‘Right now you’ve got four people running, and the two top choices are the most hated people in the world,’ says Jordan, one of the protesters. He is a former electrician who was energised by the Sanders insurgency and now can’t bring himself to vote for ‘whatshername’. After Ralph Nader allegedly cost Al Gore the presidency and ushered in the Dubya Bush era, triangulating the progressive vote is a site of past trauma. But Jordan has a retort. ‘I keep hearing about the Nader factor in 2000, when there was three people running. Well, there’s four people running this time.’
The fourth is Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate. Johnson is so unprepared for the presidency that even he seems to look on his own entry as comic relief, but he still polls around 5 per cent nationally. (A measure of American battle-sickness: among active-duty military personnel, who usually lean hard Republican, this isolationist – ‘What is Aleppo?’ – sometimes hits the lead.) Jordan really seems to believe Jill Stein can win. ‘She’s honest. She’s healthy. She’s not corrupt. She’s not being bought by big money, super PACs, things like that.’ His disillusionment is so deep that he would rather Trump than Clinton, even though he loathes the prospect.
‘The only reason people would support him is racism. Just people that are uninformed and full of hate … He talks a lot, but they’re not going to let him do half the stuff he’s saying. I think we’re better off with four years of him than eight years of Clinton. She’s going to start a war [because] she owes a lot of people who gave her money for big favours.’ It’s becoming familiar, this idea of the presidency as a puppet show, working from the assumption that the real people running the country are somewhere else.
Clinton may be one of the most hated women in the world, but pinpointing what grates about her persona isn’t easy. Ask supporters why her poll position is so timorous, and they will sometimes blame sexism. A Caribbean woman with green eyes bangs on the metal barrier outside the rally, saying, ‘Because there are too many men in this country who don’t want to be led by a woman.’ That’s true among Trumpies, where misogyny is all part of the sneering, alpha-dog attraction. There are also deficiencies that show sexism’s second-hand effect: to survive in politics as a woman, Clinton was forced to eschew exactly the emotions the public now hanker for. But college students and Stein voters aren’t primarily sexists; they’re left cold by something else.
Clinton sits alongside Sanders onstage, and she listens to Sanders talk, nodding along in a lolling, incessant movement that doesn’t seem to bear much relationship to what is being said. She doesn’t look too awkward or phoney. She’s an engaging listener who seems to fulfil the suite of emotional qualities, or their simulation, that we ask for in television-era politicians. But there’s something inert about her, something that after a few minutes sets some students chewing their fingers.
‘Think big, not small – we need to have the best-educated workforce in the world,’ says Sanders. ‘Thing big, not small’ could be the inversion of the Clinton motto, and her long period at the top has cemented a belief in slow change. Consensus. The best progressives can hope for. Obamacare, the signature achievement of the current president, and perhaps the American Left in the last quarter-century, is running into trouble already. Even this measure, realised decades after the rest of the world rejected market-based health care, may have been too soon.
One of the least mentioned facts of the 2016 campaign is this: Clinton is also a dynastic politician. She’s a former first lady and secretary of state, and after Bush II, presidential candidates with familiar names are on the nose in America. Most recently, Clinton’s focus has been the projection of American power internationally, as well as the projection of foreign power within America, through speaking deals and the like. (‘Those millions in speaking fees – let me tell you, it’s not because she’s a good speaker,’ says Trump, in one of his better lines of attack.) Foreign policy is at the heart of America’s decline, and burning $6 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of spending it on domestic bridges and schools is her policy as well.
Her speech starts to ginned-up applause and the waving of machine-made banners, all much more decorous than Trumpland. ‘Debt Free College’, say the signs behind her, and that’s all she has to repeat. Even in a country defined by grotesque inequalities and rampant financial predation, the structuring of American college debt is an outlier madness: more than a trillion dollars’ worth, much held by the government, some at an interest rate of 10 per cent, which cannot be renegotiated. In 2013, the average cost of a medical degree was $278,455. Sanders points out that this absurd expense means not only that the road to the middle class is closed, but also that well-to-do doctors and dentists have to forget about working in disadvantaged communities. All Clinton has to do is hit these same notes, bash Trump a little, not fall over, and she’ll be fine. For once, this is not a popularity contest.
It’s an unusual choice, then, to name-check the endorsement of the Republican former secretary of the navy. John Warner – ‘a World War Two veteran’ – is on Team Clinton, the first time he’s ever backed a Democrat for the White House. That’s the same John Warner whose name appears on the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (a multi-billion-dollar increase in defence spending, broadening the powers of the president to declare martial law, eliminating the auditing of expenditure in Iraq), as well as the USS John Warner, the navy’s ‘most lethal’ submarine. Not natural catnip for a college crowd.
This turns out to be one of the last times that Sanders and Clinton will campaign together. Audio emerges of Clinton trying to explain the Sanders phenomenon, a leak that the opposition tries to confect into an attack. In reality, Clinton sounds sympathetic on the tape. ‘So, as a friend of mine said the other day, I am occupying from the centre-left to the centre-right,’ she said. ‘And I don’t have much company there. Because it is difficult when you’re running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is – I don’t want to over-promise. I don’t want to tell people things that I know we cannot do.’ This is the enigma of Hillary Clinton: that after thirty years it is still not clear what she believes she cannot do. But it seems to be a lot.
She doesn’t sound angry when she says she is angry. She doesn’t sound hopeful when she says she has hope. When she tries to render her policies down to personal anecdotes, they feel somehow abstract, like they happened to someone else a long time ago. She is now unimaginable as a non-political figure, and faces an impossible task if elected, of restoring faith in the system that has made her who she is.
*
Outside the hall, the merchandise stands are packing up. One of the vendors has had a slow sales day, his table still piled with Clintonware. He usually sells ice-creams, which is how he got his nickname, Icee Don.
‘At the beginning of the election during the primaries, everything was really kind of smooth,’ says Don. ‘Everybody was excited by it. It seems like it’s kind of dwindled now that the primaries are over. I don’t know why. I mean, Bernie Sanders, he had a big wave going. Now the two candidates are Hillary and Trump, it seems the excitement is pretty low now. I’m a merchant, and I sell product, and sales are down. The momentum is down. Morale is not as it was.’
Usually he would pack up his Clinton and Sanders gear and then head to the next Trump rally, where the market is for ‘Hillary Sucks – But Not Like Monica’ stickers, and T-shirts invoking the size of Trump’s balls. Instead he has to be in court in New York, an unfortunate piece of timing that might cost him a few thousand dollars in sales. Eight dozen Trump shirts are in his van. ‘His product moves.’
‘Honestly, it’s funny, I thought I was a Democrat – [but] the one that really could bring change is Donald Trump. Because he’s a gambler. He’s new to the field. He has nothing to do but to change everything around. If any kind of change were to come, even if it’s change for the worse, it would be Donald. A spark is needed. Even if it’s just for six months, seven months. There’s an energy that’s needed. I never
thought I would be selling Republican products – ever. But Donald Trump has actually brought revenue to me, because he’s a spark. And that’s what America’s looking for.’
Icee Don is something of a ‘quiet political activist’ himself, someone with an economic revolution in mind, something that would reduce the violence he sees in the street. That’s his product. But what is America’s?
‘America’s product is reality … What’s it based on now? Embarrassment. If you watch TV, it’s based on embarrassment. And who can embarrass themselves the most.’
‘America’s product,’ says Icee Don, ‘is bullshit.’
Icee Don must be one of the last truly bipartisan men in America, able to mix with Trump fans one day and Clinton fans the next, both assuming he’s onside because of all the paraphernalia. It seems like a perverse version of Obama’s ‘Red State, Blue State’ speech: ‘The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states. Red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.’
But the acrimony captured in that speech now seems quaint, a golden age of harmony in comparison to what is happening now. And what is coming next.
Killing Our Media
Nick Feik
‘Today I want to focus on the most important question of all,’ wrote Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. ‘Are we building the world we all want?’
The ‘social infrastructure’ built by the company Zuckerberg founded is now regularly used by almost two billion people. His ‘Building Global Community’ essay, which he posted on Facebook in February, is an ode to the virtues of connectivity. Joining up the world and empowering ‘us’, Facebook is connecting people more regularly and intricately than anything that’s ever come before, and Zuckerberg intends it to become synonymous with human progress.
‘Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.’
Reasons for optimism abound. ‘We had a good start to 2017,’ Zuckerberg said in May, on the release of Facebook’s latest financial figures. Total revenue had soared by 49 per cent in the past year and profits topped $1 billion per month.
*
In April, Melbourne schoolgirl Ariella, sixteen, joined a Facebook group ’16+ hangouts’ to chat with other teens. As Rachel Baxendale reported in the Australian, when another member realised Ariella was Jewish, he and more than a dozen other teenagers began abusing her. ‘All aboard Jew express next stop Auschwitz gassing chambers, I hear there is a lovely shower aboard, Exterminate, Exterminate,’ wrote one. ‘I’ll make u proud,’ wrote another. ‘I’ll f*** her in the gas chambers.’
By the time Ariella left the group twenty-four hours after joining, she had compiled almost fifty pages of screenshots of abusive messages. She reported the abuse to Facebook.
‘Thanks for your report,’ Facebook replied. ‘You did the right thing by letting us know about this. We looked over the profile you reported, and though it doesn’t go against one of our specific community standards, we understand that the profile may still be offensive to you.’
Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities prohibits ‘hate speech’, and it has previously said that ‘while there is no universally accepted definition of hate speech, as a platform we define the term to mean direct and serious attacks on any protected category of people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or disease’.
Not that any of that was helpful to Ariella. Was this the world Zuckerberg talked about building?
*
In May, on the same day Facebook announced its first-quarter earnings, Fairfax Media employees across Australia went on strike after the company decided to cut 125 editorial staff in a bid to save $30 million.
The staff cut was greeted with great public anger and frustration. Most of it was directed at Fairfax management, particularly CEO Greg Hywood, who’d landed a $2.5 million share bonus a couple of months earlier. (Some reports suggested he may have earned as much as $7.2 million in 2016.) Fairfax’s management has not excelled over the past decade, and Hywood was never going to please many outside his family for accepting the bonus while shedding workers. But the problems Fairfax faced were much greater than those stemming from its management, and have been growing for years, just as they have at News Corp, the Guardian and almost every other major news organisation not funded by government.
It’s self-evident that news doesn’t report itself, but the economic model that has traditionally supported quality journalism is mid-collapse. Newspaper revenue has been falling by 5 per cent per year worldwide since 2009, according to Bloomberg. Print circulation has been falling, as has print advertising.
In Australia, newspaper advertising revenue has dropped 40 per cent, to $2.4 billion, in just five years, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. By contrast, the online advertising market is growing at 25 per cent a year and on various estimates will be worth $6 billion this year. According to Morgan Stanley, Google and Facebook would generate the lion’s share of this, between $4 and $5 billion – around 40 per cent of our total advertising market and rising fast.
Globally, these two tech companies account for approximately half the entire digital advertising market. Estimates vary, but it’s widely accepted that they are picking up 80 to 90 per cent of all new digital advertising.
By now these trends are reported with a degree of resignation. The leak of advertising to the tech giants seems inexorable. It’s not that readers are deserting the mastheads: the number of people who read them either in print or online has never been higher. It’s simply that ‘print dollars turned into digital cents’.
The New York Times recently added more digital-only subscriptions than in any quarter in its history: 300,000 for a total of 2.2 million. Yet its advertising revenue in the same quarter fell by 7 per cent, driven by an 18 per cent drop in print advertising.
There hasn’t been a Trump bump in Australia. And major news outlets here don’t have a potential audience of a billion people.
In May, Greg Hywood told the Senate select committee inquiry into the future of public interest journalism that in the ‘good old days’ 85 per cent of newspaper revenue was from advertising revenue and 15 per cent from subscriptions. Now it’s more like 50/50 – and not because of rising subscriptions.
*
While Facebook, Google and ‘the internet’ may be responsible for the collapse of the traditional media business, blaming them is like holding a shark responsible for biting. Technology was always going to reveal mass-market advertising as a blunt instrument. Printing every single advertisement for a second-hand car, and attempting to distribute this to every single person in the market, may have seemed great at the time, but time makes fools of all of us, especially if we’re Fairfax executives. Spraying ads for holidays to Fiji across the media was never going to be as effective as simply catching those who googled ‘flights to Fiji’.
Facebook allows advertisers to target consumers by age range, gender, location, education level, political leanings, interests, habits, beliefs, digital activities and purchase behaviour; by what they ‘like’ and share, and who their friends are; by what device they use. It can shoot an advertisement directly into your hand because you’re a middle-aged male who searched online for a hardware product and you’re near the new Bunnings on a Saturday afternoon.
It knows when you’re having anniversaries, when you’re pregnant, when you’re planning a bar mitzvah, and when you’re watching a sad film and might feel like chocolate. What’s more, it’s getting smarter at pegging your interests and vulnerabilities every time you log in. Its natural-language processing and machine-learning algorithms are building a profile based on what you look at and for
how long, what your friends shared and what you commented on. Its systems are gauging why you chose to comment on this but not that, and are comparing what you looked at versus what you typed.
According to its own Data Policy, Facebook receives information about your activities on and off Facebook (loyalty cards, mailing lists, browser cookies, receipts, apps, mobile phone permissions and the like) from hundreds of third-party partners. Additionally, ‘we may share information about you within our family of companies to facilitate, support and integrate their activities and improve our services’. If you’re using Instagram, WhatsApp or Atlas, just to give a few examples, the data belongs to Facebook. Or anyone it chooses to share with.
It may have been set up with the best of intentions – to build communities – but its corporate aim now is to build an unparalleled and irresistible machine with which to know you and influence you.
‘It’s a commercial space; it’s like a shopping mall’ is how Greens senator Scott Ludlam, deputy chair of the inquiry into the future of public interest journalism, describes it to me. ‘[And] the people who use Facebook are the commodities. It’s us that’s being sold to advertisers. I don’t know if that’s really sunk in.’
We’re discussing the implications of a cavalier attitude towards users’ data and privacy.
‘I don’t know if I’d even say they’re cavalier with privacy. They’re mining our privacy on a massive scale and that’s the product: that’s what they sell.
‘Their values are somewhat arbitrary, and they’re not really contestable because it’s a commercial space. “If you don’t like shopping in our shopping mall, you’re free to go sit in the car park.”’
Which might be a reasonable argument were it not for the ubiquity – the platform monopoly – of the online giants, and the impact two companies in particular are having on the rest of society. When it comes to collecting and employing data, they have demonstrated an inconsistent regard for users’ rights.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 11
