Saturday, 3 February 2024 — Housmans Books
Housmans has teamed up with Space4 and the FUTURES Podcast to present a series of live events regarding the impacts of capitalism on digital technology.
Category: Internet
Ordinary Racism: The Present and Future of Political and Digital Discrimination
!9 January 2024 — Valdai Discussion
Ivan Angulo , Evgeny Tipailov
The creation of closed technological state and corporate clubs, the development and implementation of new measures to limit access to digital technologies, as well as restraining competing cultural and civilizational communities and states in the development of their own digital technologies has in fact already become a reality of international interaction.
“If there is to be a livable future, it will be a future offline”
Sunday, 1 January 2023 — Canadian Dimension
Jonathan Crary’s new book excoriates the digital world of late capitalism
Review by Owen Schalk
Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World
Jonathan Crary
Verso, 2022
At this point, it is a commonplace that the techno-optimist promises of the Internet’s early proponents were either naïve or lies.
Claims of the system’s power to connect far-flung individuals and enrich one’s social life are risible. In the West, at least, the Internet’s primary effect has been to dissipate social energies into simulated flickers of friendship, comradery, or antagonism that more often than not ripple into nothingness before any deeper human experience can take root, rendering a large chunk of one’s time and attention pointless beyond the fact that it can be monetized to the benefit of seemingly omnipresent tech companies.
‘Grotesque’: Google, YouTube Invest $12 Million in Global Fact-Checking Media Network
Wednesday, 30 November 2022 — The Defender
Reacting to Tuesday’s announcement that Google and YouTube will fund a global fact-checking network through the media institute Poynter, media expert Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., said, “This is grotesque — almost to the point of comedy, except it’s not funny.”
Claiming that “Combating misinformation is an ongoing global challenge for society,” Google and YouTube on Tuesday said they will spend $12 million to create a Global Fact Check Fund that will support a network of 135 fact-checking organizations operating from 65 countries in more than 80 languages.
Digital Maps Require Greater Government Oversight
6 November 2022 — Undark
We rely more on mobile navigation apps than we realize. It’s a mistake to overlook them when regulating Big Tech.
Even though I have lived in Los Angeles for more than five years, I still regularly open the map on my phone to orient myself, to avoid traffic, and to choose the best restaurants nearby. Anecdotes and data tell me that I’m not alone: The majority of Americans regularly use mobile GPS navigation, even in their own cities. Google Maps, the most popular such app, has more than one billion active monthly users worldwide.
How Capitalism—Not a Few Bad Actors—Destroyed the Internet
3 August, 2022 — Boston Review
Twenty-five years of neoliberal political economy are to blame for today’s regime of surveillance advertising, and only public policy can undo it.
The race to commercialize the Internet is over, and advertising is the big winner. This is excellent news if you are an executive or major shareholder of one of the handful of companies that dominate the $600 billion global digital advertising economy. For almost everyone else, advertising’s good fortunes have meant the erosion of privacy, autonomy, and security, as well as a weakening of the collective means to hold power accountable.
LIVE: Why are former CIA Agents flocking to Facebook & Google? With Lowkey & Alan MacLeod
Wednesday, 17 August 17 2022 — MIntPress News
Scheduled for Aug 17, 2022: Lowkey is joined by investigative journalist Alan MacLeod to examine the latest influx of former CIA agents into the rants of Facebook and Google.
National Security Search Engine: Google’s Ranks are Filled with CIA Agents
Monday, 25 July 2022 — MintPress News
Google – one of the largest and most influential organizations in the modern world – is filled with ex-CIA agents. Studying employment websites and databases, MintPress has ascertained that the Silicon Valley giant has recently hired dozens of professionals from the Central Intelligence Agency in recent years. Moreover, an inordinate number of these recruits work in highly politically sensitive fields, wielding considerable control over how its products work and what the world sees on its screens and in its search results.
How The CIA Made Google
26 Januar 2015 — MintPress News
The Google campus-network room at a data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Photo: Connie Zhou/A
Originally published on Medium.
INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’
The Federal Bureau of Tweets: Twitter Is Hiring an Alarming Number of FBI Agents
tuesday, 21 June 2022 — MintPress News
SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter has been on a recruitment drive of late, hiring a host of former feds and spies. Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.
Twitter To Ramp Up Censorship Of ‘Misinformation’ About The Ukraine War
Friday, 20 May 2022 — Caitlin Johnson
Caitlin Johnstone
Listen to a reading of this article:
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Twitter has published what it calls a “crisis misinformation policy” announcing that it will be actively reducing the visibility of content found to be false which pertains to “situations of armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters.”
NATO’s Wars on Citizen Journalists
No citizen journalist, who values their life, should go anywhere near Ukraine’s Nazi psychotics, Declan Hayes writes.
After first citing the Armenian Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking to gain historical context, this article examines the recent Ukrainian arrest of citizen journalist Gonzalo Lira López and the smear campaigns against Patrick Lancaster and Graham Philips to explore the role of citizen journalists in NATO’s ongoing wars, Ukraine’s included. In concluding by examining the matrix NATO uses to weaponize their work, the article allows readers to evaluate the charges NATO lays against this website and its other citizen journalist targets in Ukraine, Yemen, Syria and domestically as well.
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Business As Usual: Facebook, Russia And Hate Speech
Written by Binoy KAMPMARK
Seedy, compromised and creepy, the surveillance machine of Facebook, now operating under the broader fold of its parent company Meta Platforms, is currently giving out the very signals that it was condemned for doing before: encourage discussions on hating a group and certain figures, while spreading the bad word to everyone else to do so.
If you find banning books disturbing, what about burning them? 🔥 📕
Monday, 28 February 2022 — The Internet Archive
Browsing the Archive
Turns Out You Can Burn a Digital Book
Online Debate: Can War Ever Be Justified? Mark Welton vs. David Swanson
ASPI – The Gov’t-Funded Conspiracist Think Tank Now Controlling Your Social Media Feed
Thursday, 20 January 2022 — MintPress News
Think Tank-Social Media Axis
That ASPI is now partially in charge of Twitter’s moderation, influencing what hundreds of millions of people see daily, is a grave threat to the free flow of information, as well as to the chances for a peaceful 21st century.
Meta Censors Anti-Imperialist Speech In Obedience To The US Government
5 January 2022 — Caitlin Johnson
Listen to a reading of this article:
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Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.
Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity
3 January 2022 — Caitlin Johnson
Listen to a reading of this article:
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Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.
OTF – The “Independent” Internet Freedom Organization That Makes All Your Favorite Privacy Apps – is Staffed Full of Spies
6 December 2021 — MintPress News
Silent War on Cyberspace
By Alan Macleod
WASHINGTON – The Open Technology Fund (OTF) is one of the most influential and celebrated organizations in the hacking and internet freedom communities. Well over two billion people globally use OTF-produced software, including communications app Signal and web browser Tor, services that are specifically marketed to privacy-conscious consumers looking to circumvent government censorship and surveillance. Yet its close links to the U.S. national security state raise many worrying questions about whether the world is making a mistake by trusting the organization and its products.
Twitter: Singing in the Rain
26 December 2021 — Swiss Policy Research
Twitter: Paul Singer vs. Jack Dorsey
Barely two years after becoming a major Twitter shareholder, US hedge fund billionaire Paul Elliott Singer has managed to oust Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. For Twitter users, this will likely mean more aggressive advertising and more political censorship. How can advanced Twitter users respond to this development? Ten suggestions.
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The New Dark Age 