Babak Fakhamzadeh

Impressive, on several levels, for having been written just under 100 years ago. But also dated, and with a narrative with gaps, particularly around moments of action.

One thing I did not walk away with, after reading this book, was the sense that the One State was in totalitarian control of its numbers, its citizens. After 1000 years of the One State, it seems unlikely it could have survived for so long.

Bond's book is an easy and enjoyable read, even though the author is a bit all over the place, meandering from topic to topic. Then again, this topical meandering is a good fit for a book that's about getting lost.

So, a few of my observations...

Bond argues that Homo sapiens conquered the world exactly because of its stronger sense of special awareness and his exceptional ability to navigate.

Children are natural explorers and only get stymied when older. And, these days, get much fewer opportunities than decades ago.

Bond describes how rats, and, by extension, other mammals, become familiar with individual spaces; we have a number of different types of ‘place cells' in our brain, which ‘fire' when certain geospatial properties are true, such as being in a specific place, our head facing a particular direction, our proximity to an edge, etc.
By certain combinations of these cells firing at the same time, or in a pattern, we become familiar with locations, building internal, intuitive, maps of physical space. We know we have been somewhere before because the same pattern fires.
Bond doesn't mention it, but it seems that it follows that, if for certain reasons a very similar pattern fires, in a place, or situation, which we have not been in before, we surely must feel that ‘we have been there before', or perhaps ‘I must have dreamed this'.
Fascinating: head direction cells don't trigger based on compass points, but in relation to relative orientation with respect to prominent landmarks, within the scope of the individual; you first see the Eiffel Tower? That's your lode star. Your first see the Louvre? Then that's it, instead.

“Landmarks are essential for our sense of direction, just as boundaries are essential for our sense of place.”

To entrench their spatial memory in their brains, rats replay the firing of space cells while sleeping, perhaps while dreaming, at 10 to 20 times the speed.
Does this imply that we dream at that speed? A minute of dream time is only three seconds in real life?

‘Grid cells' are particularly fascinating, firing in precise hexagonal patterns of different grid sizes.

When planning a route, we seem to ‘project' our future experience in a way that fires the series of place cells in the sequence they would occur when moving through space in the routes we consider as alternatives.
It's been shown that when using navigational tools, specifically GPS, this no longer occurs. Thus, by us relying more and more on GPS, we literally lose the physical ability to navigate in familiar spaces.

Space and memory are closely related to each other, and to the hippocampus.
This would explain the success of The Memory Palace.

Language, also processed in the hippocampus, is heavily peppered with spatial terms, and triggers the brain in a similar way as to how spatial thinking does.

Related, mental disabilities and a lack in being able to socially and partially navigate are connected.

Those with a strong sense of direction also score highly in extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness, and low on neuroticism. So, navigational skills correlate with personality.
But, also fascinating, a long running study has found no correlation between the personality of a person at 14 and at 77.

Differences in the ability to navigate between men and women appear to be the result of nurture, not nature.

It's known that, given no external visual cues, people walk in circles, though not always in the same direction.
But, surprisingly, without cues, people will not travel more than around 100 meters from their starting position, regardless of how long they walk for.

Being lost is emotional stress, complete disorientation which makes us think and act irrationally.

To make built up areas easier to navigate, they need to be both legible and intelligible. They are legible when they are easy to make sense of, they are intelligible when they are connected to other places.

“In exchange for the absolute certainty of knowing where we are in space [using GPS], we sacrifice our sense of place.”

“Without a story to tell of our journey, we cease to be wayfinders.”

In the epilogue, Bond talks about psychogeography, and tools and methods that purposely help people to get lost. Dérive app gets a shout out.

Superb science fiction, in exactly the way the author describes in her introduction; investigating how small intrinsic changes to society affect that society.

My only gripe with this novel is that, within the context of the novel, Le Guin fails to explain how a world with no mammals of meaningful size, and with no solid source of protein, was able to develop civilisation.
It's possible this is explained, in one way or the other, in one of Le Guin's other novels set in the same universe, but is a hole, here.

Similarly, I can't but expect that any civilisation must develop its own unique rituals around death, influenced by its own cultural traits and historical accidents. To the visiting alien in this book, like other cultural differences, this must be intensely interesting. Yet, little mention is made of any practice around death and dying.

Published as a paperback, the books 500+ pages carry a lot of weight.
Granted, all material in its pages is available in both English and French, doubling the volume, but the contents is an impressive overview of the long-running history of walking art, as well; Elena Biserna collated the work of some 60 artists, spanning several decades, all, in one way or another, fitting the description ‘walking score'.

In the introduction, Biserna justifies her curation, leaning on a history of Fluxus, the Situationists, and John Cage, she points out that walking scores, written in plain text as opposed to musical notation, are more easily accessible. And, through that, bring a promise of a kind of societal discovery.

Biserna brings up the unique aspects of walking scores, as per Fluxus: they question notions of authenticity, originality, and auctoriality. That is, the work can take on different forms, can be reproduced, and sees the artist lose control over the final product.

This makes this kind of walking art ‘incidental', which also covers my personal interest in the field.
Or, perhaps put more simply, walking art has the potential to democratise art, as it requires the audience to become creators, as opposed to spectators.

That's not to say that all artists in the field also act on this to its fullest extent. Granted, though a significant portion of the work in this compendium predates the widespread arrival of the internet, it saddens me that, even today, too much walking art, as well as its analyses and developments, are corralled within academia, and worse, western academia.

Even just publishing a book, without making its material available to the general public on a platform with a lower barrier to entry, is an example of this.

Biserna does not address this to its full potential, though she does bring up the disruptive possibilities inherent to walking art, for example in terms of its possibilities around decolonisation.

The book is divided in three sections; ‘walking', ‘itinerant listening', and ‘playing on the move'. The material in the latter is perhaps a bit too involved and elaborate to be useful for easy consumption, but pretty much all pieces in the first two sections are easy-to-deploy methods for urban exploration for anyone, and all are an excellent refresher, or introduction, to walking art as a playful, inclusive, framework of participatory art.

Excellent.

Starts off by showing that Putin, while stationed in Dresden in the 1980s, probably was a liaison for the RAF, the terrorist organization that planted some bombs in west Germany.
There also seems to be a clear case for Putin having been involved in plans and operations, from within the KGB and Stasi, to prepare for maintaining some kind of control of affairs, after the, by the late 1980s, expected collapse of the Soviet bloc.
The KGB's activities, disrupting western politics and their operations in the Global South, via the support of, sometimes violent, opposition movements, is interesting, but was also par for the Cold War course; the US did, and does, the same, with larger budgets.

Juicy: One of the many ‘friendly firms', businesses in the West which did business behind the iron curtain, at least in part by smuggling prohibited technology into the USSR, and handled vast amounts of money, was Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press. Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine.

At the start of the rise of Putin's political career, Putin was not the central character in the story the book tells, but one of the many figures who, through the KGB's network, first established in the 1980s, developed a mafia-like cult in order to be able to control and manage, first, the KGB's influence, also after the end of the Soviet Union and, later, political control and hegemony after Yeltsin's stepping down.
With the expertise in controlling these networks, and the knowledge that the US also has been adept at using dirty tactics, and no scruples in choosing whatever works to gain the upper hand, Putin slowly moved himself in the one central position, in full control of Russian politics and the Russian economy.
Him and his people having those killed who wouldn't support the Russian inner-circle, and looting the country's resources, at first more clumsily, later through the machinery of the state, creating a veneer of legitimacy, the networks that were cultivated from the 1980s onwards, which included Trump and his people, payed off handsomely with the election of Trump to the American presidency.

Belton is unable to prove that Trump knowingly has been on the KGB payroll. However, this doesn't really matter that much, as his behaviour and policies have been the perfect vehicle, for decades, to launder Russian ‘dark' money, and turn it into legitimate funds in the west.
By receiving handsome commissions, Trump did not care whether the proposed business deals, or the source of the funds, were legitimate or not, while, as president, having large financial stakes in the many business dealings Russian agents had him involved in, he could only see Putin, and his men, as being on his own side.

Belton makes clear that the Putin's clique's actions to strengthen the state and reign in the oligarchs were a direct reaction to the weakening of the state and the wholesale sellout of Russian assets under Yeltsin, who was supported in his actions by the US, meaning that one way of looking at Putin's actions is for them to be simple payback.

By Putin's second term, billions were made by those in the circles around Putin (and Putin himself), and influence abroad was used to either make more money, or disrupt western influence. Putin became the new Tsar, and communism, through oligopoly, had become state capitalism and feudalism.

Also juicy: the Russian money that flowed into London, and the British elite that was bought with this, seems to have been an effective catalyst for facilitating Brexit, weaning the UK off European regulations, and allowing for corrupt businesses and individuals to steal more money from Russia, as well as the UK, and from global finance as a whole.

The book was written well after the annexation of the Crimea, but before the current war in the Ukraine, meaning that Putin's story is not yet over. The current war, effectively between NATO and Russia, is still at a point where it could change the world forever, and which way it will go is still not yet quite clear.
It will be interesting to hear what Belton makes of this, though, in her book, her own bias occasionally shines through: “... the West had other troubles. It was still grappling with the hangover from the September 11 terrorist stacks, and its military incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan” is one such example; the “West” had other troubles? All three of these squarely fall on the shoulders of the US warmonger which, even after months of war in the Ukraine, has been responsible for far many more civilian deaths, corruption and abuse, than Putin is likely to ever be.

Yet, of course, the US being a rogue regime does not excuse Putin. But it's exactly Putin's knowledge of the US's hypocrisy and dark turns which, in his mind, justifies his behaviour.

An excellent account of life in the first century AD.

Interesting, Pliny the elder saw the potential dangers and rewards of globalization, and feared the excesses of capitalism, or rather, market-driven change, and its likely lack of sustainability.

Lovely sci-fi, If, on occasion, also of its time.

As a novel, ‘Another Now' is not very good. But this is also not at all the point of this book. Varoufakis intended to show that, after the 2008 crisis, the world could have taken a very different turn, as evidenced by the Another Now, a parallel world which the central characters in this book accidentally get access to. Interestingly, I'm currently reading [b:The Dispossessed 13651 The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6) Ursula K. Le Guin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353467455l/13651.SY75.jpg 2684122], written almost half a century before Varoufakis' book, which describes a world quite comparable to the world of Another Now.There's no real point commenting on the novel. I'm highlighting features of Another Now, and some problems with Our Now.“The greatest slavery is that of our own appetites.”“The right to buy into a future profit stream reinforces the irrepressible Technostructure and dissolves all its restraints.”“Animals and computers always have practical reasons for doing things. This is why they never do great things!”In Another Now, companies and jobs are fluid. There is no hierarchy. The employees decide on how company funds are allocated. Salaries are equal, bonuses are decided on by every individual in similar fashion to how Eurovision (ha!) points are allocated.Each employee has one share, one vote, merging the political and economic realms.Hiring, and firing, is done collectively.Each person has a bank account (with the central bank) consisting of three parts: accumulation, legacy, dividend. Accumulation stores salaries and bonuses. Legacy is a state-provided trust fund. Dividend is the periodical issuance (UBI), by the state, of state surplus, derived from taxation, at a fixed 5% over company revenue.This means that commercial banks no longer exist. Pseudo-banks are outlawed.Companies borrow from individuals (not from banks), preventing the creation of funds out of nothing.Services can be hired, without making the providers a partner (or, employee), when the work they do is individually identifiable. Like a plumber fixing a broken pipe.Randomly configured Citizens' Juries determine the Socialworthiness of companies, as a kind of collective replacement for stock value as an indicator of worth, to the community as a whole.International trade is monitored, trade surplus and deficit are fined, with this income distributed to regions in need of development, as financial injections, not loans.The relative values of currencies is adjusted based on consistent trade surpluses or deficits.Land is publicly owned, split between ‘commercial' and ‘socials' zones, and rented out. The rent for commercial zones is based on a self-proclaimed value, on the condition that anyone can put up the rent for an amount above the proclaimed value.As with classifying businesses on their social worthiness, land designations are supervised by a randomly selected, but representative, panel.Immigration, specifically issuing ‘visas', is handled at a local level, by local panels, of randomly selected individuals.Online personal data is personally owned, and needs to be payed for to use.A Sovereign Data Fund stores anonymous data for which royalties must be paid when used to create products.I find the feasibility of Varoufakis' alternative world likely, and probably creating a better world than the one unbridled capitalism is forcing us to suffer through. That said, it's not without its own challenges.Interestingly, one central character in the book can't agree with the Other Now, because of its continuing reliance on markets, herself requiring a society that is based around unconditional gifting; “Market exchange dissolves what makes us human”, providing clear echoes of the Situationists.Varoufakis (or this character) places this in the context of a sexual revolution that never happened (in Our Now, and is also snuffed out in Another Now), as sex is also commoditised, made into a transactional procedure. That is, ‘sex', and love, is a commodity that has become tradable, not given unconditionally, meaning that ‘society' should be more like a relationship centred around love, and not based around ‘markets'.So, bad novel, excellent theories.

Enjoyable, if at times a bit uneven.

A very rich, not always easy to follow, biography of a movement. I find it amazing how, on every rereading and reappraisal of the works of the Situationists, there are new truth bombs for me, which I had not noticed, internalised, or simply noticed, before.

Below a kind-of situationist détournement of MacKenzie Wark's text.

“The twenty first century is the culmination of two forms of individualism. In the first, individuals are all the same. In the second, they are all different. The first is classically bourgeois, the second distinctively bohemian. [...] in the twenty first century, it's the same difference.”
The collapse of bourgeois and bohemian individualism into the warm embrace of the commodity is the defining style of the middle class sensibility of today's disintegrating spectacle.

Wark makes an observation on the Letterists, the precursors to the Situationists, which might capture the appeal both have for me: not Marxist necessity, nor Sartrean freedom, but creation is the highest form of human activity.

Wark points to the origin of Situationist ethnography lying in the close study of the Paris suburb of Saint-Germain's delinquents, this area in Paris being at the center of critical societal, artistic, and bohemian thought after the Second World War.
As per early Situationist and Letterist thought, she places the context of the term ‘dérive' within an aquatic connection, perhaps as a kind of ‘flow'.
“The dérive discovers psychogeography, inventing a way of being outside of commodified time, turning the city into a playing field.”
The dérive shows what cannot be done within the limits of capitalism. Or, as I see it, the dérive shows that there are alternatives to capitalism, and that capitalism only needs to be a part of our lived experiences, if at all, not the all encompassing world view it pertains to be.

In discussing the origin of the détournement, the detour, not quite originating with the Letterists, but defined by them, Wark exposes the intrinsic sell-referential nature of the French art scene after the Second World War, but, in a way, sums this up with “all culture is derivative”.
Understood by Wark, but not yet by Debord and those around him, the kind of literary communism which the Letterists strove for was a precursor to Git, the modern platform that allows everyone to build on preexisting open source software, creating collaborations, and digital détournements. A kind of software communism.
Wark: “every kid with a BitTorrent client is an unconscious situationist in the making”.
Yet, both the Situationist times and the Internationale situationniste, both periodicals, carried acknowledgements of, essentially, flavors of Creative Commons licenses.

This digital détournement also reminded me of the ancient practice of photoshop battles, where each consecutive volley was built on top of the previous pass. The richer the result the better, with no one the single owner of each consecutive step.

A chapter on Asger Jorn describes the marrying of his Imaginist Bauhaus with Letterism, to form Situationism. For him, scientific socialism embraces a materialist worldview, without a materialist attitude to life, for which he envisioned artistic materialism to fill the gap.

After the founding of the Situationist International, Debord took up the role of the organisation's secretary, and was instrumental in developing Its theoretical framework; “the doctrine of no doctrine”; experiment as a central feature.
And, for its inner workings, a system of donation and reputation, as an alternative to conventional economics. ‘Potlatch'.
By extension, situationism pursues ‘unreturnable gifts', which could be classified, perhaps, as ‘situations'.

Debord become influenced by the Socialism or Barbarism group.
Jorn identifies a ‘creative elite', as opposed to the emerging term ‘power elite', even if the term ‘elite' was badly chosen, as it implies to not be ‘of, and by, the people'. Jorn's socialism was experimental.
Jorn sees in capital that it abolished true wealth, as he sees Marx' writings only as a critique of the capitalist form of value, not of value that is not created by labor, which can also provide wealth, it's alternatives being extinguished through capital.
Jorn then concluded that the value of things is conditioned by their differences, not their quality. This dovetails with society as spectacle, value being separated from utility, as well as labor being split from creation.

Lefebvre recognised the colonisation of everyday life, as a follow up to the impossible to maintain colonisation of far away countries. By now, he would have recognised the colonisation of both public and private life.

Types of time are linear, cyclical, or ‘adventure'. This sounds a bit ridiculous, but the point is that adventure time, a kind of aristocratic time, is an ultimate form of leisure, not captured by the controllers of capital, or labor.
This opens up seeing life as a collection of contest and chance.

Jorn and Lefebvre recognise the importance of the everyday, but do not fetishize it: it is not important for what it is, but for what it can be.
Lefebvre muses: “perhaps there should be a tomb for the unknown artist”, the true creator whom no one knows.

A dense section on the difference between Lefebvre's ‘moments', and the Situationists' ‘situations' follows.
Lefebvre talks about ‘modernity', which can be classified as ‘technology' in today's context: modernity is the ghost of revolution. With Debord, they see that the spectacle precludes praxis; we are prevented from exploring because we are lived by external controls. And, painfully prescient, “the illusion of permanent novelty occludes the possibility of surprise”.
They could be worrying about todays world of TikToks.

A split, the Second Situationist International, headed by Scandinavians and Jacqueline de jong, staged a few successful public interventions which could be seen as precursor to interventions by the Yes Men, and others, and brought me to a new appreciation of the Dutch Provo movement.

Trocchi, mostly on the periphery, created a kind of broad reciprocal communication he called the ‘log', which Wark identifies as a precursor to blogging.

Wark shows a soft spot for Constant's New Babylon, as it presupposes a different relation between production and labor, relying on surplus production through automation, freeing up time for play in a world designed for détournement.

And then, it's May ‘68. Wark conjures up a desirable picture of the Paris revolts. Quoting its Situationist chronicler Viénet: “for the first time youth really existed. Not the social category invented for the needs of the commodity economy by sociologists and economists, but the only real youth, of life lived without dead time”.
But, Wark is a realist, pointing out that the failed revolution itself, just like criminals in Marx' writings, providing for the livelihood of many; their consequence is reinforcing the spectacle through production.
But also, Wark recognises that, even today, the thoughts, concepts, ideas, are the gift from which also modern writers, scientists, artists, keep reaping; an eternal potlatch as the ongoing source of insight, based on Marxist, and Situationist, ideas.

Wark ends: “the unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life doesn't bear thinking about”.

An enjoyable memoir on the changing face of Palestine as a consequence of Israeli intervention, as told through the optics of a number of walks.
The final few pages, in which the author meets an Israeli settler and shares a nargileh, are beautifully bittersweet.

Not without its flaws, particularly when Crary becomes a bit too polemic, or stays too vague in terms of what he specifically directs his critique at. At the same time, the central accusation, and the rich scope of his thesis, are perhaps the most relevant analysis of what's wrong with the world, today, making this text essential for understanding the problems we face, as well as for identifying the direction we need to move towards as society to have any hope of meaningful survival.

Crary makes the claim that the ‘internet complex', by design, is destructive. Even proposals like the Green New Deal are pointless, because they do not address the escalating need for energy and resource extraction.
We need to radically refuse, not adapt or resign. An equitable society requires abandonment of the dominance of the market and money. And, the internet can not function independently of the catalytic operations of global capitalism.

As Marx realized that a global market would result in a dissolution of community, we are led to believe that we do not depend on each other, and can manage our friends like we manage our social media presence, letting go of the cohesion of community.

Since the 1980s, capital has invaded the entirety of social space, standardizing them into online simulations, leading to the dissolution of society.
The corporate control of digital networks is a monopoly of knowledge, serving the ambitions of empire; breaking up small communities and moving them into larger spheres under tight control.
Meanwhile, the potentially powerful majority can't recognize itself, split into separate and competing factions, from which a handful of representatives are allowed into the meritocracy. This, while social media favours easily packaged concepts, precluding radical ideas reporting long term engagement.

Moving politics online is inherently counter productive, as this makes ‘politics' integral to the platform designed for consumerism and self administration.
We need to establish different kinds of relationships to counter this, prioritising responsibility to others, nor with a focus self interested subjectivities.

By extension, war is represented by mass media as an unexceptional part of the state's external political life, facilitating plunder, securing markets, and exploiting labor, with dispersed, compliant, consumers at the core.

Western modernity is enforced on the entire world, and can only function when the whole world is under its control. The, now, American model of technological consumption results in liquidation of local culture, and decomposes the social.
So, closing the digital divide only produces more addictive behavior, and destroys diversity, enforcing a western-centric societal construct through a neocolonial mindset.

Permanent immersion in technology precludes the perception of the possibility of escape, as we denounce independent selfhood.
Power relations and hierarchies are entrenched, and the former promise, through technology, of collaborative exchanges and shared inventiveness have been overpowered by harsh time management, isolation, and productivity surveillance. All private time is forced to be productive through online mediation.

When the availability of information is infinite, common resources are trivialized and society dissolves. The result is belittlement, where the gap between personal desires and their recognition by society remains unfulfilled. We streamline our needs with what is provided by mass media, enslaving ourselves under the pretence of empowerment.

Because the global economy no longer has long term prospects, one last mad spree of plunder is ongoing all over the planet, right now.
This, while already in 1970, Debord noted that capitalism's destruction of the environment was the most pressing issue for the survival of life, and, now, capitalism has proven more than capable of mitigation and extinction of everything that sustains life.
This scorched earth policy extinguishes hope, also by capturing and disempowering youth at an ever earlier age, denying them the space and time for even limited autonomy and collective self recognition, instead assigning blanket consumerist tropes as identifiers (in the North), or austerity and state terror (in the South), and dispossessing them of their youth. This, to the extent that society now disallows youth from having the circumstances in which to imagine and build a future that belongs to them, defending their potential.

In chapter two, the author starts by highlighting the contradiction in politics' duality of envisioning an unchanged ever-present, while pretending to want to combat climate disaster, without concepts of degrowth, post-capitalism, or eco-socialism.

The end of capitalism is identified by human productivity not being augmented by technology, but by being replaced by it. Meanwhile, we are also approaching the physical limits of continuous expansion.

A recently identified concept is ‘presentism', replacing futurism, and envisioning all services and products being available on demand, with risk analysis neutralizing undesirable futures.
As a consequence, this focus on ‘now' precludes the possibility of change, entrenching capitalism's control and delinking the future from any imagination of transformed social relations.

On a planet disfigured by neoliberal austerity and environmental collapse, there is no longer even the pretense that scientific and technical development is aligned with human purpose or needs.
Instead, we get the dispossession of thought through the promise that technology will provide us with what we need before we've thought of it.

Meanwhile, science, while venerated as the source of ultimate truth, not in the least in terms of solving the climate crisis, has become servant and divinity of capitalism. Specifically, scientific advancement, and innovation, primarily serve their commercial utility. Science and technology will not provide a solution to problems created by science and technology.

Besides its role in climate destruction, the rich' focus on eradicating aging extinguishes values that transcend the veraciousness of capitalism; an ever present ‘now', for the rich, points to the irrelevance of religion, faith, and even morals.
More so, ‘aging' then becomes a problem for the poor, absolving society from responsibility in the same way it absolves itself from providing, say, social services.
In addition, the desire to transcend death imbues a focus on infusing the inanimate with meaning, emphasizing interactions with constructed systems, disconnected from the tangible, fluid, world.

An interesting implicit observation is that the current focus on the digital, connected, home is an extension of the futurist mindset of the early 20th century which disconnected the land and the living from the technologically advanced metropolis. That, of course, existed, if in the mind, through reliance on societal disconnected labor and land, in the colonies, in a similar way to how, today, advanced tech and its resources are dependent on third world labor and exploitative resource extraction, either at home, for example through intense animal farming, or remote.

Crary sums up surveillance capitalism as such: “The reality of the internet is its effectiveness in the channeling of the minuscule assets of the many into the portfolios of an elite few.”
As a consequence, the vassal class serving the elite has learned to ally themselves with capital as the conduit of success. It then becomes their duty to silence, exclude, or marginalize anyone questioning the social necessity and purported benefits of digital media products, becoming vessels for control, manipulation, consumption, and value extraction.

The abstraction, even annihilation, of the intangible, online, is continuous with how capitalism has long demanded channeling human energy into patterns molded by economic requirements.
As observed earlier, we perhaps feel more free, but are conditioned, and constrained, by an enforced and limited variety, against which we are expected to perform for gratification and exploitation. Workers and consumers are dispossessed, of knowledge, of communicative abilities, of desire.

The author emphasizes the need of small scale, local, councils, for establishing a democracy closer to the ground, in line with Debord's thinking on the importance of these physical encounters.
Crary makes the interesting point that physical encounters are literal conspiracies, ‘breathing together'. Not only can physical encounters not be quantified in the same way that digital versions can be, they provide a spontaneity and uncontrollability which provides a venue for breaking out of the straight jacket of capital and control.
In addition, the recent focus on deploying biometrics in human-computer interaction works towards a breaking down of experiencing a shared social reality, working towards a splintering, a break up, of society to the aid of the elite.

Crary's foray into user interface design points out that “experience is what I agree to attend to”, while UXD is “experience what we tell you to attend to”.
The author makes the point that the resulting control enacted on the public, if effective, is not the crux of the problem, but that our cutting off from experience results in our losing the ability, understanding, and tools, to express the negative result these forms of consumption have on our lives.

If we aren't attentive to how neoliberal imperatives are harming the intimate fabric which upholds human connections, we become less and less capable of sustaining or even initiating the larger-scale struggles against imperial war, economic terror, racism, etc. With a weakened ability to respond to others, we lack motivation to abandon the meagre compensation of our digital insularity.

This insularity is without the restorative benefits of actual solitude, and builds on the pseudo privatization of public space, without providing privacy. The individual's subjugation to the market is thus marked by delusions of autonomy while grounded in powerlessness. And, pathways to a different world will not be found through internet searches.

At the end, Crary draws hope from Sartre's observation that scarcity is the basis for human history; scorched earth capitalism, with its extreme disequilibrium, and extensive deprivations, can lead to common action, breaking through the chains of the individuals holding together the breadth of separateness and individualism.
However, without preparation for this post capitalist world, the result still will only be a new field of barbarism.

Interesting tidbit: John von Neumann advocated for a massive pre-emptive nuclear strike on all major soviet power centers.

Roberts perhaps stretches the central premise a bit, but she's also very insightful in her observations, dropping truth bomb after truth bomb.
Perhaps my biggest complaint is that, although she mentions it in passing here and there, she's not emphasising enough how her described techniques, in use in China, are also, to an unknown extent, used by western democracies, exactly because of the advantages they offer the censor.
‘Shadow banning', for example, is a form of censorship pioneered by Reddit, where the person who's shadow banned doesn't even know others can not see his contributions, because he himself can still contribute.

The central observation of Roberts is that most censorship methods implemented by the Chinese government act not as a ban but as a tax on information, forcing users to pay money or spend more time if they want to access the censored material.
Many governments have the capacity to enforce censorship more forcefully, but choose not to do so.

Roberts classifies three types of censorship. First, blatant censorship and threats, invoking fear, which may deter citizens from spreading or accessing information. This requires the threat of punishment to be observable to be credible. But, fear is problematic for authoritarian regimes because it can cause backlash, draw attention to censored information, and create information-gathering problems for governments.
If the threat is not credible, censorship may instead draw attention to authoritarian weakness or create backlash. Therefore, it is discreetly targeted toward the most capable and motivated individuals.

The other two types are friction and flooding. Friction, which imposes small taxes on information access, and flooding, which creates distractions, do not need to be obviously driven by political entities to have an impact on information consumption and dissemination. Friction and flooding are more porous but less observable to the public than censorship using fear, and therefore are more effective with an impatient or uninterested public.
Friction can more easily be explained away or go unnoticed. While flooding can be discounted or avoided. Flooding requires the consumer to take time and effort to separate out good information from bad.

Excellent observations which Roberts makes:

+ Although many people are resistant to censorship when they notice and observe it, they are very affected by it when they are inconvenienced by it, but do not recognise it as censorship, or can explain it away.

+ Circumventable censorship can be useful to authoritarian regimes precisely because it has different effects on different segments of the population.

+ Porous censorship drives a wedge between the elite and the masses.

+ By separating the elite from the masses, the government prevents coordination of the core and the periphery, known to be an essential component in successful collective action.

+ Incomplete censorship, by contrast, is more easily masked by political entities, giving the government the cover of plausible deniability.

What Roberts identifies as the ‘Achilles heal' of porous censorship I find less strong an argument: The strategy of porous censorship can be counterproductive and dangerous to the regime when it uses this censorship too decisively during times it needs censorship most.
To me, this does sound like a drawback, but also one that, mostly, can probably be managed reasonably well.

In short, Roberts major findings are on point:

+ Censorship is more than fear. Because it is also friction and flooding.
+ Censorship is customised. That is, a well oiled censorship machine treats users in the way Google does, but in stead of surfacing what they want to access, it is obfuscated.
+ More media does not always lead to better information. See ‘flooding'.
+ A broader definition of censorship has implications for democracies. Social media both floods and creates friction. Therefore censors.

Smaller observations are immensely interesting:

+ All else being equal, those who have experienced censorship persist in writing about the censored topic and are more likely to complain about censorship, even as they become increasingly targeted with censorship.
So, ‘hard' censorship does not work very well.

+ Internet users, particularly those who report having experienced censorship, are much more likely to report being unfazed or angry about censorship than fearful or worried.

+ The observation of censorship creates more, not less, interest in the censored topic and also decreases support for government censorship policies.

+ The Chinese government, likely aware that experience with censorship can undermine its reputation, adopts a two-pronged censorship strategy targeting high-profile users with fear-based censorship while attempting to make online censorship efforts less observable to the public.

+ The best predictor of the number of social media posts that accompany a self-immolation event (which she studied as part of protests in Tibet) is whether the event occurs on the weekend, when the censors are slower to censor, suggesting that the speed of censorship has important implications for the spread of information in China.

+ Those who evade The Great Firewall are technologically savvy, well-educated, high-income internet users in China who have high levels of political efficacy.

+ The Great Firewall pulls this political elite away from their potential followers.

+ Newly blocked websites have precipitous declines in usage directly following their block, showing how small impediments to access have an immediate impact on traffic from typical Chinese users.

+ Flooding in both online and traditional news media in China coordinates messages to distract the public from sensitive events.
It's easy to be cynical, but Boris Johnson has been accused of exactly this. Read this:

https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/sinister-theory-about-boris-johnsons-model-bus-story-john-mclellan-1414345

+ The government uses propaganda to distract with coverage of the mundane details of Party meetings or with encouraging quotes and positive thoughts directed at the public. For the most part this strategy is effective—highly coordinated propaganda used by the Chinese government is more likely than articles that are less coordinated to be re-shared in both the domestic and international social media spheres.

In the last chapter, Roberts speculates that authoritarian governments may adopt the strategy of porous censorship in part because citizens themselves are strategic consumers of information.

Now, the contest over free speech is not so much anymore whether someone can take the public stage, but instead which voices will rise to the top and which will be lost in the cacophony. Hence, the contrast between democracies and autocracies less stark.
Censorship consists not only of preventing individuals from speaking but also of determining how their speech is prioritised and presented to the public.

If the prioritization of information for political purposes has the impact of censorship, as this book suggests, then Roberts concludes, in democracies we have to rethink how we can protect free speech in a world of information overload.

Seemingly really about how political leadership styles have particular consequences, with Southeast Asia as the backdrop. Very wordy.

The few things I was able to take away:

+ ASEAN is a ‘talk shop'. But, ASEAN has proven resilient in the face of geopolitical and domestic change.

+ ASEAN's influence is such that some refer to the ‘ASEANization' of East Asian and Asian pacific arrangements.

+ Elites have conceived regional cooperation as a relationship building process. This is done through talking.

+ The idea of ‘one' Southeast Asia remains a radical concept. Diversity exists. But, the author argues that this diversity is a source of vulnerability, which has become a driver for the regional elite in how to approach finding unity in diversity.
However, exactly because of the differences, this drive for integration needs to happen slowly, and with care.

+ US policy shifts have been the biggest driver for Intra-ASEAN reflection and reevaluation.

+ The particular politics and social context of 1960s Southeast Asia made nationalism an important, initial ideological boundary for regional ideas and arguments.

+ Regional resilience provided an important common interpretation of problems that then made regional unity an important coordinating principle in states' response to new developments and challenges.
States' common understandings of themselves as weak, fragmented powers and the understood vulnerabilities of that division, especially in relation to various foreign forces, was a major driver for cooperation.
If the problem is identified as one of division and fragmentation, then the logical solution must be one of unity and organization. Regional resilience is what makes “Southeast Asia” a meaningful and thus powerful organizing principle.

+ Practically all of ASEAN's major initiatives—beginning with its founding—have involved activist or entrepreneurial efforts.

+ ASEAN's regionalism is informal, less rule bound, and most of all dialogue and consensus driven.

+ Three related dynamics that get less attention: the roles played by lesser events and less dramatic shocks; the evolutionary and incremental processes of change; and the cumulative effects of ideas and processes on thinking and practice.

+ Despite unprecedented calls for revoking Myanmar's membership, states have nevertheless remained reluctant to take stronger measures against that regime. This reluctance partly reflects a concern about setting a precedent of intra-ASEAN interference; but it is also a reflection of a strong belief that inclusion trumps exclusion.

Essentially a more elaborate version of the film Citizenfour.

Greenwald is at his best when synthesising the US government's history of abuse of surveillance, and its consequences for the fourth estate, the media. Though, he is also overly wordy, perhaps in part as, at the time of publication of this book, Greenwald was still not quite certain of his position vis-à-vis the US government and his chances of facing prosecution. The introductory chapters, on obtaining the documents, read like a bad spy novel, and particularly now, some 10 years after the initial revelations, take away from the importance of the contents of the book. In addition, Greenwald's ability to turn his recounting of the experiences of others really about himself, I know now, is a less-pleasant feature of Greenwald's personality and style, which dovetails with Greenwald's more recent unexpected stances on more current American politics.

Some analyses have mostly been overtaken by reality:

+ Greenwald asks whether the internet will provide individual liberation or omnipresent monitoring, pointing out that both are possible, but now mostly seems to have been answered: A little bit of the former, quite a lot of the latter. + Snowden justifies being based in Hong Kong on the city's arc towards independence from China, which, we now know, was more a anomaly than anything else. + Greenwald's departure from The Intercept, the public row, and the closing of the Snowden Archive, as well as the infiltration of the British secret service at The Guardian, make it difficult to not be cynical about society's options for avoiding full-scale surveillance and the knowledge of such. + Since the Snowden revelations, the US has started accusing Russia and China of doing exactly the things they themselves have been doing, specifically the manipulation through digital services, and the surveillance through both software, backdoors, and hardware. To this point, the rise of Chinese hardware companies is what has made the US government jittery, for its lack of access to backdoors in these technologies. + Greenwald's descriptions on the attempted character assassination against him and Snowden are almost exact, if less severe, copies of what Assange is still facing. What was coming for Assange should have been more obvious. More so, Greenwald's claim that “it is no longer possible for the US government to distract from the message simply by demonizing the messenger” has worked very well for Greenwald, though his rhetoric in relation to Trump could draw some odd conclusions, but not so much for Assange.

Points worth reiterating:

+ The post-9/11 American veneration of security has created a climate particularly conducive to abuses of power. + History shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. + The ability to eavesdrop on people’s communications vests immense power in those who do it. And unless such power is held in check by rigorous oversight and accountability, it is almost certain to be abused; Expecting the US government to operate a massive surveillance machine in complete secrecy without falling prey to its temptations runs counter to every historical example and all available evidence about human nature. + The NSA is able to turn cellphones into roving bugs, turning them on at will, as long as the battery is inserted. And, in a 2006 federal case, this was deemed *legal*. + The NSA has direct access to communications on platforms like Google and Facebook. + The NSA has shared raw unfiltered data with Israeli intelligence; "As the NSA complained, the partnership was geared “almost totally” to Israel’s needs." + The disturbing entanglement of spying for security concerns as well as economic concerns; "The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicion-less surveillance aimed at entire populations. " This is underscored by the more recent shift in American foreign security policy, to target 'corruption' abroad, in order to serve their own political agenda. + Snowden: “This was when I really started seeing how easy it is to divorce power from accountability, and how the higher the levels of power, the less oversight and accountability there was.” + The Five Eyes relationship is so close that member governments place the NSA’s desires above the privacy of their own citizens. + There are far too many power factions with a vested interest in the fear of terrorism: the government, seeking justification for its actions; the surveillance and weapons industries, drowning in public funding; and the permanent power factions in Washington, committed to setting their priorities without real challenge. + Democracy requires accountability and consent of the governed, which is only possible if citizens know what is being done in their name.

A few additional points:

"The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who 'have done something wrong' should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing."

"We shouldn't have to be faithful loyalists of the powerful to feel safe from state surveillance."

"Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else."

"The point is not the hypocrisy of those who disparage the value of privacy while intensely safeguarding their own, although that is striking. It is that the desire for privacy is shared by us all as an essential, not ancillary, part of what it means to be human." and "The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who 'have done something wrong' should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing."

Greenwald in his last chapter points out that the fourth estate and the political elite, in the U.S., have become near-interchangeable. With that, Greenwald identifies a throbbing cancer hiding in plain sight in modern western journalism in general and American journalism in particular: that in the past, journalists took pride in being the outsider, confronting the abuse of power (by the government or others), but that now, many journalists feel they are doing the right thing when their governments praise them instead.

An important aspect of the US' ability to monitor virtually all internet traffic is that, up to recently, most internet traffic ran through the US. Brazil was early in working towards connecting to the rest of the world without having to go through the US. It's now obvious why Putin has done exactly the same thing. This also very strongly ties in to the concept of 'multiple realities', based on contradicting 'facts', invisible to members of disjoint groups.

A nice aside, something I had forgotten after the first time I read the book, is that Snowden in part explains his reason for pursuing societal justice by referring to his experience in playing video games, in which a 'regular' character goes through a typical hero's journey to overcome the worst odds in defeating a nemesis.

Excellent overview of how Europe got to where it is in relation to the crises in and around the Ukraine, but published a few years ago, so before the escalation into the current war.

The authors classify the Ukrainian conflict as a ‘negative-sum game, a ruinous scenario in which every major player loses'.

This negative-sum outcome is a product of zero-sum policies pursued by Russia, the US and the EU; Russia and the West implemented policies toward the states of post-Soviet Eurasia that aimed to extract gains at the other side's expense, without regard for overlapping or shared interests.

Russian foreign policy changed in part as a result of Putin's response to new domestic political and economic challenges inside Russia. But, neither Russia's, nor the West's, actions happen in a vacuum.

The Ukraine crisis comes out of a self-reinforcing adversarial behaviour in the post-Soviet section of the Eurasian macro region in a mix of geo-politics, geo-economics, and geo-ideas.

The book mentions the more recently obfuscated fact that James Baker, in 1990, told Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward, but qualifies this in terms of NATO forces not entering eastern Germany, with no commitment on the other former Warsaw Pact countries.

The unwinding of two quasi-empires, an outer one in East Central Europe, an inner one in post-Soviet Eurasia, amounted to a staggering defeat for the ‘Russian' state. Trauma stemming from this loss of face was inevitable, and would need to be well managed. Which it was not, to the detriment of all.

At Clinton's arrival on the scene, a prevailing thought was that if NATO adopted an anti-Russian rationale for taking in new members, it could tip the balance of forces in Russian politics in exactly the direction they most feared. But, pro-change policy entrepreneurs prevailed and NATO expanded.
Seeking a new world built on shared values and preserving and strengthening America's place, NATO enlargement was part and parcel of this reality.

The ‘prefab model' (using existing structures for expansion, at the cost of ignoring the implications) was a quintessential factor in the transformation of a wide swath of post-communist Europe.

On the USSR's former territory, Russia's involvement was necessary, as no other power was prepared to step in, as well as productive, in that it put a stop to bloodshed. But, economic cooperations in the former USSR all reverted to paper tigers.

The trajectory of the ‘in-between' states (countries between Russia and the EU) moving to NATO, was chequered, mostly having to play off Russia against the west, for various reasons, including no European ‘history', a reluctant elite, and differing public opinions.

All the above resulted in a messy and fragile equilibrium.

The situation deteriorated after the color revolutions, particularly the Ukrainian in 2004. The West's ‘geo-ideas' were ‘geo-politics' in disguise, was the Russian view, though the authors plausibly dispute the severity of this.

However, the two, politics and ideas, were now strongly entangled, and highly combustable.

Russia was less successful at bending the narrative in their sphere of influence, after the color revolutions. Their attempts at soft power more resembled soft coercion.

But also the US was trying to gain ground, actively working on building support for NATO inside the Ukraine, and supporting other initiatives in Russia's doorstep, without involving Russia.

The EU wading in after the Georgian war, on a normative level, still saw several EU members operate on the basis of zero sum reasoning.

Russia successfully joined up, first with Belarus and Kazakhstan, to form the EEU, the Eurasian economic Union. Other countries followed.

Medvedev's moving in as president, at the same time as Obama on the US, and a new president in the Ukraine, at first thawed relationships, before sliding back in to mistrust and political chess.

With the election of Yanukovych in the Ukraine, a period of horse trading between Russia and Ukraine on one side, and Europe and Ukraine on the other, followed. At, eventually, little benefit to Ukraine, significant costs to Russia, and little headway for Europe. And, this also escalated in the 2014 protests and Yanukovych' disappearance from the stage. And the Russian takeover of Crimea.

Annexing the Crimea did not strengthen Putin's position towards Europe, and resulted in Ukraine signing a precursor agreement to joining the EU, the EU essentially providing hundreds of millions of euros in indirect assistance.

This, in turn, resulted in economic sanctions against Russia, bellicose language from US political players, the downing of MH17 and, with that, Europe coming on board with stronger sanctions against Russia.

Interestingly, back in 2014, at the back of half-negotiations, Putin stated to the then president of Ukraine that his 1.2 million soldiers could take Kiev in two days. To Barosso, EU president, he said he would need two weeks.

Eventually, the initially promising ‘Minsk II' agreement was signed, but, specifically lack of adherence from Ukraine and the west saw implementation fail. In part, where Ukraine would have preferred a stalemate of a split Ukraine, Russia saw anything but effectively controlling Kiev as a failure. Eventually, the end result was a near-severance of Russian-Ukrainian economic ties.

The Ukraine crisis is the apotheosis of a broader regional dynamic: zero-sum policies producing negative-sum results.

Also, the authors point to the strong nationalist, extremist, strand in Ukrainian politics, polarising politics.

The western sections, rather than turning Russians against their rulers, educed a defensive reaction, creating the perception of an external threat that the government leveraged to boost popular support.

Constructive action within the UN and beyond will depend on the ability of governments to compartmentalise, that is, not allowing confrontation on one front to prevent them from cooperating on another.

The political conflict between Russia and the EU has transformed separatist conflicts into geopolitical levers.

In Moldova and Ukraine, parties and leaders have declared themselves pro-Western to capitalise on popular desire for good government. When in power, they all too often have proven to be as corrupt and incompetent as their so-called pro-Russian opponents.

The prefab paradigm, mechanical growth of pre-existing institutions without negotiating terms among all affected parties, including Russia, and without compromises, is now unworkable.

Looking ahead, the authors suggest that all parties need to scale back their maximalist objectives and be prepared for compromises that will leave no one fully satisfied. The west needs to cease holding out for Russia to surrender and accept its terms. Russia must stop pining for the good old days of great-power politics. The neighbours should stop seeking national salvation from without, and recognise that it will be up to them, first and foremost, to bring about their countries' security and wellbeing.

New agreements must consider the following:

- They must be acceptable to all concerned parties.
- Priority should be given, for the foreseeable future, to economic growth, reform and modernisation in the In-Between countries, allowing them to pursue EU and EEU, or both.
- Parties should pledge to seek mutual agreement before pursuing change.
- Parties must recommit to respect each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
- The arrangements should create status-neutral humanitarian, security and economic measures in and around the conflict zones.

A very information-dense overview of, well, the emerging risk of ‘virtual societal warfare', essentially where ‘fake news' will lead us, that is, the customisation of ‘individual reality'.
The book's biggest failure is that it almost exclusively looks at the world through American eyes.


The authors define ‘truth decay' as the declining role of facts and analysis in life:
- Increased disagreements on facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data.
- A blurring of the line between opinion and fact.
- The increasing relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion, and personal experience over fact.
- Declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information.

Aggressors will increasingly have the opportunity not merely to spread disinformation or favorable narratives or damage physical infrastructure, but to skew and damage the functioning of the massive databases, algorithms, and networks on which modern societies will utterly depend.

Identified social trends:
- The emergence of social institutions of massive scale and reach, which challenge citizens' ability to understand or control their operation and which pose an inherent problem of trust.
- The decline of faith in institutions which played a role in sustaining generally agreed social truths.
- A weakening in measures of social capital.
- The rise in partisan polarization.
- The rise of populist movements.

Trends in the infosphere:
- Networked dynamics and the role of the viral spread of information; truthful stories spread more slowly. Falsehoods are more likely to spread.
- Broad-based sensationalism in news and other media.
- Fragmentation of the infosphere; This makes it harder for a manipulator to create a single alternative reality, but it also undermines the shared social institutions of information and awareness that once provided the leading bulwark against disinformation and social manipulation.
- Concentration of information platforms.
- The effect of self-reinforcing echo chambers, but there is also research that suggests that users might actually not be trapped in silos.
- The role of influencers.
- The emergence of a “trolling ethic” on the internet.
- The explosive growth of data collection on individuals and groups.

These trends result in an information environment which is:
- Fragmented and decentralized, subject to a significant degree of the echo chamber effect and lacking grand narratives that unify social perceptions and give people a sense of grounding and belonging in a political community.
- Increasingly networked and interlinked, and dependent on the platforms provided by a handful of major technology firms sitting on vast troves of data about individuals, which together create an increasing degree of systemic risk.
- Characterized by significant degrees of sensational news and hostile trolling and harassment of participants in social media.

Explaining how knowledge seeking works, the authors explain that this is an interpretive act. Human beings are constantly making sense of the facts they encounter. The most important aspect of those facts is not their “objective” validity, but what people make of them. This constant process is in turn a product of the larger phenomenon of cognitive miserism; People are bombarded with far more information than they can process. They are constantly in the market for shortcuts: ways to make sense of the incoming flood, especially by judging the validity of specific facts.

Though accuracy motivation (the desire to ‘get it right') exists, an ongoing habit of “bounded rationality” and misperception can be intentionally manipulated.

Belief and expectation create the lens through which people perceive events and facts. Belief is, in many ways and on most occasions, more powerful than facts.
Belief perseverance is pronounced when the attitude is important to an individual's identity or social position. Information that challenges an individual's beliefs is unwelcome and can prompt compensatory responses, such as actively suppressing that unwanted information.

Methods for changing people's attitudes (the perfect guide for spreading disinformation):
- When the information is repeated.
- When the information comes from multiple sources.
- When other members of an individual's social group demonstrate receptiveness.
- When the incoming information fits in with an individual's preexisting beliefs and worldview.
- When the information is embedded in an existing, wider narrative that lends coherence and persuasiveness to the specific story.
- When an individual is feeling secure, in control, and not threatened.
- When an individual trusts the source providing the information and perceives it to be credible.
- When negative information and language is employed.

The backfire effect (deepening beliefs when presented with contrary info) may be specific to certain circumstances, and that fact-checking and debunking can have meaningful positive effects in combating misinformation if properly designed.

Tools for correcting disinformation:
- Corrections should be preceded by warnings and inoculations (early warnings to target populations that they are being deceived).
- The effort needs a counternarrative: A causal explanation that sets the corrective information in the context of a persuasive explanation for events.
- Retractions must be repeated.
- Reputational effects or other social costs should be brought to bear.

Technologies discussed:
- Precision targeting of influence, including technologies which target people by manipulating their wants and desires through marketing and advertising which appeal to their mental state and emotional inclinations in real time.
- AI.
- Algorithmic decisionmaking.
- VR/AR.
- IoT.
- Voice-enabled interfaces. Increasingly, these systems are achieving the ability to sense people's emotional states.
- Blockchain and distributed finance systems.
- Video and audio fakery.
- Surveillance systems.

Three possible future scenarios:
- The Death of Reality. Everyone their own curated reality, after Facebook buys The New York Times, the rise of anti-intellectualism, imperceptible deep fakes, result in, eventually, completely customised ‘realities'.
- Silos of Belief. The Washington Post collapses and repositions itself as dominant in a silo, targeting a particular subgroup. This process is replicated across silos. Society fragments.
- The Rise of the Algorithms. The cloud knows where you have been, and what you think, in part through pervasive facial recognition. The cloud decides for you, via the “principle of passive election”.

Virtual societal warfare can be:
- Deploying classic propaganda.
- Generating massive amount of deepfakes.
- Discrediting key mediating institutions that can distinguish between ‘true' and ‘false'.
- Corrupting or manipulating crucial databases.
- Manipulating or degrading algorithmic decision making processes.
- Hijacking VR and AR systems.
- Manipulating conversational interfaces.

Ways to counter this:
- Invest in research and understanding.
- Begin building forms of inoculation and resilience against the worst forms of information-based social manipulation.
- Take seriously the leading role played by social media, today, and the precedent-setting character of many of the debates on information-control, playing out in that realm.
- Make investments designed to erect new, broadly trusted informational mediating institutions that can help make sense of events.
- Begin working toward international norms constraining the use of virtual societal aggression,
- Better understand the workings and vulnerabilities of emerging technologies, especially AI driven information channels, virtual and augmented reality, and algorithmic decision making.

The premise of the book is simple, and, as we know now, some four years after publication, true:

You are racist.
Your technology is racist.

The rest of the book is, in large part, filler.

That said, a few things of note are the following:

- Noble opens the book stating that the effects of search engine bias are a kind of technological redlining, the withholding of certain services to people in neighbourhoods classified as ‘hazardous'. She sees this as a threat to democracy and algorithmic oppression, as a consequence of “the most unregulated social experiment of our times, the internet”.
- The author posts out that search engines have come such a common part of our interaction with technology that they have fooled us into believing that they provide access to a truth that is depoliticised and neutral.
- Her claim that it is problematic that commonly understood referential work (like, say, “Das Kapital”) is not typically cited, and skews search results away from these works, seems not very problematic to me.
- The bigger problem of the examples Noble brings in is that many of them don't come with illegal activity. AI in general, and search engines, specifically Google, do have built-in biases, which are sexist, and racist, and their proprietors are responsible for them. But, though Noble doesn't outright advocate for more aggressive curation of content, she does seem to favour this, which is problematic, exemplified by the uproar that Twitter and Facebook faced when they decided to, and publicised, their more heavy curation of users' feeds. Making curation the responsibility of tech, even if it is well intentioned, is a dangerous slippery slope. 
In the conclusion, she says that “focus on content prioritisation processes should enter the debates over net neutrality and the openness of the web, when mediated by search engines.” True, but, this is not a solution in itself.
- What Nobel hints at a number of times, but also doesn't fully outright say, is that a major underlying problem is the commercial, capitalist, nature of society, and the companies running the algorithms. “Commercial control over the internet, the commons, has moved it further away from the public.”, “Porn on the internet Is an expansion of neoliberal capitalists interests.”, “In the case of Google, because it is a commercial enterprise, the discussions about [the meaning of words, classification, is] situated under [the rubric of] free speech and protected corporate speech.”, “It is my goal to ensure that underrepresented ideas are included [...] Internet search could allow for greater expression [...] and serve as a democratisation tool. This is impossible with the current commercial practices.”, “We are the product that Google sells to advertisers”, and brings up the added value that we create by using Google's ‘free' services, producing a profit from our free interaction with their services.”, ““An increasingly de- and unregulated commercially driven Internet raises significant issues about how information is accessed and made available.”, “Google is prioritising predatory misrepresentations ... because it is profitable to do so.”
- The well known ‘Black Girls Code' program, which was incorporated by Google, does not address current problems (like the underrepresentation of blacks in tech), but leaves the problems to be solved by a future generation.
- Neoliberalism gets a bad rap too. Example: “The goal of [discussing the right to be forgotten] is to recognise and name the neoliberal communication strategies used by Google to circumvent or suppress its record keeping of the public through surveillance.”
And, with the right to be forgotten, Noble also brings up the American Communications Decency Act, which precludes online companies from having to police their own platform. This is in itself perhaps somewhat understandable, but also points to how untenable the situation is, exemplified by the more recent calls of scrapping ‘section 230', which exactly allows companies like Facebook and Google to not have to take responsibility.

Noble also very briefly brings up the term “Ludic Capitalism”, not really explaining it. But that did bring me to the book Class Wargames by Richard Barbrook. On my list.

Essentially a series of anecdotes on how algorithms suffer from a range of problems, often not acknowledged by the parties, people, or institutions deploying these algorithms, mostly because, on balance, they generate profit, or improve certain metrics, but at real costs, financial, or physical, suffered by those on the periphery, or even those who are designed, by the algorithms, to be disadvantaged.

One huge problem of the worst algorithms, is when they do not incorporate feedback mechanisms, and become self-referential, while having no real proof of their actual success rates.
It's also almost always the disadvantaged, the poor, who are assessed by machines, the privileged, on the other hand, by other people.

Another huge problem is the use of proxy data (say, zip codes) as markers for underlying ‘truths'. The proxy data can be indicative of trends, but, if then the algorithms are used to classify individuals, and present them with consequences, each individual might not meet the trend in question, but suffers the consequences either way.

And, there's the big drawback of the algorithms camouflaging human bias with technology.

In the first chapter, Cathy O'Neill tries to explain what a mathematical model is.

The second chapter gives a background on the work history of the author, being close to the 2008 crash, working at a hedge fund, and being a date scientist for an internet company.

Chapter three is on college rankings, using proxies to measure success, pointing out the self-referential aspect of identifying schools that are considered successful as successful (what Harvard does must be what makes them successful).

Chapter four is on predatory ads and connects to fake news as click generators. Though, the real culprit is people abusing the possibilities big data offers them, particularly marketing departments and administrators of degree-mills and for-profit universities.

Chapter five is on models predicting crime rates, which, by now, are widely known to be inherently racist, as a consequence of computing risk based on properties that are not causes, ignoring the underlying reasons for higher crime rates in impoverished neighbourhoods. It also discusses the inherent racism in stop-and-frisk policies, typical to Bloomberg's New York (though in itself not a ‘WMD', this generates data that allows for them).
The author also brings in that these crime models do not police white-collar crime, and rants a bit against the prison-industrial complex, and the inherent risks in data-abuse through perpetual surveillance, face recognition, etc.
The author's proposed solution is to instead build trust between the police and the policed.

Chapter six deals with the use of personality tests in job application processes. Besides the opacity of these tests, they are also not calibrated through feedback loops, making the success of these tests self-selective.
Then, the author discusses automated resume-reviewers, triggered by certain keywords, and reviewing societal markets as indicators of low-performance.
The author does point out that the inherent biases in this selection process do not imply that, without the automation, there is no bias.
However, really, the underlying problem is the dominant profit-based model in capitalism. Businesses need to optimise for profit, meaning any shortcut that limits costs and risk is welcome, whether fair or not. O'Neill does not address the capitalist angle enough.
Insightfully, the author links the models in this chapter to phrenology, an older example of misuse of big-data, and fully discredited.

Chapter seven handles algorithms designed for employee efficiency, like scheduling tools. Finally, the author now briefly calls out capitalism as the underlying problem, as well as Republicans' lack of will to legislate against disadvantageous (for employees) scheduling software.

Chapter eight talks about credit models. In the US, these are, in part, regulated. The regulated part appears to be working well enough, as they provide transparency. But, unregulated aspects, lacking direct-feedback, are again examples of how capitalism optimises for profit, not wellbeing.

In chapter nine, the author mentions models used by insurance companies. She offers no real solution, though the implication seems to be to not target individuals for adjusted (increased, or decreased) rates, based on their perceived cohort.

Chapter ten opens with social media algorithms. But, “I wouldn't yet call Facebook or Google's algorithms political WMDs, because I have no evidence that the companies are using their networks to cause harm”. Which seems odd; none of the other examples in the author's book are of algorithms that are used to cause harm. They do cause harm, as a side effect, and so do social media algorithms.
Interesting aside: In 2015, 43% of republicans believed Obama was a muslim. This is close to the percentage of republicans who now believe Biden is an illegitimate president.

In the conclusion, the author points out that the US' motto of ‘E Pluribus Unum', is inverted in the age of data-science.
O'Neill briefly mentions that ‘we cannot count on the free market itself to right these wrongs”, and later says that “the free market could not control its excesses', but spends little time in squarely pointing to capitalism as the real problem.
She does mention a ‘Hippocratic oath' for data scientists, which is interesting in itself, but also feels like a cheap escape from the real problem.
She also mentions ‘algorithmic audits', and hints at modelling hidden, or underlying, costs, not addressed by the algorithms, like the actual need for payday loans, or the existence of a food stamps industry.
Then, she reasonably brings up regulation, and mentions ‘the big guns' as being the ‘European model', as well as the underlying functionalities of models requiring more, perhaps full, transparency.

The book's an easy read, the examples are interesting, even if they are light on the technicalities, but O'Neill fails to squarely put the finger on the pain point: capitalism. Instead, she does offer a few suggestions which would facilitate some positive change, but nothing that goes to the heart of the problem.

Amrith constructs a gorgeous impression of the shores and history of the Bay of Bengal, roughly along a chronological path. Fascinating for its rich histories, he leaves the reader with a thorough insight in the complex markup of the region, his story meandering from topic to topic, from location to location, from personal history to personal history.

Except for the Bay itself, Amrith’s history doesn’t really have a central focus, or theme, meaning that the book is really a, well told, whirlwind of over 500 years of history, spanning all countries along the shores of the Bay of Bengal, though perhaps with a somewhat stronger focus on Tamil migrations along its shores. Though, a broad range of influences get a mention, including Yemenite traders, and Mozambican slaves that the Brits at some point imported to Indonesia.

A few interesting remarks from throughout the book:

+ The rise and decline of the Bay of Bengal as a region parallels the rise and collapse of British imperialism in Asia.

+ Bangladesh *is* the Himalayas, flattened out.

+ The [Dutch] saw themselves as different from the swashbuckling Portuguese: more ordered, more rational, more enlightened. But [these] European powers had much in common; they came for Asia’s wealth in spices and textiles, they shared their dependence on inter-Asian trade, they struggled to balance their public and private interests. But, the Dutch brand of capitalism was the stronger, and more successful one. If, eventually, the Brits prevailed. And, the English were the most effective of all at combining moralism and self-interest.

+ A throwaway remark that warrants investigation: “everywhere [Muharram] was a major public celebration, and that seemed to upend the prevailing social order”. Was this celebrated as a kind of carnival?

+ The author claims that modern laws around migration, legal and illegal, were given shape at the start of the 20th century, in cases involving forced, and unforced, migration in and around the Bay of Bengal.

+ Part of One chapter is dedicated to the cosmopolitanism of Burma at the start of the 20th century. Exemplary for how tides can turn.

Near the end, Amrith argues that nationalism in and around the Bay, in the 1930s and 1940s, dovetailed with the invasion of Japan, and several successive waves of independence, with the drying up of the historical cycles of migrations around the bay, as a consequence, diminishing trade and travel. This was followed by decades of reverse migrations, where a number of countries strove for stronger ethnic unity, at the cost of denying long-term, not first-generation, migrants citizenship, or even requiring them to return to their countries of ‘origin’.

The first third of the book is a ramble. Kaplan knows his history and his geography, but the resulting jumble just ends up showing off his knowledge and expertise, without actually conveying much, while namedropping regularly
I was reminded of an armchair Theroux, or a poor man's Jared Diamond, though, in fairness, still conveying that geography is destiny.

It's in the second part of the book where Kaplan is able to shine, somewhat. His analyses of individual geographic areas tend to still be overly wordy (where was his editor, there's so much repetition), with still a tendency to ramble, but there's much more coherence, and particularly his analyses of Russia, and regions (China, South Asia) in relation to Russia are the most interesting and insightful.
For one, I don't often see the claim made, though I fully agree with it, that the death of the Russian Tsar essentially marked the end of the Roman Empire. But, then, Kaplan fails to cast Russia's activity in particularly Central Asia as colonialism.
Also, the book was written in 2012, Kaplan predicts the rise of the television channel Russia Today.

Occasionally, Kaplan even brings up something truly insightful; for example comparing China's South China Sea, and the US' Caribbean, as being in the same kind of relationship as Rome and the Mediterranean.
He also compares greater India with early-modern Europe, for its congealing and mixing ethnicities, which I found interesting.

Kaplan's description of Iran seems one long chapter of praise. Turkey is also, it seems, on his good side, if less so.

But, some of Kaplan's statements are a bit more dubious; He quotes someone else in that “The intense cold seems to have developed in the Russians a capacity for suffering...” Sure, climate influences culture, but this is a bit rich.
Or, he claims that Gorbachev's attempts at reform revealed that the Soviet Union was an inflexible empire of subject peoples, and the cause for its downfall. Arguably the Soviet Union was an inflexible empire, but I'm not pulling punches in saying that it was the parallel economy, over which the state had no control, which eventually brought down the union.
Kaplan also claims that because Germany came late to unification, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it had preserved its regional flavors, this being advantageous in todays Europe, supposedly the reason for it being the powerhouse of Europe, today. He doesn't really continue this line of thought, nor why this hasn't worked for, for example, Italy.

In the third, and shortest, part of the book, Kaplan tries to make a case that the US should focus more on its southern neighbour, less so on what happens a world away. And that the US should restrict itself to projecting military power from sea and air, avoiding land, and avoiding the fate of Venice, which after starting conflicts on land fell from power.
With that, Kaplan is surprisingly(?) bellicose, seemingly being of the opinion that the US should project its military might across the globe.

He ends with a non-sequitur: “We must never give in to geography, but must fundamentally be aware of it in our quest for a better world”

In the end, you can be envious of Kaplan's experience and extensive travels. But this book is really just a showing off of what, and who, he knows.

Dated, but insightful.

Mildly interesting, and mildly disappointing, primarily for its sole focus on US activism/politics, even though the summary of the book explicitly starts with Twitter as a tool and platform in the 2011 Iranian elections.

Overall, if you've been paying attention to how social media, and particularly Twitter, has been used by online activists over the last decade or so, the book ads very little on a conceptual level, specifically because the hashtags discussed are all connected to American socio-cultural issues, not international politics, for which government-mandated control is much more prominent, interesting, and worrisome.

Still, a number of interesting observations:

+ In the foreword, Genie Lauren insightfully states that “Hashtag activism is repeated resistance”. Salient is that she was asked to write the forward due to her activities in promoting particular activist hashtags, but that her Twitter account was taken down through ‘Twitter brigading', also a kind of hashtag activism, but in this case targeting someone who stands for social inclusion and recognition.

+ The authors point out that, like through the rise of hashtag activism, much of the discourse related to U.S. progress, from the abolition of slavery to the sexual revolution, was rooted in narratives created on the margins of society, underscoring the importance of digital labor of raced and gendered ‘counterpublics'.
In addition, the authors found significant permeability between the mainstream public sphere and counterpublics on the Twitter platform, suggesting radical possibilities for contemporary democracy. (In the US, of course.)

+ Successful hashtag activism leads to ‘crowdsourced elites', the writer of the foreword of this book being one of those.

+ The six chapters in the book each highlight a hashtag campaign which resulted in real change.
The authors, rightfully, “push back against the notion ... that the real work of change only happens offline”, supported by the importance of the online activities around these hashtags, resulting in real-world change.
But, as the authors point out, picking the hashtags that they picked is an example of selection-bias; how many hashtags failed in achieving anything?

+ As is mentioned in many places elsewhere, professional moderation and editorial review cannot scale up sufficiently to cover the overwhelming quantity of data on social media platforms. This leads to ‘publish-then-filter', and, in my opinion, shows the inherent failure of the capitalist model underpinning social media.

+ Something that warrants more investigation is that “hashtags that trended ... were almost always started by a woman”.

+ Hashtags become a shorthand for conveying complex meaning, what psychologists and scholars of public opinion call ‘schemas'; they recall complex, nuanced experiences and claims, histories and presents, and theories of social belonging in a succinct, easy to digest, and repeatable form.

Overall, an easy read, but with its sole focus on US social politics, only mildly interesting for an international audience.

Deftly constructed. But, after the killing of Trotsky, perhaps goes on for too long.

I hadn't realized I had ordered a book in the ‘juvenile fiction' category. But, though a very easy read, also a good read.