Noah is equating 2 terms here that aren't the same: "liberalism" and "democracy". Democracy is a belief that the law should be largely dictates by the will of the people. Liberalism is a set of policy propositions (rights) that are not subject to infringement. We often describe Western societies as "liberal democracies" without without realizing the tension between these ideas.
Either can obviously be taken too far.
The example I use with my students is the society of 5 animals in which the 3 wolves vote to eat the 2 sheep and the sheep are expected to lay down and die, since the "the people" have spoken. (I used a similar example when I was a TA grad student involving men and women which I'm sure I could never use today.)
What we often fail to realize is that liberalism can also lead to most political decisions ceasing to be governed by popular consent and instead controlled by "liberal principles" (which usually means, the principles of the powerful.) Totalitarianism in the name of liberalism is a very real possibility, and one that appears quite likely in the West (witness Trudeau's response to the trucker protest last year -- distinctly illiberal yet cheered by the highest centers of power.)
Thus the EU insists that Hungary is "not democratic" (for having a non-liberal government) and Poland this year "returned to democracy" (for electing a liberal government). In each case, what the EU really means is that the respective country doesn't do what the powerful in the EU say "all civilized people ought to do". But Justin Trudeau gets a pass since he's a card carrying member of the liberal elite and thus "on the right side of history".
I share Noah's concern over creeping totalitarianism, but I think he's blind in his left eye to fail to notice it coming from that direction as well.
Nice motte and bailey you have there, Brian. Would be ashamed if anything ...
Oh, too late. A lot of us who are into liberal democracy have an understanding, if not rational, then intuitive, that liberalism and democracy are two great tastes that taste great together.
Historically, liberalism's and democracy's fortunes have been bound together. To point to some time in the dead past when liberalism and democracy coupled but it was a mistake and represents a paradise lost is philosophical handwringing. Turning that mindset into a politics is an ideology known as revanchism.
Forcing to choose between ideal-types of liberalism and democracy is a false dilemma. The principles are often at odds, but liberal democracy threads that needle constantly because it recognizes this tension and can adapt to it. Totalitarian systems cannot, because they make totalizing claims about ideas and material conditions that are incapable of tolerating ambiguity, chance, technological progress, etc., when their cognitives are dissonanced.
I think we're actually saying the same thing again, Bobson. It is "threading the needle" precisely because of the oxymoronic conflict between the two ideas. I'm not asking you to choose between between them -- I explicitly said either could be taken too far. But treating the terms as synonymous is common in our day and completely hides that important tension between them -- the needle that must be constantly rethreaded. And you can't thread a needle when you pretend it's not there.
The one thing I would take issue with is your statement "at some point in the dead past when liberalism and democracy coupled". Modern liberalism is invented by John Locke in the late 17th century. Whatever coupling took place was after that fact (and gradual considering how limited the franchise was well into the 20th century). That's hardly the "long dead past", and the political effects of that coupling are still very much being worked out now.
John Locke was one of the wellsprings of liberalism. While liberalism started with Locke, among others, it didn't end with him. Liberalism is an unfinished work in progress. We can't just read Locke, call it a day and say humanity has been perfected and must be left alone.
Locke himself was a virulent anti-Catholic, who believed Catholic doctrine and liberalism are incompatible and at odds. The Vatican may grouse, but liberalism and democracy have been compatible in majority or culturally Catholic nations.
The tension between liberalism and democracy exists, but it's a healthy and symbiotic one. By giving every adult a stake in governance, this means that ideologies will try to pull laws in so many directions. You can get what you want, but you can also get so far.
And history has shown that institutional elements help to ensure the stability of both liberalism and democracy: written constitutions, checks and balances of powers, independent judiciaries, and even voting systems. European parliamentary democracies often have complicated counting methods to ensure oppositional voices get some representation, by one meeting a minimum vote threshold for seats and two often making votes beyond 50% costly (e.g., a party could win two-thirds of the popular vote but might end up with fewer than two-thirds of the seats in parliament to keep opposition voices in government and force consensus).
I used to believe everything you say, Bobson. I just don't anymore. Locke's neutral state and Mill's Harm Principle have conspired to produce a society that spends like a drunken sailor, ignores massive income inequality, celebrates abortion as a positive good, openly embraces racial separation, seizes children whose parents don't want to slice off their private parts, and where every major political issue is settled by a court instead of by elected representatives.
That's where liberalism has taken us. Count me out.
That's where modernity has taken us, with a tug of war between liberalism and conservatism.
There's no going back, Brian. We can read about pre-modern social arrangements, and neoreactionaries are trafficking in a romantic notion of a bygone past that never was. Kings, princes and emperors spent on vainglory and wars of conquest. Parents didn't worry about abortion because there were bigger problems of high rates of death during childbirth, a quarter or more dying during childhood and maybe half that live to adulthood dying by middle age. Courts are also key in orienting societies around the idea of rule of law, and they came before elected representatives. What came before courts and elected representatives? Honor cultures. Duels at dawn and retribution at the personal and family levels.
Much of modernity is motivated by escaping these conditions. They could be revived, but let's see the butcher's bill of how we drag modern society away from modernity and how much we lose in blood and treasure to get there.
I'm not talking about "going back" (although ignoring past wisdom is foolish, and I would suggest Burke might be good reading). Locke was formulating a doctrine to deal with the wars of religion that were destroying societies in his time. Locke's doctrines are now destroying societies in our time, and we need to come up with a new alternative.
The Left has already figured this out. Wokeness is a value-laden, illiberal, non-Enlightenment alternative to Locke. The Right is still trying to find its butt with both hands, but they'll figure it out eventually. It took 100 years from Locke to the first "liberal democracy". And there were lots of failures (Paris 1789 comes to mind). So this won't be a fast or clean process, but one way or another, Enlightenment liberalism is dead. There are people like Noah and Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan who are playing Weekend at Bernies with its corpse, but that's pointless.
If you don't want to live in a Left-wing, woke theocracy, I suggest you start looking for a better (Right-er) alternative.
> Democracy is a belief that the law should be largely dictates by the will of the people.
It's a bit more complicated - you are providing the abstract definition, the (alleged) *intent* (the Motte) - the more important concrete definition is *how each "democracy" *behaves* (the Bailey).... And if you think Western nations are governed according to the will of the people...well I simply must disagree.
This abstract/concrete duality is everywhere around us, but for some strange reason doesn't often get sustained attention....gosh, I wonder why that might be.
"if you think Western nations are governed according to the will of the people...well I simply must disagree"
This is a very strange statement about a country who's guiding document includes "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed". If America, the first of the modern liberal democracies, isn't governed by the will of the people, what do you believe we're governed by?
This is a very common statement, as one might expect from a person who has been subjected to some variation of the standard educational curriculum offered in most any Western nation, if not all nations....and, *not subjected to* the sort of education one would need to realize the flaws contained within the underlying thinking.
As for your question: we are governed by a system composed of many individual agents who act according to their conditioning, and how this phenomenon appears to each observer (and therefore "is", *as things are today*) is a function of the conditioning of the observer.
The extra funny part about all this is that this (and more) has been known for centuries, yet nothing changes.
A question for you: how do you think that it is *possible* for people to be governed according to their will *in a system that has no mechanism for measuring that will*?
It seems to me you are denying personal agency. If we're just a function of our conditioning and experiences, free will is an illusion. I won't go there in part because it violates my theology but mostly because it's a philosophical dead-end.
In a republic, the will of the people is measured by elections for representatives who vote on policy. In a democracy, the will of the people is measured by elections on policy. These are both imperfect, for the reasons you suggest and many others, but as Churchill said, they are also both superior to the alternative, in which the will of the people is ignored.
>If we're just a function of our conditioning and experiences, free will is an illusion.
Where did the word "just" come from?
Did it come from my comment, or did it come from somewhere else? Is it illusory, or not illusory?
> I won't go there in part because it violates my theology but mostly because it's a philosophical dead-end.
Oh my....what sort of theology do you subscribe to that tells you that you possess omniscient knowledge like this? Or, might that sensation also be illusory?
I wouldn't feel too bad though, the institution of science instills this bizarre belief in its subscribers as well.
> In a republic, the will of the people is measured by elections for representatives who vote on policy.
lol, no it isn't. The people get to cast a vote now and then for who they "want" to "represent" them, from a small pool of candidates that was already chosen for them in a separate, at best semi-democratic process. This has almost nothing to do with people's will, comprehensively.
> but as Churchill said, they are also both superior to the alternative, in which the will of the people is ignored.
That isn't the only alternative, and Churchill is yet another Allist who doesn't realize his sense of omniscience is an illusion. I often wonder if there is any other kind.
Enough nit-picking, johnny. I don't accept your premise that American democracy is a sham. But more importantly, if you think Churchill was wrong, what's your your alternative?
You lost me pretty quickly at equating Trudeau’s response to the Ottawa mob to totalitarianism. Social media polarization at work there literally trying to change up to down.
Jason, let me give you a hypothetical example. Would you have been OK with President Donald Trump freezing the bank accounts (temporarily - for 30 days) of everyone who contributed to Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020, for the express goal of defunding those protests and riots and making them stop? That is what Trudeau did in Canada with the truckers.
If a leader from the Right did that, I doubt you would have any problem calling it authoritarian. It was still authoritarian even when someone from the Left did it.
Those are both fairly left-wing sources. I don't know how many it was. You don't either. The NY Times doesn't. It doesn't really matter.
Trudeau froze the accounts of political opponents who were protesting specific policies of his government. And for doing so, he was cheered as a visionary leader by nearly every "liberal" power center in the Western world.
Every one of those is essentially a positive story. The BBC raises 2 sentences of "concern" from the Canadian Civil Rights Council somewhere around paragraph 25.
Yet if Victor Orban or Donald Trump or Marine LePen did the same thing Trudeau did, we would be treated to weeks of liberal hand-wringing about "the end of democracy".
So yes, I stand by my claim that Trudeau was engaged in authoritarian behavior, which the elite liberals of the world supported because they agreed with it.
> Something like 76 bank accounts were frozen with most unfrozen a few days later. So it seems like you’re already exaggerating to make the comparison.
Brian was explicit about it being a hypothetical example - so you are in fact framing his words misleadingly, though I do not believe it was intentional.
I agree, TJ, and that has been the historic compromise between these two. However, that compromise has largely broken down today. We consider it totally normal (in our democratic republic) for nearly every political decision to be taken to court (theoretically SCOTUS). This is a distinctly un-democratic state of affairs.
One of the things I love about this medium is the international perspective. I consider Hungary and Sweden to be two of the most interesting countries on the planet. Both very homogenous (although you less so recently) but tackling similar problems with often opposite answers. Thanks for the persepctive.
I don't necessarily disagree (for example, most liberal democratic governments assert that they have the power to institute a military draft), but I also think they usually disrespect it less than other types of government that currently exist.
I don't see how less liberal democracies like Hungary or Singapore respect the right to life any less. In some ways they respect it much more by prioritizing the rights of their own law abiding people.
I think that, on average throughout history, illiberal governments have been more likely to kill swaths of their own people for failing to be law abiding. I could be wrong though.
This gets to the definition of liberalism, where pro-liberals get to deny that any of the clear offshoots of liberalism, like Marxism, have anything to do with it. But the truth is that the principles of egalitarianism and anti-traditionalism inevitably led to Marxism.
"Historically" isn't really fair, since liberalism as an ideology was only invented in the late 17th century. Since that time, the most murderous political ideologies and dictators have been the Left: Joseph Stalin and Mao. Hitler (from the right) is a distant third.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
Noah, goddamit dude. I subscribed to your substack to get the optimistic neoliberal econo bro "chart goes up" takes in order to get away from the horrifying real politik of N. S. Lyons types. And here you are these days being a steel eyed realist about the danger of campus radicalism and totalitarian tech convergence. I agree this isn't the likeliest future, but the arguments toward it being a possible one, I would say, are a little more compelling than just a few anecdotes, especially after the Twitter files debacle.
I think the scariest thing is not that Communist China is using technology to control its people. That is just a continuation of Communist policies from the 20th Century.
The scariest thing is that in the past 5 years many in the West have decided to copy their example, and they just might have the power to fully implement it.
It will come so gradually that we won't be able to notice it.
I think leftist sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow -- now before I continue, let me preface it by saying I agree with his idea but disagree with his politics, but he's been close to the bulls-eye with his criticisms of tech -- said that surveillance tech will be deployed in pilot cases against employees or loathsome populations unable to challenge their status.
Like the Chinese surveillance-as-a-service suite deployed against the Uighurs will come to America sold as a way to monitor fraud or catch and intervene in misbehavior. Employers would love to hear that, like say to catch shrink attributable to employee malice or error. Or, sell surveillance-as-a-service as a panacea to solve homelessness and the opioid and/or fent crises, you'll have big West Coast cities' leaders screaming, "I'll take 10!"
Initially, the proof-of-concept will work by taking a use case where the technology works as intended and the press will crow about it. Over time, though, the technology will turn into a panopticon and begin to be used against people who thought they'd be safe. The fraud-tracker software will eventually be used to monitor every mouse click and keystroke of employees, who'll now have to answer for every non-work email, Slack message, or visit to a non-work-related website. Either they'll be made an example of, through petty enforcement of zero tolerance laws, or the AI will build metrics on how much time employees are spent being productive vs. unproductive and give a recommendation around reduction-in-force time.
Surveillance works by the margins creeping inwards. By tech proving itself against, say the homeless, society needs to designated a new loathsome population to surveill. Like: Let's put cameras outside of bathroom doors and sensors in commodes that can detect male and female hormones in bodily wastes to make sure bathrooms aren't invaded by people with the wrong pee-pees. Or, use voluminous data about crime to efficiently target surveillance equipment by getting around laws against racial profiling. How about taking private confidential data (e.g., health, employment and academic records), encouraging digitization thereof, and accidentally-on-purpose breaching that data to effectively moot privacy?
As Doctorow says, we must not fear that the world will slink to a surveillance-state dystopia. We are already living in it, and it happens every day because we don't pay attention to it.
Don't forget sex workers - government just loves identifying and surveilling them! There are already reports of sex workers being turned away at the US border (how do you think they suspect) despite no federal law against prostitution. Also plenty of instances of them being cut-off from financial services from PayPal to banks.
Sex work poses a conundrum. Governments globally find that no matter where the line is drawn between consensual, transactional sexual encounters and sex trafficking and pimping, the latter will always cross and obliterate the line. Any government that has tried novel approaches to decriminalize or legalize sex work, the underworld will adapt and reorganize around new rules and new enforcement.
Same could be said about drawing lines between consensual and exploitative for any kind of labor, but government, especially the US government, has a particular fixation on sex work. It certainly doesn’t surveil agricultural or domestic labor with the same zeal
That said I think you’re underweighting the dictator information problem. The AIs are also going to be tweaked to tell the dictator what he wants to hear just as all his sycophantic advisors do. It’s going to inevitably lead to catastrophic decisions that blow up the whole system.
Democracies, for all their flaws, solve the dictator information problem.
Unfortunately, a turnkey tyranny is likely even without any conscious decision on the part of Western governments. As costs fall and use-cases multiply, sensors are continuing to proliferate across our cities. These are installed for benign civic purposes like traffic monitoring, responding to noise complaints, crime prevention, and so on, but obviously collect a broad swathe of data beyond their intended purpose. Since it's all in public, it's not subject to most privacy laws.
The mountain of data these devices collect is made increasingly legible with AI. So we're increasingly entering a world where any minor crime or misdemeanor (jaywalking, technical hate speech in the UK, etc.) can and will be captured, made legible, and recorded. Whether this is actioned en-mass by police, or simply held in reserve for a future malicious actor to use against political enemies, the outcome is still tyrannical.
As I argue below, positive action is required to combat this trend. Taiwan, as per usual, is ahead of the curve here in systematising the anonymisation of public data, and even going so far as to attempt to prevent their future reverse engineering:
This is a meaningful and important article, and as usual, eloquently composed. My argument, as usual, is with the China bashing, Doing the utmost surveillance to extinguish a terror campaign that claimed many lives, and doing it without shooting up the population is a worthy exercise. Contrast this with Israel’s surveillance of the oppressed Palestinian community, which is followed up by raids and killings. Why reference China’s surveillance rather than Israel’s more deadly control, the scariest of all scary technologies, and also exported.
The printing press is a good analogy, because the printing press imo was one of the biggest factors in the collapse of monarchies across Europe, the rise of the period known as the Enlightenment, and the spread of democratic principles in France, UK, and the US, but the full impact of Gutenberg's invention didn't become apparent until decades or centuries later. Kings and Queens may have hated the printing press, but Voltaire, Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin, who was heavily involved in the printing trade, used it to make the case against absolute monarchies. I'm hard pressed though to think of any advantages that the Internet/social media/AI offers to democracies, instead it seems to be weighted heavily in favor of dictatorships and autocratic governments being better able to control unruly, subversive or rebellious citizens, just as it was bad for an absolute monarchy's hold on power to have citizens who are literate, who can form contrary opinions. I'm unconvinced that the Internet/social media encourages any semblance of reasoned debate, but it certainly leads to lots of ad hominem attacks, misinformation, and surface-level understanding of issues. There's just no shortcut to understanding issues without reading deeply and spending time on trying to better understand them.
Even the famous town hall meetings in New England that Zuckerberg or other tech bros like to compare social media to(we're connecting the world!!) were governed by regular face to face social norms with people you'd probably see quite often, and unwritten social norms about what kind of language was tolerated. Courtrooms might be the closest institution we have left to this. The unfortunate part of this, is the tenor and vitrol of social media bleeds into real life discussions, because people and especially young people, who have no memory of a pre-social media world, have never learned or never practiced how to control their emotions, to be able to discuss controversial issues in real life, while still being respectful of whomever they're debating. Obviously, this is an ideal, but social media dosen't even incentize you to practice it at all. Instead, it makes it all too easy to dehumanize people, which is what dictatorships have always thrived on. Look at Trump's recent quote that left wing people are "vermin". He's also someone who admittedly dosen't read books, and never would've become president without Twitter allowing him to form a Vulcan mind meld with his supporters.
I am reminded of President Bush Jr.'s malaprop: “I am the decider…”
The purpose of government has always been to provide order out of chaos. There has been a lot of talk about AI taking jobs from humans, but it is decision-making, the job of government, is ripe for AI dominance. We are already witnessing how AI can retrieve massive amounts of data specific to a problem and formulate a comprehensive plan within minutes eliminating human error and bias. I can’t think of a job better suited to AI’s talents. What would the world look like if Congress and Parliaments were replaced by efficient and fair algorithms rather than bumbling politicians on the take?
There is a lot of discussion about new technology and little concern for how human psychology will be affected. If an AI-augmented government becomes more efficient, will messy humans have to up their game to keep pace with technology? How much efficiency and order do we really want? In densely populated China after centuries of Confucian orderliness, the populace is happy with trading chaotic freedom for security and harmony.
When I was in the military, they taught me to follow orders and strict adherence to the chain of command. After awhile it became familiar and a way of life. My psychology shifted from being a civilian to being a soldier. I remember a bumper sticker on a car at Camp Pendleton Marine Base: “To err is human, to forgive is divine… neither of which are Marine Corps policies.” Darwin showed us that it is the most adaptable who survive. It appears we have a lot of adapting at warp speed heading our way.
It certainly has to be a threat on the political side.
But economic liberals (particularly those of a more ideological bent) should perhaps be at least as concerned about the threat of digital dirigisme. A major problem for the command economies of the C20th was getting sufficient, correct and timely information about what people wanted back to the centre, so it could adjust production accordingly. In the age of AI, that may not be the problem it was back in the days of paper files, telephones and smoke-filled rooms. Increasingly, the norm in a lot of sectors is very large, heavily-regulated organisations (often unstable or underwritten by government) with a small managerial-entrepreneurial elite making unacceptably large fortunes from them and often prepared to ignore or work around the regulations to make even bigger fortunes. A couple of medium-sized steps for regulators could add up to one giant leap for luxury automated communism - or whatever left accelerationism is being called this week. (Though other advantages of the free-market model such as spreading the intellectual burdens, costs and residual risks of product innovation, may be far harder to replicate within in the central-planning model).
And the 'O Henry' insert in Noah's penultimate paragraph is a reminder that how things turn out is almost always a surprise.
“The basic upshot is that powers that are better at marshalling economic resources tend to displace powers that aren’t as good at it.”
It is also a story about energy which is why it would be crazy for liberal democracies to neuter themselves with restrictive fossil fuel supply side policies in the struggle to decarbonize. More of a risk with Europe than the US.
Many well meaning historians explain cause/effect without hard data. Ref. today's blog: "... historian Paul Kennedy tries to explain how geopolitical power switches from one country, regime, or empire to another ... powers that are better at marshalling economic resources tend to displace powers that aren’t as good at it." However, data-driven, evidenced based historians & sociologists conclusively show that every nation/empire goes through disintegrative phases, allowing competitors to best them. See Dr. Peter Turchin (peterturchin.com) and the Seshat database. The US is now in a disintegrative phase, which explains our partisan politics and social turmoil. Noah, please see Dr. Turchin's evidence explaining where we are, how we got here, and what to do about it. Many thanks.
We failed to recognize Russian attacks on the 2016 election, which credible sources believe change the result to Trump, were a kind of unrecognized war on the U.S.A. Maybe poetic justice for all the CIA dirty tricks and bullshit free markets will make things lovely advice from economists that screwed up Russia and many other countries. The combination of more sophisticated propaganda/marketing techniques with social media delivery make for an information ecosystem that could bring down democracy worldwide. A key problem is widening gaps between rich and poor--always a problem for decaying empires. When the rich conclude that democracy will take away some of their privileges they sometimes decide we can do without democracy. They are usually disappointed. Isabelle Allende's book House of the Spirits lays this out clearly for Chile. It would be a similar mistake for U.S. elites to think that Trump will help and protect them.
> The combination of more sophisticated propaganda/marketing techniques with social media delivery make for an information ecosystem that could bring down democracy worldwide.
The same sort of thing could also bring genuine democracy to people for the first time in history. Never before have we had the necessary technology, but now that we do will we be able to recognize it, and exploit the opportunity to out advantage?
China’s has spent an inordinate amount of money via loans and often shabby or unneeded infrastructure projects in numerous countries (e.g., failing dam in Ecuador, unneeded airports), in the process saddling countries with large debt burdens. In the long term, I think this creates resentful enemies. So, what is China going to do if some of these countries tells it to buzz-off and default on loans? Fire it’s fancy missiles into South America. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. Ask Cuba how South America worked out in the long term.
A significant number of young, educated, tech-adepts fled Russia because of Putin’s war in Ukraine. This, I think, is one of the biggest unforced errors in the new Millennium. It doubled NATO’s border on Russia, weakened EU autocrats, strengthened/repaired the NATO alliance, and has damaged the Russian economy for one or two generations. Two million Russians refugees were accepted by Poland. It wouldn’t surprise me if Poland became the tech powerhouse in Europe.
In the conventional world, China will be ringed by Southeastern Asia countries ramping up business with the West. Australia, China’s largest trading partner, joined the new -country alliance.
As for AI, my money is on quiet organizations such as DARPA.
I feel myself channeling Glenn Greenwald when I read this. (Which is not supposed to happen, ever.)
Noah, you've argued that the US government should be more proactive in producing media content that promotes liberal-democratic values and counters propaganda from actors like Russia and China.
A few points to consider:
* A recent study of TikTok found that the overwhelming majority of Israel-Palestine content on the app this month has been pro-Palestinian. That matches Beijing's official position but we still don't know if it's caused by deliberate manipulation of the algorithm. It's plausible that it isn't, since TikTok is used mostly by young people and they were already more receptive to a left-wing analysis of the situation before the latest conflict broke out.
* There's no reason to think that social media platforms which are free from conscious manipulation are likely to deliver the right opinions on this issue or any other... regardless of what you think the right opinions may be. Manipulation isn't the only thing that makes social media toxic in a political context, because horrible opinions are quite capable of being amplified organically.
* If the US and other democracies want to shape public opinion by overt action, they'll need to use social media as well as traditional media, and dropping content onto existing platforms won't be enough. They'll probably also want to create popular platforms of their own and exercise some kind of algorithmic control over them. (You know, like China does.)
Bearing all that in mind:
* If the US government did control a large social media platform where political issues were discussed, would its algorithm be open to public scrutiny? What principles would it follow?
* To promote the ideals of liberal democracy at a moment when Israelis and Palestinians are at war, what should the US government try to make Americans think about the conflict?
* Separate from the last question: if those tools were currently in place, what is it *likely* that the US government would now be trying to make Americans think?
Would it be the same regardless of which party held the White House? Would it be what Americans actually ought to think?
Never go full Glenn Greenwald! I warned Taibbi about that but he went full GG…apparently there is a lot of money in going full GG!?! Maybe I should try it out. ;)
Also this ideal, movement, technology,what ever you want to call it, is being pushed forward by Disinformation ; ie Russian Propaganda, Chinese Propaganda,Left, Right, Religous.
Noah,what its doing is weakening the peoples ability to think critically.
> Also this ideal, movement, technology,what ever you want to call it, is being pushed forward by Disinformation ; ie Russian Propaganda, Chinese Propaganda,Left, Right, Religous.
Don't overlook that your perception of such matters is largely distorted due to your very own government and culture's propaganda.
> Noah,what its doing is weakening the peoples ability to think critically.
Implying people had this ability in the first place, despite it not being taught in school, and typically extremely unpopular almost everywhere else.
Noah is equating 2 terms here that aren't the same: "liberalism" and "democracy". Democracy is a belief that the law should be largely dictates by the will of the people. Liberalism is a set of policy propositions (rights) that are not subject to infringement. We often describe Western societies as "liberal democracies" without without realizing the tension between these ideas.
Either can obviously be taken too far.
The example I use with my students is the society of 5 animals in which the 3 wolves vote to eat the 2 sheep and the sheep are expected to lay down and die, since the "the people" have spoken. (I used a similar example when I was a TA grad student involving men and women which I'm sure I could never use today.)
What we often fail to realize is that liberalism can also lead to most political decisions ceasing to be governed by popular consent and instead controlled by "liberal principles" (which usually means, the principles of the powerful.) Totalitarianism in the name of liberalism is a very real possibility, and one that appears quite likely in the West (witness Trudeau's response to the trucker protest last year -- distinctly illiberal yet cheered by the highest centers of power.)
Thus the EU insists that Hungary is "not democratic" (for having a non-liberal government) and Poland this year "returned to democracy" (for electing a liberal government). In each case, what the EU really means is that the respective country doesn't do what the powerful in the EU say "all civilized people ought to do". But Justin Trudeau gets a pass since he's a card carrying member of the liberal elite and thus "on the right side of history".
I share Noah's concern over creeping totalitarianism, but I think he's blind in his left eye to fail to notice it coming from that direction as well.
Nice motte and bailey you have there, Brian. Would be ashamed if anything ...
Oh, too late. A lot of us who are into liberal democracy have an understanding, if not rational, then intuitive, that liberalism and democracy are two great tastes that taste great together.
Historically, liberalism's and democracy's fortunes have been bound together. To point to some time in the dead past when liberalism and democracy coupled but it was a mistake and represents a paradise lost is philosophical handwringing. Turning that mindset into a politics is an ideology known as revanchism.
Forcing to choose between ideal-types of liberalism and democracy is a false dilemma. The principles are often at odds, but liberal democracy threads that needle constantly because it recognizes this tension and can adapt to it. Totalitarian systems cannot, because they make totalizing claims about ideas and material conditions that are incapable of tolerating ambiguity, chance, technological progress, etc., when their cognitives are dissonanced.
I think we're actually saying the same thing again, Bobson. It is "threading the needle" precisely because of the oxymoronic conflict between the two ideas. I'm not asking you to choose between between them -- I explicitly said either could be taken too far. But treating the terms as synonymous is common in our day and completely hides that important tension between them -- the needle that must be constantly rethreaded. And you can't thread a needle when you pretend it's not there.
The one thing I would take issue with is your statement "at some point in the dead past when liberalism and democracy coupled". Modern liberalism is invented by John Locke in the late 17th century. Whatever coupling took place was after that fact (and gradual considering how limited the franchise was well into the 20th century). That's hardly the "long dead past", and the political effects of that coupling are still very much being worked out now.
John Locke was one of the wellsprings of liberalism. While liberalism started with Locke, among others, it didn't end with him. Liberalism is an unfinished work in progress. We can't just read Locke, call it a day and say humanity has been perfected and must be left alone.
Locke himself was a virulent anti-Catholic, who believed Catholic doctrine and liberalism are incompatible and at odds. The Vatican may grouse, but liberalism and democracy have been compatible in majority or culturally Catholic nations.
The tension between liberalism and democracy exists, but it's a healthy and symbiotic one. By giving every adult a stake in governance, this means that ideologies will try to pull laws in so many directions. You can get what you want, but you can also get so far.
And history has shown that institutional elements help to ensure the stability of both liberalism and democracy: written constitutions, checks and balances of powers, independent judiciaries, and even voting systems. European parliamentary democracies often have complicated counting methods to ensure oppositional voices get some representation, by one meeting a minimum vote threshold for seats and two often making votes beyond 50% costly (e.g., a party could win two-thirds of the popular vote but might end up with fewer than two-thirds of the seats in parliament to keep opposition voices in government and force consensus).
I used to believe everything you say, Bobson. I just don't anymore. Locke's neutral state and Mill's Harm Principle have conspired to produce a society that spends like a drunken sailor, ignores massive income inequality, celebrates abortion as a positive good, openly embraces racial separation, seizes children whose parents don't want to slice off their private parts, and where every major political issue is settled by a court instead of by elected representatives.
That's where liberalism has taken us. Count me out.
That's where modernity has taken us, with a tug of war between liberalism and conservatism.
There's no going back, Brian. We can read about pre-modern social arrangements, and neoreactionaries are trafficking in a romantic notion of a bygone past that never was. Kings, princes and emperors spent on vainglory and wars of conquest. Parents didn't worry about abortion because there were bigger problems of high rates of death during childbirth, a quarter or more dying during childhood and maybe half that live to adulthood dying by middle age. Courts are also key in orienting societies around the idea of rule of law, and they came before elected representatives. What came before courts and elected representatives? Honor cultures. Duels at dawn and retribution at the personal and family levels.
Much of modernity is motivated by escaping these conditions. They could be revived, but let's see the butcher's bill of how we drag modern society away from modernity and how much we lose in blood and treasure to get there.
I'm not talking about "going back" (although ignoring past wisdom is foolish, and I would suggest Burke might be good reading). Locke was formulating a doctrine to deal with the wars of religion that were destroying societies in his time. Locke's doctrines are now destroying societies in our time, and we need to come up with a new alternative.
The Left has already figured this out. Wokeness is a value-laden, illiberal, non-Enlightenment alternative to Locke. The Right is still trying to find its butt with both hands, but they'll figure it out eventually. It took 100 years from Locke to the first "liberal democracy". And there were lots of failures (Paris 1789 comes to mind). So this won't be a fast or clean process, but one way or another, Enlightenment liberalism is dead. There are people like Noah and Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan who are playing Weekend at Bernies with its corpse, but that's pointless.
If you don't want to live in a Left-wing, woke theocracy, I suggest you start looking for a better (Right-er) alternative.
Dream a little dream Bobson! :)
> Democracy is a belief that the law should be largely dictates by the will of the people.
It's a bit more complicated - you are providing the abstract definition, the (alleged) *intent* (the Motte) - the more important concrete definition is *how each "democracy" *behaves* (the Bailey).... And if you think Western nations are governed according to the will of the people...well I simply must disagree.
This abstract/concrete duality is everywhere around us, but for some strange reason doesn't often get sustained attention....gosh, I wonder why that might be.
"if you think Western nations are governed according to the will of the people...well I simply must disagree"
This is a very strange statement about a country who's guiding document includes "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed". If America, the first of the modern liberal democracies, isn't governed by the will of the people, what do you believe we're governed by?
This is a very common statement, as one might expect from a person who has been subjected to some variation of the standard educational curriculum offered in most any Western nation, if not all nations....and, *not subjected to* the sort of education one would need to realize the flaws contained within the underlying thinking.
As for your question: we are governed by a system composed of many individual agents who act according to their conditioning, and how this phenomenon appears to each observer (and therefore "is", *as things are today*) is a function of the conditioning of the observer.
The extra funny part about all this is that this (and more) has been known for centuries, yet nothing changes.
A question for you: how do you think that it is *possible* for people to be governed according to their will *in a system that has no mechanism for measuring that will*?
It seems to me you are denying personal agency. If we're just a function of our conditioning and experiences, free will is an illusion. I won't go there in part because it violates my theology but mostly because it's a philosophical dead-end.
In a republic, the will of the people is measured by elections for representatives who vote on policy. In a democracy, the will of the people is measured by elections on policy. These are both imperfect, for the reasons you suggest and many others, but as Churchill said, they are also both superior to the alternative, in which the will of the people is ignored.
>If we're just a function of our conditioning and experiences, free will is an illusion.
Where did the word "just" come from?
Did it come from my comment, or did it come from somewhere else? Is it illusory, or not illusory?
> I won't go there in part because it violates my theology but mostly because it's a philosophical dead-end.
Oh my....what sort of theology do you subscribe to that tells you that you possess omniscient knowledge like this? Or, might that sensation also be illusory?
I wouldn't feel too bad though, the institution of science instills this bizarre belief in its subscribers as well.
> In a republic, the will of the people is measured by elections for representatives who vote on policy.
lol, no it isn't. The people get to cast a vote now and then for who they "want" to "represent" them, from a small pool of candidates that was already chosen for them in a separate, at best semi-democratic process. This has almost nothing to do with people's will, comprehensively.
> but as Churchill said, they are also both superior to the alternative, in which the will of the people is ignored.
That isn't the only alternative, and Churchill is yet another Allist who doesn't realize his sense of omniscience is an illusion. I often wonder if there is any other kind.
Enough nit-picking, johnny. I don't accept your premise that American democracy is a sham. But more importantly, if you think Churchill was wrong, what's your your alternative?
You lost me pretty quickly at equating Trudeau’s response to the Ottawa mob to totalitarianism. Social media polarization at work there literally trying to change up to down.
Jason, let me give you a hypothetical example. Would you have been OK with President Donald Trump freezing the bank accounts (temporarily - for 30 days) of everyone who contributed to Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020, for the express goal of defunding those protests and riots and making them stop? That is what Trudeau did in Canada with the truckers.
If a leader from the Right did that, I doubt you would have any problem calling it authoritarian. It was still authoritarian even when someone from the Left did it.
Something like 76 bank accounts were frozen with most unfrozen a few days later. So it seems like you’re already exaggerating to make the comparison.
In general I’m in favour of equal applications of the law and responses that are proportional to the situation.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergency-bank-measures-finance-committee-1.6360769
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-protest-finances.html
Those are both fairly left-wing sources. I don't know how many it was. You don't either. The NY Times doesn't. It doesn't really matter.
Trudeau froze the accounts of political opponents who were protesting specific policies of his government. And for doing so, he was cheered as a visionary leader by nearly every "liberal" power center in the Western world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/world/americas/justin-trudeau-emergencies-act-canada.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/15/world/canada-protests-news#trudeau-takes-on-protesters-fund-raising-and-bank-accounts-with-the-emergency-powers-invocation
https://www.newsweek.com/banks-have-begun-freezing-accounts-linked-trucker-protest-1680649
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385
Every one of those is essentially a positive story. The BBC raises 2 sentences of "concern" from the Canadian Civil Rights Council somewhere around paragraph 25.
Yet if Victor Orban or Donald Trump or Marine LePen did the same thing Trudeau did, we would be treated to weeks of liberal hand-wringing about "the end of democracy".
So yes, I stand by my claim that Trudeau was engaged in authoritarian behavior, which the elite liberals of the world supported because they agreed with it.
> Something like 76 bank accounts were frozen with most unfrozen a few days later. So it seems like you’re already exaggerating to make the comparison.
Brian was explicit about it being a hypothetical example - so you are in fact framing his words misleadingly, though I do not believe it was intentional.
I agree, TJ, and that has been the historic compromise between these two. However, that compromise has largely broken down today. We consider it totally normal (in our democratic republic) for nearly every political decision to be taken to court (theoretically SCOTUS). This is a distinctly un-democratic state of affairs.
One of the things I love about this medium is the international perspective. I consider Hungary and Sweden to be two of the most interesting countries on the planet. Both very homogenous (although you less so recently) but tackling similar problems with often opposite answers. Thanks for the persepctive.
"herefore isn't up for grabs: right to life" No liberal democracy respects the right to life.
I don't necessarily disagree (for example, most liberal democratic governments assert that they have the power to institute a military draft), but I also think they usually disrespect it less than other types of government that currently exist.
I don't see how less liberal democracies like Hungary or Singapore respect the right to life any less. In some ways they respect it much more by prioritizing the rights of their own law abiding people.
I think that, on average throughout history, illiberal governments have been more likely to kill swaths of their own people for failing to be law abiding. I could be wrong though.
This gets to the definition of liberalism, where pro-liberals get to deny that any of the clear offshoots of liberalism, like Marxism, have anything to do with it. But the truth is that the principles of egalitarianism and anti-traditionalism inevitably led to Marxism.
"Historically" isn't really fair, since liberalism as an ideology was only invented in the late 17th century. Since that time, the most murderous political ideologies and dictators have been the Left: Joseph Stalin and Mao. Hitler (from the right) is a distant third.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
- Frank Herbert, Dune
"That's the point."
-Peter Thiel, probably
Noah, goddamit dude. I subscribed to your substack to get the optimistic neoliberal econo bro "chart goes up" takes in order to get away from the horrifying real politik of N. S. Lyons types. And here you are these days being a steel eyed realist about the danger of campus radicalism and totalitarian tech convergence. I agree this isn't the likeliest future, but the arguments toward it being a possible one, I would say, are a little more compelling than just a few anecdotes, especially after the Twitter files debacle.
I think the scariest thing is not that Communist China is using technology to control its people. That is just a continuation of Communist policies from the 20th Century.
The scariest thing is that in the past 5 years many in the West have decided to copy their example, and they just might have the power to fully implement it.
It will come so gradually that we won't be able to notice it.
I think leftist sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow -- now before I continue, let me preface it by saying I agree with his idea but disagree with his politics, but he's been close to the bulls-eye with his criticisms of tech -- said that surveillance tech will be deployed in pilot cases against employees or loathsome populations unable to challenge their status.
Like the Chinese surveillance-as-a-service suite deployed against the Uighurs will come to America sold as a way to monitor fraud or catch and intervene in misbehavior. Employers would love to hear that, like say to catch shrink attributable to employee malice or error. Or, sell surveillance-as-a-service as a panacea to solve homelessness and the opioid and/or fent crises, you'll have big West Coast cities' leaders screaming, "I'll take 10!"
Initially, the proof-of-concept will work by taking a use case where the technology works as intended and the press will crow about it. Over time, though, the technology will turn into a panopticon and begin to be used against people who thought they'd be safe. The fraud-tracker software will eventually be used to monitor every mouse click and keystroke of employees, who'll now have to answer for every non-work email, Slack message, or visit to a non-work-related website. Either they'll be made an example of, through petty enforcement of zero tolerance laws, or the AI will build metrics on how much time employees are spent being productive vs. unproductive and give a recommendation around reduction-in-force time.
Surveillance works by the margins creeping inwards. By tech proving itself against, say the homeless, society needs to designated a new loathsome population to surveill. Like: Let's put cameras outside of bathroom doors and sensors in commodes that can detect male and female hormones in bodily wastes to make sure bathrooms aren't invaded by people with the wrong pee-pees. Or, use voluminous data about crime to efficiently target surveillance equipment by getting around laws against racial profiling. How about taking private confidential data (e.g., health, employment and academic records), encouraging digitization thereof, and accidentally-on-purpose breaching that data to effectively moot privacy?
As Doctorow says, we must not fear that the world will slink to a surveillance-state dystopia. We are already living in it, and it happens every day because we don't pay attention to it.
Don't forget sex workers - government just loves identifying and surveilling them! There are already reports of sex workers being turned away at the US border (how do you think they suspect) despite no federal law against prostitution. Also plenty of instances of them being cut-off from financial services from PayPal to banks.
Sex work poses a conundrum. Governments globally find that no matter where the line is drawn between consensual, transactional sexual encounters and sex trafficking and pimping, the latter will always cross and obliterate the line. Any government that has tried novel approaches to decriminalize or legalize sex work, the underworld will adapt and reorganize around new rules and new enforcement.
Same could be said about drawing lines between consensual and exploitative for any kind of labor, but government, especially the US government, has a particular fixation on sex work. It certainly doesn’t surveil agricultural or domestic labor with the same zeal
Is that supposed to make me feel better, Bobson? :-) Sounds like boiling a frog to me.
You could be right.
That said I think you’re underweighting the dictator information problem. The AIs are also going to be tweaked to tell the dictator what he wants to hear just as all his sycophantic advisors do. It’s going to inevitably lead to catastrophic decisions that blow up the whole system.
Democracies, for all their flaws, solve the dictator information problem.
Unfortunately, a turnkey tyranny is likely even without any conscious decision on the part of Western governments. As costs fall and use-cases multiply, sensors are continuing to proliferate across our cities. These are installed for benign civic purposes like traffic monitoring, responding to noise complaints, crime prevention, and so on, but obviously collect a broad swathe of data beyond their intended purpose. Since it's all in public, it's not subject to most privacy laws.
The mountain of data these devices collect is made increasingly legible with AI. So we're increasingly entering a world where any minor crime or misdemeanor (jaywalking, technical hate speech in the UK, etc.) can and will be captured, made legible, and recorded. Whether this is actioned en-mass by police, or simply held in reserve for a future malicious actor to use against political enemies, the outcome is still tyrannical.
As I argue below, positive action is required to combat this trend. Taiwan, as per usual, is ahead of the curve here in systematising the anonymisation of public data, and even going so far as to attempt to prevent their future reverse engineering:
https://alethios.substack.com/p/at-the-dawn-of-the-smart-city-age
This is a meaningful and important article, and as usual, eloquently composed. My argument, as usual, is with the China bashing, Doing the utmost surveillance to extinguish a terror campaign that claimed many lives, and doing it without shooting up the population is a worthy exercise. Contrast this with Israel’s surveillance of the oppressed Palestinian community, which is followed up by raids and killings. Why reference China’s surveillance rather than Israel’s more deadly control, the scariest of all scary technologies, and also exported.
The printing press is a good analogy, because the printing press imo was one of the biggest factors in the collapse of monarchies across Europe, the rise of the period known as the Enlightenment, and the spread of democratic principles in France, UK, and the US, but the full impact of Gutenberg's invention didn't become apparent until decades or centuries later. Kings and Queens may have hated the printing press, but Voltaire, Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin, who was heavily involved in the printing trade, used it to make the case against absolute monarchies. I'm hard pressed though to think of any advantages that the Internet/social media/AI offers to democracies, instead it seems to be weighted heavily in favor of dictatorships and autocratic governments being better able to control unruly, subversive or rebellious citizens, just as it was bad for an absolute monarchy's hold on power to have citizens who are literate, who can form contrary opinions. I'm unconvinced that the Internet/social media encourages any semblance of reasoned debate, but it certainly leads to lots of ad hominem attacks, misinformation, and surface-level understanding of issues. There's just no shortcut to understanding issues without reading deeply and spending time on trying to better understand them.
Even the famous town hall meetings in New England that Zuckerberg or other tech bros like to compare social media to(we're connecting the world!!) were governed by regular face to face social norms with people you'd probably see quite often, and unwritten social norms about what kind of language was tolerated. Courtrooms might be the closest institution we have left to this. The unfortunate part of this, is the tenor and vitrol of social media bleeds into real life discussions, because people and especially young people, who have no memory of a pre-social media world, have never learned or never practiced how to control their emotions, to be able to discuss controversial issues in real life, while still being respectful of whomever they're debating. Obviously, this is an ideal, but social media dosen't even incentize you to practice it at all. Instead, it makes it all too easy to dehumanize people, which is what dictatorships have always thrived on. Look at Trump's recent quote that left wing people are "vermin". He's also someone who admittedly dosen't read books, and never would've become president without Twitter allowing him to form a Vulcan mind meld with his supporters.
I am reminded of President Bush Jr.'s malaprop: “I am the decider…”
The purpose of government has always been to provide order out of chaos. There has been a lot of talk about AI taking jobs from humans, but it is decision-making, the job of government, is ripe for AI dominance. We are already witnessing how AI can retrieve massive amounts of data specific to a problem and formulate a comprehensive plan within minutes eliminating human error and bias. I can’t think of a job better suited to AI’s talents. What would the world look like if Congress and Parliaments were replaced by efficient and fair algorithms rather than bumbling politicians on the take?
There is a lot of discussion about new technology and little concern for how human psychology will be affected. If an AI-augmented government becomes more efficient, will messy humans have to up their game to keep pace with technology? How much efficiency and order do we really want? In densely populated China after centuries of Confucian orderliness, the populace is happy with trading chaotic freedom for security and harmony.
When I was in the military, they taught me to follow orders and strict adherence to the chain of command. After awhile it became familiar and a way of life. My psychology shifted from being a civilian to being a soldier. I remember a bumper sticker on a car at Camp Pendleton Marine Base: “To err is human, to forgive is divine… neither of which are Marine Corps policies.” Darwin showed us that it is the most adaptable who survive. It appears we have a lot of adapting at warp speed heading our way.
https://johnhardman.substack.com/p/megatons-of-technology
It certainly has to be a threat on the political side.
But economic liberals (particularly those of a more ideological bent) should perhaps be at least as concerned about the threat of digital dirigisme. A major problem for the command economies of the C20th was getting sufficient, correct and timely information about what people wanted back to the centre, so it could adjust production accordingly. In the age of AI, that may not be the problem it was back in the days of paper files, telephones and smoke-filled rooms. Increasingly, the norm in a lot of sectors is very large, heavily-regulated organisations (often unstable or underwritten by government) with a small managerial-entrepreneurial elite making unacceptably large fortunes from them and often prepared to ignore or work around the regulations to make even bigger fortunes. A couple of medium-sized steps for regulators could add up to one giant leap for luxury automated communism - or whatever left accelerationism is being called this week. (Though other advantages of the free-market model such as spreading the intellectual burdens, costs and residual risks of product innovation, may be far harder to replicate within in the central-planning model).
And the 'O Henry' insert in Noah's penultimate paragraph is a reminder that how things turn out is almost always a surprise.
“The basic upshot is that powers that are better at marshalling economic resources tend to displace powers that aren’t as good at it.”
It is also a story about energy which is why it would be crazy for liberal democracies to neuter themselves with restrictive fossil fuel supply side policies in the struggle to decarbonize. More of a risk with Europe than the US.
Many well meaning historians explain cause/effect without hard data. Ref. today's blog: "... historian Paul Kennedy tries to explain how geopolitical power switches from one country, regime, or empire to another ... powers that are better at marshalling economic resources tend to displace powers that aren’t as good at it." However, data-driven, evidenced based historians & sociologists conclusively show that every nation/empire goes through disintegrative phases, allowing competitors to best them. See Dr. Peter Turchin (peterturchin.com) and the Seshat database. The US is now in a disintegrative phase, which explains our partisan politics and social turmoil. Noah, please see Dr. Turchin's evidence explaining where we are, how we got here, and what to do about it. Many thanks.
We failed to recognize Russian attacks on the 2016 election, which credible sources believe change the result to Trump, were a kind of unrecognized war on the U.S.A. Maybe poetic justice for all the CIA dirty tricks and bullshit free markets will make things lovely advice from economists that screwed up Russia and many other countries. The combination of more sophisticated propaganda/marketing techniques with social media delivery make for an information ecosystem that could bring down democracy worldwide. A key problem is widening gaps between rich and poor--always a problem for decaying empires. When the rich conclude that democracy will take away some of their privileges they sometimes decide we can do without democracy. They are usually disappointed. Isabelle Allende's book House of the Spirits lays this out clearly for Chile. It would be a similar mistake for U.S. elites to think that Trump will help and protect them.
> The combination of more sophisticated propaganda/marketing techniques with social media delivery make for an information ecosystem that could bring down democracy worldwide.
The same sort of thing could also bring genuine democracy to people for the first time in history. Never before have we had the necessary technology, but now that we do will we be able to recognize it, and exploit the opportunity to out advantage?
My prediction: no, to both questions.
China’s has spent an inordinate amount of money via loans and often shabby or unneeded infrastructure projects in numerous countries (e.g., failing dam in Ecuador, unneeded airports), in the process saddling countries with large debt burdens. In the long term, I think this creates resentful enemies. So, what is China going to do if some of these countries tells it to buzz-off and default on loans? Fire it’s fancy missiles into South America. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. Ask Cuba how South America worked out in the long term.
A significant number of young, educated, tech-adepts fled Russia because of Putin’s war in Ukraine. This, I think, is one of the biggest unforced errors in the new Millennium. It doubled NATO’s border on Russia, weakened EU autocrats, strengthened/repaired the NATO alliance, and has damaged the Russian economy for one or two generations. Two million Russians refugees were accepted by Poland. It wouldn’t surprise me if Poland became the tech powerhouse in Europe.
In the conventional world, China will be ringed by Southeastern Asia countries ramping up business with the West. Australia, China’s largest trading partner, joined the new -country alliance.
As for AI, my money is on quiet organizations such as DARPA.
I feel myself channeling Glenn Greenwald when I read this. (Which is not supposed to happen, ever.)
Noah, you've argued that the US government should be more proactive in producing media content that promotes liberal-democratic values and counters propaganda from actors like Russia and China.
A few points to consider:
* A recent study of TikTok found that the overwhelming majority of Israel-Palestine content on the app this month has been pro-Palestinian. That matches Beijing's official position but we still don't know if it's caused by deliberate manipulation of the algorithm. It's plausible that it isn't, since TikTok is used mostly by young people and they were already more receptive to a left-wing analysis of the situation before the latest conflict broke out.
* There's no reason to think that social media platforms which are free from conscious manipulation are likely to deliver the right opinions on this issue or any other... regardless of what you think the right opinions may be. Manipulation isn't the only thing that makes social media toxic in a political context, because horrible opinions are quite capable of being amplified organically.
* If the US and other democracies want to shape public opinion by overt action, they'll need to use social media as well as traditional media, and dropping content onto existing platforms won't be enough. They'll probably also want to create popular platforms of their own and exercise some kind of algorithmic control over them. (You know, like China does.)
Bearing all that in mind:
* If the US government did control a large social media platform where political issues were discussed, would its algorithm be open to public scrutiny? What principles would it follow?
* To promote the ideals of liberal democracy at a moment when Israelis and Palestinians are at war, what should the US government try to make Americans think about the conflict?
* Separate from the last question: if those tools were currently in place, what is it *likely* that the US government would now be trying to make Americans think?
Would it be the same regardless of which party held the White House? Would it be what Americans actually ought to think?
Answer carefully.
Never go full Glenn Greenwald! I warned Taibbi about that but he went full GG…apparently there is a lot of money in going full GG!?! Maybe I should try it out. ;)
Very Very Good Noah
Also this ideal, movement, technology,what ever you want to call it, is being pushed forward by Disinformation ; ie Russian Propaganda, Chinese Propaganda,Left, Right, Religous.
Noah,what its doing is weakening the peoples ability to think critically.
To the point where people just give up?
To Submit to a Higher All Knowing Power?
It is Really Orwellian
> Also this ideal, movement, technology,what ever you want to call it, is being pushed forward by Disinformation ; ie Russian Propaganda, Chinese Propaganda,Left, Right, Religous.
Don't overlook that your perception of such matters is largely distorted due to your very own government and culture's propaganda.
> Noah,what its doing is weakening the peoples ability to think critically.
Implying people had this ability in the first place, despite it not being taught in school, and typically extremely unpopular almost everywhere else.