March 6, 2018

Remembrance of Technology Past

The BlackBerry Bold 9000 circa 2008. Look at all those cool apps and that gigantic color screen. And it supported full 3G!

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Atrios:

In a novel I’m currently reading (I won’t say which because my point isn’t to pick on it), the author keeps Getting Things Wrong about the 90s, and not to provide deliberate creative anachronisms from what I can tell. The “internet” and “Brooklyn” of 2008 (roughly) are being presented as happening in 1998 and it’s really annoying me.

If this was only a problem in novels, it wouldn’t be so bad. But people have bad memories in real life too, and it has real-life consequences. Hillary Clinton, for example, made her fateful decision to use one email account in 2009. It seems pointlessly stupid to us today, with our iPhones and phablets and smart watches able to do anything we want them to. It’s hard to remember what 2009 was like, but the iPhone was still brand new back then and official Washington was still smitten with BlackBerries. Unfortunately, BlackBerries had serious limitations on handling multiple email accounts in a secure way. In practice, hauling around two BlackBerries was your only real solution.

But we forget about these pesky limitations of the past. BlackBerries today seem about as ancient as fax machines. Being limited to one email account is unfathomable. And yet, for security-minded folks that was reality back in the dim mists of 2009 unless you carried two devices. It was a pain, and Hillary had always used a single email account as a senator, so she just kept on doing it. Plus it was a busy time: everyone had a ton of transition stuff to attend to and no one really wanted to tell the Secretary of State that she couldn’t do this. So she did. And now Donald Trump is president.

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That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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