Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Let boys be happy boys

    I’ve written a few times here about toxic masculinity, the idea that certain beliefs and expectations are bad for men as well as women. This, by Tim Winton, puts it really well.

    Boys and young men are so routinely expected to betray their better natures, to smother their consciences, to renounce the best of themselves and submit to something low and mean. As if there’s only one way of being a bloke, one valid interpretation of the part, the role, if you like. There’s a constant pressure to enlist, to pull on the uniform of misogyny and join the Shithead Army that enforces and polices sexism.

    One of the most worrying things in the world right now is the radicalisation of young men, much of it online. Many young men are lost, and there are plenty of people offering them easy answers. All too often, they’re the wrong answers.

    In the absence of explicit, widely-shared and enriching rites of passage, young men in particular are forced to make themselves up as they go along. Which usually means they put themselves together from spare parts, and the stuff closest to hand tends to be cheap and defective. And that’s dangerous.

    Recruiters for the likes of the far right know this. It’s why you find them in forums where young men talk about depression, and anywhere else there are vulnerable young men looking for answers. It’s why they amplify the voices that tell people liberals, feminists, people of colour and LGBT people are stealing their birthright.

    A man in manacles doesn’t fully understand the threat he poses to others. Even as he’s raging against his bonds. Especially as he’s raging against his bonds. When you’re bred for mastery, when you’re trained to endure and fight and suppress empathy, how do you find your way in a world that cannot be mastered? How do you live a life in which all of us must eventually surrender and come to terms? Too many men are blunt instruments. Otherwise known, I guess, as tools. Because of poor training, they’re simply not fit for purpose. Because life is not a race, it’s not a game, and it’s not a fight.

    Too many people are telling angry young men that it *is* a race, it *is* a game, it *is* a fight. And that’s harming men and women alike. It’s right and proper that we call out toxic behaviour and male entitlement, but men are victims here too.

    …patriarchy is bondage for boys, too. It disfigures them. Even if they’re the last to notice. Even if they profit from it. And their disfigurement diminishes the ultimate prospects of all of us, wherever we are on the gender spectrum. I think we need to admit this.

  • I can’t get no sleep

    The Caledonian Sleeper train is in the news after the latest concerted “pile-on” (their words) by anti-trans activists who organise on Mumsnet: they don’t want trans people on sleeper trains.

    (It’s interesting to see people with hateful views, many of whom advocate violence against minorities, hiding behind the label “mumsnet user” and abusing the stereotype of mums as nice, unthreatening and sensible people who can’t possibly be vicious bigots. The US religious right trades in similar tropes.)

    Later this year, the service is changing so that people won’t be sharing with strangers at all, so the risk of feeling “uncomfortable” will be removed entirely. But even now it’s a non-issue, as Dr Brooke Magnanti explained on Twitter:

    A lot of people piling on @CalSleeper about gender clearly have never used the service; they can if they wish select single occupancy and sleep by themselves; alternatively, there are sleeper seats in an open carriage where anyone can sit next to anyone.

    You can also travel with friends and family and share your cabin with them.

    As someone who has travelled these routes regularly, it is in fact only seldom that you actually end up sharing with a stranger. And most people use the Sleeper for its intended purpose: TO SLEEP.

    If you feel uncomfortable with your assigned berthmate, you can change when you arrive (the old Sleeper system used to designate anyone with ‘Dr’ as male, so I had to do this on the platform a couple of times)

    Every carriage has an attendant, and every berth has an emergency and attendant call button if anything happens. You can change once the journey is underway; I was reassigned an empty cabin due to noisy/drunk person in the top bunk once.

    I fully support trans people.@CalSleeper, the folks piling on you now are doing it for publicity and headlines. They aren’t even your customers.

    This is something I’ve had to think about. I’m going to a concert in That London in the summer and considered the Sleeper, because it’s by far the most convenient and cost-effective option. But I decided against it: on the one hand my fear of sharing with a bloke (the same fear women have, plus the extra risk of abuse that LGBT people face), on the other my concern about making someone uncomfortable by my mere presence.

    So instead, I’m flying and staying in a hotel. It’s going to cost considerably more money and it’s considerably less convenient but I’m fortunate in that I can choose that option.

    Not everybody can. And that’s the problem with the current wave of anti-trans bile coming from Mumsnet and being parroted, unquestioned, in the media and on social media. It’s about policing where we can go, about limiting our ability to live normally. We’ve even got supposedly sensible newspaper columnists advocating segregated bathrooms, an idea that we’ve seen somewhere before:

    Some of the most vicious racists were mums who claimed black women spread disease and must be segregated; in the US, some suffragettes argued for the vote on the grounds that it would help white power defeat black people’s votes. The same kind of nice, unthreatening and totally not bigoted at all people turned their attentions to gay and lesbian people in the 1970s. It’s not that they were racist, or homophobic. They were “uncomfortable”. They had “genuine concerns”. That was more important than the dignity and safety of other people, people who had much more to fear than they did, people who they demonised and vilified.

    What extremists did then, and what their spiritual heirs are doing now, is weaponising people’s fear of the other, of the unknown. Their goal isn’t to protect anybody. It’s to erase a victimised minority, to prevent them from living normally, to exclude them from public spaces and public life.

    Don’t let the labels fool you: what bigots are doing on Mumsnet is the same radicalisation the alt-right racists and anti-semites have been doing on Reddit and other social media.

    They’re not protecting women. They’re grooming them.

  • Everything is going backwards

     

    The leading trend on UK Twitter today is #PunishAMuslimDay. The Guido Fawkes political blog’s comments section is full of staggering, blatant anti-semitism. Social media has become a cesspool of racism and every other form of bigotry and stupidity imaginable. The world appears to be getting considerably dumber by the day.

    For many years I was evangelical about the internet. I was convinced it would help us become more connected, better educated, more understanding.

    I got that one wrong, didn’t I?

  • Infowar! Huh! What is it good for?

    Profits!

    This is disturbing, to say the least. As the Cambridge Analytica scandal rumbles on, here’s Adam Ramsay’s view of “what happens when you privatise military propaganda”:

    If you privatise war, don’t be surprised if military firms start using the tools of war on ‘their own’ side. When Eisenhower warned of the Military Industrial Complex, he was thinking about physical weapons. But, just as unregulated semi-automatics invented for soldiers end up going off in American schools, it shouldn’t be any kind of surprise that the weapons of information war are going off in Anglo-American votes.

  • Facebook is rotten from the head down

    I’m not the best person to opine on Facebook: during its original meteoric rise I believed its momentum would slow and it would be overtaken by something less obviously dismissive of its users. After all, this was a business built on the belief that its users were “dumb fucks”, as Mark Zuckerberg famously said.

    So you can probably ignore my feeling that Facebook’s current privacy scandal may actually do serious damage to the company.

    But you might want to pay attention to Jean-Louis Gassée, because he is someone worth paying attention to: his career has encompassed important roles in Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Be. His Monday Note newsletters are always worth reading. and this week’s one is about Facebook.

    From the headline – Mark Zuckerberg thinks we’re idiots – on, it doesn’t pull any punches.

    “Your privacy is important to us”. Yes, of course, our privacy is important to you; you made billions by surveilling and mining our private lives.

    He’s writing amid yet more revelations about Facebook’s cavalier approach to privacy. For example, we now know that Facebook has been logging details of every phone call and SMS message made or received by many Android phone users. And we know that Facebook’s incorporation as a system-level app on some devices means it’s been able to avoid privacy protections built into system software.

    A company’s culture emanates from the top and it starts early. In 2004, the man who was in the process of creating Facebook allegedly called Harvard people who entrusted him with their emails, text messages, pictures, and addresses “dumb fucks”. Should we charitably assume he was joking, or ponder the revelatory power of such cracks?

    It’s important to understand what’s going on here. Facebook isn’t sorry that it invaded people’s privacy and made it incredibly easy for people’s personal data to be abused. It’s sorry that we’ve found out about it.

    We don’t know what the fallout of all of this will mean just yet. But it’s much more than just a technology story. Facebook is part of our lives, and as we’re beginning to discover, a very important part of politics. Facebook data wasn’t just weaponised by the Trump campaign but by the Leave.EU campaign too (with some really dodgy money moving around: Private Eye has done some excellent reporting on the links between Conservatives, the DUP and Leave.EU funding). We’re only just beginning to appreciate how deep this particular rabbit hole goes.

    And that’s why I’m probably wrong that we’ll see a big effect on Facebook, let alone a rethink of the value of privacy and personal data in the digital world. There are some very powerful vested interests who really don’t want us to know what they’ve been using our personal data for.

    Put it this way: on the Monday immediately after the Cambridge Analytica story broke, the its London offices were visited by a team of specialist digital forensics experts who came to audit its servers.

    Not from the Information Commissioner’s office. They had to wait another four days to get a warrant, an extraordinarily long delay when we’re talking about a company storing digital information.

    The forensic experts were from an organisation you don’t want anywhere near servers that might contain damning evidence about Facebook.

    Yep.

    Facebook.

  • Social media is different for girls

    I retweeted a post by Common Space editor Angela Haggerty last night. If you’re not familiar with the social network Twitter, retweeting is when you copy somebody’s message so that the people who follow you on Twitter can see it.

    As part of a thread on Twitter’s toxic abuse problem, Haggerty wrote:

    Social media abuse is probably doing more long term harm to young women/girls, and they don’t have a voice in media. Some of the stories I’ve heard are frightening and I don’t think I could have coped with it as a teen. As adults we have a huge responsibility to fight this.

    This isn’t remotely surprising to anybody who’s been paying attention. Social media can be toxic, and it can be especially toxic for young women – even more so if those women are from any minority group.

    So naturally a complete stranger charged into my Twitter mentions to post widely-debunked Men’s Rights Activist nonsense: women are really the villains, men get more online abuse, lesbians are wife-beaters and so on.

    I’ll spare you the ins and outs of my replies – executive summary: there’s tons of data that shows the significant difference in what men and women experience online; men are more likely to be told to piss off or called a cockwomble while women are more likely to be threatened with sexual violence – and present an anecdote instead.

    I’ve been using social media since 1994*. I’ve been a journalist since 1998. And I didn’t come out online as trans until 2017.

    That means I was a guy on social media for 23 years and a male journalist with publicly available social media and email for 19 years.

    During that period, lots of people called me names and told me to fuck off. Some people made a hobby of it.

    But the total amount of actual abuse I experienced in total over 19 years is less than many women experience in one day.

    * CompuServe forums FTW! <g>

  • The best democracy money can buy

    This is superb journalism, very frightening and quite clearly the tip of an iceberg.

    Observer: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.

    The short version: one company surreptitiously and unethically gathered data on 1/3 of US Facebook users and used it to precision-target them with political messages on behalf of the Trump campaign.

    The algorithm at the heart of the Facebook data breach sounds almost too dystopian to be real. It trawls through the most apparently trivial, throwaway postings –the “likes” users dole out as they browse the site – to gather sensitive personal information about sexual orientation, race, gender, even intelligence and childhood trauma.

    A few dozen “likes” can give a strong prediction of which party a user will vote for, reveal their gender and whether their partner is likely to be a man or woman, provide powerful clues about whether their parents stayed together throughout their childhood and predict their vulnerability to substance abuse. And it can do all this without an need for delving into personal messages, posts, status updates, photos or all the other information Facebook holds.

    Meet the data whistleblower.

    How Likes became a weapon.

    The same company was used by the Leave side during the run-up to the Brexit referendum.

    The data in this scandal is a tiny proportion of the data Facebook has on everybody.

    Here’s your regular reminder that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, plans to run for President of the USA.

  • If it’s outrageous, it’s contagious. And dangerous

    This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but an algorithm.

    In the New York Times. Zeynep Tufekci describes YouTube’s radicalisation problem. No matter the starting point, it recommends increasingly extreme content.

    YouTube has recently come under fire for recommending videos promoting the conspiracy theory that the outspoken survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., are “crisis actors” masquerading as victims. Jonathan Albright, a researcher at Columbia, recently “seeded” a YouTube account with a search for “crisis actor” and found that following the “up next” recommendations led to a network of some 9,000 videos promoting that and related conspiracy theories, including the claim that the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax.

    What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire

    We like conspiracies. We want to know the news THEY don’t want us to see, the products THEY tried to ban, the secrets THEY don’t want us to know. And such bullshit has been around for centuries.

    What’s different is that previously, the bullshit wasn’t mainstream. The much-derided media “gatekeepers” ensured that this shit didn’t spread beyond very small groups of people. Extreme and unhinged voices were largely unable to get a platform.

    Now, we don’t have gatekeepers. For younger people YouTube and Facebook are their BBC and CNN, and there’s often an assumption that if it’s on these sites it must be okay. And it’s not okay. It’s far from okay.

    Extremist content isn’t just being uploaded; it’s staying up. Good luck reporting actual Nazis to Twitter, or actual Nazi propaganda to Facebook, or bigotry and hate speech on any social network.

    Free speech über alles. Fuck the consequences.

    The “if it’s outrageous it’s contagious” approach prioritises the worst of us. It has turned social media into a very dangerous weapon.

    We’ll be reaping the whirlwind for a long time to come.

  • The camera lies

    If you think we’ve got problems with fake news now, wait until deepfake is mainstream.

    The Guardian:

    Show a neural network enough examples of faces from two celebrities and it’ll develop its own mental model of what they look like, capable of generating new faces with specific expressions.

    Ask it to generate a set of expressions on one face that are mapped onto a second face, and you have the beginnings of a convincing, automatically generated, utterly fake video. And so, naturally, the internet created a lot of porn.

    I haven’t seen the porn – I have no interest in seeing videos created without people’s consent – but I have seen what the technology can do in the hands of ethical people.

    This is absolutely stunning: Sven Charleer replaces actors with his wife.

    Beyond just pure fun, I can only imagine how people will start turning this tech into business ideas. Fashion will be huge (what would I look like with this kind of hair, this kind of dress…), fitness could be interesting (do I look good with muscles, will I really look better skinny), travel (this is you standing on a beach is going to be quite convincing). It’ll bring advertising to a whole new level. No need to imagine what if, they’ll tell you what your “better” life will look like! And it’ll be hard to get that picture out of your head…

    This technology is in its infancy, but it’s getting smarter by the day. And the potential ramifications for everything from revenge porn to political propaganda are enormous and disturbing.

    Back to The Guardian:

    It’s grim. But it’s not going to go away. The technology is publicly available, extensively documented, and the subject of research around the globe. This is our world now. As Lucas warned MPs: “Please don’t spend too much time looking in the mirror at what Russia did to us; look through the windscreen at what’s coming down the road. That’s much more dangerous.”

  • “My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come?”

    Good news for anybody stuck in 1818: The Sun and The Times have both shared the incredible revelation that according to “snowflake students”, the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus should be pitied.

    Here’s The Sun:

    Next the snowflakes will be telling us that The Metamorphosis wasn’t really about cockroaches and that Jonathan Swift didn’t really want us to eat children.

    As the kids might put it: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯