Automobiles remade the world, in more ways than we could have initially imagined. Nobody could have predicted the environmental fallout of the internal-combustion engine, for instance, but other effects could have been predicted by anyone not wholly myopic.
Now we’re parked at another precipice, with autonomous cars nearly ready to remake society in a similarly profound way. Along with the great advantages that will attend self-driving vehicles, there’ll come numerous challenges. One of them is a financial jolt to the middle class that will make the slow waning of the last four decades seem relatively rosy.
In a smart Backchannel article, Robin Chase explains that since driverless is ultimately going to happen–and sooner or later, it will–we need to be proactive in steering the economic and social ramifications even as we give up the actual wheel. Part of her prescription for a relatively smooth transition is a radical reworking of capitalism, since a largely automated society that’s also a free-market one cannot be managed by shopworn policy.
An excerpt:
A Capitalism Do-Over. Productivity gains once were the harbinger of improved standards of living, and improved quality of life, but automation brings jobless productivity gains. Self driving cars will be the ultimate example of this: AVs will probably be productively employed and generating revenue about 65 percent of the time, compared to our personal car’s 5 percent. No one can deny that enormous productivity gains are being enjoyed. But with so few associated workers, enjoyed by whom?
As an entrepreneur, I appreciate the hours and years of effort that has gone into building these AVs: the new IP, the many years and huge costs without any revenue to show for it. But I also understand that this is a massive market (trillions of dollars worldwide seems plausible), and the marginal cost of running the software for each of those trips will be close to zero. We need to make sure we distribute this new wealth, by closing corporate tax loopholes and taxing wealth and platforms more effectively.
As we lose more jobs, the necessity for change opens up the possibility of a fairer system, one that minimizes income inequality. A Bureau of Labor Statistics study projected an 83 percent probability of job loss by automation for workers earning less than $20 an hour, and a 34 percent probability for jobs between $20–40 an hour. In the new automated world, does it really make sense to be taxing labor at all? It makes much more sense to be taxing the new technical platforms that are generating the profits, and taxing the wealth of the small number of talented and lucky people who founded and financed these new jobless wonders.
In a world where machines do most of the work, it is time for a universal basic income. This will distribute the gains from productivity, and give more people the opportunity to focus on purposeful, passion-driven work, allowing for the next generation of ideas and technologies to emerge faster.
How we deal with the job loss caused by AVs will be a signature model for how we respond to automation throughout the economy. Even more, it may be the flood that sweeps clean a system that no longer serves the people.•
Donald Trump, the size of a bread truck and 3x as dense as the planet Neptune, loves pointing out the struggles of contemporary newspapers and magazines as a petty means of avenging their accurate reporting on his disgusting, rudderless campaign. But let’s not forget that several times in a far more kindly climate for print, the hideous hotelier’s attempts at glossy success rained red ink over all involved.
In the smart Politico piece “I Survived ‘Trump’ Magazine—Barely,” Carey Purcell, one of his former publishing-biz employees, recalls learning the hard way of the hideous hotelier’s suspect business acumen. The opening:
I had been at Trump magazine for only four months when my first paycheck bounced.
We’d heard rumors of the company’s financial troubles, but I had no idea how bad it really was until my landlord called me one afternoon to tell me that my rent check hadn’t cleared. I logged into my online banking account and saw, to my amazement, that the magazine I worked for—the one with the billionaire’s name on the cover—had stiffed me. Although it was a stressful moment, the irony was not lost on me. It felt like I was living in an Onion article: “Luxury Lifestyle Magazine Can’t Pay Its Own Employees.”
It was the fall of 2006, and Trump magazine was my first job in journalism—albeit as the receptionist. I’d landed the gig by answering an ad on Craigslist. Fresh out of journalism school, I moved to New York with two undergraduate degrees, my student loans, some meager savings and dreams of becoming a theater critic. The receptionist gig paid a paltry $25,000 per year—barely minimum wage. And that was when the checks cleared.
Personally, I had never been a fan of Donald Trump and knew very little about the man. I had never seen The Apprentice and I was hardly a real estate expert. The piles of fan mail that arrived at our office addressed to him—filled with adoring testaments to his “genius”—amused me to no end. We received handwritten letters asking for money, a formal request for Donald’s daughter Ivanka to escort a woman’s son to his Junior Ring Dance at the Air Force Academy, and incoherent six-page rants about the state of the economy and how Trump was the only man who could fix it. One letter stated, “I sincerely hope you will run for president someday.”
Before I was hired at Trump, the magazine had already gained a reputation, most of which I wouldn’t find out about until after it folded. And by that time, I had been diagnosed with cancer and—thanks to Trump—lost my health coverage.•
The transformation of heiress Patty Hearst from debutante to terrorist after her 1974 abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Army is endlessly interesting as a study in extreme psychological metamorphosis, though its fascination four decades ago lie mostly mostly in its more lurid aspects, the violent collision of rich and poor, of high society and anti-social impulses, the sacred taking up with the profane. It was worlds colliding, an impact that made the masses feel unsafe, that so fixated the nation. The Lindbergh baby was alive and conspiring with the kidnappers. Anything, it seemed, was possible, and how could that be good?
Jeffrey Toobin, the wonderful New Yorker writer and legal analyst, just published American Heiress, a book about the scion-gone-wild, though he’s fully cognizant that titles about the crimes of the rich and famous, “Tania” or O.J., for whatever they may tell us about America, aren’t nearly the most important stories to tell. One exchange from a recent New York Times interview with Toobin:
What’s the last great book you read?
Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside. Meticulously reported and gracefully written, this book captures the horror of urban violence in Los Angeles. At roughly the same time as Leovy was shadowing L.A.P.D. detectives in East L.A., I was across town, covering O. J. Her book made me think twice about what counts as a “big” story.
That’s the truth, though Hearst’s case speaks to the seismic shift young people (and some older ones) can make, whether we’re talking about her, Manson Family members, Jonestown joiners or ISIS acolytes.
Three pieces follow: 1) An excerpt from Dana Spitotta’s NYT review of Toobin’s title, 2) A segment of a 1974 People interview with psychiatrist Dr. Frederick J. Hacker, who consulted with the family while Patty was underground, and 3) A 1974 video of the devastated Randolph Hearst discussing his daughter’s life on the lam.
From Spiotta:
Perhaps the captivity story that has fascinated us the most is the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the subject of Jeffrey Toobin’s terrifically engrossing new book, “American Heiress.” The brief outline of the events will be familiar to many: Hearst was taken from her Berkeley apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army, or S.L.A. (a tiny, slogan-drunk band of revolutionaries so obsessed with guns and publicity that they seem almost pre-satirized). After being held in a closet and haphazardly coached in guerrilla warfare and revolutionary theory, Hearst declared — in a notorious message delivered in a mesmerizing combination of “breathy rich-girl diction” and “pidgin Marxist” jargon — that she was now “Tania,” that she had not been brainwashed and that her captors had offered to let her go, but “I have chosen to stay and fight.” She then helped to rob banks (in which one bystander died) and plant bombs until she was apprehended in 1975. In custody, she claimed that all of her crimes were committed under duress. Her lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, built his defense on the argument that she had acted out of “coercive persuasion” (Stockholm syndrome was not yet a common concept). She was found guilty and served nearly two years of her sentence before President Carter commuted it to time served.
Was Patricia Hearst responsible for her crimes, or was she a victim who did what she needed to do to survive? Or is the truth somewhere in between? The story has been the subject of many books — some dozen are listed by Toobin. Also inspired by the case: two novels (“Trance,” by Christopher Sorrentino, and “American Woman,” by Susan Choi), a feature film, several documentaries, at least two porn movies and an episode of “Drunk History.” Hearst herself wrote a book. Yet the questions remain unresolved, which is one reason for Toobin to investigate. Another is that he sees the episode as “a kind of trailer for the modern world” in terms of celebrity culture, the media and criminal justice.•
As surprising as it is that so many middle-class youths are drawn today via social media to ISIS, Patty Hearst, practically American royalty, being kidnapped in 1974 by the SLA and then converted somehow to its terrorist cause, completely stunned the world. She didn’t go willingly, but she became a willing accomplice, brainwashed probably, though a lot of Americans were unforgiving. It seems like some of the same factors that work for ISIS may have helped the SLA remake the debutante as “Tania.” Whatever the situation, USC psychiatrist Dr. Frederick J. Hacker, whom the family hired while she was still on the lam tohelp them understand their daughter’s descent into terrorism, probably should not have discussed the case with Barbara Wilkins of People magazine while she was still at large, but he did. An excerpt:
Question:
Why did the Hearsts consult you?
Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:
I had published a book on terrorism in Germany in 1973—dealing with the Olympic tragedy in Munich and the Arab-Israeli situation. In September ’73, I became a negotiator in Vienna between the government and two Arab terrorists. After that, I was invited to speak at Harvard and the State Department and to testify before the House Committee on Internal Security. That was how the Hearsts heard about me and my work.
Question:
When did you get involved in the case of Patricia Hearst?
Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:
When a Mr. Gould of the Hearst newspapers called me up, on behalf of the family, about four weeks after the kidnapping. I went up to Hillsborough to visit the Hearsts. I told them to take the SLA at face value, to take the political message seriously. And I urged them to get a concession for every concession they made.
Question:
What have you discovered about Patty Hearst?
Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:
I had not known her before, of course. By now everyone has read what her life had been. She was an average, intelligent girl. She lived an unspectacular life with her former tutor. She was more liberal than her family but was still relatively conservative. She was totally without political interests. She was sheltered. She’d gone to Europe with some other girls and, prior to Steve [her fiance Steven Weed], she’d had three or four other boyfriends. She was never very close to any of her sisters. The oldest sister, a polio victim, had deep religious convictions. Patty had a bad relationship with her mother, but a fairly good one with her father. They could talk. When she was kidnapped, Patty was picking out her silverware pattern, because she had talked Steve into marrying her.
Question:
What is the lure of the SLA for a girl like Patty Hearst?
Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:
In spite of everything, the sense of close proximity among these people gives a feeling of family, of community and caring. There is shared danger and a sense of strong commitment that is very impressive to the uncommitted.
Question:
Was Patty’s conversion voluntary?
Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:
Everybody asks how voluntary her conversion was. I raise the question, “How intentional was the SLA’s conversion of Patricia?” Maybe they didn’t want to convert her at first. Let’s look at it this way. She’s kidnapped, and she’s frightened and inclined to believe these people are really monsters. Then they treat her very nicely. She begins to talk to them, to the girls. She finds they are very much the kind of people she is—upper-middle-class, intelligent, white kids. She finds a poetess, a sociologist. They tell her how they have found a new ideal and how lousy it was at home. Perhaps she started to think, “Well, at my home it wasn’t so hot either.” This may be what happened. There is a strong possibility, of course, that she was brainwashed. Maybe they did use drugs, although none was found in the bodies after the L.A. shoot-out. …
Question:
Was Patricia in on the kidnapping from the beginning?
Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:
She was undoubtedly a genuine victim. All the talk that she was in cahoots is nonsense. All the evidence, in fact, is against it, including the testimony of her boyfriend, who has no conceivable reason to lie. Why did she have her identification with her? A kidnap victim doesn’t—unless someone else grabs it and takes it along.
Question:
What makes a terrorist?
Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:
A number of different things. Usually the terrorist is imbued with the righteousness of his cause, and fanatacized by the idea of remediable injustice. For example, as long as you could tell women that it was God’s will that they were mistreated by men and that it was irremediable, there was no movement to change things. As soon as it becomes clear that an injustice is not fated, is not obligatory, and that there are alternatives, then the dominant group is in trouble.
Question:
Are there different kinds of terrorists?
Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:
I distinguish three categories—the criminal, the mentally deranged and the political. With the SLA, it is not easy to confine them to one category. They are criminally involved because some of their tactics are criminal. Some actions are loony and the details are ludicrous. When Cinque’s body was found, he was wearing heavy pants, army boots up to his calf and three pairs of woolen socks—in Southern California where the temperature was 80°. He had a compass and a canteen. That’s inappropriate. They stole from that sporting goods store, but they certainly did not need the money. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars were found on all the bodies. Only the outside of the folded money burned. There were nutty elements. What kind of an army is 20 people, or 10 people? They were also political, and that is what made it so hard.
Question:
These radical movements seem to attract middle-and upper-middle-class children rather than the lower-middle-class and poor. Why?
Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:
You are asking who becomes a revolutionary. The leaders of a revolution don’t come from the class they are trying to liberate. The to-be-liberated group doesn’t have the means to lead itself out of oppression.
Question:
What can be done about terrorism?
Dr. Frederick J. Hacker:
First, you must change the “remediable” conditions that produce the terrorist solution—for instance, somehow you get rid of the Palestinian refugee camps. Second, the mass media must effect restraint so that terrorist crime does not become fashionable. Finally, I believe we must establish task forces led by law enforcement executives who are advised by responsible behavioral scientists.•
This 1970s video contains comments Randolph Hearst made to NBC News about his daughter Patty, who was at the time doing a walkabout through the Radical Left. “I think she’s staying underground just like a lot of kids stay underground,” her clearly shaken father remarked, accurately assessing the situation. Before the end of the decade, she was captured, convicted, imprisoned and, controversially, had her sentence commuted. In January 2001, Bill Clinton felt it necessary to grant her a full pardon.
Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump, the Bernie Goetz as a business mogul, may not be merely ignorant, immoral and bigoted, but perhaps he’s also seriously mentally ill. Who knows? He certainly behaves that way, in a manner that goes beyond just a deeply narcissistic person long sealed inside an ugly-as-sin echo chamber.
At Deadline Hollywood, Greg Evans reports on Robert De Niro comparing Trump to another unhinged New Yorker, the fictional Travis Bickle:
“What (Trump) has been saying is totally crazy, ridiculous, stuff that shouldn’t be even… he is totally nuts,” De Niro said. “One of the things to me was just the irony at the end [of Taxi Driver],” De Niro said about the moment in the film when Bickle “is back driving a cab, celebrated, which is kind of relevant in some way today too…People like Donald Trump who shouldn’t be where he is so… God help us.”
One of the odder things about this Baba Booey of an election season is Republicans clinging to the belief that Trump can hit some sort of magical reset button, making not only his heretofore disgusting behavior vanish but also disappearing all his horrid character traits, as if what might be remedied through decades of therapy could be cured in a campaign war room in minutes.
In a New York Times article, Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, who’ve done brilliant work throughout the election, write of the hideous hotelier’s foundering efforts at reinvention. An excerpt:
Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly concede that Mr. Trump may be beyond coaching. He has ignored their pleas and counsel as his poll numbers have dropped, boasting to friends about the size of his crowds and maintaining that he can read surveys better than the professionals.
In private, Mr. Trump’s mood is often sullen and erratic, his associates say. He veers from barking at members of his staff to grumbling about how he was better off following his own instincts during the primaries and suggesting he should not have heeded their calls for change.
He broods about his souring relationship with the news media, calling Mr. Manafort several times a day to talk about specific stories. Occasionally, Mr. Trump blows off steam in bursts of boyish exuberance: At the end of a fund-raiser on Long Island last week, he playfully buzzed the crowd twice with his helicopter.
But in interviews with more than 20 Republicans who are close to Mr. Trump or in communication with his campaign, many of whom insisted on anonymity to avoid clashing with him, they described their nominee as exhausted, frustrated and still bewildered by fine points of the political process and why his incendiary approach seems to be sputtering.•
Despite the constantly updated headlines, the world is likely getting much better by most measures, the major asterisk being climate change. Conditions have never seemed worse, though, with beheadings, xenophobia and terrorism in our faces and on our minds. A connected and wired world presents many shocks to the system, the Global Village both boon and bane. But we only seem to foresee dystopias now.
H.G. Wells, who wrote science fiction before it was so named, envisioned tomorrow’s downsides but held out hope. The author believed we should toss out the history books, which he felt poisoned us with nationalism, and start anew. His more optimistic side has been adopted by many Silicon Valley technologists, his pessimism by those crafting fiction. A strange dichotomy.
Excerpts from: 1) John Higgs’ Guardian article about the contemporary obsession with things falling apart, and 2) Jaron Lanier’s 2011 Edge articleon Wells’ concerns about wealth inequality in the age of machines.
From Higgs:
For Wells, imagining a viable version of the future was an intellectual game. It was a chance to show off, and a seemingly respectable way to be deeply subversive. Writing to his friend Elizabeth Healy, he described Anticipations, his 1901 book of predictions, as “designed to undermine and destroy the monarch, monogamy, faith in God and respectability – and the British empire, all under the guise of a speculation about motor cars and electric heating”. Futurology, for Wells, was exhilarating. The idea that writers would give up even trying was so implausible that Wells never imagined it.
The sudden disappearance of worthwhile futures from our culture coincided with the rise in our understanding of climate change. Global warming indeed appears inevitable and apocalyptic, but is this reason enough to remove all hope from our visions of the future? Rising sea levels, the need to decarbonise the economy, and chaotic shifts in ecosystems are all difficult problems to engage with, but we are a species that lived through the Black Death, the Somme and the threat of global thermonuclear war. It seems odd that we would give up now.
I suspect the real problem is as much a rejection of originality as it is a reaction to climate change. In a hypermediated age where we are constantly engaged in filtering out the irrelevant, the last thing we want is to tackle the genuinely new.
But originality was Wells’s calling card.•
From Lanier:
This brings us back, literally thousands of years to an ancient discussion that continues to this day about exactly how people can make a living, or make their way when technology gets better. There is an Aristotle quote about how when the looms can operates themselves, all men will be free. That seems like a reasonable thing to say, a precocious thing for somebody to have said in ancient times. If we zoom forward to the 19th century, we had a tremendous amount of concern about this question of how people would make their way when the machines got good. In fact, much of our modern intellectual world started off as people’s rhetorical postures on this very question.
Marxism, the whole idea of the left, which still dominates the Bay Area where this interview is taking place, was exactly, precisely about this question. This is what Marx was thinking about, and in fact, you can read Marx and it sometimes weirdly reads likes a Silicon Valley rhetoric. It’s the strangest thing; all about “boundaries falling internationally,” and “labor and markets opening up,” and all these things. It’s the weirdest thing.
In fact, I had the strange experience years ago, listening to some rhetoric on the radio … it was KPFA, in fact, the lefty station … and I thought, ‘Oh, God, it’s one of these Silicon startups with their rhetoric about how they’re going to bring down market barriers,’ and it turned out to be an anniversary reading of Das Kapital. The language was similar enough that one could make the mistake.
The origin of science fiction was exactly in this same area of concern. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine foresees a future in which there are the privileged few who benefit from the machines, and then there are the rest who don’t, and both of them become undignified, lesser creatures. Separate species.•
H.G. Wells meets Orson Welles in San Antonio (audio only):
Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden participated in a Reddit AMA, which mostly centered on his 1971 trip to the moon. In the course of the Q&A, he had kind remarks for both Wernher von Braun and Donald Trump, which is perfectly symmetrical, when you consider the former was an actual Nazi and the latter at least posturing as a Hitler-ish hotelier. Apart from politics, he comments on the current state of space exploration, which he seems to believe is lacking. A few exchanges follow.
Question:
Was going to the moon tough to top? Did you come back and have trouble figuring out ‘what next’?
Al Worden:
That’s a very good question. Going to the moon required a skillset, much like driving a car or flying an airplane. There are many other intellectual challenges that require thought process way beyond anything I needed to make a lunar flight. I think it’s very important for the future that we motivate young people in STEM courses, and that, to me, is intellectually challenging.
Question:
As I have read, you never did an EVA on the moon, but orbited the moon. Can you describe the feeling of orbiting another planet, looking not just at the Moon, but also at the Earth. Do you remember any special thoughts you had?
What do you think of the technological advancements of SpaceX and their construction of reusable rockets, and their plans to go to Mars?
What would you say to all the young people around the world who loves space and aspire to make a future career in space exploration, through the means of engineering, piloting, physics, chemistry, biology and/or other ways to contribute to the research for future space travel and exploration? Sincerely, a Swedish Masters of Computer Science and Engineering student.
Al Worden:
I remember vividly looking every 2 hours for Earth-rise over the Lunar horizon. The moon was a very cold, and deadly place, but the Earth was beautiful in the colors and the atmosphere.
Space-X is not the only commercial company that is flying into space. There is Boeing and Orbital/ATK. In the next few years, we will see lots of commercial launches into space, however they will probably be limited to Earths orbit, because the requirements are too great to go into deep space. Space-X is talking about going to Mars, but that remains to be seen.
I am a firm believer that any young person working their way through college should take whatever they want, but do very well with it. In the future there will be positions for all disciplines but those who study STEM programs will be in the fore-front.
Question:
Who are the unsung heroes of the Apollo program? Was there anyone who played a big role that history hasn’t recorded very well?
Al Worden:
I would say that maybe one of the unsung heroes was Wernher Von Braun. He did get considerable amount of publicity, but he was the chief architect for the Apollo Program. And in-fact there were many, many that were critical to the program that no one knows about.
Question:
Have you ever seen a candidate for President like Donald Trump?
Al Worden:
No, but political conditions of today require someone like Trump to set this country straight.
Question:
What do you think about all the technological advancements in space travel, and where do you think space travel will be in the future?
Al Worden:
My feelings are there are no technological advances in space travel in the past 40 years. In fact, the system that is being designed to go to Mars, is really just an oversized Apollo.
Question:
If you could go to the moon one more time, would you go?
Al Worden:
No, the moon has no interest. We need to go further out.•
It seems intuitive that good times will breed feelings that match, but often a comfortable, steady temperature makes people overheat. It’s like we crave imbalance for some evolutionary reason. Remember before 9/11 and the 2008 economic collapse and ISIS, when Bill Clinton’s intern shenanigans were a national outrage? George W. Bush, who led the single most failed administration in generations, was elected in good part to restore “honor” to the White House. That really seemed important to an awful lot of people. Today, an utter lack of honor–and competency and sanity–makes no difference to Trump supporters, despite the financial recovery (an uneven one, admittedly) we’ve experienced in the past eight years. They’re mad and want to break something.
National moods aren’t always rational, not always driven by the bottom line, but perhaps there’s something other than the spoiling effect of complacency driving the current ill feelings. Maybe our new tools have made it easier for a toxic airborne event to occur at any spot in the Global Village?
In a smart Bloomberg View column, Tyler Cowen theorizes that bad moods are traveling in a viral manner today, even settling over a relatively fortunate nation like Australia. An excerpt:
Australia does have problems and identity crises of its own, but still it seems the country has caught a dissatisfaction bug from abroad, most plausibly from the pro-Brexit forces in the U.K., the Trump and Sanders movements in the U.S. and the common global feeling that much of the world is slanting askew.
For some time now, equity returns in Australia have had one of the highest correlationswith equity returns in the U.S., and some of this probably has to do with the transmission of moods and not just shared economic shocks. What’s changing is that the risk of negative mood transmission may be going up, even though the Australian economy still appears to be fine.
It is a common theme in political science that low levels of trust in government tend to translate to inferior political performance.Trusting citizenriesgive their governments the resources to produce valuable public goods, as is often the case in the Nordic economies, but falling trust leads to higher social conflict and corruption. And so, because of its recent pessimism, Australia may be on the verge of losing some of the good governance it has enjoyed for the last few decades.
The broader and more disturbing implication is that the entire global economy may be more vulnerable to mood swings.•
There’s no way any high-ranking official at Fox News was unaware of the alleged behavior of Roger Ailes, who’s been accused by a Cosby-ish number of women of serial sexual harassment and abuse, and also of using spies to collect information on supposed enemies. This scandal runs wide and deep, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if other prominent names resigned for “new opportunities.”
It’s strange Fox has at best an ambiguous relationship with the current GOP candidate Donald Trump. Rupert Murdoch supposedly loathes him, while on-air personality Sean Hannity, the dimwitted equipment manager of a lacrosse team serving a suspension, thinks Republicans who punt on supporting Mussolini with moobs are in dereliction of duty.
That’s an odd half-heartedness because apart from the leaders of the party, who for decades used coded racist language and encouraged conspiracy theories until the GOP did a backstroke across the toilet, no entity has more enabled Trump than Fox, the logical conclusion of its support of an anti-science, whites-first party. Along with gerrymandering, Murdoch’s “news-entertainment” outlet helped protect the GOP as it drifted further and further into dangerous waters, prepared it for the mutineers, captained by the hideous hotelier.
In a smart Vanity Fair “Hive” piece, Sarah Ellison examines the mood at Fox in the wake of the tyrant’s deposition, with the fog of fear still permeating and the statues yet to be toppled. Her opening:
Few people in the news business have valued secrecy quite like Roger Ailes, the former C.E.O. of Fox News. Ailes’s very own corner office on the second floor of 21st Century Fox’s glass and steel headquarters, in Midtown Manhattan, featured a solid wood door that prevented anyone on the outside from peering in. Visitors had to be buzzed in by Ailes or an assistant. They were also captured on-camera, their image projected to a monitor on Ailes’s desk.
Many assumed that such secrecy was a vestige of Ailes’s formative years advising Richard Nixon. Now, it appears that it may have run deeper. Last month, former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed suitagainst Ailes for sexual harassment—an event that ushered in a litany of former colleagues with similar stories. Weeks later, Ailesresigned. (Ailes has fervently denied all allegations. His lawyer, Susan Estrich, reiterated those denials. A spokesperson for 21st Century Fox also declined to comment for this piece.)
Ailes’s second-floor office now stands empty. Floors below it, in Fox News’s subterranean newsroom, a former Sam Goody retail outlet, staffers are still coming to terms with the rollicking events of the past month. During periods of crisis, reporters and producers tend to bury their heads in their stories, rallying around one another in their commitment to their work. But there is only one topic on people’s minds at Fox News these days: Ailes.
Sentiment in the newsroom is generally split between those who proclaim surprise (particularly regarding the sheer number of women who have alleged that Ailes harassed them) and those who feel professional relief—not all of them women. Ailes was gender-blind when it came to relentlessly pushing his talking points and admonishing those who did not follow along. Still, others said they remain fearful that even discussing Ailes at all could result in some form of punishment.•
Those who’ve compared Presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler are dangerously irresponsible. The latter has been loudly labeled a menace by opposition, compared to a tyrant for, one example, issuing so many executive orders. For using this power, he’s been accused of dictatorial leanings. Of course, if you look at history rationally, you’ll understand there hasn’t been a two-term President since the 1800s who made fewer executive orders. When politics cause some to refer to basically decent people as Nazis, it behooves the rest of us to stand up to such slanders. In such cases, journalists and Supreme Court Justices, as much as any of us, should lead the way in refusing partisanship.
But what if someone like Donald Trump, at the very least an American Berlusconi and perhaps a Mussolini, is angling for the White House? What if the fascism is very real and the accusations of autocracy not slanders? Isn’t it the responsibility of all Americans to stand up to the madness, regardless of their job titles? Some believe so, while others think a fealty to the usual rules, even in a time of grave threat, is the bigger victory for democracy. My guess is someday Ruth Bader Ginsburg will look back fondly on her Trump criticism despite the scolding she took from editorial writers on both sides of the aisle.
If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.
But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?•
I’ve blogged about this before, but the Charles Murray system of Universal Basic Income, which is similar to the schemes of a number of Libertarian wonks and Silicon Valley stalwarts, would devastate people already barely getting by. Many senior citizens would actually lose part of their Social Security payments, even a good portion of those receiving relatively paltry amounts. It’s just another scheme to eliminate safety nets while making those doing to dismantling seem beneficent. To Murray and his ilk, the disappearance of the so-called welfare state won’t harm anyone because Americans on solid ground, of whom there are fewer in the Digital Age, will magically rally around the poor. Do they actually believe this hokum or is there something darker within them?
Charles Murray, another prominent libertarian promoter of UBI, shares Friedman’s views. In an interview with PBS, he said: “America’s always been very good at providing help to people in need. It hasn’t been perfect, but they’ve been very good at it. Those relationships have been undercut in recent years by a welfare state that has, in my view, denuded the civic culture.” Like Friedman, Murray blames the welfare state for the loss of apparently effective private charity.
Murray adds: “The first rule is that the basic guaranteed income has to replace everything else — it’s not an add-on. So there’s no more food stamps; there’s no more Medicaid; you just go down the whole list. None of that’s left. The government gives money; other human needs are dealt with by other human beings in the neighborhood, in the community, in the organizations. I think that’s great.”
To the Cato Institute, the elimination of social programs is a part of the meaning of Universal Income. In an article about the Finish pilot project, the Institute defines UBI as “scrapping the existing welfare system and distributing the same cash benefit to every adult citizen without additional strings or eligibility criteria”. And in fact, the options being considered by Finland are constrained to limiting the amount of the basic income to the savings from the programs it would replace.•
Always enjoy Steven Overly’s smart work at the Washington Post“Innovations” blog, which looks at where we may be heading and how we might get there. In the post “Farming on the moon and meat grown in a lab. Six thoughts on the future of food,” the journalist wonders about where tomorrow’s meals might come from, focusing on the ideas of the Musk brother Kimbal. Though the entrepreneur dreams of vertical farms on the moon, he acknowledges there’s a strong local component to food production that makes macro planning merely a piece of the puzzle.
Two items from the post:
1. Vertical farming is poised for prime time — and outer space.
There is no question that Musk is a strong proponent of vertical farming, by which crops are grown in tall stacks under LED lights inside massive indoor facilities. The practice is being driven in large part by a desire to grow produce locally and thereby eliminate the need to ship items long distances. It would allow major urban centers, such as New York City or Chicago, to eat local fruits and vegetables during all four seasons. Musk said that 2015 marked the first year when vertical farming companies could sell produce at a profit, meaning the declining cost of the technology makes the practice feasible for the mass market. And when future generations eventually inhabit the moon, vertical farming may be how people eat fruits and veggies there. At least that’s what Musk told the audience of futurists late last month.
6. Our taste for meat will force us to look beyond animals.
Successful efforts have been made toengineer meat in a laboratoryor replicate it using plant-based ingredients. These aren’t frozen veggie burgers; we’re talking about an innovation beyond that. “Meat” that doesn’t come from cows, pigs and chickens could one day be more widely eaten, a shift that both animal welfare advocates and environmentalists would likely celebrate. After all, the increasing number of livestock that is necessary to sate the world population’s meat consumption has hada well-documented, negative impact on the environment. For his part, Musk is much more enthusiastic about plant-based meat products, questioning whether the lab-grown variety is something consumers will ever trust. He also says simply eating less meat is one path forward. “I am a fan of less and better meat rather than replacing meat,” he said. “That’s just me personally.”•
Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian without all the talent, has lowered the bar so far this election cycle that it’s difficult to discuss serious issues. Just avoiding a madman in the Oval Office seems enough, though it isn’t.
There’s been precious little discussion about climate change, which threatens to obviate our entire species. Scant attention has been paid to tax policy, beyond this or that superficial promise. There’s been almost no mention of how automation might deliver a crushing blow to the already embattled middle class. Instead, we’ve been distracted by the guy who mocks disabled people, bans Muslims and argues with Gold Star families. Let’s not elect him.
In aGeekwire article, Alan Boyle writes of the oversight on automation during this Presidential contest. The opening:
Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both promising to bring good-paying jobs back to America, but analysts say neither of them has addressed one of the biggest challenges looming ahead: the impact of automation and the rise of artificial intelligence.
Some argue that the challenge will soon become impossible to ignore.
“Job losses due to automation and robotics are often overlooked in discussions about the unexpected rise of outside political candidates like Trump and Bernie Sanders,” Moshe Vardi, an expert on artificial intelligence at Rice University, saidbefore this month’s conventions.
Vardi pointed out that manufacturing employment has been falling for more than 30 years, and yet U.S. manufacturing output is near its all-time high.
“U.S. factories are not disappearing: They simply aren’t employing human workers,” Vardi said.
That trend is hitting America’s working class particularly hard.
“While manufacturing is the most striking example, there is considerable evidence that automation is transforming other sectors of the labor market, and there’s increasing evidence that this leads to economic stratification, the decline of the middle class and the subsequent undercurrent of misery that is driving support of Trump,” Vardi said.
The transportation sector is likely to be next, as autonomous vehicles start moving products and people.•
The idea that manufacturing jobs will persist because humans and machines will work in a sort of freestyle-chess collaboration is a lie for two reasons. Firstly, even such a silicon-carbon tandem would necessitate a serious reduction in positions. Secondly, it’s only a matter of time until the part of labor still in our hands will disappear. Eventually almost any work that can be done equally well or better by machines will be ceded to them.
The big question is how quickly will that happen. Across decades, such a drain in jobs can be absorbed, but an accelerated transition will likely cause serious cultural and political upheaval, as we’ve seen perhaps most acutely in 2016 with Trump and Brexit and all manner of worrisome nativism. We’ve begun to point fingers at one another instead of discussing the real threat to economic security–that outsourcing no longer means work moving out of countries but rather out of species.
For decades, a big trend in manufacturing has been the gradual automation of the factory floor. Robots play a major role in making advanced products today — they’re fast, clean and efficient. But Tesla chief executive Elon Musk wants to take this to a whole new level with the factory producing the upcoming, low-cost Model 3, turning “the machine that makes the machine” into an “alien dreadnought.”
Not literally. The factory isn’t going to become self-aware and turn on its masters; after all, Musk is an avowed skeptic of the kind of general artificial intelligence that could enable killer machines. But the term “alien dreadnought,” Musk told analysts on a conference call Wednesday, refers to what the factory will look like once it’s fully developed in around five years. Its visage will likely inspire something between wonder and terror.
“It’s like, ‘What the hell is that?'” said Musk.
The machine will ultimately be so complex that no humans will be expected to operate it directly, or to participate in the actual building of each Model 3.
“You really can’t have people in the production line itself,” said Musk. “Otherwise you’ll automatically drop to people speed.”•
The recent Pew Research Center study of American attitudes toward human enhancement via biotechnology depicted the majority of us as wary of the application of these potential treatments. That may be true, but the numbers actually seemed surprisingly positive to me if you dream of a future of Transhumanism. As the possible benefits of CRISPR-enabled gene editing become more widely known, the numbers should swing toward enthusiasm.
Three Pew researchers, Dr. Cary Funk, David Masci and Lee Rainie conducted a Reddit AMA about the survey. A few exchanges follow.
Question:
What is the most surprising information you came across in your research?
Dr. Cary Funk:
For all the potential appeal of having sharper brains and stronger and healthier bodies, this study finds Americans’ are largely cautious about using emerging technologies in ways that push human capacities beyond what’s been possible before. About half or more Americans say they would turn each of these potential options down. More people say they are worried about each of these scenarios than say they are enthusiastic.
Lee Rainie:
One of the most striking things we have consistently seen in our work is that Americans generally are really positive about the long-term benefits they hope will come from science and technology. For instance, a majority of the public expects cancer to be cured in the next 50 years and they say that science and technology advances are good for society.
At the same time, when you ask people about particular scientific applications like the three potential enhancements we studied here, there is not nearly universal optimism. People are wary and often less sure that the hoped-for results will be achieved.
Question:
How much do you think people’s attitudes and/or regulations towards enhancements have slowed down transhumanism on a practical level? Do you think that this attitude will change anytime soon. Also: What do you believe is the first real step people will take, on a widespread, level toward enhancement?
David Masci:
Most people are not really pondering these issues very much, something we found out in our recent poll. When you think about it, this makes sense: Most scientists say that we’re still years away from dramatic advances in human enhancement. And while the U.S. government does regulate some things – like human cloning — it has not written regulations for a lot of the things we talk about in our report, like cognitive enhancement or smart blood.
Regarding the second part of your question: It’s quite possible that CRISPR and other new gene editing methods could lead to the first meaningful human enhancements. The researchers I spoke with, including CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna, say that gene editing is now dramatically easier and more accurate than it was just a few years ago. Already, there are hundreds if not thousands of labs around the world working with CRISPR (including one in China that edited embryos), making it quite possible that some sorts of enhancements will come out of this work.
Question:
What do you think the impact of Biomedical Technology/Augmentation will have on the concepts of human rights and ownership?
This technology will no doubt be expensive – what happens when you can no longer afford your monthly payment for your brain chip (e.g.), or when the majority of your body has been replaced with augmentations that you can no longer afford? Your car, home, etc can all be repossessed, but what about something that is surgically implanted into you, and now a part of your body?
Do you think we’ll see something crazy and dystopian likeRepo Men?
David Masci:
When I interviewed ethicists and religious thinkers, I found that many of them were very concerned that human enhancement could make inequality worse. But instead of being worried that people could not keep up with payments for existing enhancements, most of these thinkers were concerned that many people would not be able to afford them to begin with. Those who favor moving ahead with enhancement research argue that, as with most other technologies, enhancement options will, over time, become available to the non-wealthy as well as the wealthy. There was a time, they point out, when cars and smartphones were luxury items.•
In the adrenaline rush to create a mind-blowing new technology (and profit from it directly or indirectly), ethical questions can be lost in an institutional fog and in competition among companies and countries. Richard Feynman certainly felt he’d misplaced his moral compass in just such a way during the Manhattan Project.
The attempt to create Artificial General Intelligence is something of a Manhattan Project for the mind, and while the point is the opposite of destruction, some believe that even if it doesn’t end humans with a bang, AGI may lead our species to a whimpering end. The main difference today is those working on such projects seem keenly aware of the dangers that may arise while we’re harnessing the power of these incredible tools. That doesn’t mean the future is assured–there’ll be twists and turns we can’t yet imagine–but it’s a hopeful sign.
Bloomberg Neural Net reporter Jack Clark conducted a smart Q&A with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, discussing not only where his work fits into the scheme of Alphabet but also the larger implications of superintelligence. An excerpt:
Question:
You’ve said it could be decades before you’ve truly developed artificial general intelligence. Do you think it will happen within your lifetime?
Demis Hassabis:
Well, it depends on how much sleep deprivation I keep getting, I think, because I’m sure that’s not good for your health. So I am a little bit worried about that. I think it’s many decades away for full AI. I think it’s feasible. It could be done within our natural lifetimes, but it may be it’s the next generation. It depends. I’d be surprised if it took more than, let’s say, 100 years.
Question:
So once you’ve created a general intelligence, after having drunk the Champagne or whatever you do to celebrate, do you retire?
Demis Hassabis:
No. No, because …
Question:
You want to study science?
Demis Hassabis:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I really want to build the AI for. That’s what I’ve always dreamed about doing. That’s why I’ve been working on AI my whole life: I see it as the fastest way to make amazing progress in science.
Question:
Say you succeed and create a super intelligence. What happens next? Do you donate the technology to the United Nations?
Demis Hassabis:
I think it should be. We’ve talked about this a lot. Actually Eric Schmidt [executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent] has mentioned this. We’ve talked to him. We think that AI has to be used for the benefit of everyone. It should be used in a transparent way, and we should build it in an open way, which we’ve been doing with publishing everything we write. There should be scrutiny and checks and balances on that.
I think ultimately the control of this technology should belong to the world, and we need to think about how that’s done. Certainly, I think the benefits of it should accrue to everyone. Again, there are some very tricky questions there and difficult things to go through, but certainly that’s our belief of where things should go.•
The Esquire interview Michael Hainey did with Clint Eastwood (and his son Scott) is getting a lot of play, but it’s awful.
The Q&A is an example of dereliction of duty by the inquisitor, in much the same way that Maureen Dowd failed miserably in her early-campaign exchange with Donald Trump, treating him like a slightly naughty uncle, allowing him free reign to use the world greatest news organization to portray himself as something other than a dangerous bigot. Dowd seem to think it was a laugh riot at the time, though the campaign has since proved to be to serious as sin and literally riotous at times.
Trying to get a subject to talk himself into a corner usually isn’t a good gambit unless you’re willing to ask the tough questions once his nose hits the wall. If you accept the assignment and the conversation crosses into politics or race or any important matter, you best offer more than a nodding head and a blank slate for any opinion offered.
When Eastwood tells Hainey people troubled by racism (non-white folks, mostly) should “just get the fuck over it,” the interviewer should have pointed out to him that those same protesters might tell him to get over his dismay with their struggle for civil rights, a matter as grave as can be given our history of legal double standards based on skin color. It also would have been wonderful if the writer had pointed out to the actor-director that the reason many people call Trump a racist is because his pronouncements and policy proposals are often explicitly racist. That should have been the minimum expected of the interview, but, unfortunately, the empty chair at the 2012 RNC offered more pushback.
An excerpt:
Esquire:
Your characters have become touchstones in the culture, whether it’s Reagan invoking “Make my day” or now Trump … I swear he’s even practiced your scowl.
Clint Eastwood:
Maybe. But he’s onto something, because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up. That’s the kiss-ass generation we’re in right now. We’re really in a pussy generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist. And then when I did Gran Torino, even my associate said, “This is a really good script, but it’s politically incorrect.” And I said, “Good. Let me read it tonight.” The next morning, I came in and I threw it on his desk and I said, “We’re starting this immediately.”
Esquire:
What is the “pussy generation”?
Clint Eastwood:
All these people that say, “Oh, you can’t do that, and you can’t do this, and you can’t say that.” I guess it’s just the times.
Esquire:
What do you think Trump is onto?
Clint Eastwood:
What Trump is onto is he’s just saying what’s on his mind. And sometimes it’s not so good. And sometimes it’s … I mean, I can understand where he’s coming from, but I don’t always agree with it.
Esquire:
So you’re not endorsing him?
Clint Eastwood:
I haven’t endorsed anybody. I haven’t talked to Trump. I haven’t talked to anybody. You know, he’s a racist now because he’s talked about this judge. And yeah, it’s a dumb thing to say. I mean, to predicate your opinion on the fact that the guy was born to Mexican parents or something. He’s said a lot of dumb things. So have all of them. Both sides. But everybody—the press and everybody’s going, “Oh, well, that’s racist,” and they’re making a big hoodoo out of it. Just fucking get over it. It’s a sad time in history.•
Theoretical question: If intelligence augmentation became possible in a time of great wealth inequality, would the financial chasm permit some to have a huge IQ advantage, or would the early adopter billionaires merelysubsidize the initially expensive technologyfor the rest of us, allowing most to put a chip in the brain as readily as a smartphone in a pocket?
Ray Kurzweil feels that benefactor scenario is the one that will play out, while John Koetsier of VentureBeatfears that by 2035 “rich people will be thousands of times smarter than poor people.” I don’t in any way think 20 years is a realistic time frame for that type of advance, though I believe in the far longer run, when such things are possible, Kurzweil will likely be right.
An except:
In Kurzweil’s view, the human brain is composed of 100-neuron patterns that are repeated 300 million times. At some point — probably in the 2030s, Kurzweil says — mobile devices will connect to our brains. More specifically, our neocortex. They’ll be several billion times more powerful than early computers, and they will connect to synthetic neocortices in the cloud. Adding capacity to your brain will be as simple as adding cloud-based server capacity today.
“In some cases, my 300 million neocortex modules won’t cut it,” he said. “I may need a billion neocortex modules … and I can extend my brain in the cloud.”
As we do so, our intelligence will grow.
“It’s going to grow exponentially … our thinking will grow exponentially, and we’ll become millions of times smarter,” Kurzweil said.
That’s more than a little mind-blowing. And it has implications for everything in human life: sciences, arts, social behavior, you name it. But it also has an implication for socio-economic status.•
Perhaps I’m too much a product of the West, but I think the downfall of autocratic societies, especially protectionist ones, is contained in their DNA, China included. The system seems antithetical to the human spirit and opposed to nurturing a creative class. That could be the reason why China has thus far not produced any great products.
That said, it’s impossible to overlook how far and fast China’s economy has grown, all while dominating its own massive market. In a smart Backchannel article, Steven Levy analyzes, in the wake of Uber’s capitulation, the impervious nature of the nation’s tech sector for American companies. An excerpt:
China is the world’s biggest internet market, and it’s destined to become the leading economy of this century. American technology companies are desperate to compete there, with dreams of reaching the same dominant market share in China that they have elsewhere in the world. But instead of commercial triumph, there has been a series of ignominious retreats, even for some of the most glorious pillars of American tech: Amazon, eBay, Google, and so on. Meanwhile, Facebook hasn’t even gotten far enough in the market to make a retreat. It keeps edging closer, even to the point whereits CEO has learned to speak Mandarin— but can’t figure out how to enter the country while still following China’s strict rules of censorship and control of data.
Uber was the latest gladiator, and seemingly one that had a chance at victory. It was going head to head with its Chinese rival Didi with a war chest full of cash and a world domination mentality. As late as this past June, Uber waspredicting it would pass its rival within a year. Now Uber is simply the most recent American internet giant who decided China was not worth the fight. And it probably won’t be the last.
China is hard. The reasons differ according to the sector and the company, but the combination of culture, nationalism, and especially a government that likes to tilt the playing field has prevented American giants who excel overseas from dominating in China. This is not to say that Chinese government regulation drove Uber’s deal with Didi, which was clobbering Uber in the ride-sharing market; in fact, Uber felt it was treated fairly by a government interested in transportation innovation. According to reports on the ground, Didi used its local knowledge to act more nimbly in satisfying Chinese customers. But my guess is that if the American ride-sharing company had been more successful, China would have put a Mao-sized thumb on the scales.•
Yawning wealth inequality seems to be contributing to contemporary political and cultural chaos, so the 1% in the U.S. and Europe has been subject to intense scrutiny over the past few years, even if the result has been more analysis than policy action. In the case of Brazil, the beleaguered host of the soon-to-be Summer Games, distribution is so out of wack you need look no further than the excesses of the .0001% to understand how stacked a deck can be.
Proof comes in the pages of Alex Cuadros’ Brazillionaires, which examines the nation’s super-rich and how they got be that way. The short answer is that oligarchs were deemed useful by economic reformers who saw a quick way to lift millions from poverty, though the long-term effects of the deal with the devil are far more complicated.
In “Brazil’s Billionaire Problem,” Patrick Iber’s smart New Republic review of the book, the critic looks at South America’s largest state and sees a microcosm. An excerpt:
The most important billionaire to the book is unquestionably Eike Batista. Eike, as he is known, rose as high as the global number 8 on the Bloomberg list of billionaires, valued at over $30 billion dollars. He was open about his ambitions to become the world’s richest man. Eike is a champion speedboat racer, has state-of-the-art hair implants, and was once married to Luma de Oliveira, a Playboy model and carnaval queen. One of their sons, Thor Batista, documents his enormous muscular torso on Instagram and, until not long ago, drove a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren valued at more than a million US dollars. Eike and his family could hardly be more representative of the billionaire playboy lifestyle of the global ultra-wealthy.
Eike also serves as a symbol of the problems of today’s Brazil, and about half of the chapters in Brazillionaires are devoted to him. In spite of what would seem to be fundamental differences in outlook and ideology, Eike forged a pragmatic working relationship with the governments of the center-left Workers’ Party. Until President Dilma Roussef was suspended from office by hostile legislators this May, the country had been governed by the center-left Workers’ Party since 2003, first under the metalworker and union organizer Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and then under Dilma (2011-2016). Before Lula took office, Brazil’s wealthy worried about what would happen when a Lula, a former socialist, assumed power. Eike himself described it as a regression. But Lula was determined to break the association of left-wing rule with economic chaos, and built alliances with Brazilian oligarchs.
Lula embraced a developmentalist program that Cuadros describes as “wanting to bring the nation not so much into the twenty-first century, with tech and high finance, but into the twentieth, with ports, dams, and big, basic Brazilian companies.” Because Eike controlled a suite of interrelated companies, mostly in the mining and gas sectors, and had made big bets on offshore drilling, he received major loans from Brazil’s state-controlled development bank. He grew close to Lula.
Corruption is almost an expected part of business and political deals in Brazil, and Eike, though often portrayed as an “American-style”, “self-made” entrepreneur, was in no way exceptional. He helped finance a flattering biopic about Lula and spent quarter of a million dollars at an auction to purchase a suit Lula had worn to his inauguration. But in spite of evidence of corruption and conflicts of interest through the political system, for a time everyone seemed to be benefitting. Brazil’s economy made enormous strides. The middle class grew and quality of life standards among the poor improved dramatically. Malnutrition was cut in half. One of Lula signature programs, Bolsa Família, provides direct cash transfers to the poor, partially in exchange for children’s school attendance. Many of the billionaires Cuadros interviewed justified their wealth with some version of the “what’s good for GM is good for the country” argument. Most Brazilians found the approach acceptable: Lula left office with an approval rating over eighty percent.
Mentioned a couple days back that Donald Trump’s gross adoration of Vladimir Putin and other autocrats recalls similar warm feelings some American oligarchs felt for Fascists during the 1930s. In an impassioned Guardian essay, Paul Mason, who believes we may soon find ourselves post-capitalism, compares the gathering clouds of that earlier decade to our own WTF moment, with the ugly political rise of the hideous hotelier clearly not an isolated case of extremism.
Mason concludes history isn’t exactly repeating itself, that we’re better off today in our globalized system, save one toxic sticking point, that “an entire generation of humanity has been brutalized.” The writer points to ISIS slayings and minority scapegoating and racist social-media trolling to support his point that we’re worse in this important way eighty years on. Perhaps, but I’m not wholly convinced. Antisemitism in Europe in the first few decades of the 20th century was deeply pernicious and the Jim Crow South was far more heinous than anything that exists in contemporary America, for all our continued instances of racial injustice.
The best argument in favor of our destabilized media, that communication breakdown, is our unmatched access to answer these outrages, to organize against them. There have never been more ways for people of good conscience to refuse to remain silent. Mason is aware of this, acknowledging “we have billions of educated and literate brains on the planet; and we have the concept of universal and inalienable human rights.”
His opening:
Things are happening with machine-gun rapidity: Brexit, the Turkish coup, Islamist massacres in France,the surrounding of Aleppo, the nomination of Donald Trump. From the USA to France to post-Brexit Britain, the high levels of public racism and xenophobia, reflected now in the outpourings of politicians with double-digit poll ratings, have got people asking: is it a rerun of the 1930s?
On the face of it, the similarities are real. Britain’s vote to leave the EU parallels its panicked decision to quit the gold standard in September 1931 – the first major country to quit the global economic system. Labour’s incipient split mirrors the one that left the party out of power for 14 years. And of course the economic background – a depression and a banking crisis – has echoes in the present situation.
But a proper study of the 1930s reveals our situation today to be better and more salvageable in many ways, although in one respect worse.•
It seems the tools we’ve created have plunged us into a permanent state of gamesmanship between listeners and leakers, the governments and corporations that want to know as much as possible about us and those that strike back, who are often as dubious as the ones they seek to neutralize (see: Assange, Julian). I don’t see anyway out, even if the whole thing is needless. Surveillance capitalism certainly isn’t good for citizens and there’s thus far little evidence that we’re safer for all the cameras and tracking by authorities. In fact, the most useful result of ubiquitous video cameras has been the exposure of institutional abuses by private citizens.
In “Resisting the Security State,” a 3 Quarks Daily essay, the excellent thinker Thomas R. Wells argues that the nature of terrorism (“warfare that is more virtual than real”) makes it impervious to surveillance and such. His opening:
Liberalism is a centuries old political project of taming the power of the state so that it works for the ruled not the rulers. Can it survive the security state midwifed by global terrorism? Only if we take back responsibility for managing the dark political emotions of fear and anger that terrorists seek to conjure.
How do we resist the security state?
First, by challenging its effectiveness. PRISM and the other opaquely named universal surveillance programmes seem to have been approximately zero use in predicting terrorist attacks before they happen; last year the TSA failed to detect 67 out of 70 weapons and explosives carried by mystery shoppers. Security expert Bruce Schneier characterises the counter-terrorism security measures that increasingly dominate our experience of public spaces as mostly theatrical, designed to “make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security”. (And actually they can’t even manage that.)
Second, by challenging the cost-effectiveness of the security state even if it worked as it is supposed to. The loss of our privacy is not a small price to pay for preventing terrorism and saving lives. Firstly because we should be consistent. If we wouldn’t give up privacy rights to reduce minor risks of death in other contexts (like installing government cameras in every bathroom to save people from bathtub slips), what rational reason do we have for giving up all our privacy to the government to reduce the risk of terrorism from almost nothing to possibly slightly less? Secondly because privacy is not an ornament but the heart of liberalism. In a liberal society the people should be mysterious and the government should be transparent; the more these are reversed the further we go towards despotism.
But there is a further problem with the security state besides its ineffectiveness and inefficiency: It is a fundamentally incoherent project.•
Italo Balbo, Mussolini’s Air Minister, created an experimental office environment that was a technocrat’s dream, humming with gizmos, even if it shared some of the fascist tendencies of his politics. There was an Automat-style lunchroom and a tubing system that delivered coffee to desks, which was wonderful provided you weren’t aging, sickly or disabled. Then you weren’t allowed to work there. There was no opting out of the system, not until Mussolini ultimately met the business end of a meat hook. An article from the February 23, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reports on Balbo’s “good ministry.”
There are antecedents in our nation’s history for the shocking and disgraceful rise of the aspiring fascist Donald Trump, especially when you consider his “America First” slogan is lifted directly from Lindbergh and the like who spearheaded the domestic Hitler-appeasement movement. In fact, if you go back to the 1930s and look at the landscape more broadly, you’ll notice a surprising number of U.S. plutocrats who thought our country doomed before the autocracy of Mussolini–Hitler, even–envious of the “orderliness” of Labor in those countries. The trains were supposed to arrive on time, as were the conductors. There would be no protests.
In a Wall Street Journal essay, David Frum recalls another populist insurgent, William Jennings Bryan, who wasn’t exactly Trump but can perhaps explain aspects of his emergence, and, maybe, eventual decline. Frum notes that both seized on the frustrations of whites who’d come to feel culturally and financially dispossessed, wooing them with easy answers and oratory skills suited to their respective moments.
One Frum line about Trump supporters seems dubious to me: “[They’re experiencing] not only the heaviest economic cost but the most onerous social cost too: family crackup, addiction, suicide, lost cultural standing, lost political respect, lost deference to their norms and expectations.” This economic narrative has been partly debunked, and the issues mentioned threaten almost all Americans, with technology, globalization and tax codes conspiring to destabilize. In response, some are buying into an impossible and ugly retreat into the past and others are moving hopefully if anxiously toward tomorrow, aiming to remedy problems without turning back the clock. And if those disappearing “norms and expectations” are steeped in racial privilege–which they are–they shouldn’t be preserved, no matter how discomfiting some may find that reality.
The opening:
Underfinanced, thinly organized and reviled in the media, the Trump campaign has nonetheless apparently pulled even in some recent polls with Hillary Clinton. Every pundit can itemize the long list of things that Donald Trump has done all wrong throughout this election season—and yet here he is, poised to overcome all dissent at the Republican convention in Cleveland and to run a competitive race afterward.
Trump’s first and strongest advocate in conservative media, the columnist Ann Coulter, has vividly described the radicalism of what has happened: “Trump isn’t a standard-issue GOP, trying to balance the ticket to get his party into power. He’s starting a new party! He’s just blown up the old GOP.”
Dazed and baffled, the old GOP is still struggling to understand how it has reached this point. One way to understand the situation is to look at an unexpected historical parallel: the populist insurgency led by William Jennings Bryan, who was three times —in 1896, 1900 and 1908—the Democratic Party’s candidate for president.
As individuals, the gaudy businessman from New York City and the Great Commoner from the prairies don’t have much in common. But the political movements that they have championed do share much in common—both on the way up and, perhaps, on the way down.•
Donald Trump, Mussolini with moobs, could no doubt do grave damage to America in just four years with his toxic mix of narcissism, bigotry and poor judgement. But isn’t considerable damage already done before he even enters office if the majority choose to elect a white supremacist and aspiring fascist? Haven’t we become a strange and different thing, not quite America? For all the troubling fear of foreigners, wouldn’t we have become something foreign to what we’re supposed to be? We’ll have voluntarily surrendered our principles to a sickening degree, created a landscape where the heinous could become routine, where “unthinkable” things, as the GOP nominee puts it, are possible.
From Ezra Klein’s Vox piece about the new abnormal:
What we just witnessed in Cleveland and Philadelphia defies our normal political vocabulary. We are used to speaking of American politics as split between the two major parties. It’s Democrats versus Republicans, liberals versus conservatives, left versus right.
But not this election. The conventions showed that this is something different. This campaign is not merely a choice between the Democratic and Republican parties, but between a normal political party and an abnormal one.
TheDemocratic Party’s conventionwas a normal political party’s convention. The party nominated Hillary Clinton, a longtime party member with deep experience in government. Clinton was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, the runner-up in the primary. Barack Obama, the sitting president, spoke in favor of Clinton. Various Democratic luminaries gave speeches endorsing Clinton by name. The assembled speakers criticized the other party’s nominee, arguing that he would be a bad president and should be defeated at the polls.
That isn’t to say that Democrats didn’t show divisions or expose fault lines. They did. Political parties are chaotic things. The Democratic Party’s primary was unusually bitter, and listening to the loud “boos” of Sanders’s most committed supporters, there’s real reason to wonder whether Democratswill fracture in coming years. But for now, the Democrats nominated a normal candidate, held a normal convention, and remain a normal political party.
The Republican Party’s convention was not a normal political party’s convention.•
Democracy is only as good as the people, and information is only useful if those crunching the numbers possess sound, critical minds. Smartphones have allowed those in the furthest corners of the globe to have access to an almost unlimited library of ideas and data. How will they use it?
In America and other developed nations, unending streams of info have created a stubbornly chaotic new normal, with conspiracies growing like weeds and democracy coming to seem less like a village than a lynch mob. Will other people, unencumbered by our baggage, manage the modern arrangement in a saner way?
In a Washington Post piece, Caitlin Dewey writes of a recent Reddit Ask Me Anything with members of the Maasai tribe, who are already connected to the rest of us, which might be a blessing. An excerpt:
Earlier this week, Redditors were given a pretty neat opportunity: Two leaders from the Maasai tribe, a seminomadic people living in Western Kenya, signed on to do an “Ask Me Anything.” Redditors asked about the standard stuff: religious practices, diet, what people in the village do for fun. And then, inevitably, one user asked the chiefs to describe their favorite “kind of Internet porn.”
“They don’t believe it and don’t know what it is,” the chiefs’ interlocutor replied — to a giddily gleeful audience. “Don’t think or know about pornography. They are asking is it normal in America.”
The assembled Redditors went wild. It was their crowning achievement. They concluded that they had, in what may have been the Redditiest moment ever Reddited, introduced the concept of Internet porn to a culture that had not encountered it.
But what actually happened is slightly more complicated … and truthfully, more fascinating. Chief Joseph and Assistant Chief Leshan had, in fact, seen Internet porn before, because data-enabled mobile phones have actually become a huge part of even their remote, disconnected community.
As distant as the Maasai may seem from the modern world — the tribe has access to neither running water nor electricity, and many of the questions in the AMA centered on customs like drinking goats’ blood and circumcision without anesthetics — they do increasingly have access to forums like Reddit.
As Adam Schiller, the 24-year-old volunteer who set up the AMA, put it: “Imagine having porn before you have power.”•
