Who watches the watchers?
Raphael Satter for Reuters: Mass surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal.
Adi Robertson for The Verge: FBI worried doorbell cameras could tip owners off.
Emma Copley Eisenberg for Esquire: Fact-checking is the core of nonfiction writing. Why do so many publishers refuse to do it?
Linkedin deserves the same scrutiny as other social platforms
My annual LinkedIn Premium account is due for renewal this month. There isn’t a lot of benefits to a premium account, and the only functions I truly have used are sending InMails to potential interview subjects and looking at profiles anonymously.
I’ve had far greater success at getting interviews via Twitter and Instagram than LinkedIn. The premium account isn’t worth it.
First, let’s look at the more pointless, petty problems of LinkedIn: The UI design. It’s stuck in the noughties. Second, it’s an insufferable cringefest. Posts are marketing and self-branding tools filled with gimmicky, tone-deaf, pseudo-motivational positivity porn with recycled pixelated images my aunts used to forward in chain emails 20 years ago because they didn’t want seven years of bad luck.
“It’s the rise of the faux-inspirational narrative, where professionals, completely unprompted, jot down little workplace vignettes meant to make other LinkedIn users think, gasp or perhaps back away from their screen muttering ‘Whoa, dude’ under their breath,” wrote Tanner Garrity. “It follows the usual template: short, declarative sentences meant to convey some vague but momentous lesson, stamped with a hashtag… These posts are intended to spread messages of goodwill and positivity. They’re the bastard children of self-help culture and HR jargon.”
Why is there so much focus on toxic optimism and why do people keep cheering and patting each other on the back for their pretentious humblebrags? Am I such a cynic that I don’t think any of them are genuine? I’m definitely not the only one; there are Twitter accounts dedicated to this: The State of Linkedin and Crap on Linkedin.
But LinkedIn is more problematic than that. False, misleading and harmful contents are shared on this platform. Let’s look at a real-life example. This is a screenshot from my frontpage feed in November 2019. “Healthcare keeps getting more exciting,” went the caption, accompanied by a link to an article with the headline: “Google is now a pharmaceutical company.”
Let’s take a closer look at the link that was shared. I have a nose trained to detect B.S. from a mile away and I knew it was a dubious website immediately. But I needed evidence. I clicked on the link to read its opening lines, which included the quote: “Google today is not only a weapon for promoting the pharmaceutical agenda [emphasis mine] but now also a drug company itself .”
“A weapon for promoting the pharmaceutical agenda?” Why did the regional head of communications of a legacy pharmaceutical company share a link to an article that is critical of their own industry?
A closer inspection of the website reveals that it is an anti-vaccination website that spreads other health-related conspiracy theories including ones related to chemtrails and GMOs. I rephrase: Why did the regional head of communications of a legacy pharmaceutical company share a link from a website that promotes pseudoscientific quackery?
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading CrimethInc’s step-by-step guide to protecting yourself against doxxing and what to do if you are targeted.
I’m watching the couple behind the popular Youtube channel, Simply Nailogical, discuss how influencers make money. (They still keep their day jobs as crime statistics analysts at Statistics Canada despite making millions on Youtube.)
I’m listening to Science Friction by Natasha Mitchell for ABC on medical misinformation, COVID-19, Big Data and BLM.
Chart of the week
The latest S&S newsletter by data journalists Sara Cooper and Sabrina Faramarzi shares how to embrace uncertainty. Using polls carried out by Ipsos about what people predicted for 2020, they explain in great detail the unpredictability of the future and suggest some ways we can still make better decisions.
Fakta, Auta & Data #7: Pemanasan sosial
Bekas penyunting teknologi di The Guardian Charles Arthur menyamakan ancaman maklumat palsu yang berlaku secara ansuran dengan pemanasan global. Dia menamakan proses ini pemanasan sosial.
Dengan peningkatan penggunaan telefon pintar, rangkaian sosial dan masyarakat yang terhubung sepanjang masa, apa yang boleh kita perhatikan adalah sama seperti pemanasan global. Sebagaimana enjin pembakaran dalam dan syarikat-syarikat penjana kuasa besar yang membakar bahan api fosil telah menyebabkan pemanasan atmosfera, dengan telefon pintar dan rangkaian sosial, kita sedang melihat ‘pemanasan masyarakat’ – pemanasan sosial.
Sepertimana kita mengubah atmosfera dengan memasukkan lebih banyak karbon dioksida ke dalamnya, kita juga mengubah cara masyarakat berfungsi dengan memasukkan lebih banyak maklumat ke dalamnya, membuatkan orang bertindak balas dengan lebih cepat, dan ia secara radikal mengubah cara masyarakat berfungsi.
Transcript for audio
The months of June (Harvest Festival), July (Sarawak Day), August (Sabah and Malaya’s Independence Day), and September (Malaysia Day) are the most exhausting for me. My phone goes buzz, my email goes ding and the rings don’t stop. It’s the time of the year I get to be the lucky token East Malaysian, hooray.
Every year, I continue my conscientious objection to contrived, tokenistic, disenfranchising Malayan-driven narratives of Malaysia Day. Granted, we ought to be wary of adopting Western sociological theories and terminologies uncritically. But here we are:
We bow to the status quo so as to not offend; we dare not ask for what has been taken from us, because we fear more will be taken otherwise; or more likely, because what was taken has been erased from history – it’s a clean slate now , we were told, through half-baked unremorseful speeches by our post-colonial overlords, and we shall all live together separately in peace so long as we stay in our own lanes. First by force, then through historical amnesia.
We assume and affirm oppressive stereotypes towards our own group – yes indeed we are lesser than our westward friends, they know better, look at their wealth and weight and the continuous wars they’ve waged and won. We whiten our skin, we lose our native tongues, we stop singing. We self-hate, we self-flagellate, we self-sabotage. We deny our identities: we are inferior, we want to rid ourselves of our primitive ways, we are in need of modernisation. We desire to be our colonists.
We look at our kin – “back home,” “back then” – with disdain and shame; those who chose not to conform with nor defer to the higher valued social group. “You are the reason they look down on us, you are the reason they treat us so poorly, you are the reason we are oppressed and discriminated against.” And as we clamour to the top of the food chain, we drag down our black and brown cousins – there is a hierarchy and if we can’t be at the top, we can settle for second best, at least we’re not at the bottom. We let ourselves in, and we shut the rest out. We’re the good ones, we tell ourselves, we’re not like them, we’re civilised, we’re modern.
We settle for crumbs. We settle for Disney shows getting rebooted remade reinforcing white savourism because at least we get screen time than no representation at all. We settle for caricature and fetishisation. We celebrate Crazy Rich Asians even when it makes a mockery of us because we know the vast majority of Asians do not and never will live the lives depicted in the film. But wild, wealthy, non-whites, isn’t that the epitome of what being the model minority is? Let’s strive for that, shall we, and not rock the boat that we just came fresh off.
I hope we heal and have the agency to tell our stories on our own terms, even if some of us are complicit. Even if some of us are well-meaning but still hung up on our colonial mentality. Even if it’s so insidious it’s one step forward, two steps back. They say an arrow can only soar by pulling it back.
In the same way feminism is not just for those who believe in it, but for all – women or not, who are oppressed by the patriarchy, whether or not they are conscious of it – decolonisation and decoloniality are the same. There are many people of colour, indigenous peoples, immigrants and other minority and marginalised groups living with internalised oppression. Internalised sexism. Internalised homophobia. Internalised racism.
I end with a quote from poet and educator Pooja Nansi: "If we remain happy to have others to define us, the day will come when we turn around and cannot recognise ourselves.”
The 18th Block: Linkedin deserves the same scrutiny as other social platforms