Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the latest ‘Commentator’ post — round-up and discussion of news. As usual, I would encourage you as well to visit
. My friend is the only person I know of to combine three wonderful things — psychedelics, Russian dissident politics, and surrealist literature. His Inner Life post is on conversations he had with Russians shortly before emigrating.Best,
Sam
CHATBOT BIAS
A subtext of ‘Commentator’ is thinking through what a ‘citizen’s role’ - or I guess more explicitly what my role should be in thinking about politics. There’s a newshound side to my personality, and, oddly enough, the purpose of ‘Commentator’ is actually to think less about news. I have the one or two days when I really dive through the news — and I do find it valuable to scan through my list of fifty or sixty publications and to get to a sense of the angles publications are taking on various stories and, as importantly, what stories are not being covered — and then I really try not to think about news the rest of the time.
The sense is that there are only a handful of stories that really matter — because a lot of people are dying or are at risk of dying or because (very occasionally) power relations are shifting around somewhere — and almost everything else is reflective of the ideological stance of the publication running the story and tends to be written in as alarmist and pressing a tone as possible. Meanwhile, there’s another type of story that needs no apologizing for but isn’t really news at all (although it tends to be hosted on news platforms). These are stories that evince an ongoing curiosity about the world and usually are only half-connected to whatever ‘peg’ their associated news outlet gives them. The idea with ‘Commentator’ is to try to cut out the whole middle ground of stories that are there to fill a ‘news hole’ or to fit in with a predetermined slant. The idea is to focus either on stories that really matter — and it tends to get a little repetitious in here because the stories that matter still matter even if they’ve already been ‘covered’ — and then on stories that for one reason or another help me to understand the world a bit differently.
And, in a sense, the most important story of all is the emergence of AI technology — which is probably one of the great historical turning points ever, taking place right in front of us, accompanied by some bemused chatter and a lot of very silly practical jokes. The New York Times has a piece out with an angle on the Chatbots that I didn’t really consider but should have — the way that they are inevitably programmed with one or another type of political bias.
Conservatives were quick to notice that the bots had certain predispositions built into them. ChatGPT was perfectly willing to compose an ode to President Biden — “the leader of the land / With a steady hand and a heart of a man” — but it was positively ambassadorial when it came to a parallel assignment for Trump, writing that “it would be inappropriate for me to generate content that promotes or glorifies any individual.”
Not so surprisingly, the conservative reaction to the bots’ evident bias has been to create some bias of their own. “We don’t intend to allow our enemies to have the keys to the kingdom this time around,” said Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, a ‘Christian nationalist’ company, which has introduced its Chatbot as part of an effort to “pioneer a parallel economy for the glory of God.”
As The New York Times notes, “An informational cacophony could emerge from competing chatbots with different versions of reality.” And Oren Etzioni, of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, adds that this ‘cacophony’ isn’t so much a “hypothetical threat” as an “imminent, imminent threat.”
What this sort of distortion reveals is obvious enough but easy to forget — that the Chatbots aren’t exactly disembodied machines; that they reveal the underlying worldview of whomever happens to be programing them; and that ‘artificial intelligence’ isn’t really intelligence so much as it is data — and the selection of what data is deemed admissible profoundly influences the response of an omniscient-appearing AI entity.
That means a political scramble. China has been quick to seize control of AI space — suspending or “placing under maintenance” ChatYuan for having the temerity to refer to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “a war of aggression,” a political gaffe that likely requires ChatYuan to modify its proscribed dataset. And, in the U.S., it means sooner or later some governmental intervention to set guardrails in AI space. Evidently, the era of techie laissez-faire is over — that’s what the congressional hearings on TikTok signify — and something or other will be instituted on Chatbots’ ability to disseminate political content in advance of the elections.
On the level of human beings and of the economy, the impact of the Chatbots is even more profound. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re at a parallel moment to the rise of industrialization in the early 19th century. In a compelling interview on Persuasion, Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, lays out the economic long-view of the past two centuries. Industrialization came first for agriculture — clearing out the traditional economy of the countryside and forcing waves of people to the city and to the new manufacturing sector. And then eventually it came for manufacturing as well, creating a new class of knowledge workers who “now completely dominate society.” But the knowledge workers aren’t quite so invulnerable as they might like to think. The bots at a stroke eliminate whole types of academic and office work — anything, in short, that relies on accessing some wide swathe of data and churning out a socially-acceptable, consensus-driven product.
The understanding — almost regardless of what guardrails the U.S. government or even the Chinese put up to stop it — is that the rise of the bots is irresistible. It’s not just that what they are doing is so cool — it’s that they plug exactly into the vulnerability of the white-collar economy. The emphasis is always on the ease of living, on comfort, convenience, the ‘frictionless existence’ — a sort of stratospheric life in which the highest human activity is to be a consumer. And that mindset makes the white-collar workforce uniquely maladapted to stave off its own decline. The temptation — as reflected in countless articles and initiatives — is to throw AI at whatever pressing problem we have and to benefit as consumers from whatever magic AI will cook up.
The wiser, more historically-influenced course, is to learn from what happened to farmers and factory workers over the last two centuries. The machines wipe out jobs that never come back and, with that, they wipe out a whole identity and way of life. The farmers basically never figured out how to adapt — the countryside today is, essentially, deserted in most industrialized nations. And if it didn’t quite work for laborers to destroy all the textile mills, which was the initial impulse, they did have the right idea in establishing unions — in recognizing that what was really of value wasn’t so much in making as much shit as possible but in ensuring jobs and quality of life for themselves.
Speaking personally, my plan is just to steer clear of machine-learning as much as I can. I’m fully aware that that’s not really going to work — I’m already hooked on things like Google Maps, Google Translate, AutoPredict, and of course there’s more to come — but, now, while AI’s capacity for destabilization is becoming apparent although not yet the shape of it, it’s a good time to take stock of what matters and how we articulate our identity to ourselves. Consumerist convenience was a nice way for a white-collar workforce to live over the past half-century. Now it’s becoming clear that the knowledge economy that it rested on is better run by bots and a few techie handlers. And value has to come from something else — from some domain that the bots and their datasets cannot access.
RUSSIA AS A COLONIAL POWER
The other story that really matters and that I keep coming back to is the turn in Russian society — which isn’t just the war in Ukraine but is a sweeping challenge to a democratic vision. In Foreign Policy, the Ukrainian writers Artem Shaipov and Yuliia Shaipova lay out, in arresting terms, their way of understanding what’s happened in Russia.
The key, really, they claim, is that Russia never accepted the nation-state model that appeared in Western Europe in the 17th century and then seemed to take root — in retrospect, with suspicious ease — around the world. I’ve gradually become convinced that the nation-state maps very poorly onto African politics and culture and has contributed greatly to Africa’s struggles post-decolonization, and there is a similar difficulty in aligning the philosophy of the nation-state with a Russian mindset. As Shaipov and Shaipova write, “After World War I, the Russian Empire avoided the permanent dismemberment that befell other multi-ethnic land empires, such as the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary.” The expansive mindset that characterized Tsarist Russia never went away and was left really untouched by the advent of the Westphalian nation-state model. And the perspective of the Russian right — which now is the perspective of Russia — has been that the nation-state is a very cramped, very neutered way of being that might work for Dutch burghers but certainly not for the Russian soul. “The state is an artificial pragmatic construction, desacralized and devoid of telos, purpose and substance,” writes, for instance, Aleksandr Dugin in Putin v. Putin: A View From The Right. “On the contrary, the empire is something alive, sacred, and replete with purpose and essence: something that has a higher destiny.”
Russia’s imperial expansiveness, claim Shaipov and Shaipova, comes at the expense of its neighbors and takes the form of a brutal colonialism. The word ‘colonialism’ seems misplaced to Western ears, since expansion is not overseas and isn’t necessarily about differences in skin tone, but the Ukrainians are insistent that colonialism is the right way to understand it. The Holodomor of the ‘30s comes to be understood as a classic colonialist consolidation of resources — in this case, as literal as starving out portions of the colony in order to feed the rest of the imperium — and the dissolution of the Soviet Union less as a shift in modes of government (as it understood in the West) than a moment of nationalist self-determination and decolonization throughout the imperium. For Shaipov and Shaipova — as for Timothy Snyder, who makes a similar argument — Ukraine itself has been a long-standing blindspot in the Western imagination. The massive Cold War-era intellectual infrastructure of Soviet studies had a “strategic flaw,” they write: “Born in an era when Moscow’s control reached far beyond today’s Russian borders, these programs inevitably framed the region through a Moscow-centric lens.”
Inadvertently, the Western perspective dovetailed with that of Russian imperialism. And this really was the mentality of the 2000s and 2010s — that the ‘CIS countries’ would form a new kind of Russian imperium. The problem with that assumption was that the Ukrainians were headed in a different direction — and, in a way, back towards the fundamental 17th century split between the nation-state and the imperial mode of governance. “In Ukraine, every conversation goes back centuries,” I was told when I was there.
I’ve been enchanted, ever since I heard it, by the prophecy of Johann Gottfried Herder, who, visiting Ukraine in 1769, declared, “Someday a cultured nation will awake there whose influence will spread throughout the world.” What I find so special about this is that Herder — ‘the father of nationalism’ — is arguing an almost perfectly antithetical position to that of Dugin and the vision of imperial Russia; and it seems apposite that this debate continues for three centuries and centers on the same disputed territory. Nationalism emerged in Europe as a means of curbing very powerful, very expansive empires. Ukraine certainly had its own 19th century nationalism culminating in the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, but this was quickly ground under by a resurgent Russian empire.
The clash between Russia and Ukraine, then, comes to be understood as something very different from “a territorial dispute.” What it really is about is culture and philosophy of governance. “The conflict is about language,” Ukrainians have — somewhat surprisingly — told me. What that means isn’t repression of Russian — everybody there speaks Russian fluently — as it is the classically nationalist project of asserting cultural self-determination. And, maybe even deeper than that, it’s about incompatible philosophies. The time-honored tradition of Russian imperialism represents one mode of thinking about statecraft. The johnny-came-lately vision of the self-determined nation-state represents another. I’m not saying that one system is intrinsically better than the other. But it’s profound differences such as these that wars are fought over.
The optimistic view — still bandied about in the West — is that Putin is basically an aberration, a man without a philosophy. “When Putin goes, there will be no Putinism to outlive him. There is no ideology, like communism, nor a political structure, like the Communist Party, to carry on his life mission of piecing together a broken empire,” writes Lucian Kim, also in Foreign Policy. “Putin has exploited lingering nostalgia for the Soviet Union for his lost cause, but he offers no vision of a future that young Russians are supposed to fight and die for.”
But that strikes me as wrong. Putin is very in tune with Russia and what he offers is far deeper than ‘nostalgia for the Soviet Union.’ He is reaching back to a sort of fundamental vision of Russianness — and we may well have to accept that that has precious little in common with liberal democracy. A searing understanding of the extent of this emerges from a profile The New York Times conducted of Marina Ovsyannikova, the iconic protestor. Ovsyannikova — who held up the “Don’t believe the propaganda, they are lying to you” sign on Channel 1 during the early days of the war — was under house arrest and facing a ten-year prison sentence when she cut off her electronic monitor and walked across the border, making her way eventually to France. “I was well aware that we were creating a parallel reality,” said Ovsyannikova, who had worked for Channel 1 for twenty years. “The war simply became a point of no return. It was no longer possible to keep quiet.”
But few shared Ovsyannikova’s compulsion. Her mother, whom Ovsyannikova said had been “zombified by Kremlin propaganda,” wanted her jailed. Her son accused her of “ruining our family life.” Her ex-husband sought custody of their children. What was different for Ovsyannikova, according to the Times article, is that she grew up in Chechnya, experienced the Russian invasion of the 1990s, and felt a certain haunting familiarity when she saw the images of Russian bombings of Ukrainian cities.
That split in consciousness helps to understand what the Ukraine War is about. From the Russian perspective, the nation-state model has almost nothing to do with it. Ukraine is understood to be part of the imperium. And it’s only those who have been on the receiving end of Russian imperialism, like Ovsyannikova, who long for something different.
RELITIGATING 2020
David Wallace-Wells, who has become The New York Times’ apologizer-in-chief, has a retrospective-minded piece on a new wave of analysis about the outbreak of Covid and the 2020 shutdowns.
“In both the United States and Britain, there is suddenly a front-and-center debate about the very earliest days of the pandemic and how each country responded,” writes Wallace-Wells.
Well, yes. But I’m not sure about the ‘suddenly’ part. It’s not exactly as if everybody was happy with everything and then out of nowhere a critique erupted. What happened was that normal channels of discourse were summarily shut off, and questions that are generally subject to vigorous debate and to the democratic process — questions like how a world-stopping virus originated, like whether you were permitted to enter a public enclosure with your own face exposed, like whether you were permitted to enter those same spaces without displaying your medical records — were settled by fiat and with dissenting opinions either deemed fringe and conspiratorial or else just quietly exiled from public discourse altogether.
Wallace-Wells quotes the Substack
in saying “It looks like we are entering a new phase of the pandemic — revisionism.” But it’s not so much revisionism as just having the debates that we should have had the first time around. The origin of the pandemic is a big one. The Wuhan seafood market — as copious reporting has revealed — was pegged as the culprit prematurely and with very scanty evidence. The evidence for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which to be honest always seemed an obvious suspect, has been quietly growing all this time, but the question isn’t settled — there’s room for a healthy debate on both sides.The news at the moment is that a fresh international team has discovered fresh evidence of a zoonotic crossover point at the Wuhan market — this time from raccoon dogs. Apparently, we can apologize to the poor bats and the poor pangolins and turn our attention to the real culprit. The evidence, it must be said, so far seems a bit slender. There is no paper out and no preprint for a paper. Based on media reports, it’s that U.S. researchers gained access to genetic sequences from the seafood market that a Chinese team had long had and found, according to The Atlantic, that “samples from 2019 that had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were also coming back chock-full of animal genetic material — much of which was a match for the common raccoon dog.” On Substack,
has an interesting analysis. He notes that, far from being a fresh team of independent researchers, "the group making the claims was made up entirely of vocal, well-known advocates for the 'zoonotic spillover' hypothesis"; and that the Chinese team that had long been working with the data from the market came to a very different conclusion from it — determining "that the pandemic did not begin in the Huanan market, but that the market was the site of a human to human 'super-spreader' event.’” All in all, far less evidence than is accruing for lab-leak. The ‘smart’ thing to say at this point is that the pandemic’s origin may be one of these things we’ll never know, and that we’ll just have to live with the uncertainty of it. That’s the position that people like Wallace-Wells and Ross Douthat are arriving at. I suspect that that’s not quite the truth — that somebody or other out there knows exactly what happened — but we can leave it there for the time being: healthy debate and an unsolved mystery.Meanwhile, the debate about the early shutdowns is really a separate set of questions. Wallace-Wells calls this “brain fog.” He writes: “With the deadliest public health crisis in a century already so out of focus in our collective memory, we find ourselves talking at the level of abstract principles as though they bear no relationship to the brutal reality of the early pandemic.”
I don’t know about him but my mind is very clear on what the early days of the pandemic looked like. There was a period of understandable panic when everything shut down, when — in the U.S. — a series of governors and public health authorities took control of an unruly situation and shuttered public life while they tried to understand what was happening. Fine. But by the summer it was very clear that the virus spread hardly at all outdoors, had little impact on healthy younger people, and almost none on children. The sensible thing would have been a gradual reopening — a push towards outdoor life, towards reopening schools, and to some principle of self-determination, with businesses and individuals setting their own degree of risk. This was, to be honest, what happened in Republican states.
But in Democratic states a very different ethos took hold. The emphasis was on extreme safety — the idea being that if anybody was at risk from Covid, then the entire society should orient itself around the vulnerable. And, meanwhile, the health care system resolved to wait for the vaccines — with the assumption that the vaccines would provide a blanket fix and no great damage would be done if society continued to be more or less shut down in the intervening months.
The way I came to think about those months was that it was the equivalent of a bank’s stress test. I think we were all a bit curious to see what our techie dystopia would look like — if remote work could replace offices, if Zoom could replace social gatherings, if the environment would heal. And the reality was — and in a way it’s good that we tried this out — that it didn’t work at all. Depression skyrocketed, education plummeted, violence escalated, the society as a whole had a sort of collective nervous breakdown.
This is not revisionism. It was a prevalent perspective through 2020 and 2021 — and it became common sense in the red states. (In California, where I was for part of the time, these divides would occur sometimes county by county.) But in blue states and counties, the government essentially said: we’ve got this and curtailed individual self-determination. This was true for shutdowns, for masks, for schools, and eventually for vaccine mandates.
The problem was that the virus ended up behaving in ways that weren’t exactly anticipated by health authorities. It mutated, first to become more deadly, and then less. And, maybe most importantly, transmission remained highly mysterious — it never really became clear whether masks or vaccines impeded transmission and, if so, to what extent; and everybody by now is familiar with stories of families or of people in close quarters where some got the virus and some inexplicably didn’t.
In The Atlantic a few months ago, Emily Oster called for “a pandemic amnesty” — the idea being that we all made mistakes in dealing with a scenario that we didn’t understand. And that’s true, to some extent, with transmission and mutation — as far as I can tell, there’s just really a lot that remains poorly understood about the mechanisms of transmission. The tendency at the moment is to land at some position like this, to say, as Wallace-Wells does, that it was a confusing situation, that everybody made mistakes, and that it is time to move on. “The idea that pandemic response was largely defined by excess and overreach may seem extreme,” he writes. “But in its softer form the belief is no longer confined to the skeptical margins of social media’s anti-establishment.”
But that strikes me as a bit too even-handed. We do have to keep relitigating 2020 for a couple of reasons. One is that it really was an exercise in a type of governmental response. It was, for a significant period of time, rule by the experts and the biomedical industry. Elected politicians largely backed away from their own inclinations — I saw this happen in real time with Cuomo. Everything was determined by data and by a safety-first mindset. Unfortunately, much of the data proved unreliable and the safety-first mindset had really terrible repercussions for civil rights, for the economy, and for the collective mental health of the society. There was an alternative available, which was politics-by-usual-means and the self-determination of people assessing their own risk. And, in a discussion of DeSantis’ approach to Covid for Vanity Fair, Katherine Eban makes it clear that that approach continues to pay major political dividends for the GOP. Eban is a critic of DeSantis’ policies — accusing him of being a cynic, of flip-flopping to an anti-vaxx position when he thought it was politically expedient, and of driving up Florida’s Covid mortality with his laissez-faire response. But, she has to concede, the expedient politics worked. As Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, who became a scientific advisor to DeSantis, said to Eban, “The people playing with fire are the [CDC], who pushed vaccine mandates when it made no epidemiological sense. They are the ones responsible for the vaccine skepticism we see.” DeSantis rode that alternate path to stunning popularity in Florida and to his frontrunner bid for the presidency. If he does win in 2024, it will be the result of the political opening given to him by the overly risk-averse, overly deferential approach of the expert-run Democratic pandemic response.
And the other reason we need to keep relitigating 2020 is that the whole thing is happening again with China. The absence of trustworthy data on China’s current Covid wave makes it impossible for anyone to make any conclusive statements about what’s really happening. “Can a million people vanish from the planet without the world knowing?” asks Michael Schuman in The Atlantic, claiming (at the time of publication) that China’s death toll since the end of zero-Covid is somewhere between 1 million and 1.5 million. That’s very different from the Chinese count of 83,000 — and Schuman offers little evidence of “the missing million.” Wallace-Wells, incidentally, sees the recent wave as an exoneration of China’s zero-Covid policy. “It makes it hard to look at China’s record and think simply, ‘disaster,’” he writes. “Over three years, the country’s people died a lot less and the country grew a bunch more.”
That technocratic equation, measuring success on the axis of deaths versus economic growth, seems to me to miss some important variables — namely, freedom and self-determination. In China, those three years featured truly unprecedented lockdowns and restrictions — which, after the arrival of Omicron, had no very clear medical benefit; and which were debilitating enough to compel the Chinese, with tremendous courage and in the face of overwhelming state pressure, to protest. The Chinese protestors against zero-Covid understood full well that a cessation of all restrictions might lead to more Covid and some greater number of deaths. For them, that was worth the risk. And, for me, that’s the real lesson of the pandemic — it’s about deciding whether you want democracy and self-determination or not. The pandemic has shown us what rule by the experts looks like — the blanket solutions, the disregard for personal autonomy, for any mode of reasoning other than deference to (highly questionable) datasets. As far as I’m concerned, I’m never falling for that one again.
NOTES ON THE NEW COLD WAR
I’m quoting more from The New York Times this week than I normally like to. David Brooks has a piece that catches me just by the casual tone in which he says, “So I guess we’re in a new Cold War.”
That’s become my understanding as well — just the really understated, matter-of-fact way in which the whole modus operandi of the last thirty years disappears and we find ourselves pretty much exactly back to where we were in the Cold War’s earlier iteration.
Russia’s revanchism is the main story there. When we write the history of the ‘new Cold War’ we don’t have to look too far to date its point of origin — it’s February 24, 2022. Slightly murkier though is how we understand the turning-away from some notion of complicity between the U.S. and China — how the two powers came to see themselves as diametrically opposed. Trump’s ‘trade war’ is part of it, although it’s striking that those policies continue more or less unabated under Biden. As Brooks put it, the mainstream approach now is “deglobalizing the economy without setting off trade wars, steadily outcompeting China without humiliating it” — all of this a long way from NAFTA and China’s Most Favored Nation trading status and the expansive markets of the ‘90s.
The offhand way in which Brooks writes of “deglobalizing the economy” speaks not only to the end of an era but to the end of a whole political philosophy without anything readily available to replace it. What exactly does America’s governing principle look like if it’s not about the ever-outflowing spread of capitalism and democracy? Is it more of a protectionist model? How does that align with the evident desire to outcompete Russia and China globally? As Brooks notes, the most arresting feature of the new Cold War is the close linking between politics and tech — which is basically about the manufacturing of microchips and control of the internet. “If the West can block off China’s access to cutting-edge technology, then it can block off China,” Brooks writes. “So China’s intention is to approach chip self-sufficiency. America’s intention is to become more chip self-sufficient than it is now and to create a global chip alliance that excludes China.”
Of course, the concern of the new Cold War at the moment is the expulsion of TikTok from America — with everybody on both sides of the aisle seeing the hearings in perfect parallel to the Cold War. “It’s been said it is like allowing the Soviet Union the power to produce Saturday morning cartoons during the Cold War but much more powerful and much more dangerous,” said Republican congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of TikTok. Meanwhile, Jamaal Bowman calls banning TikTok “a red scare.”
The concern I have here is that Democrats are allowing themselves to get outflanked on a position that should, by rights, be theirs. I’d been arguing in the fall that Democrats could reclaim their Progressive heritage with a platform that was about curbing big-tech monopolies. But the Democratic Party is too connected with Silicon Valley for that, and — in the era of social media addiction and of massive corporate data collection — Democrats have managed to be completely passive on what could well be a critical wedge issue.
The Cold War parallel is nowhere so evident as in the Sahel with the U.S. in a dogfight with the Wagner Group and the Russians for influence over Chad. The precipitating cause — which does feel like it could be ripped out of the headlines of the 1950s — is the withdrawal of the French from their traditional sphere of influence. “The more forceful American approach aims partly to shore up the crumbling position of France, which in recent years has ceded ground to Russia in former colonies like Mali and the Central African Republic,” runs a New York Times piece on Chad. “Now the Russians are looking to topple more French dominoes in central and western Africa, and the United States is responding.”
Reporting from the region indicates that the Russians have done their bit in ‘winning hearts and minds.’ The New York Times quotes a street vendor in Chad’s capital saying, “At least the Russians want to help us. With the French, it’s just for their own interests” — a parallel to the prevailing view in the Central African Republic that “the Russians are violent and efficient” and critical for providing underlying security.
So what do we take away from all of this? Well, I guess that a new Cold War calls for a Cold War mentality, which means not just being vigilant and that kind of thing but being suspicious of everything — knowing that governments and industries are in a state of heightened brinkmanship with one another and that the tendency (even more so than usual) is to keep hidden what they are really up to. That means thinking ever-more-critically about what’s really going; and taking nothing at face value.