Prime
Understanding What’s Wrong With Facebook 
We are now back in one of those recurrent waves of bad publicity for Facebook. It deserves every bit of it. Facebook is the prime online, global incubator of racist, quasi-fascist propaganda, conspiracy theories, state-run psyops and agit-prop operations, even in at least one case actual state-backed programs of population transfer and arguable genocide. But to really understand the problem with Facebook we need to understand the structural roots of that problem, how much of it is baked into the core architecture of the site and its very business model. Indeed much of it is inherent in the core strategies of the post-2000, second wave Internet tech companies that now dominate our information space and economy.
Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation. Good old fashioned advertising does that to a degree. But Facebook is much more powerful, adaptive and efficient. That’s what all the algorithms do. That’s why it makes so much money. This is the error with people who say the fact that people do bad things with Facebook is no different from people doing bad things with phones. Facebook isn’t just a ‘dumb’ communications system. It’s not really a platform in the original sense of the word. (The analogy for that is web hosting.) Facebook is designed to do specific things. It’s an engine to understand people’s minds and then manipulate their thinking. Those tools are refined for revenue making but can be used for many other purposes. That makes it ripe for misuse and bad acting.
The core of all second wave Internet commerce operations was finding network models where costs grow mathematically and revenues grow exponentially. The network and its dominance is the product and once it takes hold the cost inputs remained constrained while the revenues grow almost without limit. With the possible exception of Apple, which is still driven mostly by the production of physical products, that’s the core feature of all the big tech Goliaths.
Bill Barr Isn’t On The Trump Campaign’s Payroll, But He’s Sure Acting Like It
Where Things Stand: If The CDC Chief Isn’t ‘Closest To The Process’ Of Vaccine Creation, Who Is?
We covered news this morning of White House chief of staff Mark Meadows attempts to distance President Trump’s own CDC director from the vaccine development process in order to adhere to Trump’s own political narrative surrounding its creation.
This week David and Kate and I talk about Trump’s storyline of putting down protestors by force on election night and more. Watch after the jump or listen on the audio version of The Josh Marshall Podcast.
He Said It Again
Before more time goes by a brief follow up on yesterday’s post about the Trumpian build up for a violent showdown after the election. In his late afternoon press conference yesterday President Trump again found an opportunity to declare his readiness to put down election night “riots” or “protests” by force using the US military. He quickly joined this to a conversation about purported voter fraud and election rigging using mail in ballots.
Where Things Stand: Both Barr And Caputo Hype Sedition, But Only One Is Leaving
Michael Caputo, the longtime Trump hype man and HHS official, is taking a leave of absence from the Department of Health and Human Services.
This follows a tumultuous few days in which reports surfaced showing Caputo and one of his close aides at HHS were involved in a scheme to pressure the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into cooking the books on COVID-19 reporting data to more closely adhere to President Trump’s rosy rhetoric on the pandemic.
Trump’s Far-Right Brain Trust Lines Up Arguments for a Violent Post-Election Crackdown
I often find it a clarifying exercise to do the following. In six months we will know the outcome of the 2020 election. We will likely look back to September 2020 and see the eventual outcome as far more known, predictable than it actually appears to us today. This is in the nature of thinking historically. We have lived experience but the people of the future know more than us. My exercise is this: tell the version of me six months in the future how clear or unclear things look right now.
Taking this approach the weight of evidence points to Joe Biden winning a clear if not overwhelming victory over Donald Trump and a good likelihood that Democrats will control both houses of Congress. Looking not emotionally, not with the uncertainty that is so deep-rooted in the Trump Era and not with the weight of all that is at stake, the biggest fact of this election cycle has been the persistence and consistency of Biden’s lead. For all the drama, look at those trend lines. They barely budge.
Looking at all the available evidence, that is the most likely outcome. And I suspect in retrospect it will look even more clear, more likely. After the fact we’ll have only the evidence, the bundle of factual data and not the doubt, uncertainty and the specter of the unknown.
But of course there are other possibilities. The most likely bad outcome is simply that Donald Trump loses the popular vote by three or four percentage points but squeaks out an electoral college win with narrow victories in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Arizona and lucky breaks in maybe Pennsylvania or other states.
But I want to note another storyline being anticipated and demanded by many of Trump’s most ardent supporters. As usual with people in the Trump world, it surfaces either as ‘jokes’ or things his opponents purportedly want to do or start. In his on-going public meltdown, acting HHS comms chief Michael Caputo predicted that Joe Biden and his followers will try to overthrow the government with violence after not accepting Trump’s victory. Trump will have to put them down by force. He warns Trump’s supporters to stock up on fire arms and ammunition for the coming clash, which the Democrats will force on Trump.
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Where Things Stand: Just The Latest DOJ Attempt To Do Trump’s Bidding
We learned this morning that DOJ prosecutors are investigating the publication of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new tell-all memoir about his time in the White House, a twist in the increasingly unsurprising narrative that President Trump’s been loudly building since he appointed Bill Barr his attorney general.
South Dakota AG Story Goes to Story #3
I’m not sure it counts as South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg’s third story about running over a pedestrian two nights ago. Because it’s the first version of the story we’ve heard at length directly from him. But there are significant changes and additions from the revised story from yesterday. (Story one appeared to be that he was involved in a car accident in which someone died; story two was he ran someone over but thought the person was a deer.) You can read the full statement here.
The gist is as follows.