De-Friended Moderates: The Collateral Damage of Cancel Culture

How many times this year have I seen a frustrated political post like this one (on Facebook)?

"If you believe X, just de-friend me now!"

Or this?

"I've de-friended people who continue to post about X, and will do so again"

 As someone who loves a good argument (I prefer to lose, as I learn more when I was incorrect to start with), I have enjoyed parrying with old friends over the past decade. My kids grew up as I did - as critical thinkers - thanks to the habit of always checking {"speed bumping"} their convictions. A lot of this goes back further than my high school debate team. My dad would explain what a "fallacy" was starting when I was 4 years old, and I'd hear him explain it again to my younger brother and then younger sister (so I got it 3 times).

Unfortunately, as Socrates learned, the majority of people prefer confirmation bias, and get irritated if they are on the losing side of an argument. This is playing out in social media, and I'm observing a consequence in "cancel culture".

Thesis: As people click to de-friend opposition opinion, they lose antibodies. Like a too-clean floor (no longer recommended for toddlers), they lack exposure to true disagreement. And consequently, they go after moderates.

{Good Essay by Elizabeth Bernstein in WSJ}

Combat and Competition and Hope in Age of Universal Electronic Social Media (Thesis)

[Due to a sacroiliac injury and siatic nerve pain it has been several weeks since I've had good REM sleep.  This has made it difficult for me to concentrate and finish longer blogs, and I've turned to shorter statements via Twitter and news content.  Got some different nerve meds and had a long vivid dream last night.  Woke up with these thoughts, which I want to record in over 280 characters]

Universal Electronic Social Media [notification beeps on Facebook comments, or prolonged internet time on Reddit, etc] has created an impression of increasing conflict.  A lot of pundits are concluding that the internet is becoming more hostile, people less reserved or nuanced in their commentary -- or withdrawing altogether, or reserving comment for tighter social circles with less conflict (but also less exposure to genuine dialectic disagreement).

Pick Your Story: Anyone can PhotoJournal in Africa!

Impressed by Washington Post, Guardian, Independent, National Geographic, and NGOs documenting "Ewaste Crime"?

Don't be!  It's easy!  You can call, on the phone, today, the poster "children" (in their 20s) who adorn the pages of guilt-staining photojournalism.

Some of the photos below are from expensive documentaries.  Others - of the same people - were taken with the dudes over lunch, or sent to me by WhatsApp or Facebook.   Everyone can be like Essick, Hugo, Belini, McElvaney and other photojournalists.  Fly to Accra airport, the "Agbogobloshie" dump is just 20 minutes away.  Spend the night at the Movenpick Hotel.

What are you waiting for?  GET YOUR PULITZER!

It's incredibly easy!  You can do it, too!  And  unlike people who live there, or try to engage in trade, you get paid and don't even need to learn any names.  Take the money and run.

Or if you like, stay and interview Mohamed Saidu Rachid (top) and Awal Basit (bottom).  Stay involved and stay engaged.

Cultural Gulfs In Developing Markets #1: BlueGrass, Soukous, & 9 Mile

The Urban v. Rural path of development is a common theme in this blog.   "Emerging markets" in Brazil, China, South Africa, India, Egypt and Indonesia have their own "story of stuff".    For 3B3K (three billion people earning $3000 dollars per year) internet = entertainment.   It's a whole mass media market creating a demand for "good enough" devices.  These markets now produce/consume more "stuff" than rich nations do, but they also reuse and repair devices, like rich nations did 25 years ago.

Afrikan Marilyn Manson Die Antwoods Volandi Visser

Huge factories devoted to refurbishment of good enough display devices served these markets for the past 20 years.  They deserved more credit than they got in the "E-Waste Toxic Dump" press.  Unfortunately, I'm the only person writing about it, and I've been labelled.  This "well is poisoned".

But what about the demand, the noise, the hunger for music and videos coming from inside those cities?
How are the new hyper-cities like Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou (a metropolis with a population as large a Japan) incorporating music and culture from the rural areas migrants came from, and how are those sounds changing when infused with world pop?  When we call six billion people "the third world", we put megacities into the same category as Somalian refugee camps.

We talking about a very cosmopolitan three billion people, my friends.

Knowing Our Context: Truth is Light, Faith is Gravity

Knowing what to say which will get applause from the peers immediately surrounding me... that's the difference between a politician and a good doctor.   There are more politicians than doctors on Facebook and Twitter.

As a young man I wanted to worship the truth.  "Truth is light, faith is gravity".  I cannot function denying either.  Between any dialectic of the two, truth usually wins, and I can usually trust my sight better than my balance.  But not always, information can mislead, like a beam of light that blinds you from a wrong angle.

Off to battle.  I chose environmentalism because it's the thing we are screwing up which is most likely to be blamed by generations unborn, and I have always been fascinated by philosophers and scholars and holy men speaking to me from a distant past.    Extinction may not turn out to be "forever", there may be a tiger and dinosaur heaven, I don't know everything.  But with the information in front of me I want to make a difference that someone someday would care about without ever knowing who I was.  

That's part of what's fascinating when I hear, second hand, what some people in the industry think motivates me.   People are pretty sure by now that it's not greed.  So perhaps ol' Ingenthron's out for glory, the ego-driven explanation explains blogs and pontificatoins nicely.

While I confess I am proud of the recycling work I've done, I know that it will one day be like a ten year gig by a famous boxer (Jack Johnson), a famous orator (Martin Luther King, Jr), a famous performer (W.C. Fields), or famous engineer (H. Rembert).

Oh, you don't know Rembert?  The cotton baler (pictured above) is pretty much the same thing that drives the pre-shredding recycling industry.  Paper gets baled, ABS plastic gets baled, wire gets baled, steel gets baled... the baling area's one of the busiest places at our plant.   I correctly predicted (approximately) the employment of the Recycling Industry in Massachusetts in 1992 by counting the horizontal balers and estimated number of cars in recycling parking lots.     You could have predicted the number of slaves in the South with a good handle on the number of Eli Whitney's cotton gin sales.

When you are really focused on truth, and willing to say unpopular things, that's a secret of learning.  It makes you smarter when you weed out the platitudes aimed at applause, the tweets to the converted are a waste of electrons.

It's a Wonderful X

This was originally just a reaction to a Facebook Meme about something something being bad.

The number of things people lift their little petty pricky fingers to protest (troll) online is pitiful.  It's so negative out there, that you'd think anything "free market" or "free trade" is presumptively evil.

Robin Ingenthron

Idea: It's a Wonderful X. Make the movie (or short slide show) about things we hate (e.g. Wal-Mart) and how life would be if they never existed. I don't "LOVE" WalMart, but I do realize it's the same as a massive Co-op for poor people, bringing prices down by bringing needed jobs to other poorer people. It probably gives more to the poor (through lower pricing and net jobs) than tax-rebates or Salvation Army. Anyway, the concept is that when we oppose or hate something the free market created, we should make a little It's A Wonderful Life movie to make sure that (e.g., never invading Iraq) the world would be better today, or not. I think there are real legitimate things to protest (loss of endangered species, loss of rain forests, etc.) which will NEVER survive the "Wonderful Life" Test. I'm not pure free market, but people who postulate that free-market=evil are alchemists.

This is actually a good enough "tweet" for a blog post.

My grandfather's name was Clarence, and my son's middle name is for the Grandfather, not for the Wonderful Life Angel.

Liberal and Conservative Conservation

I've got some swell new posts in draft form, just need to do the customary cutting back (trimming some to make new topics, or "part IIs").

As it's Sunday, I have time for Facebook, we have Vermont friends coming over for a barbecue, and I have family calls to make.  Made air reservations for a liberal friend's funeral in California, made a lunch date for a conservative friend in Dallas two days later.  I'm getting the Facebook "like if (I) love Jesus" from friends in the midwest, and "like if I like George Carlin" from the Northeast.

I'll be thinking about how important it has been to get the older gals in Mexico (like Ms. Vicki above) drives to demanufacture, because our strategy of being the end market for TVs is getting hard on their backs.   Everybody, liberal and conservative, is alarmed about exporting hard drives with "information" on them to places like this, where elderly unemployed Mexicans without college degrees take them apart slowly by hand, keeping things like hard drive magnets with rare earth metals.  Texas, Vermont, and California are united... Ms. Vicki must be stopped, either because I'm exploiting her, or she's incapable, or polluting, or stealing sensitive hard drive information, or stealing American jobs.

We don't want her jumping the fence to take apart drives in the USA, and we don't want to ship the drives to Mexico.  So we put them through machines, destroying the reuse which the Thailand flood hard-drive shortage makes valuable, and destroying the rare earth metals in the magnets, which cling to the steel.

"Smiling and waving and looking so fine, I don't think you knew you were in this song"....

Four Elephant Fixers Films: IFIXIT.org, WR3A

THE TWEET:  "4 films on E-Waste Recycling: IFIXIT, WR3A, Fedele, PBS. See all and you begin to see the Elephant in Africa's room"

Kyle Wiens group, IFIXIT.org, and his professional blogger (I'm green with envy) Elizabeth Chamberlin presented on this Fixers film at Ismael's Electronics Recycling conference in Vegas.   The documentary is being produced with filmmakers at The Atlantic.

WR3A had wanted to do something like this in 2007, when we had the grant from CEA which resulted in the 3 minute "Fair Trade Recycling" film (original version presented at CES Conference).  We had dozens of interviews filmed in different countries with hand-held flip cameras and amateur and below-amateur camera people.   Bad sound, no translation, poor lighting, rambling unedited footage can be seen at WR3A group, viddler.com.

My next goal is to do a one-day event in California, have the day's take divided by geeks (perhaps from IFIXIT or Tech Soup) into two equal piles.  Then we'll RFID tag or geo-tag the items and send one batch to a California, no-intact unit E-Steward.  The other will go to Retroworks de Mexico, the womens coop which was profiled by PBS in 2010, and which is the stepping stone for the Memorial University / USC / WR3A / Peru grant ($469K) to do in depth interviews, secondary research, and film of the repair and reuse market.  The idea is to do an actual mass balance, and compare the environmental results when a group of struggling poor people, with the right tools and training, competes against a California shredding machine.

I'm grateful to Basel Action Network for one thing.   I've got an immense passion for the value added by repair and reuse, the way poor people find money in the pockets of discarded clothing, the way they resew buttons on jeans.  I love the story (from an engineer at Umicore) of the teenage kid in Ghana who jailbreaked his IPhone when every Belgian tech had said it was impossible.   Because BAN.org made this trade between rich and poor "controversial", because they made it look horrific and toxic and exaggerated the relative risk of recycling compared to mining (the only other source of metals), now my passion is considered controversial enough to get university funding.

What if I loved something that everyone agreed was a no-brainer?  Would we ever have gotten funding?

Most of the world thinks repair and recycling is a no-brainer.  Thank goodness for the Orwellian, Joseph Conrad-ish portrayal of computer monitor refurbishing by our friends who invented the term "e-waste" to describe the purchase of less-than-flat display devices by Africans, Asians and Latinos.  I'm looking forward to seeing this Fixers Film in its entirety and comparing it to David Fedele's well meaning (but in my view, tunnel-visioned... simultaneously peeping and myopic) e-Wasteland.  That one is a very, very truthful account of a rather small percentage of the export business.  If you see it after watching Fixers, you'll be ready to see the 2009 Fair Trade Recycling Mexico PBS and Fair Trade Recycling videos to grasp the solution to the questions it poses.

Then you'll understand my rage at Basel Action Network, which has devoted all their energy to banning this solution, via unsuccessful rejected interpretations of Annex IX of the Basel Convention (which they blatantly lied about having been accepted when they are rejected by Basel, in writing) and with the promotion of USA legislation to ban Fair Trade Recycling.

Take time to enjoy the Fixers film first.   I will forward a FairTradeRecycling.org Factsheet on Mining and Repair Statistics if Elizabeth or Kyle is interested in any collective thought.  It's a three dimensional world, and if people are actually excited to visit Africa based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it doesn't make sense to be angry at the stereotypes it churns... so long as they actually DO finally visit and see the whole picture... trunk, tusks, blanket, and the wall.

Join the unedited discussions and see more videos and articles at Facebook's Fair Trade Recycling group - join today, it's free.

SSFF Joke

Did Facebook public offering hype set it up for a perceived fall?    SSFF?

(note:  This summer I intend to weed out and take off line the weakest blog posts going back to 2005... the ones that SSFF.)

SSFF is my inside baseball reference to a big announcement gone bust.  SSFF comes from a joke my parents found absolutely hysterical back in the 1970s. The only other source I found for the SSFF joke, online, was the transcript of a performance in North Carolina by a negro singer, born in 1908, who was telling the joke in 1981.

See wikipedia for attribution of Tony McCoy's fall

Two penny-pinching hillbilly brothers are looking at a bad year.  They were going to be eatin their seed corn.  They decide to pool their resources and use their trump card - inside knowledge on the fastest running horse in Kentucky.

They decided to pool what money they had and bet it on the local horse.  They were so excited that they got into a bit of a quarrel over who would go to the Derby and place the bet.   They couldn't afford to both make the journey, it would eat up the bet and reduce their winnings.  They flipped a coin and made a plan.

The winner would do whatever it took to go to the Derby as cheaply as possible.  He was to beg for food, hitchhike and walk, to save every dime they had to bet on this horse.

Does Spotify Turn Pandora into MySpace?

I have been an absolute lover and fan of Pandora Radio for years.  The music service is free, and you enter in an artist you like.   The artist may play, but as likely you will hear some other artist which people who liked the first artist are likely to also appreciate.  If you don't like a song, click thumbs down, and that gets factored into the future of your playlists on the station.

I love Neil Young, discover Greg Brown.  I find out that my dad's not just weird, that people who like Gordon Lightfoot also like Uncle John's Band by Grateful Dead (without liking other deadhead tunes quitesomuchthanks)... You can't choose what song to play next, but absent that choice it's like a radio station, background music.  I discovered some of my favorite songs during the past 5 years via Pandora.  Became a paid subscriber in January for my birthday present.

Now Spotify:  Similar to Pandora, but also like limewire or napster in it's display and order-by-artist-by-song selection, but legal and supported by ads.

(Note:  Recording Industry was a dumb idiot for not immediately embracing the technology and creating Columbia Record Club for big-value-teaser-downloads in the 1990s, the industry could have been Facebook now but chose to fight the last tape-recorder war over copyright.  ITunes finally kind of caught on but does kind of a lousy job in my opinion).

Love Spotify so far.  But would I have discovered MIA Paper Planes (a gem I discovered on Pandora) or Avalanches Frontier Psychiatrist (Boy Needs Therapy)?

(Note: savvy commenter already suggests grooveshark.com)