The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• More Money and Fewer Readers: The Paradox of Subscriber Journalism — Jack Shafer at Politico: Muckraker George Seldes, one of America’s most accomplished independent journalists, built his paper-and-postage newsletter, In fact, into a 176,000-circulation phenomenon in the late 1940s, outpacing the circulation of both the New Republic and the Nation. Every bit as edgy in his journalistic approach as such Substack all-stars as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias or Matt Taibbi, Seldes should have gloried in his triumph. Instead, he was depressed by his lack of mass reach. No matter how hard he tried, he lamented in his final issue that he couldn’t connect very far beyond the “$5 liberals” who subscribed to In fact. He wanted a mass audience that would allow him to keep pace with the big newspapers that reached a million subscribers. He wanted his words to land as hard as theirs. Instead, the elite audience he’d cultivated became too much of an echo chamber.
• This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• Gee, Officer Kristen — Patrick Marlborough in Meanjin: Have you ever had to explain to somebody that the Holocaust did in fact happen? Maybe a co-worker, or someone on Facebook, or a particularly curious if off-putting child? How about someone who holds your future in their hands? Someone who you’ve watched bully a man with one arm into a job stacking shelves at Coles? Someone who just last week referred to a severely intellectually disabled man as a ‘born slacker’? Have you ever had to turn to that person and explain to them, slowly and delicately, that Hitler was a very real man who did some very bad things and that the Holocaust was not a collective false memory cleverly beamed into our brains by the race of lizard men who secretly run the world? Oh, you haven’t? Well, just imagine you have for a moment. And that at the end of your brief yet exacerbated explanation they turn back to their computer, sniff, and say ‘well, that’s not what I’ve heard’ then tell you there’s a minimum wage job going in a town in the wheat-belt that’s best known for its record breaking suicide statistics—and that you have to take it, or starve.
• The Left Must Take Back Labour — Craig Murray: If you believe that the Starmer project was a genuine belief that a right wing agenda would get Labour back into power, then the Starmer Project has totally failed on those terms. If you believe that the Starmer project was a scheme to neutralise any threat from Labour to the vast disparity of wealth in the UK and internationally, then it has spectacularly succeeded.
• Bow Down to Me, Pathetic Mortals, For I Have a Loud Engine — Susie Aquilina in McSweeney's: It has arrived, oh feeble ones, the time for my automobile to barrel through your vicinity and announce my prowess—my vital and irrefutable masculinity. How is it that you know of my unquestioned and eternal virility? I have a vehicle that goes vroom vroom! Oh, how I pity you, you mite of a human, sitting there in silence, with no engine to rev. How you must want for power, that which I possess. The power to irritate everyone within a two-mile radius. This sound that emanates from my swift movement, this amplified mechanical sputtering, exclaims to all my undisputed vigor.
• The Central Banker’s New Clothes — Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate: Friedman ignored what John Maynard Keynes called the “speculative demand for money,” which the British economist Ralph Hawtrey had succinctly identified in 1925. “When trade is slack, traders accumulate cash balances because the prospects of profit from any enterprise are slight, and the rate of [return] from any investment is low,” Hawtrey said. “When trade is active, an idle balance is a more serious loss, and traders hasten to use all their resources in their business.” This means that the state of the economy determines the quantity of money in circulation, and not vice versa. Uncertainty about future inflation is only one of many factors affecting business decisions, which reflect firms’ expectations of “customers at the door.” A central bank’s ability to control the price level and the level of economic activity through purely monetary operations is thus very limited. The bottom line is that for money to affect the economy in a predictable way, it must be spent in a predictable way. And that can happen only if the spender is the government.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks — John Bowers, Clare Stanton, and Jonathan Zittrain in Columbia Journalism Review: Our team of researchers at Harvard Law School has undertaken a project to gain insight into the extent and characteristics of journalistic linkrot and content drift. We examined hyperlinks in New York Times articles, starting with the launch of the Times website in 1996 up through mid-2019, developed on the basis of a data set provided to us by the Times. […] We found that of the 553,693 articles within the purview of our study––meaning they included URLs on nytimes.com––there were a total of 2,283,445 hyperlinks pointing to content outside of nytimes.com. Seventy-two percent of those were “deep links” with a path to a specific page, such as example.com/article, which is where we focused our analysis (as opposed to simply example.com, which composed the rest of the data set). Of these deep links, 25 percent of all links were completely inaccessible. Linkrot became more common over time: 6 percent of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43 percent of links from 2008 and 72 percent of links from 1998. Fifty-three percent of all articles that contained deep links had at least one rotted link.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Q for Conspiracy — Margaret Simons in Meanjjin: Elliot Brennan, research associate at the United States Studies Centre, a research centre at the University of Sydney, has identified QAnon theories spreading through parenting websites and the ‘wellness’ movement—which includes the Pete Evans network. ‘If the current global conspiracy theory landscape were like a bath, QAnon would be the drain around which the entire body of water is spiralling,’ he writes. […] It’s best to put aside, so far as you are able, rigid ideas of left and right in trying to understand QAnon. Think that organic food is something inner-city lefties worry about? When the so-called ‘QAnon shaman’—the man in the horned head dress arrested after the Capitol Hill riots—requested organic food in prison, he was true to type. Organic food is big with QAnon—part of its suspicion of big business and chemical companies in particular. […] The wellness industry—naturopathy, homeopathy—is a recognised ‘soft’ path into the QAnon world. And who of us has not taken a vitamin supplement for which there is no, or only dubious, scientific evidence?
• The Insecurity Industry — Edward Snowden: Prior to this week’s Pegasus Project, a global reporting effort by major newspapers to expose the fatal consequences of the NSO Group—the new private-sector face of an out-of-control Insecurity Industry—most smartphone manufacturers along with much of the world press collectively rolled their eyes at me whenever I publicly identified a fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone as a potentially lethal threat. Despite years of reporting that implicated the NSO Group’s for-profit hacking of phones in the deaths and detentions of journalists and human rights defenders; despite years of reporting that smartphone operating systems were riddled with catastrophic security flaws (a circumstance aggravated by their code having been written in aging programming languages that have long been regarded as unsafe); and despite years of reporting that even when everything works as intended, the mobile ecosystem is a dystopian hellscape of end-user monitoring and outright end-user manipulation, it is still hard for many people to accept that something that feels good may not in fact be good. Over the last eight years I’ve often felt like someone trying to convince their one friend who refuses to grow up to quit smoking and cut back on the booze—meanwhile, the magazine ads still say “Nine of Ten Doctors Smoke iPhones!” and “Unsecured Mobile Browsing is Refreshing!”
• I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was All a Hoax. — David Gilbert at Vice: Bill’s final semester at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was already difficult enough. He was part of the final graduating class of survivors of the 2018 shooting, and they all had just marked the third anniversary of the day 17 people were killed, nine of whom were Bill’s classmates. But Bill also had to deal with his father’s daily accusations that the shooting was a hoax and that the shooter, Bill, and all his classmates were paid pawns in a grand conspiracy orchestrated by some shadowy force.
• Snakes and Ladders — Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books: Most people seem able to accept considerable inequality in outcomes if they believe that the procedures that lead to these outcomes are in some broad formal sense ‘fair’; that is, they don’t probe too much into what determines the distribution of advantage before the selection procedure begins. Perhaps most of us are inclined, at least some of the time, to think that ability and effort are the things most ‘deserving’ of differential rewards. And many people are more bothered, it seems, by the thought that some individuals may be ‘getting something for nothing’ (in the form of benefits, for example) than the thought that some individuals are paid a thousand times as much as others. There may be no entirely coherent or justifiable basis for these views, but their persistence makes it difficult to build support for fundamental change, just as ingrained notions of what one should be entitled to do for one’s children set narrow limits on what are considered acceptable forms of redistribution. Moreover, like lottery players more generally, many of us seem to prefer to fantasise about ‘making it’ within the existing system than to accept the overwhelming evidence that the odds are rigged against us.
• Dinosaur Comics! — by Ryan North:
  
• Anatomy of a Stock Market Bubble — Frank Veneroso at the Levy Institute: With respect to moral hazard, the bailout measures during the 2007–9 crisis along with the quantitative easing policies that followed are just the most recent instances in a half-century pattern of ever-greater policy interventions that have distorted risk perceptions. Although low interest rates have not played a major role in past price-chasing bubbles, very low rates contributed to the duration and amplitude of the stock market’s trajectory over most of the last decade, and have operated as a signal to market participants that reinforces the moral hazard dimension. Regarding the growth of credit, although the Federal Reserve’s statistics do not reflect it, the United States has experienced a massive increase in nonfinancial enterprise debt. Due to a sustained high rate of corporate equity purchases financed with debt, this overarching expansion of credit has also made its way into the last decade’s bull market and steepened its price trajectory.
• The Future of Australian Universities: Bogans of the Pacific — Dr Binoy Kampmark for the Australian Independent Media Network: The assault on science teaching and research is not merely the work of the surfeit barbarians in the chancellery. Australian higher education is imperilled, not merely by a university management class keen to squeeze students and productive staff into oblivion but a Federal Parliament that sees little value in them. A country facing the sharper side of climate change, brutal weather, environmental destruction and energy crises would be expected to be pouring money into degrees directed towards their study. But scientific illiteracy, along with other forms, is as contagious as the novel coronavirus. In October 2020, changes made to higher education with the blessing of the Centre Alliance and One Nation parties in the Australian Senate saw an effective reduction of 29% to the subject of environmental science. Dianne Gleeson, president of the Australian Council of Environmental Deans and Directors, called this budgetary slicing “one of the largest funding cuts to any university course.”

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked? — Ian Welsh: School is, well, mostly bad. It teaches things slowly, it mostly trains obedience, and it’s a social horror show. When we say social dynamics are like high school, we never mean anything good, and there are dozens of movies about how awfully students treat each other. And most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten. I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.
• How to Write About Iran: A Guide for Journalists, Analysts, and Policymakers — Ladane Nasseri in McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Whether you are working from your DC office or your home in LA or New York, here’s all you need to know to become an expert on Iran. 1. Always refer to Iran as the “Islamic Republic” and its government as “the regime” or, better yet, “the Mullahs.” 2. Never refer to Iran’s foreign policy. The correct terminology is its “behavior.” When U.S. officials say Iran “must change its behavior” and “behave like a normal country,” write those quotes down word for word. Everyone knows that Iran is a delinquent kid that always instigates trouble and must be disciplined.
• Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
  
• Four-day week 'an overwhelming success' in Iceland — by somebody who doesn't get a byline for lightly editing a press release, at the BBC: Trials of a four-day week in Iceland were an "overwhelming success" and led to many workers moving to shorter hours, researchers have said. The trials, in which workers were paid the same amount for shorter hours, took place between 2015 and 2019. Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces, researchers said. A number of other trials are now being run across the world, including in Spain and by Unilever in New Zealand. In Iceland, the trials run by Reykjavík City Council and the national government eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which amounts to about 1% of Iceland's working population.
• The Delusional Scam of the Self-Help Book Industry — Ed Zitron: These books are adjacent to the world of personal branding, usually promising to provide an illuminating 100-300 pages of tips that will totally change your life. A commenter added an important addition to the thread that these books usually make vast assumptions about what things a person can actually change in their life, describing them as “the actual start point of an echo chamber,” and she’s totally right - these books are written for and geared toward a very specific audience of privileged individuals who have their life decisions affirmed and their failures explained away. The specific assumption they make is that everybody comes from the same sort of background - that they communicate in the same way, that they grow up the same way, and that, much like the world of advice articles and hustle culture, your failure to succeed is only a result of you not working hard enough. […] It’s frustrating, because these books are inherently manipulative. Their most crucial failure is the make-believe positivity of the world - even when they frame life as difficult or challenging, they couch that framing with the idea that it is just hard work that will make you succeed. Agents and publishers likely don’t want to put books on the stands that give advice that basically says “if you didn’t grow up with some form of wealth or privilege, you are going to have a 1000% harder time doing anything this book says.” Framing the world correctly - as oppressive and depressing to most people - isn’t the encouragement that people are looking for, and would be considered “cynical” or “polarizing.”
• Normal Conversation — xkcd by Randall Munroe:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Phil Are Go!:
  
• ‘Journalists’ Who Smear Assange Are Pure Scum — Caitlin Johnstone, who I wish would stop being so circumspect and just say what she thinks: If I had written an article in a major publication claiming there was “no real reason” to believe Assange would face extradition proceedings if he left the Ecuadorian embassy, and then that claim had proved horrifyingly wrong, I personally would have done what any normal person would do and shut the entire fuck up about Julian Assange for the rest of my life. Not James Ball though. There’s a certain type of personality that guarantees it will always fail upward because it possesses a remarkable combination of power-worshipping obsequiousness, a total lack of shame, and a complete lack of scruples. It’s the same type of personality that still gets lucrative punditry work after pushing for the Iraq invasion. James Ball has no more business opining about Julian Assange than John Bolton has about the merits of interventionist foreign policy, yet both remain visible and vocal. Because they are the same kind of creature. I’m pretty good with words, but I’ve never succeeded in finding any which adequately articulate the absolute depravity of the mass media smearmeisters who’ve spent years getting paid to churn out deceitful hit pieces about Assange while he’s silenced and unable to defend himself. There’s simply no one lower. There’s shit, there’s the shit that would come out of shit if shit could shit, and then there’s people like James Ball.
• The world's greatest democracy — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them? — Will Dunn at the New Statesman: In the longer term, as companies commit to greater automation of many roles, it's pertinent to ask whether a company needs a CEO at all. A few weeks ago Christine Carrillo, an American tech CEO, raised this question herself when she tweeted a spectacularly tone-deaf appreciation of her executive assistant, whose work allows Carrillo to “write [and] surf every day” as well as “cook dinner and read every night”. In Carrillo’s unusually frank description of the work her EA does – most of her emails, most of the work on fundraising, playbooks, operations, recruitment, research, updating investors, invoicing “and so much more” – she guessed that this unnamed worker “saves me 60% of time”. […] If most of a CEO's job can be outsourced, this suggests it could also be automated. But while companies are racing to automate entry- and mid-level roles, senior executives and decision makers show much less interest in automating themselves.
• Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
  
• Trump's Failed Blog Proves He Was Just Howling Into the Void — Philip M. Napoli at Wired: As platforms like Twitter and Facebook generated massive user bases, introduced scrolling news feeds, and developed increasingly sophisticated algorithmic systems for curating and recommending content in these news feeds, they became a vital means by which online attention could be aggregated. Users evolved, or devolved, from active searchers to passive scrollers, clicking on whatever content that their friends, family, and the platforms’ news feed algorithms put in front of them. This gave rise to the still-relevant refrain “If the news is important, it will find me.” Ironically, on what had begun as the quintessential pull medium, social media users had reached a perhaps unprecedented degree of passivity in their media consumption. The leaned-back “couch potato” morphed into the hunched-over “smartphone zombie.” The failure of Trump’s blog tells us that even the kind of impassioned political extremists that form the core of Trump’s base of support are so entrenched in their passive, social-media-dependent mode of media consumption that a traditional blog, absent accompanying social media accounts to generate algorithmic amplification, is incapable of gaining a fraction of the online engagement that a single tweet could achieve. Not even the most public of public figures can break free from the platform dependency that largely dictates the distribution of audience attention online. If Trump’s blog can’t gain traction without direct access to the audience aggregation and amplification tools of social media, then perhaps nothing can.
• Rob Rogers:
  
• Consent-Manufacturing For Patriot Act II Continues — Caitlin Johnstone again: As we discussed previously, Biden has often boasted of being the original author of the Patriot Act years before it was rapidly rolled out amid the fear and blind obsequiousness of the aftermath of 9/11. Now in the aftermath of the Capitol riot we are seeing a push to roll out new authoritarian laws around terrorism, this time taking aim at “domestic terror”, which were also in preparation prior to the event used to manufacture support for them. In a new article for Washington Monthly titled “It’s Time for a Domestic Terrorism Law”, Bill Scher argues against left-wing critics of the coming laws like Glenn Greenwald and Jacobin’s Luke Savage saying such “knee-jerk reactions” against potential authoritarian abuses fail to address the growing problem. He opens with the acknowledgement that “Joe Biden’s transition team was already working on a domestic terrorism law before the insurrection,” and then he just keeps on writing as though that’s not weird or suspicious in any way.