For my theme song, my leather black jeans on… Kanye, anonymity, free speech, and racism

Let’s reheat this soufflé.

It is very likely that it was Kanye. There he was on Alex Jones’ weird little eponymous show.  Alex Jones has just come off the back of losing a truly blistering defamation case against the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, and Kanye has recently lost a significant amount of his worth as a result of businesses refusing to affiliate with him as a result of his antisemitic commentary.  Five years ago, we would have struggled to imagine a superstar like Kanye being on Alex Jones’ ridiculous little show.  Now, it seems to fit.  The politics-entertainment ecosystem rewards this alignment of people who confuse speaking truth with speaking thoughtlessly.

And yet it wasn’t a perfect alignment.  It is very likely that it was Kanye but, if it was him, it wasn’t his image.

Quick Post: Should Netflix be required to meet an Australian content quota?

One day, I will get back to writing proper entries instead of quick posts.  That day is not today.

The Australian Directors’ Guild, the Australian Writers’ Guild, Screen Producers Australia, and the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance have launched a new campaign through their Make It Australian lobby group for content quotas on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon.

Cards on table early in this discussion: back before the pandemic, I kept arguing that we needed to fund universities for infrastructural support for Australian content creation and my proposals kept getting knocked back.  I met with a wide variety of very interesting people across politics and industry who all said: ‘Yes, this is a very good idea but there’s just no budget for it.’

The core idea behind my proposal and the motivation for the Make It Australian campaign are very similar, largely because it is obvious.  People get a surprising number of social norms from their entertainment content.  If you want people to understand their legal system, their political system, their economic system, their history, &c., &c., &c., you push more intuitions by having them repeated in the fictional content that people consume than in forcing them to watch badly recorded public lectures filmed in badly lit university seminar rooms.  The biggest part of this argument from me is that people are no longer getting even a tiny amount of news as part of their content.  Average person came home from work at about 5pm, flicked on the TV to have a gameshow playing in the background while they made dinner, and then…

…just before the end of the gameshow…

…’Before we do the final reveal, let’s cross to the newsroom for today’s headlines.’

It was a sneaky trick to get even a bare minimum amount of news into the ordinary person’s diet.  But, over the past decade, our viewing habits have changed wildly.

Quick post: No, academic Twitter is not worth saving

Search your feelings.  You know it’s true.  Twitter has never been a good platform for information or discussion.

I had a job that I absolutely loved in government law prior to coming back to do my PhD at the intersection of political science and empirical legal research.  There has been recent public discussion about the role of juries, and most of this discussion has been absolutely horrific.  Columnists and journos have made sweeping assertions that are not supported by evidence or good theory… but academics themselves have not been much better.  I bang this gong a lot: the role of the expert should not be to tell the public what the correct answer is, but to help the public form their own views within the borders of reasonable opinions.

Of particular interest was a media company publishing an opinion piece calling for the end of juries.  What was fascinating was that, during defamation law reform, Australian media companies were firmly of the view that juries should remain.  Indeed, those who were following the Barilaro v Shanks defamation case tended to have extremely strong opinions about Barilaro opposing Shanks’ motion for a jury–a topic I tried to explain here in a YouTube video.  And when the same opinion piece said that juries in defamation law were virtually unheard of, this seemed something of a surprise given that some of our biggest cases of the last few years were jury cases.

Silly me for raising this on Twitter where I then had people with significantly less experience wade in to disagree with me, although exactly what they were trying to argue remains something of a mystery.  Fundamentally, I value my time more than to argue with people who just don’t know what they’re talking about, and yet that is the vast majority of experiences on Twitter.  Indeed, one of my interlocutors ended with ‘See Mark we don’t care about data’.  Twitter is an absolute waste of time for serious discussion because you routinely are not being exposed to intellectually serious people.

Quick Post: Twitter verification and payment models – old wine in digital wine skins

By now, basically every with incurable online brain disease has heard about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the news that Twitter was exploring options to charge users to be ‘verified’.  The question of who should pay for information remains difficult.  Many Australian journalists and columnists have argued for years that paywalls are a necessary part of funding high quality information.  Media companies needed to pay bills and, therefore, the public should pay for access to its content.  This has always been an awkward argument given the way media companies get privileged access to information, certain statutory protections, and–increasingly–public subsidies both directly and indirectly.  If there is a new policy proposal from government, should I really have to buy a monthly subscription to find out the details?  If there is information about a scandal in Parliament House, should I really need to buy the information from a journalist?  My argument has been that if information is necessary for the proper functioning of democratic processes, then it should be free.  Journalists and columnists have vehemently disagreed with me on this point; if I were being uncharitable, I would suspect some self-interest in their disagreement.

Twitter is a publisher of information generated from a vast array of sources.  For a number of years, the company has undertaken a process by which it determines which of its millions of accounts are ‘verified’ sources, providing them with a blue tick.  This has attracted controversy and criticism.  Some of the criticism has been legitimate: accounts are unable to self-select for verification, meaning the vast majority of academics and academic accounts on Twitter are not verified.  If the purpose of verification is to improve the quality of information on Twitter, then this is obviously a fairly strange outcome.  Conversely, Twitter has verified some accounts whom you would never in a billion years of drinking straight turps actually believe.  Perhaps we might argue that the account is verified so that you won’t accidentally believe it.

A lot of the criticism is conspiratorial nonsense, including the idea that there are two ‘classes’ on Twitter.  This sort of rhetoric about ‘blue checks’ and ‘blue ticks’ tends to be mere disaffected grievance: the truth is being hidden by mainstream players and the government is secretly dictating the message through manipulating verified accounts.  In the US, this rhetoric mostly comes from alt-right voices.  In Australia, this rhetoric mostly comes from centre left Drips.

The typical model for demonstrating that somebody is a professional with peer-recognised skills is accreditation.  There is a professional body to whom a person pays fees and, in exchange for that money, you get to state that you’re a professional.  Australia has a rather amazingly complex system of professional indemnity law that relies upon people paying fees to a professional body in exchange for a cap on payouts in tort.

So in the digital media space, why wouldn’t a person pay a fee to a body to verify them?

The Information Action Ratio is the place to go… A monarchist’s take on the death of the Queen

Nobody was expecting much from public debate, and we seemed to get less than even that.  By the time we had a Senator telling another Senator to go back to Pakistan, we should have known that we’d reached a new low point.

The public discourse about the death of Queen Elizabeth II passed through several phases quickly.  First, we heard that she was under observation.  Then we heard she was dead.  We moved quickly to how the death of a 96 year old who recently lost their partner was actually an example of a failure of pandemic policy.  And then rapidly to who could write the most tasteless shitpost on social media.

I want an interesting synonym to describe this thing… We could fix #QandA, we just don’t want to

Last Thursday, one of the ABC’s flagship political discussion shows, Q&A, failed to reach the top twenty of the most watched free-to-air programmes that evening.  It performed worse than Gogglebox, a repeat of the previous night’s episode of The Chase, and something called Sammy J-EV.  A similar result came in the week before.

Criticisms of Q&A are not new.  Practically since it began, commentators have noted that the show is designed to fuel combat over discussion.  The audience asks the questions–provided they ask questions approved by the producers.  A few times, the audience has gone off script asking a question not cleared by the producers, with the host helpfully vetoing the spontaneous question and replacing it with the approved version instead.  With an hour-long show and five panellists, each person has a theoretical maximum of 12 minutes to put forward their view on every topic covered in the episode.  Thoughtful, insightful contributions to discussion are drowned out by snappy hot takes.

But there’s no reason for Q&A to be nearly as bad as it is.  With a fraction of the budget, you could create a far superior show.  Hell, if you got some clever buddies together, you could produce it in a living room and stream it on YouTube or Twitch from your apartment.  Call it Frequently Asked Questions or some shit.

No soldier in that gallant band hid half as well as he did… When offensiveness is the point

Jimmy Carr is no stranger to controversy or outrage.  The most recent regards a joke made on his Netflix special His Dark Materials in which the punchline was that the genocide of Romani was a ‘positive’ of the Holocaust.  Most reasonable people were offended by the joke because the joke was offensive.  Nothing in this argument is a defense of the joke.

I instead want to flip the debate a bit to look at an aspect of the ‘freedom of speech’ debate that doesn’t get a lot of attention: what happens when people are trying to be offensive?

Put your fate in your hands, take a chance, roll the dice… The Australian Research Council is not worth saving, @ARC_Tracker

[This is a heavily redacted version of my original draft]

Australian academics were given a free kick in the research funding policy debate recently.  The acting Minister for Education, Stuart Robert, rejected the recommendation from the Australian Research Council (ARC) to fund a handful of research proposals.

Unlike nearly everything in research funding policy, it became headline news.  People from beyond the academy had more than a passing interest in what was going on, and it was an opportunity to bring the public on board for extremely overdue reforms of the ARC.

Instead, we blew it.  Describing the decision as a use of a ‘veto’ (which it isn’t, but poetic licence for advocacy is forgivable), Australian academics began describing the Minister’s decision as using ‘God-like’ powers, a violation of the separation of powers doctrine, and–most surprising of all–a threat to liberal democracy.  It was embarrassing, and academia made itself look unnecessarily feeble, pathetic, and precious.

If making decisions on funding recommendations is a ‘God-like’ power, we truly have reimagined the Lord as a mere conjurer of cheap tricks.  And if deciding funding outcomes is a ‘God-like’ power, do we really want the ARC making those calls instead of an elected official?  More importantly–as I’ll argue here–do we really want either Ministers or government panels telling universities how to spend research funds?

We be the colours of the mad and the wicked… Are we becoming scared of protest?

Last year, I argued that Australia was developing a new standard for political protest: the ‘Theatre Kid Threshold‘.  If you rocked up to a political protest with a gallows that looked too good, you were no longer protesting but, instead, advocating violence.  I argued that this was a bad intuition, radically expanding what we understand to be a death threat and the apprehension of harm.  I also argued that–let’s be serious–what was driving a lot of the discussion was opposition to the message of the protest.  Which is fine and I agree with that intuition, but we might want to use other legal methods for achieving that end instead of inflating what counts as advocacy for violence.

I touched very lightly on the idea that the protest was a form of terrorism, an idea that gained some traction in the week surrounding that protest.  It’s an idea that has gained significantly more traction in the past week following the protests at Old Parliament House.  Perhaps more interesting from my perspective is the Othering of the protestors: right wing commentators have described the protesters as left wing; left wing commentators have described the protesters as right wing; there have been very disturbing denials of the Indigeneity of some of the protesters; there was one very incorrect use of the term ‘stochastic terrorism’ by an author who recently wrote a book about the alt-right.

A boring version of this blog post is me patiently working through the relevant law to explain why the protest at Old Parliament House wasn’t terrorism.  A slightly less boring version of this blog post is an argument that we should use ‘terrorism’ as a label of last resort and that contemporary popular uses of the term are missing the ‘terror’ element.

But I want to start 2022 with a blog post that really gets the blood pumping.  I’m going to sledge Sami Shah.

Fifty feet tall and revved up too high… Should there be a legal response to those gallows?

In 2012, there was a protest in Sydney inspired by the film, Innocence of the Muslims.  The most notorious image from the protests was of a child carrying a sign that said ‘Behead those who insult the Prophet’.  There was political condemnation and calls for the child to be taken into protection from the parents.  To their credit, NSW Police largely deescalated the topic.  They checked that the kid was okay and mostly left everybody alone.  To the best of my knowledge, no counter-terrorism offences were made at the protest; just the usual biffo with cops.

We all know this dance.  Protestors protest.  One side of politics calls for cops to crack down on the protestors; the other side tries to argue that the protest isn’t that big a deal.  The cops usually do the right thing, and then we all swap sides for the next protest.