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Brownstone Institute

Poynter’s Creepy ‘Fact-Based Expression’

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Thomas BuckleyTHOMAS BUCKLEY 

Fact-based expression.

That is what the once vaunted now openly vile Poynter Institute – a pivot point of the international censorship-industrial complex – wishes to “strengthen…around the globe.”

Pointedly, not “free speech,” but “fact-based expression.”

They’re not the same thing.

This absurd term, floated through the invite to read the institute’s annual and recently released “Impact Report,” may at first blush seem to be yet another silly woke wiggle, like “birthing person (mother) or “involved in the criminal justice system” (a felon) or “experiencing homelessness” (vagrant).

Like many Orwellian neologisms, it might, if you hear it only once or twice, seem to make a tiny bit of sense because “fact-based expression” implies telling the truth.

But like so many other progressive rewordings, it is purely an attempt to sound reasonable so as to mask a deeply ominous intent.

That intent? To control speech and public discourse by being the lone decider as to what is factual and what is not and those decisions are being – and will be – made based on the sociopolitical outlook of the progressive woke elite, the socialite socialist statist global drivers that fund Poynter.

But the Poynter Institute – once the premier media/journalism teaching and thinking, for lack of a better term, organizations – made a significant error in rolling out the term: it appears right after “free press,” inviting the clear comparison.

“…meaningful achievements we have made to help strengthen a free press and fact-based expression around the globe,” is how the email introduction to the report read.

So why not simply say “free speech?”

Because that’s not what they want at all (they don’t really believe in a free press either, noting the importance of the press being “responsible,” i.e..housebroken.)

To the contrary, “fact-based expression” demands both self and external censorship, a political, social, and cultural censorship that will drown out and drone on.

That is the business Poynter is in now – fact-checking. So Poynter will be telling the world what constitutes “fact-based expression” and what is not, what is verboten.

How convenient for Poynter, how wonderful for the globalists, how terrible for everyone else.

And Poynter has the connections to make it stick – take December, 2020 and Covid for example.

The American Medical Association “partnered” with Poynter to spread the gospel of vaccines, of pandemic panic, and the evils of “misinformation.”

Poynter even offered an online course that local (and national) news people from around the country could take that would leverage the trust they have built in the community to convince people to take the “vaccine:”

We know from previous vaccination efforts that local news is critically important: Audiences trust local news the most, and local journalists will be critical in guiding the public to vaccine administration sites and explaining eligibility.

The first rounds of vaccines will be based on new mRNA technology that, while being a scientific breakthrough, may raise questions in the public’s mind about safety and efficacy. We will explain the technology in ways you can pass along to the public.

The course made sure the locals reported how safe the vaccine was, how important it was, and what “misinformation” about the vaccine needed to be shot down.

Oddly enough, it also worked to help journalists “explain to audiences the importance of the second dosage of the vaccines.” On December 4, 2020 – curiously early for that specific topic – the “vaccine” had been out for only a couple of weeks.

As for all of 2020, you can see Poynter’s round-up here. Note it features the term “covidiot.”

(And you can watch a rerun of the webinar here.)

How convenient for Poynter, how wonderful for the globalists, how terrible for everyone else.

Just nine years ago, Poynter had a budget of $3.8 million and, unless you worked in the media, you had no idea it even existed. Today, thanks to massive support from the likes of Google, Meta (Facebook), and others, Poynter is a $15 million a year nexus point for those who wish to control the press and, more importantly, what everyone else says.

Poynter runs PolitiFact, a media outlet that pretends to be in the business of checking facts.

But it does no such thing. It is a global elite swamp third-party validation machine that twists and turns and backflips to put its “FACT” stamp of approval on just about anything that needs to be buttressed.

Or, more importantly, it stamps “FALSE” on a statement or story or concept that is at odds with the current popular narrative that keeps that same global elite in power (a litany of Poynter’s obfuscation and the tricks it uses can be found here).

It runs MediaWise, an outfit that claims to train (largely) younger people how to spot “misinformation,” something that does not actually exist but is a pillar of the censor’s claim to their right to exist. And through its “Teen Fact Checking Network,” Poynter is training a new generation of censors.

If Poynter were honestly trying to stop misinformation, it would not practice the art so well. 

And Poynter is the home of the International Fact Checking Network, a group of global media and other fact-checking organizations that is dedicated to “fighting repression and misinformation.”

To quote the IFCN chief: “Misinformation is on the march. The politically powerful are using disinformation to confuse the public and control the agenda. And fact-checkers and other journalists face attack and harassment simply for doing their jobs,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, IFCN director. “Yet our work continues. We are on the side of truth. We are on the side of information integrity.”

And the IFCN determines what is the truth, what information has the requisite “integrity” to pass muster?

In other words, doing to the world what it has done to the United States: work with social media and government agencies to stamp out dissent.

April 2 was “International Fact Checking Day.” To honor the occasion, Drobnic Holan took to her blog to claim that fact-checkers are not censors and, it appears, that the Murthy v. Missouri case currently in front of the United States Supreme Court is not really about the basic and immutable American tenet of freedom of speech but about letting misinformers keep muddying the waters of official truth:

The Supreme Court case is primarily about the government’s actions in dealing with tech platforms: Did the Biden administration go too far in asking for takedowns of vaccine-related misinformation? For years, similar attacks have been aimed at fact-checkers. As director of the International Fact-Checking Network, I’ve watched this movement label fact-checkers as part of a “censorship industrial complex,” claiming that fact-checkers are trying to suppress debatable information.

Ironically, this deeply misleading argument itself is aimed at suppressing critique and debate.

Google and Meta (Facebook) and TikTok are, as noted, Poynter funders and use its products to help decide what is or is not allowed on their platforms. That actual fact does not bode well for the neutrality of Poynter’s fact-checking efforts.

Specifically as to TikTok, Poynter proudly claims that “(T)hrough innovative fact-checking partnerships with Meta and TikTok, PolitiFact is slowing the spread of thousands of pieces of false or harmful online content each month — reducing future views of false information by 80% on average.”

And Poynter decides what is “harmful” and “false.”

And just a few days ago, clearly in response to the bill to force the sale of TikTok going through Congress, Poynter decided to “fact check” who really owns TikTok. Poynter decided that the statement that the “Chinese government owns TikTok” is – surprise surprise – false.

Because of its vaunted past, Poynter is the respectable (actually becoming less respectable with each passing million) face of the international movement to determine what the public can talk about.

And it seems being in the “fact” industry is good for business – budget tripled, staff doubled, got far more notoriety, and getting a bit of actual global power, all in the past decade.

Google, Meta, the Omidyar network (lefty media funders), The Just Trust (a spinoff of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative that focuses on “criminal justice), TikTok, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Stanford Impact Labs, which “invests in teams of researchers working with leaders in government, business, and communities to design, test, and scale interventions that can help us make progress on some of the world’s most pressing and persistent social challenges” are some of the major funders of Poynter.

All of the above are powerful progressive/woke companies and foundations and are intertwined with the global movement to muzzle the freedom of the average person, to create a rental world in which people will simply be interchangeable cogs to be watched, fed, and placated.

Another funder of Poynter is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), one of the most caustic – and powerful – members of the international “civil society” behemoth that lay somewhere between government and private industry and is now more powerful than either.

Note: NED was specifically founded in the 1980s to do in public what the CIA could no longer do in secret: play international politics, foment revolutions, buy supporters, and influence foreign media.

Another Poynter partner is the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a stepchild of the still-extant German Marshall Fund.

Reminder – the Marshall Plan was set up after World War II to help rebuild Germany and Europe; the Fund was created by the West German government and is now one of most slithery internationalist think tanks on the planet.

Last November, Poynter hosted a very very poorly attended “United Facts of America” online symposium, which included the participation of the Fund and the ASD. The ASD was the group behind the “Hamilton 68” Russian disinformation dashboard, a tool used countless times by the mainstream media to show how much Russia had warped the American electoral process.

The world can expect to see “fact-based expression” more often in the very near future, can expect to hear “Are you in favor of lying?” arguments if you say you are worried about the new rubric, and can expect to see ‘fact-based expression” in law books soon as an appropriate mitigation of free and unfettered speech.

The concept is already making headway – see the Online Harms Bill proposed in Canada, which “authorizes house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future (hate) crime.”

Poynter is a far far distance away from its original mission, but in theory still understands the actual news business. We asked them what exactly is “fact-based expression:”

“What is ‘fact-based expression’ exactly?  What does that term mean? It has to be different from ‘free speech’ because (the report intro) would have read ‘free speech’ just as it did ‘free press.’”

The response from the transparent media training foundation?

“We have seen your message and I have shared it with the team. We did see your deadline note in the subject line and in the body text. We’ll try to respond as soon as we can, keeping your deadline in mind.”

No further response – I guess “the team” didn’t want to answer the question or they didn’t have a “fact-based expression” to reply with.

Author

  • Thomas Buckley

    Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy.

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Brownstone Institute

If Trump Wins

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By  Bret Swanson  

How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process?

Trump enjoys the momentum. Four of the most recent major national polls show him up 2 to 3%, while Democratic-friendly outlets like the New York Times and CNN both show a TIE race in their final surveys. The 2016 and 2020 elections were razor close even though Clinton (5%) and Biden (8%) had solid polling leads at this point. We need to contemplate a Trump win not only in the electoral college but also in the popular vote.

Here are some thoughts:

  1. JD Vance ascendant, obviously. Big implications for the Republican trajectory.
  2. Will Trump replace Fed chairman Jay Powell? Or merely jawbone for a change in policy? In a new CNBC interview, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh argues that the Fed has juiced both the stock market and inflation. Would reducing inflation, which Trump has promised, automatically therefore lead to a stock market correction and economic slowdown? Not necessarily. If Trump unleashes productive economic activity and Congress ends the fiscal blowout, the Fed could normalize monetary policy without causing a major economic slump.
  3. Will Trump impose the broad and deep tariffs he proposed? Or will he mostly threaten them as a bargaining tool with China? I’m betting on some of the former but more of the latter. We notice, however, Trump allies are floating a trial balloon to replace income taxes with tariffs. As impractical and improbable as that may be, we’re glad to see the mention of radical tax reform reemerge after too long an absence from the national discussion.
  4. How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process? One idea would be to offer a “reverse amnesty” – if you leave peacefully and agree not to return illegally, we will forgive your previous illegal entry(s) and minor violations. This would incentivize self-identification and quiet departure. Plus it would help authorities track those leaving. Would migrant departures truly hit the economy, as critics charge? We doubt large effects. Substantial native populations are still underemployed or absent from the workforce.
  5. We should expect a major retrenchment of regulatory intrusions across the economy – from energy to crypto. Combined with recent Supreme Court action, such as the Chevron reversal, and assisted by the Elon Musk’s substance and narrative, it could be a regulatory renaissance. Extension of the 2017 tax cuts also becomes far more likely.
  6. Trump has never worried much about debt, deficits, or spending. But he’s tapped Elon Musk as government efficiency czar. It’s an orthogonal approach to spending reform instead of the traditional (and unsuccessful) Paul Ryan playbook. Can this good cop-bad cop duo at the very least return out-of-control outlays to a pre-Covid path? Can they at least cancel purely kleptocratic programs, such as the $370-billion Green Energy slush funds? Might they go even further – leveraging the unpopular spending explosion and resulting inflation to achieve more revolutionary effects on government spending and reach? Or will the powerful and perennial forces of government expansion win yet again, sustaining a one-way ratchet not even Elon can defeat?
  7. What if the economy turns south? One catalyst might be the gigantic unrealized bond losses on bank balance sheets; another might be commercial real estate collapse. Although reported GDP growth has been okay, the inflation hangover is helping Trump win on the economy. But many believe the post-pandemic economic expansion is merely a sugar-high and has already lasted longer than expected. A downturn early in Trump’s term could complicate many of his plans.
  8. How will NATO and its transatlantic network respond? Or more generally, what will the neocon and neoliberal hawks, concentrated in DC and the media, but little loved otherwise, do? Does this item from Anne Applebaum — arguing Trump resembles Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all rolled into one — portend continued all-out war on prudent foreign policy? Or will they adopt a more sophisticated approach? If the neocons move wholesale and formally (back) into the Democratic fold, how long will the coalition of wokes and militarists hold? On the economic front, Europe, already underperforming vis-a-vis the US, will fall even further behind without big changes. Reformers should gain at the expense of the transatlantic WEF-style bureaucrats.
  9. Can Trump avoid another internal sabotage of his Administration? Before then, if the election results are tight, will the Democrats seek to complicate or even block his inauguration? Can he win approval for his appointees in the Senate? Can he clean house across the vast public agencies? How long will it take to recruit, train, and reinvigorate talented military leadership, which we chased away in recent years? And how will Trump counter – and avoid overreacting to – taunts, riots, unrest, and lawfare, designed to bolster the case he’s an authoritarian?
  10. Will the Democrats reorient toward the center, a la Bill Clinton? Or will the blinding hatred of Trump fuel yet more radicalism? Orthodox political thinking suggests a moderation. Especially if Trump wins the popular vote, or comes close, pragmatic Democrats will counsel a reformation. James Carville, for example, already complains that his party careened recklessly away from male voters. And Trump’s apparent pickups among Black and Latino voters complicate the Democrats’ longstanding identity-focused strategy. Other incentives might push toward continued belligerence and extreme wokeness, however, and thus an intra-party war.
  11. Will the half of the country which inexplicably retains any confidence in the legacy media at least begin rethinking its information diet and filters? Or has the infowarp inflicted permanent damage?
  12. Will big business, which shifted hard toward Democrats over the last 15 years, recalibrate toward the GOP? Parts of Silicon Valley over the last year began a reorientation — e.g. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and before them, Peter Thiel in 2016. But those are the entrepreneurs. In the receding past, businesses large and small generally lined up against government overreach. Then Big Business and Big Government merged. Now, a chief divide is between politically-enmeshed bureaucratic businesses and entrepreneurial ones. Does the GOP even want many of the big guys back? The GOP’s new alignment with “Little Tech” is an exciting development, especially after being shut out of Silicon Valley for the last two decades.
  13. Industry winners: traditional energy, nuclear energy, Little Tech. Industry losers: Green Energy, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Individual winners: X (nee Twitter), Elon Musk, RFK, Jr.
  14. How will the Censorship Industrial Complex react? A Trump win will pose both a symbolic and operational blow to governmental, non-governmental, old media, and new media outlets determined to craft and control facts and narratives. It will complicate their mission, funding, and organizational web. Will they persist in their “mis/disinformation” framing and their badgering of old media and social media companies to moderate content aggressively? Or will they devise a new strategy? A.I. is pretty clearly the next frontier in the information wars. How will those who propagandize and rewire human minds attempt to program and prewire artificial ones?
  15. How will Trump integrate RFK, Jr. and his movement? Will RFK, Jr. achieve real influence, especially on health issues? Big Pharma and Big Public Health will wage a holy war to block reforms in general and accountability for Covid mistakes in particular.
  16. Trump has promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On one hand, it should be easy. Despite what you hear from DC media and think tanks, Ukraine is losing badly. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and its military is depleted and faltering. Ukraine should want a deal quickly, before it loses yet more people and territory. Russia, meanwhile, always said it wants a deal, even before the war started, focusing on Ukrainian neutrality. Why Ukrainian neutrality should bother the US was always a mystery. And yet even critics of the West’s support for Ukraine, who want an agreement, think it will be difficult to achieve. The Western foreign policy establishment has invested too much credibility and emotion. It will charge “appeasement” and “betrayal” and make any deal difficult for Trump. Russia, meanwhile, has secured so much territory and now has Odessa and Kharkiv in its sights. Putin will not be eager to accept a deal he would have taken in 2021 or before. The far better path for all involved was a pre-war agreement, or the one negotiated but scuttled in April 2022.
  17. What if A.I. launches a new productivity boom, enabled by an agenda of energy abundance, including a nuclear power revival? The economic tailwinds could remake politics even more than we currently see.
  18. Can Trump, having run and won his last campaign, consolidate gains by reaching out and uniting the portions of the country willing to take an extended hand?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Bret Swanson is president of the technology research firm Entropy Economics LLC, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and writes the Infonomena Substack.

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Brownstone Institute

They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. TuckerDebbie Lerman  

For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.

The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.

In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.

It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.

What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.

We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.

To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”

When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.

Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.

Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.

Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.

Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.

This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.

Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.

Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.

No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.

All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.

One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.

Authors

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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