Link Salad, the Fortress Conservation Edition

Some of what I'm reading

Abhi Sharma, Flickr

— The Case of the Eco-Terrorists and the Book Deal - Bryan Denson, The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2023

“The records also show that the F.B.I. dispatched undercover agents and informants to attend Mr. Rosebraugh’s speaking engagements around the country. At an event in Seattle, Mr. Rosebraugh recalled, he spotted a blond woman dressed utterly out of place in the audience of black-clad anarchists. When she sidled up and asked him out, Mr. Rosebraugh calculated the social metrics and, smelling a rat, declined her offer.”

— Western Nonprofits Are Trampling Over Africans’ Rights and Land - Aby L. Sène, Foreign Policy, Jul. 1, 2022

“National parks and nature reserves in the global south provide the middle and elite classes a place to recreate and luxuriate in a wilderness emptied of its original stewards. Tourists relish in sightings of the world’s most iconic wildlife and landscapes. For those who want to indulge in some local culture, they can purchase a safari package that includes cultural performances or artifacts from the Indigenous peoples violently evicted from their lands and now compelled to commodify their culture for the Western colonial gaze. If one is lucky, one can catch an environmental education program, where a local tour guide and white scientist team up to sell you their wildlife savior narrative, nudging you to donate funds to support conservation efforts that will allegedly save wildlife while providing meager employment to the dispossessed and impoverished African. Thus, perceptions of national parks and nature reserves as sustainable are reified.”

— The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok - Cory Doctorow, WIRED, Jan. 23, 2023

“HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

— Inside Wealth-Conference Con Man Anthony Ritossa’s Wild Web of Lies - Adam Ciralsky, Vanity Fair, Oct. 19, 2022

“In short, Sir Anthony’s summits are so chockablock with luminaries that many associated with the event may have failed to ask one fundamental question: Who the hell is Anthony Ritossa? After a yearlong investigation, including interviews with sources from a dozen countries, Vanity Fair uncovered the truth. It turns out he is a Wall Street washout, a world-class con man and an inveterate fabulist with a bogus CV and persona—a 53-year-old Australian who fancifully purports to be an heir to a 600-year-old European olive oil fortune. What’s more, he entices people to attend his summits under often-dubious pretenses, not infrequently requesting a cut of the action from presenters. And finally, this self-proclaimed maestro of “family wealth” is actually a thrice-married deadbeat dad who has been repeatedly jailed in Europe and is wanted in the US after threatening to harm his own wife and family; a man about whom Lieutenant Greg Sancho of the Pelham Manor, New York, Police Department told Vanity Fair: “We have an active warrant for Anthony Ritossa’s arrest for criminal contempt in the first degree. That’s a felony.””

— The Defiance of Salman Rushdie - David Remnick, The New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2023

“At the height of the fatwa, Rushdie set out to make good on a promise to his son, Zafar, and complete a book of stories, tales that he told the boy in his bath. That book, which appeared in 1990, is “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” (Haroun is Zafar’s middle name.) It concerns a twelve-year-old boy’s attempt to restore his father’s gift for storytelling. “Luck has a way of running out without the slightest warning,” Rushdie writes, and so it has been with Rashid, the Shah of Blah, a storyteller. His wife leaves him; he loses his gift. When he opens his mouth, he can say only “Ark, ark, ark.” His nemesis is the Cultmaster, a tyrant from the land of Chup, who opposes “stories and fancies and dreams,” and imposes Silence Laws on his subjects; some of his devotees “work themselves up into great frenzies and sew their lips together with stout twine.” In the end, the son is a savior, and stories triumph over tyranny. “My father has definitely not given up,” Haroun concludes. “You can’t cut off his Story Water supply.” And so, in the midst of a nightmare, Rushdie wrote one of his most enjoyable books, and an allegory of the necessity and the resilience of art.”

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Currently reading: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia - Rebecca West

Currently listening: Face to Face - Sevendust