other Hand Scary critiques of smartphones increasingly seem to permeate popular narratives. Everywhere we turn online, features with impressive graphics and earnest podcasters mull over the dangers of our hand machines. Are we crazy to be carrying these things around in our pockets? Or are we in the midst of a moral panic in which we project broader fears about social change onto an easily identifiable target? These are difficult questions to answer, not least because there is so much disagreement about the impact of smartphones on individuals and society more broadly. Anthropologist Judy Wacjman disagrees with Turkle, arguing that “smartphones should be regarded as another node in the flows of affect that create and bind intimacy.”38 Ling, in a pathbreaking work on mobile telephony, argues that the mobile phone “extends the reach of parents, children, and friends” and actually “seems to result in stronger internal group bonds.”39 Scholars studying social cohesion in Korea, France, and Japan reported similar findings.

America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

Although at their farther 117 AMERICA RIGHT OR WRONG fringes the forces of the American antithesis shade over into fascistic manias like that of the terrorist Timothy McVeigh and the various militia movements, the great majority are not opposed to the formal democratic aspects of the American Creed; on the contrary, they take enormous pride in them and regard them as the core of American grandeur. This national unanimity behind democracy has formed the essential component of what might be called America's self-correcting mechanism, the country's ability to undergo periods of popular hysteria, moral panic and nationalist extremism without allowing them to become a permanent feature of the national scene or to be institutionalized in dictatorship. At least until now. As later chapters discuss, a combination of the national security state created by the Cold War and a war against terrorism with no foreseeable end may create some worrying possibilities in the long term.

…

To the old anti-American prejudices elsewhere in the West, it adds the suspicion that powerful sections of the United States are driven by motives which are both wholly culturally alien to the rest of the developed world and fundamentally irrational. It risks creating a degree of fundamental alienation from America among other Western elites which was never true in the past. Moral Panics Although the Southern and Northern churches divided bitterly over slavery (with abolition becoming a great crusade for parts of Northeastern Protestantism), after the Civil War the Southern churches were also closely associated with some of the Northern and so-called mainline Protestant churches of the United States in certain moral crusades.

…

., 5, 130 political correctness, 28, 47; and nationalist myth, 5960, 62-63 populist nationalism, 96, 104, 134 Porch, Douglas, 26 Powell, Colin, 44, 78, 152, 170, 177 Present Danger, The (Podhoretz), 158 Present Dangers (Kagan, Kristol), 164-65 Prestowitz, Clyde, 46 pride, national, 3, 19-20, 53 progressive internationalists, 79 Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), 77 Prohibition, 131-32, 133, 137 propaganda, 24, 78, 113, 155; anti-Israeli, 205; around race, 47, 62 Protestantism, 6, 21, 44, 5455, 97, 125, 139 Protestants, 101, 104, 140; evangelical/ fundamentalist, 5, 8-10, 99, 124, 126, 144; and moral panic, 130-33; nativism in, 9196; and religious nationalism, 33-34 Prudhomme, Sully, 38 Pursuit of the Millennium, The (Cohn), 147 Quinet, Edgar, 35 racism, 41-47; covert, 43, 46; and cultural conformity, 41-43, 44; transformation of, 43-47, 49 Rational Choice theory, 66, 68 Ravitch, Diane, 60 Reagan administration, 79, 129,141, 169, 178; and national myth, 57-58, 59, 63, 153 "Realism," 75, 170, 183; character of, 18, 159, 17071; criticism of, 76, 78, 79; dominance of, 82, 172 273 Red Cross, International Committee of (ICRC), 121, 122 "Redneck" culture, 116 Reed, John Shelton, 102,107, 116 Reed, Ralph, 43, 92, 119,141 religion: conservative, 8, 12325; statistics on, 140.

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

., Securing an Urban Renaissance, Bristol: Policy Press, 2007. 37 David Simon, ‘The Escalating Breakdown of Urban Society across the US’, Guardian, 6 September 2008. 38 Quoted in Paul Street, ‘Republicans, Cities, and Cruise Ships’, Znet, February 2004. 39 Ibid. 40 Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, The Right and The Moral Panic Over the City, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 37–70. 41 It is striking how Christian Fundamentalists regularly espouse the pseudo-science of Social Darwinism whilst rejecting out of hand the overwhelming accumulation of hard-scientific evidence supporting Darwinian theories of Evolution.

…

One report by Visionics, a leading manufacturer, promised that its face-recognition technologies would do no less than ‘Protect … Civilization from the Faces of Terror’.105 Seduced by such hyperbole, Interpol announced in October 2008 that it was seeking to develop an international face-recognition CCTV system to integrate screening across main borders.106 The dramatically intensified investment and research in face-recognition CCTV after 9/11 has exploited perfectly the notion of what Kelly Gates calls an ‘amorphous, racialized, and fetishized enemy Other that had penetrated both the national territory and the national imagination’.107 The race is on to develop systems appropriate to the ‘nation’s new “unidentifiable” Other’ – people of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’.108 The technophilic search for an extended, distributed system for tracking the biometrically scanned faces of suspect individuals thus parallels the idea, propagated through the moral panic flooding the national media, ‘that certain faces could be inherently “faces of terror” – that individuals embody terror or evil in their faces’. This, Gates argues, could ‘not help but invoke a paranoid discourse of racialized otherness’.109 The prospect of ‘smart’ CCTV continually searching for ‘abnormal’ or ‘threatening’ elements across entire cities and nations may ultimately prefigure the collapse of the age-old notion of urban anonymity.

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We were driving next to a truck with some day laborers … and we were parked beside them at a light. [My daughter] wanted to move because she was afraid those people were going to come and get her. They looked scary to her’.59 The widening anxieties surrounding urban life within the context of the War on Terror add to moral panics over crime, social unrest, and the need to fortress oneself and one’s family against all manner of incursions and risks. Enter the SUV, carefully designed and marketed to exploit and perpetuate fears of the Other, the ghetto, while at the same time providing reassurance and patriotic symbolism for ‘homeland’ suburbanites who find themselves experiencing a new kind of war, in which vague and unknowable threats might lurk everywhere and anywhere, threatening to strike at any time.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Ofshe and Ethan Watters (1994), Making Monsters: False Memory, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria, New York: Scribners; Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham (1994), The Myth of Repressed Memory, New York: St. Martin's Press; and Frederick Crews (ed.) (1998), Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend, New York: Viking. For an excellent sociology of hysterical epidemics and moral panics, see Philip Jenkins (1992), Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter. The specific example of the woman who claimed that her father molested her from the ages of five to twenty-three is known as Laura B., who sued her father, Joel Hungerford, in the state of New Hampshire in 1995.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

A feature of the legislation is that a disproportionate number of antisocial-behaviour orders have been handed out to people with mental health problems which result in unusual behaviours, such as autism or Tourette’s syndrome.28 When antisocial-behaviour orders are breached, which they are in the majority of cases, the consequences can be up to five years in prison.29 So what is antisocial behaviour and where has it come from? ‘The morals of the children are ten times worse than formerly,’ Lord Ashley told the House of Commons in 1823, showing that moral panics about the behaviour of young people are nothing new.30 According to the legislation, antisocial behaviour is defined as behaviour which can cause ‘harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household [as the perpetrator]’. But while the definition is broad enough to cover just about anything, the antisocial-behaviour agenda, which is also branded the ‘Respect’ agenda, has introduced specific legislation, including parenting orders, curfews, evictions, antisocial-behaviour orders and dispersal orders.

…

The consequence of excluding problem families from social housing is the creation of ghettoes of terrible conditions described in the last chapter. IS BEHAVIOUR WORSE? As Lord Ashley’s comments about young people in 1823 revealed, every generation believes that behaviour, of its young people in particular, is not what it was. The term ‘moral panic’ was coined in the 1960s after the shock which greeted the clashes between mods and rockers. In the 1970s punk, with its Mohican haircuts and safety pins, terrified the older generation. Punk gave way to skinheads and football hooligans. Later in the 1980s a more overtly racist narrative linked young black men to inner-city crime.

The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith

double entry bookkeeping, Malacca Straits, moral panic, working poor

As for the received view about the so-called empty nest syndrome, like many syndromes it barely exists. In most cases, parents do feel a slight pang on the leaving of home by their children, but this pang tends to occur before the offspring go, and it is largely a dread of the syndrome itself rather than concern over the actual departure. In this way it is similar to many of the moral panics that afflict an imaginative society from time to time: the fear of what might happen in the future is almost always worse than the future that eventually arrives. So when the child finally goes off to university, or takes a gap year, or moves out to live with coevals, the parents might find themselves feeling strange for a day or two, but often find themselves exhilarated by their new freedom.

…

It would have to be one of the galleries that are accepted as being the sort of place where coffee makers – or anything, for that matter – can be sold as art. I’m not in that line of apostolic succession, so to speak.’ Big Lou was thinking. ‘The Dutch tulip affair,’ she said. ‘I was reading a funny wee book about social hysteria – about how folk get things into their heads and go mad for a while. There was something about witchcraft.’ ‘Moral panic,’ prompted Matthew. ‘Yes. That sort of thing. Didn’t the Dutch go mad about tulips back in the – when was it – 1600s? Didn’t they pay terrific prices for tulip bulbs? And these bulbs got more and more expensive and people fought to have the rarest ones they could get hold of. Sheer stupidity.’ ‘Yes,’ said Matthew.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with your friends, once unquestionable, has now become unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot.

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See also Television; specific media outlets citizen customization of political traditional Media customization MediaMetrix MedievalMUSH Mednick, Sara Meehan, Martin Meetup.com “Mental Set and Shift” (Jersild) MetaFilter Metaphor overload Meyer, David Meyer, Paul Meyer, Timothy The Mickey Mouse Club (television series) Microsoft Microsoft Outlook Microsoft Research Labs Milgram, Stanley Miller, George Milton, John Mind historical views of hypertext simulation and social and networked video games and Mobile phones. See Cell phones Mockumentaries Modernism The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy (video game) Monsell, Stephen Moody, Teena Moore, Jim Moore’s Law Moral panics Morita, Akio Mormon Church Morris, William Mosaic Motorola Moulitsas Zúniga, Markos Movable type mp3.com MPD. See Multiple personality disorder Mrs. Dalloway (Wolff) MSN MTV MtvU MUDs. See Multiuser domains Multiple personality disorder (MPD) Multiplicity Multitasking Multiuser domains (MUDs) Mumford, Lewis Muppets Murdoch, Rupert Murray, Janet Murthy, N.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

“Chinese Gene-Editing Experiment Creeps Out Scientists,” claimed NBC News, while NPR speculated about “Designing Superhumans.” In April 2015 a modest and soft-spoken Chinese biologist named Junjiu Huang used CRISPR to edit human embryos, showing that previous animal experiments could be conducted in humans too. Despite the moral panic in the United States, the reaction to this early experiment was subdued in China. This experiment did not transfer any embryos into a mother’s womb. Hand-wringing about China’s lack of ethics was distracting the public from genetic engineering experiments that were already taking place closer to home.

…

He did not fully brief the new president on the scope and scale of his ambitions, but still maintained his rock star status on campus because of his success as an entrepreneur. Once he had concrete results, with an actual pregnancy, he assumed that the university would embrace and celebrate his achievement. Dr. He closely followed the case of Junjiu Huang, the Chinese scientist who caused a moral panic in April 2015 by being the first to use CRISPR to edit non-viable human embryos. After the sensational headlines faded away, scientists in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere began to catch up with their own CRISPR experiments. The top scientific journal Nature celebrated Huang as one of “ten people who mattered” in 2015.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The temperance movement greatly benefited from the crisis, too, helping ratify the 18th Amendment—the ban on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages—in 1919.14 Figure 9-1: An advertisement card for a cocaine-based children’s toothache medication, circa 1885 In the decades that followed, the abject failure of alcohol prohibition efforts exhausted the social capital of anti-drug activists, setting the stage for the drug-, sex-, and music-fueled hippie movement of the 1960s. The movement, in turn, fed into a moral panic that precipitated the Nixon-era War on Drugs, later expanded under Reagan in response to the crack cocaine epidemic and the massive spike in urban crime. Today, the pendulum of drug policies is swinging again toward liberalization. In just a couple of years, most states either legalized marijuana or removed the associated criminal penalties.

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On the higher end, I’m partial to MKM Terzuola Jouf, made with well-regarded N690 steel and retailing for about twice as much. Although a knife is a tool far more than it is a worthwhile weapon, special care should be taken to understand the law. Knife regulations around the world tend to be remarkably boneheaded, with obscure rules rooted in long-forgotten moral panics. For example, the government of California bans the citizenry from possessing ninja throwing stars and lipstick-shaped knives.* More practically, many localities put confusing restrictions on certain blade shapes, opening mechanisms, and so forth. Picking on California again: a folding knife of any length can be carried concealed (for example, inside your pocket), but any fixed-blade knife must always be in plain view.

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

But for the past half century, the national emphasis on policing families rather than helping them hasn’t rested on a rhetoric of explicit racism and dehumanization. We don’t call children “rats” anymore or talk about the need to “civilize” them. Instead we have intensified the demonization of parents, with successive waves of moral panic about the prevalence of child abuse. THE BONES TELL A STORY This emphasis comes in part from the crusade of a doctor named Henry Kempe. He fled the Nazis alone as a teenager. When he was training as a pediatric radiologist, X-ray imaging was becoming more sophisticated. The technology held a powerful mystique in that postwar era.

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But like “tough on crime” policies, “tough on parent” policies don’t tend to make enforcement more effective, and they don’t address prevention. They burden child welfare systems with more investigative responsibilities and burden families with more scrutiny. Racism, two centuries of maternalist politics dividing mothers into deserving and undeserving, and a moral panic over child abuse that dates back half a century. Take it all together, and privileged people are ready to believe that only irredeemable mothers are in danger of losing their children. Maya, an educated white parent, had no qualms telling me, a journalist, that she had fits of rage when Jonah’s behavior got over-the-top frustrating.

Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt

British Empire, double helix, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, offshore financial centre, precautionary principle, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), War on Poverty

Since hemp paper posed direct competition to wood pulp paper, he had an economic stake in limiting hemp production, and recognised that if controls were placed on cannabis because of its psychoactive effects, it would become more difficult to grow the plant for other purposes. Hearst’s media empire spread stories about violent attacks on white women by Mexican immigrants intoxicated with marijuana, creating a sense of moral panic and support for controls on the drug, and therefore on the plant as well. The three lives of cannabis now became dependent on the fate of its use as a recreational drug. Although ordinary Americans were familiar with hemp, many didn’t realise that it had anything to do with marijuana, just as many doctors didn’t realise it was the same plant as cannabis indica, which they considered a valuable medicine.

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However, this was the decade in which recreational use became common, with some people buying it on the black market, and others 22diverting prescriptions from their doctors. Although cannabis users and medical professionals had become more organised by this point, and were trying to get the drug decriminalised for all uses, some of the moral panic from the USA had been imported, and there was a lot of political pressure to control the drug still further. After the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the British government decided 23not to renew the medical licence on cannabis, in part because of concerns about the drug being diverted from medical sources.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Douglas Hofstadter, feminist movement, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, index card, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, lolcat, McMansion, meta-analysis, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, profit maximization, quantitative easing, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, short selling, Steven Pinker, the market place, theory of mind, Turing machine

.—1785 Complaints about the decline of language go at least as far back as the invention of the printing press. Soon after William Caxton set up the first one in England in 1478, he lamented, “And certaynly our langage now vsed veryeth ferre from what whiche was vsed and spoken when I was borne.” Indeed, moral panic about the decline of writing may be as old as writing itself: Non Sequitur © 2011 Wiley Ink, Inc. Dist. by Universal Uclick. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. The cartoon is not much of an exaggeration. According to the English scholar Richard Lloyd-Jones, some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.6 My discomfort with the classic style manuals has convinced me that we need a writing guide for the twenty-first century.

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Simpler: The future of government. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sword, H. 2012. Stylish academic writing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Thomas, F.-N., and Turner, M. 1994. Clear and simple as the truth: Writing classic prose. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thurlow, C. 2006. From statistical panic to moral panic: The metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language in the print media. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11. Truss, L. 2003. Eats, shoots & leaves: The zero tolerance approach to punctuation. London: Profile Books. Van Orden, G. C., Johnston, J. C., & Hale, B.

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

And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”15 The history of another term associated with Donald Trump—“fake news”—is instructive here. Originally, it described a very specific phenomenon: websites publishing false articles in the hope of getting clicks from social media and thus advertising dollars. The iconic example was the claim that the pope endorsed Trump’s presidential bid. When Trump won, for a while there was a moral panic, serious commentators worried that gullible voters had been lured into voting for Trump because they believed these outrageous lies. That panic was a mistake. Academic studies found that fake news was never widespread or influential; most of it was consumed by a small number of highly conservative, elderly voters who were likely Trump supporters all along.

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There are encouraging signs that more researchers are welcoming replication efforts. In 2010, for instance, political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler published a study on what became known as “the backfire effect”—in brief, that people were more likely to believe a false claim if they’d been shown a fact-check that debunked the claim. This caused a moral panic among some journalists, particularly after the rise of Donald Trump. Fact-checking only makes matters worse! It hit that perfect counterintuitive sweet spot. But Nyhan and Reifler encouraged further studies, and those studies suggest that the backfire effect is unusual and fact-checking does help.

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

The suspicion of novel forms of entertainment created by people outside of the establishment and eagerly consumed by the young isn’t new—novels, movies, TV, jazz, and rock music were all feared in their early days—but it manifests differently each time. Many believed games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Grand Theft Auto harmed the moral character of children and incited them to violence, echoing the moral panic surrounding Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. Those fears did little to slow the rise of video games as an industry and a cultural force. Today, we’re constantly reminded video games generate more revenue than movies and, as of 2019, were second only to TV and video in their command of children and teens’ attention.17 Every month brings a new gaming sensation, from Minecraft to Fortnite to Among Us to Roblox; every year brings a brand-new gaming technology, like Twitch streaming, Discord chatting, location-based gaming, and virtual reality.

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It would be sensible if we were all a little more skeptical of video games studies regardless of their findings—especially given the inherent limitations I described earlier. Video games are enormously varied in design and genre, far more than can be captured in blanket statements, and they operate in different ways on different people. To talk about them in purely negative terms on the basis of moral panic and ignorance is wrong. We should talk about the positive aspects of many games, such as providing escapism, a sense of wonder and discovery, and stress relief and promoting kindness and pro-social behaviour through well-designed multiplayer experiences, acceptance of diversity, and more—but to talk about them wholly positively, handwaving any negative effects as essentially unavoidable or insignificant, is also wrong.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Pinker is frequently linked to the IDW, although not quite in the same orbit as some of the aforementioned personalities; a New York Times piece on this “amorphous network” by journalist Bari Weiss (herself largely sympathetic towards it) had him with a “tony affiliation” rather than full membership.15 Pinker has frequently appeared alongside IDW pundits in public conversations,16 debated on the side of key IDW talking points such as biological gender differences,17 and has made frequent comments on the impact of political correctness on the rise of far-right populism, notably at Davos in 2018 where he echoed one of the core talking points of the IDW: that political correctness is giving the far right “the sense that there were truths the academic establishment could not face up to”.18 Further endearing him to this crowd, he has also argued that many of the issues that progressives advocate most passionately for are little more than “moral panics”. One of these issues is campus rape, which he dismisses with what is now the standard template of New Optimist logic — supply facts which show that a given problem is less bad than in the past, and ask people to stop complaining: The moral panic du jour is campus rape: the extraordinary belief that America’s elite universities, the institutions into which the children of the upper middle class clamber to be admitted, have rates of rape that are higher than those of the world’s most savage war zones even as quantitative studies have shown university women are less likely to be raped than their non-university age-mates, and that rates of rape overall have been in decline for decades.19 Pinker is self-conscious of his provocations, making efforts to cover his tracks by insisting that it’s the hysteria over campus rape that is the problem, not rape itself.

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

The figures are patchy, but it seems that an appreciably higher proportion than usual of these burglaries were committed by juveniles – a fact that subsequent police reports not implausibly attributed to the way in which ‘during the war years children have lacked fatherly control and restraint and in a large number of families mothers have obviously tended to allow too much freedom’.16What was indisputable was that a moral panic was brewing up nicely. Reassuringly, during the spring and disappointingly poor summer, the old sporting rituals reappeared, apparently unscathed: not only the Cup Final but the Boat Race (‘the Prime Minister was there, the swans were out, young men back from the services wore beards, folk picnicked on roofs, ate ice-cream, let off crackers,’ noted Hodson), the Grand National (Captain Petre, on leave from the Scots Guards, winning on Lovely Cottage, very much the housewives’ choice) and Wimbledon (the British players routed by the French, American and Australian ones).

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And Gorer, who could speak with some authority, declared his belief that such suspicions ‘would be much more widely voiced in most other societies’.9. It was, all in all, a graphically consensual picture that this aspect of his survey evoked. The Blue Lamp was equally topical in terms of the prevailing moral panic about youth into which it so deftly tapped. ‘Rarely a day passes now without some act of criminal violence being committed,’ noted Anthony Heap in March 1950: ‘Gangs of young teen-age thugs, emulating the American gangster “heroes” they see regularly on the screen, go around “coshing”, robbing, and beating-up people with impunity.

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Henceforth, though, each episode was lumbered with a gratuitous tailpiece, in which a voiceover solemnly mulled over the moral issues that had been raised – a device that perhaps hastened the programme’s end in 1951. Juvenile delinquency, although undoubtedly a real phenomenon, was almost certainly not as widespread as the moral panic imagined. One suggestive fact is that out of 1,315 working-class Glasgow boys who left school in January 1947, just over 12 per cent had been or would be convicted in the courts at least once between their eighth and eighteenth birthdays. Analysing the lives and outcomes of these boys over the three years after they left school, Thomas Ferguson (Professor of Public Health at Glasgow University) identified the main factors behind juvenile crime: low academic ability, employment problems, bad housing and criminal habits or tendencies in the family background.

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

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

Early on, the reaction of mainstream conservative media to Internet trolls from the chan world was an unambiguously moral and condemnatory one, and the standard progressive academic reflex (implicitly pro-counterculture, implicitly pro-transgression) was less critical, verging on celebratory. The Fox News depiction of 4chan as an ‘Internet hate machine’ and trolls more broadly as an anti-social, foul-mouthed group of misanthropes, still living with their mothers, etc., simultaneously mocked and heightened the moral panic about the anarchy of the online world. Other mainstream news media focused on cyberbullying, DDoS attacks and the trolling of Facebook memorial pages. Author Whitney Phillips was more ambivalent, characterizing the cultural politics of trolling in more generous terms than the mainstream press, portioning some of the blame for their extreme cruelty to Facebook policies and the ‘encoded solipsism’ of the social network itself.

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

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

At times, these emotional mechanisms set off a spiral in which fear of heretics or the desire to avoid being accused leads to further accusations, which increases fear, multiplying the number of accusations, which results in a witch-hunt. The frenzy also serves the function of providing an internal scapegoat to unify a group against. The Inquisition, beginning in tenth-century Europe, is the most famous example of this dynamic, torturing suspected heretics and setting off a spate of moral panics. ‘Crimes’ committed by deviants are either evidence-free or grossly exaggerated.6 The Terror following the French Revolution, the Stalinist Show Trials of the 1930s, McCarthyism in the 1950s and Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s show how secular versions of the process operate. Splits within challenger movements such as the 1970s British left (satirized by Monty Python in the ‘People’s Front of Judea’ skit in Life of Brian) or Irish republicanism (I once visited an ‘Official’ IRA pub, commemorating some of those killed by the ‘Provisional’ IRA) may lead to similar purges or assassinations.

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Ritualistic aspects include shaming those who violate taboos around immigration or multiculturalism while applauding people who perform ‘virtue-signalling’ affirmations of sacred anti-racist values. This signalling-approval dynamic is identical to the ‘Amen’ which a fundamentalist preacher’s flock chants after the pastor divines signs of Satan’s or God’s presence in innocuous events. Left unopposed, the ecstasy can spiral out of control, leading to moral panics of the kind seen at Evergreen State. CONFLICT OVER THE MEANING OF RACISM While positive liberals seek to expand the scope of the anti-racism taboo, negative liberals defend it only for a narrower range of infractions. For instance, restricting the right of a Muslim woman to wear a burqa runs counter to procedural liberalism.

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That is the situation we are currently in. A second option is to have a cultural points system of immigration along the lines noted above, but to live and let live once groups are in a country. Growth is contained by the selection process, which removes the imperative for illiberal integration policies and deflates moral panics. If a Haredi Jew or Salafi Muslim wants to live in a segregated community in Britain, only interacting with their own community, I don’t mind. But this is true only because such groups are small. I would rather have a tolerant society, with a small share of illiberal minorities, than a situation like Israel where illiberal minorities are large, growing and beginning to set the tone.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

We examine the “shout-downs,” intimidation, and occasional violence that are making it more difficult for universities to fulfill their core missions of education and research. We explore the newly popular idea that speech is violence, and we show why thinking this way is bad for students’ mental health. We explore the sociology of witch hunts and moral panics, including the conditions that can cause a college to descend into chaos. In Part III, we try to solve the mystery. Why did things change so rapidly on many campuses between 2013 and 2017? We identify six explanatory threads: the rising political polarization and cross-party animosity of U.S. politics, which has led to rising hate crimes and harassment on campus; rising levels of teen anxiety and depression, which have made many students more desirous of protection and more receptive to the Great Untruths; changes in parenting practices, which have amplified children’s fears even as childhood becomes increasingly safe; the loss of free play and unsupervised risk-taking, both of which kids need to become self-governing adults; the growth of campus bureaucracy and expansion of its protective mission; and an increasing passion for justice, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires.

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In a recent review of research on the effects of social media, social psychologists Jenna Clark, Sara Algoe, and Melanie Green offer this principle: “Social network sites benefit their users when they are used to make meaningful social connections and harm their users through pitfalls such as isolation and social comparison when they are not.”45 So we don’t want to create a moral panic and frighten parents into banning all devices until their kids turn twenty-one. These are complicated issues, and much more research is needed. In the meantime, as we’ll say in chapter 12, there is enough evidence to support placing time limits on device use (perhaps two hours a day for adolescents, less for younger kids) while limiting or prohibiting the use of platforms that amplify social comparison rather than social connection.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

Come to think of it, how had I ended up here? A fungus had evolved a chemical that had been used to make a drug. Quite by accident, this drug had been discovered to alter human experience. For seven decades or so, LSD’s peculiar effects on our minds had generated astonishment, confusion, evangelical zeal, moral panic, and everything in between. As it filtered through the twentieth century, it had left an indelible cultural residue that we still struggle to make sense of. I was lying in this hospital room as part of a clinical trial because its effects remained as bewildering as they had always been. No wonder I was baffled.

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Mycophobic cultures were descendants of those who had considered their power diabolical. Mycophilic attitudes might lead Yamaguchi Sodo to write poems in praise of matsutake, or urge Terence McKenna to proselytize about the benefits of taking large doses of psilocybin mushrooms. Mycophobic attitudes might fuel a moral panic that leads to their illegalization, or prompt Albertus Magnus and John Gerard to issue stark warnings about the dangers of these “new fangled meates.” Both positions recognize the power of mushrooms to affect people’s lives. Both make sense of this power in different ways. We shoehorn organisms into questionable categories all the time.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

But the early 1790s were hardly a suitable time for balanced evaluation. There had been great excitement among British radicals, Whigs and intellectuals after the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, which many saw as the dawn of a new age of enlightened government in France. But this had long been superseded by events. By early 1793 Britain was in the grip of a moral panic about possible sedition and ‘the French treason’: not merely the replacement of one ruler by another—the good old ‘English treason’—but the overthrow of monarchy itself. These fears were only magnified by the execution of Louis XVI at the guillotine on 21 January of that year. In this context it was easy to misunderstand Smith, or to co-opt him to a specific cause, in a way all too familiar today.

…

Violence had come with similar speed to the polite professional classes of Edinburgh from the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745: as Smith put it, ‘four or five thousand naked unarmed Highlanders took possession of the improved parts of this country without any opposition from the unwarlike inhabitants.’ But that was from without: Toulouse showed how swiftly popular anger, aroused by heavy taxes and stoked by religious panic, could boil over into bloodshed from within. Finally, it was evident at the time that a key cause of Calas’s incrimination, torture and death was a moral panic driven on by Catholic fear of his outsider status as a Huguenot, a panic which the legal institutions of Toulouse had not merely failed to contain under the rule of law, but actively abetted. Smith had written in his final additions to The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1789 that ‘Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, therefore, faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest’: the Calas case was a perfect case study of that faction and fanaticism in action.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

But more than this, the book deals with controversies not necessarily on the margins of society which may have pernicious social consequences: creation-science and biblical literalism, Holocaust denial and freedom of speech, race and IQ, political extremism and the radical right, modern witch crazes prompted by moral panics and mass hysterias, including the recovered memory movement, Satanic ritual abuse, and facilitated communication. Here the difference in thinking makes all the difference. But more than this—much more—the book is a celebration of the scientific spirit and of the joy inherent in exploring the world's great mysteries even when final answers are not forthcoming.

…

Thousands of Satanic cults were believed to be operating in secrecy throughout America, sacrificing and mutilating animals, sexually abusing children, and practicing Satanic rituals. In The Satanism Scare, James Richardson, Joel Best, and David Bromley argue persuasively that public discourse about sexual abuse, Satanism, serial murders, or child pornography is a barometer of larger social fears and anxieties. The Satanic panic was an instance of moral panic, where "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates" (1991, p. 23).

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World by Timothy Cresswell

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

We do not have to confine ourselves to dictionary definitions to see the fractured ways in which mobility has been understood. More generally, modernity has been marked by time-space compression and staggering developments in communication and transportation. At the same time, it has seen the rise of moral panics ranging from the refugee to the global RT52565_C001.indd 20 4/13/06 7:21:46 AM The Production of Mobilities • 21 terrorist. The celebrated technologies of mobility simultaneously open up the possibility of an increasingly transgressive world marked by people out of place at all scales. This is the tension that runs through the chapters in this book.

…

They left Spur on New Year’s Day in an old jalopy and reentered California on January 3, reaching Marysville on January 5. Duncan remained unemployed for ten days before getting relief from the Farm Security Administration. The movements of Edwards and Duncan were far from exceptional. Migration into California from Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and other states to the east had been the subject of varying degrees of moral panic since the late 1920s. Migrants, known as Okies and Arkies, had moved to California in order to get promised work in the new agribusiness centers of the California valleys following the dust storms of the Great Plains. By the time Duncan entered California, migration had mostly switched to people looking for work in the defense industry.

Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby

autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, imposter syndrome, Mason jar, microdosing, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, rolodex, Saturday Night Live

I was no longer upset; if anything, I was relieved to know that I was capable of feeling. STOP! ELECTION TIME! As gay law reform inched ever closer in Tasmania, larger forces were assembling through national conservative coalitions that were adopting a U.S. faith-based style of campaign that attempted to galvanize a moral panic about the safety of children and the degradation of the so-called “normal” family. It wasn’t enough to meaningfully slow the momentum of the decriminalisation movement, but it did provide an alarming glimpse of the tone to come decades later in the marriage equality debate. Before the upcoming election of 1996, the Tasmanian premier Ray Groom vowed that he would not govern without his party holding the majority in Parliament.

…

I have always been so thankful to hear your voices rise above the Parliamentary fray on most matters, but especially on those that cut closer to my identity bone. And, finally, a little salute to Panti Bliss. I saw what you did and I took courage from it. But ultimately, just a blanket thanks to everyone who fights for inclusion in the face of any hateful moral panic. And now for the penultimate thanks, my extraordinary spouse lady, Jenney Shamash. THANK YOU! Not only did you usher this book over the line—handling that big cluster of technical tasks that would have been impossible for me to get through on my own—but you have helped me navigate my very frightening post-Nanette world.

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

One year after the announcement about unmarked school burial grounds in Kamloops, the New York Post ran a piece quoting an influential conservative ideologue and a longtime opponent of Indigenous rights, Tom Flanagan, who called the revelation of the graves “the biggest fake news story in Canadian history” and a case of “moral panic.” It seems that to many people, a truthful telling of history feels like treachery—and must be stamped out. But if those truths are stuffed back away, they will keep haunting us and keep reemerging in the Mirror World in distorted, twisted form. On May 14, 2022, an eighteen-year-old white supremacist obsessed with the Great Replacement theory and low birth rates among whites drove to a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York, with the aim of killing as many Black people as possible.

…

“does something that’s needed”: “US Abortion: Best Selling Author Dr Naomi Wolf Discusses Leaked US Supreme Court Documents,” GB News channel on YouTube, May 3, 2022, at 4:14–4:27. “Gosh darn I am TIRED”: Naomi Wolf @DrNaomiRWolf, Gettr post, May 13, 2022. “an historic day”: Bannon, “Parents Are Still Taking to the Streets,” at 24:58. Wolf had strongly pushed back: Rachel Savage, “INTERVIEW—U.S. Author Naomi Wolf Condemns UK’s ‘Moral Panic’ on Trans Issues,” Reuters, November 27, 2020. “huge victory”: Bannon, “Parents Are Still Taking to the Streets,” at 20:50–24:58. “You did so much”: Bannon, “Parents Are Still Taking to the Streets,” at 20:50. “a full-throated apology”: Naomi Wolf, “Dear Conservatives, I Apologize,” Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf, Substack, March 9, 2023.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

And it was for a while but then it tapered off pretty badly. It was nowhere near as radical as what computers have done. So I just, you know, shifted my allegiance in a sense from a semi-failed technology to a highly successful technology.” Despite the war on drugs, despite the constantly reconstituting government drug advisory panels and moral panics over designer drugs with implausible names, these days drugs like acid, ecstasy, dope and speed are classified as “recreational”, with all the easy hedonism that nomenclature implies. So it’s important to remember that psychedelics were once invested with the hopes of a generation as a serious, mind-expanding, “technology”.

Eastern standard tribe by Cory Doctorow

airport security, call centre, forensic accounting, high net worth, machine readable, moral panic, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, pirate software, Silicon Valley, the payments system

Once that happens, maybe I'll be able to formulate an hypothesis and try an experiment or two and maybe -- just maybe -- I'll get to the bottom of book-in-2004 and beat the competition to making it work, and maybe I'll go home with all (or most) of the marbles. It's a long shot, but I'm a pretty sharp guy, and I know as much about this stuff as anyone out there. More to the point, trying stuff and doing research yields a non-zero chance of success. The alternatives -- sitting pat, or worse, getting into a moral panic about "piracy" and accusing the readers who are blazing new trail of "the moral equivalent of shoplifting" -- have a zero percent chance of success. Most artists never "succeed" in the sense of attaining fame and modest fortune. A career in the arts is a risky long-shot kind of business. I'm doing what I can to sweeten my odds.

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

Police and intelligence agencies in the US and Europe should do their best to identify genuine potential domestic and foreign terrorists and prevent them from doing harm. Liberal democracy in the West today is not endangered by Russian machinations or resurgent fascism. But liberalism and democracy alike are endangered when irrational moral panics like today’s Russia Scare and Brown Scare in the West lead hysterical elites to redefine “extremism” or “fascism” or “white nationalism” to include ordinary populists, conservatives, libertarians, and heterodox leftists. What the historian Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America wrote of McCarthyite conservatives in the 1950s who feared that many of their fellow citizens were Russian dupes or dangerous communists who needed to be censored and blacklisted applies with equal force to today’s paranoid establishmentarians who fear that many of their fellow citizens are Russian dupes or dangerous fascists: “What must be accounted one of the tamest, mildest and most unimaginative majorities in modern political history has been bound down by a set of restrictions that betray fanatical terror.”50 My purpose is not to defend populist demagogy, which can be harmful and destructive without being totalitarian or traitorous.

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

Right now, convergence culture is throwing media into flux, expanding the opportunities for grassroots groups to speak back to the mass media. Put all of our efforts into battling the conglomerates and this w i n d o w of opportunity w i l l have passed. That is w h y it is so important to fight against the corporate copyright regime, to argue against censorship and moral panic that w o u l d pathologize these emerging forms of participation, to publicize the best practices of these online communities, to expand access and participation to groups that are otherwise being left behind, and to promote forms of media literacy education that help all children to develop the skills needed to become full participants i n their culture.

…

. , 160 Mertes, Cara, 241 Microsoft, 8,123,125 military, 74-75 Milkshakey, 36 Miller, M a r k C r i s p i n , 247 MIT. See Massachusetts Institute of Technology M I T A n i m e C l u b , 158 Mitsubishi, 69 M M O R P G , 159-162 mobile phones, 4-5, 9,14,17,110,134 m o d d e r s / m o d d i n g , 137,162-165 Moebius, 109 Mole, The, 47 monomyth, 120 Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 153 moral economy, 161, 255 moral panic, 248 M o r i m o t o , K o j i , 101 M o r r o w , Fiona, 104 Moulin Rouge!, 156 Moveon.org, 219-220, 223 Movies, The, 154 MP3,16 Mr. President (avatar), 228-230 M S N B C , 187 M T V , 78,148, 222-223 M T V Networks, 244 M T V 2,154 multiplatform entertainment, 106 M u n i z , Albert M . , Jr., 79 Murray, Bill, 200 Murray, Janet, 116,119 M u z y k a , Ray, 162 Skenováno pro studijní úcely Index M y r i c k , D a n , 102 mysteries (genre), 129,199 mythology, 121,153,156-157 Napster, 9,134,138 narrowcasting, 5, 211 N A S C A R , 71 National Research C o u n c i l , 74 Native Son, 118 N B C , 60, 72, 207, 211, 225 Neal, Connie, 199, 203 Negroponte, Nicholas, 5,10 Nelson, Diane, 186,187,190-191 N e u m a n , W.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Ruby (2012), Society, State, and Fear: Managing National Security at the Boundary between Complacency and Panic, University of Chicago Press, http://books.google.com/books? id=UPILnwEACAAJ. If strong enough, it trumps all: Dawn Rothe and Stephen L. Muzzatti (Nov 2004), “Enemies everywhere: Terrorism, moral panic, and U.S. civil society,” Critical Criminology 12, http://www.researchgate.net/publication/227209259_Enemies_Everywhere_Terrorism_Moral_Panic_and_US_Civil_Society/file/32bfe50d3c7fe0d03b.pdf. David Rothkopf (6 Aug 2013), “The real risks,” Foreign Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/06/the_real_risks_war_on_terror. they believe they have to do: It’s CYA security.

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

Democracy and the public realms are too precious to diminish the politicians who make them work on a day-to-day basis. But democracy, the idea of politics and the public realm are all under siege from a constituency that purports to be their hand-maiden and fundamental ally – the free media. The fourth estate has always been powerful, populist and given to creating moral panics. Back in the 1920s, Britain’s right-leaning press – led by the Daily Mail, which first published it – latched on to the forged Zinoviev letter to undermine Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who was pursuing a pro-Russian foreign policy at the time. The press’s dire warnings of imminent, Russian-sponsored revolution in Britain guaranteed Stanley Baldwin’s victory in the 1924 general election.

…

The Daily Mail’s success, deplored as it may be by so many, is due to the fact that it has its finger on the pulse of these fears. Politics is thus conducted in a highly adversarial environment in which right and left are both pitching to the conflicted middle in order to secure a simple majority. Moreover, this environment is regularly shaken by moral panics inflamed by the way in which information is presented. Nor is Britain alone. The same phenomenon of centralised politics is observable in every Anglo-Saxon country where a majoritarian voting system interacts with a newly powerful media. Politicians respond by trying to present a coherent, marketable view of their party, with the leader of necessity becoming the focus.

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

As Laurie Garrett has argued, from the perspective of the Left, “events in Philadelphia fit neatly with the then vogue view that an unregulated chemical industry was raining toxic compounds upon the American people.” By contrast, the Right was more inclined to view the outbreak as an act of sabotage, or as the Philadelphia Veterans of Foreign Wars put it, “a sneak attack against the finest kind of Americans.” This sense of moral panic did not escape Bob Dylan, who incorporated some of the wilder speculation into a song, “Legionnaires’ Disease.” Written for his touring guitarist, Billy Cross, the song opened with the verse: “Some say it was radiation, some say there was acid on the microphone / Some say a combination that turned their hearts to stone.”

…

See also Legionnaires’ disease legionellosis, 190–91 Legionnaires’ disease, 10, 12, 145–73, 175–91, 196, 198, 233, 251, 257, 259, 362, 396n acquired immunity to, 186 age and, 185 climate and, 186 conspiracy theories about, 168–70, 191 environmental causes and factors and, 187 etiology of, 168 in Flint, Michigan, 190 gender and, 185 in hospitals, 185 human behavior and, 189 incidence in the United States, 185 medical technologies and, 185, 189 as “missed alarm,” 191 moral panic over, 169–70 onset of, 156 panic about, 187 the press and, 153, 155, 160, 187–88 puzzle solved by McDade, 178–81 second outbreak of, 175–91 technology and, 187 toxic metals theory and, 160–61, 168, 169, 170–71 transmission of, 183–85, 187, 189, 190–91 lentiviruses, 201, 202–3, 223, 363 Leong Hoe Nam, 256 Léopoldville (Kinshasa), Zaire, 199, 224, 227–30.

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

In her book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, danah boyd (who uses no capital letters in her name), a principal researcher at Microsoft and visiting professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, likened the fear of online predators to the “moral panics” surrounding teens’ engagement with other “new genres of media” such as novels in the eighteenth century and comic books in the 1930s. “American society despises any situation that requires addressing teen sexuality,” wrote boyd, “let alone platforms that provide a conduit for teens to explore their desires.”

…

What’s being avoided are the hard questions about whether these behaviors are in fact healthy or abusive or even legal, from the perspective of the age of consent. And one reason for this may not in fact be “discomfort with teenage sexuality,” as boyd suggests, but the fear of seeming less than “sex-positive” or raising a moral panic. boyd claims a connection between anxiety over teens being sexual on social media and an uneasiness with teenage sexuality in general. But this is a type of analysis and even a moral judgment of its own, which also has a history, going back at least as far as the 1960s, when parents who didn’t “get” the new sexual mores of their hippie children were deemed “squares.”

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

Failure to diagnose the reasons for Mrs Clinton’s defeat will only make Trump’s re-election more likely. In a searing piece for the New York Times after the election, Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, called for an end to ‘identity liberalism’. The American left had ‘slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message,’ he wrote.27 Moreover, if the Democratic standard-bearer insisted on namechecking different groups at her rallies she had better mention everybody, otherwise those left out would feel resentful. Lilla also took issue with the liberal post-mortem on Mrs Clinton’s defeat that laid the blame on a racially charged ‘whitelash’ against multicultural America – a verdict that was at odds with the revealed motivations of many Trump voters.

Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education by Mike Rose

blue-collar work, centre right, confounding variable, creative destruction, delayed gratification, digital divide, George Santayana, income inequality, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, new economy, Ronald Reagan, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

And, of course, there is not only a status hierarchy among disciplines but among postsecondary institutions as well, from elite research universities to the central-city community college. Though colleges and universities have had some type of remedial or preparatory course or program in their curriculum since the mid-nineteenth century, they have always been a source of vexation—and, at times, something akin to moral panic. We are seeing attempts in about twenty states now to reduce or remove remedial courses from the college and university, typically directing students to community colleges. Conversely, the open-access community college for much of its history has provided remedial or preparatory work as part of its mission, though the demand has increased as more people are attempting postsecondary education, and as state legislators and university administrators push remediation down the status ladder to the least resourced of our institutions of higher learning. 127 BAC K TO S C HO OL The people who teach remedial courses at the university or college level are almost always graduate students or adjunct instructors, and adjuncts are widely used at the community college level as well.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

I use a network that has no incremental cost for communication, and a device that lets me install any software without permission from anyone else. Right-living is the highly mutated, commodity-hardware- based, public and free Internet. I'm QWERTY-Amish, in other words. I'm the kind of perennial early adopter who would gladly volunteer to beta test a neural interface, but I find myself in a moral panic when confronted with the 12-button keypad on a cellie, even though that interface is one that has been greedily adopted by billions of people worldwide, from strap-hanging Japanese schoolgirls to Kenyan electoral scrutineers to Filipino guerrillas in the bush. The idea of paying for every message makes my hackles tumesce and evokes a reflexive moral conviction that text-messaging is inherently undemocratic, at least compared to free-as-air email.

Frommer's Memorable Walks in London by Richard Jones

Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Isaac Newton, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Snow's cholera map, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, moral panic

About 1 block down, pause outside: 27. 14 Well Walk, the home of Marie Carmichael Stopes (1880–1958) during her first and unhappy marriage to Canadian botanist R. R. Gates. A champion of women’s rights, Stopes was also an early pioneer of birth control. Her book Married Love, written after the annulment of her marriage on the grounds of nonconsummation, became a bestseller. Its appearance helped ease the national moral panic resulting from the high incidence of venereal disease among British soldiers returning from World War I. By advocating sexual enjoyment within marriage, the book was intended to encourage young British men to settle into moral, disease-free, and sexually satisfying unions, while encouraging women to see sex as enjoyable rather than as a duty.

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates by John Logie

1960s counterculture, Berlin Wall, book scanning, cuban missile crisis, dual-use technology, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, Isaac Newton, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, pre–internet, publication bias, Richard Stallman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, search inside the book, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

And in December of that year, according to a front-page story in the Washington Post, a panel of “industry and academic experts” warned against the threat posed by hackers, describing them, in usage that now seems almost quaint, as “high-tech terrorists” (Suplee and Richards). While Ross would criticize such reporting as exemplifying a “moral panic” that threatened the “technology conscious youth culture” he valued, the term hacker would never recover its original meaning. The term’s associations with trespass and criminality would, during the 1990s, become wholly entrenched. By the end of the decade, no thinking person who was not simultaneously announcing himself as committed to transgressing the boundaries established by a combination of corporate practice and convention would use “hacker” as a self-description.

The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News,in Politics, and inLife by Michael Blastland, Andrew Dilnot

Atul Gawande, business climate, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, happiness index / gross national happiness, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), moral panic, pension reform, pensions crisis, randomized controlled trial, school choice, very high income

Visiting Finland, Christopher Pollitt of Erasmus University in the Netherlands was surprised to discover that official records showed a category of prisons where no one ever escaped, year after year. Was this the most exceptional and effective standard of prison security? “How on earth do you manage to have zero escapes every year?” he asked a Finnish civil servant. “Simple,” said the official, “these are open prisons.” Britain experienced a moral panic in early 2006 at the rate at which inmates were found to be strolling out of open prisons as if for a weekend ramble. By comparison, this seemed a truly astonishing performance. What was the Finnish secret? “Open prisons? You never have anyone escape from an open prison?” “Oh not at all! But because they are open prisons, we don’t call it escape, we classify it as absent without leave.”

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

Can moments of mindfulness really mitigate the traumas of poverty, pending unemployment, a school-to-prison pipeline, racial profiling and police brutality, gang violence, and institutional racism? Is the problem just a matter of students being unable to “self-regulate” emotions? Framing it as such creates a moral panic, casting teachers of mindfulness as saviors. It’s sad that those who have so little are blamed for so much, and merely told to work on their “deficiencies.” Instead they could be taught about the underlying problems in society, and ways to address these as part of a broader civic mindfulness. Mindful school advocates present their curricula as being apolitical, non-ideological, and evidence-based, but such claims are illusory.

Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia

Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, degrowth, emotional labour, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Internet Archive, mass incarceration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, telemarketer, women in the workforce

Migrants are not seen for their actual humanity but instead as a problem to be prevented, deterred, managed, and contained. They become stereotyped by politicians, media, and within popular consciousness as floods of people from “over there” who are “disease ridden,” “fraudulent,” or “security threats.” These narratives buttress moral panics about “keeping borders safe and secure” from poor and racialized migrants. Migrant detention regimes are a key component of Western state building and its constitutive assertion of border controls. According to research conducted by the Global Detention Project, “Migration-related detention is the practice of detaining—typically on administrative (as opposed to criminal) grounds—asylum seekers and irregular immigrants. . . .

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

A remarkable amount of advice is doled out by the media, the government, and quasi official organizations with little regard for the difficulty of complying or the often poor quality of the evidence. Chilling out The tendency toward excessive shaming begins immediately after birth because contemporary society is in the grips of a modest moral panic about breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is, obviously, a viable and appropriate means of feeding an infant. It’s an experience some mothers find rewarding or pleasurable, and under the right circumstances it can have a lower direct financial cost than buying formula. But for many mothers it’s stressful, painful, inconvenient, or otherwise difficult and only becomes more so as they attempt to rejoin adult society or even temporarily leave the newborn in the care of others.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

One of the president’s favorite congressmen, Jeffrey Cohelan, was almost knocked off in a primary challenge in the district straddling Oakland and Berkeley from New Leftist magazine editor Robert Scheer. Johnson’s poverty czar, Sargent Shriver, gave a speech to a conference of the Citizen’s Crusade Against Poverty and was jostled off the stage by radicals: “You’re lying!” they cried. “Stop listening to him!” Moral panics from the right, moral panics from the left; poor, dumpy Pat Brown pinioned helplessly in the middle. On primary day he couldn’t even get a majority, holding on to the nomination only because minor candidates diluted Yorty’s tally. Yorty received 38 percent of the vote practically without campaigning, overwhelmingly winning in blue-collar areas adjacent to black neighborhoods.

…

County Board of Supervisors voted “to uphold high moral standards” by censoring an exhibition by an artist named Ed Keinholz, who said he displayed his dioramas of consumer products and mannequins in sexual congress and babies without heads to comment on America’s “sick society.” In the Golden State, it was a season of moral panic; and as so often, California led a national trend. The head of the nation’s leading association of private schools released a statement worrying that “students have adopted ‘terrifying’ attitudes toward sex…for lack of a moral code.” But others looked upon the same developments and judged them symptoms of cultural health.

…

In the California Poll the top issues of public concern were now “crime, drugs, and juvenile delinquency.” Forty-five percent credited Reagan as the candidate who would do a better job on them. He used phrases like “basic freedom,” “basic principles,” “basic individual rights of all citizens.” He called “the one overriding issue of this campaign…the issue of simple morality.” In a season of moral panic, it made him the star. The leftists of the California Democratic Council, moralists in their own right, turned their back on Brown for his support of the administration on Vietnam. One of the president’s favorite congressmen, Jeffrey Cohelan, was almost knocked off in a primary challenge in the district straddling Oakland and Berkeley from New Leftist magazine editor Robert Scheer.

State of Emergency: The Way We Were by Dominic Sandbrook

anti-communist, Apollo 13, Arthur Marwick, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Doomsday Book, edge city, estate planning, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, financial thriller, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, post-war consensus, sexual politics, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Winter of Discontent, young professional

And at a time when the economy was sliding into chaos, the government appeared powerless in the face of the unions and traditional expectations seemed to be undermined by feminism, permissiveness and social mobility, the press coverage of mugging – often described as a ‘disease’ or a ‘virus’ – quickly began to assume the proportions of a full-blown moral panic. By the late autumn of 1972, mugging was the word on everybody’s lips. Long articles explored ‘the making of a mugger’ or asked ‘why they go out mugging’, while editorials called for more police patrols, tougher prison sentences and what the Sunday Mirror melodramatically called an all-out ‘war’ on muggers.

…

It was no coincidence that the death of Arthur Hills, supposedly Britain’s first mugging, came just a week after Idi Amin had announced the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians and at a time when the papers were full of angry letters about the predicted ‘flood’ of penniless immigrants. If poor Mr Hills had died a few months earlier, his murder might well have been ignored. Coming when it did, it became a symbol of wider anxieties about crime and immigration. But as the Birmingham theorists saw it, the ‘moral panic’ about mugging had even deeper roots, stretching back to the aftermath of the Moors murders in 1965, when the newspapers had first taken aim at the so-called ‘permissive society’. This panic was under way, they argued, even ‘before there [were] any actual “muggings” to react to’, reflecting white middle-class unease at a time of social and economic change.

…

‘Trains, carrying rampaging young fans, would end their journeys with windows broken, upholstery smashed, lavatory fittings broken, the carriages running with beer and crunching underfoot with broken glass like gravel,’ wrote Arthur Hopcraft – a vision of Harold Macmillan’s Britain very different from the cosy caricatures becoming popular two decades later.31 On the left and in academic circles, a popular explanation was that football hooliganism was a moral panic fuelled by the press, who had ‘invented hooliganism as a “social problem” ’ by drawing attention to ‘relatively minor acts of rowdyism’. It is certainly true that from about 1967 onwards, the popular newspapers, fighting desperately for circulation in an increasingly competitive market, adopted a much more sensationalist attitude to football violence, with the Sun and Mirror leading the way in banner headlines and military metaphors.

Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit From Female Sexual Dysfunction by Ray Moynihan, Barbara Mintzes

business intelligence, clean water, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, systematic bias

And with the popular Brazilian waxing exposing all, cosmetic surgeons are promoting a nip and tuck to tidy up the labia, while online companies offer a genital colorant that ‘restores the pink back to a woman’s genitals’.9 When they land, the seeds of the corporate-backed campaign to transform common sexual difficulties into medical conditions will fall on the fertile ground of considerable female insecurity. Yet backward-looking moral panic about a permissive society may not be a helpful response. Perhaps it would be better to confront the reality of women’s sexual dissatisfactions head on, tease out the cultural processes exacerbating their vulnerabilities, and identify the commercial forces seeking to exploit them. The dramatic story documented in Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals calls for a much greater scepticism towards simplistic claims that women’s sexual difficulties are somehow due to chemical deficits rather than a complicated set of causes, including the way we relate to each other, our cultures, and our individual and collective histories.

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

Salience is the psychological term for prominence, meaning that our attention can be hijacked by low-probability-high-scariness things like shark attacks while ignoring high-probability-low-scariness dangers like taking a selfie near a busy street (Yes, far more people have died in the last year from selfies than shark attacks.) It’s what led the New Englanders to ignore the unwinnable nature of the witch trials and ignited a moral panic spurred on by stories that were vivid, if nonsensical. It also leads us to rate the unfamiliar as more risky and show a preference for domestic stocks (home bias) and familiar names (mere exposure effect), regardless of their fundamental qualities. In a world in which attention is a valuable resource we must be vigilant against noise-peddlers of all sorts.

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

It’s such a natural impulse, in fact, that those who question whether all technological developments will lead to brighter, happier futures are dismissed as Luddites. Interrogate the dominance of a mounting technopoly with anything more aggressive than cocktail conversation and you will swiftly be accused of “moral panic”—which is one of those tidy terms that carries around its own moral imperative. One must not panic. Technologies themselves, though, are amoral. They aren’t good or evil, only dangerous and beloved. They are a danger we’ve been in love with for millennia, and rarely do we remember that, for example, the goal of human relations may extend beyond efficient transmissions.

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson

British Empire, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, moral panic, Stewart Brand, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, wikimedia commons

The shift from late feudalism to early agrarian capitalism, the great disruption that would fuel the growth of the metropolitan centers in the coming centuries, had disgorged a whole class of society—small, commons-based cottage laborers—and turned them into itinerant free agents. By the late 1500s, the explosion of vagabonds made them public enemy number one, triggering one of the first true moral panics of the post-Gutenberg era. Everywhere there were wanderers, whole families lost in the changing economic landscape. Serfs once grounded in a coherent, if oppressive, feudal system found themselves flotsam on the twisting stream of early capitalism. To everyone sitting on the banks above that stream, the change must have seemed something like the modern fantasies of zombie invasions: you wake up one day and realize that the streets are filled with people who not only lack homes, but also suffer from some other, more existential form of homelessness—not even knowing what kind of home they should be seeking.

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

Andrew Ross explains this transformation by citing, as do Sterling and others, the increase of computer viruses in the late eighties, especially “the viral attack engineered in November 1988 by Cornell University hacker Robert Morris on the national network system Internet. . . . While it caused little in the way of data damage. . . , the ramifications of the Internet virus have helped to generate a moral panic that has all but transformed everyday ‘computer culture.’” See Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 75. See also chapter 6 for more on computer viruses. 15. See “Beware: Hackers at Play,” Newsweek, September 5, 1983. 16.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Thus, in certain countries, in particular the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom – public demand for tougher and longer sentences has been met by public policy and election campaigns which have been fought and won on the grounds of the punitiveness of penal policy. In other countries, such as Sweden and Finland, where the government provides greater ‘insulation against emotions generated by moral panic and long-term cycles of tolerance and intolerance’ (Tonry, 1999),270 citizens have been less likely to call for, and to support, harsher penal policies and the government has resisted the urge to implement such plans. *John Irwin writes that while imprisonment is generally believed to have four ‘official’ purposes – retribution for crimes committed, deterrence, incapacitation of dangerous criminals and the rehabilitation of criminals, in fact three other purposes have shaped America’s rates and conditions of imprisonment.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, bank run, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, dematerialisation, demographic transition, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, urban sprawl, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, World Values Survey

Children’s lives were characteristically wretched: farmed out to wet nurses, sometimes put to work in factories and mines, beaten, neglected, often abandoned as infants. In his book A History of Childhood, Colin Heywood reports that, ‘The scale of abandonment in certain towns was simply staggering’, reaching one-third or a half of all the children born in some European cities.9 Street gangs of feral youths caused as much moral panic in late nineteenth-century England as they do today. Conservatives often hark back to the golden age of the 1950s. But in the 1950s, John Gillis shows, people of the same persuasion believed they had suffered a great moral decline since the early twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, people fetishised the family lives of the Victorians.

Talk on the Wild Side by Lane Greene

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, deep learning, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, framing effect, Google Chrome, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, invisible hand, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral panic, natural language processing, obamacare, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E

But this change is already complete, and the old “sick-making” meaning of nauseous is so rare as to be confusing to most people. So this type of change (going from “cause” to “experiencer” or the other way around) is commonplace. But when it happens in your century (as with nauseous) it provokes moral panic among those who think that the older meaning is always the right one; if it happened a few centuries ago (awesome) nobody is even aware of the old meaning anymore. Instead, today’s panic is about the cheapening of the word to describe a coffee. And yet we have all the words we need. If you need to say “filled with awe”, try awe-filled or awed.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“[B]y 1996,” Gross announces, “being a responsible Democrat, and one interested in prosperity and opportunity for people at all levels in society, meant being concerned about the fate of the stock and bond markets.”7 Wall Street was an ideal constituency for a party reorienting itself as a representative of the professional class. The industry in question was supremely wealthy, of course. And financiers tended to be well-graduated people of a certain cultural liberalism; the prospect of gay marriage, for example, never seemed to send them into a moral panic the way it did so many others. Wall Street didn’t pollute either, at least not in a way that cameras can see. The industry’s operations were always coated in a thick patina of expert-talk, which (as we saw in Chapter One), the professional mind finds irresistibly beguiling. Furthermore, any distasteful results of Wall Street’s operations could be easily ignored and were always far removed from the thrilling precincts of lower Manhattan.

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie

British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, delayed gratification, falling living standards, financial exclusion, full employment, income inequality, low skilled workers, meritocracy, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, unpaid internship, urban renewal, working poor

Prostitution has been associated with the neighbourhood for many generations, as Nottingham’s red light district is on the edge of St Ann’s, and it was also the neighbourhood in which most of the city’s ‘poor’ and migrant populations have settled, adding further stigma through the fear and development of the ‘other’. Therefore, the neighbourhood’s reputation has always preceded it, and the words ‘St Ann’s’ today conjure up strong thoughts and feelings among Nottingham residents in a way that no other neighbourhood has the power to do. St Ann’s has recently been linked again, usually through the moral panic of media representation, as an area ridden with crime, drugs, gangs and guns, following the high profile murders of several teenagers on the estate: Brendan Lawrence aged 16 in February 2002, and the widely publicised murder of 14-year-old Danielle Beccan in October 2004. Both were victims of drive-by shootings.

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age by Claudia Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Anton Chekhov, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, iterative process, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, overview effect, Stephen Hawking, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen

Mobile libraries, known as circulating libraries, were compared with brothels and gin shops. ‘Reading sofas’ – which sound mild enough to us – were excoriated by moralisers and social reformers. Writing in 2008, the academic Ana Vogrincˇicˇ compares eighteenth-century attitudes to the novel with the moral panic around watching TV today. ‘If novel-readers were seen as smearing books with candle-wax and causing fire, television viewers are associated with eating junk food and spilling ketchup on the carpet,’ she writes.8 Today you could replace the novel and indeed the TV with the smartphone or tablet, of course.

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

So-called ‘sus’ laws (also known as stop and search) were originally introduced in Victorian times to grant law enforcement the power to arrest people on the suspicion they were going to commit a crime. During the Thatcher years they resulted in the disproportionate harassment of black people by the police. This was justified by a society plunged into moral panic. Black people were characterised as being responsible for muggings, as threatening to social order in the UK, and for the country’s economic decline as unemployment rose.108 Watered down and made more ‘respectable’, this thinking filtered into Conservative Party literature. In a manner remarkably similar to attacks on Labour’s shadow home secretary Diane Abbott in the 2017 election, in 1987 before and during the election, Conservative advertisements and newspaper reporting suggested that activists organising as part of the Labour party’s black sections and two of Labour’s black Parliamentary candidates – Abbott and Bernie Grant – were extremists.109 Thanks to decades of organising and struggle within the party, the Opposition was at the forefront of ensuring people of colour and women had seats in Parliament.

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

As one of the most visible minority groups in Europe for centuries, Jews were frequently made scapegoats for societal ills. Many of these early accusations were religious in nature. One pernicious belief, popularized in the fourth century (and only officially repudiated by the Catholic Church in 1965), held all Jews responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. By the thirteenth century, this rumor had morphed into moral panics about Jews destroying Communion wafers and ritually murdering Christians, a myth known as “blood libel.” These myths helped cast Jews as the primary other in Christian societies, the shadowy outsider of whom almost anything could be suspected. “It was widely believed in the Renaissance that Jewish males menstruated, for example, which served as one explanation for the famous ‘blood libel,’ ” scholar Stephen Eric Bronner writes in A Rumor about the Jews.

The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

anti-communist, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, deliberate practice, edge city, falling living standards, financial independence, ghettoisation, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, immigration reform, income per capita, land reform, manufacturing employment, moral panic, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, sensible shoes, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wage slave, women in the workforce

The Carrigan Committee proposals were overshadowed by the need to prevent public discussions of these matters, some believing that commissions were too public and that a small Catholic elite should advise the government ‘without public discussion’.150 ‘the character of the national mind’ Such focus on moral panic, which often suited the interests of the Church as well as the conservative middle-class social base of Irish politics, not only inhibited the development of a strong social and labour movement but also facilitated the continued hiding of many of Ireland’s social problems. In his memoirs, Noël Browne (Minister for Health from 1948 to 1951) gave one example of the suppression of a discourse based on highlighting social need and want: ‘“They can come to my back door and ask for it if they need it”, said a priest in the course of a sermon denouncing a proposal to provide children with a free school meal as “communism”.’151 Children born into the ‘unfortunate’ class thus continued to be hidden.

…

The inferior status of lay sisters entering convents, for example, who had no dowries and were responsible for more menial duties meant they had no vote in community affairs and were ineligible to stand for election as superior. The manner in which middle-class children were more likely to end up in orphanages than industrial or reformatory schools was also an indication of a Church-endorsed class bias.185 ‘their earnestness is doubtful’ The ‘moral panic’ created by the Church in the 1920s was also couched, though sometimes privately, in the language of class. Those of a ‘weaker moral fibre’ were deemed to be in the working- or lower-class categories, particularly those who had, as Cardinal Logue informed a new generation of Catholic priests at Maynooth in 1924, lost their ‘reverence’ for religion.

…

Finola Kennedy, ‘The suppression of the Carrigan Report: A historical perspective on child abuse’, Studies, vol. 89, no. 356, Winter 2000, pp. 354–63, and Mark Finnane, ‘The Carrigan Committee of 1930–31 and the moral condition of the Saorstát’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 32, 2000–2001, pp. 519–36. 137. Susannah Riordan, ‘VD in the army: Moral panic in the Irish Free State in the 1920s’, paper delivered to the St Patrick’s College History Society, November 2001. 138. ibid. 139. Irish Times, 5 October 1996. 140. Eoin O’Sullivan, ‘“This otherwise delicate subject”’. 141. Raftery and O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children, pp. 224–5. 142.

How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson

Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, call centre, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deskilling, Easter island, financial independence, full employment, Gordon Gekko, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, moral panic, New Urbanism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, spinning jenny, three-martini lunch, Torches of Freedom, trade route, wage slave, work culture

As is well known, there were terrific downsides to absinthe abuse. It was seen as the crack cocaine of its day. And its fans were sensitive to its paradox: absinthe kills you, but it makes you live. The very thing that seems to make life worth living is also slowly destroying your health. Absinthe was banned in 1 9 1 4 following a moral panic but over the following decades the custom of the Green Hour evolved into the cocktail hour (and its vulgar kid brother, the so-called Happy Hour) . In The Book of Tiki: The Cult of Polynesian Pop in Fifties America (2000) , anthropologist Sven A. Kirsten reveals how, in the mid twentieth century, first California and then the whole of America began to adopt the primitive styles of Polynesia and Hawaii, of the Easter Islands and the South Seas islands, as symbolic of an earthly paradise, free of work and responsibility, an antidote to the civilized Western world.

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

Even though the provenance of these figures is amplified through this vision now being paraded on our television screen courtesy of The Apprentice, Dragons’ Den and suchlike, it is a far from accurate picture of the social inequality which exists at the top of British society. It follows, therefore, that we need a more subtle approach than to simply critique the vicarious fortunes of bankers and financiers, who command huge bonuses and dividends, deploy tax breaks or earn windfalls from public-sector privatization or deregulation. The moral panic about bonuses, the culture of takeovers and corporate raiding, and the significance of the ‘non-domiciled’ rich, lured to London by the tax breaks that successive governments have made available, all plays into this populist sentiment. There is a danger that our attention is thus distracted, turned away from the ‘ordinarily wealthy’ who extend well beyond the top ‘1 per cent’.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

Morris had signed 2 Live Crew in the midst of this controversy, and put out their next major label release, Banned in the U.S.A., led by their immortal single “Face Down Ass Up.” Controversy was temporary. Royalties were forever. Soon, Morris was sure, the Death Row critics would find something else to complain about, just as they had with 2 Live Crew. The moral panic would subside and he would be left to cultivate the label’s singular genius. As he had so many times before, Morris sought to hold on. Though he rarely sat for interviews, he often posed for photographs, and among them was a new favorite, which he kept in a frame on his desk: a black-and-white party shot of himself, dwarfed by Suge and Snoop, smiling alongside Pac, his eyes alight with joy.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

The increase in inequality in some countries during the past couple of decades is well documented.7 Recent research suggests that deprivation is becoming ever more concentrated within the inner cities — and that the losers ‘may become dislocated from mainstream social norms and values’.8 This explains why it is particularly in the Western world’s three most unequal countries — the US, UK and France — that the moral panic about the welfare state and its underclass is most pronounced. The Thatcher experiment It is particularly interesting that the British still feel that the welfare state needs fundamental reform, for the country has already experimented with some controversial changes. Margaret Thatcher notoriously told a women’s magazine in an interview shortly after her third election victory in June 1987, ‘There is no such thing as society.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

“I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans,” he noted.56 Clinton’s impeachment and trial over his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky distracted Americans from the strong economic expansion of his administration, with an unemployment rate of only 4 percent and annual labor productivity growth of 2.7 percent per year.57 He also successfully eliminated the federal deficit and replaced it with a surplus by “raising the top marginal tax rate to 39.6 percent, along with increased gasoline taxes, an uncapping of the payroll tax for Medicare, and increased taxation of Social Security benefits.”58 INEQUALITY AND THE WAR ON DRUGS As this chapter has shown, neoconservative doctrines about spending and welfare triumphed in the 1980s and 1990s, and welfare recipients were stigmatized, which divided Americans along both class and racial lines. The War on Drugs created by the Nixon administration accelerated during the Reagan era, worsening both inequality and racial divisiveness. In the 1980s, the moral panic surrounding the War on Drugs focused on crack cocaine, a rock-like distillation made by combining dissolved powder cocaine and baking soda in water and then heating. Smoking crack delivered a fast and cheap high and so was more popular in inner-city areas (whereas powder cocaine was a status symbol for wealthy whites).

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

—Frederic Mazzella, OuiShare magazine interview, January 14, 2013 The Internet has existed as space for commercial exchange for over two decades. Now well into the new millennium, it is easy to forget that in the mid to late 1990s, the Internet was both a scene of frenzied excitement and a site of deep apprehension, fear, and moral panic. After all, although some Internet enthusiasts like Howard Rheingold were staking out the “virtual frontier” of the Internet, others were warning people that the Internet was a potential minefield of illicit affairs, pornography, and (of course) fraudulent activities. Over the past two decades, as both the utopian speculations and paranoid misconceptions about the Internet have receded, it has become an integral part of our everyday lives.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

Theresa May was right in claiming the relationship between police numbers and crime was not linear or straightforward, but relationship there was, and steep falls in police numbers and capacity began to alarm the public (and the victims of knife crime), provoking a screeching U-turn from her successors. Initially, a trump card was what looked like a falling crime rate. But later the number of homicides in which a knife was involved increased significantly, producing a moral panic. In London and other big cities, headlines daily recorded the anguish of parents of mostly young, male victims. May said there was ‘no direct correlation’ with the fall in police numbers: knife killings had previously peaked in 2007, when police numbers were rising. But it wasn’t just the police: English council budgets for youth services shrank by £400 million.

Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex by Rachel Feltman

COVID-19, disintermediation, double helix, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Internet Archive, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, moral panic, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, TikTok, University of East Anglia, white flight

But if you report multiple jerk-off sessions a day and no other cause can be found, your physician may tell you it’s time to cool it on the self-stimulation. Other potential issues include a loss of sensitivity (which is luckily easy enough to fix by taking a break or changing up your technique) or an inability to focus on other aspects of your life. It’s a lot like video game addiction: despite some moral panic around the idea that playing first-person shooters might turn young folks into murderous monsters, many studies have concluded that frequent gaming is unlikely to bring out dangerous behavior in and of itself. And some scientists argue that nothing about playing video games inherently puts you at risk of becoming “addicted” to them.

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

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

Columbia University professor Mark Lilla expressed this most prominently in a postelection essay in the New York Times. He chided Clinton for “calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake.” This focus on the traditionally marginalized groups, and the “moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity…has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Unity, apparently, requires that all those noisy minorities (combined, an overwhelming majority, actually) need to pipe down about their individual grievances so Democrats can get back to “It’s the economy, stupid,” the mantra of Bill Clinton’s 1992 winning presidential campaign.

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The system continues to work. Songwriters still write. Producers still produce. Distributors still distribute. Lawyers still sue. Downloaders still download. We learned three essential truths from the downloading debate: a shared file is not a lost sale; there is a significant difference between a crisis and a moral panic; and culture is not a zero-sum game. See Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control Is 250 NOTES TO PAGES 166– 68 Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 43–50. 26. MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 380 F.3d 1154, 1158 (9th Cir. 2004). 27.

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

If you would like to go down the Sandusky rabbit hole, you may want to start with Ziegler. A second (and perhaps more mainstream) Sandusky skeptic is author Mark Pendergrast, who published The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment in 2017. Pendergrast argues that the Sandusky case was a classic example of a “moral panic” and the frailty of human memory. I drew heavily from Pendergrast’s book in my account of the Aaron Fisher and Allan Myers cases. One of the noteworthy things about Pendergrast’s book, I must say, is the back cover, which has blurbs from two of the most influential and respected experts on memory in the world: Richard Leo of the University of San Francisco, and Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California at Irvine.

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

As well as providing some not-so-reliable advice on bomb-making, poisons and other paraphernalia, Most invoked the idea of propagandistic deeds to issue chilling calls for anti-bourgeois violence. In 1881 he paid the price when he was imprisoned for publishing an article applauding the Tsar’s assassination. Commenting on the moral panic anarchism stirred and the resulting anti-anarchist repression, David Nicoll gave his version of this thesis. There was a hint of vengeance in his defence. Referring to the garrotting of four anarchists in Jerez in 1892 and the police shooting of nine workers at an eight-hour day demonstration in 1891 he wrote: The Anarchists are ‘criminals’, ‘vermin’, ‘gallows carrion’.

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

It was a new medium that rivaled the telegram and the radio in importance, and almost incidentally provided a near-perfect ubiquitous method of data capture. As usual, it was the young who truly embraced the new technology. Children and teenagers have always struggled with their guardians for independence and privacy, especially during the recurrent moral panics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (and, to be fair, the rest of known history). Necklaces were simply the newest outlet for their desires, and certainly the most inconspicuous. Several competing messaging networks sprung up within a few months of the first devices’ launch, with Dees and Pype dividing up most of the pie.* Judging by the billions of messages being sent each day by 2022 and the trillions sent just a few years later, there was massive demand for silent messaging.

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Weber did acknowledge the coexistence of competing ethics of work—not only traditionalism, but also, in a passing reference, “the class morality of the proletariat and the anti-authoritarian trade union,” against which the dominant ethic protects those willing to work (1958, 167). 16. Today one can hear the echoes of this moral panic over the work ethic in some of the discourses about gay and lesbian marriage, particularly from those who denigrate certain queer cultures by linking different patterns of supposedly promiscuous intimacies with so-called hedonistic consumer lifestyles and worry that those not ensconced in legible families have, to draw on Lee Edelman’s (2004) critical account of such logics, no future for which to sacrifice in the present and, to borrow a concept from Judith Halberstam’s critique of such narratives, no reproductive time (2005) around which to regulate their lives productively.

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

Bryant represented the Rhondda, but how culturally distant he seemed from a former parliamentary neighbour, the MP for Caerphilly, Ron Davies. Twelve years on, the furtiveness of his 1998 career-destroying moment of madness on Clapham Common seemed utterly anachronistic. Section 28 was a discriminatory clause in a 1988 Act passed during a spasm of Tory moral panic that forbade councillors and schools to ‘promote’ homosexuality. Largely unused, it was a textbook case of the irrelevance of statute law in affecting deep movements in public attitudes – homosexuality was becoming normal, inside families, in popular culture, even fractiously in the pulpit. Still, the law remained an affront.

Our 50-State Border Crisis: How the Mexican Border Fuels the Drug Epidemic Across America by Howard G. Buffett

airport security, clean water, collective bargaining, defense in depth, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, immigration reform, linked data, low skilled workers, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill

He watched DHS be formed and unfold in real time, and he has devoted considerable energy over the last decade and a half to trying to remedy some of its shortcomings. From the beginning of DHS, Admiral Allen notes, “We haven’t had a coherent policy to put (these agencies) together. Every time we have a major event or a moral panic, we create an agency or a department to address it.” Unfortunately, he adds, “There is no concept of operations for an end game.” I spoke at length with the admiral, who believes DHS needs what he and others call a sense of “unity of effort.” He demonstrated this concept in the heat of commanding U.S. resources during some highly stressful emergencies, including Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil platform disaster.

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

But Dan Houser had also been to Oxford. And his purchase of what had once been Truman Capote’s house in Brooklyn Heights certainly suggests that he is anything but a member of the nerd class. The explosion of the video-gaming industry reflects many aspects of the early days of Hollywood. It has produced its own share of moral panics to match anything that introduced censorship to the film industry. There have been complaints about nudity, the sex and the violence. Like the novel, and the feature film, gaming needed its own visual and narrative techniques. Rockstar was responsible for creating them. In Dan Houser, gaming may have found its Wilkie Collins, if not its Charles Dickens.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

“Hidden Tribes of America,” Hidden Tribes, hiddentribes.us (accessed November 7, 2019). 68.Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. 69.Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Micro-aggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 70.See the chapter “False Accusations, Moral Panics and the Manufacture of Victimhood” in Campbell and Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture. 71.Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind, 176. 72.Ibid., 24. 73.Ibid., 24. 74.Campbell and Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture, 2. 75.Mike Nayna, “PART TWO: Teaching to Transgress,” YouTube video, March 6, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?

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

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

The idea existed largely in the minds of angry publicists and celebrities, because even Nick’s staff wouldn’t quite go along. When Meg Hourihan mentioned walking past Gwyneth Paltrow’s landmarked West Village town house on her way to work, Nick hounded her to add the actress’s home to the stalker map. “Suddenly I was super protective of Gwyneth Paltrow,” she recalled. Gawker Stalker ignited an early moral panic over what would come to be called, and loathed, as doxxing, but Nick was unconcerned. The media elite might despise him, but they knew who he was. Jonah, meanwhile—well, The Huffington Post site was up and running, and he loved the feeling of building something new, and the drama and power his senior partners, Kenny and Arianna, carried with them.

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

If merely describing an action as “was shooting” rather than “shot” yielded more convictions, wouldn’t prosecutors do that every time? If our actions were so heavily influenced by fleeting exposures to physical sensations and words, wouldn’t people trying to influence us for a living have gained total control of our actions by now? DOES GRAND THEFT AUTO MAKE MURDERERS? Moral panics about new media forms and technologies go back at least to ancient Greece. From the invention of written language to printed books to rock lyrics to the Internet, some people will see social changes as evidence of declining standards and will blame whatever “kids today” are playing, watching, or using.

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

Soros’s support for democracy and open societies was really a stalking horse for a globalist plot to destroy the nation state itself. This was a new model for attack politics in an era of global division, one that the far right would exploit to devastating effect.83 During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Soros went from obscure Fox News talking point to moral panic. As I drove across the United States in the months before the election, I was bewildered by the number of voters who mentioned Soros. His name came up in blue-collar bars in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and outside upmarket shopping malls in Cleveland, Ohio. At the time, I was barely aware of Soros.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Communists were communists whether they realized it or not, even when they thought they only wanted better wages. It’s easy now to look back and see the Hooverites as victims of a paranoiac fantasy about the world—to see them either as the only ones who really believed the Marxist revolutionary rhetoric or as cynical operators stoking an arbitrary moral panic. But Bert knew the global revolution was real. He saw it in China, narrowly escaped it in Russia, confronted it outside the window in DC, and heard it tear apart his farm in California. They took his mines, and they would kill him and take the rest if he wasn’t vigilant, just like they did to his formerly privileged friends around the world.

…

Despite its overwhelming condescension, poor reviews, and creepy erotics, Dangerous Minds was a smash hit, nabbing number one at the box office during a very competitive summer and netting just under $180 million. As the most successful in a series of films about teachers persuading ghetto youths to school their way out of their historical circumstances, Dangerous Minds “buttress[ed] the moral panic around violence of the mid-1990s,” write scholars Stephanie Glick and Allyson Dean.48 The movie is based on the 1992 memoir of high school teacher LouAnne Johnson, the unfortunately named My Posse Don’t Do Homework.ix Johnson taught at Carlmont High School in Belmont, an affluent suburb about 10 miles up the Peninsula from East Palo Alto, where her students caught the bus every morning.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

On the contrary, the white working class functions in the rhetoric and argument not as a real community of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who want a more inclusive America. Mark Lilla’s essay “The End of Identity Liberalism” is perhaps the most profound specimen of this genre. Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity,” which distorted its message “and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Liberals have turned away from their working-class base, according to Lilla, and must look to the “pre-identity liberalism” of Bill Clinton and Franklin D.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce