The Big Story
You can see the power center in American culture shifting between generations, and from one media paradigm to another, in the Joe Rogan Spotify controversy. On Friday Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, two of the most famous musical acts of the 1960s, removed their catalogs from the streaming service after it refused to get rid of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which they and others had accused of spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. The company chose to stick with Rogan, who hosts the most popular podcast in the world, regularly pulling in some 11 million viewers. Even newly minted misinformation experts Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who had vowed to express their “concerns to [their] partners at Spotify about the all too real consequences of COVID misinformation on its platform,” could not convince the company. (In 2020, the royal duo signed a deal reportedly worth $25 million with the platform for which they have so far produced one podcast episode.)
On Sunday morning, Spotify publicly responded to the pressure campaign with a nonresponse that aimed to placate critics without giving in to their demands. Spotify also published its preexisting internal misinformation policy, and the company’s CEO, Daniel Ek, said that going forward it would post an advisory to content dealing with the novel coronavirus that would prompt users to a “hub for data-driven facts and up-to-date information.” By Monday morning, Spotify’s new misinformation hub featured as one of its top recommendations an interview with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, an interesting choice that demonstrates how the drive to credential experts blurs the lines between corporate power and public health authority, and points to the pattern in which activist-driven campaigns to “cancel” public figures end up benefiting Fortune 500 companies. Despite losing Young—whose political commitments did not preclude selling a 50% stake in his music rights to the investment firm Blackstone last year for a reported $150 million—the markets seemed to feel Spotify had made the right decision, with Spotify stock climbing by as much as 13% on Monday.
Back Pages: The Real Reason Ukraine Is Telling the U.S. to Calm Down While Preparing for War
The Rest
→ As part of the effort to deter a Russian attack on Ukraine without committing American military forces to a potential conflict, U.S. officials are planning economic sanctions that would target high-level officials close to President Vladimir Putin. The British government also discussed taking economic measures against Russia Monday with a plan to make it easier for regulators to penalize businesses with ties to the Russian government that are operating in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials continued to call for calm and restraint and warn that dire rhetoric from Western authorities is only further destabilizing the situation.
Read more on the situation from The Scroll’s Ukraine correspondent, Vladislav Davidzon, in today’s Back Pages.
→ A few hours after Israel’s President Isaac Herzog became the first Israeli president to visit Abu Dhabi on Sunday, the trip was punctuated by an incoming ballistic missile fired by Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen at the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The missile, which marked the third in a string of similar attacks in recent weeks, was intercepted with no injuries or damage to the city. The UAE was the first Arab country to become a signatory to the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and its Gulf Arab neighbors. Part of the ceremony included the playing of the two countries’ national anthems.
→ A New York Times investigation details how a “dark money” spending advantage was key to the Democrats’ electoral victory in 2020: “The findings reveal the growth and ascendancy of a shadow political infrastructure that is reshaping American politics, as mega-donors to these nonprofits take advantage of loose disclosure laws to make multimillion-dollar outlays in total secrecy.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/us/politics/democrats-dark-money-donors.html
*An interesting detail picked out by the Washington Examiner’s Byron York: Bill Kristol, who was an influential conservative standard-bearer for decades in the pre-Trump era, is now a top fundraiser for Democratic candidates.
→ New laws taking effect in New York City aim to guarantee basic labor rights for approximately 80,000 delivery workers—service employees in the so-far chronically underrepresented “gig economy.” Delivery apps such as Uber Eats and DoorDash will now be required to provide workers with essential information about each job—addresses, route, length of trip, and tip—before couriers accept the assignment and to pay workers their full wages in a timely manner, without charging processing fees. A recent study from Cornell University’s Worker Institute found that delivery workers in New York City make an average hourly wage of $12.21, including tips—several dollars less than the city’s minimum wage; many also complained that apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash (valued at $68 billion and $28 billion, respectively) were pocketing their tips. These new laws emerge in the context of ongoing debates between gig workers (a third of Americans do some form of part- or full-time gig work) and their employers, who are currently exempt from providing standard labor protections and benefits to workers who are classified as independent contractors.
→ Facebook’s metaverse promises “a future made by all of us.” It turns out this future will be made by people on the company’s payroll. The New York Times reports that as Meta (formerly Facebook Inc.) begins to shift its focus away from phone-based digital platforms to the construction of a digital universe, the 68,000-person company is less interested in the problems plaguing its current products (such as leaked documents from the company’s own researchers on the profound psychological damage its platforms have on young people, or the $150 billion lawsuit filed by Rohingya refugees claiming that Facebook cashed in on the genocide in Myanmar). Promotional materials show MarkZuckerberg’s digital avatar playing cards with some virtual friends and a robot. Can’t a guy escape his problems for a while?
→ What would it mean to build something like the opposite of the metaverse? A place that strengthens human bonds and core competencies instead of dissolving them in digital acid? It’s a worthwhile question to ponder, and here’s a clue courtesy of Twitter stranger @nevadapossum, with a quote from the American writer and farmer Gene Logsdon.
→ Thousands of trucks remained in the Canadian city of Ottawa Monday blocking the area around Parliament Hill and continuing demonstrations as Canadian officials reconvened in government buildings. Local reports suggested the crowd was smaller than the thousands who had assembled over the weekend in a massive demonstration led by truckers protesting vaccine mandates on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border.
→ Tom Brady is—or is not—retiring but is definitely at least seriously considering hanging it up. While some reports over the weekend claimed that Brady, 44, who is widely considered to be the greatest quarterback ever, is done with the game, others said he hasn’t yet made up his mind. Brady himself, in a recent interview, said that after 22 seasons of professional football, he is thinking about retiring for the sake of his family but isn’t rushing to make the decision.
→ Speaking of football greats: Nicky Montana, son of legendary quarterback Joe Montana, now lives in Israel, where he’s been immersing himself in the country’s tech sector. After playing college football at a string of schools, including as the starting quarterback for Tulane, Montana left the game behind and got into angel investing, which led him to the burgeoning financial tech field, which led him to the Holy Land.
Read more: https://circuit.news/2022/01/31/the-quarterback-scion-in-zion/
The Scroll’s Ukraine correspondent Vladislav Davidzon on The Real Reason Ukraine is telling the U.S. to Calm Down While Preparing for War
As the international crisis over a possible new Russian incursion into Ukraine loomed over everything, Ukrainian Jews commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day last week while preparing for the worst. Standing in the snowy Babyn Yar ravine in the suburbs of Kyiv ahead of the memorial, the prominent and singular Ukrainian Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to reconsider the assault on his adopted country. The Leningrad-born rabbi called on God to give wisdom to world leaders so that they might avoid war as Russia continued sending combat supplies to the Ukrainian border, where more than 100,000 Russian troops are massed along with infrastructure to support a possible full-scale attack.
What the rabbi’s prayers did not address was why, at the very moment when the reignition of the war is threatened, a rift is growing between Ukraine and its main military ally, the United States. As U.S. leaders sound the alarm about a new invasion—there are still Russian forces in the country after the 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region—the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, attempted to tamp down alarm and lower expectations that shooting would restart “imminently.” So why does the United States appear to be more concerned with the prospect of Russia escalating against Ukraine than the country’s own leadership does? One answer given by analysts of U.S. policy is that playing up the threat is part of a strategy to compel Kyiv to make difficult and potentially unpopular concessions in negotiations with Moscow. In other words, the more dire the situation appears, the easier it is to force the hand of the Ukrainian leadership in accepting settlement terms they may find unfavorable, and the more credit the White House can claim for stepping in to avert catastrophe.
Zelensky, a Jewish former television star, certainly takes the threat to his country seriously. His priority now is to create international support and procure arms for Ukraine. But the Ukrainian president has also tried to play it cool, balancing appeals to NATO and his Western audience with efforts to lower the temperature of the conflict, as heated rhetoric emanates from the White House. “I’m the president of Ukraine, and I’m based here, and I think I know the details better,” he testily responded to President Biden at a presser for foreign journalists last week in Kyiv.
For their part, the Ukrainian government, military, and intelligence services have all maintained over the previous months that the current situation, while serious, is not existential. According to sources familiar with his thinking, Zelensky is very concerned about the economic effects on Ukraine of a potential panic that could cause Western investors to flee the country in the face of an “imminent invasion.” President Biden and the foreign policy establishment in Washington D.C., on the other hand, has been trying to ratchet up the sense of alarm and urgency over Russia’s intentions.
Speculation continues over the intentions of President Putin, as well as how far he might be willing to proceed in order to break the resolve of the Ukrainian state. For his part, U.S. President Biden has spoken out publicly about the political stalemate on several occasions, and American diplomacy is now in the midst of a whirlwind process of coalition-building and sanction-preparing processes that are intended to deter any further aggression from Moscow. The U.S. State Department has issued recommendations that U.S. citizens consider leaving the country if they can. The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv is reported to have evacuated some of its nonessential personnel and has also advised U.S. citizens living in Ukraine to leave in the coming days if possible.
Kate Tsurkan, an American writer and editor of Apofenie magazine who lives in Ukraine and is married to a Ukrainian citizen told me that she wouldn’t be heeding the advice of the embassy. “My family and I spoke briefly about where to evacuate in the worst-case scenario, but it remains a rather distant possibility. Everyday life continues as usual, with a spike in COVID infections being of more immediate concern at the moment.”
Despite the flurry of international attention to the very real danger of the renewed “hot” war that concluded when the Minsk-2 Accords were signed in the spring of 2015, Ukrainians are divided in their response to the danger. Individuals all over the country are stockpiling food and joining self-defense battalions. But there is also a large proportion of the population (perhaps a bare majority) who nonchalantly refuse to take the situation seriously.
The war in eastern Ukraine has been going on for almost a decade as mixed Russian and separatist forces battle the Ukrainian army and local Ukrainian nationalist militias. As this war of static attrition and sniper warfare has ground on, large swathes of Ukraine’s population have grown inured to the conflict and skeptical of any escalation. I was flippantly told that “nothing is going to happen” by at least two dozen people from all walks of life over the course of having spent the previous week and a half in the country. Even among Ukrainians who take the renewed threat of Russian attack seriously, there is a widespread desire to avoid unnecessary hysteria that the Russian army aims to create.
Much as I have admired Joni Mitchell's talent and courage, she knows nothing about this situation and should not add her emotional .$02. As for Neil Young, what is he talking about??
Biden's military investments suggest the reason he ALWAYS rachets upU.S. hysteria re any militarily-oriented situations: profits.