Posts by Kumara Republic
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When did the typewriters switch to computers? Given how expensive computers would have been in those days, the switch would probably have come quite late in the game.
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Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is increasingly looking like the 21st century's Alfred P Sloan. Compare & contrast his bending over backwards for culture war profiteer Trumpnik Candace Owens.
HuffPost: Twitter’s Jack Dorsey Told Ilhan Omar He Won’t Take Down Trump’s Tweet Targeting Her
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Hard News: Digital persuasion and the…, in reply to steven crawford,
I know, and it’s a depressing state of affairs. It’s similar to how shopping malls privatised public meeting places and displaced the town squares. once upon a time, people would have looked at Public Address system to see what you had written here. I did. Accurately, I still do:-)
Now, it seems, the shopping mall has peaked, if it's not in decline.
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Topham and Guerin, both young men making their way in the booming industry of digital persuasion, may not feel that they’re doing anything wrong here; that it’s all in the game, that working on contract for Darth Vader is just a hell of a career opportunity. But the rest of us might feel that the material involvement of politically-connected New Zealanders in such a deceptive and deeply cynical covert politics project brings things a little too close for comfort.
War profiteers don’t always deal in bombs and bullets. If we’re going to keep up with the times, disinformation and hacking count as methods of warfare these days.
It seems worth noting that earlier this year, Facebook deliberately broke a ProPublica tool that let everyone see how ads were being targeted. The Guardian’s appeal for its own readers to help its journalists understand what’s actually going on by screenshotting any dodgy ads they may come across seems an inadequate form of oversight, but it’s all we’ve got.
I sometimes wonder if Mark Zuckerburg is a useful idiot for his financial backer Peter Thiel. The former doesn’t give a Zuck about weaponised info at best, the latter openly revels in it.
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to steven crawford,
Some remedy ideas before going down the regulation of the Internet roadway: Education, thoughtful well designed education for children to prepare them to understand the digital environment. And especially that the big social media platforms are not all the internet is. There is quite a bit of education policy work going on in Wellington over the next year or two. I hope this gets factored in. I hope the next generation become rebuilders of the Internet, not just consumers of its commercial products.
I think also that anti-trust law needs revisiting to break up too-big-to-fail monopolies & cartels. Facebook is as much a monopoly as NewsCorp. And lest we forget that cartels like IG Farben played a big part in the militarisation of the Third Reich.
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Hard News: These things we must now change, in reply to andin,
Im thinking back wondering when the race to the bottom kicked off. Sometime round the early to mid 80's I guessing. There are just some people in the media who need to be put out of a job Garner, Plunket and Hosking are at the top of the list AFAIC. Tho' they are only the public face and they seem to have friends in high places. TVNZ and RNZ boards are littered with people who adhere to rotten ideologies and questionable ethics from what I hear. Is it too late to stop the rot? And if they were put out and left to their own devices would they just fester and erupt somewhere else?
The deregulation of radio & TV was formally done at the end of the 1980s, when TVNZ was converted to an SOE. Several years later, RNZ's commercial stations (most notably the ZB Network) were sold off on the cheap. What's needed now is to dust off the 1986 Royal Commission on Broadcasting and to update it for the online age, along the lines of the Leveson & Finkelstein Inquiries.
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What happened in CHC is unprecedented in NZ for all the wrong reasons. It's NZ's worst ever mass shooting, political murder, and global terror incident all in one.
As for the memory-holing by ZB & NZNP, are they genuinely apologetic or are they too embarrassed to confront the issues? What needs to happen next are for:
*FB & Google to expand their anti-ISIL algorithms to include neo-Fascist hatemongers, or face monopoly-busting if they don't
* the authorities to finally take neo-Fascism seriously
*NewsCorp, Koch Industries et al to be decartellised or otherwise taken to the World Court
* the 1986 Royal Commission on Broadcasting to be dusted off & modernised for the social media age. -
The discussion was also given structure by the results of a fascinating and well-designed poll, which found a striking 75% of Māori in favour of legalising and regulating cannabis.
Considering they've long been a swing bloc on the issue, it's significant. Cannabis law reform could well be this century's homosexual law reform.
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Meanwhile across the Tasman...
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Hard News: Cannabis reform is a serious…, in reply to andin,
In its original form no, I was just thinking of people like MH who use it to bash unemployed over the head as lazy.
Who then proceed to welcome the Brexits and Donald Trumps of this world - or have just emerged from their fallout bunkers and denied they've happened - only to find nothing goes according to plan and then proceed to take a few pages from the captain of the Costa Concordia.