T

wo 
of 
the 
most 

destructive 
hurricanes 

in 
our 
country’s 

history just finished ravishing 
the coastline of our 
southern seaboard, and 
it made for great TV. 

Both hurricanes had 

all the elements of the 
perfect disaster story: 
terrifying 
predictions 

including reporters in 
raincoats struggling to 
stand in the wind, the 
ever-present 
satellite 

image of a multicolored 
storm spiraling toward 
the 
homeland. 
A 
terrifying 

aftermath full of flooding with 
families fleeing their homes and, 
finally, the comforting videos 
that somehow restore our faith 
in humanity as we watch first 
responders and average citizens 
rescuing people from a disaster 
we’ve been watching nonstop, 
spurring ourselves into some 
form of action, most likely 
through donations and charity.

That is, until our attention 

spans run out.

Those distinct features that 

capitalize on our desire to 
watch such tragedies and be 
moved into action to help are 
the same ones that divert our 
attention elsewhere.

North 
Korea, 
Trump’s 

Twitter, 
Myanmar 
genocide, 

Russian 
investigation, 
Neo-

Nazis, DACA are all ready to 
recapture our attention. Because 
no matter how horrifying the 
disasters in Texas and Florida 
were, no matter how much 
we are moved to charity and 
compassion — we and the media 
will move on and forget.

And when we move on, when 

our attention subsides, when 
the dramatic black-and-white 
images of mothers trudging 
through water carrying their 
children are no longer the center 
of our attention — that’s when 
we forget, and the people who 
actually needed our help the 
most never receive it.

The individuals who were 

fortunate to have private flood 
insurance will rebuild, move 
back in and try to resume a life 
after total disaster, but only 
42 percent of homes in coastal 

Florida are covered under 
such insurance, and in Texas 
even fewer homes are insured. 
In 
Harris 
County, 
which 

includes Houston 
— 
one 
of 
the 

hardest cities hit 
by the hurricane 
— only 15 percent 
of homes.

So as the TV 

networks pack up 
their news cameras 
and 
we 
resume 

our 
Facebook 

discussions on the 
benefit of hearing 

out Nazis, the hurricane victims 
who are uninsured are left to 
our federal government and the 
assistance they receive already 
looks dire. The little assistance 
they will receive are through the 
Federal Emergency Management 
Agency’s 
National 
Flood 

Insurance Program, a program 
that has been inundated since 
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — and 
currently owes the U.S. Treasury 
some $23 billion — will now have 
to extend its credit to continue 
financing the rebuilding after 
Harvey and Irma.

And 
this 
is 
where 
the 

cynicism returns. Because such 
an endeavor by FEMA and the 
Flood Insurance program will 
be unable to keep up with the 
sheer magnitude of damage done 
to Florida and Texas — disasters 
requiring hundreds of billions of 
dollars to repair the damages.

This is where the low-income 

neighborhoods disappear, where 
families flee their homes to never 
return and, most importantly, 
where new prime real estate 
opens up.

Cue 
“disaster 
capitalism,” 

what 
writer 
Naomi 
Klein’s 

describes as corporations and 
governments utilizing disasters 
to 
“transform” 
regions 
and 

gain 
financially. 
Hurricane 

Katrina was a prime example 
of this, and as described in 
Klein’s 
book 
“The 
Shock 

Doctrine,” the shock induced 
by the hurricane allowed the 
government and corporations 
to exploit the disaster — paving 
over poor neighborhoods with 
more profitable housing and 
commercial developments.

And now, after Hurricanes 

Harvey and Irma, the poorest 
people 
affected 
by 
these 

disasters, the ones hit the 
hardest, will be subject to a 
similar campaign. This is their 
punishment for not buying a 
coverage 
policy 
that 
covers 

actual flood costs.

It will occur because we’ll 

move on. And I can already hear 
the “tough love” criticisms of 
those who are truly passionate 
about government assistance:

“Let FEMA deal with them, 

let the grossly over-budgeted 
bureaucratic Flood Insurance 
Program figure out what to do 
with those poor people who 
were either too dumb or not 
working hard enough to buy 
flood insurance on their homes.”

There is something to be said 

about the speed in which we 
handle these crises from afar. 
How we rapidly horrify and 
scare ourselves, engage on an 
emotional and charitable level 
and then so instantly move on 
and forget.

Something 
like 
this 

requires 
months 
and 
years 

of 
rebuilding. 
It 
requires 

hundreds of billions of dollars. 
It requires an understanding 
that governments, and only 
governments, 
are 
capable 

of 
handling 
such 
massive 

emergencies and cleanup efforts.

Something like this requires 

us. 
We 
need 
to 
engage 

and 
participate, 
not 
just 

through 
a 
constant 
stream 

of 
charitable 
donations 
to 

specific organizations, but an 
engagement on a level that 
requires journalism to respond. 
For us to make sure those 
poor people who lost their 
homes find a way to rebuild. 
To pressure our government 
to secure funding for these 
people, before we build that big, 
beautiful wall on the Mexican 
border. To slow down from the 
clickbait disaster-prone-ridden 
news that degrades our ability 
to understand issues and work 
toward solutions.

Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4— Tuesday September 19, 2017

REBECCA LERNER

Managing Editor

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

EMMA KINERY

Editor in Chief

ANNA POLUMBO-LEVY 

and REBECCA TARNOPOL 

Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 

All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

Carolyn Ayaub
Megan Burns

Samantha Goldstein

Caitlin Heenan
Jeremy Kaplan

Sarah Khan

Anurima Kumar

Max Lubell

Lucas Maiman

Alexis Megdanoff
Madeline Nowicki
Anna Polumbo-Levy 

Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury

Ali Safawi

Sarah Salman
Kevin Sweitzer

Rebecca Tarnopol

Stephanie Trierweiler

Ashley Zhang

P

ictures coming out of 
Williston, 
N.D., 
and 

Homer, 
Alaska, 
are 

beginning to make me worry.

No, 
my 
anxiety 
is 
not 

because 
of 
destructive 

legislation coming from the 
Oval Office. Nor is it because 
I fear that the Harvey, Irma 
and Jose family might want an 
addition to their motley crew.

My anxiety lies with a 

certain 
gray-shirted, 
blue-

jeaned, 
Williston- 
and 

Homer-visiting 
billionaire: 

Mark Zuckerberg.

Early this year, Zuckerberg 

announced his goal to visit 
every state in the country in 
the hopes of understanding 
his 
2 
billion 
users 
better 

by 
“listening 
and 
learning 

about how more people are 
living, working and thinking 
about 
the 
future.”He 
has 

since visited places ranging 
from 
the 
attention-starved 

pockets of middle America to 
the more ethnically diverse 
communities on the coasts.

Zuckerberg’s 
exploits 
in 

these areas have been well 
documented. Pictures from the 
tour depicting an attentive and 
beaming Zuckerberg candidly 
injecting himself into the daily 
lives of Nebraskan locomotive 
engineers or Iowan cafe-goers 
have been continually shared 
to 
his 
nearly 
100 
million 

Facebook followers.

To 
the 
casual 
eye 

scrolling through Facebook, 
Zuckerberg’s tour seems to be 
typical procedure for the CEO 
of one of the most prominent 
companies on Earth. CEOs 
will often reach out to the 
diverse members of their base, 
learn from them and then, 
ideally, act on behalf of them. 
But Facebook is not a typical 
company, Zuckerberg is not a 
typical CEO and politicking 
today is far from typical. 

What 
differentiates 

Facebook from other companies 
is its gradually materializing 
monopoly 
on 
political 

change and persuasion. With 
Facebook’s 2 billion users and 
the revelation of fake news, 
Zuckerberg currently presides 
over an apparatus unrivaled 
in its power to discreetly sway 
public opinion.

Zuckerberg’s recent actions 

suggest that not only has he 
started to recognize these 
unique powers but that he 
is keen on using them to 
rework his own image. His 
announcement 
proclaiming 

that, in the face of his long-
held atheist identification, he 
now views “religion as very 
important”; his hiring of Joel 
Benenson, Hillary Clinton’s 
campaign chief strategist; and, 
yes, his heavily advertised 
50-state tour conducted under 
the guise of brand building 
rather 
than 
cross-country 

campaigning suggest a push 

to align himself with more 
mainstream beliefs held by the 
general U.S. populace.

The upshot of all this is 

starting to become abundantly 
clear: Zuckerberg acts and 
projects like a man positioning 
himself for a public office run 
in the near future.

Irrespective of policy, this is 

a terrifying prospect.

First, 
let’s 
not 
forget 

Facebook 
and 
Zuckerberg’s 

outsized influence in enabling 
the vitriol and disinformation 
of 
the 
2016 
presidential 

election cycle. In late August, 
the company replaced all the 
human editors in its Trending 
section with an algorithm. 
Within 72 hours, a bogus 
story from endingthefed.com 
about how Fox News anchor 
Megyn Kelly was fired for 
surreptitiously 
supporting 

Clinton made its way to the top 

of the section, where it stayed 
for a few hours.

A joint team of Harvard 

and Massachusetts Institute 
of 
Technology 
researchers 

further implicated Facebook 
in a study of media failure in 
2016. The team researched 
more than 1.25 million stories 
published between April 1, 
2015, and Election Day and 
found that “a media network 
anchored 
around 
Breitbart 

developed as a distinct and 
insulated media system, using 
social media as a backbone 
to transmit a hyper-partisan 
perspective to the world.”

Nevertheless, Zuckerberg has 

not shied away from defending 
Facebook’s 
innocence. 
In 

January, Zuckerberg professed, 
“I’m actually quite proud of the 
impact that we were able to have 
on civic discourse over all.”

The naivete of Zuckerberg’s 

response 
is 
concerning 
as 

more and more people find 
their news on Facebook. He 
is in the midst of opening 
himself 
up 
to 
showcase 

his 
all-Americanness 
and 

humanitarianism, 
yet 
he 

cowers and deflects when 

faced with one of the greatest 
weapons 
to 
democracy 
in 

recent memory. Fake news 
and 
disinformation, 
often 

originating 
from 
foreign 

actors as in the case of last 
year’s election cycle, ironically 
enough, legitimately influence 
the distortion of public opinion.

Look 
no 
further 
than 

the most recent round of 
troubling news to directly 
find Facebook’s role in the 
aforementioned 
nexus. 

Last 
Wednesday, 
Facebook 

disclosed 
to 
congressional 

investigators 
that 
between 

June 2015 and May 2017 
it sold $100,000 worth of 
advertisements to a Kremlin-
linked 
Russian 
company 

that sought to target voters 
through 
“troll” 
accounts. 

Most of the purchased ads 
focused on divisive issues 
ranging “from LGBT matters 
to race issues to immigration 
to 
gun 
rights,” 
according 

to a note published by Alex 
Stamos, the company’s chief 
security officer.

Facebook’s enabling of its 

own subversion should give 
Zuckerberg no reason to be 
proud. The company ruefully 
failed to combat fake news 
and sinister foreign influence, 
and, in the process, helped 
to elect the most unqualified 
candidate to the highest office 
in the land.

Perhaps 
that 
surprising 

result has helped Zuckerberg 
realize the political gold mine 
he has on his hands. Perhaps 
he is leveraging that influence 
to build a foundation for loftier 
goals. After all, he supervises 
the data of nearly 2 billion 
users, and it seems that this 
data has told him to project a 
carefully orchestrated veneer 
of 
corn 
husking, 
religion 

embracing 
and 
aggressive 

Facebook gloating.

But Zuckerberg needs to 

read between the lines. As 
Facebook reached the frontier 
of media influence during 
the 
presidential 
election, 

he propagated and enabled 
nefarious doings. Zuckerberg’s 
shortcomings in addressing 
the fake news, his compliance 
in 
foreign 
subversion, 
his 

cavalier attitude and, most 
importantly, 
his 
unilateral 

control and mishandling on a 
media tool powerful enough 
to 
swing 
elections 
should 

render null any of his public 
office ambitions.

But that does not mean he 

will at least give it a shot. 
Zuckerberg is smart enough 
to see that, with a little magic 
from Facebook, inexperienced 
billionaires are one for one in 
winning.

 Horrify, comfort, forget, repeat

MICHAEL MORDARSKI | COLUMN

 Zuckerberg 2020?

LUCAS MAIMAN | COLUMN

 Lucas Maiman can be reached at 

lmaiman@umich.edu.

S

ome of this year’s biggest 
political issues have not 
been the big, drawn-out 

battles that take place in Lansing 
or Washington, D.C. Important 
issues like housing, jobs and taxes 
are debated right here in Ann 
Arbor by our local government, 
a government that has little input 
from one of Ann Arbor’s most 
influential groups: students at the 
University of Michigan. 

While it may not be evident 

to most students, Ann Arbor’s 
City Council has been locked 
in a fierce election over for the 
past few months. The Aug. 8 
Democratic Primary election 
saw 
heated 
mudslinging 

between 
anti-development 

candidate David Silkworth and 
current incumbent Chip Smith. 
Blogs such as “Local in Ann 
Arbor” and papers such as Ann 
Arbor Observer hurled posts 
about each candidate’s politics 
for months. Even after the 
primary ended, independent 
candidates 
including 
Ali 

Ramlawi 
— 
owner 
of 
the 

Jerusalem Garden restaurant 

— declared candidacy over 
dissatisfaction with the results 
of the primary election.

While it may be easy to 

brush these things off as simply 
village politics that don’t matter 
to 
students, 
City 
Council’s 

responsibilities 
actually 

include some of the most 
salient and visible policy items 
in the Ann Arbor community. 
Hot-button issues like the deer 
cull and the ongoing debate 
over the Library Lot high-
rise will likely be brought into 
focus in the next council cycle. 
These issues may not seem like 
monumental 
policy 
actions 

to many students, but issues 
that do matter to students 
— including rising housing 
costs 
and 
city-University 

cooperation fall on the hands of 
the council, which seldom has 
enough student input to fairly 
represent the needs of young 
people. We don’t realize it, but 
frequently, Ann Arbor has more 

control over our everyday lives 
outside of the classroom than 
the University does.

Simply 
looking 
at 
Ann 

Arbor’s gerrymandered ward 
map will point the viewer to 
the obvious conclusion that 
Central 
Campus, 
and 
the 

heavily 
student-populated 

neighborhoods surrounding it, 
have been sliced up in a way 
that no one ward contains the 
voices of students, and that 
the concerns of students can 
be placed on the back burner 
of all 10 council members. A 
student living in the West Quad 
Residence Hall would have a 
different council member than 
a student who lived across 
the street at the South Quad 
Residence Hall. These two 
students would be represented 
differently 
than 
someone 

who lived on Tappan Avenue, 
mere steps away. All of this is 
in spite of the fact that Ann 
Arbor’s population according 
to 
the 
census 
— 
which 

determines federal funding and 
congressional 
representation 

— includes students at their 
campus addresses.

This 
creates 
a 
dynamic 

where student members of the 
Ann Arbor community won’t 
feel represented by their own 
government. The intentional 
disempowerment 
of 
student 

residents is also echoed by the 
fact that City Council elections 
are decided in August, during 
the partisan primary — a time 
when many students are away 
for vacations, internships or 
summer jobs — leaving the 
election in the hands of a few 
committed 
local 
residents. 

In fact, until this year, City 
Council races were held in non-
congressional off-years, leading 
to even lower turnout and even 
less public participation.

While the city of Ann Arbor 

recently established its Student 
Advisory Council, the roster 
for the committee currently 
only 
lists 
councilmember 

Julie Grand, D-Ward 3 with 

the contact information for 
getting involved being listed 
as 
“TBD.” 
The 
stunning 

lack of representation of the 
more than 40,000 students 
who attend the University of 
Michigan, with 10,000 students 
confirmed to be living in Ann 
Arbor is unacceptable for a city 
that prides itself on being an 
epicenter of progressive public 
policy. If every Ann Arbor-
based canvasser with an anti-
gerrymandering or pro-voting 
rights petition approached local 
politics with the same furor 
that they approach Republican-
led gerrymandering or voter 
suppression in the state House, 
then Ann Arbor’s City Council 
would have seen a dramatic 
restructuring years ago.

I urge students to stay 

aware of local political issues, 
and to contact their City 
Council member about issues 
of importance, and to always 
vote in local elections, even 
if that requires an absentee 
ballot. I also urge the city 
of Ann Arbor to focus on 
equal representation of all its 
residents. Reforms including 
redrawing wards to include 
a student-focused member of 
council, or including at-large 
or ex officio student members 
of council will go a long way 
to ensuring that all voices are 
heard in the political process.

Many of us students may 

only be four-year Ann Arbor 
residents, 
but 
the 
student 

population 
of 
Ann 
Arbor 

will continue to exist for as 
long as there is a University 
of Michigan. If our current 
political state of affairs has 
taught us anything, it is that 
participation 
in 
government 

at all levels, is crucial to the 
advancement and success of 
democracy. Staying involved in 
Ann Arbor is no different.

Student voices matter in local politics

Zuckerberg’s 
recent actions 
suggest that not 

only has he started 
to recognize these 

unique powers 

but that he is keen 
on using them to 
rework his own 

image.

 KEVIN SWEITZER | OP-ED

MICHAEL 

MORDARSKI

Kevin Sweitzer is an Editorial Board 

member.

Michael Mordarski can be reached 

at mmordars@umich.edu.

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