onfocus

Friday links are really happening on Friday this time. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad.

Denormalization

• Joshua Foust: The Abnormal Presidency
• Matthew Yglesias: We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institutions
• Sarah Kendzior: We're heading into dark times
• Bertrand Russell: Letter to a fascist

Filter Bubbles

• Jeff Jarvis: A Call for Cooperation Against Fake News
• Christina Xu: Watching the Election from The Post-Truth Future
• @AthertonKD: the loop

(thanks, @rustyk5.)

Hail Mary

• #HamiltonElectors

Politics

• Overton Window
• Anti-democratic thought
• Age of Enlightenment

Global Extra

• Foreign Affairs: Global Trumpism
• ZDNet: Britain has passed the 'most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy'
• Aodhán O'Riordáin: Senator launches stinging attack...

Tech Stuff

• SQL Server running on Linux? It happened.
• Skyliner (new AWS automation service)
• Firefox Focus (more secure iOS browser)

The soundtrack for these links is Adrian Holovaty's awesome rendtion of For No One:

Yet another round of hand-picked links from the link mill.

Normalization

• Joshua Foust: This Is Not Normal
• NYT Magazine: A Time for Refusal
• Vox: The Rise of American Authoritarianism (March 2016)

This is a fitting update by @hbons. Though it can't hurt to take another look at the original this is fine and the 2016 update: this is fine.

Filter Bubbles

• Asha Dornfest: This is what happens when we stop paying for quality journalism
• Paul Ford: Facebook, 2016
• Buzzfeed: This Is How Facebook Is Radicalizing You
• MTV: Shirtless Trump Saves Drowning Kitten (Confusion is an authoritarian tool)

Extra Extra

• Wyden Introduces National Vote by Mail Act
• Dem introducing bill to abolish Electoral College
• Rebecca Solnit: How to Survive a Disaster (her Hope in the Dark is free right now)

Tech Stuff

• Securing Your Digital Life Like a Normal Person
• Visual Studio for Mac (ms on a roll?)
• Kill the newsletter! (go RSS, but run this on your own server)

The links are coming in too fast to wait until Friday.

Practicing Cryptography

• Signal (I use it)
• EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
• How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour (+ mefi discussion)
• Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration (beyond the basics)

Normalization

• What Normalization Means
• @RojaBandari on life in a dictatorship
• @igorvolsky on normalization

Filter Bubbles

• Tim O'Reilly: Media in the Age of Algorithms
• Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash
• Fake News Does Better on Facebook Than Real News

Hail Mary

• On "faithless" (but democratically faithful) electors
• Flip The 37
• Texas elector threatens not to vote Trump

Extra Extra

• jessamyn on Librarian Resistance
• @editoremilye on how to talk to your member of congress (calling is best)
• alternate support structures

Friday link dirge. My self-prescribed media fast is not going well. If for some reason you're able to keep up with your own river of information and need more, here are some links that stood out to me this week.

• Autocracy: Rules for Survival
• @leahmcelrath on the road ahead
• @sarahkindzior on the road ahead
• The biggest threat to democracy? Your social media feed
• The 'Filter Bubble' Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t See It Coming
• The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse
• Silicon Valley Is Worried That Trump Is Going To Grab Them By The Data
• Petition: Appoint Garland Now (Senate Has Waived Its Rights)
• Reid Statement on the Election of Donald Trump
• Tim O'Reilly: How We Fight
• Elizabeth Warren: President-Elect Donald Trump
• Mike Monteiro: Let Us Now Praise Ordinary People

RIP Leonard Cohen, thank you.

ugh.

You know, we have a strong history of opposing authoritarianism. I'd like to believe that opposition is like an immune system response that kicks in.

In 1995 Umberto Eco tried to put together a description of Fascism that basically has a listicle in the middle. It might as well be called You Won't Believe these 14 Elements of Fascism. He called it, Ur-Fascism. It's hard to click and read a dry article about political theory from an Italian semiotician, so here are the highlights of Eco's Ur-Fascism:

1. cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. action for action's sake
4. disagreement is treason
5. fear of difference
6. appeal to a frustrated middle class
7. obsession with a plot
8. enemies are portrayed as both too strong and too weak
9. pacifism is trafficking with the enemy
10. contempt for the weak
11. everybody is educated to become a hero
12. machismo via weapons
13. selective populism
14. use of an impoverished vocabulary

When you see these elements all working together, you can put a name to it and make decisions from there. It's not just Eco who has worked to help us recognize this pattern. One of the reasons everyone reads 1984 in school is because it's something we need to be prepared to work against. One of the reasons we all sang This Land is Your Land is because we need it to help keep us on track.

In 2004 I collected some of my favorite books about the media: Guerilla Media Literacy List. I still think that's a great list and I plan to revisit some of those books now. (I might add Aristotle's Poetics to that list if I wrote it today.) I think we have a lot of art and literature we can turn to that helps us prepare for living with a more authoritarian system. We still have to do the work. But we can start to get our immune system prepared.

I use the bookmarking service Pinboard and I'm a fan of its Popular Bookmarks page. A lot of interesting stuff surfaces there. However, the page isn't exactly information rich. Here's a screenshot of the page this morning:



I circled all the instances where the popular link title is simply Twitter. I wanted to be able to know what those links were without visiting Twitter so I whipped up a little Greasemonkey (aka Tampermonkey in Chrome) script to embed the tweets in the page. The script is on Github here: pinpoptweets.js. (I'll leave installation as a fun exercise for you, reader.)

Now when I visit that page I see many, many embedded tweets: