Last night’s newsletter today. If you like the newsletter you should sign up here, as sometimes I post these here and sometimes I don’t.

No main story this time. Please note a new edition to our format — some stories are marked “evolving”. These are stories which have caught my interest, but where the story is nascent enough that I haven’t seen it reported on a solid site yet. I’ve struggled with these stories, because one of the things I like to do is share early-stage stories here: this tag is my compromise. “Evolving” means simply “There’s a story out there that were keeping an eye on, treat with caution.”

Killing the town square to “save” it

Apple calls its stores town squares, which makes us all throw up in our mouths a little.

Uber won’t be fined by Portland for flagrant violations of the law.

YouTube may be banning LGBTQ+ gaming videos from making money on the platform, just for mentioning bad words like “lesbian”. [evolving]

Paleofake Persistence

Warm water doesn’t help clean your hands, but no one can kill zombie advice, so we pour tons of carbon into the atmosphere just because.

Global Potemkin Village

Fighting fake news in Germany (with success, actually).

An alt-right emerges online in South Korea.

BBC sorts out the “fake news” issues in the Myanmar conflict – short answer: yes, there is some exageration and fakery, but when journalists are banned what do you expect?

Blue Whale hysteria hits India

Kenya continues to investigate fake news aimed at stirring ethnic tensions, with an eye toward prosecution.

1984, Inc.

According to a new-ish report, Vladmir Putin doesn’t so much oversee a totalitarian state as a “mobilization state” – private, individual actors are mobilized for state purposes, without being directly controlled by the state. “The government is willing – within certain bounds – to accept the presence of civil society, a free press, independent economic activity, and even some political pluralism. However, in keeping with its general philosophical belief that it is at (political) war and faces an existential cultural and political threat from the West, it reserves to itself the right to co-opt any individual or organisation when it feels the need.” This is the new face of authoritarianism.

ACLU is suing to stop warrantless phone searches at the border. Probably a lot better use of their time than defending Nazis.

The EFF has resigned from the W3C over the W3C’s reckless push for a standard of web-based DRM that makes everyone less safe.

WikiTribune was going to have a new wiki approach to news, and I’m interested in that. And I like founder Jimmy Wales, who has been a great influence on the web, of course. But I’m very worried that the first article they’ve put out is a puff piece about an organization Jimmy Wales is working with. Actual lede: “An unusual coalition of figures from the movie and music industries, fantastically wealthy philanthropists, human rights leaders, politicians, and diplomats are pushing against the nationalism and gloom evident since Brexit and the U.S. elections to push for bold new goals to combat poverty, health and security.” And it’s a crowd Wales will be talking to. We need better than this, please. (And is it just me or is that sentence really hard to parse?)

Facebook is becoming the internet, and when seen through that lens it looks more like China than a modern democracy. [NYT video] Also, from April, We Need More Alternatives to Facebook.

There’s a conservative case to be made for busting the Google-Amazon-Facebook monopolies.

In light of recent events, you probably want to read Bruce Schneir’s old post on Data as a Toxic Asset. The crazy but true thing proposed there – companies hold onto toxic data because it’s the only way to justify out of whack valuations. They risk your life and our democracy not even for direct profit, but for investor hand-waving. They are risking everything to preserve their elevator pitch.

BTW the world is burning

It turns out we may have a chance – just sliver of a chance – of avoiding the catastrophic levels of global warming. No secret how: stop pumping carbon into the air, abide by current agreements. Under another administratiion this would be amazingly hopeful news. [evolving]

Crapjects for a Post-Truth World

If you teach this stuff to students you should probably know what “prank” site generators are.

Polarization and the Twilight of the Elites

Hillary Clinton finds that de Tocqueville got there first. According to his treatment of the French revolution, revolts start not in the places that have it worst, but in places with the biggest expectation gaps.

This paper argues that engaging a frame of “civic duty” leads to more rational policy preference formation when processing information. That would be great if true, and could be a path to saving the world. Too bad the article’s paywalled.

Justin Murphy argues that the data we have (at least presently) shows very little movement towards the conservative or liberal poles in the U.S. in the past few decades, and that the only long term trend is increasing social liberalism.

If that’s true, then how do we explain polarization? I’m going to come back to the point I keep pressing: polarization is driven by elites. And where I am right now on it is that that elite polarization is largely driven by strategic concerns and outcomes, both in media and political life. I’m not 100% sure on this, but that’s where I am at the moment. Elites polarize for strategic reasons, partisans follow the cues. That’s not to say that some ideas on the “fringes” aren’t right — but when we look at why polarization seems asymmetric, for examples, we should find our answers as much in strategy as psychology.

Related to that, an interesting paper that I haven’t dug into yet that shows the impact on partisan cues on reasoning.

Via Maria Popova, a reminder from Karl Popper: “Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we can correct them.” This confusion – that truth and certainty are the same – underlies much disinfo and conspiracy theory.

The Rock 2020

Conspiracist Alex Jones has said he might support The Rock if he runs. I won’t link – you can look it up. I think Johnson’s better move is to run on the Democratic side if he’s running in 2020: the math on presidential same-party challenges is pretty bad. (Note: I’m not saying that it’s good or bad he runs, I’m just saying there’s a good chance he’s going to run and do fairly well).