Required Reading

• Art F City looks at how the Trump election will impact arts workers:

Tax reform – specifically, supply-side theory-based tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations – is the one thing that Trump and Congress currently agree on. Our House Speaker Paul Ryan is a self-proclaimed “tax wonk,” (and he has already announced his plan to privatize Medicare). Trump’s plan has shifted over the course of the election, and his campaign speeches contradict his proposed policies. He has suggested that he would let Ryan take over the detail. There’s some bad stuff coming.

• Writer Jörg M. Colberg pens some thoughts about a post-Trump photo world and what this means for photographers and others:

Do photobooks, for example, always have to be luxury objects? Couldn’t we be making newspaper-style publications and just give them away for free? Place a few copies at the local diner, say? Oh, I know, that’s not the most original idea, but right now, to me it sounds a lot more interesting than another fancy book in an edition of 300 or 500, designed to end up on some shortlist.

Honestly, what really gets me is how a field that prides itself as being progressive ends up happily playing by the rules laid out by people for whom a picture of a homeless person is only considered based on home-decoration criteria (actual story, btw — someone I know overheard two collectors debate this over a fancy dinner). Somehow, to me that doesn’t compute. But again, that might be just me.

• If you want to understand some of the problems with American democracy, this analysis of the spread of fake news vs. real news on Facebook is telling:

A BuzzFeed News analysis found that top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.

• And related: The President-elect’s Twitter feed has become a source of fake news:

• And a writer of US election-related “fake news,” Paul Horner, thinks Trump was elected because of him:

Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off viral news hoaxes for several years.

… Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected.

… My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

… Just ’cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at their rallies, and that’s just insane. I’ve gone to Trump protests — trust me, no one needs to get paid to protest Trump. I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually believed it.

• People are rightfully blaming Facebook for the misinformation, and MTV’s Brian Phillips really breaks it down (his excellent intro and kicker are quoted here):

Is anyone surprised that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t feel responsible? One of the luxuries of power in Silicon Valley is the luxury to deny that your power exists. It wasn’t you, it was the algorithm. Facebook may have swallowed traditional media (on purpose), massively destabilized journalism (by accident), and facilitated the spread of misinformation on a colossal scale in the run-up to an election that was won by Donald Trump (ha! whoops). But that wasn’t Facebook’s fault! It was the user base, or else it was the platform, or else it was the nature of sharing in our increasingly connected world.

… Mark Zuckerberg, in his mild, untroubled blamelessness, may simply be demonstrating the Crescent Park version of the delusion afflicting many Trump voters, which is that privilege is itself a kind of innocence. But then, some things are hard to disrupt. And if our president-elect has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t have to believe in your own convictions to let other people suffer for them.

• The Boston Review asked various writers and academics to repond to the Trump election. Robin D. G. Kelley responds:

The common refrain is that no one expected this. (Of course, the truth is that many people did expect this, just not in the elite media.) At no point, this refrain goes, could “we” imagine Trump in the Oval office surrounded by a cabinet made up of some of the most idiotic, corrupt, and authoritarian characters in modern day politics—Rudolph Giuliani, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, John Bolton, Ben Carson, Jeff Sessions, David “Blue Lives Matter” Clarke, Joe Arpaio, to name a few. Meanwhile, paid professional pundits are scrambling to peddle their analyses and to normalize the results—on the same broadcast media that helped deliver Trump’s victory by making him their ratings-boosting spectacle rather than attending to issues, ideas, and other candidates (e.g., Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein). They deliver the same old platitudes: disaffected voters, angry white men who have suffered economically and feel forgotten, Trump’s populist message represented the nation’s deep-seated distrust of Washington, ad infinitum. Some liberal pundits have begun to speak of President-Elect Trump as thoughtful and conciliatory, and some even suggest that his unpredictability may prove to be an asset. The protests are premature or misplaced. All of this from the same folks who predicted a Clinton victory.

• The tweets coming out post-election have been quite critical. For instance:

• The past few days, people have been focusing on VP-elect Mike Pence’s visit to the Broadway show Hamilton, rather than the settlement in the Trump University fraud case, but at least some of the responses have been funny:

• And here’s a fun game: can you tell the difference between the interior design of a billionaire and an autocrat?

• And finally, this creepy Guardian video:

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

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