Factual Dispatch

Gamification and achievement systems are amazing ways to maintain loose control over a motivated group of captive audience members, but more in-depth controls have always been way more difficult to maintain. In 1984, Big Brother monitors everyone through a screen they receive their morning propaganda and perform their Two Minutes of Hate with. In 2019, China monitors aspirational party members through the use of the "Xi Study Strong Nation" app.

Imagine one of those free-to-play games your kid is obsessed with, the one with daily quests, random achievements, and odd usage compensation rates that you don't quite understand. Got the Candy Crush/Clash of Clans product in your mind? Now replace it with an offering from the State Department, Amazon & Facebook, an app that allows you to prove how down with state-based thought you are. This is what members of the Chinese Communist Party now have to deal with. They are required to earn a certain amount of "Xi Study Points" every week. If you're not already terrified about how this can be used for authoritarian purposes, the links in this paragraph can help explain why gamified propaganda, achievement-structured and centrally monitored should be seen as antithetical to the idea of a free society, at its most basic element. Uncompensated leisure time is the crown jewel of a supposedly successful society, and this app breaches the last unconquered ground with surveillance & propaganda, that ground being the human mind at rest. The app, especially among party aspirants, blots out all of their idle time, solidifying their connection to the party and also destroying what little chance there was for non-party-based thought. It's voluntary, but only for now.

During the era of Mao, the communist surveillance state in China deployed what they referred to as the fengqiao jingyan (枫桥经验), or what can be otherwise known as the Wulin/Xicheng Aunties. Those packs of whispering, gossipy aunties in your neighborhood? Imagine if they were paid to act as a network of informants. There are a bunch of these networks of community members turned snitches across China, that mirror soft systems of monitoring seen in Islamofascist and collectivist communities all over the world. However, the networks in China are the only ones that seem to be both supported and exploited by the state. While whisper networks originally served as protective systems, these deployments by the state are both integral to suppression of the Uighur or non-Han ethnic minority and could not occur without the wholesale support of the people. Which is why America is trying hard to distort their original purpose here, no matter how illegal that distortion may be. 

The last piece of news is somewhat related, but thankfully much closer to Western protections of 1st Amendment rights. The NYPD wants to sue Google for allowing Waze, their GPS nav & traffic reporting app, to mention police stops. This hilarious awareness gap has earned the focus of many legal writers, and one of the best, Elie Mystal, commented on the varsity stupid that the "acting deputy commissioner of legal matters" demanded of Google/Waze. Pro-tip for everyone out there, don't make constitutionally fraught legal threats against a multi-billion dollar company, especially using the 1st Amendment. Because as much as I'd like Google to end up owning the NYPD, that's probably not the best thing for public safety in Gotham.

Eye-Watering Data Visualization of the Week: A Jpost article irresponsibly claimed that a lab was a year away from a cure for cancer, and as always, the lie flew around the world before the truth had a chance to put its pants on.

Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: Of course there are drones being deployed from trucks in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Of course you didn't want to remember that Ukraine is still fighting a hot war with Russia."Huh, Interesting" Read of the Week: Material changes to one's face/appearance don't just trick facial recognition algorithms, but fool real humans as well. Clark Kent's glasses and disheveled appearance might go farther than we expected.Annoying-But-Correct Take of the Week: Donny's lilting towards authoritarianism (according to a GWB staffer) and we need to be concerned about it, as bumbling as it may look. Dunk of the Week:

The days are getting longer, the bills are coming due. What are you doing with the weather that remains "unseasonable," largely because old people won't be around when we're used to it?Yours,T