There’s a Neal Stephenson Renaissance Going on Due to one Single Word
Metaverse. In case you’ve not heard of it, metaverse is the term that was coined by Stephenson in his dystopian novel “Snow Crash” to denote a virtual artificial world of corporate exploitation. In all its ironic glory the name, or a shortened version thereof, “Meta” was appropriated as a re-branding vehicle for that empire of corporate greed and exploitation… Facebook.
So then, what better backdrop for the new novel to launch, and with a potentially even more timely theme, could there be other than, namely, the looming destruction our planet faces due to climate change and excessive carbon emissions. Moreover, the lack of human cooperation needed to overcome greed and stupidity in order to resume ourselves.
If this particular perspective on a fictional, but perhaps, soon, all too real, set of circumstances, is not spot on, there is nevertheless a great need for these questions to be addressed.
After all it is ultimately the cooperation and consensus of the entire planet that will be necessary to find, and more importantly, implement a solution that will prevent armageddon.
Perhaps the newly intensified focus on the future – fantasies, but also concerns and disaster aversion planning, is just what is needed. Perhaps authors, artists, engineers and even an average citizen can begin today and find the thread of change in thinking, and ultimately, living that’s needed for all our survival.
From Bookshop.org:
One man – visionary billionaire restaurant chain magnate T. R. Schmidt, Ph.D. – has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as “elemental.” But will it work? And just as important, what are the consequences for the planet and all of humanity should it be applied?
Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, from the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas to the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert, Termination Shockbrings together a disparate group of characters from different cultures and continents who grapple with the real-life repercussions of global warming. Ultimately, it asks the question: Might the cure be worse than the disease?
Epic in scope while heartbreakingly human in perspective, Termination Shock sounds a clarion alarm, ponders potential solutions and dire risks, and wraps it all together in an exhilarating, witty, mind-expanding speculative adventure.
Facebook insists that mainstream news sites perform the best on its platform. But by other measures, sensationalist, partisan content reigns
In early November, Facebook published its Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report, the second in a series meant to rebut critics who said that its algorithms were boosting extremist and sensational content. The report declared that, among other things, the most popular informational content on Facebook came from sources like UNICEF, ABC News, or the CDC.
But data collected by The Markup suggests that, on the contrary, sensationalist news or viral content with little original reporting performs just as well as—and often better than—many mainstream sources when it comes to how often it’s seen by platform users.
Data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project shows that during the period from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2021, outlets like The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, and BuzzFeed’s viral content arm were among the top-viewed domains in our sample.
Citizen Browser is a national panel of paid Facebook users who automatically share their news feed data with The Markup.
To analyze the websites whose content performs the best on Facebook, we counted the total number of times that links from any domain appeared in our panelists’ news feeds—a metric known as “impressions”—over a three-month period (the same time covered by Facebook’s Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report). Facebook, by contrast, chose a different metric, calculating the “most-viewed” domains by tallying only the number of users who saw links, regardless of whether each user saw a link once or hundreds of times.
By our calculation, the top performing domains were those that surfaced in users’ feeds over and over—including some highly partisan, polarizing sites that effectively bombarded some Facebook users with content.
These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.
When presented with The Markup’s findings and asked whether its own report’s statistics might be misleading or incomplete, Ariana Anthony, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said in an emailed statement, “The focus of the Widely Viewed Content Report is to show the content that is seen by the most people on Facebook, not the content that is posted most frequently. That said, we will continue to refine and improve these reports as we engage with academics, civil society groups, and researchers to identify the parts of these reports they find most valuable, which metrics need more context, and how we can best support greater understanding of content distribution on Facebook moving forward.”
Anthony did not directly respond to questions from The Markup on whether the company would release data on the total number of link views or the content that was seen most frequently on the platform.
The Battle Over Data
There are many ways to measure popularity on Facebook, and each tells a different story about the platform and what kind of content its algorithms favor.
For years, the startup CrowdTangle’s “engagement” metric—essentially measuring a combination of how many likes, comments, and other interactions any domain’s posts garner—has been the most publicly visible way of measuring popularity. Facebook bought CrowdTangle in 2016 and, according to reporting in The New York Times, has since largely tried to downplay data showing that ultra-conservative commentators like The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro produce the most engaged-with content on the platform.
Shortly after the end of the second quarter of this year, Facebook came out with its first transparency report, framed in the introduction as a way to “provide clarity” on “the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter.” (More accurately, the Q2 report was the first publicly released transparency report, after a Q1 report was, The New York Times reported, suppressed for making the company look bad and only released later after details emerged.)
For the Q2 and Q3 reports, Facebook turned to a specific metric, known as “reach,” to quantify most-viewed domains. For any given domain, say youtube.com or twitter.com, reach represents the number of unique Facebook accounts that had at least one post containing a link to a tweet or a YouTube video in their news feeds during the quarter. On that basis, Facebook found that those domains, and other mainstream staples like Amazon, Spotify, and TikTok, had wide reach.
When applying this metric, The Markup found similar results in our Citizen Browser data, as detailed in depth in our methodology. But this calculation ignores a reality for a lot of Facebook users: bombardment with content from the same site.
Citizen Browser data shows, for instance, that from July through September of this year, articles from far-right news site Newsmax appeared in the feed of a 58-year-old woman in New Mexico 1,065 times—but under Facebook’s calculation of reach, this would count as one single unit. Similarly, a 37-year-old man in New Hampshire was shown 245 unique links to satirical posts from The Onion, which appeared in his feed more than 500 times—but again, he would have been counted just once by Facebook’s method.
When The Markup instead counted each appearance of a domain on a user’s feed during Q3—e.g., Newsmax as 1,065 instead of 1—we found that polarizing, partisan content jumped in the performance rankings. Indeed, the same trend is true of the domains in Facebook’s Q2 report, for which analysis can be found in our data repository on GitHub.
We found that outlets like The Daily Wire, BuzzFeed’s viral content arm, Fox News, and Yahoo News jumped in the popularity rankings when we used the impressions metric. Most striking, The Western Journal—which, similarly to The Daily Wire, does little original reporting and instead repackages stories to fit with right-wing narratives—improved its ranking by almost 200 places.
“To me these findings raise a number of questions,” said Jane Lytvynenko, senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center.
“Was Facebook’s research genuine, or was it part of an attempt to change the narrative around top 10 lists that were previously put out? It matters a lot whether a person sees a link one time or if they see it 20 times, and to not account for that in a report, to me, is misleading,” Lytvynenko said.
Using a narrow range of data to gauge popularity is suspect, said Alixandra Barasch, associate professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
“It just goes against everything we teach and know about advertising to focus on one [metric] rather than the other,” she said.
In fact, when it comes to the core business model of selling space to advertisers, Facebook encourages them to consider yet another metric, “frequency”—how many times to show a post to each user on average—when trying to optimize brand messaging.
Data from Citizen Browser shows that domains seen with high frequency in the Facebook news feed are mostly news domains, since news websites tend to publish multiple articles over the course of a day or week. But Facebook’s own content report does not take this data into account.
“[This] clarifies the point that what we need is independent access for researchers to check the math,” said Justin Hendrix, co-author of a report on social media and polarization and editor at Tech Policy Press, after reviewing The Markup’s data.
Promising content continues to go live each week in 2021
Netflix announced earlier this year, they will be rolling out some major content each week and will premier a brand new movie every week of 2021. With the upcoming price hike for another $1 for the standard account and $2 for the premium subscription, it seems like the streaming platform is giving viewers a bang for their buck..
New movie releases will have all the various genres covered! (action, sequels, dramas, musicals and more). Below are the movie releases for January, 29, 2021.
This British, period piece, based on real life events, casts Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan and Lily James. The movies tells the story: on the eve of World World II, a British widow hires a self-taught archaeologist and embarks on the historically important excavation of Sutton Hoo in 1938. Digging up a mysterious formation on her land, leads to a staggering find.
Below Zero / January 29
A Spanish gritty action thriller movie (Bajocero) that has English voice-over features is set when a prisoner transfer van is attacked. The cop, Martin, who is in charge must fight those inside and outside while dealing with a silent foe: surviving the icy temperatures.
For a lot of us, the New Year kicks off by creating resolutions of things we hope to change
In the past, I have unconsciously set myself up for failure whenever forming resolutions. The unrealistic rhetoric of “New Year, New Me”, got me thinking that the way I was setting my resolutions, was almost automatically leading me down the same path, one that would be extremely short lived and make me feel bad that I couldn’t “change” and ultimately fail.
This year instead of trying to give myself over-reaching and vague goals like “lose weight”, or “try a diet plan” or “join a gym” ( which is a precarious decision right now anyways) I decided to do it differently.
Again, for me, in the many years I’ve pledged in the past, to aim for these types of resolutions, I’ve have almost always petered out. The focus and effort only lasted for a very short period, sometimes less than a month.
Setting up these absurdly, overly ambitious and wholly unrealistic goals, it’s no wonder that almost no kind of transformation or shift in my behavior ever actually happened.
With all the craziness of 2020, and the continuing rocky start in 2021, I wanted to do something a little different. Instead of a resolution or straight-up decision to change, I decided to instead focus on creating healthy and positive intentions and goals.
How to narrow focus, yet open up to the idea of what success actually looks like
After the pandemic and all the stressors that came alongside it (physical, emotional, financial) putting another unnecessary stressor, such as desperately wanting to get down to my high school weight seemed wrong.
I consider myself a generally healthy person that “sometimes” works out, though with covid-19, the workouts have been more sporadic and inconsistent. This year, I wanted to make healthy goals, in the form of a realistic resolution, while also holding myself accountable in ways I could actually attain.
I wanted my resolution to encompass something physical while also trying to get better with my followthrough ( I’m very much a “phase” person).
I decided I wanted to have run 1,000 miles by the end 2021.
Having a specific number, like 1,000, I would be able to better breakdown and track myself and monitor my progress. I also by thinking number itself as a concrete thought, or writing it out to solidify the idea, can help to engender a stronger commitment.
Looking at that number, 1,000, I knew it was a high number, but when broken down, I knew it could easily be achieved. I just did some simple math. There are 365 days in a year if you divide that by my goal of 1000 miles that’s only a little bit less than 3 miles a day (2.73).
While 3 miles is not a lot for a “runner”, it certainly is do-able for me and would not take more than an hour a day. On days where I have full energy, I am able to run a mile in about 10 minutes, although sometimes I’m not in the mood to run and I walk which then takes double that. Still either method would count toward the distance goal and is definitely possible to achieve.
It’s both the challenge to improve and the satisfaction of meeting a goal of my very own that drives me forward
With this concept in mind, the design of my resolution, and how to reach it, gives a little more flexibility. If I don’t feel good for example or have a crazy busy day, and take a day off, there might be “make-up-days” where I’m going to run 6 miles. I think having more than 2 off days (meaning I would have to be responsible for 9 miles) would put me on check not to get too far behind.
I think it’s important to be gentle with yourself when putting forth energy into something new and positive for yourself. There are always and understandably going to be “fails” and bumps that get in the way. Yet if you are able to not get down on yourself, these fails can be opportunities to learn about yourself and even turn into internal motivators to keep going.
My hope in that I can achieve my goal. I’m optimistic because I’ve purposely made the resolution (intention, goal, etc) based on something that I already do (exercise). Instead of trying to achieve something that is not even in my wheel-house, like win first place in a triathlon.
Why? Because I think it’s important to find reasons to be proud of yourself. Last year was really rough, yet many of us have survived, so while this year is starting out rough for many, I feel that, for me, a resolution focusing on something under my personal control is a way to start 2021 to be better. In short it’s privately optimistic beginning that hopefully leads to a much better outcome as the new year unfolds.
