Coronavirus News (270)

The Problem Is in the Internet’s Bones  It was as if the Interstate System of highways had been built using volunteer road crews, working without a map. No one present at the 1969 creation of the network that later became the internet imagined that this niche Pentagon project — built as a research tool for a small group of academic computer scientists — would one day become the backbone of the global economy. ...........   he has little patience for tech’s free-market mythmaking or for the gauzy abstractions — cloud, mobile, search, social — used to describe its products. ............  the difficulties inherent in having a global network born in and governed by America. ..............  The American government spied on its citizens and allowed the internet’s insecurities to be exploited by hackers. China, busily building up its tech infrastructure as our own system frays, is willing to take surveillance and industrial espionage even further. “This is the world that advertising capitalism has built” ............   “a world in which our expectations of any kind of private life are disappearing, and leaving us feeling disempowered against both our major corporations and our governments.” ............ Keenly aware of the intrusive track record of the national security state, Ball is reluctant to lean too hard on the government for answers. Instead, he argues, “we need to become systems thinkers” who recognize that Big Tech is only one piece of a larger whole. ................  we need to change our institutions as well as our thinking. As Ball’s evidence makes clear, a sharp power imbalance between public and private sectors is at the root of our problems. We are overdue for a systemic correction. 

Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times  For a sweeping, provocative and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution. 

The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts A dispute between a small group of scholars and the authors of The New York Times Magazine’s issue on slavery represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society. ...........  they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not.” .............  The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different. .............  whether Americans, from the Founders to the present day, are committed to the ideals they claim to revere .....................  slavery’s legacy still shapes American life ..............   If you think anti-black racism still shapes American society, then you are in agreement with the thrust of the 1619 Project ...............  Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles? ............  Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize .................  “what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” ........... “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain. .............  millennia in which human slavery was accepted around the world ............ the Revolution was kindled in New England, where prewar anti-slavery sentiment was strongest .........  the original Constitution did give some ironclad protections to slavery without mentioning it.” ............  the authors’ pessimism that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black Americans toward a more perfect union. ............  Every essay tracing racial injustice from slavery to the present day speaks to the endurance of racial caste. And it is this profound pessimism about white America that many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling. ............ “the Neo-Confederate world view” that the “South actually won the Civil War by weaving itself into the fabric of post war society so it can then discredit the entire American enterprise.” ........... “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country” .......... anti-black racism is a more intractable problem than most Americans are willing to admit. ........... “I think one would be very hard-pressed to look at the factual record from 1619 to the present of the black freedom movement and come away with any conclusion other than that most of the time, black people did not have a lot of allies in that movement,” Hannah-Jones told me. “It is not saying that black people only fought alone. It is saying that most of the time we did.” ........ something that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak up in a really big way. So I support the 1619 Project as kind of a cultural event, ............ history is not objective .......... Both Du Bois and the Dunning School saw themselves as having reached the truth by objective means. But as a target of the Dunning School’s ideology, Du Bois understood the motives and blind spots of Dunning School scholars far better than they themselves did. .......... “We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race,” Du Bois wrote, “and who will not deliberately encourage students to gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a lie.” ......... much of American history has been written by scholars offering ideological claims in place of rigorous historical analysis. But which claims are ideological, and which ones are objective, is not always easy to discern.