onfocus

I took a little break from compiling links but the web did not take a break from creating them. So I bring you a new consternation of think pieces. (Pretty sure that's the collective.) No algorithms were knowingly used in collecting these links.

Corruption

• Donald Trump: Corrupt AF
• @JoltedToad: Trump Foundation admits to violating federal law by using funds to support campaign...
• NY Times: Donald Trump's Caldron of Conflicts
• LA Times: How Trump could use the presidency to help his own business interests

Media

• Fascism and The Historical Irony of Facebook’s “Fake News” Problem
• Pando: Why has Facebook changed its mind on fake news? Thank the Germans
• ProPublica: How Journalists Need to Begin Imagining the Unimaginable
• I can’t just stand by and watch Mark Zuckerberg destroy the internet.

Hail Mary

• Jill Stein: Election Integrity depends on YOU!
• The Guardian: Jill Stein requests Wisconsin recount, alleging hackers filed bogus absentee ballots
• CBS Philly: An Audit Of Pennsylvania Election Results? Already Underway
• Bruce Schneier: Hacking and the 2016 Presidential Election
• Washington Post: Electoral College must reject Trump unless he sells his business...

Practicing Cryptography

• A practical guide to securing macOS
• Decent Security on router configuration

Tech

• flarum: Delightfully simple forum software.
• trigger-happy (open source IFTTT clone in progress)
• Paul Ford: Get Me Central! (A quick explainer)
• Everything you ever wanted to know about building a secure password reset feature

Extra

• @jbushnell: I took a look at the Professor Watchlist so you don't have to...
• Washington Post: Americans keep looking away from the election’s most alarming story
• On Bullshit and the Oath of Office: The "LOL Nothing Matters" Presidency
• Kottke: Five Steps to Tyranny
• Inspirational Images: 1, 2, 3, 4

Once again, LOL. (Lots of links.) If you only read one link from this pile, make it Alex Steffen's The Politics of Optimism. It's easy for me to get bogged down in the news of the world and withdraw. This helped. It reminded me of my favorite Chomsky quote that I should just have tacked up on my monitor:

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.

And now, this:

Action

• We're His Problem Now (weekly call to action spreadsheet)
• @hels on action focus
• @mulegirl on repetition
• Comic: How to Call Your Reps When You Have Social Anxiety
• Artblock (when you're blocked... via @scottandrew)

Corruption

• US Law: Bribery, Graft, and Conflicts of Interest (via @mathowie)
• ThinkProgress: Trump poised to violate Constitution his first day in office...
• Washington Post: For foreign diplomats, Trump hotel is place to be
• Wall Street Journal to PEOTUS: Liquidate

Media

• Dan Gillmor: Facebook, Google, Twitter et al need to be champions for media literacy (@dangillmor is an essential daily read)
• EFF: Tech Companies, Fix These Technical Issues Before It’s Too Late
• Vox: Don’t let Donald Trump’s antics distract you from what’s really important
• Rough Type: Meet the new gatekeeper, worse than the old gatekeeper

Hail Mary

• USA Today: Still time for an election audit
• Time: The Electoral College Was Created to Stop Demagogues Like Trump

History

• Richard Florida reading list (via @timoreilly)
• The President and the bomb (via @jdhamblin)
• Waxy: Teaching good manners to soldiers in the 1940s
• Jacobin: Vengeance Is Mine (I hate reading election post-mortems, but this has some good looking-forward in it too)

Extra Extra

• To get it done, write it down (mathowie talks with the original lifehackers)
• You Are Not Paid to Write Code ("...code is a nasty byproduct of being a software engineer.")

Friday links are really happening on Friday this time. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad.

Denormalization

• Joshua Foust: The Abnormal Presidency
• Matthew Yglesias: We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institutions
• Sarah Kendzior: We're heading into dark times
• Bertrand Russell: Letter to a fascist

Filter Bubbles

• Jeff Jarvis: A Call for Cooperation Against Fake News
• Christina Xu: Watching the Election from The Post-Truth Future
• @AthertonKD: the loop

(thanks, @rustyk5.)

Hail Mary

• #HamiltonElectors

Politics

• Overton Window
• Anti-democratic thought
• Age of Enlightenment

Global Extra

• Foreign Affairs: Global Trumpism
• ZDNet: Britain has passed the 'most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy'
• Aodhán O'Riordáin: Senator launches stinging attack...

Tech Stuff

• SQL Server running on Linux? It happened.
• Skyliner (new AWS automation service)
• Firefox Focus (more secure iOS browser)

The soundtrack for these links is Adrian Holovaty's awesome rendtion of For No One:

Yet another round of hand-picked links from the link mill.

Normalization

• Joshua Foust: This Is Not Normal
• NYT Magazine: A Time for Refusal
• Vox: The Rise of American Authoritarianism (March 2016)

This is a fitting update by @hbons. Though it can't hurt to take another look at the original this is fine and the 2016 update: this is fine.

Filter Bubbles

• Asha Dornfest: This is what happens when we stop paying for quality journalism
• Paul Ford: Facebook, 2016
• Buzzfeed: This Is How Facebook Is Radicalizing You
• MTV: Shirtless Trump Saves Drowning Kitten (Confusion is an authoritarian tool)

Extra Extra

• Wyden Introduces National Vote by Mail Act
• Dem introducing bill to abolish Electoral College
• Rebecca Solnit: How to Survive a Disaster (her Hope in the Dark is free right now)

Tech Stuff

• Securing Your Digital Life Like a Normal Person
• Visual Studio for Mac (ms on a roll?)
• Kill the newsletter! (go RSS, but run this on your own server)

The links are coming in too fast to wait until Friday.

Practicing Cryptography

• Signal (I use it)
• EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
• How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour (+ mefi discussion)
• Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration (beyond the basics)

Normalization

• What Normalization Means
• @RojaBandari on life in a dictatorship
• @igorvolsky on normalization

Filter Bubbles

• Tim O'Reilly: Media in the Age of Algorithms
• Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash
• Fake News Does Better on Facebook Than Real News

Hail Mary

• On "faithless" (but democratically faithful) electors
• Flip The 37
• Texas elector threatens not to vote Trump

Extra Extra

• jessamyn on Librarian Resistance
• @editoremilye on how to talk to your member of congress (calling is best)
• alternate support structures

Friday link dirge. My self-prescribed media fast is not going well. If for some reason you're able to keep up with your own river of information and need more, here are some links that stood out to me this week.

• Autocracy: Rules for Survival
• @leahmcelrath on the road ahead
• @sarahkindzior on the road ahead
• The biggest threat to democracy? Your social media feed
• The 'Filter Bubble' Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t See It Coming
• The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse
• Silicon Valley Is Worried That Trump Is Going To Grab Them By The Data
• Petition: Appoint Garland Now (Senate Has Waived Its Rights)
• Reid Statement on the Election of Donald Trump
• Tim O'Reilly: How We Fight
• Elizabeth Warren: President-Elect Donald Trump
• Mike Monteiro: Let Us Now Praise Ordinary People

RIP Leonard Cohen, thank you.

ugh.

You know, we have a strong history of opposing authoritarianism. I'd like to believe that opposition is like an immune system response that kicks in.

In 1995 Umberto Eco tried to put together a description of Fascism that basically has a listicle in the middle. It might as well be called You Won't Believe these 14 Elements of Fascism. He called it, Ur-Fascism. It's hard to click and read a dry article about political theory from an Italian semiotician, so here are the highlights of Eco's Ur-Fascism:

1. cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. action for action's sake
4. disagreement is treason
5. fear of difference
6. appeal to a frustrated middle class
7. obsession with a plot
8. enemies are portrayed as both too strong and too weak
9. pacifism is trafficking with the enemy
10. contempt for the weak
11. everybody is educated to become a hero
12. machismo via weapons
13. selective populism
14. use of an impoverished vocabulary

When you see these elements all working together, you can put a name to it and make decisions from there. It's not just Eco who has worked to help us recognize this pattern. One of the reasons everyone reads 1984 in school is because it's something we need to be prepared to work against. One of the reasons we all sang This Land is Your Land is because we need it to help keep us on track.

In 2004 I collected some of my favorite books about the media: Guerilla Media Literacy List. I still think that's a great list and I plan to revisit some of those books now. (I might add Aristotle's Poetics to that list if I wrote it today.) I think we have a lot of art and literature we can turn to that helps us prepare for living with a more authoritarian system. We still have to do the work. But we can start to get our immune system prepared.