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Saturday

Will Lloyd

The rule of Caesar Mark Zuckerberg

Modern tyrants have always looked to antiquity for models of how to exercise and display their power. For Joseph Stalin self-improvement did not mean listening to more audiobooks or enrolling in bi-weekly meditation classes. A lifelong bookworm who kept improbably long office hours, Stalin enjoyed reading about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. Yet the most heavily annotated work in his 20,000 volume library was an account of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire by his favourite historian, Robert Vipper. The terrible, godlike power of the Caesars was something he could relate to. Adolf Hitler, taking a more dilettantish route, looked to classical aesthetics in painting, sculpture and architecture to infuse German culture with his ideas about race.

mark zuckerberg

Tuesday

Daniel McCarthy

Social media should be held to the same bar as a newsstand, not a publisher

You can call for killing foreigners on Twitter and Facebook, as long as you do it in the gentle language of elite respectability. War is OK — especially if it’s a war to liberate somebody somewhere, even if that liberation in practice means ‘liberating’ the poor suckers from their earthly existence or the burden of having living families. Bombs are a benediction we bestow upon those we love. What you cannot say on social media, safe space that it is, is how much you hate the politicians and propagandists who demand this kindly slaughter. When Caitlin Johnstone, a fractious left-wing critic of U.S. foreign policy, voiced her opinion that ‘the world will be improved’ once John McCain ‘finally dies,’ she was suspended from Twitter.

social media newsstand

Thursday

Taki

Amazon and Facebook: the twin evils of our age

They used to say that the primary function of a boat was to be beautiful. I suppose that is why boats were feminine, as in ‘she’s a real beauty, that one’. Puritan is certainly a beauty and I’ve had a great time on board, especially when anchoring near some modern horror or other, bloated and overstuffed with ‘toys’, its occupants reflecting the boat: fat, ugly and invasive. Why is it that boats reflect their owners, as dogs do, and as women used to, although one can get oneself killed nowadays for describing a female as ‘owned’? Show me a tart and she’s sure to be with a James Stunt type.

Saturday

Jamie Bartlett

Big data wants your vote

From the outside it all looked haphazard and frenzied. A campaign that was skidding from scandal to crisis on its way to total defeat. That’s not how it felt inside the ‘Project Alamo’ offices in San Antonio, Texas where Trump’s digital division — led by Brad Parscale, who’d worked previously with Trump’s estate division setting up websites — was running one of the most sophisticated data-led election campaigns ever. Once Trump’s nomination was secured, the Republican Party heavyweights moved in, and so did seconded staff from Facebook and Google, there to help their well-paying clients best use their platforms to reach voters.

Thursday

Jamie Bartlett

Will Mark Zuckerberg now admit that Facebook is anti-social?

Zuck speaks! He’s finally responded to the Cambridge Analytica debacle. To be honest, I could have predicted almost word-for-word this evening’s statement: It wasn’t really our fault; it was mostly their fault; we’re a little bit responsible (‘front-up’ I can imagine a comms person insisting); and here are the steps we’ve taken. In fact, we’d already taken most of these steps in 2014, when all this happened. I sensed a weariness to it. He concluded his penultimate paragraph with the phrase ‘going forward’, which is usually a sign someone’s out of ideas. Still, and I can’t quite believe I’m writing this, I almost feel sorry for Mark.

Monday

Dominic Green

Facebook’s privacy failings are no accident

Remember Nudge? It was a 2008 book by Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, full of bright technocratic ideas for using ‘choice architecture’ to ‘nudge’ the plebs to make the ‘right’ decisions. The Guardian’s reviewer called it ‘never intimidating, always amusing, and elucidating: a jolly economic romp with serious lessons within’.   On Saturday, the Guardian published a whistleblower’s account of how Cambridge Analytica used data originating from ‘tens of millions' of Facebook profiles to construct choice architecture that could nudge the plebs to really vote the ‘right’ way, by using targetted adverts to swing marginal constituencies to the Republicans.