Daily-Dose

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From New Yorker

From Vox

Text: “If you grew up in the US, you might recognize these bottles. The labels conjure the sublime beauty and abundance of America’s outdoors.” Drawing of bottled water with a bubble on one that reads: “Ice Mountain, the brand extracted from springs in Michigan, was ‘inspired by the glaciers that once covered the northern US’”
Text: “Bottled water consumption, in the US and globally, has grown dramatically in the last decade. Americans drank the equivalent of 342 standard individual bottles per person in 2020, up from approximately 210 bottles in 2010.” with a drawing of charts that illustrate this, using water droplets to represent 10 bottles. 
“A lot of bottled water, like Coke’s Dasani, comes from the tap. But some, like Arrowhead, is pumped directly from natural springs. Called spring water, this allows companies to sell the idea of nature and purity. And drinkable water is far from available to everyone. In 2016, the year that Michigan declared a state of emergency over Flint’s lead- contaminated water, bottled water outsold soda.  The more we distrust the water from our faucets, the more bottled water we consume.”

“Bottled water wasn’t inevitable. It became a viable business opportunity after the invention of the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottle in 1973.  Lightweight, unbreakable bottles revolutionized the beverage industry, making it possible to easily ship billions of individually packaged drinks. The health-conscious consumer was on the rise, too. Marketers warned people that they were at risk of dehydration, so they’d better always have bottled water on hand.”

“Americans now buy an unfathomable 75 billion plastic water bottles per year, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, and that number grows by billions more each year. The vast majority of them end up in landfills. Bottled water companies make pledges to use more recycled plastic, but it’s nowhere near enough to offset the growth of plastic waste.” Drawing of a garbage dump.
“About 8 million metric tons of plastic enters the ocean per year, most of it trapped along coastlines, buried in sediment, and elsewhere in the ocean that is not well known.” Image: the earth’s oceans from space.
“The problem goes even deeper than plastic; it’s about who owns our water. During the Flint water crisis, the city’s majority-Black residents were paying some of the highest bills in the country for poisoned water. A few hours away, Nestlé, the Swiss multinational that until recently owned America’s most iconic spring water brands, was pumping water for its Ice Mountain label virtually for free.” Drawing of a faucet pouring black water over Detroit.
“Indigenous communities have often led the fight to protect ecosystems from corporate control.” Drawing of a person reading a newspaper with the headline: “1836 treaty puts Michigan tribes at center of Nestle water bid”
A man saying “What is important is not the value of the resource solely, whether that be water, whether that be plants, whether that be fish. It’s also the relationship that we as tribal people have with those resources.” label: Frank Beaver, the natural resources department director for the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, and a member of the Grand Traverse Band.
“Commodifying water can be seen as a kind of desecration. Nestlé’s North American water brands were recently sold to private equity firms and given a new name: BlueTriton Brands, named for an ancient Greek god of the sea. BlueTriton’s water operation is extraordinarily unpopular with the people of Michigan. More than 80,000 people submitted public comments against the corporation’s plan to pump more water, compared to only 75 in favor. In 2018, the state gave them a permit anyway.”
“When capitalism and democracy disagree,” Beaver says, “it seems like democracy loses a lot and capitalism wins.” 
“Flint had no democratic representation because they’d been placed under emergency financial management by the state. That was when the city started sourcing water from the corrosive Flint River, which led to the water crisis.  “I had water coming out my tap looking like straight Hennessy,” remembers Flint resident and organizer Nayyirah Shariff. “I had rashes. A lot of folks didn’t know that city council was powerless.” 
“Bottled water has a way of making itself seem like the natural solution in times of crisis, and Flint became dependent on it. Companies including Nestlé, Coke, and Pepsi donated millions of bottles to the city, and the state paid to provide residents free bottled water.” 
    <img alt="“We were advocating for cisterns and water buffaloes. The governor decided that this was what our
recovery was going to look like. And it was extremely insulting,” Shariff says.&nbsp;" src=“https://cdn.vox- cdn.com/thumbor/UHXN3Yqa1xFY0NC_yMIhy-DY80g=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22696642/14_water_flint2.jpg” />
““Failure to invest in our public water system has contributed to the loss of trust in that system,” says water expert Peter Gleick from The Pacific Institute. “And in the meantime, the bottled water industry capitalizes on that lack of trust.”&nbsp;&nbsp;
Bottled water alone isn’t responsible for our plastic crisis or the breakdown in local water systems. But it has fundamentally redefined our relationship with this essential, finite resource. 23. “Nobody owns water,” says Michigan- based environmental lawyer Jim Olson. “If you own land, you do not own the water.” Yet by taking water and selling it back to us, bottled water makers have staked a claim on what belongs to us all.

Sources:

Dark patterns are increasingly used to trick even savvy web users.

Navigating ethics and privacy online is difficult, and it only gets worse when money is involved. With so much of our identities already online, many are now realizing that their wallets are the privacy boundary they aren’t willing to cross.

During the presidential race last fall, some Americans unknowingly crossed this boundary while donating money using online fundraising services, and four state attorneys general are currently trying to uncover more information. In late April, the attorneys general for New York, Minnesota, Maryland, and Connecticut sent letters to two online fundraising services requesting information on their use of prechecked boxes that opted contributors into a recurring donation schedule. Two organizations received these letters: WinRed, which accepts donations for Republican candidates, and ActBlue, its Democratic equivalent.

One campaign donation turned into thousands of dollars

A New York Times investigation in April showed how WinRed had used prechecked boxes in their online donation forms which automatically opted donors into monthly or even weekly donations after they voluntarily donated an initial sum, similar to a subscription service. In situations like this, the onus is on the user to deselect the service rather than actively select participation. However, enough users missed the boxes for the scheme to be a fundraising success.

The New York Times article found that “a clear pattern emerged. Donors typically said they intended to give once or twice and only later discovered on their bank statements and credit card bills that they were donating over and over again.”

Both ActBlue and WinRed used prechecked boxes without explicitly informing their users throughout the 2020 election, but not to the same degree, a fact illustrated by comparing the scale of donation refunds. WinRed, a for-profit donation service, was repeatedly flagged for fraud, and the Trump campaign ended up refunding $122 million, more than 10 percent of what it raised on WinRed in 2020. The Biden campaign, via ActBlue, which is a nonprofit organization, refunded 2.2 percent of online donations.

Throughout the election, other groups also used the precheck tool, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. However, the DCCC stated that the user receives a notification directly after the donation is processed alerting them to their decision.

After receiving the letter requesting information from the attorneys general, ActBlue said in May that it was phasing the use of this tool out, and beginning on July 1, ActBlue now requires any fundraiser that still uses prechecked boxes to explicitly ask users to donate on a recurring basis. WinRed, on the other hand, has been pushing back. In fact, the company has sued Minnesota to stop the scrutiny, saying that federal law oversees its activities and state consumer protection laws should not concern them. In a statement on its website, WinRed accuses the attorneys general of “exploiting their positions of power for partisan gain” and calls the inquiry itself “unlawful, partisan, and hypocritical.”

Worth noting is that many Americans using online platforms to donate are working-class men and women, retirees, and veterans who were not financially able to give recurring sums of money. The New York Times investigation found that some contributors who had donated and subsequently been caught in the donation trap only realized the extent of the damage once their rent payments bounced or their credit cards were rejected. And most of the people getting caught in deceptive donation tactics are older, a trend that is consistent across both parties. Data analyzed by the Times shows that the average age of donors who received refunds is about 65 for ActBlue and almost 66 from WinRed. In addition, according to federal records, 56 percent of WinRed’s online contributions come from retired Americans, which means that older Americans are donating more, and getting refunded more due to dissatisfaction.

Since May, legislation has been introduced in the House and the Senate to ban the use of prechecked boxes at the federal level. But Vox’s Sara Morrison writes that, as online capabilities grow, legislation surrounding online privacy laws will not be easy to formulate: “The line between deliberate deception and legally urging a user to make a choice that materially benefits a company can be blurry.”

Making choices online isn’t as straightforward as you think

Whether or not WinRed cooperates with the states’ request for information, the fact remains that they were able to take over $100 million from Americans all over the country with a few clicks. This not only indicates a misplaced trust in digital spaces, it also shows that websites are willing to exploit this trust for their gain — and many people are only starting to realize how much the digital spaces they frequent can get away with. A large part of this is the use of dark patterns.

Sara Morrison defines dark patterns as “design that manipulates or heavily influences users to make certain choices,” while Harry Brignull, who coined the term, wrote that a dark pattern is “a user interface carefully crafted to trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do.”

The problem is that we don’t know when we’re being tricked. When trust is breached, as in the case of the prechecked boxes, the resulting loss is monetary and there are ways to quantify it, like referencing a bank account. When the loss is personal information, it’s harder to notice, and in many cases, harder to understand why we should care.

As Morrison reports, one example is careful word choice: like Instagram preferring “activity” and “personalized” rather than “tracking” or “targeted.” This obscures the real meaning of what a user is agreeing to and leads to more people allowing the app permissions. Because users don’t often know what they’re agreeing to, and the results of clicking an “allow” button are not usually intrusive, it’s easier to do this than to constantly be barraged by follow-up requests.

In addition to hiding information in fine print, as WinRed did with its prechecked boxes, some websites use emotional manipulation to get the information they want. The signup button to receive a fashion newsletter might say “I love wearing nice clothes,” while the opt-out button might say, “I don’t have a washing machine.”

WinRed used this tactic on its donation page in messages like: “If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems.” Whether this type of user shaming is in conjunction with saying no to a newsletter or no to your presidential candidate, dark patterns are designed to get more people to say yes online.

As of now, the attorneys general are waiting for more information from both WinRed and ActBlue on their transparency practices. WinRed has argued that state players should not be involved in this issue, but the attorneys general take another perspective, stating that online donation policies affect individuals at a state level and thus the issue lands under their jurisdiction.

“Every Minnesotan is protected under the law from fraud and deception,” John Stiles, deputy chief of staff to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, told CNN. “It’s the attorney general’s job to protect Minnesotans and enforce those laws, no matter who may break them.”

Jen Kirby

So the question is not so much whether or not the Taliban will take over, but rather in what form, and if it acts like a rogue actor. But if the Taliban doesn’t, say, give safe harbor to terrorists, then the US may not be as concerned, even if that’s an uncomfortable position after 20 years of nation- building.

Madiha Afzal

Exactly. President Biden has been talking about the terrorist threat from Afghanistan being a key concern. He alludes to that repeatedly, saying, basically, “Look, the terrorist threat has morphed, it has gone elsewhere.” So, at least for his administration, the central question around the Taliban’s ascendance would be: What kind of threat does it pose to the US?

Jen Kirby

This may be an impossible question to answer, but do we have a sense of what the Taliban might do, learning the lessons of 20 years? Perhaps they’re less eager to host terrorists? Or maybe not?

Madiha Afzal

The answer to that is probably a little bit mixed, and maybe not satisfactory because there is a lot we don’t know. The Taliban is good at rhetoric. It’s good at propaganda. What it says is not what actually happens.

We should be very wary when it comes to the Taliban. There’s also a divide between the Taliban political leadership — which seems to know how to use rhetoric and propaganda — versus rural Taliban or foot soldiers who a) believe in the same draconian, regressive forms of governance they did in the 1990s, and b) believe that they’ve won a jihadist victory. And this means you don’t compromise, going back to the way things were in the 1990s.

The Taliban political leadership isn’t fully clear on what it wants in terms of girls’ education, women going to work, and so on. It has just said it’s going to be in line with Islam.

I think we ought to be wary of how much the Taliban has changed. That being said, they seem to enjoy international legitimacy. Now, whether that’s just because they want to use that to make the US get out of Afghanistan and then essentially go back to the ways of the 1990s, that could be.

They’re on a diplomatic tour of sorts, having just gone to Iran. They sometimes visit Pakistan. They’re making relationships with other countries, it seems, and countries beyond those they were in touch with in the 1990s.

So will they want to be a pariah state, isolated as they were in the ’90s? I’m not quite sure about that. They certainly want to fully take over Afghanistan at whatever cost. What they want after that, in terms of their relationship with other countries and their international status, that’s something where people think, “Maybe we can get them to moderate based on their desire for international legitimacy.”

That’s the open question. I am severely skeptical of that.

Jen Kirby

That makes me think of the US peace deal with the Taliban, brokered under the Trump administration, which seemed to give the Taliban the type of legitimacy it craved. Was that, in retrospect, a turning point for the Taliban? Did that have any influence?

Madiha Afzal

Absolutely. I think the US-Taliban deal signed in Doha gave the Taliban more legitimacy than anything until then. The Taliban has been building on that legitimacy since then. The fact that the Afghan government in Kabul wasn’t even party to that deal, that the US agreed with the Taliban on things that it then got the Afghan government to do, such as the release of prisoners. These are all things that really bolstered the Taliban, whether we like it or not.

And, in some sense, it’s become an actor that is much more confident in itself after that. People talk about Pakistan using its leverage over the Taliban. Well, a lot of other actors now have less leverage over the Taliban to get them to do what they want because the Taliban has been granted this international legitimacy, by the US more than anyone else.

Jen Kirby

So from a US standpoint, do you try to leverage that? Now that you’ve had these negotiations with the Taliban, do you try to work the gears diplomatically and try to engage?

Madiha Afzal

Sadly, I think an unconditional withdrawal basically makes the peace process redundant. The Taliban has shown that by its military strategy since.

Where our leverage existed was in this little time period that we had between the Doha deal being signed and our final withdrawal. So, to me, our troops — as cynical as that sounds — are where the leverage lay because that’s what the Taliban wanted. It wanted US troops to leave. But it didn’t have to grant the US anything. It didn’t have to do anything to get the troops to leave, so we lost that leverage by the unconditional withdrawal that the president announced in April.

Jen Kirby

So essentially the US said, “Do those things and we’ll leave.” And then they didn’t and we left anyway, but we still want them to do those things.

Madiha Afzal

Exactly. So you can see how the incentives fall away for the Taliban.

Jen Kirby

Does the US, do you think, still have to take the lead when it comes to the future of Afghanistan? Or do you think it will shift elsewhere, maybe to NATO or the United Nations?

Madiha Afzal

I think the Biden administration has been trying to say, “Look, regional countries have a responsibility here, and they really need to step up.” Pakistan, Russia, China — obviously Turkey’s important, India. That’s where the Biden administration is pointing the finger. It depends on the outcomes. But I think there’s a serious credibility problem for the US if it just looks away.

President Biden has, in terms of promising assistance, basically said, “This is a new chapter where the partnership is not a military one, but we will be there for you in other ways.” I think the US feels some burden of responsibility and, I think, will not look away entirely — though the Biden administration would probably like to focus on other things.

I think this is an administration that does care about its perception in the world, and does not want to be thought of as abandoning Afghanistan. But whether that in practice has any major effect beyond — not necessarily lip service, but rhetorical support, we’ll have to see.

Jen Kirby

I’m wondering if there is another way to protect some of the gains in Afghanistan, especially around human rights, but maybe not around the paradigm of a centrally functioning Afghan government. Is there such an approach for the US to take?

Madiha Afzal

The US cannot be the one to sustain a centrally functioning government in Afghanistan. Again, Biden talked about that quite candidly, saying it’s very difficult. So how can those gains be protected? I think the US is banking on — kind of pun intended — assistance: security, financial, economic, humanitarian, all sorts of assistance. And that the Taliban will, militarily, face pushback.

So perhaps it is looking at some outcome where there could be a decentralized framework, where the cities have a different set-up versus the rural areas, and large swaths of the country are ruled by the Taliban.

All of this will really depend on how things go militarily — whether the Afghan security forces are really able to put up a fight in those areas. Because remember that many of the gains we talk about — schools, employment — these were felt and seen in the urban areas and not in the rural areas. So in some sense, the rural areas being taken over by the Taliban may get some measure of stability in whatever form because the fighting stops.

And so what happens to the urban areas? Is there a way for the US to help the Afghans hold on to those gains a little bit longer? There’s a segment of Afghan society that doesn’t want to let those gains go. I also know that many of them are leaving. It’s a very dynamic situation.

So that one is hard to talk about without knowing how things are going to go militarily. There is a bit of a wait-and-see approach because the assistance announced is what it is. Given that and given the fighting power of the Afghan security forces, can they put up a fight?

Jen Kirby

Do you think there is any scenario where the US would recommit or intervene militarily in Afghanistan to do that?

Madiha Afzal

That’s a big question — the million-dollar question. People have talked about, well, if an ISIS-like situation emerges, as with post-Iraq withdrawal and the rise of ISIS. That’s not what we are necessarily worried about in Afghanistan. I think the terrorism threat that emerges from Afghanistan will not be something we see in the short term. It’s not going to be quick.

The worry is that once the Taliban has taken over some parts of Afghanistan [and US troops have left], they start to let al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups do what they want, and then al-Qaeda regroups or other terrorist groups [get stronger], and then perhaps begin posing a threat to the United States. That’s the worry.

In that case, though, the US assumes counterterrorism capabilities are going to be enough. So, honestly, in this administration, I don’t really see that happening. I don’t see the US military becoming involved again in Afghanistan.

Jen Kirby

It does seem very bleak, if I’m being honest. If there is a best-case scenario for Afghanistan right now, even against long odds?

Madiha Afzal

Up to the US-Taliban deal signed in Doha, I thought maybe we could actually get a decent deal signed. That was a pretty bad deal to begin with. Once it was signed, things have just been downhill from there. So I thought things looked bleak in February 2020.

They look far worse now. I am wary enough of the Taliban that I don’t see any evidence that they will either go for a peace deal or change their ways, not want a military takeover. I think perhaps the hope — and hope is not a strategy — the hope lies in perhaps the Afghan government and security forces being able to muster something up to hold them back. And I’m very sadly watching with worry.

Jen Kirby

Even in that scenario, it seems as if it will just generate more fighting, more violence, which will be felt by the people of Afghanistan.

Madiha Afzal

That’s absolutely right. In the medium term, that just means bloodshed.

I can’t imagine what those in Afghanistan are thinking about the future. It requires a lot of bravery just to be there, just to continue to go on doing the jobs they’re doing. Women journalists in particular — so many attacked in the last few months. Going to school may mean you don’t go home. It’s just horrible.

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