Yoho Tsuda, Tree with Yellow Leaves, 1980

via:

America and the Promised Land

From an American perspective, the Israel-Palestine conflict has largely exited center stage in recent years. And yet, comprehending the evolving interests, sentiments, and coalitions behind the US-Israel alliance may be the best way to understand the fundamentals that define America’s foreign policy more broadly.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Prophets without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution, Oxford University Press, 2022.

Walter Russel Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Knopf, 2022.

Though it has dragged on for three-quarters of a century, the metaphysics of Israel’s role in the international relations and the centrality of Israel-Palestine conflict in global politics continue to befuddle onlookers. How could this speck of land inspire such emotional intensity and command such outsize influence over US foreign policy?

In The Arc of a Covenant, Walter Russell Mead, a celebrated American diplomatic historian who has written widely on foreign policy in the idiom of grand strategy, uses this lacuna as his point of departure. The result of a decade-long project to reinterpret Jewish and Israeli history in the United States, the book offers a broad-tent analysis that smashes cherished conceits and challenges long-held assumptions. Rather than placing all the customary figures at the head of the table, Mead rearranges the chairs to give us a glimpse of something new.

In an earlier book, Special Providence, he established himself as the rarest kind of foreign-policy thinker, playing the part of the responsible iconoclast who seeks to educate Americans about the deeper roots of their foreign policy. There, Mead described four foreign-policy traditions that have at times defined America’s national interest: the Wilsonian, which seeks a world safe for democracy; the Hamiltonian, which prioritizes America’s economic interests; the Jeffersonian, which aims to protect America from the corrupting influences of the outside world; and the Jacksonian, which envisions an America so powerful that it can avoid foreign entanglements and focus on the home front.

For Mead, the ongoing interaction between these traditions makes America what it is. Different traditions will take precedence from one period to the next, though all of them are continuously present in the country’s foreign-policy thinking. Mead’s quiet aim is to prepare the US for a period when a mixture of Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism could become ascendant. Since then, as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, he has tackled all the big issues of great-power importance, such as the West’s rivalry with China, the realignment of global political forces, and civilizational crises like climate change.

Yet now, in this moment of profound crisis for the post-Cold War international order when most commentators are focused on the return of twentieth-century geopolitics, Mead has surprisingly pivoted to a region and a conflict that has largely exited center stage. Focusing squarely on the nature of the US-Israeli alliance, he insists that only by grappling with the evolving interests, sentiments, and coalitions behind it can we understand the fundamental factors that define America’s foreign policy more broadly.

Manifest Destinies

For Mead, Israel “occupies a continent in the American mind.” It is neither “America’s most important ally nor its most valuable trading partner,” he writes, “but the idea that the Jews would return to the lands of the Bible and build a state there touches some of the most important themes and cherished hopes of American religion and culture.” Mead’s ambition is to excavate America’s Christian past and trace its unanticipated intersections with US foreign policy. (...)

All Geopolitics is Local

For a suggestive counterpart to Mead’s book, we can turn to Prophets Without Honor, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami’s look back at the 2000 Camp David Summit and the unraveling of any commitment to a two-state future. Rather than situating Israel in the context of an always-evolving American foreign-policy identity, Ben-Ami places it smack in the center of Middle East politics. While Mead goes broad, Ben-Ami, who is also a trained historian, homes in on the particulars. (...)

Ben-Ami spends considerable attention analyzing the hopes and follies that have defined the so-called peace process since those momentous days at Camp David and Taba, bringing the story up to the 2020 Abraham Accords, the end product of Donald Trump’s “deal of the century.” He reminds us that there is an extensive history of proposed economic incentives designed to foster normalization with Israel. But the agreement that Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates eventually accepted was one where Palestine is nowhere to be seen. (The same was true when Sudan and Morocco subsequently normalized their relations with Israel.) Ben-Ami thus favors Hezbollah’s description of the accords as a “deal of shame.” It was always a dirty secret that Arab states’ official advocacy for Palestinian statehood served as a smokescreen for shoring up corrupt oligarchies at home. But now, as Ben-Ami shows, the masks have come off.

by Ivan Krastev and Leonard Bernardo, Project Syndicate |  Read more:

Image: Knopf

When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked

The doorbell. The intercom. The elevator. Once upon a time, beginning in the late nineteenth century, pushing the button that activated such devices was a strange new experience. The electric push button, the now mundane-seeming interface between human and machine, was originally a spark for wonder, anxiety, and social transformation.

As media studies scholar Rachel Plotnick details, people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers.

“Some believed that users should creatively interrogate these objects and learn how they worked as part of a broader electrical education,” Plotnick explains. “Others…suggested that pushing buttons could help users to avoid complicated and laborious technological experiences. These approaches reflected different groups’ attempts at managing fears of electricity.”

Electric push buttons, essentially on/off switches for circuits, came on the market in the 1880s. As with many technological innovations, they appeared in multiple places in different forms. Their predecessors were such mechanical and manual buttons as the keys of musical instruments and typewriters. Before electricity, buttons triggered a spring mechanism or a lever. (...)

At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two,” according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be “simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life. (...)

Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.” That resonates now, more than a century later, when technology is even more complicated and even more intimately entwined with our lives. The “black box” reigns supreme.

by Matthew Wills, JSTOR Daily |  Read more:

Image: markk

[ed. Coincidentally, this is an issue I've been thinking about lately. Here's the microwave panel over my stove. Try finding the light button on the damn thing in the dark - it's nearly impossible. No tactile feedback whatsoever (or easy way to fix it if it ever gets broken). A good example of design de-evolution.] 

The US Supreme Court Case That Could Bring Tech Giants To Their Knees

Two weeks ago, the US supreme court decided that it would hear Gonzalez v Google, a landmark case that is giving certain social-media moguls sleepless nights for the very good reason that it could blow a large hole in their fabulously lucrative business models. Since this might be good news for democracy, it’s also a reason for the rest of us to sit up and pay attention.

First, some background. In 1996, two US lawmakers, Representative Chris Cox from California and Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon, inserted a clause into the sprawling telecommunications bill that was then on its way through Congress. The clause eventually became section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and read: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

The motives of the two politicians were honourable: they had seen how providers of early web-hosting services had been held liable for damage caused by content posted by users over whom they had no control. It’s worth remembering that those were early days for the internet and Cox and Wyden feared that if lawyers had henceforth to crawl over everything hosted on the medium, then the growth of a powerful new technology would be crippled more or less from birth. And in that sense they were right.

What they couldn’t have foreseen, though, was that section 230 would turn into a get-out-of-jail card for some of the most profitable companies on the planet – such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, which built platforms enabling their users to publish anything and everything without the owners incurring legal liability for it. So far-reaching was the Cox-Wyden clause that a law professor eventually wrote a whole book about it, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet. A bit hyperbolic, perhaps, but you get the idea.

Now spool forward to November 2015 when Nohemi Gonzalez, a young American studying in Paris, was gunned down in a restaurant by the Islamic State terrorists who murdered 129 other people that night. Her family sued Google, arguing that its YouTube subsidiary had used algorithms to push IS videos to impressionable viewers, using the information that the company had collected about them. Their petition seeking a supreme court review argues that “videos that users viewed on YouTube were the central manner in which IS enlisted support and recruits from areas outside the portions of Syria and Iraq which it controlled”.

The key thing about the Gonzalez suit, though, is not that YouTube should not be hosting IS videos (section 230 allows that) but that its machine-learning “recommendation” algorithms, which may push other, perhaps more radicalising, videos, renders it liable for the resulting damage. Or, to put it crudely, while YouTube may have legal protection for hosting whatever its users post on it, it does not – and should not – have protection for an algorithm that determines what they should view next.

This is dynamite for the social-media platforms because recommendation engines are the key to their prosperity. They are the power tools that increase the user “engagement” – keeping people on the platform to leave the digital trails (viewing, sharing, liking, retweeting, purchasing, etc) – that enable the companies to continually refine user profiles for targeted advertising. And make unconscionable profits from doing so. If the supreme court were to decide that these engines did not enjoy section 230 protection, then social media firms would suddenly find the world a much colder place. 

by John Naughton, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Eugene García/EPA

Pillars of Creation

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured a lush, highly detailed landscape – the iconic Pillars of Creation – where new stars are forming within dense clouds of gas and dust. The three-dimensional pillars look like majestic rock formations, but are far more permeable. These columns are made up of cool interstellar gas and dust that appear – at times – semi-transparent in near-infrared light.

Webb’s new view of the Pillars of Creation, which were first made famous when imaged by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, will help researchers revamp their models of star formation by identifying far more precise counts of newly formed stars, along with the quantities of gas and dust in the region. Over time, they will begin to build a clearer understanding of how stars form and burst out of these dusty clouds over millions of years.

Newly formed stars are the scene-stealers in this image from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). These are the bright red orbs that typically have diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars. When knots with sufficient mass form within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars.

What about those wavy lines that look like lava at the edges of some pillars? These are ejections from stars that are still forming within the gas and dust. Young stars periodically shoot out supersonic jets that collide with clouds of material, like these thick pillars. This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water. The crimson glow comes from the energetic hydrogen molecules that result from jets and shocks. This is evident in the second and third pillars from the top – the NIRCam image is practically pulsing with their activity. These young stars are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old.

Although it may appear that near-infrared light has allowed Webb to “pierce through” the clouds to reveal great cosmic distances beyond the pillars, there are almost no galaxies in this view. Instead, a mix of translucent gas and dust known as the interstellar medium in the densest part of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk blocks our view to much of the of the deeper universe.

by NASA | Read more:

Image: NASA/Black Hole (Twitter)

[ed. Some peaks are 7 light years high.]

Mark Lanegan

 

Lucrecia Dalt

[ed. See also: Lucrecia Dalt is unstuck in time (Fader).]

RecipeTin Japan

Oysters with Tosazu dressing 3 ways
Image: Yumiko

[ed. I like this site for Japanese cooking, it's simple and straightforward. See also (for example): Grilled mini-tomatoes wrapped in pork; Pork and cabbage omelette (Tonpeiyaki); Katsu curry (Japanese curry with chicken cutlet). RecipeTin Japan.]

Hosokawa Ryohei, Tokyo At Night, My Modern Met | Read more:
via:

The Gendered Ape

It’s not always easy to talk about bonobos at academic gatherings. There is no issue with fellow primatologists, who are used to straightforward descriptions of sexual behavior and know the recent evidence. But it’s different with people outside my field, such as anthropologists, philosophers, or psychologists. They become fidgety, scratch their heads, snicker, or adopt a puzzled look. Why do bonobos stump them?

One reason for the discomfort is excessive shyness about erotic behavior, which bonobos exhibit in all positions that we can imagine, and even some that we can’t. Moreover, these apes do it in all partner combinations. People assume that animals use sex only for reproduction, but I estimate that three quarters of bonobo sex has nothing to do with it.

But there is a deeper reason why bonobos are the black sheep of our extended family despite being as close to us as chimpanzees. They fail to conform to the traditional model of the human ancestor. Most evolutionary scenarios of our species stress male bonding, male dominance, hunting, aggression, and territorial warfare. This is how our species conquered the earth, it is thought.

Chimpanzee behavior, which can be quite violent, lends support to this narrative. This ape is therefore happily embraced as model. The peaceful, female-dominated bonobo, on the other hand, doesn’t fit. The species is sidelined, such as in “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” in which Steven Pinker calls bonobos “very strange primates.” And Richard Wrangham, in “The Goodness Paradox,” portrays them as an evolutionary offshoot, who “have gone their separate way.” In other words, bonobos may be delightful apes, they are bizarre and irrelevant. Let’s just ignore them!

According to pioneering fieldworker Takayoshi Kano and his students, bonobo groups in the forest regularly “mingle” and “fuse” without any fighting. They share food between communities and occasionally adopt orphaned youngsters from their neighbors. All of this presents a huge contrast with chimpanzees, which know only various degrees of hostility between communities.

My own studies made matters worse by describing bonobos as polyamorous flower children. Intense erotic contact, known as GG-rubbing, is common among females. It allows them to form the powerful sisterhood that is the glue of their society.

Since the species has thrown a huge wrench into popular origin myths, we see regular attempts to revise our views, such as when journalists or political pundits tout observations of bonobo aggression and predation. Unfortunately for them, predation means very little. In biology, it falls under feeding behavior, not aggression. Anyone who has been chased by a bull realizes that a species’ diet says little about its aggressiveness.

But it’s true that bonobos occasionally fight. In fact, their extensive sexual activity would make no sense if their society were free of social tensions. The main purpose of this activity is to keep the peace. “Make love – not war” is a bonobo slogan.

by Frans de Waal, 3QD | Read more:
Image: Frans de Waal
[ed. See also: Short Essays On Gender Differences By Frans De Waal (3QD)]

Interview: Ted Chiang

EZRA KLEIN: I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” For years, I have kept a list of dream guests for the show. And as long as that list has been around, Ted Chiang has been on top of it. He’s a science fiction writer, but that’s underselling him. He writes perfect short stories — perfect.

And he writes them slowly. He’s published only two collections, the “Stories of Your Life and Others” in 2002, and then, “Exhalation” more recently in 2019. And the stories in these books, they’ve won every major science fiction award you can win multiple times over — four Hugo’s, four Nebula’s, four Locus Awards. If you’ve seen the film “Arrival,” which is great — and if you haven’t, what is wrong with you — that is based on a story from the ’02 collection, the “Story of Your Life.”

I’ve just, I’ve always wondered about what kind of mind would create Chiang’s stories. They have this crazy economy in them, like not a word out of place, perfect precision. They’re built around really complicated scientific ideas, really heavy religious ideas. I actually think in a way that is not often recognized, Chiang is one of the great living writers of religious fiction, even though he’s an atheist and a sci-fi legend. But somehow, the stories, at least in my opinion, they’re never difficult. They’re very humane and propulsive. They keep moving. They’re cerebral, they’re gentle.

But man, the economy of them is severe. That’s not always the case for science fiction, which I find, anyway, can be wordy, like spilling over with explanation and exposition. Not these. So I was thrilled — I was thrilled — when Chiang agreed to join on the show. But one of the joys of doing these conversations is, I get to listen to people’s minds working in real-time. You can watch or hear them think and speak and muse.

But Chiang’s rhythm is really distinct. Most people come on the show — and this goes for me, too — speak like we’re painting in watercolor, like a lot of brush strokes, a lot of color. If you get something wrong or you have a false start, you just draw right over it or you start a new sheet. But listening to Chiang speak, I understood his stories better. He speaks like he’s carving marble. Like, every stroke has to be considered so carefully, never delivering a strike, or I guess, a word, before every alternative has been considered and rejected. It’s really cool to listen to.

Chiang doesn’t like to talk about himself. And more than he doesn’t like to, he won’t. Believe me, I’ve tried a couple of times. It didn’t make it into the final show here. But he will talk about ideas. And so we do. We talk about the difference between magic and technology, between science fiction and fantasy, the problems with superheroes and nature of free will, whether humanity will make A.I. suffer, what would happen if we found parrots on Mars. There’s so many cool ideas in this show, just as there always are in his fiction. Many of them, of course, come from his fiction. So relax into this one. It’s worth it. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Here’s Ted Chiang.

So you sent me this wonderful speech questioning the old Arthur C. Clarke line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” what don’t you like about that line?

TED CHIANG: So, when people quote the Arthur C. Clarke line, they’re mostly talking about marvelous phenomena, that technology allows us to do things that are incredible and things that, in the past, would have been described as magic, simply because they were marvelous and inexplicable. But one of the defining aspects of technology is that eventually, it becomes cheaper, it becomes available to everybody. So things that were, at one point, restricted to the very few are suddenly available to everybody. Things like television — when television was first invented, yeah, that must have seemed amazing, but now television is not amazing because everyone has one. Radio is not amazing. Computers are not amazing. Everyone has one.

Magic is something which, by its nature, never becomes widely available to everyone. Magic is something that resides in the person and often is an indication that the universe sort of recognizes different classes of people, that there are magic wielders and there are non-magic wielders. That is not how we understand the universe to work nowadays. That reflects a kind of premodern understanding of how the universe worked. But since the Enlightenment, we have moved away from that point of view. And a lot of people miss that way of looking at the world, because we want to believe that things happen to us for a reason, that the things that happen to you are, in some way, tied to the things you did. (...)

EZRA KLEIN: You have this comparison of what science fiction and fantasy are good for. And you write that science fiction helps us to think through the implications of ideas and that fantasy is good at taking metaphors and making them literal. But what struck me reading that is it often seems to me that your work, it takes scientific ideas and uses them as metaphor. So is there such a difference between the two?

TED CHIANG: So when it comes to fiction about the speculative or the fantastic, one way to think about these kind of stories is to ask, are they interested in the speculative element literally or metaphorically or both? For example, at one end of the spectrum, you’ve got Kafka and in “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa turning into an insect. That is pretty much entirely a metaphor. It’s a stand-in for alienation. At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got someone like Kim Stanley Robinson. And when he writes about terraforming Mars, Mars is not standing in for anything else. He is writing very literally about Mars.

Now, most speculative or fantastic fiction falls somewhere in between those two. And most of it is interested in both the literal and the metaphorical at the same time, but to varying degrees. So, in the context of magic, when fantasy fiction includes people who can wield magic, magic stands in for the idea that certain individuals are special. Magic is a way for fantasy to say that you are not just a cog in the machine, that you are more than someone who pushes paper in an office or tightens bolts on an assembly line. Magic is a way of externalizing the idea that you are special. (...)

EZRA KLEIN: Let me flip this now. We’re spending billions to invent artificial intelligence. At what point is a computer program responsible for its own actions?

TED CHIANG: Well, in terms of at what point does that happen, it’s unclear, but it’s a very long ways from us right now. With regard to the question of, will we create machines that are moral agents, I would say that we can think about that in three different questions. One is, can we do so? Second is, will we do so? And the third one is, should we do so?

I think it is entirely possible for us to build machines that are moral agents. Because I think there’s a sense in which human beings are very complex machines and we are moral agents, which means that there are no physical laws preventing a machine from being a moral agent. And so there’s no obstacle that, in principle, would prevent us from building something like that, although it might take us a very, very long time to get there.

As for the question of, will we do so, if you had asked me, like, 10 or 15 years ago, I would have said, we probably won’t do it, simply because, to me, it seems like it’s way more trouble than it’s worth. In terms of expense, it would be on the order of magnitude of the Apollo program. And it is not at all clear to me that there’s any good reason for undertaking such a thing. However, if you ask me now, I would say like, well, OK, we clearly have obscenely wealthy people who can throw around huge sums of money at whatever they want basically on a whim. So maybe one of them will wind up funding a program to create machines that are conscious and that are moral agents.

However, I should also note that I don’t believe that any of the current big A.I. research programs are on the right track to create a conscious machine. I don’t think that’s what any of them are trying to do. So then as for the third question of, should we do so, should we make machines that are conscious and that are moral agents, to that, my answer is, no, we should not. Because long before we get to the point where a machine is a moral agent, we will have machines that are capable of suffering.

Suffering precedes moral agency in sort of the developmental ladder. Dogs are not moral agents, but they are capable of experiencing suffering. Babies are not moral agents yet, but they have the clear potential to become so. And they are definitely capable of experiencing suffering. And the closer that an entity gets to being a moral agent, the more that it’s suffering, it’s deserving of consideration, the more we should try and avoid inflicting suffering on it. So in the process of developing machines that are conscious and moral agents, we will be inevitably creating billions of entities that are capable of suffering. And we will inevitably inflict suffering on them. And that seems to me clearly a bad idea.

EZRA KLEIN: But wouldn’t they also be capable of pleasure? I mean, that seems to me to raise an almost inversion of the classic utilitarian thought experiment. If we can create these billions of machines that live basically happy lives that don’t hurt anybody and you can copy them for almost no marginal dollar, isn’t it almost a moral imperative to bring them into existence so they can lead these happy machine lives?

TED CHIANG: I think that it will be much easier to inflict suffering on them than to give them happy fulfilled lives. And given that they will start out as something that resembles ordinary software, something that is nothing like a living being, we are going to treat them like crap. The way that we treat software right now, if, at some point, software were to gain some vague glimmer of sentience, of the ability to perceive, we would be inflicting uncountable amounts of suffering on it before anyone paid any attention to them.

Because it’s hard enough to give legal protections to human beings who are absolutely moral agents. We have relatively few legal protections for animals who, while they are not moral agents, are capable of suffering. And so animals experience vast amounts of suffering in the modern world. And animals, we know that they suffer. There are many animals that we love, that we really, really love. Yet, there’s vast animal suffering. So there is no software that we love. So the way that we will wind up treating software, again, assuming that software ever becomes conscious, they will inevitably fall lower on the ladder of consideration. So we will treat them worse than we treat animals. And we treat animals pretty badly.

EZRA KLEIN: I think this is actually a really provocative point. So I don’t know if you’re a Yuval Noah Harari reader. But he often frames his fear of artificial intelligence as simply that A.I. will treat us the way we treat animals. And we treat animals, as you say, unbelievably terribly. But I haven’t really thought about the flip of that, that maybe the danger is that we will simply treat A.I. like we treat animals. And given the moral consideration we give animals, whose purpose we believe to be to serve us for food or whatever else it may be, that we are simply opening up almost unimaginable vistas of immorality and cruelty that we could inflict pretty heedlessly, and that given our history, there’s no real reason to think we won’t. That’s grim. [LAUGHS]

TED CHIANG: It is grim, but I think that it is by far the more likely scenario. I think the scenario that, say, Yuval Noah Harari is describing, where A.I.’s treat us like pets, that idea assumes that it’ll be easy to create A.I.’s who are vastly smarter than us, that basically, the initial A.I.’s will go from software, which is not a moral agent and not intelligent at all. And then the next thing that will happen will be software which is super intelligent and also has volition.

Whereas I think that we’ll proceed in the other direction, that right now, software is simpler than an amoeba. And eventually, we will get software which is comparable to an amoeba. And eventually, we’ll get software which is comparable to an ant, and then software that is comparable to a mouse, and then software that’s comparable to a dog, and then software that is comparable to a chimpanzee. We’ll work our way up from the bottom.

A lot of people seem to think that, oh, no, we’ll immediately jump way above humans on whatever ladder they have. I don’t think that is the case. And so in the direction that I am describing, the scenario, we’re going to be the ones inflicting the suffering. Because again, look at animals, look at how we treat animals.

EZRA KLEIN: So I hear you, that you don’t think we’re going to invent superintelligent self-replicating A.I. anytime soon. But a lot of people do. A lot of science fiction authors do. A lot of technologists do. A lot of moral philosophers do. And they’re worried that if we do, it’s going to kill us all. What do you think that question reflects? Is that a question that is emergent from the technology? Or is that something deeper about how humanity thinks about itself and has treated other beings?

TED CHIANG: I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.

Let’s think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there.

Now if the entire world operates according to — is run on those principles, how much do you worry about a new technology then? I think much, much less than we do now. Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs. It’s not intrinsic to that technology. It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.

It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their profits at our expense?

And so, I feel like that is kind of the unexamined assumption in a lot of discussions about the inevitability of technological change and technologically-induced unemployment. Those are fundamentally about capitalism and the fact that we are sort of unable to question capitalism. We take it as an assumption that it will always exist and that we will never escape it. And that’s sort of the background radiation that we are all having to live with. But yeah, I’d like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism.

by Ezra Klein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Arturo Villarrubia

[ed. I was re-reading a story of Ted's this morning - The Lifecycle of Software Objects (read it, it'll make an impression) and thought I'd repost this interview. Podcast available here. See also: Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter (Ted Chiang, New Yorker)]

Mr. Personality

The New England Patriots defeated the Cleveland Browns 38-15 on Sunday, moving head coach Bill Belichick to 324 career wins between the regular season and playoffs.

Rookie Brenden Schooler played a big role in sealing the win for the Patriots with a key special teams play. (...)

After his fumble recovery, Schooler took the ball and attempted to present it to Belichick.

Given the significance of Belichick's victory — 324 wins moves him into a tie for second-most in NFL history with George Halas — it's not hard to imagine that Schooler might have thought his gesture might be received well.

It was not. (...)

Bill Belichick is a lot of things, but he is not very sentimental, especially not while there is still time left on the game clock, plays left to call, and refs left to yell at.

by Tyler Lauletta, Insider | Read more:
Image: YouTube

Moose Man

Memories of the man who knew moose like no other (ADN)

Image: Ned Rozell

During the last three decades, Van Ballenberghe and those who have worked with him have cranked out a library of published information about the Denali Park moose, including a nonfiction book, “In the Company of Moose.” Van Ballenberghe and others found that, in some years, eight out of 10 moose calves don’t make it to adulthood, with grizzlies eating half of them and wolves accounting for just 6% of calf loss.

Van Ballenberghe knows that Denali Park cow moose can live to be 20 — “it’s like a 100-year-old person” — and most of its bulls are gone by the age of 13. He once observed a cow that gave birth in almost the exact same spot for 12 consecutive years.

He knows moose prefer diamondleaf willow in summer and the frozen buds of feltleaf willow in winter, and they will gorge on mushrooms when they are available. He’s noticed that moose almost never sleep for more than five minutes at a time. He has seen a fall gathering of 22 cows and 12 bulls, and he knows that those bulls did not eat for more than two weeks until the rut ended in early October.

by Ned Rozell, ADN |  Read more:

Tár Takes on the Devastating Spectacle of ‘Cancellation’

Todd Field’s new film, Tár, opens with a scene that should feel inherently uncinematic: an onstage Q&A. The conversation, between Lydia Tár (played by Cate Blanchett) and Adam Gopnik (gamely playing himself), is the kind of hoity-toity event that’d be a coveted ticket for a certain highbrow milieu. Tár is the preeminent conductor of her generation. She leads the Berlin Philharmonic and has a list of accomplishments that Gopnik could rattle off for at least an hour. (Among other things, she has an EGOT!) But why start her story in staid territory, via a back-and-forth on classical music that mostly feels like a big pat on the back for a fictional character the viewer has just met?

For two reasons, both of which underline why Field’s movie is such a biting accomplishment. The first is to see Blanchett in her element, keeping an audience hanging on every word as her character ruminates on the difficulties of her vocation and the legacy of legends such as Leonard Bernstein. The second is to establish the tone of Tár’s tightly wound world, in which she’s shuttled from place to place in luxury while everyone orbits around her, eager for just a puff of her genius to waft their way. Over the course of 158 minutes, cracks start to emerge in that hermetic universe until it finally comes apart. Field charts Tár’s decline with devastating relish.

Tár’s “cancellation” (which is simply the easiest way to describe what happens to her reputation in the film) has its specifics, but Field seems most interested in the elemental process of watching someone with such power and poise veer out of control. The unraveling of Tár begins with just a few whispers before spiraling in unpredictable directions. Field isn’t exactly rooting for her downfall, and neither was I; instead, he’s depicting the way such scandals inspire rubbernecking from all walks of life.

In the first act, Tár is prideful. A protégé of Bernstein’s, she’s a professed believer in his mantra that classical music should be accessible to the people, not remote or academic. But an early scene sees her lecturing a group of students with withering superiority. She takes particular delight in ripping apart an aspiring conductor who dares to question Bach’s place in the pantheon. Tár has intellectual heft, and watching her deploy it is breathtaking. Blanchett pours equal parts charisma and intimidation into her career-best performance. 

by David Sims, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Tár/YouTube

A Memorable Season Ends With Spectacular 18-Inning Game

It was 21 years in the waiting, and then it became an eternity of frazzled nerves and broken dreams in one afternoon turned night.

It was nail-biting, gut-wrenching, gloriously exciting playoff baseball at its finest — and most excruciating.

It was a taste of what Seattle has been missing. Scratch that — a glorious, sumptuous feast in which every at-bat, every pitch crackled with meaning and tension, and the possibility of a hero’s turn.

As Mariners players shared hugs and fought back tears after their 18-inning, 1-0 loss at T-Mobile Park to Houston that ended their breakthrough season in a mixture of massive frustration and overwhelming pride, they had unanimity on one thing.

This playoff business is addicting. And now that they got a taste of it, they want more. And next time, they plan to make it last longer. (...)

Never before in the history of baseball had a postseason game gone so long — 17 innings — without a run being scored. Only twice had a postseason game gone longer on the clock — six hours and 22 minutes. But those who think a scoreless game is boring didn’t see the one the Mariners played against the Yankees in August, and certainly not this one. It was riveting stuff, even as the frustration kept mounting. The raucous crowd of 47,690, which kept trying to will the Mariners to victory, wanted desperately to erupt but never got the key hit that would have extended the series until Sunday.

by Larry Stone, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times
[ed. What a game! Lots of heart. See also: The Mariners’ season didn’t end how they wanted, but they have plenty to be proud of (Seattle Times).]

Cracker

[ed. See also: Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? and, Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley (Astral Codex Ten). And, more cracking Cracker - Eurotrash Girl - here and here.]

PayPal and its $2,500 Fines For Misinformation

Over the years, we’ve posted so many different stories about questionable decisions by PayPal to cut off services from users it objected to, or even seizing the money in their account that it’s impossible to dig up all of those stories. But, by now, we’ve seen well over a decade of PayPal acting as some sort of morality police. It has every legal right to do so, though we could point out that there is much less competition for easy to use, consumer-friendly payment options. It is also an example of the trickiness that ensues when people look to infrastructure layer providers to get involved in content moderation.

Given all that, it wasn’t necessarily unprecedented, but still a bit shocking, to hear that PayPal had notified users of an updated Acceptable Use Policy that included two things that people (reasonably) connected, and then worried about. The first, was a new policy saying that (among other things) promoting “misinformation” was a violation of the policy.

The misinformation part got all the attention, but the whole policy is pretty broad:

involve the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials, that in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene, harassing, or objectionable, (b) depict or appear to depict nudity, sexual or other intimate activities, (c) depict or promote illegal drug use, (d) depict or promote violence, criminal activity, cruelty, or self-harm (e) depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) (f) present a risk to user safety or wellbeing, (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation, or are unlawful, (h) infringe the privacy, intellectual property rights, or other proprietary rights of any party, or (i) are otherwise unfit for publication.

So… this actually reads like a fairly typical set of terms or acceptable use policies for lots of different websites, giving the sites broad leeway to ban you for a bunch of different things, totally at the discretion of the company and its own morals. Of course, you can make arguments for why lots of it is crazy. Depicting illegal drug use? So if you have created a short film that includes someone smoking pot, they can lose their PayPal account? Is kissing an “otherwise intimate” activity? And, of course, misinformation can mean very different things to very different people.

Of course, where this became viral as news is because people realized that PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy already includes a claim that if you violate its policy they can take $2,500 from your account. While PayPal walked back some of these newly announced changes (we’ll get to that in a second), the policy about the $2,500 has existed for at least a year: (...)

So, some of the uproar over the weekend came from people seeing the new “misinformation” line and then the (already existing) claim about the $2,500 and assuming both were new and connected. Soon after much of this went viral (some driven by potentially disingenuous misinformation grifters who feared for their own livelihoods), PayPal insisted that the notice of the new policies “went out in error.”

“An AUP notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information. PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy. Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We’re sorry for the confusion this has caused,” a spokesperson told National Review in a written statement.

Lots of sites reported that PayPal had retracted its plan to fine people $2,500 for misinformation, but… the $2,500 amount is still in the policy. It’s just that the misinformation part is not going live… yet.

Of course, this raises another question: if the $2,500 liquidated damages thing has been in there since at least 2021… has PayPal ever actually done that? It seems like if it had, that would be a big story in its own right.

The fact that the $2,500 damages clause is still in the PayPal policy today still seems like a pretty big deal. Hiding the fact that a company might take $2,500 from you by burying it in an acceptable use policy no one is going to read seems like not a great thing, whether or not the policy includes “misinformation” as a triggering event.

PayPal’s statement about the misinformation bit is also… difficult to believe. The idea that it was “never intended to be inserted in our policy” doesn’t explain how it was inserted in the policy that was sent out to users. I would think that a company as large as PayPal has, you know, a few lawyers who look over this stuff before they update their policies. It seems clear that somewhere along the line someone at PayPal did very much intend to have this kind of policy, it’s just that they probably didn’t realize that they were putting it into the same section that included the threatened $2,500 cash grab.

by Mike Masnick, Techdirt |  Read more:

Image: Techdirt

Taylor Swift's Midnights

“I haven’t been on stage in a very long time,” she told the crowd. “It’s very nice!”

That impression was confirmed a month later when Swift announced the release of her 10th studio album, Midnights, onstage at the MTV Video Music awards. She later revealed it would tell “stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life … a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face.”

A week from its 21 October release date, she is yet to share a note of music – or do any interviews, leading to giddy speculation over its sound. Her understated pair of 2020 surprise albums, Folklore and Evermore, were made with members of the National and Bon Iver and billed as “alternative” on streaming services. Midnights, however, marks an official return to “pop” and features a guest appearance from the US alt-pop star Lana Del Rey. (...)

Whatever its sound, one thing is certain: despite being released in the last two months of the year, Midnights will easily become one of 2022’s biggest-selling albums. (...)

“She didn’t need it in my book but she got that final bit of critical respect off those albums,” said Dave Fawbert, the founder of Swiftogedden, a nationwide club night that plays exclusively Swift songs. “All those 50-year-old men who dismissed her were forced to admit how good she was.”

by Laura Snapes, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: The cover of Taylor Swift’s Midnights/Beth Garrabrant

[ed. An amazing talent (and industry professional). This is the song that brought me in (fabulous acoustic version here). See also (this repost): 

Yes, “The Last Great American Dynasty,” as upbeat and propulsive as this record gets, is a very explicit tribute to Rebekah West Harkness, the eccentric multiple divorceé and Standard Oil heiress/widow who filled her Rhode Island mansion’s pool with champagne and her fish tank with scotch; “stole her neighbor’s dog and dyed it key-lime green,” a splendid detail after Swift’s own master-songwriter heart; and upon her death in 1982, had her ashes placed in a $250,000 urn designed by Salvador Dalí. (This song is also your first opportunity to hear Swift sing the word “bitch.”) Naturally, Harkness has inspired multiple lengthy explainer blog posts in the past 72 hours, because Swift wrote a song about her, because Swift owns her house now. (The refrain “She had a marvelous time ruining everything” becomes “I had a marvelous time ruining everything.”) And wow is it impressive, genuinely impressive, how charming this song is given the fact that it’s a white pop star, in July 2020, singing a song about her $17.75 million Rhode Island mansion.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Donald Trump Has Told Americans Exactly Who He Is

The biggest news to come out of the ninth and (for now) final hearing of the Jan. 6 committee, on Thursday afternoon, was obvious: A subpoena requiring a former president to testify about his role in a deadly insurrection that he incited in order to prevent the transfer of power to his lawful successor is, to put it mildly, not something you see every day.

It was the right thing to do, although even in the drama of the moment (Mr. Schiff? Aye. Ms. Cheney? Aye.) it felt somewhat obligatory. After more than a year of dogged investigation involving hundreds of witnesses; thousands of texts, emails and other documents; countless sickening videos and photographs; and breathtaking testimony about the events leading up to that horrific day — all pointing directly at Donald Trump — how else could the committee have wrapped things up?

“We want to hear from him,” Representative Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, said in justifying the extraordinary motion, which he and the other members proceeded to authorize by a 9 to 0 vote.

Whether we actually hear from Mr. Trump is another matter. Immediately after the hearing, he mocked the committee on his social media site, asking why it had not called him to testify months ago. Anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the past seven years could tell you this is classic Trumpian misdirection. The man doesn’t take any oath he isn’t prepared to violate, and he goes to lengths to avoid appearing anywhere that he can be criminally charged for lying.

On the other hand, Mr. Trump craves the spotlight. If the committee were to agree to his reported demand that his testimony be aired on live TV, he might actually go through with it. After all, it would be free prepublicity for his likely presidential run — even if he did nothing but invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, as he did more than 400 times during a deposition last summer, part of a New York State investigation into whether he fraudulently inflated his real estate assets. (The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, determined that he had, suing Mr. Trump, his family business and three of his adult children for lying to lenders and insurers to the tune of billions of dollars.)

However the subpoena negotiations play out, it’s important to remember one thing: We already have heard from him. Again and again and again and again, Mr. Trump has told the American people who he is, what he wants and exactly how he plans to get it — the law, the Constitution and the Republic be damned.

Sometimes he says it directly; sometimes it comes through the remarks of his closest allies or administration officials. Consider just a sampling of quotations that the Jan. 6 committee summarized in Thursday’s hearing:

‘We want all voting to stop.’

Mr. Trump said this on national television, in the early morning hours of Nov. 4, after initial vote counts that showed him in the lead began to move toward Joe Biden as more votes rolled in. The phenomenon was so predictable that it already had a name: the blue shift. In fact, Mr. Trump was warned repeatedly that this was very likely to happen, in part because of his own actions. Throughout the summer of 2020, he discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, meaning that mail-in ballots, which some states don’t start counting until polls close, would skew toward Democrats. Rather than accept what he must have known to be true, Mr. Trump effectively called for the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of Americans. But it was worse than that.

‘What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory, right? He’s going to declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s a winner.’

That was Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a former top White House adviser, speaking with a group of associates shortly before Election Day 2020. He was laying out in plain view the plan he knew was in the works. And it had been in the works for months. As the committee revealed on Thursday, Brad Parscale, who managed Mr. Trump’s 2020 bid, testified that the former president “planned as early as July that he would say he won the election even if he lost.”

‘There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.’

Bill Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, said this in his testimony to the committee, describing his frustration with trying to bat away the unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud that Mr. Trump kept bringing to him — claims that were rejected by every federal and state court to consider them in the months after Election Day. When Mr. Barr resigned in December 2020, Mr. Trump attempted to replace him with Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer in the Justice Department who had expressed a willingness to help Mr. Trump subvert the election. The plan failed only when top department officials threatened to resign if Mr. Clark got the job.

‘He knows it’s over. He knows he lost, but we’re going to keep trying.’

According to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, Mr. Meadows said this to her soon after Mr. Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and tried in vain to shake him down for 11,780 votes, exactly one more than Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in the state. That was on Jan. 2, four days before Mr. Trump stood before tens of thousands of his supporters at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., and repeated many of the claims of voting fraud that he had been repeatedly told were false. He knew that many of those supporters were armed, because they had refused to pass through the magnetometers that had been set up for Mr. Trump’s safety. But he didn’t care. As he said, according to Ms. Hutchinson, “They’re not here to hurt me.”

As the committee revealed on Thursday, the Secret Service was aware of the threat of violence and specifically of an armed attack on the Capitol more than a week before Jan. 6. “Their plan is to literally kill people,” one tipster wrote. Mr. Trump was informed of the threats, too, before he whipped the mob into a frenzy and urged them to march on the Capitol.

These are only a few examples pulled from the immense body of evidence that the Jan. 6 committee has compiled for the American people and the world to see. Together they paint a clear and damning picture of the man who sat in the Oval Office for four years and will almost certainly try to again. Before that happens, Mr. Trump must be “required to answer for his actions,” as Mr. Thompson rightly said. It sounds so basic and yet, with Mr. Trump, it has remained so elusive.

by Jesse Wegman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter, NY Times 

[ed. See also: ‘It’s My Curse and My Salvation’: Trump’s Most Famous Chronicler Opens Up (Maggie Haberman - Politico)

Aja

Aja produced three excellent singles (“Peg,” “Josie,” and “Deacon Blues”) and sold millions of copies, becoming the group’s most commercially successful release. But it was a perplexing bestseller. Steely Dan spent the 1970s getting progressively more esoteric: jazzier, groovier, weirder. Even now, mapping the album’s melodic and harmonic shifts is impossible to do with confidence. Its songs are sprawling and fussy, populated by oddball characters with inscrutable backstories, like “Josie,” from the song of the same name (“She’s the raw flame, the live wire/She prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire”) or “Peg,” an aspiring actress headed who-knows-where, who’s “done up in blueprint blue.” “Blueprint blue”! It’s the kind of simple, perfect description prose writers pinch themselves over.

Outside of the studio, Becker and Fagen reveled in being a little rascally. They took long breaks from touring, and when they conceded to an interview, they often appeared self-satisfied, if not antagonistic. Their disdain for the record business occasionally bled into a disdain for their fans, itself a kind of merciless, punk-rock pose. When they did tour—like, say, in 1993, when, after a decade-long hiatus, they booked a few weeks of U.S. dates—they did not pretend to enjoy it. That year, when a reporter from The Los Angeles Times asked Becker how the tour was going, he said, “Well, not too good. It turns out that show business isn’t really in my blood anyway, and I’m looking forward to getting back to working on my car.”

Because the production on Aja is so expert—whole stretches are perfect, impenetrable, like the first 31 seconds of “Black Cow,” when that creeping bass line cedes passage to guitar and electric piano, and the backing vocals pipe up for “You were high!”—it’s easy to ignore the sophistication of its architecture. Becker and Fagen used obscure chords (like the mu major, a major triad with an added 2 or 9) and custom-built their own equipment (for 1980’s Gaucho, they paid $150,000 to build a bespoke drum machine). What they were doing was so particular and new, it was often difficult for critics to even find a vocabulary to describe it. On the title track, the verse shifts and dissolves as Fagen croons, “I run to you.” His voice thins as he finishes the line, a little gasp of tenderness. The minute-long drum solo that closes “Aja,” performed by the virtuosic session man Steve Gadd, is dressed with horns and synthesizers, and makes a person briefly feel as if they are being transported to a different dimension. Steely Dan reveled in making technical choices that would have hobbled a less ambitious outfit. That they succeeded still feels like some kind of black magic.

By 1977, it is possible that some corners of the culture had become desperate for music that was intellectually challenging but not exactly arduous to consume—something less predictable than Top 40, but not quite as hyperbolic or gnashing as punk. By the end of the 1960s, rock had been relentlessly and breathlessly defined as a frantic, bloody, all-consuming practice, for both performers and fans. Aja, though, doesn’t necessarily require any sort of deep emotional entanglement or vulnerability from its listeners. In that way, the record works as an unexpected balm, a break—a little bit of pleasure just for pleasure’s sake.

by Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork | Read more:
Image: Aja

[ed. All their albums were great, including their under-appreciated (and one of my favorites) Two Against Nature. They were exceptional lyricists and musicians (see examples below). For more SD samples see: here and here.]

"I'm working on gospel time these days (Summer, the summer. This could be the cool part of the summer). The sloe-eyed creature in the reckless room, she's so severe. A wise child walks right out of here. I'm so excited I can barely cope. I'm sizzling like an isotope. I'm on fire, so cut me some slack. First she's way gone, then she comes back. She's all business, then she's ready to play. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. This house of desire is built foursquare. (City, the city. The cleanest kitten in the city). When she speaks, it's like the slickest song I've ever heard. I'm hanging on her every word. As if I'm not already blazed enough. She hits me with the cryptic stuff. That's her style, to jerk me around. First she's all feel, then she cools down. She's pure science with a splash of black cat. She's almost Gothic and I like it like that. This dark place, so thrilling and new. It's kind of like the opposite of an aerial view. Unless I'm totally wrong. I hear her rap, and, brother, it's strong. I'm pretty sure that what she's telling me is mostly lies. But I just stand there hypnotized. I'll just have to make it work somehow. I'm in the amen corner now. It's called love, I spell L-U-V. First she's all buzz, then she's noise-free. She's bubbling over, then there's nothing to say. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. She's old school, then she's, like, young. Little Eva meets the Bleecker Street brat. She's almost Gothic, but it's better than that." ~ Almost Gothic. 

-------

"Charlie Freak had but one thing to call his own. Three weight ounce pure golden ring no precious stone. Five nights without a bite. No place to lay his head. And if nobody takes him in he'll soon be dead. On the street he spied my face I heard him hail. In our plot of frozen space he told his tale. Poor man, he showed his hand. So righteous was his need. And me so wise. I bought his prize. For chicken feed. Newfound cash soon begs to smash a state of mind. Close inspection fast revealed his favorite kind. Poor kid, he overdid. Embraced the spreading haze. And while he sighed his body died. In fifteen ways. When I heard I grabbed a cab to where he lay. 'Round his arm the plastic tag read D.O.A. Yes Jack, I gave it back. The ring I could not own. Now come my friend I'll take your hand. And lead you home." ~ Charlie Freak.