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An extremely important point that seems to be completely missed in the discussion of disinformation.

We are exclusively focused on the *supply chain*. We neglect the *demand* for this content.

The truth is that people searched for an excuse, or opening, to be radicalized.


I find the comparison to drugs and addiction helpful here, and it is one that I do carefully.

100 people to to the doctor and get an opioid after a procedure. About 95 will never use again.

A lot of us are exposed to extremist content. Most of us don’t get radicalized.

So while the supply and exposure played a role in both addiction and radicalization, it is not magic. It doesn’t just take over people. It taps into demand.

So maybe the question is less about how they got the supply and more why they find it so appealing.

That’s tougher.

It is much easier to imagine an immediate policy solution to Trump’s twitter account or YouTube’s auto play than to the coercive impact of 401 years of America apartheid and racist myth making.

But again drugs suggest that those quick supply cuts don’t work.

A century of drug busts made the problem worse. This observation led to the iron law of prohibition: the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs.

When you cut supply, people who want drugs *will* find drugs — and often more dangerous drugs.

This is where my insight ends.
So a few people have asked why I have this snarky response. What is my problem with this service? Well, to be clear, it’s not an issue with GraphQL, it’s an issue with direct coupling with underlying datasources #thread


The service as advertised makes it simple to map a GraphQL definition against a database. Now, what’s the problem with this? Well, the devil here is in the detail. But fundamentally it comes down to how important information hiding is to you.

Information hiding is the concept whereby you expose as little information as possible to external parties. Anything you expose over a boundary becomes part of the contract between provider and consumer.

Anything I hide inside a boundary can be changed freely. Anything I expose must be maintained if I want to maintain backwards compatibility.

Why is backwards compatibility important? If I break compatibility with external consumers of an interface, then such a change can lead to the need to lock step releases of consumer and producer, or even worse accidental breakages in prod.
I find this a really interesting point because to me it seems demonstrably true but also symptomatic of why the West Ham board are never going to turn around their reputation without a sea change in their thinking. (Thread, mute as appropriate)


“Win more” is the footballing solution of taking a painkiller for toothache. The pain goes away for a bit but ultimately you still need a painful root canal. And West Ham have needed that for a long time. This current limited success is *despite* the Board, not because of them.

Lest we forget, Moyes did a fine job first time around and was let go so we could pursue a bigger name, waste tens of millions and undo his good work. They’re lucky he was still available and willing to work for them again. They don’t deserve him.

But winning is helpful because a lot of the time, fans struggle to articulate what needs changing. So if the team is doing well it’s easy for the media to say “You’re fourth - what more do these West Ham fans want!” and for fans not to have an easily digestible answer.

But we know that a losing streak will arrive, we’ll suffer some bad luck and some injuries and then it won’t seem so rosy. And at that point we’ll be accused of being fickle, when the reality is that the underlying problems have been present for the entirety of the GSB reign:
This sounds insane and yet it's pretty much what happened.


If we're being extremely sober-minded about this, in a tight election there's always multiple causes and movements are caused by a complex interplay of factors etc etc.

But it's also true a far right tumor grew within gamer communities and


To me the big mystery of 2016 is always going to be how did Trump, who has no redeeming characteristics, get a perfectly normal number of votes? Why did multiple parts of our political immune system fail? A large part is that the GOP qua Party was weaker than we thought.

Gamergate and its spawn did a couple things to the immune system. It directly stressed it by creating a dangerous identity in a way it turns out it could not handle, and it revealed flaws that other bad actors took advantage of.

If you time-traveled and you eliminated Eron Gjoni before he hit "publish" would Donald Trump still be elected in 2016? I honestly don't think so, because it was such a close election. But the dominoes would still be in a place for a different trigger that could have happened.
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