The Sackler family (previously)
is one of the richest in the world, and if you’ve heard of them, it’s
probably because their family name adorns so many art galleries,
museums, and academic institutions around the world: but they way they
got that money is less-well-known.
The Sackler fortune was made through the family pharma company, Purdue,
which used illegal tactics, fraud, bribery and disinformation campaigns
to deliberately create the US opioid addiction (read about it here),
whose death toll puts the Vietnam wars and other great national scars
in the shade. What’s more, Purdue is recycling the tactics it developed
to trick, coerce or bribe doctors into overprescribing its flagship
product Oxycontin in other countries, creating fresh mountains of
corpses and mountains of cash.
The Sacklers are pretty much Exhibit A when it comes to using
philanthropy to launder the reputations of capitalism’s most immoral,
rapacious beasts. As Anand Giridharadas has forcefully argued,
one of the major functions of “charitable giving” is to deflect
attention away from the blood on a billionaire’s hands (the other
function is to allow billionaires to turn their pet theories into public
policy, and here the Sacklers also shine, helping to destroy the life-chances of a whole generation by funding privatization efforts that shut down public schools and replace them with underperforming “charter schools”).
Nan Goldin is a legendary photographer
who nearly died when she got hooked on the Sacklers’ products after a
routine surgery. She’s the founder of a pressure group called PAIN
(Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which is modelled on the AIDS
activist group ACT-UP, following their example with high profile,
flashy direct actions that lift the rock on wrongdoing and its enablers.
This weekend, PAIN targeted both the Guggenheim and the Met in New York;
groups of activists dressed as normal museumgoers trickled into the
Guggenheim and fanned out in small cells. Then Goldin entered the
building and drew a small crowd (her work hangs in the Guggenheim) and
at an agreed-upon signal, the activists showered “prescriptions” from
the atrium railings on every floor of the Guggenheim, in which Robert
Sackler, MD prescribes massive amounts of Oxytocin to Solomon R.
Guggenheim – calling attention to the massive sums that the Guggenheim
has taken from the Sacklers, and the massive credibility that the
Guggenheim has returned to the Sacklers, helping to make them synonymous
with philanthropy, rather than murder.
Goldin let the protesters in a call-and-response that made their message
and demands clear: “We want their money. For safe-consumption sites.
For harm reduction. For treatment. It’s time, Guggenheim! Take down
their names!” Then the chant broke out: “Oxy money is in the halls!
Throw them out if you have the balls!”
The prescriptions that PAIN showered the Guggenheim with bore a quote
from a discussion between Oxytocin inventor Robert Kaiko and Purdue’s
Richard Sackler, revealed in a filing by Massachusetts Attorney General
in a lawsuit over Purdue’s wrongdoing in the opioid epidemic: “If
OxyContin is uncontrolled, it is highly likely that it will eventually
be abused … How substantially would it improve our sales?”
The protesters staged a march without a permit from the Guggenheim to
the Met, ignoring police entreaties to stick to the sidewalk, and staged
a rally where survivors of opioid addiction and those who lost loved
ones told their stories and called for the Sacklers to be brought to
justice, their fortunes turned to helping those whose lives they
destroyed and extinguishing the wildfire of addiction they deliberately
set.
Masha Gessen’s moving account of the day for The New Yorker
reveals the power of the action, and illustrates how inequality and the
proliferation of ever-richer billionaires connects directly to misery
and death. There are no good billion-dollar fortunes.
Tumblr, we know you’ve been fighting valiantly to restore net neutrality. Whether you added widgets to your Tumblrs, or reblogged posts to spread the word to your followers, or contacted your reps asking them to keep the internet free and open as we know it—you’re helping. You’re doing it. Let’s keep that momentum up.
BattleForTheNet.com (@fight4future) is letting Congress know that the internet is keeping score of every Congressperson who is and is not supporting the restoration of net neutrality.
Right now you can visit that scoreboard and easily look up whether or not your reps support the Congressional Review Act resolution.
This CRA will restore the net neutrality rules the FCC dismantled back in November 2017. They have 177 signatures, but need 44 more. You can help make that happen. This grassroots effort is working. Just two days ago Rep. Mike Coffman listened to his constituents from Colorado and became the first Republican to support the Democrat-led CRA. Keep putting that same pressure on your congresspeople. Urge them to sign the petition. If your congressperson has already pledged to support the CRA, reblog this post, add the new widget to your Tumblr (just copy and paste the small line of code from Battle For The Net right into the customize theme page on the web), and shout out what’s happening on all of your social media accounts. We have to spread the word.
Keep going, Tumblr. This matters, and you’re making a marked difference.
Anonymous asked: Once, I encountered the funny story of an AI image descriptor with a sheep obsession. It had been trained on pictures of fields of sheep. Therefore, it tagged anything in a field as 'sheep', including an empty field, because they work on statistical probability. Therefore, it thinks "ah, a field! there's probably a sheep here." (It's a bit more complicated but basically that.) It also couldn't recognise sheep in places that weren't fields, such as petrol stations or barns. [cont]
Now, the alarming aspect of this story is that the very same technology is probably what tumblr is using to identify porn. Now, if it can’t tell that an empty field is not, in fact, full of sheep, what hope do we have that it can’t tell an empty room isn’t full of writing human forms engaged in passionate coitus?
this really does sound like an episode of black mirror
This is gonna produce some absolutely baffling pornography.
…. oh my fucking god they actually are using open source software. They’re using a fucking one-layer unidirectional bicategory tag-trained neural network. This will never work. Literally, it will never work. There’s just not enough algorithmic complexity to do what they’re asking of it. I bet you I could prove on a mathematical level that this joke of a neural net fundamentally lacks the abstraction necessary to do its job.
This will never get better. Their algorithm will never stop fucking up, it will never actually flag porn reliably and it will always require a massive quantity of human hours to deal with the deluge of mistagged pictures. This isn’t just a case of an insufficiently trained algorithm, it’s just … this is the most basic neural network you can make. It probably hasa a lot of neurons and has loads of training data but like … you can’t just brute force this kind of stuff. One layer of neurons is just Not Enough.
Also, just to make this clear, Tumblr lied. I mean, we already know this, but I mean they liiiieeeeed. All that stuff they promised about what would or would not be censored? That cannot be delivered on with a system this simple. Nude classical sculptures, political protests, male-presenting nipples (really Tumblr?), nude art outside the context of sex, all that? You cannot train a bicategory one-layer neural network to exclude those things. It cannot be done. Tumblr never intended for those things to actually be permitted, they were just lying. Because the system they have cannot actually do what they said it would and never will be able to.
Also, this kind of system is super vulnerable to counter-neural strategies. I bet you before the end of the month someone hooks up their own open source one layer bicategory neural network which puts an imperceptible (to humans) layer of patterned static over arbitrary images, and trains it by having it bot-post static-ed images to Tumblr and reinforcing based on whether the images are labeled nsfw or sfw. Seriously, within a month someone will have an input-output machine which can turn any image ‘sfw’ in Tumblr’s eyes.
This is genuinely pathetic. Like, I have real pity for whoever implemented this, because it’s clear Tumblr doesn’t actually have any engineers with any expertise with machine learning left at all and they foisted the job off on some poor bastard who has no idea what they’re doing and is going to get all kinds of flak for their (perfectly reasonable and predetermined) failure from management.
As has been pointed out before, there are no humans behind this at all. The review process just reruns either the same algorithm or another algorithm, but people have posted screen shots showing obviously SFW pictures that were still deemed NSFW on review, despite the fact that any human, no matter how overworked / tired would have seen that these pictures were not porn.
I’ve made a new blog for shit posting of stuff I like or find interesting, check it out at Escalator Utopia. Hopefully at some point I’m going to be putting up some original content on here, Indaglow Matinee. Stay Tuned!
Net neutrality ends on the 27th but they’ll try and fool you tomorrow by acting like the repeal of it is okay. Do not be fooled, that is state propaganda to keep you complacent and to stop riots and rebellion from happening! Do not give up! Keep calling who you need to call and keep signing petitions and texting! I know it’s a lot of emotional labor but we cannot give in! 🔥
