Misinformation, Plagiarism and Elon Musk's power play.
The ghouls are coming for you! A shady lobby group called 'NetChoice,' and a billionaire loose cannon to serve up tricks with treats.
As I write this, my high school students are setting up a house of horrors for Halloween. I watched them turn our hallways and rooms into scare-zones out of which ghouls will scream out. Lots of make-up, and strobe lights…
A lot like election season. I keep a stack of ‘creepy’ mailers I began collecting a few week ago; there are enough to pave a small room. The BS to scare us into voting this way or that is so blatant. The selective quotes and data they cite is so inauthentic, you’d think people should be tossing these out. I began to save these to make a point of the waste campaign funds. Unless, of course, scare tactics work! Strobe lights that mask their real identities.
Misinformation on a larger scale.
I recently wrote an Op-ed about what Google, Meta, and the usual suspects are up to. It will spook you. It’s in the DailyFT in Sri Lanka. You could find it here.
I referenced the ‘Kids Online Safety Act’ (KOSA) being opposed by our favorite companies: Google , Meta, Amazon, Snap —the usual suspects. In case you haven’t heard of KOSA, it’s a Cybersecurity act.
AI’s plagiarizing—again.
A startup called Perplexity is facing a barrage of lawsuits from several news organizations, including Wired, the New York Times, and even News Corp (the Murdock group that owns the Wall Street Journal). They accused Perplexity of scraping their website for content. Plagiarism, in other words. Other media have been suing AI companies too. Conde Nast sued OpenAI earlier for the same reason.
Same story. Different bad boy. Impunity. Like the next story.
Elon’s Gambit
The ‘richest man in the world’ has a way of BS-ing his way while losing/spending money fast. (He’s gutted Twitter, its value went down by 71 percent in January.) His latest gambit, offering $1 million a day to someone tells us something about what he’s after. When your reputation is on the line there’s one way to redeem it: buy your way. All this in addition to Musk amplifying conspiracy theories that get fact checked fast. The US justice department has issued a warning, so he hit pause.
Funny, I have to teach my students simple norms of civics that adults like this blatantly defy.
Salman Rushdie’s ‘Knife.’
I just completed an unusual book. It’s Salman Rushdie’s latest memoir, —his second memoir—Knife. This follows his near fatal stabbing in upstate New York in 2022. At first I was not impressed, mainly because I expected the prose to be like Midnight’s Children. But as it gathered speed, his observations about his recovery and his reflections on what it meant to be attacked became gripping stuff. His sense of humor spills out on every other page, despite the horrific injuries he explains with clinical precision, like losing his right eye which he likens to cyclops and several other literary metaphors. Here’s one quote:
“A man sees his reflection and isn’t sure he recognizes himself. Who are you, he asks the figure in the mirror. Do I even know you? Will you at some point turn back into me, or is this I am stuck with now, this wild haired one-eyed dead stranger.”
Rushdie manages to reference the Beatles, The Lord of the Rings, Johnny Cash and King Lear among others, making this such a delightful commentary of the times we are in. I once met the man, I believe it was in 2008. He was such a nice person to talk to, and we talked about his Indian experience, and work in advertising. Fun Fact: Rushdie worked at Ogilvy and Mather, an agency for which I worked back in the day. In a prior job he apparently wrote a famous headline, “Look into the Mirror tomorrow – you’ll like what you see.” It was for chocolate, and the mirror was the Daily Mirror. I find that interesting, relative to the quote above. He didn’t refer to the ‘mirror’ ad in his book, unfortunately.
And that’s a wrap.
I had some amazing guest speakers in my class. One from London, one from Sri Lanka, another from Phoenix, and the next one will be from the local NPR radio station. I’ll feature them in my next newsletter. Thanks for subscribing.