3 ms·

Agreed but ISPs couldn't get away with it without us voters endlessly reelecting pols who trade law+power for campaign cash.

rhaksw 5y ago
ISPs may also be lobbying us through social media. Peter Pomerantsev makes a strong case that moderated forums are for sale in This Is Not Propaganda [1]. For example, he mentions "consensus cracking", > There are instructions on how to control an internet forum, including tips on “consensus cracking”: using a fake persona to express the ideas you oppose in such a weak and unconvincing manner that you can then use another fake persona to knock them down. Here is Peter speaking [2] a week ago at a Stanford conference on disinformation where Obama gave the keynote [3]. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41717504-this-is-not-propaganda https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41717504-this-is-not-pro... [2] https://youtu.be/Nd1CKG3o818?t=23848 https://youtu.be/Nd1CKG3o818?t=23848 [3] https://youtu.be/YrMMiDXspYo?t=1855 https://youtu.be/YrMMiDXspYo?t=1855
- throwaway290 5y ago
  Thanks for the links. The panel seemed focused on the right problems. I found Peter's input underwhelming and not very on topic, though. I might check out his book if it has more specifics on less obvious online opinion control measures.
  - rhaksw 5y ago
    The book is great. Here three paragraphs I highlighted, from different sections. You can check if they resonate with you. > And it’s not just conflicts or elections that are affected. I see people I have known my whole life slip away from me on social media, reposting conspiracies from sources I have never heard of, some sort of internet undercurrent pulling whole families apart, as if we never really knew each other, as if the algorithms know more about us than we do, as if we are becoming subsets of our own data, which is rearranging our relations and identities with its own logic, or in the cause of someone else’s interests we can’t even see. > When she interviewed Al-Qaeda recruits and their families, what struck her was how normal their backgrounds were, how distant fundamentalist purity was for most of them. Bin Laden's trick had been to take the different grievances of different groups and give them the illusion that if they united globally, they would achieve a better world, if only they could get rid of unbelievers. > Russia, with its social media squadrons, haunts these [social media network] maps. Not because it is the force that can still move earth and heaven as it could in the Cold War, but because the Kremlin's rulers are particularly adept at gaming elements of this new age, or at the very least are good at getting everyone to talk about how good they are, which could be the most important trick of all.
    - nonrandomstring 5y ago
      > Russia, with its social media squadrons... at the very least are good at getting everyone to talk about how good they are, which could be the most important trick of all. A key use of propaganda is demoralisation. Sapping the enemy's resolve and sowing seeds of doubt. It's a long march. For years I've noticed certain voices in tech forums who are not merely fearful of the negative effects of some technologies against liberal democracy, they positively celebrate them. "Liberal values are doomed." - they tell us. "The battle is already lost." Their relentless message is that authoritarian technology is inevitable. It's already ubiquitous. Privacy is an illusion we are better to give up on. The corporations are too powerful. Against state actors there is no point even trying to secure your digital world. Regardless your choice or morals, eventually everyone will be forced to fall into line... etc etc ad-nauseum. I see this as a corrosive meta campaign by voices that have unwittingly been recruited as denouncers of liberal democracy. They sound like the mocking voice of Lord Haw-Haw or the German denouncer in Saving Private Ryan, calling; "The Statue of Liberty ist Kaput!" BTW: This looks like a very interesting book I may be buying. Thanks for posting these snippets.
    - throwaway290 5y ago
      From the excepts, I felt as if I would not learn something really new or find out about specific shady misinformation tricks I should watch out for. The vibe is generally similar to what Peter said at the panel. I wonder whether things like these are more intuitively understood by someone who grew up in the shadow of USSR and is always on the lookout for misinformation and propaganda. That said, it seems some parts of the book could help me clarify/support my own experiences and provide wider context and more examples.
- Smithalicious 5y ago
  > There are instructions on how to control an internet forum, including tips on “consensus cracking”: using a fake persona to express the ideas you oppose in such a weak and unconvincing manner that you can then use another fake persona to knock them down. Why does this necessitate the neologism "concensus cracking" rather than the well-established term "false flagging"?
  - rhaksw 5y ago
    Well for one thing, as I understand it, it is a term the antagonizers use themselves to train each other. But also, a false flag pins blame on someone else in order to change public opinion. Cracking consensus is any disguised action and does not require blaming someone else. It can just be secretive actions like a mod removal where the removal is not apparent to the logged-in author, like on Reddit. See: https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/ https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Because that's not at all what a false flag is. A false flag is a manufactured pretext to attack i.e. a way to paint an attack as a defense. People who are actually doing these things probably need to be precise.
Uehreka 5y ago
I’ve supported candidates who want to clamp down on private electoral financing (like the unfortunate @cantbuypaul) but the problem seems to be that in order for this to work, we’d need to elect a ton of these people, against the will of many lobbyists, and all at the same time (so they could be a large enough caucus to get a bill through). Unfortunately, the only way the left (I chuckle at any conservatives/libertarians who claim to actually oppose corporate campaign finance) has managed to get people into congress is a couple people per election. People on the whole just aren’t in to campaign finance reform, even when it’s decoupled from the so-called “woke agenda”.
- rolandog 5y ago
  I can't remember where I read it, but I recall there was a study that argued that it would be "better" (can't recall the hypothesis: more democratic? more representative?) to actually pick people like jury duty (i.e. at random).
  - retrac 5y ago
    To the electoral policy nerds, that method is known as sortition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition a.k.a. selection by lots. It has consistently had its advocates over the centuries. I too feel it's underrated as a method. Plato was basically right all those years ago; those who actively seek power generally don't deserve it. I seriously wonder if we'd be better off with a legislature selected of random citizens, and an executive council selected the same way. It did work for the Ancient Athenians for some 300+ years. Democracy in ancient Greece meant selection by lottery and most offices in the Athenian democracy were picked that way. Following selection there was a public interview during which any citizen could pose questions and the candidate could at that point be disqualified for a legally established reason by a vote of the previously-elected archons. (The main exception was military generals, who were elected by popular vote. Competence and respect were considered more important than incorruptibility for that particular office.)
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    It would be better to have an electoral system that provides proportional results, like most established democracies. Sortition does that probabilistically, so it would be better in that sense. OTOH, most of the other proposed benefits of sortition are dubious. E.g., it's often portrayed as insulation against corruption because people aren't dependent on corporate cash to get reelected. OTOH, with most politicians not careerists with a relatively reliable fallback of various cushy sinecures in periods where they are out of office, the amount of money you need to dangle in front of randomly chosen and soon to revert to normal life citizens to radically change their post-term life drops considerably, and neither public enforcement nor media outlets are going to be able to devote the bandwidth necessary to police corruption in the firehouse of people pumped through government.

rhaksw 5y ago

ISPs may also be lobbying us through social media. Peter Pomerantsev makes a strong case that moderated forums are for sale in This Is Not Propaganda [1]. For example, he mentions "consensus cracking", > There are instructions on how to control an internet forum, including tips on “consensus cracking”: using a fake persona to express the ideas you oppose in such a weak and unconvincing manner that you can then use another fake persona to knock them down. Here is Peter speaking [2] a week ago at a Stanford conference on disinformation where Obama gave the keynote [3]. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41717504-this-is-not-propaganda https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41717504-this-is-not-pro... [2] https://youtu.be/Nd1CKG3o818?t=23848 https://youtu.be/Nd1CKG3o818?t=23848 [3] https://youtu.be/YrMMiDXspYo?t=1855 https://youtu.be/YrMMiDXspYo?t=1855

throwaway290 5y ago
Thanks for the links. The panel seemed focused on the right problems. I found Peter's input underwhelming and not very on topic, though. I might check out his book if it has more specifics on less obvious online opinion control measures.
- rhaksw 5y ago
  The book is great. Here three paragraphs I highlighted, from different sections. You can check if they resonate with you. > And it’s not just conflicts or elections that are affected. I see people I have known my whole life slip away from me on social media, reposting conspiracies from sources I have never heard of, some sort of internet undercurrent pulling whole families apart, as if we never really knew each other, as if the algorithms know more about us than we do, as if we are becoming subsets of our own data, which is rearranging our relations and identities with its own logic, or in the cause of someone else’s interests we can’t even see. > When she interviewed Al-Qaeda recruits and their families, what struck her was how normal their backgrounds were, how distant fundamentalist purity was for most of them. Bin Laden's trick had been to take the different grievances of different groups and give them the illusion that if they united globally, they would achieve a better world, if only they could get rid of unbelievers. > Russia, with its social media squadrons, haunts these [social media network] maps. Not because it is the force that can still move earth and heaven as it could in the Cold War, but because the Kremlin's rulers are particularly adept at gaming elements of this new age, or at the very least are good at getting everyone to talk about how good they are, which could be the most important trick of all.
  - nonrandomstring 5y ago
    > Russia, with its social media squadrons... at the very least are good at getting everyone to talk about how good they are, which could be the most important trick of all. A key use of propaganda is demoralisation. Sapping the enemy's resolve and sowing seeds of doubt. It's a long march. For years I've noticed certain voices in tech forums who are not merely fearful of the negative effects of some technologies against liberal democracy, they positively celebrate them. "Liberal values are doomed." - they tell us. "The battle is already lost." Their relentless message is that authoritarian technology is inevitable. It's already ubiquitous. Privacy is an illusion we are better to give up on. The corporations are too powerful. Against state actors there is no point even trying to secure your digital world. Regardless your choice or morals, eventually everyone will be forced to fall into line... etc etc ad-nauseum. I see this as a corrosive meta campaign by voices that have unwittingly been recruited as denouncers of liberal democracy. They sound like the mocking voice of Lord Haw-Haw or the German denouncer in Saving Private Ryan, calling; "The Statue of Liberty ist Kaput!" BTW: This looks like a very interesting book I may be buying. Thanks for posting these snippets.
  - throwaway290 5y ago
    From the excepts, I felt as if I would not learn something really new or find out about specific shady misinformation tricks I should watch out for. The vibe is generally similar to what Peter said at the panel. I wonder whether things like these are more intuitively understood by someone who grew up in the shadow of USSR and is always on the lookout for misinformation and propaganda. That said, it seems some parts of the book could help me clarify/support my own experiences and provide wider context and more examples.
Smithalicious 5y ago
> There are instructions on how to control an internet forum, including tips on “consensus cracking”: using a fake persona to express the ideas you oppose in such a weak and unconvincing manner that you can then use another fake persona to knock them down. Why does this necessitate the neologism "concensus cracking" rather than the well-established term "false flagging"?
- rhaksw 5y ago
  Well for one thing, as I understand it, it is a term the antagonizers use themselves to train each other. But also, a false flag pins blame on someone else in order to change public opinion. Cracking consensus is any disguised action and does not require blaming someone else. It can just be secretive actions like a mod removal where the removal is not apparent to the logged-in author, like on Reddit. See: https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/ https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Because that's not at all what a false flag is. A false flag is a manufactured pretext to attack i.e. a way to paint an attack as a defense. People who are actually doing these things probably need to be precise.

Uehreka 5y ago

I’ve supported candidates who want to clamp down on private electoral financing (like the unfortunate @cantbuypaul) but the problem seems to be that in order for this to work, we’d need to elect a ton of these people, against the will of many lobbyists, and all at the same time (so they could be a large enough caucus to get a bill through). Unfortunately, the only way the left (I chuckle at any conservatives/libertarians who claim to actually oppose corporate campaign finance) has managed to get people into congress is a couple people per election. People on the whole just aren’t in to campaign finance reform, even when it’s decoupled from the so-called “woke agenda”.

rolandog 5y ago
I can't remember where I read it, but I recall there was a study that argued that it would be "better" (can't recall the hypothesis: more democratic? more representative?) to actually pick people like jury duty (i.e. at random).
- retrac 5y ago
  To the electoral policy nerds, that method is known as sortition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition a.k.a. selection by lots. It has consistently had its advocates over the centuries. I too feel it's underrated as a method. Plato was basically right all those years ago; those who actively seek power generally don't deserve it. I seriously wonder if we'd be better off with a legislature selected of random citizens, and an executive council selected the same way. It did work for the Ancient Athenians for some 300+ years. Democracy in ancient Greece meant selection by lottery and most offices in the Athenian democracy were picked that way. Following selection there was a public interview during which any citizen could pose questions and the candidate could at that point be disqualified for a legally established reason by a vote of the previously-elected archons. (The main exception was military generals, who were elected by popular vote. Competence and respect were considered more important than incorruptibility for that particular office.)
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  It would be better to have an electoral system that provides proportional results, like most established democracies. Sortition does that probabilistically, so it would be better in that sense. OTOH, most of the other proposed benefits of sortition are dubious. E.g., it's often portrayed as insulation against corruption because people aren't dependent on corporate cash to get reelected. OTOH, with most politicians not careerists with a relatively reliable fallback of various cushy sinecures in periods where they are out of office, the amount of money you need to dangle in front of randomly chosen and soon to revert to normal life citizens to radically change their post-term life drops considerably, and neither public enforcement nor media outlets are going to be able to devote the bandwidth necessary to police corruption in the firehouse of people pumped through government.