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Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today: Art theory, starting with the idea that digital life has changed our relationship to attention generally. Bishop argues that most existing writing about attention “assumes a normative subject—privileged, white, straight, able-bodied, volitional—who confers his attention onto an exteriority thereby constituted as an object. For minoritarian subjects, the discourse of attention has little relevance because it is structurally difficult to occupy the position of attentiveness; historically, we have always been the objects of others’ attention.” Disruption as a way of getting attention to art: she points to the rise of the alt-right (and the history of Italian Futurism) to point out that disruption, shocking and transgressing, can be used by very different political groups. Very few of the actual artworks discussed spoke to me, but it was good to get a glimpse of what’s going on in other disciplines.
Renée DiResta, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality: Account of how we got to Elon Musk making his own reality, with the willing and enthusiastic participation of Americans as well as foreign actors interested in disrupting democracy. DiResta insists that we can’t just blame “the algorithm”—people make decisions to spread bad content. At the same time, foreign actors seized on actual conflicts and heightened them, posting both as Black women and conservative white men. As she explains, the goal of propaganda today is to activate a group of people that already believes what you want them to believe. Another workable tactic is to flood the zone—generate so many reports/theories that people give up on figuring out what’s true. This doesn’t just happen in the US; she and her colleagues identified 46 operations originating in the Middle East in a 3-year period, targeting multiple other countries.
Another example is the anti-vax movement’s exploitation of platforms. DiResta notes the longstanding “asymmetry of passion in health information”—millions of people get vaccinated and nothing happens. They don’t bother to post about their ordinary experiences. She’s against deplatforming disinformation sources—she thinks that there’s always a place for them to go, like Telegram, Rumble, and Substack, where they often regrow their audiences and become even more radical. At the same time, fact-checking doesn’t dissuade propagandists—they will “write around it, undermine its neutrality, or double down on whatever claim in the Gish gallop [name for a barrage of false claims that overwhelms the target] the target failed to address.” And responses don’t help people who are primed not to trust you. (Writing after the 2024 election, it seems to me that the best you can do is fight misinformation for people who are following the news; there’s no currently successful way to reach people who aren’t.)
DiResta argues persuasively that even though many brouhahas are often inscrutable to people who aren’t extremely online, they have changed the incentives for politicians who harness this energy to get elected, and they also enable massive harassment of ordinary people.
What is to be done? Very few hopeful suggestions here. DiResta suggests prioritizing disclosure of paid political and commercial placement, so audiences know when speakers have financial incentives. I think this might be because she’s spent less time with disclosures, which tend not to work very well for most people (after all, most people miss most information most of the time), than with takedowns. She also argues that governmental transparency about what takedown requests they’re making is good (though it’s hard to imagine that increasing trust—it mostly reveals authoritarian requests), and that big platforms should be required to share information with researchers—that last has been adopted in Europe, or at least they’re trying.
She wants more “humans in the loop” making content moderation decisions, as well as advocating that there shouldn’t be any wholly automated “trending” features because of the horrible stuff that gets surfaced that way. “Gaming [trending features] is a key element in creating majority illusions, projecting false consensus, and driving abuse toward Main Characters.” Still there’s a need for means of disseminating information quickly and widely, as with wildfire/hurricane info. Thus, she suggests human curation.
She’s also a fan of giving users “more control of what they see”—and as someone who hard-sets all my social media to datestamp order, I get it, but it’s evident that most of us aren’t like me most of the time and prefer algorithmic curation of “interesting” things, which is one reason TikTok has been so successful. But her suggestion is to do more Bluesky-like things, with community blocklists that people could choose from, allowing users to opt into “moderation approaches that align with their values.” I’m skeptical because most people don’t know what their content moderation values are.
What about when you’re the target of misinformation? She suggests that there are multiple groups involved: enemies who always believe the misinformation, the uninvolved/inattentive, allies who’ll support the target, and the hesitant “who don’t know what to think.” (Sounds a lot like the four children at the Seder.) The last group may matter the most—if they aren’t engaging, silence might help the misinformation die. But if they seem to be paying attention and sharing the rumor across their networks, you need to respond. Ideally, you will respond in a relevant way, using a messenger who can reach the relevant group. Unfortunately, she points out, big companies often succeed at this by suing for big bucks, like Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox—but most of us can’t do that. Another possible response: reframe the rumor and make it embarrassing to share—only suckers believe this. But this is getting harder as “norms have fractured along with reality.” Still, people do sometimes respond to learning that they’ve shared something demonstrably false with embarrassment and retraction. Another potentially effective strategy: explaining why people believe the rumors. “Prebunking” is a related strategy—explaining how and why propaganda works and illustrating tropes, to inoculate audiences. “No one likes to be manipulated, and prebunking taps into that inherently human desire to maintain autonomy.”
Based on her own experience being targeted for disinformation—partially successfully, as rightwingers got a lot of election integrity work shut down—she argues that there will be no waiting it out if you’re a sufficiently useful villain. “Once your institution or a team member, manager, or CEO is part of some conspiracy theorist’s monetized cinematic universe, he will always find a way to work that entity or person back into the story. Niche media are fully aware that you will not sue them because of the cost and time commitment involved in a defamation complaint; there is no cost or consequence for continuing to lie.” If—and only if—disinformation starts to spread outside an echo chamber, she advocates “rapid transparent responses.” Don’t fight in the mud, but get your own story out, not least so searchers can find your response easily. Monitor Wikipedia to keep it aligned with the truth. If you’re FOIA’d, “consider posting the documents preemptively yourself on an official website to prebunk the claims” or sharing them with a good-faith media outlet. “If you receive bad-faith media inquiries from recurringly dishonest outlets, consider posting the full email, along with your response, publicly on your site or sharing it to social media.” Talk to other victims of smear campaigns. Work with colleagues to promote messages—local election officials or doctors can talk to people in ways they’re familiar with. Those groups are used to one-on-one discussions, but need to be able to get the information out online—from the right messenger, which means multiple messengers.
Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture: Interesting account of how white and Black women thought about makeup/skin care from the late 1800s to the late 1900s (ugh). Not very deep on analysis, but I hadn’t thought before about how odd it is in the abstract that a culture went from “makeup means you’re a painted whore” to “a respectable woman uses lipstick and nail polish.”
Corinne E. Blackmer, Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism: The most engaging parts are responses to accusations of “pinkwashing”—that is, touting Israel’s LGBTQ rights regime, which is far better than that of all its neighbors (though only male/female marriages can be performed there; the state recognizes marriages performed elsewhere). Pro-Palestinian theorists have condemned references to Israeli LBGTQ rights—and to the deadly, homophobic laws and practices of Arab states—as distracting from Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Blackmer argues that this is wrong (though sometimes falls into her own whataboutism), since both should be priorities. Apparently Israeli security forces sometimes blackmail gay Palestinians into cooperation with threats of outing, which is particularly odious. Otherwise the book is a bit in the weeds of critiquing particular theorists.
Victoria Vantoch, The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon: Interesting but a bit repetitive/willing to make big causal claims about the role of stewardesses—a glamorous profession open to (attractive, thin, white) women through the 1950s-1970s. Probably most interesting to me was the discussion of the use of American stewardesses’ glamor/sexuality to contrast with Aeroflot stewardesses, who were not specifically required to meet appearance standards, which Americans presented as evidence of American superiority.
Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War: Super interesting history of the US and rebels’ attempts to get international support/fend off international support for the other. Both sides tried to leverage propaganda; the Confederates paid supporters more, while the Union learned to rely on Europeans with ideological sympathies. Lincoln’s initial attempts to frame the war as merely to preserve the Union, not to end slavery, substantially weakened the case for sympathy for the Union among the European liberals who wanted to oppose slavery. When that changed, European autocrats wanted to help the South, but internal politics—including the effects of Garibaldi’s support for liberation—made that difficult for long enough that the South lost before they could do so. (I had no idea the Pope had been so Confederate-friendly.) Also, European powers took the opportunity of the Civil War to ignore the Monroe Doctrine, despite Seward’s bellicose threats; only when the Confederates were put down did the European monarch foisted on Mexico get dethroned.
Tracy Campbell, The Year of Peril: America in 1942: A year of fear and uncertainty after Pearl Harbor, when Americans feared further attacks but weren’t yet prepared to go on the attack. The shift to wartime production led to substantial concerns with inflation, and domestic politics focused on things like price controls, whether full employment should be the policy after the war, and whether the New Deal social innovations would survive.
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America: Personal narrative interwoven with the history of identifying Natives—how the US whipsawed from trying to destroy tribes to protecting them, but only if they’d somehow survived the earlier devastation while retaining traditions, governance, a compact enough territory, and a tribal identification system. Not all tribes use a blood quantum definition to identify members, but those who do tend to face resource demands that force difficult decisions. Children of parents from two different tribes may lack the blood quantum necessary to allow them to be enrolled members of either, even though pan-Indian movements have made such relationships more common. And the history on which blood quantum determinations are made is corrupt: the censuses the author examines assign racial classifications apparently arbitrarily and changeably; one ancestor she discusses was given three different labels in three different decennial censuses. One key metric, the Dawes list, included full siblings whose claims to Indianness were treated differently. (The unsurprising constraint on arbitrariness: people who looked white were often allowed to claim Indianness, but people who looked Black were often not.) But the book is not about alternatives—there may not be good ones—it is rather about sitting in the contradictions of using descent to manage identity in the context of Native life.
Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies: With greatest detail about Rome and the Mayans, the core argument is that societies collapse because there is a declining marginal productivity of most things—the 1000th unit of food/energy/education etc. costs more to produce than the first and benefits society less. At a certain point, those costs aren’t worth bearing any more and the society goes to a much lower level of complexity, which means fewer differentiated roles, smaller geographic scope, and fewer people. Collapse may not be inevitable, but the declining marginal utility of investment means that complex societies are likely to use up their surpluses as they get bigger and more complex, unless they can sustain themselves by adding new resources, usually by conquest. And if there are noncollapsed neighbors, then those neighbors might simply absorb units at the edge, so it’s also relative. I didn’t think it did a great job of handling the role of innovation (the shift to coal involved more investment but also created a lot of new things that were more valuable).
Renée DiResta, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality: Account of how we got to Elon Musk making his own reality, with the willing and enthusiastic participation of Americans as well as foreign actors interested in disrupting democracy. DiResta insists that we can’t just blame “the algorithm”—people make decisions to spread bad content. At the same time, foreign actors seized on actual conflicts and heightened them, posting both as Black women and conservative white men. As she explains, the goal of propaganda today is to activate a group of people that already believes what you want them to believe. Another workable tactic is to flood the zone—generate so many reports/theories that people give up on figuring out what’s true. This doesn’t just happen in the US; she and her colleagues identified 46 operations originating in the Middle East in a 3-year period, targeting multiple other countries.
Another example is the anti-vax movement’s exploitation of platforms. DiResta notes the longstanding “asymmetry of passion in health information”—millions of people get vaccinated and nothing happens. They don’t bother to post about their ordinary experiences. She’s against deplatforming disinformation sources—she thinks that there’s always a place for them to go, like Telegram, Rumble, and Substack, where they often regrow their audiences and become even more radical. At the same time, fact-checking doesn’t dissuade propagandists—they will “write around it, undermine its neutrality, or double down on whatever claim in the Gish gallop [name for a barrage of false claims that overwhelms the target] the target failed to address.” And responses don’t help people who are primed not to trust you. (Writing after the 2024 election, it seems to me that the best you can do is fight misinformation for people who are following the news; there’s no currently successful way to reach people who aren’t.)
DiResta argues persuasively that even though many brouhahas are often inscrutable to people who aren’t extremely online, they have changed the incentives for politicians who harness this energy to get elected, and they also enable massive harassment of ordinary people.
What is to be done? Very few hopeful suggestions here. DiResta suggests prioritizing disclosure of paid political and commercial placement, so audiences know when speakers have financial incentives. I think this might be because she’s spent less time with disclosures, which tend not to work very well for most people (after all, most people miss most information most of the time), than with takedowns. She also argues that governmental transparency about what takedown requests they’re making is good (though it’s hard to imagine that increasing trust—it mostly reveals authoritarian requests), and that big platforms should be required to share information with researchers—that last has been adopted in Europe, or at least they’re trying.
She wants more “humans in the loop” making content moderation decisions, as well as advocating that there shouldn’t be any wholly automated “trending” features because of the horrible stuff that gets surfaced that way. “Gaming [trending features] is a key element in creating majority illusions, projecting false consensus, and driving abuse toward Main Characters.” Still there’s a need for means of disseminating information quickly and widely, as with wildfire/hurricane info. Thus, she suggests human curation.
She’s also a fan of giving users “more control of what they see”—and as someone who hard-sets all my social media to datestamp order, I get it, but it’s evident that most of us aren’t like me most of the time and prefer algorithmic curation of “interesting” things, which is one reason TikTok has been so successful. But her suggestion is to do more Bluesky-like things, with community blocklists that people could choose from, allowing users to opt into “moderation approaches that align with their values.” I’m skeptical because most people don’t know what their content moderation values are.
What about when you’re the target of misinformation? She suggests that there are multiple groups involved: enemies who always believe the misinformation, the uninvolved/inattentive, allies who’ll support the target, and the hesitant “who don’t know what to think.” (Sounds a lot like the four children at the Seder.) The last group may matter the most—if they aren’t engaging, silence might help the misinformation die. But if they seem to be paying attention and sharing the rumor across their networks, you need to respond. Ideally, you will respond in a relevant way, using a messenger who can reach the relevant group. Unfortunately, she points out, big companies often succeed at this by suing for big bucks, like Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox—but most of us can’t do that. Another possible response: reframe the rumor and make it embarrassing to share—only suckers believe this. But this is getting harder as “norms have fractured along with reality.” Still, people do sometimes respond to learning that they’ve shared something demonstrably false with embarrassment and retraction. Another potentially effective strategy: explaining why people believe the rumors. “Prebunking” is a related strategy—explaining how and why propaganda works and illustrating tropes, to inoculate audiences. “No one likes to be manipulated, and prebunking taps into that inherently human desire to maintain autonomy.”
Based on her own experience being targeted for disinformation—partially successfully, as rightwingers got a lot of election integrity work shut down—she argues that there will be no waiting it out if you’re a sufficiently useful villain. “Once your institution or a team member, manager, or CEO is part of some conspiracy theorist’s monetized cinematic universe, he will always find a way to work that entity or person back into the story. Niche media are fully aware that you will not sue them because of the cost and time commitment involved in a defamation complaint; there is no cost or consequence for continuing to lie.” If—and only if—disinformation starts to spread outside an echo chamber, she advocates “rapid transparent responses.” Don’t fight in the mud, but get your own story out, not least so searchers can find your response easily. Monitor Wikipedia to keep it aligned with the truth. If you’re FOIA’d, “consider posting the documents preemptively yourself on an official website to prebunk the claims” or sharing them with a good-faith media outlet. “If you receive bad-faith media inquiries from recurringly dishonest outlets, consider posting the full email, along with your response, publicly on your site or sharing it to social media.” Talk to other victims of smear campaigns. Work with colleagues to promote messages—local election officials or doctors can talk to people in ways they’re familiar with. Those groups are used to one-on-one discussions, but need to be able to get the information out online—from the right messenger, which means multiple messengers.
Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture: Interesting account of how white and Black women thought about makeup/skin care from the late 1800s to the late 1900s (ugh). Not very deep on analysis, but I hadn’t thought before about how odd it is in the abstract that a culture went from “makeup means you’re a painted whore” to “a respectable woman uses lipstick and nail polish.”
Corinne E. Blackmer, Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism: The most engaging parts are responses to accusations of “pinkwashing”—that is, touting Israel’s LGBTQ rights regime, which is far better than that of all its neighbors (though only male/female marriages can be performed there; the state recognizes marriages performed elsewhere). Pro-Palestinian theorists have condemned references to Israeli LBGTQ rights—and to the deadly, homophobic laws and practices of Arab states—as distracting from Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Blackmer argues that this is wrong (though sometimes falls into her own whataboutism), since both should be priorities. Apparently Israeli security forces sometimes blackmail gay Palestinians into cooperation with threats of outing, which is particularly odious. Otherwise the book is a bit in the weeds of critiquing particular theorists.
Victoria Vantoch, The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon: Interesting but a bit repetitive/willing to make big causal claims about the role of stewardesses—a glamorous profession open to (attractive, thin, white) women through the 1950s-1970s. Probably most interesting to me was the discussion of the use of American stewardesses’ glamor/sexuality to contrast with Aeroflot stewardesses, who were not specifically required to meet appearance standards, which Americans presented as evidence of American superiority.
Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War: Super interesting history of the US and rebels’ attempts to get international support/fend off international support for the other. Both sides tried to leverage propaganda; the Confederates paid supporters more, while the Union learned to rely on Europeans with ideological sympathies. Lincoln’s initial attempts to frame the war as merely to preserve the Union, not to end slavery, substantially weakened the case for sympathy for the Union among the European liberals who wanted to oppose slavery. When that changed, European autocrats wanted to help the South, but internal politics—including the effects of Garibaldi’s support for liberation—made that difficult for long enough that the South lost before they could do so. (I had no idea the Pope had been so Confederate-friendly.) Also, European powers took the opportunity of the Civil War to ignore the Monroe Doctrine, despite Seward’s bellicose threats; only when the Confederates were put down did the European monarch foisted on Mexico get dethroned.
Tracy Campbell, The Year of Peril: America in 1942: A year of fear and uncertainty after Pearl Harbor, when Americans feared further attacks but weren’t yet prepared to go on the attack. The shift to wartime production led to substantial concerns with inflation, and domestic politics focused on things like price controls, whether full employment should be the policy after the war, and whether the New Deal social innovations would survive.
Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America: Personal narrative interwoven with the history of identifying Natives—how the US whipsawed from trying to destroy tribes to protecting them, but only if they’d somehow survived the earlier devastation while retaining traditions, governance, a compact enough territory, and a tribal identification system. Not all tribes use a blood quantum definition to identify members, but those who do tend to face resource demands that force difficult decisions. Children of parents from two different tribes may lack the blood quantum necessary to allow them to be enrolled members of either, even though pan-Indian movements have made such relationships more common. And the history on which blood quantum determinations are made is corrupt: the censuses the author examines assign racial classifications apparently arbitrarily and changeably; one ancestor she discusses was given three different labels in three different decennial censuses. One key metric, the Dawes list, included full siblings whose claims to Indianness were treated differently. (The unsurprising constraint on arbitrariness: people who looked white were often allowed to claim Indianness, but people who looked Black were often not.) But the book is not about alternatives—there may not be good ones—it is rather about sitting in the contradictions of using descent to manage identity in the context of Native life.
Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies: With greatest detail about Rome and the Mayans, the core argument is that societies collapse because there is a declining marginal productivity of most things—the 1000th unit of food/energy/education etc. costs more to produce than the first and benefits society less. At a certain point, those costs aren’t worth bearing any more and the society goes to a much lower level of complexity, which means fewer differentiated roles, smaller geographic scope, and fewer people. Collapse may not be inevitable, but the declining marginal utility of investment means that complex societies are likely to use up their surpluses as they get bigger and more complex, unless they can sustain themselves by adding new resources, usually by conquest. And if there are noncollapsed neighbors, then those neighbors might simply absorb units at the edge, so it’s also relative. I didn’t think it did a great job of handling the role of innovation (the shift to coal involved more investment but also created a lot of new things that were more valuable).
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I've wondered about blood quantum
and the Schuettpelz looks like it's useful!
Thanks for these reviews.
From:
Re: I've wondered about blood quantum