An app will not save us. We will not sort out social inequality lying in bed staring at smartphones. It will not stem from simply sending emails to people in power, one person at a time.

New, neoliberal conceptions of individual freedoms (especially in the realm of technology use) are oversupported in direct opposition to protections realized through large-scale organizing to ensure collective rights. This is evident in the past 30 years of active antilabor policies put forward by several administrations and in increasing hostility toward unions and twenty-first-century civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter. These proindividual, anticommunity ideologies have been central to the anti-democratic, anti-affirmative-action, antiwelfare, antichoice, and antirace discourses that place culpability for individual failure on moral failings of the individual, not policy decisions and social systems. Discussions of institutional discrimination and systemic marginalization of whole classes and sectors of society have been shunted from public discourse for remediation and have given rise to viable presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, someone with a history of misogynistic violence toward women and anti-immigrant schemes. Despite resistance to this kind of vitriol in the national electoral body politic, society is also moving toward greater acceptance of technological processes that are seemingly benign and decontextualized, as if these projects are wholly apolitical and without consequence too. Collective efforts to regulate or provide social safety nets through public or governmental intervention are rejected. In this conception of society, individuals make choices of their own accord in the free market, which is normalized as the only legitimate source of social change.

It is in this broader social and political environment that the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission have been reluctant to regulate the internet environment, with the exception of the Children’s Internet Protection Act and the Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007. Attempts to regulate decency vis-à-vis racist, sexist, and homophobic harm have largely been unaddressed by the FCC, which places the onus for proving harm on the individual. I am trying to make the case, through the mounting evidence, that unregulated digital platforms cause serious harm. Trolling is directly linked to harassment offline, to bullying and suicide, to threats and attacks. The entire experiment of the internet is now with us, yet we do not have enough intense scrutiny at the level of public policy on its psychological and social impact on the public.

The reliability of public information online is in the context of real, lived experiences of Americans who are increasingly entrenched in the shifts that are occurring in the information age. An enduring feature of the American experience is gross systemic poverty, whereby the largest percentages of people living below the poverty line suffering from un- and underemployment are women and children of color. The economic crisis continues to disproportionately impact poor people of color, especially Black / African American women, men, and children.

about the author

Safiya Umoja Noble is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School of Communication. Noble is the co-editor of two books, The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online and Emotions, Technology & Design.

Furthermore, the gap between Black and White wealth has become so acute that a recent report by Brandeis University found that this gap quadrupled between 1984 and 2007, making Whites five times richer than Blacks in the US. This is not the result of moral superiority; this is directly linked to the gamification of financial markets through algorithmic decision making. It is linked to the exclusion of Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans from the high-paying jobs in technology sectors. It is a result of digital redlining and the resegregation of the housing and educational markets, fueled by seemingly innocuous big-data applications that allow the public to set tight parameters on their searches for housing and schools. Never before has it been so easy to set a school rating in a digital real estate application such as Zillow.com to preclude the possibility of going to “low-rated” schools, using data that reflects the long history of separate but equal, underfunded schools in neighborhoods where African Americans and low-income people live.

These data-intensive applications that work across vast data sets do not show the microlevel interventions that are being made to racially and economically integrate schools to foster educational equity. They simply make it easy to take for granted data about “good schools” that almost exclusively map to affluent, White neighborhoods. We need more intense attention on how these types of artificial intelligence, under the auspices of individual freedom to make choices, forestall the ability to see what kinds of choices we are making and the collective impact of these choices in reversing decades of struggle for social, political, and economic equality. Digital technologies are implicated in these struggles.

These dramatic shifts are occurring in an era of US economic policy that has accelerated globalization, moved real jobs offshore, and decimated labor interests. Claims that the society is moving toward greater social equality are undermined by data that show a substantive decrease in access to home ownership, education, and jobs—especially for Black Americans. In the midst of the changing social and legal environment, inventions of terms and ideologies of “colorblindness” disingenuously purport a more humane and nonracist worldview. This is exacerbated by celebrations of multiculturalism and diversity that obscure structural and social oppression in fields such as education and information sciences, which are shaping technological practices. Research by Sharon Tettegah, a professor of education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, shows that people invested in colorblindness are also less empathetic toward others. Making race the problem of those who are racially objectified, particularly when seeking remedy from discriminatory practices, obscures the role of government and the public in solving systemic issues.

Central to these “colorblind” ideologies is a focus on the inappropriateness of “seeing race.” In sociological terms, colorblindness precludes the use of racial information and does not allow any classifications or distinctions. Yet, despite the claims of colorblindness, research shows that those who report higher racial colorblind attitudes are more likely to be White and more likely to condone or not be bothered by derogatory racial images viewed in online social networking sites. Silicon Valley executives, as previously noted, revel in their embrace of colorblindness as if it is an asset and not a proven liability. In the midst of reenergizing the effort to connect every American and to stimulate new economic markets and innovations that the internet and global communications infrastructures will afford, the real lives of those who are on the margin are being reengineered with new terms and ideologies that make a discussion about such conditions problematic, if not impossible, and that place the onus of discriminatory actions on the individual rather than situating problems affecting racialized groups in social structures.

Formulations of postracialism presume that racial disparities no longer exist, a context within which the colorblind ideology finds momentum. George Lipsitz, a critical Whiteness scholar and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggests that the challenge to recognizing racial disparities and the social (and technical) structures that instantiate them is a reflection of the possessive investment in Whiteness—which is the inability to recognize how White hegemonic ideas about race and privilege mask the ability to see real social problems. I often challenge audiences who come to my talks to consider that at the very historical moment when structural barriers to employment were being addressed legislatively in the 1960s, the rise of our reliance on modern technologies emerged, positing that computers could make better decisions than humans. I do not think it a coincidence that when women and people of color are finally given opportunity to participate in limited spheres of decision making in society, computers are simultaneously celebrated as a more optimal choice for making social decisions. The rise of big-data optimism is here, and if ever there were a time when politicians, industry leaders, and academics were enamored with artificial intelligence as a superior approach to sense-making, it is now. This should be a wake-up call for people living in the margins, and people aligned with them, to engage in thinking through the interventions we need.

From Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. Courtesy of NYU Press.

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ARMS, a fighting game for the Nintendo Switch, insists on commitment. Each of its colorful pugilists possesses two elastic arms designed to punch, slash, or blast across an entire arena. Think the spring-loaded boxing gloves from Looney Tunes, deployed on a stretchy coil like a telephone. (The other kind of telephone. The one people used before everyone carried supercomputers everywhere.) Each arm is vulnerable while uncoiling, and you can't make another attack until it completes its arc and returns. Picture a slapstick, slow-mo boxing match, each flailing blow landed by a boomerang.

That imprecision makes for a uniquely considered take on the genre. You must plan your position, carefully time your strikes, and gently nudge your weapons in the right direction midflight. At their best, fights feel distinct and deliberate without ever sacrificing fluidity. It's a matter of waiting, watching, and punishing mistakes. These dynamics lie at the core of every fighting game, but for anyone who lacks the skills for combo-heavy, highly technical fighters, ARMS offers an accessible alternative. When it comes arrives June 16, ARMS will be one of the only major titles released on the Nintendo Switch since its launch, and in many ways it lives up to the best ideas of the console. It's easy to pick up and play—and just smart enough to hold attention for longer sessions, with a promise of hidden depths to explore.

ARMS subscribes to the same multiplayer game philosophy as Blizzard's Overwatch: a vision of cooperative and competitive play that's inclusive and friendly, a fireburst of soothing colors and diverse characters. The 10 playable characters feature only minute tactical distinctions, but significant aesthetic differences. Compelling visual design gives the cast brightness and pop. Twintelle fights with her coiled blonde hair instead of her arms. Ribbon Girl infuses her combat with a bubblegum pop persona. Helix is basically Gumby with large strands of DNA attached to his sides.

That said, the game offers slim singleplayer offerings. The closest thing ARMS has to a story mode gets periodically interrupted by mini-games you won't find nearly as fun as the fighting. This clearly is meant to be a party game, and could be a very good one. It offers several control options, including using the Switch's JoyCons as motion controllers. (Punching through the air feels great, though the positioning is clumsier than using with standard buttons and joysticks.) You can even split the two JoyCons into two separate, though slightly uncomfortable, controllers for two people.

ARMS is a piece of software as flexible as the Switch itself, able to contort itself into whatever form required for the social situation at hand. But don't forget that this is a fighting game in a crowded and competitive field. This is where it falters; Nintendo seems ignorant of what's needed for longevity. Despite solid foundations, the game lacks the strategic depth needed to entice anything more than the most casual gameplay. The game doesn't offer enough characters, enough diversity of play styles in the equippable arm attachments, or nearly enough thought about what might make ARMS engaging.

I don't have many complaints about the content of ARMS. Mostly, I'm frustrated there's not more of it. The game asks you to commit to your moves, to think and act carefully, and does so while sparkling with a light, bubbly energy. It's precisely the kind of game you'd want Nintendo to release for the Switch, and it feels like the start of something special. It's just not quite there yet.

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You stocked up on iTunes digital movies a decade ago because it was the only game in town. You’ve got a handful of favorites on Google Play, because at some point you switched to Android. And you stash some classics on Amazon Video, thanks to that one holiday blowout sale you couldn’t resist.

As far as hardships go, having your movie collection sprinkled among a few different digital retailers ranks somewhere below "poured skim instead of half-and-half." Still, it’s frustrating to have to dig through two or three or four digital shelves to find what you’re in the mood for right now. You also, for the most part, won’t have to anymore, thanks to Movies Anywhere.

The promise of Movies Anywhere, which launches right now, is deliciously simple. Once you create an account, any movie you buy from one of the five major studios—Paramount and Lionsgate are holding out, apologies to Transformers fans—will show up in the Movies Anywhere app, available on Android, iOS, Roku, and pretty much any other streaming device you can think of. And before you seize up from a bad flashback to Ultraviolet, the floundering DRM scheme that studios have pushed for years, know that those movies will also all show up automatically in your iTunes, Amazon Video, Google Play, and Vudu accounts, if you choose to link them.

Not only that, but the service applies retroactively. Meaning that if the movies in your various digital libraries are among the 7,300 available today on Movies Anywhere, they can be in all of your libraries at once. Switching between Amazon and iTunes for whatever reason? It’ll know where you left off.

Technically, Movies Anywhere already existed; Disney launched it three years ago, but only for Disney (or Disney-owned, like Marvel) movies. It also, like so few things in this life, works exactly as advertised; films bought on one platform pop up on all the rest instantly. That reliability comes from Disney’s KeyChest technology, which creates a sort of digital locker for all of your purchases outside of the traditional retail outlets. Think of it like your own personal, movie-only Dropbox bin, which you can tie to your iTunes, Amazon Video, Google Play, and Vudu accounts.

Or you can just use the Movies Anywhere app, which Movies Anywhere general manager Karin Gilford hopes will become a destination unto itself, not just air traffic control. “It’s feature film-focused,” says Gilford. “Everything from the search, the browsing, it’s all based on that user experience.”

In other words, it strips away all the clutter that you find in other places: the original series, the streaming options you may or may not care about. If you’re in the mood for just a movie you love enough to already own, the argument goes, Movies Anywhere can get you there better than anything.

There’s no real downside for consumers here; the only question is how many people buy enough digital movies to care that Movies Anywhere exists in the first place.

“I think what they’re doing is just giving consumers more options in the market. Hey, great. There’s consumers who want more options,” says Dan Rayburn, a streaming media analyst with Frost & Sullivan. “Are they providing a service consumers are clamoring for? No, not that I’ve seen.”

The numbers bear that out somewhat. Subscription streaming revenue outpaced digital movie purchases by a factor of three in the first half of 2017, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry organization. Still, those sales are increasing year over year. And Gilford argues that streamlining the buying—and storing—experience can only help.

“Purchase and streaming have always been side by side,” says Gilford. “It’s a formidable revenue stream. Whenever you can improve the consumer experience, you see things.”

That’s especially true if Movies Anywhere manages to win over the two studio holdouts, and adds more retail partners to its stable. It also doesn’t hurt that Movies Anywhere is offering as many as five free movies—Ice Age, last year’s Ghostbusters, Big Hero 6, Jason Bourne, and The Lego Movie—for people who join and link at least two retail accounts.

And even without the freebies, Movies Anywhere gives a certain kind of movie fan—the kind that likes to shop for deals, the kind that hasn’t gone all-in on one ecosystem, or might want to explore another—freedom that was previously unimaginable outside of Disney flicks. It may not save digital movie sales from streaming, but it might just save you some hassle.

If it were up to Walt Disney, no one would ever leave his world. Like Howard Stark, a man whose identity the late animator's company now owns, he wanted to create massive, fantastical expos that showed off the possibilities of human innovation. Science fiction builds worlds with words and pictures; Walt Disney did it for real.

In so doing, Disney (the man, not the company) didn’t just illustrate princess castles—he built them. He did it first in Disneyland in Anaheim in the 1950s, then in Orlando's Walt Disney World in the 1970s. But decades later, Disney (the company, not the man) has a lot more worlds to build. A series of shrewd 21st-century acquisitions have given it the rights to the massive comic book world of Marvel; the far, far away galaxy of Lucasfilm; and the animated lands of Pixar. It literally owns so much fictional property, it could never build it all IRL.

But that doesn't mean it's not trying.

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Now that all of the studio’s film units are seemingly on blockbuster autopilot, Disney is fully invested in bringing its cinematic universes to its theme parks. The first—and most hotly anticipated—is Star Wars land (as it's commonly but unofficially known), a pair of 14-acre complexes slated to open in 2019 at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. As with all things associated with Lucasfilm, the company is tight-lipped when it comes to specifics about the world, but have promised that it will let people take control of the Millennium Falcon and put themselves in the middle of a battle between the First Order and the Resistance. No one is saying exactly where this face-off will happen, but this week at Disney’s D23 fan event in Anaheim, the company unveiled a large model of the theme park environment and revealed that it will be a place that’s known in the Star Wars universe but has never been on film before. Visitors will find a cantina (naturally), places for rebels to hide, stormtroopers—everything that falls in the Venn diagram where Star Wars movies and theme park trips meet. In other words, get ready for blue milkshakes at every concession stand.

How magical or realistic these spaces end up being—and how immersive it can feel when stormtroopers are walking alongside tourists in flip-flops and tank tops—won’t be known until 2019, but what seems more certain is that this is just the beginning. As sure-fire successful IP gets consolidated into just a few franchises, moving those franchises into other storytelling formats is going to become the next frontier in monetizing them and expanding their reach. Universal's Wizarding World of Harry Potter was only the beginning; Pandora – The World of Avatar opened at Walt Disney World in June, and the D23 Expo this week featured a model of “Mission: Breakout!”—the new Guardians of the Galaxy twist on the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride. And as virtual reality and augmented reality become more of a, well, reality, parks like Disney’s will be able to merge their cinematic and IRL offerings even further.

Even if Walt Disney couldn’t have predicted Star Wars, let alone that his company would one day own it, immersing visitors in his company’s stories and ideas couldn't be more on-brand. Disney didn’t live to see Walt Disney World completed, but before he died he was deeply involved in building it, as well as its “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” (EPCOT). "Disney wanted a community where people really lived," former Disney executive Marty Sklar would say later. In other words, he wanted to build a science fiction world, without the fiction. And now, as D23 visitors are learning, even the fiction is becoming fact.

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When the Justice League crew took the stage at Comic-Con International’s Hall H on Saturday—minus Henry Cavill, whose Superman is technically dead—they did so to a standing ovation, with the loudest screams reserved for Gal Gadot/Wonder Woman. But as the banter started and the footage rolled, there was one thing missing: their director. Joss Whedon, one of geekdom’s most beloved auteurs, took over Justice League a few months ago following the death of director Zack Snyder’s daughter, and some (OK, us) had speculated the director would make a grand return to Comic-Con for his latest film.

He didn’t—but that doesn’t mean his presence wasn’t felt. Because at the panel, just days after reports that Whedon was doing “extensive reshoots” for the movie, Warner Bros. released a new trailer for the film that demonstrated one thing is for certain: Justice League is turning into a Joss Whedon movie.

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First signal that we're working with a Whedon joint: the new trailer opens on Wonder Woman taking on a machine-gun-wielding group of heavies. Sure, Warners would be fools to not harness the power of the highest-grossing movie of the summer, but don't forget that badass heroines are kind of Joss’ thing—or at least one of them. Considering that he started work on the movie before Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman opened, chances seem good that he moved Godot’s character into the forefront. The fact that she’s positioned as the rational, together one throughout the rest of the proceedings feels very Whedonesque as well.

Exhibit B: The Flash, played by Ezra Miller. Barry Allen was already being portrayed as the new kid on the block (as well as the comedic relief) at last year's Hall H panel. But in the new trailer unveiled today, he and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) are the insecure rookies—and Whedon loves an outcast.

But more than anything, the biggest difference between the new trailer and anything we’ve seen out of Justice League before is the visual tone. Outside of the bigger action scenes with new villain Steppenwolf and some night shots, the dark patina Snyder gives to his films has faded away. It’s still darker than anything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but this latest peek shows a movie much lighter on its feet than anything fans have seen before—more Wonder Woman than Dawn of Justice. It’s even got a possibly-Superman-teasing button at the end that feels like a Marvel post-credits scene. Through and through, it shows off the kind of heroics that made Wonder Woman a hit and Avengers Whedon’s calling card.

Justice League doesn’t hit theaters until November 17. That may seem like a long way from now, but it’s a relatively short amount of time for Whedon to take a three-fourths-baked movie and make it jibe with his vision. Of course he didn’t make to Comic-Con—he’s working. Joss Whedon may not have been sitting in Hall H this year, but he’s definitely back.

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Didja hear? The Han Solo standalone movie had quite the shakeup last week. With just a few weeks left to go before the end of principal filming, the directors of the flick were fired from the project and replaced a couple days later. Meanwhile, the director of Star Wars: Episode IX found himself the subject of a barrage of criticism. Suddenly, things aren't looking so exciting in the galaxy far, far away. (Although some hot takes are probably taking the panic a bit too far.) What's going on in the land of the Jedi? Oh, not much. Just all this.

So, What Actually Happened with the Han Solo Movie?

Source: Anonymous insiders with, inevitably, agendas of their own

Probability of Accuracy: Who can know, really?

The Real Deal: So… exactly why were Phil Lord and Christopher Miller let go from the untitled Han Solo movie? The situation is still unfolding, but based on two early reports, it looks as if the cause was as simple as a culture clash between the directors, who favored improvisational filmmaking and a looser style, and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and the movie's screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who wanted something far more faithful to the written word. Just two days after Lord and Miller were let go, Lucasfilm announced that Ron Howard will take over the movie. "We believe the highest goal of each film is to delight, carrying forward the spirit of the saga that George Lucas began 40 years ago," Kennedy said in a statement announcing Howard as the new director, adding that the studio was "thrilled" to have him onboard. "We have a wonderful script, an incredible cast and crew, and the absolute commitment to make a great movie," she said. After a brief hiatus to let Howard review the work done to date, production will resume July 10, according to Lucasfilm.

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There's a Specific Episode IX Set-Up In The Last Jedi

Source: Internet speculation based on a tease from director Colin Trevorrow

Probability of Accuracy: The speculation is, at best, 50/50, but there are moving parts beyond this quote…

The Real Deal: During an appearance on MTV's Happy Sad Confused podcast, Episode IX director Colin Trevorrow was asked if he requested that anything to be changed in The Last Jedi to pave the way for his follow-up. "There was one little thing," he said in response. "It wasn’t an adjustment, it was just 'Could you shoot this one extra thing while you’re in this place on this day?' And [director Rian Johnson] did, which was great." This has led people to believe that there's gong to be something in The Last Jedi that was inserted to directly set up the next movie in the sequence. But it's also possible that Johnson has filmed something that won't be seen until Episode IX. No matter what scenario ends up being true, though, fans probably won't know about it until 2019, when Episode IX reaches theaters. But will Trevorrow still be directing that movie? That's open to question, because the genuinely appalling reviews for his current movie The Book of Henry have people wondering if Lucasfilm might ditch him in favor of another director. Given what just happened on the Han Solo movie, suddenly that doesn't seem that unlikely.

Lego Has Spoiled The Last Jedi

Source: Internet leaks

Probability of Accuracy: The images certainly seem legit, but it's unclear what they're actually revealing about the movie itself.

The Real Deal: Speaking of The Last Jedi, some leaks of upcoming Lego tie-ins have revealed that fans will get to see an all-black evil BB-8 (referred to as BB-9E in the leaks, but it's hard to tell if that's legit), as well as an entirely different look for Supreme Leader Snoke that looks… well, not unlike the outfits worn by Qui-Gon Jinn and Luke Skywalker in earlier movies. Is this just the casual look of the Star Wars galaxy, or is there some larger connection to be made? Fans will know when the movie hits theaters in December.

It's Not Easy Being a Stormtrooper

Source: An official preview courtesy of USA Today

Probability of Accuracy: It's an official preview of a new in-canon story. That's as accurate as it gets, really.

The Real Deal: Ahead of the book's July 25 release, USA Today published an excerpt of the first chapter of Star Wars Battlefront II: Inferno Squad, the official prose tie-in/prequel to the upcoming Battlefront II videogame, giving a short glimpse of what it was like to be a stormtrooper during the final days of the Empire. (Spoiler alert: Not that glamorous.) The excerpt also reveals what it's like for stormtroopers to watch the destruction of a Death Star, as well.

It's Still Not Easy Being a Stormtrooper (But It Does Look Kinda Fun)

Source: Two new videos from the Battlefront II game

Probability of Accuracy: Not only a high probability of accuracy, but also a high potential for awesomeness.

The Real Deal: In other Star Wars: Battlefront II news, there's a fresh trailer for the game that shows off a battle across Theed (Naboo's royal city from Episode I: The Phantom Menace):

If that's not enough, there's also this extended gameplay video:

Developer EA also announced that all DLCs for Battlefront II will be free, with design director Niklas Fegraeus saying the decision was in keeping with the spirit of Star Wars. "If you’re a fan, you’re a part of the family," he said in a statement. "And splitting that up and saying, ‘If you have this content you can play here, but if you have this content you can play here.’ And if you don’t share, you will be split up. What we wanted to do was have a journey that starts at the launch of the game." And why is that good news? Because the first DLC will feature Finn and Captain Phasma as playable characters, as well as Crait, the new planet glimpsed in the Last Jedi trailer. See? Now you're interested. The game hits shelves this November.

“Innovation,” Jeff Bezos once said, “happens by gently lifting a grandfather and asking him for six different ideas.”

Actually, that kudzu bit of biz-speak inspiration isn’t entirely attributable to the Amazon CEO. It’s the work of Botnik, a new AI-assisted humor application that scours various types of human-created, word-crowded content—from season-three Seinfeld scripts to Yelp reviews to Bezos' shareholder letters—in order to build predictive, idiom-specific keyboards. Those keyboards, many of which are available on Botnik.org, can then be used to write new, inevitably askew versions of well-known works: An episode of Scrubs, perhaps, or a Bachelorette soundbite.

The best Botnik creations, like this PBS-derived set of otter facts, retain the structure and wordplay of their source material, while adding a goofy, appropriately robotic sense of stiltedness. They all represent a new form of comedy, a human-computer collaboration, one that “gathers all these evocative phrases from a genre, and then builds them together in an absurd collage," says Botnik cofounder Jamie Brew.

Botnik began in earnest last year, when Brew—then a writer for The Onion’s site Clickhole—began talking with Bob Mankoff, the artist and former New Yorker cartoon editor who, in 2005, launched that magazine’s popular caption-writing contest. During his New Yorker stint, Mankoff worked with both Microsoft and Google's Deepmind department on projects that attempted to make algorithmic sense of the contest's thousands of entries, with middling results. "I thought, 'The computers [alone] aren't going to solve this,'" Mankoff says. "'If the humor problem is going to be solved, or even partially solved, it's only going to be solved people working with machines."

He then heard about a predictive-text generator that Brew had created, one that was inspired by hours spent on his smartphone, using its text suggestions to craft hilariously dull sentences. The phone's bare-bones text-predictions, Brew says, "channeled the voice of the most boring person in the world. But when I noticed you can get a kind of poetry out of just taking this machine's very limited suggestions, the next natural step was to try to apply this to other texts."

The two paired up, and with support from Techstars' Alexa Accelerator program, the Botnik team spent this past year building and fine-tuning several corpuses—essentially large language databases, each one culling from a specific pop-cultural genre or entity, like beauty ads, or *Savage Love* columns. Those terms populate the site's individual keyboards, which allow you to craft sentences—each word dictating your options for the next—and ultimately your own weirdo missives.

It's technology as well-informed collaborator, as opposed to a coldly automated content-creator. "What's generated automatically by a computer only has a transient interest for us," says Mankoff. "But [with Botnik], it's a person working with a computer, and adding a kind of mastery to it. It's based on the idea that you can write anything: If you want to write a country-western song, you're accessing the predictive text of country western songs—but you're not simply spitting it out. You're modifying it."

As of now, there are Botnik keyboards dedicated to Tennyson, pancake recipes, and animal facts—all genres with their own familiar structures. Much of the strange, spun-out prose these devices generate is then overseen by an editorial community of about 150 volunteer writers, including staffers from Saturday Night Live and The Onion. Using Slack, they upvote and cobble together the best entries, resulting in works like this Seinfeld script…

…or this cooking-tutorial video:

In both examples, the logic and structure of the original form remain intact—but they've been infused with a blunt, weird, hilariously assured sensibility that make the familiar seem alien. As Botnik chief scientist Elle O'Brien notes, the best Botnik entries "are the ones that hit you in that perfectly uncanny spot, where you recognize what they're trying to mimic." There's even a keyboard dedicated to Wired's product reviews, which yielded:

There have been other recent attempts to combine the fields of AI and comedy ¹, including DEviaNT, a program designed to spout out "that's what she said" at the exact appropriate (or inappropriate?) time. But the hope for the Botnik team—which recently contributed material to Amazon's Alexa device—is that the application will be expanded beyond humor. "It's a brainstorming tool for all kinds of creativity," says Mankoff, who's currently the cartoon and humor editor at Esquire. "One of the possibilities for this going forward is that you're stuck in the middle of an article, and the corpus you're looking at is everything Brian Raftery ever wrote." Which is a terrifying prospect—partly because it would require a computer to scour years of my bad-pun-filled writings, but also because it could possibly put me out of work.

Still, Mankoff insists no one should be worried about being replaced: "We're not going to give it over the machines," he says with a laugh. "Human beings always have to be at the center, just for the sake of humanity." That's what she said.

¹ UPDATE 2:52 ET 10/25/17: This story originally mentioned LOL-bot, a "robot" at a comedy festival that appeared to create its own jokes. However, that appearance was an April Fool's Day prank; the robot was being controlled by comedians backstage. The mention has been removed. #FakeRobotNews

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Last weekend's events in Charlottesville, Virginia, showed the ugliest face of white nationalism in the United States. That racism is a problem—in both its structural and personal forms—shouldn't surprise anyone. But even if you knew that virulent hate groups existed, they're fringe enough that most Americans have never spoken to their members. Aside from a few figureheads like David Duke, you're more likely to have seen one of their memes than one of their faces.

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ABOUT

Dave Algoso (@dalgoso) is a social change consultant. He was raised in Virginia and graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Today, that's no longer true. We know exactly what they look like. The weekend was well-covered, with participants and journalists capturing most scenes from multiple angles. Last Friday's tiki torch march through the University of Virginia, last Saturday's rally in Emancipation Park, and the violence that accompanied both reached us in real-time over Facebook and Twitter. The nightly news and front pages of newspapers have replayed those images in the days since.

Crowd-sourced sleuthing soon turned up the identities and social media profiles of several participants. The willingness to show their faces
put "Unite the Right" attendees in stark contrast to the iconic hooded Klansman. As sociologist and educator Eve Ewing commented on
Twitter: "They're all confident they'll have jobs on Monday."

They turned out to be wrong. Cole White had lost his job at a California hot dog joint by Sunday morning. Peter Tefft faced a scathing open letter from his father in North Dakota,
denouncing his son's hateful beliefs and attendance at the Charlottesville rally. Peter Cvjetanovic, a college student from Nevada,
defended his participation after he was identified; more than 40,000 people have signed Change.org petitions calling on the university to expel him. Chris Cantwell, featured in a Vice documentary on the weekend’s events, was kicked off the dating site OkCupid.

The trolls of the so-called alt-right are making a twisted "free speech" defense, playing the victims of an intolerant left. They claim they're being punished for their political beliefs. But the weapons that rally participants brought to Charlottesville undercut that claim. Last Friday's assaults on students and last Saturday's attacks on counter-protestors—including the group beating of local resident Deandre Harris in a parking garage—reveal the group's insincerity. And the murder of Heather Heyer by a member of white supremacist group Vanguard America shows the argument to be a cover for a cynical, hate-filled world view.

If this had been a peaceful rally within the realm of normal political discourse, then publishing the names of attendees or firing them from
their jobs would be an unreasonable reaction. That's not the case here. No one responded this way in the past, even for white nationalist
rallies. This wasn't even the first time they'd marched in Charlottesville this summer: A smaller group had held a torch-lit preview at the same park in May. But it was the first time white nationalists showed up armed, in large numbers, and became violent.

Fascist views were already well outside acceptable politics. By enacting those views with violence, the rally violated a deep norm that undergirds our social contract. As political scientist David Karpf argued on Twitter, these violations must be met with penalties or the norms fade away. The Trump
administration has seen norms against nepotism, kleptocracy, and profiteering soften because a Republican-controlled Congress has refused to impose any penalties. In this case, ordinary people can step in and assert that these norms matter. We should applaud them for it. (Though the task could be approached with more care: Misidentification is a problem, and even accurate identification shouldn’t be followed by threats of
violence.)

Unfortunately, this penalty only applies to the rank-and-file. The organizers and leaders were never anonymous. Their names were on the
rally posters. Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler have proudly sought notoriety by promoting white nationalism. Last weekend drew rebukes from the mainstream right, but rally leaders saw a victory in President Trump's reluctant, kid-gloves condemnation. They left Charlottesville emboldened and empowered.

The job losses and other punishments facing the members of this mob are necessary but will have unintended consequences. When those individuals woke up on Monday morning, they returned to the same online forums and Twitter feeds where they'd first encountered hateful ideologies. Social sanctions may even deepen their involvement. When part of your identity is challenged, you double down on it. Movements unify when under attack.

Society needs a follow-up to the rebuke. We need to help white supremacists unlearn the ideologies that took them to the streets of Charlottesville. One group doing active outreach is Life After Hate, a nonprofit run by former far-right extremists who now work to bring others out of the movement. They were approved to receive federal funding by the Obama administration, only to have their funding paused and then cancelled by the Trump administration. In response, the group launched a crowd-funding campaign that’s taken off since last weekend, raising more than $200,000 for their programs.

One group can't do it alone. Churches and religious groups are also critical to this effort. Drawing on research from violent groups around
in the world, peace and conflict expert Rebecca Wolfe has pointed to the important role of families in pulling extremists back from the brink. Institutions like faith and family provide people with narratives about themselves and their
identity that can counter those offered by white supremacist groups. Many of these groups are ill-equipped to do this work on their own,
especially given the role of online communities in radicalization. Lessons from anti-gang work show the need for a whole-of-community approach.

Reaching white nationalists isn’t just about restoring their own humanity. Their place at the extreme end of the spectrum legitimizes other forms of white supremacy. Conservative politicians can swat away accusations of racism—even while advancing policies of mass incarceration, police violence, racial profiling, economic inequality, inhumane deportation, and voter suppression—by pointing to the crazies in the street and saying: “Me? A racist? I’m not one of those neo-Nazis!”

By reining in the extremes, we can shift the middle ground toward justice. The goal should be to leave people like Spencer and
Kessler out on their own, without support from the political establishment or their previously anonymous troll army. That creates
more space for the hard work of dismantling white supremacy in its more prevalent forms, bringing allies and waverers over toward active
anti-racism. Let's not just ostracize the neo-Nazis. Let's counter-recruit their base out from under them.

WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here.