Who Benefits Most from Facebook's Frictionless Sharing (aka Beacon's Revenge)?

(cartoon by Bob Cochran)

I've just read through 15 or so recent articles about Facebook's new frictionless sharing feature, and I'm worried that people are misunderstanding who will benefit most from this feature. HINT: It sure as hell ain't the users.

What seems obvious to me is that frictionless sharing, much like its legally dubious predecessor Beacon, is an auto-sharing feature that offers direct, massive benefits to Facebook (as a data miner and seller), Facebook's advertisers and social media marketers, market/media researchers, and media content creators (as consumers of all that delicious, detailed, longitudinal user data).

Didya notice a pattern in the list of beneficiaries up there? If your organization wants to sell to, study, or strategize about engaging Facebook users, considering the massive amounts of data being auto-shared by millions of individual consumers, this feature is a friggin' goldmine. If you are merely an average, individual Facebook user, however, I'd say there are more risks involved with this new, hard-to-avoid feature than there are rewards. What sort of risks?

1) Privacy is obvious. I mean, for pete's sake, Congress ALREADY CURTAILED our privacy rights just so this Facebook feature would technically be legal. Though I personally think the settings on Facebook are sufficient to allow those users who are paying attention to limit their sharing as they wish, the simple fact is that, duh, not all Facebook users pay attention to their privacy settings. Thus, people will inevitably auto-share media consumption experiences that they don't necessarily want others to know about. A good example in one article I read was that if your timeline showed you reading a bunch of cancer articles, people could easily make the assumption that you got cancer.

Moreover, even if you don't mind auto-sharing the content that you read or listen to or watch, you can expect people to increasingly, if informally, hold you responsible for that content. If I see that my 12-year-old daughter has explicit music videos popping up on her timeline, you think I'm going to ignore that? If my boss notices that I routinely read pro-marijuana-legalization articles, how could that not, at some level, affect his opinion or assumptions about me?

Even the advertisers and market researchers slurping up your data on the back end will be holding you responsible for implicitly endorsing content that you simply experienced. I'll talk more about this little problem later - it's the reason those benefits I cited above may actually prove illusory to advertisers and other user-data-consumers over the long term. (Also, Paul Spoerry knows what's up - he made some of these same points before I did, but I didn't steal them I promise.)

2) De-friending or ignoring on a massive level due to info overload/lack of personality. If one of my friends is constantly filling up my feeds with trivia about his/her day and I get sick of it eventually, what do I do? I hit the "Hide So-and-So" button and never see another word about him unless I actively seek it out, right? Or maybe I go a step further and fully de-friend him if I don't want my content to go back in his direction. Either way, there could be tons of "sharing" going on, but if everyone you're sharing with has hidden you or de-friended you already and you've done the same, nobody is really paying attention to anybody else anymore.

Also, how can I be sure that my friend even knows what the heck he is sharing anymore? And if he's not consciously sharing it, is it really from him or is it sent to me by Facebook's software? I thought this dilemma was comically understated by Philip Bump in his Atlantic piece: "Facebook moving curation from us to its algorithms means we could lose some of our personality in what we present." Yeah, I'd change that 'could' to a 'will,' Phil.

3) Time wastage/mental effort - from an exponential increase in both banal minutiae, or "lightweight" data as Zuckerberg likes to call it, and in actual content. Plus, there's all the fiddling you're going to have to do to get your privacy settings right and then try to maintain them. At the rate the settings and policies change, it's a fool's errand anyway.

Also, as Nick Bradbury points out, now you'll have to pre-consider whether you want to even watch or read something because as soon as you do, others will see that you have. That's adding a whole other decision criteria for each piece of content I want to consume online (and I dunno about you, but I consume content online like Pac-Man consumes yellow balls and blue ghosts - nom, nom, nom-stop, bitches).

4) Increasingly invasive/creepy/deceptive/individualized marketing. Don't you love getting into intimate, one-on-one relationships with corporations, content producers, and marketing agencies? There's something about getting a personalized message from a monstrous, faceless corporation concerned solely with maximizing profit that really lets me know I'm special. I know you're just like me, and together we'll find it really friendly and appealing and not at all disturbing and stalker-ish when companies start sending us personalized Facebook ads or messages like:

"How's your cat, Butterstuff, doing? He looked cute in that picture you posted yesterday. Why not buy him some Purina-brand Kitty Treats to keep his teeth clean and healthy? Give Butterstuff our love, Your Friends at Purina." [before Purina's lawyers make libelous cat food out of me, I should note that's a fictional ad...for now]

User rewards:
1) Being able to be an even creepier Facebook stalker, yourself.

2) Random exposure to an actually interesting tidbit auto-shared from a friend, now and again.

3) Richard MacManus claims that sometime in the future, users might get special coupons/offers/services in exchange for opting into auto-sharing (ok, that's something at least), but I think his next sentences undermine that aspiration:

"It's important to note that you, the user, will always have to give your permission for frictionless sharing to happen. Over time there will be incentives to do that, in the form of value-added services that exist precisely because of seamless sharing. Sure, that's a rose-colored look at the future of frictionless sharing. But Facebook is well aware that it will need to incentivize its users if it wants this functionality turned on across thousands of content sites. ... Content services want to access Facebook's huge user base and so they will [italics author's]enable this feature. Facebook's size gives it the ability to make this form of sharing the norm for future generations of Internet users.

That's not to belittle the very real concerns about over-sharing and privacy, as stated eloquently by Molly and Marshall. But Facebook has identified the immense value in tapping into media consumption patterns and, in frictionless sharing, it has found an ingenious way to capture that data.

Now Facebook's challenge is to convince its users that some of that value is for the end user. [italics mine] Frictionless sharing is scary, there's no doubt about it. It's also not ideally implemented right now. So Facebook has work to do, both on the implementation and to show people the benefits of this new form of sharing."

4) ????????

But Don't Bust Out the Champagne Just Yet, Media Marketers

Briefly, as promised above, I do have reason to suspect that eventually, advertisers and market researchers might realize they've thrown the baby out with the bathwater by gushing over this frictionless sharing thing (and probably helping Facebook develop it behind the scenes after Beacon failed). The reason is that if content that I consume online is auto-shared to my friends, I'm not consciously, explicitly, or selectively endorsing that content. The only conclusion my friends can draw is that I have had a certain media experience (if I even read or watched the whole thing before it was auto-shared), not what I thought about it or whether I thought it would be interesting to them.

By removing the conscious, explicit, sometimes selective endorsement that came along with actually having to click a button in order to share something with a particular someone, Facebook has actually loosened the relationship between the content that I share and the content me and my friends enjoy. Instead of sharing only the content I like and I think others will like, I'm now sharing all the content I experience (or much more of it, at least) so it is no longer as representative, overall, of my actual interests.

In other words, while the deluge of "lightweight" data might LOOK really granular and appealing to marketers at first, since its no longer a product of conscious endorsement, it no longer has the same marketing value as shared content (or word-of-mouth) did before it was automated. There might be some technical ways to account or adjust for this redefinition of sharing in research/message design, but my basic warning to media makers, marketers, and researchers who can't stop orgasming about frictionless sharing might best be summed up by paraphrasing Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word - 'sharing.' I do not think it means what you think it means."

So there you have my rant/provocation about frictionless sharing. IMHO, it's clearly more appealing and beneficial to Facebook as a data company and the various data-hungry clients it has than to the average Facebooker. No wonder its reception has been markedly less enthusiastic among the grassroots so far.

Fun Friday

It's been a loooong week of workin' and schoolin', so this well-written article by Joe Robinson was a much-needed reminder about the importance of balancing work time and play time.

Sure, newspaper companies are struggling, but case studies like that of the Journal Register Company give some reason to think that their extinction is not inevitable.

Fun Friday

Things that don't suck:

Let's face it: The classic superheroes of our childhoods have been over-commodified and repackaged so many times that they just don't provide the same fuzzy nostalgic feelings they used to. Somehow, they no longer seem to even fit in with the popular zeitgeist. I mean, Batman is a billionaire playboy for god's sake - could there be any "occupation" less in keeping with the generation who brought you the past year of Occupations?

What we citizens need now is a new superhero for a new, politically fraught age. If bloodsuckers and parasites are the only people who can make things happen in Washington D.C., we plebes need the most powerful bloodsucker of them all working tirelessly in the public interest. We need...
BEDBUG MAN!  

 How to Do Your Part to Ensure that Citizens Retain Control over the Internet:  Dave Winer, Internet philosopher king, provides some of the simplest, most radical advice I've seen yet for anyone concerned with government or corporate control over the Internet: run your own server.  See his posts here and here to learn why this is easier than you think it is.  

Atheist Gets Positive Coverage in NYT

Friendly Atheist has been following the story of Jessica Ahlquist, a high-schooler who sued to have a prayer banner removed from her public school hallway.  Sure, it's a pretty trivial thing to sue about, but she's absolutely on the right side of that case, as the judges agreed, and the banner should not have been there.  From my point of view, this story is a double-bonus - atheist checks creeping, illegal religious influence in public setting AND atheist gets positive press for once.

Awesome 90s Mega Mix Taking Us Into the Weekend

FBI Keeps Baby-Stepping Toward Big Brother

What if you got a Facebook message alerting you that "The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now following your news feed?" Would that make you rethink your penchant for publicizing personal ponderings? Even worse - what if the FBI started following you and you never got that alert?

That invasive situation may well be the status quo in a couple of years, as the FBI has recently submitted a public Request for Information (RFI) concerning the possible development of a social media monitoring application. This potential piece of software would collect information from a wide variety of sources - mapping/geolocational sources, surveillance cameras, weather reports, diplomats, intel reports, and, controversially, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

As other sources reporting on this have noted, in its RFI, the FBI seeks to collect "publicly available" (their quotes, not mine) information on such sites, but the suspicious quotation marks (who are they quoting there?) suggest that, of course, the FBI's definition of "publicly available" will be problematic. For instance, is information that I share only with my family members public? How about information I share with both my family and my friends? How about the things I say only to my best friend? Isn't that sort of the same as a phone call, which the FBI can't tap without a warrant? What about information I share with a particular Facebook group? What about information I share with journalists, doctors or lawyers on Facebook - do our confidentiality and source-protection privileges go down the toilet if my Facebook privacy settings aren't set high enough? What if my privacy settings are high but the person I'm sending a message to doesn't have the same settings? How much of that message can the FBI read?

And those are simply the problems I can think of off the top of my head just for ONE WEBSITE. There would have to be separate, or at least tweaked, standards of "publicness" created for Twitter, Flickr, and every other site the FBI saw. Furthermore, you can bet that if the Supreme Court rules that all/most data posted on social networking sites is "public," there's going to be an immediate mass exodus out of those sites and/or an immediate mass decision to opt out of public posting. Not only would that basically kill the whole phenomenon/nascent industry of social media, but it would also leaves the FBI without all the data it was going after in the first place. (Hint to Facebook and social media advertisers: start lobbying against this initiative immediately because it might be an existential threat to your business.)

Now, aside from the huge problem that the FBI has in appropriately and legally defining "publicly available" data on such websites, I'm actually not opposed to this idea in the abstract. As long as I have a clear, easy option NOT TO BE CONTINUOUSLY SURVEILLED BY MY OWN GOVERNMENT online, I think the FBI should be able to collect whatever info it wants from public online sources.

Of course, this also assumes that its software actually does a pretty good job of coding and analyzing that data so it doesn't routinely send SWAT teams scrambling toward false alerts. I mean, you can see how it would be hard for a computer program to tell the difference between "I hate Obama - I want to make him dead" tweeted by a drunk Republican frat boy at Liberty University and "I hate Obama - I want to make him dead," tweeted by a radical terrorist ringleader plotting a presidential assassination attempt in his apartment down the street from Liberty University. It seems like there would need to be TONS of human oversight and double-checking of these alerts. For instance, I'm sure this blog post has already been caught in some domestic security agency's automated cyber-dragnet simply because of the words used in the example above. So is it really efficient to now make a security analyst read this blog post so he can make an educated guess as to what my true sentiments are/were?

So assuming the FBI can appropriately define what is "publicly available" content on social media sites, and assuming that the software it ends up with is actually able to parse tones of voice, connotations, and implicit meanings from disembodied text messages, I say go for it. In other words, this isn't a horrible concept from the FBI, but it will probably be impossible to implement in reality.

Barack Obama is Andrew Sullivan's Ideal President

Many people forwarded me Andrew Sullivan's article on The Daily Beast yesterday arguing that Obama's critics on both the right and the left have grossly mischaracterized and misunderstood the president himself, his political strategy, and the results he achieved in his first term. After describing and justifiably dismissing the insane critique of Obama that emanates from the right, Sullivan proceeds to argue that liberals have also given the man short shrift considering the impressive list of accomplishments he compiled in such a time of national stress and strife. That's the part where Sullivan loses me, and I think betrays his personal political perspective as a gay, conservative, wealthy white man.

I give Sullivan credit for making best case I've seen yet for why liberals shouldn't be pissed off at the man they elected four years ago, but it's a case that's chock full of dubious phrases and specious claims that tend to, in my view, miss the point about why so many liberals are indeed so disillusioned with Obama. Below, I point out where and why I think Sullivan gets the lefty critique very, very wrong.

Starting on page 3 of the article, his first claim is that "liberals projected onto him absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country, where anything requires 60 Senate votes to even stand a chance of making it into law." Sullivan then lists a bunch of bad names that liberals have supposedly called Obama, but fails to provide any evidence that anybody expected him to perform grand miracles of any kind. He also neglects to mention who might have placed such lofty goals (if they existed) in the heads of Obama supporters - perhaps Candidate Obama's soaring rhetoric about "change" and "reform" played a part in pumping up those expectations? I mean, there's no denying he sort of got us all "hoping" pretty hard in the beginning there. Can you blame us for being let down when those hopes have yet to be fulfilled?

And no, Andrew, we weren't hoping for him to change the world on day one in office; we were just hoping he would do the things he explicitly promised he would do, like close Gitmo on day one in office. Plus, Obama could have used executive agencies to do anything within the law that he wanted done or change any policies within the law that he wanted changed, all without Congress. And 60 votes is not, nor should it be, the threshold for Congressional legislation. Call yourself a pragmatist or a realist for claiming that it is, Andrew, but to me, you're factually wrong, journalistically lazy and basically unpatriotic for doing so.

Next, Sullivan claims that the left hasn't recognized the sheer scale and number of Obama's achievements. His first three examples are a depression that was averted, an auto bailout that was successful and a bank bailout that was also successful. This is where it really hit me that Andrew Sullivan's idea of "the left" and my idea of "the left" are two different things. For one, it's WAY too early to be calling any of these a certain success. Paul Krugman argued we're in the midst of a global depression last month, for example. The auto bailout certainly forestalled the death of American automakers, but if that's Sullivan's standard for "success," then it's a pretty meaningless one. For all we know, they could be bankruptcy-bound again in a few years.

But more importantly, the fact that Sullivan termed the bank bailout a success highlighted his ignorance about the essential critique of those bailouts from liberals, as well as about the fundamentals of capitalism. You see, Andrew, we liberals don't judge the success of such bailouts (or any government activity, really) by whether or not we get our money back. That's the kind of private-sector-oriented profitability analysis you guys on the right love to misapply. Rather, liberals put a primacy on the deleterious political and governmental precedents set by these bailouts that specific corporations and even entire industries can rely upon the citizens of the United States to pay for their monumental, inexcusable fuck-ups, just as long as those fuck-ups are big and scary enough.

Liberals care about how these bailouts break the basic rules of capitalism - they undermine the legal and ideological standards undergirding the economic system of our country - so that major companies receive unfair advantages over individual citizens. The fact that you would cite these bailouts and the depression they supposedly avoided as issues Obama's supporters should give him credit for rather than issues they should be pissed at him over really drives home how little you understand our grievances. You argue that "any responsible president’s priority would have been stabilization of the financial system, not the exacting of revenge," but this feeble straw man can't stand up to a moment's consideration: Why were exacting revenge or stabilizing the financial system Obama's only two choices? They weren't. You just made them up out of thin air, struggling to make that choice seem rational and agreeable when even you likely realize that something very basic went wrong there.

Moving on, Sullivan claims Obama ended the war in Iraq "on time" and "without troops left behind." Again, he's using these phrases loosely in Obama's favor. The timetable for ending hostilities in Iraq was extended and revised several times in Obama's first two years, even if it stayed relatively consistent over the last two. Second, unless Obama was going to allow our soldiers to be tried in Iraqi civil courts, he had to get all troops out by 12/31/2011 under the SOFA agreement. Even if he had wanted them to remain, his military advisers would have urged strongly against it, and they would have been right.

Also, Sullivan neglects to mention how Obama essentially doubled-down, rather than folding, in Afghanistan. Also, there's that whole secret war in Libya, the ongoing, extralegal murder of foreigners with our drone spy planes, and the expanded and entrenched ability for the chief executive to indefinitely detain any American he points his finger at and calls a terrorist. Forces fighting for transparency and accountability in all this - WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street - are hunted down and harassed while those who may have committed war crimes are granted immediate, unconditional forgiveness with no questions asked.

So no, Andrew, when it comes to foreign policy and national security, we on the left are not pleased by Obama's ability to end Iraq on time and without leaving men behind. Oh yeah, and the defense budget is being cut only because the SECDEF came out and begged Congress to cut his budget for the good of the country.

Next, Sullivan notes that support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization are at all-time highs. How or why these levels of support are due to Obama in any way, shape or form, he doesn't say. Surely, they're not affected by the decades-long debacle that is the drug war or the dying off of a generation of bigoted, easily frightened elders. Moreover, when it comes to weed, Obama hasn't just failed to act as he said he would when he was a candidate; he's consciously avoided the discussion altogether, trying to laugh off the fact that every time he asks the country what it wants directly, the number-one response is legalization. I'll come back to the issue of gay rights at the end, because I think that's sort of what motivates Sullivan's perspective in this piece.

Moving on, he cites renewable energy investment and "drastically" raised fuel efficiency standards. Fair enough, and kudos to Obama for kick-starting the economy of the future, but his admirable record on energy could all go down the toilet should he approve the Keystone XL pipeline in the next few weeks, which, IMO, he probably will. Also, those drastic fuel efficiency gains aren't mandated until 2016 at the earliest (and that's just to 36 mpg, not the 55 mpg he wants to reach by 2025), so there's still a lot of time for them to be reversed, reformed or otherwise thwarted by the next Republican in office.

Next, Sullivan blithely claims, "Torture was ended." This is basically a punch line in the context of the blanket amnesty Obama granted to the torturers, his continued policy of extraordinary rendition, which allows prisoners to be shipped to countries where torture is totally fine, and his signing of the NDAA, with its clauses concerning indefinite detention and the like. But Sullivan hammers it home in his conclusion: "But [Obama] has done the most important thing of all: excising the cancer of torture from military detention and military justice. If he is not reelected, that cancer may well return. Indeed, many on the right appear eager for it to return." Heads up, Andrew: That cancer may well return even if he IS re-elected because he will, at most, be in office for four more years, not the rest of the lifespan of the United States. Moreover, the naivete oozing from this statement is almost provocative. You remind me a child stamping his feet and affirming that, gosh darn it, "Santa Claus IS real because Daddy says he is." Torture hasn't ended for sure just because Obama daddy said it did.

Two women replaced two men on the Supreme Court, Sullivan continues - an occurrence I don't think anyone is citing as a reason to vote for Obama. Finally, the "liberal holy grail" of "nearly universal healthcare" was signed into law. Like women on the Supreme Court, this is an issue I don't care very much about, and it certainly wasn't an issue that motivated me to elect Obama. I'd rather he'd spent all that political capital closing down Gitmo or making the public case for marijuana legalization.

Look, Sullivan clearly overstates the lefty case for re-electing Obama with a lot of wishful thinking, loose language and lazy, straw-man arguments. So why is he so optimistic? Because he's a gay, conservative white man - a segment of the population that may have benefited more than any other under Obama. See, in terms of gay rights, Obama made a TON of progress (or at least Sullivan attributes it to him), for instance gays in the military, DOMA dying in the courts and New York legalizing gay marriage. In terms of personal finance, Obama did his utmost to protect the interests of Sullivan's socioeconomic cohort over and above the interests of any other.

In fact, Obama might be Andrew Sullivan's ideal president - strongly committed to legal equality for gays but without any silly ideas about shaking up the economic system overall or the financial sector in particular. With this in mind, it's no wonder Sullivan sees this president with rose-tinted specs, and it makes sense that he wants the rest of the American left to appreciate Obama just as much to ensure another four years. Enjoy Obama while he lasts, Andrew, but don't claim the rest of us on the left are unrealistic or unfair just because he hasn't done as much for us as he's done for you.

News and Views Roundup

A small sampling of media-related food for thought...

Newspapers Lose a Third of Stock Value in 2012 - Time to Buy Low?

Alan Mutter reports that major U.S. newspapers continued their steady financial decline last year, averaging a 27% decline in stock values. Some of his commenters, however, note that Warren Buffett just bought a newspaper and that the final few months of 2011 saw a significant surge in stock prices. Though the financial trend for papers certainly still seems negative, it's getting harder to say whether the decline will persist or whether this old news medium has finally found rock bottom in the opinion of Wall Street. Of course, Wall Street's opinion concerning paper profitability doesn't change the fact that newspapers provide an increasingly essential, if increasingly under-financed, venue for thorough, credible, well-researched journalism.

Media Critics Muse about Connections between Journalism and Information Science

Walter Frick at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab ponders ways in which journalists might better source their articles, as well as ways in which news consumers might be assisted by computers in their efforts to understand and evaluate claims and arguments. As my lengthy comment below Frick's post illustrates, I'm wholeheartedly supportive of the first project but just as strongly opposed to the second. Rather than assisting individuals in evaluating abstract arguments and making personal decisions about normative, controversial issues, I envision information science providing insightful concepts and language with which to evaluate journalism's social contribution and utility - for example, in the way that Nick Diakopolous lucidly describes in his recent blog post.

Discussion and Debate Rages on Concerning Anonymous, Wikipedia, and Twitter

Wired's Threat Level blog releases the second part of Quinn Norton's excellent expose of Anonymous; Andy Carvin and Clay Shirky banter about the many important impacts of Twitter; Nancy Scola discusses the uncertain future of an under-appreciated Internet mainstay - Wikipedia.

New Year's Roundup - The Country is Still Sucking

(photo: Nathan Cheeley)

It's a new year, but America's death spiral continues unabated... 

PRESIDENT OBAMA CREATES LOOPHOLE IN DUE PROCESS, THEN CLAIMS HE WON'T USE IT: In an uncharacteristically sketchy move, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 on New Year's Eve in Hawaii. He attached a (non-binding, entirely interpretive) signing statement claiming he wouldn't exercise many of the extreme executive powers he just signed into law - for instance, the power to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial. Of course, as usual, Obama had no control over the movement of his own right hand, which was forced by congressional Republicans objecting to disentangling these fundamental due process concerns from the yearly paychecks of the U.S. soldiers whose asses they routinely revel in kissing.

Put simply, Republicans held this year's paychecks to the U.S. Armed Forces hostage to their national security ideal that anyone suspected of terrorism has no legal rights and should be tortured and jailed forever. Fuck you, Obama - you just lost my vote this year. If you can't take the time to explain to the American public that military paychecks DID NOT NEED TO BE TIED TO REAUTHORIZING GITMO, I can't take the time to support you. Plus, HELLO, you just opened the door to massive legal and human rights abuses when the next Republican gets elected president. Are your next four years in the White House more important to you than American due process? Did you or did you not go to Harvard Law School and learn about precedent? IMHO, you're a failure as a president; go back to Congress where you can compromise to your heart's content and you don't have to exhaust and contradict yourself trying to be an actual fucking leader.

MAJOR, SECRETIVE LOBBYIST GROUP IS WRITING MANY STATE LAWS: Check out this fantastic piece of journalism by Olivia Ward, who attended the luxurious, quasi-secret circlejerk of lawmakers and lobbyists put on each year by ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council. Ward lays bare the Republican-led crony capitalism that takes place at ALEC's policy summit, wherein corporations make it very easy for lawmakers to obey them by simply providing pre-written state laws for them to pass in their cute little legislatures.

Numerous other exposes (including two entire websites devoted to keeping an eye on the group's shady hijinks) corroborate the reprehensible buying of votes and influence that takes place at ALEC's idyllic retreats: John Nichols did a two-part piece for The Nation, with one part focusing on ALEC's ties to the Koch brothers; NPR then interviewed Nichols about his findings, as well as ALEC's national chairman, Louisiana State Rep. Noble Ellington for a response.

People for the American Way also joined the expose fray. But there's actually no need to read any of those to get an idea of what ALEC is really about - just visit the cabal's own website, which proclaims "Limited Government, Free Markets, and Federalism" as its ideals and includes such dubious descriptors as "the nation's largest, non-partisan, individual, public-private membership association of state legislators."

HEALTHY FOOD IS GETTING MORE EXPENSIVE AND HARDER TO FIND: Last summer Gallup found that, overall, Americans were eating less healthy foods compared to recent years, despite the constant refrain in media and the marketplace about prioritizing healthy, local, and fresh foods over fatty, fast ones. From Gallup's report: "In particular, Hispanics and young people were by far the least likely to eat produce frequently in 2011, with less than half of each group getting the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables at least four days per week."

At Salon, David Sirota ascribed this trend to the overwhelming political influence of the "pizza and french fry lobby," whose success at securing government subsidies for unsalutary staples such as corn and cheese has kept prices of fruits, veggies, and other healthier foods artificially higher than prices of, say, Big Mac meals. At Grist, Stacy Mitchell added another piece to this bad-food puzzle, charting the rise of Walmart as a major supermarket chain, the effects that rise had on industry consolidation among both competitor chains and food suppliers, and the company's obvious ambitions to expand further, especially in low-income "food deserts," where the nutrition problem is already disproportionately severe.

To sum up, our national food system is pretty fucked up in terms of the health outcomes it generates now, so you'd best be shopping at farmer's markets or healthier grocery stores (Trader Joe's and the obvious Whole Foods come to mind) if you want to live well. Or even better, try growing some plants in your own backyard and then eating them - it will save you money and maybe a heart attack. At the very least, take a glance at the nutrition label on the foods you do buy from your local UBERGROCERYMART, and try to avoid high-fructose corn syrup.

For those too ignorant or apathetic to make these basic consumer choices, your increasingly poor health will translate into added strain on the nation's medical resources, and since many of you will be too poor to pay your hospital bills, the rest of us healthy people will pick up the tab for your fat, lazy ass as your butter-clogged arteries start to act up. This means that all those skinny hippies you see clomping around farmer's markets in their Crocs are not only more physically attractive than you, but they are MORE PATRIOTIC than you because they will ultimately be less of a drain on the country's emergency rooms. All I'm asking for is a bit of food consciousness - doing your part to keep your own body healthy. Since the government and corporations are making it harder to eat well, we consumers now need to think harder in order to do so.

Presidential Election 2012 - Obama Wins, Now Let's Talk About Serious Stuff

So it's almost 2012, and I'm already sick of the MSM's pointless yammering about the "candidates" in this upcoming politimediagasm next fall. The Republicans are all clowns, and mean-spirited ones at that. They're in a race for second place, along with a bonus prize for whichever candidate can amass the most outrageous anecdotes for his or her "I just ran for president" memoir in 2013. Sorry to spill the beans early, people, but I don't think the country can afford to flush another year of social discourse down the tubes: Barack Obama, president of the United States for another four years. Bing, bang, boom - done.

Next topic...

It's a War Out There

But only one side is violent...

MoJo: Newly popular Newt takes up a classic Republican cause celebre - numbers are the liberal devil!

NYT/Indy: Something tells me that Buy Nothing Day will be more successful this year than in years past. Perhaps it is that Americans are finally getting fed up with ceaseless commercialism and increasingly invasive advertising.

CJR: The IRS is stalling on granting non-profit status to several independent journalism outlets, even though similar decisions have been made on a routine basis in recent years. Keep digging, CJR - something smells fishy here if you ask me.

Wired: The Army is FINALLY getting around to trying Bradley Manning next month, 18 months after his initial arrest. I'm glad to see Manning's attorney, David Coombs, plans on mounting a vigorous defense, as he's listed 50 witnesses he would like to call during the five-day hearing. Anonymous and other hacker groups that support Manning's alleged leaking of documents are keeping up a steady drumbeat of digital abuse directed at their antagonists.

Wired/ThinkProgress: In other subversive news, Occupy Boston's legal status is in limbo pending a December 1st hearing, but at least OWS protesters were finally able to force a reaction from the Prez at a speech in New Hampshire.

Wonkette: Good news: big banks are cut and bleeding as a result of OWS's Bank Transfer Day effort. It seems credit unions are looking like a better and better investment compared to financial behemoths who have no idea what they're investing your money in. Guess what, Bank of America? You better enjoy my last checking account fee this month because come 2012, we're fucking through with each other. Bank on it, bitches.

And of course, everyone on teh intarwebs is now casually pepper-spraying everything.

OWS Grievance Roundup

A survey of the sort of headlines that motivate many at Occupy Wall Street and motivate me to support it:

MoJo/WaPo: Kevin Drum nauseously passes along a good article in WaPo by Zach Goldfarb describing the grand success of Wall Street on the backs of the taxpayers.

GG: Greenwald's description of the "drone mentality" is, as usual, exceptionally lucid and extraordinarily vexing to anyone who believes in human rights and/or the rule of law. This nation's policy of prejudicial, "pre-emptory" murder of foreign citizens is not only sickening, but strategically stupid.

NYT: Paul Krugman voices support for Occupy Wall Street, confirming that wealth inequality is not just unfair or unhelpful, but fundamentally unsustainable in a democracy such as ours.

FP: Dan Drezner is none too confident in the "eurofarce" he sees playing out across the pond, claiming that the global economic system is teetering on the brink of collapse.

Monday Roundup

A few interesting headlines:

NYT: I'm glad to see somebody is still focused on defense cuts. In particular, these seem like sensible steps to me:

Among other steps, Mr. Panetta said, Pentagon strategists were looking at additional cuts in the nuclear arsenal, with an eye toward determining how many warheads the military needed to deter attacks.

Mr. Panetta also held out the possibility of cutting the number of American troops based in Europe, with the United States compensating for any withdrawal by helping NATO allies improve their militaries.

NYT: Yet another worrying example of misguided drug-war mission creep begun by Bush and sustained by Barack:

The D.E.A. now has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to Western Hemisphere nations — including Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize — that are battling drug cartels, according to documents and interviews with law enforcement officials.

The program — called FAST, for Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — was created during the George W. Bush administration to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2008 and continuing under President Obama, it has expanded far beyond the war zone.

ThinkProgress: I guess that Keystone XL tar sands pipeline isn't too popular with a lot of folks. Whatever happened to your clean, green economy-growing machine, Obama?

FDL: "Top Secret America" looks like a must-read, in part because I transcribed some of the background interviews!

Roemer Endorses Occupy. Will They Endorse Him Back?

Buddy Roemer:  Don't count me out just yet!
Occupy Wall Street might like what I have to offer.

For a little while now, I've been thinking about what kind of candidates Occupy Wall Street should/will endorse, if they eventually do. Obviously, their main issue seems to be the corrupting influence of money in politics and government, so it would stand to reason that their candidate would prioritize that as a main issue, himself. Well, it just so happens there is one candidate whose main issue (perhaps only major issue) is getting the money out of politics and returning the power to the people: Republican fringe candidate Buddy Roemer.

Buddy has enjoyed bumps from Colbert and the Daily Show, but otherwise remains stuck below the media radar, excluded from major events like the Republican debates yet steadfastly marching on despite a $100 limit on all donations to his campaign. Recently, Roemer endorsed Occupy Wall Street, even joining the protesters on the streets. In response to Herman Cain's description of the protests as "un-American," Roemer replied: "You're wrong, Herman - this is as American as a civil rights march. This is as American as a revolution. The young people are speaking. We ought to listen."

So Roemer has endorsed OWS and clearly prioritizes their main issue as his main issue, as well. This all begs the obvious question: Will Occupy Wall Street endorse Buddy right back? I sure hope so. If OWS announced even majority support for Roemer, let alone unanimous support, his name recognition and his campaign would immediately enjoy a major boost. Moreover, Obama might finally realize how disillusioned many of his supporters are (enough even to vote for a Republican, given the right kind of Republican) and the mainstream Republican candidates would no doubt face an interesting new challenger at their next debate. So how about it, OWS? What say you all to endorsing Buddy Roemer for president?

Covering Occupy Wall Street - Questions and Answers

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a grassroots protest movement. It's grassroots, which means a bunch of non-aligned strangers with similar sentiments are getting together spontaneously or via their own organization efforts. It's a protest, which means these strangers are all anti-status quo in some way, or they all want some sort of change. And it's a movement, which means it's occurring with significant numbers of people in a significant number of places around the country.

The mass media, which has been trained over the last 20 years to distill things like grassroots protests movements into 30-second sound bytes, is having trouble doing their usual thing when it comes to OWS. They need a spokesperson, a manifesto, a mission statement so that they can fit everyone involved in OWS into some sort of neat, stereotypical box. And until they get something they can latch onto, the mass media won't really know how to portray or "cover" OWS, besides in terms of the incidental violence between protesters and police or how much the protests are estimated to be costing X city each week or day or minute (which is a pretty transparent conservative media ploy to undercut the legitimacy of OWS, by the way).

Oh, mass media, you ignorant slut. Allow me to assist you in making sense of OWS because you are clearly struggling. This post is specifically a response to Rick Hampson's front-page article today in USA Today, wherein Rick asks five fundamental questions that are currently frustrating journalists when it comes to OWS.

1) Led or leaderless?

Hampson conveys the debate about whether or not OWS should elect or install some sort of spokesperson/leader figure to make decisions and represent the group overall. This debate entirely misses the point. Anybody can be a leader when it comes to the various causes that OWS champions - they just have to be doing something about them.

The protesters simply need to start pointing out good examples. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are two excellent ones to start with. When they speak passionately (and more importantly, ACT passionately) in defense of consumer rights and individual taxpayers rather than corporations, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are leading OWS. They are championing the causes that the people standing around shouting would like to be championed. When/if Obama actually closes Gitmo, Obama will be "leading" OWS because that is one of the main causes OWS is all about.

If you're looking for leaders of OWS, look for people that are already championing OWS-style causes. Of course, leaders may spontaneously emerge from the protests themselves, similar to what happened recently when the Pirate Party got elected in Germany. But my guess is professional politicians will see the political demand that OWS represents and present themselves as the suppliers ready to meet it (in exchange for OWS-supported votes come Election Day, of course).

2) Organization: horizontal or vertical?

This isn't even a question, really. Hampson correctly notes that OWS is currently horizontal, but in the future it will necessarily get more vertical, for instance by endorsing certain candidates or deciding on a governing committee or a manifesto or an official representative of some sort.

3) What's the agenda? Is there one?

Again, if not a misguided question, certainly a premature one. When OWS becomes a formal political party and starts enrolling members, then it becomes appropriate to ask for some sort of cogent, coherent political ideology or issue platform for the group.

Until then, the agenda of OWS is simply to voice dissent and discontent - to illustrate to society that I am so angry, so anxious, so aggrieved by the status quo that I am willing to get out in the street and literally chant my discontent to random passersby. That alone is the first, most fundamental message of OWS: these people are so unhappy with some aspect of the current situation that they're willing to physically, actively, publicly protest it.

Rather than asking what, on a specific and individual level, each of these persons is protesting about, mass media should be taking the protests as the general cue that they are to our elected officials: You are not representing the wishes of your constituents. People protest as a last resort, when they feel that all their systemic, institutional options have been exhausted and there is simply no more effective way to fix things than get out in the street and scream about them.  Take a quick glance at polls and you'll get a good idea of how little faith Americans now have in their elected officials, the media or anybody, really, to accomplish any positive change. 

So the fact that there are so many people protesting and they have such a variety of things to protest about is a really worrying signal for the health of American democracy. This country is saying to itself, hey, America, in a lot of specific, different ways, you are not taking care of yourself. Your head (government) is not correctly managing or responding to your body (the people). The significance, the meaning of OWS is that it is a symptom of increasing democratic disease, dysfunction and decay. Put more bluntly, there is taxation without adequate or legitimate representation - sound familiar, Tea Party?

4) What about Election Day?

See #1 above. When politicians start credibly promising and/or actually acting to meet the various demands and champion the various causes within OWS, members will start mobilizing for and supporting those politicians on Election Day. These politicians might emerge from the movement or they might choose to join it. Regardless of how it happens, in a democratic free market, where there is political demand, political supply will inevitably rise to meet it. Keep in mind, however, politicians need not necessarily be the "supply" here - it could take the form of popular referenda on various issues, skipping the political middlemen altogether.

5) Managing conflict

That's just a life skill, not unique to protest movements at all.  Sure, it's interesting to observe, but doesn't directly relate to putting OWS into a wider sociopolitical context or making lay-sense out of it.

So for all you mass media professionals out there that are, I'm sure, reading this blog religiously, I hope this provides some insight on covering OWS as it evolves in the near future. It's significance is that it is yet another wake-up call America is giving itself.

"Fighting the Last War" Against Terrorism

A constant refrain among American military officials is that they are concerned with "not fighting the last war." For those not steeped in military history, to "fight the last war" is to employ the strategy and tactics that were successful in the previous major conflict, regardless of whether or not they will work in a new conflict.

For instance, after the defense-oriented trench warfare of World War I, the French general Andre Maginot constructed a massive, impenetrable line of defenses on France's borders with Germany and Italy. If such defenses had existed in the First World War, France indeed would have been mightily strengthened.

But Maginot did not anticipate the highly-mobile, offense-oriented blitzkrieg of the Germans in World War II, who simply circumvented his stationary defenses by blazing through Belgium into France from the north. Simply put, the lesson here is as the technology and aims of war change, so too does its nature; thus a new strategy is needed for each new conflict. Old strategies are not likely to be successful.

Candidate Obama had clearly heard this phrase by July of 2008, when he stated on the campaign trail, "The danger ... is that we are constantly fighting the last war, responding to the threats that have come to fruition, instead of staying one step ahead of the threats of the 21st century."

Candidate Obama went on to demonstrate an impressive grasp of defense strategy, listing the kinds of policy changes that would enable the U.S. to stop "fighting the last war" against terrorism and instead start to meet the threat on its own terms: closing Guantanamo Bay, ending our "conflicts" in Iraq and Afghanistan, building up our cyber capabilities, increasing cooperation between police and intelligence agencies, and many others.

Unspoken, but certainly implicit, in Candidate Obama's message was that out-and-out war is not the right tool to use when attempting to solve the problem of terrorism; rather, employing other tools, like intelligence, police work, public relations, et cetera would be much more effective. Fighting terrorism by means of war is as cliche and muddleheaded as fighting fire with fire.

So what gives? Why hasn't President Obama carried out the strategic vision so eloquently enunciated by Candidate Obama? What persuaded him that tanks, guns, mortars and bullets would now be effective, whereas up until 2008, they had not? Why is President Obama trying to fight Bush's "war on terror" when he knew COMING INTO THE JOB that you can't fight terrorism with war? Someone should ask him that.