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Our Open Letter to The Economist

To the Editors:

We just found out via your announcement on Twitter that you'll be hosting Steve Bannon at your Open Future Festival in New York City, our home town, next month. As longtime subscribers, we cannot tell you how disgusted we are at this announcement; we just cancelled our recently-renewed subscription.

We extensively study disinformation and hate speech online. One of us is the co-founder of the London-based Global Disinformation Index Project and Faculty at New York University, teaching a class on Disinformation and Narrative Warfare this coming academic year.

One of the key elements of the curriculum will be Karl Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies, specifically Note 4 to Chapter Seven. We are sure the erudite editorial staff at The Economist knows Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, but in case you forgot, he states:

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

It was no accident that Popper wrote these words during World War II, when the forces of intolerance were literally on the verge of destroying tolerant society. Today, we see similar forces rising up, amplified by ad-driven social media, and once again being given a platform by people who quite honestly should know better.

A Medium post on the event by Audience Engagement Editor Adam Smith uses words that are eerily and disappointingly similar to those of our current so-called “president:” “...it is vital that we invite views from all sides."

Without equivocation, it is absolutely NOT vital that we invite views from “all sides.” Sides that peddle in intolerance, hatred, and bigotry cannot be tolerated as Popper argued, for they will destroy the very debate you seek to facilitate. There is no such thing as a reasoned debate with people like Steve Bannon. He and his followers treat anyone who is not a white, Christian, straight, cisgender male as subhuman. Does The Economist wish to encourage this destructive cancer on our society?

Fascism and white supremacy are neither logical nor reasonable. They are sloppy, dangerous, hate-filled shortcuts human beings take to avoid confronting our pain and fear. If you want your platform to be one of logic, truth, and reason, including the most illogical, unreasonable, lie-filled, and wholesale destructive parts of human nature is anathema to your cause. Steve Bannon’s agenda should not be given space, nor should we entertain the lie that there is any logic or reason to his lazy hatred.

When a peddler of fascist ideology like Steve Bannon seeks a platform, it is not to engage in reasoned debate. Bannon seeks false equivalency of an ideology that dismantles the very humanity of people who are not white, Christian, straight, cisgender men, and he does so to provide scapegoats for those with latent fear or anger in order to fracture society into warring, controllable factions. False legitimacy feeds false equivalence; "Tolerate our intolerance!" they say, luring the tolerant among us into a self-destructive trap. We MUST resist this argument. Our tolerance is exactly the weakness they seek to exploit.

By inviting Bannon to your Open Future Festival, you fall into the trap he and his followers deliberately set for you, and you lend legitimacy, moral equivalency, and credence to his fascism and white supremacy. Uninvite him now, and not only regain our subscription, but help preserve the open tolerant society we all worked so hard to preserve, the one that Popper so passionately defended as he wrote those words many years ago.

Facebook’s Dehomag Moment

There is so much to write about, I don’t know where to start. Just the other day our idiot orange “president” announced, first via Twitter and then in a fucking press conference, that he is a “very stable genius.” Right, because Very Stable Geniuses go around having press conferences about how they are very stable fucking geniuses.

Can you tell I’m mad as hell? If you can’t, I am. I’m mad at all of the forces — from the Mercers to the Russians to decades of gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts by the GOP to the racist origins of the electoral college itself — conspiring to bring about an early demise of the American Experiment.

For today, I’ll focus on Facebook, because Facebook is one of the most intrumental platforms for influence in the world, and because they perfectly represent the cavalier, faux-libertarian attitude that the tech community has these days toward their place in the world, even as they rake in gobs of money from advertisers with minimal accountability.

To me, nothing captures the way the tech industry has found themselves benefitting from being central forces for influence in the world while entirely shirking their own responsibility than this recent revelation from Bloomberg:

As the authors reveal, Facebook’s political unit, run by former Giuliani presidential campaign staffer Katie Harbath, has been supporting all kinds of politicians and groups around the world, from Rodrigo Duterte to Germany’s far-right AfD party.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen highly ethically dubious behavior from Facebook. But given our own political situation and the fact that this team directly supported the Trump campaign, this revelation holds special significance.

The entire story of Silicon Valley right now is one of rewards without responsilbilty. Until literally last month, Facebook didn’t have to disclose who paid for political ads. They did this through some ridiculous lobbying that somehow convinced the FEC that they were more like skywriting (?) than television.

But the revelations that Facebook’s political unit have been supporting the likes of Duterte really take the cake. In case you missed it, Duterte is destroying what was one of Asia’s most dynamic democracies through everything from the promotion of extrajudical killings to the suppression of free speech. Just recently, Duterte’s government attempted to force the shutdown of Rappler, a vibrant local news site that was often critical of his regime.

And today, BuzzFeed revealed Facebook’s role in assisting the Cambodian government in clamping down on dissent within their own country.

Some of the assistance is overt, through Facebook’s political unit as described above. Other assistance is simply compliance with local government requests to do things like remove profiles. Facebook’s real names policy, for example, provides authoritarian regimes the ability to invoke Facebook’s own terms of service to track down dissidents, as people use pseudonyms to avoid arrest by their governments for speaking out.

Put simply, we are witnessing Facebook’s Dehomag moment. For those who don’t remember, Dehomag, or Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH, was IBM’s German subsidiary leading up to and during World War II. You know those famous number tattoos that concentration camp survivors have? It was Dehomag machines that ran the databases that tracked those numbers. It was Dehomag’s machines that processed the 1933 German census that the Nazis used to search for Jews.

And IBM was not a passive player in all of it. Edwin Black, author of the now-famous book, IBM and the Holocaust, points out that:

When the Nazis invaded Poland..."IBM New York established a special new subsidiary called Watson Business Machines," after its then- president, Thomas Watson. "IBM's new Polish company's sole purpose was to service the Nazi occupation during the rape of Poland." Watson Busi ness Machines even operated a punch-card printing shop over the street from the Warsaw Ghetto…

IBM not only knew, but was actively engaged in technical support to the Nazi regime, all while profiting off of the genocide.

Much in the same way, Facebook today is so enamoured of their own relevance, they are paying no attention to how political entities around the world are using what amounts to a Weapon of Mass Influence. In fact, they are profiting off of if to degrees rarely seen in the history of the American economy. And while dictators are using Facebook to suppress dissent, Facebook itself is hiding behind this fig leaf of “free speech.” They claim that they don’t want to take a side, they don’t want to get involved in the decision over who to support, because of everyone’s right to free speech. It’s a mighty convenient way to avoid touching revenue streams and continuing to profit off of authoritarian influence campaigns.

Well, Facebook, no one has a right to free speech on Facebook. Not only does one get to choose — one MUST choose what to allow, what to amplify, and what to eliminate altogether from one’s platform. Hate, misogyny, xenophobia, fascism, all rely on a false moral equivalency, one that can be exploited to bring aobut an end to tolerance altogether, and right now Facebook is hastening that end by washing their hands of the problem altogether.

It’s high time for Facebook to take the responsibility that comes along with all that profit. It’s high time for Facebook to choose where it stands, and to end its support of authoritarian regimes around the world. Security companies already grapple this, and when they screw it up, they are judged severely. Facebook, should it continue to shirk its responsibilities, is destined to be judged by history in the same way.

The inefficiency of making even something as humble as a sandwich by oneself, without the benefits of market exchange, is simply mind-boggling.

This about sums it up for me.

"...it is the first time that a thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas, a serious psychiatric disorder, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity to learn has. And it wasn’t just Donald Trump who won last night—it was his supporters too. The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons. Angry young white men who think rap music and Cinco de Mayo are a threat to their way of life (or are the reason for their way of life) have been given cause to celebrate. Men who have no right to call themselves that and who think that women who aspire to more than looking hot are shrill, ugly, and otherwise worthy of our scorn rather than our admiration struck a blow for misogynistic shitheads everywhere. Hate was given hope. Abject dumbness was glamorized as being “the fresh voice of an outsider” who’s going to “shake things up.” (Did anyone bother to ask how? Is he going to re-arrange the chairs in the Roosevelt Room?) For the next four years, the President of the United States, the same office held by Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R., J.F.K. and Barack Obama, will be held by a man-boy who’ll spend his hours exacting Twitter vengeance against all who criticize him (and those numbers will be legion). We’ve embarrassed ourselves in front of our children and the world.”

(from Aaron Sorkin’s letter to his daughters after the election).

The Beginning of the End of the American Experiment?

This might be the beginning of the end. If you had to put your finger on a single event, yesterday, some subset of America — nobody is quite sure which — elected this cursing demagogue, this narcissistic, loudmouth sweet potato, as president over the most qualified candident in recent history, maybe all of American history (who just happened to be a woman).

Now all of the progress since the civil rights movement seems threatened. People are making jokes today that would never have been socially acceptable to say yesterday. The sharks and crypto-facists are quietly (and not so quietly) moving into place, doing what they do best: circling to coolect for personal gain at the expense of the weaker and more vulnerable. Literally, all within 12 hours.

I’m terrified for the future of America, for the future of this nearly 250 year old experiment in enlightened thinking, in this pinnacle of civilization’s achievement, in its dogged dedication to rule of law, to global peace and security. Everything we have achieved — the spread of democracy, the development of technology around the world, and the unparalleled lifting up of the world’s most vulnerable people — all seem fragile today, like we might blink and it’ll all be gone.

Not that it’s perfect by any means. Plenty of people have been left behind, traumatized, disenfranchised, even killed, but to me, it’s still the best humanity has achieved to date. I love America, I love the idea of the American experiment, not in a flag-waving, jingoistic way, but in a we’ve-been-married-a-long-time-and-I-know-all-your-foibles-but-love-you-anyway-and-would-do-it-all-over-again sort of way. I mean, the very idea of progress toward something - equality, liberty, freedom - is a uniquely American ideal.

And so today I feel as if America was just diagnosed with metastatic cancer. It’s in the lungs, the liver, the pancreas — each scan reveals a new nodule. A cancer of narcissim, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and hate. We don’t know if it’ll be terminal — we’re gonna fight it tooth and nail — but it sure scares the shit out of me.

And to be clear, I don’t think Trump is another Hitler. I don’t think he has a lifelong psychopathic malice in his heart. He doesn’t skin cats for fun. I think he’s a childish narcissist who people said couldn’t be elected, so he said whatever he needed to say to play to America’s worst, basest, parts in order to prove the likes of Seth Meyers wrong.

Well, he’s done that, and in the process, he’s unleashed — or at least pumped the bellows into — the most rabid, vicious, disgusting underbelly of the American psyche we’ve seen since Jim Crow. Not that he cares. He got his, and now the crypto-facists he’ll casually surround himself with will get theirs, too. And America will suffer a thousand cuts of corruption and neglect and mismanagement, and the world will catch fire because no one is manning the fire station, and everyone — EVERYONE — will be worse off. America at her best can do, and has done, so much good in the world. Let’s see if those of us that care can keep her from dying.

From today’s must-read...

“In fact, Russia is not about to go to war with America. Much of its language is no more than bluster. But it does pose a threat to stability and order. And the first step to answering that threat is to understand that Russian belligerence is not a sign of resurgence, but of a chronic, debilitating weakness.” Read the whole thing here: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21709028-how-contain-vladimir-putins-deadly-dysfunctional-empire-threat-russia

You heard it here first...

“Greek mathematics got stuck because it remained a verbal, pictorial activity, Moslem "algebra", after a timid attempt at symbolism, died when it returned to the rhetoric style, and the modern civilized world could only emerge —for better or for worse— when Western Europe could free itself from the fetters of medieval scholasticism —a vain attempt at verbal precision!— thanks to the carefully, or at least consciously designed formal symbolisms that we owe to people like Vieta, Descartes, Leibniz, and (later) Boole.”

Dijkstra, ‘On the foolishness of "natural language programming"’

Opposing Demographic Forces: Africa and the World

The Wall Street Jounal, in a special series entitled 2050, had a pair of headlines that were particularly interesting when juxtaposed:

For a Growing Africa, Hope Mingles With Fear of the Future

The World’s New Population Time Bomb: Too Few People

From the former, “The biggest human increase in modern history is under way in Africa. On every other continent, growth rates are slowing toward a standstill for the first time in centuries, and the day is in sight when the world’s human population levels out.But not here—not yet.”

And the latter: “Next year, the world’s advanced economies will reach a critical milestone. For the first time since 1950, their combined working-age population will decline, according to United Nations projections, and by 2050 it will shrink 5%.”

What’s interesting is that you can immediately see what the future will look like around the globe: The next world-wide immigration wave will originate in Africa, and much of the population and workfoce decline around the world will be mitigated by a population explosion coming from African nations. Investing now in things like education and public heath on the African continent may help the next big demographic shift go more smoothly than those before it.

This whole conference is utterly unrepresentative when it comes to the business world at large! That’s why the mindfuck is so complete. You have a tiny minority of capital providers, their hang-arounds, and the client companies all vested in perpetuating a myth that you need them! That going into the cold, unknown world of business without their money in your mattress is a fool’s errand. Don’t listen! They’ve convinced the world that San Francisco is its primary hope for progress and that while you should emulate it where you can, that emulation is going to be a shallow one. Best you send your hungry and your not-so-poor to our shores so we can give them a real shot at glory and world domination. They’ve trained the media like obedient puppies to celebrate their process and worship their vocabulary. Oh, Series A! Cap tables! Vesting cliffs! But in the end, they’re money lenders.

https://medium.com/@dhh/reconsider-41adf356857f

independentscience-blog

It has been quite some time since I've been able to put a good post up, and a lot has happened in the past few weeks. So to get the ball rolling again I'd like to introduce you all to Miriam Boer, ...

Someone asked me questions, so I provided answers.

lookatmeimdanny

"I can solve problems with meaning, problems whose solutions can genuinely impact humanity. I can create something where there was once nothing."

independentscience-blog

Now's your chance to pick the tech scene's best and brightest.

Hey, I was nominated for Scientist of the Year, and I would really appreciate your vote!

introspectacles

RADM Grace Hopper on Late Night with David Letterman, October 2, 1986. (via USNI Blog)

"To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?"

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Are we nearing peak lithium?

“Can lithium batteries scale up? According to this quick and purely speculative math, the short answer is, with current reserves, not just no, but hell no.”

The other business Elon Musk didn’t announce last week.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The old adage is as good as any to sum up the laws of thermodynamics, and it kept coming to mind as I watched Elon Musk’s 20-minute announcement of Tesla’s Powerwall home battery system. The wisdom of putting nine, or heck, one, (rather flammable) lithium ion battery on the side of your house aside, the bigger news is obviously the industrial play, what Tesla is calling the power pack, as exemplified by Musk’s announcement that these packs will power Tesla’s new gigafactory.

But as he described the prospects for a solar powered country, even planet, the no free lunches adage kept nagging me. 16,000 GWh to power the nation. 90,000 for the whole world. What’s the catch? After all, it would only take 900 million power packs to power the whole world. That is, as Musk points out, less than the number of cars on the planet’s roads today!

The catch, of course, is that it takes energy - and more importantly, materials - to make these batteries. But just how much? Is it even possible to make 900 million power packs?

To find out, I did some quick research and a simple calculation. Some facts, courtesy of the internet:

- Lithium is mined from two sources: brines and hard rock. Most lithium is mined from brine sources - that is, by evaporating water from brine pumped from underground aquifers. It is extracted in the form of lithium carbonate and processed into lithium hydroxide for use in batteries and other applications. The amount of lithium mined is typically measured in metric tonnes (1000 kg) of lithium carbonate equivalent, or LCE.

- The global production of lithium has been growing for years but is expected to level off around 2020 at about 500,000 tonnes LCE per year as supplies start to become constrained.

- It takes about 3 kg of LCE per kWh to make a lithium ion battery.

So is there enough lithium available to make all the batteries Musk talks about in his announcement? Let’s start with just the United States. It takes, according to Musk, 16,000 GWh to power the United States. That’s 16e9 kWh. Multiplying 3 kg LCE per kWh times 16e9 kWh yields nearly 50 billion kilograms of LCE, or 50 million metric tonnes. That’s a hundred times the expected yearly production of LCE in 2020 and beyond!

Does this mean that Tesla Power is doomed to fail? Of course not. There are still plenty of people and even industries that will buy these batteries for myriad reasons. But it does mean that Musk’s claim to want to power the planet, or even just the U.S., entirely off of his power packs, which elicited enthusiastic cheers from the crowd, is either naive or dishonest.

Maybe the other business Musk didn’t announce last week was his new SpaceX initiative to strip mine the moon, because without doing something drastic like that, there’s no way there’s enough lithium around to make as many batteries as he promised.

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