#dave karpf

[thatstormygeek]

So for the next couple months, we are essentially Schrödinger’s Electorate. There is no uncertainty about Trump’s ambitions....But there is real uncertainty about his capacity to execute.

We won’t know until at least January just how dark things are about to get. There is a version of Trump’s second term where he talks a lot about mass deportation, but actually deports comparatively few people. He gestures at massive tariffs, but mostly as a negotiating tactic. The most dangerous parts of Project 2025 languish because they require more attention to detail than he cares to give. (Plus they would be unpopular. And Trump likes to feel popular.) This would be a Trump II that kind of resembles Trump I, when he talked a whole lot about “building the wall,” but lacked the will and skill to actually put the plan into practice. This is not a good future, mind you. But it’s the best possible of all the bad futures. Its one where we suffer through several years of mid-level corruption and a ceaseless barrage of Trump intrigue and incompetence. It’s a future that still yields a couple hundred more Trump judges with lifetime appointments to the federal bench, ensuring that no future administration can accomplish its goals. It’s also a future that sets us back at least four years on climate commitments, all while handing the plutocrats more money and power that they will ruthlessly work to defend. It’s, y’know, still really bad. But the other version of Trump II is the one where he deputizes and mobilizes a deportation force that removes tens of millions of people from their homes. Some will be sent back to their home countries. But most will be rounded up and sent to makeshift camps. And that’s a future where he also uses Schedule F to replace all federal workers with Trump ideologues, reducing the federal government to a cutout front for the Trump organization. It’s one where he shuts down all progressive organizations under the cover of fighting “extremism,” rendering the Democratic Party network incapable of competing in future in elections. One where his political opponents go into hiding, and the military is deployed against protestors, and press critics quickly learn that their constitutional protections are not self-enforcing. This would be much, much worse.

I’ve heard a cold-comfort, rally-the-troops message in some progressive circles: “we’ve been here before. We know how to mobilize against him!” I hate to be a downer, but… no. If your strategic plan for Trump II relies on a repeat of the conditions of Trump I, that is a very bad strategic plan. When Donald Trump assumed the Presidency in 2017, we had (1) a mainstream media that was eager to play a watchdog role, (2) a Republican Party that had not been entirely cleansed of Trump critics, (3) a judicial branch with zero Trump appointees, and (4) Trump and his team lacking even the vaguest sense of how to run the executive branch. We had, in other words, a huge attack surface. ... It’s also going to be harder to tie him up in the courts than it was in the first term. Trump appointed 234 federal judges, including three Supreme Court Justices. These Trump judges have shown no deference to precedent. Many are naked partisans, with no incentive to hide it. (Hell, a Trump judge just struck down Biden’s overtime pay Executive Order yesterday.) The Supreme Court has also gotten very comfortable using its shadow docket to speed up and slow down cases to Trump’s benefit. ... Here’s a rough outline of what I think might work. The basic assignment is simple: run out the clock. There are 102 weeks until the 2026 midterm election. There are 206 weeks until the 2028 Presidential. That’s a lot of time to be playing prevent defense against an opponent who controls all the structural power levers at the federal level. This will hardly be easy. But Donald Trump is not some strategic genius, enacting a meticulously-crafted long-term plan. He has grown older, but no wiser. He is as likely to focus on deporting 20 million people as he is to get into a weeklong Twitter spat with Mark Cuban. He is a ridiculous person, and tremendously vulnerable to ridicule. His administration will be staffed by devoted ideologues, not skilled operators. Rudy Giuliani was a devoted Trump supporter. So was John Eastman. Both were comically inept, and are now disbarred as a result. The benchwarmers suiting up now that they are off the playing field have no great excess of skill.

[charliejaneanders]

I don’t see how else to make sense of it. 2022 was the year the 20-year tech bubble finally burst. 2023 was still bad for startups, and was full of bad headlines for the big platforms. And yet, in the markets, tech investors just took a deep collective breath and started inflating the next bubble, as though the previous year had never happened.

Silicon Valley runs on Futurity

[nextwavefutures]

The long boom that wasn’t

I spent much of the ‘90s working in a technology-related job, launching an interactive television channel for a cable company in London. One of the side effects of this was that I needed to know about the nascent internet, and to do this you needed to read WIRED magazine. At the time, this was like opening a vein and injecting yourself with Silicon Valley, before it became a vampire. And,…

[epersonae]

I have a bunch of receng genAI-related links that I want to store somewhere other than browser tabs, so here, have some mostly depressing reading

As I said in chat, it's giving Star Trek TOS "The Ultimate Computer":

The report from MIT Technology Review is worth clicking through to:

Some musings from a college-level writing instructor:

Some thoughts on financialization and futurity from a guy writing a book on sort of the "history of the future" (iirc mostly by way of old Wired magazines)

A polemic on management, business culture, and genAI (and I mean polemic in the best way)

And then a little dark humor

[chongoblog]

WAIT

I JUST REMEMBERED HEARING AN ELON MUSK QUOTE WHERE HE TALKS ABOUT HOW HE BELIEVES CHESS IS "TOO SIMPLE" OR WHATEVER AND HE SAID HIS FAVORITE GAME WAS A GAME CALLED "POLYTOPIA"

I JUST REMEMBERED THAT IVE PLAYED POLYTOPIA

It being Elon's favorite game (or at least one so important to him that his biographer dedicates a lot of time to it) is.....really really funny.

Basically, imagine Civilization, but as a mobile game. So like if Civilization Revolution was even more dumbed down (that's a Civilization insult. That's devastating. It's devastated right now). For what it's worth, it's not a bad game. On the contrary, from what I could tell in the little bit of time I played it, it's a perfectly competent game with good design. But it's not a deep game by any means. I played through it once, won easily on my first go, then saw that the other playable characters had barely any differences between them.

Like, not to imply you can judge a book by its cover, but here's what it looks like

I came across an article by Dave Karpf discussing this exact thing, and I think it describes it wonderfully

[azspot]

There will be a parade of corruption and incompetence scandals. If I had to guess, I’d say RFK Jr won’t last long in the administration — not because any Trumpist will stand up for basic public health protections, but because he has served his purpose, and his ego is too voluminous to show proper deference. Expect lots of infighting. Anyone not related to Donald Trump by blood or by marriage will have only a tenuous grasp on power.

Dave Karpf

[sab-cat]

1. Tech Billionaires vs. Democracy: Elon Musk and the Rise of "Network States"

In the explosive first episode of The Nerd Reich podcast, host Gil Duran teams up with economic sociologist Brooke Harrington and internet politics expert Dave Karpf to decode the alarming rise of "network states." They're diving deep into how tech billionaires like Elon Musk are trying to dismantle traditional governance to create their own power structures through crypto and artificial intelligence. They discuss the hidden dangers behind AI-driven governance, the disturbing intersection of wealth and political influence, and why understanding human behavior through humanities matters now more than ever. Plus, they share bold predictions about where tech authoritarianism is heading and reveal powerful strategies for resisting the growing control of billionaire tech elites. Don't miss this essential conversation about the fight for democracy's future!

[barrapontoquotes]

(1) how do these technologies actually work? What are their actually-existing capacities and limitations?

(2) how are they likely to be incorporated into existing social practices? What economic, political, and cultural practices will they amplify? What will they disrupt? How will the existing institutional forces of money and power warp their deployment?

(3) who is positioned to do what to alter this likely trajectory? Which possibilities ought to be promoted or foreclosed, and through what means?

Dave Karpf in On technological optimism and technological pragmatism

[bluefly]

Nate Silver gives me the willies. His interview with Ezra Klein made my skin crawl, and I had to turn it off. Big overtones of the bros of my youth wanting to hear themselves talk...

Can't hide my head in the sand though. Might as well learn more second hand.

Edit: On second thought, I tried reading the thread and felt my anxiety rise. I'm out.

[loud-brain]

I've learned more about current politics over the past year from Dave Karpf's newsletter than all the news outlets combined. This one was a particularly good take imho

[thatstormygeek]

The problems with her campaign are mostly problems that take years, rather than months, to fix. It sure would be nice if the Democratic Party network had the type of networked media apparatus that the Republican Party network enjoys. It sure would be nice if the party had spent years building local organizing capacity at the grassroots level across swing states and the south (Give us forty-eight more Ben Wiklers and Stacey Abramses, please!). It sure would be nice if the billionaire class hadn’t bought up all the media networks, and if the courts hadn’t repeatedly decided that the law is for little people, and if government was still mostly in the business of trying to improve peoples’ lives. But you campaign in the short-term and then (try to) govern in the medium- or long-term. Over the course of these few months, there aren’t many decisions the Harris campaign has made that I think they should meaningfully regret. I’m not sure how to feel about all the Liz Cheney, cross-partisan-coalition events. It’s clear that the Harris campaign is betting that they can create a permission structure for Nikki Haley voters to cast a ballot for a Democrat. That makes me nervous, because I'm old enough to get a strong Charlie-Brown-and-the-football vibe from it. Throughout my adult life, Democrats have tried to appeal to an imagined bloc of moderate swing voters. It rarely seems to pan out. But I can also see the sense of it here. They’re basically targeting two clusters of voters — Republicans who voted in the primary, are therefore high-propensity voters, and have already voted against Trump because they don’t want to put up with his bullshit anymore, plus low-information moderates who generally just wish the parties could get along. If that sort of message was ever going to work, this is probably the election to try it.

People, en masse, just don’t believe that the economy is in good shape right now. That’s a comms problem for Harris/Walz. You can’t have the candidate insisting “no, no, the public is mistaken. Things are great right now.” That kind of gaslighting is not exactly a winning message. The state of our media infrastructure surely doesn’t help. Elon bought Twitter and turned it into a Republican propaganda and misinformation network. A handful of billionaires own most of our major media outlets, and they do not appreciate that the government is sometimes looking at their cool merger ideas and saying “no.” This, again, is a medium-term problem. You solve it by rebuilding the regulatory state and building your own media institutions over the course of years, not months. Seth Masket has summarized the state of the race as “people want change but MAGA terrifies them.” My personal hunch is that people want change because we have collectively never dealt with the pandemic. It was a once-in-a-century global catastrophe. No one was prepared for it, no one has dealt well with it, and our political leaders do not have the moral authority to address it.

[pscottm]

What Elections Are For - by Dave Karpf

All I can say to them (calmly now, and with increased urgency as the year progresses) is that politics is a constant struggle, and elections are inflection points. The choice is not between the lesser of two evils. The choice is whether you would rather spend the next four years fighting to improve the status quo, or spend them fighting to preserve it.

[thoughtportal]

Paris Marx is joined by Dave Karpf to discuss Meta’s misguided attempt to turn Facebook into a metaverse company, how Wired Magazine has evolved, and why the tech billionaires are destroying the world.

                 Guest                      

Dave Karpf is an Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University. He’s also the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy. Follow Dave on Twitter at @davekarpf.

[thebiscuiteternal]

Big Tech's QAnon problem is just beginning - CNN

And in perhaps the ultimate indictment of how online platforms failed to stop QAnon from gaining traction sooner, the baseless claims on which QAnon thrives have already been embraced or sympathized with by at least six Republican congressional candidates in districts ranging from Georgia to California.

The problem goes beyond QAnon. Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who has called herself a "proud Islamophobe" and has been banned by numerous online platforms, won a primary on Tuesday and became the Republican party's nominee in a Florida congressional race.

Now, the tech companies find themselves in an even more difficult position: Having to reconcile their commitments to limit the spread of harmful content without appearing to censor the politicians who are directly involved in driving those messages to an ever-wider audience.

"Once the conspiracy theorists become the elected officials, you either need to say 'Forget it, we're never touching anything, let the conspiracy theories reign,' or they need to go in the other direction and say, 'We need to no longer give elected officials an exemption anymore,'" said Dave Karpf, a political scientist at George Washington University who has studied digital political movements.

[azspot]

I’m beginning to suspect that this “Elon Musk” isn’t a real person. He’s a fictional character meant to make Mark Zuckerberg look like less of a dumbass.

dave karpf

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Warren trolls Facebook by running campaign ads that lie about Mark Zuckerberg

Xeni Jardin:

This morning I posted that Facebook and Twitter have taken the position that they will accept political ads that contain lies because they don't feel it's in their best interest to fact check claims made in the ads.

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren put Facebook to the test by running an ad on Facebook falsely claiming that Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have publicly announced their endorsement of Trump for president. Facebook said it will let the ad run. “If Senator Warren wants to say things she knows to be untrue, we believe Facebook should not be in the position of censoring that speech,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told CNN.

"Either Facebook doesn't touch the ad and the ad is therefore noteworthy, or they touch the ad and it's noteworthy," Dave Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, told CNN. "It's a smart tactical move."

https://boingboing.net/2019/10/11/warren-trolls-facebook-by-runn.html