Issue 5 - Free Linda ✊🏼 and Lost Causes 📖

What do you think trust is?

AuthorAuthor

Jesse Hirsh & Jan Lemke
October 12, 2023

Welcome to issue five! We’re really building momentum, with our newsletter and our salons. Our network is growing and we’re connecting with multiple ecosystems.

Of course we also love to hear from you, and appreciate the feedback and story ideas you’re sending. You can reply to this email or contact us via [email protected]

Also a big thanks and shoutout to Murlatron a/k/a Murley Herrle-Fanning as they were the first to participate in our referral program, earning them this recognition! You too can receive this honour. More on how at the end of this email.

Upcoming Event

Oct 17th at 11am EDT - AI, Influencers, Celebrity, and PR

What used to be conceived of as marketplaces of ideas, can now be described as ecosystems of attention: arguments, memes, and actors (whether human or automated) competing for followers and influence. Truth isn’t dead, even if it is up for negotiation. News is more social than local, and conspiracy is as dominant as ever. Identity is more fluid. Whether they are a bot or not is far less important than whether they care about your story/issue. What does this mean for public relations professionals, and what is the future of the communications industry? What role is automation currently playing, and what role will it play? What are the ethics of AI in PR and how can we establish best practices?

Our salons are designed to combine smart conversation with improvised performance. We discourage preparation and encourage participation. If you’re reading this you’re not only smart enough, but perfectly positioned to join in the fun. Think of it as an opportunity to practice public speaking while also developing the art of the sound bite.

We’re currently using Zoom, recording them, and sharing clips. We ask that you RSVP via [email protected] as that allows us to get a sense of the numbers. If you have any questions about our salons, by all means, please ask, as we want you to join and have fun!

What do you think trust is?

We had a great salon on Trust this past Tuesday. Here’s a clip of Sherida introducing the topic, and posing the key question:

Health Salon Follow up

Eco Punk Jeanette Herrle sent us the following in response to the salon we held about health care:

Further to our discussion in the last salon, and specifically the example of creeping privatization of healthcare for seniors in Ontario that David brought up, I thought this tweet thread was of real interest. She makes a compelling case for how elevating efficiency above all other considerations (including the wellbeing of patients) can be incredibly brutal in its impacts and yet do little to alleviate wait times, while reinforcing the scapegoating of the elderly as bed blockers

Free Linda!?

Due to the tremendous success of the Free Britney movement, the Eco Punks went ahead and initiated the Free Linda movement. And with that we refer to Elon’s Linda, Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of Twitter. Uhm, sorry, we meant to say X. Or Twitter? Never mind, let’s move on.

Linda is an industry captain who joined Twitter / X from NBC Universal Media where she had served as Head of Global Partnerships and Advertising. Since then, she has moved on to become the lame duck who needs to go, talk and represent Twitter / X where and to whomever Elon can’t be bothered to talk. And while doing this, she has to do the best she can, reading tea-leaves or her bosses mind in order to field questions that don’t get to Elon.

Last week, she had to do this at the prestigious Code conference, and what happened has been labeled everything from “cringeworthy”, “hard to watch”, “hard to be in the same room as'', “delusional”, “underprepared” and “the worst performance of a CEO in the last decade”. But watch for yourself, here is the full interview:

and here is commentary from Andrew Ross Sorkin and Julia Bortensetin who conducted the interview:

Awkward, uncomfortable - we cannot take this anymore, believe that Linda cannot and should not take this anymore either and therefore we plead: FREE LINDA.

Stay tuned for more - we will keep a close eye on this and provide updates.

Worth Reading

Cory Doctorow and The Lost Cause

Cory Doctorow's new book, "The Lost Cause," is an antidote to the moment we find ourselves in. Set in a near-future world, the novel explores themes of social justice, activism, and the power of collective action. Doctorow's work has always been known for its prescient and thought-provoking nature, and "The Lost Cause" is no exception. In a time when societal divisions are widening and the fight democracy is more crucial than ever, this book serves as a rallying cry to come together and challenge oppressive systems. Doctorow's masterful storytelling and ability to blend technology, politics, and human emotions make "The Lost Cause" a must-read for those seeking to understand and navigate the complexities of our current moment in history.

The Lost Cause

It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can’t let ...

us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/thelostcause

Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, Cory is producing and distributing the audiobook version independently, using Kickstarter. If you prefer to listen to books rather than read, this is a great way, to both support the author, and enable alternative distribution models.

Eco Punk Corrections

Any credible publication should acknowledge when it made a mistake or got things wrong. And while we are totally prepared to do so when that happens, we also take pleasure in pointing out corrections to institutional mistakes and incompetence.

Many readers of this newsletter are familiar with the fallacies of predictive policing, but if this is news to you, check out this snippet from the article above:

Geolitica, known as PredPol until a 2021 rebrand, produces software that ingests data from crime incident reports and produces daily predictions on where and when crimes are most likely to occur.

We examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica between Feb. 25 to Dec. 18, 2018 for the Plainfield Police Department (PD). Each prediction we analyzed from the company’s algorithm indicated that one type of crime was likely to occur in a location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. In the end, the success rate was less than half a percent. Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category, that was also later reported to police.

Diving deeper, we looked at predictions specifically for robberies or aggravated assaults that were likely to occur in Plainfield and found a similarly low success rate: 0.6 percent. The pattern was even worse when we looked at burglary predictions, which had a success rate of 0.1 percent.

The danger and power of predictive software is the authority and arrogance that drives its adoption. We want to believe we can predict the future, and even more so that with enough data we can do so.

However the flaws are not just in the results, but in the methods and philosophies that conceived these systems. This is one of the benefits of taking an ecosystem approach. It makes it easy to identify how narrow perspectives result in erroneous results and failed projects.

Help us recruit more punks!

That means you Peche, Laurence, and Vass! You’re being called out to find a punk or two using the referral link above!

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