Haunting Shadow of Scrubbed Banksy Mural Goes Viral

The erasure of the mural outside London’s Court of Justice has become a metaphor for widespread government crackdowns on protesters around the world.

from Hyperallergic

"It took courthouse administrators less than two days to remove Banksy’s latest stencil mural of a judge attacking a protester, which appeared in central London early this week. But what remains of the artwork is a shadowy stain, eerily reminiscent of a hooded Grim Reaper wielding a scythe, that has captured widespread attention in its own right.

"The saga began on Monday morning, September 8, when the mural was seen on the exterior of the Royal Courts of Justice just days after police arrested nearly 900 people at a protest in support of Palestinian activists. The striking image — a judge in a wig and robes raising a gavel high above his head, looming over a cowering protester holding a blood-spattered placard — was claimed by the famously elusive British artist in his signature style of sharing photos on Instagram."

Breaking the Social Media Prism

How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing

book by Chris Bail from Princeton Unversity Press

"In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves.

"Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less. Bail takes you inside the minds of online extremists through vivid narratives that trace their lives on the platforms and off—detailing how they dominate public discourse at the expense of the moderate majority. Wherever you stand on the spectrum of user behavior and political opinion, he offers fresh solutions to counter political tribalism from the bottom up and the top down. He introduces new apps and bots to help readers avoid misperceptions and engage in better conversations with the other side. Finally, he explores what the virtual public square might look like if we could hit “reset” and redesign social media from scratch through a first-of-its-kind experiment on a new social media platform built for scientific research."

A Facebook Insider’s Exposé

from NY Times

"For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes.

"In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Facebook employees embedded with the Trump campaign helped it micro-target potential voters, feeding them bespoke ads filled with “misinformation, inflammatory posts and fund-raising messages.” (The Clinton campaign declined Facebook’s offer to embed employees.) The following year, in Myanmar, a country heavily reliant on Facebook, hateful lies propagated on the platform incited a genocide against the minority Rohingya ethnic group."

5 Points for Anger 1 Point for Like

Facebook’s Formula Prioritized Anger and Ended up Spreading Misinformation

from The Hill

"Internal documents reveal Facebook’s algorithm prioritized angry reactions, which were disproportionately likely to push out misinformation to users."

Algorithmic Justice League

Technology should serve all of us. Not just the privileged few.

"We now live in a world where AI governs access to information, opportunity and freedom. However, AI systems can perpetuate racism, sexism, ableism, and other harmful forms of discrimination, therefore, presenting significant threats to our society - from healthcare, to economic opportunity, to our criminal justice system.

"The Algorithmic Justice League is an organization that combines art and research to illuminate the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence."

Quotes

from Writers for Democratic Action MN

• "I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of Being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art: the art of words."
  — Ursula K. LeGuin
• "Poetry is not a luxury."
  — Audre Lorde
• "It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
  — James Baldwin
• "Freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose."
  — George Orwell
• "Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass."
  — Grace Lee Boggs
• "I am often asked what keeps me going after all these years. I think it is the realization that there is no final struggle. Whether you win or lose, each struggle brings forth new contradictions, new and more challenging questions. As Alice Walker put it in one of my favorite poems: I must love the questions themselves as Rilke said like locked rooms full of treasures to which my blind and groping key does not yet fit"
  — Grace Lee Boggs
• "America has more money than any other single country or civilization has ever been able to amass. We have the most powerful army in the world. How is it in contrast to that we also have the largest prison population in the world? How is it that we have so much unemployment? How is that we have so much need in education?…We need to redistribute how wealth is given to the people who have done so much to earn that wealth."
  — Harry Belafonte
• "I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States senator."
  — Mary Harris Jones (“Mother Jones”)
• "When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him."
  — Bayard Rustin
• "We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books"
  — W.E.B. Du Bois
• "The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands — the ownership and control of their livelihoods — are set at naught, we can have neither men’s rights nor women’s rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease."
  — Helen Keller
• "Only the poor break laws — the rich evade them."
  – T-Bone Slim
• "We have never seen health as a right. It has been conceived as a privilege, available only to those who can afford it. This is the real reason the American health care system is in such a scandalous state."
  — Shirley Chisholm
• "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
  — Margaret Mead
• "Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world."
  — Howard Zinn
• "Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people’s struggle here in the United States and everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress."
  — Howard Zinn
• "Activism works. So what I’m telling you to do now, is to act. Because no one is too small to make a difference."
  — Greta Thunberg
• "Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world."
  — Malala Yousafzai
• "Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on."
  — Thurgood Marshall
• "I'm no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I'm changing the things I cannot accept."
  — Angela Davis
• "You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time."
  — Angela Davis

The 25 Most Influential Works of American Protest Art Since World War II

Three artists, a curator and a writer came together to discuss the pieces that have not only best reflected the era, but have made an impact.

from T — NY Times

"On a recent afternoon, the artists Dread Scott, Catherine Opie and Shirin Neshat, as well as T contributor Nikil Saval and Whitney Museum of American Art assistant curator Rujeko Hockley, joined me on Zoom for a conversation about protest art. I had asked each to nominate five to seven works of what they considered the most powerful or influential American protest art (that is, by an American artist or by an artist who has lived or exhibited their work in America) made anytime after World War II. We focused specifically on visual art..."

Protest Art

from Hyperallergic

An evolving list of examples ...