Links and Notes for June 10th, 2022

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

Economy & Finance

Merger Buyer’s Remorse Sometimes Works by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“But I also think that often the way crypto works in practice is to take the problems of the banking system and make them much worse. If you don’t like the financial system making leveraged speculative bets with your deposits, you might find yourself putting your money in some entirely unregulated crypto bank whose entire purpose is to make leveraged speculative bets with your money.”

“See, I genuinely think that there are some people who would sneer at a bank saying “we have a fortress balance sheet and exceed our regulatory requirements for capital and liquidity, as you can tell from our quarterly financial statements”:

““Sure,” these people would scoff, “we’ve heard that before.”

“And then they’ll read a Medium post from a crypto project that claims to have, but does not describe, a “comprehensive liquidity risk management framework” and put all their money in it.”

“Tether’s latest reserves report, as of March 31, 2022, states that its “consolidated total assets amount to at least US$82,424,821,101,” while its “consolidated total liabilities amount to US$82,262,430,079, of which US$82,188,190,8131 relates to digital tokens issued.” That represents equity capital of about $162.4 million on a balance sheet of $82 billion, or a capital ratio of about 0.20%. Banks have risk-weighted capital requirements of at least 8%. Banks also publish audited financial statements and have prudential requirements limiting what they can do with their money; Tether does not. If, say, one $500 million loan to Celsius — or one similar-sized margin loan to some other crypto firm during a crypto market meltdown — went bad, Tether’s entire capital would be vaporized and its stablecoin would be undercollateralized.”

Sharp Wall Street fall resumes as more central banks lift interest rates by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“This takes the form of an international drive by the major central banks, the smaller ones following suit, to lift interest rates to slow the economy and induce a recession, if that proves necessary, to suppress the growing wages movement of the working class in response to surging price hikes. That is, to cut real wages and boost corporate profits, starting with those sections of capital, in energy, food and other key areas, that are benefitting from price increases.

“This drive is being conducted under the banner of the need to “fight inflation” but the real target is the working class because the interest rate hikes will do nothing to bring down prices.”

Babel Finance suspends withdrawals and redemptions by Molly White (Web3 is Going Great)

“Babel Finance is the latest crypto finance platform to suddenly limit customer withdrawals. Citing “unusual liquidity pressures” and “conductive risk events” to crypto institutions, Babel announced that they would be “temporarily suspending” redemptions and withdrawals for an indeterminate period. Babel Finance had just completed a $80 million Series B round, with a valuation of $2 billion, in May.”

Public Policy & Politics

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov visits Turkey as NATO escalates war in Ukraine by Ulaş Ateşçi (WSWS)

“AP wrote, “While food exports are technically exempt from the sanctions, Russia claims that restrictions on its ships and banks make it impossible to deliver its grain to global markets.” According to AP, 22 million tons of grain are sitting in silos in the Black Sea ports of Ukraine, “one of the world’s largest exporters of wheat, corn and sunflower oil.””

“On June 3, Russian President Vladimir Putin said: “If someone wants to solve the problem of exporting Ukrainian grain—please, the easiest way is through Belarus. No one is stopping it,” adding: “But for this you have to lift sanctions from Belarus.” He also said that British and US sanctions on Russian fertilizers would escalate problems on global food markets.”

“Russia is demanding Ukraine clear sea mines around its ports in exchange for allowing food ships to leave Ukraine. According to the Turkish state-owned Anadolu Agency, Lavrov said “the main problem with the export of Ukraine’s grains is the country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky’s refusal to discuss the clearing of sea mines.””

“European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hypocritically claimed: “Our sanctions do not touch basic food commodities. They do not affect the trading of grain or other food between Russia and third countries.” She added, “And the port embargo specifically has full exemption on agricultural goods. So let’s stick to the truth. It’s Putin’s war of aggression that fuels the food crisis and nothing else.””

God, she’s so sleazy. That is so untrue. What she means is that Russia can give away all of its exports for free because the U.S. and the EU have cut off any means of payment for them.

Democrats and Republicans Have One Thing in Common: Both Suck on Free Speech by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“The worst of all possible worlds would see speech policy added to the long list of under-publicized areas of near-total consensus between the two parties, like military spending, bank bailouts, corporate taxation, and warrantless surveillance. We’re almost there.”

“[…] a generation has clearly been taught that it’s not only possible but necessary to suppress opinions different from our own and that discussion and persuasion are dead-ends. More even than the alleged issue at hand, this felt like the more important subtext to Walsh’s movie: the idea that a new generation of left-leaning intellectuals wants the right to dictate acceptable opinions about even very complex subjects without having to explain them. They want to be a literally unimpeachable intellectual vanguard. Free dialogue has been so impoverished that asking questions is considered a hostile act.”

Phase Three in Ukraine by Scott Ritter (Consortium News)

“After more than ninety days of incessant Ukrainian propaganda, echoed mindlessly by a complicit western mainstream media that extolls the battlefield successes of the Ukrainian armed forces and the alleged incompetence of the Russian military, the Russians are on the cusp of achieving the stated goal of its operation, namely the liberation of the newly independent Donbass Republics of Lugansk and Donetsk, which Russia recognized two days before its invasion.”

“Russia has completed Phase One despite the efforts of the U.S., NATO, and the E.U. to supply Ukraine with a significant amount of lethal military assistance, primarily in the form of light anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. “We consider it a vast mistake,” Rudskoy concluded, “for Western countries to supply weapons to Kiev. This delays the conflict, increases the number of victims and will not be able to influence the outcome of the operation.””

“According to the daily briefings provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Ukrainians are losing the equivalent of a battalion’s worth of manpower every two days, not to mention scores of tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery pieces, and trucks.”

“Logic dictated that the Ukrainian government, stripped of a viable military, would have no choice but a modern-day version of the surrender of France in June 1940, following decisive battlefield victories by the German army.”

“[…] demilitarization has become much more difficult since the invasion of Feb. 24. While military aid provided to Ukraine by the U.S. and NATO before that date could be measured in terms of hundreds of millions of dollars, since Phase Two operations began this aid has grown to the point where total military aid provided to Ukraine by the U.S. alone approximates $53 billion.”

“While this massive support will not be able to reverse the tide of inevitability concerning the scope and scale of the Russian military victory in the Donbass, it does mean that once Russia has fulfilled its stated objective of liberating the breakaway republics, demilitarization will still not have taken place. Moreover, given the fact that demilitarization is premised on Ukraine being stripped of all NATO influence, including equipment, organization, and training, one can make a case that Russia’s invasion has succeeded in making Ukraine a closer partner of NATO than before it began.”

“Any large-scale expansion of Russian military operations in Ukraine, which seeks to push beyond the territory conquered by Russia during Phase One and Phase Two, will require additional resources which Russia may struggle to assemble under the constraints imposed by a peacetime posture. This task would become virtually impossible if the Ukrainian conflict were to spread to Poland, Transnistria, Finland and Sweden.”

“Only Russia’s leaders can decide what is best for Russia, or what is deemed to be viable militarily. But the combination of an expired legal mandate, unfulfilled political objectives, and the possibility of a massive expansion of the scope and the scale of combat operations, which could possibly include one or more NATO members, points to an absolute need for Russia to articulate the mission of Phase Three and why it needs one.”

Democrats Will Lose 2022. They Can Win 2024 if Biden-Harris Say They Won’t Run by Ted Rall

“Biden could do all sorts of things on progressives’ wish list, thus shoring up the currently unenthusiastic party base: a blanket pardon of nonviolent drug offenders, closing Guantánamo Bay, forgiveness of federal student loans, canceling federal contracts with companies that engage in union-busting, pardoning political prisoners like Julian Assange and targets of the security state like Edward Snowden. He could follow the lead of Richard Nixon of all people, and impose wage and price controls to fight inflation.”

Neither Biden nor any other Democrat could care less about any of these issues.

Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia exposes the hypocrisy of the imperialist war against Russia by Joseph Kishore (WSWS)

“There was no condemnation in the US media at the time of Saudi “war crimes” against Yemen, nor were their howls of protest from the pseudo-left backers of US imperialism over the war crime. Two-and-a-half months later, however, a missile strike on a Ukrainian train station that killed 50—blamed, dubiously, on Russia—was seized on to demand a major intensification of US military support for Ukraine. This is “genocide,” Biden declared.”

“Military weaponry has continued to flow into the country unabated. The US is the principal supplier of weapons to Saudi Arabia (accounting for 73 percent of arms imports, according to the Brookings Institution). Per the US State Department website, “Saudi Arabia is the United States’ largest foreign military sales (FMS) customer, with more than $100 billion in active FMS cases.”

“[…] on Thursday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre praised Saudi Arabia for “helping consolidate” a temporary truce in Yemen, that is, to put a partial pause on a bloody carnage it has led with the backing of American imperialism.”

“The naked hypocrisy of US imperialism, we can rest assured, will not stop the upper-middle-class moralists in the media and academia from giving their full support for the imperialist crusade against Russia, waving the tattered and bloody banner of “human rights.””

Rüstungswettlauf im Bundestag by Peter Schwarz (WSWS)

“Es ist ein Maß für den Niedergang und die Verkommenheit der deutschen Medien, dass nicht ein Kommentar vor den gefährlichen Implikationen dieser militärischen Eskalation warnt. Stattdessen wurde Scholz für sein militärisches Auftrumpfen bejubelt. „Der Kanzler kann auch anders“ (Tagesschau) und „Der Kanzler geht in die Offensive“ (taz) lauteten die Schlagzeilen.”

“41 Milliarden sind für die Modernisierung der Luftwaffe bestimmt. Geplant ist der Kauf nuklearwaffentauglicher amerikanische F-35-Kampfflugzeuge, die Entwicklung und der Kauf von Eurofightern mit der Fähigkeit zur elektronischen Kampfführung und die Bewaffnung von Heron-TP-Drohnen.”

More F35s. Was für ein Witz.

Ralph Nader: Is There Any Hope Left for Democracy? by Robert Scheer (Scheer Post)

This is an absolutely essential 42-minute discussion between two giants. A must-listen for anyone interested in knowing what is really going on in America. They are both national treasures.

Journalism & Media

Social Justice Advocates Don’t Get to Just Exempt Themselves From Politics by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“To the extent that America’s racial politics have become more emotional and linguistically radical, they’ve also become wrapped in a layer of pandering and head-patting on the part of benevolent white liberals who have little need for material change (as they’re already affluent themselves) and much to lose from appearing not to kowtow to social justice norms (as their lives are unusually dependent on reputation). An outcome of this situation is that you have a lot of people who ostensibly support a social justice agenda and yet are totally indifferent to whether anything actually gets done.”

“[…] untold thousands of white lefties put “Defund the Police #ACAB” in their Instagram bios anyway because actually meaningfully changing policing practices had far less interest to them than did appearing to be the right kind of person. This is why I’ve said for years that one of the social justice agenda’s biggest problems lies in its adherents; many of them are really only onboard with appearing to be onboard.”

“We live with this constant two-step where social justice advocates complain that their beliefs are treated differently from other political beliefs, but then turn around and insist that people are not allowed to criticize them because their political movement is unlike any other. And it’s just not sustainable. The army of people who pop up every time an essay like this gets published and beats their chest about how we don’t need white bros to lecture us etc. etc. are demanding that their politics should exist outside of politics.”

“Here on Planet Earth, everybody has a politics, everybody else gets to make fun of those politics, and the woke demand that woke politics can never be criticized is childish and unhelpful. People are going to criticize you if you want to change the world. Grow up.”

You could level this critique against many factions. Sure, sure, the woke have refined it to a knife-point that goes in each other’s backs. But many factions have their “we don’t talk about this” topics. Like, we all talk all day about Uighurs, but no-one really talks about the downtrodden Chinese workers with no shot at organizing—because that would upset our apple-cart of cheap goodies that we all depend on. Uighurs are in China’s breadbasket, so we can all feel free to take a moral whack at those policies—because changing those policies would have negative impact only on China, and zero negative impact on the West.

Abby Martin’s Speech on US Sanctions & Economic Gangsterism by Empire Files (YouTube)

“These countries are not underdeveloped; they’re overexploited.”

Welcome to a Science-Fiction Planet by David Barsamian & Noam Chomsky (Antiwar.com)

“It’s kind of astonishing to see the difference in commentary. So, you read the New York Times and their big thinker, Thomas Friedman. He wrote a column a couple of weeks ago in which he just threw up his hands in despair. He said: What can we do? How can we live in a world that has a war criminal? We’ve never experienced this since Hitler. There’s a war criminal in Russia. We’re at a loss as to how to act. We’ve never imagined the idea that there could be a war criminal anywhere.

“When people in the Global South hear this, they don’t know whether to crack up in laughter or ridicule. We have war criminals walking all over Washington. Actually, we know how to deal with our war criminals. In fact, it happened on the twentieth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Remember, this was an entirely unprovoked invasion, strongly opposed by world opinion. There was an interview with the perpetrator, George W. Bush, who then went on to invade Iraq, a major war criminal, in the style section of the Washington Post — an interview with, as they described it, this lovable goofy grandpa who was playing with his grandchildren, making jokes, showing off the portraits he painted of famous people he’d met. Just a beautiful, friendly environment.”

“Chomsky: Those two thoughts are standard in the entire West. I just had a long interview in Sweden about their plans to join NATO. I pointed out that Swedish leaders have two contradictory ideas, the two you mentioned. One, gloating over the fact that Russia has proven itself to be a paper tiger that can’t conquer cities a couple of miles from its border defended by a mostly citizens’ army. So, they’re completely militarily incompetent. The other thought is: they’re poised to conquer the West and destroy us.”

“Barsamian: In an article in Truthout, you quote Eisenhower’s 1953 “Cross of Iron” speech. What did you find of interest there?

“Chomsky: You should read it and you’ll see why it’s interesting. It’s the best speech he ever made. This was 1953 when he was just taking office. Basically, what he pointed out was that militarization was a tremendous attack on our own society. He — or whoever wrote the speech — put it pretty eloquently. One jet plane means this many fewer schools and hospitals. Every time we’re building up our military budget, we’re attacking ourselves.”

The World’s Most Taboo Legal Case by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Most of the cross-dressing men claiming a “transgender identity” and granted transfer… are sex offenders, most are heterosexual men who want to be housed with women to get penis-in-vagina sex, most stop taking any feminizing hormone medications right after getting into women’s prison, they all refer to themselves as men when speaking to the women inmates, many have threatened to “fight you like a man” to women inmates, many have threatened to rape us, and they all have working penises that they are using to have sex with female inmates.”

“In a fascinating development this week, the New York Times ran a long story by Emily Bazelon called “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” that read suspiciously like Timesian interpretation of work by oft-denounced people like Jesse Singal, Katie Herzog, Wright, and even Abigail Shrier. The paper described a working group of clinicians trying to develop standards of care on behalf of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) who, among other things, wondered if the “rise in trans identification among teenagers” could be the result of “social influence.”

“The piece also flatly said hormone treatments can “permanently alter” bodily characteristics like voice depth and breast development, and quoted researchers who suggested that teens and preteens undergo “comprehensive diagnostic assessment” and demonstrate “several years” of persistent identification with another gender before proceeding to medical transition. Even mentioning these ideas a year ago was a cancelable offense.”

On the Blowback to “What is a Woman?” and the Difference Between Debate and Bigotry by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Let me explain my thoughts on this subject, since some seem to feel that laughing when a professor is caught calling “truth” transphobic is equivalent to supporting genocide.”

“What, we’re going to pretend that gender, or sexual identity and gender, is the only area in which there’s no peer influence? Well, that’s preposterous. It’s like, kids talk about everything… In the last year of Covid, they’re online talking with everyone in the world about everything. To presume this doesn’t have any effect whatsoever, flies in the face of what we know.”

“When I first had kids I was shocked by the depth and power of parental love, how totally it clears away your “ideas” about things and reduces life to a single goal — keep them alive! — and you really don’t care how you get there.”

This is accurate. I have rarely, if ever, met a parent who currently has children still at home who was in any way capable of reasoning about the world in a politically constructive way. There is generally no notion of collectivity and little to no empathy.

“I increasingly wonder if we’re telling young people, especially girls and I’d guess especially young lesbians, that if they don’t like dresses and boys and sugar and spice and everything nice, they’re trapped in the wrong body, when their real problem might be growing up in a dumb, regressing, morally manic society.”

Wonderfully put.

Meet the Censored: Kara Dansky by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“The far left, libertarians, Greens, and other assorted malcontents used to be just ignored by popular media, but now they don’t even enjoy that privilege. The new instinct has a clear and effective purpose, to create the illusion that there is no intramural debate on one side of the aisle, that disagreers are actually enemies in disguise.”

“But adding that T, I think it was an absolutely ingenious political strategy, because this whole thing is an effort to persuade ordinary Americans that biological sex doesn’t exist. If the proponents of this ideology had simply said, “Biological sex doesn’t exist,” ordinary Americans would say, “What are you talking about? Everybody knows how babies are made.” So they made up the T, they made up the word, and then they got it attached to what was a very legitimate and very successful civil rights movement.”

“We’re literally dealing with a situation today where female prisoners are being housed in prisons with male rapists and murderers. That is actually happening. That’s not theoretical. I really think that that needs to be a national scandal, and I don’t understand…”

“I appreciate a lot that’s in the film, but approximately zero Democrats are going to be persuaded by a Daily Wire production featuring a Christian conservative traditionalist. They need us. But they ignore us because they either don’t realize this (or they do and they just don’t care), and because it would not advance their traditionalist conservative agenda to credit feminists with having accomplished anything positive.”

“It’s as if these interview subjects believe winning over people who don’t already agree with them is not only not important, but offensive and beneath them. Certainly the subjects in What is a Woman? go out of their way to dismiss as utterly insignificant those who don’t share their worldview.”

“Wright said, “I think it did a great job highlighting just how radical gender ideology is. It is not simply pseudoscience, but is anti-science as it fundamentally rejects the notion of a stable and discoverable material reality.” He added, “Gender ideology views truth as something that is literally socially constructed by language, and therefore rejects the notion of ‘The Truth’ in favor of relativistic notions of ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth.’””

“There is a perception that these relatively new controversies have been declared undebatable, by a priesthood of experts who feel above talking to the unwashed.”

“Ignoring popular discontent or confusion on principle isn’t a strategy that can ever work, for any political movement. Walsh’s movie exposes this, and give him credit — he got the people inclined to hate him the most to make his arguments for him.”

Art & Literature

Mad God by Simon Abrams (RogerEbert.com)

“This description does not, admittedly, tell you much, but the movie’s less of a narrative-driven parable than a dazzling and corrosively cynical vision of a hyper-compartmentalized society that’s struggling to both die and reset. Tippett’s overwhelming descent into his own id also inevitably reveals itself to be about its own miraculous creation. Beautiful and disgusting, mean and awe-inspiring, “Mad God” looks like multiple people died to make it exactly as you see it.”

“It’s amazing that this movie exists, is what I’m trying to say.”

“In some scenes, characters either seem to enjoy or simply accept the daily reality of being surveyed. In all scenes, there’s a melancholic certainty that whatever comes next won’t be friendly or necessarily sensible beyond its basic self-serving function: as long as I can get mine, everyone/thing else can go to hell.”

Abolish the Military-Entertainment Complex by David Sirota (Jacobin)

“As a top military recruiter told Fox News, “We want to take advantage of the opportunity to connect not just the movie and the idea of a military service, but the fact that we’ve got jobs and we’ve got recruiters waiting for them.” This sort of quid pro quo is nothing new. For decades, the military has been working hand in hand with Hollywood to help make promotional films and television shows — and deter the making of movies that question the military and militarism as an ideology.”

“Getting access to military hardware at free or reduced rate prices is effectively a huge government subsidy to studios that agree to the military’s propaganda demands”

“The movie’s glaringly incurious characters and story were no accident. The script was shaped by Pentagon brass in exchange for full access to all sorts of hardware — the access itself a priceless taxpayer subsidy. According to Maclean’s, Paramount Pictures paid just “$1.1 million for the use of warplanes and an aircraft carrier,” far less than it would have cost the studio had it been compelled to finance the eye candy itself.”

“Though many parents might have objected to such obscene Pentagon-Hollywood collusion, most had no idea it was taking place. Unlike the proudly Pentagon-financed-and-advertised newsreels made by Hollywood directors during, say, World War II, filmmakers from the 1980s on almost never tell audiences that they are enjoying military-subsidized-and-sculpted productions.”

“As the director of The Hunt for Red October recounted, this new reality prompted studios in the ’80s to start telling screenwriters and directors to “get the cooperation of the [military], or forget about making the picture.” Not surprisingly, that directive has fostered an insidious pressure for pro-militarist self-censorship among a whole generation of screenwriters.”

“How many of the dead Americans joined the military because of some movie that they saw not knowing that the military was the ones that were behind the scenes manipulating the content of the script to make the military look better than it really was? Once they got to Iraq it was too late — it wasn’t so glamorous over there.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Seventeen Theses on Disability by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)

“Almost no disabilities come with any kind of compensatory benefits, and none come with vague and flattering psychosocial benefits such as superior insight or being “deeper” than those around you. Assumptions otherwise are based on a desire to establish some sort of inherent justice in the universe, which does not exist.”

“The goal with all disabilities is to end them with treatment and prevention. Any condition that should not be ended through treatment and prevention is therefore not a disability.”

“The legal and social accommodations extended to those with disabilities exist precisely because disabilities are or create disadvantages, hindrances, problems. If a condition is not a disadvantage or hindrance or problem it therefore does not deserve accommodation.”

“The inevitable long-run impact of these trends − treating disability as just another identity class used for social positioning, and sowing intentional confusion about whether disabilities are harmful − will be to reduce society’s material accommodations for the disabled.”

Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Honkies: Or Why We Should All Resist the Great Assimilation by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“Whiteness isn’t an ethnicity. It has no language or culture. Whiteness is a race. A carefully constructed social class defined by an embrace of Anglo colonialist values like the observance of a rigid capitalist hierarchy, the rejection of cultural diversity, and the exclusion of all those outside of these norms that formed the foundation for the cult of whiteness that thrives in the state today.”

“We also had to forfeit our identity, to lose everything we were, our culture, our language, our traditions, and for what? So we could be one of them, the people who put us in chains and starved us off our own fucking island? So we could wear chinos and a Hawaiian shirt on casual Fridays and wait in line to sing Journey songs with all the other yuppie schnooks on karaoke night at Ruby Tuesday’s? For this we gave up our jigs and our chanties and our folklore and our beautiful Black brides (the Census actually had to add the word “mulatto” to their records because we couldn’t keep our peasant hands off each other). Was it really worth it? Well it was if you wanted to stop being whooped like an outsider and if you think it can’t happen again, think again. That’s how white supremacy really works. It spreads like a virus to any ethnicity that challenges its hegemony. You can resist us or join us and disturbingly plenty of Hispanics have already made the latter Faustian bargain.”

“This is how whiteness works. Those lucky enough not to get thrown away into the bottomless pit of the Prison Industrial Complex or slaughtered by some skinhead at your local grocery store commit ethnic suicide and become douche bags like the rest of us. It could happen to you!”

“Mark my words, if Latinos let their babies grow up to be Irish then our next generation’s Tucker Carlson will be some smug asshole named Juan warning terrified mamacitas about the existential threat of being replaced by those sneaky Malaysians crossing President Hunter Biden’s heavily guarded open borders. The whiteness will get you too if you don’t watch out!”

Notes on the Vibe Shift by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“All paper yellows, and any new way of speaking will come to seem out of it sooner or later. Ways of speaking that were first incubated online by children with no knowledge of history, and evidently next to no knowledge of physical, economic, or social reality, naturally did not prove an exception to this rule. It was a strange way of speaking, the strangest to come along in my lifetime: self-certain, undialectical, content with a few easily memorised slogans, much like those Mao helpfully distilled in his Red Book for the peasant masses. Yet the slogans were most zealously interiorised not by the peasants, but by the educated classes, precaritised as they were, anxious about the security of their positions in a changing world, but at least equipped with the power to deftly manipulate symbols.”

“I think of the “avian dinosaurs”, as some supercilious taxonomists insist on calling them, after the asteroid hit, who must have gone right on twittering (as birds do), and of how the simple sound of their song must have sounded like a sort of continuity too. While that is reassuring in the abstract, in the lived experience of the present moment it is jarring to see the machine of technologically mediated human discursivity rumble on as it does, ensuring epochal continuity from day to day, and one can’t help but wonder just what degree of cataclysm, precisely, would finally make it shut up.”

“Social media exacerbate and quicken the perception of radical breaks — their economic logic, in fact, requires that we perceive new such breaks to be happening daily or weekly. Thus nothing will ever be the same after the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial, or after Elon buys Twitter, or after Harry and Meghan escape from Buckingham, or whatever.”

Technology

Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible? by Molly White

“The technology industry, and the crypto industry especially, has long adopted a “move fast, break things” approach to innovation. Companies and developers have sacrificed quality, security, and user safety in the name of innovation, writing off collateral damage to real human beings as simply a cost of progress. Considerations of ethics, user safety, privacy, security, “how can this be used for evil”, and “is this even good for society” often come as a belated afterthought, and “testing in production” is the norm. Regulators and legislators lag behind, often only intervening once enormous harm has been done (and often not even then).”

“For example, proof-of-attendance NFTs (POAP NFTs, often just called POAPs) aim to prove that a person attended a real-life event or experience, and so such systems will take two wallets holding a POAP from the same event to mean they are likely not operated by the same individual. Other NFTs are issued only after the recipient completes a “quest”—some level of participation or effort that is not trivial—and these are used as a signal of uniqueness under the idea that it would be prohibitively difficult for a person to repeat the effort across many wallets.”

“Some crypto-literate readers will already be familiar with the blockchain trilemma proposed by Vitalik Buterin: decentralization, scalability, and security. Blockchains end up making tradeoffs in one goal to achieve the other two (though there are those who argue all three can be achieved, but that’s another subject entirely). The digital identity trilemma Digital identity has its own trilemma: privacy, Sybil resistance, and decentralization.”

“Now, ignoring Buterin’s more-than-questionable conflation of the lack of a criminal record to trustworthiness, he’s also revealing here that his dreams for soulbound tokens involve police departments uploading criminal records to the blockchain. Not only that, but he’s envisioning a world in which every police department uploads criminal records to a blockchain, providing the level of data completeness required to prove a negative.”

“An acquaintance now quits those ‘old-fashioned’ relationship-building niceties and gets straight to the SSI point. Where do you work? Which college did you go to? Which college did your parents go to? Republican or Democrat? What’s your gender? Your ethnic origins? Do you have this gene or the other one? If you fail to offer up the requisite verifiable claims then you fail to get to ‘trust building’ first base in the SSI century. (Note: this is in fact trust avoidance not trust building.) You are then ignored or indeed rejected. But it’s worse. The new social norm now expects you, expects everyone, and more accurately expects your agents to perform similar examinations as a matter of course. And why not? We’re told it’s beneficial, that it’s trust building, that it’s the missing layer. It’s frictionless. It works on an individual basis and government services have adopted it, so surely then it must be good for society as a whole?”

“I’m also not optimistic about a world where average people are expected to self-custody this kind of data, acting as the source of truth rather than their doctor or the town hall. I’m a software engineer and computer nerd, and I don’t trust myself to self-custody this data.”

“If I suddenly found myself tasked with doing so, I would probably implement some sort of expensive and technically complex system of backups, because I understand there’s no recovering from a catastrophic loss when I am the source of truth on information that is absolutely necessary for me to participate in society.”

“Let’s be clear: I think people should have more control over what data they provide and to whom. I think people should understand what data companies are storing, and why, and they should be able to request its removal. Sensitive data should be protected carefully, with strict limitations on who can access or share it. Penalties for unauthorized sharing or sale of user data should be severe. But as more and more developers and companies and “blockchain visionaries” seek to eschew centralization and trust in the state and institutions, it seems that their definition of “acceptably” when they describe “acceptably non-dystopian” projects is very different from my own.”

Programming

Mobile-First CSS: Is It Time for a Rethink? by Patrick Clancey (A List Apart)

“If a component’s layout looks like it should be based on Flexbox at all breakpoints, it’s fine and can be coded in the default style sheet. But if it looks like Grid would be much better for large screens and Flexbox for mobile, these can both be done entirely independently when the CSS is put into closed media query ranges. Also, developing simultaneously requires you to have a good understanding of any given component in all breakpoints up front. This can help surface issues in the design earlier in the development process.”

“The goal is to: Only set styles when needed. Not set them with the expectation of overwriting them later on, again and again. To this end, closed media query ranges are our best friend. If we need to make a change to any given view, we make it in the CSS media query range that applies to the specific breakpoint. We’ll be much less likely to introduce unwanted alterations, and our regression testing only needs to focus on the breakpoint we have actually edited.”

“To determine which version of HTTP you’re using, go to your website and open your browser’s dev tools. Next, select the Network tab and make sure the Protocol column is visible. If “h2” is listed under Protocol, it means HTTP/2 is being used. Note: to view the Protocol in your browser’s dev tools, go to the Network tab, reload your page, right-click any column header (e.g., Name), and check the Protocol column.”

“An organization that is going to, as Norman Siegel, who was featured in my documentary Mighty Ira, once said, “If I’m going to have anything tattooed on my chest, it’s going to be ‘neutral principles.’” That’s really what we’re advocating for here, that freedom of speech is an insurance policy for us. If we don’t defend the rights of speakers with whom we disagree with, how can we expect our rights to be protected?”