e²mc

Wiley’s sudden withdrawal of over 1,300 textbooks from the ProQuest Academic Complete database, which many universities subscribe to, in the days before or (in my university’s case) just after the beginning of the fall semester, seems unconscionable to me. It is consistent with the predatory behavior some other academic publishers have become known for.

To protest, I am making available the book that is mentioned in today’s Inside Higher Ed article on this topic, An Introduction to Human-Environment Geography: Local Dynamics and Global Processes. Nothing against the editors of that book, but as academics they are likely to make reasonable middle-class salaries from their institutions, while publishers profit from their labor. Click on the link below for your copy (scroll down to bottom to find the link).

If there is a Wiley book that you need access to and cannot find, please write to me for suggestions on where you could likely find it for free.

Cross-posted at Immanence.

Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of “The Coup We Are Not Talking About,” published in today’s Sunday New York Times, is an essential follow-up to her book Surveillance Capitalism, applying that book’s analysis to the situation we are living through.

This other coup is the “epistemic coup” which, she writes, “proceeds in four stages”:

While last week’s election has resulted in the announcement of a new president and vice-president, with leaders of many countries around the world recognizing those results (and with global markets rallying their apparent support), the current Trump administration has not recognized them. As with the debate over the scientific veracity of climate change, what we have with this election is two sides, each of which has decried the other as a source of disinformation.

President Trump and his proxies have repeatedly claimed to be victorious and accused the Democrats of “stealing” the election through massive “fraud,” with the “mainstream media” complicit, censorious, and biased in the Democrats’ favor. All of Trump’s supposed enemies—in the Democratic party, among Republican “never Trumpers,” in the media, and ensconced in various levels of government—are taken to make up a “deep state” that is untrustworthy, nefarious, and committed to stopping his administration from continuing what they have “started.”

On the other side, the election has been taken to be fair, having played itself out more or less according to expectations — with in-person balloting showing more support for Trump, and mail-in ballots, which in most states were counted later, showing significantly more support for Biden (albeit with pollster projections somewhat off, as in 2016). (One of the possible reasons suggested for that degree of polling error is QAnon; more on them below.) The fairness of the election, despite known challenges, has been confirmed by international observers. The margin of victory for Biden is clear and Trump’s protestations are taken to be largely or completely unfounded and intended to disinform the electorate and rile up his base of supporters. This interpretation has been more or less accepted by most major media organizations, with governments around the world supporting it through their congratulatory statements to the Biden-Harris team.

As with the issue of climate change (and to some degree with Covid-19), the questions surrounding these election results, especially for media attempting to cover those results, are therefore: which side should we trust, and why? Is there a factual basis for deciding between them, or should both sides be given “equal air time,” with voters and observers being left to “make up their own minds”?

On the disinformation front: Two things seemed to move the “laptop from hell” story yesterday, one of them forward (sort of), one of them back (to the drawing room?).

The first was Glenn Greenwald’s splashy announcement that he is resigning from The Intercept, the investigative journalistic platform he helped found, because of apparent censorship of an article on the Hunter Biden story, censorship Greenwald claims is widespread among Biden-supporting media today. What strikes me most about this is (1) that Greenwald seemed so intent on getting the story out in time to influence the election (which the editors seemingly didn’t think was a good idea, given the uncertainties), and (2) that his proclamations about censorship and disinformation (by a source with a long history of critical coverage of Joe Biden) appear disingenuous in light of his decision to go running immediately to Fox News for an interview on the Tucker Carlson show (despite Tucker). Wow, Glenn, something funny about your choice of venue…

The second thing is NBC’s apparent scoop that the document behind the story was faked at least in large part by an anti-China economics professor named Christopher Balding. Of course, just because there was faking involved to get the story out doesn’t mean there’s no story of some kind there. But at this point, voters might just know enough about Trump’s kids‘ involvements in different countries to have a comparative reference point for taking in a new story about Hunter Biden.

Meanwhile, the number of new coronaviruses infections in the U. S. continues to break records, topping 90,000 yesterday, with some questioning the high number of “excess deaths” that aren’t even included in the current count.

Addition (2:20 p.m. Eastern time): Zeynep Tufekci has just posted on the Hunter Biden story and, as always, makes some very astute observations. The “real questions,” she writes, concern “How much media attention should be given, to what parts of the story?” In the digital age, she argues, it is not speech but attention that is restricted and regulated. There is whistle-blowing and there is whistle-drowning, which this story is an example of. Like Hillary Clinton’s e-mails in 2016, it is “designed to flood the public a flurry of allegations that make it very difficult to concentrate on the important questions facing us.”

The media’s role, in Tufekci’s assessment, should not be to devote equal attention to allegations about both candidates — rather like news about climate change should devote equal attention to scientists who research the topic and professional obfuscators of it. It should be to devote “proportional attention to allegations and stories according to their credibility, scale, scope and importance.”

While a record-shattering 76 million people have already voted, Election Day itself remains the milestone that several media-political developments seem to be aiming toward. The reasons for that aren’t restricted to the goal of catching those last remaining undecided voters. There is also the question of the election’s aftermath and what will happen if the results (as expected) aren’t entirely conclusive. The risks of violence are being monitored by global election-monitoring groups including the International Crisis Group.

Most prominently, the Senate’s hearings on Big Tech, surprising in their timing so close to the election, are revealing themselves to be politically very interesting and contentious. I had earlier shared the view that the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Google would be interesting to watch, and that it indicates some measure of convergence between Democrats and Conservatives, despite somewhat different motivations. Now it seems the divergence around big tech has become more obvious. Democracy Now‘s interview this morning with Digital Cultures Lab director Ramesh Srinivasan provides some interesting observations about Republicans’ claims that Big Tech is biased against conservatives, when data indicate Big Tech’s influence, not just here but around the world, has largely been supportive of illiberal politicians and the conspiratorial claims that often drive their campaigns.

Meanwhile, Politico has an update on what’s been happening with the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” narrative. (Not much, it seems, as the right-wing mediasphere hasn’t been able to give it much traction.)

All for now. More to come.