#electiondenial — Public Fediverse posts

Trump Is Manufacturing an Election Crisis to Justify Military and ICE Power

Trump is manufacturing claims of foreign interference and noncitizen voting to discredit future election losses and prepare Americans for authoritarian federal action.

Weekly output: Google’s AI Mode, Waymo’s software testing, Trump threatens Chris Krebs, Venmo’s dubious privacy defaults

I had a short and useful visit to the future home of Starfleet Academy’s headquarters, courtesy of NTT’s Upgrade 2025 conference there hosting me (including comped airfare and lodging), and now I need to finish writing two pieces from that Japanese telco’s event.

4/7/2025: Google Expands Its Conversational ‘AI Mode’ Search Option, PCMag

Since I already had access to AI Mode and since this is a gardening time of the year, I tested this search option with some queries on that subject for Google’s Gemini AI.

4/8/2025: For Waymo’s Software Team, Bug Hunting Sometimes Happens at 45mph, PCMag

I wrote up an enlightening talk from a Waymo engineer at a software-quality conference I attended the week before hosted by a Tysons Corner startup called Antithesis–and then I got to experience the results of Waymo’s ongoing work during two uneventful rides in San Francisco.

4/10/2025: Still Mad About Losing the 2020 Election, Trump Targets Cybersecurity Pro, PCMag

One reason that I haven’t yet filed anything from NTT’s event is that I took time Thursday to report and write this post to ensure that it would adequately convey the fraudulent nature of Trump’s complaint against Chris Krebs, the CISA director he hired in 2018 and then fired in 2020 for telling the truth about the integrity of that year’s election.

4/11/2025: Venmo’s dubious defaults look like a permanent privacy foul, Fast Company

I’ve had a version of this story on my to-do list for a while, but then the inept opsec of the Trump administration served up a news peg when journalists found the Venmo accounts of multiple White House principals and started exploring their public-by-default friends lists. (Everyone in this administration should have known better, since BuzzFeed News located Joe Biden’s Venmo and inspected his friends list back in 2021). I quizzed a few subject-matter experts, but getting a statement out of Venmo took a little longer.

#2020Election #AIMode #Antithesis #BugBash #ChrisKrebs #defaultSettings #electionDenial #electionSecurity #GoogleAI #GoogleGemini #PayPal #TrumpRetribution #Venmo #VenmoFriendsList #Waymo

Liberal conspiracism and the parts of the psyche that media literacy training doesn’t touch

From Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism loc 1107:

If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’: the fantasy is doing something for me. It is staging something that I want, even if I don’t want to want it. And if that fantasy is then adopted by numerous others, for no good reason, then the wish obviously isn’t reducible to personal psychopathology but is rooted in a shared social condition.

I wrote extensively in The Public and the Platforms (largely drawing on Noortje Marres and Will Davies) about the limits of relying on facts to support deliberation in the public sphere when the institution of factfulness (a neutral representation that has been produced by competent experts in a disinterested way) has unravelled.

I’m trying to decide if the psychoanalytical case Seymour is making here constitutes an extension of this argument or an alternative to it. Is factfulness an institution or is it a fantasy? Is it one fantasy (those-who-know working on behalf of all of us) being replaced by other, darker and more enjoyable fantasies? It’s a very useful time for Seymour to have published this book, particularly as liberal conspiracism seems to have gone into overdrive since the US election. From loc 1,066:

Wherever conspiracy theories suddenly appear, we wonder: Who is behind this? Who is pulling the strings? We become conspiracy theorists about conspiracy theories. We think, to use the terms of journalist Alexi Mostrous, that conspiracists can be divided between ‘victims’ and ‘manipulators’.28 The wishful implication is that there are cynical producers and gullible consumers. Those who intentionally mislead, for profit or attention, and those who are innocently misled. The latter can be saved if only we can discredit the former. Perhaps when mass media was a one-way system, and propaganda worked on the principle of suggestion, this was plausible.

There was always something epistemically dubious about diagnoses of post-truth were made, given the tendency to ascribe the breakdown of a previously functioning system to an outside agent. I’ve written in a couple of places about this as a form of liberal populism: e.g. everything was working fine in the public sphere until those dastardly Russians came along and tricked the population into voting for Brexit. But it was also incipient in the whole notion of conspiracism traditionally construed, in the way Seymour points to here.

The psychoanalytical reading of conspiracism suggests we should not see a growth of liberal conspiracism as more people being dragged into the post-truth vortex, but rather more people insisting on their right to the jouissance that conspiracies offer. Why should the Republicans have all the fun? Why should we obey the law, remain within the boundaries of ‘truth’ and moderate our responses? Why can’t we just make shit up too? Isn’t it more satisfying to imagine that Musk stole the election with Starlink than facing up to the possibility of structural, even terminal, weaknesses with the organising mechanisms which constitute the Democratic party?

#conspiracism #conspiracy #conspiracyTheory #electionDenial #elections #Jouissance #NoortjeMarres #PostNeoliberalCivics #postPandemicCivics #postTruth #publicAndTheirPlatforms #richardSeymour #WillDavies

Liberal conspiracism and the parts of the psyche that media literacy training doesn’t touch

From Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism loc 1107:

If I agree to fantasise about gruesome, erotically charged scenarios for whose reality I’ve been given no good evidence, I am not simply lacking ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’: the fantasy is doing something for me. It is staging something that I want, even if I don’t want to want it. And if that fantasy is then adopted by numerous others, for no good reason, then the wish obviously isn’t reducible to personal psychopathology but is rooted in a shared social condition.

I wrote extensively in The Public and the Platforms (largely drawing on Noortje Marres and Will Davies) about the limits of relying on facts to support deliberation in the public sphere when the institution of factfulness (a neutral representation that has been produced by competent experts in a disinterested way) has unravelled.

I’m trying to decide if the psychoanalytical case Seymour is making here constitutes an extension of this argument or an alternative to it. Is factfulness an institution or is it a fantasy? Is it one fantasy (those-who-know working on behalf of all of us) being replaced by other, darker and more enjoyable fantasies? It’s a very useful time for Seymour to have published this book, particularly as liberal conspiracism seems to have gone into overdrive since the US election. From loc 1,066:

Wherever conspiracy theories suddenly appear, we wonder: Who is behind this? Who is pulling the strings? We become conspiracy theorists about conspiracy theories. We think, to use the terms of journalist Alexi Mostrous, that conspiracists can be divided between ‘victims’ and ‘manipulators’.28 The wishful implication is that there are cynical producers and gullible consumers. Those who intentionally mislead, for profit or attention, and those who are innocently misled. The latter can be saved if only we can discredit the former. Perhaps when mass media was a one-way system, and propaganda worked on the principle of suggestion, this was plausible.

There was always something epistemically dubious about diagnoses of post-truth were made, given the tendency to ascribe the breakdown of a previously functioning system to an outside agent. I’ve written in a couple of places about this as a form of liberal populism: e.g. everything was working fine in the public sphere until those dastardly Russians came along and tricked the population into voting for Brexit. But it was also incipient in the whole notion of conspiracism traditionally construed, in the way Seymour points to here.

The psychoanalytical reading of conspiracism suggests we should not see a growth of liberal conspiracism as more people being dragged into the post-truth vortex, but rather more people insisting on their right to the jouissance that conspiracies offer. Why should the Republicans have all the fun? Why should we obey the law, remain within the boundaries of ‘truth’ and moderate our responses? Why can’t we just make shit up too? Isn’t it more satisfying to imagine that Musk stole the election with Starlink than facing up to the possibility of structural, even terminal, weaknesses with the organising mechanisms which constitute the Democratic party?

#conspiracism #conspiracy #conspiracyTheory #electionDenial #elections #Jouissance #NoortjeMarres #PostNeoliberalCivics #postPandemicCivics #postTruth #publicAndTheirPlatforms #richardSeymour #WillDavies