The Beast Within Capitalism

The most popular YouTuber in the world is MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, a 24-year-old from North Carolina who specializes in ever-more-costly stunts and giveaways. MrBeast’s videos include:

• Extreme endurance feats and challenges (counting to 100,000, reading the entire dictionary, spending 50 hours in Antarctica, spinning a fidget spinner for an entire day, being buried alive, starving himself for 30 days, completing a marathon in comically oversized shoes, eating a really big slice of pizza)

• Game show setups (last person to take their hand off an object wins a cash prize, high-stakes hide-and-seek, an elaborate Squid Game simulation that entirely misses the original series’ satirical point)

• Unpleasant dares (Would you sit in a bathtub full of snakes if someone paid you a lot of money?)

• A lot of what I would classify as “labor-intensive stupidity” (filling a friend’s house with a million Legos or tons of green slime, dropping a car from a helicopter into a pool of Orbeez, crashing a train into a brick wall, having a hundred people in dinosaur costumes walk into a store)

Many of MrBeast’s most popular videos are what is known as “stunt philanthropy,” making an entertaining spectacle out of giving large sums of money away. MrBeast hit upon the formula after using money from an early sponsorship deal to film a video in which he simply approached a random homeless man and handed him $10,000. The video became hugely popular, and MrBeast realized the “sheer viral power of simply giving money away.” As each video racked up views, the money it brought in was used to create the next cash giveaway stunt, with the amounts given away becoming more extreme as the channel became successful. When he filmed himself giving his mom $100,000, he explained to her that the video itself would go viral and therefore make the money back. (“So you’re using me for views?” she said. “Yes, but you get money too, so we’re both happy,” he replied.) Subsequent giveaway videos include: giving people on the street a credit card they can use to buy anything they like, tipping servers with actual gold bars, tipping a pizza guy by giving him the house he’s delivering to, opening a restaurant that hands out wads of cash to patrons, offering random people $100,000 to quit their jobs, and giving one of his subscribers an island.

Extravagantly giving away money has been extremely lucrative for MrBeast: he is now poised to be the first billionaire YouTuber. His line of chocolate bars (Feastables) is now stocked in Walmart, a custom Nerf gun bears his imprimatur, and he has a chain of “ghost franchise” burger restaurants (essentially, local restaurants deliver their own burgers to you in a MrBeast wrapper). His online shop has sold tie-in merchandise “like socks ($18), water bottles ($27) and T-shirts ($28).” (...)

MrBeast insists in interviews that the main goal of all of this is simply to help people and make positive change in the world. In the authorized documentary on his rise to fame, MrBeast says he just loves the feeling that comes from changing lives. When he handed a stranger thousands of dollars, “a lot of them just broke down in tears in front of me.” A pizza delivery guy who received one of MrBeast’s mega-huge tips was profusely thankful, telling him “I just got to spend the rest of the day with my kid because you gave me money and it allowed me to take the day off.”

MrBeast has therefore tried to target many of his giant cash donations to those who actually need them. He has given away a million dollars in food to people in need, given tens of thousands of dollars to people who lost their jobs during the pandemic, bought all of the food in a grocery store to give it to a food bank, filled five buses with school supplies for poor schools, given millions to Ukrainian refugees, built houses for homeless families, rebuilt tornado survivors’ homes, and planted 20 million trees. 

The latest MrBeast philanthropy video, “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time,” has attracted some controversy. In it, he pays for thousands of sight-restoring surgeries for vision-impaired people around the world, and documents their reactions as they see the world with clear vision for the first time. (He also gives some of them stacks of cash, and gives one young man a brand new Tesla. One patient peels off the bandages and the first thing he sees is a sign that reads “You Just Won $10,000.”) Some viewers called the video “demonic” and “exploitative.”  (...)

But MrBeast has a defense of what he does: Would he be a better person if he didn’t cure the blind and donate to food banks? If he stuck to paying people to cover themselves in snakes, would he be less controversial? The people whose surgeries he paid for seem genuinely overwhelmed with gratitude, and it is clear he has changed their lives. One might argue that if he’s going to pay for surgeries, he shouldn’t do videos about it, because this kind of “inspiration porn” essentially coerces people with disabilities (since who is going to be able to turn down a sight-restoring operation?) into appearing on YouTube and uses them for clicks. MrBeast would likely counter by saying that his video has raised both awareness and money, and that people are going to have their sight restored who would not be able to see if the video hadn’t caused the public to donate the funds. One irate Beast-defender said “Go ahead and cancel him, that’s 1000 people that wouldn’t get a life-changing surgery they can’t afford.”

I think we can better understand the problem with MrBeast, however, if we don’t focus so much on MrBeast himself. In fact, the person who called MrBeast’s video “demonic” said exactly that: Beast himself was merely “fascinating and bizarre”; what was disturbing was a video whose core message was: “a single rich guy paid for life-changing surgery for us, and it’s easy to do this.” Another critic pointed out that the real problem was “the dystopian thought [that] we’re reliant on YouTube videos instead of competent government for assistance,” and we “can never again untangle acts of kindness from brand-building.” As Hasan Piker explained, the problem with the video is less with MrBeast paying for the surgeries than with the fact that a quick, easy surgery isn’t accessible to people in the first place and so they’re getting it through a MrBeast video:

“You watch this video and go, ‘Aww, how cute and how nice.’ I watch this video and I’m filled with rage that we shut off access to a ten-minute procedure because we paywalled it and decided that like some people just simply can’t get it. It is so insanely frustrating that it’s up to like one YouTube guy to decide to make content out of it, that people who are too poor can’t just fucking see.” (...)

It’s nice that MrBeast plants trees and donates to food banks. Plenty of the super-rich use less of their wealth to fund good works, so targeting him in particular can seem a little harsh. (However, I don’t mean to single him out for criticism; I’ve previously written about lots of other terrible rich people.) But he could do a great deal more good if, when trying to change lives, he gave some indication that he understood the basic concept of justice. As it is right now, it seems like the only thing he knows is that when he hands a giant roll of hundred dollar bills to someone, they become overjoyed, and he likes the feeling he gets when they tell him how wonderful he is and how much he has done for them. MrBeast could actually have done a video on blindness that would have avoided controversy if he had demonstrated some of the anger that Hasan Piker had about how it’s absurd that MrBeast even has to do this. He could have not just advocated that people in the audience give money, but encouraged them to think seriously about the fact that this problem could easily cease to exist with a few tweaks to the healthcare financing system. I realize it may be too much to expect from a 24-year-old YouTube bro who just enjoys playing Willy Wonka, showering golden tickets (blindness cures, bricks of cash, Teslas) on random people. But I am willing to take MrBeast at his word when he says he wants to give away his money and help people, and I believe it’s possible for him to undergo moral and political self-education that will make him a better advocate for the causes he says he cares about.

So while I’m tempted to say “the problem isn’t MrBeast himself, it’s the economic system that lets people become so desperate they need MrBeast in order to take a day off and see their kid,” and I do think that’s true, MrBeast himself is also grotesque. In his videos, he relishes the power that unlimited wealth gives him. Sometimes he uses this to change lives, but sometimes he will only give people the money if they first swim with sharks. The competitions mostly seem pretty harmless, if often unpleasant (staying in a small circle for 100 days to win $500,000), but it’s clear that part of the reason people are willing to undergo whatever challenges MrBeast sets is that money has the power to completely change people’s lives. In a world where everybody was doing fine economically, maybe there wouldn’t be anything objectionable about offering people a reward to participate in some televised challenge, but in this world, where nearly half of Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency expense, a lot of people are going to be grasping for MrBeast’s largesse because they need it. (...)

I do think, however, that there is something fundamentally tawdry about MrBeast’s money obsession. The videos I like most are the ones where he does a complicated and cool thing like building a giant Lego tower. The videos I like least involve simply going up to people and handing them wodges of cash, not just because it conflicts with my notions of distributional justice, but because it’s lazy, taking advantage of the fact that just having a bunch of money gives you an immense amount of power in our world. Yes, it means you can get people to do things like sit in a big bucket of ramen noodles for hours. But the side of humanity that will eat worms for money is not the side we should be encouraging, because these scenarios are, at worst, exploitative and, at best, extremely stupid.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: MrBeast/uncredited

[ed. Links galore (if you're into this sort of thing). I've only been peripherally aware of this guy and glad I didn't waste my time finding out more.]

The Rage and Joy of MAGA America

I’ve shared this fact with readers before: I live in Tennessee outside Nashville, a very deep-red part of America. According to a New York Times tool that calculates the political composition of a community, only 15 percent of my neighbors are Democrats. I’ve been living here in the heart of MAGA country since Donald Trump came down the escalator. This is the world of my friends, my neighbors and many members of my family. That is perhaps why, when I’m asked what things are like now, eight years into the Trump era, I have a ready answer: Everything is normal until, suddenly, it’s not. And unless we can understand what’s normal and what’s not, we can’t truly understand why Trumpism endures.

It’s hard to encapsulate a culture in 22 seconds, but this July 4 video tweet from Representative Andy Ogles accomplishes the nearly impossible. For those who don’t want to click through, the tweet features Ogles, a cheerful freshman Republican from Tennessee, wishing his followers a happy Fourth of July. The text of the greeting is remarkable only if you don’t live in MAGA-land:

Hey guys, Congressman Andy Ogles here, wishing you a happy and blessed Fourth of July. Hey, remember our Founding Fathers. It’s we the people that are in charge of this country, not a leftist minority. Look, the left is trying to destroy our country and our family, and they’re coming after you. Have a blessed Fourth of July. Be safe. Have fun. God bless America.

Can something be cheerful and dark at the same time? Can a holiday message be both normal and so very strange? If so, then Ogles pulled it off. This is a man smiling in a field as a dog sniffs happily behind him. The left may be “coming after you,” as he warns, but the vibe isn’t catastrophic or even worried, rather a kind of friendly, generic patriotism. They’re coming for your family! Have a great day!

It’s not just Ogles. It’s no coincidence that one of the most enduring cultural symbols of Trump’s 2020 campaign was the boat parade. To form battle lines behind Trump, the one man they believe can save America from total destruction, thousands of supporters in several states got in their MasterCrafts and had giant open-air water parties.

Or take the Trump rally, the signature event of this political era. If you follow the rallies via Twitter or mainstream newscasts, you see the anger, but you miss the fun. When I was writing for The Dispatch, one of the best pieces we published was a report by Andrew Egger in 2020 about the “Front Row Joes,” the Trump superfans who follow Trump from rally to rally the way some people used to follow the Grateful Dead. Egger described the Trump rally perfectly: “For enthusiasts, Trump rallies aren’t just a way to see a favorite politician up close. They are major life events: festive opportunities to get together with like-minded folks and just go crazy about America and all the winning the Trump administration’s doing.”

Or go to a Southeastern Conference football game. The “Let’s Go Brandon” (or sometimes, just “[expletive] Joe Biden”) chant that arises from the student section isn’t delivered with clenched fists and furious anger, but rather through smiles and laughs. The frat bros are having a great time. The consistent message from Trumpland of all ages is something like this: “They’re the worst, and we’re awesome. Let’s party, and let’s fight.”

Why do none of your arguments against Trump penetrate this mind-set? The Trumpists have an easy answer: You’re horrible, and no one should listen to horrible people. Why were Trumpists so vulnerable to insane stolen-election theories? Because they know that you’re horrible and that horrible people are capable of anything, including stealing an election.

At the same time, their own joy and camaraderie insulate them against external critiques that focus on their anger and cruelty. Such charges ring hollow to Trump supporters, who can see firsthand the internal friendliness and good cheer that they experience when they get together with one another. They don’t feel angry — at least not most of the time. They are good, likable people who’ve just been provoked by a distant and alien “left” that many of them have never meaningfully encountered firsthand.

Indeed, while countless gallons of ink have been spilled analyzing the MAGA movement’s rage, far too little has been spilled discussing its joy.

Once you understand both dynamics, however, so much about the present moment makes clearer sense, including the dynamics of the Republican primary. Ron DeSantis, for example, channels all the rage of Trumpism and none of the joy. With relentless, grim determination he fights the left with every tool of government at his disposal. But can he lead stadiums full of people in an awkward dance to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People? Will he be the subject of countless over-the-top memes and posters celebrating him as some kind of godlike, muscular superhero? (...)

Trump’s fans, by contrast, don’t understand the effects of that fury because they mainly experience the joy. For them, the MAGA community is kind and welcoming. For them, supporting Trump is fun. Moreover, the MAGA movement is heavily clustered in the South, and Southerners see themselves as the nicest people in America. It feels false to them to be called “mean” or “cruel.” Cruel? No chance. In their minds, they’re the same people they’ve always been — it’s just that they finally understand how bad you are. And by “you,” again, they often mean the caricatures of people they’ve never met.

In fact, they often don’t even know about the excesses of the Trump movement. Many of them will never know that their progressive neighbors have faced threats and intimidation. And even when they do see the movement at its worst, they can’t quite believe it. So Jan. 6 was a false flag. Or it was a “fedsurrection.” It couldn’t have really been a violent attempt to overthrow the elected government, because they know these people, or people like them, and they’re mostly good folks. It had to be a mistake, or an exaggeration, or a trick or a few bad apples. The real crime was the stolen election.

It’s the combination of anger and joy that makes the MAGA enthusiasm so hard to break but also limits its breadth. If you’re part of the movement’s ever-widening circle of enemies, Trump holds no appeal for you. You experience his movement as an attack on your life, your choices, your home and even your identity. If you’re part of the core MAGA community, however, not even the ruthlessly efficient Ron DeSantis can come close to replicating the true Trump experience. Again, the boat parade is a perfect example. It’s one part Battle for the Future of Civilization and one part booze cruise.

The battle and the booze cruise both give MAGA devotees a sense of belonging. They see a country that’s changing around them and they are uncertain about their place in it. But they know they have a place at a Trump rally, surrounded by others — overwhelmingly white, many evangelical — who feel the same way they do.

by David French, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle, via Getty Images
[ed. Sounds about right. I'm as sick of MAGA idiots (and their enablers) as I am Nazi sympathizers (white supremacists). Probably a lot of overlap.]

Heat Records Are Broken Around the Globe as Earth Warms, Fast

The past three days were quite likely the hottest in Earth’s modern history, scientists said on Thursday, as an astonishing surge of heat across the globe continued to shatter temperature records from North America to Antarctica. (...)

Already, the surge has been striking. The planet just experienced its warmest June ever recorded, researchers said, with deadly heat waves scorching Texas, Mexico and India. Off the coasts of Antarctica, sea ice levels this year have plummeted to record lows.

And in the North Atlantic, the ocean has been off-the-charts hot. Surface temperatures in May were 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.6 degrees Celsius, warmer than typical for this time of year, breaking previous records by an unusually large margin.

The sharp jump in temperatures has unsettled even those scientists who have been tracking climate change.

“It’s so far out of line of what’s been observed that it’s hard to wrap your head around,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. “It doesn’t seem real.”

by Brad Plumer and Elena Shao, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Andy Wong/Associated Press
[ed. Not your grandmother's planet. Especially the ocean temps. See below.]

via:

Human Resources

ITEM: Insects are an ideal source of protein for denizens of a world facing climate change and a growing population.

ITEM: The rise of government-assisted euthanasia produces a new source of organ donations.

ITEM: A new startup that specializes in composting people seeks to raise $5 million in its latest funding round.

Scenes from a 1970s dystopian science fiction film? Nah, just typical headlines from the past year. How apropos, then, that it should be the fiftieth anniversary year of one of that subgenre’s most iconic films, Soylent Green. And, while we’re counting anniversaries, we’ve just passed the year in which that story was set, 2022.

But, to paraphrase the film’s central mystery, what is Soylent Green? It is many things: dystopian science fiction, kitsch, excellent meme-fodder, a showcase for Charlton Heston (who is simultaneously a genuine charismatic and one of cinema’s great hams), and more. It came out of that fertile late-1960s and early-1970s period of imaginative fiction, in which the gee-whiz optimism of the early postwar era gave way to increasing pessimism and even nihilism, and cosmic anxieties became metaphors for social ones, and vice versa.

Like most major science-fiction movies, it is based (loosely) on a novel, the mostly forgotten Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. And, like many science-fiction films — including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Back to the Future II, and Blade Runner — the action takes place in a future that has now already passed. Soylent Green’s then-distant future of 2022 is one of desperate overpopulation, global warming, and class inequality. The few rich live in fortified compounds and have access to regular food and water, while the many poor must rely on synthetic foodstuff, mass-produced by the powerful Soylent Corporation. A partial solution to the demographic crisis is euthanasia.

The story centers on an NYPD detective, Robert Thorn (played by Heston), who uncovers a conspiracy spanning the government, scientific elites, and of course the Soylent Corporation. Through a series of plot machinations too convoluted to elaborate here, he discovers that the synthetic food Soylent Green is in fact made from the corpses of the recently euthanized, leading to the film’s famous climax, in which he reveals the awful truth.

It is a testament to the film’s resonance that many people who have never sat through an entire viewing of it nonetheless know its famous concluding scene — up there with the ending of Planet of the Apes (another Charlton Heston sci-fi showcase) for producing a cultural legacy that has outgrown that of the movie itself. (...)

Of course, overpopulation fears were hardly limited to the domain of imaginative fiction. Amid exponential population growth worldwide, the postwar era saw widespread expressions of concern, crystalized by Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb, which erroneously predicted the deaths of hundreds of millions of people through starvation within a decade.

But the Malthusian nightmare did not come to pass. While the population of the United States (not to say the world) has increased substantially in the intervening years — growing nearly 60 percent since 1973 — apocalyptic fears of overcrowding and mass starvation did not materialize. In fact, throughout most of the world, demographic collapse is the more likely future, as birth rates continue to decline. Meanwhile, our agricultural output has been keeping pace with population growth thanks to the Green Revolution (though its benefits are not yet entirely global). If you lifted an extra out from inside the world of Soylent Green and deposited him in our own present day, one imagines he would be astonished at the world of plenty he now inhabits.

Is Soylent Green then merely a curio — a Seventies relic like The Late Great Planet Earth or pet rocks? Perhaps not. For technological advancement is not a panacea for social ills. And while our own story (so far) has averted the apocalypse, we have not averted some of the more dystopian implications of that era’s speculative fiction. (...)

Of course, one might argue that any prescience on the part of Soylent Green is qualified by its getting the larger Malthusian argument wrong. But beneath this material issue lies a deeper philosophical fear: that faced with external constraints, technocratic modernity will find instrumental uses for people, whether they want that or not. In this sense, the film retains a certain queasy power not in spite but because of its ridiculousness, its willingness to make explicit our otherwise tacit horror of turning human beings into mere matter — in this case, literally.

This is to say that Soylent Green may remain kitsch, but kitsch can sometimes express widespread hopes and fears more clearly than great art. And its particular fears concerning the appropriate size and equality of our population are arguably perennial ones, for every human society must reckon with them in some measure. Beneath these fears lies the question of whether our ever more utilitarian modern society has transformed humanity itself into something merely instrumental.

by David Polansky, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Soylent Green

Natalia Lafourcade

[ed. See also: Natalia Lafourcade: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert]

The Acceleration of the Age of the Idiot

There’s a thought I keep on having, and maybe you’ve had it too. The main question they’ll ask about our age is: how did everything get so stupid, so fast? You can look at our economies and see inflation ripping through them. But there’s another kind of inflation at work too. In human folly, and all its flavors, from ignorance to malice to bad faith and beyond. It’s pulsating through our societies, and the lunatics, it seems, are seizing control of them, faster and faster.

I know you know that. But I also think it’s instructive to really think about it for a moment.

Think back to a decade ago. Just a decade ago. 2013. It seems like a…practically a…Golden Age…by comparison. We’d go online, and Twitter and Facebook weren’t…great. But they weren’t the smoking wrecks of disinformation, hate, and moronitude they are today, either — not even close. Our politics was fragmented and a little bit fractured — but nation after nation hadn’t been seduced by fanatics who’d go on to wreck its institutions and norms, like Brexit did to Britain, or Trumpism did to America. Our economies weren’t exactly in stellar shape — stagnation was beginning to bite.

But we weren’t exactly in the insane — to me as an economist, anyways — position of a recession hammered home by central banks raising rates to astronomical levels just as the mega-scale impacts of climate change hit. Which themselves were largely ignored, in favor of an endless parade of celebrities and billionaires.

Does it feel a little bit like…what’s the phrase I’m looking for…The Bonfire of Vanities at the end of a civilization…out there today? Welcome to the Acceleration of the Age of Stupid.

Think back, again, just a decade, and remember how you felt. How do you feel now, in comparison? If indicators are any bet, you feel not just worse, but astonishingly worse. People are so pessimistic that it’s hard to even do it justice in words — 80% of people, and this finding holds true across societies, basically think there’s not going to be a future, for them or their kids. A decade ago? Societies might not all have been shining examples of happiness — but they weren’t exactly biting their nails to keep from screaming in despair, either. And all that’s taken a knock-on effect on social cohesion, meaning trust and ties, which are collapsing at light speed.

When I or you say “stupid,” as in, “Jesus, how can people even be this stupid?” — and we mean everything from climate denial to regressive who want to take rights away to fanatics who want to ban books to lunatics who think storming Congress is wonderful and peaceful — part of what we mean, even if we don’t know it, is all that: pessimism, the loss of social cohesion, trust and ties collapsing — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

by Umair Haque, Eudimonia and Co. |  Read more:

Image: Peter Dynes

"So a weird and startling megatrend is emerging: human consciousness is shrinking — that’s what all these flavors of stupidity really are — at precisely the time it needs to expand. Expand most, given our civilization crossing the threshold into the Age of Extinction.

The growth of conscisouness is the expansion of empathy, grace, truth, beauty, justice, goodness, wisdom, courage, humility. See any of that happening? Or just the explosive growth of every flavor of folly, every crazed admixture of stupidity, history’s ever seen, at light speed?"

via:

They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine.

Chris Hedges:They Lied About Afghanistan. They Lied About Iraq. And They Are Lying About Ukraine. (ScheerPost)

Image: Preying for Peace – by Mr. Fish

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Review – Tom Cruise Does It Better

Already, the keynote stunt has become a legend: the one on the poster, the one he reportedly did – for real – six times in one day before he was satisfied. Tom Cruise’s compact body floats free of the motorbike as it drops to earth from between his diamond-hard thighs, having launched him with a throaty roar off an unfeasibly high cliff-edge; he sails through the sky, pulls the ripcord on a nifty little parachute, and swoops down towards … the speeding Orient Express, fully intent on the traditional carriage-top punch-up. We gasped in the audience. Someone behind me went: “Oh shi-i-i …” Carly Simon should have come in with a new song: Fair Enough, Somebody Does It Better.

This outrageously enjoyable spectacle has compelled my awestruck assent with its sheer stamina, scale and brio: the seventh in the Mission: Impossible action franchise with Cruise starring as Ethan Hunt, the mysterious, superfit leader of a top-secret intelligence/combat unit called the Impossible Mission Force, brought in by a shadowy US government agency when they want deniable stuff doing. Their initials of course are IMF, and in this film they finally get round to doing the gag about them not being the International Monetary Fund, the one we reviewers have been doing for years.

  

Seven films! Daniel Craig got sick of 007 after just five. But at 61, Cruise looks better than ever and pretty much wedded to the IMF. (...)

In this film, as in so many in the past, evil forces are trying to get hold of a MacGuffiny object which will permit them to control/destroy the world, and Ethan and the gang are the only people to stop them. There is some tremendous stunt work, including a wacky Italian Job-style chase around Rome in a titchy little yellow Fiat, the biggest train scenes since Paddington 2 and some very impressive horsemanship from Tom in the Arabian desert – in his headdress he is the seventh pillar of hunkiness. A very tense opening sequence aboard a Russian sub called the Sebastopol – its associations with Crimea being perhaps a rebuke to Putinist chauvinism – introduces us to a certain bejewelled cruciform key, split into two; this is the oddly low-tech object whose owner, having reunited the halves, can master a new and terrifying form of AI, a self-replicating digital consciousness with the capacity to invade any operating system in the world. Already the genie is emerging from the bottle. (...)

In the past I have been agnostic and a nay-sayer about M:I, but the pure fun involved in this film, its silly-serious alchemy, and the way the franchise seems to strain at something crazily bigger with every film, as opposed to just winding down, is something to wonder at.

by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: YouTube
[ed. Taking my grandson to see this one. See also: Running, jumping, looking: is the new Mission Impossible the Tom Cruisiest film Tom Cruise has ever made? (Guardian).]

Light My Fire

[ed. Impressive.]

The Abuse of YouTube's Copyright Policy

[ed. Important. We need a massive overhaul of copyright law, especially with AI coming.]

Madeline von Foerster (American, 1973) - Orchid Cabinet (n.d.)

via:

Gérard Schlosser (French, b. 1932) - Two Friends

via:

How to Stave Off Constitutional Extinction

Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate independence, but it might be more significant, more pregnant with meaning, to celebrate amendment — the writing, ratifying and especially the amending of constitutions. Except lately there hasn’t been much to celebrate, with amendment having become a lost art. And a constitution that can no longer be amended is dead.

The U.S. Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1971. Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification in 1972, but its derailment rendered the Constitution effectively unamendable. It’s not that people stopped trying. Conservatives, especially, tried.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan endorsed a balanced-budget amendment. In the 1990s, Republicans proposed anti-flag-burning amendments, fetal-personhood amendments and defense-of-marriage amendments. Lately, amendments have been coming from the left. “Nationally, Democrats generally wish to amend constitutions and Republicans to preserve them,” The Economist proclaimed last month, on the same day that California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, proposed a federal constitutional amendment that would regulate gun ownership. “I don’t know what the hell else to do,” he said, desperate.

The consequences of a constitution frozen in time in the age of Evel Knievel, “Shaft” and the Pentagon Papers are dire. Consider, for instance, climate change. Members of Congress first began proposing environmental rights amendments in 1970. They got nowhere. Today, according to one researcher, 148 of the world’s 196 national constitutions include environmental protection provisions. But not ours. Or take democratic legitimacy. Over the last decades, and beginning even earlier, as the political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky point out in a forthcoming book, “The Tyranny of the Minority,” nearly every other established democracy has eliminated the type of antiquated, antidemocratic provisions that still hobble the United States: the Electoral College, malapportionment in the Senate and lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. None of these problems can be fixed except by amending the Constitution, which, seemingly, can’t be done.

It’s a constitutional Catch-22: To repair Senate malapportionment, for instance, you’d have to get a constitutional amendment through that malapportioned Senate.

While it’s true that Americans can no longer, for all practical purposes, revise the Constitution, they can still change it, as long as they can convince five Supreme Court justices to read it differently. But how well has that worked out? That’s what happened, beginning in the early 1970s, with abortion and guns, the north and south poles of America’s life-or-death politics, in which either abortion is freedom and guns are murder or guns are freedom and abortion is murder. Chances are that if you like the current court, you like this method of constitutional change and if you don’t like the current court, you don’t like this method. But either way, it’s not a great boon to democracy.

Troublingly, our current era of unamendability is also the era of originalism, which also began in 1971. Originalists, who now dominate the Supreme Court, insist that rights and other ideas not discoverable in the debates over the Constitution at its framing do not exist. Perversely, they rely on a wildly impoverished historical record, one that fails even to comprehend the nature of amendment.

A written constitution ratified by the people — and subject to amendment by the people — is an American invention. In the 18th century, people who drafted constitutions and commented on constitutionalism came to agree that if such a strange, new and fragile thing as a written constitution were to endure, it would, as time passed, need to be both repaired and improved, mended and amended. To amend meant, at the time, to correct a fault; to repair an omission; to fix what’s broken; or to improve, in a moral sense: to make something better. The word shares a root, four of its five letters, and almost the entirety of its meaning, with the verb “mend.” You can mend a dress but you can also mend your ways; you can amend your will but, for your errors, you can also make amends. All this was contained within the philosophy of amendment.

“We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth,” Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense,” published in January 1776. The states and the new federal government began writing constitutions that spring. Delegates to the Continental Congress who drafted what became the Declaration of Independence were also working on state constitutions: Thomas Jefferson was drafting the preamble for the Virginia Constitution and John Adams was involved in the drafting of the constitutions of Virginia and New Jersey while avidly following the constitutional goings-on in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Maryland. (...)

Amendment is a constitutional mechanism necessary to avoid insurrection. The U.S. Constitution was itself an act of amendment, written in 1787 because the Articles of Confederation were technically amendable but, for all practical purposes, not. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, the Virginia delegate George Mason, pointing out that everyone knew the Constitution that they were drafting was imperfect, argued that “amendments therefore will be necessary, and it will be better to provide for them in an easy, regular and constitutional way than to trust to chance and violence.”

by Jill Lepore, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rozalina Burkova

[ed. Happy 4th.]

Nearly Half of US Honeybee Colonies Died Last Year

America’s honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies, an annual bee survey found.

But using costly and Herculean measures to create new colonies, beekeepers are somehow keeping afloat. Thursday’s University of Maryland and Auburn University survey found that even though 48% of colonies were lost in the year that ended April 1, the number of United States honeybee colonies “remained relatively stable.”

Honeybees are crucial to the food supply, pollinating more than 100 of the crops we eat, including nuts, vegetables, berries, citrus and melons. Scientists said a combination of parasites, pesticides, starvation and climate change keep causing large die-offs.

Last year’s 48% annual loss is up from the previous year’s loss of 39% and the 12-year average of 39.6%, but it’s not as high as 2020-2021’s 50.8% mortality rate, according to the survey funded and administered by the nonprofit research group Bee Informed Partnership. Beekeepers told the surveying scientists that 21% loss over the winter is acceptable and more than three-fifths of beekeepers surveyed said their losses were higher than that.

“This is a very troubling loss number when we barely manage sufficient colonies to meet pollination demands in the U.S.,” said former government bee scientist Jeff Pettis, president of the global beekeeper association Apimondia that wasn’t part of the study. “It also highlights the hard work that beekeepers must do to rebuild their colony numbers each year.”

The overall bee colony population is relatively steady because commercial beekeepers split and restock their hives, finding or buying new queens, or even starter packs for colonies, said University of Maryland bee researcher Nathalie Steinhauer, the survey’s lead author. It’s an expensive and time consuming process.

The prognosis is not as bad as 15 years ago because beekeepers have learned how to rebound from big losses, she said.

“The situation is not really getting worse, but it’s also not really getting better,” Steinhauer said. “It is not a bee apocalypse.”(...)

Some commercial beekeepers who have succeeded in the past lost as much as 80% of their colonies this past year, while other beekeepers did well, it varied so much, Evans said. Pettis, who has 150 colonies on Maryland’s Eastern shore, had less than 18% loss, saying he used organic acids for mite control. (...)

The demand for pollination from commercial bee colonies is growing even as the beekeepers have to work harder to make up for losses, Steinhauer said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says 35% of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants and the honeybee is responsible for 80% of that pollination.

by Seth Borenstein, AP | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Julio Cortez

Jung HaiYun - Untitled, (2012)

via:

The Hidden Cost of Gasoline

A black, electric-powered Nissan Leaf pulled up to a gas station — not to fuel up, of course. Matthew Metz, the founder of Coltura, a nonprofit trying to speed up the country’s shift away from gasoline, climbed out of his car with printed maps in hand, prepared to give me a tour.

It was a sunny spring day, and the Arco station in North Seattle looked like any other on a busy street corner, with cars fueling up and a line of bored people waiting to buy snacks and drinks inside the convenience store. Metz knows a lot about gas stations, and it changes what he sees. Looking around, he marveled at the risks that everyone was taking, even if they weren’t aware of it. “This is a hazardous materials facility,” he told me.

Drivers pumped their tanks with gas, breathing carcinogens like benzene, the source of gasoline’s signature sweet smell. On the east side of the property, tall white pipes that vent toxic vapors from petroleum kept underground stood just 10 feet away from the window of a childcare center. Hidden below the station is a tract of contaminated soil that extends underneath a neighboring apartment building.

 

The Arco station has a long history of leaking, with petroleum products discovered floating in the septic tank beneath it in 1990. After decades of efforts to remove and break down that pollution — a host of contaminants including lead, benzene, and the suspected carcinogen methyl tertiary-butyl ether — trace amounts remain, with some highly polluted patches in the soil. One sample taken late last year showed levels of gasoline-related compounds 72 times higher than Washington state’s allowable limit.

This Arco station is hardly unique. Almost every gas station eventually pollutes the earth beneath it, experts told Grist. The main culprit: the underground storage tanks that hold tens of thousands of gallons of fuel, one of the most common sources of groundwater pollution. Typically, two or three of these giant, submarine-shaped tanks are buried under a station to store the gasoline and diesel that gets piped to the pump. A large tank might be 55 feet long and hold as many as 30,000 gallons; a typical tank might hold 10,000 gallons. Leaks can occur at any point — in the storage tank itself, in the gas pumps, and in the pipes that connect them. Hazardous chemicals can then spread rapidly through the soil, seeping into groundwater, lakes, or rivers. Even a dribble can pollute a wide area. Ten gallons of gasoline can contaminate 12 million gallons of groundwater — a significant risk, given that groundwater is the source of drinking water for nearly half of all Americans.

As a result, time-consuming cleanup efforts are unfolding all across the country, with remediation for a single gas station sometimes topping $1 million. Leaks are such a huge liability that they’ve led to a high-stakes game of hot potato, where no one wants to pay for the mess — not the gas station owners, not the insurance companies that provide coverage for tanks, not the oil companies that supply the fuel. In some states, polluters have shifted tens of millions of dollars in remediation costs onto taxpayers. Roughly 60,000 contaminated sites are still waiting to be cleaned up, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA — and those are just the ones that have been found. Washington state has about 2,500 in line, one of the biggest backlogs in the country.

Much of this pollution has been stagnant for decades. Forty years ago, steel storage tanks began corroding, setting off a slow-motion environmental disaster all over the United States. Leaks often weren’t discovered until long after petroleum had poisoned the groundwater, when neighbors of gas stations began complaining that the water from their taps smelled like gasoline. In 1983, the EPA declared leaking tanks a serious threat to groundwater, and Congress soon stepped in with new regulations. One of the largest spills was in Brooklyn, where a 17 million-gallon pool of oil gradually collected beneath a Mobil gas station — a larger spill than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, when a tanker ran aground in Alaska and poured oil into Prince William Sound.

Fast-forward to today, and more than half a million leaks have been confirmed around the country. The Government Accountability Office estimated in 2007 that the total bill for cleanups would top $22 billion. Those old, decrepit storage tanks have left a legacy: overgrown, empty lots that real-estate developers don’t want to touch. Of the roughly 450,000 brownfields in the country, nearly half are contaminated by petroleum, much of it coming from old gas stations.

As the contamination from these spills lingers, underground storage tanks are becoming a problem again as the next generation of tanks — installed in a rush after the old steel ones started breaking — begin nearing the end of their 30-year warranties, when there’s broad consensus they are highly likely to leak. In Washington state, for instance, the average tank is about 29 years old. The tanks at the Arco station in North Seattle were replaced in 1990, soon after contamination was discovered, putting them a few years past the 30-year cutoff. (...)

But states are discovering that many private insurers, which have long hesitated to provide coverage, are even more reluctant as tanks get older. “I don’t think they’re super thrilled to insure them anymore,” said Cassandra Garcia, the deputy director of Washington state’s Pollution Liability Insurance Agency. “This isn’t generally the most profitable business line for them.”

If gas stations don’t have insurance, states can shut them down. This predicament prompted Washington state to adopt a new law this spring providing fully state-backed insurance for gas stations. But critics like Metz wonder whether stations need to be saved at all. With electric vehicles on the rise, Metz thinks that selling gasoline is a dying business. “The whole financial underpinnings of gas stations are starting to crumble,” Metz said.

Gas stations often bear the names of major oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron, but that doesn’t mean those companies actually own the stations. Usually, they supply the fuel to independent business owners who signed agreements to sell their products and pay royalties to use their branding. Back in the day, oil companies owned a lot of stations (and thus the tanks beneath them); today, the top five largest oil companies own about 1 percent of gas stations.

The number of stations overall has been in decline for decades thanks to mediocre profits, rising land values in cities, and more fuel-efficient cars. An analysis from Boston Consulting Group found that between 25 and 80 percent of gas stations nationwide could be unprofitable in 12 years — and that analysis was conducted in 2019, before a slate of new policies, including federal tax credits, were passed to promote electric vehicles. Under vehicle-emissions rules unveiled by the Biden administration in April, EVs would make up as much as two-thirds of all U.S. car sales by 2031. Last year, Washington state set a target of ending the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2030, just seven years away; it has also adopted California’s stricter deadline of 2035, along with five other states.

That shift could lead to a pileup of vacant gas stations that the existing cleanup programs won’t be able to handle. There are more than 145,000 fueling stations in the U.S., according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. Even if the country manages to break off its century-long attachment to gasoline, the fuel’s legacy may live on in the soil and water. The question of who pays to clean up the contamination is a mess in itself: In theory, station owners are supposed to pick up the tab, but sometimes they’re unable to pay — or unable to be found — when the bill comes due. So then, who pays? 

by Kate Yoder, Grist |  Read more:

Image: Grist/Jesse Nichols

The Invisible Effect Medical Notes Have on Care

In the mid-1990s, when Somnath Saha was a medical resident at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, he came across a cluster of studies showing that Black people with cardiovascular disease were treated less aggressively compared to White people. The findings were “appalling” to the young physician who describes himself as a “Brown kid from suburban St. Louis, Missouri.” (...)

While numerous studies have found evidence of racial discrimination in medicine through patient reports, less is known about how implicit bias shows up in medical records, and how stigmatizing language in patient notes can affect the care that Black patients receive.

That’s part of the reason why, about seven years ago, Saha began poring through medical records. For him, they offered a window into doctors’ feelings about their patients.

As part of his latest research, Saha’s team examined the records of nearly 19,000 patients, paying particular attention to negative descriptions that may influence a clinician’s decision-making. The data, which was recently presented at the 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, isn’t yet published, but it suggests what researchers have long speculated: Doctors are more likely to use negative language when describing a Black patient than they are a White patient. The notes provide, at times, a surprisingly candid view of how patients are perceived by doctors, and how their race may affect treatment.

The study adds to a concerning body of literature that explores how racial bias manifests in health care. Researchers like Saha are interested in how such prejudice leaves a paper trail, which can then reinforce negative stereotypes. Because medical notes get passed between physicians, Saha’s research suggests they can affect the health of Black patients down the line.

“The medical record is like a rap sheet, it stays with you,” Saha said, adding that “these things that we say about patients get eternalized.” (...)

But in his first year of medical school, his professor shared the story of a longtime patient, whom she had referred to an outside specialist. In Sun’s recollection, the professor regarded her patient in kind terms, having worked with her for some time to treat a chronic illness. But when she got the specialist’s notes back, she was confused by the description of her patient: Terms like “really difficult,” “non-compliant,” and “uninterested in their health.” This was not the patient she remembered.

“This, as a first-year medical student, really shocked me because I had taken at face value that any words used in notes were true, were valid, or rightfully used,” said Sun. “I realized all the ways that bias, untold stories, and unknown context may change the way that we view our patients.” (...)

Saha pointed to three categories of stigmatizing language that were the most pronounced: expressing doubt or disbelief in what the patient said, such as reporting they “claimed” to experience pain; insinuating that the patient was confrontational, using words like “belligerent” or combative”; and suggesting a patient was not cooperating with a doctor’s orders by saying they “refused” medical advice.

“We’ve known for some time that in health care we sometimes use language that can be confusing or even insulting,” Matthew Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado, wrote in an email to Undark. But he noted that research such as Saha’s has drawn attention to a previously overlooked issue. Describing a patient as “non-compliant” with medications, he said, “makes it sound like the patient is intentionally refusing to follow advice when, in fact, there are many reasons why people might not be able to follow our advice and intentional refusal isn’t even a very common one.”

Saha noted that if a patient isn’t taking their medication, it’s important that doctors note that, so that the next physician doesn’t overprescribe them. But the concern, he said, is whether doctors are using these terms appropriately and for the right reasons because of the implications they have on patients.

If a doctor portrays their patient negatively, Saha said, it can “trigger the next clinician to read them and formulate a potentially negative opinion about that patient” before they’ve even had a chance to interact.

Still, stigmatizing language is only one small piece of the puzzle. What also matters, Saha said, is how those words can have an impact on care. In prior work, Saha has shown how implicit and, in some cases, explicit bias, affects a patient’s treatment recommendations.

by Sara Novak, Undark |  Read more:

Image: Jose Luis Pelaez/The Image Bank via Getty Images
[ed. Glad to see this issue getting some attention, albeit with an unfortunate racial angle. Medical records are like school records, biased by the physician/teacher recording them, and passed on through sucessive interactions within the healthcare/education system. How many people request a copy of their medical records? You might be appalled at what you find.] 

“We Have Built a Giant Treadmill That We Can’t Get Off”: Sci-Fi Prophet Ted Chiang on How to Best Think About AI

Ted Chiang, author of the most prestigious science fiction of our time (that’s four Hugo awards, four Nebula awards, and one feature film adaptation spread across a measly, by sci-fi standards, oeuvre of a dozen and a half short stories over three decades) understands this human impulse. In Chiang’s fiction, characters across all kinds of universes grapple with the limits of our kind as they claw toward transcendence via automatons and alien languages. In fiction and in life, we humans like to think we can see it coming.

Lately, Chiang has been thinking about this current reality: Via viral essays for The New Yorker, he’s been wading into this year’s public discourse to explain ChatGPT and generative AI in terms any smartphone-wielder can actually process. For a species forever at odds with our own imaginative powers, the sci-fi author has become the most lucid voice in the room—a credit as much to that compact Chiangian prose as much as it is to the utter chaos of the 2023 technological landscape.

Some time in between Marc Andreessen blogging about how AI will save the world and the release of the new Black Mirror season, Chiang and I sat down over Zoom to discuss our current moment in tech and the metaphors we use to make sense of it all.

This conversation has been condensed and edited.

Vanity Fair: In terms of cultural touchstones, what were your earliest influences?

Ted Chiang: When I was maybe 11, I started reading Isaac Asimov—his science fiction and his popular science writing. Reading both gave me a very clear sense of the difference between the two. When I was younger, say in fourth grade, I had been really into books about sea serpents and Bigfoot and ancient astronauts. What I didn’t realize was the mixture of fact and fiction that is involved in those topics, so when I started reading Asimov, it clarified for me the nature of my interest. Because, yeah, there’s cool stuff in science, and there’s really cool stuff in speculating about science, but in coming up with your fictional scenarios inspired by science, you should be very clear about which one you’re engaged with at any point. (...)

How plugged in are you to the daily churn of tech news? I’m curious if you keep up with things like Marc Andreessen’s blog post about AI.

I am not, although I guess I'll say I'm not super interested in what Marc Andreessen has to say. In general, I can't say that I really keep up in any systematic fashion. But nowadays, you almost have to make a deliberate effort to avoid hearing about AI.

Would you consider yourself to be an early adopter?

Not of most technologies. I feel like being an early adopter requires a real commitment to constantly getting used to a new UI. I’m interested to see what is happening in technology, but in terms of my day-to-day work, I’m not looking for new software unless there’s an actual problem that I’m having. I wish I could still use a much older version of Word than I have to. (...)

In the most recent essay, “Will AI Become the New McKinsey?,” you talk about our reliance on problematic metaphors, like comparing AI to a genie in a bottle, stuff like that. I’ve been thinking about how we also love using the same default pop culture touchstones when it comes to talking about tech we don’t understand—works like The Terminator, Black Mirror, Her, etc. What do you think of the limitations of having these default references on hand?

By personifying things, it's easy to tell a dramatic story. If you think of what is currently called “AI,” it’s more like a system. There are stories about the effects of bureaucracy and systems crushing people, but those are a little harder. They’re not as visceral. (...)

The “AI as McKinsey” piece also articulates an underlying capitalist critique in your work. You clearly hold a lot of skepticism about the idea that Silicon Valley can provide magic fixes for social ills; you wrote this BuzzFeed News essay in 2017 that was so saucy. When reading “Seventy-Two Letters,” your short story from 2000, I gravitate toward this conversation between a craftsman and an inventor trying to create labor-saving robots, where the craftsman tells the inventor:

“Your desire for reform does you credit. Let me suggest, however, that there are simpler cures for the social ills you cite: a reduction in working hours, or the improvement of conditions. You do not need to disrupt our entire system of manufacturing.”

At a moment when we’re being promised “labor-saving” AI, this feels…relevant.

There's this saying, “There are two kinds of fools. The first says, ‘This is old and therefore good.’ And the second one says, ‘This is new and therefore better.’” I think about that a lot. How can you evaluate the merits of anything fairly without thinking it's good simply because it’s new? I think that is super difficult.

There probably was a time in history where most people were thinking, “This is old and therefore good,” and they carried the day. Now I think that we live in a time where everyone says, “This is new and therefore better.” I don't believe that the people who say that are right all the time, but it is very difficult to criticize them and suggest that maybe something that is new is not better.

Or it's like, better for whom?

Yes. Because we also live in an era in which there are a lot of people who have financial incentives to convince us that something is better because it's new. There’s another quote where Upton Sinclair said that it's very hard to make a person understand something if their salary depends on them not understanding it. The companies who are selling these products—the people who work for them, you know, they may be entirely sincere. it's not exactly malice. It's just that, you know, they have a kind of motivated reasoning to believe that these things are good.

My last question is about your very short story, “The Evolution of Human Science,” also from 2000. I read this as a fairly upbeat story about a universe where humans can exist peacefully and productively alongside “metahumans,” who are these superintelligent entities they’ve created. There’s this great line that says, “We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we.”

Is that a fair interpretation? And does that optimism apply to where you think we stand in the real world in relation to something like AI?

That story was written in response to an idea there was around 2000, when people were talking about the singularity and that we would transcend into something much greater. I was mostly thinking, well, why is everyone so certain they’re going to be the ones to transcend? Maybe transcendence isn’t going to be available to all of us, so what would it be like to live in a world where there are these incomprehensible things going on, and you’re sort of on the sidelines?

But I don't think that that is actually applicable to our current situation here, because there are no super intelligent machines.There's no software that anyone has built that is smarter than humans. What we have created are vast systems of control. Our entire economy is this kind of engine that we can’t really stop. That’s a different thing than saying we’ve created machines smarter than us. We have built a giant treadmill that we can’t get off. Maybe.

It probably is possible to get off, but we have to recognize that we are all on this treadmill of our own making, and then we have to agree that we all want to get off. There are other countries that have a healthier relationship to the narrative of progress; there are countries where they have much healthier attitudes toward work than we have in the U.S. So I think those things are possible. But we have created a system, and now it is all we know. It’s hard for us to imagine life outside of it. And we are only building more tools that strengthen and reinforce that system.

by Delia Cai, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Alan Berner