Watching the battle for Mosul live on Facebook

https://frieze.com/article/modern-warfare

Modern Warfare

by Orit Gat

It’s a windy day outside of Mosul. The sound of wind, familiar from so many phone calls made on the street or news reports on extreme weather, is as mundane as the echoes of construction the microphone is also picking up: a truck reversing, machines moving building materials, faraway conversations in a foreign language (Arabic? Kurdish?). It’s 12:20pm on Monday 17 October, and I’m on Channel 4 News’s Facebook page watching a livestream of combined Iraqi and Kurdish forces as they advance toward Mosul, the last Islamic State stronghold in Iraq.

Later on, I’ll learn that the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi has signalled the beginning of the offenisve (Operation Conquest / Operatio Fatah) earlier that morning and that broadcasters set up cameras in the closest safe zone to Mosul a week prior, and are planning on moving them forward as IS retreats. At 12:20 pm there are mainly tractors in view. There’s also dust, images of drones, tanks and people running across the screen. When I log on at work, between tasks and trying to hide the fact that I’m on Facebook from my boss, it’s pretty consistently tractors and people loitering around.

What are those tractors doing there? Are they building a safe zone for those escaping the city? Are they fortifying? Are they, in front of our eyes, physically drawing a new border? It’s a silent form of news. I try to understand what is happening, to place it geographically, to see if there are signs of war in the background. I look for drones or fighter jets in the sky. There’s nothing but the camera feed, no commentary, no voiceover: the only language surrounding the live feed is the comments section.

Staring at the comments feels like the old chatrooms of the 1990s, with single lines in an infinite vertical scroll. It also brings about the fears of old chatrooms: that you’ll see a raw, human response that you hoped to never be exposed to. ‘There was blood earlier?’ one comment reads. (And obviously, it’s one of the first I see.) The word offensive rolls on the tongue. Its military use fitting, as it is with another term: react. Facebook invites you to ‘react’ to the livestream and familiar emojis flow across the screen: a desert scene with uniformed men running above smiley faces, thumbs up, hearts and crying faces.

The headline of the Daily Mail soon after reads: ‘Channel 4 defends streaming the battle for Mosul on Facebook Live amid criticism it is using war as entertainment,’ which seems ironic from a website that actively disguises entertainment as news (‘Is YOUR phone spying on you?’). Conflating Facebook with entertainment or thinking of it as just a social media platform is incorrect; Facebook has much loftier ambitions. It doesn’t want to be just another website you visit, it wants to be the internet. So that everything around you that is networked (which in the near future will include your house keys and fridge, your entertainment, your work and private conversations) will be mediated via your Facebook account. That’s why Facebook has bought Oculus VR, chatting platform Whatsapp, and Parse, which has become one of the biggest Internet of Things projects.

And the news? Facebook centralizes information. It has signed deals with most major publishers to run articles via Instant Articles (that quick-to-load in-Facebook reading window, especially noticeable on mobile, that redirects you to the article your friend shared without actually sending you out of Facebook). Publishers can either sell ads on those articles and keep all the money to themselves, or leave Facebook to sell the ads in exchange for a 30 percent commission.

Here’s the problem with this, writes Michael Woolf: ‘Netflix will pay approximately $3 billion in licensing and production fees this year to the television and film industry; Hulu is paying $192 million to license South Park; Spotify pays out 70 percent of its gross revenues to the music labels that hold the underlying rights to Spotify’s catalogue. Now here’s what Facebook is guaranteeing a variety of publishers, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and the Atlantic, which are posting articles in its new ‘instant articles’ feature: $0.’ There’s the problem with entertainment. Not that Facebook is entertainment, but that Facebook promotes a two-tier content system where entertainment is streamed at premium prices and licensing fees, and text is offered up for free. This is news now. This is how Facebook Live is becoming a news outlet: journalists see Facebook as a partner. Channel 4’s livestream of Mosul is not entertainment – it’s the death knell of the financial model that has sustained journalism until now.

‘Maybe the battle isn't happening today!!’ reads another comment. In the current issue of The Paris Review, there’s an essay by American novelist Ben Lerner, introducing a series of photos of Chris Marker’s studio taken by Adam Bartos between 2007–08, before Marker died in 2012. Though the photos were taken while the studio was still in use, they are empty. ‘What appears,’ Lerner writes, ‘appears to wait for the return of the human, but since nothing is as human as waiting, as the experience of duration that is boredom, I begin to invest things with feelings.’

On a Facebook feed, war is much slower than you’d think. To watch the livestream means to wait – that most human feeling – for what the movies had taught us was fast. On Facebook, of all places, we learn that ‘live’ does not mean ‘action’.

I’m watching with 2.3k others. Over the next few days, I learn that well over a million people viewed the attacks at some point in the three-hour livestream. Another Facebook comment rolls across my screen: ‘Live coverage of a war. We are doomed as a world.’ I look at Facebook the day after. It reads ‘Channel 4 News was live’. The video is slow to load and the thumbnail is of the press conference at its end, where a Peshmerga general explained the progress of the battle.

Nowadays we see so much that our relationship to images, moving images and the structure of the news, is reshaped constantly. Still, viewing the livestream is an uncanny experience: discouraging, painful, curious, demoralizing and impossible to look away from. Making sense of it and finding its utility is yet to come. It’s quite likely that after this novelty, Facebook users won’t know how to react – besides a thumbs-up or a sadface – to streams of the real world. That’s not what they are on Facebook for. But it’s also possible that this silent, long-duration viewing is so foreign an experience that it may mean a new form of proximity, or empathy. I cut Lerner’s quote above, just short of the end. In full it reads, ‘I begin to invest things with feelings. And then the things look back at me.’

Orit Gat

Orit Gat is a writer based in London. She is the features editor of Rhizome and the managing editor of WdW Review.

His horror show hides Clinton's rotten agenda

Donald Trump is so despicable that no one is paying attention to what Hillary Clinton actually stands for. Elizabeth Schulte and Alan Maass think that should stop.

https://socialistworker.org/2016/10/20/his-horror-show-hides-clintons-rotten-agenda

[…]

On enforcement, Clinton joins Republican and Democratic politicians alike in calling for tougher border controls. In 2013, she supported legislation that included a path to citizenship, as she said in the debate--but on the condition that billions of dollars be devoted to new surveillance equipment and fencing (otherwise known as a wall) along the Mexican border, along with 20,000 more border agents.

The consequences of these policies are deadly. Since January, officials say that fewer people attempted to illegally cross the border between the U.S. and Mexico, but more have died trying to make the journey. According to the Pima County medical examiner in Arizona, 117 bodies have been recovered along migration routes in southern Arizona so far this year, an increase over last year.

This is the true face of Clinton's promise to "protect our borders"--death and misery for people fleeing persecution and poverty.

Clinton supporters focus on the nightmare of a Trump presidency for immigrants. But the nightmare is already happening. Trump may have blustered about the actual number, but it's true that Barack Obama has presided over the deportation of well over 2 million people, more than all the presidents of the 20th century combined.

And forfeiting immigrant lives in the name of border security is hardly unique to the latest Democrat in the White House. It was Bill Clinton who imposed "Operation Gatekeeper" in 1994, pandering to the right wing by pouring more millions into border enforcement and, yes, wall-building.

With friends like these...well, you know the rest.

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What Clinton Told Goldman Sachs

Okay, okay, the real news story is how WikiLeaks got hold of e-mails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and transcripts of Clinton's paid speeches, not what was in them. Clinton herself said the most important question of the final debate was whether Trump would condemn Russian espionage to hack her e-mails.

But hey, bear with us.

It's not news that Clinton has deep ties to Corporate America going back decades. But with Clinton touring the country and telling her supporters that America is "already great," it's worth remembering who America is really great for.

In a speech at Goldman Sachs three years ago, Clinton did everything but apologize for the weak banking regulations imposed in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. "More thought has to be given to the process and transactions and regulations so that we don't kill or maim what works, but we concentrate on the most effective way of moving forward with the brainpower and the financial power that exists here," Clinton pandered to an audience of banksters.

Explaining that Dodd-Frank bill was passed for "political" reasons, Clinton assured the investment bank aptly referred to in 2010 as "a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity" that she believes the best overseers of Wall Street are...wait for it...Wall Street itself.

"There's nothing magic about regulations--too much is bad, too little is bad," Clinton said, and one assumes that she emphasized the "too much is bad" part.

For all the working-class families who bore the burden of underwater mortgages during the housing crisis, Clinton has signaled, if anyone was still wondering, whose side she's on--the parasites on Wall Street.

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The Return of Roe

Remember reproductive rights? It was pretty shocking to hear the words "abortion" or "Roe" and "Wade" uttered in last night's debate. So far this election, we've heard precious little about this essential health care question for women.

It's not for a lack of things to talk about--Texas shuttering its clinics because of punitive legislative restrictions, an Indiana woman facing murder charges for having a miscarriage, congressional Republicans smearing Planned Parenthood with fabricated video.

But you wouldn't know about any of that from the two presidential candidates, including the Democrat who says she supports a woman's right to choose.

Last night, Trump admitted that he would nominate Supreme Court justices who would, without doubt, overturn legal abortion. By comparison, Clinton seemed, well, actually human. But as a result, the limitations of her defense of the right to legal abortion, now and in the past, were overshadowed.

Clinton helped perfect the modern-day Democratic strategy of searching for "common ground" with conservatives on the issue of abortion--an issue on which any sincere defender of women's rights shouldn't find common anything with the right. She helped coin the slogan of "safe, legal and rare" as the goal of pro-choice Democrats.

The "common ground" arguments haven't saved reproductive rights--instead, they've given up ideological ground to the right and made the pro-choice side weaker.

If you want to know how important reproductive rights are to Hillary Clinton, look at her vice presidential choice Tim Kaine. In 2005, he ran for Virginia governor promising to lower the number of abortions in the state by promoting abstinence-only education. The state's chapter of NARAL withheld their endorsement because he "embraces many of the restrictions on a woman's right to choose."

But of course, nothing is getting in the way of the mainstream women's organizations backing the Clinton-Kaine ticket to the hilt this year. They don't care if reproductive rights are part of the debate. But a lot of women out there do--and many of them are fed up with the way the Democrats take them for granted at election time, and don't lift a finger to stem the attacks when they come.

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Remember the $15 Minimum Wage and All That Socialist Stuff?

It's almost obliterated from our memory, thanks to the monstrosity that is Donald Trump, but during the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton had to talk about some of the issues that supporters of the Democratic Party care about

The socialist message of the Bernie Sanders campaign put these questions in the spotlight and forced the most corporate of Democrats to address them--and also answer for her own terrible record on a number of things that didn't come up at the debate. For a time, the brewing anger at corporate greed and the corrupt political status quo--given expression in grassroots movements like the Fight for 15 and Black Lives Matter--found a voice in the political mainstream.

With a few weeks to go before the election, that seems like a long time ago.

Part of the reason is Hillary Clinton, but another part is Bernie Sanders. He's stopped his sharp criticisms of Clinton and tells his supporters that now is the time to stop Trump, not make demands on Clinton. In the debate, when Trump repeated one of his routine sound bites about Sanders saying Clinton had "bad judgment," Clinton smiled smugly and pointed out that Sanders was campaigning and urging a vote for her.

There were many issues that Clinton had to address this year only because people mobilized to make sure they couldn't be ignored--like anti-racist activists who made sure she was reminded of her support for Bill Clinton's crime bills, or Palestinian rights supporters who confronted her support for Israeli apartheid.

Those issues were invisible at the October 19 debate, but so were many others that people care about. They don't come up within the narrow confines of mainstream politics in the U.S.--where the politics of fear of what's worse forces voters to settle for what's hopefully less bad.

The two-party duopoly is organized to squash political debate and dissent outside the mainstream--which is why it's up to us to raise both, before the election between Clinton and Trump is decided, and especially after.