Storm Warnings

’ Tis the season for apocalyptic literature .
With COVID-19 bearing down on the entire world , a presidential election becoming a Götterdämmerung , and a nation that , if you squint at it hard enough through the distorting lens of Twitter , appears to be coming apart at the seams , anxious minds might reach the conclusion that the end times are upon us .
Into this social and historical moment , two recent novels that can fill the wee hours spent pondering what the morrow might hold , The Second Sleep by Robert Harris and The End of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ book , published in April , has turned out to be a prophetic look at how a COVID-like pandemic might unfold .
The former , which came out late last year , deals with a post-apocalyptic future set in 1468 .
Or is it ?
Is that ambiguous enough for you ?
Let me say right here that these books can not be effectively reviewed without engaging in massive spoilage .
If you don ’ t like that , stop reading right here .
Still with me ?
Then let ’ s proceed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worlds created by talented , if very different , writers .
The Cambridge-educated Harris is one of those annoyingly good fiction writers who just doesn ’ t seem to know how to clear his literary throat .
Every story starts so smartly and proceeds at such a pace that the reader is left startled and trying to catch up .
My introduction to Harris ’ s writing—which is prolific , extending over 40 years—was Conclave ( 2016 ) , which begins with the Vatican secretary of state racing to the papal apartments .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ regrets and clerical time-bombs behind him .
Harris ’ s more recent novel Munich opens in a London club as a senior Foreign Ministry official , and the other club members , listen in dead silence to Hitler ’ s radio address issuing the threats against Czechoslovakia that draw Neville Chamberlain into his ill-conceived efforts to avoid war .
There ’ s no turning back in either .
The Second Sleep , atypically for Harris , buries its central conceit late in the third chapter .
During the opening pages , we meet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ making his way by horseback to officiate the burial of an eccentric fellow priest in a remote village .
We know where we are .
Rain-pelted , pre-modern England , a land of subsistence farming overseen by feudal gentry .
Modernity , the industrial revolution , and global trade are still well over the horizon .
That ’ s where we think we are until Fairfax gets a look at the strange archeological collection of the dead priest .
This is not a book set in our past , but in our future @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and presumably the world , resetting the clock of history .
Fairfax is stunned at what he finds , and at that moment the novel achieves what every novel is supposed to and yet rarely does : draws us into the mind and sensations of the character in real-time .
As Fairfax reels , we encounter the sickening realization that the modern , technological society in which we live has been destroyed along with those of us who lived in it .
It is a neat literary trick .
The other feature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ studied ambiguity .
He specializes in inconclusive morality tales .
Good and evil are always present but telling one from the other can be an uncertain business .
The Second Sleep evokes that notion in its title .
In the pre-modern world , nighttime was determined not by clocks and electric lights but by the setting of the sun .
There were candles and hearths , yes , but generally , when darkness fell , sleep soon followed .
Especially during the shorter , winter days , this meant long nights during it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ period of wakefulness in the early morning hours when they might work , make love , or write before a “ second sleep ” that carried them to dawn .
The mysterious past apocalypse in the story is the first sleep .
Father Fairfax and a few others are now “ awake ” to the possibilities of rediscovery and recovery , while a corrupt church and state are determined to prevent the resurrection of the technological society .
If Fairfax is thwarted the stunted civilization will return to its “ second sleep.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The End of October as a prequel to The Second Sleep , showing us the kind of pandemic disaster that might lay waste to modernity .
Lawrence Wright is not primarily a novelist but an investigative journalist with the New Yorker ; he is best known for his bestselling history of the lead up to the September 11 terrorist attacks , The Looming Tower : Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 .
Unlike that book , The End of October is fiction—but it is built on the same commitment to intensive research @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , geopolitics , and international health .
The book shows how a tightly integrated world and emerging novel diseases could quickly turn toxic .
The main value to The End of October is not the elegance of its prose .
Wright is an experienced , skilled writer , to be sure , but his narrative and dialogue is less of a draw than his considerable ability to assess and extrapolate from our current cultural , political , and international scene .
It is truly uncanny the way his book forecasts how a crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deadly—far more deadly than COVID—disease he describes emerges in Asia , where the feckless Indonesian health ministry is doing everything it can to cover it up .
As viruses are wont to do , it hops a plane to Mecca at the height of the Hajj and is dispersed across the globe by religious pilgrims .
National and international health agencies never really have a chance to quarantine the illness .
Bear in mind , reader , this was all researched and written before most of us had ever heard of city called @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the United States , a feckless president surrenders supervision of the pandemic to his vice president while beginning treatments with an untested prophylactic drug that , we come to understand , kills him .
One of the most interesting portraits is of the national security advisor , a kind of female John Bolton who , in the face of the growing pandemic , is fixated on her long-term adversary , the president of Russia .
In her mind , since the Russians don ’ t seem to be coming down with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rest of the world they must have cooked the virus in a lab along with a vaccine .
The advisor jams these speculations into her anti-Russian worldview and persuades the new president to unleash American bioweapons in retaliation .
The world suffers now not from one plague but multiple , and the U.S. president is forced into the airborne command to fight a biowar .
And the advisor , we learn , was wrong : The disease didn ’ t emerge from a lab but from a much more prosaic source—the carrion of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of climate change .
What Wright is warning us about is not just emerging bio-threats but the problem of contingency , the unknown-unknowns that besiege pandemic responses .
Is COVID droplet-transmitted or airborne ?
Are children at risk or not ?
Should we attempt to treat the virus or control symptoms like cytokine storms ?
Novel viruses are mysteries that take decades , not weeks or months , to understand fully and , as we ’ ve seen with COVID , many people die as our etiological knowledge solidifies .
We know disease @ @ @ @ @ @ @ COVID-19 , as bad as it is , is probably best understood as a dress rehearsal for “ the big one.
” Our public agencies and political leadership have been caught flatfooted by it , and the price tag for these failures has been high in human lives and economic losses .
They are also a fraction of the cost of a different disease that might , like the 1918 influenza , target the young and healthy rather than the sick and elderly .
Our failure to prepare for and deal with diseases @ @ @ @ @ @ @ telling us , could be a prelude to the first sleep of Robert Harris .

’Tis the season for apocalyptic literature. With COVID-19 bearing down on the entire world, a presidential election becoming a Götterdämmerung, and a nation that, if you squint at it hard enough through the distorting lens of Twitter, appears to be coming apart at the seams, anxious minds might reach the conclusion that the end times are upon us.
Into this social and historical moment, two recent novels that can fill the wee hours spent pondering what the morrow might hold, The Second Sleep by Robert Harris and The End of October by Lawrence Wright. The latter book, published in April, has turned out to be a prophetic look at how a COVID-like pandemic might unfold. The former, which came out late last year, deals with a post-apocalyptic future set in 1468. Or is it?
Is that ambiguous enough for you? Let me say right here that these books cannot be effectively reviewed without engaging in massive spoilage. If you don’t like that, stop reading right here.
Still with me? Then let’s proceed into to two different yet hauntingly connected worlds created by talented, if very different, writers.
The Cambridge-educated Harris is one of those annoyingly good fiction writers who just doesn’t seem to know how to clear his literary throat. Every story starts so smartly and proceeds at such a pace that the reader is left startled and trying to catch up. My introduction to Harris’s writing—which is prolific, extending over 40 years—was Conclave (2016), which begins with the Vatican secretary of state racing to the papal apartments. The current pope has died unexpectedly leaving regrets and clerical time-bombs behind him. Harris’s more recent novel Munich opens in a London club as a senior Foreign Ministry official, and the other club members, listen in dead silence to Hitler’s radio address issuing the threats against Czechoslovakia that draw Neville Chamberlain into his ill-conceived efforts to avoid war. There’s no turning back in either.
The Second Sleep, atypically for Harris, buries its central conceit late in the third chapter. During the opening pages, we meet a Catholic clergyman, Father Fairfax, making his way by horseback to officiate the burial of an eccentric fellow priest in a remote village. We know where we are. Rain-pelted, pre-modern England, a land of subsistence farming overseen by feudal gentry. Modernity, the industrial revolution, and global trade are still well over the horizon.
That’s where we think we are until Fairfax gets a look at the strange archeological collection of the dead priest. This is not a book set in our past, but in our future following an obscure apocalypse that swept England, and presumably the world, resetting the clock of history. Fairfax is stunned at what he finds, and at that moment the novel achieves what every novel is supposed to and yet rarely does: draws us into the mind and sensations of the character in real-time. As Fairfax reels, we encounter the sickening realization that the modern, technological society in which we live has been destroyed along with those of us who lived in it. It is a neat literary trick.
The other feature of Harris’s writing is its studied ambiguity. He specializes in inconclusive morality tales. Good and evil are always present but telling one from the other can be an uncertain business. The Second Sleep evokes that notion in its title. In the pre-modern world, nighttime was determined not by clocks and electric lights but by the setting of the sun. There were candles and hearths, yes, but generally, when darkness fell, sleep soon followed. Especially during the shorter, winter days, this meant long nights during it was common for people to have a period of wakefulness in the early morning hours when they might work, make love, or write before a “second sleep” that carried them to dawn. The mysterious past apocalypse in the story is the first sleep. Father Fairfax and a few others are now “awake” to the possibilities of rediscovery and recovery, while a corrupt church and state are determined to prevent the resurrection of the technological society. If Fairfax is thwarted the stunted civilization will return to its “second sleep.”
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
It’s helpful to think about The End of October as a prequel to The Second Sleep, showing us the kind of pandemic disaster that might lay waste to modernity. Lawrence Wright is not primarily a novelist but an investigative journalist with the New Yorker; he is best known for his bestselling history of the lead up to the September 11 terrorist attacks, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Unlike that book, The End of October is fiction—but it is built on the same commitment to intensive research, this time into biology, government, geopolitics, and international health. The book shows how a tightly integrated world and emerging novel diseases could quickly turn toxic.
The main value to The End of October is not the elegance of its prose. Wright is an experienced, skilled writer, to be sure, but his narrative and dialogue is less of a draw than his considerable ability to assess and extrapolate from our current cultural, political, and international scene. It is truly uncanny the way his book forecasts how a crisis like COVID-19 would play out. The deadly—far more deadly than COVID—disease he describes emerges in Asia, where the feckless Indonesian health ministry is doing everything it can to cover it up. As viruses are wont to do, it hops a plane to Mecca at the height of the Hajj and is dispersed across the globe by religious pilgrims. National and international health agencies never really have a chance to quarantine the illness.
Bear in mind, reader, this was all researched and written before most of us had ever heard of city called Wuhan.
As the disease takes hold in the United States, a feckless president surrenders supervision of the pandemic to his vice president while beginning treatments with an untested prophylactic drug that, we come to understand, kills him. One of the most interesting portraits is of the national security advisor, a kind of female John Bolton who, in the face of the growing pandemic, is fixated on her long-term adversary, the president of Russia. In her mind, since the Russians don’t seem to be coming down with the disease at the same rate as the rest of the world they must have cooked the virus in a lab along with a vaccine. The advisor jams these speculations into her anti-Russian worldview and persuades the new president to unleash American bioweapons in retaliation. The world suffers now not from one plague but multiple, and the U.S. president is forced into the airborne command to fight a biowar. And the advisor, we learn, was wrong: The disease didn’t emerge from a lab but from a much more prosaic source—the carrion of long-dead animals exposed by the thawing permafrost of climate change.
What Wright is warning us about is not just emerging bio-threats but the problem of contingency, the unknown-unknowns that besiege pandemic responses. Is COVID droplet-transmitted or airborne? Are children at risk or not? Should we attempt to treat the virus or control symptoms like cytokine storms? Novel viruses are mysteries that take decades, not weeks or months, to understand fully and, as we’ve seen with COVID, many people die as our etiological knowledge solidifies.
We know disease threats are increasing. In fact, COVID-19, as bad as it is, is probably best understood as a dress rehearsal for “the big one.” Our public agencies and political leadership have been caught flatfooted by it, and the price tag for these failures has been high in human lives and economic losses. They are also a fraction of the cost of a different disease that might, like the 1918 influenza, target the young and healthy rather than the sick and elderly. Our failure to prepare for and deal with diseases more lethal than COVID, Wright is telling us, could be a prelude to the first sleep of Robert Harris.


thebulwark--2020-10-12--Our Abiding Quarrel with Russia

Our Abiding Quarrel with Russia

Rigged America , Russia , and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference by David Shimer Knopf , 367 pp.
, $ 29.95 The Folly and the Glory America , Russia , and Political Warfare , 1945-2020 by Tim Weiner Holt , 325 pp.
, $ 29.99 In publicly enlisting the aid of a hostile foreign power to interfere on his behalf in the last presidential election , Donald Trump seemed unaware that his vile gambit was superfluous .
Vladimir Putin had already ordered a covert “ influence operation ” to manipulate the election for America ’ s highest political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but the Kremlin ’ s campaign to sabotage the 2016 American election and help Trump become president would rank among the most successful clandestine operations in history .
It was one factor among many that brought Trump to the White House , but in a historically close race , only the president ’ s purest sycophants—seldom in short supply—could write it off as inconsequential .
The fifth and final volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia ’ s election interference , published in August and representing the culmination of three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alarming catalogue of contacts between Trump ’ s circle of advisers and Russian government officials .
This will come as a surprise to Trump ’ s defenders who insisted that the Mueller inquiry exonerated the president on charges of collusion .
In fact , Mueller explicitly disclaimed that his team investigated collusion at all .
( “ We did not address ‘ collusion , ’ which is not a legal term , ” Mueller said .
“ Rather , we focused on whether the evidence was sufficient to charge any member of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conspiracy.
” ) In contrast to Mueller ’ s narrowly tailored criminal probe , the Senate Intelligence Committee report did investigate collusion .
The most damning evidence of collusion has been in full view since Trump , on live-television , asked Russia to pilfer and publish Hillary Clinton ’ s emails .
But the Senate report fills in some of the sordid details of the “ aggressive , multi-faceted ” Russian intervention to hack the email correspondence of senior Democratic figures and time their public release to maximize advantage for the Trump campaign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quid pro quo but the Trump associates who played the largest role in this scheme , campaign manager Paul Manafort and outside adviser Roger Stone , were convicted of lying to investigators .
Only the most credulous partisans could believe that the serially shady conduct of the Trump clique earned any benefit of the doubt , or could accept the term “ Russia hoax ” as a taunt against Trump ’ s political opponents .
In this , they demonstrated a supreme willingness to deceive themselves or others ( or both ) .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ skullduggery is a routine feature of political life , but suborning the intervention of Russian intelligence in the American democratic process was an exceptionally brazen act .
The party that benefited from this intervention has also stymied any efforts to protect the integrity of U.S. voting systems .
And since there were no punitive measures taken in response to Russia ’ s interference—and thus no deterrence against future interference by Russia or other malicious actors—it will come as no surprise that , according to U.S. intelligence , Russia has undertaken to repeat this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the upcoming election .
Two new books document this squalid feature of the Trump era with a blend of first-rate reportage and scholarly precision .
Rigged by David Shimer and The Folly and the Glory by Tim Weiner bring a sharp eye to the long history of electoral interference by America and Russia in the affairs of foreign nations , and each other ’ s .
Both works shed light on the Russian effort to sow discord in Western democracies and to bring down the international system of liberal hegemony .
Rigged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in reverse chronological order , with Putin ’ s audacious—and , even in hindsight , astonishingly reckless—decision to launch a covert operation on behalf of the Trump candidacy .
In the summer of 2016 , President Obama faced a momentous choice .
U.S. intelligence agencies had established that Russia was interfering in America ’ s upcoming election , and ( thanks to a still highly classified source ) confirmed that Putin personally directed the operation .
The possibility of retaliating directly against the Kremlin—applying enhanced sanctions or releasing compromising information about Putin—possessed the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the risks of escalation were acute , as James Clapper , then the director of national intelligence , stressed .
“ What would the retaliation have been ?
” As Shimer points out , the answer to that question was unknown .
Russian intelligence had already stolen and released emails damaging to the Democratic party , in a transparent effort to cloud voters ’ minds .
But Russian hackers had also penetrated electoral systems and Washington feared that states and localities with unencrypted and insecure voter-registration databases were vulnerable to attack .
If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ light American countermeasures , Russian operatives could have directly disrupted the voting process by deregistering voters or altering outcomes in swing counties .
The entire election could ’ ve been thrown into chaos , even without an unscrupulous Republican candidate alleging that the election had been rigged .
With Clinton favored to win the election , Obama exercised restraint .
This is not to say that Obama simply ignored the matter .
Although the Obama administration initially underestimated the scope of Russian mischief that ultimately reached about 220 million Americans on Facebook , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an Obama official who claims that at a summit in China , Obama warned Putin : “ You f— with us and we ’ ll take you down.
” According to Avril Haines , the deputy national security advisor , efforts to manipulate state electoral systems constituted “ a redline of sorts.
” Russia ’ s operatives do seem to have feared they would have summoned a devastating response from Washington had they crossed it , and voting unfolded on election day without a hiccup .
Any relief felt by U.S. intelligence agents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cyberattack was short-lived .
The elaborate process undertaken by voters to decide how to cast their ballot had undoubtedly been manipulated by a sophisticated and often unsubtle Russian influence campaign .
It may not have mattered that Russia didn ’ t prevent the actual operation of American democracy ; a darker possibility remained : An outside force had conditioned the supreme choice Americans made at the ballot box , persuading them that their interests aligned with those of a hostile foreign power .
In the waning days of his presidency , Obama ordered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ against the Russian state , expelling diplomats and imposing sections .
But the costs of these measures were infinitesimal compared to the windfall that the Kremlin reaped from helping to elect Trump to America ’ s highest office .
After the fact , senior Obama officials expressed regret at the diffidence shown in real time during Russia ’ s great act of aggression against the United States .
Obama ’ s reticence was a classic case of well-intentioned folly that so often bedeviled U.S. foreign and defense policy during his term .
Instead @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and leading the Western democracies to deter Putin ’ s malevolence , sins of commission were the only ones that he sought to avoid .
Inevitably , sins of omission proliferated on his watch—to the detriment of U.S. interests .
Complementing Shimer ’ s book , Tim Weiner ’ s The Folly and the Glory reveals the modern scope of Russia ’ s information warfare , and how it both recycles past tactics as well as innovating new ones .
During the Cold War , the KGB had a special department— “ Service @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” ( aktivnyye meropriatia ) designed to fracture and enfeeble the West .
Weiner sheds light on how subversion and campaigns of disinformation featured prominently in the Soviet Union ’ s intelligence services , thanks to Yuri Andropov , the head of the KGB in the 1970s and one of Putin ’ s heroes .
The author quotes a retired KGB major general as claiming that subversion , not espionage , was “ the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence.
” By the 1980s , the CIA estimated the active measures department had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 4 billion .
But the program went as far back as World War II .
In 1946 , in his famous long telegram , George Kennan argued that the Soviet Union would not attack America militarily but that it would go out of its way “ to undermine general political and strategic potential of major Western powers .
.
.
to disrupt national self confidence , .
.
.
to increase social and industrial unrest , to stimulate all forms of disunity .
.
.
.
Where suspicions exist , they will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” When the Soviet Union collapsed , this department was refashioned , but not dismantled .
The active measures undertaken by Putin ’ s security services against liberal ideology have harnessed modern technology to create more disruption than was thinkable during the Cold War .
The template of Cold War elections that the Soviets and Americans sought to influence had a very different cast .
To take one example : Fearful that the Communists would win enough votes to dominate the Italian parliament , the United States intervened to help the anti-Communist Christian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country ’ s 1948 election .
Shimer recounts the ingenious methods by which that influence was conveyed : Italian-Americans were encouraged en masse to write letters to their Old World relatives , and an estimated 10 million messages were dispatched warning of the dangers of communism .
The Kremlin no longer restricts itself to promoting crude political slogans to influence outcomes in American elections—in the early 1980s it tried to stop Reagan ’ s re-election by advertising “ Reagan Means War !
” Although Russian intelligence did circulate rumors that a vote for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the Russian Federation , Putin had also refined Andropov ’ s department into a more complex and insidious machine of political warfare .
Weiner covers this evolution of Russian intelligence deftly .
The Internet Research Agency , financed by a wealthy Putin confidant and working at the direction of the Kremlin , assembled an army of English-speaking and internet-savvy trolls in St. Petersburg to deepen and inflame American political divisions online .
The IRA ’ s campaign reached millions of voters .
It connected with at least 126 million Americans on Facebook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more than 1 million on Twitter .
This invisible campaign generated innumerable social media interactions , some of which were directly recirculated by Trump and his surrogates .
What ’ s more , a Russian military intelligence front started deploying stolen Democratic National Committee documents with maximum effect into the political arena .
Moscow had conscripted ostensible opponents of government secrecy such as Wikileaks as instruments of Russian intelligence to circulate these ill-gotten goods .
The potential danger of direct electoral interference should not blind us to the realized version of another danger @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be changed or subverted when minds have been changed or sullied .
In an age of social unrest , the American mind is as deeply impressionable as ever , and the concerted efforts of a hostile foreign state to derange that mind ought to stir every American to vigilance against Russian-engineered “ fake news.
” The main stumbling block toward this broad public understanding lies with the cohort of pro-Trump Republicans , who have always been skeptical of the evidence of Russian meddling .
From their vantage point , Trump ’ s hawkishness @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he enjoys Putin ’ s support .
This argument has been advanced in spite of the president ’ s unrelenting praise for Putin and suggestion that NATO is “ obsolete.
” This argument has somehow even survived the president ’ s efforts to force the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation into Joe Biden by hindering the delivery of lethal aid to Ukraine—aid that Ukraine needs to defend its sovereign territory from Russian aggression .
It is hardly to Trump ’ s credit , but it ’ s important to recognize that Republican @ @ @ @ @ @ @ feeble posture toward Russia had a sound basis in fact .
In 2016 , Hillary Clinton , although certainly no dove , was prone to indulge the Democratic habit of signaling weakness to the nation ’ s enemies .
It was Clinton , after all , who as Obama ’ s secretary of state launched the ill-fated “ Russian reset ” on the notion that tensions with the Kremlin lay more with past Republican intransigence than Putin ’ s own determined calculations of the Russian national interest .
This dubious assumption bred an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But it is precisely this fact that makes even more suspicious Putin ’ s strong preference for her opponent .
During the 1970s , in another era of American confusion and retreat , Ronald Reagan sought to re-engage the United States in a decisive ideological struggle with the Soviet Union .
This return to the robust antitotalitarianism of the early Cold War earned Reagan scorn from the reigning progressive consensus , but also from the illiberal conservatives in his own party .
In office , Reagan drove both progressives and self-described realists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Union an “ evil empire ” and waging a fierce and unrelenting political struggle against Soviet communism .
In a remarkable volte face , a quarter-century after the free world ’ s triumph in the Cold War , a Republican standard-bearer had become Russia ’ s preferred candidate .
In his first term , Trump has discredited American institutions , divided the social order , and diminished the nation that has been indispensable to the liberal order .
Little wonder that at this hour Russian intelligence services are working tirelessly to perpetuate the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same way in November should ask themselves what could possibly justify contributing to another election result that would be celebrated in the Kremlin with champagne .

Rigged
America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference
by David Shimer
Knopf, 367 pp., $29.95
The Folly and the Glory
America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945-2020
by Tim Weiner
Holt, 325 pp., $29.99
In publicly enlisting the aid of a hostile foreign power to interfere on his behalf in the last presidential election, Donald Trump seemed unaware that his vile gambit was superfluous. Vladimir Putin had already ordered a covert “influence operation” to manipulate the election for America’s highest political office. No one knew it yet, but the Kremlin’s campaign to sabotage the 2016 American election and help Trump become president would rank among the most successful clandestine operations in history. It was one factor among many that brought Trump to the White House, but in a historically close race, only the president’s purest sycophants—seldom in short supply—could write it off as inconsequential.
The fifth and final volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia’s election interference, published in August and representing the culmination of three years of work, laid out an alarming catalogue of contacts between Trump’s circle of advisers and Russian government officials. This will come as a surprise to Trump’s defenders who insisted that the Mueller inquiry exonerated the president on charges of collusion. In fact, Mueller explicitly disclaimed that his team investigated collusion at all. (“We did not address ‘collusion,’ which is not a legal term,” Mueller said. “Rather, we focused on whether the evidence was sufficient to charge any member of the campaign with taking part in a criminal conspiracy.”)
In contrast to Mueller’s narrowly tailored criminal probe, the Senate Intelligence Committee report did investigate collusion. The most damning evidence of collusion has been in full view since Trump, on live-television, asked Russia to pilfer and publish Hillary Clinton’s emails. But the Senate report fills in some of the sordid details of the “aggressive, multi-faceted” Russian intervention to hack the email correspondence of senior Democratic figures and time their public release to maximize advantage for the Trump campaign. The committee did not establish a quid pro quo but the Trump associates who played the largest role in this scheme, campaign manager Paul Manafort and outside adviser Roger Stone, were convicted of lying to investigators. Only the most credulous partisans could believe that the serially shady conduct of the Trump clique earned any benefit of the doubt, or could accept the term “Russia hoax” as a taunt against Trump’s political opponents. In this, they demonstrated a supreme willingness to deceive themselves or others (or both).
Politics is not a nursery, and skullduggery is a routine feature of political life, but suborning the intervention of Russian intelligence in the American democratic process was an exceptionally brazen act. The party that benefited from this intervention has also stymied any efforts to protect the integrity of U.S. voting systems. And since there were no punitive measures taken in response to Russia’s interference—and thus no deterrence against future interference by Russia or other malicious actors—it will come as no surprise that, according to U.S. intelligence, Russia has undertaken to repeat this attack on America’s democratic process in the upcoming election.
Two new books document this squalid feature of the Trump era with a blend of first-rate reportage and scholarly precision. Rigged by David Shimer and The Folly and the Glory by Tim Weiner bring a sharp eye to the long history of electoral interference by America and Russia in the affairs of foreign nations, and each other’s. Both works shed light on the Russian effort to sow discord in Western democracies and to bring down the international system of liberal hegemony.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
Rigged is a particularly engrossing history that opens in reverse chronological order, with Putin’s audacious—and, even in hindsight, astonishingly reckless—decision to launch a covert operation on behalf of the Trump candidacy. In the summer of 2016, President Obama faced a momentous choice. U.S. intelligence agencies had established that Russia was interfering in America’s upcoming election, and (thanks to a still highly classified source) confirmed that Putin personally directed the operation. The possibility of retaliating directly against the Kremlin—applying enhanced sanctions or releasing compromising information about Putin—possessed the virtue of deterring further meddling. But the risks of escalation were acute, as James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, stressed. “What would the retaliation have been?”
As Shimer points out, the answer to that question was unknown. Russian intelligence had already stolen and released emails damaging to the Democratic party, in a transparent effort to cloud voters’ minds. But Russian hackers had also penetrated electoral systems and Washington feared that states and localities with unencrypted and insecure voter-registration databases were vulnerable to attack. If Putin was provoked to retaliate against even light American countermeasures, Russian operatives could have directly disrupted the voting process by deregistering voters or altering outcomes in swing counties. The entire election could’ve been thrown into chaos, even without an unscrupulous Republican candidate alleging that the election had been rigged. With Clinton favored to win the election, Obama exercised restraint.
This is not to say that Obama simply ignored the matter. Although the Obama administration initially underestimated the scope of Russian mischief that ultimately reached about 220 million Americans on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, Shimer quotes an Obama official who claims that at a summit in China, Obama warned Putin: “You f— with us and we’ll take you down.” According to Avril Haines, the deputy national security advisor, efforts to manipulate state electoral systems constituted “a redline of sorts.” Russia’s operatives do seem to have feared they would have summoned a devastating response from Washington had they crossed it, and voting unfolded on election day without a hiccup.
Any relief felt by U.S. intelligence agents who were vigilantly monitoring for a Russian cyberattack was short-lived. The elaborate process undertaken by voters to decide how to cast their ballot had undoubtedly been manipulated by a sophisticated and often unsubtle Russian influence campaign. It may not have mattered that Russia didn’t prevent the actual operation of American democracy; a darker possibility remained: An outside force had conditioned the supreme choice Americans made at the ballot box, persuading them that their interests aligned with those of a hostile foreign power.
In the waning days of his presidency, Obama ordered a bevy of economic and diplomatic reprisals against the Russian state, expelling diplomats and imposing sections. But the costs of these measures were infinitesimal compared to the windfall that the Kremlin reaped from helping to elect Trump to America’s highest office. After the fact, senior Obama officials expressed regret at the diffidence shown in real time during Russia’s great act of aggression against the United States. Obama’s reticence was a classic case of well-intentioned folly that so often bedeviled U.S. foreign and defense policy during his term. Instead of defending U.S. interests with unflinching resolve and leading the Western democracies to deter Putin’s malevolence, sins of commission were the only ones that he sought to avoid. Inevitably, sins of omission proliferated on his watch—to the detriment of U.S. interests.
Complementing Shimer’s book, Tim Weiner’s The Folly and the Glory reveals the modern scope of Russia’s information warfare, and how it both recycles past tactics as well as innovating new ones.
During the Cold War, the KGB had a special department—“Service A”—responsible for “active measures” (aktivnyye meropriatia) designed to fracture and enfeeble the West. Weiner sheds light on how subversion and campaigns of disinformation featured prominently in the Soviet Union’s intelligence services, thanks to Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB in the 1970s and one of Putin’s heroes. The author quotes a retired KGB major general as claiming that subversion, not espionage, was “the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence.”
By the 1980s, the CIA estimated the active measures department had 15,000 officers and an annual budget of $4 billion. But the program went as far back as World War II. In 1946, in his famous long telegram, George Kennan argued that the Soviet Union would not attack America militarily but that it would go out of its way “to undermine general political and strategic potential of major Western powers . . . to disrupt national self confidence, . . . to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity. . . . Where suspicions exist, they will be fanned; where not, ignited.”
When the Soviet Union collapsed, this department was refashioned, but not dismantled. The active measures undertaken by Putin’s security services against liberal ideology have harnessed modern technology to create more disruption than was thinkable during the Cold War. The template of Cold War elections that the Soviets and Americans sought to influence had a very different cast. To take one example: Fearful that the Communists would win enough votes to dominate the Italian parliament, the United States intervened to help the anti-Communist Christian Democrats to a landslide victory in that country’s 1948 election. Shimer recounts the ingenious methods by which that influence was conveyed: Italian-Americans were encouraged en masse to write letters to their Old World relatives, and an estimated 10 million messages were dispatched warning of the dangers of communism.
The Kremlin no longer restricts itself to promoting crude political slogans to influence outcomes in American elections—in the early 1980s it tried to stop Reagan’s re-election by advertising “Reagan Means War!” Although Russian intelligence did circulate rumors that a vote for Hillary Clinton would risk a thermonuclear exchange with the Russian Federation, Putin had also refined Andropov’s department into a more complex and insidious machine of political warfare.
Weiner covers this evolution of Russian intelligence deftly. The Internet Research Agency, financed by a wealthy Putin confidant and working at the direction of the Kremlin, assembled an army of English-speaking and internet-savvy trolls in St. Petersburg to deepen and inflame American political divisions online. The IRA’s campaign reached millions of voters. It connected with at least 126 million Americans on Facebook, 20 million on Instagram, and more than 1 million on Twitter. This invisible campaign generated innumerable social media interactions, some of which were directly recirculated by Trump and his surrogates. What’s more, a Russian military intelligence front started deploying stolen Democratic National Committee documents with maximum effect into the political arena. Moscow had conscripted ostensible opponents of government secrecy such as Wikileaks as instruments of Russian intelligence to circulate these ill-gotten goods.
The potential danger of direct electoral interference should not blind us to the realized version of another danger. The mechanism of voting need not be changed or subverted when minds have been changed or sullied. In an age of social unrest, the American mind is as deeply impressionable as ever, and the concerted efforts of a hostile foreign state to derange that mind ought to stir every American to vigilance against Russian-engineered “fake news.”
The main stumbling block toward this broad public understanding lies with the cohort of pro-Trump Republicans, who have always been skeptical of the evidence of Russian meddling. From their vantage point, Trump’s hawkishness toward Russia invites doubt about claims that he enjoys Putin’s support. This argument has been advanced in spite of the president’s unrelenting praise for Putin and suggestion that NATO is “obsolete.” This argument has somehow even survived the president’s efforts to force the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation into Joe Biden by hindering the delivery of lethal aid to Ukraine—aid that Ukraine needs to defend its sovereign territory from Russian aggression.
It is hardly to Trump’s credit, but it’s important to recognize that Republican criticism of the Obama administration’s feeble posture toward Russia had a sound basis in fact. In 2016, Hillary Clinton, although certainly no dove, was prone to indulge the Democratic habit of signaling weakness to the nation’s enemies. It was Clinton, after all, who as Obama’s secretary of state launched the ill-fated “Russian reset” on the notion that tensions with the Kremlin lay more with past Republican intransigence than Putin’s own determined calculations of the Russian national interest. This dubious assumption bred an accommodationist policy that undoubtedly impaired U.S. interests. But it is precisely this fact that makes even more suspicious Putin’s strong preference for her opponent.
During the 1970s, in another era of American confusion and retreat, Ronald Reagan sought to re-engage the United States in a decisive ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. This return to the robust antitotalitarianism of the early Cold War earned Reagan scorn from the reigning progressive consensus, but also from the illiberal conservatives in his own party. In office, Reagan drove both progressives and self-described realists to distraction by baldly declaring the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and waging a fierce and unrelenting political struggle against Soviet communism.
In a remarkable volte face, a quarter-century after the free world’s triumph in the Cold War, a Republican standard-bearer had become Russia’s preferred candidate. In his first term, Trump has discredited American institutions, divided the social order, and diminished the nation that has been indispensable to the liberal order.
Little wonder that at this hour Russian intelligence services are working tirelessly to perpetuate the Trump presidency. Americans preparing to vote the same way in November should ask themselves what could possibly justify contributing to another election result that would be celebrated in the Kremlin with champagne.


thebulwark--2020-10-12--Make Anti-Communism Great Again

Make Anti-Communism Great Again

Capitalism seems passé these days .
In a 2019 survey , only around half of millennials—defined as people born between 1981 and 1996—reported that they have a favorable opinion of capitalism , while nearly the exact same percentage reported a favorable opinion of socialism .
And a shockingly large portion—36 percent—said they even hold a favorable opinion of communism .
Perhaps if the poll ’ s respondents knew more about the record of communism , both past and present , they would have a different view .
Indeed , the scourge of communism , which seems so last-century , lingers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most populous and second-most-powerful country on earth : China .
It is baffling how rarely we acknowledge that China languishes under the control of a Marxist-Maoist party .
Mainstream American news media have normalized Xi Jinping ( as they did his predecessors ) by referring to him as “ President Xi ” and not more fittingly as “ General Secretary Xi ” or “ Chairman Xi.
” ( Even though president is an official position , referring to him by that title , generally used by the elected leaders of democratic states , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Chinese regime is a party-led one . )
Colleges and universities have witnessed relatively little anti-Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) activism and , in some cases , they are so dependent upon the money they get from Chinese students that they punish students who dare speak out against the odious regime .
Hollywood and many American businesses have become lobbyists for the CCP and its propagandists .
In short , what ’ s missing from the public discourse about the emerging new cold war is what animated the first : an understanding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ communism .
Instead of glossing over Chinese communism , the United States should make it a focal point of the geopolitical contest in which we find ourselves .
The U.S. relationship with China is very different from the historical U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union—not least in terms of economic enmeshment .
At its peak , in 1979 , U.S.-Soviet two-way trade reached just $ 4.5 billion ( $ 16 billion in today ’ s dollars ) .
In 2018 , U.S.-China two-way trade reached about $ 740 billion .
But like the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , our competition today with China is in part a struggle between two ideologies .
The differences between the two political systems are manifold .
Americans enjoy unparalleled freedom and democratic institutions while the CCP wields an iron fist of political repression , economic centralization , and an obscene disregard for human rights .
The contrast is vivid in the two states ’ foreign policies : While the American military is invited to be on its allies ’ soils by their democratic governments , Xi Jinping and his cronies have had enough with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and imposing a Communist-engineered Sinocentric world order .
A necessary first step toward a more sensible China policy is clarifying our public discussion about the Chinese regime .
That will require challenging useful idiots like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna , who have made careers out of misrepresenting America ’ s role in the world and the liberal international order , or intellectuals like Thomas Friedman who deem the Chinese system superior .
Apologies for communism writ large still occasionally pop up in mainstream publications .
We must remember that China @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Soviet Union was .
If you believe in unelected apparatchiks , extrajudicial killings , persecution of ethnic and religious minorities , rampant state ownership , and coercing other countries far and wide , then communism is for you .
If you believe in natural rights , it ’ s anathema .
We need to do a better job communicating to unwitting observers that China remains Communist .
As Michael Pillsbury shows in The Hundred-Year Marathon , the notion that China has parted ways with communism is just a myth—one aggressively promoted by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s true that Beijing has implemented some economic liberalizations since the 1980s .
But the CCP still calls the shots .
Through enormous state subsidies , it picks winners and losers .
Just ask AmCham how hard it is to do business in China and what the costs are .
Denying fair market access to foreign companies , as Beijing does as a matter of course , is no sign of capitalism .
Those who would say otherwise should ask themselves whether a nation can be non-Communist if about a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enterprises .
It ’ s also true that Beijing has brooked some cultural reforms .
The one-child policy is no more , and many millions of Chinese are now allowed to travel abroad each year ( including , as noted above , hundreds of thousands who come to study at American universities each year ) .
Yet other draconian Communist policies are alive and well : Consider the forced abortions and sterilizations inflicted on Uighur women in Xinjiang .
This is to say nothing of the growing surveillance state , which afflicts the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Communists have always done , and we should not expect anything different .
The CCP is the same Communist party that killed untold millions during Mao ’ s disastrous Great Leap Forward .
It is the same Communist party that massacred students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 .
It is the same Communist party whose lies and cover-ups contributed to the worst pandemic in a century .
Those who doubt CCP ’ s power should read The Party by Richard McGregor .
At the end of the day , the party , not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ picks China ’ s leadership from top to bottom .
Upward mobility requires party membership .
And the party ’ s ultimate goal is to protect itself , even at the cost of the Chinese people ’ s wellbeing and prosperity—evidenced by shrinking economic growth , which has resulted from backtracking on economic liberalization to solidify the party ’ s rule .
China serves the party , not the other way around .
Just as in the Soviet Union , the party sets the policy , and the state is a mere administrative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s reforms in the 1970s and ’ 80s took the party away from its founding years and Mao ’ s vision .
The result was a long run of prosperity .
Deng made sure that his legacy would live on by handpicking his successors .
But things changed once Xi came to power in 2012 .
General Secretary Xi has decided to return to something resembling Maoist government .
Even to the minimal extent that China liberalized economically and politically under Deng , Xi has reversed course .
To the extent that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sought to restore it .
Some of this is a matter of symbolism and rhetoric .
He makes a point of wearing a “ Mao suit ” rather than a Western-style suit on ceremonial occasions .
During his message to the Chinese congress on Marx ’ s 200th birthday , Xi said , “ We commemorate Marx in order to pay tribute to the greatest thinker in the history of mankind , ” adding , “ and also to declare our firm belief in the scientific truth of Marxism.
” Ideological education has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that “ Western textbooks are banned and being replaced with new indigenous versions that emphasize Marxism.
” And even if today ’ s Communists aren ’ t as explicitly committed to Marxism-Leninism as their predecessors , that does not mean they ’ ve forsworn its ills .
The Xi-led CCP has the same callous disregard for life and liberty as past iterations of the party .
Look no further than the millions around the world who have contracted COVID-19 , the disappeared citizens , and foreigners detained on arbitrary charges .
Much of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Cold War derived from the moral high ground it occupied .
In addition to economic and military clout , the United States and its allies had a far stronger ideological argument than the Communist bloc .
The same is true today—just look at immigration : Each year , millions and millions of Asians ( including from China ) , Africans , and Latin Americans try to immigrate to the United States , and almost nobody tries to immigrate to China .
It is also incumbent upon us to distinguish between the Communist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Age of Ambition , Evan Osnos details how entrepreneurial , diligent , and good-hearted the Chinese people are .
Surely many of them resent the stranglehold of the CCP on their country .
And , as in historical Communist states , some party members may just be trying to make do within a depraved system .
What is more , ethnic Chinese living in freedom in Taiwan , Hong Kong ( until recently at least ) , and the diaspora vitiate the CCP ’ s claim that it alone must rule the Chinese @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ash heap of history , those in China will have a chance to realize all the benefits of democracy .
Until that day , we should remember the sage advice that Hong Kong democracy activist Martin Lee received from his father : “ You can never , ever trust the Communists .
”

Capitalism seems passé these days. In a 2019 survey, only around half of millennials—defined as people born between 1981 and 1996—reported that they have a favorable opinion of capitalism, while nearly the exact same percentage reported a favorable opinion of socialism. And a shockingly large portion—36 percent—said they even hold a favorable opinion of communism.
Perhaps if the poll’s respondents knew more about the record of communism, both past and present, they would have a different view. Indeed, the scourge of communism, which seems so last-century, lingers on in a handful of countries—including the most populous and second-most-powerful country on earth: China. It is baffling how rarely we acknowledge that China languishes under the control of a Marxist-Maoist party. Mainstream American news media have normalized Xi Jinping (as they did his predecessors) by referring to him as “President Xi” and not more fittingly as “General Secretary Xi” or “Chairman Xi.” (Even though president is an official position, referring to him by that title, generally used by the elected leaders of democratic states, takes away from the fact that the Chinese regime is a party-led one.) Colleges and universities have witnessed relatively little anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) activism and, in some cases, they are so dependent upon the money they get from Chinese students that they punish students who dare speak out against the odious regime. Hollywood and many American businesses have become lobbyists for the CCP and its propagandists.
In short, what’s missing from the public discourse about the emerging new cold war is what animated the first: an understanding of the contrast between liberal democracy and communism.
Podcast · August 15 2023 A.B. Stoddard: All the Ex-President’s Conspirators Donald Trump has been a low-rent mobster for his entire career, and now he’s getting…
Instead of glossing over Chinese communism, the United States should make it a focal point of the geopolitical contest in which we find ourselves. The U.S. relationship with China is very different from the historical U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union—not least in terms of economic enmeshment. At its peak, in 1979, U.S.-Soviet two-way trade reached just $4.5 billion ($16 billion in today’s dollars). In 2018, U.S.-China two-way trade reached about $740 billion.
But like the long U.S. struggle with the Soviet Union, our competition today with China is in part a struggle between two ideologies. The differences between the two political systems are manifold. Americans enjoy unparalleled freedom and democratic institutions while the CCP wields an iron fist of political repression, economic centralization, and an obscene disregard for human rights. The contrast is vivid in the two states’ foreign policies: While the American military is invited to be on its allies’ soils by their democratic governments, Xi Jinping and his cronies have had enough with moderation and are hell-bent on bullying neighbors and imposing a Communist-engineered Sinocentric world order.
A necessary first step toward a more sensible China policy is clarifying our public discussion about the Chinese regime. That will require challenging useful idiots like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna, who have made careers out of misrepresenting America’s role in the world and the liberal international order, or intellectuals like Thomas Friedman who deem the Chinese system superior. Apologies for communism writ large still occasionally pop up in mainstream publications. We must remember that China is Communist in much the same way the Soviet Union was. If you believe in unelected apparatchiks, extrajudicial killings, persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, rampant state ownership, and coercing other countries far and wide, then communism is for you. If you believe in natural rights, it’s anathema.
We need to do a better job communicating to unwitting observers that China remains Communist. As Michael Pillsbury shows in The Hundred-Year Marathon, the notion that China has parted ways with communism is just a myth—one aggressively promoted by party pooh-bahs.
Look at the economy. It’s true that Beijing has implemented some economic liberalizations since the 1980s. But the CCP still calls the shots. Through enormous state subsidies, it picks winners and losers. Just ask AmCham how hard it is to do business in China and what the costs are. Denying fair market access to foreign companies, as Beijing does as a matter of course, is no sign of capitalism. Those who would say otherwise should ask themselves whether a nation can be non-Communist if about a quarter of its GDP comes from state-owned enterprises.
It’s also true that Beijing has brooked some cultural reforms. The one-child policy is no more, and many millions of Chinese are now allowed to travel abroad each year (including, as noted above, hundreds of thousands who come to study at American universities each year). Yet other draconian Communist policies are alive and well: Consider the forced abortions and sterilizations inflicted on Uighur women in Xinjiang. This is to say nothing of the growing surveillance state, which afflicts the country more generally. This is what Communists have always done, and we should not expect anything different.
The CCP is the same Communist party that killed untold millions during Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward.
It is the same Communist party that massacred students at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
It is the same Communist party whose lies and cover-ups contributed to the worst pandemic in a century.
Those who doubt CCP’s power should read The Party by Richard McGregor. At the end of the day, the party, not the people or any other entity, picks China’s leadership from top to bottom. Upward mobility requires party membership. And the party’s ultimate goal is to protect itself, even at the cost of the Chinese people’s wellbeing and prosperity—evidenced by shrinking economic growth, which has resulted from backtracking on economic liberalization to solidify the party’s rule. China serves the party, not the other way around. Just as in the Soviet Union, the party sets the policy, and the state is a mere administrative instrument of the party.
Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1970s and ’80s took the party away from its founding years and Mao’s vision. The result was a long run of prosperity. Deng made sure that his legacy would live on by handpicking his successors. But things changed once Xi came to power in 2012. General Secretary Xi has decided to return to something resembling Maoist government. Even to the minimal extent that China liberalized economically and politically under Deng, Xi has reversed course. To the extent that Communist ideology had diminished, Xi has sought to restore it. Some of this is a matter of symbolism and rhetoric. He makes a point of wearing a “Mao suit” rather than a Western-style suit on ceremonial occasions. During his message to the Chinese congress on Marx’s 200th birthday, Xi said, “We commemorate Marx in order to pay tribute to the greatest thinker in the history of mankind,” adding, “and also to declare our firm belief in the scientific truth of Marxism.”
Ideological education has returned, too. Susan Shirk observes that “Western textbooks are banned and being replaced with new indigenous versions that emphasize Marxism.”
And even if today’s Communists aren’t as explicitly committed to Marxism-Leninism as their predecessors, that does not mean they’ve forsworn its ills. The Xi-led CCP has the same callous disregard for life and liberty as past iterations of the party. Look no further than the millions around the world who have contracted COVID-19, the disappeared citizens, and foreigners detained on arbitrary charges.
Much of the West’s comparative advantage in the Cold War derived from the moral high ground it occupied. In addition to economic and military clout, the United States and its allies had a far stronger ideological argument than the Communist bloc. The same is true today—just look at immigration: Each year, millions and millions of Asians (including from China), Africans, and Latin Americans try to immigrate to the United States, and almost nobody tries to immigrate to China.
It is also incumbent upon us to distinguish between the Communist party and the Chinese people. In Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos details how entrepreneurial, diligent, and good-hearted the Chinese people are. Surely many of them resent the stranglehold of the CCP on their country. And, as in historical Communist states, some party members may just be trying to make do within a depraved system. What is more, ethnic Chinese living in freedom in Taiwan, Hong Kong (until recently at least), and the diaspora vitiate the CCP’s claim that it alone must rule the Chinese people.
Once Communism is banished to the ash heap of history, those in China will have a chance to realize all the benefits of democracy. Until that day, we should remember the sage advice that Hong Kong democracy activist Martin Lee received from his father: “You can never, ever trust the Communists.”


thebulwark--2020-10-12--Fixing the Big Tech Bad Apples

Fixing the Big Tech Bad Apples

Remember the last time you woke up and before you even had a chance to go void your bladder you pulled your phone off the nightstand and raced over to Wikipedia to read up on the Franco-Prussian War and the ripple effects it had on Europe and ultimately World War I ?
Right—me neither .
But why not ?
Much like Facebook , Wikipedia is a massive internet colossus rife with misinformation and used by billions of people across the globe .
It comes in every language and is easily editable by absolutely anyone .
Funny story : A friend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boost his own professional profile , added himself to the Wikipedia entry for a massive # 1 pop hit—as a co-writer of the song .
I won ’ t say what friend or what song , but suffice it to say that this attribution is # FakeNews , along with much else on Wikipedia .
And yet , while there was a lot of kvetching a decade and a half ago about how Wikipedia could pollute public knowledge , and while teachers and librarians still often worry about students overusing or misusing the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dire concerns about Wikipedia .
Its founders—10 bucks says you can ’ t even think of their names—are not being hauled in front of Congress to answer for their irresponsible contribution to massive global misinformation .
No one seems to be holding them accountable for causing any suicides—let alone genocides .
In the popular mind , they and their creation aren ’ t associated with the shattering of social norms and the impending collapse of society .
And that ’ s great—because Wikipedia plays no part in any of these ills .
Indeed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ number of internet tools and services that contribute to a vast improvement of our lives .
Remember standing in line—I mean queued up with a bunch of other human beings on a sidewalk—all night in February to buy tickets for AC-DC ?
I do .
( Brrr . )
Sadly , though , there are a few bad apples—and a new Netflix documentary tears these bad apples to their cores .
The Social Dilemma features some of my heroes , like Tristan Harris and Jaron Lanier and Roger McNamee , as well as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bunkers of Google , Facebook , Twitter , Instagram , and the like .
Its tale of woe should send a shiver down the spine of any rational viewer .
The film , directed by Jeff Orlowski , is presented in two interwoven threads .
The first consists of an off-camera interviewer asking all these tech refugees questions about what precisely is the problem .
The second is a dramatized depiction of some of the ills that are being described .
The objective here is to give everyone watching a high-level checklist of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then to illustrate it for them in relatable terms , presumably because the servings of info being offered to the viewers are pretty large and a fictionalized story will make them more easily digestible .
That story involves a family trying to go about its life while besieged by the multitude of malicious corporate actors whose primary purpose is to dominate their attention and steer them to .
.
.
well .
.
.
I won ’ t spoil it for you , you should watch it .
It ’ s a bit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Afterschool Special kind of way .
The documentary has been reviewed by writers at many reputable outlets—most effectively by Andrew Sullivan .
For present purposes , I want to set aside any discussion of the stylistic cinematic choices and evaluate the substance of the film ’ s argument .
And on the substance , all the dismissive takes on The Social Dilemma boil down to these two objections : First , this complaining about Big Tech is the same brand of hysteria as that time everyone ’ s hair went aflame when we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Facebook is doing nothing more than direct mail advertising—just much more effectively .
The film doesn ’ t do an adequate job of anticipating and disputing these claims .
But they are easy to refute .
The bicycle argument arises because bikes are mentioned in the film : Tristan Harris suggests that there was no noteworthy social upheaval after the bicycle became popular .
Historians of technology were quick to point out that he was wrong .
To which I ’ d say : Unlike with the case of the bicycle , with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what will happen if we unleash the Bad Apples , we ’ re now cataloging what has happened and predicting , based on a mountain of proof , what will happen next if we allow it to continue .
These predictions are far less hypothetical than the nineteenth-century predictions about the potential deleterious social effects of bicycles .
As for the argument that social media is comparable to the direct marketing we ’ ve all become accustomed to , well , there are aspects of it that are indeed very similar .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people are generally concerned about .
Direct marketing of yesteryear didn ’ t have any means to microtarget specific people based on a billion personal data points , manipulate them to skip voting , and then lie to the public about having done it .
If you think this reads like dystopian sci-fi , I regret to inform you that it ’ s happening today .
Harris , who is given the role of the lead protagonist in the film , also recently appeared on Sam Harris ’ s podcast .
Right out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : “ So what ’ s the solution ?
” Tristan admitted to Sam that there are no easy solutions and the two then spent over an hour discussing the problems arising from social media .
In the end , Tristan ’ s “ solutions ” largely depend on a kind of consciousness raising : the hope that enough people will see this film ( or other films or articles or books or news reports making the same case ) to change their own behavior , or at least to act with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and used and addicted and that their privacy is in jeopardy .
Interestingly , Jaron Lanier ( the film ’ s Robin to Tristan Harris ’ s Batman ) seems to have a very similar hope that he articulates towards the end of the film .
And Roger McNamee ( I guess he ’ s Alfred ? )
posits a hope that the users ’ interests will finally get the attention and protection they warrant , ahead of all the big monied commercial interests , but neither he nor the filmmakers proffer an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whom or by what mechanism this might happen .
As conclusions go , these are underwhelming and unsatisfying .
In spite of all the talent and expertise on offer in the film , the ultimate takeaway basically boils down to : I genuinely admire what the people in this film have set out to do and I wholeheartedly agree with them as to the ends , but Harris ’ s stated hope for the means is that “ the people ” will wean themselves off these products of their own volition .
To @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , I don ’ t know if you ’ ve met “ the people , ” but I ’ m sorry to tell you that no one ’ s ever lost any money underestimating them—and I count myself squarely among their ranks .
Also , climate change called and would like to know when “ the people ” are coming for their greenhouse gases cause it heard we ’ re all very eager to take those back but it has a thing it has to run to soon and is wondering if it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Apples executives aren ’ t going to do anything without their arms being twisted by either their customers ( the advertisers ) or regulators .
Yes— “ the people ” could , in theory , quit on Facebook as they quit on MySpace and Friendster , but let ’ s be honest : the odds of this happening are pretty slim at this point .
I hear you saying “ but no one other than my grandmother uses Facebook ” —but that ’ s not true because even if you don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you probably know people who use Instagram or WhatsApp ( both owned by Facebook ) or at least some Bad Apples product ( s ) .
And they ’ re not going to quit .
They also all use Wikipedia , and no one ’ s concerned—for good reason !
Wikipedia isn ’ t trying to game their attention—rewarding them with likes or public comments and discussions and flamewars and the other temptations of social media .
But why not ?
If those practices are all essential to user retention—if they ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ does Wikipedia manage to attract so many users without engaging in them ?
Wikipedia isn ’ t a business—it is a nonprofit organization—but does its example suggest that it may be possible to run a successful business without them ?
This may be the first question that people should be giving serious thought to when complaining to Congress about how to regulate the Bad Apples .
It ’ s actually not that complicated .
Human beings crave attention and validation .
We want to be seen and heard and told that we ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with us .
We ’ ve learned from Hollywood and ESPN that there ’ s really nothing more wonderful than being famous .
The Bad Apples give us tastes of that “ fame ” a thousand times a day .
Wikipedia does not .
So that ’ s one big piece of the puzzle .
If you want addicts to give up the thing they ’ re addicted to , it goes a long way to first cut off their supply .
Here we can learn much from the history of Coca-Cola .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t you can read about it on Wikipedia—Coca-Cola gets its name from one of its former ingredients , cocaine .
Why did Coca-Cola drop cocaine ?
It was not a matter of law alone .
There was a significant societal backlash to its being in a beverage consumed by children .
Between the backlash and the law , the highly addictive substance was removed and Coca-Cola promptly went out of business by 1910 and we never heard of the company again .
Wait—no—it thrived and became one of the most successful businesses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mr. Zuckerberg , pay attention !
Similarly , I believe that the Bad Apples can remove those aspects of their wares that are the most addictive as well as add all sorts of ( optional ) features that allow people to reduce their usage .
Aside from the harm of addiction , there are the arguably much greater harms of misinformation and tribalism and siloing and confirmation bias and the coming apart at the seams of society .
( I ’ ve written here in The Bulwark before about these problems . )
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ are obvious solutions that would make a massive difference to how people regard the information they receive .
And here again , I have to ask you to take a step back and consider how we used to evaluate information before the advent of social media .
Crazy street people were obviously crazy street people .
There was no need to do validations on whether or not they were “ bots ” or Russian agitprop actors , or trolls , or false-flag operators , or provocateurs out to make a buck .
Your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your nose ) were all the tools you needed to understand that these were not serious opinion holders to whom to give your attention or money .
The sad reality now is that the most prosperous , healthiest , least violent , most benevolent , least racist society in the history of humanity is completely deranged with the false narrative that things have never been worse and that the end times are upon us .
And indeed—we can easily self fulfill this prophecy—but if anyone is left to write the history of what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of “ these people managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as their instruments of communication drove them all mad and they all clawed each others ’ eyes out in a drunken frenzy of totally unwarranted despair.
” We are inundated with misinformation , half-truths , uninformed opinions , and absurdist melodrama from across the globe .
And as we are being driven mad by this lack of clarity and never-ending noise fighting for our attention 24 hours a day .
However , the answer is not for the Bad Apples @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as Sam Harris correctly notes , these companies are now run by young people who regard just about anything they disagree with as “ racist ” and/or “ hate speech.
” They are abjectly unqualified to do any “ moderating ” because ( sorry kids ) they aren ’ t “ moderate.
” But you know who is moderate ?
Average Jane Internet .
She ’ s sitting around and her eye sockets are rubbed raw from how much eye-rolling she ’ s doing at all the lunacy on these platforms .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ button .
How easy would it be for the Bad Apples to put a “ bullshit ” button next to the likes ?
( That ’ s rhetorical—it ’ s very easy . )
And then add an algorithm to notice when a particular user is posting things that are amassing an unusually high ratio of “ bullshits ” to “ likes ” and put a “ bullshit ” flag on their post or their profile ?
If this is “ social ” media then why aren ’ t more of the tools @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
That ’ s how society works .
It ’ s not perfect—but it ’ s a whole hell of a lot better than what the Bad Apples have brought us .
All of the problems enumerated in the film—anonymity , bots , selection bias , addictive rewarding , personalized news from disreputable sources , etc.—have reasonably straightforward , technological solutions .
None of those solutions is perfect and none of them is one-size-fits-all , which is why Tristan Harris has no single-sentence answer to the question “ What ’ s the solution @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of tinkering to fine-tune them .
But we don ’ t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater .
The Bad Apples , much like Coke , can go on making insane amounts of money , even as their exact practices are adjusted to free us from their ever-tightening embrace .
A few of the kinds of suggestions they could start to implement : • require that users verify their identities , or at least include instant markers that show when an account is likely a bot or a troll ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such as timers that disable the apps during certain parts of the day and a way to easily disable things like “ autoplay next video ” ) and make them the default that must be opted out of ; • encourage people to use their actual faces and names—making it harder to be anonymous and harder to earn “ rewards ” if you insist on being anonymous ; • offer paid tiers of service that eliminate you from the rolls that are tracked and packaged as a “ product ” to advertisers ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Facebook to counter the current state of ambiguity as to the credibility of the content—people should know when they ’ re reading something written by a fly-by-night source of propaganda originating in Russia ; • make it 100 percent clear when a published story is only popping up because someone paid for it to be there .
This isn ’ t a white paper , so I ’ ll stop there , but you get the point : these are just a few of the kind of small but meaningful improvements that are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the product .
The auto industry is figuring out how to have cars without gas , so surely the Bad Apples can figure out how to sell us shoes without ruining civilization .
That ’ s what The Social Dilemma is missing .
An epilogue that says “ here are twenty ideas that would fix 80 percent of the Bad Apples ’ problems .
Write your members of Congress and tell them to pass this message along.
” The time has come to stop wringing our hands and clutching our pearls and put @ @ @ @ @ @ @ workable , technological improvements to these platforms .

Remember the last time you woke up and before you even had a chance to go void your bladder you pulled your phone off the nightstand and raced over to Wikipedia to read up on the Franco-Prussian War and the ripple effects it had on Europe and ultimately World War I?
Right—me neither. But why not? Much like Facebook, Wikipedia is a massive internet colossus rife with misinformation and used by billions of people across the globe. It comes in every language and is easily editable by absolutely anyone. Funny story: A friend of mine, in an effort to boost his own professional profile, added himself to the Wikipedia entry for a massive #1 pop hit—as a co-writer of the song. I won’t say what friend or what song, but suffice it to say that this attribution is #FakeNews, along with much else on Wikipedia.
And yet, while there was a lot of kvetching a decade and a half ago about how Wikipedia could pollute public knowledge, and while teachers and librarians still often worry about students overusing or misusing the site, no one seems to have dire concerns about Wikipedia. Its founders—10 bucks says you can’t even think of their names—are not being hauled in front of Congress to answer for their irresponsible contribution to massive global misinformation. No one seems to be holding them accountable for causing any suicides—let alone genocides. In the popular mind, they and their creation aren’t associated with the shattering of social norms and the impending collapse of society.
And that’s great—because Wikipedia plays no part in any of these ills. Indeed, it is one of a huge number of internet tools and services that contribute to a vast improvement of our lives. Remember standing in line—I mean queued up with a bunch of other human beings on a sidewalk—all night in February to buy tickets for AC-DC? I do. (Brrr.)
Sadly, though, there are a few bad apples—and a new Netflix documentary tears these bad apples to their cores. The Social Dilemma features some of my heroes, like Tristan Harris and Jaron Lanier and Roger McNamee, as well as many other escapees from the underground prison bunkers of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like. Its tale of woe should send a shiver down the spine of any rational viewer.
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The film, directed by Jeff Orlowski, is presented in two interwoven threads. The first consists of an off-camera interviewer asking all these tech refugees questions about what precisely is the problem. The second is a dramatized depiction of some of the ills that are being described. The objective here is to give everyone watching a high-level checklist of what they need to worry about and then to illustrate it for them in relatable terms, presumably because the servings of info being offered to the viewers are pretty large and a fictionalized story will make them more easily digestible. That story involves a family trying to go about its life while besieged by the multitude of malicious corporate actors whose primary purpose is to dominate their attention and steer them to . . . well . . . I won’t spoil it for you, you should watch it. It’s a bit hokey but pretty adorable in an ABC Afterschool Special kind of way.
The documentary has been reviewed by writers at many reputable outlets—most effectively by Andrew Sullivan. For present purposes, I want to set aside any discussion of the stylistic cinematic choices and evaluate the substance of the film’s argument.
And on the substance, all the dismissive takes on The Social Dilemma boil down to these two objections: First, this complaining about Big Tech is the same brand of hysteria as that time everyone’s hair went aflame when we invented the bicycle. And second, Facebook is doing nothing more than direct mail advertising—just much more effectively.
The film doesn’t do an adequate job of anticipating and disputing these claims. But they are easy to refute.
The bicycle argument arises because bikes are mentioned in the film: Tristan Harris suggests that there was no noteworthy social upheaval after the bicycle became popular. Historians of technology were quick to point out that he was wrong. To which I’d say: Unlike with the case of the bicycle, with social media we’re not debating what will happen if we unleash the Bad Apples, we’re now cataloging what has happened and predicting, based on a mountain of proof, what will happen next if we allow it to continue. These predictions are far less hypothetical than the nineteenth-century predictions about the potential deleterious social effects of bicycles.
As for the argument that social media is comparable to the direct marketing we’ve all become accustomed to, well, there are aspects of it that are indeed very similar. But those aren’t the aspects that people are generally concerned about. Direct marketing of yesteryear didn’t have any means to microtarget specific people based on a billion personal data points, manipulate them to skip voting, and then lie to the public about having done it. If you think this reads like dystopian sci-fi, I regret to inform you that it’s happening today.
Harris, who is given the role of the lead protagonist in the film, also recently appeared on Sam Harris’s podcast. Right out of the gate, Sam asked him: “So what’s the solution?” Tristan admitted to Sam that there are no easy solutions and the two then spent over an hour discussing the problems arising from social media. In the end, Tristan’s “solutions” largely depend on a kind of consciousness raising: the hope that enough people will see this film (or other films or articles or books or news reports making the same case) to change their own behavior, or at least to act with the understanding that they’re being manipulated and used and addicted and that their privacy is in jeopardy.
Interestingly, Jaron Lanier (the film’s Robin to Tristan Harris’s Batman) seems to have a very similar hope that he articulates towards the end of the film. And Roger McNamee (I guess he’s Alfred?) posits a hope that the users’ interests will finally get the attention and protection they warrant, ahead of all the big monied commercial interests, but neither he nor the filmmakers proffer an explicit suggestion as to how or by whom or by what mechanism this might happen.
As conclusions go, these are underwhelming and unsatisfying. In spite of all the talent and expertise on offer in the film, the ultimate takeaway basically boils down to:
I genuinely admire what the people in this film have set out to do and I wholeheartedly agree with them as to the ends, but Harris’s stated hope for the means is that “the people” will wean themselves off these products of their own volition. To which I’d say: Tristan, I don’t know if you’ve met “the people,” but I’m sorry to tell you that no one’s ever lost any money underestimating them—and I count myself squarely among their ranks. Also, climate change called and would like to know when “the people” are coming for their greenhouse gases cause it heard we’re all very eager to take those back but it has a thing it has to run to soon and is wondering if it should wait. . .
Let’s start with the obvious.
The Bad Apples executives aren’t going to do anything without their arms being twisted by either their customers (the advertisers) or regulators. Yes—“the people” could, in theory, quit on Facebook as they quit on MySpace and Friendster, but let’s be honest: the odds of this happening are pretty slim at this point.
I hear you saying “but no one other than my grandmother uses Facebook”—but that’s not true because even if you don’t know anyone who uses Facebook proper, you probably know people who use Instagram or WhatsApp (both owned by Facebook) or at least some Bad Apples product(s). And they’re not going to quit.
They also all use Wikipedia, and no one’s concerned—for good reason! Wikipedia isn’t trying to game their attention—rewarding them with likes or public comments and discussions and flamewars and the other temptations of social media.
But why not? If those practices are all essential to user retention—if they’re so engaging and engrossing to the public—how does Wikipedia manage to attract so many users without engaging in them? Wikipedia isn’t a business—it is a nonprofit organization—but does its example suggest that it may be possible to run a successful business without them? This may be the first question that people should be giving serious thought to when complaining to Congress about how to regulate the Bad Apples.
It’s actually not that complicated.
Human beings crave attention and validation. We want to be seen and heard and told that we’re right and that respectable people agree with us. We’ve learned from Hollywood and ESPN that there’s really nothing more wonderful than being famous. The Bad Apples give us tastes of that “fame” a thousand times a day. Wikipedia does not.
So that’s one big piece of the puzzle. If you want addicts to give up the thing they’re addicted to, it goes a long way to first cut off their supply.
Here we can learn much from the history of Coca-Cola. As you probably know—and if you don’t you can read about it on Wikipedia—Coca-Cola gets its name from one of its former ingredients, cocaine.
Why did Coca-Cola drop cocaine? It was not a matter of law alone. There was a significant societal backlash to its being in a beverage consumed by children. Between the backlash and the law, the highly addictive substance was removed and Coca-Cola promptly went out of business by 1910 and we never heard of the company again. Wait—no—it thrived and became one of the most successful businesses in the history of the world. Mr. Zuckerberg, pay attention!
Similarly, I believe that the Bad Apples can remove those aspects of their wares that are the most addictive as well as add all sorts of (optional) features that allow people to reduce their usage.
Aside from the harm of addiction, there are the arguably much greater harms of misinformation and tribalism and siloing and confirmation bias and the coming apart at the seams of society. (I’ve written here in The Bulwark before about these problems.)
Here again, I believe that there are obvious solutions that would make a massive difference to how people regard the information they receive.
And here again, I have to ask you to take a step back and consider how we used to evaluate information before the advent of social media.
Crazy street people were obviously crazy street people. There was no need to do validations on whether or not they were “bots” or Russian agitprop actors, or trolls, or false-flag operators, or provocateurs out to make a buck. Your eyes and your ears (and sometimes your nose) were all the tools you needed to understand that these were not serious opinion holders to whom to give your attention or money.
The sad reality now is that the most prosperous, healthiest, least violent, most benevolent, least racist society in the history of humanity is completely deranged with the false narrative that things have never been worse and that the end times are upon us. And indeed—we can easily self fulfill this prophecy—but if anyone is left to write the history of what happened it will be through the lens of “these people managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as their instruments of communication drove them all mad and they all clawed each others’ eyes out in a drunken frenzy of totally unwarranted despair.”
We are inundated with misinformation, half-truths, uninformed opinions, and absurdist melodrama from across the globe. And as we are being driven mad by this lack of clarity and never-ending noise fighting for our attention 24 hours a day.
However, the answer is not for the Bad Apples to hire censors and fact-checkers because, as Sam Harris correctly notes, these companies are now run by young people who regard just about anything they disagree with as “racist” and/or “hate speech.” They are abjectly unqualified to do any “moderating” because (sorry kids) they aren’t “moderate.”
But you know who is moderate? Average Jane Internet. She’s sitting around and her eye sockets are rubbed raw from how much eye-rolling she’s doing at all the lunacy on these platforms. But there’s no “BULLSHIT” button. How easy would it be for the Bad Apples to put a “bullshit” button next to the likes? (That’s rhetorical—it’s very easy.) And then add an algorithm to notice when a particular user is posting things that are amassing an unusually high ratio of “bullshits” to “likes” and put a “bullshit” flag on their post or their profile? If this is “social” media then why aren’t more of the tools of our “social” order present?
That’s how society works. It’s not perfect—but it’s a whole hell of a lot better than what the Bad Apples have brought us.
All of the problems enumerated in the film—anonymity, bots, selection bias, addictive rewarding, personalized news from disreputable sources, etc.—have reasonably straightforward, technological solutions. None of those solutions is perfect and none of them is one-size-fits-all, which is why Tristan Harris has no single-sentence answer to the question “What’s the solution?” It will require a lot of tinkering to fine-tune them. But we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Bad Apples, much like Coke, can go on making insane amounts of money, even as their exact practices are adjusted to free us from their ever-tightening embrace. A few of the kinds of suggestions they could start to implement:
require that users verify their identities, or at least include instant markers that show when an account is likely a bot or a troll;
offer users tools to self-regulate (such as timers that disable the apps during certain parts of the day and a way to easily disable things like “autoplay next video”) and make them the default that must be opted out of;
encourage people to use their actual faces and names—making it harder to be anonymous and harder to earn “rewards” if you insist on being anonymous;
offer paid tiers of service that eliminate you from the rolls that are tracked and packaged as a “product” to advertisers;
add news-source certification on platforms like Facebook to counter the current state of ambiguity as to the credibility of the content—people should know when they’re reading something written by a fly-by-night source of propaganda originating in Russia;
make it 100 percent clear when a published story is only popping up because someone paid for it to be there.
This isn’t a white paper, so I’ll stop there, but you get the point: these are just a few of the kind of small but meaningful improvements that are the equivalent of removing the cocaine from the product. The auto industry is figuring out how to have cars without gas, so surely the Bad Apples can figure out how to sell us shoes without ruining civilization.
That’s what The Social Dilemma is missing. An epilogue that says “here are twenty ideas that would fix 80 percent of the Bad Apples’ problems. Write your members of Congress and tell them to pass this message along.”
The time has come to stop wringing our hands and clutching our pearls and put forth proposals for actionable, implementable, workable, technological improvements to these platforms.