Repetition

 

Just to make sure you understand.

Because anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, apparently.

Destined

Because it's the "in" thing, video game studio Bungie (the creators of the Halo franchise, and, more recently Destiny and the rebooted Marathon) has laid off a significant number of staff. According to a statement published online, part of the reason for the reorganization of the company was that "Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years."

I played Destiny and Destiny 2 for quite a long time, even if I wasn't all that great at it. They were fun games, at least for a time. One day, after not having played Destiny 2 for some time, I loaded it up again, and within 30 minutes was having a grand old time, running, jumping around the map and shooting aliens in the face. After a couple of hours, when I logged off, I asked myself, "Why did I stop playing this game?"

The next day there was an update, and a new environment opened up. Being the sort of gamer who loves to explore the environments (especially when they are as well-crafted as Destiny's were), I jumped in, and found myself in a mission to fight my way through some sort of spaceship or orbital station... I don't remember which. It was fine, until my character encountered the final boss. And died. I tried again. And died. Over, and over, and over again, I adjusted my tactics, tinkered with my character's loadout, and tried again. Only to be killed by a powerful, and bullet-spongy final boss. Which reminded me of why I'd stopped playing Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 was a very particular type of game, and one aimed at a very particular type of first-person shooter player. It likely goes without saying that I was not that type of player. And so I eventually found myself pushed out of the game, because I didn't have the inclination, or the time, to mold myself into the sort of player that the game was geared towards, and Bungie wasn't ready and or able to make the game more accommodating of other types of players.

According to the "Bartle taxonomy of player types," first laid out 30 years ago by Richard Bartle, I'm an Explorer. I'm the sort of player who love to have their character wander around in new environments and just check them out. Finding a secret or hidden pathway to something I've never seen before is the highlight of a session for me.

And Destiny 2 wasn't built for that sort of thing. It had a number of really interesting places to explore, but many of them were gated behind difficult fight sequences, or were parts of raids and weren't really designed to just roam around and examine in detail. And so I drifted away.

With new companies, the question they have to be able to answer is: Why should people stop playing their current favorite games to play yours? For established companies like Bungie, the question becomes: Why should people continue to play your game, rather than explore what else is out there?" And I think that they didn't take that question as seriously as perhaps they might. And the business is starting to wither as a result.

One Week Left

A week from today will be the 4th of July, and 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It's supposed to be a big deal.

But it will, of course, be just another day in the grand scheme of things, and even in the life of the nation. Especially given that so many people have fundamental disagreements of what, if anything, there is to celebrate.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that "A House divided against itself cannot stand," but the United States has always been divided, often in multiple ways, and it's still here. The Trump Administration may not be doing much to bring the nation together (unsurprising, given how few people seem to genuinely want such an outcome), but even they are unlikely to bring the whole enterprise down around everyone's heads.

And so life will go on. As it has for all of the years before. Because change is expensive, and very few people feel flush enough to pay what it asks. And so they don't volunteer. And when change has to happen, the costs are passed along until they find someone with no choice but to cough up. And because the perception of scarcity is perhaps the biggest threat to self-governance, the American version of representative and participatory government seems to be at risk, even as it's grown to encompass a vast number of people that, in 1776, were not considered to have the requisite powers of reason to be allowed to have a say in things.

The trade-offs that would need to be made to improve things are straightforward, but also easier said than done, because someone's going to have to be the first person to extend a hand, even though there's a very real chance that it will be cut off, because one should never give a villain an even break. And sometimes, this comes across as a society that dearly loves to have villains.

As I've grown older, I've come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as deserves. The world is as it is, and there is no way in which it ought to be different. If one wants it to change, then one's task is to effectuate that change, either on one's own, or with a group of the like-minded. But, of course, there's more to it than that, because someone will have to pay the price for those changes, and if that feels more like a sacrifice (or theft) than an investment, there will be resistance. And to the degree that such resistance is taken to be the proof of one's correctness, it's cultivated. And so there will be grievance and resentment on what should be a nationwide celebration.

Because the United States of America is made up of people, just like everywhere else is. Perhaps there needs to be a greater recognition of that. That would also be something to celebrate.

Three by Three

Pew Research has published their most recent data on the political typology of the United States, which divides the nation into nine broad ideological categories, namely:

• No Apologies Right
• Faith First Conservatives
• Unconventional Right
• Pragmatic and Polite Right
• Tuned-Out Middle
• Order and Opportunity Left
• Left-Out Left
• Loyal Liberals
• Leftward Progressives

I find it somewhat convenient that there are four right-leaning types, four left-leaning and one rather disengaged one in the center, but I suppose that it makes things more accessible to people that way, given the degree to which many Americans understand politics to only have the single Right-Left dimension.

But, and perhaps this is simply more proof that I'm a nerd, the first thing that came to mind was a Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart, which also has nine types, defined in a grid having Good-Neutral-Evil on one axis and Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic on the other. Dropping Pew's "Tuned-Out Middle" into the "True Neutral" center box of D&D alignments is simple enough, but it become fairly complicated from there... Which type would map to Neutral Evil? Or Chaotic Good?

One could make a political quiz out of that itself... Give people the descriptions of the nine different Types, have them place them on an alignment chart and then see what their choices say about them, and their Type. Given that there are nine Types and nine alignments, I suspect that most people would seek to create a 1:1 correlation, but there's no reason why two or more Types couldn't share a single alignment. For people like me, who don't really believe that real world people ever genuinely qualify as Evil, they'd have to.

But I'm in the minority, I think. I'd be willing to bet that many Left-leaning Americans would have little difficulty filling the three Evil boxes on the alignment chart with the Right-leaning types from the Pew survey and vice-versa. And that there's useful (if perhaps depressing) information in that. Because part of the nature of high levels of partisanship, especially negative affective partisanship, is the view that people on the other side of things are the enemy. And part of the rationale that drives in-group versus out-group animosity is often the idea that the out-group is willfully, deliberately, perverse.

If, for example, a person who identifies with the Faith First Conservatives places themselves as Lawful Good, and slots the Left-Out Left into Chaotic Evil, that tells one a lot about how they view both groups. Them placing the Pragmatic and Polite Right into the Chaotic Evil box says something different, but just as enlightening, especially in a political environment where "having the right enemies" can be an important marker of group identity.

Limelight

One of the great things about just being out and conversing with random people is that one never knows that sorts of topics might come up. I had the opportunity to tell someone my theory on why people would set their resale prices for Trader Joe's mini tote bags (which are on sale again, by the way) at levels that no rational person would pay, and it spiraled into a conversation about the incentive structure of the attention economy.

My interlocutor was a bit conspiratorial for my tastes, but it was an interesting discussion nonetheless. I should come up with random things to talk to people about more often.

Because otherwise, I find, discussions tend to turn to things that cause people anxiety, and while it can be good to help soothe people's worries, sometimes it seems that it just reinforces those anxieties, or people become agitated if their concerns are not shared. Which I get; I understand the logic behind "misery shared is misery halved," after all. What I don't really understand is what I get out of my half-measure of someone else's misery. I'd rather take a stab at simply making them less miserable.

Which, like a lot of things, is more easily said that done. Now that I'm middle aged, I can look back on life and see something of a pattern. While people have always had worries about "the rich and powerful," there's been a general ratcheting up of who qualifies as that. The sorts of wealthy people that someone might tell you ran the world in the 1990s barely qualify as influential now; the bar for being "an élite" has risen much faster than the rate of inflation. Mainly, I think, because it tracks with visibility. Someone with the current equivalent of Bill Gates' fortune back in the day wouldn't command the same level of public attention that Mr. Gates did at the time, because they wouldn't be as close to the top of the list of wealthy people that one regularly hears about.

So now I'm curious about the role of visibility, and hence, the overall media landscape, in shaping people's general notions of who, or what, it running the show. I understand that my own limited media diet insulates me from a lot of this, but I'm starting to wonder if it plays a bigger role than I would have given it credit for. 

No, You're the Crazy One

[President] Derangement Syndrome is a partisan malady which is diagnosed as a way of calling out opposing partisans over their dislike of any given presidential administration. Republicans, for instance, will call out critics of the Trump Administration as having "Trump Derangement Syndrome," but it would be considered sacrilegious for a Republican to describe, say, President Trump as having "Obama Derangement Syndrome," despite the fact that it appears that Barack Obama has been living rent-free in Donald Trump's head for quite some time now.

I find this interesting for what it says about America politics; namely that even though partisans are wont to speak of the current political moment in very high-stakes, existential terms, they appear to believe that its inappropriate for opposing partisans to do so, even when it seems rational to do so.

President Trump, for example, has taken a lot of steps to punish Democratic leaning areas for apparently nothing more than voting Democratic, and the current Republican redistricting push is explicitly designed to make it easier for Republicans to hold on to the House of Representatives, and thus continue to allow the President to implement policies that are intended to be punitive. So why wouldn't Democrats see that as a threat to themselves and their vision for the nation? Why wouldn't they see the Trump Administration as deliberately wrongheaded? Many Republicans are happy to describe Barack Obama and Joe Biden that way, and it's not clear to me that the former Presidents were anywhere nearly as overtly hostile to their political opponents as President Trump openly describes himself as.

It's a weirdly one-sided vision of conflict.

I mean, if I were actively attempting to kill someone, I would expect them to be pulling out all the stops in defending themselves, if not trying to kill me first, and I think that a lot of people would find it disingenuous of me to expect that the other person would treat me as if I weren't ready, willing and able to do them harm. But that might just be the circles that I move in.

Because there seem to be a lot of people who not only see themselves as being obviously the Good Guys, but expect their opposition to see them that way as well. Which I sort of understand, but it strikes me as an outlook on the world that is immature bordering on actively childish. But maybe this is because I lack a sense of the world as being divided between forces of Good and Evil, and where the two sides understand the roles that they play in the greater narrative. Perhaps if I saw one or the other side as being deliberately perverse, I would also be of the opinion that they're the only side that would think to use unjustified aggression and that they would also realize this.

In this sense [President] Derangement Syndrome isn't a behavioral descriptor, but a moral one. So of course partisans don't use it to describe members of their own coalitions... to do so would be to call those people out as purposely wrong-headed, and violate tenets of in-group solidarity.

Worry, Worry

As with most technology, the problem that many people appear to have with generative automation isn't the technology itself; it's the idea that it's being deployed as a weapon against them by other people.

The United States is perhaps the worst place in the world for generative automation, because it's a society where circles of care tend to be small. If the negative consequences from the rollout of some or another technology don't land on the individual, their family or their friends, it's not of much concern. As is common, "not my problem" equates to "not a problem."

And I think that this is what's leading to the current wave of anxiety in the white-collar workforce. Blue-collar communities that have survived their own waves of downsizing, and the increased unemployment that came with it, aren't going to stand up for the same people who showed, by in large, little sympathy for them. And the investor class tends to see every dollar that goes to labor as a direct hit to their broader financial goals; and are willing to bet that enough of a customer base will remain for companies that layoffs will translate directly into increased returns.

And so people in technology are learning the lesson that so many other previously have learned; the United States believes that it can thrive even when fairly large segments of the population are barely (or not at all) getting by. Sure, the effect of ubiquitous automation may be an economic collapse that results in a repeat of the New Deal, but given the federal government's current willingness to fund subsidies with debt, that may not be as simple as people think it is.

Tech Tied

A snippet, from a LinkedIn post...

[Amazon] Quick: "Rima. If I stopped working tomorrow, what would you do first?"
Me: [long pause]

This is one of the things that I've never really understood about some people's relationship to technology. It's one thing to ask people how they would keep in contact with distant contacts without telephony... for most people, telephones (in general, not just cellular phones) have been around their entire lives; they've literally never known a time when one couldn't simply pick up the phone and call someone.

As much as I understand the Worldwide Director for Data & AI Go-To-Market at Amazon being a generative automation booster, the idea that she would have literally no idea how to do her job without access to a tool that she had no access to for most of her career seems very far-fetched to me. I still know how to navigate without using GPS, and can back a car into a driveway or parking space without backup cameras. These are really useful technologies, but they haven't scooped the old skills that I once used out of my brain. Granted, I'm bad at remembering telephone numbers these days, but it's not as if I couldn't tell you what I'd do if I lost access to my phonebook application.

To be fair, this is an Amazon executive advertising their product... a certain amount of hype and puffery is to be expected. But this isn't the only instance I've encountered of people positioning modern technology as the only way they can get things done, when there was a time in recent memory when they had to do otherwise. I understand the impulse to see technology as a necessity in this way, but it always stands out for me when people do.

Honestly

[Yohuru] Williams[, founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas] says it's time to have an "honest" conversation about the historical legacy of corporal punishment within the Black community. "That would be far more communal and affirmative of human dignity and the dignity of black life," he said. "Coming out of the Black Lives Matter movement, you kind of look back at this, and you go, 'We understand it from a historical standpoint.' But from a humanistic and community-centered, restorative justice practices standpoint, there's something that just doesn't sit right with me about this practice. And I think we owe it to ourselves as a community to revisit that."
D.C.-area artist turns belts into a conversation about discipline

I'm always dubious of calls for an "honest" conversation about things, mainly because the person making the call seems to appoint themselves the arbiter of what constitutes honesty. And since calls for honest conversation presuppose that the discourse to that point have been somehow dishonest, this tends to place the person into the position of somehow knowing the minds of others.

I understand Mr. Williams' viewpoint in this, but not everyone is a humanist, community-centric believer in the tenets of restorative justice. Accordingly, they're likely to have a different understanding of corporal punishment and its effects on the broader community. While I understand that the practice of corporal punishment doesn't sit right with him, that doesn't create an obligation for the community at large to come to an understanding that does sit well with him. Or that the current understanding is not an honest one.

There's nothing wrong with advocating for one's position. But I'm not a fan of the idea that it's the only genuine way of looking that things.

Unneighborly

According to the Wall Street Journal, State Farm sales agents are up in arms over a scheme to reduce their compensation and benefits, now that State Farm has lost the title of premier auto insurer to Progressive.

I don't blame them.

I used to be a State Farm customer. I was with them for many years.

One day, my car was in the parking lot of a local drugstore, when some yahoo hit it and drove away. I called State Farm and was told to use their online claims tool. Which I did. A week went by, with no response. In the meantime, I learned that I really needed to have my car fixed, because despite the fact that it ran perfectly well, the fact that it was now down a headlight and turn signal meant that it wasn't street legal.

So I called State Farm. And was told to use their online tool. I told customer service that I had. The agent looked, and, with clear surprise, told me that the company had simply dropped the ball; for reasons they couldn't explain, my report was still sitting there, waiting to be picked up.

Things went downhill from there. If someone had told me in advance how poorly things would have gone, I wouldn't have believed them. It was an unmitigated disaster. And completely unexpected, given that State Farm wasn't just some random online-only insurance startup.

And so I switched insurers. My State Farm agent, who I really liked, sent me a letter, asking me to come back, and promising me a discount on premiums. I felt badly for him; none of what happened was remotely his fault, yet he was the one expected to grovel. And I told him: what I was looking for was from someone for State Farm corporate to get on the phone and say that they hadn't met expectations. One mistake can be chalked up to human error. When literally nothing works as promised, there's a process problem that needs to be fixed.

I understand State Farm forcing cuts on agents, due to falling revenues. But when I stopped buying insurance through them, it wasn't due to premium rates; it was the impression that I couldn't be sure that I would get the services I was paying for. I shopped around when I switched companies, and the rates were pretty much all the same; the only real way to reduce what I was paying was to drop certain coverage. Given this, I suspect that I'm not the only person who didn't find State Farm to be good value for money. Making the agents take it on the chin won't fix that.

Hot Coffee

Taken in a Seattle-area Starbucks. (Where else?)

One thing that I've never taken the time to learn is image-manipulation software. I'm pretty sure that Photoshop could accentuate the steam rising from the white tumbler pretty easily. Come to think of it, I suspect that if I knew my camera well, I could have made the steam stand out simply by engaging the proper settings. But it's reasonably visible as it is, and that's good enough for my needs.
 

Looking Up

I avoid doomscrolling. I think. I'm not sure that I'm clear enough on the definition of the term to be able to confidently say that I don't do it. I don't spend much time on news sites these days, because most of them require subscriptions, and I don't find most of them valuable enough to trade date, let alone money, for. And other than Linkedin, I don't have much of a social media presence. I enjoyed Google+, but that's long dead at this point. I could never get a straight answer as to the proposed business models of the would-be alternatives, and so never moved over to any of them. I haunt Reddit once in a while, but don't spend much time reading the news there.

So I don't think that I indulge in a lot of doomscrolling. But even without it, it's hard to find positive news about what's going on in the would, since positive items neither sell subscriptions nor drive attention to advertisers. So my media diet tends to have a fairly negative bent to it... which I dislike, and so I'm less likely to spend a lot of time reading the news.

But why do that, when the positive news is out there... it's just a matter of going out and finding it. Part of it, I suspect, is an aversion to the treacly "rainbows and puppies" sort of good news. It's easy to sort, and easy to report, but it comes across as being pretty trivial. There are only so many rousingly successful grade school bake sales I can be bothered to read about. Perhaps it's due to the stories being mainly human interest. And of course there are always people out there doing good things... the population of the United States is in the hundreds of millions, we can't all be jackasses all the time.

I think that what I'm actually looking for is accessible technology news; something I can read to learn how people are getting out there and solving problem, with enough technical detail that it's not all about the personal stories involved, but in language that I can actually make heads or tails of, given that I don't have a technical education.

That's likely to be a rare beast, and unlikely to be free. But, given the length and breadth of the World Wide Web, it's out there somewhere, I just have to find it. I expect that it will be a worthwhile project. 

Enlightening

Why not?

I stopped in a local bookstore and found this display. I'd never heard of celebrity prayer candles before, but it turns out that there's a decent-sized cottage industry for this sort of thing. I already have a few too many things that I don't have an immediate use for, otherwise, I might have purchased one, just for the novelty factor.

I'm a bit surprised that this hasn't made anyone angry enough that it's become newsworthy, but I suppose I shouldn't complain when people take things in stride for a change.
 

Hidden

A low-effort fake profile from LinkedIn.

So I received a connection request on LinkedIn from a person I'd never heard of, and wasn't even a second-level contact. Curious, I looked at their profile. And was greeted by a raft of red flags.

This sort of thing is common with fraudulent LinkedIn profiles: the lack of connections, prior roles without details and only a handful of connection despite a seemingly long career. And all that before I did a reverse image search on the profile picture.

And that commonality can be part of the problem. Because while not all bogus profiles are so obviously bogus, it can be easy to come to the conclusion that they are. And thus, anyone with an ounce of sense should be able to spot them. But someone with a decent amount of time and some resources can avoid many of the obvious pitfalls; existing profiles can be "rented" or compromised, work histories can align with stated timeframes and locations, and a fabricated résumé can be constructed. That may be more effort than a stereotypical third-world fraudster can bring to the project, but not everyone conforms to the stereotype.
 

Can't Buy Me Love

Given the fact that part of the reason why SpaceX wants to build data centers in space is that they understand that many communities find living near ones on Earth sucks, the idea that opposition is the result of a foreign influence campaign by Chinese interests seems to be a bit misguided.

Look, I get it, there's the promise of money to be made from ubiquitous automation, and boosters of technology have long held that the general public is simply too ignorant for their concerns to be allowed to slow progress.

But there's a reason why there are individuals who aren't going for: "This will be great for everyone; just trust us," and that's because time and again, promised benefits haven't arrived (or, perhaps more accurately, haven't been shared), and rather than supporters of technology taking the responsibility to make those who bore the costs whole, fingers were pointed until the whole thing blew over.

If LLMs were going to be such moneymakers, why did Meta and Anthropic feel the need to pirate books to train their systems, rather than just paying for them? I think that there are more causes to be suspicious of generative automation firms than their supporters may be willing to cop to.

The fact of the matter is that "Big Business" are not considered trustworthy by many members of the general public, and "Big Business" hasn't done a whole lot over the years to change that. Generally speaking, it's rare that someone supports something where they bear the costs, but the benefits go to someone else.

All of that said, I think that it's more than "the rich" and "tech moguls" who think (or want to think) they smell a rat. There's a reason why the term "Luddite," is more of a pejorative today than it was originally. When groups of people are pitted against one another, it's common for one or both sides to not only believe they deserve to win, but to see the opposition to them as illegitimate. And a lot of people have hitched their wagons to the generative automation star. It's not only the well-off among them who might resent pushback.

Consolation

 Microsoft's Brad Smith made a blog post today about responding to concerns, especially from young people, about generative automation and the possible impacts on employment.

It's a very cromulent bit of corporation-speak, designed to convey to readers that Microsoft isn't so wealthy, powerful or distant that it doesn't care about people's worries concerning technology. And Mr. Smith is willing to say some things that other corporate executives have been less willing to; he notes that there has been "corporate pressure to reduce headcount to help pay for AI’s enormous capital expenditures," rather than pretending that job cuts were the result of generative automation being able to do the work better. I think I still fault him for making this admission only after that reality had become public knowledge, but honesty is honesty.

But as I read it, I kept being drawn back to the Copilot Super Bowl ad (since removed from YouTube) that aired in 2024. For all that Mr. Smith says that the goal of generative automation is to help people do better work, rather than replace them, the promise of that initial advertisement was that people could be "soloprenuers" by letting Copilot do the things they would hire other people to do. And I said at the time: "If one's fear is that technology will drive isolation, or that AI will render one's skills obsolete, the message of this commercial is not reassuring." I would liked to have seen Mr. Smith acknowledge that there are people who are afraid because Microsoft's messaging gave them reason to be afraid.

Mr. Smith notes that in their book Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI, Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman note five "soft skills that are uniquely human," namely: curiosity, creativity, compassion, communications, and courage. Which is all fine and good. But these are not traits that are in short supply. If the majority of people thought that the demand for these skills were high enough to keep the job market afloat, there wouldn't be so much worry about a jobpocalypse on the horizon.

If widespread adoption of generative automation by businesses is inevitable, and the jobs shed to free up budget for capital expenditures aren't coming back, the technology is going to have to create demand for human labor somewhere else. And "human observation and insight" aren't going to be that demand unless, somehow, the percentage of returns going to labor increases markedly, such that demand for automation-produced goods and services really skyrockets. And that's not a prediction that technology industry analysts seem to be making at this point.

To the degree that progress can be described as a process of creative destruction, I suspect that the public at large is better off when creativity drives destruction, rather than destruction demanding sudden creativity. But the public at large isn't calling the shots. It's the investor class, in search of returns on their investments. And as a high-ranking executive at a publicly-traded company, it's not difficult to tell which of those groups Mr. Smith is more immediately answerable to. And so I wonder about the motivation of this post, from a public relations standpoint. Is this honestly what the leadership of the company is thinking, or is it being conciliatory in an attempt to head off anger that may impact profitability and investor confidence?

Early

I was at Costco this weekend, and noticed that a giant skeleton decoration was already up and on sale. While June seems pretty early for Halloween decorations to be on store shelves, it's something of a necessity if things are both going to be sold, but not in the way of the earlier and earlier start to the Christmas shopping season.

Personally, not being a big Christmas person, I'm not a fan of the longer and longer time that's being devoted to it. But I get it from the point of view of retailers. To the degree that Christmas shopping can be chalked up to impulse buys, it makes sense that stores that have items out first are going to capture sales. And this sets up something of a race to have things out early. And that pushes other seasonal items, like Halloween, earlier in the year.

We'll see if Halloween decorations are on the shelves in May next year, or if the march of the start of the Christmas season takes a year or two to catch its breath.
 

Numbered

I was watching a video by Hank Green, where he was announcing his new podcast, "Humans," and one of the points he was making was that to people who create media for the internet, whether that's YouTube videos, podcasts or what-have-you, they tend to see their audience in terms of numbers, rather than as individuals. Mr. Green said that he spends time in the comments of his videos specifically to interact with people as, well, people.

After that, I watched a short by a guy named "blumineck," in which he related the story of how he was fooled into making an outraged response video to someone appearing to be unsafe with a heavy bow, and had nearly posted it before he realized he'd fallen for a hoax. His takeaway from that was to always verify things, especially those that make one angry, before responding.

Which it pretty common advice about dealing with things on the Internet. I first encountered it well more than a decade ago.

But it occurs to me that between Mr. Green and blumineck, there may be a more general lesson there. And that is: "To many people on the Internet, you're simply a number."

When I posted a "fraudspotting" post on LinkedIn that gained enough traction to top 50,000 "impressions," LinkedIn didn't congratulate me on informing people, or potentially sparing a person whose profile had been copied from reputational damage. Rather they took note of the numbers, and encouraged me to post more in an attempt to keep those numbers rising.

Hank Green had pointed out in his video that for YouTube creators, their interests are somewhat aligned with those to YouTube (Alphabet) itself. YouTube's goal is to increase the number of people who watch videos on the website, and the amount of time that they watch. And to the degree that YouTube rewards more views with more money, a creator can share that goal.

But the goal of making numbers go up can lead to situations in which someone pretends to injure themselves to drive sharing of their video. It can lead to making inflammatory claims for the sake of responses. Or simply a raft of things that all come across as roughly the same as people copy what they have seen others be successful at, in a hope of driving the same numbers.

It's a different mindset than one would have for dealing with a live audience. And keeping that in mind makes the Internet more intelligible. 

Fanrage

I don't know if people understand how much the fandom of something or someone can come to feel valued and respected by the idea that whatever it is exists for them and them specifically. Telling fans to chill out or calm down in the face of changes to the object of their feelings is to tell them that the needs the fandom fulfills are, in fact, trivial.

And, to be sure, to many people, they are. For me, whether or not a character in a movie adaptation is faithful to some original portrayal of them is completely unimportant. But that can also be said for a lot of things that people find important... Importance is, after all, a subjective determination.

So I think that discounting people's emotional attachments may be something done too often in haste. 

Party All the Time

The lower court also “failed to follow our instruction in Callais that the mere fact that voters of different races vote for different parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns.”
Supreme Court permits Alabama to use congressional map struck by lower court as racially discriminatory. SCOTUSblog

So then, one wonders, what is?

In the unsigned order, handed down late last month, the 6 conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court basically said that a racial community that consistently votes in a partisan manner are partisans first, and members of their racial community second. Accordingly, gerrymandering districts in such a way as to dilute their voting power is a partisan act, and not a racially discriminatory one.

I understand the logic in play there, even if I highly doubt that this was what Congress had in mind with the various Voting Rights acts. But those were a long time ago, and in the meantime, the Supreme Court has become a hotbed of partisanship. Not because the justices are bad at their jobs, but because the White House and the Senate effectively control access to the court; and with the President now being the effective leader of their political party, anyone who cannot be shown to be loyal to the party line has zero chance of being nominated, let alone confirmed to the bench. In other words, being a loyal partisan is the job of a Justice of the Supreme Court.

And thus, we have a decision widely regarded as nakedly partisan.

Personally, I'm somewhat impressed the ability of partisans to see partisan bias as good for the country. The whole reason why the Louisiana legislature had redrawn its maps was to add another Republican seat to its Congressional delegation, and it had apparently concluded that there was no way they were going to convince enough voters in either of the districts held by Democrats to change their affiliations; so writing one of the districts out of existence was their only option.

One can debate whose fault this is; Black voters in Louisiana for not buying whatever it was Republicans there are selling, or the Republicans for not being willing to make a deal appealing enough to win over those voters. But the end result of the gerrymander is that it no longer matters... Not needing any more actual votes to secure a new seat, Republicans no longer need to offer anything better to Democratic voters, and they have no reason to respond to any shift those voters might make in their direction. Which, in turn, means that Democrats have no reason to consider Republican candidates. One-party systems, even when not enforced by law, tend to be unresponsive to fairly high levels of dissatisfaction for just this reason; unless their base of support completely collapses, they have the ability to tell those who disagree with them to simply lump it. And they don't have to reward anyone outside of their base of support, because those people have no way of inflicting pain on the establishment. And if their base currently benefits at the expense of outsiders, there's an active incentive to keep them outside.

Of course, one of the recurring blind spots of partisans is to see their positions as objectively right and good, and see the public as having a responsibility to them, rather than the other way around. I think that American politics has become more and more partisan since the election of Ronald Reagan, back when I was in junior high school, with Newt Gingrich and company really kicking the process into high gear. (Although this might simply be a factor of my being too young to really follow politics prior to that.) But they were abetted in this by a general fecklessness in government by both parties at a number of levels, which left a lot of people (and i think more join them every day) with the impression that the only way they could protect their interests was single-party dominance.

The very idea that partisan gerrymanders are allowable, but strictly racial gerrymanders are not speaks to this. While gerrymanders rely on the fact that people's votes can be reliably predicted fairly well in advance, their point is to make elections non-competitive. And this lessens the importance of policies that impact the electorate as a whole, in favor of the preferences of primary voters. To use myself as an example, if I only vote in the general elections, and will base my vote on the party affiliation of whomever is on the ballot, why should any care what my opinion on anything is? My vote isn't in play, and so it affords me no power. Given that political parties are simply private political organizations, why hand them, via their most vocal members, this sort of influence?

Coming up on 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the United States is still a disunified (and largely dysfunctional) polity. There's no rational reason why Democratic and Republican voters should be so at odds with one another that so many of them won't even consider voting across party lines. The divide may not be as total as it's often described, but it's present, and deeper than I suspect is healthy.

Elizabeth Willing Powel: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Benjamin Franklin: “A republic, ma’am. If you can keep it.”
Overheard, it is said, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787

Keep it? I'm not convinced that many people even want any part of it.

Severance

The problem with "inside the Beltway" punditry is that it tends to be divorced from the actual reasons why the public at large does things. I was listening to a recent episode of the Slate Politics podcast, and host David Plotz was attempting to make the point that Graham Platner's character flaws were different, and lesser, than President Trump's, as an answer to a an expected Republican callout of hypocrisy.

What serious Democrat cares if Republicans think they're a hypocrite, given the number of Republicans who already regard them as Enemies of the State? Democrats who are going to vote for Graham Platner will do so not because they've decided he's morally upstanding, but because control of the United States Senate is important, and a Senator Platner makes that more likely than Senator Susan Collins remaining in office does. Disliking the new rules of the game doesn't mean that people don't have to play. And the new rules of the game dictate that controlling the various levers of government is the only thing that matters.

As long as Democratic and Republican voters continue to organize themselves into two mutually hostile camps where "the other side losing" is considered equal to "winning," this is going to be the new normal, because the activist classes on both sides see themselves as too broke to be able to care about right and wrong.

Ironically, it's because they can't afford not to.

"Inside the Beltway" commentary that expects people to feel secure enough to take the high road simply comes across as disconnected from the way that people are actually engaging with politics. And it's difficult to offer workable solutions to a problem when one is committed to an incorrect diagnosis.

Junish

It's June again, and so it's also LGBTQ Pride Month. I have to admit that it's only the Third, and I'm already weary of the skirmishing between conservative Christians and Pride boosters, even if I understand the real and imagined stakes of the conflict.

It reminded me of Ross Douthat's Believe, which I read earlier this year. Chapter 6 is "Three Stumbling Blocks," barriers to returning to faith that Mr. Douthat believes people may encounter. After laying out his answers to "Why Does God Allow So Many Wicked Things to Happen?" and "Why Do Religious Institutions Do So Many Wicked Things?" he moves on to "Why are Traditional Religions So Hung Up on Sex?" (As an aside, I'm curious how he decided that these were the topics to tackle. Perhaps his readers who wrote to him about their vacillations over their choice to leave their faiths sought these answers.)

At one point in the section he notes:

It's possible to think that Christianity or Islam or any other faith is a locus of divinely revealed truth about the universe and that it's gotten sexual ethics almost completely wrong from the get-go. But there's a certain tension between those two beliefs, and it's hardly ridiculous to think that the second one substantially undermines the first. Come worship the God who revealed Himself to us, and who, by the way, let us go completely and cruelly wrong about sex and gender for several thousand years isn't an ideal pitch even if it seems to fit the spirit of the times.

Mr. Douthat then goes on to make his case that religions haven't gotten sexual ethics wrong, but that brings me to another thing that comes up every June: Juneteenth.

Now, when I first learned of Juneteenth, it was just something that people in Texas did to have another excuse for a barbecue. And I don't really pay any more attention to it now. But what's important here is that it doesn't draw sectarian fire in the same way that Pride month does. Even though one can make the case that God, by the way, let humanity go completely and cruelly wrong about owning other people as property for several thousand years.

If it's uncontroversial that Abrahamic acceptance of slavery was actively misguided, why is it so difficult to credit that Abrahamic sexual and gender ethics might also reasonably be considered to have outlived their usefulness? The Bible is pretty clear on the permissibility of owning slaves; Mosaic law doesn't beat around the bush on the topic. Sure, there are people who string together various parts of Scripture to make the case that the Bible actually condemns slave owning, but if that's the case it's remarkable that it took some eighteen centuries for the message to get across, and reasonable to ask why such a long delay.

To defend divine revelation that everyone ought to be either in a monogamous, cisgender, mixed-sex relationship or celibate for life, while discarding divine revelation that slavery is permissible and that slaves have responsibilities to their owners as flawed comes across as cherry-picking. While Mr. Douthat confidently states: "But the social history of the last few decades should, at the very least, disturb one's confidence that the world before the sexual revolution was simply oppressive and the world since simply more liberated and just," making the case that the social history of the period from June 19, 1865 to today should disturb one's confidence that the world before emancipation was simply oppressive, et cetera, would be to invite being pilloried as an unreconstructed racist. Perhaps I'm incorrect in this, but I can't see Mr. Douthat attempting to make the second case, despite the current state of the African-American community writ large.

The sectarian sniping over Pride Month, and whether or not LGBTQ people fit properly into some divine plan is pointless, and drives home the fact that religion can be completely (even if "cruelly" overstates things) out-of-step with modern ethical understanding; all in the name of a refusal to simply live and let live when Internet clout points are on the line.

Vector

There is a type of fraud, perpetrated against job seekers, termed a "Contagious Interview." The tactic has been around for a few years now, and like many fraud tactics, has been evolving and spreading. Originally, it was targeted at developers: a fraudster would ask a job seeker to clone and execute code from code hosting platforms, like GitHub. The code package would have a malicious payload attached to it, and if it was run in an insecure environment, that payload would be installed on the target's computer/network.

It's taken a while, but the technique is now being deployed against other job seekers. Some examples I've heard of are people being asked to record videos of themselves for verification purposes or even something as simple as being sent a Zoom link. In each case, the target is presented with an error message or dialog box that informs them that a driver, or their Zoom installation, is out-of-date and that specific commands need to be run in the Terminal to address this and continue.

Of course, updating camera drivers or video conferencing software doesn't require Terminal commands; this fraud depends on targets following instructions, even when they don't understand precisely what they are doing. And that relies, at least in part, on a certain amount of anxiety. And there's no shortage of anxiety among job seekers today. Someone flustered by a potential roadblock between them and an interview is much more likely to follow dodgy instructions than someone feeling more secure in their situation.

And, of course, someone stressed from being unemployed will find being stolen from via malicious software running on their computer to be a bigger blow than someone with a steady income. But money is money, and the fact that a dollar, pound or euro goes a fairly long way in a poor or developing nation means that people there will continue to target people in wealthy nations who are looking for work. It's a form of resource curse unto itself, and one that will keep evolving, so long as the world's poor have easy access to websites and people's inboxes.