zaterdag 31 augustus 2024

Don’t rejoice yet, Elon Musk and his tech bros-in-arms are winning the global battle for the truth

The banning of X in Brazil and the arrest of Telegram boss Pavel Durov won’t stop their lies

t was a breaking news alert to lift the spirits and make the heart sing. A tech billionaire arrested as he stepped off his private jet and detained by the French authorities. Happy days!

Because while the UK police have been charging individuals who incited violence online during this summer’s riots, the man who helped to fuel its flames – Elon Musk – has simply tweeted his way through it.

It turned out – because you can’t have it all – that the man arrested and subsequently charged in France this week was not Elon. It was his bro-in-arms, Pavel Durov, an Elon-alike who founded the encrypted messaging app Telegram, though for the casual observer it can be hard to tell where Durov ends and Musk begins.

Just as the flattening effect of algorithms means that coffee shops in Brooklyn and Bristol look the same these days, so it is with the bros. From Wim Hof ice baths to a diet of grass-fed beef, social media algorithms have created a tech-masculine ideal and tech-masculine lifestyle fuelled by the kind of basic strongmen they both seem to admire, chief among them Vladimir Putin.

Musk has form for chatting with Putin on the phone and while Durov claims to have been driven into exile by the Russian government, it’s hard to square that with the stream of supportive statements from Russian ministers last week demanding his “rescue”.

Both labour under the apparent eugenicist belief that a man of superior intelligence has a duty to spread his seed as widely as possible – it was revealed earlier this year that Durov has fathered 100 children by sperm donation while Musk uses more traditional methods such as impregnating his employees. Crucially, although Musk was born in South Africa and Durov in St Petersburg, the language they speak is the same: specious, self-serving lies dressed up as ideology.

Last week saw perhaps the first major showdown between the pseudo cryptolibertarianism they both espouse and that old-fashioned, resolutely analogue concept known as the nation state. For anyone who has spent any time pondering the intergalactic levels of entitlement among the tech broligarchy and the – until now – total impunity they’ve faced, the arrest and subsequent charging of Durov was a singular moment.

It’s the first time a tech CEO has found himself in the position of being forced to take responsibility for his actions

It’s the first time a tech CEO has found himself in the uncomfortable position of actually being forced to take responsibility for his actions. While this seemed, on the surface, like a moment in which there might finally be some sort of day of reckoning for the tech edgelords, that has yet to be seen.

Durov’s arrest was followed, days later, by another geopolitical first: on Friday, a Brazilian judge ordered the country’s telecoms agency to block access to X across the entire country because Musk had failed to comply with a court order.

It’s the first time a western country has imposed such a ban and the country of 200 million people is X’s fourth biggest market. And although Musk’s efforts to portray this as the work of an “unelected pseudo-judge” seeking to destroy free speech for “political purposes”, it was actually down to another old-fashioned concept Musk is ill-acquainted with: rule of law.

It’ll be months and years before the downstream consequences of Durov’s arrest and Musk’s defiance of the Brazilian authorities are known – whether this is a moment in which the nation state reasserts itself over the lawless wastelands of the internet, the nowhereville beyond the reach of any law influentially described by the poet John Perry Barlow 28 years ago in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

Or whether it’s the opposite. Because just as history is told by the winners, here’s the thing about owning your own global speech platform: you get to control whose speech is heard. And in Musk’s case, that means him. He gets to tell the story. He controls the narrative. And he has already broadcast his version of Durov’s arrest and the court proceedings in Brazil to his 196 million followers. He is the ultimate arbiter of “truth”.

Except it’s not truth, it’s snake oil. Although Musk describes himself as a “free speech absolutist”, a gussied-up term that supposes some deeper philosophical thinking behind his actions, this isn’t ideology, it’s grift.

Musk believes in free speech in the same way that he believes in free Teslas. Free for him, very expensive for everyone else. In between a stream of tweets on how “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy” and “Censorship is a certainty if Dems win” was another one in which he gloated about a ruling in his libel case against Media Matters for America.

Because this is a free speech absolutist who is suing an NGO who dared to criticise him. The case against has been called a classic Slapp, or strategic lawsuit against public participation, issued with the intention of intimidating and silencing, as a judge in California ruled earlier with regard to another suit he brought against another NGO. “This case is about punishing the defendants for their speech,” he said.

Musk isn’t a truth teller, he’s a truth twister. Like Donald Trump, he does the direct opposite of what he actually says. He’s a free speech absolutist who has complied with 83% of requests from authoritarian governments to remove content from X, often as apparent leverage to advance his business interests.

This isn’t a civilisational battle for the future of “free speech”. And Durov isn’t a hero. The charges against him include the decidedly unfuturistic crime of money laundering and his less than heroic failure to suppress the spread of sexual images of children.

It’s actually a civilisational battle for the truth. What we need to face up to is that this is a battle that Musk is winning. His truth is simply louder, faster, disseminating further. His algorithms are spreading his metaphorical seed, spawning an entire generation of mini-Musks and would-be Musks who dream of electric Cybertrucks.

Increasingly, 2024 is starting to feel like a tear in reality. This is Musk’s world and we’re living in it now.

Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/31/elon-musk-x-brazil-telegram-pavel-durov

vrijdag 30 augustus 2024

Was Kamala Harris’s big interview a success? Sort of

Moira Donegan

Harris was competent, personable and forceful – but didn’t have much to say about abortion or Gaza

ow much of an incentive does Kamala Harris really have to lay out a thorough policy agenda? With fewer than 70 days until the general election, the newly official Democratic presidential nominee has exited her party’s Chicago convention riding a a wave of tight but improving poll numbers and tremendous party goodwill.

Her move to the top of the ticket has prompted waves of enthusiasm and barely concealed relief, as young voters and weary Democrats greeted the happy prospect of an election campaign that was, at last, not between Biden and Trump. The shift of candidates initiated a new shift in the campaign’s voice, with a more playful, irreverent and optimistic turn coming to characterize the Democrats’ public messaging. When the vibes are this good, few people ask about specifics.

The Democrats sound less lofty, more earthy – and it’s working

Margaret Sullivan

There are pitfalls, too, for a politician who is too precise about what they aim to do in office. After all, much of the Democrats’ 2024 campaigning has featured deep dives into Project 2025, the 900-plus-page policy prescription for a second Trump term that was compiled by conservative thinktanks under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation. Democrats, including Harris herself, have used the document as a near-depthless well of possible attacks, making each one of the plan’s copious number of proposals into an attack that they can make Republicans answer for.

As Harris heads into the final weeks of the campaign, one can see a certain cynical logic to her imprecise policy positions: why would she bother painting a target on her own back?

So maybe it’s not surprising that on Thursday night, in her first major interview since ascending to the presidential nomination, the vice-president did not seem interested in making any news. She was competent, personable and a forceful defender of the Biden administration; she was attentive to issues where her campaign believes her to be vulnerable, such as on immigration and energy policy; and she was deliberate in depicting herself as a hawkish advocate for stricter border controls.

She did not talk much about her opponent, Donald Trump, brushing off a question from CNN’s Dana Bash about his recent slanderous claim that Harris had only recently “turned Black”. She did not endorse an arms embargo to Israel, whose genocidal war in Gaza has killed upwards of 40,000 Palestinians with the aid of American weapons. And with the exception of a few economic proposals – like for an expansion of the child tax credit, a $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers and a repeat of her promise to punish price gauging – she was light on specifics.

The interview seemed to be less about presenting a policy vision for the American people than about presenting them with a character. The character that emerged in the form of Vice-President Harris was one who is confident, intelligent and at ease with her authority; one who was unfazed by Bash’s sometimes pointed questioning, in part because she has mastered the art of the dodge.

Among the interview’s surprising omissions was abortion, the issue that has redefined the status, health and civil rights of half of Americans as a result of the presidency of her opponent. The word was only mentioned once over the course of the interview, when the vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, mentioned the issue as something that voters were more interested in than his own previous verbal gaffes. He’s probably right that voters care more about it, but both he and Harris declined to address the issue further.

Harris, historically a forceful advocate for abortion rights who was largely tasked with campaigning on the issue while Biden was still in the race, seemed to demur from the historical nature of her candidacy more broadly. When Bash asked her about a viral photo from the Democratic national convention – which pictured Harris at the podium, being gazed up at by her great-niece, a pigtailed young girl – she avoided the question’s implicit inquiry into how she feels about the prospect of becoming the nation’s first female president. Harris said only that she was running because she believed herself to be the best person for the job, and that she aimed to be a president for Americans of all races and genders.

It was a nice sentiment, and probably even true. But her words avoided the gender issue that has come to shape the campaign, and left aside an opportunity to rally voters in the 10 states that will have abortion rights measures on the ballot in November. If anyone in the Harris campaign feels that electing a woman president now, in this post-Dobbs era, could be a righteous rebuke to the backward and bigoted misogyny that has come to define the Trump-Vance ticket, then that is not an argument they are interested in having their candidate make.

Harris will be criticized on the left for her refusal to endorse an arms embargo to Israel, whose war has become a generational moral catastrophe that threatens to destabilize the region. When asked about the conflict, Harris spoke of the atrocities of 7 October in lurid terms; of the unfathomable human cost that has been imposed on Palestinians, she said only that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed”. (An unfortunate phrase that implies that there is an acceptable number of innocents that Israel can murder.) Her unwillingness to speak with more empathy and commitment about this issue threatens to alienate young voters, a disorganized but growing left, and the large cohorts of Muslim and Arab voters she needs to win over in places like Minnesota and Michigan.

That unwillingness also threatens to give more credence to other leftwing suspicions of Harris, such as the marginal but noticeable suspicion among activists over whether she will maintain Biden’s enthusiasm for antitrust enforcement.

Maybe Harris is calculating that these voters have nowhere else to go; maybe she just doesn’t really share their values on these issues. But the central argument for her candidacy is about values: that she is a more moral, more principled, more trustworthy candidate than Donald Trump; that she will bring less bigotry, less selfishness, less recklessness and less tedious narcissism to the White House. It’s a low bar, but she still has to clear it. If Harris’s campaign is about values, but she is unwilling to more forcefully champion women’s rights and the value of Palestinian lives, she risks making some wonder just what those values are.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/30/kamala-harris-interview