They were better dressed than I, wealthier obviously, and possessed of an oily smoothness which threatened that if you dared scratch through their surface, your nails would sink deeply into… more surface. And it would be moist. I remember the gates, too. Actual steel gates, big heavy motherfuckers, keeping outsiders firmly outside. Inside was the House of Fairfax, in those days located over on Broadway. I was only allowed to meet these particular gatekeepers in a pub across the road from what was then the Fairfax citadel because my entree to the pub was guaranteed by Brian Toohey, the legendary investigative journalist and editor.
That was the the real lightbulb moment for me back when the first thorough exposés of online astroturfing were coming out. The fact that the goal is not to persuade people of your case. It’s to make the entire public discourse so poisonously unmoored from reality that people just throw up their hands and tune out. Then you’ve cut the legs out from under anyone who actually wants to make a case or report a fact. And then you can do utterly whatever the fuck you like.
In the words of Ms Penny, a problem that the Marketplace Of Ideas struggles to deal with is that a lot of people aren’t there to shop.
I'm sure there's a bit from an Adam Curtis doco on Youtube that talks about Putin having done precisely this, and it's obvious that the most recent former US president took many leaves from Vlad's instruction manual.
They may not have written the playbook but they arguably refined it into its current definitive form. Another lightbulb moment I remember was when IP tracing showed that the same IP troll farm was responsible for sites and social media accounts both exalting and demonising a particular US political candidate, running one campaign whipping people up to attend a particular rally while whipping their opponents up to go and protest and shut down the same rally. That was instructive in a way that reading about the practice in theory wasn't. There was no agenda there apart from jamming a crowbar into every single division they could find and levering it open into a giant fiery crack in the earth.
Jul 14, 2023·edited Jul 14, 2023Liked by John Birmingham
It gets worse, of course. The ultimate outcome of the latest ACMA-misinformation bill percolating the parliament as we speak will probably be legislated robot-gatekeepers. Side-effect of the number and width of the gates now, and the supposed censorship-industrial complex now metastasizing.
Leave the question of who gets to tell the robot-gatekeepers what the truth is as a deeply buried footnote. And let's not worry about the many, many realms of life and discourse where reasonable humans reasonably differ.
I reckon that coffee houses, pubs, and other venues for face-to-face discussion might once again become popular, or closed chat-groups, at least among the sane.
What YouTube already blocks is scary. But, every day I get ads for an investment scam, with deepfaked Karl Stefanovic and Elon Musk talking complete bollocks in not-yet-perfected robotic voices. Google and Meta will be Cyberdine or Umbrella Corp.
A return to organic discussion and protest would be good for many reasons. I think the French are pioneering this as we speak.
Jul 14, 2023·edited Jul 14, 2023Liked by John Birmingham
For me the term post-truth used to just conjure up images of the Tangerine Mussolini doing his grift But between the troll farms, AI, and encountering Cookers the term 'Post-Truth' now conjures in me a fear and anxiety greater than if I'd intercepted a telegram from Cthulhu saying "You are all fucked STOP. Haha STOP"
Jul 14, 2023·edited Jul 15, 2023Liked by John Birmingham
I have to get back to my Hannah Arendt books, JB - what a clear seer she was on matters political, discriminatory, racist, propaganda - unfair? It was a guide from Porto Alegre in southern Brazil to places of particular Jewish resonance in Berlin whose PhD had focussed on Hannah Arendt which sent me to her books. Yes - the betrayal of the algorithm by the controllers of tech giants. I find in discussion with friends - reading you, indeed - people with longer and deeper insights into the news deliverers than me - all speaking of the general untrustworthiness of much of news content - especially those who keep tabs on commercial TV but even from the ABC - on politically domestic and international matters.
Well, that was certainly a bit of a bodice ripper! Actually had me sign on for a year's subs to support your breakfast gin habit. Flew right in the face of my ex-single Mum, Great Depression descendent, free stuff devotee thing. That & you actually remembered Hannah Arendt when nobody else seems to even know who she is these days ...
Oh, yeah, Birmo ... a bodice ripper of a piece! Actually, caused me - ex-single Mum, Great Depression descendent, freelance hack & hybrid author, general all-round devotee of the best of the free stuff - to shell out on a year's subscription. I hope you don't spend it all on gin. For breakfast? FFS!!!
The re-emergence of Nazis has also coincided with the inevitable decline of the generation that survived their horror the first time around. They were the staunchest gatekeepers.
What sucks is that's it not just the super extreme propositions that are being thrown up as truths, but less immediately fatal ones that otherwise smart people are swallowing whole and regurgitating.
This is where the poisonous "balance" requirement imposed on the ABC to keep Hanson quiet lives. It ensures that every wingnut with an unhinged counter-opinion on any subject gets a say.
Jul 14, 2023·edited Jul 14, 2023Liked by John Birmingham
I recall hearing about some fairly vigorous debate re. Nazism between 1939 and 1945, and I was rather hoping that the results of that were somewhat conclusive...
Note that those who accuse Lineker of abusing Godwin's Law have in effect misrepresented what he said to spuriously claim protection under Godwin's Law. Which is pretty much exactly why it needs to go.
Definitely not. When I think of debating Nazis I always get the picture of that woman swinging her handbag at one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_with_the_Handbag. In that instance we should all be swinging handbags .. with bricks in them.
Great read, I miss Ramsey and Carlton who were always good for a chuckle at the expense of someone I despised but who also did the hard work before setting finger to keyboard.
I’ve been thinking about the common wisdom that once photography was invented painting was set free to abandon verity and wander free in the blurry fields of Impressionism. Now we find photography and reporting are in the same boat, without an emerging technology to replace them, the perfect conditions for our ‘post-truth’ society.
The contemporary commentariat can and do paint any wordscapes they like, expressionistic musings on personal experience that conveniently ignore privilege, surreal mash-ups of fascism and family values, even strenuous denials that certain shapes or colours exist. These arrive in our feeds without gatekeeper of even gate.
Christ knows what will come of this intellectual anarchy, it’s less fun than it sounds.
I like to think of storming the gates these days as being like the zerg rush on Starship Troopers. Speaking as someone who’s been gatekept out of not just the citadel but strangers on the street have told me I shouldn’t be allowed out in public because I’m disabled. And, shock horror, by entering into a public space, I’m in their way. It was pretty much the same at uni and in the workplace. So it’s nice for you that you got to storm the citadel and chose to leave. Many of us have no choice though.
So I do my website. And I get snide comments about my “little” website. And other people who do similar things tell me I should subscribe to their website for - and I kid you not - $17.95 a month! I had to read that figure several times to confirm. I’m doing what I’m doing for free and I’ve been told by published authors to STFU, sit down and never speak on the internet again because “disabled woman”. And one of those nasties - I’d previously given him good publicity but he apparently decided I hadn’t done enough - he encouraged his followers to pile on and to pile on on Twitter and on my website too.
So maybe the zerg rush isn’t such a good image after all…
Mate it fucking sucks that they treated you like that. But you’re still here, kicking arse. Your ‘little website’ isn’t little. You built your own citadel and threw the gates open wide. Fuck those other guys.
Yeah, that's the bitch of it- people subscribe to transparent lies just because they see some utter bullshit in print somewhere. "I did my own research." Yeah, and you turned up crap facts that cemented your confirmation bias. Up close and in real time I have seen this phenomenon cause real-world damage.
This is far too thinking a piece for me to fling back a glib response based on surface cultural capital and a wide but shallow reading that I do to pass the time.
With the deep fake video, there's the potential for people to throw that out as a red herring if they actually get caught on film. Though deny, deny, deny seems to work quite well.
As a captioner for film and TV, we used to be able to rely on certain news organisations to have the correct spellings for names of people, places, companies, etc. These days I don't know if I can trust any website to get them right.
Ugh, you're reminding me of a report on one of the earliest identified fake-news farms. Remember that bunch of guys in the Balkans, I think maybe Croatia, who were doing that work for buyers all over the world and were happy to talk about it?
At one point they apparently went through it with the reporter watching, took a photo from a news story about some young people beating a homeless man to death somewhere in the USA (an actual story and crime, and needless to say a horrifying one), recaptioned the photos to "Hilary supporters chant anti-Trump slogans as they beat a disabled veteran to death" and put the photo back into circulation. Went viral.
And here's me, JB, maybe making you feel bad - with a blank look -because I'm not sure I recognise people. Or don't trust my judgement. Or memory. Feel lost. And dont want to intrude. And be embarressing.
So, I don't know. Maybe I'll try and grimace a smile if I suspect I see you around.
Yeah, Andrew I think? everyone. I miss feeling shared truths and realities too. Coffee shop discussions comment - hope too.
Reminds me of occasional chats with other people in a bank branch. (Before the agressive pushes from the industry to get everyone online).
Spending a hour maybe on a street visiting shops, eating, greeting or chatting, buying - or more like window shopping! Being a pest maybe, visiting aquaintances.
I dont know. Places like Coorparoo and Camp Hill/ Holland Park just feels noisy and insular and almost hostile. At times anyway.
Not condusive to incidental chats, as they say.
Um, no body language here online, so don't know how to close.
The prescience of George Orwell is continuing to creep into the daily fabric of our lives.
The ogre in the room of course, is the News Corp giga factory manufacturing hatred, loathing, fear and mendacity.
The new drug of chose, Dopamine, chains us to the big brother screen so as to prevent us seeing the new evolving society.
With advent of AI, Alternative Imagery, a plethora of new business models, both good and bad, and some really bad will make people pine for the old days, by simply ordering some rose tinted glasses from Amazon.
I have retreated into my own gated community, the slumber shed and watch the Barbie movie on a continuous loop. It's cheaper than Prozac.
That was the the real lightbulb moment for me back when the first thorough exposés of online astroturfing were coming out. The fact that the goal is not to persuade people of your case. It’s to make the entire public discourse so poisonously unmoored from reality that people just throw up their hands and tune out. Then you’ve cut the legs out from under anyone who actually wants to make a case or report a fact. And then you can do utterly whatever the fuck you like.
In the words of Ms Penny, a problem that the Marketplace Of Ideas struggles to deal with is that a lot of people aren’t there to shop.
I'm sure there's a bit from an Adam Curtis doco on Youtube that talks about Putin having done precisely this, and it's obvious that the most recent former US president took many leaves from Vlad's instruction manual.
They may not have written the playbook but they arguably refined it into its current definitive form. Another lightbulb moment I remember was when IP tracing showed that the same IP troll farm was responsible for sites and social media accounts both exalting and demonising a particular US political candidate, running one campaign whipping people up to attend a particular rally while whipping their opponents up to go and protest and shut down the same rally. That was instructive in a way that reading about the practice in theory wasn't. There was no agenda there apart from jamming a crowbar into every single division they could find and levering it open into a giant fiery crack in the earth.
It gets worse, of course. The ultimate outcome of the latest ACMA-misinformation bill percolating the parliament as we speak will probably be legislated robot-gatekeepers. Side-effect of the number and width of the gates now, and the supposed censorship-industrial complex now metastasizing.
Leave the question of who gets to tell the robot-gatekeepers what the truth is as a deeply buried footnote. And let's not worry about the many, many realms of life and discourse where reasonable humans reasonably differ.
I reckon that coffee houses, pubs, and other venues for face-to-face discussion might once again become popular, or closed chat-groups, at least among the sane.
What YouTube already blocks is scary. But, every day I get ads for an investment scam, with deepfaked Karl Stefanovic and Elon Musk talking complete bollocks in not-yet-perfected robotic voices. Google and Meta will be Cyberdine or Umbrella Corp.
A return to organic discussion and protest would be good for many reasons. I think the French are pioneering this as we speak.
For me the term post-truth used to just conjure up images of the Tangerine Mussolini doing his grift But between the troll farms, AI, and encountering Cookers the term 'Post-Truth' now conjures in me a fear and anxiety greater than if I'd intercepted a telegram from Cthulhu saying "You are all fucked STOP. Haha STOP"
I have to get back to my Hannah Arendt books, JB - what a clear seer she was on matters political, discriminatory, racist, propaganda - unfair? It was a guide from Porto Alegre in southern Brazil to places of particular Jewish resonance in Berlin whose PhD had focussed on Hannah Arendt which sent me to her books. Yes - the betrayal of the algorithm by the controllers of tech giants. I find in discussion with friends - reading you, indeed - people with longer and deeper insights into the news deliverers than me - all speaking of the general untrustworthiness of much of news content - especially those who keep tabs on commercial TV but even from the ABC - on politically domestic and international matters.
Well, that was certainly a bit of a bodice ripper! Actually had me sign on for a year's subs to support your breakfast gin habit. Flew right in the face of my ex-single Mum, Great Depression descendent, free stuff devotee thing. That & you actually remembered Hannah Arendt when nobody else seems to even know who she is these days ...
Oh, yeah, Birmo ... a bodice ripper of a piece! Actually, caused me - ex-single Mum, Great Depression descendent, freelance hack & hybrid author, general all-round devotee of the best of the free stuff - to shell out on a year's subscription. I hope you don't spend it all on gin. For breakfast? FFS!!!
Status Unlocked: New Favourite
The re-emergence of Nazis has also coincided with the inevitable decline of the generation that survived their horror the first time around. They were the staunchest gatekeepers.
Yes, those counter arguments ..
What sucks is that's it not just the super extreme propositions that are being thrown up as truths, but less immediately fatal ones that otherwise smart people are swallowing whole and regurgitating.
One of the things I really struggle with is the proposition that all ideas have to be debated. Really? All of them? I dont think so.
This is where the poisonous "balance" requirement imposed on the ABC to keep Hanson quiet lives. It ensures that every wingnut with an unhinged counter-opinion on any subject gets a say.
I recall hearing about some fairly vigorous debate re. Nazism between 1939 and 1945, and I was rather hoping that the results of that were somewhat conclusive...
But people espousing Nazi opinions hate being told their opinions are those of Nazis (ask Gary Lineker). Godwin's Law is utterly obsolete.
"Who are the REAL Nazis here? The Nazis, or the people calling the Nazis out on being Nazis?"
"Um... the Nazis?"
"Hah, nice try, Nazi!"
Exactly. A better analysis than I could provide is here:
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2023/dont-mention-the-war-gary-lineker-did-and-he-got-away-with-it
Note that those who accuse Lineker of abusing Godwin's Law have in effect misrepresented what he said to spuriously claim protection under Godwin's Law. Which is pretty much exactly why it needs to go.
Definitely not. When I think of debating Nazis I always get the picture of that woman swinging her handbag at one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_with_the_Handbag. In that instance we should all be swinging handbags .. with bricks in them.
Great read, I miss Ramsey and Carlton who were always good for a chuckle at the expense of someone I despised but who also did the hard work before setting finger to keyboard.
I’ve been thinking about the common wisdom that once photography was invented painting was set free to abandon verity and wander free in the blurry fields of Impressionism. Now we find photography and reporting are in the same boat, without an emerging technology to replace them, the perfect conditions for our ‘post-truth’ society.
The contemporary commentariat can and do paint any wordscapes they like, expressionistic musings on personal experience that conveniently ignore privilege, surreal mash-ups of fascism and family values, even strenuous denials that certain shapes or colours exist. These arrive in our feeds without gatekeeper of even gate.
Christ knows what will come of this intellectual anarchy, it’s less fun than it sounds.
I like to think of storming the gates these days as being like the zerg rush on Starship Troopers. Speaking as someone who’s been gatekept out of not just the citadel but strangers on the street have told me I shouldn’t be allowed out in public because I’m disabled. And, shock horror, by entering into a public space, I’m in their way. It was pretty much the same at uni and in the workplace. So it’s nice for you that you got to storm the citadel and chose to leave. Many of us have no choice though.
So I do my website. And I get snide comments about my “little” website. And other people who do similar things tell me I should subscribe to their website for - and I kid you not - $17.95 a month! I had to read that figure several times to confirm. I’m doing what I’m doing for free and I’ve been told by published authors to STFU, sit down and never speak on the internet again because “disabled woman”. And one of those nasties - I’d previously given him good publicity but he apparently decided I hadn’t done enough - he encouraged his followers to pile on and to pile on on Twitter and on my website too.
So maybe the zerg rush isn’t such a good image after all…
Mate it fucking sucks that they treated you like that. But you’re still here, kicking arse. Your ‘little website’ isn’t little. You built your own citadel and threw the gates open wide. Fuck those other guys.
Aww thank you.
Yeah, that's the bitch of it- people subscribe to transparent lies just because they see some utter bullshit in print somewhere. "I did my own research." Yeah, and you turned up crap facts that cemented your confirmation bias. Up close and in real time I have seen this phenomenon cause real-world damage.
This is far too thinking a piece for me to fling back a glib response based on surface cultural capital and a wide but shallow reading that I do to pass the time.
Brilliant work
With the deep fake video, there's the potential for people to throw that out as a red herring if they actually get caught on film. Though deny, deny, deny seems to work quite well.
Diamond Joe Quimby: "That could be anyone's ass."
As a captioner for film and TV, we used to be able to rely on certain news organisations to have the correct spellings for names of people, places, companies, etc. These days I don't know if I can trust any website to get them right.
Per that recent story about the Philippines tourism bureau putting out an advertisement containing photos of three completely other places.
Lots of on-line mis-news-formation involves photos that may well be of the correct (mentioned) place, but at a completely different time.
Ugh, you're reminding me of a report on one of the earliest identified fake-news farms. Remember that bunch of guys in the Balkans, I think maybe Croatia, who were doing that work for buyers all over the world and were happy to talk about it?
At one point they apparently went through it with the reporter watching, took a photo from a news story about some young people beating a homeless man to death somewhere in the USA (an actual story and crime, and needless to say a horrifying one), recaptioned the photos to "Hilary supporters chant anti-Trump slogans as they beat a disabled veteran to death" and put the photo back into circulation. Went viral.
Ah, crap, I was slowly coming to the idea that I needn't finish The Origins of Totalitarianism. It's back on the "finish me" pile.
Yeah, I bought it in late 2016 for some reason and haven't gotten to it yet. I think I should put it on top of my "read next" stack.
Ripsnorter indeed Helen.
Very thinky. 11pm. Tired. Just woke up.
And here's me, JB, maybe making you feel bad - with a blank look -because I'm not sure I recognise people. Or don't trust my judgement. Or memory. Feel lost. And dont want to intrude. And be embarressing.
So, I don't know. Maybe I'll try and grimace a smile if I suspect I see you around.
Yeah, Andrew I think? everyone. I miss feeling shared truths and realities too. Coffee shop discussions comment - hope too.
Reminds me of occasional chats with other people in a bank branch. (Before the agressive pushes from the industry to get everyone online).
Spending a hour maybe on a street visiting shops, eating, greeting or chatting, buying - or more like window shopping! Being a pest maybe, visiting aquaintances.
I dont know. Places like Coorparoo and Camp Hill/ Holland Park just feels noisy and insular and almost hostile. At times anyway.
Not condusive to incidental chats, as they say.
Um, no body language here online, so don't know how to close.
The prescience of George Orwell is continuing to creep into the daily fabric of our lives.
The ogre in the room of course, is the News Corp giga factory manufacturing hatred, loathing, fear and mendacity.
The new drug of chose, Dopamine, chains us to the big brother screen so as to prevent us seeing the new evolving society.
With advent of AI, Alternative Imagery, a plethora of new business models, both good and bad, and some really bad will make people pine for the old days, by simply ordering some rose tinted glasses from Amazon.
I have retreated into my own gated community, the slumber shed and watch the Barbie movie on a continuous loop. It's cheaper than Prozac.