Daily Bafflements

• Today in innovation and its discontents: contributing editor Evgeny Morozov appeared in The Guardian this week, deconstructing the tech takeover of Western politics. “While the financial industry has historically been key to ‘buying time’ and staving off the populist rebellion, in the future that role will be assigned to the technology industry,” Morozov warns, leery of the popular idea that “big data, automation, the ‘fourth industrial revolution’—will step in to save us or, at least, delay the ultimate rupture.”

• The future of Irish government remains uncertain after a controversial election left none of the country’s political parties with enough votes to control the government. The issue splitting the country is whether EU-backed austerity policies are a bitter but necessary medicine for the Irish economy or merely a punitive measure, responsible for epidemic homelessness and child poverty. Recently, we’ve had takes from The Baffler’s Sarah Jaffe and David Graeber on the philosophy’s effects on Ireland and the UK.

• After this week’s Supreme Court tie on mandatory union dues for government employees, our friends over at Pacific Standard offer a breakdown on how public sector unions came to be in such a hazardous position.

What Obama Gets Wrong About Our Political Media

Journalists and political leaders alike are suckers for high-minded reverie. Of all the many cognitive fancies billowing through both professions, probably the most alluring one is that the best and brightest among us are charged with the sacred trust of citizen-building. Without their tender ministrations, so they say, the populace will drift ineluctably into mere titillation—or worse, into intolerance, cynicism, and deranged fantasy.

And so in recent weeks our media savants have been rending their hairshirts over the notion that they, in a rare misapplication of their civic duties, have created the Trump phenomenon. And this plaint has gained an influential publicist in Barack Obama, the lame-duck leader of the free world who’s been moonlighting as a media critic of late.

Obama showcased his brief against the present media dispensation in a speech this week marking the 2015 Robin Toner prize for accomplished political reporting. (Robin Toner, it should be noted, was a truly sharp and skeptical political reporter for the New York Times who died tragically young in 2008; this year’s recipient of the Syracuse University award endowed in her honor is the equally impressive ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis.) That Obama’s remarks about the civic role of journalism are anodyne in the extreme is not itself all that noteworthy. There’s always a general aura of stultifying worthiness about awards ceremonies, and when they combine the interlocking self-regard of a loquacious profession and president, it takes an unusual astral alignment for anything remotely interesting to be said at such a gathering.

Daily Bafflements

• Oh, you thought Silicon Valley proper was the hub for tech-driven psychosis? Meet HubSpot, a Cambridge-based company that specializes in inbound marketing, where math, logic, and a healthy dose of anti-capitalism have all been thrown out the door in favor of . . . candy and spam-that-isn’t-spam? Dan Lyons, a former employee and editor at Newsweek, writes,

The ideal HubSpotter is someone who exhibits a quality known as GSD, which stands for “get shit done.” This is used as an adjective, as in “Courtney is always in super-GSD mode.” The people who lead customer training seminars are called inbound marketing professors and belong to the faculty at HubSpot Academy. Our software is magical, such that when people use it—wait for it—one plus one equals three. Halligan and Dharmesh first introduced this alchemical concept at HubSpot’s annual customer conference, with a huge slide behind them that said “1 + 1 = 3.” Since then it has become an actual slogan at the company. People use the concept of one plus one equals three as a prism through which to evaluate new ideas. One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR, tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.” 

Full disclosure: we use HubSpot, although not in the borderline spammy way it’s intended to be used. Still, oy vey.

Primary Lessons in Propaganda

All propaganda is not advertising, but all advertising is propaganda. With “sponsored content” becoming the norm, corporations hiring “reporters” to cover themselves, and media organizations hiring political operatives to deliver the news, the notion that journalism once had a meaning distinct from advertising sounds increasingly quaint and fanciful, like believing in gnomes and fairies. This process of redefinition is pretty far along, and when it is complete, the sort of critical speech once deemed essential to democracy will be shunned as deviant, conspiratorial, or even criminal.

The victory of propaganda will be total. There will be no escaping it, and no fighting it—except by vigilantly rejecting abuses of language and, where appropriate, condemning the perpetrators to quiet time in the naughty corner.

The powerlessness and futility many Americans feel is exacerbated by the inadequacy of their political vocabulary. That’s why it’s so important to use that word, propaganda, and to understand what it means. Propaganda is not merely an export of the Islamic State, China, or Russia. It is the principal product of the “new media,” which is so awful and regressive it makes New Coke seem like a triumph of innovation on par with the Apollo program.

Delegate Math Doesn’t Have Feelings

Politics is hard, so The Baffler has employed expert comic mind David Rees to give us a visual rendering of the day’s signature political controversies. The only problem is that David can’t draw, so his cartoons are word pictures—which is to say, words.

Baffler reader Catie West was kind enough to illustrate our previous cartoon of Marco Rubio—an affecting figure—wearing a Pinocchio-style floppy bowtie.

How to Shoot a Suspect in the Back, Reasonably

Beyond the racial prejudice of juries and district attorneys, a major—and frequently ignored—factor as to why county prosecutors fail to indict cops who maim or kill unarmed citizens is a handful of Supreme Court and federal cases that exalt police discretion over common sense.

The key question at the center of these excessive force cases is “reasonableness”—not what is reasonable to you and me, but to a police officer. Writing on behalf of the court in Graham v. Connor, a landmark case regarding police violence, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote, “the ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” The court went even further by couching the officer’s  reasonableness in the likely context of “split-second judgments” and “in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.” The preemptive apologism of this language provides police with a wide breadth for mistakes or misconduct—and the public with little guarantee of even application. It fortifies the absurd idea that the hastiest of police actions is not only justifiable, it is eminently reasonable.

Dethorne Graham, a North Carolinian transportation worker and diabetic, brought the case to the Supreme Court. One afternoon in 1984, Graham was feeling the onset of a bad insulin reaction from low blood sugar. Graham called a friend, William Berry, for a ride to the convenience store to get some orange juice. Graham went into the store while Berry waited in the car. There was a long line at the check-out counter so Graham quickly decided to look elsewhere. Rushing out, Graham got back in Berry’s car. What police officer Connor, parked across the street, saw was Graham hurry into the store, run out, and then jump into his friend’s car; moves considered “textbook” for a thief.

Daily Bafflements

• Andrew Auernheimer, the hacker also known as weev, is claiming to have printed anti-semitic and racist fliers remotely so that they landed right on the printer trays of US universities. Angela Nagle wrote about this fascist sympathizer in the current issue of the magazine (why not subscribe?), as well as about his supporters in the liberal press. “Significantly, weev’s sensibility fuses elements of the anti-establishment far right, like the militia movement (which styles its anti-government activities a form of ‘leaderless resistance’),” writes Nagle, “with the left-leaning vision of the old anti-establishment counterculture.”

• If startups didn’t come up with such godawfully twee composite names (TaskRabbit? SpoonRocket?!) they might not need to “pivot” to different business models quite so regularly. Hey ho, though, bit late for The Baffler to start backseat driving now, the damage is done—Salon has officially called a “contagion of pivots”: “Companies like Cherry (car washes), Prim (laundry), SnapGoods (gear rental), Rewinery (wine) [no shit], HomeJoy (homecleaning) all went bust.” There is a moral to this story (beyond not to trust the Economist): “If they want good workers, they need to offer decent jobs.”

• Today in “pod culture”: Ever wanted “a social network with a physical address”? Us neither. But it exists, for startup entrepreneurs, and it claims to “end world loneliness,” to boot. “We built the pods facing each other so that the community polices each other,” making sure the hepped-up young so and sos follow rules like “No PodSex.” Sounds incredibly lonely to us, but what do we know.

Daily Bafflements

• “Today we are seeing the effects of a relentless war against the very idea of working-class politics or working-class community,” writes Baffler contributing editor David Graeber. “That has left most working people with little way to express that care except to direct it towards some manufactured abstraction: ‘our grandchildren’; ‘the nation’; whether through jingoist patriotism or appeals to collective sacrifice.” As David contended in our current issue, until a recent spate of hope struck, the British working class “saw the hard times and rationing of World War II as the last time Britons had acted with a genuine common purpose.”

• The “platform” model beloved by startups, where sellers and buyers are connected by a powerful overseer who sets the rules, has an antecedent in twelfth–century Champagne Fairs: “Getting booted out of the fair would be the equivalent of being blacklisted from Amazon in a world where that was the only way of reaching your customers, which isn’t that far from the circumstances businesses operate in today.” 

• Inside the slow and fishy death of a billionaire.