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Category: Technology

  • This machine in Texas could suck up companies’ carbon emissions — if they pay

    To burnish their green credentials, companies have long paid to plant trees or protect forests in the hopes that nature will absorb their greenhouse gas emissions. Shopify, the Canadian company that runs e-commerce sites, wants to take a more hands-on approach — by paying a Texas venture to pull carbon dioxide from the sky and store it underground.

    Shopify struck a deal this month with Carbon Engineering, which is about to start building a sprawling “direct air capture” facility in West Texas with its partner 1PointFive. Their plant, expected to be the largest of its kind, will use huge fans to draw in air and churn out pure CO2. Shopify has agreed to “buy” 10,000 metric tons of the gas that will be permanently sequestered in deep rock formations.

    The initiative comes as corporations are redoubling promises to address climate change. Tech firms, airlines, and oil-and-gas giants have all recently pledged to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050 — a loosely defined strategy which generally means they’re working to cut new emissions and reverse past pollution. Climate scientists say the world must now do both to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by mid-century.

    As part of those efforts, companies as wide-ranging as Microsoft, Audi, ExxonMobil and Stripe are investing in businesses developing cutting-edge technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it away. Selling CO2-removal by the ton offers a way to fund these enormously expensive ventures while allowing companies to claim credit for (eventually) trimming their carbon footprints.

    “We firmly believe these types of frontier technologies are going to be a necessary part of the climate solution,” said Stacy Kauk, director of Shopify’s sustainability fund. Along with the deal it struck to remove 10,000 tons in Texas, the ecommerce software company is buying 5,000 metric tons of carbon removal from Climeworks. The Swiss firm is expanding its direct air capture plant in Iceland and developing a new one in Norway.

    Carbon Engineering’s working pilot plant in Squamish B.C.
    Carbon Engineering

    Shopify aims not only to curb its own carbon footprint from powering and heating its buildings and employees’ travel — nearly 8,000 metric tons in 2019 — but also to jumpstart broader demand for carbon removal projects by being an early adopter. “As direct air capture gains traction, we’re hoping this purchase, plus other purchases from other companies, will start to scale this service and drive down costs,” Kauk said.

    The strategy is likely to catch on with other large businesses and heavy polluters, particularly in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like airlines and steel manufacturing, according to experts. Still, they stressed that these projects shouldn’t replace efforts to slash emissions directly from flying jets, shipping goods, powering buildings, or running factories. 

    “We need to make sure that we don’t dilute the stringency of an emissions reduction target of a given company,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate in the World Resources Institute’s global climate program in Boston.

    Offsets tied to direct air capture may have certain advantages over, say, planting trees. To start, there’s less guesswork around how much carbon is actually pulled from the sky using big machinery. And gas that’s sequestered deep underground is less likely to escape into the atmosphere than from a forest or wetland, where wildfires, plant disease, and human activity can set CO2 loose.

    Projects that remove carbon and permanently store it may also avoid a key criticism of other types of offsets: that they don’t do much for the climate. For instance, a company can pay a nonprofit to protect swaths of the Amazon rainforest from deforestation; the company then claims credits for the CO2 that isn’t emitted as a result of its investment. But if the land isn’t likely to be developed anyway, then it’s impossible to say whether there’s any real benefit.

    In Carbon Engineering’s case, the carbon removal and sequestration will only happen if someone pays to do it, said Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute who is based in Seattle.

    The direct air capture plant in Texas will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. At full scale, the facility could capture 1 million metric tons of CO2 every year, according to Carbon Engineering. The Canadian firm is licensing its technology to 1PointFive, a joint venture between a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the private equity firm Rusheen Capital Management, based in Santa Monica, California. 

    an artist rendering of the direct air capture plant showing a large building with big fans on top
    Artist rendering of what Carbon Engineering’s large-scale Direct Air Capture plants will look like.
    Carbon Engineering

    Much of the captured carbon will be injected into old wells in the Permian Basin to force up remaining oil. But interested customers like Shopify can separately pay for “pure sequestration,” meaning the CO2 would go into long-term storage wells in deep rock formations, according to Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering. The service is “a way of allowing anybody to buy negative emissions,” he said.

    Construction on the giant fans is expected to start this year, with operations slated to begin in late 2024. Oldham said Occidental is working to find nearby sites for storing CO2 and obtain permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates this type of well. Shopify has paid a deposit for the 10,000 tons and will hand over the rest of the money once the carbon is actually removed, said Kauk from Shopify. (She and Oldham declined to disclose financial details. Kauk said only that Shopify is investing $5 million annually to address climate change, of which at least $1 million is devoted to capturing and permanently storing atmospheric carbon.)

    Current estimates put the price of sucking carbon from the sky at about $600 for every metric ton of CO2. Oldham said he expects it to drop to around $100 to $150 per metric ton once more facilities are built. 

    Despite the potential advantages, using direct air capture to reduce a company’s carbon emissions still raises questions and concerns, Broekhoff and other experts said.

    United Airlines, for instance, recently announced plans to make a “multimillion-dollar investment” in 1PointFive, which is leading construction of the Texas facility. United said the investment will help to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. But the airline isn’t buying a share of pure sequestration; it’s backing the entire venture. So it’s unclear how much United’s money leads to “additional” carbon removal, since the project is already underway. It’s also hard to say when, or by how much, this support will translate into actual emissions reductions.

    “Investments are critical, but let’s not imagine that investing in and testing the technology is the same as actually using that technology toward climate goals,” said Simon Nicholson, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University in Washington, D.C. In a blog post, Nicholson and colleagues said the United announcement should be “applauded” as well as the subject of  “careful scrutiny.”

    Given the high cost and technical complexity of these projects, there’s also the risk that some facilities won’t be built or operate as planned. If companies invest now and subtract the captured carbon from their current footprints, they may wind up overestimating the actual results.

    a man stands in front of a big machine that fills an entire industrial space
    Carbon Engineering’s pilot plant pellet reactor and associated equipment.
    Carbon Engineering

    So that outsiders can gauge whether carbon removal projects are delivering on their promises, developers should provide detailed, standardized, and accessible data, according to CarbonPlan, a nonprofit in California. But that’s not currently happening, researchers there said. CarbonPlan recently evaluated dozens of proposals for nature-based and technical solutions and said it couldn’t independently validate claims owing to “missing, incomplete, or duplicative” information.

    “Without stronger disclosures, it’s almost impossible for companies — or the public — to know with confidence whether these activities are working,” CarbonPlan’s researchers wrote.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • This machine in Texas could suck up companies’ carbon emissions — if they pay

    To burnish their green credentials, companies have long paid to plant trees or protect forests in the hopes that nature will absorb their greenhouse gas emissions. Shopify, the Canadian company that runs e-commerce sites, wants to take a more hands-on approach — by paying a Texas venture to pull carbon dioxide from the sky and store it underground.

    Shopify struck a deal this month with Carbon Engineering, which is about to start building a sprawling “direct air capture” facility in West Texas with its partner 1PointFive. Their plant, expected to be the largest of its kind, will use huge fans to draw in air and churn out pure CO2. Shopify has agreed to “buy” 10,000 metric tons of the gas that will be permanently sequestered in deep rock formations.

    The initiative comes as corporations are redoubling promises to address climate change. Tech firms, airlines, and oil-and-gas giants have all recently pledged to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050 — a loosely defined strategy which generally means they’re working to cut new emissions and reverse past pollution. Climate scientists say the world must now do both to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by mid-century.

    As part of those efforts, companies as wide-ranging as Microsoft, Audi, ExxonMobil and Stripe are investing in businesses developing cutting-edge technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it away. Selling CO2-removal by the ton offers a way to fund these enormously expensive ventures while allowing companies to claim credit for (eventually) trimming their carbon footprints.

    “We firmly believe these types of frontier technologies are going to be a necessary part of the climate solution,” said Stacy Kauk, director of Shopify’s sustainability fund. Along with the deal it struck to remove 10,000 tons in Texas, the ecommerce software company is buying 5,000 metric tons of carbon removal from Climeworks. The Swiss firm is expanding its direct air capture plant in Iceland and developing a new one in Norway.

    Carbon Engineering’s working pilot plant in Squamish B.C. Carbon Engineering

    Shopify aims not only to curb its own carbon footprint from powering and heating its buildings and employees’ travel — nearly 8,000 metric tons in 2019 — but also to jumpstart broader demand for carbon removal projects by being an early adopter. “As direct air capture gains traction, we’re hoping this purchase, plus other purchases from other companies, will start to scale this service and drive down costs,” Kauk said.

    The strategy is likely to catch on with other large businesses and heavy polluters, particularly in hard-to-decarbonize sectors like airlines and steel manufacturing, according to experts. Still, they stressed that these projects shouldn’t replace efforts to slash emissions directly from flying jets, shipping goods, powering buildings, or running factories. 

    “We need to make sure that we don’t dilute the stringency of an emissions reduction target of a given company,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate in the World Resources Institute’s global climate program in Boston.

    Offsets tied to direct air capture may have certain advantages over, say, planting trees. To start, there’s less guesswork around how much carbon is actually pulled from the sky using big machinery. And gas that’s sequestered deep underground is less likely to escape into the atmosphere than from a forest or wetland, where wildfires, plant disease, and human activity can set CO2 loose.

    Projects that remove carbon and permanently store it may also avoid a key criticism of other types of offsets: that they don’t do much for the climate. For instance, a company can pay a nonprofit to protect swaths of the Amazon rainforest from deforestation; the company then claims credits for the CO2 that isn’t emitted as a result of its investment. But if the land isn’t likely to be developed anyway, then it’s impossible to say whether there’s any real benefit.

    In Carbon Engineering’s case, the carbon removal and sequestration will only happen if someone pays to do it, said Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute who is based in Seattle.

    The direct air capture plant in Texas will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. At full scale, the facility could capture 1 million metric tons of CO2 every year, according to Carbon Engineering. The Canadian firm is licensing its technology to 1PointFive, a joint venture between a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. and the private equity firm Rusheen Capital Management, based in Santa Monica, California. 

    an artist rendering of the direct air capture plant showing a large building with big fans on top
    Artist rendering of what Carbon Engineering’s large-scale Direct Air Capture plants will look like. Carbon Engineering

    Much of the captured carbon will be injected into old wells in the Permian Basin to force up remaining oil. But interested customers like Shopify can separately pay for “pure sequestration,” meaning the CO2 would go into long-term storage wells in deep rock formations, according to Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering. The service is “a way of allowing anybody to buy negative emissions,” he said.

    Construction on the giant fans is expected to start this year, with operations slated to begin in late 2024. Oldham said Occidental is working to find nearby sites for storing CO2 and obtain permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates this type of well. Shopify has paid a deposit for the 10,000 tons and will hand over the rest of the money once the carbon is actually removed, said Kauk from Shopify. (She and Oldham declined to disclose financial details. Kauk said only that Shopify is investing $5 million annually to address climate change, of which at least $1 million is devoted to capturing and permanently storing atmospheric carbon.)

    Current estimates put the price of sucking carbon from the sky at about $600 for every metric ton of CO2. Oldham said he expects it to drop to around $100 to $150 per metric ton once more facilities are built. 

    Despite the potential advantages, using direct air capture to reduce a company’s carbon emissions still raises questions and concerns, Broekhoff and other experts said.

    United Airlines, for instance, recently announced plans to make a “multimillion-dollar investment” in 1PointFive, which is leading construction of the Texas facility. United said the investment will help to meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. But the airline isn’t buying a share of pure sequestration; it’s backing the entire venture. So it’s unclear how much United’s money leads to “additional” carbon removal, since the project is already underway. It’s also hard to say when, or by how much, this support will translate into actual emissions reductions.

    “Investments are critical, but let’s not imagine that investing in and testing the technology is the same as actually using that technology toward climate goals,” said Simon Nicholson, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University in Washington, D.C. In a blog post, Nicholson and colleagues said the United announcement should be “applauded” as well as the subject of  “careful scrutiny.”

    Given the high cost and technical complexity of these projects, there’s also the risk that some facilities won’t be built or operate as planned. If companies invest now and subtract the captured carbon from their current footprints, they may wind up overestimating the actual results.

    a man stands in front of a big machine that fills an entire industrial space
    Carbon Engineering’s pilot plant pellet reactor and associated equipment. Carbon Engineering

    So that outsiders can gauge whether carbon removal projects are delivering on their promises, developers should provide detailed, standardized, and accessible data, according to CarbonPlan, a nonprofit in California. But that’s not currently happening, researchers there said. CarbonPlan recently evaluated dozens of proposals for nature-based and technical solutions and said it couldn’t independently validate claims owing to “missing, incomplete, or duplicative” information.

    “Without stronger disclosures, it’s almost impossible for companies — or the public — to know with confidence whether these activities are working,” CarbonPlan’s researchers wrote.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This machine in Texas could suck up companies’ carbon emissions — if they pay on Mar 29, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Documents Show Amazon Is Aware Drivers Pee in Bottles and Even Defecate En Route, Despite Company Denial

    In anticipation of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s scheduled trip to Bessemer, Alabama, to support the unionization drive by Amazon workers there, Amazon executive Dave Clark cast the $1 trillion behemoth as “the Bernie Sanders of employers” and taunted: “So if you want to hear about $15 an hour and health care, Senator Sanders will be speaking downtown. But if you would like to make at least $15 an hour and have good health care, Amazon is hiring.”

    Rep. Mark Pocan replied via tweet: “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a progressive workplace when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles,” echoing reports from 2018 that Amazon workers were forced to skip bathroom breaks and pee in bottles. Amazon’s denial was swift: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”


    But Amazon workers with whom I spoke said that the practice was so widespread due to pressure to meet quotas that managers frequently referenced it during meetings and in formal policy documents and emails, which were provided to The Intercept. The practice, these documents show, was known to management, which identified it as a recurring infraction but did nothing to ease the pressure that caused it. In some cases, employees even defecated in bags.

    Amazon did not provide a statement to The Intercept before publication.

    One document from January, marked “Amazon Confidential,” details various infractions by Amazon employees, including “public urination” and “public defecation.” The document was provided to The Intercept by an Amazon employee in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who, like most of the employees I talked to, was granted anonymity to avoid professional reprisal.

    The employee also provided an email sent by an Amazon logistics area manager last May that chastised employees for defecating into bags. “This evening, an associate discovered human feces in an Amazon bag that was returned to station by a driver. This is the 3rd occasion in the last 2 months when bags have been returned to station with poop inside. We understand that DA’s [driver associates] may have emergencies while on-road, and especially during Covid, DAs have struggled to find bathrooms while delivering.”

    “We’ve noticed an uptick recently of all kinds of unsanitary garbage being left inside bags: used masks, gloves, bottles of urine,” the email continues. “By scanning the QR code on the bag, we can easily identify the DA who was in possession of the bag last. These behaviors are unacceptable, and will result in Tier 1 Infractions going forward. Please communicate this message to your drivers. I know if may seem obvious, or like something you shouldn’t need to coach, but please be explicit when communicating the message that they CANNOT poop, or leave bottles of urine inside bags.”

    Obtained by The Intercept

    An email sent by an Amazon logistics area manager in May 2020.

    Obtained by The Intercept

    Halie Marie Brown, a 26-year-old resident of Manteca, California, who worked as a delivery driver for an Amazon delivery contractor, Soon Express, until quitting on March 12, told The Intercept that the practice “happens because we are literally implicitly forced to do so, otherwise we will end up losing our jobs for too many ‘undelivered packages.’”

    An email that Brown received from her manager this past August has a section titled “Urine bottle” and states: “In the morning, you must check your van thoroughly for garbage and urine bottle. If you find urine bottle (s) please report to your lead, supporting staff or me. Vans will be inspected by Amazon during debrief, if urine bottle (s) are found, you will be issue an infraction tier 1 for immediate offboarding.”

    While Amazon technically prohibits the practice — documents characterize it as a “Tier 1” infraction, which employees say can lead to termination — drivers said that this was disingenuous since they can’t meet their quotas otherwise. “They give us 30 minutes of paid breaks, but you will not finish your work if you take it, no matter how fast you are,” one Amazon delivery employee based in Massachusetts told me.

    Asked if management eased up on the quotas in light of the practice, Brown said, “Not at all. In fact, over the course of my time there, our package and stop counts actually increased substantially.”

    This has gotten even more intense, employees say, as Amazon has seen an enormous boom in package orders during the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon employees said their performance is monitored so closely by the firm’s vast employee surveillance arsenal that they are constantly in fear of falling short of their productivity quotas.

    One email, provided to The Intercept by a Houston-based driver associate who works for an Amazon contractor, alludes to company cameras that can find workers who leave urine bottles behind in the vans. “Data from these cameras can be sent to Amazon in the event of any incident on the road. (We have had several bad accidents, a stolen van, drivers leaving piss bottles etc in the vans).”

    The employee said, “Every single day of my shift, I have to use the restroom in a bottle to finish my route on time. This is so common that you’ll often find bottles from other drivers located under seats in the vans. … The fact that Amazon would tweet that is hilarious.”

    Public reports that Amazon employees skipped bathroom breaks originated in a 2018 book by the British journalist James Bloodworth. That book, “Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain,” alleged that Amazon workers at a warehouse in Staffordshire, U.K., resorted to urinating in bottles in order to meet production quotas. While most of the employees I spoke to were drivers who delivered products, workers said the practice was commonplace in factories as well.

    The vote by Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama on whether to unionize has become a flashpoint for organized labor. While Amazon has publicly criticized Sanders, he is far from the only prominent politician to voice support for the employees’ right to form a union. Last month, President Joe Biden released a video statement saying, “Every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union,” which “should be made without intimidation or threats by employers.”

    The election, which ends on March 29, would determine if the more than 5,000 warehouse workers will join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. None of Amazon’s 800,000 employees in the U.S. are currently unionized.

    The post Documents Show Amazon Is Aware Drivers Pee in Bottles and Even Defecate En Route, Despite Company Denial appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Facebook leak underscores strategy to operate in repressive regimes

    Exclusive: users are allowed to praise mass killers and ‘violent non-state actors’ in certain situations

    Facebook users are permitted to praise mass murderers and “violent non-state actors” in certain situations, according to internal guidelines that underline how the tech corporation is striving to operate in repressive regimes.

    The leak also reveals that Facebook maintains a list of “recognised crimes” and instructs its moderators to distinguish between those and “crimes not recognised by FB” when applying the company’s rules.

    Related: Facebook guidelines allow for users to call for death of public figures

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Recommendations to the Biden Administration On Regulating Disinformation and Other Harmful Content on Social Media

    Permalink

    This post was originally published on Press and Publicity – NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

  • The new symbol of climate action: Hard hats?

    Saving the planet never required this many hard hats before — or hammers or blowtorches. A batch of environmental groups released an ad this week titled “Calling All Builders” as part of a new campaign to push President Joe Biden and lawmakers for ambitious green infrastructure plans. And for once, there’s not a polar bear, recycling bin, or tree in sight.

    Instead, the 30-second-long commercial is a call to action for everyday working people. The narrator — who has the kind of deep, gravelly voice normally heard in truck commercials — starts off with a shoutout to welders, roofers, engineers, electricians, brick masons, boilermakers, steelworkers, and steamfitters. “Your country is calling you to rebuild America,” Macho Voice says, “to create a cleaner, safer, more prosperous future for all.” (Implied: After you finish with those barbells.)

    The advertisement, currently running on cable channels in Washington, D.C., kicked off a $10 million public awareness campaign by Climate Power, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Potential Energy Coalition. In addition to echoing Biden’s “Build Back Better” messaging, it appears to be appealing to conservative sensibilities with a “get ’er done” attitude and 20th-century nostalgia.

    It’s the latest effort to give concern for the environment a kick-ass makeover. In 2015, a spoof action-movie trailer showed Pope Francis donning red boxing gloves and taking to the ring to “fight for God’s creation.” More recently, a GM ad narrated by Lebron James introduced the world to an extravagant, 18-foot-long all-electric Hummer. Tesla’s electric vehicles were similarly sold as sexy status symbols. In taking a marketing lesson from car advertisements, the “Calling All Builders” blew the mind of some climate advocates.

    The ad makes the effort to kick the country off fossil fuels look like a job for a CrossFit aficionado. It features a diverse array of people involved in manual labor, including women, but its vibe is burly and rugged. By my count, the ad shows 10 hard hats in the span of 30 seconds, for an average of one hard hat every three seconds. That might seem like an odd metric, but the hard hats are doing double-duty here: The construction gear has long been a symbol of masculinity and blue-collar workers. The phrase “hard hats,” according to an article in the New York Times, has even become “shorthand for working people with a conservative patriotism.”

    Taking care of the planet has sometimes been seen as women’s work. And it’s true that, compared to men, women tend to recycle more, have smaller carbon footprints, and be more concerned about climate change and other environmental crises. Some research suggests that many men avoid doing eco-friendly things because it’s seen as feminine, like carrying a purse or drinking a neon-pink cocktail.

    Climate Power | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DYxwno6CS0

    The TV commercial appears to be aimed at swaying a base that the climate movement has had trouble reaching in the past. Nostalgic messages tend to resonate more with those on the right (remember “Make America Great Again”?), and the new commercial is full of them. The black-and-white color scheme brings to mind old movies and TV shows; the all-caps “YOUR COUNTRY IS CALLING YOU” is reminiscent of the famous World War I-era poster of Uncle Sam in his stars-and-stripes top hat, saying “I WANT YOU for the U.S. ARMY.” 

    “Tackling climate change: This is the job of our lifetime,” the narrator says at the end of the commercial. “It’s time to build back better. Let’s get to work.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The new symbol of climate action: Hard hats? on Mar 18, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Amazon Retaliated Against Chicago Workers Following Spring Covid-19 Protests, NLRB Finds

    In April 2020, as the world was coming to terms with the new coronavirus pandemic, workers at an Amazon sorting facility in Chicago launched a series of safety strikes to demand Covid-19 protections for all staff. It was one of several organized protests by Amazon workers nationwide, and the actions in Chicago, at the DCH1 delivery station in Pilsen on the south side of the city, came after management announced in late March that a worker had tested positive for the virus.

    “We decided to take a stand,” said Shantrece Johnson, a worker who was involved. “Most of us, we don’t mind working, but we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and we had the potential to bring this [virus] home.” Johnson ultimately contracted Covid-19 in mid-April, before Amazon agreed to provide personal protective equipment to workers at the warehouse.

    Roughly 70 to 80 workers participated in the four safety strikes. Among other things, the Chicago workers demanded that their warehouse be shut down for two weeks and cleaned; that Amazon cover the costs of any medical bills for workers who get sick on the job; that the warehouse pause processing nonessential items; and that management provide immediate transparency if and when anyone else got infected.

    Following the strikes, DCH1 Amazon workers said they faced retaliation in the form of intimidation and disciplinary write-ups. Johnson herself was written up, she said, for ostensibly not obeying social distancing. The workers banded together and filed a charge with their regional National Labor Relations Board office. Their charge, known as an unfair labor practice, or ULP, included five allegations of National Labor Relations Act violations. The workers accused their site lead, Domonic Wilkerson, of unlawfully disciplining them for protected activities, unlawfully interrogating them, unlawfully engaging in surveillance, unlawfully breaking up their gatherings, and maintaining an “overly broad rule” that precluded gatherings on Amazon’s property outside their normal shifts.

    In text messages reviewed by The Intercept, the NLRB regional agent assigned to the case informed the workers on February 24 that the federal agency had reached a decision and found merit to the workers’ claims. On March 10, the NLRB told the workers that “Amazon has stated its intent to settle” and that the agency was working with the company to clarify an agreement. (A settlement would lay out how Amazon will remedy the violations, but if Amazon does not ultimately agree to settle, then the NLRB would issue a complaint and schedule a hearing before an administrative law judge.) The timeline is not clear, but as redress, the workers requested that Amazon provide notice, both physically and electronically, to all relevant employees about what happened and make clear that their rights will not be violated again.

    Neither Amazon nor Wilkerson returned requests for comment, and an NLRB spokesperson told The Intercept that the agency could not comment on the case until a final decision is released.

    Ted Miin, one of the workers who filed the charge, said that the most significant thing to him about the NLRB’s decision is “the message that we have rights, we should know them, and we should know how to use the NLRB as a tool to make more room for us to organize.” Miin said that, while anecdotal, he feels that over the last year as their charges have been investigated, management has “been more careful” with workers on a daily basis; Miin also said that personally he felt higher-ups were more accommodating with requests for warehouse supplies, equipment, and day-to-day issues.

    Johnson also called the NLRB decision “a major victory” given Amazon’s “big team of lawyers.” Both Johnson and Miin said they received calls from the regional NLRB in late February informing them that the NRLB found merit to their claims.

    Image-1

    Amazon workers in Chicago celebrate after organizing for paid time off in 2020.

    Photo: Amazonians United Chicagoland

    The Amazon worker organizing happening in Chicago — under the banner of Amazonians United Chicagoland — looks different from the ongoing high-profile union drive in Bessemer, Alabama.

    In Alabama, nearly 6,000 Amazon warehouse workers have been casting votes on whether to form a union with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Voting continues through March 29, and if a majority votes in favor, it would mark the first Amazon union in the United States. (The only previous election, at a warehouse in Delaware in 2014, failed.) The Washington Post reported that more than 1,000 Amazon workers in other parts of the country have contacted the RWDSU about potentially launching their own union organizing drives, and President Joe Biden recently offered support for the workers.

    In Chicago and in other cities, including New York City and Sacramento, there are worker-led Amazonians United groups that consider themselves unions, though they are not affiliated with any formal legally recognized union like the RWDSU.

    “We are not affiliated with any legal organization that claims to be a union, especially major business unions, many of whom have tried to recruit us,” said Miin. He said that they support the Amazon workers in Bessemer and did not rule out affiliating with a formal union in the future but that they have a different approach to worker organizing. Miin added that affiliating with a legal union would be a decision determined democratically by the workers later when and if they felt ready.

    Amazonians United Chicagoland got its start in April 2019, when a handful of DCH1 workers came together to demand clean water be made available to them in the warehouse. Their five-gallon water stations were often left open to dusty air and were never clean, and there were often no cups available, they said. Workers collected 150 signatures from colleagues protesting the conditions, and after delivering the petition to management, Amazon consented to provide water.

    Later that summer, workers banded together again to organize for air conditioning, health insurance, and a pay increase, and by the fall, workers organized around a manager they felt was abusive. Miin says their largest campaign was their successful effort in early 2020, before Covid-19 hit, to push for paid time off. Their organizing was inspired by a similar PTO campaign launched by Amazon workers in Sacramento in December 2019. In a formal update dated March 20, 2020, Amazon confirmed that the workers could begin taking paid time off.

    Do you have a coronavirus story you want to share? Email us at coronavirus@theintercept.com or use one of these secure methods to contact a reporter.

    While the workers are celebrating their not-yet-official victory at the NLRB, their latest fight is against a new policy Amazon began rolling out in January known as “megacycle” shifts. These 10 1/2-hour shifts, which run from 1:20 a.m. to 11:50 a.m., were presented to DCH1 workers as new nonnegotiable work schedules going forward. Vice reported in February that the megacycle shifts were being rolled out quietly at delivery stations nationwide, collapsing multiple shorter shift options into one long one. Workers noted that the new option leaves no flexibility for parents and caretakers.

    Amazonians United has launched a new petition for megacycle accommodations, with demands that include a $2-per-hour pay increase, Lyft rides to and from work to compensate for inaccessible public transit after midnight, and flexibility for associates who can’t work the full shift.

    “I think we’d be really naive to believe the megacycle shifts are in no way related to the organizing we’ve been doing,” said Miin.

    The post Amazon Retaliated Against Chicago Workers Following Spring Covid-19 Protests, NLRB Finds appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Shifty Shifters: Movers and Shapers like a Trillion Locusts

    The final report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concludes that the project has been ‘the most successful anti-poverty movement in history’. Two key claims underpin this narrative: that global poverty has been cut in half, and global hunger nearly in half, since 1990. This good-news narrative has been touted by the United Nations and has been widely repeated by the media. But closer inspection reveals that the UN’s claims about poverty and hunger are misleading, and even intentionally inaccurate. The MDGs have used targeted statistical manipulation to make it seem as though the poverty and hunger trends have been improving when in fact they have worsened. In addition, the MDGs use definitions of poverty and hunger that dramatically underestimate the scale likely of these problems. In reality, around four billion people remain in poverty today, and around two billion remain hungry – more than ever before in history, and between two and four times what the UN would have us believe. The implications of this reality are profound. Worsening poverty and hunger trends indicate that our present model of development is not working and needs to be fundamentally rethought.

    — Jason Hickel, Third World Quarterly , Volume 37, 2016 – Issue 5

    *–*

    How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.

    Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?

    — Michael Parenti

    Genocide Phnom Penh

    Staggering, no,  the memory hole shoveling going on and perpetrated by elites in commerce, weapons, media, education, a la industrial complexes in the second decade of the 21st Century? Like plagues of locusts. Leeches two hundred worth per hominid, and the tapeworm eats the last, next and current generation like a desiccating alien of our nightmares.

    The more light shining on the criminals, spotlights onto the military war lords, floodlights on the entire punishment cabal in governments, in corporations, in policing and uniformed military agencies, the more that bearing witness just peters out. It flags the average Yankee, and the doodle dandy is football, flicks and frolicking with furious caloric intent.

    Welcome to the West. Then, the mind-numbing retorts to the initiation of discourse, of legitimate discussion about the ails of the world, largely set loose by the captains of industries — the military-media-legal-medical-penal-computing-financial-education-energy-AI-real estate-poison-agriculture COMPLEX. And, boy, is it never really “complex” — it’s about the art of the steal, the art of the scam, the art of the grift, the art of the toll-fine-fee-garnishment-penalty-tax-attachment set forth by the lobbies of the lords of death with the Eichmann’s of Bureaucracy greasing the skids and oiling the wheels. Keep those hedge funds going, the trains running, the profits heaping.

    • “We can only take so much trauma.”
    • “The human brain can’t take so much truth.”
    • “Trigger Warning; The Following Stories About Wealth for the Rich and Poverty for the rest of Us Might Cause Spasms of Collective Amnesia, Anxiety, Animosity.”
    • “There is no meek shall inherit the earth. We are talking about the meek and the poor inheriting the toxins, pollutants, the penury, the profound suffering inflicted upon them generation after generation by the rich and their enablers, the ultimate evil — those turning a blind eye to suffering, raping, razing, murdering.”

    I’m getting it from all angles, really, the tired, the over-educated (in terms of college but not in terms of smarts). The tired middle class. Retired and one-trick phony environmentalist ponies. All those huffing and puffing and blowing down the Trump Towers, folk who are self-blinding themselves, as if bearing the truth of Biden et al, as well as bearing the weight of protecting Everything/Anything Empire, while the chorus of War Mongering Democrats a la LGBTQA-+ sing ‘Hallelujah, No More Trump’ puts them right smack where Oedipus was, exposed to the truth and overcome with shame, grief, and remorse. Poking eyes out is the least the people who follow the perverse leaders should do.

    Except, their blinding is symbolic, life-long, from womb to cradle to grave, as in turning a blind eye to the roots, the very radical cause of all the suffering, the police no-knocks, the cesium floating in lungs and bellies, and a dozen other micro-particles from this or that nuclear fallout incident. Symbolic and demonstrative of the kill-for-profits Capitalism.

    It is too too much for the masses — The Truth —  so we all have to gather round the Zoom screen, tune into Amazon Prime, and sing, Give Peace a Chance while the world is fleeced by the billionaires, but also those millionaires (we tend to give millionaires, multi-millionaires a get-out-of-jail pass, when they too are the culprits helping spread that poisonous fallout).

    Professor Bernd Grambow (co-author from IMT Atlantique) added “the present work, using cutting-edge analytical tools, gives only a very small insight in the very large diversity of particles released during the [Fukushima] nuclear accident, much more work is necessary to get a realistic picture of the highly heterogeneous environmental and health impact.”

    Lockdowns for a flu virus, lockdowns for free thought, lockups for free speech, lock and loaded for the Empire, shackled to bills-mortgages-policies-ballooning debt…. BUT  for fuck’s sake, we can’t lock-down the fossil fuel monsters, lock-up the Fukushima shills, shutdown the Olympics, punish and quell the military saber rattlers (read: purveyors of nuclear- chemical-bacterial-viral-digital-intergalactic weaponry).

    Business as usual is a trillion easy dollars in Pandemic Profits, and a cool several trillion more with mandatory masking, Zooming, SARS-CoV2,3,4,5,6 annual vaccinations and semi-annual boosters.

    Passports to their hell. Yet, when you talk to a Kamala Harris floozy, well, they get teary eyed, sing the All Spangled Banner of Buffoonery, and then tell you to hit the road, no more Haeder in their House.

    Literally, people want nothing of politics, or the reveal — showing how their own colonized and kettled thinking under the guise of “liberal” looting under the Democrat Vote has always been part of the problem, not any solution to the world thievery or a pathway to  world peace.

    So What is The Answer?

    It is not a $64,000 question, for sure, since the answer is collectively simple, easily repeated, easily understood, Yet, that is the jig, always looking for the messiah, or having their cake (capitalism) and eating it (profits-profits-profits) too. They are limited and limiting, and they gladly take the Kool-Aide and mix in a shot of Jack Daniels and a jigger of high fructose fizz.

    Resisting for them is not an option. If they can’t converse, frame, contextualize, harmonize, recount, go back in history, recall the scene of the crime(s), then how the hell can these same folk who ask, Well, you sure know how to criticize and go on and on about the ills of Capitalism, but show me any other system that works. Humanity is humanity, whether in the center of Wall Street or out on the Rez?

    This is their thinking, their great retort, and so, how do we get to that point where we just get to the basics, the Cornel West basics– Watch his rumble in the jungle: At Harvard, the worst kind of man-eating institution, along with a few hundred elite schools on this side and that side of the pond:

    Listen to him, watch him, feel his presence of soul, Dr. West. Not a perfect man, thank god!

    So, what is the answer? Justice. Social-spiritual-ecological-cultural-gender-age-racial-ethnic-ecnonmic-educational-food-energy JUSTICE? Using the inverse, the answer is the whole human-whole earth, toward holism, embedded in systems thinking, what it means to have the commons, what it is to be a society among other societies that is ecologically-based, agrarian-centered, humanistic-thriving, environmentally-aware, is, well, the opposite formulation of these Gandhian sins:

    Wealth Without Work
    Pleasure Without Conscience
    Knowledge Without Character
    Commerce (Business) Without Morality (Ethics)
    Science Without Humanity
    Religion Without Sacrifice
    Politics Without Principle

    It doesn’t take much K12 education and applied learning to understand that reversing these sins and following the antithesis would illuminate the bearable weight of being a human in the world, triggering change at a global and galactical level. Prometheus steals the fire from the gods and gives it to people. Bound to the mountain. Prometheus grows weary. The future, oh, the future, swallowed up by that lack of hope. Let us all be Prometheus, and help each other take from the thieves, the rich, and give warmth and fire to the world. Unbound us together. Break the chains of the illicit gods and their devils.

    Really, though, one person’s hope is another person’s oppression. In capitalism, there is the king of the dung heap, the winner being the one who dies with the most toys. Dog-eat-dog, and survival of the most unfit (using the Seven Sins of Humanity above as illustrative of what makes capitalism really zip along).

    In Western culture, it all might seem like a Greek Tragedy of Trailer Park or Mar-a-lago proportions. It might all seem like a hardscrabble blues tribute to American stick-to-it-ness. That hardened soul, as DH Lawrence ascribed —

    The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

    We know that Western soul is a killer from the womb — those royals and despicable ones from the Old World, those Belgium in the Congo, those Romans, those hard, soldiering, religious zealots, hand in hand with silver chalice and golden rosary, those kings and queens, launching the deplorable ones, the rabble into crusades of raping-ravaging-razing. There is no “American soul” without the British slave traders-merchants-purchasers; no American soul without the French and Spanish interlopers. The American soul is part and parcel those former Nazis and the money-changers, the globalists looking for a micro-penny for every human corpuscle exploited in their gaming humanity. This is Turtle Island, not some chunk of land named for an Italian map maker for the king.

    Now that’s a dark dark killer that never melts — Capitalism.  It is now cleaned up, a la Madison Avenue and slick green-blue-pink-white washing, no longer presented as cold, stoic, but happy, illustrious, coopting, brainwashing, gleeful, the ice cream truck coming to serve all the children with gooey goodies. Shifty, slick, liberal, slippery, hip. It is now a virus inside a thousand viruses —

    A democratic society shapes itself – by means of the participation of its citizens in discussing and deciding how things should be organised and to what ends.

    But, as even their name reveals, the Global Shapers want to “shape” society from above and in their own interests.

    This is not the solution to global problems, and, the rockets and payloads of Bezos and Musk and DoD and the rest of the capitalists looking for lucre and gold on Mars and the Moon. Reset is not rebounding. Reset is not reconvening the true holistic way of life. Reset is not returning to a point in time in our civilizations where we come together in mutual aid, live a biodynamic present and future, hold onto sacred tribal principles, understand the soil-air-water. The reset is not a return to sanity, actualization for woman, man, child, ecosystem. This reset is the rich’s bargain basement theft of our agency, our independence, our collective will to strike at them as the felons of our time. Their reset is tracking our every movement, each blink of the eye, each snore and defecation. This reset is about pulling strings, forcing the Faustian Bargain each moment. They will fine-garnish-withhold-penalize-criminalize our unborn, and our dying parents. You get a universal income, but not to be spent on what they do not want you/us to spend it on.

    The foregone conclusion is what the teachers teach the children. It is what the media paint around us. Each narrative directed and shot for Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or Vudu, they are set to propagandize for the rich, the resetters, the titans who want mars colonized, who want the moon for their private resort. Orbiting Club Meds in the ionosphere.

    Yet, the Lesson is Dead Wolves, Manatees and Turtles

    The very place of Trump and Spring Break, Florida, is emblematic of the fall, the disgusting imbalance of the world, of sanity, of thinking. Manatees dying off in unfathomable numbers. Turtles washing up sick and dead. The expansion of the ocean, wiping out much of Florida by 2100. The bastion of Spring Break and lust and speedboats and dream hoarding.

    Florida has seen an alarming rise in manatee deaths in 2021.

    Something not to be proud of, and to lend pause for humanity, but not more than once, and give it to me once in that 24-hour news cycle, please. At least 432 Florida manatees have already died in 2021, well over double the state’s 5-year average for the same time period.

    Hundreds of sea turtles washing up on Southwest Florida beaches this year in a mass mortality event that researchers say will impact the recovery of the protected species is not a good sign of HUMAN health. The Great Reset has nothing to say about the reality of our own commons.

    Gray wolves in the North American wilderness.

    Then you have Wisconsin, gun-toting AR15-loving murderers taking on a record 216 wolves killed in 60 hours. What does this say about this society, this blood sport society of high powered weapons, radar trackers, dually pick-ups, $340,000 campers, TV, booze, and a quick trip in the woods to murder wolves?

    Migrants rescued by Save the Children’s Vos Hestia

    Or, the hard cold soul of the European, Italians, putting 20-year sentences on people working with charities to help stranded and sinking and drowning refugees from African countries. Imagine that world of the cold Great Resetters.  Save the Children and MSF among dozens facing sentences of up to 20 years over humanitarian work

    Humanitarian organizations are rejecting what they say is an attempt to criminalize lifesaving aid to migrants and refugees at sea after Italian prosecutors charged three groups with aiding and abetting illegal immigration through their rescue operations in the Mediterranean.

    Over 20 people are facing up to 20 years in prison. — Source.

    rescue operation

    Each story of injustice is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, demonstrating the insanity of systems — legal systems of punishment-abandonment-unruly laws against the suffering, laws meant to pay the rich, pay off the rotting bureaucrats, the Eichmann’s, big and small, who keep the wheels and the gears of death grinding, whether those wheels are those of the Empire, or the Capitalists, or the Economic Hitmen-Frontmen-Debasers, or all the pigs who make money off the penury and punishment unleashed by Capitalism.

    Not me. Not I. Over my dead body.

    The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.
    — Ernesto Che Guevera

    Che Guevara Photo

    The post Shifty Shifters: Movers and Shapers like a Trillion Locusts first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Microwaves could be the future for plastic recycling

    This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    It’s been almost a decade since Jocelyn Doucet first experimented with recycling plastic waste in a microwave.

    Now he says the technology derived from those early efforts will make it possible to produce plastic almost exclusively from recycled materials.

    “We’re consuming more and more plastics,” says the Quebec-based engineer and founder of Pyrowave, a company pioneering microwave-based plastic recycling technology. “Yet there are not that many solutions to address the end-of-life problem, and this is what we’re proposing.”

    The technology is so promising it has caught the attention of French tire giant Michelin. Last year, the company announced a partnership with Pyrowave to build a microwave recycling system for tires. It will be the first time Doucet’s technology is used on a commercial scale.

    Most recycling in Canada today is mechanical, where plastics are shredded before being melted down to make new, usually lower-quality, products. For the process to be viable, the stream of plastics entering the processing facility needs to be clean and well sorted, which poses huge logistical challenges. Pyrowave’s technology then uses high-powered microwaves to break clean polystyrene — a common plastic used to make everything from yogurt cups to keyboards — into molecular components, or monomers, that manufacturers can use to create entirely new polystyrene plastic.

    Simple as it sounds, the approach is novel. Few researchers had successfully used microwaves to break plastic into its constituent parts until Doucet, who has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Polytechnique de Montréal, took up the challenge with a team in 2009.

    At the time, he was working on food waste technologies and wanted a new challenge. “We started getting approached for plastic waste,” he says. Plastic recycling was something new.

    He wondered if pyrolysis could be used in the recycling process. Pyrolysis is a chemical process that burns carbon-based materials like wood or plastic without oxygen to remove the material’s hydrogen and oxygen molecules, leaving nothing but carbon. It’s ancient — Egyptians used pyrolysis to make charcoal.

    Doucet thought a modified version could be used to recycle plastic.

    “Very quickly, we fell on a microwave unit in the lab and started playing with microwaves,” he said. They found high-powered microwaves worked — an exciting discovery for the environmentally minded team.

    Doucet’s microwave process uses electric energy instead of heat, dramatically reducing the amount of energy and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) needed to produce polystyrene plastic, he says. According to a forthcoming life cycle assessment by Pyrowave, producing polystyrene using microwave pyrolysis recycling is 40 percent more energy efficient than virgin oil production, Doucet adds.

    Observers are reserving judgment.

    “Pyrowave’s technology might play a role in terms of displacing the production of virgin plastic and materials, but until we have more transparent and verifiable data on the yields, environmental and climate impact, we need a cautionary approach,” says Shanar Tabrizi, chemical recycling and plastics-to-fuel policy officer for Zero Waste Europe.

    wingedwolf / Getty Images

    Those potential impacts are broad, from the energy required to collect, sort, and clean plastic waste before the recycling process to managing the toxic residues created by plastic additives. She also noted life-cycle assessments can be misleading, depending on their methodologies.

    “It’s hard to assess (Pyrowave’s) claims and see whether there might be significant pollutants released in the process,” says Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. “In general, anything we can do to recycle plastic in more environmentally friendly ways helps, but reducing the scale of production and consumption is even better.”

    Maximizing the environmental potential of Doucet’s technology demands a wholesale restructuring of how we produce and dispose of plastics, the Quebec researcher said. New facilities that use microwave pyrolysis to manufacture plastic will need to be built. And as long as the price of virgin-oil plastic remains low, recycled plastic can’t compete. It will take government regulations mandating that new plastic products contain mostly recycled materials to make the switch, Doucet said.

    He compared microwave pyrolysis recycling and virgin-oil plastic manufacturing to the difference between steam and electric trains. As electricity became widespread, train engineers quickly realized it was more efficient to build entire rail systems based on high-speed electric trains than it was to replace coal with electric heating coils in steam train boilers. The new technology pushed a wholesale shift in how rail systems worked.

    “This is the opportunity to completely rethink,” Doucet says.

    The petrochemical and oil and gas industries so far show no signs of slowing down.

    Virgin-oil plastic factories have been integrated into oil and gas infrastructure like refineries and pipelines for decades — investments that industry is loath to abandon. The sector is betting on continued plastic production to stay afloat as the world transitions away from fossil fuels, with plastic manufacturing anticipated to fuel between 45 percent and 95 percent of the sector’s future growth. Fossil fuel and petrochemical companies are even spending $509 billion more worldwide to expand their facilities by 2024, according to a September 2020 report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative.

    Rosemary Calvert / Getty Images

    That has environmentalists concerned. While recycling — including microwave pyrolysis recycling — can be part of the solution, it can’t be used to justify current levels of production and plastic use, said Laura Yates, lead plastics campaigner at Greenpeace Canada. The organization has been leading efforts for greater government regulations to decrease overall plastic production and implement stringent recycling requirements in Canada.

    In particular, Yates is concerned about efforts by the plastics industry to convert plastic waste into vehicle fuel. That will continue to stimulate virgin-oil plastic production and fail to reduce overall GHG emissions, Yates said.

    Still, there are glimmers of hope. Virgin-oil plastic production decreased by four percent in 2020, and the trend is expected to continue in the coming decades, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative. That shift is driven by more stringent rules in China and Europe mandating that plastic products be made primarily from recycled materials. They have also started to make recycled plastic economically competitive in those markets, Doucet said.

    As well as the shift in Europe, the federal government is currently drafting new plastics regulations that could see similar policies implemented here, despite intense pushback from the plastics industry on key parts of the planned regulations. Doucet is hopeful that if the new rules are implemented, they will help make plastic recycling — including microwave pyrolysis recycling — commercially viable in Canada.

    Doucet is honest about his technology’s limitations. It is only one tool to end the plastic crisis, not a panacea. Reducing how much plastic we use and ensuring what gets produced gets recycled more efficiently remain essential.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Microwaves could be the future for plastic recycling on Mar 13, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Facebook Told Black Applicant With Ph.D. She Needed to Show She Was a “Culture Fit”

    A Black woman passed over for a job at Facebook told federal regulators that even though she was exceptionally qualified for the position, she was rushed through interviews with entirely white staffers, told she wouldn’t like the job, and advised that the company wanted a strong “culture fit,” according to a complaint to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission provided to The Intercept.

    The woman joins three others who have recently complained to the EEOC about anti-Black racism at Facebook. The agency has begun conducting a “systemic” probe of Facebook, looking into whether the company’s own policies further discrimination, Reuters reported earlier this month.

    The complaint comes as evidence piles up that large Silicon Valley companies are not diversifying their predominately white and Asian work forces quickly enough, particularly within high-paying technical and managerial roles. Facebook’s latest diversity report, from July, stated that only 3.9 percent of its U.S. employees were Black and 6.3 percent Hispanic. Google said that in 2020 its U.S. staff was 5.5 percent Black and 6.6 percent Latinx, and, like Facebook, has faced repeated accusations of racist practices, including, just in the last week, that it de-prioritizes applicants from historically Black colleges and universities and that it pushes people who complain about racism to seek mental health care.

    The woman, whose attorneys shared her complaint with The Intercept on the condition that she not be named, alleges she was “subjected to Facebook’s pattern or practice of discrimination against Black applicants” during a series of interviews for a managerial position at the company in 2020. In the complaint, filed in December, the applicant says her prior work experience and directly related doctoral degree made her particularly well-suited for the job: partnerships and program manager at Facebook’s Global Impact Partnerships. She adds that her experience and education were brought up only in an early interview with the position’s hiring manager, who she alleges told her, “You have a big brain, you wouldn’t like this job.”

    “We believe it is essential to provide all employees with a respectful and safe working environment,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told The Intercept. “We take any allegations of discrimination seriously and investigate every case.”

    In the complaint, the applicant says she made it past the initial screening process and was granted further interviews, culminating in a round of in-person meetings with a group of all-white Facebook employees in San Francisco, during which she “sensed that the interviewers were not prioritizing her interviews because all of the interviews seemed rushed after making her wait for several hours.” The complaint notes that the applicant wasn’t interviewed by a single person of color and that the “only Black Facebook employee [she] encountered during the entire hiring process was a receptionist.”

    She further alleges that during one of the in-person interviews in California, she was told, “There’s no doubt you can do the job, but we’re really looking for a culture fit.” The term “culture fit” is common in corporate tech culture, typically defined as the quality of hiring someone you’d want to hang out with socially or grab a beer with, but often criticized as little more than a euphemistic stand-in for racial or gender-based discrimination and a way for companies to deflect accusations of hiring bias. Given the overwhelming racial homogeneity of American tech companies and the pervasive belief that they require some sort of common vision of the future as much as any technical skill, determining what the “culture” in question even is or how one might “fit” into it can be impossible if an applicant doesn’t closely resemble a company’s founders or current staff.

    Indeed, the applicant’s complaint states that Facebook’s “general policy of discrimination against Black applicants” is built partly on “Facebook’s strong consideration of ‘culture fit’ in hiring, without providing sufficient objective guidance to managers and other employees on how to determine which applicants and employees will be a good ‘culture fit’ at Facebook.”

    The three other recent EEOC complaints about Facebook made similar allegations that Facebook relied on “culture fit” and evaluation by white and Asian employees to determine who made the cut. They were filed by Facebook employee Oscar Veneszee Jr. and by two applicants turned down for jobs. All four individuals are represented by attorneys from Gupta Wessler PLLC, Katz Marshall & Banks, and Mehri & Skalet.

    The post Facebook Told Black Applicant With Ph.D. She Needed to Show She Was a “Culture Fit” appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Facebook Told Black Applicant With Ph.D. She Needed to Show She Was a “Culture Fit”

    A Black woman passed over for a job at Facebook told federal regulators that even though she was exceptionally qualified for the position, she was rushed through interviews with entirely white staffers, told she wouldn’t like the job, and advised that the company wanted a strong “culture fit,” according to a complaint to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission provided to The Intercept.

    The woman joins three others who have recently complained to the EEOC about anti-Black racism at Facebook. The agency has begun conducting a “systemic” probe of Facebook, looking into whether the company’s own policies further discrimination, Reuters reported earlier this month.

    The complaint comes as evidence piles up that large Silicon Valley companies are not diversifying their predominately white and Asian work forces quickly enough, particularly within high-paying technical and managerial roles. Facebook’s latest diversity report, from July, stated that only 3.9 percent of its U.S. employees were Black and 6.3 percent Hispanic. Google said that in 2020 its U.S. staff was 5.5 percent Black and 6.6 percent Latinx, and, like Facebook, has faced repeated accusations of racist practices, including, just in the last week, that it de-prioritizes applicants from historically Black colleges and universities and that it pushes people who complain about racism to seek mental health care.

    The woman, whose attorneys shared her complaint with The Intercept on the condition that she not be named, alleges she was “subjected to Facebook’s pattern or practice of discrimination against Black applicants” during a series of interviews for a managerial position at the company in 2020. In the complaint, filed in December, the applicant says her prior work experience and directly related doctoral degree made her particularly well-suited for the job: partnerships and program manager at Facebook’s Global Impact Partnerships. She adds that her experience and education were brought up only in an early interview with the position’s hiring manager, who she alleges told her, “You have a big brain, you wouldn’t like this job.”

    Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

    In the complaint, the applicant says she made it past the initial screening process and was granted further interviews, culminating in a round of in-person meetings with a group of all-white Facebook employees in San Francisco, during which she “sensed that the interviewers were not prioritizing her interviews because all of the interviews seemed rushed after making her wait for several hours.” The complaint notes that the applicant wasn’t interviewed by a single person of color and that the “only Black Facebook employee [she] encountered during the entire hiring process was a receptionist.”

    She further alleges that during one of the in-person interviews in California, she was told, “There’s no doubt you can do the job, but we’re really looking for a culture fit.” The term “culture fit” is common in corporate tech culture, typically defined as the quality of hiring someone you’d want to hang out with socially or grab a beer with, but often criticized as little more than a euphemistic stand-in for racial or gender-based discrimination and a way for companies to deflect accusations of hiring bias. Given the overwhelming racial homogeneity of American tech companies and the pervasive belief that they require some sort of common vision of the future as much as any technical skill, determining what the “culture” in question even is or how one might “fit” into it can be impossible if an applicant doesn’t closely resemble a company’s founders or current staff.

    Indeed, the applicant’s complaint states that Facebook’s “general policy of discrimination against Black applicants” is built partly on “Facebook’s strong consideration of ‘culture fit’ in hiring, without providing sufficient objective guidance to managers and other employees on how to determine which applicants and employees will be a good ‘culture fit’ at Facebook.”

    The three other recent EEOC complaints about Facebook made similar allegations that Facebook relied on “culture fit” and evaluation by white and Asian employees to determine who made the cut. They were filed by Facebook employee Oscar Veneszee Jr. and by two applicants turned down for jobs. All four individuals are represented by attorneys from Gupta Wessler PLLC, Katz Marshall & Banks, and Mehri & Skalet.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Moruroa Files – how cutting edge science, secret documents and journalism exposed a Pacific lie

    Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    Cutting edge nuclear science, a trove of declassified documents, and investigative journalism have exposed the human and environmental impacts of French nuclear testing in the Pacific in a new book and web microsite/database.

    Between 1966 and 1996, France conducted 193 atmospheric and underground nuclear weapons tests in Polynesia in the southern Pacific Ocean.

    These nuclear explosions profoundly affected the environment and health of local indigenous Maohi people and of French veterans involved in the testing programme.

    Using an archive of 2000 pages of declassified French government documents, hundreds of hours of computer simulations of the nuclear tests and fallout predictions, dozens of interviews in France and Polynesia, the book Toxique presents the results of a two-year long study on the consequences of French nuclear testing in the Pacific and the continued struggle of local communities and veterans to seek justice and compensation.

    It sheds unprecedented light on the radiological and environmental contamination of the people of the Pacific through scientific research, journalism, and storytelling.

    It challenges existing official narratives of the consequences of the test, and reveals that more could have been done to protect the public and that justice is owed.

    The book, authored by Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, has a parallel microsite and database – Moruroa Files: Investigation into French nuclear tests in the Pacific.

    Unprecedented collaboration
    “This work is the result of an unprecedented collaboration between a Princeton University nuclear expert, INTERPRT, a collective of architects specialising in the forensic analysis of environmental crimes, and investigative journalists from the media Disclose.

    Classified until 2013, the archives were finally made public as a result of a long legal battle between the French state and the victims of the nuclear tests.

    Toxique
    Toxique … the book of the investigation. Image: APR screenshot

    Until now, the documents have never been studied in their totality. The research team reorganised them by date and subject matter and have now filed them into a database that can be accessed by victims of the tests, researchers and the wider public.

    Along with the study of the documents, the team carried out interviews with more than 50 people, including 18 inhabitants of Polynesian atolls, 16 former military personnel, as well as with magistrates, scientists and organisations from civil society in both French Polynesia and mainland France.

    Using 3D modelling tools and the visualisation of data, we have reproduced, for the first time ever, the events that followed the most contaminating of France’s atmospheric nuclear explosions carried out between 1966 and 1974.

    The team also re-evaluated the extent of the radioactive contaminations these caused, and in which the civilian populations were the principal victims.

    Moruroa Files 2
    Moruroa Files … the Moruoa atoll bunker pictured in the investigation. Image: APR screenshot

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Murray Horton: Reflections on Owen Wilkes, iconic peace researcher, adventurer and ‘bird watcher’

    COMMENTARY: By Murray Horton in Christchurch

    Owen Wilkes, an internationally renowned peace researcher and Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) founder, died in 2005, aged 65 (see my obituary in Watchdog 109, August 2005). And yet, 16 years later, I’m still learning more about him and gaining insights into his life and character.

    In late 2020 I was contacted, out of the blue, by an octogenarian Kiwi expat in Oslo, who had been a good friend of Owen’s in Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s and then for most of the rest of Owen’s life.

    In 1978, I and my then partner (Christine Bird, a fellow CAFCINZ founder and first chairperson of CAFCA) accompanied Owen on a “spy trip” through Norway’s northernmost province, the one bordering the former Soviet Union, which gave me my first glimpse of the sort of domes with which I’ve become so familiar at the Waihopai spy base during the last 30 plus years.

    We met this expat Kiwi while in Oslo. Although we were strangers, he immediately recognised us as New Zealanders the second we stepped off the train at his station.

    Why? Because of the distinctive shabbiness of our dress. I hadn’t heard from him in decades. In 2020, he went to the trouble of contacting an NZ national news website to get my email address.

    He told me that he had a small collection of Owen’s letters and other material about him, and as he was decluttering and couldn’t think of any Scandinavian home for them, would I like them?

    I was happy to do so. Reading them brought back vivid memories from more than 40 years ago, none more so than in connection with that “spy trip”.

    Thrived in Scandinavia
    Owen thrived in Scandinavia, and particularly loved his 18 months in Norway, paying Norwegians the highest accolade of being “good jokers”. All up, he lived six years in Scandinavia, most of it in Sweden, where he worked for the world-famous Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

    He applied his unique talents to researching in both countries e.g., he identified the entire security police staff by the simple expedient of ringing every block of particular extension numbers.

    In 1978, Christine Bird and I did our Big OE, part of which included crossing the former Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express from the Pacific coast and staying with Owen in his Stockholm apartment.

    In this most sophisticated of northern European cities, he still dressed and acted like The Wild Man of Borneo (when I inquired about toilet paper, he told me that he used the phonebook). It was quite a sight to visit the SIPRI office full of oh, so proper Swedes and there was Owen working away at his desk, naked except for shorts.

    Owen Wilkes 2
    Owen Wilkes … New Zealand peace researcher, 1940-2005. Image: File

    We met up with him for a reason, which was to accompany him on a “spy” trip through Norway’s northernmost Finnmark province, which was chokka with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) military bases and lots of Waihopai-like spy bases, the first time I ever saw those distinctive domes.

    Norway was then one of only two NATO members with a land border with the Soviet Union (the other being Turkey).

    Mad Norwegian adventure
    Off we went, the three of us, on this mad adventure, travelling by boat, train, bus and hitchhiking. We slept in a tent wherever we could pitch it.

    Bird and I went by bus right up to the Soviet border; Owen got the deeply suspicious driver to drop off him beforehand so that he could walk up and check out a spy base in the border zone (photography was strictly forbidden near any of these bases, even at Oslo Airport, because it was also an Air Force base). From memory, he told the bus driver that he was a bird watcher (he had his ever-present binoculars to prove it).

    He told us that if he hadn’t rejoined us within a couple of days, it would mean that he had been arrested and to ring the office in Oslo to let them know. Right on time he turned up.

    We duly delivered the rolls of film back to the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) and they were used in a book co-authored by Owen and Nils Petter Gleditsch, the PRIO Director. The book, Uncle Sam’s Rabbits (a pun on the rabbit ear aerials used at some of the listening post spy bases) caused such a sensation in Norway that both authors were charged, tried, convicted and fined for offences under the Official Secrets Act.

    Much more excitement was to come, not long after, in Sweden. Security agents swooped on Owen as he was returning from a bike trip around islands between Sweden and Finland, he was held incommunicado for several days amid sensational headlines about a Soviet spy being arrested (this was the sort of stuff that gave his poor old Mum palpitations back in Christchurch).

    He was eventually released and charged with offences under Sweden’s Official Secrets Act (after his death, NZ media coverage mistakenly said that he was convicted of espionage offences. That means spying for a foreign country. He wasn’t charged with any such offence, let alone convicted).

    Forded Arctic river in shorts to covertly enter Soviet Union
    This was at the height of the Cold War, when neutral Sweden was being particularly paranoid about Soviet spies (not helped when a Soviet Whiskey class submarine got embarrassingly stuck in Stockholm Harbour, the famous “Whiskey On The Rocks” episode).

    Owen’s trial was very high profile, attracting international media attention. At first, he was convicted and sentenced to six months’ prison. He never served a day of that, because he appealed, and the sentence was suspended but he was fined heavily and ordered expelled from Sweden for 10 years (he used to joke that he should have appealed for it to be increased to 20 years).

    The 2020 package of material from Oslo added one vital detail I didn’t know about that “spy trip” we did with him. The Kiwi expat wrote to a work mate of Owen’s, after his death: “He once even crossed the Norwegian-Soviet border in the high north, wading across an icy river in his shorts and was there several hours – only a few people know about this.

    It doesn’t bear thinking about what could have happened to him, or so-called international relations, if he’d been jumped on by the vodka-sodden Soviet frontier guards. As unshaven as Owen. He would have managed though …

    No wonder that bus driver was so suspicious of him. There is great irony in the fact that both the Norwegian and Swedish security agencies suspected Owen of being some sort of a Soviet spy and both prosecuted him; yet if he’d been caught on his covert visit to the Soviet Union, he would have doubtless been presented to the world as a Western spy.

    A 1981 letter that Owen wrote to his Oslo mate shed some light on his arrest and detention for several days by the Swedish Security Service (SAPO).

    “Overall, it wasn’t such bad fun. I had a clear conscience all along and I wasn’t scared that SAPO would try and plant evidence or anything like that… So, I slept well at night, found the interrogations intellectually stimulating, read several novels. Getting out was fun too…”

    I can personally testify as to how much Owen enjoyed being locked up. We were among a group of people arrested inside the US military transport base at Christchurch Airport during a 1988 protest (the base is still there). This is from my 2005 Watchdog obituary of Owen, cited above:

    “It was a weekend, so we were bailed after a few hours to appear later in the week”.

    “But that didn’t suit Owen, he had things to do and didn’t want to be mucking around with inconvenient court appearances. So, he refused bail and opted to stay locked up for 24 hours so that the cops had to produce him at the next day’s court hearing (which was more convenient for him), where he duly got bail.

    “He told me that he’d found some old Reader’s Digests in the cells and had had a wonderful uninterrupted time reading their Rightwing conspiracy theories about how the KGB was behind the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul 11. In the meantime, I was left to deal with his then partner, who was frantic about how come he’d ended up in custody, as that hadn’t been part of their South Island holiday plans. In the end, we fought the good fight in court, were convicted and got a small fine each”.

    Getting to read his Swedish security file
    A letter to his Oslo mate at the turn of the century says that he learned that Swedish police files on him would be among those now available to the people who were the subjects of them. He wrote, from New Zealand, asking for access to their files on him from 1978-81.

    He got a reply saying he could have access to 1025 pages and that he had two months to do so. Owen had been planning a Scandinavian trip with his partner, May Bass, and this was the icing on the cake for him (“she is going to find something else to do while I am poring through the archives in Stockholm”).

    When I last saw Owen, in 2002, he told that me that the file showed that the Swedish authorities were absolutely convinced that he was a Soviet spy and there was circumstantial evidence of which he had been unaware – for instance, he had been monitoring a whole lot of radio frequencies broadcasting from the Soviet Union, and in the case of one, he had apparently stumbled onto the means of communication between the KGB (former Soviet spy agency) and their agent in Sweden.

    He had no idea but this reinforced the Swedish spooks’ idea that he was a Soviet spy, rather than an insatiably curious peace researcher.

    By contrast, to this day, the NZ Security Intelligence Service has refused to release anything but a fraction of its file on him (see my “Owen Wilkes’ SIS File. A bit more feleased, a decade after first smidgen”, in Watchdog 150, April 2019).

    The SIS says it holds six volumes on Owen. It still deems the great majority of that too sensitive to be released, even to his one remaining blood relative – his younger brother.

    In 1982, after six years of high drama in Scandinavia, he returned home in a blaze of publicity and CAFCINZ (as CAFCA was then) sent him around the country on an extremely successful speaking tour.

    Christchurch academic, Professor Bill Willmott, nominated him for the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize (funnily enough, he didn’t win it. It was never likely that the Scandinavians would ever award their homegrown prize to a peace activist who had been convicted for “spying” on them).

    A copy of Willmott’s nomination letter is among the material I was sent. After his involuntary return, Owen never lived overseas again, but he continued to be of ongoing interest to Scandinavian media.

    A 1983 Norwegian article reported on Owen from where he was living in the Karamea district. It was titled: “’Spy’ yesterday, farmer today”.

    Extreme adventurer, renouncing Peace Movement
    Owen wasn’t a big fan of Sweden but he absolutely loved Norway. It gave him full scope for the extreme adventures that he loved, whether on foot, in the water, on skis or on a bike.

    His letters describing some of his adventures are wonderful examples of travel writing, although not for the fainthearted reader. This is his description of what happened when he boarded a coastal ferry after one such jaunt through days of unrelenting rain:

    “.. I noticed the people were looking rather strangely at me, which I assumed was just because of the way I went squilch-squelch when I walked, and the way a little rivulet would wend its way out from under my chair when I sat down. Then I chanced to look in a mirror, and discovered that my skin had gone all soft and wrinkly and puffy, so that I looked like a cadaver that had been simmered in caustic soda solution”.

    He would have fitted right in to any movie about the zombie apocalypse.

    His letters shed light on various fascinating aspects of his life and personality. In the 1990s he basically and publicly renounced the Peace Movement (I refer you to my 2005 Watchdog obituary, cited above. See the subheadings “Leaving the Peace Movement” and “Writer of crank letters”). A 1993 letter to his Oslo mate gives a small taste of this.

    It lists his disagreements with “Greenpeas [not a typo. MH] …on quite a few issues. Some of their campaigns are just great, but some of them are pretty bloody stupid, I reckon. And it is only recently that they’ve started going screwy” (he then details six areas of disagreement).

    “Grumble, grumble, it’s no wonder I am getting offside with the peace movement around these parts, is it… Anyway, I am sort of getting out of the peace movement”.

    Another 1993 letter to Oslo (the only handwritten one) is a fascinating, hilarious and white-knuckle account of how – after the unexpected death of his father in Christchurch – he and his brother tried to get their bedridden mother moved by small plane from Christchurch to the brother’s district of Karamea.

    A classic Canterbury norwester put paid to that and they had to land at a rural airstrip (after the sheep had been chased off it). The journey had to be finished by ambulance and took 26 hours. Owen’s parents died within a few months of each other, in 1993. I knew both of them and Becky and I attended both funerals.

    Owen was a depressive, which played a role in his 2005 suicide. That same 1993 handwritten letter concluded with this: “There’s an election coming up in 3 weeks, but I feel quite detached. Basically, I think we’re all totally doomed + the civilisation is into its final orgy of environmental destruction before the end. Rather than trying to improve the future by changing the present, I plan on documenting the past, just in case civilisation is re-established in some distant future + its people are in a mood to learn from our past. Hence my archaeology. It’s a choice between archaeology or alcoholism, I reckon”.

    Pleasure and sadness
    Owen Wilkes was a fascinating and simultaneously infuriating man. He has been dead for 16 years and this quite unexpected package of material goes back more than 40 years. But that passage only reinforces for me what a loss he is, both to the progressive movement nationally and globally, but also as a person, an indomitable adventurer, and as a friend and colleague.

    It was with both pleasure and sadness that I read through this material. It brought back so many memories.

    As for the Oslo expat, he and I went on to have an extensive correspondence in late 2020 and on into 2021. And not just about Owen but about many other people and topics. He has permanently lived outside NZ since the 1960s but we still have people in common.

    For example, in 1960s Christchurch he was involved with the Monthly Review and knew Wolfgang Rosenberg. I sent him my Watchdog obituary of Wolf (114, May 2007). The upshot of all this was that he insisted on sending CAFCA a donation.

    Thank you, Owen, you’re the gift that keeps on giving.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Twitter cracks down on COVID vaccine misinformation

    The company said that it has started using human reviewers to assess whether tweets violate its policy against COVID vaccine misinformation

    This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.

  • Breaching Digital Rights: India’s Platform and Media Ethics Code

    Having made something of a splash last month with the fuss over Australia’s News Media Bargaining code, Facebook, and the digital giants, are facing another stormy front in India.  The move here has nothing to do with revenue so much as alleged bad behaviour.  “We appreciate the proliferation of social media in India,” stated Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s minister of electronics and information technology. “We want them to be more responsible and more accountable.”

    Such responsibility and accountability will purportedly be achieved through the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.  They are part of a program that has been incubating for some years.  An IT industry consultant advising the government expressed the sentiment to Wired in 2018.  “The government’s message is: If you want to do business in India, do it on our terms and conditions or you are free to leave.”  Previously, the Indian approach has been more timorous.  It had “always been ‘Do it the Apple way, do it the Facebook way, do it the Amazon way.”

    Behind such rules is a crude, self-vested interest at work.  The primary role of social media lies in the sharing of information.  Governments tend to be happy with material they can finesse, curate and control on such platforms.  When the platforms become home for material that challenges the official version, stirring the blood of the citizenry or encouraging misrule, problems emerge.

    To make its case, the Indian government has resorted to the marketing of moral outrage.  Over the last years, fake news has become something of a favourite, the Zeitgeist driving the regulatory truck.  In 2017 and 2018, over 40 deaths due to mob violence were said to have arisen from generously circulated disinformation.  On July 1, 2018, in the hamlet of Rainpada, five men, all members of the Nath Panthi Davari Gosavi wanderers, were beaten to death.  They were victims of a rampaging mob incensed by rumours circulating on WhatsApp that the area was crawling with opportunistic child kidnappers.

    The Indian authorities duly asked WhatsApp to assist in stopping the “irresponsible and explosive messages” on its platform.  Some actions were taken.  The number of forwards was limited to five at a time.  Those messages also sported a “forwarded” tag.  This did little to pacify government officials.

    The scope of the proposed changes is far from negligible.  The draft IT rules take aim at over-the-top (OTT) media services responsible for content on such outlets as Amazon, Netflix and Prime and news media platforms.  Applicable entities include “publishers of news and current affairs content”; “intermediaries which primarily enable the transmission of news and current affairs content” and “publishers of online curated content”.  Finally, “intermediaries which primarily enable the transmission of online curated content” are included.

    The regulatory framework will entail three tiers: self-regulation by the entity itself; self-regulation through “self-regulating bodies of the applicable entities” and an “Oversight mechanism by the Central Government.”  The creation of “Chief Compliant Officers” by the companies is envisaged as are “nodal” persons responsible for 24 hour “coordination with law enforcement agencies and officers to ensure compliance to their orders or requisitions made in accordance with the provisions of law or rules made thereunder.”  Resident Grievance Officers will also have to be appointed.

    The introduction of this additional layer of regulation will constitute a form of bureaucratic strangulation, with the oversight mechanism open to censoring content in a manner that goes even beyond the current powers of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for TV regulation.

    The Internet Freedom Foundation considers the mechanism a calamity in waiting, breaching the digital rights of citizens, causing economic harm “and [will] also negatively impact India’s growing cultural influence through the production of modern and contemporary video formats entertainment.”  In anticipation of the government code, 17 OTT platforms have already developed “self-regulation toolkits” which risk embracing the genie of self-censorship.

    The incorporation of news media in the Code goes beyond the ambit of current legislation and potentially exceeds the safe harbour protections for intermediary platforms outlined by section 79 of the Information Technology Act.  That section exempts intermediaries hosting material from liability provided they follow various stipulated guidelines.  The draft rules, as they stand, circumvent due process and parliamentary scrutiny through regulation.  Media would also be censored if the government were to take a broad reading of the definition “publisher of news and current affairs content”.

    Prasad does not merely want social media channels to be more diligent monitors and, if necessary, censors.  He is clear that such digital platforms lend a hand in identifying culprits who might be behind the dissemination of information and be targets of government prosecution. “We don’t want to know the content, but firms need to be able to tell who was the first person who began spreading misinformation or other objectionable content.”

    Sub-rule (2) of Rule 5 proposes to do this, stating that the significant social media intermediary primarily responsible for providing messaging services “shall enable the identification of the first originator of the information on its computer resource as may be required by a judicial order passed by a court of competent jurisdiction” or by “the Competent Authority” pursuant to legislation.

    The unacceptable content officials have in mind is detailed in a government release.  The objectionable material would be the sort that relates to Indian sovereignty and integrity, state security, friendly relations with States, “public order or of incitement to an offence relating to the above or in relation with rape, sexually explicit material or child sexual abuse material punishable with imprisonment for a term of not less than five years”.  Prosecutors will have much to play with.

    Breaking the resistance of companies such as WhatsApp to traceability requests has been a central aim of the Modi government, despite such proposals being dismissed as ineffectual in actually achieving their stated purpose.  They are not the only ones.  End-to-end encryption is seen by states as a technique for concealment, ripe for abuse, which is always a mean spirited way of clamping down on digital sovereignty.  Countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia fantasise about creating backdoors to content.  That very subject is being currently considered by the Indian Supreme Court in the case of Antony Clement v Union of India (TC Civil No. 189 of 2020).

    The emerging trend here is that, while such policy may fail to achieve its stated goal, it will certainly be pernicious in other ways, as any backdoor weakening of encryption or vital escrow systems would breach privacy and security.  Given that encryption acts as a safeguard in the current digital environment of data aggregation, while also deterring identity theft and code injection attacks, the draft rules look menacing.

    Manoj Prabhakaran, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering based at ITT Bombay, suggests that States should do the opposite.  In a furnished expert report in the Antony Clement case, he urges government authorities to “promote strong encryption and anonymity.  National laws should recognize that individuals are free to protect the privacy of their digital communications by using encryption technology and tools that allow anonymity online.”

    While the conduct of digital platforms is monstrous in terms of their operating rationale, not least their tendency to monetize privacy and commodify predictive behaviour, government scapegoating is a shallow distraction.  The agenda of the Modi government is moral stringency, surveillance and the monitoring of unruly citizens.  Breaking down the doors of encryption while encouraging social media giants to regulate themselves into censorship, is all in keeping with this theme.

    The post Breaching Digital Rights: India’s Platform and Media Ethics Code first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Breaching Digital Rights: India’s Platform and Media Ethics Code

    Having made something of a splash last month with the fuss over Australia’s News Media Bargaining code, Facebook, and the digital giants, are facing another stormy front in India.  The move here has nothing to do with revenue so much as alleged bad behaviour.  “We appreciate the proliferation of social media in India,” stated Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s minister of electronics and information technology. “We want them to be more responsible and more accountable.”

    Such responsibility and accountability will purportedly be achieved through the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.  They are part of a program that has been incubating for some years.  An IT industry consultant advising the government expressed the sentiment to Wired in 2018.  “The government’s message is: If you want to do business in India, do it on our terms and conditions or you are free to leave.”  Previously, the Indian approach has been more timorous.  It had “always been ‘Do it the Apple way, do it the Facebook way, do it the Amazon way.”

    Behind such rules is a crude, self-vested interest at work.  The primary role of social media lies in the sharing of information.  Governments tend to be happy with material they can finesse, curate and control on such platforms.  When the platforms become home for material that challenges the official version, stirring the blood of the citizenry or encouraging misrule, problems emerge.

    To make its case, the Indian government has resorted to the marketing of moral outrage.  Over the last years, fake news has become something of a favourite, the Zeitgeist driving the regulatory truck.  In 2017 and 2018, over 40 deaths due to mob violence were said to have arisen from generously circulated disinformation.  On July 1, 2018, in the hamlet of Rainpada, five men, all members of the Nath Panthi Davari Gosavi wanderers, were beaten to death.  They were victims of a rampaging mob incensed by rumours circulating on WhatsApp that the area was crawling with opportunistic child kidnappers.

    The Indian authorities duly asked WhatsApp to assist in stopping the “irresponsible and explosive messages” on its platform.  Some actions were taken.  The number of forwards was limited to five at a time.  Those messages also sported a “forwarded” tag.  This did little to pacify government officials.

    The scope of the proposed changes is far from negligible.  The draft IT rules take aim at over-the-top (OTT) media services responsible for content on such outlets as Amazon, Netflix and Prime and news media platforms.  Applicable entities include “publishers of news and current affairs content”; “intermediaries which primarily enable the transmission of news and current affairs content” and “publishers of online curated content”.  Finally, “intermediaries which primarily enable the transmission of online curated content” are included.

    The regulatory framework will entail three tiers: self-regulation by the entity itself; self-regulation through “self-regulating bodies of the applicable entities” and an “Oversight mechanism by the Central Government.”  The creation of “Chief Compliant Officers” by the companies is envisaged as are “nodal” persons responsible for 24 hour “coordination with law enforcement agencies and officers to ensure compliance to their orders or requisitions made in accordance with the provisions of law or rules made thereunder.”  Resident Grievance Officers will also have to be appointed.

    The introduction of this additional layer of regulation will constitute a form of bureaucratic strangulation, with the oversight mechanism open to censoring content in a manner that goes even beyond the current powers of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for TV regulation.

    The Internet Freedom Foundation considers the mechanism a calamity in waiting, breaching the digital rights of citizens, causing economic harm “and [will] also negatively impact India’s growing cultural influence through the production of modern and contemporary video formats entertainment.”  In anticipation of the government code, 17 OTT platforms have already developed “self-regulation toolkits” which risk embracing the genie of self-censorship.

    The incorporation of news media in the Code goes beyond the ambit of current legislation and potentially exceeds the safe harbour protections for intermediary platforms outlined by section 79 of the Information Technology Act.  That section exempts intermediaries hosting material from liability provided they follow various stipulated guidelines.  The draft rules, as they stand, circumvent due process and parliamentary scrutiny through regulation.  Media would also be censored if the government were to take a broad reading of the definition “publisher of news and current affairs content”.

    Prasad does not merely want social media channels to be more diligent monitors and, if necessary, censors.  He is clear that such digital platforms lend a hand in identifying culprits who might be behind the dissemination of information and be targets of government prosecution. “We don’t want to know the content, but firms need to be able to tell who was the first person who began spreading misinformation or other objectionable content.”

    Sub-rule (2) of Rule 5 proposes to do this, stating that the significant social media intermediary primarily responsible for providing messaging services “shall enable the identification of the first originator of the information on its computer resource as may be required by a judicial order passed by a court of competent jurisdiction” or by “the Competent Authority” pursuant to legislation.

    The unacceptable content officials have in mind is detailed in a government release.  The objectionable material would be the sort that relates to Indian sovereignty and integrity, state security, friendly relations with States, “public order or of incitement to an offence relating to the above or in relation with rape, sexually explicit material or child sexual abuse material punishable with imprisonment for a term of not less than five years”.  Prosecutors will have much to play with.

    Breaking the resistance of companies such as WhatsApp to traceability requests has been a central aim of the Modi government, despite such proposals being dismissed as ineffectual in actually achieving their stated purpose.  They are not the only ones.  End-to-end encryption is seen by states as a technique for concealment, ripe for abuse, which is always a mean spirited way of clamping down on digital sovereignty.  Countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia fantasise about creating backdoors to content.  That very subject is being currently considered by the Indian Supreme Court in the case of Antony Clement v Union of India (TC Civil No. 189 of 2020).

    The emerging trend here is that, while such policy may fail to achieve its stated goal, it will certainly be pernicious in other ways, as any backdoor weakening of encryption or vital escrow systems would breach privacy and security.  Given that encryption acts as a safeguard in the current digital environment of data aggregation, while also deterring identity theft and code injection attacks, the draft rules look menacing.

    Manoj Prabhakaran, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering based at ITT Bombay, suggests that States should do the opposite.  In a furnished expert report in the Antony Clement case, he urges government authorities to “promote strong encryption and anonymity.  National laws should recognize that individuals are free to protect the privacy of their digital communications by using encryption technology and tools that allow anonymity online.”

    While the conduct of digital platforms is monstrous in terms of their operating rationale, not least their tendency to monetize privacy and commodify predictive behaviour, government scapegoating is a shallow distraction.  The agenda of the Modi government is moral stringency, surveillance and the monitoring of unruly citizens.  Breaking down the doors of encryption while encouraging social media giants to regulate themselves into censorship, is all in keeping with this theme.

    This article was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2021 at 8:35pm and is filed under Digital Rights, India, Prime Minister Norendra Modi, Social media, Technology, Transparency/Secrecy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Working Class Backbone of Hi Tech

    In his comprehensive and educational book, Coders (2019 Penguin Press), tech writer Clive Thompson tells the story of computer programmers, a workforce that is undoubtedly one of the “most quietly influential on the planet.” Thompson writes:

    You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car manages the braking system; ‘machine-learning’ algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity.

    While the field isn’t something I plan to pursue (I’m too much of a wannabe Luddite for that to happen), it was fascinating to learn more about what programming actually is; its language; how the work combines engineering and art, logic and puzzle-solving, passion and patience. I also learned more about the people that do the work; how they think and why; the heady impact of being able to literally change the world overnight, particularly when an app or program generates millions of global users. Of special interest was the history, beginning with the first coders: “Brilliant and pioneering women, who, despite crafting some of the earliest personal computers and programming language, were later written out of history.”

    Coders affirmed two things for me. One is that in the struggle for social justice and human liberation, coders are a decisive force for success—arguably the decisive force, particularly in any pursuit of a People’s Internet, or at the very least a People’s Media. Indeed, the digital battlefield is paramount.

    My second affirmation was being reminded, yet again, about the power of the working class. The Internet, embedded in the lives of billions around the globe, is routinely compared to a cloud, a place without place, without distance. But that’s an illusion. All it takes is for service to go down for us to realize that someone has to fix it, be it a broken fiber optic cable, a damaged router, or a down electrical line.

    When we rely on the Internet, we rely on workers, from mainframe engineers to computer programmers to office workers to maintenance personnel. In his 2012 book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Wired correspondent Andrew Blum describes how the Internet is “as fixed in real physical places any railroad or telephone ever was. It fills enormous buildings, converges in some places and avoids others, and it flows through tubes underground, up in the air and over the oceans all over the world. You can map it, can smell it, and you can even visit it.”

    There is a human, geographic side to the worldwide web, intricate and utterly interdependent on the other: Those who keep the power going and the work stations clean; the workers who mine and extract the silicon, the silver, copper, mercury, aluminum, tin, lead, and all the rare earth elements; the vast and global workforce that assembles the computers, smart phones and tablets. Then there are those who do the shipping and delivery, who dispose the toxic and radioactive electronic waste.

    I think of tech’s working class whenever I feel I’m too becoming user-centric, and forgetting about the human beings whose labor makes it all run, with the awesome power to make it not run as well.

    The post The Working Class Backbone of Hi Tech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Working Class Backbone of Hi Tech

    In his comprehensive and educational book, Coders (2019 Penguin Press), tech writer Clive Thompson tells the story of computer programmers, a workforce that is undoubtedly one of the “most quietly influential on the planet.” Thompson writes:

    You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car manages the braking system; ‘machine-learning’ algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity.

    While the field isn’t something I plan to pursue (I’m too much of a wannabe Luddite for that to happen), it was fascinating to learn more about what programming actually is; its language; how the work combines engineering and art, logic and puzzle-solving, passion and patience. I also learned more about the people that do the work; how they think and why; the heady impact of being able to literally change the world overnight, particularly when an app or program generates millions of global users. Of special interest was the history, beginning with the first coders: “Brilliant and pioneering women, who, despite crafting some of the earliest personal computers and programming language, were later written out of history.”

    Coders affirmed two things for me. One is that in the struggle for social justice and human liberation, coders are a decisive force for success—arguably the decisive force, particularly in any pursuit of a People’s Internet, or at the very least a People’s Media. Indeed, the digital battlefield is paramount.

    My second affirmation was being reminded, yet again, about the power of the working class. The Internet, embedded in the lives of billions around the globe, is routinely compared to a cloud, a place without place, without distance. But that’s an illusion. All it takes is for service to go down for us to realize that someone has to fix it, be it a broken fiber optic cable, a damaged router, or a down electrical line.

    When we rely on the Internet, we rely on workers, from mainframe engineers to computer programmers to office workers to maintenance personnel. In his 2012 book, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Wired correspondent Andrew Blum describes how the Internet is “as fixed in real physical places any railroad or telephone ever was. It fills enormous buildings, converges in some places and avoids others, and it flows through tubes underground, up in the air and over the oceans all over the world. You can map it, can smell it, and you can even visit it.”

    There is a human, geographic side to the worldwide web, intricate and utterly interdependent on the other: Those who keep the power going and the work stations clean; the workers who mine and extract the silicon, the silver, copper, mercury, aluminum, tin, lead, and all the rare earth elements; the vast and global workforce that assembles the computers, smart phones and tablets. Then there are those who do the shipping and delivery, who dispose the toxic and radioactive electronic waste.

    I think of tech’s working class whenever I feel I’m too becoming user-centric, and forgetting about the human beings whose labor makes it all run, with the awesome power to make it not run as well.

    David Perez is a writer, journalist, activist, and actor, born in the South Bronx in New York City and currently living in Taos, New Mexico. Read other articles by David.

    This article was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2021 at 10:06am and is filed under Opinion, Technology, Working Class.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • India top over-performer in frontier technologies

    Over-performance is measured as the difference between the actual index rankings and the estimated index rankings based on per capita income

    This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.

  • ‘Existential threat to our survival’ – see the 19 Australian ecosystems already collapsing

    ANALYSIS: By Dana M Bergstrom, University of Wollongong; Euan Ritchie, Deakin University; Lesley Hughes, Macquarie University, and Michael Depledge, University of Exeter

    In 1992, 1700 scientists warned that human beings and the natural world were “on a collision course”. Seventeen years later, scientists described planetary boundaries within which humans and other life could have a “safe space to operate”.

    These are environmental thresholds, such as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and changes in land use.

    Crossing such boundaries was considered a risk that would cause environmental changes so profound, they genuinely posed an existential threat to humanity.

    This grave reality is what our major research paper, published today, confronts.

    In what may be the most comprehensive evaluation of the environmental state of play in Australia, we show major and iconic ecosystems are collapsing across the continent and into Antarctica. These systems sustain life, and evidence of their demise shows we are exceeding planetary boundaries.

    We found 19 Australian ecosystems met our criteria to be classified as “collapsing”. This includes the arid interior, savannas and mangroves of northern Australia, the Great Barrier Reef, Shark Bay, southern Australia’s kelp and alpine ash forests, tundra on Macquarie Island, and moss beds in Antarctica.

    We define collapse as the state where ecosystems have changed in a substantial, negative way from their original state – such as species or habitat loss, or reduced vegetation or coral cover – and are unlikely to recover.

    The good and bad news
    Ecosystems consist of living and non-living components, and their interactions. They work like a super-complex engine: when some components are removed or stop working, knock-on consequences can lead to system failure.

    Bleached coral
    The Great Barrier Reef has suffered consecutive mass bleaching events, causing swathes of coral to die. Image: Shutterstock

    Our study is based on measured data and observations, not modelling or predictions for the future. Encouragingly, not all ecosystems we examined have collapsed across their entire range. We still have, for instance, some intact reefs on the Great Barrier Reef, especially in deeper waters. And northern Australia has some of the most intact and least-modified stretches of savanna woodlands on Earth.

    Still, collapses are happening, including in regions critical for growing food. This includes the Murray-Darling Basin, which covers around 14 percent of Australia’s landmass. Its rivers and other freshwater systems support more than 30 percent of Australia’s food production.

    The effects of floods, fires, heatwaves and storms do not stop at farm gates; they’re felt equally in agricultural areas and natural ecosystems. We shouldn’t forget how towns ran out of drinking water during the recent drought.

    Drinking water is also at risk when ecosystems collapse in our water catchments. In Victoria, for example, the degradation of giant Mountain Ash forests greatly reduces the amount of water flowing through the Thompson catchment, threatening nearly five million people’s drinking water in Melbourne.

    This is a dire wake-up call — not just a warning. Put bluntly, current changes across the continent, and their potential outcomes, pose an existential threat to our survival, and other life we share environments with.

    A burnt pencil pine
    A burnt pencil pine, one of the world’s oldest species. These ‘living fossils’ in Tasmania’s World Heritage Area are unlikely to recover after fire. Image: Aimee Bliss/The Conversation

    In investigating patterns of collapse, we found most ecosystems experience multiple, concurrent pressures from both global climate change and regional human impacts (such as land clearing). Pressures are often additive and extreme.

    Take the last 11 years in Western Australia as an example.

    In the summer of 2010 and 2011, a heatwave spanning more than 300,000 sq km ravaged both marine and land ecosystems. The extreme heat devastated forests and woodlands, kelp forests, seagrass meadows and coral reefs. This catastrophe was followed by two cyclones.

    A record-breaking, marine heatwave in late 2019 dealt a further blow. And another marine heatwave is predicted for this April.

    These 19 ecosystems are collapsing: read about each

    What to do about it?
    Our brains trust comprises 38 experts from 21 universities, CSIRO and the federal Department of Agriculture Water and Environment. Beyond quantifying and reporting more doom and gloom, we asked the question: what can be done?

    We devised a simple but tractable scheme called the 3As:

    • Awareness of what is important
    • Anticipation of what is coming down the line
    • Action to stop the pressures or deal with impacts.

    In our paper, we identify positive actions to help protect or restore ecosystems. Many are already happening. In some cases, ecosystems might be better left to recover by themselves, such as coral after a cyclone.

    In other cases, active human intervention will be required – for example, placing artificial nesting boxes for Carnaby’s black cockatoos in areas where old trees have been removed.

    Two black cockatoos on a tree branch
    Artificial nesting boxes for birds such as the Carnaby’s black cockatoo are important interventions. Image: Shutterstock/The Conversation

    “Future-ready” actions are also vital. This includes reinstating cultural burning practices, which have multiple values and benefits for Aboriginal communities and can help minimise the risk and strength of bushfires.

    It might also include replanting banks along the Murray River with species better suited to warmer conditions.

    Some actions may be small and localised, but have substantial positive benefits.

    For example, billions of migrating Bogong moths, the main summer food for critically endangered mountain pygmy possums, have not arrived in their typical numbers in Australian alpine regions in recent years. This was further exacerbated by the 2019-20 fires. Brilliantly, Zoos Victoria anticipated this pressure and developed supplementary food — Bogong bikkies.

    Other more challenging, global or large-scale actions must address the root cause of environmental threats, such as human population growth and per-capita consumption of environmental resources.

    We must rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero, remove or suppress invasive species such as feral cats and buffel grass, and stop widespread land clearing and other forms of habitat destruction.

    Our lives depend on it
    The multiple ecosystem collapses we have documented in Australia are a harbinger for environments globally.

    The simplicity of the 3As is to show people can do something positive, either at the local level of a landcare group, or at the level of government departments and conservation agencies.

    Our lives and those of our children, as well as our economies, societies and cultures, depend on it.

    We simply cannot afford any further delay.
    The Conversation

    Dr Dana M Bergstrom, principal research scientist, University of Wollongong; Dr Euan Ritchie, professor in wildlife ecology and conservation, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University; Dr Lesley Hughes, Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, and Dr Michael Depledge, professor and chair, Environment and Human Health, University of Exeter. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Sheryl Sandberg and Top Facebook Execs Silenced an Enemy of Turkey to Prevent a Hit to the Company’s Business

    by Jack Gillum and Justin Elliott

    As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook’s top executives faced a political dilemma.

    Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted. Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?

    Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.

    It wasn’t a particularly close call for the company’s leadership, newly disclosed emails show.

    “I am fine with this,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG’s photos and updates about the Turkish military’s brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can’t be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey.

    The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly. When the Turkish government attacked the Kurds in the Afrin District of northern Syria, Turkey also arrested hundreds of its own residents for criticizing the operation.

    Publicly, Facebook has underscored that it cherishes free speech: “We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world,” the company wrote in a blog post last month about a new Turkish law requiring that social media firms have a legal presence in the country. “More than half of the people in Turkey rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family, to express their opinions and grow their businesses.”

    But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey’s military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with the government’s demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were centered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights. “The page caused us a few PR fires in the past,” one Facebook manager warned of the YPG material.

    The Turkish government’s lobbying on Afrin-related content included a call from the chairman of the BTK, Turkey’s telecommunications regulator. He reminded Facebook “to be cautious about the material being posted, especially photos of wounded people,” wrote Mark Smith, a U.K.-based policy manager, to Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy. “He also highlighted that the government may ask us to block entire pages and profiles if they become a focal point for sharing illegal content.” (Turkey considers the YPG a terrorist organization, although neither the U.S. nor Facebook do.)

    The company’s eventual solution was to “geo-block,” or selectively ban users in a geographic area from viewing certain content, should the threats from Turkish officials escalate. Facebook had previously avoided the practice, even though it has become increasingly popular among governments that want to hide posts from within their borders.

    Facebook confirmed to ProPublica that it made the decision to restrict the page in Turkey following a legal order from the Turkish government — and after it became clear that failing to do so would have led to its services in the country being completely shut down. The company said it had been blocked before in Turkey, including a half-dozen times in 2016.

    The content that Turkey deemed offensive, according to internal emails, included photos on Facebook-owned Instagram of “wounded YPG fighters, Turkish soldiers and possibly civilians.” At the time, the YPG slammed what it understood to be Facebook’s censorship of such material. “Silencing the voice of democracy: In light of the Afrin invasion, YPG experience severe cyberattacks.” The group has published graphic images, including photos of mortally wounded fighters; “this is the way NATO ally Turkey secures its borders,” YPG wrote in one post.

    Facebook spokesman Andy Stone provided a written statement in response to questions from ProPublica.

    “We strive to preserve voice for the greatest number of people,” the statement said. “There are, however, times when we restrict content based on local law even if it does not violate our community standards. In this case, we made the decision based on our policies concerning government requests to restrict content and our international human rights commitments. We disclose the content we restrict in our twice-yearly transparency reports and are evaluated by independent experts on our international human rights commitments every two years.”

    The Turkish embassy in Washington said it contends the YPG is the “Syrian offshoot” of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which the U.S. government considers to be a terrorist organization.

    Facebook has considered the YPG page politically sensitive since at least 2015, emails show, when officials discovered the page was inaccurately marked as verified with a blue check mark. In turn, “that created negative coverage on Turkish pro-government media,” one executive wrote. When Facebook removed the check mark, it in turn “created negative coverage [in] English language media including on Huffington Post.”

    In 2018, the review team, which included global policy chief Monika Bickert, laid out the consequences of a ban. The company could set a bad example for future cases and take flak for its decision. “Geo-blocking the YPG is not without risk — activists outside of Turkey will likely notice our actions, and our decision may draw unwanted attention to our overall geo-blocking policy,” said one email in late January.

    But this time, the team members said, the parties were embroiled in an armed conflict and Facebook officials worried their platform could be shut down entirely in Turkey. “We are in favor of geo-blocking the YPG content,” they wrote, “if the prospects of a full-service blockage are great.” They prepared a “reactive” press statement: “We received a valid court order from the authorities in Turkey requiring us to restrict access to certain content. Following careful review, we have complied with the order,” it said.

    Email from Joel Kaplan to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg that says, "FYI that we have received an order from the Turkish government to take down the page of the Kurdish organization YPG. The team's recommendation, which Elliot and I agree with, is to hold off taking action on the YPG page until we receive further notice from the Turkish government that they will block us, but to move immediately to geo-block the page in Turkey if we do receive a blocking threat. Please let us know if you have any concerns with this approach."

    In a nine-page ruling by Ankara’s 2nd Criminal Judgeship of Peace, government officials listed YPG’s Facebook page among several hundred social media URLs they considered problematic. The court wrote that the sites should be blocked to “protect the right to life or security of life and property, ensure national security, protect public order, prevent crimes, or protect public health,” according to a copy of the order obtained by ProPublica.

    Kaplan, in a Jan. 26, 2018, email to Sandberg and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, confirmed that the company had received a Turkish government order demanding that the page be censored, although it wasn’t immediately clear if officials were referring to the Ankara court ruling. Kaplan advised the company to “immediately geo-block the page” should Turkey threaten to block all access to Facebook.

    Email from Joel Kaplan that says, in part, "We are wary of setting the precedent that we will geo-block an opposition group's content simply because a government has deemed the organization to be illegal. However, those concerns are alleviated here as the YPG is engaged in armed conflict with the Turkish military …. Thus, we are in favor of geo-blocking the YPG content …."

    Sandberg, in a reply to Kaplan, Zuckerberg and others, agreed. (She had been at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, touting Facebook’s role in assisting victims of natural disasters.)

    In a statement to ProPublica, the YPG said censorship by Facebook and other social media platforms “is on an extreme level.”

    “YPG has actively been using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and others since its foundation,” the group said. “YPG uses social media to promote its struggle against jihadists and other extremists who attacked and are attacking Syrian Kurdistan and northern Syria. Those platform[s] have a crucial role in building a public presence and easily reaching communities across the world. However, we have faced many challenges on social media during these years.”

    Cutting off revenue from Turkey could harm Facebook financially, regulatory filings suggest. Facebook includes revenue from Turkey and Russia in the figure it gives for Europe overall and the company reported a 34% increase for the continent in annual revenue per user, according to its 2019 annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

    Yaman Akdeniz, a founder of the Turkish Freedom of Expression Association, said the YPG block was “not an easy case because Turkey sees the YPG as a terror organization and wants their accounts to be blocked from Turkey. But it just confirms that Facebook doesn’t want to challenge these requests, and it was prepared to act.”

    “Facebook has a transparency problem,” he said.

    In fact, Facebook doesn’t reveal to users that the YPG page is explicitly banned. When ProPublica tried to access YPG’s Facebook page using a Turkish VPN — to simulate browsing the internet from inside the country — a notice read: “The link may be broken, or the page may have been removed.” The page is still available on Facebook to people who view the site through U.S. internet providers.

    For its part, Facebook reported about 15,300 government requests worldwide for content restrictions during the first half of 2018. Roughly 1,600 came from Turkey during that period, company data shows, accounting for about 10% of requests globally. In a brief post, Facebook said it restricted access to 1,106 items in response to requests from Turkey’s telecom regulator, the courts and other agencies, “which covers a range of offenses including personal rights violations, personal privacy, defamation of [first Turkish president Mustafa Kemal] Ataturk, and laws on the unauthorized sale of regulated goods.”

    Katitza Rodriguez, policy director for global privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the Turkish government has also managed to force Facebook and other platforms into appointing legal representatives in the country. If tech companies don’t comply, she said, Turkish taxpayers would be prevented from placing ads and making payments to Facebook. Because Facebook is a member of the Global Network Initiative, Rodriguez said, it has pledged to uphold the group’s human rights principles.

    “Companies have an obligation under international human rights law to respect human rights,” she said.

    Do you have access to information about Facebook that should be public? Email jack.gillum@propublica.org. Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

    Mollie Simon contributed reporting.

    This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

  • Facebook news ban turns attention to tech giants’ impact on journalism

    By Kalinga Seneviratne in Sydney

    The tech juggernaut Facebook’s shock decision to block all news feeds from Australian media outlets this week in response to a proposed new Media Bargaining law, that will force social media giants to pay for news content that is posted on their platforms, has created fury among Australians.

    But it is also turning attention to the impact of Facebook – and Google – on Australian journalism.

    Facebook banned Australian users from accessing news in their feeds on the morning of Thursday, February 18, as the government pursues laws that would force it to pay publishers for journalism that appears in people’s feeds.

    The legislation was introduced to Parliament in Canberra in December 2020. The House of Representatives passed it earlier this week.

    The bill that has wide political support in Australia is now under review by a Senate committee before it is presented for a vote in the upper house.

    In a lengthy statement issued by Facebook on February 18, the company revealed that it would bar Australian news sites from sharing content on the platform.

    Within moments of the announcement being made public, Australian news organisations, media commentators, interest groups and local consumers of Facebook that runs into millions, began voicing their fury.

    ‘Go directly to source’
    National broadcaster ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) immediately posted a notice on their news pages on the website calling on Australians to “go directly to the source” by downloading from their own news application.

    Facebook’s head of policy for Asia-Pacific, Simon Milner was unrepentant during an interview on the ABC network, arguing that they disagree with the broad definition of news in the new legislation.

    “One of the criticisms we had about the law that was passed by the House of Representatives [on February 16] is that the definition of news is incredibly broad and vague,” he said

    Facebook has said earlier that the proposed laws fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between their platform and publishers who used it to share news content.

    In fact, Facebook has been arguing for a long time that they are a publisher that provides a free platform for news organisations.

    But many media organisations and scholars argue that they are bleeding out revenue from the Australian media running advertising on these pages, which otherwise used to go to the media companies and their platforms such as newspapers and TV stations.

    A first of its kind, the success or otherwise of the Australian legislation is closely watched by other countries, especially in Europe.

    US government pressure
    Interestingly, according to an ABC report on January 18, the US government had tried to pressure the Australian government to drop the proposed legislation.

    According to the ABC, a document with the letterhead of the Executive Office of the President has said: “The US government is concerned that an attempt, through legislation, to regulate the competitive positions of specific players … to the clear detriment of two US firms may result in harmful outcomes.”

    The Australian government, however, sees the new legislation as designed to ensure these media companies are fairly remunerated for the use of their content on search engines and social media platforms.

    Google has begun signing deals with publishers in response, but Facebook has chosen to follow through on its threat and remove news for Australian users.

    In an interview on ABC Radio on February 18, Glen Dyer of popular Crikey! media that uses Facebook extensively to reach their audiences described Facebook’s behaviour as “resembling China’s (Community Party)”.

    He argued that in the past year China has been imposing trade restrictions literally overnight on spurious grounds inconveniencing Australians at the behest of China’s leader, and Mark Zuckerberg is also behaving in a similar high-handed way.

    “It [Facebook] has a management structure that is controlled by a small group headed by Mark Zuckerberg,” he noted.

    Boycott Facebook
    “Australian advertisers should boycott Facebook”.

    However, Dyer added that they would not have the guts because “most of these Australian companies are controlled offshore and the local executives would not risk their bonuses”.

    Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, speaking on ABC TV’s flagship current affairs programme 7.30 Report on February 18, argued strongly for an across the board tax on advertising revenue designed in such a way that both local and foreign companies operating in Australia cannot avoid it.

    “The real question is that the revenue model for media has moved into other platforms like Facebook and Google. There is less revenue support for journalism and that has been a worry for some time,” said Turnbull, who was a merchant banker before moving into politics.

    “Government will be better off imposing a tax on advertising revenue across the board …. take that revenue from Facebook and Google and make the money available to support public interest journalism,” he recommended.

    Turnbull believes that government has lost the plot because they are saying to companies like Facebook and Google, “you have to pay money to those [media companies] who put contents on your site [even though] you are not stealing it or breaching copyrights, you have to pay”.

    Thus, he appealed to Australians to go directly to Australia media news platforms and applications – like that offered by the ABC – without using Facebook.

    Digital threat to democracy
    Chris Cooper, executive director of Reset Australia, a global initiative working to counter the digital threat to democracy has also condemned Facebook’s action.

    “Facebook is telling Australians that rather than participate meaningfully in regulatory efforts, it would prefer to operate a platform in which real news has been abandoned or de-prioritised, leaving misinformation to fill the void,” he argued.

    Reset Australia had made a submission to the government during the legislation’s drafting stage arguing that the true impact of the legislation should be changes to the news, media and journalism landscape in Australia, that should ensure promoting greater diversity and pluralism within the Australian media landscape.

    Cooper argues that Facebook does not care about Australian society nor the functioning of democracy.

    “Regulation is an inconvenient impost on their immediate profits – and the hostility of their response overwhelmingly confirms regulation is needed,” he says.

    Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg blasted Facebook’s decision to block access to pages like 1800Respect, the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services and the Bureau of Meteorology.

    Speaking on ABC he said that this was done at a time that a bushfire emergency in Western Australia depended on this information, and also when Australia is about to roll out the covid-19 vaccines where people needed access to reliable information.

    Frydenberg noted that this heavy-handed action will damage its reputation.

    “Their decision to block Australians’ access to government sites — be they about support through the pandemic, mental health, emergency services, the Bureau of Meteorology — was completely unrelated to the media code, which is yet to pass through the Senate,” he said.

    “What today’s events do confirm for all Australians, is the immense market power of these digital giants.”

    Kalinga Seneviratne is a media analyst and author. This article was first published on IDN-InDepth News and is republished with the permission of the author.

     

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Facebook news ban turns attention to tech giants’ impact on journalism

    By Kalinga Seneviratne in Sydney

    The tech juggernaut Facebook’s shock decision to block all news feeds from Australian media outlets this week in response to a proposed new Media Bargaining law, that will force social media giants to pay for news content that is posted on their platforms, has created fury among Australians.

    But it is also turning attention to the impact of Facebook – and Google – on Australian journalism.

    Facebook banned Australian users from accessing news in their feeds on the morning of Thursday, February 18, as the government pursues laws that would force it to pay publishers for journalism that appears in people’s feeds.

    The legislation was introduced to Parliament in Canberra in December 2020. The House of Representatives passed it earlier this week.

    The bill that has wide political support in Australia is now under review by a Senate committee before it is presented for a vote in the upper house.

    In a lengthy statement issued by Facebook on February 18, the company revealed that it would bar Australian news sites from sharing content on the platform.

    Within moments of the announcement being made public, Australian news organisations, media commentators, interest groups and local consumers of Facebook that runs into millions, began voicing their fury.

    ‘Go directly to source’
    National broadcaster ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) immediately posted a notice on their news pages on the website calling on Australians to “go directly to the source” by downloading from their own news application.

    Facebook’s head of policy for Asia-Pacific, Simon Milner was unrepentant during an interview on the ABC network, arguing that they disagree with the broad definition of news in the new legislation.

    “One of the criticisms we had about the law that was passed by the House of Representatives [on February 16] is that the definition of news is incredibly broad and vague,” he said

    Facebook has said earlier that the proposed laws fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between their platform and publishers who used it to share news content.

    In fact, Facebook has been arguing for a long time that they are a publisher that provides a free platform for news organisations.

    But many media organisations and scholars argue that they are bleeding out revenue from the Australian media running advertising on these pages, which otherwise used to go to the media companies and their platforms such as newspapers and TV stations.

    A first of its kind, the success or otherwise of the Australian legislation is closely watched by other countries, especially in Europe.

    US government pressure
    Interestingly, according to an ABC report on January 18, the US government had tried to pressure the Australian government to drop the proposed legislation.

    According to the ABC, a document with the letterhead of the Executive Office of the President has said: “The US government is concerned that an attempt, through legislation, to regulate the competitive positions of specific players … to the clear detriment of two US firms may result in harmful outcomes.”

    The Australian government, however, sees the new legislation as designed to ensure these media companies are fairly remunerated for the use of their content on search engines and social media platforms.

    Google has begun signing deals with publishers in response, but Facebook has chosen to follow through on its threat and remove news for Australian users.

    In an interview on ABC Radio on February 18, Glen Dyer of popular Crikey! media that uses Facebook extensively to reach their audiences described Facebook’s behaviour as “resembling China’s (Community Party)”.

    He argued that in the past year China has been imposing trade restrictions literally overnight on spurious grounds inconveniencing Australians at the behest of China’s leader, and Mark Zuckerberg is also behaving in a similar high-handed way.

    “It [Facebook] has a management structure that is controlled by a small group headed by Mark Zuckerberg,” he noted.

    Boycott Facebook
    “Australian advertisers should boycott Facebook”.

    However, Dyer added that they would not have the guts because “most of these Australian companies are controlled offshore and the local executives would not risk their bonuses”.

    Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, speaking on ABC TV’s flagship current affairs programme 7.30 Report on February 18, argued strongly for an across the board tax on advertising revenue designed in such a way that both local and foreign companies operating in Australia cannot avoid it.

    “The real question is that the revenue model for media has moved into other platforms like Facebook and Google. There is less revenue support for journalism and that has been a worry for some time,” said Turnbull, who was a merchant banker before moving into politics.

    “Government will be better off imposing a tax on advertising revenue across the board …. take that revenue from Facebook and Google and make the money available to support public interest journalism,” he recommended.

    Turnbull believes that government has lost the plot because they are saying to companies like Facebook and Google, “you have to pay money to those [media companies] who put contents on your site [even though] you are not stealing it or breaching copyrights, you have to pay”.

    Thus, he appealed to Australians to go directly to Australia media news platforms and applications – like that offered by the ABC – without using Facebook.

    Digital threat to democracy
    Chris Cooper, executive director of Reset Australia, a global initiative working to counter the digital threat to democracy has also condemned Facebook’s action.

    “Facebook is telling Australians that rather than participate meaningfully in regulatory efforts, it would prefer to operate a platform in which real news has been abandoned or de-prioritised, leaving misinformation to fill the void,” he argued.

    Reset Australia had made a submission to the government during the legislation’s drafting stage arguing that the true impact of the legislation should be changes to the news, media and journalism landscape in Australia, that should ensure promoting greater diversity and pluralism within the Australian media landscape.

    Cooper argues that Facebook does not care about Australian society nor the functioning of democracy.

    “Regulation is an inconvenient impost on their immediate profits – and the hostility of their response overwhelmingly confirms regulation is needed,” he says.

    Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg blasted Facebook’s decision to block access to pages like 1800Respect, the WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services and the Bureau of Meteorology.

    Speaking on ABC he said that this was done at a time that a bushfire emergency in Western Australia depended on this information, and also when Australia is about to roll out the covid-19 vaccines where people needed access to reliable information.

    Frydenberg noted that this heavy-handed action will damage its reputation.

    “Their decision to block Australians’ access to government sites — be they about support through the pandemic, mental health, emergency services, the Bureau of Meteorology — was completely unrelated to the media code, which is yet to pass through the Senate,” he said.

    “What today’s events do confirm for all Australians, is the immense market power of these digital giants.”

    Kalinga Seneviratne is a media analyst and author. This article was first published on IDN-InDepth News and is republished with the permission of the author.

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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • European Space Agency recruit 26 new astronauts.

    Muqeem Ahmad, London,

    The European Space Agency has announced the recruitment of new astronauts, an opportunity that has become available after 11 years. This time, women and the physically challenged are also being encouraged to create diversity and equality among astronauts.

    Recruitment will start from the end of March and will continue till the end of May. Candidates must have a master’s degree in science and mathematics while they have to go through 6 stages for selection in which scientific and technical knowledge is mental. It also includes physical fitness and the ability to stay calm in difficult situations According to head of European Space Agency, said that we are going to recruit new astronauts with experienced to continue the space mission.

    The European Space Agency last recruited astronauts in 2008 and received 8,000 applications, of which only 10 made it to the finals. This time the European Space Agency will recruit 26 permanent and reserve astronauts.

    This post was originally published on VOSA.

  • The left is under the most extensive attack since the 1950s

    A former Labour MP has been tasked with examining left wing groups as part of a government review into UK ‘extremism’. But this move is just the thin end of the wedge. It is one part of a much wider assault on left-wing views and activity.

    Taken as a whole, we are witnessing perhaps the system’s greatest attack on us since the McCarthyism of the 1950s.

    John Woodcock: witchfinder general

    As The Canary‘s Tom Coburg recently wrote:

    In November 2019, home secretary Priti Patel appointed lord Walney (former Labour MP John Woodcock) as the government’s envoy on countering violent extremism. According to the Telegraph, Woodcock will be looking at “progressive extremism” in Britain. That includes how ‘far-left’ groups could infiltrate or hijack environmental movements and anti-racism campaigns.

    To be clear, ‘extremism’ is a nonsense term. As police monitoring group Netpol’s Kevin Blowe wrote for The Canary, it can mean a number of things: from being a member of a civil disobedience group to being part of a campaign that challenges corporate power. Moreover, the government hasn’t even defined the term extremism or extremist in law. So it allows the state, and its agents, to decide who gets labelled as one.

    The thin end of the wedge

    Already, the right wing in the UK is cheering Woodcock on. The Telegraph wrote with glee that he’d be looking at “anti-capitalist” groups. Woodcock himself stated that:

    I want to look at the way anti-democracy, anti-capitalist far-Left fringe groups in Britain like the Socialist Workers Party tend to have much more success hijacking important causes… than the far-Right, and the harm that may do.

    Woodcock’s review is the thin end of the wedge. Because it sums up what’s happening across society. He’s implying there is no alternative to corporatism (or “capitalism” as he incorrectly refers to it). Anything “anti” that is wrong and must be stopped. And in the wider world, this is already happening. It can be broken down into several areas.

    Un-social media: controlling the narrative

    Facebook and Twitter have been actively silencing dissent. This has now been happening for a while. In 2017, Facebook changed its algorithm to intentionally remove smaller, left-wing news outlets from people’s feeds. The Intercept reported last year that as Facebook was banning far-right, QAnon-related groups, it was doing the same to antifacist ones, too. It consistently shuts down pro-Kurdish accounts. Also, UK Twitter has repeatedly banned left-wing voices. And now, Facebook will be “depoliticising” its platform. In short, it’s looking to reduce the amount of news in people’s feeds. But campaigners say this will hit small, grassroots groups the hardest.

    Now, you could argue ‘it’s the algorithms what did it’. But someone designed those algorithms. And according to reports, CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened to make sure left-wing sites were hardest hit. Why? It’s about control of the narrative. And it’s also about protecting powerful people and companies’ interests.

    Losing the internet

    The internet nearly caused control of the narrative to be lost. In the early days, it was a fairly open platform. But then, the dot com crash of 2000 came. The demise of countless new, smaller tech start-ups was a disaster capitalist’s dream. It paved the way for the domination of the internet by a few companies. And in turn, these companies have ended up being some of the biggest in the world.

    At first, this was about concentrating ownership. But after events like the Arab Spring, the system realised the power the internet could yield for the people. So, the shutting down began. But just recently, we’ve seen some tech giants openly go to war with governments. Most pointed in this is Australia. Its government is making companies like Facebook pay the media for its content. Facebook isn’t happy. In response, it has blocked all news content from its Australian site. Google, meanwhile, is so far going along with the Australian government’s plans.

    The situation in Australia sums up another problem. Namely the establishment corporate media. Because it too has massive control over the public narrative.

    Manufacturing consent, 21st century-style

    The Canary‘s Tom Coburg recently summed up the problem with the establishment corporate media. He wrote that:

    Professor Noam Chomsky co-wrote Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which famously argued that the mainstream media’s role was all about suppressing criticism of the powerful. Now recent moves by media in the UK are about to see that ‘manufactured consent’ taken to a whole new level.

    Coburg argued that UK media is already dominated by a few players. People like right-wing Rupert Murdoch control huge sections of it. But Coburg wrote about how it’s about to get worse. He said that:

    in February 2021, Ofcom was reported to have given its approval for Murdoch and Brooks to launch News UK TV, an outlet that will undoubtedly reflect the political leanings of its owner.

    Meanwhile, it’s understood that former editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, is rumoured to become the next chair of Ofcom [the broadcast media regulator].

    Dominating the narrative

    And then:

    In January, it was reported that Richard Sharp, a former Goldman Sachs banker who donated an estimated £416,189 to the Conservative Party, is to be chair of the BBC’s board of directors.

    In short, the corporate media was already run by a few, right-wing people. Now, it’s about to get worse. The new Australian rules are all the more concerning, too. Because with Google and Murdoch now in financial cahoots, power over the narrative is even more concentrated.

    Overall, the left wing is being shut down on social media. It’s actively deplatforming our news sites. The establishment corporate media is more and more dominant. So, we all better get back to protesting on the streets, yes? Well, we are facing a clampdown there as well.

    Co-opting climate chaos

    Whatever you think of Extinction Rebellion (XR), it’s gotten a name for itself. Its protests in London and around the world have been high-profile. But the system is determined to shut the group down. UK home secretary Priti Patel called its members “criminals”. She said its methods were a:

    shameful attack on our way of life, our economy and the livelihoods of the hard-working majority.

    Billionaire tech mogul Bill Gates said XR was not “constructive”. And Woodcock will be including the group in his review. So, why are the establishment attacking XR? It’s about control of the climate change narrative.

    In short, we’re seeing corporations and those in power co-opting the green movement for their own benefit. Gates is one example. Elon Musk is another. Shell, one of the world’s largest oil companies, is another; rolling out low carbon fuels. The system and its proponents know that we’ve screwed the planet. They know it needs fixing. But in the process, these disaster capitalists also see a money-making opportunity. Plus, if the system fails, so do they. So, XR and its people-led approach needs stopping. And the UK’s increasingly authoritarian police are central to this.

    Increasing authoritarianism

    Police monitoring group Netpol recently wrote that the UK government:

    is planning to introduce major changes to public order legislation to crack down on protests, under a new “Protection of the Police and Public Bill” planned for 2021.

    It’s looking to increase police powers over protest. These include police being able to control where they happen and using stop and search powers on protesters. Netpol says it comes in the wake of not only XR but also Black Lives Matter (BLM). Patel accused the latter of “hooliganism and thuggery”. Little wonder, when its call for defunding of the police is, like XR, a threat to the system. BLM’s drive for equality and social justice is the same. Corporate capitalism needs inequality to function. Any true levelling of the playing field would be too damaging for it.

    So, what if the police do arrest and charge you over a demo? At least lawyers will be able to help you. Or so you’d think.

    Battering the law

    The government is also attacking the legal profession. As former Green Party leader Natalie Bennett recently wrote for Bright Green:

    It’s not just that the government has drained away the resources of legal aid: the annual legal aid budget is now £1.6bn a year, £950m less in real terms than it was in 2010, or removed all support for large areas of work under the 2013 Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act (LASPO).

    It’s also that the government has actively attacked the role of lawyers in upholding the rule of law: Priti Patel attacked “do-gooders” and “lefty lawyers”, her Home Office tweeted (although after an outcry deleted) an attack on “activist lawyers” and even produced a video with the same theme (also eventually deleted).  Marina Sergides, a barrister at Garden Court, testified to the APPG: “We are public servants but we are not treated as public servants… we are actively attacked by the government”.

    That attitude permeates throughout government action. Just this weekend, Paul Powlesland tweeted that while assisting, pro bono, anti-HS2 protesters at Euston, he was slapped with a £200 Covid regulation fine. He said he’s confident of being able to fight it in court – but what a pass we’ve come to when police are acting against legal protection.

    So, the left is becoming increasingly squeezed. We’re unable to operate effectively online. Our media outlets are impaired. The corporate news is all the more dominant. Physical protest is becoming more and more restricted. And our right to legal recourse is also under threat. So, we’d best hope that Generation Z is going to save us then?

    Indoctrinating the youth

    In 2020, the UK government issued new education guidance. Vice reported that it:

    told leaders and teachers involved in setting the RSE curriculum that anti-capitalism is categorised as an “extreme political stance”, comparable to the opposition to freedom of speech, antisemitism and the endorsement of illegal activity.

    Of course, this would mean students would not hear any opposing views on capitalism. But it could also mean erasing huge parts of history. As George Monbiot said in a Twitter thread:

    Behind these histories lies an even bigger and more sacrilegious truth. It’s that the system we call capitalism… is really a system of global theft… Let’s imagine there’d been no theft. No gold, silver and land stolen from Native Americans, no people stolen from Africa, no wealth stolen from India and the other colonies, no ransacking of our life support systems. How successful would this system we call capitalism have been? How rich and powerful would nations like ours have been? I would guess: not very. Capitalism is not what it claims to be. It is not the great success story its beneficiaries proclaim. It is the ideological structure we use to shield ourselves from brutal truths.

    So, the system has to erase valid criticism of it for it to continue to evolve. And it’s embedding this further, too.

    Cancelling cancel culture

    We’re also seeing a “twin” attack on so-called “cancel culture”. The UK government has just said it’s ‘strengthening’ free speech at universities. Education secretary Gavin Williamson said:

    I am deeply worried about the chilling effect on campuses of unacceptable silencing and censoring. That is why we must strengthen free speech in higher education, by bolstering the existing legal duties and ensuring strong, robust action is taken if these are breached.

    In short, the UK Tories are targeting students trying to shut down transphobes, racists, and misogynists.

    Also with this comes a government focus on ‘heritage’.

    The “war on woke”

    The government is bringing together 25 of the UK’s biggest heritage bodies and charities in an attempt to whitewash British history. Third Sector said that the government has “summoned” them:

    to a summit where Oliver Dowden [the culture secretary] is expected to tell them “to defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down”.

    It is being seen as an escalation of the government’s “war on woke” against so-called “cancel culture”, amid concern at senior levels in the government over what it sees as attempts to rewrite Britain’s past.

    It’s an obvious attack on BLM and the removing of slave trader statues. But moreover, it’s an attempt to shore up the false nationalist history peddled by the establishment that has led the system to the point it’s at today.

    So, you’d be hard-pushed to find somewhere the system wasn’t attacking the left. These individual cases are nothing new. But what seems new this time is the sheer scale of it. And a freelance journalist has compared this to another time in history.

    A new McCarthyism?

    Tim Fenton said that much of this is a new form of McCarthyism. Historically, it’s not far off in terms of the current system’s MO. Woodcock’s review is the same as a ‘Salem Witch Trial’. That is, in the context made famous by Arthur Miller in his play The Crucible. Miller’s Salem witch trials were a metaphor for the clamp-down on communists during the 1950s in the US. But Fenton’s point is also useful in seeing why this is going on.

    In the 1950s, two forces were pulling the world apart: communism and capitalism. Human society was at a crossroads of ideologies. It could have gone either way. Fast-forward to the 21st century, and we are in a similar position. Except this time, the forces are not communism and capitalism. They are corporatism on one side and humanity on the other. This isn’t just a UK phenomenon, either. It’s been the same in the US. And it’s the same in France. It’s the same in Australia. Power is now highly concentrated. And those with it want to make sure it stays that way.

    But in the UK, Woodcock’s review isn’t the end of the story.

    The left wing: being dunked, Tory style

    The government will soon be introducing the Online Safety Bill. As I previously wrote for The Canary, this proposed legislation is peak Tory government. It’s dressing up an overarching attack on freedom and democracy as something that’s good and protective for us. Put this authoritarian piece of law in tandem with Woodcock’s review. Then, tie in all the other crackdowns mentioned above. And what you have is perhaps the greatest attack on the left since McCarthyism in the 1950s. In fact, it may end up being even worse.

    With the advances in technology have come more and more ways for activists to organise. But consequently, traditional methods have been lost. Our lives and our human interactions are now dominated by tech. This leaves us exposed to governments and corporations exerting more power than ever before over them. My late father was a prominent member of the communist party in the 1950s/60s. He used to have a favourite story to tell. When they held meetings, the chair would always end his opening speech by saying:

    And finally, a very special welcome to our friends at the back of the room.

    He was referring to undercover police. But the meeting would still go ahead. Now, we live in the age of virtual organising. And our right to even discuss having a meeting may end up being curtailed. Our freedom to object to, and protest against, what the system is meting out has never been under such a threat. It’s up to all of us to push back – before it’s too late.

    Featured image via Rupert Colley – Flickr and Sky News – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Facebook has pulled the trigger on news content — and possibly shot itself in the foot

    Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg … The social media giant claims news publishers derive more value from news sharing than Facebook does. Image: Michael Reynolds/AAP/The Conversation

    ANALYSIS: By Diana Bossio, Swinburne University of Technology

    Facebook this week made good on its threat to block Australians from accessing or posting news content. The ban includes blocking links to Australian and overseas news publishers.

    Facebook said the ban was a direct response to the federal government’s news media code legislation, which is expected to become law soon and would require digital platforms such as Facebook and Google to pay news media companies whose content they host.

    The move is either a last-ditch attempt to gain concessions in the legislation, or a simple cut-and-run by Facebook.

    The social media giant claims news publishers derive more value from news sharing than Facebook does. This is plausible, as news content makes up only 4 percent of sharing on the platform, whereas many news sites gain a large fraction of their traffic from Facebook referrals.

    But this is probably more about flexing some muscle. Facebook may be demonstrating to the Federal government that if it does not like the rules, it can damage national interests.

    Collateral damage
    Australians will feel some short-term negative impacts of Facebook’s flex.

    Certain government Facebook pages, such as those belonging to the Bureau of Meterology and some health department sites, have been caught up in the ban. Facebook says this is due to the wording of the legislation, stating:

    As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted.

    While Facebook says it will restore non-news pages, the action will put pressure on the government to define more clearly what it means by news content.

    In the meantime, the move will affect Australians’ access to vital information related to emergencies and the covid pandemic. Without a concerted effort to ensure online behaviour change from users, this could be dangerous.

    Misinformation risk
    We can also expect to see a short-term proliferation of misinformation as Facebook’s news feed will have a vacuum of professionally sourced and fact-checked news.

    A significant number of Australians discuss news on Facebook, both via their newsfeed and in groups. Being able to source factual information from news sites is part of the everyday political and social participation that social media platforms facilitate.

    The democratic impact of Facebook’s ban will be felt – and is counter to Facebook’s stated principle of connecting people and its recent pledge to tackle misinformation.

    Will it hurt Facebook?
    The impact of this action against the legislation on Facebook itself is yet to be seen.

    The reputational damage from blocking important sites that serve Australia’s public interest overnight – and yet taking years to get on top of user privacy breaches and misinformation – undermines the legitimacy of the platform and its claimed civic intentions.

    Facebook’s actions may send a message to the government, but they will also send one to their Australian users.

    Readers are likely to find other ways to get their news. If we learn from the experience of Google’s news ban in Spain, we can see that after an initial dip in traffic, most major news organisations in Spain regained much of their web traffic after about a year.

    Surfing social waves
    Tools such as Facebook are only useful if people want to use them. And for some existing users, the lack of news might be a dealbreaker.

    Facebook already faces a long-term problem of an ageing user demographic, as under-25s turn to Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok for news and information.

    Young people may have Facebook profiles, but they are less likely to be active users.

    News organisations are already following their lead. For example, The Conversation Australia has 325,735 Facebook followers and will probably feel the impact of the loss of engagement there.

    But it also has more than 21,000 Instagram followers and counting. It is increasingly making visual news “tiles” to cater for the younger demographic of users who source news from other platforms. It has also been working to reach readers directly via regular email newsletters, which one in five US readers now say is their primary way of accessing news.

    News organisations have already learned how to pivot fast. When Facebook changed its algorithms in 2018 to deprioritise news publishers, many took action to reduce their reliance on Facebook’s traffic, analytics or digital advertising dollars.

    What now?
    Larger news organisations will be OK in the long run. But Australia’s smaller outlets, including local publishers and non-profits that produce public interest journalism, will need protection.

    The long-term task for news organisations and journalists is to convince the public – especially young people – that it’s worthwhile to actively seek out professional news and journalism as part of their daily online lives, rather than simply reading whatever comes across their feed.

    As for Facebook, going back to its original purpose of facilitating personal connection and social networking, rather than posing as a forum for public information, may not be a bad thing. But the reputational damage and publisher exodus will eventually damage its core business: digital advertising revenue.The Conversation

    Dr Diana Bossio is a lecturer in Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    Print Friendly, PDF & Email

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Facebook has pulled the trigger on news content — and possibly shot itself in the foot

    ANALYSIS: By Diana Bossio, Swinburne University of Technology

    Facebook this week made good on its threat to block Australians from accessing or posting news content. The ban includes blocking links to Australian and overseas news publishers.

    Facebook said the ban was a direct response to the federal government’s news media code legislation, which is expected to become law soon and would require digital platforms such as Facebook and Google to pay news media companies whose content they host.

    The move is either a last-ditch attempt to gain concessions in the legislation, or a simple cut-and-run by Facebook.

    The social media giant claims news publishers derive more value from news sharing than Facebook does. This is plausible, as news content makes up only 4 percent of sharing on the platform, whereas many news sites gain a large fraction of their traffic from Facebook referrals.

    But this is probably more about flexing some muscle. Facebook may be demonstrating to the Federal government that if it does not like the rules, it can damage national interests.

    Collateral damage
    Australians will feel some short-term negative impacts of Facebook’s flex.

    Certain government Facebook pages, such as those belonging to the Bureau of Meterology and some health department sites, have been caught up in the ban. Facebook says this is due to the wording of the legislation, stating:

    As the law does not provide clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted.

    While Facebook says it will restore non-news pages, the action will put pressure on the government to define more clearly what it means by news content.

    In the meantime, the move will affect Australians’ access to vital information related to emergencies and the covid pandemic. Without a concerted effort to ensure online behaviour change from users, this could be dangerous.

    Misinformation risk
    We can also expect to see a short-term proliferation of misinformation as Facebook’s news feed will have a vacuum of professionally sourced and fact-checked news.

    A significant number of Australians discuss news on Facebook, both via their newsfeed and in groups. Being able to source factual information from news sites is part of the everyday political and social participation that social media platforms facilitate.

    The democratic impact of Facebook’s ban will be felt – and is counter to Facebook’s stated principle of connecting people and its recent pledge to tackle misinformation.

    Will it hurt Facebook?
    The impact of this action against the legislation on Facebook itself is yet to be seen.

    The reputational damage from blocking important sites that serve Australia’s public interest overnight – and yet taking years to get on top of user privacy breaches and misinformation – undermines the legitimacy of the platform and its claimed civic intentions.

    Facebook’s actions may send a message to the government, but they will also send one to their Australian users.

    Readers are likely to find other ways to get their news. If we learn from the experience of Google’s news ban in Spain, we can see that after an initial dip in traffic, most major news organisations in Spain regained much of their web traffic after about a year.

    Surfing social waves
    Tools such as Facebook are only useful if people want to use them. And for some existing users, the lack of news might be a dealbreaker.

    Facebook already faces a long-term problem of an ageing user demographic, as under-25s turn to Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok for news and information.

    Young people may have Facebook profiles, but they are less likely to be active users.

    News organisations are already following their lead. For example, The Conversation Australia has 325,735 Facebook followers and will probably feel the impact of the loss of engagement there.

    But it also has more than 21,000 Instagram followers and counting. It is increasingly making visual news “tiles” to cater for the younger demographic of users who source news from other platforms. It has also been working to reach readers directly via regular email newsletters, which one in five US readers now say is their primary way of accessing news.

    News organisations have already learned how to pivot fast. When Facebook changed its algorithms in 2018 to deprioritise news publishers, many took action to reduce their reliance on Facebook’s traffic, analytics or digital advertising dollars.

    What now?
    Larger news organisations will be OK in the long run. But Australia’s smaller outlets, including local publishers and non-profits that produce public interest journalism, will need protection.

    The long-term task for news organisations and journalists is to convince the public – especially young people – that it’s worthwhile to actively seek out professional news and journalism as part of their daily online lives, rather than simply reading whatever comes across their feed.

    As for Facebook, going back to its original purpose of facilitating personal connection and social networking, rather than posing as a forum for public information, may not be a bad thing. But the reputational damage and publisher exodus will eventually damage its core business: digital advertising revenue.The Conversation

    Dr Diana Bossio is a lecturer in Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Post-Pandemic American Society Must Not Return to its Industrial Capitalist Roots

    Our mace shaped COVID-19 enemy and its mutations merrily popping up around the United States, ironically has opened up new possibilities for inching beyond the grimy confines of industrial capitalism to new modes of work, learning and being that were initially promised by technocrats at the dawn of the Internet/World Wide Web. Indeed, the Pandemic of 2020-21 (Pandemic) revealed that remote education and work was feasible easing; for example, the pollution that filled the air with the exhaust from automobiles, buses, aircraft and idle factories.

    Further, telemedicine was catapulted from mere novelty to reality as the medical community realized that simple follow-up appointments did not require brick and mortar (B&M) office visits. Corporations like Amazon saved billions, according to CNBC, on travel expenses by halting the practice of needlessly sending employees to conferences and trade shows that could just as easily be conducted online. Families were forced to spend time together maybe getting to know one another better.  Businesses that survived during the Pandemic were forced to make hybrid arrangements for employees so they could care for their children while staying physically distanced from the workplace. Americans had time to think in isolation and perhaps, for a moment, they became bored with all the technological gadgets and networks that blur, rather than educate.

    Was it really all that bad? Can’t the nation wean itself off of industrial capitalism? Do we have to go back?

    Yes, no doubt, suffering was real. Millions went unemployed and the destruction wrought by the Pandemic was revealed in the numbers filing for unemployment claims, food assistance, rent/mortgage and student loan forbearance. Homelessness increased. Surplus labor skyrocketed. Indeed, according to the human resources consultancy Adeccogroup.com, the top five jobs set for the post-Pandemic chopping block are in higher education, sales, administration and office support, construction, air travel and the hospitality industry. What now?

    Never Forget

    It was in this that the Pandemic exposed the sheer ruthlessness of American industrial capitalist governance and its homicidal policies. Even as 500,000 Americans died from complications of COVID-19, Americans would watch as the US government—through its elected representatives, simply told the people to go pound sand. Watching the mostly wealthy entrenched ideologues in the US Congress bicker, or vacation, while COVID-19 was causing America to eat itself has to stand as one of the more sickening events in American history. Indeed, stock prices soared at many points during the Pandemic even as a modern day plague ravaged the land.

    No one should ever forget it.

    The Pandemic caused American government to buckle on its knees. It was a horrific structural failure and the wreckage is there for all Americans, and the world, to see. It is there in the COVID-19 KIA body counts, a flimsy healthcare system ravaged by privatization, logistical impasses in transporting vaccines and, in the midst of it all, the US Congress—while in session affirming the electoral vote count for president Joe Biden—was overrun by an ignorant mob. And now those at the apex of industrial capitalism, here in the United States, and those at the bottom of it, want to move back to the standard industrial model that has left a path of death, suffering and waste in its wake. “Build Back Better,” US president Joe Biden says. Back to what?

    Yes, our deadly friend COVID-19 showed that Americans are made of the stuff of ignorance, fear, complaint and irresponsibility. The Pandemic caused Americans not to adapt and put on a brave face, but rather exposed the flimsy myth of America as exceptional. Oh, first responders and frontline medical workers have great courage, of course, and so do many US soldiers that experience combat, but those individuals are small in number in a nation of 335 million people.

    It is strange that the Pandemic pushed the Internet/WWW to be used for what it was initially meant for: research, learning, work, and video/voice communication in a time of isolation. It was a far better use of the medium as opposed to  24 hours news casts, Tik-Tok videos and perpetual head-down positions required by the handhelds; all accompanied, of course, by loud, tractor-pull mutilated language or techno pop. With 100 places to turn for electronic stimulation— and the fear of missing a call, video or text—it’s no wonder attention spans for the young and old have become so irreparably damaged that recalling sentence number one at the end of a four sentence paragraph is a challenge of the highest order.

    Lobotomy Please, Not Reality

    But perhaps there is a ghost in the machine type of logic to it all. The network connected American has come to forget in the evening what was purchased in the morning. It is certainly good for business. History is what happens in the future, not the past. The past needs to be wiped away so the future can appear. The unintended use of the Internet/WWW and communications technologies/gadgets, have caused in-depth, critical thinking to be wiped away in the United States. The Pandemic has shown that Americans do not want to slow down or spend time apart from their handheld which is, of course, connected to the Internet/WWW.

    With the Internet—the cables, links, routers, switches and other machinery upon which content (voice, images, video, text, software) travels the World Wide Web, Americans became easily blinded into thinking that they were living out some novel, fantastical existence in a technologically sophisticated, forward thinking society. It was all cosmetic gloss, a techno-veil, one which we all donned because we really believed that by doing so we were moving in some direction to a sort of new American Nirvana.

    It is tempting to refer to the artsy-tech movie The Matrix and the scene where Morpheus shows Neo that the world he thought he knew has been destroyed. “Welcome to the world of the real,” Morpheus says as Neo looks on and goes into shock, vomiting.

    But the world of 2021 is no special effects movie.

    Americans are eager to get back to the way things were, in their world of the real. To get back on the road to commute to work/school; that is, increase pollution, vehicle accidents. To be relieved of parenting, that is, using schools/teachers as a babysitting service and prisons for prepubescent adolescents and/or maturing teenagers. Why does the United States want to rush back into the B&M model? Consider building construction, or, better still, phrase it as building empty, wasteful spaces. Elementary and high school buildings remain largely empty during a 24/7, 12 month cycle (after hours they remain largely vacant). The sports fields, running tracks and basketball courts that accompany each structure are only partially used. The same can be said for sky-scraping office buildings that, over the same 24/7 hour, 12 month cycles, remain empty. Meanwhile, taxpayer funded sports stadiums are never fully used. It is reminiscent of cathedrals and mosques built at great expense on the backs of the poor that become tourist attractions more than places of worship. Or think about military bases, factories and housing projects abandoned, rotting away. These are the wasteful byproducts of industrial capitalism still existing and perpetually constructed in what is wistfully called “The Information Age.”

    The Human Condition has hardly changed at all.

    Warehouses for the Young

    The Pandemic showed that the Internet—those land, seafloor and space-based communications networks, combined with the content and software of the World Wide Web (WWW), could be effectively used to teach students online, at home, and in virtual classrooms. As it is, America warehouses K-20 students; separating, or rather protecting them, from the messy society adults have created. Students are taught — what exactly? How to master a college entrance exam? To memorize Algebraic equations they will forget in a year?

    The Pandemic of 2020-21, showed just how archaic B&M education is. Let’s face it, isn’t distance learning/work the way the United States was supposed to evolve even minus COVID-19?

    Prognosticators claimed the greatest technological powerhouse on the planet was going to push ahead building pipelines to carry and host vast stores of knowledge content via the Internet and WWW for learning. No more bulky, out of date textbooks. Students, parents, teachers and local-state-federal government officials (in that order) would work together to develop an educational plan based on the student’s primary interests which would likely be demonstrated by 12th grade, perhaps, with second and third interests in the pipeline if the student’s subject matter area changed.

    Course tracks would be customized by downloading, largely free, content from the WWW. The teacher would become more like a tutor and the student would have many of them with perhaps a learning coordinator/advocate constantly tweaking the course menu. Since performance data on students in K-12 in the USA is tracked anyway; for example—including absent/sick days, suspensions and legal problems— career path/trend analyses based on grades and other statistics could be implemented to assist the student in selecting a field of study-employment.

    Chained to the Bicycle Rack

    “It’s nice to know things. I like to know things. You like to know things,” said Professor David Perkins of Harvard University in the 2015 issue of Harvard Ed Magazine. “But there are issues of balance, particularly in the digital age. The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips…Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack…It sits solidly in the minds of parents: I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it? The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out…the life worthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty, it seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”

    It is often necessary to visit the past for a solution to the present. Consider the following from 1971. It is excerpted from Between Two Ages: The Technetronic Era, by Zbigniew Brzeziński.

    The following would be a good start for Americans to set about changing their views of learning, working and being.

    In America higher education is carried on within a relatively self-­contained organizational and even social framework, making for a protracted period of semi­-isolation from problems of social reality. As a result, both organizationally and in terms of content, a divorce between education and social existence has tended to develop…extending education on an intermittent basis throughout the lifetime of the citizen, society would go a long way toward meeting this problem. The duration of the self­-contained and relatively isolated phase of initial education could then be shortened. Taking into account the earlier physical and sexual maturation of young people today, it could be more generally pursued within a work ­study framework, and it should be supplemented by periodic additional training throughout most of one’s active life.

    A good case can be made for ending initial education—more of which could be obtained in the home through electronic devices, somewhere around the age of eighteen. This formal initial period could be followed by two years of service in a socially desirable cause; then by direct involvement in some professional activity and by advanced, systematic training within that area; and finally by regular periods of one and eventually even  two years of broadening, integrative study at the beginning of every decade of one’s life, somewhere up to the age of sixty. For example, medical or legal training could begin after only two years of college, thus both shortening the time needed to complete the training and probably also increasing the number attracted into these professions. Regular and formally required retraining—as well as broadening—could ensue at regular intervals throughout most of one’s professional career.

    By now you are wondering: So what is my solution? I don’t have an adequate response to that question, but I do know that national and transnational cultural education has to be connected to any answer or plan that sets America—and the world, for that matter, on a path to a post-industrial capitalist society. The country isn’t even close to it now. The Pandemic has shown that. It just does not seem likely that returning to the industrial capitalist, B&M norm—or the model of governance as it is run by officials now in power—will move the country any closer to change. The wars go on, weapons are more lethal and will soon be operated by AI programs, racism still exists, ignorance is bliss, corporations are people, pollution continues, wasted spaces are good for business, and education is awash in a mishmash of learning methodologies, software applications and a war between parents, teachers and administrators.

    Perhaps—like the US military as it seeks to stand down to contemplate the problem of extremism in its ranks—American civil society needs to stand down for some period of time to reassess learning, work and being.

    The post Post-Pandemic American Society Must Not Return to its Industrial Capitalist Roots first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Post-Pandemic American Society Must Not Return to its Industrial Capitalist Roots

    Our mace shaped COVID-19 enemy and its mutations merrily popping up around the United States, ironically has opened up new possibilities for inching beyond the grimy confines of industrial capitalism to new modes of work, learning and being that were initially promised by technocrats at the dawn of the Internet/World Wide Web. Indeed, the Pandemic of 2020-21 (Pandemic) revealed that remote education and work was feasible easing; for example, the pollution that filled the air with the exhaust from automobiles, buses, aircraft and idle factories.

    Further, telemedicine was catapulted from mere novelty to reality as the medical community realized that simple follow-up appointments did not require brick and mortar (B&M) office visits. Corporations like Amazon saved billions, according to CNBC, on travel expenses by halting the practice of needlessly sending employees to conferences and trade shows that could just as easily be conducted online. Families were forced to spend time together maybe getting to know one another better.  Businesses that survived during the Pandemic were forced to make hybrid arrangements for employees so they could care for their children while staying physically distanced from the workplace. Americans had time to think in isolation and perhaps, for a moment, they became bored with all the technological gadgets and networks that blur, rather than educate.

    Was it really all that bad? Can’t the nation wean itself off of industrial capitalism? Do we have to go back?

    Yes, no doubt, suffering was real. Millions went unemployed and the destruction wrought by the Pandemic was revealed in the numbers filing for unemployment claims, food assistance, rent/mortgage and student loan forbearance. Homelessness increased. Surplus labor skyrocketed. Indeed, according to the human resources consultancy Adeccogroup.com, the top five jobs set for the post-Pandemic chopping block are in higher education, sales, administration and office support, construction, air travel and the hospitality industry. What now?

    Never Forget

    It was in this that the Pandemic exposed the sheer ruthlessness of American industrial capitalist governance and its homicidal policies. Even as 500,000 Americans died from complications of COVID-19, Americans would watch as the US government—through its elected representatives, simply told the people to go pound sand. Watching the mostly wealthy entrenched ideologues in the US Congress bicker, or vacation, while COVID-19 was causing America to eat itself has to stand as one of the more sickening events in American history. Indeed, stock prices soared at many points during the Pandemic even as a modern day plague ravaged the land.

    No one should ever forget it.

    The Pandemic caused American government to buckle on its knees. It was a horrific structural failure and the wreckage is there for all Americans, and the world, to see. It is there in the COVID-19 KIA body counts, a flimsy healthcare system ravaged by privatization, logistical impasses in transporting vaccines and, in the midst of it all, the US Congress—while in session affirming the electoral vote count for president Joe Biden—was overrun by an ignorant mob. And now those at the apex of industrial capitalism, here in the United States, and those at the bottom of it, want to move back to the standard industrial model that has left a path of death, suffering and waste in its wake. “Build Back Better,” US president Joe Biden says. Back to what?

    Yes, our deadly friend COVID-19 showed that Americans are made of the stuff of ignorance, fear, complaint and irresponsibility. The Pandemic caused Americans not to adapt and put on a brave face, but rather exposed the flimsy myth of America as exceptional. Oh, first responders and frontline medical workers have great courage, of course, and so do many US soldiers that experience combat, but those individuals are small in number in a nation of 335 million people.

    It is strange that the Pandemic pushed the Internet/WWW to be used for what it was initially meant for: research, learning, work, and video/voice communication in a time of isolation. It was a far better use of the medium as opposed to  24 hours news casts, Tik-Tok videos and perpetual head-down positions required by the handhelds; all accompanied, of course, by loud, tractor-pull mutilated language or techno pop. With 100 places to turn for electronic stimulation— and the fear of missing a call, video or text—it’s no wonder attention spans for the young and old have become so irreparably damaged that recalling sentence number one at the end of a four sentence paragraph is a challenge of the highest order.

    Lobotomy Please, Not Reality

    But perhaps there is a ghost in the machine type of logic to it all. The network connected American has come to forget in the evening what was purchased in the morning. It is certainly good for business. History is what happens in the future, not the past. The past needs to be wiped away so the future can appear. The unintended use of the Internet/WWW and communications technologies/gadgets, have caused in-depth, critical thinking to be wiped away in the United States. The Pandemic has shown that Americans do not want to slow down or spend time apart from their handheld which is, of course, connected to the Internet/WWW.

    With the Internet—the cables, links, routers, switches and other machinery upon which content (voice, images, video, text, software) travels the World Wide Web, Americans became easily blinded into thinking that they were living out some novel, fantastical existence in a technologically sophisticated, forward thinking society. It was all cosmetic gloss, a techno-veil, one which we all donned because we really believed that by doing so we were moving in some direction to a sort of new American Nirvana.

    It is tempting to refer to the artsy-tech movie The Matrix and the scene where Morpheus shows Neo that the world he thought he knew has been destroyed. “Welcome to the world of the real,” Morpheus says as Neo looks on and goes into shock, vomiting.

    But the world of 2021 is no special effects movie.

    Americans are eager to get back to the way things were, in their world of the real. To get back on the road to commute to work/school; that is, increase pollution, vehicle accidents. To be relieved of parenting, that is, using schools/teachers as a babysitting service and prisons for prepubescent adolescents and/or maturing teenagers. Why does the United States want to rush back into the B&M model? Consider building construction, or, better still, phrase it as building empty, wasteful spaces. Elementary and high school buildings remain largely empty during a 24/7, 12 month cycle (after hours they remain largely vacant). The sports fields, running tracks and basketball courts that accompany each structure are only partially used. The same can be said for sky-scraping office buildings that, over the same 24/7 hour, 12 month cycles, remain empty. Meanwhile, taxpayer funded sports stadiums are never fully used. It is reminiscent of cathedrals and mosques built at great expense on the backs of the poor that become tourist attractions more than places of worship. Or think about military bases, factories and housing projects abandoned, rotting away. These are the wasteful byproducts of industrial capitalism still existing and perpetually constructed in what is wistfully called “The Information Age.”

    The Human Condition has hardly changed at all.

    Warehouses for the Young

    The Pandemic showed that the Internet—those land, seafloor and space-based communications networks, combined with the content and software of the World Wide Web (WWW), could be effectively used to teach students online, at home, and in virtual classrooms. As it is, America warehouses K-20 students; separating, or rather protecting them, from the messy society adults have created. Students are taught — what exactly? How to master a college entrance exam? To memorize Algebraic equations they will forget in a year?

    The Pandemic of 2020-21, showed just how archaic B&M education is. Let’s face it, isn’t distance learning/work the way the United States was supposed to evolve even minus COVID-19?

    Prognosticators claimed the greatest technological powerhouse on the planet was going to push ahead building pipelines to carry and host vast stores of knowledge content via the Internet and WWW for learning. No more bulky, out of date textbooks. Students, parents, teachers and local-state-federal government officials (in that order) would work together to develop an educational plan based on the student’s primary interests which would likely be demonstrated by 12th grade, perhaps, with second and third interests in the pipeline if the student’s subject matter area changed.

    Course tracks would be customized by downloading, largely free, content from the WWW. The teacher would become more like a tutor and the student would have many of them with perhaps a learning coordinator/advocate constantly tweaking the course menu. Since performance data on students in K-12 in the USA is tracked anyway; for example—including absent/sick days, suspensions and legal problems— career path/trend analyses based on grades and other statistics could be implemented to assist the student in selecting a field of study-employment.

    Chained to the Bicycle Rack

    “It’s nice to know things. I like to know things. You like to know things,” said Professor David Perkins of Harvard University in the 2015 issue of Harvard Ed Magazine. “But there are issues of balance, particularly in the digital age. The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips…Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack…It sits solidly in the minds of parents: I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it? The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out…the life worthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty, it seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”

    It is often necessary to visit the past for a solution to the present. Consider the following from 1971. It is excerpted from Between Two Ages: The Technetronic Era, by Zbigniew Brzeziński.

    The following would be a good start for Americans to set about changing their views of learning, working and being.

    In America higher education is carried on within a relatively self-­contained organizational and even social framework, making for a protracted period of semi­-isolation from problems of social reality. As a result, both organizationally and in terms of content, a divorce between education and social existence has tended to develop…extending education on an intermittent basis throughout the lifetime of the citizen, society would go a long way toward meeting this problem. The duration of the self­-contained and relatively isolated phase of initial education could then be shortened. Taking into account the earlier physical and sexual maturation of young people today, it could be more generally pursued within a work ­study framework, and it should be supplemented by periodic additional training throughout most of one’s active life.

    A good case can be made for ending initial education—more of which could be obtained in the home through electronic devices, somewhere around the age of eighteen. This formal initial period could be followed by two years of service in a socially desirable cause; then by direct involvement in some professional activity and by advanced, systematic training within that area; and finally by regular periods of one and eventually even  two years of broadening, integrative study at the beginning of every decade of one’s life, somewhere up to the age of sixty. For example, medical or legal training could begin after only two years of college, thus both shortening the time needed to complete the training and probably also increasing the number attracted into these professions. Regular and formally required retraining—as well as broadening—could ensue at regular intervals throughout most of one’s professional career.

    By now you are wondering: So what is my solution? I don’t have an adequate response to that question, but I do know that national and transnational cultural education has to be connected to any answer or plan that sets America—and the world, for that matter, on a path to a post-industrial capitalist society. The country isn’t even close to it now. The Pandemic has shown that. It just does not seem likely that returning to the industrial capitalist, B&M norm—or the model of governance as it is run by officials now in power—will move the country any closer to change. The wars go on, weapons are more lethal and will soon be operated by AI programs, racism still exists, ignorance is bliss, corporations are people, pollution continues, wasted spaces are good for business, and education is awash in a mishmash of learning methodologies, software applications and a war between parents, teachers and administrators.

    Perhaps—like the US military as it seeks to stand down to contemplate the problem of extremism in its ranks—American civil society needs to stand down for some period of time to reassess learning, work and being.

    This article was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2021 at 6:35pm and is filed under COVID-19, Education, Industsrial Capitalism, Internet, Lockdown, Opinion, Pandemics, Society, Technology.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • $614 million loss force Airbus to halt production of A380 Super Jumbo.

    Muqeem Ahmad, London,

    Year 2020 was the most difficult for Airbus and it lost becomes 510 million Euros or 614 million dollars, according to European aircraft maker Airbus.

    Global travel restrictions, lockdowns and the closure of business and tourism activities forced Airbus to halt production of A380 Super Jumbo, and many such projects had to close with heavy losses. While Airbus has not received any major orders for jets in 2021, it has stopped distributing profits to shareholders this year in a row.

    On the other hand, Airbus’s customer airline is also facing severe difficulties. Air France’s, KLM and other international airlines have been affected by the pandemic and the sale of new aircraft is almost non-existent.

    The Airbus factories still have 100 jets ready and have no buyers. The global aviation industry has high hopes for an end to the Corona virus pandemic, which will be able lead to resumption of travel and tourism.

    This post was originally published on VOSA.