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Social media has a reputation for capturing ephemeral thoughts and images, but around the world, people are using Facebook for a different purpose, setting up groups to record and share images and memories of the past. Facebook history groups and pages have popped up in major cities like New York and Seattle and in small towns and suburbs across the U.S. Other groups focus on the histories of hobbies and interests from ham radio to cooking to punk rock, but geographical groups in particular often collect unique information that may not be found anywhere else on the internet. Members share personal photos, family stories, and ephemera tied to places in their hometowns from former schools to businesses that have changed hands. “There’ll be a corner store, and we have one name for it, and then people remember all of the owners over time,” says John Marks, curator of collections and exhibits at Historic Geneva, a museum in Geneva, New York, that operates a Facebook page with frequent historic discussions. Historic Geneva frequently digitizes and posts photos from its collection of tens of thousands, and residents chime in with their own memories of bars, church groups, neighborhoods, and businesses, sometimes connecting with former neighbors in comment sections or following up with Historic Geneva to share details or artifacts with the museum. “Say I post a picture of a factory that was here, and they say, ‘you know, my mom worked there, and I have X, Y and Z from that factory,'” Marks says. “I’ll reply to the post and say if you ever want to donate it, we’d love to have you give me a call.” Marks says he typically spends a few hours a month preparing and scheduling posts, researching what the museum knows about particular images to caption them as best as possible. He’ll also try to record information Facebook users share about what he posts if it seems reliable, like the names of former owners of a business. And while some history pages are run by professional historians or museum workers like Marks, many others are run by amateurs who essentially volunteer their time to moderate posts, removing spam and other unwanted content like political arguments from groups that in some cases have hundreds of thousands of members. “It never stops,” says Mike McGinness, who founded a Florida history group that now has more than 300,000 members and 75,000 photos. “It’s a full-time job, just keeping the group civil, and keeping the group on track as to what our focus is.” Photos posted in the group have helped old friends and even family members reconnect, he says, and well-captioned posts can be searched by users looking to find information about particular buildings or addresses. And about three years ago, McGinness and his co-admin Jeff Davies were contacted by publisher McIntyre Purcell, which led to a coffee table-style book of historic photos of Florida they’ve since promoted at bookstores, houses of worship, universities, and festivals up and down the Sunshine State. “We’ve been, you know, promoting not even necessarily the book, but the Facebook group, and our brand of preserving Florida history,” says Davies. “It’s always good to sell a book, but it’s also good to preserve history, so 20, 30, or 40 years from now, if someone’s driving down the street anywhere in Florida and they look at a building, they could see what was there before.” ‘It’s really hard to get a hold of any support from Facebook’ Most Facebook history groups are probably run by inspired amateurs like McGinness and Davies, not professional historians, says Mark Tebeau, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the coauthor of the Handbook of Digital Public History. And they help connect members with historical memories and materials in a way that local historical societies and museums might struggle to do, since they have limited budgets and space to archive and exhibit community materials at scale. The trouble is, Tebeau says, Facebook itself isn’t designed to be a historical archive. It’s not necessarily easy to browse or search material posted to Facebook groups, unless captions match search terms fairly precisely, and the lack of public APIs make it difficult for researchers to systematically access material stored on the site. “These kinds of channels are not interested in these kinds of open internet practices that would be required for archivists like me to actually harvest and gather material from local communities,” Tebeau says. Permissions and copyright issues can also make it difficult for professional historians to systematically archive or use material from Facebook, Tebeau says. It’s also not at all clear that Meta intends Facebook to be a long-term historical repository or what will become in the long run of one-of-a-kind photos and recollections shared exclusively on the site. “I think people mistakenly think Facebook is forever, and it’s not,” he says. Meta didn’t respond to inquiries from Fast Company. But it’s clear that moderators of history groups have challenges getting help from the company, as is common with services from Meta and other big tech companies. “It’s really hard to get a hold of any support from Facebook,” McGinness says. “We’ve had quite a few glitches happen with our group, and we’ve tried to communicate with them, and it’s very difficult.” He and Davies try to control who’s admitted to the group, weeding out obviously suspicious users with new accounts and no ties to Florida, and using moderation tools to flag posts with vulgarity and removing offenders, but McGinness says spammers do sometimes manage to slip into the group through means unknown. “Mike and I have spent hours and hours going through members, trying to remove the ones that have slipped in,” he says. And at the same time, bogus Florida history groups have popped up, sometimes using photos taken without attribution from their group, which they post intermixed with spam, Davies says. Other history groups and pages have struggled with cybersecurity issues, sometimes losing control of their groups to hackers. A Seattle group was hijacked last year, and, according to news reports, the administrators struggled to get the attention of Facebook or law enforcement until someone offered to connect them with a Meta employee, who was able to help restore access. The group admins didn’t respond to inquiries from Fast Company. A Facebook page belonging to the Illinois State Historical Society, which has been active on the site for about 15 or 20 years, was similarly hacked last year, says executive director William Furry. The page had promoted historical content, events, and anniversaries from around the state, including promoting news from other historical societies in the state with limited resources for advertising. The historical society also saw some of its own content go viral, with plenty of comments from readers, including posts about the Radium Girls poisoned on the job in the early 20th century as they painted glow-in-the-dark clocks with the radioactive element. But when the hackers took over, they shortened the page name, removing mention of Illinois, and started posting a flood of Star Wars trivia and memes. “The good news is it wasn’t worse than that,” Furry says. The hijacked page is now operated as Star Wars Society, albeit with a link to the historical society website and Furry’s email address still posted. And while the real historical society has since started a new page, it hasn’t regained a full complement of followers. There’s some stigma to being hacked, with followers potentially concerned they’ll be more vulnerable by association, Furry says. And the group never regained access to its old content, though Furry says he considered everything posted on the page to be “ephemeral” to begin with, serving a purpose of bringing historical information to those who see it. “What I want to emphasize is that the problem for me is that there is no help from the Meta organization to stop this sort of thing,” he says. “It’s all on the victim for trying to resolve the problem, and there’s no effort on the part of Meta to go after the perpetrators.” In general, even without security issues, Facebook history groups and pages tend, like other online forums, to rely on a degree of volunteer admin work that may not be obvious to casual visitors and posters. “It’s a labor of love,” says Rebecca Heimbuck, who spends a couple of hours a day administering the group “Billings, Montana As She Was & Is.” Heimbuck says she started the group partly to share her collection of historic postcards”you can sit and look at your own stuffwhat’s the fun in that?” she saysand partly to help dispel a notion that Billings is less historically interesting than other Montana cities. She made an effort to add detailed captions about the images she’d post, and she’s seen a steady stream of other people join to share their own memories and snapshots of Billings, adding more than 22,000 members in about three years. “So, as long as there’s an interest and as long as people like it, I hope to keep it up as long as I can,” she says.
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E-Commerce
The Daytona 500 is one of the more challenging races on the NASCAR circuit. The speedway is long and narrow, forcing drivers to be more aggressive. And the weather in central Florida doesnt always cooperate. During the 2024 event, a deluge of rain had forced a Monday conclusion. After 41 lead changes and with only eight laps to go, a crash involving half the field prompted a red flag and a 15-minute delay. At the end, another collision between leader Ross Chastain and Austin Cindric opened the door for William Byron to zip by and take the checkered flag. Byrons win wasnt a huge surprisehed notched 10 prior wins on the NASCAR circuitbut his backstory is unusual. Hes part of a new emerging generation of drivers who have learned much of the craft of high-speed racing online through iRacing, the premier esport for virtual, or sim, racing, where anyone can channel their inner Joey Logano and race in the glitziest virtual races in the world. Now 27, Byron became a NASCAR fan at the age of 6 when his father took him to a race in Virginia. A few years later, Byron heard an interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr. gushing about sim racing and thats what got me interested, he says. I felt like I could learn something. William Byron, driver of the #24 Axalta Chevrolet, celebrates in the victory lane after winning the NASCAR Cup Series Daytona 500 at the Daytona International Speedway on February 19, 2024 in Daytona Beach, Florida. [Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR] iRacing at 12 Equipped with the necessary steering wheel, pedal, and a working PC, Byron began sim racing at age 12. He learned how to navigate tight turns, calculate angles, temper speedall without the worry of real-life crashing. Its realistic enough to get started and see if youre good at it, he says. Its really similar to pickup basketball. A chance for people to compete in a way they probably wouldnt have the opportunity to any other way. After a year and a half, Byron began to enter local go-kart races. Eighteen months after that, he was racing legend cars, launching his career. Chelmsford, Massachusettsbased iRacing, cofounded by Boston Red Sox owner John Henry and motorsports simulator (and sometime racecar driver) Dave Kaemmer in 2008, is the biggest name in sim racing, with 150 employees and consistent double-digit annual growth. This past November, iRacing began collaborating with Microsoft to integrate AI technologies into its simulators. In partnership with the Tiffany of racing brands, NASCARa deal that dates to the year of iRacings debutiRacing is changing the face of the sport: how up-and-coming drivers like Byron learn to drive, how cars are designed, how courses themselves are built, modified, and selected. [Photo: iRacing] Simulating excellence Simulators have altered the landscape of athletics, especially in more finely skilled competitions such as baseball and golf. But virtual racing may be having the biggest impact. iRacings brand partnerships, not only with NASCAR but also some of the sports most storied racetracks and automakers, have allowed the company to re-create a real-world race experience down to the hubcaps. NASCAR and iRacing are also using the technology to figure out where (and even if) its feasible to build new tracks, or how to best modify existing ones, an arrangement that has led directly to races on the short track inside the L.A. Coliseum and the streets of downtown Chicago. I think the iRacing partnership was a little bit ahead of its time, says Tim Clark, NASCARs executive vice president and chief brand officer. If you go back to the beginning, we probably didnt really know what to make of it. Was it a game? Entertainment? A training tool? And the answer is it was a little bit of all those things. Its so unique, because you could influence a NASCAR fan of tomorrow, you could influence a NASCAR driver of tomorrow. I make this joke all the time. the Dallas Cowboys arent looking for their next quarterback on Madden, but you can scout the next driver of a NASCAR national series on iRacing. Chicago Street Course [Photo: iRacing] NASCAR 25 Its like the experience of driving that race car in competition at any racetrack in the world, and gets you as close to reality without having to leave your home, adds iRacing executive director Dale Earnhardt Jr., a 2021 NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee. The tracks are scanned to perfection. Every bump, crack, crevice in a unique character about that racetrack is included. Bonus: if you crash, no one ends up in a hospital. iRacing currently boasts more than 1.2 million unique accounts and more than 300,000 active members. Now comes its next chapter: the launch this fall of NASCAR 25, an attempt to Madden-ize iRacings offerings and take sim racing from niche obsession to mass market behemoth. Its the companys very first console title. Up until now, iRacers had to pony up for a steering wheel and pedal set (which can run as high as $600), in addition to having to race solely on a PC. Entering the console spacea landscape dominated by competitors like EA, Sony Interactive, and NintendoiRacing is betting that NASCAR 25 can deliver the verisimilitude of its online races via a console on a big screen TV, at a more consumer-friendly price point. While an annual membership in iRacing costs around $100, with additional fees if you want access to fancier cars and tracks, NASCAR 25 will allow drivers to start their engines on their trusty Xbox or PlayStation at a to-be-determined price point that should be similar to existing sports games. (Madden NFL 25 retails for $69.99.) We want to make a NASCAR stock car drive like a real NASCAR stock car, says Steve Myers, the executive vice president of iRacing. Theres a reason only 40 guys in the world get to do itbecause its hard. [Photo: iRacing] From PC to console iRacings biggest asset has been the realism of its racing experience. Diehard fans now wonder if the console version can match the original. Making the jump from the PC ecosystem to consoles is a big step, opening the door for more players to experience iRacings level or realism, says Alberto Segovia, an amateur driver and prolific blogger on sim racing. What intrigues me the most is how theyll manage to balance that authenticity with the accessibility of a console game. But if anyone can pull it off, its iRacing. For NASCAR, Clark says, the game represents an effort to create fans on their terms. I think in years past, we may have taken a more selfish view of fandom, that you have to watch on TV or you have to buy a ticket and come to a racetrack. But if youre fandom is getting on iRacing and participating in some of these races that way, Im totally fine with that. [Photo: iRacing] A league of its own? Therein lies other potential marketing gold to be mined, in the form of a televised TGL Golftype virtual racing league (NASCAR dipped a toe in during the COVID lockdowns), or even a celebrity-laden, Cannonball Runstyle special, with stars sliding into virtual race cars, ready to rev up. A lot will depend on just how much mass appeal NASCAR 25 can muster. I want every fan of motorsport to be able to experience the anxiety of trying to qualify for race, the nerves and the butterflies of sitting on a starting grid before the engines fire, being in that nose-to-nose battle on the final lap, having to make that exact right decision in the right moment to win the race, Earnhardt says. Thats what they get to experience in iRacing. Theres no candy-coating, theres no handholding. Thats the draw. Byron, who still sim races offseason to get the rust knocked off, is excited for the launch, and hell be right there at the starting line. He still sim races under his own name. Does he win all the time? He laughs. Usually.
Category:
E-Commerce
On January 29, President Donald Trump celebrated the latest victory in unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s crusade against inefficiency in the government: stopping $50 million from, according to Trump, being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. Fact-checkers diplomatically pointed out that no evidence exists for this claim, which, if it were true, would work out to 1.5 billion condoms for some 2.1 million Gazans. They also noted that for several years, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides food, medical care, and humanitarian aid abroad, had not sent any condoms anywhere in the Middle East. In a press conference on Tuesday, Musk appeared to concede that this might have been a mistake. (One theory: He got confused by the fact that the U.S. government funds disease prevention in Gaza Province, Mozambique.) But the condoms for Hamas story took on a life of its own on X, the social media platform Musk bought in 2022, where the outraged blue-check accounts that dominate feeds and replies treated it as incontrovertible proof of the righteousness of Mucks mission. Tip of the iceberg, Musk wrote on January 28, quoting an account called Autism Capital, which had shared a clip of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt making the condoms claim. As of this writing, the Autism Capital tweet has been viewed 54 million times; Musks retweet is not far behind, at 47 million. In the weeks since, Musk has been working diligently to dismantle USAID, which he has described as a criminal organization that needs to die. Under his direction, the agency was gutted by a rapid-fire series of furloughs, firings, and spending freezes intended to reduce staffing by roughly 95%. Some smaller organizations that received USAID funding were forced to fold immediately; other luckier ones are scrambling to figure out what they will do if they exhaust their cash reserves sometime in the next few months. A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of these orders from taking effect, but on Monday morning, staffers still found themselves locked out of their offices and were instructed to telework until further notice. In the meantime, USAID-funded soup kitchens in famine-stricken areas have already closed, and refugee hospitals are turning patients away; in Uganda, workers said that dozens of newborns were contracting HIV daily after funding for antiretroviral drugs disappeared. Even if some federal judge eventually rescues USAID from Musks clammy grasp, people will suffer and die because Trump turned the government over to a Big Tech reactionary who believes that money spent on poor people is money wasted. We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper, Musk tweeted on the evening of Sunday, February 2. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead. Musks war on USAID is the fullest realization yet of his efforts to turn X into a Musk-inflected agitprop factory. By replacing the legacy Twitter verification system with one that makes algorithmic boosts freely available for purchase, Musk created an environment in which anyone with a paid account can turn their favorite conspiracy theory into a trending topic. When Musk, as he so often does, weighs in on a post that catches his attention, his cosign amplifies it to his more than 200 million followers, who read, digest, and repeat it to the point where it might work its way to the top of the trending-topics page again. It is an unprecedented level of being Too Online: Musk is both driven by news cycles on X and driving news cycles on X all by himself. Before the election, the byproduct of this dynamic was typically just an unfunny tweet with the cry-laughing emoji appended. Now, with Trump in the White House and apparently happy to serve out his term getting puppeteered by the worlds richest man, the stakes are considerably higher: If a stupid viral tweet about condoms sufficiently piques his interest, Musk has the power to ruin lives overnight. As the Washington Post reports, Musks obsession with USAID appears to originate from Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official who, prior to his stints in government, seems to have moonlit as a pseudonymous alt-right streamer warning of the looming dangers of white genocide. Benzs thesis, as outlined in a blizzard of color-coded tweets and hours-long videos that make the Pepe Silvia guy look like the paragon of rational thinking, is that USAID is a front group for American intelligence involved in mass censorship, leftist indoctrination, and/or clandestine anti-Trump machinations executed by shadowy figures at the highest levels of government. Most of Musks anti-USAID tweets in recent weeks, according to NBC News, are interactions with Benz and other blue-check X accounts pushing the same narrative. (Among them: a clip from Benzs December appearance on Joe Rogans podcast.) Musks triumphant wood chipper tweet, for example, quoted a tweet from Benz that called USAID the Terror Titanic, which in turn quoted a tweet from Milo Yiannopoulos that described USAID as the most gigantic global terror organization in history. There is a simple moral argument for one of the worlds wealthiest countries spending a fraction of its annual budget to fight starvation and epidemic and poverty abroad, especially when its annual military spendingthe same military that drops bombs on other countries whenever U.S. politicians deem that particular form of intervention more usefulis more than $800 billion, or roughly 20 times the $40 billion budget of USAID. But you do not have to buy this argument to understand how USAIDs work benefits the economy, or national security, or whatever else you might include in a term as nebulous as American interests. The reason Congress created and continues to fund USAID is to strategically build soft power and goodwill; that this often takes the form of providing badly needed (and relatively inexpensive) humanitarian aid is mostly a happy coincidence. When a country is still struggling to address, say, chronic food shortages or an antibiotic-resistant strain of tuberculosis, planning ambitious new ventures with U.S. businesses probably wont be at the tippy-top of its priority list. Musks purported interest in government efficiency has always been about accumulating power, and his decision to single out USAID is unsubtle even by his standards. He is implementing a farcically literal version of America First, eager to cut off people whose lives, in his opinion, are not worth the trouble of improving, let alone saving from preventable death. In some ways, the Musk-USAID odyssey follows a familiar pattern: conspiracy theories bubbling up from the murkiest depths of the right-wing media ecosystem, which tweaks, launders, and repackages stories to the point where they’re coherent enough for the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, the front page of Drudge, and/or the A-block on Fox & Friends. During the first Trump administration, there was no better way to track the presidents official position on pretty much any issue of substance by reviewing whatever Steve Doocy and Ainsley Earhardt had spent the morning gabbing about. Eight years later, however, stories no longer need to appear in a Murdoch-owned media property to rocket to the top of the White House agenda. If you are a conservative activist who wants to influence the trajectory of American politicsor, for that matter, if you are a member of a foreign intelligence agency looking to do the samethe single smartest investment you can make is a monthly subscription for an X account that earns a coveted Wow! reply from Musk. Or, even better, Looking into this. The proliferation of fringe views on X aligns nicely with Musks policy preferences. But it is also good for the long-term viability of the X platform, which Musk frames as a tool for citizen journalists to report on stories that the traditional news media fails to cover accurately, thoroughly, or both. Musk often exhorts X users to remember they are the media now”and of the four X accounts NBC News identifies as peddling anti-USAID content boosted by Musk, one promises unfiltered breaking news, and another claims to be a citizen journalist. Omitted from Musks rhetoric is the simple fact that X does not subject content to a meaningful vetting process; in practice, citizenship journalism is a euphemism for empowering anyone to label anything as news and trust the algorithm to make it so, no matter how disconnected from reality it may be. When Musk calls X the future of journalism, he isnt saying he wants people on X to report on the shuttering of USAID or the deaths of the people it serves. He wants people on X to drown out the journalists who report these things. For people steeped in the closed, pay-to-play universe hes built, whatever is happening on X is the story. If it isnt happening on X, is it even happening in the first place? Nobodys going to bat a thousand, Musk said in his White House press conference after a reporter asked about the condom falsehood. We will make mistakes, but well act quickly to correct any mistakes. Shortly thereafter, he tweeted a clip of himself speaking at the press conference, along with the caption, $50M of condoms is a LOT of condoms. It has 59 million views and counting.
Category:
E-Commerce
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