Dust in the Light
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
However, what I don't hear is radical solution to this problem. Even in Obama's medium essay, the solution is deep police and criminal justice reform. Which, while important, is incremental. What we need here is a step change to course correct 400 years of history. And incremental changes do not cut it. Here are some step change suggestions
1)Trillions of dollars of reparations 2) A generous UBI 3) Free healthcare 4) Trillions of investment in schools in poorer neighborhoods 5) A dramatic rise in minimum wage
In pre-COVID world, I would accept a reasonable pushback against this suggestion was "deficit" "debt" etc. But COVID has exposed these pushbacks was hypocritical (puts a stark spotlight on the hypocritical Tea Party movement). We printed trillions of dollars overnight to save small and big businesses, and employees. Why can't we move at that scale ? If we can suddenly print that much money, what is stopping us from massive investments in our most disadvantaged communities to undo 400 years of history ?
Last year, I was outside talking to our (White) yard guy. His truck with the name of his lawn service was parked out front. He was dressed in beat up jeans, dusty, and holding the lawn mower while I had just come from work - in slacks and button down shirt. A neighbor walked over to us and asked him how long has he been living here while completely ignoring me. He looked like he was going to say something and I quietly nudged for him not to. I politely said I would see them later and walked into the house.
She was embarrassed - point made. When she left, I walked back outside with a bottle of water for him and we started back talking. I told him I just walked into the house to make a point and we both laughed.
And they are going to vote for him again?
How many “good Christians” support him even after the recording came out about him “grabbing a woman by the p%%%%”?
For working class people, neoliberal economics have done nothing for them. Plants in town have closed and they don't see any investment in their community from their tax dollars.
If neither party is going to look out for you, it's perfectly rational to sigh and pick the one that at least doesn't villainize you as some sort of oppressor.
If the democrats want to win back the white union vote, they need to actually offer something besides "vote for us or you're racist". I guess there's always 2024.
Basically the type of people who think saying "Black Lives Matter" means you hate White people.
Also, WaPo recently used one question from historical surveys by the ANES (American National Election Studies) to measure what they consider "white resentment", and there seems to be a large correlation between that and other political positions. [2]
(Skip to the "Here’s how we did our research" part and the graph if you're not a fan of WaPo)
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[1] https://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/08/my-on...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/1...
edit: To make an analogy, if you move into a condo, and its roof needs to be replaced the next year, it's not your fault that the building's reserve fund can't cover the cost, but that doesn't exempt you from paying the special levy.
I am not so sanguine. People in power all over the world are seeing the threat to their power from the Internet and working to curtail it. China is probably the most ahead, but I am sure everyone else is hard at work.
The centralization of the Internet makes it a much easier task. If you get Google, Facebook, and Twitter on board, you basically control the flow of information to most of the West.
In the West it probably won’t be overt coercion but more likely via monetary and legal incentives. Immunity or liability from lawsuits for user posted content will be the big carrot and stick that will be used to get these companies to do the governments’ bidding.
I fear that the George Floyd video equivalent 10 years from now will get immediately deleted by ML algorithms as too disturbing and the uploaders automatically banned
Please don't get me wrong I'm not trying to equate China and the west, China is a lot worse but strictly looking at the reaction of those in power to the internet... People in power in the west are definitely reacting strongly.
China is more 1984 and the west is more brave new world.
I think the scarier truth is that they did not so much forget about it, but that people really didn't care.
Both can be bad, but they're not the same thing. China leads on both.
Hiding or delaying riots and looting from the snapmap could be seen as censorship or keeping the peace, by preventing everyone from jumping to join in until its over.
An editorial delay to perceived live events, in the interest of public safety, in an interesting wrinkle in the debate between censorship vs fanning the fire.
Coming soon to Twitter: Automated trigger warnings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologia
for large tech monopolies.
These essays are fueled by throwing some facts and nuance around so that we appear to be a thoughtful person but then roughly sums it up with "isn't it great we have cellphones and facebook?"
this particular post seems to marvel at how big tech provides otherwise-sheltered people a lens on the wider world, and by extension, a (rather tiny) mechanism of change. it claims more significance for this mechanism than, you know, masses of people marching on the streets, because that's the vantage point of the author and it's relative importance to him.
edit: i just listened to Funmilola Fagbamila on yesterday's take two [0], and she was incredibly articulate and insightful about the protests and organizing for change: https://www.funmilola.com/
[0] https://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2020/06/01/20889/
Sure, seeing large marches are great at grabbing attention, but seeing actual video evidence of police brutality is _much_ more persuasive. Now almost everyone has high-def cameras, and the ability to stream live to everyone (so people will see it even if the police take/destroy your phone). I think that makes a big difference, though I'm not arguing that tech alone deserves credit for improving things. Having people in the streets still matters.
again, for you. the people marching didn't need to see the video to be angry and mobilize for change. they were already angry, a long-simmering anger of an even longer and more widely tolerated injustice and oppression. when people protest, we should listen to them, believe them, because protesting is not without its risks and costs. that the video matters so much to you relative to the protesters is exactly the criticsm of perspective leveled here.
[0]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-lots-of-white-democ...
I mean, the masses of people marching on the streets would very likely not be there but for the widespread sharing of the video.
But when was the last time we had this level of protest in support of a minority group? The million man march? And that required how much organization in comparison?
No one is arguing that it’s a required feature for masses of people being angry at injustice.
What they’re arguing is that it changes which injustices are visible.
so injustice doesn't matter when it's just minorities, only when some (presumably white) people "support" them?
> "What they’re arguing is that it changes which injustices are visible."
...to him. the injustices are painfully apparent to the population affected.
look, all things being equal, it's better that he's now startled out of ignorance by a tragic and now-sensationalized video of someone's death, but sorry, that's not the central mechanism of change here.
Perhaps I was unclear.
First: injustice absolutely matters in all cases, not just when it's visible to white people.
But, injustice towards minority groups has, for most of American history, been invisible to and/or ignored by majority groups (obviously not to the minority groups experiencing it, thanks, or even to others). To be clear, this is BAD.
Second: pervasive cellphones (+ cameras) and social media is changing that, making injustices directed at minority groups visible to majority groups, and harder to ignore by those majority groups.
Are you saying that this is not happening, or that it is bad? Or that it's not because of cellphones and social media? What is the central mechanism of change?
(Whether this visibility will ultimately help change anything remains to be seen, for sure. And there are also clearly downsides to social media that make other things worse, too.)
my secondary point is that it shouldn't need to take a video to convince (white) people. just listen to the protesters, carefully and earnestly, as well as the investigative journalism around what they say. that should be enough, if folks care enough to not ignore the injustices.
I think I worry that, short of revolution, change happens because people in power acquiesce to it. :/ (Again, obviously, this is bad, and I wish it were not this way, and I don’t condone or want to justify this. I just worry that it’s what history suggests.)
If that’s true — and again, I hope it’s not, and it sucks if it is — then the effects of supporters and sympathies are not actually marginal to change, and the ability for those without power to attract the sympathies and support of those with it is both a Big Deal, and new — media has long been closely gatekept by power.
But I’m not a particularly strong student of history, and I’d love to be wrong here.
To your secondary point: I wholeheartedly agree, it should be enough.
being aware is simply not enough. we've been aware of our collective racism for at least the last 150 years and no change to that has happened top-down. it's all bottom-up. it's all people fighting for their rights and dignity. power isn't acquiesced so much as chipped away. awareness weakens the stone so the chipping is easier, but the chips don't just fall off on their own.
that's why the (white) awareness is "marginal", not because it's not helpful, or possibly even necessary, but because it's not causative. there's nothing wrong with marginal, it's good, better than irrelevant, but it's not the catalyst of change in racial power dynamics.
The income disparity graphs personally provided more understanding as to why the issue appears to happen in certain locations.
If it makes it approachable to undergraduate MBA types who feel more comfortable in seeing spreadsheets and data science analysis and understandable to a wider, different audience that doesn't seem like such a bad thing.
That said, I'd be really interested in being pointed to better sources for data science approaches to understanding the issue(s) - in addition to the more narrative based suggestions provided.
His writing doesn't deliver in a chain of reasoning that you would expect in undergraduate argument papers. Despite their organization and polish the meat of argument is just not there.
As "internet/media analyst" he genuinely seems unaffected by the events of the last 8 years. It's disturing that there are people still out there with this bovine of an outlook. 2020 and techbro discovers redlining and racism were a thing for the last... Most of his essays are just the same way but in different topics. edited -- wrong guy same outlook
Well, isn't it? I mean yes, that's not the only conclusion to be drawn here. But without their ubiquity, this would never have become a story in the first place.
If insight on demand was achievable, we'd be living in a different world.
We need to innovate in terms of how we keep democracies healthy, given the dramatic change to the flow of information caused by social media and the internet.
Adding a "get the truth" notice to posts that contain misinformation is a great way to strike a balance between censoring misinformation and letting it spread unchecked, and this approach is an interesting new tool in the toolkit we have for keeping conversations healthy on the internet. I applaud Twitter for their work in developing and experimenting with this tool.
Likewise, limiting the viral spread of posts that threaten violence (by preventing likes and retweets) is also a useful tool. It's interesting to note that the reason this post wasn't removed entirely is because public figures like Trump get a "newsworthiness" exception in Twitter's Code of Conduct that allows them to essentially say whatever they want, even if it violates the CoC.
It mentions redlining, quotes Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but then mostly argues that Twitter's filter on Trump's tweet made it spread wider, the reverse of the action they wanted, implying they did the wrong action, or that it would not work in the future, which is pretty bad logic.
The tweet became more notable because Twitter has never done this before. It got reproduced because it was the first time Twitter did it, not because people wanted to read the "shocking tweet". If twitter were to do this often, or dump Trump, we'd stop talking about it again. Cf Milo.
And then it ends with this whole "The internet is the new industrial revolution, and that is both good and bad" thing. Kind of like, Ben couldn't stop himself from Internet Thoughtleadership for a minute. After 4 minutes of commenting on Race in America he had to go back to musing about Platforms.
I get it, you want to (and can!) tie it in to your expertise. But you just kind of failed at that.
You could talk about the huge tech titans making it worse: Amazon's Ring doorbell, the $10B JEDI contract with the DoD, Facebook's extremist groups/lack of moderation, Twitter not banning Trump the first time around, the Adtech industry in general pushing surveillance everywhere it can, to gather datapoints. Or the way tech has made income inequality worse. The homogenous makeup of the tech industry. The social construction of "nerdiness" as whiteness. The tech industry (and everyone on the Internet)'s unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist approach, and only being accessible to people with money and app solutionism.
But instead it ends with "I am hopeful there are fewer gatekeepers, and can therefore see racism more clearly now". Like, that's it?
At least put a couple links to non-profits in the footer. Doesn't this guy make a few million $ a year from his newsletter? Donate it!
Interesting that in his mind the looting is the dark side of this uprising.
How about the drones the riot cops use to watch the protesters' every move?
Wasn't it Microsoft and AWS fighting over the facial recognition AI contract that Google finally dropped?
This is part II.
(To be clear: the things you mention are bad)
An alternative plausible explanation is it's a half circle because the town center is on the southern end of the lake.
Way too much being made of multiple sets of data points and pins on a map around a lake, without mentioning density, with a lake.
"Racial covenants were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1948, but the effect remains; compare the racial covenant map to the racial dot map Blank referenced above — the blue (which is white people) adheres to the blue of racial covenants:...
"A map of racial covenants closely matches a map of Minneapolis' population
"That red cross, meanwhile, is the location of the homicide of George Floyd, in the decidedly non-blue portion of the map."
I have downvoted your comment, not because there's anything specifically wrong in it, but because I cannot believe focusing on the word "crescent" and disregarding any context could be anything other than an attempt to diminish the discussion.
There is. Constructing a convoluted worldview in which there isn't, and promulgating it, is racism.
On the contrary....
I grew up in Africa. My sister is professor of African studies with degree from UW Madison. I'm familiar with the area and the issues.
The "crescent" seen in the data is geography, not some sort of compelling argument for correlation.
Exactly contrary to your interpretation of my comment, my point is that the same data sets are correlated everywhere there's density, but I guess "the blob" doesn't seem as persuasive as "the crescent".
It's not that it's a crescent, it's just urban America.
And it's a problem.
PS. See also, "centuries worth of negative compounding at work": https://ofdollarsanddata.com/racial-wealth-gap/