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‘What Would Social Media Be Like As the World Is Ending?’

Hulton Archive / Getty, Greywolf Press

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | February 2019 | 22 minutes (6,069 words)

 

Mark Doten is a deranged seer, a mad scribe mapping the end of the world. In The Infernal, his wonderfully strange first novel, he tackled a host of twenty-first century horrors: Osama Bin Laden and his followers, the moral disaster of the War on Terror, the gravitational pull of the networked world on our minds, and a seemingly inevitable post-human future in which one of the few survivors is Mark Zuckerberg. Now, in Trump Sky Alpha, Doten’s produced a fierce, unexpectedly moving, and surprisingly quickly conceived book about the Trump presidency. The new novel begins with a nuclear conflagration that wipes out 90 percent of the global population. The protagonist, Rachel, a journalist steeped in the folkways of the internet, is one of the few survivors. In an effort to reboot American journalism, the New York Times Magazine, risen from the ashes, assigns her to write an article about internet humor at the end of the world. What were people tweeting as the bombs fell?

It may sound like a deliberately obscure assignment, but it soon takes Rachel into some of the darkest corners of the post-apocalyptic American landscape. Mourning her dead wife and child, Rachel is also searching for their final resting place; along the way she finds a new lover, encounters an American security state that seems just as malevolent as its pre-apocalyptic forebears, tangles with a frightful hacktivist-turned-cyber-villain, and meets a novelist dying of radiation exposure who may be the key to it all. Trump Sky Alpha begins as an elaborate farce and ends as something much more grim and compelling, covering issues of politics, resistance, identity, and what, after all these years of mindless info-consumption, the internet actually means to our society. Read more…

‘I Saw My Countrymen Marched Out of Tacoma’

Illustration by Mark Wang

Joy Lanzendorfer| Longreads | February 2019 | 12 minutes (3,300 words)

On February 6, 1885, David Kendall, a city councilman in Eureka, California, was shot. Two Chinese men, possibly from rival gangs, were firing at each other from across the street when a bullet hit Kendall and killed him. Within 20 minutes of his death, a mob of 600 white men marched into Chinatown, intending to burn it to the ground.

Disturbingly, this wasn’t unusual. Violence against Chinese people and Chinese-Americans was a regular occurrence on the West Coast. However, this event was different because of what happened next. Instead of destroying Chinatown, the city decided to order the Chinese to leave. Within 48 hours, most of the Chinese residents were forced onto boats bound for San Francisco. This “peaceful” method of expelling them from their homes was quickly imitated. Towns up and down America’s West Coast, but also as far north as Vancouver, Canada, and as far east as Augusta, Georgia, began forcing out their Chinese populations. Jean Pfaelzer, author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans, considers it ethnic cleansing.

“The intention … was to round up all the Chinese people in over 200 towns across the Pacific Northwest and drive them out so they would never come back,” she says. Read more…

‘Stanford Is the Valley’: On Grooming Tech’s Next Generation

For years, Stanford University has been ground zero for Silicon Valley talent, and employers like Facebook and Google have been considered dream companies to work for. But given the major scandals and constant stream of negative news in the industry, there’s a “growing skepticism of the inherent goodness of technology,” writes Victor Luckerson, and a push at the university to revamp its computer science courses to address the ethical challenges that companies, especially the corporate giants, currently face.

At The Ringer, Luckerson explores Stanford’s ties to Silicon Valley’s biggest employers, the evolution of its computer science curriculum, and its students’ changing views on what it means to work in tech.

As tech comes to dominate an ever-expanding portion of our daily lives, Stanford’s role as an educator of the industry’s engineers and a financier of its startups grows increasingly important. The school may not be responsible for creating our digital world, but it trains the architects. And right now, students are weighing tough decisions about how they plan to make a living in a world that was clearly constructed the wrong way. “To me it seemed super empowering that a line of code that I wrote could be used by millions of people the next day,” says Matthew Sun, a junior majoring in computer science and public policy, who helped organize the Theranos event. “Now we’re realizing that’s maybe not always a good thing.”

Landing a job at a major tech firm is often as much about prestige as passion, which is one reason the CS major has expanded so dramatically. But a company’s tarnished reputation can transfer to its employees. Students debate whether fewer of their peers are actually taking gigs at Facebook, or whether they’re just less vocal in bragging about it. At lunch at a Burmese restaurant on campus, Hall and Sun summed up the transition succinctly. “No one’s like, ‘I got an internship at Uber!’” Sun says. Hall follows up: “They’re like, ‘I got an internship … at Uber …’”

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The Ethical Dilemma Facing Silicon Valley’s Next Generation

Longreads Pick

At Stanford University, a farm system for tech giants, “students are reconsidering whether working at Google or Facebook is landing a dream job or selling out to craven corporate interests.”

Source: The Ringer
Published: Feb 6, 2019
Length: 21 minutes (5,462 words)

The Paid Manipulators of Reality

Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire

By using avatars, Facebook, fake websites, and fake news, new private intelligence firms staffed by Israeli intelligence personnel are waging wars on perception to alter targeted groups’ beliefs and behavior. In their story for The New Yorker, Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow profile one firm called Psy-Group to delve deep into this disturbing frontier, which one Israeli intelligence officer described as “a place where wars are fought, elections are won, and terror is promoted.” Psy-Group wanted to tap the growing, lucrative field of American elections. So why was it planning an “influence campaign” over a hospital board election in rural Tulare, California?

The 2016 election changed the calculus. In the U.S., investigators pieced together how Russian operatives had carried out a scheme to promote their preferred candidate and to stoke divisions within U.S. society. Senior Israeli officials, like their American counterparts, had been dubious about the effectiveness of influence campaigns. Russia’s operation in the U.S. convinced Tamir Pardo, the former Mossad director, and others in Israel that they, too, had misjudged the threat. “It was the biggest Russian win ever. Without shooting one bullet, American society was torn apart,” Pardo said. “This is a weapon. We should find a way to control it, because it’s a ticking bomb. Otherwise, democracy is in trouble.”

Some of Pardo’s former colleagues took a more mercenary approach. Russia had shown the world that information warfare worked, and they saw a business opportunity. In early 2017, as Trump took office, interest in Psy-Group’s services seemed to increase. Law firms, one former employee said, asked Psy-Group to “come back in and tell us again what you are doing, because we see this ability to affect decisions that we weren’t fully aware of.” Another former Psy-Group employee put it more bluntly: “The Trump campaign won this way. If the fucking President is doing it, why not us?”

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The Battle Over Teaching Chicago’s Schools About Police Torture and Reparations

Illustration by Cha Pornea

Peter C. Baker | Longreads and The Point | February 2019 | 35 minutes (8,900 words)

This story is produced in partnership with The Point and appears in issue no. 18.

“What do you know about Jon Burge?”

Barely seven minutes into her black-history elective on the morning of April 16th, Juanita Douglas was asking her students a question she’d never asked in a classroom before, not in 24 years of teaching in Chicago’s public schools. She’d been preparing to ask the question for over a year, and she knew that for many of her students the conversation that followed would be painful. Disorienting. She didn’t like the idea of causing them pain. She didn’t want to make them feel overwhelmed or lost. But she thought, or at least hoped, that in the end the difficulty would be worth the trouble.

It was only second period. Several of Douglas’s students — a mix of juniors and seniors — were visibly tired. A few slumped forward, heads on their desks. I was sitting in the back row, so I couldn’t tell for sure, but I thought one or two might be fully asleep. Some were stealthily texting or scrolling through Snapchat. Others were openly texting or scrolling through Snapchat.

After a few seconds, Douglas repeated the question: “Do you know Jon Burge?”

A ragged chorus of noes and nopes and nahs.

“Tell me again what year you were born in,” said Douglas, who is 54 and likes to playfully remind her students that they don’t know everything about the world.

2000. 2001. 1999.

“Okay,” she said. “Well… Welcome to Chicago.”

Like so many new curriculum units in so many high schools across America, this one began with the teacher switching off the lights and playing a video. Who was Jon Burge? The video supplied the answer. Burge was a former Chicago Police Department detective and area commander. Between 1972 and 1991 he either directly participated in or implicitly approved the torture of at least — and this is an extremely conservative estimate — 118 Chicagoans. Burge and his subordinates — known variously as the Midnight Crew, Burge’s Ass Kickers, and the A-Team — beat their suspects, suffocated them, subjected them to mock executions at gunpoint, raped them with sex toys, and hooked electroshock machines up to their genitals, their gums, their fingers, their earlobes, overwhelming their bodies with live voltage until they agreed: yes, they’d done it, whatever they’d been accused of, they’d sign the confession. The members of the Midnight Crew were predominately white men. Almost all of their victims were black men from Chicago’s South and West Sides. Some had committed the crimes to which they were forced to confess; many had not. The cops in question called the electroshock machines “nigger boxes.”

The video cut to Darrell Cannon, one of the Midnight Crew’s victims. He spoke about getting hauled by cops into a basement:

I wasn’t a human being to them. I was just simply another subject of theirs. They had did this to many others. But to them it was fun and games. You know, I was just, quote, a nigger to them, that’s it. They kept using that word like that was my name… They had no respect for me being a human being. I never expected, quote, police officers to do anything that barbaric, you know… You don’t continue to call me “nigger” throughout the day unless you are a racist. And the way that they said it, they said it so downright nasty. So there’s no doubt in my mind that, in my case, racism played a huge role in what happened to me. Because they enjoyed this. This wasn’t something that was sickening to them. None of them had looks on their faces like, ugh, you know, maybe we shouldn’t do this much. Nuh-huh. They enjoyed it, they laughed, they smiled. And that is why my anger has been so high. Because I continuously see how they smile.

Text on the screen explained that Burge was fired in 1993, following a lawsuit that forced the Chicago Police Department to produce a report on his involvement in “systematic torture,” written by its own Office of Professional Standards. After his firing Burge moved to Apollo Beach, Florida, where he ran a fishing business. In 2006 another internally commissioned report concluded that he’d been a torture ringleader, but still no charges were brought; the Illinois five-year statute of limitations for police brutality charges had by then expired. In 2008 FBI agents arrested Burge at his home, and creative federal prosecutors charged him — not with torture, but with perjury. In a 2003 civil case, Burge had submitted a sworn statement in which he denied ever taking part in torture. In 2010 a jury found him guilty. After the trial, jurors pointed out that the name of Burge’s boat — Vigilante — hadn’t helped his case.

As soon as the video ended and Douglas flipped the lights back on, her students — most of whom were, like her, black — started talking. Their confusion ricocheted around the room.

“How long did he get?”

“Four-and-a-half years.”

“He only got four-and-a-half years?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“I really feel some type of way about this.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I’ve got it on my phone.”

“He didn’t torture them alone. Why didn’t anyone else get charged?”

“I’ve got it on my phone. He’s still alive.”

“I’m just… angry.”

“He lives in Florida!”

“Didn’t no one hear the screams?” Read more…

Why Must We Tarnish the Glittering Legacy of Italo Disco with Petty Squabbles

Den Harrow, either during a performance or just after escaping from a pack of wild boars.

Italo Disco was the disco that no one really needed: “English-language vocals, whose repetitive lyrics, often accented and malaprop-laden, were set to catchy melodies filigreed with synthesizers.” One of its biggest stars was Den Harrow, an invented performer cobbled together out of Tom Hooker (the singer) Stefano Zandri (the on-stage lip syncer). At GQ, Alice Gregory tells the story of Den’s sharp rise, unsurprising decline, and the fallout from two blowhard, sort-of partners who really, really don’t like one another.

Tawny and taut, with twinkly eyes and TV teeth, Tom looks even more like Rob Lowe than Rob Lowe looks like himself. He has the appearance (faultless) and bearing (dauntless) of a very lucky person, which he is, and which he is usually capable of remembering. Tom has a loving family, a beautiful home, a creative career, and lots of money. He also has a mortal enemy. When Tom talks about Stefano Zandri—or, as he calls him, “Stefano or Den or Whatever”—the grace with which his life has been blessed disappears, instantly it seems, from the foreground of his mind. He begins to swear and to brag; he becomes bothered by minor three-decade-old slights. Tom mocks Stefano for not speaking English, for “not having a pot to piss in.” He calls him “obnoxious,” a “chronic liar,” “a horndog with low standards and no selection process.” To observe this transformation, from blessed family man to apoplexy incarnate, is to bear witness to something almost mythic. Like if Achilles’ problem wasn’t his heel but his toe, which he stubbed, repeatedly, over the years and which every time he did sent him into a temporary infantile rage.

To be fair, Stefano himself isn’t above Tom-directed barbs, which he spouts in Facebook posts, Instagram comments, and national radio interviews, and which he tends to express with an impressive, almost poetic specificity. “Needle dick” is one of his preferred insults. For years he’s been preoccupied with the notion that Tom bought the exact same Porsche as he did in 1989. On Facebook, he’s called Tom “envious and troubled,” a “clown,” a “brown-noser with no personality,” a “small penis man,” a “Coward!” “You should be ashamed that you sold your voice,” he’s written. “You are clumsy and you have a bad energy as you are a bad person.” A few weeks after writing “I would put your head in your butt for real,” Stefano threatened Tom, saying, “I know where you live. I will come to Vegas and kick your flaccid ass.” Tom’s two daughters were 5 and 6 at the time, and the threat to his family infuriated him. Tom insisted to me that he wasn’t actually scared but then added, “I don’t know—maybe he has some guys around!”

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‘I Knew It Was Not My Correct Life, Because It Asked Me To Mute My Voice.’

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | February 2019 | 15 minutes (4,177 words)

 

I first stumbled across Reema Zaman on Facebook where each week she posts Love Letter Monday in which she discusses her life, both the hardships and successes, in an unabashedly self-loving manner. At first it caught me by surprise. I was so unaccustomed to hearing a woman speak well of herself — it felt, well, wrong. But soon enough I found myself sneaking back as if the words were contraband and the act of reading them a necessary revolution. The posts also contain an outpouring of love for the reader. A clarion call for women to turn “wound into wisdom” and “pain into poetry.” To be the authors of their own lives.

Her new memoir I Am Yours continues the call. In an evolving age-specific voice, Reema guides the reader through her life from a childhood in Bangladesh and Thailand with a domineering and unpredictable father, through anorexia and rape while living with roommates in Manhattan and navigating an often degrading and even dangerous life as an actress and model, to emotional abuse while living in a dilapidated barn in the middle of no-cell-phone-service woods with her then husband until, at age thirty, she at last lands a room of her own.

Reema’s prose is as ablaze as her heart. Lyrical, precise, in places frothing with desire or rage or faith, Reema’s unbridling of her tightly-watched self-suppressed voice is not an easy task. Yet it’s an essential one. These are hard stories, let loose at last with grace, sagacity, and dollops of clever humor. At its heart, I Am Yours is a story of hope. Read more…

Without a Trace: Missing, In an Age of Mass Displacement

Longreads Pick

Masood Hotak left Afghanistan in December 2015, hoping to make it to Europe. On January 3, 2016, he posted on Facebook that he’d reached the Greek island of Samos. And then… nothing. His big brother Javed has traveled thousands of miles trying to find him.

Published: Jan 14, 2019
Length: 35 minutes (8,959 words)

Fruitland

Photo by David Black, via Light in the Attic Records

Steven KurutzTrue Story | December 2016 | 51 minutes (10,117 words)

 

Some years back, an unusual and astonishing album began circulating among record collectors and fans of lo-fi music. Will Louviere was one of the first to hear it. A Bay Area vinyl dealer, Louviere is an authority on private-press LPs from the 1960s and 1970s—records that were self-produced and released by amateur musicians and destined, in most cases, for the bins of thrift stores and flea markets. In a year, Louviere and his fellow collectors across the country might buy one thousand of these obscure albums between them. Of those, maybe ten would be artistically interesting. Maybe one would astonish.

This record had been sent to Louviere by a collector, but still, his expectations weren’t high. The group was a duo, Donnie and Joe Emerson. The cover featured a studio portrait of them: teenagers with feathered brown hair, faces dappled with acne, sincere eyes meeting the camera. They were posed against the swirly blue backdrop you’d see in a school photo, with the album’s title—Dreamin’ Wild—written above them in red bubble script. Both boys were dressed flamboyantly in matching spread-collared white jumpsuits, like the outfit Evel Knievel wore vaulting over Snake River Canyon, though the jumpsuits had name patches on the chest, like a mechanic’s work shirt, an odd counter to the attempt at showbiz slickness. Donnie, posed in the front, held a Les Paul and looked a little stoned.

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