New Yorker: The Urgent Quest For Slower, Better News

Lately, I have begun to wonder, like Newport, whether the sheer volume of online news actually runs counter to the goal of keeping people informed. Research on this question is surprisingly scant. “My hunch is that readers aren’t less informed than before,” Pablo Boczkowski, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, told me. “They’re differently informed.” Among Boczkowski’s areas of research is how young people interact with the news today. Most do not go online seeking the news; instead, they encounter it incidentally, on social media. They might get on their phones or computers to check for updates or messages from their friends, and, along the way, encounter a post from a news site. Few people sit down in the morning to read the print newspaper or make a point of watching the TV news in the evening. Instead, they are constantly “being touched, rubbed by the news,” Bockzkowski said. “It’s part of the environment.”

The article goes on to kinda make the point, but I’ll summarize it this way: I’m not sure this is a very good way to get to a meaningfully informed citizenry! Having “rubbed up against” twenty headlines over a couple of days about the terror attacks in Sri Lanka, I’m not actually informed, I just know that something bad happened. Without doing the work of actually reading all the articles behind those headlines, there’s a good chance that whatever limited knowledge I have works to trick me into thinking I know more than I do. And, as the article goes on to point out, if I take my woefully inadequate understanding of the situation and rub it up against someone else’s woefully inadequate understanding of the situation, and we agree with each other, I’ve likely reinforced my own poorly-informed views with more ignorance. And if we happen to be having this conversation in view of someone who brings even less informed knowledge to the equation, the appearance of our false consensus could fix all sorts of bad information in their minds. Welp, at least we’re trying!

She spent a week in jail. Lost her job and her kids. Then, all charges were dropped

One county issued a warrant for this woman’s arrest. She was in her car in a parking lot outside a Target when (it seems) an Automated License Plate Reader on a cop car flagged her for an outstanding warrant. The police got her out of her car and arrested her, leaving her two young children, including her eight-week-old infant, as temporary wards of the state. After five days in jail, it was discovered that the warrant was a mistake, charges were dropped, and she was released. At least they didn’t kill her first, I guess!

In a more just world, I suppose she’d get a fine cash settlement. In an actually just world, she’d sue the government and the manufacturer of the ALPRs all the way up to the Supreme Court, and Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch would team up to yell at Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito about the 4th Amendment. Probably, nothing will happen.

Florida, Anti-Vaxxers, and a Drugged Bear

A prankster attempting to “do some good” by trying to create a fake news cycle around a non-existent anti-vaccine rally, using the, ahh, good name of a real-life anti-vaccine activist. An extremely 2019 kinda story.

Slate: The Black Feminists Who Saw the Alt-Right Threat Coming

Like virtually everything else in Slate these days, there’s plenty of dumb in the assumptions underlying the tone of this article. But it gets at how difficult it is to believe anything you read online, and how major media outlets are willing to swallow obvious bullshit if it allows them to express outrage at the absurdity of their ideological opponents.

The mockery #EndFathersDay made of an increasingly influential online feminist movement became predictable catnip to conservatives. Tucker Carlson devoted a segment to it. Ashe Schow in the Washington Examiner called it the latest “drivel” “from the feminist outrage machine.” Dan McLaughlin tweeted that the hashtag was “a neat illustration of the cultural trajectory of progressivism.” “#EndFathersDay Because it’s really just Second Caregiver of Unspecified Gender Identity Day, you cisnormative a**holes,” mocked Ben Shapiro. What these commentators were missing was that the #EndFathersDay campaign was a hoax, started by anonymous trolls on 4chan to engender exactly the vitriol that pundits so readily stepped up to spew.

The worst part is that just about everyone who participated in the pile-on of the would-be liberal lunatics (who didn’t actually exist) don’t care that they’d been had—whether it was actually true or not, it was true to their beliefs, so the facts don’t matter at all.

Liz Warren: Daenerys Targaryen is Good, Actually

Elizabeth Warren wants you to know that she likes what you like, kids! Her trash blog post concludes like this:

And as much as Dany wants to take on her family’s enemies and take back the Iron Throne, she knows that she must first fight the army of the dead that threatens all mankind. This is a revolutionary idea, in Westeros or anywhere else. A queen who declares that she doesn’t serve the interests of the rich and powerful? A ruler who doesn’t want to control the political system but to break the system as it is known? It’s no wonder that the people she meets in Westeros are skeptical.

(…)

So this is it — season eight. Winter is here, the Wall is crushed, and only five episodes remain. With all these powerful women preparing for battle, will the mighty bank silence the army of the people? Will the army of the dead heading straight for Winterfell make all of this talk about breaking wheels irrelevant? We’ve got five episodes to find out if the people can truly break their chains, destroy the wheel, and rise up together to win.

Daenerys is a shit character with shit motivations and a shit claim to the throne, and she would be a shit authoritarian leader of the Seven Kingdoms. She may “declare” that she wants to “break the wheel” that has crushed the common people for generation after generation as the ruling class has battled for power, but she’s none-too-shy about demanding that everybody she comes across “bend the knee, or die.” The only way she can redeem herself, if she survives the coming war with the dead and the subsequent war with Cersei for King’s Landing, would be to melt the throne with dragonfire and replace nonsensical, anarchy-and-war-inducing monarchical rule with some sort of democratic leadership council. But she won’t do that! She has made clear at every possible opportunity that she wants to rule, and that what’s good for the realm will be important, but only after she gets hers. Liz wants you to know she’s rooting for the strongest, least-evil woman candidate (who also desperately wants to be the Queen) to come out on top. But the show has been telling us for a decade that just wanting to sit on the Iron Throne betrays a power-hungry corruption that eats souls. The only person who is worthy of the throne is the person who would never dream of sitting on it, in Westeros or anywhere else. And that’s certainly not Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, rightful heir to the Iron Throne, rightful Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, the Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt, the Breaker of Chains, blah blah totalitarian self-regarding weirdo blah. I hope the Night King turns her into a zombie while somebody’s reading her inflated self-impressed CV to him. If Warren really wants to root for the people in the Game of Thrones universe, she’d be better off on Death’s side than hoping Daenerys prevails. At least the Night King will leave everybody alone once he’s accomplished his goals.

The Atlantic: Social Media Influencers, like, don’t even care, man

It is extremely on-brand for me to get the willies reading a piece like this (see also), but what the fuck is even going on, here:

“Previously influencers used to say, ‘Oh, that’s not on brand,’ or only post things shot in a certain light or with a commonality,” says Lynsey Eaton, a co-founder of the influencer-marketing agency Estate Five. “For the younger generation, those rules don’t apply at all.”

In fact, many teens are going out of their way to make their photos look worse. Huji Cam, which make your images look as if they were taken with an old-school throwaway camera, has been downloaded more than 16 million times. “Adding grain to your photos is a big thing now,” says Sonia Uppal, a 20-year-old college student. “People are trying to seem candid. People post a lot of mirror selfies and photos of them lounging around.”

The brand is candid. The brand is real. The brand has, like, sweet grain effects. The brand is relaxed.

“Everyone is trying to be more authentic,” says Lexie Carbone, a content marketer at Later Media, a social-media marketing firm. “People are writing longer captions. They are sharing how much money they make … I think it all goes back to, you don’t want to see a girl standing in front of a wall that you’ve seen thousands of times. We need something new.”

Everyone is trying to be more authentic. Everyone is trying to be more authentic. Everyone is trying to be more authentic.

Ultimately, Eaton says, “people are just looking for things they can relate to.” And “the pink wall and avocado toast are just not what people are stopping at anymore.”

So there was a time, only too recently, that the pink wall and the avocado toast, those were the things people were relating to. The avocado toast is not candid enough. The pink wall didn’t seem uncontrived enough, anymore.

Maybe I’m just a cranky old man (yes, full stop, that’s it) but there’s nothing about Instagram influencers that I can even begin to imagine relating to. Pretending like there’s meaning where there’s none is the height of bullshit. Probably, I’m just a bit sensitive after listening to NPR talk about Smells Like Teen Spirit this morning. I wish Kurt were still around to be properly horrified by what passes for authenticity these days, but it’s probably best he’s not.