On The Degrading Effects of Life Online

"Most of the time when we talk about social media being bad for us we mean for our mental health. These platforms make us anxious, depressed, and insecure, and for many reasons: the constant social comparison; the superficiality and inauthenticity of it all; being ranked and rated by strangers. All this seems to make us miserable.

But I don’t just think it makes us miserable. I’ve written before about how it makes us bitchy. And self-absorbed. And over time I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people.

Social comparison, for example. This is one of the main problems people mention when talking about the harms of social media. Constantly comparing our beauty, our success, our lifestyle, our popularity, to infinite streams of other people makes us feel anxious and inadequate, yes. But I also think it makes us resentful. Bitter. Competitive. Quietly wishing for others to fail. We talk constantly about what like, follow and comment metrics do to our self-esteem—but don’t they also make us so shallow? We hate when people judge us by numbers on a screen, but aren’t we doing it all the time, to everyone else, even subconsciously? We talk endlessly about how editing apps and filters give girls and young women anxiety and body dysmorphia, which is important, but never about how they make us competitive, envious, vain. Sometimes it’s not my self-esteem I’m worried about. It’s who I become when I obsess over my profile and image and what everyone else is doing. Sometimes I lock my screen and don’t like who is looking back at me in its black reflection."

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Moving from coproduction to commonization of digital public goods and services - Shulz - Public Administration Review - Wiley Online Library

"The hybridization of digital commons and public administration institutions led by bureaucratic entrepreneurs is a relatively recent phenomenon that has received limited attention in the literature. The term coined to describe this evolution is the “commonization” of digital public goods and services. I define commonization as the integration of shared property, peer production, and self-governance into public administration. To explore the democratizing potential of commonization, I conducted a qualitative study comparing two case studies in France and Spain (Barcelona). My approach involves 44 semistructured interviews and online observations analyzed through the analytical framework of institutional work. The findings highlight five factors that enhance, and two that hinder, citizen power in co-governance arrangements. In conclusion, I identify the theoretical and practical implications of commonizing digital public goods and services, providing valuable insights for practitioners and scholars, particularly in the New Public Governance paradigm."

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Military Operations in Civilian Disguise, Part 3: Bio-Nano Governance and Terms of Use for Humans 2.0 - Propaganda In Focus

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(321) Big Brother Is Watching The Protesters, Sponsored By Corporate America - YouTube

"What sort of technologies are authorities using to monitor the protesters — and where did these spy tools come from?

This week on Lever Time, David Sirota and producer Arjun Singh look at college protests in the age of total surveillance. They talk with Alistair Kitchen, a student journalist who’s been reporting from Columbia’s campus, and explore how corporate America has taught the intelligence community new ways to use consumer data to spy on people everywhere"

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(321) The Founding of Classical Education in the West - YouTube

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Expert Political Judgment - Wikipedia

"Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? is a 2005 book by Philip E. Tetlock. The book mentions how experts are often no better at making predictions than most other people, and how when they are wrong, they are rarely held accountable."

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Hunga Tonga Volcano is "Most Likely" Cause of Recent Warm Temperatures – The Daily Sceptic

"Hunga Tonga Volcano is “Most Likely” Cause of Recent Warm Temperatures"

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BBC iPlayer - Storyville - Praying for Armageddon

"A Storyville documentary that explores the power and influence of American Evangelical Christians as they aim to fulfil the Armageddon prophecy"

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How impunity for extremist Jewish settlers shape Israel's gov't - Israel News - The Jerusalem Post

"In a scathing 60-page report titled "The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel," The New York Times argues in three parts there is a separate and unequal system of justice in the West Bank for Jewish residents and Arab residents and then outlines how extreme fringes in Jewish society became part of the current government. 

The report begins by asking, “How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals, and at what price?” "

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Degrowth communism is capitalism's monster - UnHerd

"A spectre is haunting the West — the spectre of degrowth communism. Or so Kohei Saito, the rising star of contemporary Marxist thought, would have you believe. Saito is the author of Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, which was a huge success in his home country Japan, selling over half a million copies, and has now just been published in English.

Saito’s argument is pretty straightforward: capitalism is destroying the planet, and the only way to pull civilisation back from the brink of extinction is for “the entire world, without exception, to become a part of a sustainable, just society”. In other words, to embrace degrowth communism — a radical reorganisation of society based on the elimination of mass production and consumption, the prioritisation of use-value (social utility) over commodity value, and the total decarbonisation of the economy.

According to Saito — and this is what puts him at odds with most Marxists — Marx himself, towards the end of his life, embraced this kind of back-to-Earth communism, rejecting his earlier “productivist” iterations of communism."

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