Tribes
Edward Snowden on his life in Russia, as interviewed by Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen of The Nation: he’s often recognized in computer stores. And regarding his questioning of Vladimir Putin about Russian surveillance practices: “Yeah, that was terrible! Oh, Jesus, that blew up in my face.”
Also, here is Snowden on how the Internet has made politics more polarized:
What we’re seeing now, or starting to see, is an atomization of the Internet community. Before, everybody went only to a few sites; now we’ve got all these boutiques. We’ve got crazy little sites going up against established media behemoths. And increasingly we’re seeing these ultra-partisan sites getting larger and larger readerships because people are self-selecting themselves into communities. I describe it as tribalism because they’re very tightly woven communities. Lack of civility is part of it, because that’s how Internet tribes behave. We see this more and more in electoral politics, which have become increasingly poisonous.
All this is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it helps people establish what they value; they understand the sort of ideas they identify with. The curse is that they aren’t challenged in their views. The Internet becomes an echo chamber. Users don’t see the counterarguments. And I think we’re going to see a move away from that, because young people—digital natives who spend their life on the Internet—get saturated.
Confused about where 2016 hopeful Hillary Clinton stands on NSA reform? National Journal’s Dustin Volz says you are not alone, given how little she has said to clarify her views since the Snowden revelations began.
Placemeter is a private company that is paying New Yorkers up to $50 a month to video record what is going on outside their window, a feed that is then turned into aggregated and anonymized local data. Reporting for The Guardian, Elizabeth Rust suggests that this privatized watching system–even if it used just for counting and measuring traffic–could easily be abused.
Calling bullshit on Facebook’s claim that its users are in charge of their news feed experience, by Jay Rosen.
Thousands of Hungarians rallied Sunday against a proposed Internet tax, reports Matt Schiavenza for The Atlantic.
“Civic tech is booming,” blogs Microsoft’s Dan’l Lewin, the company’s corporate VP for technology and civic engagement. He defines it as ranging “from engagement between the city government and its population on social platforms, all the way to enterprise solutions that offer deep government IT problem-solving.” And he says, “The civic tech movement was fueled in part by President Obama’s December 2009 directive to put government data online,” which has led dozens of cities to follow suit.