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15 Spaces for events and items City Council October 18...what's before that?
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Saturday, October 09, 2021
CITY OF MESA GOVERNMENT: THE INCOMPLETE OCTOBER CALENDAR
15 Spaces for events and items The Bottom-Up Dynamic That Shapes Our Perceptions of Reality: Internet Transmissions Create 'Viral Moments' Impacting Democracy and Society
Once upon a time not so long ago, we got our information from on-the-spot seeing events first-hand with our own eyes, from word-of-mouth, from the clicketty-clack of printing presses spewing out books and newspapers we handled one-on-one at given moments in time for mass distribution, then to the ethereal information transmissions on the airwaves to listen-to-radio and watch-TV, and then The Age of Information expanded exponentially and faster to the worldwide internet and The Internet of Things up-in-the-cloud (and everywhere else across the planet) in quick-burst flashing simultaneous instants of time 24/7/365.
We have rapidly gone from "Freedom of The Press" to almost immediate "Viral Moments"
THE TAKE-AWAY: Understanding the incentives of influencers, recognizing the very common rhetorical techniques that precipitate outrage, developing an awareness of how online crowds now participate in crystallizing public opinion—that is an education that Americans need.
It’s Not Misinformation. It’s Amplified Propaganda.
You don’t need fake accounts to spread propaganda online. Real people will happily do it.
By Renée DiResta is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Reference: Renée DiResta The Atlantic
Renée DiResta: ". . .Through my work at the Internet Observatory, I’d witnessed many attempts to push messages by gaming the algorithms that Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms use to identify popular content and surface it to users. Confronted with campaigns to make certain ideas seem more widespread than they really are, many researchers and media commentators have taken to using labels such as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But those terms have fallen victim to scope creep. They imply that a narrative or claim has deviated from a stable or canonical truth; what was generally reliable information is simply a matter of opinion.
In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda.
That term, however, comes with historical baggage.
> It presumes that governments, authority figures, institutions, and mass media are forcing ideas on regular people from the top down. But more and more, the opposite is happening.
> Far from being merely a target, the public has become an active participant in creating and selectively amplifying narratives that shape realities.
> Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is one that doesn’t exist quite yet: ampliganda, the shaping of perception through amplification.
It can originate from an online nobody or an onscreen celebrity. No single person or organization bears responsibility for its transmission. And it is having a profound effect on democracy and society. . ."
The author doubles-down on two key prerequisites for creating a viral moment:
(1) an Extremely Online supporter base experienced in Twitter conflict, and
(2) a hashtag slogan expressing righteous indignation.
Here's what the author noticed in just one example she went into details about social media manipulation and trending lists
"At 11:57 a.m., a Twitter user withwho went by @Pondipper and had a modest 1,700 followers, jumped the gun: #PelosiMustGo. Tweet No. 1.
Buttar himself posted promptly at noon: “Why do you think #PelosiMustGo?” he asked his 113,000 followers.
The tweet inspired several hundred replies and retweets, some encouraging him, others questioning him, others mocking him.
But anyone who engaged with Buttar’s post—whether to applaud it or scorn it—was telling Twitter algorithms to elevate it. My coffee cooled as the hashtag moved up Twitter’s rankings and began elbowing aside trends about AR-15s, golf, Donald Trump’s pardons, and then–Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. . ."
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BLOGGER NOTES: Here's a flashback to an earlier post from 2019
The medium is the message:Watching 50% of Humanity Go Online Over a Single Day is ... Mesmerizing
https://medium.com › insights-monash-university-ip-observatory › watchin...
Apr 14, 2019 - We present and analyse visualisations from the Monash University IP Observatory of internet connectivity through a single pseudo-24 hour day ...
And it turns out that everyone, everywhere, eventually switches off and goes to bed.
Well, almost.
Well, almost.
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Back to the sequence:
". . .In the previous few years, taking advantage of features like trending lists had become more challenging as social-media companies had gotten wise to the manipulation.
> By 2018, Twitter had already begun to discount postings from bot and sock-puppet accounts when determining which subjects were becoming popular.
> Facebook had kicked an infamous Russian troll factory off the platform, and then established integrity teams to look for “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—that is, suspicious activity by networks of accounts that, in many cases, consisted of fake personas.
For tech platforms, cracking down on fake accounts, bot networks, and institutional trolls was easy to justify; the general public didn’t much care about the free-speech rights of fake people. But the rewards for successfully capturing public attention were still huge enough to keep authentic actors looking for creative ways to propel their message to the top of Twitter’s popularity charts. More and more, I noticed, ordinary people had been stepping up to spread messages that, in the past, might have been amplified by bots. . .But by contributing, they only amplified the messages of ideological enemies
. . .Although it is tempting to believe that foreign bogeymen are sowing discord, the reality is far simpler and more tragic: Outrage generates engagement, which algorithmically begets more engagement, and even those who don’t want to damage-shred the fabric of American society are nonetheless encouraged to play by these rules in their effort to call attention to their cause...
> Some ampliganda takes off because an influential user gets an ideologically aligned crowd of followers to spread it; in other cases, an idea spontaneously emerges from somewhere in the online crowd, fellow travelers give it an initial boost, and the influencer sees the emergent action and amplifies it, precipitating a cascade of action from adjacent factions. . .
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE:
"In 1622, the same year that Galileo was reiterating his defense of the heliocentric model of the solar system, Pope Gregory XV created the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith—known in Latin as the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or the Propaganda Fide for short—a body tasked with coordinating and expanding the missionary activity of the Catholic Church.
The Church was in crisis. The Protestant Reformation, kicked off just more than a century earlier, had divided the European continent into competing factions. The English and Dutch were spreading Protestantism to far-flung colonies in Asia and the Americas, while the printing press and rising literacy rates had shattered the Church’s monopoly on the divine word. The Propaganda Fide was intended to stem the losses, to draw waverers back to the one true faith. The word propaganda is a form of a Latin verb, one that Gregory likely chose “to add to the sense of a religious Crusade,” Maria Teresa Prendergast and Thomas Prendergast write in the Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. The term referred less to what Church representatives said than what they did; propaganda described their fervid mission to disseminate the Church’s view far and wide.
> Over the subsequent centuries, propaganda gradually acquired a secular meaning—information with an agenda, deliberately created to shape the audience’s perception of reality.
> The term also took on an antidemocratic connotation: Propaganda’s intent was to circumvent a citizen’s reason, to propel him via deceit or chicanery toward belief in a particular cause. Historically, many Americans have been loath to admit either spreading or falling for such material. During the two world wars, propaganda was what the Germans did; in the Cold War era, conservatives in the United States feared Communist domination of the media.
> Yet the notion that the powerful could manipulate the masses from the top down took hold on the left as well.
At the zenith of mass media, television networks and radio stations communicated unidirectionally to the public. The linguist, philosopher, and social critic Noam Chomsky argued in a 1988 book that the U.S. government was “manufacturing consent” for its policies with the help of complicit news outlets, whose economic incentives and ties to elites led them to abdicate their responsibility to inform the public. This line of reasoning gradually took on a conspiratorial undertone among its most sympathetic audiences: They are trying to control us.
> Since then, social media has ended the monopoly of mass-media propaganda. But it has also ushered in a new competitor: ampliganda—the result of a system in which trust has been reallocated from authority figures and legacy media to charismatic individuals adept at appealing to the aspects of personal or ideological identity that their audiences hold most dear.
Of all the changes wrought by social networks, this ability of online crowds to influence one another is among the most important and underappreciated. In a postmortem analysis of the 2016 election, MIT’s Yochai Benkler described a “propaganda pipeline” whereby marginal actors on such social-media sites as Reddit and 4chan pass stories to online influencers, who in turn draw the attention of traditional media. Another scholar, Alicia Wanless, applied the term participatory propaganda, and Jennifer Mercieca, a rhetoric professor at Texas A&M, recently insisted, “We are all propagandists now.” The old top-down propaganda model has begun to erode, but the bottom-up version may be even more destructive.
Today there is simply a rhetorical war of all against all: a maelstrom of viral hashtags competing for attention, hopping from community to community, amplified by crowds of true believers for whom sharing and retweeting is akin to a religious calling—even if the narrative they’re propagating is a ludicrous conspiracy theory about stolen ballots or Wayfair-trafficked children. Ampliganda engenders a constellation of mutually reinforcing arguments targeted at, and internalized by, niche communities, rather than a single, monolithic narrative fed to the full citizenry.
It has facilitated a fragmentation of reality with profound implications. Each individual act of clicking or resharing may not feel like a propagandistic act, but in the aggregate, those acts shape conversations, beliefs, realities. . ."
THE AUTHOR'S CONCLUSION:
"America’s political and civic norms have not adjusted to these conditions. We are surrounded at all times by urgency, by demands to take action. We may not be entirely sure why something popped up in our feed, but that doesn’t obviate the nagging feeling that we should pay attention. Understanding the incentives of influencers, recognizing the very common rhetorical techniques that precipitate outrage, developing an awareness of how online crowds now participate in crystallizing public opinion—that is an education that Americans need. Regulators and members of Congress are attempting to sort out which guardrails our communication infrastructure might require, and the platforms that designed the architecture incessantly amend their policies in response to the latest media exposé of unintended consequences. In the short term, each of us becomes more aware of what we choose to amplify, and how we choose to participate. To adapt to the new propaganda, the public must first learn to recognize it.
I closed my laptop as #PelosiMustGo began to fall off the Twitter leaderboards. The next day, there would be new hashtags to track. Whether organic or contrived, they would be amplified by factions, curated and pushed out to the public by algorithms that reward engagement with yet more engagement. A giant web of interconnected users, each with an agenda, shouting at one another to pay attention. It’s not disinformation. Our politics is awash in ampliganda, the propaganda of the modern age."
Friday, October 08, 2021
The Spoils of The Afghan War
Here's just one story in the aftermath of the end of the 20-year Afghan war
HomeUSA News 
Son of former Afghan defense minister buys $20 million Beverly Hills mansion, media reveals
8 Oct, 2021 21:42 / Updated 1 hour ago
(
Carla Ridge Residence in Beverly Hills, bought by the son of a former Afghan defense minister (FILE PHOTO) © Woods+Dangaran architects )
"The US government spent $85 billion on the Afghan military, only to see it surrender to the Taliban without a fight. Now the son of a former defense minister is spending millions to buy a luxury mansion with a view of Los Angeles.
A man by the name of Daoud Wardak recently bought the Trousdale Estates property in Beverly Hills for $20.9 million, Yahoo News reported, citing real estate records. He was described as an “ethnic Pashtun refugee” born in 1977, with public records showing him as president of AD Capital Group, based in Miami, Florida.
When you tell the US Military to train the Afghan Military to be just like ours pic.twitter.com/YtMFisRhEl
— Sam Rogers (@RealSamRogers) October 8, 2021
Wardak already owns a $5.2 million at the St. Regis Bal Harbor resort in Miami Beach, according to the same sources. His new Beverly Hills mansion, known as the Carla Ridge Residence, was recently redesigned in a “contemporary minimalism” style and offers views of the Los Angeles skyline through its glass walls.
Daoud is the younger son of Abdul Rahim Wardak, who served as defense minister in the US-backed government in Kabul between 2004 and 2012. The former mujahideen fighter was a key player in setting up the Afghan National Army (ANA) – the same force that collapsed without a fight in August, leaving the Taliban in control of the country even before US troops had a chance to leave.
The Pentagon spent an estimated $85 billion over the past 20 years on the ANA, including on weapons, equipment and paying the soldiers’ salaries. There were persistent allegations over the years that some ANA commanders were falsifying the number of troops under their command (so-called “ghost soldiers”) so they could pocket the difference.
While Wardak toured Western capitals to advocate for funding the ANA, he clearly didn’t believe in the future of Afghanistan enough to leave his children there. Both Daoud and his older brother Hamed ended up in the US, where Hamed ran a military contracting company, NCL Holdings, getting paid by the Pentagon to secure supply routes in Afghanistan.
Hamed Wardak was also mentioned as CEO of Ludus Athletics, a “lifestyle brand inspired by Miami” with a motto of “LOVE THE WORLD,” which organized a beach volleyball tournament in March 2012. Less than five months later, his father was ousted from his Defense Ministry perch in a parliamentary no-confidence vote.
Wardak's seemingly defunct athleisure brand is archived here. https://t.co/nRgT53lXM5 They had fun https://t.co/bfTMwgK0K6
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) October 7, 2021
Ludus appears to be defunct now, however, and features nowhere in Hamed Wardak’s LinkedIn biography.
US President Joe Biden announced in March that all US troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September, insisting that the Afghan Army was more than capable of holding off the Taliban. Instead, the Taliban captured Kabul without a fight by August 14, leaving the US scrambling to evacuate thousands of Americans and Afghan allies via the capital’s civilian airport.
Biden described the airlift that brought out 124,000 people – but left some US citizens and many more Afghan allies behind – as an “extraordinary success,” while the Pentagon leadership rejected calls to resign in the aftermath.
Likewise, no one was disciplined over the deaths of 13 US troops and more than 170 Afghan civilians in the August 26 suicide bombing at the airport – or the retaliatory drone strike two days later, which killed 10 innocents including seven children, instead of a suspected terrorist.
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FTX: Fast-Track Crypto Currency-Trading 29-Year-Old Billionaire: Earning Digital Assets To Give It All Away
Doing the most good possible - and there's always more beyond crypto
Daily Cover| OCT 6, 2021
Meet The World’s Richest 29-Year-Old: How Sam Bankman-Fried Made A Record Fortune In The Crypto Frenzy
( Guerin Blask for Forbes )
FTX cofounder Sam Bankman-Fried has amassed $22.5 billion before turning 30 by profiting off the cryptocurrency boom – but he’s not a true believer. He just wants his wealth to survive long enough to give it all away.
STEVEN EHRICH : ". . .Four years ago, Bankman-Fried had yet to buy a single bitcoin. Now, five months shy of his 30th birthday, he debuts on this year’s Forbes 400 at No. 32, with a net worth of $22.5 billion. Save for Mark Zuckerberg, no one in history has ever gotten so rich so young. The irony? Bankman-Fried is no crypto evangelist. He’s barely even a believer. He’s a mercenary, dedicated to making as much money as possible (he doesn’t really care how) solely so he can give it away (he doesn’t really know to whom, or when). . .
At the moment, Bankman-Fried’s “effective altruism,” the utilitarian-inflected notion of doing the most good possible, is almost entirely theoretical. So far, he has given away just $25 million, about 0.1% of his fortune, placing him among the least charitable members of The Forbes 400. He’s betting that he’ll eventually be able to multiply his giving by a factor of at least 900 by continuing to ride the crypto wave instead of cashing out now. . .Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, which enables traders to buy and sell digital assets such as bitcoin and Ethereum, raised $900 million from the likes of Coinbase Ventures and SoftBank in July at an $18 billion valuation. It handles some 10% of the $3.4 trillion face value of derivatives (mostly futures and options) traded by crypto investors each month. FTX pockets 0.02% of each of those trades on average, good for around $750 million in nearly risk-free revenue—and $350 million in profit—over the last 12 months. Separately, his trading firm, Alameda Research, booked $1 billion in profit last year making well-timed trades of its own. Lately Bankman-Fried has been hitting the TV circuit to opine on bitcoin prices, regulations and the future of digital assets.
“It’s a really weird, awkward in-between time for the industry,” he says. “There’s just a lot of uncertainty in half the countries in the world.”
. . . “My goal is to have impact,” he says. But to get there, Bankman-Fried, who moved to Hong Kong in 2018 and to the Bahamas in September, will have to survive increasing government attention and outflank an army of competitors vying for the business of more than 220 million traders worldwide—all while braving the boom-and-bust crypto cycles that can spawn great fortunes at historic speeds yet level them just as quickly. . .
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BLOGGER NOTE: Here's some about family history and education. Just enough to get you started and to encourage you to read more of the reporting in Forbes:
'The son of two Stanford law professors, Sam Bankman-Fried grew up reading Harry Potter, watching the San Francisco Giants and listening to his parents talk politics with West Coast academics.
> After graduating from a small private Bay Area high school that, he says, “would have been really great if I were more hippie-ish and liked science less,” he enrolled at MIT, where he “half-assed” his way through a physics degree, spending more time playing video games Starcraft and League of Legends than studying.
> He figured he might become a physics professor. But he was fundamentally more interested in ethics and morality. “There’s a chicken tortured for five weeks on a factory farm, and you spend half an hour eating it,” says Bankman-Fried, who is a vegan. “That was hard for me to justify.”
> He read deeply in utilitarian philosophy, finding himself especially attracted to effective altruism, a Silicon Valley–esque spin on philanthropy championed by Princeton philosopher Peter Singer and favored by folks like Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz.
> The basic idea: Use evidence and reason to do the absolute most good possible. Typically, people give to trendy causes or those that have affected them personally. An effective altruist looks to data to decide where and when to donate to a cause, basing the decision on impersonal goals like saving the most lives, or creating the most income, per dollar donated.
> One of the most important variables, obviously, is having a lot of money to give away to begin with. So Bankman-Fried shelved the notion of becoming a professor and got to work trying to amass a world-class fortune.
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. . .
“I got involved in crypto without any idea what crypto was,” he says. “It just seemed like there was a lot of good trading to do.”
In late 2017 he quit his job and launched Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm, with about $1 million from savings and from friends and family. He set up shop in a Berkeley, California, Airbnb with a handful of recent college grads and began working the arbitrage trade, hard. Sometimes his entire staff would have to stop work to swarm foreign-exchange websites because they couldn’t convert Japanese yen to dollars fast enough. At its peak, in January 2018, he says he was moving up to $25 million worth of bitcoin every day.
But he soon grew frustrated with the quality of the major crypto exchanges. They were geared toward making it easy for individuals to buy and sell a few bitcoins, but they were in no way equipped to handle professional traders moving large sums at rapid speeds. Sensing his moment, he decided to start his own exchange. . .
Bankman-Fried’s aim: to position his risk-taking two-year-old financial firm as something safe and mature. If your company becomes part of everyday discourse, it’s much harder for politically sensitive regulators to shut you down.
[ NOTE ] It’s a playbook written by PokerStars during the first great online gambling boom, which peaked around 2010, and later adopted by sports gaming outfits FanDuel and DraftKings.
He also wants to move beyond crypto.
> Last year, he steered FTX into prediction markets, which let traders bet on the outcome of real-world events like the Super Bowl and presidential elections.
> He’s eyeing broader expansion, too: The hope is that one day customers will be able to buy and sell everything from an Ethereum call option to a share of Microsoft or a mutual fund on FTX.
“There’s a wide world out there,” says the single biggest beneficiary of the crypto boom. “We shouldn’t think that crypto is going to be the most fertile ground to work in forever.”
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