media | tech | future
There is one disinformation aspect that is less lauded outside newsrooms, but can be just as harmful. With the obliteration of the traditional media business model, journalism in most places had to adapt in a way that the battle for accurate information is lost from the start.…
Information systems will be born from the ashes of the media obliterated by digital, a broader, decentralised, reshuffled replacement. But that won’t come easily.
Two stakeholders determined the whole Western post-industrial agenda: the elites and the media. They intermingled, most of the time, the latter has been controlled by the former.
Virtually any news coverage today is tainted by lousy information somehow. It goes from orchestrated manoeuvres by foreign states to simple partisan media coverage made to appease audiences with enough purchasing power to subscribe to the most comfortable cable channel. But the problem goes way down the waterline.…
Last week, Apple and Facebook, once again, starred controversial events that, theoretically, they should be entitled to do. Facebook shut down a project to allow researchers to study political ads. At the same time, Apple decided to scan users’ content to find pedophiliac content coming from a database provided by an NGO.…
The break of news raising doubts over the security of open-source software sent shockwaves through the technology realm, more specifically for the communities developing it. Open-source code is sacred for such communities, made of millions of people that work for free in the name of a highly hippish, nearly Marxist ethos of equality, where sharing things is not an act of goodwill but a mindset.…
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn, 1881
Last week, The Economist brought a jaw-dropping report that shows that the Covid death tally is much bigger than the awful 3.5 million stated today.…
Whenever some disinformation event, agent or consequence comes into question, it’s very unlikely that the scapegoats are not the technology companies, politicians or the state. This is a too-narrow vision. Those are often the agents exploiting a societal weakness, yes, but they are symptoms of that weakness.…
Russians. UKIP. Trump. Marine Le Pen. Bolsonaro. These are some of the names we often relate to disinformation, frequently accused of manipulating data. The shady, right-wing, unscrupulous, tyrant-wannabe actors are definitely guilty. But even if they indeed take (or took at some point) advantage of misguiding data, they are not the root cause but a symptom.…
“We have to cease to think, if we refuse to do it in the prison house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Most of the times, the establishment does not need to put effort to support its own good.…
The right to information is one where the will of the individual has little value. Societies have the responsibility to ensure — or even enforce — this right because the subject’s unwillingness to accept such a right compromises others’ rights. It is not a license for governments to act as the universal “enforcer”, quite the opposite: the state is the very last player that should intervene unilaterally.…
Any intellectual output has a strong human fingerprint all over it, even if produced by machines. This fingerprint can be made out of authorship, context, meaning, lots of things. It is relevant because it defines the roots of how content interacts with audiences, a process that is deeper than usually noted.…
Wiping out the newspapers’ ad business, Google killed journalism. Western culture is built on guilt, but this is a natural, comfortable conclusion – especially for journalists, to have a scapegoat. But it’s not true. Google was the predator that nature developed to finish a creature ill-equipped for a new environment.…