The remarkable qualities and energies that innova-tion names and unleashes—creativity, invention, imagination, and artful-ness—are therefore distributed more broadly in the technology landscape than our dominant discourses of innovation and the systems of economic, professional, and social value built around them are keen to acknowledge.

Finally, moving maintenance and repair back to the center of thinking around media and technology may help to develop deeper and richer sto-ries of relationality to the technological artifacts and systems that surround us, positioning the world of things as an active component and partner in the ongoing project of building more humane, just, and sustainable collec-tives.

When equivalent amounts of RECs are purchased and retired by a corporation as the MWh they use, the company may then legally claim that they are ‘powered by 100% renewable energy,’ even if this isn’t what materially transpires.

IT administrators often do not even have to be physically present at the site as much of their work can be done remotely. And, with the proliferation of private networks, cloud infrastructures are further loosened from previous path dependencies and public investments that once anchored the Internet in place.

Dominion opened a new coal power plant, pushing more fossil energy onto the grid.

Once waste is understood as an integral aspect of processes of materialization, it is no longer possible to imagine its complete elimination or to position it simply as raw material to be fed into friction-free futures

Fossils are not abstract distributions but, rather, temporal sedimentations and transformations; they are mutable and contingent forms.

Silicon Valley is a landscape that registers the terminal, but not yet ter-minated, life of digital technologies—a space where the leftover residue of electronics manufacturing accumulates. Yet this waste is not exclusive to the production of electronics.

Spam persists and diversifies because we are living through a major, complex transition in the constitution and management of our own atten-tion, a transition moving faster than our governance, our metaphors, and our software can keep up with.

These are, obviously, quite different categories of action, migrating from on-network tools (flaming) to attack on-network individu-als (spammers and the like), swamping them with mail, to a mix of on- and off-network tools (news stories and the wide distribution of personal information, telephone calls, pranks) to shame in-world individuals for a variety of in-world offenses. (As explained in the following section, the project of antispam actually encompasses both approaches from a very early moment.) Though as a concept it seems like a natural and intuitive fit, vigilantism is a rather misleading point of comparison, and the charivari concept offers a more nuanced set of comparisons for understanding what ’ s happening in many antispam projects as well as other cases of collective social punishment on the Internet.

The presence of assholes on the system was a technical inevitability, like noise on a phone line, and best dealt with not through repressive social disciplinary mechanisms but through the timely deployment of defensive software tools.

One of the functions of the botnet is to use spare com-puter power and Internet connection bandwidth to send out spam mes-sages on behalf of the botnet ’ s controller, who can thus generate hundreds of millions of messages at effectively no cost.

A more foundational change is, at present, aspirational. It is that Republican leaders recognize the dangers that the propaganda feedback loop poses to American democracy, and find a way to lead their party and voters out of it. Only those who have credibility and power within the partisan media sphere stand a chance of breaking the destructive cycle

Here, however, a major pathway to communicating on a platform whose human users are provided the service for free is by hiring outside marketing firms that specialize in using that free access to provide a paid service to the person seeking political influence.

The major innovation of the bill is to leverage the technological capabilities of online advertising to create a timely, publicly open record of online advertising that would be available “as soon as possible” and would be open to public inspection in machine-readable form.

This is a holdover from an earlier, “hands off the internet” laissez-faire attitude that can no longer be justified given the size of the companies involved and the magnitude of the role they play in political advertising.

The commercial bullshit or clickbait sites are the most familiar challenge. They are simply a new breed of spammers or search engine optimizers. It is feasible to identify them through some combination of machine learning based on traffic patterns, fact checking, and human judgment, likely outsourced to independent fact-checking organizations. Excluding clickbait factories is normatively the least problematic, since they are not genuine participants in the polity. That is why most of the announcements and efforts have been directed at this class of actors

err on the side of over-censoring rather than take the risk of being found in violation of a law that carries very high fines

The NetzDG requires companies it covers to either delete the content if it is “manifestly unlawful” within 24 hours, or, if its unlawfulness is not “manifest,” to take one of two actions. The company may decide on the content’s lawfulness within seven days, or it may refer the content to an industry-funded tribunal that will be overseen by a public authority, which then has seven days to decide on the unlawfulness of the content. Violations can be sanctioned at various levels, all the way up to 50 million euros. Sharp criticism that the draft of the act was overly restrictive came from within Germany and outside. I

We find instead that professional mainstream media continue to play an enormously important role for most Americans.

It is certainly possible to resist these attacks without particularly sup-porting one side over the other. In November 2017, for example, the right-wing disinformation outfit Project Veritas tried to trip up the Washington Post, offering the Post a fake informant who told the Post that Roy Moore had impregnated her when she was a teenager. The sting operation was intended to undermine the credibility of the Post’s reporting on Roy Moore’s alleged pursuit and harassment of teens when he was a 30-something-year-old.6 Rather than jumping at the opportunity to develop the Moore story, the Washington Post’s reporters followed the professional model—checked out the source, assessed her credibility, and ultimately detected and outed the attempt at manipulation. Mainstream media editors and journalists must understand that they are under a sustained attack, sometimes as premeditated and elaborate as this sting, usually more humdrum.

public performance of neutrality

357357Practically, this means that professional journalism needs to recalibrate its commitment to objective reporting further toward transparent, accountable verifiability and away from demonstrative neutrality.

Most Americans do not occupy the right-wing media ecosystem.

The right wing of the American media ecosystem has been a breeding ground for conspiracy theory and disinformation, and a significant point of vulnerability in our capacity, as a country and a democracy, to resist disinformation and propaganda.

What has happened first and foremost to make all these things possible is that the Republican Party has been taken over by ever-more right-wing politicians.

In this chapter we take on a range of possible interventions that might strengthen media ecosystems and raise the level of public discourse and political reporting.

fact-checking norms and journalistic institutional commitments dampen the diffusion and amplification of disinformation.

The right-wing media ecosystem in particular circulates an overwhelming amount of domestic disinformation and propaganda, and its practices create the greatest vulnerabilities to both foreign propaganda and nihilistic commercial exploitation by clickbait factories.

Weopenedthis book with a threat matrix:a description of the major sources of polluted information that have been blamed for threatening our ability to tell truth from fiction as a society. We noted that most public discussion of the threats focused on novel and technological causes, rather than long-term institutional and structural causes. As we come to the conclusion of our book, we can say with confidence that writing this chapter of possible solutions would have been easier had our analysis revealed a clear, technologically driven cause for our present epistemic crisis. It would be easier if we knew that the present crisis was caused by entrepreneurial teenagers running fake news sites on Facebook, Russian sockpuppet and bot accounts, targeted psychographics-informed advertising from Cambridge Analytica, or even technologically induced symmetrically partisan echo chambers.

351Network Propaganda. Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. © Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts 2018. Published 2018 by Oxford University Press.13What Can Men Do Against Such Reckless Hate?

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Red Pill Classics tends to be relatively superficial, relying on the uninterrogated assumption that its mem-bers are the natura l inheritors of the legacy of classical antiquity

Many men, even outside the manosphere, seem to feel that while women are allowed or even encouraged to be emotional, men face a societal pressure to be stoic (that is, not Stoic, but rather to display no emotions) that can lead to an inability to deal with emo-tions in a healthy manner.

Red Pill community

But today spam is largely understood as robotically generated text issued from “botnets” comprising computers that have been unknowingly recruited into transmitting mind-bogglingly large amounts of unwanted messages advertising Viagra, genital enhancements, and Nigerian get-rich-quick schemes, or linking to malware in order to steal passwords or simply recruit yet another computer into the mechanical zombie horde.

I think The Internet of Garbage still provides a useful framework to begin to talk about our new dystopia, and it continues to be surprisingly relevant in many ways. But I wrote the book with a tone of optimism I did not feel even at the time, hoping that by reaching the well- meaning policy teams across Silicon Valley, I might be able to spark change for the better.

easons—namely, their ephemerality, the still vast numbers of Black folk who hadn’t gotten online, and the unnot

your homework.