Taylorism Returns: Life under the algorithm, how a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class

I'm only putting up three paragraphs from this article off The New Republic, as I don't want to cause any copyright headaches.  This is a long, detailed article and is well worth your time.  It is a review of two recent books on this gig economy Victorian redux narrative.

In her new book, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Guendelsberger re-creates a version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous experiment in Nickel and Dimed. Guendelsberger, a reporter for the alt-weekly Philadelphia City Paper until it was sold off and shut down in 2015, went undercover at three low-wage workplaces: an Amazon warehouse in Indiana, a call center in North Carolina, and a McDonald’s in San Francisco. Whereas Ehrenreich’s main discovery was that there still existed an exploited working class—a controversial point in the late 1990s and early 2000s—Guendelsberger takes inequality and exploitation as given, asking instead what these jobs are doing to the millions who work them.


In her first job, at an Amazon “fulfillment center,” Guendelsberger finds a regime that is Taylor’s “vision incarnate.” (One co-worker, sensing Taylor’s ghost, theorizes that Amazon is “a sociological experiment on how far a corporation can push people.”) Guendelsberger, a “picker,” is made to carry on her waist a scanner gun, which monitors her location, tells her the precise item among the hundreds of thousands in the warehouse that she is to go pluck from the shelves, its location, and how much time she has to do it. A sliding bar counts down as seconds go by, haranguing her. When she’s identified the shelf in the vast facility, dug through the bin, and scanned the item, the next one appears right away. 


Seen from Guendelsberger’s point of view, America’s working class is quivering in stress and fear, hurting from torn-up feet, and all covered in honey mustard. The economic miseries inflicted on working-class people are bad enough, but here Guendelsberger has identified something deeper and arguably worse: “Chronic stress drains people’s empathy, patience, and tolerance for new things.” We’ve been brutalized, bullied, and baited into being trained work-animals and not even afforded a corresponding pay bump. No wonder our society fell apart.


https://newrepublic.com/article/155666/life-algorithm

Here's a videoclip of relevance from PBS Newshour:

An inside look at injury rates in Amazon warehouses

https://www.pbs.org/video/prime-risk-1574896564/

I really do not know why the formatting is all over the place, nor how to correct it.  My apologies.

Summary of the Ukraine Issue

A 3 minute video accurately summarizes the House fact findings in the first phase of the impeachment inquiry. The summary is less than 100 words long and is a description of the section headings in the ~300 page House document.

The 3-minute video is here: https://youtu.be/Tk2ABtEzcXQ

The House report can be read here.

Congressional republicans continue to reject this as untrue, unfair, a hoax, nothing impeachable and/or mostly lies, with the facts mostly not being facts or evidence of anything impeachable. Elsewhere in the same broadcast, Maddow showed videos of Lindsey Graham speaking about impeachment in 1999 and in 2019 regarding impeachment. Graham has evolved from saying impeachment is about cleansing the office of the presidency and no laws need to be broken to impeach a president, while also complaining that senators need to listen to facts before deciding. Now, Graham considers the current matter nothing of concern and he will not even read witness testimony because he believes the impeachment process is s sham.

Another term for that kind of evolution in thinking is called partisan hypocrisy.

Gun Violence Statistics

FOR THOSE WHO CARE:
 https://lawcenter.giffords.org/facts/gun-violence-statistics/

Average Deaths per Year1
Total 36,383

https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-america/

Marketing Unproven Medical Treatments

The Washington Post reports on a growing industry that uses hardball marketing tactics to patients with terminal diseases. The industry sells stem cell treatments for progressive lung disorders, Parkinson's disease and other untreatable diseases. Because the patients are desperate, they fall prey to the sales pitches. The sales tactics include telling patients how they can raise the needed money, e.g., fundraising on GoFundMe. None of the treatments have been proven safe and effective by the FDA. Some people spend all of their remaining money for these treatments.

It is hard to imagine why such businesses are allowed to operate legally. It is bad enough that useless treatments and products such as nutritional supplements and homeopathy products are legal. These stem cell treatments are worse because they falsely claim to treat serious diseases. Nutritional supplements and homeopathy products all must carry a warning label stating that the product has not been shown to treat or improve any disease or symptom.

One of these fake medicine companies, the Lung Health Institute, doesn't show that disclaimer on its website. The only disclaimer is innocuous and in small print, “Each patient is different. Results may vary.”

Indeed, results will vary. They will vary from failure to failure coupled with bankruptcy and homelessness.

What is government for?

One can ask about the role of government here. It is clear that government isn’t concerned about companies selling fake treatments to sick people. In this instance, the role of government is mostly to protect companies and their business interests. Patient welfare is of little apparent concern although these companies presumably cannot poison their patients under current law. This is the face of modern anti-government conservative and populist ideology. 

Question: Is it irrational or incorrect to assert that, for this industry, the role of government is to protect companies and their business interests more than protecting consumer from health treatment scams?

How to Spot Professional Trolls Online

Two professors at Clemson University have been analyzing social media and propaganda tactics that professional Russian and other foreign nation trolls use to foment social discord and distrust online in Western democracies. They analyzed data and Tweets that Twitter has made public. What they conclude is that, regardless of where they are located, amateur trolls who are bigoted, narrow minded, angry and/or try to provoke liberals, conservatives and minority groups and individuals just for the fun of it “aren’t a threat to Western democracy.”

By contrast with amateur trolls, professional democracy attackers are much more subtle and effective. They start by posting or Tweeting positive, warm messages designed to build a social media following. Rolling Stone writes:

Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.

Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so. While the rest of the world learned how to conduct a modern disinformation campaign from the Russians, it is from the world of public relations and advertising that the IRA learned their craft. To appreciate the influence and potential of Russian disinformation, we need to view them less as Boris and Natasha and more like Don Draper.

As good marketers, professional trolls manipulate our emotions subtly. In fall 2018, for example, a Russian account we identified called @PoliteMelanie re-crafted an old urban legend, tweeting: “My cousin is studying sociology in university. Last week she and her classmates polled over 1,000 conservative Christians. ‘What would you do if you discovered that your child was a homo sapiens?’ 55% said they would disown them and force them to leave their home.” This tweet, which suggested conservative Christians are not only homophobic but also ignorant, was subtle enough to not feel overtly hateful, but was also aimed directly at multiple cultural stress points, driving a wedge at the point where religiosity and ideology meet. The tweet was also wildly successful, receiving more than 90,000 retweets and nearly 300,000 likes.

This tweet didn’t seek to anger conservative Christians or to provoke Trump supporters. She wasn’t even talking to them. Melanie’s 20,000 followers, painstakingly built, weren’t from #MAGA America (Russia has other accounts targeting them). Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart. (emphasis added)

The researchers, Darren Linvill, associate professor of communication, and Patrick Warren, associate professor of economics, discussed their research with KUOW, an NPR affiliate station, in a 9 minute interview. KUOW writes:

To stop trolls from exploiting existing tensions in American society, he says people need to question why we’re seeing certain messages and the consequences of sharing them before hitting retweet.

“I think that there’s a lot that you can do,” Warren says. “If you’re mindful of the origins of the information you’re sharing, it can make a big difference.”

Linville: “..... I think it doesn’t ultimately [matter] if it’s a Russian troll or an Iranian troll or a Chinese troll, I think one needs to be careful when you’re interacting with anonymous accounts not to retweet someone just because they use the same hashtag as you did and you agree with them, but also not accuse people of being Russian trolls just because you disagree with them. I think that’s one of the biggest impacts of Russian disinformation is that we don’t trust each other anymore and it’s really dangerous and it’s a lasting impact.”

Warren: “I think it’s important to realize that when you share something on social media, you’re doing two things. You’re sharing a message, but you’re also bringing prominence to the account you’re sharing. And so the question you should be asking yourself often on social media, in addition to the obvious question that we all start with, which is: Is this real or not? The next question you should be asking yourself is, why am I seeing this? Algorithms kind of rule our lives on social media. And what these guys are trying to do is get people who shouldn’t be central to the conversation to become more central to the conversation due to their gaming of the algorithm.”

Defensive disinformation vs. offensive disinformation

Defensive disinformation is used by professional government trolls to deny and distract from information the government wants to hide, distort or deny. For example, the Saudi Arabian government ran botnet trolls on Twitter that falsely denied the Saudi government murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

By contrast, offensive disinformation which is  content specifically designed to manipulate emotions and attitudes by focusing on social stress points and playing on personal ideology. This kind of propaganda focuses on what is important to the people in the target country, not in the troll farm country. The goal is to to reinforce differences in existing attitudes and beliefs and use those differences to foment social division, distrust in institutions, e.g., the professional media, fellow citizens, and out-groups.

The ideology target

In a previous discussion here, I attacked political ideologies as a factor that significantly contributes to, or directly causes, major social and political problems. Strongly held ideological beliefs make it much easier to reject inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning. The research discussed in this OP makes it clear that professional trolls intentionally reinforce and then target ideological differences to foment social distrust and discord.

For self-defense against troll manipulation, the researchers suggest asking some self-reflection questions when you are confronted with social media content from a source you are not familiar with. First ask yourself, is this true? For ideologues, belief in lies is easy when the lie fits personal ideological belief. Second, ask why am I seeing this? Trolls know how to manipulate the algorithm. Third, ask what impact on other would sharing or upvoting this have? This asks for a measure of empathy, which in a way is an opposite of self-righteous belief, which can easily be reinforced by troll lies and manipulation.

Here’s Everything The Mueller Report Says About How Russian Trolls Used Social Media

The Mueller report clearly describes how Russian trolls reached millions of people on Facebook, were quoted in major newspapers as real Americans, and even organized rallies.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/mueller-report-internet-research-agency-detailed-2016

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign provides one of the most detailed looks at how Russia’s Internet Research Agency — the infamous Kremlin-linked troll farm — tried to hijack the 2016 election and swing the vote in favor of Donald Trump.

The report, which concludes that Trump didn’t commit a crime but “also does not exonerate him [of obstruction],” gives us a clear and exhaustive look at the scope, focus, and results of the IRA’s efforts. The agency learned how to use platforms like Facebook and Twitter over the span of four years. By the end, it used analytical tools and the built-in network effect of massive social media platforms to create large artificial grassroots political organizations that were aggressively targeting both Republicans and Democrats.

The IRA was able to reach up to 126 million Americans on Facebook via a mixture of fraudulent accounts, groups, and advertisements, the report says. Twitter accounts it created were portrayed as real American voices by major news outlets. It was even able to hold real-life rallies, mobilizing hundreds of people at a time in major cities like Philadelphia and Miami. Fake online personas were able to communicate with members of the Trump campaign — who were unaware they were ever communicating with foreign nationals.

Here’s everything we know about Russian interference from the report.

It started in 2014.

According to Mueller’s report, the IRA began creating fake Facebook accounts and small groups as early as 2014.

“IRA employees operated social media accounts and group pages designed to attract U.S. audiences,” the report reads. “These groups and accounts, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists."

The lines up with what we already knew about the IRA’s activity. One of its first large-scale misinformation projects was the Columbian Chemicals Plant explosion hoax in September 2014, when IRA members created a completely fake explosion at a chemical plant in Louisiana. “The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers,” the New York Times wrote about the hoax.

The IRA consolidated all of its US operations into one department called the “Translator” department, which appears to have operated like a typical digital media startup with different agents focusing on specific platforms, monitoring analytics, and even graphic designers. About a dozen people, known as “specialists,” would run an account at a time.

The IRA’s activity wasn’t confined to social media, either. IRA employees traveled to the United States on intelligence-gathering missions in 2014.

“Four IRA employees applied to the U.S. Department of State to enter the United States, while lying about the purpose of their trip and claiming to be four friends who had met at a party,” the report reads. “Ultimately, two IRA employees-Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova-received visas and entered the United States on June 4, 2014.”

The IRA was on pretty much every platform.

At first, the IRA focused its activity on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Later, Tumblr and Instagram accounts were created. In the beginning, Russian trolls were manning only fake individual accounts. By 2015, however, they began creating larger groups and pages. Finally, they attempted to flex their network effect to hold real-life rallies.

According to Mueller’s report, the Facebook groups were particularly popular. By the time Facebook deactivated them in 2017, the Russia-controlled group "United Muslims of America" had over 300,000 followers, the "Don't Shoot Us" group had over 250,000 followers, the "Being Patriotic" Facebook group had over 200,000 followers, and the "Secured Borders" Facebook group had over 130,000 followers.

A post from an IRA-controlled Facebook page called "Secured Borders".

MUCH MORE TO THIS STORY HERE:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/mueller-report-internet-research-agency-detailed-2016

NOW LET'S HEAR FROM TRUMPERS THAT THE REAL INTERFERENCE WAS REALLY BY THE UKRAINE!!