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Google and Facebook know how to utilize negative emotions, leading to the new system-wide goal: find personalized ways to make you feel bad

in Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies, where he notices that ‘it seems strange to assert that anything as broad as a class of technologies might have an emotional tenor, but the internet of things does. That tenor is sadness… a melancholy that rolls off it in waves and sheets. The entire pretext on which it depends is a milieu of continuously shattered attention, of overloaded awareness, and of gaps between people just barely annealed with sensors, APIs and scripts.’ It is a life ‘savaged by bullshit jobs, over-cranked schedules and long commutes, of intimacy stifled by exhaustion and the incapacity by exhaustion and the incapacity or unwillingness to be emotionally present.’

Omnipresent social media places a claim on our elapsed time, our fractured lives. We’re all sad in our very own way.4 As there are no lulls or quiet moments anymore, the result is fatigue, depletion and loss of energy. We’re becoming obsessed with waiting. How long have you been forgotten by your love ones? Time, meticulously measured on every app, tells us right to our face. Chronos hurts. Should I post something to attract attention and show I’m still here? Nobody likes me anymore. As the random messages keep relentlessly piling in, there’s no way to halt them, to take a moment and think it all through.

Unlike the blog entries of the Web 2.0 era, social media have surpassed the summary stage of the diary in a desperate attempt to keep up with real-time regime. Instagram Stories, for example, bring back the nostalgia of an unfolding chain of events – and then disappear at the end of the day, like a revenge act, a satire of ancient sentiments gone by. Storage will make the pain permanent. Better forget about it and move on

By browsing through updates, we’re catching up with machine time – at least until we collapse under the weight of participation fatigue. Organic life cycles are short-circuited and accelerated up to a point where the personal life of billions has finally caught up with cybernetics

The price of self-control in an age of instant gratification is high. We long to revolt against the restless zombie inside us, but we don’t know how.

Sadness arises at the point we’re exhausted by the online world.6 After yet another app session in which we failed to make a date, purchased a ticket and did a quick round of videos, the post-dopamine mood hits us hard. The sheer busyness and self-importance of the world makes you feel joyless. After a dive into the network we’re drained and feel socially awkward. The swiping finger is tired and we have to stop.

Much like boredom, sadness is not a medical condition (though never say never because everything can be turned into one). No matter how brief and mild, sadness is the default mental state of the online billions. Its original intensity gets dissipated, it seeps out, becoming a general atmosphere, a chronic background condition. Occasionally – for a brief moment – we feel the loss. A seething rage emerges. After checking for the tenth time what someone said on Instagram, the pain of the social makes us feel miserable, and we put the phone away. Am I suffering from the phantom vibration syndrome? Wouldn’t it be nice if we were offline? Why is life so tragic? He blocked me. At night, you read through the thread again. Do we need to quit again, to go cold turkey again? Others are supposed to move us, to arouse us, and yet we don’t feel anything anymore. The heart is frozen

If experience is the ‘habit of creating isolated moments within raw occurrence in order to save and recount them,’11 the desire to anaesthetize experience is a kind of immune response against ‘the stimulations of another modern novelty, the total aesthetic environment’.

unlike burn-out, sadness is a continuous state of mind. Sadness pops up the second events start to fade away – and now you’re down the rabbit hole once more. The perpetual now can no longer be captured and leaves us isolated, a scattered set of online subjects. What happens when the soul is caught in the permanent present? Is this what Franco Berardi calls the ‘slow cancellation of the future’? By scrolling, swiping and flipping, we hungry ghosts try to fill the existential emptiness, frantically searching for a determining sign – and failing

Millennials, as one recently explained to me, have grown up talking more openly about their state of mind. As work/life distinctions disappear, subjectivity becomes their core content. Confessions and opinions are externalized instantly. Individuation is no longer confined to the diary or small group of friends, but is shared out there, exposed for all to see.

Snapstreaks, the ‘best friends’ fire emoji next to a friend’s name indicating that ‘you and that special person in your life have snapped one another within 24 hours for at least two days in a row.’19 Streaks are considered a proof of friendship or commitment to someone. So it’s heartbreaking when you lose a streak you’ve put months of work into. The feature all but destroys the accumulated social capital when users are offline for a few days. The Snap regime forces teenagers, the largest Snapchat user group, to use the app every single day, making an offline break virtually impossible.20 While relationships amongst teens are pretty much always in flux, with friendships being on the edge and always questioned, Snap-induced feelings sync with the rapidly changing teenage body, making puberty even more intense

The bare-all nature of social media causes rifts between lovers who would rather not have this information. But in the information age, this does not bode well with the social pressure to participate in social networks.

dating apps like Tinder. These are described as time-killing machines – the reality game that overcomes boredom, or alternatively as social e-commerce – shopping my soul around. After many hours of swiping, suddenly there’s a rush of dopamine when someone likes you back. ‘The goal of the game is to have your egos boosted. If you swipe right and you match with a little celebration on the screen, sometimes that’s all that is needed. ‘We want to scoop up all our options immediately and then decide what we actually really want later.’25 On the other hand, ‘crippling social anxiety’ is when you match with somebody you are interested in, but you can’t bring yourself to send a message or respond to theirs ‘because oh god all I could think of was stupid responses or openers and she’ll think I’m an idiot and I am an idiot and…’

The metric to measure today’s symptoms would be time – or ‘attention’, as it is called in the industry. While for the archaic melancholic the past never passes, techno-sadness is caught in the perpetual now. Forward focused, we bet on acceleration and never mourn a lost object. The primary identification is there, in our hand. Everything is evident, on the screen, right in your face. Contrasted with the rich historical sources on melancholia, our present condition becomes immediately apparent. Whereas melancholy in the past was defined by separation from others, reduced contacts and reflection on oneself, today’s tristesse plays itself out amidst busy social (media) interactions. In Sherry Turkle’s phrase, we are alone together, as part of the crowd – a form of loneliness that is particularly cruel, frantic and tiring.

What we see today are systems that constantly disrupt the timeless aspect of melancholy.31 There’s no time for contemplation, or Weltschmerz. Social reality does not allow us to retreat.32 Even in our deepest state of solitude we’re surrounded by (online) others that babble on and on, demanding our attention

distraction does not pull us away, but instead draws us back into the social

The purpose of sadness by design is, as Paul B. Preciado calls it, ‘the production of frustrating satisfaction’.39 Should we have an opinion about internet-induced sadness? How can we address this topic without looking down on the online billions, without resorting to fast-food comparisons or patronizingly viewing people as fragile beings that need to be liberated and taken care of.

We overcome sadness not through happiness, but rather, as media theorist Andrew Culp has insisted, through a hatred of this world. Sadness occurs in situations where stagnant ‘becoming’ has turned into a blatant lie. We suffer, and there’s no form of absurdism that can offer an escape. Public access to a 21st-century version of dadaism has been blocked. The absence of surrealism hurts. What could our social fantasies look like? Are legal constructs such as creative commons and cooperatives all we can come up with? It seems we’re trapped in smoothness, skimming a surface littered with impressions and notifications. The collective imaginary is on hold. What’s worse, this banality itself is seamless, offering no indicators of its dangers and distortions. As a result, we’ve become subdued. Has the possibility of myth become technologically impossible?

We can neither return to mysticism nor to positivism. The naive act of communication is lost – and this is why we cry

ten years earlier, in an essay for Vogue, he described in detail the spread of social media and its totalizing effects on our lives. In the technological future, he wrote, “each of us will be both star and supporting player.” Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.

this description almost perfectly captures the behavior of the average user of Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Ballard wrote a 1977 short story called “The Intensive Care Unit,” in which—writes the site Ballardian---“ordinances are in place to prevent people from meeting in person. All interaction is mediated through personal cameras and TV screens.”

“Now everybody can document themselves in a way that was inconceivable 30, 40, 50 years ago,” Ballard notes, “I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for ‘reality’—for ordinary reality. It’s very difficult to find the ‘real,’ because the environment is totally manufactured.” Like Jean Baudrillard, another prescient theorist of postmodernity, Ballard saw this loss of the "real" coming many decades ago. As he told I-D in 1987, “in the media landscape it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.”

So, my cellmate Claire was this forty-something career lobbyist who used to be my boss inside the Beltway. Claire was full of horror stories about the cruelty of the socialist regime. Because, in the old days before we got ourselves arrested, alarmist tales of this kind were Claire's day-job. Claire peddled political spin to the LameStream Media to make sure that corporations stayed in command, so that situations like our present world stayed impossible.

Claire and I hated the sharing networks, because we were paid to hate them. We hated all social networks, like Facebook, because they destroyed the media that we owned. We certainly hated free software, because it was like some ever-growing anti-commercial fungus. We hated search engines and network aggregators, people like Google -- not because Google was evil, but because they weren't. We really hated "file-sharers" -- the swarming pirates who were chewing up the wealth of our commercial sponsors.

We despised green power networks because climate change was a myth. Until the climate actually changed. Then the honchos who paid us started drinking themselves to death.

This prison game was diabolical. It was very entertaining, and compulsively playable. This game had been designed by left-wing interaction designers, the kind of creeps who built not-for-profit empires like Wikipedia. Except they'd designed it for losers like us. Everybody in rehab had to role-play. We had to build ourselves another identity, because this new pretend-identity was supposed to help us escape the stifling spiritual limits of our previous, unliberated, greedy individualist identities. In this game, I played an evil dwarf. With an axe. Which would have been okay, because that identity was pretty much me all along. Except that the game's reward system had been jiggered to reward elaborate acts of social collaboration. Of course we wanted to do raids and looting and cool fantasy fighting, but that wasn't on. We were very firmly judged on the way we played this rehab game. It was never about grabbing the gold. It was all about forming trust coalitions so as to collectively readjust our fantasy infrastructure.

Jean Paul Sartre (who was still under copyright, so I reckon they stole his work). I learned some things from him. That changed me. "Hell is other people." That is the sinister side of a social-software shared society: that people suck, that hell is other people. Sharing with people is hell. When you share, then no matter how much money you have, they just won't leave you alone. I quoted Jean-Paul Sartre to the parole board. A very serious left-wing philosopher: lots of girlfriends (even feminists), he ate speed all the time, he hung out with Maoists. Except for the Maoist part, Jean-Paul Sartre is my guru. My life today is all about my Existential authenticity. Because I'm a dissident in this society.

These Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability geeks were maybe seven percent of America's population. But the termite people had seized power. They were the Last Best Hope of a society on the skids. They owned all the hope because they had always been the ones who knew our civilization was hopeless. So, I was in their prison until I got my head around that new reality. Until I realized that this was inevitable. That it was the way forward. That I loved Little Brother. After that, I could go walkies.

I learned to sit still and read a lot. Because that looks like innocent behavior.

they were scanning us all the time. Nobody ever gets it about the tremendous power of network surveillance. That's how they ruled the world, though: by valuing every interaction, by counting every click. Every time one termite touched the feelers of another termite, they were adding that up. In a database. Everybody was broke: extremely poor, like preindustrial hard-scrabble poor, very modest, very "green." But still surviving. The one reason we weren't all chewing each other's cannibal thighbones (like the people on certain more disadvantaged continents), was because they'd stapled together this survival regime out of socialist software. It was very social. Ultra-social. No "privatization," no "private sector," and no "privacy." They pretended that it was all about happiness and kindliness and free-spirited cooperation and gay rainbow banners and all that. It was really a system that was firmly based on "social capital." Everything social was your only wealth. In a real "gift economy," you were the gift. You were living by your karma. Instead of a good old hundred-dollar bill, you just had a virtual facebooky thing with your own smiling picture on it, and that picture meant "Please Invest in the Bank of Me!"

social networks versus bandit mafias is like Ninjas Versus Pirates: it's a counterculture fight to the finish

the European Red Cross happened to show up during that episode (because they like gunfire). The Europeans are all prissy about the situation, of course. They are like: "What's with these illegal detainees in orange jumpsuits, and how come they don’'t have proper medical care?" So, I finally get paroled. I get amnestied.

in a network society, the power is ALL personal. "The personal is political." You mess with the tender feelings of a network maven, and she's not an objective bureaucrat following the rule of law. She's more like: "To the Bastille with this subhuman irritation!"

like "Heavy Weather" with a post-technology green catastrophe thrown in

The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem.

Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters. This capability gap is eminently exploitable; why execute a lengthy, costly, complex attack on the power grid when there is relatively no cost, in terms of dollars as well as consequences, to attack a society’s ability to operate with a shared epistemology? This leaves us in a terrible position, because there are so many more points of failure

Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for; it’s what defense and intelligence agencies got good at. It’s what CSOs built their teams to handle. But as social platforms grew, acquiring standing audiences in the hundreds of millions and developing tools for precision targeting and viral amplification, a variety of malign actors simultaneously realized that there was another way. They could go straight for the people, easily and cheaply. And that’s because influence operations can, and do, impact public opinion. Adversaries can target corporate entities and transform the global power structure by manipulating civilians and exploiting human cognitive vulnerabilities at scale. Even actual hacks are increasingly done in service of influence operations: stolen, leaked emails, for example, were profoundly effective at shaping a national narrative in the U.S. election of 2016.

The substantial time and money spent on defense against critical-infrastructure hacks is one reason why poorly-resourced adversaries choose to pursue a cheap, easy, low-cost-of-failure psy-ops war instead

Information war combatants have certainly pursued regime change: there is reasonable suspicion that they succeeded in a few cases (Brexit) and clear indications of it in others (Duterte). They’ve targeted corporations and industries. And they’ve certainly gone after mores: social media became the main battleground for the culture wars years ago, and we now describe the unbridgeable gap between two polarized Americas using technological terms like filter bubble. But ultimately the information war is about territory — just not the geographic kind. In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.

If an operation is effective, the message will be pushed into the feeds of sympathetic real people who will amplify it themselves. If it goes viral or triggers a trending algorithm, it will be pushed into the feeds of a huge audience. Members of the media will cover it, reaching millions more. If the content is false or a hoax, perhaps there will be a subsequent correction article – it doesn’t matter, no one will pay attention to it.

The 2014-2016 influence operation playbook went something like this: a group of digital combatants decided to push a specific narrative, something that fit a long-term narrative but also had a short-term news hook. They created content: sometimes a full blog post, sometimes a video, sometimes quick visual memes. The content was posted to platforms that offer discovery and amplification tools. The trolls then activated collections of bots and sockpuppets to blanket the biggest social networks with the content. Some of the fake accounts were disposable amplifiers, used mostly to create the illusion of popular consensus by boosting like and share counts. Others were highly backstopped personas run by real human beings, who developed standing audiences and long-term relationships with sympathetic influencers and media; those accounts were used for precision messaging with the goal of reaching the press. Israeli company Psy Group marketed precisely these services to the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign; as their sales brochure put it, “Reality is a Matter of Perception”.

This shift from targeting infrastructure to targeting the minds of civilians was predictable. Theorists  like Edward Bernays, Hannah Arendt, and Marshall McLuhan saw it coming decades ago. As early as 1970, McLuhan wrote, in Culture is our Business, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

Combatants are now focusing on infiltration rather than automation: leveraging real, ideologically-aligned people to inadvertently spread real, ideologically-aligned content instead. Hostile state intelligence services in particular are now increasingly adept at operating collections of human-operated precision personas, often called sockpuppets, or cyborgs, that will escape punishment under the the bot laws. They will simply work harder to ingratiate themselves with real American influencers, to join real American retweet rings. If combatants need to quickly spin up a digital mass movement, well-placed personas can rile up a sympathetic subreddit or Facebook Group populated by real people, hijacking a community in the way that parasites mobilize zombie armies.

Attempts to legislate away 2016 tactics primarily have the effect of triggering civil libertarians, giving them an opportunity to push the narrative that regulators just don’t understand technology, so any regulation is going to be a disaster.

The entities best suited to mitigate the threat of any given emerging tactic will always be the platforms themselves, because they can move fast when so inclined or incentivized. The problem is that many of the mitigation strategies advanced by the platforms are the information integrity version of greenwashing; they’re a kind of digital security theater, the TSA of information warfare

Algorithmic distribution systems will always be co-opted by the best resourced or most technologically capable combatants. Soon, better AI will rewrite the playbook yet again — perhaps the digital equivalent of  Blitzkrieg in its potential for capturing new territory. AI-generated audio and video deepfakes will erode trust in what we see with our own eyes, leaving us vulnerable both to faked content and to the discrediting of the actual truth by insinuation. Authenticity debates will commandeer media cycles, pushing us into an infinite loop of perpetually investigating basic facts. Chronic skepticism and the cognitive DDoS will increase polarization, leading to a consolidation of trust in distinct sets of right and left-wing authority figures – thought oligarchs speaking to entirely separate groups

platforms aren’t incentivized to engage in the profoundly complex arms race against the worst actors when they can simply point to transparency reports showing that they caught a fair number of the mediocre actors

What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation. We are (rightfully) concerned about silencing voices or communities. But our commitment to free expression makes us disproportionately vulnerable in the era of chronic, perpetual information war. Digital combatants know that once speech goes up, we are loathe to moderate it; to retain this asymmetric advantage, they push an all-or-nothing absolutist narrative that moderation is censorship, that spammy distribution tactics and algorithmic amplification are somehow part of the right to free speech.

We need an understanding of free speech that is hardened against the environment of a continuous warm war on a broken information ecosystem. We need to defend the fundamental value from itself becoming a prop in a malign narrative.

Unceasing information war is one of the defining threats of our day. This conflict is already ongoing, but (so far, in the United States) it’s largely bloodless and so we aren’t acknowledging it despite the huge consequences hanging in the balance. It is as real as the Cold War was in the 1960s, and the stakes are staggeringly high: the legitimacy of government, the persistence of societal cohesion, even our ability to respond to the impending climate crisis.

Influence operations exploit divisions in our society using vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. We have to move away from treating this as a problem of giving people better facts, or stopping some Russian bots, and move towards thinking about it as an ongoing battle for the integrity of our information infrastructure – easily as critical as the integrity of our financial markets.

The video ends by displaying a future vision of Russian expansion that includes most of Europe (notably not Turkey), the Middle East and Asia

According to Nox Influencer, Bright Side alone is earning between $314,010 and 971,950 monthly, and 5-Minute Crafts is earning between $576,640 and $1,780,000 monthly through YouTube partner earning estimates. As a privately held company, TheSoul Publishing doesn’t have to disclose its earnings. But all the Cypriot-managed company has to do to earn money from YouTube is meet viewing thresholds and have an AdSense account. AdSense, a Google product, just requires that a company have a bank account, an email address and a phone number. To monetize to this magnitude of revenue, YouTube may have also collected tax information, if TheSoul Publishing organization is conducting what it defines as “U.S. activities.” It’s also possible that YouTube verified a physical address by sending a pin mailer.

According to publicly available information from the YouTube channels themselves—information provided to YouTube by the people who set up and operate the channels at TheSoul Publishing—as of August 2019, 21 of the 35 channels connected to TheSoul Publishing claim to be based in the U.S. Ten of the channels had no country listed. Zodiac Maniac was registered in the U.K, though TheSoul Publishing emphasizes that all of its operations are run out of Cyprus.

 Now I’ve Seen Everything was the only channel registered in the Russian Federation. That channel has more than 400 million views, which, according to the analytics tool Nox Influencer, come from a range of countries, including Russia and Eastern European and Central Asian countries—despite being an English-language channel

In another video on Smart Banana, which has more than 1 million views, the titular banana speculates on “12 Countries That May Not Survive the Next 20 Years”—including the United States, which the video argues may collapse because of political infighting and diverse political viewpoints

Facebook pages are not a direct way to increase profit unless a company is actively marketing merchandise or sales, which TheSoul Publishing does not appear to do. The pages coordinate posting, so one post will often appear on a number of different pages. To a digital advertiser, this makes perfect sense as a way to increase relevance and visibility, but it’s far from obvious what TheSoul Publishing might be advertising. Likewise, there’s no obvious financial benefit to posting original videos within Facebook. The company did not meaningfully clarify its Facebook strategy in response to questions on the subject.

Facebook forbids what it describes as “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” as its head of cybersecurity describes in this video. While TheSoul’s Publishing’s behavior is clearly coordinated, it is unclear that any of its behavior is inauthentic based on information I have reviewed.

One thing that TheSoul is definitely doing on Facebook, however, is buying ads—and, at least sometimes, it’s doing so in rubles on issues of national importance, targeting audiences in the United States. The page Bright Side has 44 million followers and currently lists no account administrators located in the United States, but as of Aug. 8, 2019, it had them in Cyprus, Russia, the United Kingdom, El Salvador, India, Ukraine and in locations “Not Available.” It used Facebook to post six political advertisements paid for in the Russian currency.

the point here is not that the ad buy is significant in and of itself. The point, rather, is that the company has developed a massive social media following and has a history of at least experimenting with distributing both pro-Russian and paid political content to that following

TheSoul’s political ads included the one below. The advertisement pushes viewers to an article about how “wonderful [it is] that Donald Trump earns less in a year than you do in a month.” The advertisement reached men, women, and people of unknown genders over the ages of 18, and began running on May 15, 2018. TheSoul Publishing spent less than a dollar on this advertisement, raising the question: why bother advertising at all?

All around the world, political leaders, scholars and citizens are searching for responses to the challenge of preserving control of our identities in a digital world that never forgets. Are the most promising solutions going to be technological? Legislative? Judicial? Ethical? A result of shifting social norms and cultural expectations? Or some mix of the above?

These approaches share the common goal of reconstructing a form of control over our identities: the ability to reinvent ourselves, to escape our pasts and to improve the selves that we present to the world.

many technological theorists assumed that self-governing communities could ensure, through the self-correcting wisdom of the crowd, that all participants enjoyed the online identities they deserved. Wikipedia is one embodiment of the faith that the wisdom of the crowd can correct most mistakes — that a Wikipedia entry for a small-town mayor, for example, will reflect the reputation he deserves. And if the crowd fails — perhaps by turning into a digital mob — Wikipedia offers other forms of redress

In practice, however, self-governing communities like Wikipedia — or algorithmically self-correcting systems like Google — often leave people feeling misrepresented and burned. Those who think that their online reputations have been unfairly tarnished by an isolated incident or two now have a practical option: consulting a firm like ReputationDefender, which promises to clean up your online image. ReputationDefender was founded by Michael Fertik, a Harvard Law School graduate who was troubled by the idea of young people being forever tainted online by their youthful indiscretions. “I was seeing articles about the ‘Lord of the Flies’ behavior that all of us engage in at that age,” he told me, “and it felt un-American that when the conduct was online, it could have permanent effects on the speaker and the victim. The right to new beginnings and the right to self-definition have always been among the most beautiful American ideals.”

In the Web 3.0 world, Fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks.

“Our customers include parents whose kids have talked about them on the Internet — ‘Mom didn’t get the raise’; ‘Dad got fired’; ‘Mom and Dad are fighting a lot, and I’m worried they’ll get a divorce.’ ”

as facial-recognition technology becomes more widespread and sophisticated, it will almost certainly challenge our expectation of anonymity in public

Ohm says he worries that employers would be able to use social-network-aggregator services to identify people’s book and movie preferences and even Internet-search terms, and then fire or refuse to hire them on that basis. A handful of states — including New York, California, Colorado and North Dakota — broadly prohibit employers from discriminating against employees for legal off-duty conduct like smoking. Ohm suggests that these laws could be extended to prevent certain categories of employers from refusing to hire people based on Facebook pictures, status updates and other legal but embarrassing personal information. (In practice, these laws might be hard to enforce, since employers might not disclose the real reason for their hiring decisions, so employers, like credit-reporting agents, might also be required by law to disclose to job candidates the negative information in their digital files.)

research group’s preliminary results suggest that if rumors spread about something good you did 10 years ago, like winning a prize, they will be discounted; but if rumors spread about something bad that you did 10 years ago, like driving drunk, that information has staying power

many people aren’t worried about false information posted by others — they’re worried about true information they’ve posted about themselves when it is taken out of context or given undue weight. And defamation law doesn’t apply to true information or statements of opinion. Some legal scholars want to expand the ability to sue over true but embarrassing violations of privacy — although it appears to be a quixotic goal.

Researchers at the University of Washington, for example, are developing a technology called Vanish that makes electronic data “self-destruct” after a specified period of time. Instead of relying on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete the data that is stored “in the cloud” — in other words, on their distributed servers — Vanish encrypts the data and then “shatters” the encryption key. To read the data, your computer has to put the pieces of the key back together, but they “erode” or “rust” as time passes, and after a certain point the document can no longer be read.

Plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that young people, having been burned by Facebook (and frustrated by its privacy policy, which at more than 5,000 words is longer than the U.S. Constitution), are savvier than older users about cleaning up their tagged photos and being careful about what they post.

norms are already developing to recreate off-the-record spaces in public, with no photos, Twitter posts or blogging allowed. Milk and Honey, an exclusive bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, requires potential members to sign an agreement promising not to blog about the bar’s goings on or to post photos on social-networking sites, and other bars and nightclubs are adopting similar policies. I’ve been at dinners recently where someone has requested, in all seriousness, “Please don’t tweet this” — a custom that is likely to spread.

There’s already a sharp rise in lawsuits known as Twittergation — that is, suits to force Web sites to remove slanderous or false posts.

strategies of “soft paternalism” that might nudge people to hesitate before posting, say, drunken photos from Cancún. “We could easily think about a system, when you are uploading certain photos, that immediately detects how sensitive the photo will be.”

It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a “global village,” to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people — oral or written, true or false, friendly or mean — was considered a terrible sin because small communities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But the Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global village, where much of the content on the Internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip: although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the book of life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes. “If a man was a repentant [sinner],” the Talmud says, “one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.’ ” Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor.

On the Internet, it turns out, we’re not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others don’t have the empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention spans necessary to judge us in context, there’s nothing we can do about it.

Gosling is optimistic about the implications of his study for the possibility of digital forgiveness. He acknowledged that social technologies are forcing us to merge identities that used to be separate — we can no longer have segmented selves like “a home or family self, a friend self, a leisure self, a work self.” But although he told Facebook, “I have to find a way to reconcile my professor self with my having-a-few-drinks self,” he also suggested that as all of us have to merge our public and private identities, photos showing us having a few drinks on Facebook will no longer seem so scandalous. “You see your accountant going out on weekends and attending clown conventions, that no longer makes you think that he’s not a good accountant. We’re coming to terms and reconciling with that merging of identities.”

a humane society values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of their personalities in different contexts; and at the moment, the enforced merging of identities that used to be separate is leaving many casualties in its wake.

we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever

Socioeconomic inequality matters because it strengthens the belief that some people are worth much more than others. Those at the top seem hugely important and those at the bottom are seen as almost worthless. In more unequal societies we come to judge each other more by status and worry more about how others judge us. Research on 28 European countries shows that inequality increases status anxiety in all income groups, from the poorest ten percent to the richest tenth. The poor are affected most but even the richest ten percent of the population are more worried about status in unequal societies

being at the bottom of the social ladder feels the same whether you live in the UK, Norway, Uganda or Pakistan. Therefore, simply raising material living standards is not enough to produce genuine wellbeing or quality of life in the face of inequality

Psychotic symptoms such as delusions of grandeur are more common in more unequal countries, as is schizophrenia. As the graph below shows, narcissism increases as income inequality rises, as measured by ‘Narcissistic Personality Inventory’ (NPI) scores from successive samples of the US population.

Those who live in more unequal places are more likely to spend money on expensive cars and shop for status goods; and they are more likely to have high levels of personal debt because they try to show that they are not ‘second-class people’ by owning ‘first-class things.’

by examining our evolutionary past and our history as egalitarian, cooperative, sharing hunter-gatherers, we dispel the false idea that humans are, in their very nature, competitive, aggressive and individualistic. Inequality is not inevitable and we humans have all the psychological and social aptitudes to live differently.

inequalities of outcome limit equality of opportunity; differences in achievement and attainment are driven by inequality, rather than being a consequence of it

inequality is a major roadblock to creating sustainable economies that serve to optimise the health and wellbeing of both people and planet.  Because consumerism is about self-enhancement and status competition, it is intensified by inequality. And as inequality leads to a societal breakdown in trust, solidarity and social cohesion, it reduces people’s willingness to act for the common good. This is shown in everything from the tendency for more unequal societies to do less recycling to surveys which show that business leaders in more unequal societies are less supportive of international environmental protection agreements.

The UK charity we founded, The Equality Trust, has resources for activists and a network of local groups. In the USA, check out inequality.org. Worldwide, the Fight Inequality Alliance works with more than 100 partners to work for a more equal world. And look out for the new global Wellbeing Economy Alliance this autumn.

Inequality creates the social and political divisions that isolate us from each other, so it’s time for us all to reach out, connect, communicate and act collectively. We really are all in this together. 

Hitler, unlike Stalin or Mao, was an intuitive master of media stagecraft. David Bowie’s too-clever quip that Hitler was the first rock star, for which Bowie was widely reviled at the time, was spot-on.

the media like Hitler because Hitler liked the media

Perhaps that’s why he continues to mesmerize us: because he flickers, irresolvably, between the seemingly inhuman and the all too human.

His psychopathology is a queasy funhouse reflection, straight out of Nightmare Alley, of the instrumental rationality of the machine age. The genocidal assembly lines of Hitler’s death camps are a grotesque parody of Fordist mechanization, just as the Nazis’ fastidious recycling of every remnant of their victims but their smoke—their gold fillings melted down for bullion, their hair woven into socks for U-boat crewmen—is a depraved caricature of the Taylorist mania for workplace efficiency.

there’s something perversely comforting about Hitler’s unchallenged status as the metaphysical gravitational center of all our attempts at philosophizing evil

he prefigured postmodernity: the annexation of politics by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, the rise of the celebrity as a secular icon, the confusion of image and reality in a Matrix world. He regarded existence “as a kind of permanent parade before a gigantic audience” (Fest), calculating the visual impact of every histrionic pose, every propaganda tagline, every monumental building

By denying everyone’s capability, at least in theory, for Hitlerian evil, we let ourselves off the hook

Yet Hitler, paradoxically, is also a shriveled untermensch, the protypical nonentity; a face in the crowd in an age of crowds, instantly forgettable despite his calculated efforts to brand himself (the toothbrush mustache of the military man coupled with the flopping forelock of the art-school bohemian)

there was always a comic distance between the public image of the world-bestriding, godlike Fuhrer and his Inner Adolf, a nail-biting nebbish tormented by flatulence. Knowingly or not, the Downfall parodies dance in the gap between the two. More immediately, they rely on the tried-and-true gimmick of bathos. What makes the Downfall parodies so consistently hilarious is the incongruity of whatever viral topic is making the Fuhrer go ballistic and the outsized scale of his gotterdammerung-strength tirade

The Downfall meme dramatizes the cultural logic of our remixed, mashed-up times, when digital technology allows us to loot recorded history, prying loose any signifier that catches our magpie eyes and repurposing it to any end. The near-instantaneous speed with which parodists use these viral videos to respond to current events underscores the extent to which the social Web, unlike the media ecologies of Hitler’s day, is a many-to-many phenomenon, more collective cacophony than one-way rant. As well, the furor (forgive pun) over YouTube’s decision to capitulate to the movie studio’s takedown demand, rather than standing fast in defense of Fair Use (a provision in copyright law that protects the re-use of a work for purposes of parody), indicates the extent to which ordinary people feel that commercial culture is somehow theirs, to misread or misuse as the spirit moves them.

the closest thing we have to a folk culture, the connective tissue that binds us as a society

SPIEGEL: Can you also get your revenge on him by using comedy? Brooks: Yes, absolutely. Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths. [...] We take away from him the holy seriousness that always surrounded him and protected him like a cordon.”

risking the noose, some Germans laughed off their fears and mocked the Orwellian boot stamping on the human face, giving vent to covert opposition through flüsterwitze (“whispered jokes”). Incredibly, even Jews joked about their plight, drawing on the absurdist humor that is quintessentially Jewish to mock the Nazis even as they lightened the intolerable burden of Jewish life in the shadow of the swastika. Rapaport offers a sample of Jewish humor in Hitler’s Germany: “A Jew is arrested during the war, having been denounced for killing a Nazi at 10 P.M. and even eating the brain of his victim. This is his defense: In the first place, a Nazi hasn’t got any brain. Secondly, a Jew doesn’t eat anything that comes from a pig. And thirdly, he could not have killed the Nazi at 10 P.M. because at that time everybody listens to the BBC broadcast.”

News about politics is viewed as particularly suspect and platforms are seen by many as contentious places for political conversation – at least for those most interested in politics. Rates of trust in news in general are comparatively higher than trust in news when it pertains to coverage of political affairs.

Negative perceptions about journalism are widespread and social media is one of the most often-cited places people say they see or hear criticism of news and journalism

Despite positive feelings towards most platforms, large majorities in all four countries agree that false and misleading information, harassment, and platforms using data irresponsibly are ‘big problems’ in their country for many platforms

marketers could someday use more invasive techniques to identify random people on the street along with, say, their credit scores

“You might think it’s cool, or you might think it’s creepy, depending on the context,”

many users do not understand that Facebook’s tag suggestion feature involves storing people’s biometric data to re-identify them in later photos

Mr. Caspar said last week that he was disappointed with the negotiations with Facebook and that his office was now preparing to take legal action over the company’s biometric database. Facebook told a German broadcaster that its tag suggestion feature complied with European data protection laws. “There are many risks,” Mr. Caspar says. “People should be able to choose if they want to accept these risks, or not accept them.” He offered a suggestion for Americans, “Users in the United States have good reason to raise their voices to get the same right.”

American consumers spent five hours per day on their mobile devices, and showed a dizzying 69% year-over-year increase in time spent in apps like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The prevalence of apps represents a concrete example of the movement away from the old notion of accessing the Internet through a browser and the new reality of the connected world and its myriad elements – news, social media, entertainment – being with us all the time

“In the 90s and even through the early 2000s, for many people, there was this way of thinking about cyberspace as a space that was somewhere else: it was in your computer. You went to your desktop to get there,” Weigel says. “One of the biggest shifts that’s happened and that will continue to happen is the undoing of a border that we used to perceive between the virtual and the physical world.”

While many of us think of the smartphone as a portal for accessing the outside world, the reciprocity of the device, as well as the larger pattern of our behavior online, means the portal goes the other way as well: it’s a means for others to access us

Weigel sees the unfettered access to our data, through our smartphone and browser use, of what she calls the big five tech companies – Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon – as a legitimate problem for notions of democracy

an unfathomable amount of wealth, power, and direct influence on the consumer in the hands of just a few individuals – individuals who can affect billions of lives with a tweak in the code of their products

“This is where the fundamental democracy deficit comes from: you have this incredibly concentrated private power with zero transparency or democratic oversight or accountability, and then they have this unprecedented wealth of data about their users to work with,”

the rhetoric around the Internet was that the crowd would prevent the spread of misinformation, filtering it out like a great big hive mind; it would also help to prevent the spread of things like hate speech. Obviously, this has not been the case, and even the relatively successful experiments in this, such as Wikipedia, have a great deal of human governance that allows them to function properly

We should know and be aware of how these companies work, how they track our behavior, and how they make recommendations to us based on our behavior and that of others. Essentially, we need to understand the fundamental difference between our behavior IRL and in the digital sphere – a difference that, despite the erosion of boundaries, still stands

“Whether we know it or not, the connections that we make on the Internet are being used to cultivate an identity for us – an identity that is then sold to us afterward,” Lynch says. “Google tells you what questions to ask, and then it gives you the answers to those questions.”

It isn’t enough that the apps in our phone flatten all of the different categories of relationships we have into one broad group: friends, followers, connections. They go one step further than that. “You’re being told who you are all the time by Facebook and social media because which posts are coming up from your friends are due to an algorithm that is trying to get you to pay more attention to Facebook,” Lynch says. “That’s affecting our identity, because it affects who you think your friends are, because they’re the ones who are popping up higher on your feed.”

Our politics clearly adore fear, notably from the Trump administration and its emphasis on immigrant-driven carnage.  Our news media continue to worship at the altar of “if it bleeds, it leads.”

that CNN is the opposite of a fringe news service.  Between Fox and MSNBC it occupies a neutral, middle ground.  It is, putatively, the sober center.  And it simply adores scaring the hell out of us

What does the likelihood of even more stupid fear-mongering mean for education?  It simply means, as I said years ago, we have to teach people to resist this stuff.  In our quest to teach digital literacy we should encourage students – of all ages – to avoid tv news, or to sample it judiciously, with great skepticism.  We should assist them in recognizing when politicians fire up fear campaigns based on poor facts.

politicians peddle terror because it often works

the negative impacts of such fear – the misdirection of resources, the creation of bad policy, the encouragement of mean world syndrome, the furtherance of racism – the promulgation of real damage

the justice system continues to be slow to understand the link between online harassment and real-life violence

In order to increase public safety this decade, it is imperative that police — and everyone else — become more familiar with the kinds of communities that engender toxic, militant systems of harassment, and the online and offline spaces where these communities exist. Increasingly, that means understanding social media’s dark corners, and the types of extremism they can foster.

Businesses have to learn when online outrage is manufactured

There’s a difference between organic outrage that arises because an employee actually does something outrageous, and invented outrage that’s an excuse to harass someone whom a group has already decided to target for unrelated reasons — for instance, because an employee is a feminist. A responsible business would ideally figure out which type of outrage is occurring before it punished a client or employee who was just doing their job.

Social media platforms didn’t learn how to shut down disingenuous conversations over ethics and free speech before they started to tear their cultures apart

Dedication to free speech over the appearance of bias is especially important within tech culture, where a commitment to protecting free speech is both a banner and an excuse for large corporations to justify their approach to content moderation — or lack thereof.

Reddit’s free-speech-friendly moderation stance resulted in the platform tacitly supporting pro-Gamergate subforums like r/KotakuInAction, which became a major contributor to Reddit’s growing alt-right community. Twitter rolled out a litany of moderation tools in the wake of Gamergate, intended to allow harassment targets to perpetually block, mute, and police their own harassers — without actually effectively making the site unwelcome for the harassers themselves. And YouTube and Facebook, with their algorithmic amplification of hateful and extreme content, made no effort to recognize the violence and misogyny behind pro-Gamergate content, or police them accordingly.

All of these platforms are wrestling with problems that seem to have grown beyond their control; it’s arguable that if they had reacted more swiftly to slow the growth of the internet’s most toxic and misogynistic communities back when those communities, particularly Gamergate, were still nascent, they could have prevented headaches in the long run — and set an early standard for how to deal with ever-broadening issues of extremist content online.

Violence against women is a predictor of other kinds of violence. We need to acknowledge it.

Somehow, the idea that all of that sexism and anti-feminist anger could be recruited, harnessed, and channeled into a broader white supremacist movement failed to generate any real alarm, even well into 2016

many of the perpetrators of real-world violence are radicalized online first

It remains difficult for many to accept the throughline from online abuse to real-world violence against women, much less the fact that violence against women, online and off, is a predictor of other kinds of real-world violence

Politicians and the media must take online “ironic” racism and misogyny seriously

Gamergate masked its misogyny in a coating of shrill yelling that had most journalists in 2014 writing off the whole incident as “satirical” and immature “trolling,” and very few correctly predicting that Gamergate’s trolling was the future of politics

Gamergate was all about disguising a sincere wish for violence and upheaval by dressing it up in hyperbole and irony in order to confuse outsiders and make it all seem less serious.

Gamergate simultaneously masqueraded as legitimate concern about ethics that demanded audiences take it seriously, and as total trolling that demanded audiences dismiss it entirely. Both these claims served to obfuscate its real aim — misogyny, and, increasingly, racist white supremacy

The public’s failure to understand and accept that the alt-right’s misogyny, racism, and violent rhetoric is serious goes hand in hand with its failure to understand and accept that such rhetoric is identical to that of President Trump

deploying offensive behavior behind a guise of mock outrage, irony, trolling, and outright misrepresentation, in order to mask the sincere extremism behind the message.

many members of the media, politicians, and members of the public still struggle to accept that Trump’s rhetoric is having violent consequences, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The movement’s insistence that it was about one thing (ethics in journalism) when it was about something else (harassing women) provided a case study for how extremists would proceed to drive ideological fissures through the foundations of democracy: by building a toxic campaign of hate beneath a veneer of denial.

Not only do smartphones affect our memory and our concentration, research shows they are addictive – to the point where they could be a ‘gateway drug’ making users more vulnerable to other addictions.

Smartphones are also linked to reduced social interaction, inadequate sleep, poor real-world navigation, and depression.

“The more time that kids spend on digital devices, the less empathetic they are, and the less they are able to process and recognise facial expressions, so their ability to actually communicate with each other is decreased.”

“Casino-funded research is designed to keep people gambling, and app software developers use exactly the same techniques. They have lots of buzzes and icons so you attend to them, they have things that move and flash so you notice them and keep your attention on the device.”

Around 90 per cent of US university students are thought to experience ‘phantom vibrations', so the researcher took a group to a desert location with no cell reception – and found that even after four days, around half of the students still thought their pocket was buzzing with Facebook or text notifications.

“Collaboration is a buzzword with software companies who are targeting schools to get kids to use these collaboration tools on their iPads – but collaboration decreases when you're using these devices,”

“All addiction is based on the same craving for a dopamine response, whether it's drug, gambling, alcohol or phone addiction,” he says. “As the dopamine response drops off, you need to increase the amount you need to get the same result, you want a little bit more next time. Neurologically, they all look the same.“We know – there are lots of studies on this – that once we form an addiction to something, we become more vulnerable to other addictions. That’s why there’s concerns around heavy users of more benign, easily-accessed drugs like alcohol and marijuana as there’s some correlation with usage of more physically addictive drugs like heroin, and neurological responses are the same.”

parents can also fall victim to screens which distract from their child’s activities or conversations, and most adults will experience this with friends and family members too.

“We also know that if you learn something on an iPad you are less likely to be able to transfer that to another device or to the real world,”

a series of studies have tested this with children who learn to construct a project with ‘digital’ blocks and then try the project with real blocks. “They can’t do it - they start from zero again,”

“Our brains can’t actually multitask, we have to switch our attention from one thing to another, and each time you switch, there's a cost to your attentional resources. After a few hours of this, we become very stressed.” That also causes us to forget things

A study from Norway recently tested how well kids remembered what they learned on screens. One group of students received information on a screen and were asked to memorise it; the second group received the same information on paper. Both groups were tested on their recall.Unsurprisingly, the children who received the paper version remembered more of the material. But the children with the electronic version were also found to be more stressed,

The famous ‘London taxi driver experiments’ found that memorising large maps caused the hippocampus to expand in size. Williams says that the reverse is going to happen if we don’t use our brain and memory to navigate. “Our brains are just like our muscles. We ‘use it or lose it’ – in other words, if we use navigation devices for directions rather than our brains, we will lose that ability.”

numerous studies also link smartphone use with sleeplessness and anxiety. “Some other interesting research has shown that the more friends you have on social media, the less friends you are likely to have in real life, the less actual contacts you have and the greater likelihood you have of depression,”

12-month-old children whose carers regularly use smartphones have poorer facial expression perception

turning off software alarms and notifications, putting strict time limits around screen use, keeping screens out of bedrooms, minimising social media and replacing screens with paper books, paper maps and other non-screen activities can all help minimise harm from digital devices including smartphones

There are very real consequences from a white supremacist holding the highest office in the land. There are very real consequences to Trump using the bully pulpit to foster hate on the basis of almost every human characteristic, be it race, faith, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, immigration status, gender, or class

The policies of the Trump administration cannot be divorced from the rhetoric of the Trump administration. The rhetoric and the policies are both driven by xenophobia, Islamaphobia, misogyny and white supremacy. And if the government is going to treat diverse and marginalized communities as subhuman so will everyone else

We have to be prepared for much worse from the Trump administration because this is what he has said that he would do all along. It is naïve and foolish of us to think that he is not going to follow through on his promises.

It is dystopic. I have met with survivors who have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. One survivor, Tanya Gersh, described to me how she rarely says hello to strangers and is not as gregarious and outgoing as she used to be. She described to me how after she was viciously trolled by white supremacists in Whitefish, Montana. There were something like 700 forms of communication such as emails, social media messages, voice mails. She told me she had to have a conversation with her ten year old about the Holocaust and how every Jewish parent struggles with when to have that conversation with their children about anti-Semitism. Hate crimes that target individuals send a community wide message that its members are not welcome. This undermines feelings of safety and security. It is  called "vicarious trauma." For example the vandalism and arson of house of worship, the targeting of organizations, student groups, campus communities or even state sponsored forms of hate are also designed to terrorize whole communities and groups of people. We also know that hate literally kills people by making communities physically and emotionally sick.

There are many victims of hate crimes who out of fear remain silent. Hate crimes are very underreported in America. The stats do not capture the scale of the problem.

The War on Terror must stop as well because I don’t think you can separate what the United States does abroad with what it does to its own people — especially nonwhites, Muslims, and other marginalized and discriminated against communities. Justice also involves archiving this moment, documenting what survivors and their communities have experienced

there is no one size fits all answer. It should ultimately be determined by the survivors. In my book there are survivors  who forgave the aggressors and culprits in open court and elsewhere because they don’t believe that prison is the answer. There are others who felt otherwise. But overwhelmingly the survivors that I met are open to reconciliation so long as there is accountability

The epistemic crisis Trump has accelerated is now morphing into a full-fledged crisis of democracy.

As Voltaire famously put it: “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”

The right, in all its organs, from social media to television to the president, is telling a well-worn, consistent story: Opposition from the left and Democrats is fraudulent, illegitimate, a foreign-funded conspiracy against the traditional white American way of life.

Having two versions of reality constantly clashing in public is cognitively and emotionally exhausting. To an average person following the news, the haze of charge and countercharge is overwhelming. And that is precisely what every autocrat wants.

every aspiring tyrant in modern history has made the independent media his first target

Then they go after the courts, the security services, and the military. Once they have a large base of support that will believe whatever they proclaim, follow them anywhere, support them in anything — it doesn’t have to be a majority, just an intense, activated minority — they can, practically speaking, get away with anything.