Dick Pountain/Idealog 272/15 March 2017 13:54
A few months ago (issue 269 to be exact) I wrote a column about the way the so-called 'alt-right' in the USA had built an alarmingly effective alternative web of sites that pumped a continual stream of 'fake news' stories into the mainstream social and news media during the 2016 presidential election campaign. A US professor of communications, Jonathan Albright, mapped the topography of this dark web, which he dubbed a 'micro-propaganda machine', and the Guardian printed his map. This network employs advanced SEO and link tweaking tricks to stay hidden.
Turns out though that this was barely half the story, and after I found out some of the other half I rather wished I hadn't, because I've been feeling slightly queasy ever since. I found out through a highly entertaining blog post by Dale Beran, a writer and comic artist who had the distinction of being an early user of the 4chan.org website (where his comic work was admired). Now I've personally only been on 4chan.org once - by accident when following some obscure search - and I began to feel uncomfortable after about three minutes, fled after five and spent the next half hour scrubbing against malware. Bit like a jungle, bit like a locked-ward, bit like a circus, good test of your anti-virus solutions...
According to Beran's extraordinary piece (https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba#.gp86cg9ns) 4chan was the breeding ground for the Anonymous hackers network, the 'Gamergate' scandal, Bitcoin, and more recently for the alt-right micro-propaganda network. Its denizens tend to be nihilistic, misogynistic, game-playing nerds with an extremely dark (and often very funny) sense of humour. Beran explains why they swung their considerable online skills behind Donald Trump, not because he was any good, not because they agreed with his politics (they don't really do politics) but precisely because he's so awful - the ultimate prank, elect a nutjob as president of the world's sole superpower. They also supplied the Trump team with its mascot, that unpleasant cartoon frog Pepe.
I recommend you read Beran's piece for yourself, with couple of big Solpadeine and a glass of water to hand. And I have to admit being jealous of the deft way he wove a Charles Bukowski novel about horse racing into his narrative. But what I intend to pursue here is the likely effect of this apotheosis of fakery on the future of our affairs, which might go way beyond mere prankery. The overall effect of all this fake news and contempt for rational argument - which has started popping up not only in Whitehouse press briefings but everywhere from Sweden to Turkey to China - is to erode trust, and trust is perhaps the most valuable commodity in the whole world.
Surely a slight exaggeration? Everyone tells a white lie now and again don't they? No need to get so worked up about it. Actually I'm not worked up at all, because I don't see this from a moral perspective. No, what terrifies me is that debt, credit, markets and even money itself, are all just forms of materialised trust. If I hand you a fiver, you not only trust that I didn't forge it but more importantly you also trust everyone else to recognise its value and give you the equivalent goods in exchange for it. The very word 'credit' is defined by Collins as 'the quality of being believable or trustworthy'. Undermining trust is like putting sand into the engine-oil of the world economy.
To be sure the relationship between money, credit and trust is rather more complex than I've just suggested, as extensively analysed by everyone from Adam Smith to Maynard Keynes. My favourite recent study is 'Debt: The First 5000 Years', a lively and groundbreaking work by David Graeber (one of the masterminds behind Occupy) in which he says:
'A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it.'
Which brings me to another dangerous online lifeform, the gold-bug. You'll have seen those websites where folk that argue that all our bank-created 'fiat money' is actually worthless, bits on hard disk, and that gold is the only real source of value. A few years ago this seemed either mildly eccentric or mere gold-salesman hucksterism, but keep undermining trust in everything and these arguments start to be believed. That way eventually leads to Northern Rock. Once you believe nothing, in practice you'll believe anything: say, that insulting China will resurrect America's rusting factories, or that leaving the EU will save the NHS from collapse.
Sunday 6 August 2017
ANALOG REVOLT?
Dick Pountain/Idealog 271/16 February 2017 14:50
Our industry is notorious for its love of buzzwords (think "agile", or "responsive", or "passionate") but currently the most egregious one, the one that makes me reach for my imaginary Luger, is "creative". It's one of those words like "love" or "cool" that's so radically unabusable, so self-evidently good and desirable, that it's guaranteed it will be continually abused. I of course consider myself creative, like everyone else in the friggin' world, but I've recently been prompted to examine more closely exactly what that means. What prompted me to this reflection was a Bill McKibben review in the New York Review of Books, of "The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter" by David Sax.
Sax’s thesis is that we're witnessing more and more islands of analog refuge among the foaming waves of digital media and communications: places where we can relax and think as opposed to clicking, and where we touch actual physical objects instead of bitmaps. One obvious example is the re-discovery of vinyl records by young people, in sufficient numbers to warrant the reopening of several pressing plants. Another is the recent fashion for carrying a Moleskine notebook, even among folk who clutch the latest iPhone in their *other* hand. (This actually sent me off down a timewasting diversion about pronunciation: Brits call it Mole-skin, Europeans and ex-Europeans like me say Mol-ess-kinay). The company recently went public valued at a positively digital €490 million, for a quintessentially analog product. Sax talked to architectural firms and software companies who hand out these notebooks and forbid their designers to turn on their computer until they've brainstormed an initial design on paper. The electronic whiteboard utterly failed to displace paper pads and marker pens, as used by this very magazine in our own brainstorming sessions...
Sax continues though to push this argument a step too far for me. Moleskine's ads claim their notebooks helped Picasso and Hemingway to success:
"Creativity and innovation are driven by imagination, and imagination withers when it is standardized, which is exactly what digital technology requires—codifying everything into 1s and 0s, within the accepted limits of software."
Well, perhaps, but remember paper notebooks were all they had. We can't know whether Picasso would have taken to Procreate or Zen Brush on an iPad, but my guess is he'd have loved it. The 1s and 0s objection is a 10ad 0f 01d b0110x in the era of GUIs.
I've written many columns about my quest for useability in pocketable devices, and this book review played right into my latest discovery, namely that Google Keep has just added a sketching facility. I can now knock out line and tone drawings with my finger on phone or tablet as fast as I could with Moleskine and a pen, and they automatically appear on all my devices without having to scan them in. If I need more features Autodesk's brilliant Sketchbook is installed on my tablet too, and Android's ubiquitous Share menu shuttles pix between them in seconds.
I've also written here about the thousand-odd processed photographs that I keep on Flickr, and about my Python-based music composition system. In both these media I do actually respect Sax's aversion to "standardization": for example when I apply dozens of successive filters and blend-modes to a photo, I deliberately refrain from writing down the sequence so that image is unique and unrepeatable - though of course it is easily *copyable*, which is a principal joy of digital versus analog. I do the same when composing tunes: while I keep the Python source code for each family of tunes, I don't record every parameter (for example random ones) for each particular instance, so these tunes have the same uniqueness as my photos.
A deep attachment to matter is both desirable and laudable, given that we're all made of it, but it can also stray into the sentimental or romantic. It also cuts two ways: while matter has a certain permanence and leaves a historical trace - we still have pottery and statues made thousands of years ago - most people believe that digital data is impermanent, volatile, easily lost (which can be very true if you have a sloppy backup regime). But that very volatility is also a strength of the digital realm. Art is indeed all about essences, representations and images, and handling these digitally produces far less waste of both materials and time. Check out the price of oil paint and canvas nowadays: it's an expensive way to learn. Best overcome any superstitious aversion to 1s and 0s, design and edit your work in the digital domain and only finally turn it into matter when it's good enough. After all that's what 3D printers and record pressing plants are there for.
Our industry is notorious for its love of buzzwords (think "agile", or "responsive", or "passionate") but currently the most egregious one, the one that makes me reach for my imaginary Luger, is "creative". It's one of those words like "love" or "cool" that's so radically unabusable, so self-evidently good and desirable, that it's guaranteed it will be continually abused. I of course consider myself creative, like everyone else in the friggin' world, but I've recently been prompted to examine more closely exactly what that means. What prompted me to this reflection was a Bill McKibben review in the New York Review of Books, of "The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter" by David Sax.
Sax’s thesis is that we're witnessing more and more islands of analog refuge among the foaming waves of digital media and communications: places where we can relax and think as opposed to clicking, and where we touch actual physical objects instead of bitmaps. One obvious example is the re-discovery of vinyl records by young people, in sufficient numbers to warrant the reopening of several pressing plants. Another is the recent fashion for carrying a Moleskine notebook, even among folk who clutch the latest iPhone in their *other* hand. (This actually sent me off down a timewasting diversion about pronunciation: Brits call it Mole-skin, Europeans and ex-Europeans like me say Mol-ess-kinay). The company recently went public valued at a positively digital €490 million, for a quintessentially analog product. Sax talked to architectural firms and software companies who hand out these notebooks and forbid their designers to turn on their computer until they've brainstormed an initial design on paper. The electronic whiteboard utterly failed to displace paper pads and marker pens, as used by this very magazine in our own brainstorming sessions...
Sax continues though to push this argument a step too far for me. Moleskine's ads claim their notebooks helped Picasso and Hemingway to success:
"Creativity and innovation are driven by imagination, and imagination withers when it is standardized, which is exactly what digital technology requires—codifying everything into 1s and 0s, within the accepted limits of software."
Well, perhaps, but remember paper notebooks were all they had. We can't know whether Picasso would have taken to Procreate or Zen Brush on an iPad, but my guess is he'd have loved it. The 1s and 0s objection is a 10ad 0f 01d b0110x in the era of GUIs.
I've written many columns about my quest for useability in pocketable devices, and this book review played right into my latest discovery, namely that Google Keep has just added a sketching facility. I can now knock out line and tone drawings with my finger on phone or tablet as fast as I could with Moleskine and a pen, and they automatically appear on all my devices without having to scan them in. If I need more features Autodesk's brilliant Sketchbook is installed on my tablet too, and Android's ubiquitous Share menu shuttles pix between them in seconds.
I've also written here about the thousand-odd processed photographs that I keep on Flickr, and about my Python-based music composition system. In both these media I do actually respect Sax's aversion to "standardization": for example when I apply dozens of successive filters and blend-modes to a photo, I deliberately refrain from writing down the sequence so that image is unique and unrepeatable - though of course it is easily *copyable*, which is a principal joy of digital versus analog. I do the same when composing tunes: while I keep the Python source code for each family of tunes, I don't record every parameter (for example random ones) for each particular instance, so these tunes have the same uniqueness as my photos.
A deep attachment to matter is both desirable and laudable, given that we're all made of it, but it can also stray into the sentimental or romantic. It also cuts two ways: while matter has a certain permanence and leaves a historical trace - we still have pottery and statues made thousands of years ago - most people believe that digital data is impermanent, volatile, easily lost (which can be very true if you have a sloppy backup regime). But that very volatility is also a strength of the digital realm. Art is indeed all about essences, representations and images, and handling these digitally produces far less waste of both materials and time. Check out the price of oil paint and canvas nowadays: it's an expensive way to learn. Best overcome any superstitious aversion to 1s and 0s, design and edit your work in the digital domain and only finally turn it into matter when it's good enough. After all that's what 3D printers and record pressing plants are there for.
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