Here's the thing. A lot of important Guelph issues are really complex. And to understand them we need more than "sound bites" and knee-jerk ideology. The Guelph Back-Grounder is a place where people can read the background information that explains why things are the way they are, and, the complex issues that people have to negotiate if they want to make Guelph a better city. No anger, just the facts.
I had another festival of government paperwork recently with regard to personal matters and that ate up a lot of the intellectual energy I put into this blog. As a result, there isn't going to be a "deep dig" or even much of an op ed this week. So instead I'm going to give a short plug for a service I subscribe to, and, explain a new feature to this blog that I'm starting this weekend.
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The other day I was foolishly reading Facebook and found the following post.
I looked up the story, on the New York Post and the way it was covered was very carefully constructed to not imply that this allegation was actually true. The story was that Project Veritas reported this issue, not that it actually happened.
What I want to point out is that if you look at the Facebook screen shot I posted above, right under the woman's picture there is a little green shield icon with a check mark in it---next to the caption "NYPOST.COM". That's my NewsGuard ranking application that sits in my web browser and checks everything I read on line against a list of known news sources and identifies the ones that pass or fail a set of minimum standards.
Knowing that the original story came from Project Veritas, I then went to it's website to check what NewsGuard has to say about it. When I got there, I clicked on the NewsGuard icon on the upper right hand side of Fire Fox. Then a window popped up.
Here's a larger version of the the window that came out to describe Project Veritas.
And when I click on the "See the full Nutrition Label" link, I get several pages of very detailed information that the staff at NewsGuard have provided identifying the issues that they found with the site. These include things like who owns it, what it's sources of revenue are, it's credibility, what it's done in the past, and, a long list of links to news stories that talk about the site in detail.
Since I've signed up with the service, I've found it absolutely invaluable to cutting through the nonsense on social media. I simply look at the "NewsGuard" icon. If it's green, I'll look at the story. But if it's red, I tend to just ignore it. The service costs about three dollars a month, but I think that it is well worth the money spent.
I suspect that for most people slinging around these fake news stories, things like NewsGuard fail to butter their parsnips. But this does help me better evaluate how much these people are really interested in finding the truth---and how they are often so committed to the conspiracy mythos that they are just looking for excuses to believe. For someone who does a lot of research on line, it helps me speed up the process of evaluation---which is very useful.
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But this is also yet another cost for publishing the Back-Grounder. Three dollars a month might not sound like much, but I'm only grossing about $60/month. In addition, I'm soon going to max out on the "freebie" posting that I can do on Sound Cloud for audio recordings, which will then cost me $20/month. As you can see, I'm not really raking in the dough. So why not subscribe? It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.
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A while back I wrote an op ed titled What is the Point? that suggested, among other things, that people used to subscribe to newspapers for content that had nothing at all to do with news. In their greatest era---during the late 19th century---one of those features was syndicated fiction. If you were a student who wondered why writers like Dickens, Tolstoy, and, Dostoevsky wrote such long novels, it was because they published them first in the pages of newspapers---who paid by the word.
Last year a good friend strongly encouraged me to put some time into writing fiction. I took this advice to heart and have spent months writing a novella, which I will start publishing as a "weekend feature". If you are charitable, you could think of it as me following in the steps of Charles Dickens. If you aren't, think of it as me trying to emulate the old Doug Wright cartoons (featuring "Little Nipper") that I used to look at as a kid when my dad bought the Saturday Star.
Yup, 1960s newspaper humour in the Toronto Star. And, if I am being totally honest, we probably bought it for these cartoons more than the news and opinion. Used under the "Fair Dealing" copyright provision.
Either way, look for The Climate Trials on Sundays at this space.
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Furthermore, I say unto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
Hill mentioned Instagram poetry. That sounded worth checking out, so I found a couple articles on line that included lists of people the author liked, one in Huffpost and another in Bookriot. Here are examples from two people that I signed up to follow on Instagram. Jeremy's right, forcing yourself to think about short poems does do something to help calm my mind.
But having said that, you could read these Instagram poems as being part of an "arm's race" between different "social media influencers" who are trying to build a name for themselves in order to sell books. So that leads to my next question for Jeremy.
Hill mentioned the Gordon Hill Press, which is his latest endeavour. This naturally led to a question about how it came about and where it fits into his vision.
There are different types of publishing, so I think it's important for readers to understand that when Jeremy talks about "literary publishers" he's talking about a specific type of business---as opposed to several others. Definitions aren't totally universal, but from my research I came up with the following categories:
Trade
Academic
Self-Publishing
Literary
Trade
The important issue to understand is that only one of these categories fits completely into the capitalist framework: "trade". That is the type of publishing where a corporation buys a manuscript from an author, edits it, then publishes it either in book, Ebook, or, magazine. If it sells well, they make a profit. If it doesn't, they lose money. That's how the last few books I read---Fatal Voyage, Mindhunter, and, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children---were paid for. (At least originally. I bought these particular copies at the St. Vincent de Paul store on Elizabeth street.)
Academic
Academic publishing is somewhat different. It has suffered for years from predatory, monopolistic exploitation by a small number of for-profit publishers. This has caused real hardships for academic libraries. This following chart shows the way subscriptions have tremendously exceeded the inflation rate for years and years.
Increased costs of acquisitions (ie: "Annual Ongoing Resource Expenditures"). "CPI" means "Consumer Price Index (ie: rate of inflation). (Click on the graphic for a clearer copy.)
Naive readers might be excused for thinking that the move towards "paperless libraries" would generally cut the costs for reading academic articles, but they'd be mistaken. The big publishers have been attempting to create giant "bundles" of academic journal titles and force libraries to go "all or nothing" with them. Moreover, they expect them to sign licenses that force Universities to exclude anyone who isn't a member of the community from being able to log into the database. This means that whereas in the past ordinary folks (ie: without computer sign-in privileges) could just walk into a library and read the hard copy, now they have to pay huge fees.
Under the new business model of licensing access to journals online rather than distributing them in print, for-profit publishers often lock libraries into bundled subscriptions that wrap the majority of a publisher’s portfolio of journals – almost 3,000 in Elsevier’s case – into a single, multi-million dollar package. Rather than storing back issues on shelves, libraries can lose permanent access to journals when a contract expires. And members of the public can no longer read the library’s copy of a journal because the licenses are limited to members of the university. Now the public must buy online copies of academic articles for an average of US$35 to $40 a pop.
In response, academics have declared war on these for-profit publishers and created their own open source Web-based publishing system to allow free access to academic publications. This has been facilitated by the creation new technologies that automate and dramatically cut the costs of various stages of the publishing and distribution process. These include:
print-on-demand hard-copy publishing for low demand academic titles
robotic scanners to create digital versions of old public domain books
E-publishing
not-for-profit aggregators and search engine systems
a network of not-for-profit server farms to store digital texts
These systems have been paid for by a combination of government and charitable grants plus on-going institutional funding based on reciprocal agreements between academic institutions.
I don't want to go into too much detail on the subject (which is surprisingly large), but I think the situation can be summarized by saying that because of the excesses of monopoly exploitation, universities have decided to discard it and move towards a post-capitalist system based on the principles of the open source movement. This is less surprising as it sounds, because the free flow of information is one of the key principles of academic research. In a world where information is the new capital, scholars are all radical Marxists!
Self-Publishing
Self-publishing used to be confined to the "vanity presses", where people paid someone to knock off a few thousand copies of something so they could give them away and describe themselves as a "published author". Unfortunately, I still hear people who should know better who dismiss self-publishing as being ridiculous. But as a matter of fact, it is an already huge and very fast growing part of the market. There are a lot of people making real money self-publishing.
It's hard to find any detailed information on the actual numbers, because self-publishing is fragmented and many of the larger distributors don't collect or publish separate figures for it. In addition, there is a lot of cross-pollination between different booksellers. To cite a personal example, I publish my Ebooks through Smashwords, but that means that they get distributed through other websites and services, such as Apple books, Walmart (yikes!), Barnes and Noble, Scribd, and others---including companies with names I can't even pronounce in countries like India and Brazil.
The "big five" legacy publishers.
One thing that I could find a lot of information on is the percentage of royalties that authors get through self-publishing. The general consensus seems to be that if you go the regular route, the publisher will give you between 10% and 15%. In contrast, I get between 60% and 80% royalties on Ebooks because I self-publish on SmashWords. (The prices vary because when I sell a book through another seller---like Apple or Barnes and Noble---they pay less than directly through the SmashWords website, but it's still a whole lot more than through a traditional publisher. There is also the issue of selling through an online library service---like Scribd.)
With regard to paperbacks, I publish through an on-demand printing service, Lulu Books. They don't set a percentage for royalties, authors like me do. But they do charge 20% of that as their payment. For example, I charge $10.30 US (or $15 Canadian) for Walking the Talk, and they say that it costs $5.17 per book to print it. The difference is $5.17. Twenty percent of that is $1.03, which leaves me $4.14 per book, or, 40% royalties.
I'm never going to get rich off my writing, but this new self-publishing infrastructure allows me to get the books "out there", and they do generate a very modest income for me. What's really nice is that they allow me to do so while at the same time dramatically lowering the price to the consumer. A while back someone got a copy of my first book and contacted me to say that he liked it so much that he was buying a bunch of copies for a study group. He made a point of saying that he thought the price of $10.30 US was very inexpensive, and, compared to most of the books sold through traditional publishers, it really is.
Self-publishing is quickly becoming a large part of book sales. It's not easy to find any information about it, as things like best-seller lists and public data tend to be the property of the large publishing houses---and they have a vested interest in hiding the fact that their business model is in steep decline. This means that the latest info that I can find is around 2016, but the following graphs tell an interesting tale.
It appears that self-published Ebooks are "eating the lunch" of the major publishers. This shouldn't be surprising, as they generally cost a lot less. Image from the blog justpublishingadvice.com (JPA).
And here's the companion graph that explains why this is a good thing. By cutting out the publishing houses, authors end up making more money. Again from JPA.
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And, of course, here's my attempt to pay the bills through self-publishing. It's easy to support me through Patreon and Pay Pal. If you can afford it, you'll get a warm glow from doing so. And you will be helping create a growing, permanent collection of "Background Briefs" that will help people learn more about issues that affect people in Guelph. What could be more useful for the engaged citizenry?
This gets me back to Jeremy Luke Hill and his work. If you go to the Canada Council for the Arts website you will find a page for "Literary Publishing Projects". It defines what is or isn't available for a grant. It's pretty common sense. They don't want to channel money to people who are just seeking an "easy buck". And they also want to support the sort of literature that is going to have a hard time finding a mass market, but still holds artistic merit.
Part of the problem is how you define that slippery term "artistic merit". There's a whole division of philosophy called "epistemology" which deals with how we know what we think we know. And within that, there is a sub-category called "aesthetics" which deals with understanding what is or isn't of "artistic merit". Like most issues in philosophy, there can be a wide variance of opinion. And like all issues of a similarly nebulous type, it gets dealt with by the creation of a rough consensus among experts. (That's how science proceeds, for example.)
In the case of the Canada Council, this boils down to creating panels of people who are "experts" in the particular art that the applicant is pursuing, and who get to decide who does or doesn't get a grant. This really isn't that much different from what used to happen in the renaissance, only back then it was an individual, filthy-rich aristocrat who decided to toss some coin at an artist so he could create something amazing. The aristocrats were the government and the money they had was extracted from the peasants and burghers through taxes, so it was pretty much the same as what we have now.
But as Jeremy himself says, this is far from an ideal situation. As an outside observer, I'd suggest that a key part of the system is an attempt to mimic the example of the mainstream legacy publishers. The hope is that someone will "make it big"---like Margaret Atwood---after having their artistic "pump primed" through Canada Council grants. Personally, I think it would make a lot more sense to instead follow the examples of Academic and self-publishing. But to create something that sustains the artistic traditions that the Canada Council and people like Luke Hill currently do, I'd suggest that a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) makes a lot of sense.
The new technologies have dramatically reduced the non-human costs of publishing. That means that the only major cost now is the writer. If there was a basic social income administered through the same sort of mechanism as the Old Age Security (OAS) or the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) programs, artists would be able to keep a roof over their heads while building their skills. Hopefully, they could then self-publish their work and use that income to supplement and even replace the GAI. This would remove the need for peer-based panels to separate "deserving" from "non-deserving" artists and leave the income issue in the hands of readers.
I mentioned in the beginning of this conversation how much I missed the pub nights and coffee shop evenings that Jeremy organizes as part of his "Friends of Vocamus Press" gig. I first met the guy through the Tool Library where he offered to help me with self-publishing advice. He turned me onto Lulu books for the on-demand paperback and Smashwords for the Ebook. So he certainly proved the points he made in the above answer.
If you are interested in the Vocamus Writer's community, or, the Vocamus Press, I'd suggest you follow the hypertext links. If you read, consider buying a book. If you write, maybe get involved, if you have the bucks and want to support the arts, make a donation.
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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
This is the spacer I put in to deal with the Sound Cloud embedding problem.
For those readers who don't know, I spend decades of my life involved in politics in one form or another. Primarily, I filled the role of "crazy person with nutty ideas" who was trying to encourage people to see the world differently. To that end, I started the Green Party in Guelph and was a major instigator in reforming the constitutions of both the Green Party of Ontario and Canada. I ran repeatedly for office, and used the platform that this provided to talk to voters about the need to deal with climate change with a carbon tax, combat growing inequality with a Guaranteed Annual Income, and, the necessity of transitioning from an economy based on continued exponential growth to one that is in harmony with the limits that the environment places upon humanity.
I knew going into this that I would never have a hope in Hell of getting elected while advocating for these sorts of things, but that wasn't the point. The only real way to get into office is by pandering to people's prejudices, which means that "realistic" politicians never try to get voters to embrace anything new, or even tell them truths that they don't want to hear. Indeed, former Prime Minister Kim Campbell pretty much summed this up in her infamous quote that
Former Prime Minister Kim Campbell. Photo C/o Simon Fraser University
"An election is no time to discuss serious issues."
I wrote "infamous" because many naive people and some very cynical people were/acted outraged by it. But truth be told, I think that this is the opinion held by most "professional" politicians. The reason why is simple. A significant fraction---if not an outright majority---of the public will automatically oppose any proposal that they don't understand. And most of those folks won't bother to try to learn more about anything that they don't already "get".
That's why I think that Canadian society benefits from having "ginger parties"---like the Greens and NDP. They generally suggest changes that Canadians totally reject, but decades later those policies usually end up getting accepted by the majority of voters. And years after that majority support crystalizes---generally in a crisis like the current one---one of the mainstream parties will grudgingly pass legislation that is similar to that original suggestion. At this point the new way of doing things usually becomes very popular and people wonder why we took so long to accept it.
(If anyone questions the above statement, consider the following examples: socialized medicine, gay rights, and, cannabis legalization. All were fought tooth and nail for very, very long times. But when they were passed and the public got used to them, almost everyone began asking themselves what all the fuss had been about.)
This gets me to the point of this Op Ed. Why is it that so many people hate change? This being the age of "Professor Google", I simply asked it that very question. The only results I got were from business consultants who were talking about people's resistance to change at the workplace. This isn't exactly the same thing as people being against legalizing cannabis or allowing an apartment building in their neighbourhood, but I do think that the situations are similar enough that we can gain some insights from the research.
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Yet one more thing that has changed is the way we get our news. I know people are resisting it, but we do need to see information as just one more thing that we need to pay for. If you can afford it, then why not subscribe? It's easy to do through Pay Pal or Patreon, and you'll get a warm glow knowing that you helped keep indie news going so everyone with access to the Web can be better informed.
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From the Harvard Business Review I found Rosabeth Moss Kanter's Ten Reasons People Resist Change. From it, I got eight items that I think map onto the political reality. The first four are:
Loss of control
Excess uncertainty
Surprise, surprise!
Everything seems different
I can remember reading somewhere that people who are food insecure in poor countries are like folks who are standing in water up to their chins or nose. This means that even the slightest disturbance to the status quo can be deadly. Even in a place as prosperous as Guelph, a lot of people in feel like they are in the same state.
They may be locked into a mortgage that takes almost every penny they have. They might have big bills that they ran up either through foolish spending or because of a totally unexpected financial catastrophe---like an illness that forced them to quit their job. Some people are financially secure, but for various reasons are stressed to the absolute breaking point and simply cannot mentally afford anything much more than the slightest change in the way they live their lives. For all of these people any change in the way things are is profoundly difficult to deal with. It doesn't really matter if the change isn't a big deal, as just fretting about what it might be like is already too much for someone who is over-burdened by the life they are living.
More work
Ripple effects
Another part of this is that changes don't affect everyone equally. Beyond anxiety about whether or not something will further burden a person who is already at the end of their tether, there is the point that changes usually affect different people in different ways. To cite one simple example, I can remember when paper recycling was introduced where I used to work. The housekeeping staff refused to have anything to do with it because their job description only mentioned "garbage", not "recycling". As a result, my department---who's primary job responsibility was supposed to be security---ended up having to roll very heavy (several hundred pounds) large wheelie bins off a loading dock to pavement level once a week so the recycling truck could pick up the fine paper. People sometimes have a real reason to be afraid that a particular change in the way things are done will result in a significant amount of new work being dumped on their particular plate with no added compensation.
Past resentments
"You never get a second chance to make a first impression." "Once bitten, twice shy." "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." These are popular sayings for a reason. Lots of folks have had experiences in their past that has soured them on government innovations. I can reel three big ones that affected me just off the top of my head:
the welfare "reform" that resulted in the downtown being crowed with beggars--almost overnight
the "relaxing" of closing hour rules for bars that turned the downtown into a combat zone on weekends
the "easing" of rules governing taxi companies that turned my front yard into a zoo between 2:00 and 4:00 am until the dispatch office moved somewhere else
Government officials carry the history of their past decisions like rotting albatrosses around their necks. And they often don't even realize how much misery their decisions have caused some people. This means that they can often be genuinely surprised when an individual or small group expresses how angry they are with them for how their "great new idea" has affected their lives. Unfortunately---being real human beings who don't like negativity directed against them any more than anyone else---their response is often to just "tune out" this negative feedback as "only coming from a small number of flakes".
Sometimes the threat is real
Here's the rub. Sometimes a "positive change" is actually a bad thing and sometimes people can actually predict how it's going to be a bad thing. I remember the "free trade election" where the Liberals and Conservatives were arguing about whether or not a free trade deal with the USA would be a good idea. At the time---like a lot of other people---I believed that the sky was falling when Brian Mulroney won a majority and started the job of negotiating NAFTA. I now believe that free trade is generally a good idea. But that doesn't mean that I was "totally out to lunch" in my initial opposition.
I've read that many economists arguing for free trade warned that it would be necessary for governments to enhance social programs to help the people who were personally affected by the freeing up of the market under neo-liberalism. Unfortunately, almost no government actually did this, which is why so many programs---like unemployment insurance---have "withered on the vine". This meant that far too much of the wealth that came from free trade agreements ended up in the hands of billionaires---some of whom seem to be approaching the status of characters from comic books. (Elon Musk is often called "the real Tony Stark". Should we start calling Jeff Bezos "the real Lexx Luthor"?)
Jeff Bezos, dept of defense photo---public domain.
Lexx Luthor, DC comics. Used under "fair dealing".
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The first stage of fixing a problem is admitting that it actually exists. Unfortunately, I don't think that a lot of bureaucrats and politicians want to admit that there are any problems with how they interact with the public. That's because the only real way to get the public "on board" with change is by investing a LOT OF TIME into working with them. And both bureaucrats and politicians tend to be tremendously strapped for it.
In the case of bureaucrats, this is the result of both cost-cutting in the public service and the proliferation of regulations aimed at "preventing fraud" or "protecting the public". You and I experience this as forms that would require a Philadelphia lawyer to fill out, hours-long wait times on service calls, and, a huge emphasis on interacting through computer instead of face-to-face meetings.
For politicians, their time gets eaten up by ridiculous Parliamentary processes that require them to be able to drop what they are doing and run to the Commons so they can make a snap vote. This is a result of hyper-partisanship which has sabotaged the conventions that used to govern how parties work together.
Local representatives' time is also eaten up by the decline in the civil service. Increasingly, constituency staff spend their time working as "Ombudsmen" who have to cut through red tape for constituents who's lives are suffering because the understaffed and over-burdened bureaucrats simply can't deal with the peculiarities of their personal situation. In addition, because of the growth of hyper-partisanship, members of Parliament increasingly find themselves having to spend more and more time campaigning and fundraising, which leaves less time for other things.
Both of these states of affairs came about because of changes that specifically weren't put in front of ordinary citizens to comment on. The civil service can have their budgets cut by administrative fiat and the money saved gets spent on tax cuts. Similarly, elected back bench MPs and MPPs have had their authority reduced over and over again as the power of party leaders and their appointed staff have expanded to take over Parliament. Changes that make filling out forms more difficult come under a wide variety of headings and include things like "the war on terror", "enhanced privacy rules", and so-on. Again, many of these come from administrative fiat---with a few more imposed by the courts.
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Ever heard of the term "feedback loop"? One example is that loud squeal you hear when someone puts a microphone in front of it's amplified speaker.
That noise is the result of the microphone picking up a sound coming from the speaker, which is then amplified, played back through the speaker, which is then picked up again, amplified, and, then played back to the mike, and so-on until someone stops the cycle.
This is a very well understood phenomenon in science. It's called "positive feedback". People have learned to recognize in a lot of different processes. For example, it also is involved in cattle stampedes. One cow running can raise concerns with other cows, who then start running. At that point more cows see others running, which gets them concerned so they start running. Before you know it, the whole herd is running and the cowboys are riding fast trying to head them off before they go over the cliff.
Public Domain image c/o Wikimedia Commons. Original drawing by Trevithj.
It seems to me that the people's fear of change is also a feedback loop. Community leaders propose some change and a small number of people come to a public consultation meeting to voice their concerns about it. Overworked bureaucrats go through the motions of listening to them, but eventually get sick of hearing the same complaints from the "usual suspects", so they stop listening. Increasingly things become more and more an exercise in "box ticking". This makes the "usual suspects" more upset, so they stop listening to the people proposing changes. That just reinforces the idea that these people are just flakes and shouldn't be listened to.
As a result of this diminished consultation, more projects get through the "pipeline" that really should have been modified before being implemented. This creates more scandals and more people angry because of past resentment. This creates even more opposition, which in turn encourages more harried officials who just "tune out" the citizenry. This creates more bad projects----and so the cycle of feedback continues.
I think that I can increasingly hear the "loud squeal" of a feedback loop wailing through our government processes. I think that it has a lot to do with the policy logjams that have developed over things like the Climate Emergency, the cost of housing, and, the opioid overdose problem.
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This feedback loop gets disrupted during periods of crisis---like wars, depressions, and, pandemics. I'm only speculating, but it seems to me that if people have really serious problems in their lives they tend to be less willing to expend energy complaining about hypotheticals. Moreover, bureaucrats and politicians who are dealing with objective crises are rewarded much more for innovating and punished much less for failed experiments than they would be during normal times. I suspect that that's why sitting Liberal MPs in Ottawa have recently identified creating a Guaranteed Annual Income system as their most important priority.
My hope is that this means that this time next year we will have replaced our hodgepodge of failing social safety net programs with something much better, far less difficult to access, and, which will be transformative in much the same way that single-payer medical insurance was back in our grandparent's time. And I also hope that two years from now most people will love it just as much and are similarly wondering what all the fuss was about.
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Moreover, I say unto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
One of the things I miss most during this pandemic are the twice-monthly writer's social gatherings organized by the "Friends of the Vocamus Press". When I started going to them I found that I was having the sort of bright, intellectual conversations that I remember from my university days and never seem to be able to have anywhere else in life.
To that end, I thought readers might be interested in hearing a conversation with the fellow behind them---Jeremy Luke Hill.
I mentioned Hill's blog post but mangled the title. It wasn't "Social Media is the Opiate of the People", but rather Poetry as Opiate---but I do think that I got the general thrust of the essay right. Here's the cover of his book, Trumped, using the "found poetry" of the Trump administration.
For those readers who've never heard of Ivan Illich, or his book Deschooling Society, he was a Catholic priest and academic who had strong reservations about the social implications of education as it is currently used in most societies. If memory serves, the book argues that education is usually just as much about reinforcing class divisions and discouraging non-educated people from learning as it is about teaching. I suppose you could say he was an advocate of "life long" and "self-directed" learning. He didn't live long enough to see it, but he'd probably be a fan of the "Maker movement" that involves hordes of people teaching skills on-line through You Tube videos.
In contrast, I don't know what he'd make of the proliferation of false information being strewn around the Web by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. He was quite skeptical about mainstream medicine, but he wasn't a fool---so he might have changed some of his ideas if he'd seen the impact of self-taught medical info on society during a pandemic.
Ivan Illich. I got this image from the LA Progressive, where I didn't see any provenance for the photo. I'm using it under the "Fair Dealing" provision simply because I couldn't find any public domain images.
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The economist that Jeremy is referring to is William A. Darity Jr who has done some very interesting work on the role of inter-generational wealth in America---especially with regard to people of colour. Probably one of the more startling results of his research is the fact that while education is related to income, it doesn't correlate with wealth.
William A. Darity. Image from the Duke University, Sanford School of Public Police, profile page.
This might seem odd, but increases in income from education can---as Jeremy says---be offset by the cost of paying off student loans for a significant fraction of your working life. If someone has their education paid for by their parents or some other mechanism (such as the tuition waiver that Hill refers to in the conversation), then that becomes a source of significant inter-generation wealth transfer. (It's important to remember that tuition is significantly more expensive in the USA---which is where Darity is doing his work. But I suspect quite a few university graduates in Canada are also stuck paying off students loans for many years too.)
The problem with inter-generational wealth is that "it takes money to make money", and many white American's parents and grand parents benefited mightily from government programs that no longer exist---such as the "GI Bill" and government subsidized university tuition---and the historically unparalleled prosperity of the post-war boom. Unfortunately, because of Jim Crow laws and practices, people of colour were rarely able to take advantage of these opportunities. That means that there was no general accumulation of wealth for black parents during these decades which could then be used to help out their children and grand children.
Infographic from The Centre for Global Policy Solutions. This is a "think tank" that provides resources for organizations trying to spread the word about issues of public interest.
Here's the You Tube video that Jeremy was referring to. It's a bit long, but well worth the time. Darity is a good speaker and unlike many economists who suffer from "math envy" and who just play around with theoretical models based on dubious assumptions, he actually does primary research. He only mentions in passing the suggestion he's come up with to deal with the racial wealth gap---baby bonds---but it is also worth looking into.
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What exactly am I trying to do with the "Guelph-Back-Grounder"? Primarily, it's a reaction to the shallow, emotionally-driven news stories that used to infuriate me when reading the mainstream media. What I'm trying to do is create news that is designed to educate instead of entertain. I think that it's working because when I look at the statistics, I see that even stories that I published years ago are still being read.
I've learned that "news as entertainment" is a thing because traditional media is first and foremost an advertising business. And advertising isn't about education at all---it's about driving people's emotions. This means that the "Back-Grounder" isn't a business in anything like a traditional sense. Instead, it's a public service. And like any other public service, it cannot support itself through sales. Instead, it has to be supported by donations.
That's why I ask for people who can afford it to subscribe through Pay Pal or Patreon, you aren't paying for traditional news. Instead, you're supporting a source of information that will help people find out why the world we inhabit is acting the way it is. Personally, I think that this is tremendously important. If you do too, then consider signing up for a monthly subscription.
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Publishers are suffering financially, just like journalists and musicians, so I asked Hill what he thought about the Liberal plan to channel tax money towards the "legacy media".
Jeremy talks about why support for makers shouldn't be all about trying to hold back the transition to a new form of distribution. Instead, it must accept that things are changing and try to manage that change in ways that benefit society.
Recently there have been moves by several countries to force social media to start paying news media for the stories that they publish on their platforms:
Australia has legislation in front of Parliament to force both Google and Facebook to pay publishers for content that gets published on their media. In retaliation, Facebook has threatened to simply stop individuals from sharing news in Australia on either Facebook or Instagram
The French National Assembly recently passed legislation that had been already OK'd by the European Parliament that allows governments to ask social media businesses to collect money "by the click" to be pay the original publishers of the content. (Google announced shortly afterwards that rather than collect these funds, it will change the way it lists content in it's search feeds in order to avoid the intent of the legislation.)
The Liberals under Justin Trudeau appear ready to levy a 3% tax against the tech giants (ie: Facebook and Google) for revenue raised through advertisement and digital information sales. In contrast to Australia and France's attempt at enforcing copyright rules, both Facebook and Google have announced that they will comply with this legislation when it is passed. This is different legislation than that passed by France or considered by Australia, but there is no reason why Ottawa couldn't redirect the revenue raised towards publishers who find their content used by social media.
Heritage minister Steven Guilbeault is ready to tax social media companies. Official photo from government website.
I may have misunderstood the impact of the legislation coming out of Australia and France, but it's hard to understand how one could use copyright legislation to deal with social media and content creators.
The value that Google and Facebook bring to the table is their artificial intelligence that allows people to search for information either through typing in a word search or by having their previous selections create a "profile" that anticipates your interests.
This is a tremendously useful feature (at least in theory) because it puts the entire world of information at your finger tips. The only way that the giant companies can pay for creating this and other features (think about the way Google translate can step in and translate---for example---French legislation into English just by clicking a box) is through ad revenue.
The legacy media is totally different. They have human gatekeepers who control what content readers see and charge admission for anyone who wants to see what they have in their "walled garden". For example, I have a paid subscription to the Toronto Star. Everything I read from it has been selected by editorial staff. This does have the benefit of keeping out fake news, but it also dramatically limits what I see. If the editorial board decides that its goal is to push a specific political party (like the Toronto Sun did in the last provincial election), then that's all I'm going to get. Moreover, if I don't have a paid subscription, odds are that if I search out an article that I want to see and I haven't got a subscription, I'm not going to see it. No one has enough money to subscribe to everything, and it can be very frustrating to see something that looks like exactly what you want---but you can't read it because it's behind a pay wall. (The other day I was looking for an academic paper and looked at the cost of purchasing it. It was listed at over $300---for one academic paper!)
The Google search engine and social media AI are crucially important to "small fry" like the Guelph-Back-Grounder in that they allow us to publish and market our work without having to first build a huge "brand" that will allow us to create our own "walled garden". This is exactly the point that Jeremy Luke Hill is making about how government policies need to be crafted that serve public interests instead of just propping up legacy media.
Having said that, however, there does seem to be some need to end the "Wild West" aspect of the Internet. There's a huge amount of content theft going on. For example, sometimes I "Google" my name just to find out what's going on. Among other surprising things, I sometimes find my books for sale on websites that I have never heard of, and who I know will never pay me royalties. I also am astounded how many on-line "journals" I see that are people with computers and a domain who just repackage stories they've lifted from other news sites so they can sell advertising around them. Obviously, there needs to be some way to cut down on this sort of business activity. I just hope that the governments don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
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Hill also expands on the discussion to talk specifically about government support of publishers like him. He admits that he'll take whatever money there is up for grabs, but in the long run thinks that there has to be a better way of supporting the arts than through government hand outs.
I think that this is a logical place to stop for now. I've got more interesting stuff "in the can" to put up at a later date, but I think that this post is already long enough.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
In my last post I was heavily into speculation about the motivations behind the people engaged in the whole Face Book "whackadoodle" world---primarily with a focus on the local Yellow Vest page. In this post I hope I'll be on somewhat firmer ground because of the research I've been doing.
The first thing that struck me when I looked at the Yellow Vest page was the number of people on the local page. According to the front page, it has 507 members---which seems like a lot. Funny thing, however, is that when I did a check of the Administrators and Moderators, I found that not a single one identified themselves as someone who lives in Guelph. This got me thinking about exactly how many ordinary members live here, so I started working through the list of members to see if I could identify their place of residence.
This isn't an easy thing to do, as a lot of them haven't filled out much info about themselves that is available to the "non-friend" viewer. What I did was separate the members into three columns. The first was those that didn't say where they lived, or, who seemed to be obviously lying (for example, one fellow with a very English name said that he lived in St. Petersburg Russia and was born in Mongolia.) I was quite strict about this as a great many of them said they went to school in another province or even country, and, most of their friends were in another province or country too---yet I still put them in the "don't know" column.
I did check the names of people through other social media systems such as "Linked In". Once in a while I'd find the same name at the same place of business---sometimes even with a photo of the obviously same person. If a location was mentioned in this other account, I'd use that address to assign them a place of residence.
Doing this methodology I worked through 72 names (ie: I went until I found someone who said she lived in Guelph) and came up with the following:
40 members who successfully hid where they lived
31 members who admitted that they live outside of Guelph or I found evidence that they did
1 person who said that they live in Guelph
I decided that it would be a waste of time to do this for the entire 507 members, so I'll extrapolate from the sample to suggest that this might mean that as as little as 1.4% of the group actually live in Guelph, or, 7 actual people.
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Of course, this raises the obvious question "Why would someone go to the trouble of organizing all this nonsense on Face Book---even in towns where they don't actually live?" I did some research and found out some interesting things.
First off, you can actually make money off Face Book groups. There are several ways of doing this, but mostly it comes down to advertising, asking for donations, or, selling people's information.
sell adverts on the top header of the page
make the group "closed" and charge a fee to join
ask for donations
sell a product
direct viewers to a web page with a form to fill out and then sell the data
sell adverts that you then "pin" towards the top of the page for a given period of time
direct viewers to a web page that then tries to sell you something or asks for a donation
Here's an example of a local Face Book page that sells adverts in it's header.
Big Face Book pages can be worth a fair amount of money. I asked on line and one fellow said that he knew a person who paid $10,000 for a site devoted to stupid jokes and that she was able to make a significant regular income off it through selling advertising. I don't think that the Yellow Vests are in that ball park, but I do think that there is something of a pay off for some of them.
I'm not saying that the actual administrators of this group are trying to make money. I have no doubt at all that these folks actually believe in what they are doing. What I'm referring to are the people who generate the content that keeps getting promoted through the Face Book. Let me illustrate with a couple examples.
If you've been following this issue you might know that Alex Jones and InfoWars has been bounced off You Tube. What you might not know is that his program never left the Web. That's because it now gets posted on "banned.video" and "BitChute". These are two streaming video services that don't have anywhere the popularity of You Tube. So no casual viewer is going to get sent to them by an AI anymore, right? Yes and no. Because Face Book hasn't banned links to these streaming services, this means that the Face Book AI is now directing people to pages (like Guelph Yellow Vests), which are in turn directing people to banned.video and BitChute. And when people get to these streaming services, you can see that they are monetized. Again, it's true that Pay Pal has banned several of these groups off their service, but there are plenty of other ways that people can easily send money to these businesses---who are quite happy to create the media content that people can then share on Face Book groups like the Yellow Vests.
(To be totally up front, I should point out that I monetize my blog using other people's groups whenever I announce that I've published another story. I build my readership, increase my Face Book followers, and, eventually pick up the odd subscriber this way.)
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It's a lot of work putting out these articles. If you like them, why not consider subscribing through Patreon or Pay Pal? It will give you a warm, fuzzy feeling.
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Why should anyone be upset about this? After all, we live in a country with free speech, don't we? If this was just a question of speech, there would be no real problem. The problem is the behaviour of the people who take this speech to heart and then act on it. For both better and worse, we happen to live in a modern, complex society with a lot of technology that amplifies an individual's ability to do harm. Consider the examples of the modern semi-auto rifle and the face mask.
Kyle Rittenhouse. Image original provenance unknown. Taken from The Mercury News, used under Fair Dealing provision.
The above is a picture of a 17 year old boy who killed two people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha Wisconsin. He doesn't look terribly fit and I doubt if he has had much experience fighting. If it was just a question of fisticuffs, he probably wouldn't be much of a threat to anyone but himself. But the gun in his hands makes that irrelevant. With it (and a modicum of training), he becomes a bad ass killing machine---as long as no one else has a similar weapon.
Unfortunately, because of ideology it is now legal for children like Rittenhouse to walk down the street of a protest in Wisconsin with rifle slung over his shoulder. (Fortunately, this would still catch the eye of the police in Guelph and result in it being taken away ASAP.) Unfortunately, because of technology certain words and ideas have been spread over social media that encouraged him to be prepared to use violence against strangers. Primarily, I'm talking about the meme that humanity can be split into three distinct fractions: sheep, wolves, and, sheep dogs.
To a certain extent, I tend to agree with this sentiment. There are a lot of people who just live personal lives and don't really put much thought into the problems that people create for others. There are also people who have zero concern for the well-being of others and want to take whatever they want from the first group. And, the job of police officers and the military---and maybe even "woke" citizens---is to protect the former from the latter. But there are several subtleties to the situation that need to be understood and I suspect that the people who promote this meme rarely do.
First off, we need to understand exactly what people are talking about when they talk about the violence that "wolves" do to "sheep". If someone hits you over the head with a lead pipe and takes your wallet, well that's obvious. What if they wear a suit and tie, and, steal the money from your bank account? What if they sell you some shoddy merchandise? Or pollute your drinking water? These last few examples can harm a lot more people than the mugger. But should "vigilant armed citizens" be protecting the citizenry from them?
Secondly, I think it's important to understand just how violent society really is. I've had lots and lots of arguments with people over this, but my understanding is that if you actually look at the statistics (instead of listening to commentators harping on about anecdotal evidence) society has become less and less violent throughout human history. This includes my lifetime. Take a look at the following graphs from the Pew research centre that cover the last 25 years.
Click on the image for a clearer picture. Used under the "Fair Dealing" provision.
This reduction in both violence and property crime would suggest to me that if there ever really was a reason for armed vigilantes, it no longer exists. But, I would argue, the facts aren't really what's important here. Instead, I'd say that for one reason or another some people are promoting the idea that America needs armed citizens to stand on guard and keep the antifa hordes at bay. Moreover, I think that while the vast majority of the population can tell that this is total nonsense, there is a small percentage of the population who are so naive that they believe it. And when they act on that belief they become extremely dangerous.
Rittenhouse clearly wanted to be a police officer. So having been taught that he was a "sheep dog"---he naturally took his rifle and headed off to protect property from the Black Lives Matter "wolves". He was probably encouraged to do this because of stories on the Web that said that hordes of antifa "terrorists" were being bused into various protests in order to create mayhem. The technology embodied in the rifle and the rules that govern their use in modern day America mean that "sticks and stones may break our bones---but words can get us shot!" This dramatically complicates the situation regarding free speech on the Web, no matter what absolutists might say.
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Similarly, the extreme mobility (ie: jets, trains, buses, cars) that we now take for granted as part of life mean that epidemics can spread really fast. This means that when a dangerous one comes along---like COVID-19---we need to all follow the advice of the health authorities. And it also means that it only takes a small fraction of the public acting foolishly to undo the precautions of the vast majority. And that will kill people just as surely as pumping slugs into them with an AR-15.
The important idea I'm trying to point out in this blog post is that what is happening isn't just a question of free speech, but one of marketing violence. And in this day-and-age we need to ask ourselves whether society has a right to limit the ability of citizens and businesses to market violence. For my part, I think it does.
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A group with the name "Avaaz" recently published a detailed report about the role of Face Book in promoting disinformation about COVID-19 titled Facebook's Algorithm: A Major Threat to Public Healthand it makes for fascinating reading.
This study just looked at the role of Facebook in spreading false narratives about COVID-19. One of the key roles that it plays as a way of directing people towards websites that then went on to propagandize people into disregarding directives by official health agencies. Here's a list of the top ten, who were responsible for 1.5 billion views last year.
It's important to understand the impact of these sorts of websites on public discourse. According to the Avaaz study,
We then compared this with the views generated on Facebook for the websites of 10 leading health institutes in the UK, the United States, France, Italy, and Germany, as well as with the WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), over the same period. We found that on Facebook, the content from the top 10 websites spreading health misinformation generated almost four times as many views as equivalent content from the top 10 websites of leading health institutions.
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At this point, it's interesting to ask the two questions "who is it that's spreading this misinformation?" and "why are they doing it?" Again, the Avaaz report attempts to answer.
The first answer to "who" is to ask if there is any obvious political orientation.
The first thing to understand is that the majority of sites have no discernible political message at all (61%). So it's important to understand that most of this seems to be being posted for some other reason. But at the same time, it's important to realize that a sizable fraction is being posted by people who do seem to have a right-wing axe to grind (35.4%). That's still quite significant. Finally, it's important to "put to rest" the lazy idea that "they all do it". That's because only a tiny minority of these sites appear to have some sort of left wing agenda (3.6%).
I've gone through and glanced at the top ten COVID-19 disinformation sites that the Avaaz report identifies, and it's not immediately clear where all of them get their money. Many of them do have products for sale and ways that you can donate money to them. I didn't see these things on some other sites, but there were calls to "sign up for a newsletter" on some of these. It's important to realize that these are "entry portals", though, and their job isn't to immediately get money into the hands of the people running them so much as to let people get "engaged" with the site on an on-going basis so they can make a financial pitch at some future time.
Reading through the Avaaz report, however, it appears that most of these sites are designed to raise money more than anything else. I suspect that at least one person is making some money off all of them. But I don't think that they are anywhere near as lucrative as many other businesses---I don't think that they are being run by James Bond style super-villains.
Moreover, I think it's just an accident of ideology that so many of them espouse right-wing politics. Right wing types just tend to be paradoxically more skeptical about experts and more gullible towards snake oil salesmen. Every business person knows that the "customer is always right". If the majority of the people who want to buy what you have to sell believe in a vast left wing conspiracy, then you will start acting like you believe it too. That's just good sales practice.
The problem is, however, that just like it doesn't take a lot of losers like Kyle Rittenhouse to create a violent mess on our streets, it doesn't take a lot of anti-maskers to spread a pandemic. It raises the question, therefore, about whether our society believes in a radical version of freedom of speech so much that it wants to continue to allow a small number of con artists to keep undermining the public education campaigns of our health authorities. Is the ill-gotten livelihood of a dozen or so sleazebags more important than the lives of all the people their misinformation campaign kills?
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I recently received the following message on my personal Face Book feed:
Effective October 1, 2020, section 3.2 of our Terms of Service will be updated to include: “We also can remove or restrict access to your content, services or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Facebook".
I don't really know, but I hope that it means that the company is stepping back from the sort of freedom of speech absolutism that Mark Zuckerberg (the CEO) was known for in the past.
I've had a lot of arguments over the years about free speech. There are a lot of different elements at play here, but with regard to what I've been discussing here I want readers to walk away with the following points:
if Face Book decides to turn off the taps of these fountains of disinformation we need to remember that what's happening isn't about individuals having the freedom to speak, but rather the freedom of a company to not publish stuff that they don't agree with
this issue cannot be solved through the "back and forth" of honest debate. That's because this isn't about what the majority of people think. Instead the problem is that a very small minority of people who believe the nonsense can create havoc for the majority
the media have always had 'gate keepers' who exert editorial control over the content of what they publish. People used to send in letters to the editor of newspapers. They had to be signed by the authors, who included their phone numbers, and, the papers called those numbers to ensure that what was being said actually came from the individual identified. If the editor thought that the letter contained lies or libel (or were just not worth reading) they didn't get published.
We've been living through a short period of time where the technology got ahead of the regulations. And it is also a time when young people who are good at computer coding---but lack any real understanding of the complexities of the social issues they are dealing with---are making all the decisions. The time of "trial and error" is coming to an end, and I hope that the tech sector is realizing that the sort of easy libertarian solutions suggested in university coffee shops often don't work in the real world.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
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