…I don’t want to jinx it…but

The official said that there is a “framework deal” and Israel has “more or less accepted” a ceasefire to allow for the release of Hamas-held hostages in Gaza and to allow aid into the territory that has been devastated by four months of bombardment, killing more than 30,000 people.

…there’s always a but

However, the official said that Hamas has not yet agreed to a “defined category of vulnerable hostages” – a sticking point to an agreement. Israel has reportedly said that ceasefire talks would not continue until Hamas presents a list of the hostages, including who is alive and who is dead.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/02/israel-six-week-gaza-ceasefire-proposal

…so…this seems like it can hardly be a bad thing

US officials said that US and Jordanian C-130 planes taking off from Jordan dropped 66 pallets of food, containing a total of 38,000 meals at mid-afternoon local time, in the first of a series of airdrops that Joe Biden announced on Friday.

…but…on the one hand…what took you?

Jordan has already airdropped aid into Gaza, as have France, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Saturday’s drop marks the first US involvement.

…&…you know…the other thing?

The decision to use air drops has been fiercely criticised by aid agencies and human rights groups as being an ineffective way of delivering humanitarian assistance. The critics have pointed out that Biden has opted not to use Washington’s leverage as Israel’s principal arms supplier.

Emile Hokayem, the director for regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, called the US air drops “virtue signalling and an admission of impotence on the part of the US”.

“Airdrops are not the solution to relieve this suffering, and distract time and effort from proven solutions to help at scale,” the International Rescue Committee aid organisation said. “All diplomatic focus should be on ensuring Israel lifts its siege of Gaza … We need a sustained ceasefire.”

…needed…surely the present tense undersells that?

The flow of trucks carrying aid through two land crossings has slowed to trickle, restricted by Israeli red tape and increasing incidents of looting. The UN has warned that Gaza now faces “imminent famine” with a quarter of the 2.3 million population “one step away from starvation”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/02/us-gaza-airdrop

…there’s…in at least some senses…still time for joe to be right about that coming good before monday…& fingers crossed that fighting-while-fasting is not on the menu…but…it’s hard to know who to believe

Across the world we see the growth of propaganda that promotes an alternative reality where black is white and white is black, and where truth is cast away in favour of a sense of superiority and ever more murderous paranoia. How can we defeat it? It’s easy to despair when fact checking is rejected by the millions who don’t want to hear the truth in the first place; when worthy journalism that preaches the virtues of “democracy” crumples in the face of suspicion, seeded purposefully for decades, that the media are actually “enemies of the people”.

…it’s…well…that does seem about the size of it, basically

We are not, however, the first generation to confront the challenge of authoritarian propaganda. And as I looked for past experiences to inform our own, I discovered a British second world war media operation that managed to engage huge audiences who had been loyal to the Nazis and undermine their faith in Hitler’s regime. If we think reaching people in “echo chambers” today is tough, think about how hard it was to persuade Germans to trust the people who were literally trying to kill them.

…I mean…you put it like that & it sounds pretty tricky…but the GOP seems to have managed it…& they are demonstrably dumber than shit…so…that’s something of a paradox for a start

This campaign was led by Sefton Delmer, who as head of special operations for the Political Warfare Executive, created dozens of radio stations, newspapers leaflets and rumours, all intended to break the spell cast by Hitler’s propaganda by fair means or foul. He employed stars from the German cabaret scene, soldiers, surrealist artists, psychiatrists, forgers, spies and dissidents from across occupied Europe. Ian Fleming and Muriel Spark lent their talents to Delmer’s operations. According to declassified UK government files, which have been unearthed and organised by the historian and archivist Lee Richards, around 40% of German soldiers tuned into Delmer’s stations. The SS Obergruppenführer of Munich complained that Delmer’s stations were among the top three in the city and were causing complete havoc. Goebbels was dismayed by how effective they were.

Delmer’s interest, however, went beyond the uniquely nasty realm of nazism. He saw the same patterns at play throughout Germany in the 20th century as well as in Britain during the first world war. And his wartime work has many lessons for us today.

[…] I felt this bicultural childhood left him with the sense that all social roles are exactly that: roles that are there to be performed. Propaganda is successful when it gives people a satisfying part to play: someone to be, to love and hate. It also left him with an awareness of how deeply we all need to belong to a group – Delmer had found it painful to be an outsider, seen as not properly British. Until the end of his life he would remain an imperial nostalgist, performing an almost caricatured version of the Britishness he longed to be part of as a child.

It was the performative aspect of propaganda, and the simultaneous need to belong, that struck him when he observed Hitler’s success. In the 1920s, Delmer became a star reporter for the Daily Express in Berlin. He gained behind-the-scenes access on Hitler’s election flights around Germany, where adoring crowds saluted the führer. Hitler gave people the sense of being part of a huge mass, a Volk, which appealed to many after the confusing changes of the early 20th century, when the old social order had been upended. He also gave people roles to play when the old ones had vanished: in the confusing cabaret of Weimar Germany, where identities were in flux, you knew who you were when you became a Nazi party member or an SS man. These roles were emotionally satisfying: they allowed people to submit to a strong leader, and feel strong and superior through him; they also allowed them to feel the victim, which in turn legitimised anger and cruelty to others. Some psychoanalysts who observed the rallies believed these grievance narratives gave people the chance to blame external forces for all the things they didn’t like about themselves. Orators like Hitler make us feel we can crush the voice inside of us that tells us we are not good enough, by projecting it on to others.
[…]
Rather than produce moral and “rational” media, Delmer wanted to undermine the Nazi’s monopoly over people’s strongest, most violent urges. Then he turned the propaganda back on to the Nazis: “Our stories were peopled with Burgomasters, District Leaders, Local group leaders,” he explained. “We spread over them a slime of obloquy as foul as that which they themselves had spread over the Jews.”

Delmer’s aim was not to replace one violent movement with another. Instead, he wanted to alienate people from Nazi propaganda by, as he explained to the king when he presented his work, pushing Nazi propaganda “one step further into the ridiculous”. This wasn’t quite satire – people were meant to believe Der Chef was a genuine soldier hiding somewhere inside German-held territory. And satire doesn’t always do much to undermine the hold a leader has on his followers: satirists who mock Trump or Brexit might make their own audiences feel good but don’t necessarily reach the other side.

…it’s…sort of persuasive…but…sort of not…I mean…it’s not clear to me how you do better with amoral or immoral & irrational media…but…I follow the general idea…& you can’t argue with success…or so they tell me?

Delmer understood the need to engage people around their own interests rather than what you might like them to care about, and this is a lesson Ukrainian info warriors have been learning in their war with Russia. Ukraine is full of advertisers and hackers, activists and journalists all trying to reach Russian audiences.

They buy ads on Russian pornography sites and bootleg movie portals or use cold calling software more familiar from marketing campaigns. Early on they found that “moral” content didn’t take off. When they made mass telephone calls to Russians, they found that some 80% would hang up during the first 20 seconds if the calls were about war crimes, but only 30% hung up when the call focused on their personal interests, such as a special tax they had to pay to support Russia’s newly occupied lands.

But though Delmer’s first station was a success, with some sources in Europe even claiming it was the most listened-to station in Germany, it didn’t take long for the Nazis to work out that it was the British who were behind it. They began calling it out publicly, using it as an example of how dastardly the British propaganda was. Indeed, here is one (of many) negative lessons from Delmer’s work. Then, as now, creating “sock puppet” media – media that pretend to be one thing but are actually another – can backfire.

…that part doesn’t sound like success, though…so I might argue with some of it

Today it is so much easier to understand what people care about, even in closed societies. You can look at open-source research into corrupt procurement by local government, do sentiment analysis of social media, or use secure messaging apps that allow you to talk directly to people even in the most dangerous areas. The key is always to understand people’s conditions, and be useful to them. Delmer never talked down or lectured – instead he understood the gripes of the soldiers and made them feel part of a community that looked after their interests better than the Nazis.

But just as important as what was broadcast was the experience of tuning in. Here was a radio programme pretending to be Nazi, which understood that its listeners knew that it wasn’t, and whose listeners tuned in because they needed the emotional and physical safety of play acting as if they thought it might be Nazi after all. If the principle of Goebbels’ propaganda was to try to entrance you, to dissolve you into the loud, angry crowd, then here was media that required you to make a series of autonomous, conscious steps to engage. Delmer’s other media, such as his leaflets to help you feign illness and defect from the front, were also designed for people to take control and be more active. He encouraged people to invent roles for themselves rather than play the ones forced on them by Nazi propaganda.

…probably not this bit, though?

How people think and act can be just as important as what they think when undermining the most malign propaganda. People are most susceptible to conspiracy theories, for example, when they don’t feel they have any agency or influence over their lives and rely on conspiracies to explain the world. Many are drawn to “strongmen” when they feel they can’t take back control over their lives. The real antidote to this is not plying them with facts. It’s helping to fix the underlying lack of agency.

…how good an idea it is to award someone willing to choke down the GOP line…along presumably with a well-set hook & a succession of sinkers…significant agency in terms of matters of polity…is…debatable…but I think the principle’s probably sound in a stitch-in-time-saves-nine sorta way…& you know what they say about the best time to plant a tree

[…] we need to be much more attuned to the needs of audiences – think of media less as dispensing information and more as a social service. We are, by the looks of it, going to be in a long struggle with Russia. Now is the time to start investing in media that engage the parts of society that are critical to their war effort: workers in munitions factories or, most obviously, soldiers. It’s much easier than in Delmer’s time to obtain evidence of what they care about. Last month there was, for example, a large leak of documents from Russia’s military that showed how the leadership lies about losses on the front. The aim is not to make these people, who are often involved in war crimes, “good” – it’s to help win the war by getting them to disobey their orders.

[…] such media need to nurture a sense of community, especially in polarised democracies where there is still a chance of displacing malign propaganda before it reaches total dominance, and where there are audiences up for grabs. Instead of experiencing power through a strongman, this community needs to empower people to act for themselves. There are many small initiatives that already pioneer this. Hearken, for example, is an online platform where users can help media choose which topics they should focus on, taking power away from aloof editors and grounding it in local needs. vTaiwan is another platform whose algorithm helps people find solutions to polarising issues by identifying common ground on which to build policies. Such examples are tiny and experimental, and need to be scaled massively.

…not sure what “scaled massively” looks like for something like that beau of the fifth column guy…although maybe it’s just supposed to apply to the views his clips rack up

Sefton Delmer had as many bad lessons for us as good. But the most fundamental one is related to his sense that all social roles are somehow performed. We have a choice. We can either play the role prescribed by propagandists – which makes us dependent on them. Or we can invent media that welcome people into a relationship where they become active players.

You can’t shove “the truth” down people’s throats if they don’t want to hear it, but you can inspire them to have the motivation to care about facts in the first place.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/02/the-man-who-tricked-nazi-germany-lessons-from-the-past-on-how-to-beat-disinformation

…funny enough I seem to remember it being a very long time ago that I first heard the suggestion that “you can’t learn them as won’t be told”…& while some things do appear to change…that one doesn’t seem to be one of them…on the other hand…do you even care about that if you can outsource your thinking to something that will tell you what it might look like…but…basically doesn’t either…at which point…are two heads better than none?

One of the most pernicious myths about digital technology is that it is somehow weightless or immaterial. Remember all that early talk about the “paperless” office and “frictionless” transactions? And of course, while our personal electronic devices do use some electricity, compared with the washing machine or the dishwasher, it’s trivial.

Belief in this comforting story, however, might not survive an encounter with Kate Crawford’s seminal book, Atlas of AI, or the striking Anatomy of an AI System graphic she composed with Vladan Joler. And it certainly wouldn’t survive a visit to a datacentre – one of those enormous metallic sheds housing tens or even hundreds of thousands of servers humming away, consuming massive amounts of electricity and needing lots of water for their cooling systems.

…which…would be arguably less than super-smart…even if it isn’t as utterly bloody daft as the part where we did the same shit just to have people argue over how bad digital art could be worth more than your actual masterpieces…but also be trivially forged from the perspective of the proverbial eye of the beholder…&…may be making me feel guilty about the amount of pictures in whatever cloud library has currently offered to hoover up mine & not bug me about culling them down to ones I’d keep on purpose…a data center is a data center, I guess

On the energy front, consider Ireland, a small country with an awful lot of datacentres. Its Central Statistics Office reports that in 2022 those sheds consumed more electricity (18%) than all the rural dwellings in the country, and as much as all Ireland’s urban dwellings. And as far as water consumption is concerned, a study by Imperial College London in 2021 estimated that one medium-sized datacentre used as much water as three average-sized hospitals. Which is a useful reminder that while these industrial sheds are the material embodiment of the metaphor of “cloud computing”, there is nothing misty or fleecy about them. And if you were ever tempted to see for yourself, forget it: it’d be easier to get into Fort Knox.

…although I guess they probably aren’t created equal, either

There are now between 9,000 and 11,000 of these datacentres in the world. Many of them are beginning to look a bit dated, because they’re old style server-farms with thousands or millions of cheap PCs storing all the data – photographs, documents, videos, audio recordings, etc – that a smartphone-enabled world generates in such casual abundance.

…it would fit the pattern…the things we call smart & intelligent arguably aren’t either of those things any more than we are…but…quite a lot of it is…if not necessarily obvious…pretty reasonably inferred

But that’s about to change, because the industrial feeding frenzy around AI (AKA machine learning) means that the materiality of the computing “cloud” is going to become harder to ignore. How come? Well, machine learning requires a different kind of computer processor – graphics processing units (GPUs) – which are considerably more complex (and expensive) than conventional processors. More importantly, they also run hotter, and need significantly more energy.

On the cooling front, Kate Crawford notes in an article published in Nature last week that a giant datacentre cluster serving OpenAI’s most advanced model, GPT-4, is based in the state of Iowa. “A lawsuit by local residents,” writes Crawford, “revealed that in July 2022, the month before OpenAI finished training the model, the cluster used about 6% of the district’s water. As Google and Microsoft prepared their Bard and Bing large language models, both had major spikes in water use – increases of 20% and 34%, respectively, in one year, according to the companies’ environmental reports.”

Within the tech industry, it has been widely known that AI faces an energy crisis, but it was only at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that one of its leaders finally came clean about it. OpenAI’s boss Sam Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.

…sam altman’s betting on fusion…because…err…sam altman’s betting on fusion…in the shape of a bunch called Helion Energy…which he has a stake in…& not in the sense that we all have a stake in this turning out not to be a complete disaster

As far as cooling is concerned, it looks as though runaway AI also faces a challenge. At any rate, a paper recently published on the arXiv preprint server by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, estimates that “operational water withdrawal” – water taken from surface or groundwater sources – of global AI “may reach [between] 4.2 [and] 6.6bn cubic meters in 2027, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of … half of the United Kingdom”.

…&…that ain’t great…what with the UK having had to resort to things like hosepipe bans for years already…& that population isn’t exactly coming on by leaps & bounds when it comes to being asked politely to adjust its demand or be cleverer about how it’s used…& I’m not even going to get started on the not keeping up with the maintenance of the infrastructure…or the abject failure to prevent way more contamination than the landscape can filter…how much of a surprise it comes as…well…it’s smaller for me, any road

Given all that, you can see why the AI industry is, er, reluctant about coming clean on its probable energy and cooling requirements. After all, there’s a bubble on, and awkward facts can cause punctures. So it’s nice to be able to report that soon they may be obliged to open up. Over in the US, a group of senators and representatives have introduced a bill to require the federal government to assess AI’s current environmental footprint and develop a standardised system for reporting future impacts. And over in Europe, the EU’s AI Act is about to become law. Among other things, it requires “high-risk AI systems” (which include the powerful “foundation models” that power ChatGPT and similar AIs) to report their energy consumption, use of resources and other impacts throughout their lifespan.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/02/ais-craving-for-data-is-matched-only-by-a-runaway-thirst-for-water-and-energy

…speaking of life expectancy…sort of

The media industry has been in freefall for longer than most of us can remember, but the devastation of late has been happening at warp speed. Workers at newspapers, magazines, and websites across the US are playing a game of musical chairs that is devastating to both their personal livelihoods and the preservation of democracy.

…no shit

Whether it’s city politics and video gaming culture you like to read about, or your interests run to music criticism and sports – there’s probably a journalist collective out there seeking your support. Meet the new model on the rise: the publication owned and operated by its worker-members, liberated from the ever contracting and ever soul-crushing world of legacy media. These publications offer contributors a chance to keep doing what they love without the specter of anxiety over sudden layoffs that imbues today’s newsrooms – and to do so with the camaraderie and collaboration of fellow journalists.

The website for Flaming Hydra – “a collective of 60 writers, on fire and hard to kill”, per the tagline – does not feature a masthead in the traditional sense. There is no editor-in-chief or associate publisher, no head of events or vice-president of revenue sales, nor cultural attaché.

Instead, there are dozens of bylines, mostly names that will be familiar to readers of traditional media. There’s the New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake, the international reporter Jonathan Katz, and the former Gawker heavyweight – and current Guardian contributor – Hamilton Nolan, whose ex-employer filed for bankruptcy in 2016 following its legal battle against Hulk Hogan (whose legal fees were covered by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel).

…seems like HamNo could have told them about that discourse effort…since they’d been making a go of it on that model for a while by the time the january mentioned in this rolled around…unless I’m much mistaken…which…well…is somewhere between possible & likely, I suppose…so a lot probably depends on…appetites?

Thanks, in large part, to a gloomy advertising market and the avarice of CEOs and public equity firms, news outlets are struggling to stay in business. Broadcast, print and digital outlets cut 2,681 journalism jobs in 2023, up 48% from 2022, according to a report from the employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. A 2022 study by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism predicted that a third of American newspapers that existed around two decades ago will be out of business by 2025.

“The newspaper industry is collapsing and we’re at a point of no return – and magazines are even worse off,” said Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “The only investors who can see any profit-making potential in the legacy print industry are the hedge funds who want to come in as vulture capitalists and dismantle what’s left and sell off what they can. No one else sees the advantage.”

…still…it’s not clear there’s a living in it…much less a steady one

Entering a co-op frees journalists up to follow their passions and publish material that might not be catnip to advertisers. But these experiments are more creatively satisfying than lucrative. “It’s not anyone’s permanent livelihood, though I hope it can be one day,” said Bustillos. “For now it’s an interesting and valuable supplement to other kinds of paying work for these writers, and we’re having a lot of fun with it.”

…I’m guessing this is already on our matthew’s radar…but it’s not one I’m familiar with

Eventually they decided to launch Hell Gate, a site focusing on the inner workings of New York City, in 2022. Other co-founders were Chris Robbins, who had been at Gothamist and the Voice; Esther Wang, formerly of Jezebel; and Max Rivlin-Nadler, a fellow Voice alum. “As reporters, we wanted a newsroom where we called the shots,” said Pinto. “We know what we think is newsworthy; we don’t need multiple layers of people second-guessing that.”

The venture started with a staff of five people that has grown to seven. All of Hell Gate’s employees make $60,000 a year – a decent salary by some standards, but hardly enough to live comfortably in New York. “In a more enlightened society we would publicly support some of these cooperatives so they can focus on producing good journalism while also having a sense of wellbeing that comes from a meaningful livelihood,” said Pickard, the journalism professor. “Then they could support a family or take a few weeks off for vacation.”

…it’s a quaint concept, I know…but…tiny acorns & such

But the new model doesn’t always mean diminished resources. “For the most part, most of us are making more than we did at Deadspin,” said Tom Ley, part of a cluster of journalists who constituted the exodus of Deadspin – a sport site formerly owned by Gawker Media – with 19 people leaving over clashes with management. “The owners fired one of us and the rest of us quit,” says Ley, who started a subscription-based magazine in 2020 called Defector that covers sports, politics, and pop culture.

Defector now has a staff of 25, and an annual revenue of $4.5m. Employees make a base salary of $70,000. A recent opening for a staff writer position received 700 applications. Eighty-five per cent of Defector’s revenue comes from subscriptions. The bulk of the remaining 15% comes from advertising from its podcast, Normal Gossip.

Defector’s success was recently cited as inspiration by Jason Koebler, who co-founded 404 Media with three other alumnae from Motherboard, Vice’s tech vertical. Six months after launching, 404 media is profitable, he told NiemanLab last month.

…but the stringer’s life does rather dangle by a thread

The shift to a collective model tends to leave journalists wearing more hats than they may be accustomed to. The staff of five at Aftermath, a video game site co-owned by five former Gawker media staffers, look after everything from marketing and payroll to taxes and membership efforts. “We’re still writers, but we’re taking on all this small business apparatus, which is sometimes interesting, and sometimes deeply annoying,” said the site’s co-founder Luke Plunkett, who was at Gawker’s video game website Kotaku for 17 years before quitting over concerns about new ownership.
[…]
“Autonomy is a huge part of job satisfaction, but autonomy when you don’t have a financial model in place is concerning,” Reinardy said. And he has doubts that the next generation will get on board. “I don’t think my journalism students will adopt this model. They won’t work 60 hours and be paid for 40 … They have a stronger sense of a work-life balance.”

One of Flaming Hydra’s co-owners and contributors, Harry Siegel, concedes that the money from Flaming Hydra is nothing to write home about. Siegel is a lifelong New York City journalist whose career has come to resemble a juggling act of side gigs that will be familiar to many trying to hold on in the industry. He is a senior editor at the non-profit news platform the City, writes a column for the Daily News, co-hosts the podcast FAQ NYC, and contributes to Flaming Hydra. The pay from Flaming Hydra, he says, isn’t the point.

“It’s a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day,” he said. “In the long run we’re all dead, but in the short term we can go out swinging and do some really good work.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/mar/02/journalism-us-media-industry-layoffs-co-ops

…I mean…sure…I can appreciate the sentiment…but…is there a future in it?

…fuck it…it’s sunday…there’s a list as long as my arm of things I could keep racking my way through…but a short time to go before I’m due to call time…so I’ll spare you…or me…or whichever of us it is that would have to make an effort if I went the usual way on that…& have a think about finding something I’d rather listen to than me

…just…bear in mind I can’t be a complete lackwit…on account of the part where if it were up to me we’d be on day two of a holy trinity in weekend terms…so…just think about who has your best interests at heart & I’ll go ahead & throw myself on the mercy of the court?