
Dust in the Light - zwieback
https://stratechery.com/2020/dust-in-the-light/
======
dmode
I love Ben Thompson's writing and I like how he accurately connects the
history of institutional racism to the events of today. I have seen a few
articles of this kind, and it seems like in today's America vast majority of
people (except a few Trump holdouts) have acknowledged that the historical arc
of slavery to segregation to white flight to real estate discrimination has
led to where we are.

However, what I don't hear is radical solution to this problem. Even in
Obama's medium essay, the solution is deep police and criminal justice reform.
Which, while important, is incremental. What we need here is a step change to
course correct 400 years of history. And incremental changes do not cut it.
Here are some step change suggestions

1)Trillions of dollars of reparations 2) A generous UBI 3) Free healthcare 4)
Trillions of investment in schools in poorer neighborhoods 5) A dramatic rise
in minimum wage

In pre-COVID world, I would accept a reasonable pushback against this
suggestion was "deficit" "debt" etc. But COVID has exposed these pushbacks was
hypocritical (puts a stark spotlight on the hypocritical Tea Party movement).
We printed trillions of dollars overnight to save small and big businesses,
and employees. Why can't we move at that scale ? If we can suddenly print that
much money, what is stopping us from massive investments in our most
disadvantaged communities to undo 400 years of history ?

~~~
disease
Economic parity would go a long way towards solving these problems, I don't
think they can happen before white racial resentment is solved. It's
interesting that so many working class whites are so willing to vote against
their own economic self interest - particular where the possibility of raising
the levels of working class blacks is concerned. Last Place Aversion is a very
real thing it seems.

~~~
dmode
Can you expand a little bit on the white racial resentment and what you mean
by it ?

~~~
pcbro141
A non-trivial percentage of White Americans feel like African-Americans have
already been made whole for the hundreds of years of wrongdoing done to them,
and some even feel like Black people actually have more privilege/opportunity
than White people in America and that America is now "reverse racist".
Anecdotally, they tend to be poorer Whites who feel aggrieved that they
haven't gotten the wealth they feel they deserve, but not always.

Basically the type of people who think saying "Black Lives Matter" means you
hate White people.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> And no matter what upheaval lies ahead, I am certain that the light that
> illuminates that dust so brightly can never be put away. There are no more
> gatekeepers, oftentimes for worse, but also for better.

I am not so sanguine. People in power all over the world are seeing the threat
to their power from the Internet and working to curtail it. China is probably
the most ahead, but I am sure everyone else is hard at work.

The centralization of the Internet makes it a much easier task. If you get
Google, Facebook, and Twitter on board, you basically control the flow of
information to most of the West.

In the West it probably won’t be overt coercion but more likely via monetary
and legal incentives. Immunity or liability from lawsuits for user posted
content will be the big carrot and stick that will be used to get these
companies to do the governments’ bidding.

I fear that the George Floyd video equivalent 10 years from now will get
immediately deleted by ML algorithms as too disturbing and the uploaders
automatically banned

~~~
ses1984
I don't think China is ahead of the west, they just take a slightly different
approach. People have a really short memory, they already forgot about
Snowden, prism, Room 641A: that shit never stopped.

Please don't get me wrong I'm not trying to equate China and the west, China
is a lot worse but strictly looking at the reaction of those in power to the
internet... People in power in the west are definitely reacting strongly.

China is more 1984 and the west is more brave new world.

~~~
foobiekr
None of the things you listed actually involves suppressing content. The
parent author is concerned about suppressing the internet, not spying on it.

Both can be bad, but they're not the same thing. China leads on both.

~~~
ses1984
Suppressing content is just one of the means to the ends of maintaining power
and control.

------
WhatIsDukkha
As usual, overlong and is another apologia -

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologia)

for large tech monopolies.

These essays are fueled by throwing some facts and nuance around so that we
appear to be a thoughtful person but then roughly sums it up with "isn't it
great we have cellphones and facebook?"

~~~
clairity
yeah, i've read a few of these analyses, and while they're mildly interesting,
they're not nearly as earth-shatteringly insightful and counter-intuitive as
many seem to think they are. it's mostly bog-standard strategic analysis you
learn during MBA school, but to ben's credit, well laid out, organized, and
appropriately cited.

this particular post seems to marvel at how big tech provides otherwise-
sheltered people a lens on the wider world, and by extension, a (rather tiny)
mechanism of change. it claims more significance for this mechanism than, you
know, masses of people marching on the streets, because that's the vantage
point of the author and it's relative importance to him.

edit: i just listened to Funmilola Fagbamila on yesterday's _take two_ [0],
and she was incredibly articulate and insightful about the protests and
organizing for change:
[https://www.funmilola.com/](https://www.funmilola.com/)

[0] [https://www.scpr.org/programs/take-
two/2020/06/01/20889/](https://www.scpr.org/programs/take-
two/2020/06/01/20889/)

~~~
WhatIsDukkha
I think you nailed with your comment, I'm even more critical however.

His writing doesn't deliver in a chain of reasoning that you would expect in
undergraduate argument papers. Despite their organization and polish the meat
of argument is just not there.

As "internet/media analyst" he genuinely seems unaffected by the events of the
last 8 years. It's disturing that there are people still out there with this
bovine of an outlook. 2020 and techbro discovers redlining and racism were a
thing for the last... Most of his essays are just the same way but in
different topics. edited -- wrong guy same outlook

~~~
satyrnein
Your link is Benedict Evans. The OP is Ben Thompson.

~~~
WhatIsDukkha
Yeah my bad... triggered on the internet.

------
gigatexal
Ben’s writing on this is so powerful. It should be at the top of HN with a
million points. I’m glad to be a supporter of his. As a subscriber I got to
hear him read this and it was moving.

~~~
1123581321
The free weekly articles are also available as free podcast episodes.

------
KerrickStaley
Zooming in on the commentary on Facebook/Twitter's approaches to Trump's post,
I just want to say that in my opinion, Twitter did the right thing in this
case and also in the previous case of misinformation about mail-in voting.

We need to innovate in terms of how we keep democracies healthy, given the
dramatic change to the flow of information caused by social media and the
internet.

Adding a "get the truth" notice to posts that contain misinformation is a
great way to strike a balance between censoring misinformation and letting it
spread unchecked, and this approach is an interesting new tool in the toolkit
we have for keeping conversations healthy on the internet. I applaud Twitter
for their work in developing and experimenting with this tool.

Likewise, limiting the viral spread of posts that threaten violence (by
preventing likes and retweets) is also a useful tool. It's interesting to note
that the reason this post wasn't removed entirely is because public figures
like Trump get a "newsworthiness" exception in Twitter's Code of Conduct that
allows them to essentially say whatever they want, even if it violates the
CoC.

------
rockmeamedee
This is pretty weak.

It mentions redlining, quotes Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but then mostly argues that
Twitter's filter on Trump's tweet made it spread wider, the reverse of the
action they wanted, implying they did the wrong action, or that it would not
work in the future, which is pretty bad logic.

The tweet became more notable because Twitter has never done this before. It
got reproduced because it was the first time Twitter did it, not because
people wanted to read the "shocking tweet". If twitter were to do this often,
or dump Trump, we'd stop talking about it again. Cf Milo.

And then it ends with this whole "The internet is the new industrial
revolution, and that is both good and bad" thing. Kind of like, Ben couldn't
stop himself from Internet Thoughtleadership for a minute. After 4 minutes of
commenting on Race in America he had to go back to musing about Platforms.

I get it, you want to (and can!) tie it in to your expertise. But you just
kind of failed at that.

You could talk about the huge tech titans making it worse: Amazon's Ring
doorbell, the $10B JEDI contract with the DoD, Facebook's extremist
groups/lack of moderation, Twitter not banning Trump the first time around,
the Adtech industry in general pushing surveillance everywhere it can, to
gather datapoints. Or the way tech has made income inequality worse. The
homogenous makeup of the tech industry. The social construction of "nerdiness"
as whiteness. The tech industry (and everyone on the Internet)'s unquestioning
acceptance of the capitalist approach, and only being accessible to people
with money and app solutionism.

But instead it ends with "I am hopeful there are fewer gatekeepers, and can
therefore see racism more clearly now". Like, that's it?

At least put a couple links to non-profits in the footer. Doesn't this guy
make a few million $ a year from his newsletter? Donate it!

------
samirillian
> Both peaceful protests and wanton destruction and looting were likely
> organized on social media.

Interesting that in his mind the looting is the dark side of this uprising.

How about the drones the riot cops use to watch the protesters' every move?

Wasn't it Microsoft and AWS fighting over the facial recognition AI contract
that Google finally dropped?

~~~
gilbetron
Were the cops organizing by social media? He's making the point that social
media can be used for good or bad, what the cops use is a rather orthogonal
point.

(To be clear: the things you mention are bad)

~~~
samirillian
What do you think this facial-recognition AI is trained on? To me it's just
amazingly pedestrian to consider "I saw a blog post" an actual political
analysis of social media.

------
Terretta
"The crescent" is another way of saying "land SE of a big lake".

An alternative plausible explanation is it's a half circle because the town
center is on the southern end of the lake.

Way too much being made of multiple sets of data points and pins on a map
around a lake, without mentioning density, with a lake.

~~~
mcguire
" _While red-lining helped shape segregation in many cities, Minneapolis was
pre-emptive about its discrimination; beginning in the 1910s Minneapolis real
estate deeds started to include “Covenants” that explicitly excluded African
Americans. A team from the University of Minnesota has been researching real
estate deeds to uncover these covenants, and created this striking time-lapse
of their spread:..._

" _Racial covenants were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1948,
but the effect remains; compare the racial covenant map to the racial dot map
Blank referenced above — the blue (which is white people) adheres to the blue
of racial covenants:..._

" _A map of racial covenants closely matches a map of Minneapolis '
population_

" _That red cross, meanwhile, is the location of the homicide of George Floyd,
in the decidedly non-blue portion of the map._ "

I have downvoted your comment, not because there's anything specifically
_wrong_ in it, but because I cannot believe focusing on the word "crescent"
and disregarding any context could be anything other than an attempt to
diminish the discussion.

~~~
sanj
I'm downvoting it because it is willfully, thoughtfully, and purposefully
attempting to argue that there is no racially motivated correlation between
these datasets.

There is. Constructing a convoluted worldview in which there isn't, and
promulgating it, is racism.

~~~
Terretta
> _willfully, thoughtfully, and purposefully attempting to argue that there is
> no racially motivated correlation between these datasets._

On the contrary....

I grew up in Africa. My sister is professor of African studies with degree
from UW Madison. I'm familiar with the area and the issues.

The "crescent" seen in the data is geography, not some sort of compelling
argument for correlation.

Exactly contrary to your interpretation of my comment, my point is that the
same data sets are correlated _everywhere_ there's density, but I guess "the
blob" doesn't seem as persuasive as "the crescent".

It's not that it's a crescent, it's just urban America.

And it's a problem.

PS. See also, _" centuries worth of negative compounding at work"_:
[https://ofdollarsanddata.com/racial-wealth-
gap/](https://ofdollarsanddata.com/racial-wealth-gap/)

