Posts Tagged ‘web’
“The purpose of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is to destroy the old culture. You cannot stop us!”*…
… or perhaps (per the title quote above), China in the late 60s and early 70s.
Ryan Broderick, with thoughts on reactions to the recent assassination of United Healthcare’s CEO…
Last week, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down by an unknown suspect outside of a Manhattan hotel as he was headed to an investor’s meeting. The New York Police Department is now carrying out a manhunt to find the gunman, who is still at large. Authorities released four, unfortunately, dazzling photos of Thompson’s seemingly very handsome masked killer, revealed that his shell casings had the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” carved on them, and, also, found a backpack full of Monopoly money believed to belong to the suspect. Oh, also, the hospital Thompson was sent to after the shooting wasn’t in UnitedHealthcare’s network. All of this has only added to the social media frenzy around the murder.
In fact, the overwhelming response to Thompson’s death online could be summed up as “lol, lmao even.” But it, should be noted, that it’s not just chronically online shitposters celebrating Thompson’s death. It’s possible this is the most aligned America — well, aside from the folks in its highest tax brackets — has been about a news story since the invention of the internet.
An announcement on Facebook from UnitedHealthcare had to have reaction counts turned off because of the amount of laughing emojis users were adding to it. Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro’s viewers were breaking rank in the comments underneath a video of his about the killing. Reddit moderators couldn’t contain a thread about it on r/medicine. There was a lookalike contest for Thompson’s killer in Washington Square Park over the weekend. There’s a ton of merch with “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” popping up. And there are even some fun conspiracy theories…
… Reporter Taylor Lorenz went long over in User Mag about about how, no, this does not mean that an overwhelming amount of the country is pro-murder, or whatever. “Thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people,” she wrote. And Today In Tabs’ Rusty Foster put it another way, writing, “A nation full of people absolutely parched for consequences and with nothing to look forward to but rising fascism.”
The only recent story like this that you can really point to is the assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022. His killer revealed that he carried out the attack because of Abe’s support of the Unification Church, a cult-like religious order that wields a tremendous amount of political influence in Japan. And the overwhelming response from both the Japanese public and lawmakers, alike, was, yeah, actually, he had a point. I don’t think Thompson’s murder is suddenly going to lead to the dismantling of America’s cruel and inhumane healthcare industry, but it’s certainly been a cathartic few days online.
It has also quickly unraveled a decade-plus of right-wing programming in online spaces for young men. Many of whom are suddenly realizing maybe there are meatier subjects to take their anger out on than the racial makeup of Star Wars casting announcements. The best example being a thread yesterday on the subreddit for the edgelord streamer Asmongold, where users were enthusiastically talking about giving up the culture war to focus on a “class war”. The thread was deleted eventually for being “political,” but the same conversations are happening all over the manosphere right now. Which, you know, I don’t think anyone had an anonymous assassin on their list of possible “Leftist Joe Rogan’s,” but it seems like he’s moved to the head of the pack.
As Bluesky user hayao.lol wrote, “However this ends up [as of this writing, authorities have detained “a person of interest”] the guy won, flat out. This has done more damage to the image of the surveillance state, public complacency around healthcare, and ‘cops’ as a concept than any other single act.” Which I suspect is what’s actually making US elites so uncomfortable about all of this.
Thompson’s death [has] been a real shock to the system for America’s ruling class, who seem to be realizing for the first time that the majority of the country will not mourn their deaths. As podcaster and reporter Michael Hobbes wrote a few years ago, “I think we’ll look back on the last decade as a time when social media gave previously marginalized groups the ability to speak directly to elites and, as a result, elites lost their minds.” Which is why a whole bunch of tedious hall monitors are suddenly tut-tutting about all the memes in every major newspaper. I, personally, am not going super hard on the pro-assassination memes — as funny as they are — because we just don’t know what the motive was. We live in a time of mass accelerationist violence and I don’t feel like publicly cheerleading a guy who might have a compound full of deranged far-right ramblings. But I’m also not stupid enough to think that scolding the entire internet for how they’re acting is a meaningful use of my time on planet Earth. Maybe if I had a paid column somewhere — or proper health insurance — I’d feel different…
History suggests that when a political/economic system needs reset, but those who control it resist, the consequence can be an explosive period of painful brutality… that’s to say, “brutal” in that it is too often too bloody, and “brute” in that it is a blunt instrument, inflicting pain and damage much more broadly than just on its ostensible targets… a period of chaos too often followed by an autocracy (a la Napoleon in France and CCP one-party rule in China). The only way to avoid such an explosion is to begin making the changes that can alleviate pressure– to address the real needs of those whose suffering is fueling their growing anger– before that pressure destroys the system entirely.
Fix it, or it fails completely… and quite possibly catastrophically.
Learning from tragedy– on the warning shot that killed the United Healthcare CEO: Trying to scold the entire internet,” from @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social.
See– do see– also: “Radicalized,” from Cory Doctorow
* An unnamed Red Guard, 1966
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As we contemplate consequences, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Chinese president Yuan Shikai proclaimed the Empire of China (AKA the Hongxian Monarchy), an attempt to reinstate the monarchy in China, with himself as emperor. His reign was short-lived: a civil war broke out 10 days later; in March of 1916, Yuan “abdicated,” and the republic was restored. The republican cause was set back by several years, and China entered into a period of fracture and conflict among a number of local warlords.
“Only connect!”*…
… Mobile phone companies are doing their best to oblige– and so far over half of the world’s population is connected to mobile internet. But as Khadija Alam and Russell Brandom report (in the indispensable Rest of World) growing that number is getting harder. (Read to the end for a twist)…
When Facebook hit 1 billion users in 2012, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that when it comes to getting another billion users, “The big thing is obviously going to be mobile.” In an interview at the time, Zuckerberg told Bloomberg, “As more phones become smartphones, it’s just this massive opportunity.”
Clearly, he was correct. A recent survey from Global System for Mobile Communications Association Intelligence (GSMA), the research wing of a U.K.-based organization that represents mobile operators around the world, found that 4.6 billion people across the globe are now connected to mobile internet — or roughly 57% of the world’s population.
Now, the rate of new mobile internet subscriber growth is slowing. From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to 160 million. Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers. That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge. GSMA collects data by surveying a nationally representative sample of people in each country, and then it correlates the results with similar studies.
Max Cuvellier Giacomelli, the head of the Mobile for Development program at GSMA, said that large swaths of the world’s population still don’t have access to mobile internet primarily because of affordability. Although the cost of data has dropped radically in recent years, the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency focused on information and communications technologies, notes that huge disparities between regions persist. The cost of data in Africa, for example, is more than twice that of the Americas, the second most expensive region…
… In countries including China, the U.S., and Singapore, a high share of the population is already connected to mobile internet — 80%, 81%, and 93%, respectively. So it’s no surprise that the rate of mobile internet subscriptions has slowed.
But the rate of new users has also slowed in countries including Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Pakistan — where only 37%, 34%, and 24% of the population currently use mobile internet.
Coverage continues to be a challenge, although data suggests that the issue is improving relatively quickly. Just 350 million people across the world, or 4% of the global population, still live in areas that are not covered by a mobile broadband network. According to GSMA, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest coverage gap of any global region. But between 2021 and 2023, mobile coverage in this area expanded from 83% to 87%.
Furthermore, recent advances in satellite technology have the potential to close this coverage gap by bringing mobile internet networks to rural or remote areas that lack mobile infrastructure. SpaceX’s Starlink, for example, is now available in over 100 countries and provides a roaming plan…
… Even in countries with high rates of mobile internet subscription, there are still stubborn pockets of people with no mobile internet access. In China, for example, 80% of the population has access to mobile internet. But subscription rates among the remaining 280 million people are slowing. Recent advances in satellite technology could bring mobile internet to new users in the country, especially in rural areas. In August, China began launching a satellite internet network [the Qianfan Constellation], set to rival SpaceX’s Starlink, in an effort to bring everyone online.
What happened to the “next billion” internet users? They’re already online: “New data shows the number of new mobile internet users is stalling,” from @khadijaalam_ and @russellbrandom in @restofworld.
Your correspondent finds himself pondering the final sentence in the piece: While the on-boarding of the unconnected 47% may be the result of a patchwork of local efforts, it’s clearly the goal of Starlink and the Qianfan Constellation to centralize connectivity… and the company– or government or culture– that controls the means of communication has a great deal of influence on what gets communicated and how. Nearly half the world’s population is in play, with all that that entails for geopolitics and geoeconomics; for example, see here (and the links therein)…
* E. M. Forster, Howards End
(R)D will be on its traditional Thanksgiving hiatus from today. Regular service will resume when we’re clear of Black Friday…
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As we contemplate connectivity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1995 that Microsoft released Internet Explorer 2.0…
Nearly 6 months to the day after Bill Gates sent his Internet Tidal Wave memo recognizing the importance of the Internet, and only 3 months after releasing version 1.0, Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 2.0 for Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5. IE 2.0 was still based on licensed code from Spyglass Mosaic, but was the first IE version to support now-common features such as SSL, JavaScript, and cookies. It was also the first version to allow the importing of bookmarks from Netscape Navigator, which at the time had a virtual monopoly on the web browser market. This was the first inklings of the “browser war” that was soon to erupt over the next few years.
– source
“If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour… then you are the sucker”*…
Patrick Redford in the always-enlightening (and entertaining) Defector, on ESPN’s pivot to wagering…
Like an anglerfish lighting its lure, ESPN is attempting to use the shiny bauble of its broadcast rights and import within the sports media world to tempt people onto its gambling platform. The Worldwide Leader signed a 10-year, $2 billion deal with Penn Entertainment one year ago, on the theory that a fusion of ESPN’s brand with Penn’s sportsbook would make for a serious player in the sports gambling world. That theory, which has borne dubious results thus far, depends upon ESPN transforming itself into a gushing firehose of gambling sludge.
To that end, the company broadcast its gambling show ESPN Bet on regular ESPN for the first time this week, shuffling it over from lesser auxiliary ESPNs onto the main channel for the purpose of shoving the words ESPN Bet—also the name of the company’s sportsbook—in front of as many people as possible before football season. I watched both of this week’s episodes, curious what sort of impression the company would try to make. What strategies would it use to turn parlays into paydays? What I saw was an hour-long advertisement that made thin, watery attempts to justify itself as programming, which it is not. The point of ESPN Bet, italicized, is not to make you smarter about sports or give you good picks, but to divert the nascent gambler away from the two biggest sportsbooks in the country and onto ESPN Bet, plain text.
The show is hosted by Tyler Fulghum and Joe Fortenbaugh. It adheres to a very simple pattern: Here is something you can bet on (e.g.: NFL Comeback Player of the Year, the Cincinnati Reds, Israel Adesanya); here are the odds; here is an affirmative or negative case for why to bet or not bet on or against those odds. There are various gimmicky setups that don’t so much disguise this basic loop as they merely vary its cadence…
…
… Something as abstract as LSU and Miami’s making the College Football Playoff four months from now is already banal talk-show fodder on its own; ESPN Bet‘s outlook is even more refracted. The topic is not whether one or both of those teams make the CFP, but rather how correctly those teams’ respective chances of making the CFP are calibrated on this gambling app. The drama, to the extent there is any, is located not in anything that happens on the field or court, but essentially in arbitrage. ESPN Bet is SportsCenter, but about a number instead of a game.
The ostensible point is to make you, the viewer, a more informed gambler so you can make money. There are a number of lies being told here. The most obvious one concerns the topline nature of the operation: Casinos exist to separate you from your money, not to help you take theirs. No matter how spiffy Fortenbaugh’s mustache is—personally, I think he looks cool; Ray Ratto says he looks like “Ronald Colman in a 1953 black-and-white movie” and clearly means this as a bad thing—and how convincing he is about the solidity of the Orioles money line, anyone who is thinking about this rationally has to know there is no algorithmic way to beat the computers. Rather, if there is, it will not be broadcast in public by the very entity that stands to lose money off anybody learning it. There are sharps and there is everyone else, a dissonance that makes ESPN Bet‘s false performance of gambling knowledge all the more icky.
If you are serious about any of this, you know you’re being sold something. The show knows it’s selling you something, and while this is occasionally acknowledged—Fortenbaugh mentioned on Monday where the sharp money was going, which should prompt any viewer to ask what that makes them—the predatory artifice of ESPN Bet is only barely subtext. The specifics are interesting to the extent that they’re pushing a ton of football futures bullshit, as football is the most gambled upon sport in the U.S. But really, all that matters is that Fulghum and Fortenbaugh look you in the eye and say the words “ESPN Bet.” The show is straightforwardly an ad for the app, which ESPN executives have openly talked about on earnings calls.
The incentives are obvious. DraftKings and FanDuel have roughly equal shares of a combined 74.5 percent of the U.S. gambling market. ESPN Bet, meanwhile, controls a paltry 3.2 percent as of the second quarter of the fiscal year, which is down from 4.7 percent in the first quarter. They are getting crushed. ESPN Bet’s competitors are an order of magnitude larger because of first mover advantage, and the only strategic fulcrum ESPN has to utilize is its essentiality as a broadcaster. ESPN’s value proposition is that unlike DraftKings or FanDuel, it operates a vast media apparatus, one that can set itself on a gentle slope, sliding its audience inexorably toward gambling on their phones. An example of that approach’s noxiousness in practice, as Kathryn Xu wrote earlier this year, is the win probability graphic ESPN slaps on baseball broadcasts. But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s Penn CTO Aaron LaBerge on his company’s earnings call last week:
For example, when we have account linking in November, if you place a parlay on ESPN Bet, it’s going to appear in the ESPN app. You have to do no work. It’s going to be seamless. If anyone here has placed a parlay of more than two or three legs, you know that’s a struggle. And so, it’s just going to be like magic for you to actually consume that within ESPN. (source)
“Magic” is offensively lofty rhetoric to use about “consum[ing] that” when the sum total of “that” is losing $15 on a Jalen Williams-centric parlay without having to leave the ESPN appsphere. In the case of something like the Tigers’ birdbrained same game parlays, there is at least baseball (albeit Detroit Tigers baseball) at the core of the experience. Gambling content that is attached, remora-like, to the side of a sports-watching experience is annoying but ultimately ignorable. ESPN Bet is the gambling content shorn of the sports, like if your spam folder was a TV show.
Consider the question of what sort of audience ESPN Bet is even for. Anyone sharp and dedicated enough to actually make money on sports gambling is not getting their picks from two energetic guys on the TV. A viewer rational enough to know this is a sucker’s game will find ESPN Bet equally useless if not outright reprehensible. A viewer who wants to learn something about sports or have fun will find far better options.
What is actually sinister about this show isn’t its adjacency to gambling, but its nihilism. At best this is a show for nobody. Background music hums along behind the hosts throughout the broadcast, an obvious sign that this is intended less as programming you are meant to pay any actual attention to and more as something engineered to run in the background while you wait out an oil change or a connecting flight, a dog whistle audible to the most abject of marks. It is scarcely distinguishable from the commercials that break up its runtime, as it is itself a commercial. The show walks backward, away from the viewer, hoping to draw them into the void…
“‘ESPN Bet’ Is A Black Hole” (gift article) from @redford in @DefectorMedia.
See also: “Sports Betting Is Legal, and Sportswriting Might Never Recover.”
And for a different (and equally astounding/depressing) example of the outsized impact of money on sports see “Ex-Pac-12 Teams Will Face Some of The Worst Travel Distances in Power-Conference History,” from @Neil_Paine.
* Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) in Rounders
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As we look for the line, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that the World Wide Web was introduced to the world at large.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim) proposed the system to his colleagues at CERN. He got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including a browser called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network) and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development, he defined the first version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the primary document format.
The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then– with the publication of this (likely the first public) web page— to the whole Internet 32 years ago today. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created. (Today, while it is understood that the number of active sites fluctuates, the total is estimated at over 1.5 billion… more than a handful, gambling sites.)
“What shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”*…
A.W. Ohlheiser on a new book, Invisible Rulers— an investigation of the ways in which technology has transformed power and influence– by Renée DiResta, a leader of the late, lamented Stanford Internet Observatory…
… The book examines and contextualizes how bad information and “bespoke realities” became so powerful and prominent online. She charts how the “collision of the rumor mill and the propaganda machine” on social media helped to form a trinity of influencer, algorithm, and crowd that work symbiotically to catapult pseudo-events, Twitter Main Characters, and conspiracy theories that have captured attention and shattered consensus and trust.
DiResta’s book is part history, part analysis, and part memoir, as it spans from pre-internet examinations of the psychology of rumor and propaganda to the biggest moments of online conspiracy and harassment from the social media era. In the end, DiResta applies what she’s learned in a decade of closely researching online disinformation, manipulation, and abuse, to her personal experience of being the target of a series of baseless accusations that, despite their lack of evidence, prompted Rep. Jim Jordan, as chair of the House subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, to launch an investigation.
There’s a really understandable instinct that, I think, a lot of people have when they read about online misinformation or disinformation: They want to know why it’s happening and who is to blame, and they want that answer to be easy. Hence, meme-ified arguments about “Russian bots” causing Trump to win the presidential election in 2016. Or, perhaps, pushes to deplatform one person who went viral by saying something wrong and harmful. Or the belief that we can content-moderate our way out of online harms altogether.
DiResta’s book explains why these approaches will always fall short. Blaming the “algorithm” for a dangerous viral trend might feel satisfying, but the algorithm has never worked without human choice. As DiResta writes, “virality is a collective behavior.” Algorithms can surface and nudge and entangle, but they need user data to do it effectively…
…
…So, what would work?
DiResta’s ideas for this echo conversations that have been happening among misinformation experts for some time. There are some things platforms absolutely should be doing from a moderation standpoint, like removing automated trending topics, introducing friction to engaging with some online content, and generally giving users more control over what they see in their feeds and from their communities. DiResta also notes the importance of education and prebunking, which is a more preventative version of addressing false information that focuses on the tactics and tropes of online manipulation. Also, transparency…
Misinformation: “Why lying on the internet keeps working,” @abbyohlheiser in @voxdotcom.
DiResta on her experience of harassment while at the Internet Observatory: “My Encounter with the Fantasy-Industial Complex” (gift article)
For more on prebunking, see “Fact or Fake? The role of knowledge neglect in misinformation” (source of the image above.
Also apposite: “Is social media fueling political polarization?“
On the other hand, there’s this consideration of misinformation in the larger epistemological context of all of the information available to us: “How Dangerous is Misinformation?“: “The problem with alarmism about “misinformation” is not that it is too pessimistic about the state of media and public discourse. The problem is that it is not pessimistic enough.” Caveat lector.
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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As we steel ourselves, we might recall that it was on this date in 1947 that Kenneth Arnold reported a UFO sighting; Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier (in Washington State) at speeds that he estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour.
His was the first post-World War II sighting in the United States that attracted nationwide news coverage and is credited with being the first of the modern era of UFO sightings– including numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks. Arnold’s description of the objects led the press quickly to coin the terms flying saucer and flying disc as popular descriptive terms for UFOs.
After the 1947 UFO sighting, Arnold became famous “practically overnight.” Arnold’s daughter would later recall the family receiving 10,000 letters and constant phone calls. In the 1960’s Arnold entered politics, running as a Republican for Lieutenant Governor of Idaho. He lost to the Democratic incumbent.
“Aging, quite simply, is a loss of information.”*…
And as it is in the human condition, so it is on the internet. As the Pew Research Center reports: 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later…
The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.
A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.
This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023…
The not-so-pretty results of their study, and an account of their methodology at “When Online Content Disappears,” from @pewresearch.
Happily, the Internet Archive‘s wonderful Wayback Machine, where one can find saved copies of (many, many, if not all) web pages that have disappeared, is a(n at least partial) antidote. Indeed, via a background script, the Wayback Machine supplies the most recent archived version of many Wikipedia links that have gone dead.
(Image above: source— where one can find the origin of “404” as the designator of a broken link…)
* David Sinclair, controversial anti-aging researcher
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As we search for the missing, we might send elegantly-designed birthday greetings to John Cocke; he was born on this date in 1925. A computer engineer, he made numerous important contributions to computer architecture and to optimizing compiler design. Most notably, he is considered by many to be “the father of RISC architecture” (which first appeared in his design of the IBM 801).
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