city:san francisco

Harvard Calls for Retraction of Dozens of Studies by Noted Cardiologist - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/health/piero-anversa-fraud-retractions.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/15/science/15RETRACTIONS1/15FRAUD1-facebookJumbo.jpg

A prominent cardiologist formerly at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston fabricated or falsified data in 31 published studies that should be retracted, officials at the institutions have concluded.

The cardiologist, Dr. Piero Anversa, produced research suggesting that damaged heart muscle could be regenerated with stem cells, a type of cell that can transform itself into a variety of other cells.

Although other laboratories could not reproduce his findings, the work led to the formation of start-up companies to develop new treatments for heart attacks and stroke, and inspired a clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health.

“A couple of papers may be alarming, but 31 additional papers in question is almost unheard-of,” said Benoit Bruneau, associate director of cardiovascular research at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. “It is a lab’s almost entire body of work, and therefore almost an entire field of research, put into question.”

#Fraude_scientifique #Conflits_intérêt #Science

This Is Not an Atlas. A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies

This Is Not an Atlas gathers more than 40 counter-cartographies from all over the world. This collection shows how maps are created and transformed as a part of political struggle, for critical research or in art and education: from indigenous territories in the Amazon to the anti-eviction movement in San Francisco; from defending commons in Mexico to mapping refugee camps with balloons in Lebanon; from slums in Nairobi to squats in Berlin; from supporting communities in the Philippines to reporting sexual harassment in Cairo. This Is Not an Atlas seeks to inspire, to document the underrepresented, and to be a useful companion when becoming a counter-cartographer yourself.

https://www.transcript-verlag.de/media/image/ae/4b/99/9783837645194gYL3TsTUxo1A1_600x600@2x.jpg

#atlas (ou pas) #livre #cartographie #contre-cartographie
cc @reka @fil

What Public Life Used to Look Like in San Francisco’s Mission District | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/what-public-life-used-to-look-like-in-san-franciscos-mission-district

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5bbcd4da778dc02d3cd4c9c0/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/heller-delaney10.jpg

Fabuleuses photos de The Mission à San Francisco

The photographer Janet Delaney first came to San Francisco in 1967, for the Summer of Love. By the time she began living in the Mission, in the nineteen-eighties, she had learned Spanish and trained herself to recognize moments of quiet revelation in the streets. “I’ve always seen San Francisco as a small place where big things happen,” she says. “There’s a kind of freedom in being on the West Coast, as if your parents aren’t around.” She was an interloper in the Mission, not having been raised there. And yet, like many new arrivals, she found her place—and her subject—by studying the people for whom it was home.

The area was busy and fast-moving then, with domestic culture spilling out onto the public turf. Photographing life in the streets was fluid and spontaneous work—“like shooting from the solar plexus,” Delaney says—and often it was unclear what she had until she got back to her darkroom. In this way, she was capturing, not composing; gathering, not trying to bear out a story. In time, though, a story did form in her photographs, much as a drift grows from accumulated flakes of snow. The story was about the inflow of culture that kept a pluralistic district alive—and the way that this flow drove life into the local streets, and then beyond them, toward a bigger world.

#San_Francisco #The_Mission #Photographies

What’s so bad about assimilation? -

Lucy Aharish and Tzachi Halevy may actually spawn a much more moral and civilized race than the one that has arisen here so far

Gideon Levy
Oct 13, 2018 1

▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-what-s-so-bad-about-assimilation-1.6552472

The fear of assimilation is something we’ve all imbibed with our mothers’ milk. Annihilation, destruction, Auschwitz, something like that. Even as proud Israelis with our own country and army, many among us were afraid to enter a church. Long before the latest wave of religious coercion while we were still fearfully kissing bibles that had fallen on the floor, we the children of the false secularism of Tel Aviv would sometimes play with fire: We’d cross ourselves, sort of as a joke. It was a test of courage and test of fate, no less than jumping from a roof or touching the flame of a burning candle.
On Jaffa’s Yefet Street there’s a threatening school, and we were told it belonged to the “Missionaries.” Missionaries then sounded like the Gestapo. Whenever we’d walk pass it, even when we were already a little older, we would fearfully ponder what was going on within its walls. There was a rumor that a child from our school went there and was never heard from again. We never forgave. We suspected his parents of being Christians. It really frightened us.
That’s how we grew up, the first generation of the rebirth of the Jewish state – that’s how they brainwashed us with fear. We were never taught a single word of the New Testament. Impurity. “The Narrow Path: The Man from Nazareth” by Aaron Abraham Kabak was the only sliver of information we got about Jesus in the secular, liberal, official school curriculum, long before the advent of Naftali Bennett. We of course heard nothing at all about Islam or the Koran. When Arela (Rela), the daughter of a close friend of my mother’s and a cousin of Benjamin Netanyahu’s, married Donny in San Francisco, we said, it’s not so bad, Donny is nice despite his being a gentile. That’s the way we were.

>> ’She seduced a Jew’: Lawmaker bemoans wedding of Fauda star to Israeli Arab TV anchor
We’ve grown up since then and gotten more powerful. Israeliness took root in the country, the world went global, and weddings with gentiles become more common and less threatening at least among a substantial minority of liberals. But the national narrative stayed the same: Mixed marriages are an existential threat, assimilation means destruction. We don’t need an excoriating Oren Hazan to understand how deeply rooted this narrative remains in the Jewish Israeli experience. Ask almost any parent, including most of those who regard themselves as enlightened and secular, and they’ll reply that they’d “prefer” that their son marry a Jewish woman. Why, for God’s sake?
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The opposition to assimilation is racist and purely nationalistic. Again it’s the superior and pure Jewish blood that mustn’t be mixed, heaven forbid, with any Christian, Muslim or other impurity. After a long history living as a minority under threat, the people can’t shake that survival instinct. But let’s advance on step and ask: What for?
The state of Israel is the embodiment of Judaism and its values. Here the Jews are a majority, they’re the sovereign, there’s nothing to stop them from achieving their wishes.
If Israel were a model society or moral country, we could understand the need for the struggle against assimilation for the sake of preserving lofty values. But look at the disaster: Gentile Canada has in the past year absorbed some 3,000 Eritrean asylum seekers fleeing Israel where they were shamefully rejected. Netta Ahituv recently described with what humanity the unchosen country has treated them, and what memories they have of the Chosen Land (Haaretz, September 21). That’s just one example.
Is the struggle against assimilation a struggle to preserve Jewish values as they’ve been realized in Israel? If so, then it would be best to abandon that battle. The gefilte fish and hreime (spicy sauce), the bible, religion and heritage, can be preserved in mixed marriages as well. While Western countries are becoming multi-cultural and mixed marriages routine, here we fight against any mixing. We view it as an existential threat, with one of the ministers even threatening the children of mixed unions.
The Jewish state has already crystallized an identity, which can only be enriched by assimilation, which is a normal, healthy process. Lucy Aharish and Tzachi Halevy may actually spawn a much more moral and civilized race than the one that has arisen here so far.

The mad, twisted tale of the electric scooter craze
▻https://www.cnet.com/news/the-mad-tale-of-the-electric-scooter-craze-with-bird-lime-and-spin-in-san-fran

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Dara Kerr/CNET

For weeks, I’d been seeing trashed electric scooters on the streets of San Francisco. So I asked a group of friends if any of them had seen people vandalizing the dockless vehicles since they were scattered across the city a couple of months ago.

The answer was an emphatic “yes.”

One friend saw a guy walking down the street kicking over every scooter he came across. Another saw a rider pull up to a curb as the handlebars and headset became fully detached. My friend figures someone had messed with the screws or cabling so the scooter would come apart on purpose.

A scroll through Reddit, Instagram and Twitter showed me photos of scooters — owned by Bird, Lime and Spin — smeared in feces, hanging from trees, hefted into trashcans and tossed into the San Francisco Bay.

It’s no wonder Lime scooters’ alarm isn’t just a loud beep, but a narc-like battle cry that literally says, “Unlock me to ride, or I’ll call the police.”

San Francisco’s scooter phenomenon has taken on many names: Scootergeddon, Scooterpocalypse and Scooter Wars. It all started when the three companies spread hundreds of their dockless, rentable e-scooters across city the same week at the end of March — without any warning to local residents or lawmakers.

Almost instantly, first-time riders began zooming down sidewalks at 15 mph, swerving between pedestrians and ringing the small bells attached to the handlebars. And they left the vehicles wherever they felt like it: scooters cluttered walkways and storefronts, jammed up bike lanes, and blocked bike racks and wheelchair accesses.

The three companies all say they’re solving a “last-mile” transportation problem, giving commuters an easy and convenient way to zip around the city while helping ease road congestion and smog. They call it the latest in a long line of disruptive businesses that aim to change the way we live.

The scooters have definitely changed how some people live.

I learned the Wild West looks friendly compared to scooter land. In San Francisco’s world of these motorized vehicles, there’s backstabbing, tweaker chop shops and intent to harm.

“The angry people, they were angry,” says Michael Ghadieh, who owns electric bicycle shop, SF Wheels, and has repaired hundreds of the scooters. “People cut cables, flatten tires, they were thrown in the Bay. Someone was out there physically damaging these things.”

Yikes! Clipped brakes

SF Wheels is located on a quaint street in a quintessential San Francisco neighborhood. Called Cole Valley, the area is lined with Victorian homes, upscale cafes and views of the city’s famous Mount Sutro. SF Wheels sells and rents electric bicycles for $20 per hour, mostly to tourists who want to see Golden Gate Park on two wheels.

In March, one of the scooter companies called Ghadieh to tell him they were about to launch in the city and were looking for people to help with repairs. Ghadieh said he was game. He wouldn’t disclose the name of the company because of agreements he signed.

Now he admits he didn’t quite know what he was getting into.

Days after the scooter startups dropped their vehicles on an unsuspecting San Francisco, SF Wheels became so crammed with broken scooters that it was hard to walk through the small, tidy shop. Scooters lined the sidewalk outside, filled the doorway and crowded the mechanic’s workspace. The backyard had a heap of scooters nearly six-feet tall, Ghadieh told me.

His bike techs were so busy that Ghadieh had to hire three more mechanics. SF Wheels was fixing 75 to 100 scooters per day. Ghadieh didn’t say how much the shop was making per scooter fix.

“The repairs were fast and easy on some and longer on others,” Ghadieh said. “It’d depend on whether it was wear-and-tear or whether it was physically damaged by someone out there, some madman.”

Some of the scooters, which cost around $500 off the shelf, came in completely vandalized — everything from chopped wires for the controller (aka the brain) to detached handlebars to bent forks. Several even showed up with clipped brake cables.

I asked Ghadieh if the scooters still work without brakes.

“It will work, yes,” he said. “It will go forward, but you just cannot stop. Whoever is causing that is making the situation dangerous for some riders.”

Especially in a city with lots of hills.

Ghadieh said his crew worked diligently for about six weeks, repairing an estimated 1,000 scooters. But then, about three weeks ago, work dried up. Ghadieh had to lay off the mechanics he’d hired and his shop is back to focusing on electric bicycles.

“Now, there’s literally nothing,” he said. “There’s a change of face with the company. I’m not exactly sure what happened. … They decided to do it differently.”

The likely change? The electric scooter company probably decided to outsource repairs to gig workers, rather than rely on agreements with shops.

That’s gig as in freelancers looking to pick up part-time work, like Uber and Lyft drivers. And like Nick Abouzeid. By day, Abouzeid works in marketing for the startup AngelList. A few weeks ago, he got an email from Bird inviting him to be a scooter mechanic. The message told Abouzeid he could earn $20 for each scooter repair, once he’d completed an online training. He signed up, took the classes and is ready to start.

“These scooters aren’t complicated. They’re cheap scooters from China,” Abouzeid said. “The repairs are anything from adjusting a brake to fixing a flat tire to adding stickers that have fallen off a Bird.”

Bird declined to comment specifically on its maintenance program, but its spokesman Kenneth Baer did say, “Bird has a network of trained chargers and mechanics who operate as independent contractors.”

All of Lime’s mechanics, on the other hand, are part of the company’s operations and maintenance team that repairs the scooters and ensures they’re safe for riders. Spin uses a mix of gig workers and contract mechanics, like what Ghadieh was doing.
Gaming the system

Electric scooters are, well, electric. That means they need to be plugged into an outlet for four to five hours before they can transport people, who rent them for $1 plus 15 cents for every minute of riding time.

Bird, Spin and Lime all partially rely on gig workers to keep their fleets juiced up.

Each company has a different app that shows scooters with low or dead batteries. Anyone with a driver’s license and car can sign up for the app and become a charger. These drivers roam the streets, picking up scooters and taking them home to be charged.
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“It creates this amazing kind of gig economy,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden, who is a former Uber and Lyft executive, told me in April. “It’s kind of like a game of Pokemon Go for them, where they go around and try to find and gobble up as many Birds as they can.”

Theoretically, all scooters are supposed to be off city streets by nightfall when it’s illegal to ride them. That’s when the chargers are unleashed. To get paid, they have to get the vehicles back out on the street in specified locations before 7 a.m. the next day. Bird supplies the charging cables — only three at a time, but those who’ve been in the business longer can get more cables.

“I don’t know the fascination with all of these companies using gig workers to charge and repair,” said Harry Campbell, who runs a popular gig worker blog called The Rideshare Guy. “But they’re all in, they’re all doing it.”

One of the reasons some companies use gig workers is to avoid costs like extra labor, gasoline and electricity. Bird, Spin and Lime have managed to convince investors they’re onto something. Between the three of them they’ve raised $255 million in funding. Bird is rumored to be raising another $150 million from one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, Sequoia, which could put the company’s value at $1 billion. That’s a lot for an electric scooter disruptor.

Lime pays $12 to charge each scooter and Spin pays $5; both companies also deploy their own operations teams for charging. Bird has a somewhat different system. It pays anywhere from $5 to $25 to charge its scooters, depending on the city and the location of the dead scooter. The harder the vehicle is to find and the longer it’s been off the radar, the higher the “bounty.”

Abouzeid, who’s moonlighted as a Bird charger for the past two months, said he’s only found a $25 scooter once.

“With the $25 ones, they’re like, ’Hey, we think it’s in this location, it’s got 0 percent battery, good luck,’” he said.

But some chargers have devised a way to game the system. They call it hoarding.

“They’ll literally go around picking up Birds and putting them in the back of their car,” Campbell said. “And then they wait until the bounties on them go up and up and up.”

Bird has gotten wise to these tactics. It sent an email to all chargers last week warning them that if it sniffs out this kind of activity, those hoarders will be barred from the app.

“We feel like this is a big step forward in fixing some of the most painful issues we’ve been hearing,” Bird wrote in the email, which was seen by CNET.

Tweaker chop shops

Hoarding and vandalism aren’t the only problems for electric scooter companies. There’s also theft. While the vehicles have GPS tracking, once the battery fully dies they go off the app’s map.

“Every homeless person has like three scooters now,” Ghadieh said. “They take the brains out, the logos off and they literally hotwire it.”
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I’ve seen scooters stashed at tent cities around San Francisco. Photos of people extracting the batteries have been posted on Twitter and Reddit. Rumor has it the batteries have a resale price of about $50 on the street, but there doesn’t appear to be a huge market for them on eBay or Craigslist, according to my quick survey.

Bird, Lime and Spin all said trashed and stolen scooters aren’t as big a problem as you’d think. When the companies launch in a new city, they said they tend to see higher theft and vandalism rates but then that calms down.

“We have received a few reports of theft and vandalism, but that’s the nature of the business,” said Spin co-founder and President Euwyn Poon. “When you have a product that’s available for public consumption, you account for that.”

Dockless, rentable scooters are now taking over cities across the US — from Denver to Atlanta to Washington, DC. Bird’s scooters are available in at least 10 cities with Scottsdale, Arizona, being the site of its most recent launch.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, regulators have been working to get rules in place to make sure riders drive safely and the companies abide by the law.

New regulations to limit the number of scooters are set to go into effect in the city on June 4. To comply, scooter companies have to clear the streets of all their vehicles while the authorities process their permits. That’s expected to take about a month.

And just like that, scooters will go out the way they came in — appearing and disappearing from one day to the next — leaving in their wake the chargers, mechanics, vandals and people hotwiring the things to get a free ride around town.

#USA #transport #disruption #SDF

La lente prise de conscience du poids de l’#argent sur la #recherche

Les questionnements sur l’impact des #liens_d’intérêts sur les travaux scientifiques remontent à une trentaine d’années.

L’utilisation de la science par des #intérêts_privés est l’une des thématiques centrales de #Lobbytomie, le livre-enquête de notre collaboratrice #Stéphane_Horel, qui paraît jeudi 11 octobre aux éditions La Découverte (368 pages, 21,50 euros). Dans le monde académique, l’intérêt suscité par cette question – les liens d’intérêts agissent-ils sur la science ? – est récent : il ne remonte qu’à un peu plus de trois décennies. Singulièrement depuis le début des années 1990, un nombre croissant de chercheurs en sociologie et en histoire des sciences, mais aussi en nutrition, en toxicologie ou en épidémiologie, s’engagent dans des travaux visant à réexaminer les résultats ou les orientations de ces disciplines au prisme des financements et des conflits d’intérêts.
"L’une des premières tentatives de répondre scientifiquement à la question de savoir si le financement d’une étude pouvait avoir un impact sur son résultat a été une étude publiée au milieu des années 1980 dans laquelle un chercheur, Richard Davidson, a divisé en deux groupes toutes les études cliniques comparant différentes thérapies, avec d’un côté celles financées par l’industrie, et de l’autre côté, toutes les autres, raconte Sheldon Krimsky, professeur à la Tufts University de Boston (Etats-Unis), le premier à avoir formalisé la notion de « biais de financement » (funding effect en anglais) et auteur d’un ouvrage pionnier sur le sujet (La Recherche face aux intérêts privés, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2004). Sa conclusion était que les travaux sponsorisés par les industriels différaient dans leurs résultats de ceux financés par d’autres sources."
Difficile à accepter par de nombreux chercheurs ou médecins, l’idée que la science n’est pas nécessairement souveraine a été très tôt mise à profit par divers intérêts privés. De nombreux travaux d’histoire des sciences montrent sans ambiguïté, à partir d’archives industrielles, que les secteurs du sucre, de la viande, et surtout les grands cigarettiers, ont cherché avec succès, dès les années 1950 et 1960, à peser sur la science.
« Nombreuses réticences »
En 1978, dans leur livre The Regulation Game (Ballinger Publishing, non traduit), deux économistes spécialistes de la régulation des entreprises, Bruce Owen et Ronald Braeutigam, expliquent déjà sans fard que « les manœuvres tactiques de #lobbying les plus efficaces » sont « d’identifier les principaux experts dans chaque domaine de recherche pertinent, et de les recruter comme consultants, conseillers, ou de leur offrir des financements de recherche ». « Cela requiert un minimum de finesse et ne doit pas être trop flagrant, de manière à ce que les experts eux-mêmes soient incapables de réaliser qu’ils ont perdu leur objectivité et leur liberté d’action », poursuivaient-ils.
« Il a fallu attendre le milieu des années1980 pour qu’une revue savante, le New England Journal of Medicine, décide de demander aux auteurs des études qu’elle publiait de déclarer leurs liens d’intérêts, explique Sheldon Krimsky. Mais les réticences ont été nombreuses, y compris dans les revues les plus prestigieuses ! » Et le mouvement est singulièrement lent. En février 1997, la revue Nature publie un éditorial annonçant qu’elle évitera de sombrer dans « le financièrement correct » et qu’elle ne demandera pas aux scientifiques qu’elle publie de déclarer leurs liens d’intérêts.
La science, dit en substance l’éditeur de Nature, est au-dessus de cela. Quatre années plus tard, la célèbre revue britannique mange son chapeau jusqu’à la dernière couture : dans un éditorial d’une pleine page, elle annonce qu’à compter du 1er octobre 2001, elle demandera aux scientifiques qui souhaitent publier dans ses pages, de remplir un formulaire de déclaration d’intérêts.
Entre ces deux éditoriaux antagonistes, la divulgation par la justice fédérale américaine des « tobacco documents » – ces millions de documents internes prélevés dans les quartiers généraux de Philip Morris, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson ou British American Tobacco – a crûment dévoilé l’ampleur et la sophistication des campagnes menées par les grands cigarettiers pour instrumentaliser la science en la finançant généreusement.
Les premières analyses de cette immense documentation, publiées par le cardiologue Stanton Glantz (université de Californie à San Francisco, Etats-Unis) montrent comment l’industrie cigarettière est parvenue, pendant quatre décennies, à créer artificiellement du dissensus dans la littérature scientifique et ainsi alimenter le doute sur les dangers du tabac, à troubler la perception des vrais risques posés par la cigarette en détournant l’attention vers d’autres causes de maladie, à fabriquer de toutes pièces des éléments permettant de faire accroire au public la possibilité de bénéfices sanitaires liés à la cigarette, etc. Dans le monde académique, ces révélations sont un choc.
L’une des études les plus célèbres montrant, à partir des tobacco documents, toute l’ampleur des effets produits par le financement des chercheurs a été publiée en 1998 par Lisa Bero et Deborah Barnes, alors chercheuses à l’université de Californie à San Francisco, dans le Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Les deux scientifiques ont rassemblé les 106 études alors disponibles sur les effets du tabagisme passif : 39 montraient que la fumée ambiante ne présentait pas de danger et 67 concluaient à l’inverse. Pourquoi ?
Les preuves s’accumulent
Les auteures ont examiné tous les critères possibles permettant d’expliquer ces différences : année de la publication, taille des échantillons, nature des effets délétères recherchés, etc. Las ! « Le seul facteur permettant de prédire les conclusions d’une étude était le fait que l’un des auteurs soit ou non affilié à l’industrie du tabac », écrivent-elles. L’accès, dans les tobacco documents, aux listes de chercheurs financés par l’industrie du tabac permettait soudain de porter un regard rétrospectif sur leur production. Et de mesurer la manière dont ils avaient pesé, des années durant, sur les grandes controverses liées à la cigarette.
Depuis, les preuves de l’effet de financement s’accumulent. La pharmacie, le sucre, les biotechnologies, les pesticides, la pétrochimie… tous ces secteurs pèsent lourdement, ou ont pesé, à des degrés divers, sur la façon dont la connaissance et la réglementation se construisent – un fait désormais consensuel dans la communauté scientifique travaillant sur le sujet. Pourtant, dans le monde de l’expertise au sens large, cette idée peine à faire son chemin : « J’ai participé à beaucoup de groupes d’expertise, raconte Sheldon Krimsky. Mais je n’ai jamais vu un expert se déporter spontanément en raison de ses liens d’intérêts, de ses participations financières, etc. Beaucoup sont encore persuadés d’être au-dessus de cela. »

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Facebook Launches Video Device, Says Privacy is ’Very, Very, Very Important’
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-08/facebook-designs-video-device-to-be-as-un-creepy-as-possible

Facebook Inc. wants you to buy its new video chat devices for your home, complete with cameras that track movement. That sounds like a lot to ask for a social-media company mired in privacy scandals. But Facebook has crafted its Portal gadgets, launched Monday, to be as un-creepy as possible. At a recent product demonstration in San Francisco, executives explained that a tracking camera was just there to frame the shot correctly, so users can move around hands-free during video hangouts (...)

#Facebook #algorithme #domotique #CCTV #Portal #écoutes #vidéo-surveillance #biométrie (...)

##voix

Bumble, l’application de rencontres dopée par #metoo
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2018/10/06/bumble-l-application-de-rencontres-dopee-par-metoo_5365635_3234.html

Le mouvement antiharcèlement a fait de la plate-forme de rencontres féministe un phénomène de société. Lancée fin 2014 par Whitney Wolfe Herd, elle est passée depuis 2017 de 22 à 40 millions d’inscrits.

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Whitney Wolfe Herd n’est pas de celles qui font des concessions à la « bro » culture, la culture macho des programmeurs de la Silicon Valley. Ni tee-shirt ni tennis bariolées : quand elle arrive sur la scène de la conférence TechCrunch Disrupt, ce matin de septembre à San Francisco (Californie), elle est vêtue d’un tailleur fluide d’un bleu classique et chaussée de talons hauts. Imaginez Inès de La Fressange dans une convention de start-upeurs.

A 29 ans, Whitney Wolfe « pèse » 230 millions de dollars (environ 200 millions d’euros), selon Forbes. Elle a cofondé Tinder, l’application de rencontres en ligne, en 2012, avant de claquer la porte, deux ans plus tard, et de poursuivre ses anciens camarades pour harcèlement sexuel. Fin 2014, elle a lancé Bumble, une plate-forme concurrente mais d’orientation féministe. « J’avais remarqué que beaucoup de femmes étaient en attente vis-à-vis des hommes, explique-t-elle. En attente d’un message, d’une proposition. Du premier pas. » Bumble a renversé l’équation.

Etre traité avec « respect et gentillesse »

Dans un secteur en pleine expansion (un mariage sur trois aux Etats-Unis commence par une rencontre en ligne), Bumble a réussi à se distinguer en donnant le pouvoir aux femmes. En bouleversant « les normes hétérosexuelles dépassées », précise le site français. Le principe est le même que pour Tinder : on fait son marché en éliminant – ou en conservant –, d’un swipe (« glissement ») à droite ou à gauche, les photos des partenaires potentiels.

Mais sur Bumble, seules les femmes ont l’initiative pour engager le dialogue. Si un homme pour qui elles ont « voté » les a aussi gratifiées d’un « like », elles ont vingt-quatre heures pour entrer en contact. L’application est gratuite (sauf le service premium pour celles qui ont raté ce délai ou qui, saisies d’un regret, veulent réactiver des connexions qui ont expiré).

Le succès a été immédiat, dans un marché pourtant très concurrentiel. Au début, la plate-forme était installée dans un appartement loué par Whitney Wolfe à Austin (Texas). « La salle de conférence était disposée autour de la baignoire », raconte-t-elle. L’attrait, pour les femmes, vient du fait que Bumble débarrasse le dating en ligne des manifestations de « toxicité masculine », selon l’expression des féministes : les commentaires vulgaires, les gros plans sur pénis, qui découragent les intéressées sur la plupart des autres applis.

Sur Bumble, tout le monde doit être traité avec « respect et gentillesse ». Pas de contenus érotiques ou de photos en maillot, sauf devant une plage ou une piscine. Et pas d’armes à feu non plus sur les profils, depuis la fusillade qui a fait dix-sept morts, le 14 février, au lycée de Parkland, en Floride.

BUMBLE SE VOIT COMME UNE RUCHE QUI AMBITIONNE DE « REDONNER UNE PLACE DE POUVOIR À LA FEMME », TOUT EN « RÉPARANT LES DÉSÉQUILIBRES HOMMES-FEMMES »

Mais c’est le mouvement antiharcèlement #metoo, en 2017, qui a fait de Bumble un phénomène de société. En un an, le site est passé de 22 millions d’inscrits à 40 millions, la croissance la plus rapide jamais constatée dans le secteur. Et, phénomène rare parmi les start-up, il dégage des bénéfices.

Whitney Wolfe se défend de tout opportunisme. « Il n’y a pas un moment où on s’est dit qu’il fallait être en phase avec un mouvement culturel, affirme-t-elle. C’est notre identité, notre voix authentique, et ça l’était avant #metoo. » Bumble se voit comme une ruche. Sa couleur emblématique est le jaune, celui des abeilles (Bumble vient de bumblebee, « bourdon » en anglais). Et ambitionne de « redonner une place de pouvoir à la femme », décrit Whitney Wolfe, cela tout en « réparant les déséquilibres hommes-femmes ».

« L’Internet a démocratisé la misogynie »

L’égérie du dating en ligne a grandi à Salt Lake City (Utah), où son père était promoteur immobilier. Quand elle était en CM1, ses parents ont pris un congé sabbatique d’un an en France. Des années plus tard, elle a passé un semestre à la Sorbonne, dans le cadre des études à l’étranger offertes par son université, la Southern Methodist de Dallas (Texas). Elle adore la France. Avant Bumble, elle avait envisagé d’appeler son application Merci.

Chez Tinder, elle était vice-présidente chargée du marketing, mais les relations se sont détériorées en juin 2014, quand elle a accusé un autre des fondateurs, Justin Mateen – son ancien petit ami – de harcèlement. Il a fallu qu’elle porte plainte et montre les textos insultants du personnage pour être prise au sérieux. Justin Mateen a été suspendu, puis écarté de la compagnie. Le procès a été réglé à l’amiable, au prix d’une compensation de 1 million de dollars pour la plaignante.

Whitney Wolfe ne dit pas grand-chose du contentieux avec Tinder, du procès et du harcèlement en ligne qu’elle a subi, sinon qu’ils lui ont coûté très cher au niveau de l’estime de soi. Dans un article pour le magazine Harper’s Bazaar, elle explique qu’elle ne pouvait plus se regarder dans la glace, qu’elle buvait trop, déprimait, ne dormait plus. « A 24 ans, j’avais l’impression que j’étais finie. » De cet incident, elle a tiré une conclusion amère : « Pour le dire simplement : l’Internet a démocratisé la misogynie. »

La jeune femme est rapidement retombée sur ses pieds après avoir rencontré l’entrepreneur russe Andreï Andreev, le propriétaire de Badoo, une autre application de rencontres, populaire dans le monde entier. Badoo est aujourd’hui l’actionnaire principal de Bumble.

Entre-temps, Whitney Wolfe a épousé (sur la côte amalfitaine) Michael Herd, l’héritier d’une fortune pétrolière du Texas – elle dont le premier travail, à la sortie de l’université, fut de lancer une ligne de sacs en bambou au profit des victimes de la marée noire de BP dans le golfe du Mexique, en 2010.

La guerre avec Tinder n’a jamais vraiment cessé. A deux reprises, le groupe Match, qui possède la plate-forme, a essayé de racheter Bumble, d’abord pour 450 millions de dollars, puis pour 1 milliard. Ne pouvant y parvenir, il a porté plainte pour vol de propriété intellectuelle. « C’est ce qu’on appelle du bullying [« harcèlement »] », a réagi la direction de Bumble, dans une lettre ouverte. La société a une politique radicale contre les mauvais joueurs, rappelle le texte : « swipe left » – ou l’élimination sans même un regard.

Réseau social des « relations saines »

Bumble a aussi déposé une contre-plainte, réclamant 400 millions de dollars de dommages et intérêts. Et le 24 septembre, Whitney Wolfe a annoncé que, faute d’arrangement à l’amiable, le divorce irait jusqu’au procès.

Selon elle, le groupe Match, qui possède aussi OkCupid et Plenty of Fish, se sent menacé dans son quasi-monopole par les 100 % de croissance enregistrés en un an par Bumble. Si Tinder reste nettement plus gros (50 millions d’utilisateurs, pour un chiffre d’affaires de 400 millions de dollars en 2017), Bumble a affiché 200 millions de dollars de revenus en 2017 et rattrape son concurrent en matière d’abonnés payants : plus de 2 millions, contre 3,8 millions pour Tinder.

Whitney Wolfe a confiance. Diplômée de marketing, elle a le don de sentir son époque. Bumble se veut aussi désormais le réseau social des « relations saines », à l’inverse des plates-formes qui encouragent les comparaisons dévalorisantes.

Outre le dating, Bumble propose des rencontres amicales (Bumble BFF, pour Best Friend Forever, l’acronyme qu’aiment à partager les ados) ou du réseautage professionnel (Bumble Bizz). Le but est de promouvoir les bonnes conduites. « La plupart des plates-formes hésitent à en faire autant. Elles ont peur de perdre leurs usagers », note la créatrice.

« Believe Women »

Et comme il se doit, Bumble est à la pointe du mouvement Time Well Spent (« le temps bien employé »), qui voit dorénavant les plates-formes appeler elles-mêmes les consommateurs à passer moins de temps en ligne. « Nous sommes en partie responsables de cette épidémie d’obsession pour les réseaux sociaux », reconnaît Whitney Wolfe.

Bumble vient ainsi de lancer Snooze, ou mode « veille », pour encourager les usagers à se « préoccuper de leur santé mentale ». Les princes charmants devront attendre le retour de l’éventuelle partenaire (ils sont avertis qu’elle fait une pause technologique).

Whitney Wolfe a elle-même suivi une cure de digital detox (« désintoxication numérique ») de trois semaines. Cela a été dur, explique-t-elle aux technophages de TechCrunch. Une crise de manque pendant quarante-huit heures. « J’étais paniquée, anxieuse. Puis j’ai réappris à être humaine. Un formidable sentiment de libération. »

La jeune femme est sortie de sa cure à temps pour partager le désespoir de millions d’Américaines devant les auditions du juge Brett Kavanaugh au Sénat. Au lendemain du témoignage de Christine Blasey Ford, l’universitaire qui accuse le candidat à la Cour suprême de l’avoir agressée sexuellement en 1982 – traumatisme qui, dit-elle, l’a accompagnée toute sa vie –, Bumble a publié une pleine page de publicité dans le New York Times. Toute jaune, avec ces seuls mots : « Believe Women ». Ecoutez les femmes et, surtout, « croyez-les ». Whitney Wolfe a également annoncé qu’elle donnait 25 000 dollars au réseau national de lutte contre le viol, l’inceste et les agressions sexuelles (Rainn).

Accessoirement, Bumble prépare une possible introduction en Bourse. La nouvelle porte-drapeau de l’empathie en ligne fait le pari qu’« éradiquer la misogynie » est une valeur en hausse dans la société américaine, y compris à Wall Street.

Osaka drops San Francisco as sister city over ’comfort women’ statue | World news | The Guardian

▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/04/osaka-drops-san-francisco-as-sister-city-over-comfort-women-statue

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f818d05371d1b85072f958905733a07382cb6d6c/0_44_3000_1800/master/3000.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&crop=faces%2Centropy&bm=normal&ba=bottom%2Cleft&blend64=aHR0cHM6Ly9hc3NldHMuZ3VpbS5jby51ay9pbWFnZXMvb3ZlcmxheXMvZDM1ODZhNWVmNTc4MTc1NmQyMWEzYjYzNWU1MTcxNDEvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&s=fd9347d99c87bb65220ea6cb4247e67b

The city of Osaka has ended its 60-year “sister city” relationship with San Francisco to protest against the presence in the US city of a statue symbolising Japan’s wartime use of sex slaves.

Osaka’s mayor, Hirofumi Yoshimura, terminated official ties this week after the US city agreed to recognise the “comfort women” statue, which was erected by a private group last year in San Francisco’s Chinatown district, as public property.

The statue depicts three women – from China, Korea and the Philippines – who symbolise women and teenage girls forced to work in frontline brothels from the early 1930s until Japan’s wartime defeat in 1945.

#Canary Mission Blacklist Funded By Jewish Federation [*] – The Forward
▻https://forward.com/news/national/411355/revealed-canary-mission-blacklist-is-secretly-bankrolled-by-major-jewish

https://assets.forwardcdn.com/images/cropped/37049982-10214498948241055-6617239800661409792-n-1538511108.jpg

For three years, a website called Canary Mission has spread fear among undergraduate activists, posting more than a thousand political dossiers on student supporters of Palestinian rights. The dossiers are meant to harm students’ job prospects, and have been used in interrogations by Israeli security officials.

At the same time, the website has gone to great lengths to hide the digital and financial trail connecting it to its donors and staff. Registered through a secrecy service, the site is untraceable.

*Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco

#Palestine #BDS

The Unlikely Politics of a Digital Contraceptive | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-unlikely-politics-of-a-digital-contraceptive

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5bb38ba68688f82d6d6673a8/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/Altman-The-Unlikely-Politics-of-Digital-Contraceptive.jpg

In August, the F.D.A. announced that it had allowed a new form of contraception on the market: a mobile app called Natural Cycles. The app, which was designed by a Swedish particle physicist, asks its users to record their temperature with a Natural Cycles-branded thermometer each morning, and to log when they have their periods. Using a proprietary algorithm, the app informs its users which days they are infertile (green days—as in, go ahead, have fun) and which they are fertile (red days—proceed with caution), so that they can either abstain or use a backup method of birth control. In clearing the app as a medical device, the F.D.A. inaugurated “software application for contraception” as a new category of birth control under which similar products can now apply to be classified. The F.D.A.’s press release quotes Terri Cornelison, a doctor in its Center for Devices and Radiological Health, who said, “Consumers are increasingly using digital health technologies to inform their everyday health decisions and this new app can provide an effective method of contraception if it’s used carefully and correctly.”

On touche vraiment au grand Ogin’importe quoi.

In January, a single hospital in Stockholm alerted authorities that thirty-seven women who had sought abortions in a four-month period had all become pregnant while using Natural Cycles as their primary form of contraception. The Swedish Medical Products Agency agreed to investigate. Three weeks ago, that agency concluded that the number of unwanted pregnancies was consistent with the “typical use” failure rate of the app, which they found to be 6.9 per cent. During the six-month investigation, six hundred and seventy-six additional Natural Cycle users in Sweden reported unintended pregnancies, a number that only includes the unwanted pregnancies disclosed directly to the company.

Berglund’s story—a perfect combination of technology, ease, and self-discovery, peppered with the frisson of good fortune and reliance on what’s natural—has helped convince more than nine hundred thousand people worldwide to register an account with Natural Cycles. But the idea of determining fertile days by tracking ovulation, known as a fertility-awareness-based method of birth control, is anything but new. Fertility awareness is also sometimes called natural family planning, in reference to the Catholic precept that prohibits direct interventions in procreation. The most familiar form of fertility awareness is known as the rhythm method. First designated in the nineteen-thirties, the rhythm or calendar method was based on research by two physicians, one Austrian and one Japanese. If a woman counted the number of days in her cycle, she could make a statistical estimate of when she was most likely to get pregnant. Those methods evolved over the years: in 1935, a German priest named Wilhelm Hillebrand observed that body temperature goes up during ovulation. He recommended that women take their temperature daily to determine their fertile period.

Plenty of doctors remain unconvinced about Natural Cycles. “It’s as if we’re asking women to go back to the Middle Ages,” Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a fertility specialist in San Francisco, said. Technology, she warned, “is only as reliable as the human being behind it.” Forman, from Columbia, said that “one of the benefits of contraception was being able to dissociate intercourse from procreation.” By taking a pill or inserting a device into an arm or uterus, a woman could enjoy her sexuality without thinking constantly about what day of the month it was. With fertility awareness, Forman said, “it’s in the opposite direction. It’s tying it back together again. You’re having to change your life potentially based on your menstrual cycle. Whereas one of the nice benefits of contraception is that it liberated women from that.”

#Médecine #Hubris_technologique #Contraception #Comportements

[Anim] One day in the life of San Francisco Bay | Max Galka

Cartographie animée de 24h de mouvements de navire dans la Baie de San Francisco, rapportée par The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/feb/23/24-hours-marine-traffic-san-francisco-bay-mapped

▻https://youtu.be/fDD8HjGc0XI

Voir ici quelques éléments d’explication (exemple de la méditerranée) : ▻https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01428974

#flowmap #cartedeflux #mouvement #animation #navires #flux #maritime #movement_mapping

Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? | The New Yorker
►https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b9189222baa30258f02e769/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/180917_r32804.jpg

Since 2011, Zuckerberg has lived in a century-old white clapboard Craftsman in the Crescent Park neighborhood, an enclave of giant oaks and historic homes not far from Stanford University. The house, which cost seven million dollars, affords him a sense of sanctuary. It’s set back from the road, shielded by hedges, a wall, and mature trees. Guests enter through an arched wooden gate and follow a long gravel path to a front lawn with a saltwater pool in the center. The year after Zuckerberg bought the house, he and his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, held their wedding in the back yard, which encompasses gardens, a pond, and a shaded pavilion. Since then, they have had two children, and acquired a seven-hundred-acre estate in Hawaii, a ski retreat in Montana, and a four-story town house on Liberty Hill, in San Francisco. But the family’s full-time residence is here, a ten-minute drive from Facebook’s headquarters.

Occasionally, Zuckerberg records a Facebook video from the back yard or the dinner table, as is expected of a man who built his fortune exhorting employees to keep “pushing the world in the direction of making it a more open and transparent place.” But his appetite for personal openness is limited. Although Zuckerberg is the most famous entrepreneur of his generation, he remains elusive to everyone but a small circle of family and friends, and his efforts to protect his privacy inevitably attract attention. The local press has chronicled his feud with a developer who announced plans to build a mansion that would look into Zuckerberg’s master bedroom. After a legal fight, the developer gave up, and Zuckerberg spent forty-four million dollars to buy the houses surrounding his. Over the years, he has come to believe that he will always be the subject of criticism. “We’re not—pick your noncontroversial business—selling dog food, although I think that people who do that probably say there is controversy in that, too, but this is an inherently cultural thing,” he told me, of his business. “It’s at the intersection of technology and psychology, and it’s very personal.”

At the same time, former Facebook executives, echoing a growing body of research, began to voice misgivings about the company’s role in exacerbating isolation, outrage, and addictive behaviors. One of the largest studies, published last year in the American Journal of Epidemiology, followed the Facebook use of more than five thousand people over three years and found that higher use correlated with self-reported declines in physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction. At an event in November, 2017, Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, called himself a “conscientious objector” to social media, saying, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” A few days later, Chamath Palihapitiya, the former vice-president of user growth, told an audience at Stanford, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no coöperation, misinformation, mistruth.” Palihapitiya, a prominent Silicon Valley figure who worked at Facebook from 2007 to 2011, said, “I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds.” Of his children, he added, “They’re not allowed to use this shit.” (Facebook replied to the remarks in a statement, noting that Palihapitiya had left six years earlier, and adding, “Facebook was a very different company back then.”)

In March, Facebook was confronted with an even larger scandal: the Times and the British newspaper the Observer reported that a researcher had gained access to the personal information of Facebook users and sold it to Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy hired by Trump and other Republicans which advertised using “psychographic” techniques to manipulate voter behavior. In all, the personal data of eighty-seven million people had been harvested. Moreover, Facebook had known of the problem since December of 2015 but had said nothing to users or regulators. The company acknowledged the breach only after the press discovered it.

We spoke at his home, at his office, and by phone. I also interviewed four dozen people inside and outside the company about its culture, his performance, and his decision-making. I found Zuckerberg straining, not always coherently, to grasp problems for which he was plainly unprepared. These are not technical puzzles to be cracked in the middle of the night but some of the subtlest aspects of human affairs, including the meaning of truth, the limits of free speech, and the origins of violence.

Zuckerberg is now at the center of a full-fledged debate about the moral character of Silicon Valley and the conscience of its leaders. Leslie Berlin, a historian of technology at Stanford, told me, “For a long time, Silicon Valley enjoyed an unencumbered embrace in America. And now everyone says, Is this a trick? And the question Mark Zuckerberg is dealing with is: Should my company be the arbiter of truth and decency for two billion people? Nobody in the history of technology has dealt with that.”

In 2002, Zuckerberg went to Harvard, where he embraced the hacker mystique, which celebrates brilliance in pursuit of disruption. “The ‘fuck you’ to those in power was very strong,” the longtime friend said. In 2004, as a sophomore, he embarked on the project whose origin story is now well known: the founding of Thefacebook.com with four fellow-students (“the” was dropped the following year); the legal battles over ownership, including a suit filed by twin brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, accusing Zuckerberg of stealing their idea; the disclosure of embarrassing messages in which Zuckerberg mocked users for giving him so much data (“they ‘trust me.’ dumb fucks,” he wrote); his regrets about those remarks, and his efforts, in the years afterward, to convince the world that he has left that mind-set behind.

New hires learned that a crucial measure of the company’s performance was how many people had logged in to Facebook on six of the previous seven days, a measurement known as L6/7. “You could say it’s how many people love this service so much they use it six out of seven days,” Parakilas, who left the company in 2012, said. “But, if your job is to get that number up, at some point you run out of good, purely positive ways. You start thinking about ‘Well, what are the dark patterns that I can use to get people to log back in?’ ”

Facebook engineers became a new breed of behaviorists, tweaking levers of vanity and passion and susceptibility. The real-world effects were striking. In 2012, when Chan was in medical school, she and Zuckerberg discussed a critical shortage of organs for transplant, inspiring Zuckerberg to add a small, powerful nudge on Facebook: if people indicated that they were organ donors, it triggered a notification to friends, and, in turn, a cascade of social pressure. Researchers later found that, on the first day the feature appeared, it increased official organ-donor enrollment more than twentyfold nationwide.

Sean Parker later described the company’s expertise as “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” The goal: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” Facebook engineers discovered that people find it nearly impossible not to log in after receiving an e-mail saying that someone has uploaded a picture of them. Facebook also discovered its power to affect people’s political behavior. Researchers found that, during the 2010 midterm elections, Facebook was able to prod users to vote simply by feeding them pictures of friends who had already voted, and by giving them the option to click on an “I Voted” button. The technique boosted turnout by three hundred and forty thousand people—more than four times the number of votes separating Trump and Clinton in key states in the 2016 race. It became a running joke among employees that Facebook could tilt an election just by choosing where to deploy its “I Voted” button.

These powers of social engineering could be put to dubious purposes. In 2012, Facebook data scientists used nearly seven hundred thousand people as guinea pigs, feeding them happy or sad posts to test whether emotion is contagious on social media. (They concluded that it is.) When the findings were published, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they caused an uproar among users, many of whom were horrified that their emotions may have been surreptitiously manipulated. In an apology, one of the scientists wrote, “In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.”

Facebook was, in the words of Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, becoming a pioneer in “ persuasive technology. ”

Facebook had adopted a buccaneering motto, “Move fast and break things,” which celebrated the idea that it was better to be flawed and first than careful and perfect. Andrew Bosworth, a former Harvard teaching assistant who is now one of Zuckerberg’s longest-serving lieutenants and a member of his inner circle, explained, “A failure can be a form of success. It’s not the form you want, but it can be a useful thing to how you learn.” In Zuckerberg’s view, skeptics were often just fogies and scolds. “There’s always someone who wants to slow you down,” he said in a commencement address at Harvard last year. “In our society, we often don’t do big things because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing. The reality is, anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can’t keep us from starting.”

In contrast to a traditional foundation, an L.L.C. can lobby and give money to politicians, without as strict a legal requirement to disclose activities. In other words, rather than trying to win over politicians and citizens in places like Newark, Zuckerberg and Chan could help elect politicians who agree with them, and rally the public directly by running ads and supporting advocacy groups. (A spokesperson for C.Z.I. said that it has given no money to candidates; it has supported ballot initiatives through a 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization.) “The whole point of the L.L.C. structure is to allow a coördinated attack,” Rob Reich, a co-director of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, told me. The structure has gained popularity in Silicon Valley but has been criticized for allowing wealthy individuals to orchestrate large-scale social agendas behind closed doors. Reich said, “There should be much greater transparency, so that it’s not dark. That’s not a criticism of Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a criticism of the law.”

La question des langues est fondamentale quand il s’agit de réseaux sociaux

Beginning in 2013, a series of experts on Myanmar met with Facebook officials to warn them that it was fuelling attacks on the Rohingya. David Madden, an entrepreneur based in Myanmar, delivered a presentation to officials at the Menlo Park headquarters, pointing out that the company was playing a role akin to that of the radio broadcasts that spread hatred during the Rwandan genocide. In 2016, C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit, published a detailed analysis of Facebook usage in Myanmar, and described a “campaign of hate speech that actively dehumanizes Muslims.” Facebook officials said that they were hiring more Burmese-language reviewers to take down dangerous content, but the company repeatedly declined to say how many had actually been hired. By last March, the situation had become dire: almost a million Rohingya had fled the country, and more than a hundred thousand were confined to internal camps. The United Nations investigator in charge of examining the crisis, which the U.N. has deemed a genocide, said, “I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it was originally intended.” Afterward, when pressed, Zuckerberg repeated the claim that Facebook was “hiring dozens” of additional Burmese-language content reviewers.

More than three months later, I asked Jes Kaliebe Petersen, the C.E.O. of Phandeeyar, a tech hub in Myanmar, if there had been any progress. “We haven’t seen any tangible change from Facebook,” he told me. “We don’t know how much content is being reported. We don’t know how many people at Facebook speak Burmese. The situation is getting worse and worse here.”

I saw Zuckerberg the following morning, and asked him what was taking so long. He replied, “I think, fundamentally, we’ve been slow at the same thing in a number of areas, because it’s actually the same problem. But, yeah, I think the situation in Myanmar is terrible.” It was a frustrating and evasive reply. I asked him to specify the problem. He said, “Across the board, the solution to this is we need to move from what is fundamentally a reactive model to a model where we are using technical systems to flag things to a much larger number of people who speak all the native languages around the world and who can just capture much more of the content.”

Lecture des journaux ou des aggrégateurs ?

once asked Zuckerberg what he reads to get the news. “I probably mostly read aggregators,” he said. “I definitely follow Techmeme”—a roundup of headlines about his industry—“and the media and political equivalents of that, just for awareness.” He went on, “There’s really no newspaper that I pick up and read front to back. Well, that might be true of most people these days—most people don’t read the physical paper—but there aren’t many news Web sites where I go to browse.”

A couple of days later, he called me and asked to revisit the subject. “I felt like my answers were kind of vague, because I didn’t necessarily feel like it was appropriate for me to get into which specific organizations or reporters I read and follow,” he said. “I guess what I tried to convey, although I’m not sure if this came across clearly, is that the job of uncovering new facts and doing it in a trusted way is just an absolutely critical function for society.”

Zuckerberg and Sandberg have attributed their mistakes to excessive optimism, a blindness to the darker applications of their service. But that explanation ignores their fixation on growth, and their unwillingness to heed warnings. Zuckerberg resisted calls to reorganize the company around a new understanding of privacy, or to reconsider the depth of data it collects for advertisers.

Antitrust

In barely two years, the mood in Washington had shifted. Internet companies and entrepreneurs, formerly valorized as the vanguard of American ingenuity and the astronauts of our time, were being compared to Standard Oil and other monopolists of the Gilded Age. This spring, the Wall Street Journal published an article that began, “Imagine a not-too-distant future in which trustbusters force Facebook to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.” It was accompanied by a sepia-toned illustration in which portraits of Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and other tech C.E.O.s had been grafted onto overstuffed torsos meant to evoke the robber barons. In 1915, Louis Brandeis, the reformer and future Supreme Court Justice, testified before a congressional committee about the dangers of corporations large enough that they could achieve a level of near-sovereignty “so powerful that the ordinary social and industrial forces existing are insufficient to cope with it.” He called this the “curse of bigness.” Tim Wu, a Columbia law-school professor and the author of a forthcoming book inspired by Brandeis’s phrase, told me, “Today, no sector exemplifies more clearly the threat of bigness to democracy than Big Tech.” He added, “When a concentrated private power has such control over what we see and hear, it has a power that rivals or exceeds that of elected government.”

When I asked Zuckerberg whether policymakers might try to break up Facebook, he replied, adamantly, that such a move would be a mistake. The field is “extremely competitive,” he told me. “I think sometimes people get into this mode of ‘Well, there’s not, like, an exact replacement for Facebook.’ Well, actually, that makes it more competitive, because what we really are is a system of different things: we compete with Twitter as a broadcast medium; we compete with Snapchat as a broadcast medium; we do messaging, and iMessage is default-installed on every iPhone.” He acknowledged the deeper concern. “There’s this other question, which is just, laws aside, how do we feel about these tech companies being big?” he said. But he argued that efforts to “curtail” the growth of Facebook or other Silicon Valley heavyweights would cede the field to China. “I think that anything that we’re doing to constrain them will, first, have an impact on how successful we can be in other places,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry in the near term about Chinese companies or anyone else winning in the U.S., for the most part. But there are all these places where there are day-to-day more competitive situations—in Southeast Asia, across Europe, Latin America, lots of different places.”

The rough consensus in Washington is that regulators are unlikely to try to break up Facebook. The F.T.C. will almost certainly fine the company for violations, and may consider blocking it from buying big potential competitors, but, as a former F.T.C. commissioner told me, “in the United States you’re allowed to have a monopoly position, as long as you achieve it and maintain it without doing illegal things.”

Facebook is encountering tougher treatment in Europe, where antitrust laws are stronger and the history of fascism makes people especially wary of intrusions on privacy. One of the most formidable critics of Silicon Valley is the European Union’s top antitrust regulator, Margrethe Vestager.

In Vestager’s view, a healthy market should produce competitors to Facebook that position themselves as ethical alternatives, collecting less data and seeking a smaller share of user attention. “We need social media that will allow us to have a nonaddictive, advertising-free space,” she said. “You’re more than welcome to be successful and to dramatically outgrow your competitors if customers like your product. But, if you grow to be dominant, you have a special responsibility not to misuse your dominant position to make it very difficult for others to compete against you and to attract potential customers. Of course, we keep an eye on it. If we get worried, we will start looking.”

Modération

As hard as it is to curb election propaganda, Zuckerberg’s most intractable problem may lie elsewhere—in the struggle over which opinions can appear on Facebook, which cannot, and who gets to decide. As an engineer, Zuckerberg never wanted to wade into the realm of content. Initially, Facebook tried blocking certain kinds of material, such as posts featuring nudity, but it was forced to create long lists of exceptions, including images of breast-feeding, “acts of protest,” and works of art. Once Facebook became a venue for political debate, the problem exploded. In April, in a call with investment analysts, Zuckerberg said glumly that it was proving “easier to build an A.I. system to detect a nipple than what is hate speech.”

The cult of growth leads to the curse of bigness: every day, a billion things were being posted to Facebook. At any given moment, a Facebook “content moderator” was deciding whether a post in, say, Sri Lanka met the standard of hate speech or whether a dispute over Korean politics had crossed the line into bullying. Zuckerberg sought to avoid banning users, preferring to be a “platform for all ideas.” But he needed to prevent Facebook from becoming a swamp of hoaxes and abuse. His solution was to ban “hate speech” and impose lesser punishments for “misinformation,” a broad category that ranged from crude deceptions to simple mistakes. Facebook tried to develop rules about how the punishments would be applied, but each idiosyncratic scenario prompted more rules, and over time they became byzantine. According to Facebook training slides published by the Guardian last year, moderators were told that it was permissible to say “You are such a Jew” but not permissible to say “Irish are the best, but really French sucks,” because the latter was defining another people as “inferiors.” Users could not write “Migrants are scum,” because it is dehumanizing, but they could write “Keep the horny migrant teen-agers away from our daughters.” The distinctions were explained to trainees in arcane formulas such as “Not Protected + Quasi protected = not protected.”

It will hardly be the last quandary of this sort. Facebook’s free-speech dilemmas have no simple answers—you don’t have to be a fan of Alex Jones to be unnerved by the company’s extraordinary power to silence a voice when it chooses, or, for that matter, to amplify others, to pull the levers of what we see, hear, and experience. Zuckerberg is hoping to erect a scalable system, an orderly decision tree that accounts for every eventuality and exception, but the boundaries of speech are a bedevilling problem that defies mechanistic fixes. The Supreme Court, defining obscenity, landed on “I know it when I see it.” For now, Facebook is making do with a Rube Goldberg machine of policies and improvisations, and opportunists are relishing it. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, seized on the ban of Jones as a fascist assault on conservatives. In a moment that was rich even by Cruz’s standards, he quoted Martin Niemöller’s famous lines about the Holocaust, saying, “As the poem goes, you know, ‘First they came for Alex Jones.’ ”

#Facebook #Histoire_numérique

The LSD Archive at The Institute of Illegal Images
“It kept me from eating it if it was framed on the wall” - Mark Mcloud on his amazing collection of LSD Blotters.
▻https://flashbak.com/lsd-archive-institute-illegal-images-394427

https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/acidtabblotterbarnmarkMcCloud-1.jpg

On October 6, 1966 (aka ‘The Day of the Beast’ in psychedelic circles) California banned the possession of LSD. Two years later the law went nationwide. Mark McCloud did as anyone of vision might: he began buying loads of blotters, sheets of paper infused with LSD, for consumption. Eventually his San Francisco home filled with thousands of LSD tabs. Over time the acid broke down. So now the framed sheets (part of an archive of more than 33,000 sheets and individual tabs), and Mark’s “Institute of Illegal Images” – “the most comprehensive collection of decorated LSD blotter paper in the world” – can be viewed by art buffs, former heads and anyone who wants to see objects that came to define an era.

The art is broadly two-fold: graphics and visions of the sort of thing you see after ingesting LSD. They are, says Mark, who earned a Masters of Fine Art from UC Davis, “examples of true American folk art, like whittling.”

https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/acidtabblotterbarnmarkMcCloud-2.jpg

La « salle de crise » de Facebook contre la désinformation AFP - 19 Septembre 2018 - Le Devoir
▻https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/science/537181/une-salle-de-crise-speciale-elections-contre-la-desinformation-chez-facebo

Facebook est en train de mettre sur pied une « salle de crise » (war room) installée au siège du groupe, destinée à déjouer « en temps réel » les tentatives de manipulation des élections, ont annoncé des responsables du groupe américain.

« Nous construisons une war room à Menlo Park [où est situé le siège de Facebook, au sud de San Francisco] pour les élections au Brésil et aux États-Unis », a expliqué mercredi Samidh Chakrabarti, responsable « élections et engagement civique » lors d’une conférence téléphonique consacrée aux mesures prises par Facebook pour sinon empêcher, du moins limiter la manipulation politique de scrutins via des publications circulant sur la plateforme.

https://media2.ledevoir.com/images_galerie/nwd_657262_503454/image.jpg

Cloué au pilori depuis deux ans pour ne pas avoir su combattre ces campagnes de désinformation en particulier pendant la présidentielle américaine de 2016, Facebook n’en finit plus de promettre de faire mieux désormais et détaille régulièrement ses différentes initiatives.

Facebook est « en permanence » à l’affût de ces campagnes de désinformation dans le monde entier et passe son temps à supprimer faux comptes et contenus litigieux, mais ce « centre de commandement » sera en mesure « de prendre des décisions en temps réel » en cas de « pire des scénarios », comme des afflux de messages trompeurs à l’approche des élections ou le jour même du scrutin, a expliqué M. Chakrabarti.

Il a cité comme exemple des messages erronés indiquant que l’on pouvait voter par SMS, comme cela s’est produit lors de scrutins précédents.

La salle devrait être opérationnelle pour l’élection présidentielle au Brésil, dont le premier tour est prévu le 7 octobre. Les élections de mi-mandat aux États-Unis doivent se dérouler le 6 novembre.

Des campagnes de manipulation politiques, prenant le plus souvent la forme de publications sur des sujets polémiques dans le but de diviser encore davantage la société, ont été attribuées par Facebook à une officine russe, elle-même liée au Kremlin, selon les services de renseignements américains.

Facebook a aussi récemment détecté des tactiques similaires venant d’Iran.

Le réseau est « mieux préparé » contre les tentatives de manipulation d’élections, avait une nouvelle fois assuré son patron Mark Zuckerberg dans un long texte sur le sujet diffusé la semaine dernière.

Pour autant, avait-il poursuivi, « nous faisons face à des adversaires sophistiqués et bien financés. Ils ne lâcheront pas et ils vont continuer à évoluer ».

 #désinformation #médias #propagande #manipulation #fake_news #information #facebook #manipulation #réseaux_sociaux #élections #etats-unis #USA #Brésil #gafa

La recette des Planètes de papier
▻https://visionscarto.net/la-recette-des-planetes-de-papier

Ces planètes de papier ont été conçues pour la conférence D3.js de San Francisco, en septembre 2017, où elles ont été testées par un public d’informaticien·nes qui ont pu tester ainsi leur maîtrise du « couper/coller ». Rien de tel que ces manipulations manuelles pour comprendre la façon dont fonctionnent les #Projections cartographiques, et ressentir de combien elles diffèrent de la vraie forme du globe. Voici une recette pour les reproduire, et des fichiers PDF à télécharger si vous souhaitez les imprimer (...)

#Billets

/ Projections

dWeb : vers un web (à nouveau) décentralisé ?
▻http://www.internetactu.net/a-lire-ailleurs/dweb-vers-un-web-a-nouveau-decentralise

La journaliste Zoë Corbyn, pour le Guardian est revenue sur le Sommet pour un web décentralisé (vidéos), qui se tenait début août à San Francisco. Les partisans du web décentralisé, explique Corbyn, souhaitent promouvoir et développer un web qui ne dépendrait plus des grandes entreprises qui amassent nos données pour (...)

#A_lire_ailleurs #Services #blockchain #confiance #gouvernance

Une brève histoire du Hardcore Punk Underground aux Philippines

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/0001381553_10.jpg

►https://daily.bandcamp.com/2018/09/07/a-short-history-of-the-hardcore-punk-underground-in-the-philippines

En 1981, les Dead Kennedys et Circle Jerks ont joué leur premier concert à San Francisco, dans un restaurant philippin appelé Mabuhay Gardens. Par coïncidence, le tout premier spectacle punk aux #Philippines a également eu lieu la même année, à 7 000 milles de distance. Le nom de cet événement historique ? Brave New World.

Tout comme la légendaire « British Invasion » de plus d’une décennie, le #punk_hardcore - un mouvement déclenché par des jeunes de la classe ouvrière dans les rues du Royaume-Uni, des États-Unis et d’Australie au milieu des années 70 scène comme il était un changement de mer culturel ressenti dans le monde entier, y compris l’Asie du Sud-Est. Les Philippins ont été parmi les premiers dans cette région à développer leur propre version du hardcore punk ; cette tradition distincte datant de plusieurs décennies se poursuit encore aujourd’hui.

Ce développement a été rendu possible grâce à Dante « Howlin ’Dave » David, un disc-jockey de la station de radio philippine DZRJ-AM, qui a joué la première chanson punk de la radio philippine « Anarchy In The UK ». jouer des chansons punk et new wave dans le cadre de sa rotation régulière. Howlin ’Dave a également créé la série de concerts Brave New World, du nom du roman dystopique d’Aldous Huxley, qui servait de tremplin à certains des plus grands noms du circuit local.

Peut-être le personnage le plus essentiel de sortir de Brave New World était Tommy Tanchanco, chef de la tenue hardcore région du Tiers Monde Chaos et fondateur de Twisted Croix-Rouge, une cassette uniquement vénérée étiquette de bricolage qui a fonctionné de 1985 à 1989. Comme pour les concerts susmentionnés , la discographie des 17 albums du label définit les paramètres du son philippin encore naissant en défendant les talents locaux féroces tels que Dead Ends, Wuds, George Imbecile et The Idiots, Urban Bandits et Betrayed - le dernier ayant sorti un album en juillet dernier , après un hiatus de 32 ans.

« Twisted Red Cross a été une bénédiction car Tommy a produit des groupes qui n’auraient pas pu enregistrer et sortir des albums eux-mêmes », explique le chanteur de Dead Ends, Al Dimalanta, dont le groupe a sorti son album Second Coming en 1986 . "Ces quelques années au milieu des années 80 ont eu un effet dans notre musique, mais je ne pense pas que cela se produira à nouveau dans le rock, pas dans cette ampleur."

Comme avec la plupart des communautés hardcore des années 80, le #punk_underground philippin était animé par les jeunes, qui ont abordé leur art avec une honnêteté sans faille et (le plus souvent) des idéaux anti-establishment. « Nous avons aimé la façon dont le punk a permis aux enfants ordinaires de se réunir, de former un groupe, d’écrire des chansons représentant les pensées et les idéaux de la jeunesse philippine », explique Dimalanta, qui travaillait en tant que professeur. Lui et ses pairs ont passé une grande partie de la décennie à livrer des accusations musicales à la dictature de Ferdinand Marcos dans les clubs punks de Manille, comme On Disco sur Roxas Boulevard et Katrina’s à Malate (ce dernier étant souvent qualifié d’équivalent philippin du CBGB). des lieux comme le toit de la maison Matimyas.

Dans les années 90, la scène hardcore avait commencé à disparaître à Manille. "Tous les punks ont disparu", se souvient Jep Peligro, créateur de Konspirazine , un zine de premier plan publié à la fin des années 90 et au début des années 2000, documentant la scène musicale locale du bricolage. Cependant, il y avait des pôles d’activités si vous saviez où regarder, comme à Laguna, une province au sud-est de Manille avec une culture punk bricolage riche, et la région voisine de Cavite.

« Les groupes de Laguna étaient décidés à bouger un peu, et à rappeler au reste de la scène que nous étions toujours là, en train de faire notre travail en permanence », a déclaré Peligro. (Un vidéaste de la scène qui se fait appeler Crapsalad a soigneusement filmé des spectacles en direct à l’aide d’un caméscope, documentant le mouvement pour les générations futures.)

Les maisons de disques et les petites distributions de bricolage comme Rare Music Distribution, dirigée par des membres d’un autre groupe emblématique, Philippine Violators et Middle Finger Records, ont également joué un rôle essentiel dans la survie des années 90. Il est important de noter que Peligro souligne que « [Ce] sont des labels punks dirigés par des punks réels » plutôt que des sociétés.

L’impact de ces ancêtres continue de se faire sentir à ce jour, comme en témoignent les rassemblements de punk abondants et de longue durée du pays. L’année 2018 marque la 23e édition du festival Hardcore Punk de Cebu, un événement annuel mettant en vedette des groupes de partout aux Philippines sur la chaîne insulaire de Visayas. Plus au sud, dans les villes de Butuan et de Cagayan de Oro, il y a le Mindanao Hardcore Fest, maintenant dans sa 18ème année.

« Tout ce que tout le monde a fait a contribué à la scène, que ce soit de manière géniale ou minable. Cela a en quelque sorte enrichi l’expérience et la communauté », explique Jon« Fishbone »Gonzales, bassiste du groupe punk Bad Omen, un pilier de la scène depuis un quart de siècle.

Plus de 30 ans après la montée du hardcore philippin, et avec l’administration actuelle de Rodrigo Duterte sur le pays avec une main de fer, les principes punks sont plus que jamais d’actualité, sinon plus. Comme toujours, les participants déploient leurs accords de pouvoir et leurs voix vocales principalement pour exprimer leurs préoccupations face aux troubles sociaux afin de sensibiliser et, espérons-le, de planter les graines du changement.

« Nous essayons de trouver de petites joies et de petites victoires dans notre vie quotidienne », déclare fièrement Peligro. « En même temps, ajoute-t-il, nous sommes le groupe de parias le plus énervé, le plus en colère et le plus opprimé de la société - notre président Google. »

De la tenue anti-émeute à la #musique thrash-punk, la tradition philippine est à la base. Voici une liste restreinte de groupes qui perpétuent l’héritage aujourd’hui.

▻https://tigerpussyx.bandcamp.com/track/daughter

Gérard Darmanin frappe les Philippines, faisant ses premières victimes
Le super Typhon Mangkhut fait la leçon aux énarques à Strasbourg

Athlétisme : mission patrimoine, 2,5 millions de tickets vendus
Jeu de grattage : un Décaster en forme de rédemption pour Kevin Mayer

Fashion week : Bruxelles veut laisser le champ libre aux Etats membres
Heure d’hiver ou heure d’été : New York se libère !

En Syrie et au Yemen, « le principe sacré de protection de l’enfance » varie selon les époques
« L’intensité de la polémique sur « les mauvais pauvres » n’est plus respectée »

Deux skinheads nient toute agression sexuelle
Procès Merci : le candidat de Trump à la cour suprême condamné et des zones d’ombre

Climat : L’Assemblée rejette à nouveau l’interdiction de l’herbicide dans la loi
Glyphosate : le sommet de San Francisco s’achèvre entre volontarisme et catastrophisme

#de_la_dyslexie_cretative

27 villes du C40 auraient atteint le pic d’émissions. Pourquoi à ce stade je me méfie de cette annonce ?
▻https://www.c40.org/press_releases/27-cities-have-reached-peak-greenhouse-gas-emissions-whilst-populations-increas

27 of the world’s greatest cities, representing 54 million urban citizens and $6 trillion in GDP have peaked their greenhouse gas emissions. New analysis reveals that the cities have seen emissions fall over a 5 year period, and are now at least 10% lower than their peak. City Halls around the world have achieved this crucial milestone, whilst population numbers have increased and city economies have grown. These 27 cities have continued to decrease emissions by an average of 2% per year since their peak, while populations grew by 1.4% per year, and their economies by 3% per year on average.
The cities are: Barcelona, Basel, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Milan, Montréal, New Orleans, New York City, Oslo, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, Rome, San Francisco, Stockholm, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, Warsaw, Washington D.C.

Comme c’est beau ! Comme par hasard, aucune ville des pays actuellement en voie d’industrialisation, tel que la Chine par ex. n’est dans ce groupe. On peut se demander comme sont calculées ces émissions. Mon hypothèse est que ces données ne prennent pas en compte le cycle de vie des matières et des services produits dans les villes en question, seulement les émissions locales. Ce qui est sale est aujourd’hui en Chine, au MO, etc. Merci la mondialisation...
D’autre part, des questions se posent également sur les contours des villes prises en considération, par ex. est-ce uniquement Paris intra muros ou bien la Métropole, voire l’IdF ? Probablement la première option. A ce stage les informations disponibles ne répondent pas à ces questions de base.
Pour aller plus loin sur la question des méthodes de calcul, et notamment la différence entre la méthode territoriale et celle basée sur la consommation des ménages prenant en compte le cycle de vie, voir par ex. Pichler, Peter-Paul, Timm Zwickel, Abel Chavez, Tino Kretschmer, Jessica Seddon, and Helga Weisz, ‘Reducing Urban Greenhouse Gas Footprints’, Scientific Reports, 7 (2017), 14659 <▻https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-15303-x>

#changement_climatique #fake_news_possible

À San Francisco se déroulent en parallèle le Global Climate Action Summit et les PRI in Person. À cette occasion, les investisseurs responsables rappellent qu’une transition juste ne se fera pas qu’en répondant aux enjeux climatiques et environnementaux, mais que la dimension sociale doit être également prise en compte.
▻https://www.novethic.fr/actualite/finance-durable/isr-rse/le-facteur-social-parent-pauvre-des-debats-sur-l-esg-dans-la-gestion-financ

Jeudi 13 septembre, Consuelo Escorcia une femme de ménage de l’hôtel Mariott Marquis a pris la parole à San Francisco devant le millier …

https://www.novethic.fr/fileadmin//PriInPerson.JPG

Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web
▻https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-interne

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f406f86cb13df31264e640e04dc63ba3cf18c54d/0_0_3500_2100/master/3500.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&usm=12&fit=crop&crop=faces%2Centropy&bm=normal&ba=bottom%2Cleft&blend64=aHR0cHM6Ly9hc3NldHMuZ3VpbS5jby51ay9pbWFnZXMvb3ZlcmxheXMvZjZlYzA2YWNlZGUwZWRmMDNiMDM3MmE1Y2VkZWJmZTIvdG8tZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&s=094f39d74004bfb691c58a6fd86175f2

he story that broke early last month that Google would again cooperate with Chinese authorities to run a censored version of its search engine, something the tech giant has neither confirmed nor denied, had ironic timing. The same day, a group of 800 web builders and others – among them Tim Berners-Lee, who created the world wide web – were meeting in San Francisco to discuss a grand idea to circumvent internet gatekeepers like Google and Facebook. The event they had gathered for was the Decentralised Web Summit, held from 31 July to 2 August, and hosted by the Internet Archive.

The proponents of the so-called decentralised web – or DWeb – want a new, better web where the entire planet’s population can communicate without having to rely on big companies that amass our data for profit and make it easier for governments to conduct surveillance. And its proponents have got projects and apps that are beginning to function, funding that is flowing and social momentum behind them. In light of the Snowden revelations and Cambridge Analytica scandal, public concerns around spying and privacy have grown. And more people have heard about the DWeb thanks to the television comedy Silicon Valley, whose main character recently pivoted his startup to try and build this “new internet”.

#Internet #GAFA #DWeb #réinventer_l'Internet

Neurocapitalism | openDemocracy
▻https://www.opendemocracy.net/ewa-hess-hennric-jokeit/neurocapitalism

https://www.opendemocracy.net/sites/all/themes/od960/logo-200.png

There is good reason to assert the existence, or at least the emergence, of a new type of capitalism: neurocapitalism. After all, the capitalist economy, as the foundation of modern liberal societies, has shown itself to be not only exceptionally adaptable and crisis-resistant, but also, in every phase of its dominance, capable of producing the scientific and technological wherewithal to analyse and mitigate the self-generated “malfunctioning” to which its constituent subjects are prone. In doing so – and this too is one of capitalism’s algorithms – it involves them in the inexorably effective cycle of supply and demand.

Just as globalisation is a consequence of optimising the means of production and paths of communication (as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted), so the brain, as the command centre of the modern human being, finally appears to be within reach of the humanities, a field closely associated with capitalism. It may seem uncanny just how closely the narrow path to scientific supremacy over the brain runs to the broad highway along which capitalism has been speeding for over 150 years. The relationship remains dynamic, yet what links capitalism with neuroscience is not so much strict regulation as a complex syndrome of systemic flaws.

At this point, if not before, the unequal duo of capitalism and neuroscience was joined by a third partner. From now on, the blossoming pharmaceutical industry was to function as a kind of transmission belt connecting the two wheels and making them turn faster. In the first half of the twentieth century, mental disorders were treated mainly with sedative barbiturates, electric shock therapy and psychosurgery. But by the 1930s, neuro-psychopharmacology was already winning the day, as Freud had predicted it would.

Is it a paradox, or one of those things that are so obvious they remain unobserved, that the success of Freud’s psychoanalysis and that of modern neuroscience are based on similar premises? Psychoanalysis was successful because it wove together medically relevant disciplines like psychiatry and psychology with art, culture, education, economics and politics, allowing it to penetrate important areas of social life. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the neurosciences seem to be in a position to take on a comparable role in the future.

The ten top-selling psychotropic substances in the USA include anti-depressants, neuroleptics (antipsychotics), stimulants and drugs for treating dementia. In 2007 one hundred million prescriptions were issued for these drugs with sales worth more than sixteen billion dollars. These figures illustrate how, in an environment that is regulated but difficult to control, supply and subjectively perceived need can create a market turning over billions of dollars. What is more, it is a market that is likely to expand into those areas in which a performance-driven society confronts the post-postmodern self with its own shortcomings: in others words in schools and further education, at work, in relationships, and in old age. Among the best-selling neuro-psychotropic drugs are those that modulate the way people experience emotions and those that improve their capacity to pay attention and to concentrate, in most cases regardless of whether there is a clinically definable impairment of these functions.

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Neurocapitalism
Ewa Hess and Hennric Jokeit 3 March 2010
Despite the immense costs for healthcare systems, the fear of depression, dementia and attention deficit disorder legitimises the boom in neuro-psychotropic drugs. In a performance-driven society that confronts the self with its own shortcomings, neuroscience serves an expanding market

Today, the phenomenology of the mind is stepping indignantly aside for a host of hyphenated disciplines such as neuro-anthropology, neuro-pedagogy, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and neuro-economics. Their self-assurance reveals the neurosciences’ usurpatory tendency to become not only the humanities of science, but the leading science of the twenty-first century. The legitimacy, impetus and promise of this claim derive from the maxim that all human behaviour is determined by the laws governing neuronal activity and the way it is organised in the brain.

Whether or not one accepts the universal validity of this maxim, it is fair to assume that a science that aggressively seeks to establish hermeneutic supremacy will change everyday capitalist reality via its discoveries and products. Or, to put it more cautiously, that its triumph is legitimated, if not enabled, by a significant shift in the capitalist world order.

There is good reason to assert the existence, or at least the emergence, of a new type of capitalism: neurocapitalism. After all, the capitalist economy, as the foundation of modern liberal societies, has shown itself to be not only exceptionally adaptable and crisis-resistant, but also, in every phase of its dominance, capable of producing the scientific and technological wherewithal to analyse and mitigate the self-generated “malfunctioning” to which its constituent subjects are prone. In doing so – and this too is one of capitalism’s algorithms – it involves them in the inexorably effective cycle of supply and demand.

Just as globalisation is a consequence of optimising the means of production and paths of communication (as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted), so the brain, as the command centre of the modern human being, finally appears to be within reach of the humanities, a field closely associated with capitalism. It may seem uncanny just how closely the narrow path to scientific supremacy over the brain runs to the broad highway along which capitalism has been speeding for over 150 years. The relationship remains dynamic, yet what links capitalism with neuroscience is not so much strict regulation as a complex syndrome of systemic flaws.

Repressive late nineteenth-century capitalism, with its exploitative moral dictates, proscriptions and social injustices, was a breeding ground for the neurosis diagnosed by scientists in the early twentieth century as a spiritual epidemic. This mysterious scourge of the bourgeoisie, a class which according to Marx, “through the rapid improvement of all instruments of production [...] draws all, even the most barbarian nations, into civilisation”, expressed the silent rebellion of the abused creature in human beings. It was, in other words, the expression of resistance – as defiant as it was futile – of people’s inner “barbarian nation” to forceful modernisation and civilisation.

To introduce here the inventor of psychoanalysis and neurosis researcher Sigmund Freud as the first neurocapitalist practitioner and thinker might be thought to be overstepping the mark. Yet people tend to forget that Freud was a neuro-anatomist and neurologist by training, and saw himself primarily as a neuroscientist. What distinguished him from his colleagues was that he was more aware of the limitations of the methods available for studying the brain at the end of the nineteenth century. Having identified neurosis as an acquired pathology of the nervous system for which there was no known treatment or way to localise, he decided instead to take an indirect route. The means he invented in order both to research and to cure this mysterious illness was psychoanalysis. Fellow researchers like Oskar Vogt, who continued to search for the key to psychopathology and genius in the anatomy of the brain, were doomed to fail. From then on, psychology served the requirements of everyday life in a constantly changing capitalist reality. As a method based on communication, psychoanalysis penetrated all spheres of social interaction, from the intimate and private to the economic and cultural. In doing so, it created new markets: a repair market for mental illness and a coaching market for those seeking to optimise capitalist production and reproduction.

Delayed by the Second World War, the repressive capitalism of the nineteenth century was eventually replaced by libertarian, affluent capitalism. Conformity, discipline and feelings of guilt – the symptoms of failure to cope with a system of moral dictates and proscriptions – gave way to the new imperative of self-realisation. The psychic ideal of the successful individual was characterised by dynamically renewable readiness for self-expansion, which for the subject meant having a capacity for self-motivation that could be activated at any time and that was immune to frustration. Failure now meant not being able to exhaust the full potential of one’s options. This development brought a diametric change in the character of mental illness. Neurosis, a disorder born of guilt, powerlessness and lack of discipline, lost its significance. Attention shifted to the self’s failure to realise itself. Depression, the syndrome described by Alain Ehrenberg in The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, began its triumphal march.

Depression, however, was also the first widespread mental illness for which modern neuroscience promptly found a remedy. Depression and anxiety were located in the gaps between the synapses, which is precisely where they were treated. Where previously there had only been reflexive psychotherapy, an interface had now been identified where suffering induced by the self and the world could now be alleviated directly and pre-reflexively.

At this point, if not before, the unequal duo of capitalism and neuroscience was joined by a third partner. From now on, the blossoming pharmaceutical industry was to function as a kind of transmission belt connecting the two wheels and making them turn faster. In the first half of the twentieth century, mental disorders were treated mainly with sedative barbiturates, electric shock therapy and psychosurgery. But by the 1930s, neuro-psychopharmacology was already winning the day, as Freud had predicted it would.

Is it a paradox, or one of those things that are so obvious they remain unobserved, that the success of Freud’s psychoanalysis and that of modern neuroscience are based on similar premises? Psychoanalysis was successful because it wove together medically relevant disciplines like psychiatry and psychology with art, culture, education, economics and politics, allowing it to penetrate important areas of social life. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the neurosciences seem to be in a position to take on a comparable role in the future.

What cannot be overlooked is that the methodological anchoring of the neurosciences in pure science, combined with the ethical legitimacy ascribed to them as a branch of medicine, gives them a privileged position similar to that enjoyed by psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century. Unlike the latter, however, the neurosciences are extremely well funded by the state and even more so by private investment from the pharmaceutical industry. Their prominent status can be explained both by the number and significance of the problems they are attempting to solve, as well as the broad public recognition of these problems, and by the respectable profits to be made should they succeed. In other words, they are driven by economic and epistemic forces that emanate from the capitalism of today, and that will shape the capitalism of tomorrow – whatever that might look like.
II

In Germany, the USA and many western European countries, it is neither painkillers nor cardiovascular drugs that now put the greatest strain on health budgets, but rather neuro-psychotropic drugs. The huge market for this group of drugs will grow rapidly as life expectancy continues to rise, since age is the biggest risk factor for neurological and psychiatric illness. All over the world, whole armies of neuroscientists are engaged in research in universities, in projects often funded by the pharmaceuticals industry, and to an even greater extent in the industry’s own facilities, to find more effective and more profitable drugs to bring onto the market. The engine driving the huge advances being made in the neurosciences is capital, while the market seems both to unleash and to constrain the potential of this development.

Depression, anxiety or attention deficit disorders are now regarded by researchers and clinical practitioners alike as products of neuro-chemical dysregulation in interconnected systems of neurotransmitters. They are therefore treated with substances that intervene either directly or indirectly in the regulation of neurotransmitters. Given that the body’s neuro-chemical systems are highly sensitive and inter-reactive, the art of successful treatment resides in a process of fine-tuning. New and more expensive drugs are able to do this increasingly effectively and selectively, thus reducing undesirable side effects. Despite the immense costs for healthcare systems, the high incidence of mental disorders and the fear of anxiety, depression and dementia make the development of ever better neuro-psychotropic drugs desirable and legitimate.

However, the development and approval of drugs designed to alleviate the symptoms of mental disorders also open the gates to substances that can be used to deliberately alter non-pathological brain functions or mental states. The rigid ethical conventions in the USA and the European Union – today the most profitable markets for neuro-psychotropic drugs – mean that drug development, whether funded by the state or by the pharmaceuticals industry, is strictly geared towards the prevention and treatment of illness. Few pharmaceutical companies are therefore willing to make public their interest in studying and developing substances designed to increase the cognitive performance or psychological wellbeing of healthy people. The reason is simple: there is no legal market for these so-called “neuro-enhancers”. Taking such drugs to perform better in examinations, for example, is a punishable offence in the USA. Yet sales figures for certain neuro-psychotropic drugs are considerably higher than the incidence of the illnesses for which they are indicated would lead one to expect. This apparent paradox applies above all to neuropsychotropic drugs that have neuro-enhancement properties. The most likely explanation is that neuro-enhancers are currently undergoing millions of self-trials, including in universities – albeit probably not in their laboratories.

The ten top-selling psychotropic substances in the USA include anti-depressants, neuroleptics (antipsychotics), stimulants and drugs for treating dementia. In 2007 one hundred million prescriptions were issued for these drugs with sales worth more than sixteen billion dollars. These figures illustrate how, in an environment that is regulated but difficult to control, supply and subjectively perceived need can create a market turning over billions of dollars. What is more, it is a market that is likely to expand into those areas in which a performance-driven society confronts the post-postmodern self with its own shortcomings: in others words in schools and further education, at work, in relationships, and in old age. Among the best-selling neuro-psychotropic drugs are those that modulate the way people experience emotions and those that improve their capacity to pay attention and to concentrate, in most cases regardless of whether there is a clinically definable impairment of these functions.

Attempts to offset naturally occurring, non-pathological deviations from the norm are referred to as “compensatory” or “moderate enhancement” – in the same way that glasses are worn to correct the eyes’ decreasing ability to focus. The term describes a gradual improvement in function to a degree that is still physiologically natural. By contrast, “progressive” or “radical enhancement” denotes a qualitative improvement in function that exceeds natural boundaries. To return to the optical metaphor, we could say that the difference between these forms of performance enhancement is like that between wearing spectacles and night-vision glasses.

In all ages and cultures, producers and purveyors of drugs and potions purported to enhance the individual’s cognitive state have been able to do a tidy trade, as the many references to magic potions and fountains of youth in literature and the fine arts testify. Nowadays, one substance with this kind of mythical status is ginkgo. Billions of dollars worth of ginkgo-biloba preparations are sold in the USA every year; and if ginkgo really did have any significant effect on cognition or memory, it would be a classic case of the widespread, unchecked use of a compensatory neuro-enhancer. As it is, however, the myth and commercial success of ginkgo are more a testament to the perhaps universal human need for a better attention span, memory and mental powers, and to the willingness to pay good money to preserve and enhance them.

For the attainment of happiness as the aim of a good life, Aristotle recommended cultivating a virtuous mind and virtuous character. This is precisely what some neuro-psychotropic drugs are designed to do. The virtues of the mind are generally understood to be instrumental traits like memory and attention span. The extent to which these traits are innate or acquired varies from person to person. After adolescence, their efficiency gradually goes into decline at individually varying rates. Inequality and the threat of loss are strong motivations for action. The current consensus on the ethics of neuro-enhancement seems to be that as long as the fundamental medical principles of self-determination, non-harm (nil nocere) and benefit (salus aegroti) are adhered to, rejecting pharmacological intervention in the instrumental traits of the brain would be at odds with a liberal understanding of democracy.

A more complex ethical problem would seem to be the improvement of so-called character virtues, which we shall refer to here as socio-affective traits. Unlike instrumental traits such as attention span and memory, traits like temperament, self-confidence, trust, willingness to take risks, authenticity and so on are considered to be crucial to the personality. Pharmacological intervention that alters these traits therefore affects a person’s psychological integrity. While such interventions may facilitate and accelerate self-discovery and self-realisation (see the large body of literature on experience with Prozac, e.g. Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac: Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self , they may also do the exact opposite. We will never be able to predict with any certainty how altering instrumental and socio-affective traits will ultimately affect the reflexively structured human personality as a whole. Today’s tacit assumption that neuro-psychotropic interventions are reversible is leading individuals to experiment on themselves. Yet even if certain mental states are indeed reversible, the memory of them may not be.

The barriers to neuro-enhancement actually fell some time ago, albeit in ways that for a long time went unnoticed. Jet-lag-free short breaks to Bali, working for global companies with a twenty-four hour information flow from headquarters in Tokyo, Brussels and San Francisco, exams and assessments, medical emergency services – in all of these situations it has become routine for people with no medical knowledge to use chemical substances to influence their ability to pay attention. The technologies that have sped up our lives in the era of globalisation – the Internet, mobile phones, aeroplanes – are already a daily reality for large numbers of people and are interfering with their biologically and culturally determined cycles of activity and rest.

That is not to say that the popularisation of these findings has had no effect at all. Reconceptualising joy as dopamine activity in the brain’s reward centres, melancholy as serotonin deficiency, attention as the noradrenalin-induced modulation of stimulus-processing, and, not least, love as a consequence of the secretion of centrally acting bonding hormones, changes not only our perspective on emotional and mental states, but also our subjective experience of self. That does not mean that we experience the physiological side of feelings like love or guilt any differently, but it does make us think about them differently. This, in turn, changes the way we perceive, interpret and order them, and hence the effect they have on our behaviour. By viewing emotions in general terms rather than as singular events taking place in a unique temporal and spatial context, the neurosciences have created a rational justification for trying to influence them in ways other than by individual and mutual care.

The possibility of pharmacological intervention thus expands the subjective autonomy of people to act in their own best interests or to their own detriment. This in turn is accompanied by a new form of self-reflection, which encompasses both structural images of the brain and the ability to imagine the neuro-chemical activity that goes on there. What is alarming is that many of the neuroscientific findings that have triggered a transformation in our perception of ourselves are linked with commercial interests.

It is already clear that global capitalism will make excessive demands on our material, and even more so on our human-mental resources. This is evident from the oft-used term “information society”, since information can only function as a commodity if it changes human behaviour, and it can only do this if we accord it our attention and engage with it emotionally.

#Neurocapitalisme #Neurosciences

Scooter use is rising in major cities. So are trips to the emergency room. - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/scooter-use-is-rising-in-major-cities-so-are-trips-to-the-emergency-room/2018/09/06/53d6a8d4-abd6-11e8-a8d7-0f63ab8b1370_story.html?noredirect=on

https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/Uk44BD0Jsn8HwrHo9Z1lV81ikr4=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/NMTG5YVRDUI6RC2TKAIWO2HETE.jpg

Attention aux faux-amis, ici scooter veut dire trottinettes electriques.

Il faudra un jour repenser la question de ces systèmes qui n’ont pas de points fixes (dont qui encombrent les villes, sont moins biens réparés et plus abîmés). Ce modèle est une certaine idée du partage qui en réalité est ouverte... à la « tragédie des communs ». Effectivement, dans ce modèle, le partage et la conservation du système devient second par rapport à l’utilité pour chaque usager. Les conditions de la tragédie des communs sont alors réunies : il n’y a pas de communauté pour « se parler » (communs, communautés et communication viennent de la même racine latine) et donc régler les problèmes.

They have been pouring into emergency rooms around the nation all summer, their bodies bearing a blend of injuries that doctors normally associate with victims of car wrecks — broken noses, wrists and shoulders, facial lacerations and fractures, as well as the kind of blunt head trauma that can leave brains permanently damaged.

When doctors began asking patients to explain their injuries, many were surprised to learn that the surge of broken body parts stemmed from the latest urban transportation trend: shared electric scooters.

In Santa Monica, Calif. — where one of the biggest electric-scooter companies is based — the city’s fire department has responded to 34 serious accidents involving the devices this summer. The director of an emergency department there said his team treated 18 patients who were seriously injured in electric-scooter accidents during the final two weeks of July. And in San Francisco, the doctor who runs the emergency room at a major hospital said he is seeing as many as 10 severe injuries a week.

As the injuries pile up in cities across the country, the three largest scooter companies — operating under the names Bird, Lime and Skip — have seen their values soar as they attempt to transform urban transit, following the successes of ride-hailing and bike-sharing companies. The scooter start-ups have attracted massive investments from Uber, the prominent technology venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, with some analysts estimating that some of the privately held companies might be worth more than $1 billion.

A commuter rides a scooter on 15th Street NW in Washington. (Robert Miller/The Washington Post)

But a growing number of critics — including doctors, former riders, scooter mechanics and personal injury lawyers — say the devices may look like toys but inflict the same degree of harm as any other motorized vehicle on the road, only without having to comply with safety regulations. These critics add that some ­electric-scooter fleets are poorly maintained by a loose-knit flock of amateur mechanics, making them prone to dangerous mechanical failures.

Bird and Skip have programs that give helmets to riders who request them, and Lime notes that riders must go through an “in-app tutorial” on helmet safety to unlock one of the company’s scooters for the first time.

“We also strive to reduce injuries though our vehicle design and include key safety features such as headlights and taillights, independent suspension, and a wider and higher footboard to improve stability,” a statement from Skip said.

But Bird is also lobbying against legislation in California that would require users to wear helmets.

The injured might quickly discover that their ability to sue the scooter industry is limited.

Bird and Lime, the two biggest companies, require consumers to agree to not sue — either individually or as part of a class-action suit — and instead turn to a form of mediation known as “binding arbitration” as a condition of using their scooters. They both name specific arbitration companies, while Bird also names a preferred location for arbitration and Lime requires users to first engage in a 60-day “dialogue” with the company.

Bird says its user agreement “represents an industry standard” among “transportation technology companies.”

Skip recently informed users that its arbitration agreement would be binding for users beginning Friday. Skip said the company is adding the arbitration provision as part of a revamp of its user agreement as the firm expands across the country. In a statement, Skip said the changes “make the terms and conditions more clear, more informative, and more efficient.”

Consumer advocates have long criticized binding arbitration as putting consumers at a disadvantage. Arbitration clauses — often appearing as fine print in user agreements and employee contracts — have become a defining feature of corporate contracts used by many of the nation’s most recognizable brands across multiple industries.

#Véhicules_partagés #Tragédie_des_communs #Accidents #Economie_collaborative(_mon_c..)

« Dans nos rues pour le #Climat » : journée mondiale d’action
▻https://www.bastamag.net/Dans-nos-rues-pour-le-climat-journee-mondiale-d-action

Canicules de longue durée, incendies géants, inondations meurtrières, rétrécissement rapide des glaciers et de la banquise... Les dérèglements climatiques s’accélèrent, pendant que les gouvernements demeurent au mieux indifférents, au pire complices de la catastrophe annoncée. La société civile réagira-t-elle massivement ? Alors que le prochain sommet mondial d’action pour le climat se tiendra du 12 au 14 septembre à San Francisco, des milliers de rassemblements sont prévus partout dans le monde. Basta ! (...)

ça bouge !

/ Climat, #Altermondialisme

#ça_bouge_ !