OPINIÓN | PAISAJE ANTES DE LA BATALLA

Up-ed. Americatv.com 10/31/2020

Al final, es una batalla por el alma de la nación. En eso coinciden liberales y conservadores. La división es radical. El 3 de noviembre del 2020 quedará en la historia como el comienzo de una dramática transformación para Estados Unidos. Esta vez, aunque ojalá incruenta, no habrá tierra media en una colosal confrontación civil.

Paradójicamente, tras la derrota de Hillary Clinton en el 2016, fue Joe Biden el único líder demócrata que destacó los errores de su partido. Sorprendió al decir que esos obreros de Pensilvania, esos agricultores de Indiana y Tennessee, no eran racistas, misóginos, homofóbicos, en fin, deplorables. Hillary, y su cohorte de intelectuales (muchos, por cierto, sin dote de intelecto), no sólo desatendieron los reclamos de esa tradicional base, sino que, al igual que Obama, hicieron mofa del apego a sus costumbres, sus creencias y sus armas.

Lejos de corregir su rumbo, los demócratas siguieron ahondando un cisma cultural y moral que arrastra a las minorías en una autodestructiva cruzada contra la mayoría. Sin un programa viable de gobierno, la elite liberal apela al recurso totalitario de manipular la percepción de la realidad. Gigantes de la comunicación como Twitter, Facebook, CNN y The New York Times, entre otros, ejercen las funciones de leales órganos de censura y propaganda partidista. A su vez, la academia produce una mezquina reelaboración histórica de Estados Unidos y certifica los talking points de las turbas de guardias rojos que pintan de racismo el menor intento de debate y convierten al dueño de un grocery en Chicago y a un mecánico de Alabama en corruptos explotadores obligados a purgar, de manera simbólica y material, su “privilegio blanco”.

Respetables voces del exilio cubano han puesto su credibilidad en pantalla para asegurarnos que Biden y Kamala Harris no son socialistas ni comunistas. (Tampoco son otras muchas cosas que debían ser). Más urgente es decir lo que sí son. Biden es un caricaturesco dinosaurio del establishment, dispuesto por casi medio siglo a cambiar alianzas y traicionar promesas con tal de sobrevivir lo mismo un deshielo liberal que una glaciación conservadora. Harris es el fiel retrato de la incompetente oligarquía liberal de California. Una simple búsqueda en Google basta para encontrar los hitos de una trayectoria iniciada en el nepotismo que culminó en el estrepitoso fracaso de su insustancial candidatura a la nominación del Partido Demócrata. Ambos son los idóneos personajes para el pacto fáustico con los socialistas y los comunistas que hoy le empujan el carro y mañana le escribirán el libreto.

Hace 40 años yo vi a Ronald Reagan resucitar una nación que había perdido la medida de su poder y la conciencia de su destino. Entonces, yo era un recién llegado y el enemigo estaba lejos. Ahora, se trata de la patria de mis hijos y el enemigo aguarda en mi patio. Para mí, está claro. Cuestión de principios. Así en la paz como en la guerra, mejor perder con Trump que ganar con Biden.

BIDEN, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

Hace 40 años yo vi a Ronald Reagan resucitar una nación que había perdido la medida de su poder y la conciencia de su destino. Entonces, yo era un recién llegado y el enemigo estaba lejos. Ahora, se trata de la patria de mis hijos y el enemigo aguarda en mi patio. Para mí, está claro. Cuestión de principios. Así en la paz como en la guerra, mejor perder con Trump que ganar con Biden.

Uped. Americatv.com 10/31/2020

A SHERLOCK PARA SIEMPRE

 A SHERLOCK, MI ETERNO COMPAÑERO              

       06/26/2012 - 10/12/2020

A SHERLOCK PARA SIEMPRE

A él, también mi amigo y más que ningún Platero

A mi incondicional compañero

Que espera y atiende en la inequívoca mirada

En mi reflejo, buscando y siguiendo mi voz 

Que persigue con devoción y adivina mis sonidos

Sin importar lo que le diga, porque ya lo sabe.

Su atención reconoce mis intenciones

Y adivina mis propósitos.

A él que los encarna a todos y al último.

Todos en él, en él todos.

Yo en ti, tu conmigo.

Ahora perdido sin él

Pero con él para siempre,

En su dolor último y breve aliento,

Su última mirada,

Su última espera

Por mi aprobación, mi caricia.

A él, su compañía y silueta por todas partes,

En el atardecer compartido

Testigos de la flecha del tiempo y su polvo de estrellas

A su carácter amoroso e inteligente

Que para siempre me sigue cuando me adivina.

A su humanidad que también es la mía

A mi celoso guardián absoluto

A pesar de sus favoritas travesuras.

A él para siempre conmigo

Amigo de David, Venus y la tarde

Siguiéndome sin descanso

Aunque olvidara el camino.

Solo confundido cuando no encontraba mi respuesta

Celoso y egoísta de mis destinos.

A él, sus olores y al sonido de su mirada

A mi amigo y confidente

A su ausencia triste

Con él la vida no era igual

Sin él, la espiral de la vida se trastorna

El dolor ya no es el mismo

Y sin él tampoco el tiempo será igual.

Algo me cambió para siempre

Aunque esté conmigo

 

Como sanar la pérdida

Cuando el dolor no renuncia a dejarme

Renunciando a olvidarle sin poder hacerlo

Y a llevarle en el silencio sin hablar de él.

Porque duele no poderle ver

Y mirar su imagen y silueta

O el placer constante

De su atención y contacto.

El mío no es un dolor único o mayor

Pero es el mío por su pérdida

Es la herida que no puedo tocar 

El mío por su ausencia

Siempre atento a mi mirada

Sabiendo lo que pensaba sin necesidad de hablar

Mi vida cambia porque no está

Aunque nunca se fue y algo me falte para siempre

Espero que regreses poco a poco

Cada día mas cerca de los que ya están contigo

Sin el dolor de tu ausencia

La humanidad de tu lealtad

Que veo por todas partes y siento en todos tus caminos

Ahora que no estás, nunca me dejes

Mantén tu absoluta compañía para siempre

Con tus olores, atenciones y el último aliento que compartimos

Protégeme en tu perpetuo sueño

Y que tu compañía sea eterna cuando compartas mi sueño.

     

 

  

 

A mi Perrito Sherlock

A su Incondicionalidad

A su Caracter y Personalidad

 This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit

The story of how one metric has changed the way you see the world.

Tobias Rose-Stockwell

Medium Media 17 min read

The world feels more dangerous. Our streets seem less safe. The assault on our values is constant. The threats feel real.
The enemy is out there — just check your feed.

One evening in late October 2014, a doctor checked his own pulse and stepped onto a subway car in New York City. He had just returned home from a brief stint volunteering overseas, and was heading to Brooklyn to meet some friends at a bowling alley. He was looking forward to this break — earlier that day he had gone for a run around the city, grabbed coffee on the High Line, and eaten at a local meatball shop. When he woke up the next day exhausted with a slight fever, he called his employer.

Within 24 hours, he would become the most feared man in New York. His exact path through the city would be scrutinized by hundreds of people, the establishments he visited would be shuttered, and his friends and fiancée would be put into quarantine.

Dr. Craig Spencer had contracted Ebola while he was treating patients in Guinea with Doctors Without Borders. He was not contagious until long after he was put into quarantine. He followed protocol to the letter in reporting his symptoms and posed no threat to anyone around him while he was in public. He was a model patient — a fact readily shared by experts.

This did not stop a media explosion declaring an imminent apocalypse. A frenzy of clickbait and terrifying narratives emerged as every major news entity raced to capitalize on the collective Ebola panic.

The physical damage done by the disease itself was small. The hysteria, however — traveling instantly across the internet — shuttered schools, grounded flights, and terrified the nation.

Social Media exploded around the topic, reaching 6,000 tweets per second, leaving the CDC and public health officials scrambling to curtail the misinformation spreading in all directions. The fear traveled as widely as the stories reporting it. The emotional response — and the media attached to it — generated billions of impressions for the companies reporting on it.

Those billions were parlayed directly into advertising revenue. Before the hysteria had ended, millions of dollars worth of advertising real-estate attached to Ebola-related media had been bought and sold algorithmically to companies.

The terror was far more contagious than the virus itself, and had the perfect network through which to propagate — a digital ecosystem built to spread emotional fear far and wide.

I’m going to tell you a few things you probably already know

Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground. The aggressors are the architects of your digital world, and their weapons are the apps, news feeds, and notifications in your field of view every time you look at a screen.

They are all attempting to capture your most scarce resource — your attention — and take it hostage for money. Your captive attention is worth billions to them in advertising and subscription revenue.

To do this, they need to map the defensive lines of your brain — your willpower and desire to concentrate on other tasks — and figure out how to get through them.

You will lose this battle. You have already. The average person loses it dozens of times per day.

This might sound familiar: In an idle moment you open your phone to check the time. 19 minutes later you regain consciousness in a completely random corner of your digital world: a stranger’s photo stream, a surprising news article, a funny YouTube clip. You didn’t mean to do that. What just happened?

This is not your fault — it is by design.

The digital rabbit hole you just tumbled down is funded by advertising, aimed at you. Almost every “free” app or service you use depends on this surreptitious process of unconsciously turning your eyeballs into dollars, and they have built sophisticated methods of reliably doing it. You don’t pay money for using these platforms, but make no mistake, you are paying for them — with your time, your attention, and your perspective.

This is not a small, technical shift in the types of information you consume, the ads you see, or the apps you download.

This has actually changed how you see the world.

The War for Your Attention

Before I go any further, let me assure you that this is not a list of grievances about the evils of technology. I am not a Luddite. Like much of humanity, I deeply value my devices as a helpful prosthesis for my memory, my productivity, and my ability to connect to the people I care about.

This is instead a sober evaluation of how the strategies of digitally capturing our attention have altered us — our lives, our media, and our worldview. These incremental shifts have added up to enormous changes in our politics, our global outlook, and our ability to see each other as fellow humans.

Many of the biggest problems we face in this moment as a society result from decisions being made by the hidden creators of our digital world — the designers, developers, and editors that create and curate the media we consume.

These decisions are not made with malice. They are made behind analytics dashboards, split-testing panels, and walls of code that have turned you into a predictable asset — a user that can be mined for attention.

They do this by focusing on one over-simplified metric, one that supports advertising as its primary source of revenue. This metric is called engagement, and emphasizing it — above all else — has subtly and steadily changed the way we look at the news, our politics, and each other.

This article is one of a series exploring how these strategies of capturing our attention are influencing our lives.

What follows is an exploration of how the primary artery of our factual information — the News — has been fundamentally altered by these methods.

How? Let’s look to the recent past.

The History of the New

“The Media” as we know it is not that old. For most of our history the News was, literally, the plural of the ‘New’ thing(s) people heard about and shared, and was limited by physical proximity and word-of-mouth. Since the invention of the printing press, the news consisted of notes posted in public places and pamphlets distributed to the small number of people who could actually read them.

Between the 18th and 19th centuries newspapers became fairly common, but were largely opinion rags containing political essays, sensationalized stories, and eventually muckraking. They were megaphones for people to exert political influence, and many had an extremely loose relationship with facts.

During the lead up to World War I, unchecked propaganda from all sides in the news reached a fever-pitch, with every belligerent participating in a massive fight for public opinion. By the end of the war it was clear that information warfare was a powerful weapon — it could raise armies, incite violent mobs, and destabilize whole nations.

In response to this systematic manipulation of the truth, there was a concerted effort to create an institution of fact-driven journalism beginning in the 1920's. This process was ushered forward by the advent of the first mass-media communication networks: national newspapers and national radio. These slowly gave way to television, and between these three new platforms, a global media system took hold — buoyed by the tenets of journalism.

The news continued to have competitors in the battle for attention, and because of this it continued to flirt with hyperbole. The drive to sell (papers, ads, products) is naturally somewhat at odds with the idea of editorial accuracy and measured factual reporting. Journalistic standards, libel laws, and industry-shaming became common mechanisms to help curb this slide into sensationalism.

Yet something happened recently when the news met the internet and began migrating into our pockets: it started losing the battle for our attention.

The Rise of Algorithmic Engagement

Here is the rest of the article very well worth to read it!

https://medium.com/@tobiasrose/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de

 

Medium Media