We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins: the reinvention of reporting for the internet age – review by Luke Harding in The Guardian. “We Are Bellingcat is [Eliot] Higgins’s gripping account of how he reinvented reporting for the internet age. ... . A media studies dropout and avid gamer, he found he had time on his hands as the Arab spring kicked off... He realised it was possible to establish from your sofa what was going on in a faraway war zone, in Libya or Syria. The material was out there: YouTube videos, Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram – a galaxy of images and text tossed out via social media. By sifting, discoveries could be made. Higgins became an expert on weapons. He found collaborators. Bellingcat developed a credo: look for public evidence, cite sources, collaborate. An open model, in contrast to tabloid chicanery. This transparent method has had remarkable success. Bellingcat has uncovered war crimes in Syria and unmasked neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville. In 2018 it winkled out the real identities of ... the two GRU assassins who went to Salisbury to snuff out Sergei Skripal.... Bellingcat’s rise reveals something new about our digitally mediated times: spying is no longer the preserve of nation states – anyone with an internet connection can do it. The balance between open and secret intelligence is shifting. The most useful stuff is often public. Bellingcat, you suspect, knows more than the suits of MI6; certainly, it’s nimbler. ‘An intelligence agency for the people,’ as Higgins’s subtitle puts it.”
Three Weeks Inside a Pro-Trump QAnon Chat Room – article by Stuart A. Thompson in The New York Times. Referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “As President Biden’s inauguration ticked closer, some of Donald Trump’s supporters were feeling gleeful. Mr. Trump was on the cusp of declaring martial law, they believed. Military tribunals would follow, then televised executions, then Democrats and other deep state operatives would finally be brought to justice. These were honestly held beliefs. Dozens of Trump supporters spoke regularly over the past three weeks on a public audio chat room app, where they uploaded short recordings instead of typing. In these candid digital confessionals, participants would crack jokes, share hopes and make predictions. I spent the past three weeks listening to the channel — from before the Jan. 6 Washington protest to after Mr. Biden’s inauguration. ... If the Q movement had a slogan, it would be ‘Do your research.’ The conspiracy is designed like a game. Discovering clues that clarify Q’s cryptic missives produces a eureka effect, which offers a hit of dopamine and improves memory retention. It’s the same satisfaction that comes from solving a puzzle or finding the answer to a riddle. Believers apply the same approach to everyday news: Find information that confirms any existing beliefs, then use it to augment their understanding of the conspiracy. Reject facts or information that counter the existing beliefs. ... The audio chat offers a clearer picture of these believers than the Facebook pages and Telegram channels where they also gather. The all-caps screeds of the internet give way to gentler moments, like when they talk about their pets or babysitting their grandkids. Many members were struggling in some way — financially or emotionally, with legal troubles or addiction. As Covid-19 swept their states, many got sick, and some family members died. A few members were recently out of prison. Another was living in a sober house.... As I listened over these three weeks, I saw that they’re drawn to Q and Mr. Trump for many reasons. The political status quo wasn’t working for them. Mr. Trump was an antidote to Washington and was beholden to neither party. And Q offered not just a political orientation but also a way to place themselves in a bigger narrative that explains life’s shortcomings.... Listening in, I came to realize what extremism researchers and cult experts have long known to be true: You cannot just destroy a community and expect it to disappear when it is load bearing. If we are to deradicalize Q believers in a Biden era, how will we do it? What can we offer them in its place?”
The age of the cyber romantics is coming to an end – article by Onora O’Neill in Noema.
Referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Is this heightened suspicion of experts an inevitable effect of digital communications technologies? I suspect that the problem may lie not with the technologies themselves but with the disruption to practices and standards for communication that have followed their chaotic introduction. ... This is not the first time that new technologies have disrupted established communicative practices and standards. Plato tells us that Socrates was so worried by the written word’s disruption of communication that he relied entirely on the spoken word. ... The practices of attribution, validation, authorization and commentary, on which writing and publishing now depend, had not been developed in ancient Greece. ... A second wave of difficulties arose with the development of printing. Once again, the difficulties were not due to the technology but to the disruption caused by innovation. Laws had to be enacted and practices developed in order to define the respective roles and responsibilities of authors, printers and publishers. New laws had to provide remedies for the wrongs that can be inflicted by distributing printed material, ranging from defamation to breach of copyright, from fraud to breach of privacy, and from misleading advertising to breaches of commercial and professional confidentiality. ... The situation is similar with online communication. Legal and cultural measures needed to secure ethical standards in communication have been massively disrupted, leaving us less able to judge whether others’ claims are honest, competent and reliable. Seemingly direct, unmediated, even intimate online communication sometimes turns out to emanate from or to have been shared with unknown others. Seemingly professional and expert claims sometimes misrepresent or falsify. Seemingly original material sometimes turns out to have been plagiarized. Yet the ethical standards and the epistemic norms that matter for trustworthy communication, and that underpin the possibility of checking and challenging what others communicate, matter every bit as much for online as for offline communication.”
Planting Iris – from a talk ‘How to keep going’ by Austin Kleon, quoted in his blog post. Referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Leonard Woolf had listened to Hitler’s ‘savage and insane ramblings’ on the radio with his wife, Virginia, and one day, when he was out in the orchard, she called out to him that the lunatic was back on the radio. ‘I shan’t come!’ he shouted back at her. ‘I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead!’ I don’t know what my equivalent of planting iris is, but I intend to find it, and so should you.”
Twitter, George Soros, and Porn – blog post by Ranjan Roy. Referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “I’ve been a tech platform cassandra for my non media+tech friends for a few years now, but trying to explain how ad-based business models and algorithms combine to create a completely distorted understanding of reality has been difficult. The one thing that almost instantly breaks through is to equate the reality presented in a social feed to porn. Yes, the things you are presented with are real and do exist, but they are not representative of the mundane nature of everyday life.... The algorithm does not promote the uninteresting and the unstimulating. If there is any censorship on these platforms, it’s of the tedious and routine elements of life. To look at your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter feed as representative of reality is to look at Pornhub and think ‘this is how most people have sex’.”
Classics reissued with lower standards – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “The Adequate Mr. Ripley – Highsmith. George’s Passable Medicine – Dahl. Reasonable Expectations – Dickens. The Mediocre Wizard of Oz – Baum. The OK Gatsby – Fitzgerald.”
'You could be a cult leader': Diane Morgan and Adam Curtis on Brexit, Trump and his new series – interview by Simon Usborne in The Guardian. “AC With this one I had a question in my head, which is: why does no one have any other alternative visions of the future? Why are we stuck, when we’re also dissatisfied? ... Why, post-Trump and Brexit, did none of the people who hated Trump and Brexit have any alternative to offer? Why did they spend all their time going into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about Vladimir Putin rather than actually thinking: ‘Well, actually, if all these people are really pissed off, can we offer something better than weirdos like Donald Trump and strange dreams like Brexit?’ They didn’t. That was my theme and I had all these stories to fit together. DM The whole thing about Britain is deluded self-confidence, right? AC Yeah. ... I was interested in Michael de Freitas, ... I’d read [his] book, where he said there was a sadness at the heart of England. [He] didn’t like the racism, but he said there’s something underneath that, which is a sort of melancholy about what they’d lost. And I think you still feel that now, not just among the Brexit voters, but you also feel it about the people who hated the Brexit voters because they go: ‘We’ve come to this?’”
'I’ve been called Satan': Dr Rachel Clarke on facing abuse in the Covid crisis – article by Rachel Clarke in The Guardian. “During the first wave, I knew the public had our backs. This time round, being an NHS doctor makes you a target. For the crime of asserting on social media that Covid is real and deadly, I earn daily abuse from a vitriolic minority. I’ve been called Hitler, Shipman, Satan and Mengele for insisting on Twitter that our hospitals aren’t empty. ... we have reached the point in the pandemic where what feels like armies of trolls do their snarling, misogynistic utmost to silence NHS staff who try to convey what it’s like on the inside. Worse even than the hatred they whip up against NHS staff, the deniers have started turning up in crowds to chant ‘Covid is a hoax’ outside hospitals full of patients who are sick and dying. Imagine being forced to push your way through that, 13 hours after you began your ICU shift. Some individuals have broken into Covid wards and attempted physically to remove critically ill patients, despite doctors warning that doing so will kill them. I well understand why they want to gag us. Our testimony makes Covid denial a tall order. We bear witness not to statistics but to human beings. Our language is flesh and blood. This patient, and then this patient, and then another. The pregnant woman in her 20s on ICU, intubated and lifeless. The three generations of one family on ventilators, each of them dying one after the other. We humanise, empathise, turn the unfathomable dimensions of the 100,000 dead into mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. Increasingly, speaking out feels like a moral imperative. Because perhaps – if we can only disprove enough untruths, if we can just slow the onslaught of disinformation – we may have fewer dying hands to hold in the future. Please don’t flinch. Please don’t look away. The truth of conditions inside our hospitals needs telling.”
Naomi Wolf accused of confusing child abuse with gay persecution in Outrages – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. “Outrages recounts the life of writer John Addington Symonds and how gay men in the 19th century would have feared lengthy prison sentences and hard labour for ‘unnatural offences’. The book first ran into trouble when ... the historian Dr Matthew Sweet ... pointed out that she had misunderstood the term ‘death recorded’ in historical records. Wolf had believed it signified an execution, and claimed that she had found ‘several dozen executions’ of gay men after the last recorded execution for sodomy in 1835. However, the term reflects a crime punishable by death that was commuted to a custodial sentence, a common occurrence.... Now Sweet and historian Dr Fern Riddell have responded to the corrected paperback edition, accusing Wolf of citing cases of men found guilty of sexually assaulting children and animals as examples of a wider persecution of gay men in consensual relationships. In a blistering article in the Telegraph, Sweet pointed to Wolf’s depiction of John Spencer, a man who she describes as ‘tried three times, accused of sex with three different men’. Sweet’s article says that Spencer was a school headmaster who was accused of sexually assaulting a group of schoolchildren and found guilty on one count, according to contemporaneous newspaper reports and Old Bailey records from 1860.”
‘D Day’: UK marks 50 years since decimalisation – article by Hilary Osborne in The Guardian. “The anniversary of Decimal Day on Monday 15 February 1971 marks when Britain finally moved to a system based on units of 10. ... It was ... in 1966 that the country agreed to switch. ... The long buildup ensured a smooth transition. The chair of the Decimal Currency Board, Lord Fiske, had said he hoped it would be ‘the non-event of 1971’ and he got his wish. The first decimal coins were issued in 1968, to give shoppers a chance to get used to them before the old system was scrapped. ... Banks had trained their staff to deal with the new currency, and held talks for members of the public. NatWest alone delivered 3,000 presentations by June 1970 to groups including the Women’s Institute. It also produced a monthly Decimal Currency Digest which it sent to staff, and cashiers had to read four booklets and complete six training exercises to make sure they understood the new systems. The country’s banks all closed for the Thursday and Friday before – this was a time when they were already closed at the weekend – to convert accounts. The Stock Exchange closed, and on the Friday Post Offices were shut. The Royal Mint spent years producing millions of new coins, and these were distributed to banks around the country ahead of the switch.”
Some literary collective nouns – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “A chapter of novelists. A stanza of poets. A draft of editors. A borrowing of librarians. A recommendation of booksellers. A blurb of publicists. An autopsy of critics. A gruop of proofreaders.”
As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own – article by Namina Forna in The Guardian. "When I was a child, I was what you would call a JRR Tolkien fangirl. I read The Lord of the Rings over and over. ... When the first Lord of the Rings movie was finally released, I was 14 and so excited to see it. But immediately, I noticed something distressing: no one on screen looked like me. The darkest characters on screen, the orcs, were all male. Even as a monster, it seemed, there was no place for people who looked like me in Tolkien’s world. Thankfully, I had my own to work with. I grew up in Sierra Leone, a place I consider the most fantastical in the world. ... Fantasy was a lifesaver. When I was born, in the late 1980s, Sierra Leone was on the brink of civil war. The country was in chaos; people were suffering and dying. To distract me, my father and grandmother would tell me stories about the magic of Africa, some of them rooted in real history.... When I moved to the US in 1996, war was suddenly no longer a part of my life. But neither was the magic. Instead of goddesses and Amazons, there was now the legacy of slavery, civil rights and racial struggle.... But this didn’t make any sense to me. I knew my history. Yes, some Black people had been slaves, but others had been queens, kings, adventurers, tricksters, country folk. Yes, there were huts and slave cabins, but there were also castles in Ethiopia, towering walls and streetlights in Benin, libraries in Timbuktu and fortresses in Great Zimbabwe. The richest man to ever exist, Mansa Musa, was African. The N’Nonmiton, the female warriors my father and grandmother had told me tales about when I was young, were African. There was more to Blackness than struggle."
Seven ways to cope until the end of lockdown – portmanteau article in The Guardian. Matt Haig on hope ("I always think it is interesting that arguably the most hopeful song of the 20th century – 'Over the Rainbow' – arrived in arguably its darkest year"), Ella Risbridger on food ("I have cooked my way through so many crises in my life: mental illness, family estrangement, a suicide attempt, the slow death of my partner and the complex grief that followed"), Adam Phillips on boredom ("This boredom is like a fog over the battlefield. If we allowed ourselves not to be bored, we would be acutely aware of how frustrated we are; of what we want and the fact that we mostly can’t have it; and of the scale of suffering of oneself and other people"), Anita Sethi on nature ("if lockdown has taught me anything it’s the virtue of putting one foot in front of the other – however far those footsteps might take us"), Philippa Perry on art ("there are dark moods around right now that might be more manageable if we processed them into songs, pictures or poems"), Mollie Goodfellow on friends ("I’ve only really grasped in the last few months ... the concept of being really honest with your friends"), Nikesh Shukla on play ("Playing with my kids has been a real reminder for me to lean into my imagination").
