What Happened Today: December 1, 2022
Musk’s brain chip; China’s relaxing lockdowns; Elon vs. Obama
The Big Story
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, hopes to begin surgically implanting a device in people’s brains that will connect them to a computer as soon as next year, although the Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve the product. At a presentation on Wednesday, Musk demonstrated the latest advances in the implant made by his company Neuralink, showing what appeared to be monkeys outfitted with the device moving a computer cursor with only their brains. The rudimentary application of the device, which is wired into the brain’s grey matter with threads of electrodes, is one of many features that Musk says will allow disabled users to move, communicate, and revive their vision, although some researchers in the brain-computer field have remained underwhelmed by Musk’s claims of the implant’s capabilities.
The presentation serves as something of a shiny distraction for Musk and the media alike, giving them a break from several controversies he’s kicked up in his race to make Twitter profitable since taking over in November, including a run-in with Tim Cook, head of Apple. Earlier this week, Musk accused Apple of limiting free speech because of what Musk described in a series of tweets as threats to remove the Twitter app from the iPhone App Store. Though Cook did not respond to Musk’s accusations, he did host the Twitter CEO at the Apple campus in Cupertino, California, where the two executives apparently squashed any disagreements with a walk around the headquarter’s pond. “Good conversation,” Musk wrote of the meeting, adding that Twitter would not be banned from the iPhone ecosystem. “Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so,” Musk tweeted.
In The Back Pages: Elon vs. Obama
The Rest
→ After mass protests spread across China in response to the country’s draconian COVID-19 lockdowns, Beijing officials appear poised to relax some restrictions over the next week—a remarkable shift following what had been the most visible public defiance against the government in recent memory. The unrest was fueled in part by the ongoing economic pressures that were exacerbated by the lockdown protocols, though within 24 hours of violent protests in certain cities, public health officials in at least half a dozen districts announced they were going to lift lockdowns and reopen schools, businesses, and restaurants to the public. “After nearly three years fighting against the epidemic, our country’s medical and healthcare system has withstood the test,” Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who runs China’s COVID-19 response team, said on Thursday, marking the dramatic change in tone that could soon serve as the sunset on much of the zero-Covid program.
→ French President Emmanuel Macron was at the White House on Thursday for the French leader’s first state visit during President Joe Biden’s administration, with much attention paid by the longtime allies on how to continue to finance the Western support of Ukraine. “Our two nations are sisters in the fight for freedom,” Macron said during his remarks at the arrival ceremony. The visit comes as support for Ukraine is becoming more contentious. The GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has said the House will not be writing “blank checks” for Biden’s Ukraine effort, and European officials are encountering resistance at home from residents who question sending aid to Ukraine amid their own energy crisis. At an event at the French embassy, Macron complained that the Biden administration’s climate legislation subsidizing technology like electric vehicles made in the United States will take a big chunk out of European exports. “The choices that have been made ... are choices that will fragment the West,” Macron said.
→ Paul Whelan, the former U.S. Marine and security executive who was arrested in Moscow and sentenced to 16 years by a Russian court in 2020 on bogus espionage charges, has been moved to a prison hospital and not heard from since, raising alarms for American diplomats and Whelan’s family. Held in a high-security prison eight hours from Moscow, Whelan was in regular contact with family and had received a visit from U.S. and Irish diplomats just before the prison staff sent the family vague messages that he’d been sent to the medical facility of his high-security prison. Whelan has received less attention than the WNBA basketball star Brittney Griner, another American detained in Russia, but freeing both prisoners has been an ongoing if fruitless effort for Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other U.S. officials. “Regrettably, we do not have an update specifically about where [Whelan] is or what condition he’s in,” John Kirby, a representative for the National Security Council, said on Tuesday.
→ The Maryland Attorney General’s office wants the public to see the 456-page report it compiled investigating 158 priests in the archdiocese of Baltimore who are accused of sexually abusing at least 600 victims over an eight-decade stretch, but some of the people named in the investigation might keep the report from coming to light. Finding the church knew of victims as young as preschool age up to young adults, including boys and girls affiliated with the parishes where the priests were sometimes kept on despite being identified as abusers, the report comes after the AG’s office three-year examination reviewing more than 100,000 documents from the church’s records. The findings make clear that the archdiocese went to extensive lengths to keep the abuse a secret. “Time and again, the Archdiocese chose the abuser over the abused, the powerful over the weak, and the adult over the child,” the report says. After a grand jury investigation, which is often kept from the public, the church agreed at the end of November to the AG’s request to release the report as part of a recent reform effort at more transparency. But now people who aren’t accused of wrongdoing but are named in the investigation are trying to seal the case file, which leaves the fate of the report’s release in the hands of a Baltimore judge.
→ Number of the Day: 180
That’s how many micrograms of fine particles per cubic meter of air were found in New Delhi on Tuesday, as the world’s most polluted capital city braces for another winter of intense smog and difficult breathing. The New Delhi reading taken on Tuesday was three times what’s considered the acceptable upper limit of 60 micrograms, and reflects the uphill battle city officials face against polluted air quality. New Delhi has already swapped out some old buses for those that use cleaner fuel or electric power and limited the burning of waste during colder months, but similar tactics must be adopted by the city’s neighboring towns and outposts across northern India, where the air quality is similarly dire.
→ Tweet of the Day:
That’s some of the top-line implications from a new meta-analysis study led by a Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher that reviewed semen samples from 223 studies and found that sperm counts worldwide are declining at such a rate as to become an urgent public health issue, if not an existential problem for the future of humanity. The team had previously investigated declining sperm counts in North America, Europe and Australia between 1981 and 2013, but their more recent meta-analysis, using the old data set plus studies from 1973-2018 which included all continents, suggests sperm counts are declining even more rapidly than before, and everywhere, adding new urgency to ongoing efforts for governments to intervene. Not that there’s an off-the-shelf solution to the problem, as some research suggests the lowered sperm counts are the result of too much exposure to chemicals and even the plastic that dominates our lives.
→ What do you call a meat-eating prehistoric creature with two legs and a body fit for underwater hunting? The answer, of course, is Natovenator polydontus, the new dinosaur species recently found in Mongolia that Philip Currie, a University of Alberta paleobiologist who co-wrote a paper on the discovery, said might bring to mind a penguin or shorebird, though “a swimming Velociraptor is a pretty good characterization.” The finding of the skeleton in a Gobi Desert rock formation continues to broaden the established understanding of what types of environments dinosaurs could live within. “They lived in deserts, they lived in forests, they lived in very wet areas,” Currie said. “And now we’re finding these things that spent most of their time in the water.”
→ Asian investors are getting antsy about threats to their cash flow amid continued economic turbulence, rapidly pulling their money out of private equity behemoth Blackstone’s real estate investment fund. The $125 billion fund is predominantly tied to commercial real estate assets, which have been on a roller coaster since the beginning of the pandemic, and Asian investors have led the effort to get their money out of the fund to free up some much-needed cash as Asian markets continue to struggle. Blackstone began throttling the withdrawals last month, with 70% of those requests from Asian investors, even though investors outside the United States only account for 20% of the investor pool. It’s all another signal that commercial real estate might have one of the rockiest roads ahead in 2023, as major commercial real estate holders continue to liquidate vacant office buildings and some travel destination properties that have never recovered from the pandemic.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Banality of Good by Paul du Quenoy
In his recent book, Matias Desmet takes on a new totalitarianism not enforced by jackbooted thugs, but dull bureaucrats imposing consensus
Jafar Panahi Dances With Bears and Produces a Masterpiece by Bernard-Henri Lévy
The imprisoned director’s latest film is as powerful for its absences as its images
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Elon vs. Obama
Choose your fighter
By Jacob Siegel
So it’s war.
Twitter, the social media platform that led the charge in censoring reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, was reluctantly forced to approve Elon Musk’s $44 billion “leveraged buyout” Monday after running out of options to block the deal. With that move, the richest man in the world, with a day job running electric car manufacturer Tesla, instantly promoted himself to five-star general of a free speech army fighting to liberate the internet from top-down political control. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk tweeted in his first statement announcing the deal, where he also pledged to make the platform’s algorithms open source “to increase trust,” defeat the site’s spam bots, and authenticate its human users. “The Berlin Wall of censorship fell yesterday,” internet entrepreneur David Sacks tweeted on Tuesday.
If Sacks had wanted to use a different metaphor, he might have said that Musk had captured a key foothold—a defensible initial position from which to build up forces in an effort to gradually expand the territories in which it’s possible to dissent from the party line on issues like COVID-19 or U.S. policy in Ukraine where discourse has been most tightly regulated. Because, with this latest move, Musk and a merry band of fellow billionaires that includes Sacks and the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen seem to be coalescing into an American counterelite committed to breaking the monopoly on public discourse held by our current ruling class.
On the other side of the skirmish line we have the forces of the bipartisan political establishment under the command of General Barack Obama. The members of this faction are easy to identify because they have been engaged in an unhinged freakout for weeks. Ever since news first broke indicating that Musk was trying to acquire a controlling share of Twitter, his critics have been apoplectic about the dangers to democracy that will be unleashed by allowing users to more freely share and view information. Former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich captured the shrill zeitgeist of apocalyptic liberal technocrats everywhere when he warned that Musk’s “libertarian vision of an ‘uncontrolled’ internet [is] also the dream of every dictator, strongman, and demagogue.” Uh, sure, “what linked Idi Amin, Suharto, and Adolf Hitler,” James Kirchick recently noted in The Scroll, “was their belief in unfettered freedom of speech.”
But the official, buttoned-up version of the freakout was articulated by Obama himself. Less than a week ago in a speech at Stanford University, the former president warned that it’s necessary to impose more regulations on the internet, in order to prevent toxic disinformation from destroying American democracy by eroding citizens’ trust. “Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won,” Obama told the audience at the Silicon Valley hub. “As Putin discovered leading up to the 2016 election,” Obama said, “our own social media platforms are well designed to support such a mission.”
The Stanford speech was a nearly perfect encapsulation of what is so corrupt about the disinformation discourse—which is, at this moment, frantically being redirected against Musk to force him into playing ball or being painted as a Russian stooge. In the same speech where he made the case for more censorship, even while hollowly proclaiming his commitment to free speech, Obama could not stop himself from echoing the single most destructive piece of disinformation of the modern political era—the establishment’s “big lie” that Russia swung the 2016 election for Donald Trump, a claim that has repeatedly been proved false but is kept alive because it makes such an effective political weapon.
Obama has to uphold the Russian collusion narrative, even if it means spreading disinformation himself, because that extraordinary claim established the basis for the joint government-tech company control over the information environment, which was expanded under COVID and he now wants to fortify. In the current system, which Musk is vowing to change, social media platforms take orders on censorship protocols from government officials and partisan functionaries with titles like “fact-checker” who work inside the complex of NGOs funded by the Democratic Party.
If Obama, or President Biden for that matter, was serious about curtailing the power of the tech oligarchs, they would put aside the culture war rhetoric and act in the national interest by using antitrust laws to break up tech monopolies. That might actually restore political agency to American citizens and political sovereignty to the government. So why hasn’t that happened, and indeed won’t ever happen? Because the Democratic Party relies on the tech companies to fund its political campaigns and regulate what kind of information reaches voters.
The populist movements of 2016 were an attempt on both the left and right to wrest power back from technocratic elites. Those movements relied on figureheads—Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—because average voters, even when they were tens of thousands strong, were too cut off from the levers of power located inside institutional centers to pose any long-term challenge to the American ruling class. Even Trump, at the time supposedly the most powerful man in the world, couldn’t quash the false Russia collusion narrative or keep himself from getting booted off of Twitter, and was forced to mope off pathetically like he was just another anonymous troll account.
Musk and other billionaires who are now coalescing into the counterelite are testing out what happens when they simply buy back the central institutions of public discourse and—exercising a degree of independence that only truly “fuck you money” can buy—remake the rules in a way that empowers average users but directly threatens the interests of the establishment elite.
It is, let us say, hardly ideal in a democracy to depend on the whims of a billionaire who seems to get off on winding people up to secure the basic constitutional protections of free speech. Let’s not forget that Twitter’s founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey—who has been embarrassingly woo-woo in his praise of Musk—was until very recently more than happy to go along with the Hunter Biden charade and the government’s other censorship demands. But given Twitter’s current ownership structure, in which the majority of its shares are owned by BlackRock and Vanguard, and the fact that the company serves an alliance of global financial capital, the Democratic Party, and progressive activists, I’ll take my chances on the counterelite.
This article originally appeared in The Scroll on April 26, 2022.
The Elon vs. Obama article should go into Tablet's collection on the Decline of the Press.
"The presentation serves as something of a shiny distraction for Musk and the media alike"
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Musk, that he's somehow just messing around, liable to get bored with his companies, with Twitter. The reality is his tweets are a surface sideshow, essentially inconsequential. He's been telling the exact same story with his companies for decades, to the point of tedium. I doubt he gets "distracted". Look at his actual track record (which isn't his tweets).
The media, on the other hand...