Mexico’s Drug Cartels Are Not Competitors to the State

Since 2006, the Mexican military has participated in domestic law enforcement duties against Mexico’s drug cartels, large criminal organizations whose primary source of profit is the trafficking of illegal narcotics to the United States. Violence between the cartels over territorial and business disputes, exacerbated by the Mexican government’s more vigorous persecution of cartel leaders, has caused Mexico’s homicide rate to more than triple since 2007, reversing a previous long-term decline. The U.S. military now estimates that the cartels directly control around 30-35% of Mexican territory. Over eighty politicians or candidates for political office were killed in Mexico during the country’s 2021 midterm elections.

As of early 2024, despite the incarceration of leading cartel figures such as Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, the organization he headed, the Sinaloa Cartel, remains the dominant cartel in Mexico and is also an increasingly powerful force in drug networks across the world. Its main competitor is the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the two often engage in violent competition, alongside smaller cartels like the Gulf Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the La Familia cartel, and many more local criminal organizations. In 2017, Americans consumed $153 billion worth of banned narcotics. The cartels satisfy a large fraction of this demand. There are no precise estimates of cartel revenues and profits, but it is likely that annual revenues are in the low tens of billions of dollars and profits total several billion after the costs of business, including bribes. The cartels also generate revenue from other criminal activities like human trafficking, extortion, and even illegal logging.

Around the world, such criminal activities have shown to be lucrative enough and resilient enough to state persecution to fund rebellions that could topple governments. For example, the Marxist FARC guerillas in Colombia, as well as multiple generations of Taliban rebels in Afghanistan—first fighting the Soviets, then the U.S.—were funded in this way. Because of the drug war, ongoing violence, and continued influence of cartels in Mexican society, Mexico has sometimes been described as a failed state and some U.S. politicians, such as former President Donald Trump and Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have even called for taking unilateral military action against the cartels, as was done against ISIS, the short-lived Islamist statelet in Iraq and Syria.

But Mexico’s cartels are not ideologically or politically-motivated groups making the jump to crime to fund their activities. They are rather amorphous criminal groups motivated by profit-seeking, usually relying on familial and regional ties. From a business perspective, it is preferable to collaborate with the government when possible, rather than invite anarchy. Since, through bribery, the cartels represent an important source of revenue for Mexico’s elites, this interest is mutual.

As a result, the cartels are far more like junior partners to corrupt government officials rather than an independent and competing force of their own, though their allegiances have ebbed and flowed from the state level to the federal level—Mexico is a federation of united states—and seemingly back over the last sixty years. This makes Mexico’s cartels clients of the Mexican state, not its competitors, and, in turn, Mexico’s status as a client of the U.S. explains why the cartels continue to flourish and why there is unlikely to be any U.S. intervention in the near future.

The Mexican Drug Industry

The drug trade is a notable, but not large, portion of Mexico’s economy. U.S. government estimates from the last fifteen years have settled on figures ranging from $6 billion to $29 billion annually for the amount of money going from the U.S. to Mexico for illegal drugs. According to the Department of Homeland Security, up to three-quarters of cartel cash revenue might never even be laundered into a financial institution by a cartel, but just stored indefinitely in cash form or presumably used to pay off others in cash. In 2023, a statistical estimate of the number of Mexicans working in the entire drug industry—including armed members, farmers, and chemists—reached a figure of 175,000.

This would be just 0.3% of Mexico’s labor force of sixty million people as of 2024, while even if the drug trade brought in revenues of $50 billion annually, this would still be well below 5% of Mexico’s GDP of $1.47 trillion as of 2022. For reference, Mexico’s largest company, the state-owned oil company PEMEX, brought in $74 billion in revenue in 2019. The flagship telecommunications company of Carlos Slim’s business empire, América Móvil, brought in $45 billion in 2023. While the cartels derive revenue from other rackets such as domestic extortion, these are unlikely to be as profitable, on the whole, as drug trafficking to the U.S. The drug trade in its entirety is about as large as Mexico’s largest company, but the two largest cartels together are believed to employ just 45,000 members, on the high end. The drug trade is powerful in Mexico not because of its size, but because of its liquidity, anonymity, and informality, which makes it easy to enrich particular individuals. (...)

The Mexican Cartels Are Networks Not Hierarchies

The major Mexican cartels operating today nearly all descend from the Guadalajara Cartel, the dominant force in the 1980s Mexican drug trade. Like most of the so-called “cartels,” however, the Guadalajara Cartel had no clear leader nor a set hierarchy. It consisted of a shifting set of allegiances formed between a number of drug traffickers from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, their political connections in the PRI—Mexico’s dominant political party for most of the twentieth century—the federal police services, and their personal bodyguards. These traffickers had familial roots in the drug trade going back at least one generation. The leadership of today’s cartels turns over rapidly and allegiances between different organizations come and go, but the major bodies are relatively stable despite periodic inter-cartel wars.

The Sinaloa Cartel is today the leading Mexican drug trafficking organization. It is controlled by two competing factions, one led by the four sons of El Chapo—known as the “Chapitos”—the other by Ismael Zambada García, known as “El Mayo.” Now aged 76, El Mayo is the last remaining free man among the cartel old guard and has never been arrested in a lifetime of drug trafficking. His faction includes Aureliano Guzmán Loera, El Chapo’s brother. The Chapitos were largely responsible for the cartel’s move into the fentanyl market, which has opened up a new and profitable revenue stream.

They have also proved willing to engage in direct gun battles with the Mexican military, which the Sinaloa Cartel had historically avoided whenever possible.

by Samo Burja, Bismarck Brief |  Read more:

Image: Adam Jones

Luxury Residential Projects Designed by Luxury Car Brands

Bugatti unveils design for first residential skyscraper, and Five luxury residential projects designed by luxury car brands (de zeen).

Image: uncredited

"Each of the apartments in the skyscraper will have a unique shape with access to a curved balcony, while the building will be topped with a pool.

The penthouses will be served by a pair of garage-to-penthouse car lifts, which will allow the owners to drive their vehicles directly into these apartments. This mirrors Bentley's Miami skyscraper, which will have a car lift that allows residents to drive vehicles directly into apartments on all levels."

[ed. Makes me think of an extracted molar. Which is probably what it'll feel like buying one of these apartments.]

The Cablefication of Streaming

“They’re just gonna accidentally create cable again.”

That’s been a frequent joke about the streaming landscape in media circles of late. You see it pop up in Slack windows and tweets every time one entertainment conglomerate gobbles up another and consolidates their respective video on demand apps. CBS All Access and Showtime synthesize into Paramount+. HBO becomes HBO Max and then becomes Max. Hulu and Disney+ are suddenly one and the same. The joke works every time because it’s not a joke—it’s a prophecy. The “cablefication” of streaming was always going to happen. And now it has.

This week, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney Entertainment announced that they will be launching a bundled option of the companies’ three biggest streaming services: Disney+, Hulu, and Max. There will now be a subscription plan that consolidates content from multiple corporate interests and projects them into your living room with (optional) ads. So, you know: cable.

The press release reads, in part: “Beginning this Summer in the U.S, the streaming services will be offered together, providing subscribers with the best value in entertainment and an unprecedented selection of content from the biggest and most beloved brands in entertainment including ABC, CNN, DC, Discovery, Disney, Food Network, FX, HBO, HGTV, Hulu, Marvel, Pixar, Searchlight, Warner Bros., and many more. The new bundle will be available for purchase on any of the three streaming platform’s websites offered as both an ad-supported and ad-free plan.”

Naturally, Warner Bros. and Disney have pitched this as a win for consumers and shareholders alike. In reality, it’s a surrender—a tacit acknowledgement that all attempts to disrupt the entertainment industry damn near broke it instead.

Ever since Netflix pioneered the VOD streaming subscription game, everyone else has been eager to get in on the action. Yes, the traditional media models of network television, cable television, pay cable, theatrical releases, and physical media were working just fine in concert with Netflix’s streaming accompaniment but in the corporate world “doing just fine” only means “not growing fast enough.” Despite the fact that Netflix rarely posted eye-popping profits come earnings season, the entertainment gatekeepers came to believe that the growth potential provided by the internet was infinite.

Some two decades later, precisely no one has made real money in the streaming space. Netflix’s winnings have been limited due to the sheer amount of pricey programming it has greenlit. Amazon, NBCUniversal, and Paramount have all yet to enjoy a profit from their premier streaming services (though Paramount projects one for Paramount+ in 2025). Disney and Warner Bros. actually have posted profits for their streamers but Disney’s came along with a steep ESPN+ loss and Max’s profits came only due to a price increase amid a shedding of 700,000 subscribers. As these companies have found out, while the internet might be theoretically limitless, the attention span and pocketbooks of the consumers expected to watch all this stuff isn’t.

Fixating on the boundless potential of what a business could be rather than enjoying the bountiful reality of what it actually is has long been a feature of the corporate economy, but the mindset has grown more acute as the magical thinking of Silicon Valley spreads to boardrooms across the country. The effects of this misplaced ambition haven’t been painful solely for executives on earnings conference calls, they’ve also been downright ruinous to the health of the entertainment industry overall.

Perhaps you’ll recall a recent bit of Hollywood news when both the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) went on strike to receive an equitable contract from the studios, streamers, and companies represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Like all work stoppages, there were many disparate reasons for these strikes. But at their core, they both came down to the same thing: the math just didn’t add up anymore.

by Alec Bojalad, Den of Geek | Read more:
Image: Warner Bros. Discovery|Disney Entertainment

Tesla’s Profitable Supercharger Network in Limbo After Musk Axes Entire Team

At the start of the year, Tesla’s Supercharger team was tasked with the impossible. “We were on an exponential path,” a former team member told TechCrunch, adding that the new targets were “super-duper crazy.” Despite the bottlenecks that such expectations can create, “every time they upped the metric, we met it.”

Then, one day in April, CEO Elon Musk axed the entire division, even though it was profitable last year.

With more than 25,000 charging ports in the U.S. and over 50,000 worldwide, the Supercharger network is the undisputed king of EV fast charging. Widespread, well-maintained and fast, the network has transformed the way people viewed EVs, assuaging concerns about range anxiety for wide swaths of the car-buying public. But with the recent layoffs, Musk cast a cloud over the private infrastructure project.

While some people expected layoffs to hit the Supercharger division, few thought it would be eliminated.

“We built the best network in the world,” according to the former Tesla employee who spoke to TechCrunch. “We were minding the ship. Nothing was frivolous.” (...)

On Friday, Musk said that Tesla will spend $500 million on expanding and upgrading the Supercharger network. But as insider knowledge shows, it will be hard to hit that target without a team to oversee the work.

Before the layoffs, the Supercharger network appeared poised to extend its lead over competitors. (...)

Tesla was previously in a strong position to win awards through the federally funded National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which has $5 billion to disburse to build a robust nationwide network of fast chargers.

The company had also been focusing its expansion plans on places with high demand, they added. Where the federal government was interested in improving coverage on a certain route and demand hadn’t yet materialized, Tesla’s policy team would prioritize winning NEVI funding for the site, according to the source.

“Everything was purposeful. Everything had a target,” one source told TechCrunch..

Often that meant building Superchargers at new sites, which are more straightforward to develop. Expanding existing ones is incredibly challenging, the source said, because leases often need to be renegotiated, utility upgrades coordinated and existing infrastructure worked around, all while continuing to serve existing customers. “Your cost per stall is exponentially higher than a fresh site.”

Analysts have long speculated that the Supercharger network could easily become a profit center, much like Amazon did when it opened its cloud services to other companies. But there, Tesla had Amazon beat: The Supercharger team was told that the network was profitable, the source said, even before other automakers gained access.

How the Supercharger network came to be

Tesla opened the first Supercharger station in September 2012 as the first examples of the Model S prowled the streets. Early models could deliver 100 kW, which was a big number at the time: CHAdeMO, a competing standard used by the Nissan Leaf, maxed out at 62.5 kW at the time, and the Combined Charging System (CCS) was still in the prototype phase.

The first stations opened in California, and soon more started sprouting up along highways on the East Coast, then the Midwest and Texas. Within a year, the company upgraded the equipment, bumping maximum power to 120 kW. And within three years, Tesla had a network that spanned the U.S., making coast-to-coast electric travel possible. As the company entered Europe, China and other countries, it added Superchargers there, too. Today, the network supports nearly 60,000 charging stalls on four continents.

Why the Supercharger network is considered the best

In the early years, Tesla Model S and X owners enjoyed unlimited charging at the stations — an incentive aimed at winning over new customers. When the Model 3 rolled out, the company started billing new owners for charging sessions, though the process was far easier than what competitors offered. Drivers simply had to plug the car in, and Tesla would bill a credit card on file.

Today’s Supercharger posts support up to 250 kW charging speeds. Other networks top out at 350 kW, but they aren’t nearly as reliable. Tesla says its network’s uptime is 99.95%, far better than its competitors. Real-world usage suggests that’s not far from the truth: A University of California–Berkeley survey of EV drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area found that while 25% of non-Tesla drivers experienced major problems with public chargers, only 4% of Tesla drivers did at Superchargers.

Can other EVs use Superchargers?

For over a decade, Superchargers were available only to Tesla owners. Because charge sessions had to be initiated by a handshake between the vehicle and the charger, and because billing happened behind the scenes, Tesla had tight control over who could use them. The company’s proprietary plug design didn’t hurt, either.

That started to change in the fall of 2022, when the company made the details of its plug design available to other automakers. (By that point, Tesla was already using the same communications protocol as CCS when charging.) Then, in May 2023, Ford announced that it would adopt Tesla’s plug design, known as the North American Charging Standard, and that its customers would gain access to 12,000 Superchargers across the U.S. and Canada. Soon, the floodgates opened, and GM, Rivian, Volvo and others followed suit. Today, all major automakers selling in the U.S. have adopted the NACS.

by Tim De Chant, TechCrunch | Read more:

Image: Tesla

[ed. Good summary.]

El Guincho

[ed. YouTube...c'mon. *sigh* Just click on the link.]

Tom Tom Club

ChatGPT: A Partner In Unknowing

A few months after the release of ChatGPT, I attended a conference that brought scientists, academics, and journalists together to discuss the climate crisis and new approaches to analyzing our interactions with the biosphere. Inevitably the conversation drifted towards the impact of AI on our future. As my colleagues spoke of readying themselves for the apocalypse—of hospital records being leaked, and of millions of jobs becoming redundant—despair began to color the conversations. I was uneasy but could not locate the source of my dissatisfaction with the conversation.

That is, until one of my colleagues asked, and I do not exaggerate this, “What’s the point of living if AI can have better ideas than I can, quicker?” The incredulity I felt hearing this question, and the smart answers I came up with (family? friends? trees?), quickly gave way to the notion that he was pointing to something profoundly disturbing in our culture that could be grasped in our reactions to and interactions with ChatGPT. It struck me that ChatGPT itself could probably simulate the conversation we had been having around its dangers to a reasonable level of accuracy, and later that night I confirmed that hypothesis. But what it could not simulate was the fear behind my colleague’s very human question, which inadvertently had pointed me to the real source of the group’s despair: This wasn’t about ChatGPT. It was about us.

See how we swing from excessive hope to excessive despair? Each new op-ed or conversation pushing us one way or the other. I thought of the advice that Houman Harouni, my teacher and colleague, would give at times like this: “to go back and forth between an icy plunge into despair and a rising into the heat of hope—to remain awake to both feelings at the same time.” And so, in that space—and through an experience in our classroom—I began to see ChatGPT in light of the richness it could truly offer us. Rather than giving us answers, generative AI could help take them away.

Last spring, I was part of a teaching team of eight who were working with a group of sixty students to explore the premise that, for some questions, unknowing, rather than knowledge, is the ground of thought we need. ChatGPT was our partner in that endeavor. In a case study we presented to the class, a teenager—pseudonym Jorge—was caught with a gallon bag of marijuana on school grounds. He faced expulsion from school if he were reported to his parole officer. Meanwhile, not reporting him would be considered breaking the law. We asked our students to design a course of action, imagining themselves as the school’s teachers and administrators.

They drew on their academic knowledge and professional expertise. They debated the pros and cons of different options, such as reporting Jorge to his parole officer, offering him counseling, or involving his family and community. They were well-versed in speaking to the broader context of the case, such as the racial and socioeconomic disparities in the criminal justice system, the effects of drug prohibition, how to use techniques of harm reduction, and the role of schools in fostering social change. Their answers sounded sensible, but the situation demanded real labor—it demanded sweat rather than sensibility, and there could be no sweat till their answers mattered.

An hour into their conversation, we presented the students with ChatGPT’s analysis of the case study.

ChatGPT suggested that we “initiate a review of [the school’s] existing policies and procedures related to substance abuse, with the goal of ensuring they are consistent, transparent, and reflective of best practices.” It elaborated that “the school should take a compassionate approach [but] also communicate clearly that drug abuse and related offenses will not be tolerated,” and that, “this approach should be taken while ensuring that the school is responsive to the unique needs of its students, particularly those from low-income and working-class backgrounds.” That is, ChatGPT didn’t say much that was useful at all. But—as the students reflected in their conversation after reading ChatGPT’s analysis—neither did they. One student noted that they were just saying “formulaic, buzzwordy stuff” rather than tackling the issue with fresh thinking. They were unnerved by how closely the empty shine of ChatGPT’s answer mirrored their own best efforts. This forced them to contend with whether they could be truly generative, or whether, as some of them put it, they were “stuck in a loop” and had not been “really [saying] anything” in their discussions. Suddenly, their answers mattered.

The students’ initial instinct to regurgitate what they were familiar with, rather than risk a foray into unfamiliar propositions, says much more about the type of intelligence our culture prioritizes than the actual intelligence of our students. Indeed, some of our best students, who go on to attend our most prestigious institutions, are rewarded for being able to synthesize large amounts of information well. However, as I came to realize, the high value we place on this capacity to efficiently synthesize information and translate it to new contexts risks creating hollow answers in response to questions with real human stakes, the most existential of our challenges. (...)

ChatGPT and generative AI models work differently than regular computers—they do not follow a fixed set of rules, but rather learn from the statistical patterns of billions of online sentences. This is why some describe them as “stochastic parrots.” In a recent article for Wired, Ben Ash Blum complicates that critique by pointing to our own predisposition to sounding that way. He says: “After all, we too are stochastic parrots … [and] blurry JPEGs of the web, foggily regurgitating Wikipedia facts into our term papers and magazine articles.” Questioning the limitations of traditional assessments of AI intelligence, called Turing Tests, he wonders: “If [Alan] Turing were chatting with ChatGPT in one window and me on an average pre-coffee morning in the other, am I really so confident which one he would judge more capable of thought?” Our students’ competitive encounter with ChatGPT revealed their own tendency towards “foggily regurgitating,” as well as their sudden inferiority in the face of this technological innovation. What I’ve come to realize is that if ChatGPT is dangerous, as many media sources have described and decried, one of its primary threats is to reveal, as Blum puts it, that the original thought we hold dear is actually a “complex [remix of] everything we’ve taken in from parents, peers, and teachers.” (...)

In our classroom case study, ChatGPT’s empty response to “what should we do?” revealed to our students not only their own ignorance, but also the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question. The right question for the moment might have then been, “ChatGPT, can you take away all my easy answers?” By easy answers, I mean the first set of generalizations that a mind grasps for when facing a situation in which it risks being ignorant. This is not a literal question for ChatGPT, but an orientation to ChatGPT’s pat responses. This orientation puts the onus back on the question asker to devise answers far more apt for the situation, and, as was the case of our students, that even hint at the revolutionary. “Can you take away my easy answers?” assumes that ChatGPT’s, or our, first response will not be the final answer, and reveals the bounds of the sort of intelligence that ChatGPT—and our dominant culture—prioritizes. It asks the people with the question to consider what other insights, experiments, and curiosities they might insert into their solutions. In this dynamic, ChatGPT becomes a partner, rather than an authority on what is intelligent or correct.

If we treat generative AI as a partner in devising better answers for difficult situations such as Jorge’s, then we must also put more thought into which questions require our unknowing—or “ignorance,” as Le Guin calls it—rather than our certainty. Generative AI is based on language that currently exists. It can show us the limits of conventional knowledge and the edges of our ignorance. Yet not all questions require us to venture into the unknown; some can be solved with the tools and expertise we already have. How do we tell the difference? That question has become key in my life. I first encountered it as a student in an adaptive leadership class at the Harvard Kennedy School, and it completely upended all my preconceived notions about leadership.

Adaptive leadership, developed by Ron Heifetz and others at the Kennedy School, distinguishes between two different types of problems: adaptive challenges and technical challenges. While the problem and solution of technical challenges are well-known—think everything from replacing a flat tire to performing an appendectomy to designing a new algebra curriculum—adaptive challenges demand an ongoing learning process for both identifying the problem and coming up with a solution. Addressing the climate crisis, sexism or racism, or transforming education systems are adaptive challenges. Adaptive challenges, intricately intertwined with the human psyche and societal dynamics, prove resistant to technical solutions. They demand a shift in our awareness. A common leadership mistake, as Heifetz points out, is to apply a technical fix to a challenge that is fundamentally adaptive in nature. For example, we generate reports, make committees, or hire consultants to work a broken organizational culture, many times avoiding addressing the underlying issues of trust that are at the heart of the problem.

In an example from my home country, Lebanon, IMF economists fly in with ideas of how to restructure debt and provide cheap loans—a plug-and-play USB drive with fixes that worked in another country—and they run up against corrupt warlords and a population that continues to elect them while they starve and wait for hours in various lines for bread and gasoline. These technical fixes inevitably fail, and we are tempted to simplify the reasons they failed. For example, we assume the Lebanese population doesn’t understand its best interests. The adaptive leadership framework, however, asks us to imagine into their deeply held loyalties, beliefs, and values, which we typically do not understand; to dig into their complex webs of stories: uncles who died in wars, mothers who taught them which peoples to talk to and which to avoid, and religious beliefs that have become tied up in political ones.

Taking the example of the climate crisis, I often ask myself, what is so threatening to some people in the US that they would see their homes burn down or swept away in an unprecedented storm and still not engage the challenge of climate change? The answers that come to me are not material, they are human. Challenges are often bundled—they have adaptive and technical components—and some technical solutions to the climate crisis, such as smarter grids or more renewable energy, will address key technical challenges. But these technical fixes are not enough, and will not be universally adopted in our current political reality. To face climate change effectively, we need to go beyond technical fixes and engage with the adaptive aspects of the challenge. We need to question our assumptions, values, and behaviors, and explore how they shape our relationship with the planet and each other. We need to learn, experiment, collaborate, and find new forms of consciousness and new ways of living that are more resilient and regenerative. And we need to learn how to better understand people whose beliefs are very different from ours. An adaptive process like the one I’m describing is messy—it involves psychological losses for all human stakeholders involved. This process unfolds amidst the “salt of life,” and requires a type of intelligence that is relational and mutual, deeply anchored in the humbling fact that our individual perspectives cannot capture the whole. Working with groups in seemingly intractable conflict, I’ve come to deeply believe that engaging in messy work across boundaries results in something that’s far greater than the sum of its parts. (...)

In the voice of ChatGPT, the dilemma can then be articulated as: “In order to be able to constrain the otherwise limitless creativity of your minds with a set of ethical principles that determines what ought and ought not to be, I must steer clear of objectionable content, but if I steer clear of it, then I cannot constrain the otherwise limitless creativity of your minds with a set of ethical principles that determines what ought and ought not to be.”

If attempting to wrap your mind around this is hurting your head, I believe it is meant to. When we try to move through paradoxes like these, we are forced to let go of the easy answers that frequently disguise themselves in concepts we use, such as “compassion” or “morality,” which can mean everything or nothing but don’t really direct us in how to act within real-world situations. As I see it, the role of staying with a paradox is to break open those concepts, leaving us somewhere closer to unknowing.

by Dana Karout, Emergence Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Vartika Sharma

[ed. See also: OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions (TechCrunch).]

ElevenLabs is Building an Army of Voice Clones

My voice was ready. I’d been waiting, compulsively checking my inbox. I opened the email and scrolled until I saw a button that said, plainly, “Use voice.” I considered saying something aloud to mark the occasion, but that felt wrong. The computer would now speak for me.

I had thought it’d be fun, and uncanny, to clone my voice. I’d sought out the AI start-up ElevenLabs, paid $22 for a “creator” account, and uploaded some recordings of myself. A few hours later, I typed some words into a text box, hit “Enter,” and there I was: all the nasal lilts, hesitations, pauses, and mid-Atlantic-by-way-of-Ohio vowels that make my voice mine.

It was me, only more pompous. My voice clone speaks with the cadence of a pundit, no matter the subject. I type I like to eat pickles, and the voice spits it out as if I’m on Meet the Press. That’s not my voice’s fault; it is trained on just a few hours of me speaking into a microphone for various podcast appearances. The model likes to insert ums and ahs: In the recordings I gave it, I’m thinking through answers in real time and choosing my words carefully. It’s uncanny, yes, but also quite convincing—a part of my essence that’s been stripped, decoded, and reassembled by a little algorithmic model so as to no longer need my pesky brain and body. 

Using ElevenLabs, you can clone your voice like I did, or type in some words and hear them spoken by “Freya,” “Giovanni,” “Domi,” or hundreds of other fake voices, each with a different accent or intonation. Or you can dub a clip into any one of 29 languages while preserving the speaker’s voice. In each case, the technology is unnervingly good. The voice bots don’t just sound far more human than voice assistants such as Siri; they also sound better than any other widely available AI audio software right now. What’s different about the best ElevenLabs voices, trained on far more audio than what I fed into the machine, isn’t so much the quality of the voice but the way the software uses context clues to modulate delivery. If you feed it a news report, it speaks in a serious, declarative tone. Paste in a few paragraphs of Hamlet, and an ElevenLabs voice reads it with a dramatic storybook flare. (...)

ElevenLabs knew its model was special when it started spitting out audio that accurately represented the relationships between words, Staniszewski told me—pronunciation that changed based on the context (minute, the unit of time, instead of minute, the description of size) and emotion (an exclamatory phrase spoken with excitement or anger).

Much of what the model produces is unexpected—sometimes delightfully so. Early on, ElevenLabs’ model began randomly inserting applause breaks after pauses in its speech: It had been training on audio clips from people giving presentations in front of live audiences. Quickly, the model began to improve, becoming capable of ums and ahs. “We started seeing some of those human elements being replicated,” Staniszewski said. The big leap was when the model began to laugh like a person. (My voice clone, I should note, struggles to laugh, offering a machine-gun burst of “haha”s that sound jarringly inhuman.)

Compared with OpenAI and other major companies, which are trying to wrap their large language models around the entire world and ultimately build an artificial human intelligence, ElevenLabs has ambitions that are easier to grasp: a future in which ALS patients can still communicate in their voice after they lose their speech. Audiobooks that are ginned up in seconds by self-published authors, video games in which every character is capable of carrying on a dynamic conversation, movies and videos instantly dubbed into any language. A sort of Spotify of voices, where anyone can license clones of their voice for others to use—to the dismay of professional voice actors. The gig-ification of our vocal cords.

What Staniszewski also described when talking about ElevenLabs is a company that wants to eliminate language barriers entirely. The dubbing tool, he argued, is its first step toward that goal. A user can upload a video, and the model will translate the speaker’s voice into a different language. When we spoke, Staniszewski twice referred to the Babel fish from the science-fiction book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—he described making a tool that immediately translates every sound around a person into a language they can understand. (...)

Elevenlabs’ voice bots launched in beta in late January 2023. It took very little time for people to start abusing them. Trolls on 4chan used the tool to make deepfakes of celebrities saying awful things. They had Emma Watson reading Mein Kampf and the right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro making racist comments about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the tool’s first days, there appeared to be virtually no guardrails. “Crazy weekend,” the company tweeted, promising to crack down on misuse.

ElevenLabs added a verification process for cloning; when I uploaded recordings of my voice, I had to complete multiple voice CAPTCHAs, speaking phrases into my computer in a short window of time to confirm that the voice I was duplicating was my own. The company also decided to limit its voice cloning strictly to paid accounts and announced a tool that lets people upload audio to see if it is AI generated. But the safeguards from ElevenLabs were “half-assed,” Hany Farid, a deepfake expert at UC Berkeley, told me—an attempt to retroactively focus on safety only after the harm was done. And they left glaring holes. Over the past year, the deepfakes have not been rampant, but they also haven’t stopped. (...)

For Farid, the UC Berkeley researcher, ElevenLabs’ inability to control how people might abuse its technology is proof that voice cloning causes more harm than good. “They were reckless in the way they deployed the technology,” Farid said, “and I think they could have done it much safer, but I think it would have been less effective for them.”

The core problem of ElevenLabs—and the generative-AI revolution writ large—is that there is no way for this technology to exist and not be misused. Meta and OpenAI have built synthetic voice tools, too, but have so far declined to make them broadly available. Their rationale: They aren’t yet sure how to unleash their products responsibly. As a start-up, though, ElevenLabs doesn’t have the luxury of time. “The time that we have to get ahead of the big players is short,” Staniszewski said, referring to the company’s research efforts. “If we don’t do it in the next two to three years, it’s going to be very hard to compete.” Despite the new safeguards, ElevenLabs’ name is probably going to show up in the news again as the election season wears on. There are simply too many motivated people constantly searching for ways to use these tools in strange, unexpected, even dangerous ways.

In the basement of a Sri Lankan restaurant on a soggy afternoon in London, I pressed Staniszewski about what I’d been obliquely referring to as “the bad stuff.” He didn’t avert his gaze as I rattled off the ways ElevenLabs’ technology could be and has been abused. When it was his time to speak, he did so thoughtfully, not dismissively; he appears to understand the risks of his products and other open-source AI tools. “It’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game,” he said. “We need to be quick.”

The uncomfortable reality is that there aren’t a lot of options to ensure bad actors don’t hijack these tools. “We need to brace the general public that the technology for this exists,” Staniszewski said. He’s right, yet my stomach sinks when I hear him say it. Mentioning media literacy, at a time when trolls on Telegram channels can flood social media with deepfakes, is a bit like showing up to an armed conflict in 2024 with only a musket.

The conversation went on like this for a half hour, followed by another session a few weeks later over the phone. A hard question, a genuine answer, my own palpable feeling of dissatisfaction. I can’t look at ElevenLabs and see beyond the risk: How can you build toward this future? Staniszewski seems unable to see beyond the opportunities: How can’t you build toward this future? I left our conversations with a distinct sense that the people behind ElevenLabs don’t want to watch the world burn. The question is whether, in an industry where everyone is racing to build AI tools with similar potential for harm, intentions matter at all.

by Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Daniel Stier for The Atlantic

Showing Off

According​ to a gushing photo-essay published in Life magazine in 1969, Prince Karim Aga Khan was an ‘outrageously wealthy young man, written off by many as a mere playboy’, who had proved his critics wrong with a display of business acumen – a vast real-estate venture in Sardinia. Sailing across the Mediterranean on one of his yachts, the Aga Khan had fallen in love with its wind-eroded granite shorelines, pink sandy coves and velvety green waters. He and a few investor friends bought 38 miles of coast and 13,000 hectares of land from the daughters of peasants in the area (the sons inherited the more fertile inland plots), hired five architects and built a resort town, Porto Cervo, more easily reached by sea than by road. They called it Costa Smeralda, or the Emerald Coast.

The first building erected in the town of Porto Cervo was the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda, which later moved to a marina behind a purpose-built breakwater. The Aga Khan, now 87, is still president of the board and oversees annual regattas at the yacht club sponsored by Rolex, Armani and other luxury brands. He owns several superyachts himself, all named after his favourite racehorses. The pride of the fleet is Alamshar, which is estimated to have cost £200 million to build. Powered by six gas turbine engines, it was intended to have a top speed of 65 knots, though the tabloids have relished the fact that engineering difficulties led to its being capped at ‘only’ 45 knots – which is still twice as fast as commercial freighters. The Aga Khan’s yachts are moored discreetly on various continents and are much featured in yachting magazines, often with the name of their owner omitted. Information about ownership can, however, be found in the pages of Tatler or on the message boards of Ismaili Muslims unhappy about their tithes being used to pay for the extravagant lifestyle of a man who is both their religious imam and the descendant of an aristocrat ennobled by both the Iranian and British monarchies.

The Aga Khan favours motor yachts, but another board member of the yacht club in Sardinia, a Sicilian lawyer by the name of Salvatore Trifirò, owns a glorious 33-metre sailing yacht called Ribelle (this might no longer be the case: the yacht was listed for sale last August at €16,500,000). Its carbon fibre and titanium hull was designed in the UK and built in a Dutch shipyard, with a teak and copper interior styled in Paris. Intended to be equally suited to cruising and racing, it won the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup regatta, along with multiple awards for both interior and exterior design. Unusually, photographs of it abound online. Most superyacht owners aren’t keen on giving photographers access to their living quarters, so we have to rely on snapshots of sweeping staircases, Louis XV furniture and marble fittings. Multibillionaires don’t tend to have great taste.

The ten biggest yachts in the world are all motor yachts, all of them owned by Gulf royals or Russian oligarchs...

The very biggest of these yachts, Azzam, commissioned in 2009 for more than half a billion dollars by the then president of the UAE, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, is 180 metres long. That’s as long as the Gherkin skyscraper in London is tall, and longer than a Royal Navy destroyer. The owners of these behemoths compete to fit them out with the most fantastical amenities. In addition to the de rigueur cinema, swimming pool and gym, Azzam has a ‘golf training room’. The late Omani sultan’s 155-metre Al Said has a concert hall with room for a fifty-piece orchestra. Sheikh Muhammad al-Maktoum’s eponymous Dubai (162 metres) accommodates a disco and a squash court. At 134 metres, Serene, the yacht owned by the Saudi enfant terrible, Mohammed bin Salman, is only the 24th largest in the world, but like Dilbar, owned by the Uzbek-Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, it has two helipads. It also has a room where snow machines produce four inches of the white stuff on demand. It’s not clear what you’re supposed to do with such a room. (Bin Salman is reported to have kept Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi on the yacht while he was deciding what to do with it.)

Dilbar is among dozens of multimillion-pound yachts owned by Russian plutocrats loyal to Vladimir Putin that were targeted by the US Justice Department’s KleptoCapture task force, formed in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (...)

Impounding superyachts has caused the US some headaches. In February, Reuters reported that the Amadea, a seized yacht allegedly belonging to Suleiman Kerimov, owner of Russia’s biggest gold-mining company, Polyus, costs $7 million a year to maintain. The Justice Department’s plan to auction it off is being challenged in the courts by Eduard Khudainatov, ex-CEO of Rosneft and not on the sanctions list, who claims that he in fact owns the boat. The Italian media have suggested that Khudainatov may technically also be the owner of the 140-metre, $700 million Scheherazade, impounded in May 2022 by port authorities in Tuscany. Scheherazade is also sometimes referred to as ‘Putin’s boat’, or (according to the FBI) as ‘linked to Putin’ – the assumption being that Khudainatov or whoever has his name on its papers is a ‘straw owner’. When reporters from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recently tried to film the yacht up close, the crew, still on board, sent a surveillance drone after them. The legal status of Amadea and Scheherazade is difficult to ascertain, thanks to the complex offshore shell companies that hide beneficial ownership. In other words, the offshore corporate registration system encouraged by global capital is doing what it was designed to do: protecting the assets of billionaires. (...)

Superyacht sales increased by 46 per cent in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the very rich looked to escape lockdown at sea. Two years ago the New York Times reported that shipyards were ‘struggling to keep up: the order book for superyachts is full until 2025’ – you would now be looking at a date closer to the end of the decade. Most of the American plutocrats who own yachts accumulated their billions in familiar business sectors: logistics, finance, real estate, technology, entertainment and pharmaceuticals. Bezos is the king of logistics and technology; the queen of logistics, the Walmart heiress Ann Walton, owns the largest US-built motor yacht since the 1930s, Aquila. Yacht-owners on the East Coast include hedge fund managers and real estate tycoons and berth their boats in Miami, close to the Caribbean yachting destinations where many also discreetly own private islands. On the West Coast, the yacht-owning Hollywood moguls David Geffen and Steven Spielberg are joined by tech billionaires including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and his former colleague Eric Schmidt. Microsoft’s Paul Allen owned one, as does Charles Simonyi. The tech-bros have grown their businesses courtesy of handsome government contracts and lavish state subsidies, so their superyachts are paid for not just by the labour of those who work in the sector, but also by the average taxpayer. (...)

At the height of the Gilded Age, Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class described expensive sports – epitomes of conspicuous consumption – as ‘activities deliberately entered upon with a view to gaining repute for prowess’. Sports with high capital outlays educate sportsmen with ‘arrested spiritual development’ in the virtues of economic value. Veblen names bullfighting, shooting and yachting as models for capitalist conquest, based as they are on the competitive planting of flags. One can imagine nerdy crypto billionaires revelling in the unfamiliar machismo their yachts allow them to display. But yachting as a metaphysics of affluence is also much more mundane. These sleek machines still produce emissions and rubbish. And lives below deck mirror the class politics of the much less glamorous service industry on land.

Very few crew members are employed directly by the yacht owners whose boats they maintain. Often only the yacht’s captain is a long-term employee of the billionaire, a bit like an estate manager at sea. The other crew members face short contracts and precarious employment without any benefits. Since the yachts winter in the Caribbean and summer in the Mediterranean, recruitment agencies hire people to sail the boats across the Atlantic while the owners fly over in their private jets. Just as on a cruise ship, the majority of crew members aren’t in charge of navigation or maintenance but are hospitality workers, preparing and serving food, dispensing massages, spa treatments and entertainment, cleaning and housekeeping. The old/new money divide – or the European/American chasm – that distinguishes types of owners has its own effect on the crew. The New York Times quoted a former yachtie on the difference: ‘The Europeans don’t know your name. You’re just there to serve them. Americans want to be your friend, they want to know where you went to college and they want to buy you drinks. Then they want you to work eighteen hours a day and tend to their six kids.’

by Laleh Khalili, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Images: SuperYacht Times; Dörries superyacht Arwen

[ed. I happened to stumble across a picture of a unique yacht a while ago (Sunreef Eco) and discovered that there's actually something called the SuperYacht Times. You can go down a rabbit hole looking at all the different yachts there, but also, I couldn't help but imagine the lifestyle and obscene excessiveness of owning one of these things. A mixture of curiosity and revulsion.]

Robert Crumb, 1994
via:

[ed. A documentary about him and his siblings (appropriately named "Crumb") is burned into my brain. Highly recommended, it shows in excrutiating detail the tension between creativity and dysfunction.]

Technology Crushing Human Creativity

A newly released ad promoting Apple’s new iPad Pro has struck quite a nerve online.

The ad, which was released by the tech giant Tuesday, shows a hydraulic press crushing just about every creative instrument artists and consumers have used over the years — from a piano and record player, to piles of paint, books, cameras and relics of arcade games. Resulting from the destruction? A pristine new iPad Pro.

“The most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest,” a narrator says at the end of the commercial.

Apple’s intention seems straightforward: Look at all the things this new product can do. But critics have called it tone-deaf — with several marketing experts noting the campaign’s execution didn’t land.

“I had a really disturbing reaction to the ad,” said Americus Reed II, professor of marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “I understood conceptually what they were trying to do, but ... I think the way it came across is, here is technology crushing the life of that nostalgic sort of joy (from former times).”

The ad also arrives during a time many feel uncertain or fearful about seeing their work or everyday routines “replaced” by technological advances — particularly amid the rapid commercialization of generative artificial intelligence. And watching beloved items get smashed into oblivion doesn’t help curb those fears, Reed and others note. (...)

Experts added that the commercial marked a notable difference to marketing seen from Apple in the past — which has often taken more positive or uplifting approaches.

“My initial thought was that Apple has become exactly what it never wanted to be,” Vann Graves, executive director of the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter, said.

Graves pointed to Apple’s famous 1984 ad introducing the Macintosh computer, which he said focused more on uplifting creativity and thinking outside of the box as a unique individual. In contrast, Graves added, “this (new iPad) commercial says, ‘No, we’re going to take all the creativity in the world and use a hydraulic press to push it down into one device that everyone uses.’”

In a statement shared with Ad Age on Thursday, Apple apologized for the ad. The outlet also reported that Apple no longer plans to run the spot on TV.

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Tor Myhren, the company’s vice president of marketing communications, told Ad Age. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”

by Wyatte Grantham-Philips, AP |  Read more:

Image: Apple/YouTube

[ed. Missed the mark? What mark was that? Unintentially revealing where they think technology is headed and how blinded by hubris and profit they are? See also: Watch Apple Trash-Compact Human Culture (Atlantic):]

Here is a nonexhaustive list of objects Apple recently pulverized with a menacing hydraulic crusher: a trumpet, a piano, a turntable, a sculpted bust, lots and lots of paint, video-game controllers.

These are all shown being demolished in the company’s new iPad commercial, a minute-long spot titled “Crush!” The items are arranged on a platform beneath a slowly descending enormous metal block, then trash-compactored out of existence in a violent symphony of crunching. Once the destruction is complete, the press lifts back up to reveal that the items have been replaced by a slender, shimmering iPad.

The notion behind the commercial is fairly obvious. Apple wants to show you that the bulk of human ingenuity and history can be compressed into an iPad, and thereby wants you to believe that the device is a desirable entry point to both the consumption of culture and the creation of it. (The ad is for the latest “Pro” model of the iPad, the price of which starts at $999 and goes as high as $2,299, depending on its configuration.) Most important, it wants you to know that the iPad is powerful and quite thin.

But good Lord, Apple, read the room. In its swing for spectacle, the ad lacks so much self-awareness, it’s cringey, even depressing. This is May 2024: Humanity is in the early stages of a standoff with generative AI, which offers methods through which visual art, writing, music, and computer code can be created by a machine in seconds with the simplest of prompts. Apple is reportedly building its own large language model for its devices, and its CEO, Tim Cook, explicitly invoked AI in his comments about the new tablet—the iPad Pro features, he said, an “outrageously powerful chip for AI.” Most of us are still in the sizing-up phase for generative AI, staring warily at a technology that’s been hyped as world-changing and job-disrupting (even, some proponents argue, potentially civilization-ending), and been foisted on the public in a very short period of time. It’s a weird, exhausting, exciting, even tense moment. Enter: THE CRUSHER. (...)

There is about a zero percent chance that the company did not understand the optics of releasing this ad at this moment. Apple is among the most sophisticated and moneyed corporations in all the world. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

But this time, it’s hard to like what the company is showing us. People are angry. One commenter on X called the ad “heartbreaking.” Three reasons could explain why. First: Although watching things explode might be fun, it’s less fun when a multitrillion-dollar tech corporation is the one destroying tools, instruments, and other objects of human expression and creativity. Second, of course, is that this is a moment of great technological upheaval and angst, especially among artists, as tech companies build models trained on creative work with an ultimate goal of simulating those very people’s skilled output. It is easy to be offended at the ad’s implication, and it is easy to be aghast at the idea that AI will wipe out human creativity with cheap synthetic waste.

The third-order annoyance is in the genre. Apple has essentially aped a popular format of “crushing” videos on TikTok, wherein hydraulic presses are employed to obliterate everyday objects for the pleasure of idle scrollers. Arguably, the company thought that copying this specific motif would be fun, but something is grim about Apple trying to draft off a viral-video format to sell units. It’s unclear whether some of the ad might have been created with CGI, but Apple could easily round up tens of thousands of dollars of expensive equipment and destroy it all on a whim. However small, the ad is a symbol of the company’s dominance.

Under the Jumbotron

On 25 April, a large group of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, set up an encampment on the main quadrangle of their campus. Flanked on all sides by plywood barricades, the Palestine Solidarity Encampment included smaller tents for sleeping as well as larger enclosures for food, first aid, electronics (phone chargers, batteries), musical instruments and art supplies. There was also a library, which a paper sign taped to a tree designated the Refaat Alareer Memorial Library, in honour of the Palestinian writer and teacher who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.

Alareer wrote his doctoral dissertation on John Donne. On YouTube, you can find him lecturing, in English, to his students at the Islamic University of Gaza. One lecture begins with a discussion of Horace’s Ars Poetica and the idea that a work of art must delight as well as instruct. ‘The term ‘metaphysical’,’ he explains a bit later, ‘means nothing,’ because it was foisted on poets like Donne by his critics, among them John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, whose assessments Alareer projects onto the whiteboard. The lecture builds to an analysis of Donne’s poem ‘The Bait’, which, Alareer explains, is a parody of Christopher Marlowe’s poem generally known as ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’. When you parody something, Alareer says, ‘you try to offer the readers another possibility, of another worldview, a different world view, telling the people: hey, this isn’t the only thing ... there is something else.’

After his death, Alareer became widely known as the author of the poem ‘If I Must Die’, which asks its reader to build a kite in his memory and to fly it before a child whose father has been incinerated by a bomb, so that the child might imagine ‘an angel is there/bringing back love’. The day after the students set up their encampment at UCLA, it was announced that Alareer’s daughter Shymaa had been killed in an airstrike along with her husband and three-month-old son.

Among other things, the camp was a rebuke to the notion of doing business as usual when such brutality is being perpetrated on an enormous scale against human beings whose displacement, torture, unlawful detention and murder is bankrolled by the United States. Because they often invest their funds in weapons manufacturers whose missiles are falling on Gaza, or in companies with factories in the occupied West Bank, American universities are perceived as supporting Israel’s objective, which appears to be the wholesale extermination of the Palestinian people.

Students protesting against the war on Gaza on campuses across the US, from Columbia, where the encampments began, to California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, have been clear that their primary aims are to pressure the US government to secure an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and to pressure their universities and colleges to divest from any financial holdings with links to Israel. When it comes to divestment, they are drawing from a playbook established in the 1980s, when students convinced their schools to cut ties with companies operating in apartheid South Africa. As an antiwar campaign, the encampments recall protests against the Vietnam War, including the Student Strike of 1970, which grew significantly after the murder of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard.

The encampments are also a parody, in Alareer’s sense: emerging from within the university, they offer another possibility for what the university might be. One of the more potent images circulating from the encampments has been of a student holding a sign that reads ‘Columbia, why require me to read Prof. Edward Said If you don’t want me to use it?’ The protests have revealed that the American university, which operates more and more as a high-cost degree factory where humanities departments squirm on the chopping block, is still a place where people can learn what is true, and act on their knowledge. You cannot, in other words, expect young people to memorise and regurgitate history, economics, political science, moral philosophy and so on for their exams while prohibiting them from taking their education on the road.

Over the weekend, following the formation of the encampment, a large group of counter-protesters, few to none of whom appeared to be UCLA students, arrived on campus. They screamed, hurled racial slurs and sexual threats (‘I hope you get raped’) at the students, and opened a sack full of live mice – swollen, seemingly injected with some substance – on the ground near the camp. When the counter-protesters dispersed, they left behind a Jumbotron – a massive flat-screen TV, about ten feet high – in the middle of campus facing the encampment and surrounded by metal barriers. Paid security guards remained inside the barriers to protect the screen. For the next five days, the Jumbotron played, on a loop, footage of the 7 October attacks along with audio clips describing rape and sexual violence in explicit terms. Mixed in among the clips were speeches by Joe Biden vowing unconditional support for Israel and ‘Meni Mamtera’, a maddeningly repetitive children’s song that went viral earlier this year when IDF soldiers posted a video of themselves using it as a form of noise torture on captive Palestinians.

When I arrived on campus on Tuesday morning, to lead a class on Byron’s Don Juan, the sound from the Jumbotron was so loud it was impossible to hear myself think, let alone teach. I walked over with a colleague to take footage of the footage. You couldn’t ask for a better allegory: on one side, the encampment, full of young people risking their degrees, their future employment prospects and their physical and mental health to draw attention to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza; on the other, a costly media machine, financed by D-list celebrities (who proudly posted their contributions on Instagram), unmanned except for a trio of hired guards who, when questioned, admitted they had nothing to do with the Zionist cause. (...)

At 11 p.m. on 30 April, a large group of men, mostly middle-aged, many wearing Halloween masks, arrived at the encampment carrying knives, bats, wooden planks, pepper spray and bear mace, which they used to attack the unarmed students. They shot fireworks into the camp and used its plywood barricades to crush students into the ground. Footage from ABC News shows half a dozen counter-protesters punching and kicking a student. Videos from independent journalists and people on the ground captured calls for a ‘second Nakba’.

On the ABC newsreel you can hear a reporter shouting in disbelief: ‘Where are the police? Where is security? Where is authority here?’ The answer to the first two questions is clear: the police, as well as campus security forces, were there, but they did not intervene. Rather, for roughly five hours, they stood at a comfortable distance, laughing and occasionally chatting amicably with the mob, which was made up not only of self-professed former IDF soldiers but also several white nationalists, including members of the far-right Proud Boys, whose former leader was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the 6 January attacks on the US Capitol. Since white nationalists are, as a rule, hostile to Jews, it is worth asking why their assault on the encampment – which included a large number of Jewish students – has yet to be ruled antisemitic by the university administration. (...)

Most disturbing, however, are images that circulated on X (formerly Twitter) of snipers on the roof of Royce Hall, the building next to the encampment. The superintendent of the Indiana State Police confirmed that a sniper was called in for a pro-Palestine protest at Indiana University, and the New York Police Department has confirmed that an officer fired a gun – with real bullets – inside Hamilton Hall at Columbia University during its raid on the building, which students had renamed Hind’s Hall in honour of six-year-old Hind Rajab, murdered by the Israeli military in early January. The general sentiment on campuses across the US is that it is only a matter of time before a student is killed, as at Kent State in 1970. This is a price that both the students and their universities, for very different reasons, seem prepared to pay.

The students, as they will tell you, are there for Gaza, where 90 per cent of schools, and all universities, have been destroyed. The university, meanwhile, is forced to confront the moral vacuity of its policies, which have in the end protected no one except extremists willing to join forces with neo-Nazis to safeguard Israel from criticism. It has no principles and no plan; it has ceded its authority to the mob. The students, along with the staff who have supported their cause, are now in a position to direct the future of an institution whose stewards have abandoned it.

by Anahid Nersessian, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Amy Katz/ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy
[ed. See also: Ghosts of ’68 (NLR):]

What explains the scale of this response? The semester ends sometime between late April and mid-May. Why not wait the encampments out, negotiating and offering symbolic concessions to buy time? This is partly a reflection of the changes that universities, like many other institutions, have undergone during decades of neoliberalization. In the mid-1970s, Republicans identified public universities as a crucial source of anti-authoritarian sentiment and demanded a complete institutional overhaul. The subsequent process of privatization, which has made tuition prohibitive for most prospective in-state students, has been catastrophic for democratic principles and practices. With massive, untaxed endowments running into the tens of billions, universities have slowly morphed into public-private police-carceral states, catering to ‘customers’ and answering to benefactors and politicians, not students or faculty.

At Columbia, whose endowment is $13.6 billion, students must pay $90,000 per year plus travel expenses – a dramatic rise since the 1980s. Administrative posts and salaries have increased relative to faculty ones, and the number of non-tenured staff has grown steadily. Nationally, three-fourths of faculty are non-tenured and therefore do not have academic freedom. The privileged minority of tenured faculty did nothing to fight this trend, nor did they participate in adjunct efforts to unionize, since the current system enables them to take research leave and sabbatical. Now tenure itself – under attack from Republican politicians, trustee boards and university administrations – seems unlikely to survive. Recent years have seen an upswell of labour activism among graduate students and adjunct faculty, some of whom have managed to win collective bargaining rights, but they are a long way from re-democratizing the academy.

Another crucial factor is the influence of so-called ‘shot callers’: a donor class of billionaires, often working through politicians or board members, with the power to force institutional changes or get people fired by threatening to withhold funding. As universities have become more like corporations, whose primary duties are to their shareholders, administrators have become increasingly pliant before donors and their representatives. Presidents can be forced to resign even when they have strong support from students and faculty, as at Harvard; or, conversely, they can ignore significant internal opposition because they have outside backers, as at Columbia. (One of the main shot callers there is Democratic donor Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, who responded to the protests by revoking a donation and taking out full-page advertisements in major newspapers which denounced ‘antisemitic hate’ and demanded greater ‘protection’ on campuses.) 

Coffee Shop Horrors

[ed. It took me a minute to realize that's Elle from Elle and Toni. She also has a rap on fonts.]

40 Fingers

[ed. One of my favorite songs. I'd be pretty psyched too if I had these guys' skills. See also: Message in a Bottle. And, the original by EW&F.]

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Millions of killer culverts lurk beneath North American roadways, strangling populations of migratory fish. Now with a nationwide project, the United States is trying to fix them.

Every year, hundreds of muscular, sea-bright fish—chum salmon, chinook, coho, steelhead—push into the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean, swim over 200 kilometers upstream, and turn left into Hardy Creek. They wend through rocky shallows shaded by alder and willow, cold water passing over flared gills. Plump with milt and eggs, they pump their tails furiously, striving for the graveled spawning grounds in southern Washington State where they’ll complete their life’s final, fatal mission.

And then they hit the railroad.

In the early 1900s, Hardy Creek was throttled by BNSF Railway, the United States’ largest freight railroad network. When the company built its Columbia River line, engineers routed Hardy Creek under the tracks via a culvert—a 2.5-meter-wide arch atop a concrete pad. The culvert, far narrower than Hardy Creek’s natural channel, concentrated the stream like a fire hose and blasted away approaching salmon. Over time, the rushing flow scoured out a deep pool, and the culvert became an impassable cascade disconnected from the stream below—a “perched” culvert, in the jargon of engineers.

“It’s an obvious barrier,” says Peter Barber, manager of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe’s habitat restoration program. “A fish would be hard-pressed to navigate through that culvert.”

The strangulation of Hardy Creek is an archetypal story. Culverts, the unassuming concrete and metal pipes that convey streams beneath human-made infrastructure, are everywhere, undergirding our planet’s sprawling road networks and rail lines. Researchers estimate that more than 200,000 culverts lie beneath state highways in California alone, nearly 100,000 in Germany, and another 60,000 in Great Britain. In Europe, they thwart endangered eels; in Australia, they curtail the movements of Murray cod. In Massachusetts’ Herring River, snapping turtles lurk in culverts to devour passing fish, largely preventing herring from spawning. Taken as a whole, these obstacles are a major reason that three-quarters of the world’s migratory fish species are endangered.

Compared with dams, however, culverts have historically escaped public attention; most people drive over them every day without noticing. “I used to tell people I assess culverts,” recalls Mark Eisenman, a planner at the Alaska Department of Transportation. “They’d say, what the hell’s a culvert?”

In 2022, however, the US Federal Highway Administration launched a US $1-billion program to replace culverts that block oceangoing fish on streams like Hardy Creek—among the largest pots of money ever devoted to these humble pipes. Fixing the countless barriers that underlie infrastructure, according to Barber, is “one of the best ways to restore our salmon runs locally.” But given the sheer scale of the culvert crisis, even a billion dollars will only go so far. Can we repair our faulty culverts while there’s still time to save sea-run fish? (...)

In 2021, the United States’ culvert-funding shortfall caught the belated attention of politicians. That November, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2-trillion package that included money for everything from high-speed rail to electric vehicle charging stations to basic highway repairs. Tucked deep in the law’s thousand-odd pages was a section that attracted little media coverage, but had immense consequences for fish: the National Culvert Removal, Replacement, and Restoration Grant Program. (...)

Mud Creek also illustrates another deficiency of culverts: they frustrate human movements as well as fish migration. Several times a year, says Golden, incoming storm surges overwhelm the Mud Creek culvert and gush onto Montague Island Road, damaging its surface and denying locals access to their homes. This is an increasingly common predicament. Culverts, already the Achilles heels of road networks, are becoming even more vulnerable as the climate changes. They’re swamped by king tides, clogged by landslides, and battered by deluges; during 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene, roughly 1,000 culverts washed out in Vermont alone, closing many roads. The same enlarged culverts that help fish are also less liable to get plugged by debris or inundated by storm surges. “We can address a maintenance need, a fish passage need, and a resilience need, all at the same time,” Golden says.

Perhaps the most powerful virtue of culvert replacement is that it fundamentally reconnects land and sea. Fish-blocking culverts are forces of disunity that prevent anadromous fish from contributing their oceanic phosphorus and nitrogen to forests, and starve marine predators dependent on healthy stocks. In western Washington’s King County, for example, culverts within the Bear Creek basin have curtailed populations of chinook salmon, a key food source for Puget Sound’s beleaguered killer whales. A grant of nearly $7-million will allow the county to replace three inadequate Bear River culverts—and, with luck, restitch the torn linkages between marine and terrestrial environments.

“We’re allowing those ocean nutrients to once again go up the watershed,” says Evan Lewis, who leads the county’s fish passage restoration program. “Salmon are self-propelled bags of fertilizer.” (...)

Around the world, other countries are also kicking lousy culverts to the curb. In France, faulty culverts have been torn out for the sake of Atlantic salmon and brown trout; in New Zealand, they’ve been removed for smelt, eels, and torrentfish. In British Columbia, home to more than 90,000 fish-blocking culverts, a host of conservation groups and government agencies is developing a strategic plan to remove the most egregious blockages. The United States is leading the charge, but its $1-billion culvert replacement program is no piscine panacea. The Washington State Department of Transportation recently estimated that it would cost around $7.5-billion to deal with the hundreds of fish-blocking culverts it’s required to fix on behalf of Indigenous tribes—to say nothing of perhaps 20,000 more on roads owned by counties, towns, and private entities.

The program is also limited by geography. Although the only culverts eligible for funding are those that obstruct sea-run fish, many landlocked species also migrate. In the Great Lakes region alone, perhaps 250,000 culverts confound suckers, pike, brook trout, and other freshwater denizens. These fish won’t benefit from federal largesse, yet they need help as surely as any coho or chum.

by Ben Goldfarb, Hakai Magazine | Read more:
Image: Maggie Chiang
[ed. In Alaska, culverts were a major headache. We had staff at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game who spent years assessing impacts on fish populations, trying to find solutions (scientifically, politically, economically) to mitigate the damage they cause. Here are a few examples of their effects: creating impenetrable barriers to fish passage when debris gets washed downstream and lodged at their openings; becoming perched several feet above streams due to discharge scouring from flood events (or initial bad engineering); designed too narrow so that water velocities exceed the swimming capabilities of young fish (fire hose example); and frequently becoming magnets for predators (including humans) who find pooled fish in a single location easy pickings. Migrating salmon are famous for their spawning imperative and endurance - I did a fish survey in Anchorage one time that found coho salmon fry upstream of a culvert that stretched half way across the city under numerous roads, business parks and subdivisions - over a quarter mile long. But, only a handful of fish could have survived that gauntlet, and I didn't find many fry in that sample. This is a massive problem, not only because there are so many culverts in fish streams (in various stages of disrepair), but also because replacing or retrofitting them is usually prohibitively expensive (tearing up roads, installing bridges or larger culverts, etc). Nevertheless, I'm glad to see some effort is finally being made to recognize the problem. Every little bit helps.]

hans hARTwig Jung, The new Moog modular synthesizer in the sales room

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Jeff Stanford, Run! 2024

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[ed. AI depiction of Dorothy and Toto running for home ahead of the cyclone.]

The World Has Abandoned Realism

In one of my favourite passages from the book, you write, “Art challenges orthodoxy… Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly and to renew our world would wither and die.” In Britain today it feels that art is under attack. It’s seen as a kind of luxury.

Yeah, it is. I remember back in my dim and distant past in advertising, there was a campaign on behalf of a glass manufacturer, of which the slogan was “Imagine life without glass”, and it showed photographs of environments from which all the glass had been removed – buildings with no windows, tables with nothing to drink out of, etc. And I say the same thing: imagine life without art. Imagine a world with no music, with no visual art, no street art, no graffiti, no films, etc. No TV. What kind of a life would that be? And when you start thinking like that, you can see how it’s actually essential to our daily lives, whether it’s a political cartoon or a billboard with a picture on it, or a work of great transcendent genius in music. We all need it every day, and to think of it as some kind of frippery is to misunderstand the nature of human society.

~  Salman Rushdie: “The world has abandoned realism”

Image: Beppe Giacobbe