I find it odd that Americans aren't angrier about Russia running disinfo bot networks for over a decade now, building up to almost everything in the current cultural moment.
Also odd that the tech behind this isn't more talked about. I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate - and this predated ChatGPT by many years.
Big platforms like Google or X have only mildly experimented with heavenbanning and discourse manipulation at scale. These Russian networks have had at least a decades' worth of experience with it.
Somehow, in reducing all political opponents to bots, the discourse does seem to forget that there's often someone behind the bots, a tangible nation-state of a target.
I think in part this is because it would require them to admit that they've been had, which is even worse than to have to admit you're a terrible person. Being terrible is one thing, most people can handle that. Being so utterly dumb that you've been carrying water against your own country and effectively are in every sense of the word a useful idiot is a thing most people would shy away from.
Psychology is weird. As soon as something becomes a part of your identity you start living as though it is really you that is attacked, rather than the thing you stand for, no matter what it is, no matter whether it is positive or negative. The response is invariable to dig in.
Religion, atheism, vegetarianism, fascism, libertarian, democrat or republican, fan of Arsenal or rather the opposite and so on. They all tap into some kind of deep tribal sense of belonging and people will go to extreme lengths to defend their tribe at the expense of themselves. There probably is a direct evolutionary link here as well.
In some sense, it is a part of one's identity, for one can't easily separate the worldview from the person. But we enter a strange era when your identity is challenged and remoulded by a non-human entity.
People have always derived a tribal sense of belonging from a set of worldviews, but these views are now perpetuated by robots. These anti-immigration or anti-brown or post-renaissance worldviews are lived by very few people of flesh and blood - it's a set of interlinked concepts and ideals in an imaginary post-truth world.
But it lives more in silicon than in some Aryan ideal. And if you had to draw a line from this silicon to reality, you'd still end up in Crimea or in Pokrovsk, watching a 21st-century battle with echoes of WWI. It is about land and power and politics, like it always has been. But the person fighting "woke" in a comment section over a made-up story about a made-up Disney film doesn't know it.
I'm in India, so the second-order effects of all this are even more surreal here. You get Christians cheering the rise of a Hindutva nationalist government because it's "anti-woke" (only to get heckled and beaten up during Christmas) and Trump supporters doing religious ceremonies for the man for the same reason (only to get the nation's entire suite of exports tariffed), and you see cabs with giant Russia Today ads on their sides in the streets (but the discounted oil we buy from Russia has not dropped prices at the pump by even a rupee). Our lived reality has very little in common with these digital culture wars.
I don't think it is a tangent at all, it just underlines the principle in even more stark ways than the other ones do: tribalism is a very powerful button to press and we're in an era now where you can be a 'tribe of one' with your mentality manipulated by extremely personalized targeting to steer you in a particular direction, no matter where you were born or what your original affiliations are.
It will take extreme mental fortitude and some degree of self isolation not to be pulled in. When I was 15 the peer pressure to start smoking, drinking and using drugs was absolutely off the charts. I stopped going to parties, basically. Until I was 13 or 14 or so it was ok and then from one moment to the next it stopped being fun. People don't like being confronted with their own idiocy and just having one reminder in a roomful of people that you're doing something stupid is apparently enough to become really aggressive against that person. Better if it isn't just you, so the first enlist some of your buddies.
That experience really helped me in many ways.
People in large groups are far more stupid than individuals, and the internet has tied people together into all kinds of weird large groups that reinforce their worst belief systems.
Russia may be a factor, but I have always maintained the american right wing has enough natural and innate stupidity it could have anyways self created maga.
The Tea Party was an astroturfed political movement that started freerunning on hatred, and still hasn't stopped. MAGA is just that political movement still running.
That political movement was basically "Fox News will save us from the Government", and of course, "Black people are their own problem"
Donald Trump can be directly traced back to shit Nixon did, and every single Republican administration since. "If the president does it, it's not illegal" is literally how Nixon tried to defend his crimes.
It's a common trope in liberal circles that Fox News was started explicitly to never ever let that happen again. Well, it worked.
IMO it goes all the way back to reconstruction being abandoned because racist people voted for horrifically racist politicians who were sympathetic to the Confederate cause. America elected many politicians, including literal presidents, who thought fixing the problem of genuine traitors should be avoided.
The confederacy was a shithole, authoritarian state who's entire purpose was maintaining the institution of slavery, and the vast majority of it's supporters didn't even hold slaves. But they needed to live in a world where a black person was inherently worse than they were. The confederacy was also working to lean on the dumbest fundamentalists Christians they could find, the ones who lapped up the "God wants us to enslave black people" tripe they spouted, and millions did exactly that. The Confederacy was exploring being an explicit theocracy, but the main reason against that was essentially that the oligarchs preferred being in control.
This happened again with the Civil Rights movement, where America has responded by pretending it wasn't real, we never did anything to black people that wronged them after we banned slavery, it's all woke nonsense, why do black people keep talking about being oppressed, "Obama shouldn't have made it a race thing" when it was definitely a race thing, etc.
> I find it odd that Americans aren't angrier about Russia running disinfo bot networks for over a decade now
Half the country has been convinced that stories about Russia running disinformation campaigns are a hoaxes.
> I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate
I read a similar argument years ago about how disinformation gets into the networks. It starts with bots sharing and discussing with each other until it reaches the level to hit a few real people (useful idiots) who then share it out giving it more credence. Musk comes to mind as a key target for these types of posts now.
i have been screaming that this is possibly the #1 information systems problem/failure that has led us to where we are and i have seen no thought leaders or solutions emerge. it's imo the top impact vector and the most critical thing that must be addressed to take the foot off the gas. it's the other side of the double edged blade of open and free internet and we are so far beyond trusting that open and free on its own is going to naturally sort itself out. nothing is being done to combat this, everyone that has the wits and intelligence to problem solve in this arena is head down reading about the next claude code update.
i'm terrified/hopeless tbh, this fucking sucks. i've always seen this as the number one thing that is destabilizing countries around the world. this shit is not contained to the US and other countries will follow our course in the coming years without efforts to solve for russia/iran/china and their damn ass bots. these things are way more sophisticated than people think and most people cannot discern the difference. they can and do simulate arguments in comment sections to play up a winning side in a believable way.
Also, I genuinely look forward to setting up a situation monitor when I shift to a bigger place. I've seen the memes about "monitoring the situation with the lads" and always thought it would actually be quite fun.
All the federated structure in the world doesn't matter if you don't have users. I think we're better off encouraging bluesky to finish what they're building, mastodon won't ever get there.
There's a quote by Mahatma Gandhi that resonates whenever I see contrasting debates about this economic indicator or that:
"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."
India's IT outsourcing-led GDP growth can benefit many almost-poor and poor people by giving them access to more spending by the "middle-class" (a very debatable minority in India) and the rich. But it will not benefit the poorest - social welfare schemes do that, but anti-homeless measures cancel it out. Access to formalised lending can do that, but anti-immigrant schemes and the Kafkaesque labyrinth of getting an id-card in India will negate that. And banks won't give you a loan if you're poor (so they go to loansharks).
You can have all the Apples and the Facebooks of the world in California, but putting spikes in places where homeless people could sleep makes Gandhi's talisman stand out far better than any macro-economic indicator.
Inflation can be positive or negative but if you're living in a place with less supply than demand, your rent will go up by far more than the price of eggs. This will hurt you completely independently of the price of eggs.
All this to say - if you care about the poorest, you'll find little to cheer about. But should you care about the poorest? Is that a good measure of healthy economic growth? Is economic growth the only priority after 1991?
You can be poor and destitute in a capitalist dystopia and you can be poor and destitute in a communist dystopia. This is why I hate the language of the Cold War so much - we lose an infinite amount of nuance with terms like "Capitalism" "socialism" "communism" and "GDP"
"Hostile architecture" is a keyword to search here if you are more interested in the topic -- aka architecural elements meant to discourage certain segments of the population from existing in certain spaces.
The other comments address it well. In the Indian context, I'd say it's all the slum demolition drives that have happened of late, often with questionable reimbursement if any.
and who decides if I want to use a knife to cut mushrooms instead? see where I am going, there are (or could exist) legit cases when you need to use it in a non-standard way, one that the model authors didn't anticipate.
Make content for your startup? Window-into-the-life, engineering notes, etc - anything that lets the public see what you're up to and that you're serious about the work.
Genuine content always beats the stuff marketing will come up with
I know this might seem reductive but when you say "look where everyone is looking", the answer hasn't really changed since the 2010s — it's our phones.
(and to some extent, monitors if you account for the amount of time 9-5 people spend on their work laptops or screens. desktop is not dead but that's another matter)
The hot apps are for now, chatbots and vertical shortform platforms. We know advertisers get much better bang for their buck marketing where the influencers are.
Google is "dead" because search advertising is much worse at figuring you out and showing you stuff when you're not necessarily looking for it. But Google can easily advertise where the eyeballs are - your phones.
We must remember that enshittification is an ongoing process and Google has the power to reach billions of people, one shitty update at a time.
From their POV, it definitely feels like a miss that they don't own a successful and dedicated social media platform. Maybe they will make another foray into it.
I might be oversimplifying, but isn't a lot of our neurological understanding about ADHD based on "fMRI shows decreased activity in the frontal cortex"? Or for that matter, our neurological understanding of a lot of mental health conditions.
I know the actual diagnosis is several times more layered than this attempt at an explanation, but I always felt that trying to explain the brain by peering at it from outwards is like trying to debug code by looking at a motherboard through a bad microscope.
I do not think there is much neurological understanding about ADHD at all from current fMRI research, there are far too many quality and reliability issues here, not just on the fMRI end or limited amount of data overall, but in the measurement and diagnosis of ADHD itself (i.e. ADHD subtypes, and of course ADHD is a complicated diagnosis with many components manifesting to different degrees in different individuals, which makes it very hard to cleanly link to messy fMRI signals).
Or, as I have commented elsewhere here, the idea that statements like "fMRI shows decreased activity" are ever valid is just fundamentally suspect (lower BOLD response could mean less inhibition or less excitation, and this is a rather crucial difference that fMRI simply can't distinguish). EDIT: Or to be more precise: it may well be that fMRI research suggests less metabolic activity in certain regions, but this could mean the region is actually firing more than normal, less than normal, is more efficient than normal, etc., and interpreting anything about what is functioning differently in ADHD, given this uncertainty, is what is going to be suspect.
Yes this is true, but we actually have a lot more data to back this on than exclusively fMRI analysis - for example the ADHD medication guanfacine works only because the alpha 2 receptors happen to be wired differently in the prefrontal cortex than it is in other areas of the brain (a2 is inhibitory for most brain regions, but in the PFC they're positioned to amplify connections between neurons) , so by stimulating alpha 2 we allow for a more “top down” control from the prefrontal cortex than we do without, which improves executive function.
So that is one extremely robust way to understand neurological conditions like ADHD or Parkinson’s
With such medications, besides behavioural changes, how are they able to measure outcomes without fMRIs? Like knowing whether neuron connections are amplified or not?
They don't, this is speculative (i.e. a theory) and almost certainly untrue (or a gross over-simplification), much like the early and now disproven serotonin theories of depression.
Sad but necessary headline (if you don't get attention, no one clicks) that kinda obscures what the report marks as a solution - and no, it's NOT refusing to cure patients.
I'm not even close to being a libertarian, but I find that people expect biotech companies to swallow billions of $ of loss as some sort of public good. Reports like these are an attempt to better harmonise their survival model. Companies need to make money to offset their losses, if not to profit. And while biotech companies can profit, these can very quickly be offset by the cost of a single clinical trial - IIRC it costs $1 billion to take any new drug from trial to completion now. Imagine discovering the next penicillin in your garage and then needing to raise $1 billion to cure people with it?
The analysts recommendations are fairly tame - companies should target cures for diseases with a lot of sufferers (a social good) + note that there are a LOT of genetic diseases that could benefit from a single-shot cure.
Again, not a sympathiser for "big pharma" if that even exists, but I wonder how sustainable a model this can be if companies can get their stock wiped out by a single bad trial. Pharma is notorious as a risky investment - which for some, might sound like a problem for rich people. But really, it then becomes a problem to fund experimental research, the kind that pays off.
I'm not looking to defend pharma companies here, only to frame a slightly more reasonable set of terms for this debate. I'm sure such reports have their harms - rare, incurable diseases will get less attention. But we need a solution that acknowledges the constraints, not one that merely wishes away the limits of capital and sustained long-term research.
Also odd that the tech behind this isn't more talked about. I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate - and this predated ChatGPT by many years.
Big platforms like Google or X have only mildly experimented with heavenbanning and discourse manipulation at scale. These Russian networks have had at least a decades' worth of experience with it.
Somehow, in reducing all political opponents to bots, the discourse does seem to forget that there's often someone behind the bots, a tangible nation-state of a target.
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