[Plura-list] The Black Panther self-care method; Facebook shows mall ninja gear ads on insurrection articles

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* The Black Panther self-care method: A revolutionary idea.

* Facebook shows mall ninja gear ads on insurrection articles: "Storm
the Capitol!" "Buy body armor!"

* This day in history: 2011, 2016, 2020

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

👷🏾 The Black Panther self-care method

"Self-care" is a commodified notion that sounds like a marketing gimmick
to sell you an app or a livestreamed fitness course, but as Lenora E
Houseworth writes in Teen Vogue, its roots are in the radical struggle
for Black liberation.

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-radical-history-of-self-care

The Black Panthers popularized what had been an obscure medical term in
the 1960s, using it to refer to everything from mindfulness to yoga to
meditation, all practiced by incarcerated Panther leaders like Angela
Davis and Ericka Huggins to help survive prison.

After their release, Davis and Huggins created nutrition and movement
programs in Black neighborhoods around the country. Over time, this
focus on wellness was integrated into the "self-defense" component of
the Panthers' 10-point program.

Houseworth quotes Penn state postdoc Maryam K Aziz: "Rather than
focusing on the physicality of such moves, the [Black Panther] Party’s
martial arts program emphasized appreciating one’s Black body as it was."

This radical tradition carries over to the works of such icons as Audre
Lorde, whose writing about surviving cancer and campaigning for civil
rights draws an explicit connection between self-care and struggle.

The racially disproportionate trauma of covid and the BLM uprising have
increased the need for - and the politicization of - self-care.

Houseworth quotes Pholk Beauty founder Niambi Cacchioli: "If social
justice work is your calling, then now is the time to look after your
mental and physical wellbeing. There’s plenty of fight ahead of us."

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

👷🏾 Facebook shows mall ninja gear ads on insurrection articles

We hear a lot about Facebook as a platform for manipulation - using
machine learning to bypass our critical faculties and trick us into
believing things that are bad for us - but the real show is in
Facebook's ability to target, not manipulate.

People who hold disfavored views struggle to find one another and
mobilize. To find other people that feel the same way as you and make
common cause with them to effect political change, you have to reveal
your views and suffer social sanction.

Search allows people who hold these views to find one another. If you
have a deep feeling about your gender being nonbinary but don't know the
words for it, you can search for communities of people who have those
words, join them, and discover who you've been all along.

This is why, in this moment, so many ideas are migrating from the fringe
to the center: ideas about racial justice, gender identity, alternatives
to market systems, etc. People have harbored these views all along, but
have held back on expressing them.

Being able to express yourself in private, among people who share your
views, is a prelude to going public and putting your case to the wider
world in hopes of effecting change.

This goes for ALL disfavored views: not just ones we laud, but also the
ones we deplore. Many Americans have nursed secret white supremacism but
only whispered about it, because saying it aloud would attract social
sanction, with real consequences.

Search let these people find each other. Having formed groups, they were
able to brave social consequences and begin to shout about it. When they
did, they converted people who were sort-of racist all along to their
cause. "Radicalization" is closely related to "convincing."

But search isn't the only way that groups with hard-to-find traits can
be discovered: there's also targeting. Ad-tech companies spy on us,
ascribe traits to us, then sell the right to target those traits to
advertisers.

"Show my ad to midwestern high school cheerleaders"

"To people shopping for a new fridge"

"To the owners of senior dogs"

"To people with diabetes"

"To readers of cyberpunk science fiction novels"

"To people skeptical of Big Tech"

"To Bernie Sanders supporters"

"To violent, Trump-addled conspiracists plotting insurrection"

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-profits-military-gear-ads-capitol-riot

To be fair, the Facebook ads "for body armor, gun holsters, and other
military equipment next to content promoting election misinformation and
news about the attempted coup at the US Capitol" were probably not
necessarily targeted at "coup plotting" per se.

Rather, they were probably targeting the correlates of "coup plotting" -
Maga and Qanon affinities, 2A mania, support for the likes of Steve King
or Ted Cruz.

No service operating a FB's scale could predict all of these correlates...

But.

Facebook actually knows about this one. It's one of the minority of
these dangerous targeting-pairings that its own internal teams
discovered and warned management about, only to met with yawning
indifference.

And moreover, no one put a gun to FB's head and ordered to it to
acquire, sue, copy, or otherwise predate upon all of its competitors
until it was so large it could no longer police its own ads.

Nor was FB forced to spend vast fortunes lobbying against privacy rules
that would limit its targeting ability.

People who want to kill CDA230, take note. Facebook agrees with you:
they want a rule that forces its rivals to spend money they don't have
on moderation.

If you want to hurt FB, look for the things that it lobbies AGAINST:
privacy regulations and antitrust enforcement.

Targeting is different from search. The ability to target people who'll
buy scammy, expensive products produces profits for the companies who
sell them.

Those companies then mobilize those profits, investing them in
convincing more people to hold beliefs that earn them money (think of
Amazon starting a be-very-afraid crime news service as part of the
marketing for its Ring surveillance doorbells).

There's a difference between "being convinced by someone else's odious,
sincere beliefs" and "being convinced by someone's cynical, profitable
promotion of ideas that they don't believe themselves."

The Macedonian teens who promoted fraudulent "news-stories" during the
Trump election didn't care if Trump won or lost - they were just chasing
a buck. And messed-up, scared people part with money more readily than
stable, calm people.

Targeting creates a business-model: defrauding frightened, traumatized
people by scaring them more. It's not an automated process of digital
manipulation: it's the result of human beings thinking of lies that they
think will make them rich.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

👷🏾 This day in history

#10yrsago Report: Belarusian mobile operators gave police list of
demonstrators https://charter97.org/en/news/2011/1/12/35161/

#5yrsago US Treasury Dept wants to know which offshore crimelords are
buying all those NYC and Miami penthouses
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2016/0113/Are-luxury-condo-purchases-hiding-dirty-money

#5yrsago UK Home Secretary auditions for a Python sketch: “UK does not
undertake mass surveillance”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jpg8mx/the-uk-does-not-undertake-mass-surveillance-says-uk-home-secretary

#5yrsago The Internet of Things in Your Butt: smart rectal thermometer
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgkbab/this-rectal-thermometer-is-the-logical-conclusion-of-the-internet-of-things

#5yrsago How an obsessive jailhouse lawyer revealed the existence of
Stingray surveillance devices
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/13/10758380/stingray-surveillance-device-daniel-rigmaiden-case

#1yrago Podcast: Inaction is a form of action
https://ia802800.us.archive.org/3/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_323/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_323_-_Inaction_is_a_form_of_action.mp3

#1yrago Newton’s Principia Mathematica, George Washington’s journal:
archivist stole $8m worth of rare books from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie
Library
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/01/14/carnegie-library-book-theft/

#1yrago Schneier: “It’s really too late to secure 5G networks”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/01/china_isnt_the_.html

#1yrago Med-tech company repossess veteran’s artificial legs because the
VA won’t cover them
https://www.jacksonville.com/zz/news/20200110/company-repossessed-and-returned-vets-prosthetic-legs-he-still-cant-use-them

#1yrago You will be helped! Research using real-world situations fails
to replicate the “bystander effect”
https://psyarxiv.com/nqscj/download?format=pdf

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

👷🏾 Colophon

Today's top sources: JWZ (https://www.jwz.org/blog/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 510 words (98937
total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 26)
https://craphound.com/news/2020/12/14/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-26/

Upcoming appearances:

* Keynote for linux.conf.au, Jan 22 (US) 23 (Australia)
https://linux.conf.au/schedule/

* Evening with William Gibson, Jan 25,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/william-gibson-cory-doctorow-agency-tickets-132831910821

* Boskone, 58, Feb 12-15, https://boskone.org/

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* Repair.org presents CES Worst In Show, Jan 15,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeUhrRRsyZs

* Hedging Bets on the Future (Motherboard Cyber):
https://play.acast.com/s/cyber/hedgingbetsonthefuturewithauthorcorydoctorow

* Applying the Pandemic Mindset to Climate Change:
https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/12/applying-the-pandemic-mindset-to-climate-change-with-cory-doctorow

* 2020 Beaverbrook Lectures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y66r57bGG5w

* Bibliotherapy/Shelf Healing:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1509671/6580831

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

👷🏾 How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/web/accounts/303320

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and
advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/attachments/20210114/636b77b6/attachment.sig>