News — At The Edge — 3/16

Most know change is badly needed — disinformation, privacy and economic inequality — but absent leadership with vision and cojones to change the rules of the game things will grow worse.

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Marking 30 years of the web, Tim Berners-Lee calls for a joint fight against disinformation —

“[Berners-Lee] warning especially about corporate capture of the online sphere…[and] break the grip of dominant digital walled gardens…boils the problem of web misuse into three distinct categories:

1. Deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behavior, and online harassment.
2. System design that creates perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed…[with] revenue models that…reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation.
3. Unintended negative consequences of benevolent design, such as the outraged and polarized tone and quality of online discourse….

’[T]he first category is impossible to eradicate completely…[but] both laws and code…minimize this behavior…as we have always done offline….The second category requires us to…change incentives….[Third] category calls for research to understand existing systems and model possible new ones’….

[Basically] the problem of digital information being maliciously and deliberately weaponized in order to sew social division…works against the kind…a healthy online space and thus society….It’s our journey from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future….

[T]he breadth of societal problems being linked to the Web…[include] competitively distorted markets; to human rights infringements and threats to democracy, privacy, diversity and security; to the undermining of science fact and public safety; and even a conduit for further increasing inequality.” https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/12/marking-30-years-of-the-web-tim-berners-lee-calls-for-a-joint-fight-against-disinformation/

Privacy for Sale (3 min. Video) —

Roger McNamee was an early investor in Facebook and still holds a stake in the social media giant — but he’s also become a vocal critic of its practices, especially around how it handles user data…[W]e need to stop being passive and take control of how we share our personal information.

The dangers of our 'new data economy,' and how to avoid them

Behold a New Samsung Foldable Form Factor: The Wristband Phone

“Would you want to wear your phone on your wrist…[that] turns it into a (long!) candybar when you need it…[with] a full-display…[and] powerful magnets on each end of the phone that will close the phone once you put it around your wrist….

[Also] SIM card would be inserted on the top while a USB-C port will be on its bottom….

It is doable with current technology or stuff that we know exists in labs or is on the verge of production.” https://www.tomsguide.com/us/samsung-foldable-wristband-phone,news-29618.html

Is modern monetary theory nutty or essential? —

“In the decades after the Depression economists argued…over how to build on the ideas of…Keynes, macroeconomics’…[and] a mathematised, American strain of Keynesianism became dominant….

[1990s] post-Keynesian ideas in fleshing out the perspective embodied in MMT…[with] some central ideas.

• A government that prints and borrows in its own currency cannot be forced to default, since it can always create money to pay creditors.
• New money can also pay for government spending; tax revenues are unnecessary.
• Governments…should use their budgets to manage demand and maintain full employment (tasks now assigned to monetary policy, set by central banks).
• The main constraint on government spending is not the mood of the bond market, but the availability of underused resources, like jobless workers….
• Spending is the accelerator, taxation the brakes.
• Fiscal deficits are irrelevant as long as unemployment is low and prices are stable….

MMT is less a rival theory than a qualitative critique.

• Yes, central banks can use interest rates to achieve full employment, if rates are not too close to zero. But MMTers think governments are better equipped.
• Monetary policy works via banks and financial markets, but when markets panic, this mechanism is weakened.
• Rate cuts stimulate the economy by encouraging firms and households to borrow, but that can engender risky levels of private-sector debt….
• Similarly, rate rises can slow inflation…[but] work by inducing indiscriminate involuntary unemployment. The state could instead tame an unruly boom, MMTers argue, by breaking up monopolies — thus loosening supply constraints — or by aiming tax increases at [certain] firms….

Macroeconomic arguments tend…[to show] only those with more influence and those with less….Paul Romer [2018] Nobel laureate…wrote in 2016 that ‘for more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards.’” https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/03/12/is-modern-monetary-theory-nutty-or-essential

Capitalism and Post-Capitalism — The Whole Truth & Nothing But

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Doc Huston