Myanmar, Kenya, Resistance, Power, and Fire
Thoughtful Net #61: curated links from the past few weeks
You may notice that I haven’t put a The Best section in this issue; that’s because the links in the Politics section are all brilliant and I couldn’t choose between them, so I urge you to please read them all. When you do, try to remember this quote from Paul Virilio:
Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
Politics
How Social Media Took Us From Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
Zeynep Tufekci on how the promise of online networks to create change has been weaponised by people in power. Brilliant, this.
Digital platforms allowed communities to gather and form in new ways, but they also dispersed existing communities, those that had watched the same TV news and read the same newspapers.
How Facebook Failed The Rohingya In Myanmar
A recent UN report into Myanmar’s ‘genocide’ of the Rohingya people called Facebook a “useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate”. This is an investigation into exactly how the social network was implicated, and what they’re doing in response. By Megha Rajagopalan, Lam Thuy Vo, and Aung Naing Soe.
As Facebook’s user base grew in Myanmar, it’s unclear whether the site fully appreciated a notion that is familiar to social scientists and historians: that dehumanizing rhetoric targeting minority ethnic groups and spread through mass media channels can be a catalyst for ethnic cleansing.
Kenya’s Technology Evolved. Its Political Problems Stayed the Same
Ten years of radical technological change has transformed many areas of life in Kenya, but has done nothing to combat violence between ethnic groups. By Nanjala Nyabola.
The primary lesson is that when communication platforms cater to specific audiences while shutting out others amid existing social divides, hate speech thrives. And this was as true of pre-internet technology as it is now.
Culture
Brazil’s Museum Fire Proves Cultural Memory Needs a Digital Backup
Emily Dreyfuss on the aftermath of the terrible fire that destroyed Brazil’s national museum, and the lack of concerted effort to create a digital archive of priceless culture.
Fire doesn’t heed history. It doesn’t care about posterity or culture or memory. Fire consumes everything and anything, even if that thing is the last of its kind.
How TripAdvisor Changed Travel
Trip Advisor has become the de facto standard for reviewing places, but its power has real-world consequences and has left it in a fragile position. By Linda Kinstler.
In promising a faithful portrait of the world, TripAdvisor has, like other tech giants, found itself in the unhappy position of becoming an arbiter of truth, of having to determine which reviews are real and which are fake, which are accurate and which are not, and how free speech on their platform should be.
The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us
Ostensibly a review of books about the internet, but actually a piece full of tremendous insight about our relationship to it–and all the more impressive for its foresight of the reality of living in 2018, considering it was written in 2011. By Adam Gopnik.
A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them.
God Is in the Machine
Carl Miller on the inscrutability of complex algorithms, and the danger that poses as they’re given more influence over our lives.
Algorithms… are capable of accomplishing tasks and tackling problems that they’ve never been able to do before. They are able, really, to handle an unfathomably complex world better than a human can. But exactly because they can, the way they work has become unfathomable too.
The New Reading Environment
The relationship between writers and their readers has been changed by article comments and social media into one that rewards equivocation or, worse, the op-ed. By “The Editors”.
Twitter has helped turn the internet into an engine for producing op-eds, for turning writers into op-ed writers, and for turning readers into people on the hunt for an op-ed. The system will not be satisfied until it has made op-ed writers of us all.
The Thoughtful Net is an occasional (less than weekly, more than monthly) publication collecting great writing about the internet and technology, culture, information, society, science, and philosophy. If you prefer to receive it in your inbox you can follow this publication or subscribe to the email newsletter.
