The Disinformation Manifesto

From Scott Alexander/Siskind's fantasy presidential debate:

Alexander: Mr. Trump, you’ve been accused of being one of the chief spreaders of misinformation, both personally and through your website Truth Social. What do you have to say for yourself?

Trump: GK Chesterton said that fairy tales were more than true, not because they tell us that dragons are real, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. In the same way, I think misinformation is more than true - not because it tells us there are pedophiles in pizza parlors, but because it tells us that pizza parlor pedophiles can be discovered and dragged into the light.

The COVID vaccine might not literally contain a microchip that lets Bill Gates control your mind. But we really do grant unaccountable tech billionaires root access to our culture. And seemingly pro-social requests really can be a vector for establishing control. I, Donald Trump, might not literally lead a euconspiracy of patriotic Americans who are about to blow the lid off the corrupt Biden administration and liberal establishment. But it really is true that even in the darkest night, when all seems lost, there are seeds of hope visible to those who search for them, and that even the most invincible-seeming tyranny can fall in an instant if enough people push at it.

So who cares about the literal truths? The average American lives in a dull apartment building in a decaying city, his subsistence dependent on the whims of macroeconomic forces he cannot comprehend, let alone control. You want to tell him to spend his tiny sliver of time on Earth thinking about interest rates and carbon credits? We need to re-mythologize the world! We need to re-weave the rainbow, re-haunt the air, re-gnome the mine! If the scientists have robbed us of trolls under bridges, we will replace them with Satanic cults in state capitols. If they take our soma, we will invent adrenochrome.

If I’m elected president, I plan to double down on this. I will spread rumors of griffons in the Rocky Mountains, allude to unspeakable things beneath the deserts of Nevada, and question whether the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a mystical portal to dream-realms beyond the setting sun. Not because any of these things are true. But because they are more than true. They’re what makes this country great. 

No, I have Not Done This. I Swear.

Today's interesting story from the world of publishing:

A fantasy debut author who had a two-book deal with Penguin Random House on Tuesday admitted to creating fake accounts on the website Goodreads to sabotage other novelists by leaving negative reviews.

The novelist, Cait Corrain, posted an admission and an apology on the social media platform X, citing a struggle with depression and substance abuse. In the note, Corrain said that this month, she had suffered a “psychological breakdown” and created around half a dozen fake accounts that left positive ratings on her upcoming novel and “bombed the ratings of several fellow debut authors.”

For this she was dropped by her agent, and her novel was withdrawn by the publisher.

Which led me to contemplate my own situation. I have, after all, posted several terrible reviews here, including some of recent fantasy fiction. But not to promote myself! I swear! I had no such intention!

Sometimes I just dislike books, and want to vent about them. Please, please don't ban me for it.

I am a good person!  I would never tear town others to raise up myself! I swear!

Unhelpful Tarot

Ace of Wands and The Devil

All you have is a blunt instrument, but that’s okay, because you’re pretty sure that everything you encounter can be dealt with by thumping it.

I just discovered a hilarious Tumblr, Unhelpful Tarot. Each post is just two cards with an amusing or absurd interpretation, like the ones above and below.

Two of Cups and Seven of Wands

You were so busy looking deeply into one another’s eyes that you completely missed the fight at the next table.

Choosing a Speaker

We should just have a lottery. If you lose you have to be Speaker.

–Representative Mike Collins (R-Georgia)

Farmers Praise their Gods

From one of the Songs of Inana and Dumuzi, the world's oldest body of love poetry, mostly spoken to the Goddess Inana by the young shepherd god Dumuzi. The odest texts date to around 2000 BC:

Maiden, colorful as a pile of grain, fit for the king,
Inana, colorful as a pile of grain, fit for Dumuzi!
Maiden, you are a shock of two-row barley, fully developed in loveliness,
Inana, you are a shock of two-row barley, fully developed in loveliness!

I mean, what could be more beautiful than a shock of two-row barley?

So Let's Suppose You're a Spy

So, you're a Chinese or Russian or Iranian spy, working like a dog to get little scraps of information about American military plans. And you go online today and discover that stuff beyond anything you thought you might ever find spent years sitting in crumbling cardboard boxes at Mar a Lago:

The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.

The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods. . . .

Even, like, in the bathroom. Which has a chandelier, for some reason.

And you missed it. Are you the greatest failure in the history of spying, or what? Are you kicking yourself up and down the street? What are your bosses going to say? How will you defend yourself? Will, "Who could ever imagine that the President of the United States would be such a doofus?" be a good enough excuse?

Of course maybe you did find it. In that case, did you tell your bosses that all you had to do was walk into the bathroom at Mar a Lago and open a box? Or did you invent a crazy story about your great inside sources and all the spycraft you had to use to contact them and arrange drops and all that spy stuff? I mean, who ever got promoted for walking into a bathroom and opening a box?

My Plan for a New Business as a Sensitivity Reviewer

According to one of my children who has spent time on web sites for writers, they are full of ads offering to pay people rather small amounts of money (often $50 or $100) to serve as "sensitivity reviewers" for book manuscripts.

I thought, what a way to make money! I could pose as a sensitivity reader with an expertise on every possible ethnic and gender situation. I could have a whole string of pseudonyns: Jay Whitewolf, Hector Gonzales, Ta-Nehisi Williams, Mahalia Brown, Susan Lepinski, Zephyr, Maddoger Bikerbabe, and an Appalachian sensitivity expert named Ripper T. Jackson.

I would do the reviews. I mean, I'm sure Google will tell me what the main red flags are. And I could be completely arbitrary as to whether I would just quibble about a couple of words or rip the whole thing to pieces for its plantation racist-neocolonial-transphobic-caveman sexist-suburban whitebread-out of touch Boomer attitudes.

And after I had duped people into paying me a few thousand dollars I could write an article for The New Yorker about the whole experience and what it says about America culture.

Foolproof!

How I Feel about Parties

The Investor

The mature young gentleman is a gentleman of property. He invests his property. He goes, in a condescending amateurish way, into the City, attends meetings of Directors, and has to do with traffic in Shares. As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares.  

– Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

And one more bit of this book:

Mr Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap’s opinion.

That's the thing with Dickens; the plots are mostly riduculous, and this one seems especially contrived and silly, but there's a line like that on almost every page.

Predictions for 2023

Civilization will endure, and life will go on for most people much like it did last year.

Andrew Tate will stop bragging about how many Bugattis he has and start bragging about how many lawyers he has.

Seventeen more superhero movies will be released, and I will not see any of them.

The Just Stop Oil people will escalate their protests until they succeed in damaging a major work of art, turning even more people against their cause.

By the end of the year fewer than 40% of Americans will remember who Kamala Harris is.

No progress will be made in undrestanding dark matter.

The Taliban will spring Andrew Tate from prison, and he will join them and become their spokesperson.

Donald Trump will not go to prison, and people will be mad about this.

Nobody will win the Ukraine war.

Online cancellation will become less powerful and threatening, and the thought police will respond by canceling even more people, until everyone has been canceled and it doesn't make any difference.

American politics will be ugly; British politics will be farcical; Russian politics will involve lots of people falling out of tall buildings.

No progress will be made in understanding how memories are stored in the brain.

I will attempt to read 32 fantasy or sci-fi novels, toss 27 away after the first chapter, finish three, and think one was worth reading.

The flat earth movement will fracture over whether the edge of the world is blocked by ice mountains or concealed by a corporate/government/Illuminati conspiracy. The ice mountains faction will further fracture over whether the ice mountains are threatened by global warming or global warming is a corporate/government/Illuminati conspiracy. 

By the end of the year, at least one Nigerian mega-church pastor will be richer than Elon Musk.

The return of the woolly mammoth will remain five years away.

American academic life will somehow get even worse.

AI will keep getting smarter, and people will not.

Others?

Gender Reveal

How History is Remembered

My family was just discussing British politics and we agreed that in a century Liz "Outlasted by a Lettuce" Truss will be like "Ethelred the Unready," completely unknown except for her amusing name.

The Woke Cult Comes to Idaho

I give you the best ad of the political season, "Woke Cult," from Idaho gubernatorial candidate Ammon Bundy.

The Father's Day Tribute

I was listening to rock radio yesterday when they played a set of songs "for all the dads out there," one of which was "Papa was a Rolling Stone." So, like, this one's for all the no good, never around, deadbeat, bigamizing dads out there; hey, it's your day, too!

Oh, the Eighteenth Century

From a review of a new biography of Alexander Pope in the 8 October 2021 TLS:

It still gets called the age of Enlightenment, but people could be defiantly unenlightened in early eighteenth-century England. Take Alexander Pope, the most celebrated poet of his day, not only in Britain but across Europe, admired for his witty heroic couplets and poised versification of fashionable intellectual and cultural matters. Pope was so furious when the publisher Edmund Curll insinuated he'd written a satirical "court eclogue" about a Tory duchess being overlooked for preferment that he met Curll for a drink at a tavern and slipped a noxious emetic into his glass of sack. The drug took predictable effect.

After Curll recovered, Pope published an invented account of Curll's gastric catastrophe, "A Full and True Account of a horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison, on the body of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller" (1716). Along with obligatory scenes involving the chamber pot, Pope fabricated a deathbed confession of Curll's dodgy, scandal-mongering publishing practices. Curll retaliated by encouraging a widespread smear campaign against Pope's new translation of the Iliad (1715-1720), which he branded Jacobite and Catholic, and commissioned pamphlets and essays that cruelly mocked Pope's physical disabilities. Undaunted, Pope published a follow-up "Further Account", plus a third pamphlet alleging that Curll had converted to Judaism and been circumcized, "out of an Extraordinary Desire of Lucre". The last pamphlet concludes with Mrs. Curll lamenting that her husband's foreskin is on display in a local coffee house.

The Ransomware Guys Realize they Hacked the Wrong Person

 Matt Levine:

Ahahahahahahaha hahahahahaha hahahahaha:

In October, the infamous ransomware gang known as Conti released thousands of files stolen from the UK jewelry store Graff.

Now, the hackers would like the world to know that they regret their decision, perhaps in part because they released files belonging to very powerful people. …

“We found that our sample data was not properly reviewed before being uploaded to the blog,” the hackers wrote in an announcement published on Thursday. “Conti guarantees that any information pertaining to members of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar families will be deleted without any exposure and review.”

“Our Team apologizes to His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman and any other members of the Royal Families whose names were mentioned in the publication for any inconvenience,” the hackers added.

Imagine being a big-time ransomware hacker, thinking that you’re pretty tough, fancying yourself a master criminal, giving yourself an intimidating online alias, maybe even being able, in certain circumstances, to call down violence on your enemies, and then realizing one day that you’d accidentally hacked a guy who had a journalist kidnapped, tortured to death and then dismembered with a bone saw for criticizing him.

They are adding new compliance procedures to make sure this won’t happen again:

The hackers also said that other than publishing the data on their site, they did not sell it or trade, and that from now on they will “implement a more rigid data review process for any future operations.”

We have talked before about the compliance function at ransomware firms. If you run a legal company, you have a compliance department to make sure that you don’t do anything illegal, or at least, if your company is really big, to keep the illegality within acceptable limits. If you run a criminal gang, you have concerns that are different in degree but directionally similar: Your whole business is doing illegal things, sure, but you don’t want to do too many things that are too illegal. You want to do crimes that make you money, but not crimes that get you shut down. You want to steal information from rich people and extort money from them. But not Mohammed bin Salman! Good lord!

Martin Shkreli, the Wu Tang Clan, and NFTs

You may remember that when he was riding high, "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli bought a unique album by the Wu Tang Clan for $2 million. When he was convicted of securities fraud the Feds seized it, among with a lot of other property, and they just sold it for an undisclosed sum:

Earlier today, the United States sold the sole copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” (the “Album”) which had previously been ordered to be forfeited as a substitute asset in connection with the approximately $7.4 million forfeiture money judgment (Forfeiture Money Judgment) entered against Shkreli at his March 2018 sentencing. Proceeds from the sale of the Album will be applied to satisfy the outstanding balance owed on the Forfeiture Money Judgment. The contract of sale contains a confidentiality provision that protects information relating to the buyer and price. …

At the time Shkreli purchased the Album in 2015, it was marketed as “both a work of art and an audio artifact.” The Album includes a hand-carved nickel-silver box as well as a leather-bound manuscript containing lyrics and a certificate of authenticity. The Album is subject to various restrictions, including those relating to the duplication of its sound recordings. In September 2017, just weeks after his conviction but before the district court-imposed forfeiture, Shkreli attempted to sell the Album through an on-line auction. 

Matt Levine thinks the Feds showed a real lack of imagination here:

Ehh I guess? I mean, fine, it’s a box and a book and an associated set of contractual provisions. I suppose if you are buying the thing you have to figure out whether you succeed to Shkreli’s contractual rights to prevent Wu-Tang from releasing more copies of the album; it’d be funny if someone paid the government a lot of money for this one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang album and then Wu-Tang just put it on Spotify. You’d still have the certificate of authenticity, though; no one else has that. Unless they type up their own. You’d have the only authentic certificate of authenticity.

Obviously the thing that Martin Shkreli bought from the Wu-Tang Clan was a non-fungible token? It was a non-fungible token rendered in paper and leather and nickel and silver rather than immutable blockchain code, but still. And then the government seized it and re-sold it, which is a thing it can do, but you can certainly imagine a more interesting deal? What if the government had securitized Martin Shkreli’s Wu-Tang album? Or what if it had sold a limited edition of 1,000 non-fungible tokens, each recorded on the blockchain, each accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Brooklyn, each representing “hey I bought an NFT of the time the U.S. government seized Martin Shkreli’s Wu-Tang album”? What if the government had held a press conference and said “crime does not pay, and we will destroy everything associated with this crime,” and then burned the Wu-Tang album on camera and then sold an NFT of that? What if I sold this section of this column as an NFT? What if someone filmed Martin Shkreli reading this paragraph and sold that as an NFT?

Do you remember when NFTs were a big deal? It was only like a couple of months ago.

The Internet

Could I interest you in everything, all of the time?
A little bit of everything, all of the time?
Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime.
Anything and everything, all of the time.

–Bo Burnham 

Topical

The Bear and the Bale of Straw

Who says bears have no fun?