He was the first Black golfer to play in golf’s most fabled U.S. Ironically, this year’s Masters made Lee Elder an Honorary Starter. Black groups countered by threatening to boycott sponsors of the recent Masters Golf Tournament played in Augusta, Georgia. Meanwhile, a backlash came from Republican lawmakers shouting that they will eliminate all tax breaks and subsidies now going to companies who publicly oppose the law. Several Black leaders have gone so far as to advise these corporations to pull out of Georgia altogether if the law is not repealed. It’s a tightrope walk for these companies, because Black groups are threatening more, such as eliminating corporate contributions to Republicans who support suppressing the Black vote. Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, UPS, and other large Georgia companies have issued tepid statements against the law with language like they “support the right to vote for all.” Major League Baseball pulled its scheduled All-Star Game from Atlanta and is sending it to Denver. This Georgia drama continues to spawn subplots.
The law enacts many new restrictions, such as eliminating Sunday voting, shortening the early voting period, limiting the number of ballot drop boxes, and prohibiting non-poll workers from giving food or water to voters waiting in line. District Court, arguing that the new law violated both he First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. The New Georgia Project, founded by Stacy Abrams, promptly called it the “Voter Suppression Bill.” Her group filed suit in U.S. It recently was signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp. You may remember that, following unsubstantiated claims that Trump, not Joe Biden, won Georgia and its pivotal electoral votes, the state legislature there passed Senate Bill 202. I’ve been using it of late to cut through the smoke still clouding attempts at Black voter suppression in the State of Georgia. Schick’s Infocalypse is a particularly useful tool for African Americans trying to understand the huge amount of humbug swirling around today’s racially charged events.
This is the brave new world of doctored “deep fake” videos, of calculated misinformation, and of a highly partisan news ecosystem that tramples old rules that used to separate fact-based journalism from opinion-laced rhetoric. She borrows the term “ Infocalypse” – defined as the dangerous and untrustworthy information ecosystem within which most humans now live – from a 2016 coinage by media theorist Aviv Ovayda. Schick zeroes in on the phenomenon of calling the truth something different. Now comes author Nina Schick with a timely warning titled Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse: What You Urgently Need to Know. That latter nightmare ought to remind us that these recurring intersections between new technologies and potent ideas can doom us to disaster as well as draw us to discovery. More recently we can fairly ask if there would have been an Arab Spring without the ubiquitous cellphone…or a Donald Trump presidency without Twitter and Fox News? Martin Luther would have been an obscure 16th Century heretic were it not for the newfangled printing press. Every so often a new way of thinking joins forces with a new way of communicating so that things long assumed to be true can no longer be taken for granted.
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