The Zero Room

In the last few months, I have been mostly reading newspaper headlines:

• Remembering Robert Fisk — Ian Williams in Tribune: Having braved the sectarian battles of Belfast, Fisk was prepared for the bitter conflicts he covered when he reported from Beirut over so many years. He brought a sense of history that Western media pundits on drop-in visit tend to lack, the cable and internet sock-puppets pontificating from faraway studios. Not least of his assets was that he lived in the region and spoke Arabic – and did so directly to ordinary people. A consummate beat reporter, he cultivated local sources even as he listened carefully to what official sources said. To report on the region, he advised, “we journalists have to fight the Trumps as well as the Arab dictators, the pro-Israeli lobbyists and the Muslim factions and sometimes, yes again, tolerate the anger of our colleagues.” […] But Fisk was always the maverick, prepared to blaze his own trail. He would not profess the spurious objectivity so often honoured in the breach by the media of record. He said that journalism must “challenge authority, all authority, especially so when governments and politicians take us to war.” When most of the media were being rounded up to support the Iraq War, Fisk was among the who not only saw the transparent absurdity of the WMD evidence, but also detailed the massive support Britain and the US had given to Saddam Hussein – which is why, he suggested, the Iraqi leader was quickly hanged to prevent him revealing his persecutors’ complicity.
• Facebook Forced Its Employees To Stop Discussing Trump's Coup Attempt — Ryan Mac at Buzzfeed: Facebook employees were appalled by President Donald Trump’s encouragement of his supporters as they stormed the US Capitol building on Wednesday to prevent the ratification of a free and fair election. The employees were scared and frustrated, and some came to the realization that the platform they had helped build and operate had contributed to the wave of fear, disinformation, and chaos that flooded Congress. So they spoke out on an internal message board, and some called for Trump’s removal from the platform. In less than an hour, Facebook moved to silence them. Without any apparent explanation, administrators froze comments on at least three threads in which employees had discussed removing Trump from the site.
• Honey, Do We Need Soap This Expensive? - Maynard Blarvin — Phil Are Go!:
  
• Everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation: An ongoing list — Jillian C. York: First of all, the only “precedent” set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company. I suppose that if your entire worldview is what happens in the United States, you might be surprised. But were you took outside that narrow lens, you would see that Facebook has booted off Lebanese politicians, Burmese generals, and even other right-wing US politicians…nevermind the millions of others who have been booted by these platforms, often without cause, often while engaging in protected speech under any definition. 2020 alone saw the (wrongful, even in light of platform policies) deplatforming of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people using terms related to Iran (including a Los Angeles-based crafter’s “Persian dolls” by Etsy) in an overzealous effort by companies to comply with sanctions; the booting of Palestinian speakers from Zoom on incorrectly-analyzed legal grounds; the deplatforming by Twitter of dozens of leftist Jews and Palestinians for clapping back at harassers, and so much more.
• The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage — Katherine Stewart in the New York Times: In multiple speeches, an interview and a widely shared article for Christianity Today, Mr. Hawley has explained that the blame for society’s ills traces all the way back to Pelagius — a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago. In a 2019 commencement address at the King’s College, a small conservative Christian college devoted to “a biblical worldview,” Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines. […] The line of thought here is starkly binary and nihilistic. It says that human existence in an inevitably pluralistic, modern society committed to equality is inherently worthless. It comes with the idea that a right-minded elite of religiously pure individuals should aim to capture the levers of government, then use that power to rescue society from eternal darkness and reshape it in accord with a divinely approved view of righteousness.
• Q-Nuts: "It's the Great Storm, Charlie Brown" — Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling:
  
• Ed-Tech and Trauma — Audrey Watters: The reporter asked me "what if we could build an AI that didn't have any privacy or security issues, that didn't have any bias?" And I argued with her that that was absolutely the wrong way to think about this. What if, for example, someone built an online proctoring tool that was bias-free, privacy-respecting, and absolutely secure? Well, I'd say that it would be impossible, but sure, okay. What if? It would still be a terrible idea because online proctoring is carceral pedagogy — that is, a pedagogy that draws on beliefs and practices that echo those of prisons — surveillance, punishment, and too often literal incarceration. Carceral pedagogy is the antithesis of education as a practice of freedom. And carceral pedagogy is deeply traumatizing.

Today was a day off from work after five long, tiresome days in a row. Slept in till 10am and skipped breakfast so that I could justify the indulgence of a pizza picnic down at Bogan Bay.

So, on my day off I walked back up to work and bought a five dollar cheese-smothered flatbread and a six dollar bottle of bubbly. I was planning on a five dollar bottle of red, but this is the kind of wild extravagance I'm now allowing myself.

You see, I'm on holiday.

I had an epiphany last week (sitting down; I always sit down when I'm having an epiphany as it's less potentially messy than standing up). I don't need to live in this awful place any more.

I have enough savings to get me back to Sydney. There is nothing I have here that I can't get in Sydney, and plenty there that I can't get here. Yes, the latter includes Covid, but Covid is going to be with us for another couple of years (at least - on and off), and while it's nice to have the luxury of not having to wear a mask, and feeling free to cough without burying your face in your armpit, it's not worth the rest of what living in Reejnal Straya entails.

I don't want any of this. I don't want to trudge to and from my part-time near-minimum wage job over pedestrian-de-optimimised terrain in permanently mouldy safety shoes and mud-spattered trousers. I don't want to deal with squat, stout old men, who wear shorts and thongs all the way through winter as a declaration of cultural identity, and greet me with a toothless grin and "G'day, big fella!" before asking where the eggs are (aisle 11).

I don't want to feel I have to sleep with a kitchen knife by my bed when one of my neighbours who has been simmering for a while seems to be approaching boiling point. I don't want to have police in body armour, bristing with holsters containing implements of varying lethality wandering up and down the landing outside my flat/cell.

I don't even want the things that I could get here if I had a socially-inclusive wage. I'm a Dickensian street urchin pressing my nose against the shop window and being slightly revolted by what's inside.

In the dying days of my marriage, my wife insisted on taking me and our joint credit card out for a weekly "date night", at one or another restaurant in Sawtell. This consisted of her buying the most expensive cocktails on the menu and I gingerly sipping the cheapest beer on the menu, while she gleefully recounted all the personal failings of, and wrongs done to her by, people most of whom I'd never heard of. Then the vodka would kick in, the snarl would settle on her pretty face, and she'd move on to the main menu of my own inadequacies. Not wanting to Make A Scene, I just just sat there and took the abuse and wondered "How is this fun for you?"

On the rare occasions I walk down First Avenue of an evening I can't see how the majority of the conversations in the self-consciously funky cafes and restaurants are any less mean and rancorous. It's some consolation, however, to know how many of the local restauranteurs buy their exotic and expensive delicacies in kilo bags from the frozen department of the local supermarket.

Anyway, that sort of negativity is now a thing of the past. I will be out of here at some point in 2021. I can do it at any time. It would be nice beforehand to get some ducks in a row, peas in a pod, pecks in a bushel, etc., but none of that is strictly necessary.

So that frees me up to look at this place anew, as someone with no skin in the game. I'm just passing through, on a working holiday. Maybe Sawtell will again, as it did in 2004, appear charming.

Comment

Never Mind the Magma Creature, Here's the Caves of Androzani

I have on several occasions unsuccessfully tried to explain the virtues of fandom to my friend and occasional acting coach Tony Wickert (director of, among other things, numerous episodes of Z-Cars but no Doctor Who; Verity Lambert approached him, but he turned it down!).

It is vital that the object of your fandom is not uniformly excellent. It should be occasionally excellent, mostly good, sometimes bad, and every now and then absolutely atrocious. Such variation encourages the development of the cultural literacy necessary to explain it, and contributes to the depth and richness of one's appreciation of any work of art. A consistent work of unalloyed genius would be absolutely useless to this end.

By this measure, the mid-1980s was perhaps the best time to be a Doctor Who fan, regardless of how we felt at the time. When thinking about this period, I can't but recall an excellent article written at the time by the frighteningly prolific Paul Cornell (writer of Father's Day for Christopher Ecclestone's Doctor, and Human Nature for David Tennant, as well as being a one-man industry of print fiction including, but far from limited to, titles within the worlds of Doctor Who of varying levels of canonicity).

Titled "The Androzani Effect", it absolutely nailed what had gone wrong with Doctor Who to produce the appalling first full series of Colin Baker's Doctor in 1985. About five years ago, I was looking for a copy of this article online, and found there was none, but (of course) I had a cardboard box in the cupboard full of fanzines, so I asked Paul via his website if it would be okay if I preserved it for digital posterity, and he very kindly agreed. A few personal developments in the meantime meant that I didn't get round to it until recently. However, before the casual viewer of New Who has a very rewarding read of it, I feel obliged to add my two cents worth of context.

Firstly, one must consider the average age of fandom in 1985. A decade earlier, then producer Philip Hinchcliffe established, in his own mind at least, that the core audience for Doctor Who was "intelligent fourteen-year-olds". I was fourteen years old in 1985. Current Doctor Who showrunner (as far as I can make out, "showrunner" is a merging of the old roles of producer and script editor) Chris Chibnall was fifteen. Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Robert Shearman — basically the authorial class of 2005 New Who — were all teenagers. Emeritus showrunners Russell T. Davies and Stephen Moffat were in their early twenties. When you are fourteen (if my own experience is any guide) you're suddenly taller than your parents, there are hormones raging, and you feel intensely passionate about the oddest things. For some reason the The Famous Five and the Tomorrow People lose their allure, and you're desperate for something that will stretch your imagination and flex your intellectual muscles, because you have an inkling that something big is about to happen, and you need to be ready for it. (Sadly, I'm still waiting.) Suffice it to say that this is an audience you disappoint at your peril.

The aforementioned Hinchcliffe, along with script editor Robert Holmes — a tall, urbane fellow, perpetually wreathed in pipe tobacco smoke, who had been writing for Doctor Who since the 60s — presided over what (to hell with it I'll give up on qualifiers) was the programme's Golden Era. It's this period that most people think of when they consider classic Who. Tom Baker was dazzling and working incredibly hard, rather than phoning it in or sending it up, as he was later inclined to do. Elizabeth Sladen as the indefatigable Sarah Jane Smith was an acting masterclass in every episode; the difference between what she was sometimes given on the page and what she delivered on screen is just amazing. And beneath it all was the work of Robert Holmes, writing, or more often heavily re-writing, the majority of the stories.

Nobody knew the soul of Doctor Who like Holmes. To be sure, other writers have equalled him in one way or another. Stephen Moffat can write dialogue to equal Wilde, but too often Moffat writes his characters from the outside in, and sometimes not very far in. With Holmes, the wit bubbles up from from the core of the character. Often it's when two characters realise they are just fundamentally not on the same page and they are going to have to muddle through as best they can; for the initiated, think Litefoot and Leela's supper in Talons of Weng-Chiang, or Harry and Vira in the Ark in Space.

[I, and I realise I may be in a minority here, love Harry Sullivan. Conventional wisdom says that he was devised to cater for the casting of a Doctor older and less partial to physical action than Jon Pertwee's, and upon the casting of a younger Doctor was relegated to the role of buffoon. I disagree; he was a character who functioned extremely well in a very particular and familiar context, and taken out of that context he adapted in ways that were sometimes sub-optimal, but still revealed his fundamental decency. He ought to be regarded as a template for how to do a companion, not an aberration.]

The point of all this waffle is to say that the story of what went wrong with Doctor Who in the 80s begins with what went wrong with Doctor Who in the 70s. After Hinchcliffe and Holmes left, the program cruised along under the momentum they had given it for a while. At some point, possibly due to the existence of a subsidised bar at the BBC, somebody thought it would be a ripping wheeze to hire the notoriously deadline-averse Douglas Adams as script editor while he was also supposed to be writing the second radio series of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This worked to the detriment of both programmes (despite providing the delightful Adams-penned romp City of Death).

At the same time the second oil crisis of the 1970s hit the UK, causing devastating inflation, the winter of discontent, and strikes such as those which terminated the production of Adams' next story Shada. Due to inflation, budgets planned at the start of a series' run dwindled to nothing by the time it came to produce the last episodes, and the programme, never blessed with the money necessary to realise its ambitions, began to look decidedly cheap. Nobody was at the wheel, and the programme's charismatic star had become lazy and petulant. As commentators subsequently put it, Doctor Who had become, at best, "The Tom Baker Comedy Half-Hour".

Enter a saviour in 1980: John Nathan-Turner, or JN-T to fans, having worked his way up the BBC ladder from floor assistant on shows such as BBC's Doctor Who to the rank of producer for the eighteenth series.

JN-T sincerely loved and believed in Doctor Who; he just didn't understand it.

Fortunately he had new script editor Christopher H. Bidmead, with a history not just as a scriptwriter, but also as a science journalist, and by heavens Bidmead worked himself as hard in that year as Holmes had done previously. The scripts were tighter, and there were thematic threads of varying degrees of subtlety that ran through the series, prefiguring New Who. The errant star, despite being "ill" much of the time (of the kind of illness you might catch in the public bar of the Coach and Horses or the Colony Room) delivered some of his best performances, "reined in" as they say, but still utterly beguiling.

And then the wheels came off. Baker demanded more money, which gave JN-T the opportunity to wish him all the best for the future. Bidmead also left, and JN-T, with no real idea what he was doing, managed to coast along on scripts Bidmead had commissioned for series nineteen, along with no small amount of luck. The casting of Peter Davison as the Doctor could be considered genius, were it not for JN-T's own admission that the reasoning behind it was that he wanted to contrast an older actor with curly hair with a young actor with straight hair. #facepalm

Here's where we get to Cornell's critique. Halfway though series nineteen, a young writer named Eric Saward was taken on as script editor. Like JN-T, he didn't understand Doctor Who, but unlike JN-T I don't think he ever really cared about it.

Saward's universe was bleak, and its inhabitants were constantly bickering to no good end. Endless whining in the Tardis console room was, for Saward, the stuff of drama. It became painful to spend time with these people. Once outside the Tardis (and sometimes even inside), body counts and bloody vengeance were at the core of Saward's 80s Hollywood sensibility.

Davison deployed all his charm in consistently playing against Saward's version of the Doctor: melancholic, irritable, amoral. His successor, Colin Baker. on the other hand, took that brief and ran with it. But first there was the return of Robert Holmes.

JN-T was vehemently opposed to hiring old hands, but Saward, to his credit, felt that Holmes was the person to write the Doctor Who twentieth anniversary special. Holmes wisely refused to shoehorn five Doctors, every supporting actor that could be rounded up, and a grab-bag of old monsters whose costumes hadn't disintegrated while in storage, into ninety minutes. That job fell to his script editing predecessor Terrance Dicks, who did about as well as can be expected with Peter Davison, two other Doctors, a stand-in for one, and some location footage from the unfinished Shada in lieu of an egotistical Baker. Then, for Davison's final story a year later, Saward again turned to Holmes.

Here you should transport yourself back to 1985 and turn to Paul Cornell's insightful analysis. I'll be waiting here till you're done.

Good, wasn't it? I remind you that the author was at an age where many of his peers were still saying things like "Wouldn't it be great if the Cybermen battled the Daleks?". No Russell, it wouldn't! It would be very, very boring!

I desperately tried to enjoy series twenty-two and Colin Baker's Doctor. True, at the age of fifteen, I was probably at my most vulnerable to Saward's excesses (I was also watching a lot of James Bond at the time; a penchant I now find utterly inexplicable). Other criticisms of the show's direction failed to persuade me. Founding member of Australian Doctor Who fandom Antony Howe famously railed against "Doctor Whooligan" and basically quit all association with the program in protest, yet I was unmoved.

Yes, series 22 was, in comparison to its predecessor, a dud series, but it had its bright spots. Vengeance on Varos was at its core a clever variation on prior dystopic tales like the Sun Makers, somehow managing to critique reality television long before the term had even been coined. The Mark of the Rani was an old-school psuedo-historical which ought to have pleased the traditionalists. Holmes' the Two Doctors suffered from a mostly superflous, exposition-heavy first episode and flat direction which utterly failed to take advantage of much-hyped location filming in Spain (an example of JN-T's instinct to produce based on what would make for a good press release while being quite unconcerned by what ended up on the screen), still it is not quite without charm and Swiftian bite ("But I remember a dish… Shepherd's Pie." "Shepherd's Pie? Oh, a shepherd! Can't we walk faster?").

Saward created for the series 22 finale (here I perhaps damn with faint praise) his best credited work on the programme in Revelation of the Daleks. Cornell is of course quite right in identifying it as largely the product of lessons half-learned from Holmes. But on the other hand, Saward did at least bother to draw a wider than usual net of cultural influences including Evelyn Waugh's the Loved One and ripping yarns of the Knights Templar. And it is tightly paced, save for the by then traditional plot exile into which he sends the Doctor and Peri, who wander around aimlessly for the whole of the first episode, and in fact barely influence events at all throughout the entire story. Saward did not much like his regular cast, and prefered to do without them wherever possible.

It was Cornell's dissection of the way that Saward had learned all the wrong lessons from Homes that shook me from complacency, making fan commentary I'd previously dismissed suddenly salient. Certainly in retrospect it was on target in a way that hindsight has only vindicated.

Still, if there is anything Doctor Who does well, it's reinvention. Two troubled series later, once Andrew Cartmell, who both loved and understood the series as well as recognising its potential to break new ground, was firmly established as script editor the show was as solid, and certainly as innovative as it had ever been.

But by then Doctor Who was the only drama that the BBC was still producing in-house, as the corporation preferred to follow strict Thatcherite doctrine by becoming a purely managerial enterprise, and outsourcing actual production to companies without the merest sliver of the institutional expertise that the Beeb once had. It is doubtful that any programme could have survived in this environment.

However it is tempting to look at how well 1989's series 26 and (if one really must adopt new nomclementure) 2005's season 1 (really series 27) mesh together, and wonder what might have been. I know that Cornell, Cartmell, et al. were having fun writing novels, audio dramas, and so on, but oh! for another couple of years at least with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred…

This who-knows-for-how-long, I have been mostly reading:

• To Defeat Fascism, We Must Recognize It’s a Failed Response to Capitalist Crisis — William I. Robinson in Truthout: Yet many white members of the working class have been experiencing social and economic destabilization, downward mobility, heightened insecurity, an uncertain future and accelerated precariatization — that is, ever more precarious work and life conditions. This sector has historically enjoyed the ethnic-racial privileges that come from white supremacy vis-à-vis other sectors of the working class, but it has been losing these privileges in the face of capitalist globalization. The escalation of veiled and also openly racist discourse from above is aimed at ushering the members of this white working-class sector into a racist and a neo-fascist understanding of their condition. Racism and the appeal to fascism offer workers from the dominant racial or ethnic group an imaginary solution to real contradictions; recognition of the existence of suffering and oppression, even though its solution is a false one. The parties and movements associated with such projects have put forth a racist discourse, less coded and less mediated than that of mainstream politicians, targeting the racially oppressed, ethnic or religious minorities, immigrants and refugees in particular as scapegoats. Yet in this age of globalized capitalism, there is little possibility in the United States or elsewhere of providing such benefits, so that the “wages of fascism” now appear to be entirely psychological. The ideology of 21st-century fascism rests on irrationality — a promise to deliver security and restore stability that is emotive, not rational. It is a project that does not and need not distinguish between the truth and the lie.
• Joe Biden’s drive for diversity in top political jobs is only an illusion of change — Nesrine Malik in the Guardian: Biden’s diverse picks, the “very best of the nation”, are not representatives of the people who put them into office as much as they are figureheads. They are ambassadors with no brief other than to stand as proof of meritocracy – if you work hard and are “the very best”, you too can get a great gig. Diversity in government isn’t about solidarity, it’s used as proof of the soundness of the system: the elevation of women in particular as “girl boss feminists” who will not be interrupted, the reduction of the deeply serious business of government to inspiration politics. […] When people are hired to make a government “look” a certain way, by governing parties with conservative politics, it’s usually a way of making change so everything stays the same – or gets worse. Little demonstrates that more than the “most diverse parliament in history” that came to Westminster in 2019. The election of a number of female and black and minority ethnic MPs to the Conservative party, and their rise in the ranks of the cabinet, has produced a government that feels more comfortable in doubling down on policies such as the hostile environment, and where senior BAME ministers have been recruited to the task of denying structural racism.
• What would a state-owned Amazon look like? Ask Argentina — Cecilia Rikap in openDemocracy: Last October, Argentina announced the creation of an online marketplace called “Correo Compras”. The platform is to be run by a state-owned company, Correo Argentino, which is also the country’s official postal service. Argentina has been severely hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, and its lockdown has been among the longest. Even before the pandemic internet penetration in Argentina was already high (74%), and since the lockdown e-commerce and other digital services thrived in the country. Through its publicly owned option, the government aims to offer an alternative to Latin America’s current e-commerce private octopus.
• Before — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Australia’s spy agencies caught collecting COVID-19 app data — Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch could have knocked me down with a feather: Australia’s intelligence agencies have been caught “incidentally” collecting data from the country’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app during the first six months of its launch, a government watchdog has found. The report, published Monday by the Australian government’s inspector general for the intelligence community, which oversees the government’s spy and eavesdropping agencies, said the app data was scooped up “in the course of the lawful collection of other data.” […] The report did not say when the incidental collection stopped, but noted that the agencies were “taking active steps to ensure compliance” with the law, and that the data would be “deleted as soon as practicable,” without setting a firm date.
• Do You Know Your Microsoft Productivity Score? — Jacob Silverman in the New Republic: The tech giant recently announced the wide availability of Productivity Score, declaring, “As leaders, it’s our job to make sure people have the tools they need to do their best work. But tools alone are not enough—you also need to help everyone in your organization build the habits that harness the true power of those tools. Until now, it’s been difficult for leaders to get insight into these habits and understand how to help people make the most of the technology they invest in.” (Their emphasis, of course.) The score is a feature within Microsoft 365’s Workplace Analytics, which the company advertises as a way for employers to “harmonize productivity and well being,” “enhance organizational resiliency,” “transform meeting culture,” and “increase customer focus.” Critics and labor advocates say this all amounts to an invasive method of monitoring and cataloging worker behavior, producing inscrutable metrics and forming databases that may be used for union-busting or to tilt the playing field toward employers during annual reviews.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• Mythbuster: What is quantitative easing and how does it work? — Richard Murphy provides more detail than most people want or need to know. The punchline is this: Politically it has suited the government’s narrative to maintain this pretence that interest is owing on these [BoE-held] gilts. As a consequence of this pretence, successive governments have been able to claim that the cost of government debt servicing has been more onerous than has actually been the case, and have claimed that this has prevented it from undertaking other forms of spending. This claim has been disingenuous. In practice, the income received by the APF as a result of the payment of this interest belongs to the Treasury as a consequence of the management agreement reached between it and the Bank of England, previously noted. The result has been that the income in question has been returned to HM Treasury, as a matter of fact. The accounts of the APF make this clear. The refund has not, however, been used to cancel the interest charge recorded in the government’s own accounts: it does, instead, appear to be shown as part of the ‘other income’ of the government. In accounting terms this might be called a misrepresentation. The two sums should be offset to present a true and fair view of the interest cost that the government actually incurs. The only possible explanation for this misrepresentation has been that it has suited government purposes to make it.
• The Purging of Jeremy Corbyn - The Truth — Esha Krishnaswamy at Historic.ly: In March of this year, we reviewed leaks from an internal report commissioned by the Labour Party ahead of the EHRC report. I have thoroughly read the report and instead of finding instances of anti-semitism amongst Corbyn supporters, the report found instances of sabotage, leaks, and betrayal by the staff of the Labour Party to their constituency: the working class of Britain. Governance and Legal Unit (GLU) was responsible for handling complaints from members regarding anti-semitism, racism and sexism within the ranks. Instead of handling such complaints, the GLU was more interested in attacking and purging Corbyn supporters. […] On April, 2017, when Theresa May called for a general snap election, instead of working to make sure that labour wins as many seats as possible, the staffers intentionally sabotaged Corbyn, his campaign and some members of the Labour Party. In February, they already talked about sabotaging the election in hopes of electing a new leader.
• Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Labor and Environmental Groups — Lauren Kaori Gurley at Vice: A trove of more than two dozen internal Amazon reports reveal in stark detail the company's obsessive monitoring of organized labor and social and environmental movements in Europe, particularly during Amazon's “peak season” between Black Friday and Christmas. The reports, obtained by Motherboard, were written in 2019 by Amazon intelligence analysts who work for the Global Security Operations Center, the company's security division tasked with protecting Amazon employees, vendors, and assets at Amazon facilities around the world. The documents show Amazon analysts closely monitor the labor and union-organizing activity of their workers throughout Europe, as well as environmentalist and social justice groups on Facebook and Instagram. They also indicate, and an Amazon spokesperson confirmed, that Amazon has hired Pinkerton operatives—from the notorious spy agency known for its union-busting activities—to gather intelligence on warehouse workers.
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro: