Notes from the Metaground
The week's highlights in extremism, tech and extremist tech
In this week’s newsletter:
Extremists respond to the Trump indictment
A.I., Brain Scans and Cameras: The Spread of Police Surveillance Tech
Surge in Anti-LGBTQIA+ Tweets Under Musk
Who Could Have Foreseen…
R.I.P. Intelwire Daily Brief
Extremists respond to the Trump indictment
How were extremists taking the Trump indictment? A little bit of this, and a little bit of that, a lot of heavy sighs. Trump’s premature announcement of his impending arrest may have drained the reservoirs of outrage, but some buzz remains. Many QAnon types attempted to rationalize the indictment as the start of “the storm,” arguing that the indictment of Trump was just to set a precedent for the nebulous hidden forces of good, who would then be empowered to arrest Biden and Obama. The “coming civil war” crowd kept on keeping on, as did some old-school commenters who warned that Trump’s arrest was bait and that the feds were waiting to pounce on anyone who reacted to the news. Overall, I’d have to call the reaction underwhelming, at least in the public-facing channels that I track.
The downside of fomenting a narrative of constant life-or-death crisis is that it's hard to escalate when something actually happens.
That said, the mood could change sharply with the actual arraignment, expected on Tuesday. For a lot of people, the charges might not seem real until then (see the aforementioned premature announcement). And how Trump behaves will also be a factor. It feels like it’s only a matter of time before he utters the magic words “The storm is upon us” to send his very large QAnon following into unprecedented hysterics. It might not happen. This is real life, Chekhov's gun does not necessarily apply. On the other hand, it’s all show business to Trump, and if his comeuppance ever catches up with him, there’s little doubt he will try to drag us all down with him.
A.I., Brain Scans and Cameras: The Spread of Police Surveillance Tech
That headline in the New York Times is every bit as dystopian as it sounds. And while the Times claims these efforts show “startling effectiveness,” the industry by its nature tends to exaggerate its claims. Don’t get me wrong, this stuff is a nightmare if it works, but it’s also a nightmare if it doesn’t work (#readoptimal). Its aims are Orwellian, but its outcomes are just as likely to be Kafkaesque. As the story notes, these systems are unaccountable in many places around the world. When they arrive in America, of course, they’ll be packaged into the luxury surveillance industry, so there’s always that to look forward to. Speaking of Kafka, another NYT story this week proves that the government isn’t the only thing you have to worry about. We’re long overdue for a reckoning over social media mobs, and the social media giants are less equipped than ever to deal with it.
Surge in Anti-LGBTQIA+ Tweets Under Musk
A new study by Center for Countering Digital Hate shows a massive increase in tweets attacking LGBTQIA+ people, with a special emphasis on T. The findings here line up with my forthcoming study that broadly examines Twitter activity before and after Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform. Among the many findings in that paper, accounts using the “groomer” slur discussed in the CCDH paper were created in record numbers in the days after the takeover, outpacing account creation for the rest of the platform. More on this in weeks to come.
Who Could Have Foreseen…
The Metaverse is dead, or at least pining for the fjords. Who could have foreseen spending billions to recreate the cutting-edge technology of 2003 would turn out to be a massive and embarrassing failure. You won’t find a better eulogy for the Metaverse than this spectacularly written New York Magazine article. When the history of the 2020s is written, it’s going to be hard for future generations to understand how much money was thrown away by (arguably) sociopathic businessmen who believed without evidence that their genius for “benefiting humanity” transcended all available facts and reason—$36 billion on the Metaverse, and $44 billion on Twitter. Think about what good someone could have done for the world with the $80 billion sunk into these two vanity projects alone.
R.I.P. Intelwire Daily Brief
The INTELWIRE Daily Brief will fold on April 20, 2023. The Brief started as a project to capitalize on the rich vein of stories tweeted by the people I follow on Twitter. A lot of quality tweeters have gone silent recently, but the real culprit is Elon Musk in the conservatory with a candlestick. Paper.li, the service that collected links from tweets and put them into a digest can no longer afford to continue operating now that Twitter is implementing draconian price hikes for API access. I’ll consider whether the Brief can be revived in some new and different form over the next few weeks, but in the meantime, thank you to everyone who subscribed.
