Winter is Coming

Looking ahead, far ahead, futurist Sara Robinson writes for Civicist that we should understand Trump’s rise as the end of an 80-year “saeculum” and make peace with the fact that it will be quite a while before we know what the new rules are. She writes:

We’re children of the Information Age, which is changing the entire epistemology of society away from machine metaphors and toward cybernetic ones—a shift that will require us to re-make all of our institutions, economies, and physical infrastructure to keep up. The carbon-based energy regime of that era is killing us. The Cold War balance of powers is now obviously archaic, and the relationships that once defined it are destabilizing. I could go on, but you get the point: we are entering an acute era of all-levels-all-sectors disruption, which has been a long time in the making, and which might be viewed as a seasonal, cyclic event—a historical winter, if you will.

Looking ahead to just the Trump presidency, futurist Darrell West offers four scenarios: traditional Republican, popular rogue, failed president, and authoritarian leader.

“That democracy depends on an independent civil society is a bedrock assumption in political theory. In the USA, we’ve just held an election that will test this theory against reality.” That’s Philanthropy 2173’s Lucy Bernholz mulling the impact of the election on civil society and the challenges ahead.

Against Normalization: This is from writer Eyal Press’s Facebook page: “A correction is required to the following paragraph in this morning’s NY Times. In a profile of Stephen Bannon, the paper informs its readers that the alt-right’s “‘nationalist movement’ – which has promoted and enabled anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and racist sentiment – will now have a champion at Mr. Trump’s side in the West Wing.” In point of fact, that nationalist movement now has a champion in the President-elect who will soon be occupying the Oval Office. Bannon’s appointment merely reinforces the point.”

President-elect Donald Trump wants his adult children to have security clearances, while they also run his businesses as a “blind trust.” No danger of a conflict there, right?

Don’t miss veteran tech journalist (and Civic Hall member) Dan Gillmor on the responsibilities of journalists today. He says journalists must be “Activists for freedom of expression, among the liberties that are at the core of societies where freedom is an institution, not just a word. Activists for media literacy, the foundation of which is critical thinking. Activists, because if we don’t do this we’ll be helping the authoritarians and failing to serve our fellow citizens.”

Public school students are starting to walk out of their schools in protest of the election result, with many more walkouts planned for Wednesday, according to this map from Cosecha. Many are declaring their campuses to be sanctuaries.

Vox.com contributor and New America fellow Lee Drutman had anti-Semitic literature promising concentration camps mailed to his home, as he posted to Twitter.

The day after Barack Obama was elected in 2008, white nationalists and other Americans angry about the election of the nation’s first black president went on a tear, reports David Niewert, not unlike the hate crime rampage we are seeing today.

Upside-down world: The Daily Caller, a rightwing news site, publishes H.A. Goodman, a noted Bernie or Buster, arguing that “President Trump Should Pardon Julian Assange.” Only a few years ago, The Daily Caller published David Bossie attacking Michael Moore for “aiding and abetting the enemy” for trying to help Assange; Ron Hart jeering at leftists in Berkeley for wanting to offer Assange amnesty; and Jeff Poor praising Patrick Buchanan for warning that WikiLeaks was trying to “destroy American diplomacy and frankly disarm America.”

Tech and postmortems: Veteran progressive Democratic organizer Mike Lux has an interesting post-mortem on the election up on Huffington Post. Among the factors he cites in Hillary Clinton’s loss:

After we won in 2008, our party fell in love with technology and data- big data and what Obama and Clinton strategist Jim Messina calls “little data” and microtargeting. And data is very important to running modern campaigns. But we fell in love with it so much that it sometimes feels like we forgot that we have to create a political movement that excites and motivates and energizes people, a movement that involves actual humans who volunteer to make calls and knock on doors; who give their small contributions online; who get on their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to post videos and memes; who are excited about convincing their friends and neighbors and coworkers to get out and vote for Democrats. Obama didn’t get 70 million votes in 2008 mainly because of data, he got those votes because people felt they were part of a movement. While they weren’t as excited in 2012, there was still enough residual love for him and that movement to put him over the top after a tough 4 years. We didn’t have that feeling this year, and we need a candidate and party that will get us back to that old time movement religion.

Along the same lines, Scott Goodstein, who led Bernie Sanders’ online operation, writes for The New York Times oped page that “Democratic campaigns must stop looking at social media as a one-way communication device for amplifying overproduced campaign messages. The true power of social media for politicians is unleashed only if they use it to make emotional connections.”

Don’t miss Faye Anderson explaining why 13 percent of black men voted for Trump (watch out for the twist at the end of her post).

Life in Facebookistan: Don’t miss Zeynep Tufekci’s trenchant rebuttal in the New York Times of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that his company’s news feed algorithms had no effect on the election.

An unofficial task force of Facebook employees from across the company are trying to challenge their boss Mark Zuckerberg for his claim that fake news proliferating on the massive site didn’t influence the election, Sheera Frenkel reports for BuzzFeed.

As the New York Times’ Mike Isaac reports, top executives at Facebook are also discussing the issue. Isn’t that nice. As technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci comments in the story, “A fake story claiming Pope Francis—actually a refugee advocate—endorsed Mr. Trump was shared almost a million times, likely visible to tens of millions. Its correction was barely heard. Of course Facebook had significant influence in this last election’s outcome.”

Michael Nunez reports, sort of, for Gizmodo that the company had “a planned News Feed update that would have identified fake or hoax news stories, but disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing that content from people’s feeds. According to [his unnamed] source, the update was shelved and never released to the public. It’s unclear if the update had other deficiencies that caused it to be scrubbed.” Nunez’s source added “there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics,” and that “a lot of product decisions got caught up in that.” I don’t know—a story like this ought to have at least one named source, right? Or else it just might be…fake.

Today in less stupid: Responding to concerns raised here, Avaaz has closed its campaign to its US members that had falsely claimed that there was a way to change last week’s election result by changing the working of the Electoral College. It posted, “In an email to Avaaz members in the United States, we wrote that if states with a combined 270+ electoral college votes supported the National Popular Vote Bill before the December 19 electoral college meeting, it would stop Donald Trump becoming the next president. In fact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact contains an internal deadline of July 20 of the year of a Presidential election, and cannot affect the outcome of the 2016 election. Upon discovering this error, we closed the campaign, updating the pages with a correction and emailing all signers of the petition. We will continue to campaign for the National Popular Vote bill which will be a great step forward for democracy in the US, and in the wake of this year’s election results, remains hugely important to support to ensure it is in place before 2020.”

Tech VC Sherwin Pishevar is trying to clarify that he isn’t supporting the YesCalifornia secession movement, and just wants a new third party devoted to devolving power to the states. That should really help vulnerable people who don’t like in California. I’ll believe it when he deletes all his tweets promoting secession, starting with this one.

Happy Birthday to Talking Points Memo, which turned 16 (!) on November 13th. Pretty amazing run—and needed more than ever.

Your moment of zen: From a NYC high school teacher and a dear friend of mine. Please RT.