Internet

republican vs. democrat cage match boxing ring

Buckle up, we’re in for a wild ride. Many of the serious scholars of political history and authoritarian regimes are sounding the alarm bells that, although it is a very very good thing that we got the Trump crime family out of the Oval Office, it is still a very very bad thing for America to have so rapidly tilted towards authoritarianism. How did we get here?! How has hyper partisanship escalated to the point of an attempted coup by 126 sitting Republican House Representatives? How has political polarization gotten this bad?

These are some of the resources that have helped me continue grappling with that question, and with the rapidly shifting landscape of information warfare. How can we understand this era of polarization, this age of tribalism? This outline is a work in progress, and I’m planning to keep adding to this list as the tape keeps rolling.

Right-Wing Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is both a personality type and a form of government — it operates at both the interpersonal and the societal level. The words authoritarian and fascist are often used interchangeably, but fascism is a more specific type of authoritarianism, and far more historically recent.

America has had flavors of authoritarianism since its founding, and when fascism came along the right-wing authoritarians ate it up — and deeply wanted the United States to be a part of it. Only after they became social pariahs did they change position to support American involvement in World War II — and some persisted even after the attack of Pearl Harbor.

With Project 2025, Trump now openly threatens fascism on America — and sadly, some are eager for it. The psychology behind both authoritarian leaders and followers is fascinating, overlooked, and misunderstood.

Scholars of authoritarianism

  • Hannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism
  • Bob Altemeyer — The Authoritarians
  • Derrida — the logic of the unconscious; performativity in the act of lying
  • ketman — Ketman is the psychological concept of concealing one’s true aims, akin to doublethink in Orwell’s 1984, that served as a central theme to Polish dissident CzesΕ‚aw MiΕ‚osz‘s book The Captive Mind about intellectual life under totalitarianism during the Communist post-WWII occupation.
  • Erich Fromm — coined the term “malignant narcissism” to describe the psychological character of the Nazis. He also wrote extensively about the mindset of the authoritarian follower in his seminal work, Escape from Freedom.
  • Eric Hoffer — his book The True Believers explores the mind of the authoritarian follower, and the appeal of losing oneself in a totalist movement
  • Fascism — elevation of the id as the source of truth; enthusiasm for political violence
  • Tyrants and dictators
  • John Dean — 3 types of authoritarian personality:
    • social dominators
    • authoritarian followers
    • double highs — social dominators who can “switch” to become followers in certain circumstances
  • Loyalty; hero worship
    • Freud = deeply distrustful of hero worship and worried that it indulged people’s needs for vertical authority. He found the archetype of the authoritarian primal father very troubling.
  • Ayn Rand
    • The Fountainhead (1943)
    • Atlas Shrugged (1957)
    • Objectivism ideology
  • Greatness Thinking; heroic individualism
  • Nietszche — will to power; the Uberman
  • Richard Hofstadter — The Paranoid Style
  • George Lakoff — moral framing; strict father morality
  • Neil Postman — Entertaining Ourselves to Death
  • Anti-Intellectualism
  • Can be disguised as hyper-rationalism (Communism)
  • More authoritarianism books
Continue reading Hyper Partisanship: How to understand American political polarization
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Surveillance Capitalism Dictionary

They were inspired by hippies, but Orwell would fear them. The giants of Silicon Valley started out trying to outsmart The Man, and in the process became him. And so, surveillance capitalism got born. Such is the story of corruption since time immemorial.

This surveillance capitalism dictionary of surveillance is a work in progress! Check back for further updates!

TermDefinition
algorithmA set of instructions that programmers give to computers to run software and make decisions.
artificial intelligence (AI)
Bayes' Theorem
bioinformaticsA technical and computational subfield of genetics, concerned with the information and data encoded by our genes and genetic codes.
child machineAlan Turing's concept for developing an "adult brain" by creating a child brain and giving it an education
CHINOOKcheckers program that becomes the first time an AI wins an official world championship in a game of skill, in 1994
click-wrap
collateral behavioral data
common carrierA sort of hybrid public interest served by corporate promise of meeting a high bar of neutrality -- a historical precedent setby the early Bell system monopoly, and an issue of public-private strife today with the advent of the internet.
contracts of adhesion
cookiesSmall packets of data deposited by the vast majority of websites you visit, that store information in the browser as a way to extract intelligence about their users and visitors.
corpusIn Natural Language Processing, a compendium of words used to "train" the AI to understand patterns in new texts.
decision trees
Deep BlueChess program that beats world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997
deep learning
evolutionary algorithms
Facebook
facial recognition
Flash Crash of 2010sudden drop of over $1 trillion in the E-Mini S&P 500 futures contract market via runaway feedback loop within a set of algorithmic traders
FLOPSfloating-point operations per second
Free BasicsFacebook's plan, via Internet.org, to provide limited free internet services in rural India (and elsewhere in the developing world).Controversy centers on the β€œlimited” nature of the offering, which gives Facebook the power to select or reject individual websites and resources for inclusion.
genetic algorithms
GOFAI"Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence"
HLMIhuman-level machine intelligence: defined as being able to carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human
interoperability
Kolmogorov complexity
language translation
linear regression
machine learning
Markov chains
monopoly
NAFTA
natural language processing (NLP)A technology for processing and analyzing words
neofeudalism
net neutralityLegal and regulatory concept maintaining that Internet Service Providers must act as common carriers, allowing businesses and citizens to interoperate with the physical infrastructure of the communications network equally, without being subject to biased or exclusionary activities on the part of the network.
neural networks
netizens
"Online Eraser" law (CA)
patrimonial capitalism
Pegasus
phonemes
predatory lending
predictive analytics
privacy
private eminent domain
probability
prosody
qualia
r > gPiketty's insight
randomness
random walk
recommender systems
recursion
recursive learning
right to be forgottenWhen it became EU law in 2014, this groundbreaking legislation gave citizens the power to demand search engines remove pointers to content about them. It was the growing of a data rights movement in Europe that led later to GDPR.
SciKit
simulation
smart speakers
speech recognition
spyware
statistical modeling
strong vs. weak AI"weak AI" refers to algorithms designed to master a specific narrow domain of knowledge or problem-solving, vs. achieving a more general intelligence (strong AI)
supermajority
supervised learning
surplus data
TensorFlow
Tianhe-2The world's fastest supercomputer, developed in China, until it was surpassed in June 2016 by the also Chinese Sunway TaihuLight
Terms of Service
Twitter
unsupervised learning
WatsonIBM AI that defeats the two all-time greatest human Jeopardy! champions in 2010
WhatsApp
WTO
Zuccotti Park
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speak, sistah!

see also: Shoshanna Zuboff (who wrote the seminal work on surveillance capitalism), Don Norman, Dystopia vs. Utopia Book List: A Fight to the Finish, surveillance capitalism dictionary

Some takeaways:

  • surveillance won’t be obvious and overt like in Orwell’s classic totalitarian novel 1984 — it’ll be covert and subtle (“more like a spider’s web”)
  • social networks use persuasion architecture — the same cloying design aesthetic that puts gum at the eye level of children in the grocery aisle

Example:

AI modeling of potential Las Vegas ticket buyers

The machine learning algorithms can classify people into two buckets, “likely to buy tickets to Vegas” and “unlikely to” based on exposure to lots and lots of data patterns. Problem being, it’s a black box and no one — not even the computer scientists — know how it works or what it’s doing exactly.

So the AI may have discovered that bipolar individuals just about to go into mania are more susceptible to buying tickets to Vegas — and that is the segment of the population they are targeting: a vulnerable set of people prone to overspending and gambling addictions. The ethical implications of unleashing this on the world — and routinely using and optimizing it relentlessly — are staggering.

Profiting from extremism

“You’re never hardcore enough for YouTube” — YouTube gives you content recommendations that are increasingly polarized and polarizing, because it turns out that preying on your reptilian brain makes you keep clicking around in the YouTube hamster wheel.

The amorality of AI — “algorithms don’t care if they’re selling shoes, or politics.” Our social, political, and cultural flows are being organized by these persuasion architectures — organized for profit; not for the collective good, not for public interests, not subject to our political will anymore. These powerful surveillance capitalism tools are running mostly unchecked, with little oversight and with few people minding the ethics of the stores of essentially a cadre of Silicon Valley billionaires.

Intent doesn’t matter — good intentions aren’t enough; it’s the structure and business models that matter. Facebook isn’t a half trillion dollar con: its value is in its highly effective persuasion power, which is highly troubling and concerning in a supposedly democratic society. Mark Zuckerberg may even ultimately mean well (…debatable), but it doesn’t excuse the railroading over numerous obviously negative externalities resulting from the unchecked power of Facebook in not only the U.S., but in countries around the world including highly volatile domains.

Extremism benefits demagogues — Oppressive regimes both come to power by and benefit from political extremism; from whipping up citizens into a frenzy, often against each other as much as against perceived external or internal enemies. Our data and attention are now for sale to the highest bidding authoritarians and demagogues around the world — enabling them to use AI against us in election after election and PR campaign after PR campaign. We gave foreign dictators even greater powers to influence and persuade us in ways that benefit them at the expense of our own self-interest.

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When usability pioneers have All the Feels about the nature of our creeping technological dystopia, how we got here, and what we might need to do to right the ship, it’s wise to pay attention. Don Norman’s preaching resonated with my choir, and they’ve asked me to sing a summary song of our people in bulleted list format:

  • What seemed like a virtuous thing at the time — building the internet with an ethos of trust and openness — has led to a travesty via lack of security, because no one took bad actors into account.
  • Google, Facebook, et al didn’t have the advertising business model in mind a priori, but sort of stumbled into it and got carried away giving advertisers what they wanted — more information about users — without really taking into consideration the boundary violations of appropriating people’s information. (see Shoshana Zuboff’s definitive new book on Surveillance Capitalism for a lot more on this topic)
  • Tech companies have mined the psychological sciences for techniques that — especially at scale — border on mass manipulation of fundamental human drives to be informed and to belong. Beyond the creepy Orwellian slant of information appropriation and emotional manipulation, the loss of productivity and mental focus from years of constant interruptions takes a toll on society at large.
  • We sign an interminable series of EULAs, ToS’s and other lengthy legalese-ridden agreements just to access the now basic utilities that enable our lives. Experts refer to these as “contracts of adhesion” or “click-wrap,” as a way of connoting the “obvious lack of meaningful consent.” (Zuboff)
  • The “bubble effect” — the internet allows one to surround oneself completely with like-minded opinions and avoid ever being exposed to alternative points of view. This has existential implications for being able to inhabit a shared reality, as well as a deleterious effect on public discourse, civility, and the democratic process itself.
  • The extreme commercialization of almost all of our information sources is problematic, especially in the age of the “Milton Friedman-ification” of the economic world and the skewing of values away from communities and individuals, towards a myopic view of shareholder value and all the attendant perverse incentives that accompany this philosophical business shift over the past 50 years. He notes that the original public-spiritedness of new communication technologies has historically been co-opted by corporate lobbyists via regulatory capture — a subject Tim Wu explores in-depth in his excellent 2011 book, “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.“

Is it all bleak, Don?! His answer is clear: “yes, maybe, no.” He demurs on positing a definitive answer to all of these issues, but he doesn’t really mince words about a “hunch” that it may in fact involve burning it all down and starting over again.

Pointing to evolution, Norman notes that we cannot eke radical innovation out of incremental changes — and that when radical change does happen it is often imposed unexpectedly from the outside in the form of catastrophic events. Perhaps if we can’t manage to Marie Kondo our way to a more joyful internet, we’ll have to pray for Armageddon soon…?! 😱

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCEeAn6_QJo
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Anger is the defining emotion of the internet.

It’s designed to whip you up into a frenzy in order to foment cheap pageviews. Its interest is in you becoming a histrionic attention whore, such that you suck in as much clandestinely stolen user data to your platform of choice as possible. Turns out, conflict gets attention.

Anger is also notably the “loophole” emotion — it’s the invisible one men get to have, while claiming for generations upon generations that “women are too emotional to be entrusted” with leadership or anything meaningful, really. Meanwhile male anger and aggression have killed hundreds of millions and wreaked destruction upon the earth many times over, as fragile masculinity is repeatably and predictably triggered over any little old thing.

A neat trick.

A story.

A lie.

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Peter Thiel at Isengaard looking into the Palantir

Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey are a particularly toxic breed of billionaire welfare queen, who outwardly revile government with every chance they get while having both sucked at its teat to make their fortunes, and currently making a luxe living on taxpayer largesse.

Thiel’s Paypal and Facebook-induced riches rode the coattails of the DARPA-created internet, while Luckey had his exit to internet giant Facebook. Now Thiel helms creepy-AF data mining company Palantir, whose tentacles are wrapped all the way around the intelligence community’s various agencies, while Luckey’s Thiel-funded startup Anduril is bidding for lucrative defense contracts to build Trump’s border wall. It’s the stuff of full-on right-wing neocon wet dreams for both men.

They follow in a long line of right-wing denialism in which Austrian School econ acolytes (and trickle down aficionados) have claimed to be self-made men while reaping untold rewards from lucrative military contracts and other sources of government funding or R&D windfall. Barry Goldwater once famously invoked the mythology of the independent cowboy to describe his successful rise (as would union man Ronald Reagan years later) — when in reality he inherited the family department store business that itself became viable only due to the public money pouring in to nearby military installations springing up in Arizona since as far back as the Civil War.

Even without the American government as their businesses’ largest client, the Libertarian ideal of disproportionately enjoying the fruits of public goods while viciously fighting against the taxation required to pay for them puts the lie to these mens’ claims of Ayn Randian moral supremacy. The ritual flogging of so-called “Great Man Theory” animates all sorts of dangerous social projects such as the world’s richest man purchasing the de facto town square and turning it into a right-wing plaything.

If we’re lucky, Luckey will create some sort of VR seasteading community that sucks the Silicon Valley Supremacists right in and traps them in a sort of Libertarian Matrix forever.

Peter Thiel and the Antichrist in 8 minutes (video)

This NotebookLM video does a great job explaining the background and impact of Thiel’s dangerously apocalyptic rhetoric inspired by a Nazi theorist β€” and below it you can find a deeper explanation of all major points:

More on Peter Thiel and his right-wing political network:

  • Buddies with right-wing Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks — now Trump’s “AI and Crypto Czar” as of December 2024
  • Member of the PayPal Mafia
  • Funded successful Ohio Senator (and now VP) JD Vance‘s campaign
  • Funded loser Blake Masters’ Senatorial campaign in Arizona in 2022
  • Influenced by his philosophical Rasputin, Curtis Yarvin
  • Acolyte of the anti-Enlightenment, pro-monarchist Neoreaction (NRx) ideology
  • Proponent of AI accelerationism
  • Increasingly open about his belief in a right-wing Christian-rooted value system for the US and fears of The Antichrist
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While multiple formal investigations against the Trump family and administration continue to unfold, and Drumpf supporters weirdly deny the probable cause for concern, Putin’s troll army continues to operate out in the open on Twitter, Facebook, Medium, and other social media networks. The sheer scale of this operation started to become clear to me in the months leading up to Election 2016, having both spent a lot of time on social media both professionally and personally for over a decade as well as a hefty amount of time on political investigation during this presidential cycle: bots on Twitter had taken over.

Whatever your thoughts on the #RussiaGate corruption scandal may be, it should concern any citizen that an enormous group of bad actors is working together to infiltrate American social media, with a specific intent to sway politics. Media literacy is one part of the answer, but we’re going to need new tools to help us identify accounts that are only present in bad faith to political discourse: they are not who they claim to be, and their real goals are kept carefully opaque.

Cold War 2.0

We should consider our nation embroiled in a large international game of psychological warfare, or PsyOps as it is referred to in intelligence circles. The goal is to sow disinformation as widely as possible, such that it becomes very difficult to discern what separates truth from propaganda. A secondary goal is to sow dissent among the citizenry, particularly to rile up the extremist factions within America’s two dominant political parties in an attempt to pull the political sphere apart from the center. 

We didn’t really need much help in that department as it is, with deep partisan fault lines having been open as gaping wounds on the American political landscape for some decades now — so the dramatically escalated troll army operation has acted as an intense catalyst for further igniting the power kegs being stored up between conservatives and progressives in this country.

Luckily there are some ways to help defray the opposition’s ability to distract and spread disinfo by identifying the signatures given off by suspicious accounts. I’ve developed a few ways to evaluate whether a given account may be a participant in paid propaganda, or at least is likely to be misrepresenting who they say they are, and what their agenda is. 

Sometimes it’s fun to get embroiled in a heated “tweetoff,” but I’ve noticed how easy it is to feel “triggered” by something someone says online and how the opposition is effectively “hacking” that tendency to drag well-meaning people into pointless back-and-forths designed not to defend a point of view, but simply to waste an activist’s time, demoralize them, and occupy the focus — a focus that could be better spent elsewhere on Real Politics with real citizens who in some way care about their country and their lives.

Bots on Twitter have “Tells”

1) Hyper-patriotism

– Conspicuously hyper-patriotic bio (and often, name)  – Posts predominantly anti-Democrat, anti-liberal/libtard, anti-Clinton, anti-Sanders, anti-antifa etc. memes:

2) Hyper-Christianity

– Conspicuously hyper-Christian in bio and/or name of bots on Twitter: 

3) Abnormally high tweet volume

Seems to tweet &/or RT constantly without breaks — supporting evidence of use of a scheduler tool at minimum, and displaying obviously automated responses from some accounts. The above account, for example, started less than 2 years ago, has tweeted 15,000 more times than I have in over 10 years of frequent use (28K). Most normal people don’t schedule their tweets — but marketers and PR people do.

4) Posts only about politics and one other thing (usually a sport)

– Posts exclusively about politics and potentially one other primary “normie” topic, which is often a sport – May proclaim to be staunchly not “politically correct”:

5) Hates Twitter Lists

– Bots on Twitter have a strange aversion to being added to Lists, or making Lists of their own:

6) Overuse of hashtags 

– Uses hashtags more than normal, non-marketing people usually do:

7) Pushes a one-dimensional message

– Seems ultimately too one-dimensional and predictable to reflect a real personality, and/or too vaguely similar to the formula:

8) Redundant tweets

– Most obviously of all, it retweets the same thing over and over again:

9) Rehashes a familiar set of memes

– Tweets predominantly about a predictable set of memes:

Mismatched location and time zone is another “tell” — and although you can’t get the second piece of data from the public profile, it is available from the Twitter API. If you know Python and/or feel adventurous, I’m sharing an earlier version of the above tool on Github (and need to get around to pushing the latest version…) — and if you know of any other “tells” please share by commenting or tweeting at me. Next bits I want to work on include:

  • Examining follower & followed networks against a matchlist of usual suspect accounts
  • Looking at percentage of Cyrillic characters in use
  • Graphing tweet volume over time to identify “bot” and “cyborg” periods
  • Looking at “burst velocity” of opposition tweets as bot networks are engaged to boost messages
  • Digging deeper into the overlap between the far-right and far-left as similar memes are implanted and travel through both “sides” of the networks

Further Reading

Twitter Timeline: From Public Square to X, a Right-Wing Cesspool
Who owns Twitter (X)? [2024 update]
Book Review: Amusing Ourselves to Death — Neil Postman
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I still see a lot of denialism on this point about the DNC email hacks from the far-left (or the alt-left, depending on your favored terminology), which is a bit devastating to see as it essentially parrots the pro-Russian ideology of the far-right (both the alt-right and the neo-libertarian flavors). Green Party candidate Jill Stein is an especially pernicious promoter of this myth that Vladimir Putin is a poor, innocent, peaceful world leader who is being bullied by NATO (when in fact, Russia has been the aggressor since its annexation of Crimea in 2014).

DNC email hacks forensic evidence

Two separate Russian-affiliated adversaries were behind the attacks, according to a post-mortem by cyber-security firm CrowdStrike when the news of the intrusion first broke in early June, 2016. This has since been confirmed by other independent security firms including Fidelis, Mandiant, SecureWorks, and ThreatConnect as well as corroborated by analysis from Ars Technica and Edward Snowden.

At this point the US intelligence community is confident enough to formally accuse Russia of involvement in the hacks, and are currently investigating other breaches of voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois as well as in Floridaβ€Šβ€”β€Šthe key battleground state from the 2000 election that handed GWB an unfortunate victory. Elsewhere, there is ample evidence of Putin’s extensive disinformation campaign being waged online (including several experiences I have myself witnessed), which is the continuation of a long through line of wielding propaganda as a tool from the former head of the KGB.

Related:

  • A timeline of recent Russian aggression
  • A RussiaGate Dictionary: Lexicon for the New Cold War
  • A RussiaGate Bestiary: Principal actors and related extras in the 2016 election scandal
  • The Russian Mafia State: How the former USSR has become a sclerotic kleptocracy under the rule of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, who vowed revenge on the West after his station in Dresden, East Germany was overrun by angry citizens during the month leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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