What Happened: July 26, 2021

The Big Story

Facebook held its first virtual faith summit last month, part of a larger effort by the social media company to boost user engagement by absorbing religious experience into the social media realm. The summit offered both a proof of concept and a marketing opportunity. The virtual event featured religious leaders convening live with their congregations on Facebook’s streaming site, along with a pitch from Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg about new tools for worship and religious communities built on augmented and virtual reality. The company has already unveiled a new “pray” button to go along with the standard “likes” as part of its campaign.

The prayer button provides an example of how Facebook can apply the same template of “gameplay” employed to maximize users’ engagement in other areas of social life to religion. Reuters illustrates how the button is used: “One woman used the tool to request prayers for an aunt sick with coronavirus. People replied by clicking a button to say, ‘I prayed,’ and their names were counted underneath. Users could choose to be notified with a reminder to pray again tomorrow.” A Facebook representative acknowledged that the prayer posts, like everything else on the site, are fundamentally tools for driving ads—in this case, used to create personalized and targeted advertising. While the social media company has long seen religion—and “faith partnerships” as CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it in a 2017 speech—as essential to its growth, the pandemic accelerated those efforts by driving more of religious life (along with every other kind of life) online.

Read it here: https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-decided-faith-groups-are-good-business-now-it-wants-your-prayers-2021-07-22/

Today’s Back Pages: Bitcoin Magic

The Rest

The rate of homeschooling in the United States has doubled in the wake of the pandemic, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Records kept by the government agency show that in March, 11% of U.S. households were homeschooling their children, up from 5.4% six months earlier. The largest increase has been in Black households, which jumped from 3.3% homeschooling in the spring of 2020 to 16.1% in the fall of that year. After 21 years in existence, National Black Home Educators grew from roughly 5,000 members before the pandemic to a current membership of more than 35,000, the organization’s co-founder told the Associated Press.
Read it here: https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-homeschooling-2f0ac73aa4b9fbfc5f2179103f1a14c4

Israel conducted airstrikes against Hamas targets in Gaza Sunday, after the group launched incendiary balloons across the border that started at least three fires in southern Israel. The strikes targeted Hamas military bases and infrastructure sites, according to Israeli defense officials. Since the last Israel-Hamas war ended with a cease-fire declared in May, the group has sent dozens of balloons laden with explosives and incendiary devices into Israel, according to Israeli officials who say they will continue to treat the balloons as if they were no different than rockets.

Since the pandemic brought QR code technology into widespread use in the U.S. restaurant industry, half of all full-service establishments are now employing QR code menus that allow customers to order directly from their phones, according to the National Restaurant Association. Not only does the technology cut significant labor costs by eliminating waitstaff, it also provides businesses with direct access to customers’ phones that they can use to gather behavioral, location, and spending data. “People don’t understand that when you use a QR code, it inserts the entire apparatus of online tracking between you and your meal,” a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union told The New York Times. So now, instead of a human being coming to offer you a coffee refill and earning a living that may go toward supporting a family, you’ll have an algorithm trying to optimize your eating habits with targeted advertisements. They tell me this is progress.
Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/technology/qr-codes-tracking.html

Iraq’s prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, is scheduled to meet with President Biden today at the White House in what is expected to be a discussion centered on the future of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Kadhimi has said he wants to end the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq while maintaining training and support ties to U.S. forces. Currently some 2,500 U.S. troops are stationed in the country as part of an anti-ISIS mission that also provides an unofficial means to counter Iranian influence and project power in the region. Iraq’s military is now reliant on pro-Iranian militia forces that were absorbed into the security structure during the anti-ISIS operation. In late 2019, mass demonstrations broke out in multiple Iraqi cities to protest Tehran’s control over the Iraqi political system.

The once unbeatable U.S. basketball team was dealt its first loss in 17 years as France defeated them 83-76 at the Tokyo Olympics.

Tucker Carlson’s wild accusations about the government spying on him appear to have been technically misstated but substantively accurate. Cybersecurity website The Record reports that two sources familiar with the matter said that an internal investigation at the National Security Agency, triggered by Carlson’s claims about being a target of surveillance leaks, found that while Carlson was not himself the target, his identity was revealed when he was “unmasked” after being mentioned in communications between third parties. A 2016 “transparency” report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailed the rules for the procedure: “Under NSA policy, NSA is allowed to unmask the identity for the specific requesting recipient only under certain conditions and where specific additional controls are in place to preclude its further dissemination, and additional approval has been provided by a designated NSA official.” Carlson’s claim is that his identity was unmasked specifically for the purpose of disseminating it further.

Thirty years ago, 33% of U.S. adults said they had 10 or more close friends, compared to 13% who say the same now, marking a precipitous decline in friendship that has affected not only the number of friends but the degree of intimacy as well. As Axios highlights from a new study by the Survey Center on American Life, a project run by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, “best friends” are also in decline. In 1990, 75% of adults in the U.S. reported having one compared to 59% who said the same this year. COVID-19 “is the most obvious culprit in the national friendship decline,” the study notes before listing the “broader structural forces” that also play a role, such as Americans marrying later, becoming more geographically mobile, spending more time with their children, and working longer hours. 

A crackdown by Chinese authorities has introduced sweeping new regulations targeting the country’s for-profit education sector. The new regulations take aim at the booming after-school tutoring industry that promises to help Chinese students succeed in competitive entrance exams. Under the new rules, tutoring companies operating in the $100 billion industry would be required to operate as nonprofits, would be barred from raising capital in the stock market, and could not be foreign-owned. The education initiative follows a similar push last month by state regulators targeting China’s tech industry.

Union leaders in New York City are pushing back against a new policy from Mayor Bill de Blasio mandating weekly testing for unvaccinated city workers, who will also be required to wear masks indoors. Following the announcement from City Hall Monday enacting the new policy, the city’s largest public sector union, DC 37, responded with a public statement: “While we encourage everyone to get vaccinated and support measures to ensure our members’ health and well-being, weekly testing is clearly subject to mandatory bargaining. New York City is a union town, and that cannot be ignored.”

The Back Pages

Cryptocurrencies have “no inherent worth,” the chief executive of the largest hedge fund in the world told the Financial Times in an interview over the weekend. Luke Ellis compared cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to tulips—a reference to a textbook episode of a bubble market from 17th-century Holland that was driven up by speculation before its inevitable crash.

It’s not necessarily advisable to take Ellis’ statement at face value, considering that he has his own trading position relative to the value of the currencies he’s calling worthless. But if you do, then the obvious question is what separates paper money and other fiat currencies from crypto? There’s no easy answer. The federal reserve backs the dollar, as does the might of the U.S. military—that’s one significant difference. But that still doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter.

One way to understand digital currencies is as a store of desire. As much as they are wanted, that’s what they’re worth. (Where the want comes from is another matter.) This is more or less the theory of crypto you get from Jonathan Lethem’s labyrinthine stoner sci-fi novel Chronic City, published in 2009 at roughly the same time Bitcoin was making its debut. Characters in the novel obsessively bid for mysterious, perhaps supernatural vase-like items called chaldrons found on ebay. Chaldrons, says the novel’s protagonist, Perkus Tooth, are like “proof of another, better world,” a kind of “treasure from the future, if we deserve a future that benign.”

Unsurprisingly, for an object beckoning a better, possible future, the price of chaldrons careens wildly. Tooth can’t keep up with demand or with his own desire.

“Ordinary proportions and ratios were upturned” by the chaldron, the novel’s narrator tells us: “The chaldron, an opera pouring from a flea’s mouth, an altarpiece bigger than the museum that contained it. The only comparison in any of our hearts being, of course, love.”

Like a sublime work of art, the chaldron offers a transcendent experience. Something like love, which is very nearly the opposite of how we think of money. But money makes things possible, both good and bad. And as the technologist Jaron Lanier wrote in his book Who Owns the Future?, it is precisely money’s inhuman, otherworldly quality that makes it such a powerful engine of new possibilities:

Money forgets. Unlike the earliest ancient clay markings, mass-produced money, created first as coins—and much later on a printing press—no longer remembered the story of its individual conception. If we were to know the history of each dollar, the world would be torn apart by war to an even greater degree than it already is, because people are even more clannish than greedy. Money allows blood enemies to collaborate; when money changes hands we forget for at least a moment the history of conflict and the potential for revenge.

Bitcoin is closer to perfect memory. It works on a technology called blockchain that maintains a complete unalterable ledger of all transactions in which it has ever been a part. It never forgets. That doesn’t make Ellis wrong, but it suggests that Bitcoin is closer to magic than inherent worthlessness, more like a chaldron than a tulip.

Read more here: https://www.ft.com/content/9275baf4-0422-43a1-b8c9-9317882ca874