Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the Commentator post of the week — this is riffs on news and politics. At the partner site
, of ‘Kindling’ has an impassioned piece on the importance of writing harsh truths.Best,
Sam
BREAKDOWN
There are three really horrible stories out at the moment, all of them different, all related to a general breakdown in civic life.
Most inconceivable is the school shooting in Serbia by a 13-year-old. Obviously, there is nothing intelligent to say about this. I’d point out that this shooting and another the following day, also near Belgrade, help give the lie to a still widely-believed idea that mass shootings are somehow a uniquely American phenomenon. I tackled this idea recently in a discussion of Paul Auster’s Bloodbath Nation, in which Auster takes the Americanness of the malady almost entirely for granted, writing that the mass shootings “have occurred often enough in the past two decades to qualify as a new form of American ritual.” The reality is that they are a problem anywhere where there is a gun culture and where a psychosis of random violence has taken root. Encouragingly, Serbia’s president promised to institute strong new gun legislation, vowing “almost complete disarmament.”
These are the sort of words that Americans can only read forlornly. The New York Times points out that nearly anywhere around the world where a mass shooting breaks out, authorities immediately respond by curbing the supply of guns — the U.K. in 1987 banning semiautomatic weapons, Australia implementing a thorough buyback program in 1996, Canada, New Zealand, and Norway all introducing stricter firearms restrictions after shootings. In this case, it turns out that Serbia already actually has pretty reasonable gun control laws on the books, but Aleksandar Vucic, the president, has announced an amnesty program for turning in illegal weapons, a moratorium on new licenses, and a somewhat poorly-defined “audit” for gun owners including drug and psychological tests.
As The New York Times tartly writes, “A prominent exception [to enhanced gun control] is the United States, where the right to bear arms is written into the Constitution.” I continue to believe that the best direction for meaningful gun control is banning semiautomatic weapons. To be honest, I can’t even imagine what a sane argument in favor of civilian possession of semiautomatic weapons would be, but, it goes without saying, we’re way past sanity in the American gun control debate. That was more than evident in a shooting in Texas last week in which a man asked by a neighbor to stop shooting his AR-15 in his backyard instead went into the neighbor’s house and shot and killed his entire family “execution-style.”
The reality, though, is that I’m pretty resigned to never seeing a curb on the gun problem during my lifetime — or at least not until the modern GOP comes to its senses. Gun control legislation is one thing, but there are so many guns in America — legally-purchased — that it’s very difficult to get any kind of a grip on the gun problem without requisitioning existing firearms, which is the red line for many gun-owners. I very much would like to see the U.S. for once take on some good ideas from other countries and initiate, for instance, a well-publicized, generously-funded buyback program — local programs have been enacted in U.S. cities since the 1970s, have been popular, and a larger program might just sneak its way through Congress. The deep reality, though, is that the nation’s founders, so wise in so many ways, yadda yadda, really just bollixed it on the gun thing. The fundamental responsibility of a government is to provide a guarantor of security, which means a monopoly on violence. Call that a protection racket or whatever, but at the basic level that’s what a government is. By failing to create an effective mechanism limiting the dissemination of lethal force, the founders allowed a deep schism to run through the society — it just really isn’t clear from the Second Amendment whether the ‘right to bear arms’ refers only to ‘well-regulated militias,’ which are one thing, or to private ownership of weaponry, which is something different altogether. In any case, gun violence is too large of a problem — and semiautomatic weapons too flagrant of an abuse of the intent of the Second Amendment — for moderates to just give up on gun control legislation. This really needs to be at the forefront of anything that Democrats do, even if it’s unlikely that they’ll ever actually succeed.
Meanwhile, there’s another horrible event with the death of Jordan Neely in a New York City subway. For anybody who wants to have an opinion on the incident, it’s necessary, first of all, to watch the entire four-minute cell phone video taken by another rider. That video makes clear — in ways that some really irresponsible reporting on the incident does not — that Neely’s strangulation wasn’t as simple as a white-on-black crime. Three riders restrained Neely together; only one of the three, Daniel Penny, who applied the chokehold, was white.
Without having seen any video of the lead-up to the chokehold, it’s fairly easy — speaking as a New Yorker — to envision what might have occurred. Incidents not so dissimilar to this are really common in New York City public transit. Somebody — presumed homeless, definitely crazy — is legally way over the line, harassing women, threatening passengers, etc. Most of the time, people just ignore it, but there is a point where passengers start looking around at each other, feeling compelled to step in. It’s fairly clear from the video (although this is an inference) that it’s not as if Penny were a “vigilante” acting on his own; multiple other passengers evidently felt exactly as Penny did and were working together to restrain Neely. It’s also pretty clear that no malice was meant — passengers articulate concern about Neely’s well-being and the group restraining him moves him into a recovery position once they believe he’s no longer a threat. And, based on prior records, there was every reason to think that Neely could have been dangerous. According to the NYPD, Neely had been arrested 42 times, four times for alleged assault, including for a 2021 incident in which he punched an older woman, breaking her nose.
Nonetheless, it’s completely clear that the Manhattan DA will have to bring charges, likely of manslaughter, against Penny — and probably against the other riders who retained Neely. As New York Magazine writes, “The legal challenge for Penny is that New York law specifies a duty to retreat once an immediate deadly threat has passed” — and even if the initial intervention was warranted, the passengers continued to restrain Neely after he was obviously dangerous and to the point where Neely himself as at greater risk.
I’ve written in the past on Eric Adams’ new policies aimed at involuntary hospitalizations for individuals exhibiting mental illness. I thought that policy — and the now near-ubiquitous presence of police in the transit system — was going to generate controversy. The surprise is that national news is being made by exactly the sort of incident that the new policy was designed to preempt — passengers finding themselves in a tricky situation in public transit and taking the law into their own hands. If anything, the Neely incident underscores the wisdom of Adams’ new policy. It also is a perfect illustration of just how divided the country has become. The New York Times calls it “a political Rorschach test,” which is exactly right. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that Neely “was murdered….and the murderer protected with passive headlines and no charges” — and then later described the incident as “a public execution.” The Nation wrote, “White supremacy and anti-Blackness combine to make the violent murder of a human being on public transportation into the kind of thing white people can do and then go home.” Meanwhile, FOX, never to be outdone, had an openly racist response, with host Kayleigh McEnany saying on-air of a protest of largely black demonstrators, “Well, at least they have rhythm.”
Taken together, Neely’s death and a string of shootings across the country over really trivial pretexts (in addition to the AR-15 owner executing five of his neighbors, Texas earlier this month witnessed a man shooting a scammer in a restaurant parking lot and then asking to be seated in the restaurant as if nothing had happened) all speak to the at-this-point-somewhat-tedious topic of a breakdown in civic norms, Americans simply seeing the world completely differently from one another. As worryingly for the civic order, that basic lack of agreement on norms extends into the democratic institutions. In the Montana state legislature, a transgender lawmaker was barred from the House floor after having accused the legislature’s majority of “having blood on [its] hands” for a bill restricting transition care for minors. And in Nebraska, a state senator has conducted a nine-week filibuster against Nebraska’s anti-trans legislation and said she would “burn to the session to the ground over this bill.”
What else is there to say except that this is where we are as a society — a number of hot-button issues multiplying (gender-affirming surgery, gun control, abortion, Black Lives Matter) that the extremes on both sides view as more important than the normal conduct of the civic and electoral process. The dynamic so far has played out as impassioned left legislators overwhelmed by a stony-faced majority in a red state, but it’s only a matter of time before these sorts of disputes — refusing to seat elected legislators; legislators refusing to yield the floor, etc — make their way to the national congress itself. I can’t say much in the face of this except that it’s more important than ever to remember who we are — to stick to basic civic values, to remember that what we have is a very old and very good system and much better than many of the alternatives, and in the face of any of our impending crises to take a deep breath and to really sort out facts before jumping to conclusions (in the case of Neely’s death, for instance, actually watching the video before slotting the event into pre-determined racial categories). This is a really hard time. Honestly, it’s going to be amazing if we make it through with our civic infrastructure intact.
GOD SAVE THE KING!
And speaking of very old systems, a new king is crowned in the U.K. It’s sort of requisite at a moment like this to say something snarky about the monarchy — how regressive, how antiquated, it is — but, look, any system that’s survived as long as this one has wisdom in it, and it’s worth taking a moment to think about what constitutional monarchy really means.
And what it really means — as yesterday’s coronation aptly demonstrated — is a wrapping of a single person so tightly in ermine that they become not us, a projection of our collective psyche but indisputably different from us. The whole point of the long, long ceremony, all the finery, pageantry, etc, is for it to wear heavy on the king, so that some particular person — in this case, a fairly pleasant older gentleman, who talks to his plants, has some regressive views, but, really, for these purposes, could be just about anyone — becomes a sort of costume of the power that nobody ever really gets to have.
The central question with political power of any sort is why it should be one person and not another. Frazer begins The Golden Bough with an indelible picture of what power looks like in its ‘natural state’: the priest-king of Nemi “carrying a drawn sword, peering warily about him as if at every second he expected to be set upon by an enemy.” In Frazer’s version of the story — which may be a little fanciful — “the candidate for the priesthood can only succeed to office by slaying the priest and, having slain him, retains office till he himself is slain by a stronger or a craftier.”
The whole challenge of ‘political science,’ then, becomes how to get out of this conundrum — in which, as Frazer puts it, “though the holder of the post carries the title of king, surely no crowned head could ever lay uneasier or be visited by more evil dreams than this.” The long-standing tradition was for the best person — or the descendants of the best person — to hold power, but that (despite some pretty out-there myths about ‘royal blood’ or the ‘divinity of kings’) inevitably runs into the problem of the King of Nemi: ‘best’ tends to mean most vicious, most forceful, the person who is most skillful at putting down all possible rivals.
There are two innovations that counteract this tendency towards absolutism. One is representative government — which, above all else, means term limits. Someone or other goes through the whole drama of proving themselves the best, the most fit to rule. We see their triumph on election night; we see their solemn swearing-in. But the real magic of the system occurs several years later when they pack up their furniture and leave by the back door while somebody new goes through the same pageantry. In that figure’s return to being an ordinary citizen (and in our near-constant critique of them while they are in power), we find a certain psychic release that compensates for the abiding inequality of this semi-random person being haphazardly in power.
And constitutional monarchy — an innovation from exactly around the same time as modern representative democracy — has much of the same genius to it, although in this case the genius of the system is (in a sense) even darker and more clever. We take one person, treat them as if they’re very special, exactly as if they were an all-powerful absolutist monarchy, but, here, it’s a practical joke. This person is subject to unremitting scrutiny but has no actual power and is actually prohibited — in the political sense — from achieving anything at all, from even having an opinion let alone running for office. Their entire purpose is to be a sort of collective meditation on the inherent asymmetries of power — on the one hand, they get the sumptuous, elevated life; on the other, there is the great indignity of not being a free, independent person, and in a million jokes and tabloid articles the body politic gets to take out a certain inner fury on the hapless figure of their monarch.
Psychologically, it’s a deep tangle — and, really, not a bad solution at all to the fundamental injustice of power. In this puzzle, what makes us unhappy is if the royal decides — like Harry has, or Edward VIII — that they just want to be a regular boy, that they prefer being free and independent. And what pleases us is when, like the rest of the Windsors, they allow themselves to be crusted over, embalmed really, in all the sumptuousness. Charles has been good about it — and probably more than most constitutional monarchs has had to soldier through the psychologically ugly side of the whole system, the general mockery of him for having had to wait a long time for the crown, for not being quite as cool as he was supposed to be, for marrying a woman who, fundamentally, was out of his league. All of that is the price that he’s had to pay, what he’s had to put up with, and in return we like him because he’s basically been a good sport about it, retained a certain iconoclasm in his own worldview but dutifully waited his turn and then allowed himself to be embalmed in furs and scepters.
In the commentary on the coronation, the attempt is being made to humanize him — “he is an individual, and a sensitive one at that,” writes Nina Power in Compact — but in a way that’s missing the point. What’s really of value in the ceremony is that he’s becoming — even more than he was as a prince — a symbol. It’s a very equivocal, challenging sort of role to play, and he seems able to do it just as well as any of his predecessors have.
And in so doing, he takes on an odd and unexpected function — he becomes, just as much as the calendar itself, the clock of an era. I flipped through a video of the life of Charles on Der Spiegel’s website and found myself very moved by it — just as I had been very moved looking at pictures of Queen Elizabeth throughout her life. It is difficult to say what was so affecting about it. Charles isn’t my king, he’s somebody I’ve never thought about all that much, am extremely unlikely to meet and probably wouldn’t particularly be interested in if I did, but the point was the very ordinariness of it. There was him as a baby touching his mother’s cheek in his first public appearance. There was him doing that so-strange sideways wave while standing next to his mother at her coronation. There was him, at a very feudal moment in mother-son dynamics, kneeling and pledging fidelity to his own mother. There was the ears and the nose nose, the way the various crowns and robes never seemed to sit quite right on him. Nothing impressive — nothing that would be all that different than anybody outfitted in the same clothes and presented in the same ceremonies. And that was exactly the point of the whole exercise: everybody could see an entire era somehow refracted through those images.
Looking at a video like that, in a very difficult time, it’s hard not to think nostalgically about that whole period — Elizabeth’s reign; Charles’ princedom. It was a good era, actually; one of the best. And, in its gentle way, a seamless succession like this, with the sense of continuity it brings, makes one surprisingly optimistic about whatever’s coming.
GEOFFREY HINTON - AI DEFECTOR
That optimism is badly needed, though, in the salient issue of the moment — AI.
The story at the moment is that Geoffrey Hinton, ‘the godfather of AI,’ has left his job at Google and become one of the dissenters. “I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us,” he said in an interview with MIT Tech Review. “I think they’re very close to it now and they will be much more intelligent than us in the future. How do we survive that?”
One might wish that Hinton would have started considering the philosophical and ethical implications of AI sometime before now, say in 1972 when, as a grad student, he began working on neural networks, or in 2012 when he sold his company pioneering computer-based object recognition to Google for $44 million, but anyway. Now, with the genie literally out of the bottle, it’s suddenly occurred to the lamp keeper that it might have been such a great idea to have constructed a genie in the first place. And Hinton’s reservations are the kind of thing that really could have crossed his mind before now. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he insightfully told The New York Times. Meanwhile, his defense of his career-to-this-point is a less-than-encouraging quoting of Robert Oppenheimer on the mindset for pursuing the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
In terms of why Hinton has had his abrupt Road-to-Damascus moment, he cites AI having advanced faster than he would have expected it to. “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” Hinton said in the Times interview. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Most importantly for Hinton, the technology just seemed to be behaving in ways that its developers wouldn’t have expected. The initial idea for neural networks was to “mimic” the human brain. Instead, AI has come up with what Hinton calls “a completely different form of intelligence, a new and better form of intelligence.” Sounding not at all like a starchy scientist — sounding, in fact, very much like David Bowie, who, in 1999, called the internet “an alien life form” — Hinton told MIT Technology Review: “These things are totally different from us. Sometimes I think it’s as if aliens had landed and people haven’t realized because they speak very good English.”
Hinton’s confession makes me a bit more sympathetic to the view of Sam Altman, whom I got annoyed with in a recent Commentator post. Altman, the OpenAI CEO, shares, to a surprising degree, all the fears of the AI detractors and decided to launch ChatGPT in part out of a sense that Silicon Valley couldn’t on its own quite figure out what to make of AI and that it was better for the open market and a democratic polis to grapple with it. “I think the development of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, should be a government project, not a private company project, in the spirit of something like the Manhattan Project. I really do believe that,” he said in a recent interview with The Free Press. “But given that I don’t think our government is going to do a competent job of that anytime soon, it is far better for us to go do that than just wait for the Chinese government to go do it.”
That kind of perspective is more or less where Hinton is as well — very muddled. Even in his dissident phase, he continues to advocate for AI: “In the shorter term AI would deliver many more benefits than risks, so I don't think we should stop developing this stuff," he said to the BBC. And, meanwhile, some kind of flat-out U.S. moratorium on AI development would, he posted, just allow China to “get a big lead.”
In the end, Hinton and Altman were basically saying that their work was done, they were, as Hinton put it, “experts on science not policy,” and it really was time for governments to try to actually govern. Lina Khan, the FTC chair, who is rapidly turning into a personal hero, fired off one of the first salvos in a coherent government response. (So far, the only other people who have really acted to deal with AI are the Skver Hasidics and Georgia Meloni’s Italy.) In an op-ed for The New York Times, Khan compared the advent of AI with the rise of the Internet 2.0 in the 2000s — and to the general abdication of governmental responsibility at that time, which, as it turned out, came at great social cost. “The trajectory of the Web 2.0 era was not inevitable — it was instead shaped by a broad range of policy choices,” she wrote. “The history of the growth of technology companies two decades ago serves as a cautionary tale for how we should think about the expansion of generative A.I.”
Khan’s point is that we have been locked into a particularly laissez-faire view of government — in which the market reigns over all and technology is permitted to wander in whatever direction it will. But Khan’s purview is over monopolization, and, she makes clear, she is prepared to use all the power at her discretion to curb the monopolistic tendencies inherent in AI. “A.I. tools that firms use to set prices for everything from laundry detergent to bowling lane reservations can facilitate collusive behavior that unfairly inflates prices — as well as forms of precisely targeted price discrimination,” she wrote. “The F.T.C. is well equipped with legal jurisdiction to handle the issues brought to the fore by the rapidly developing A.I. sector, including collusion, monopolization, mergers, price discrimination and unfair methods of competition.”
At the moment, it seems like there’s a major standoff on principles — the free market and innovation vs. governmental intervention. Actually, what the tech community is communicating — people like Hinton and Altman, as well as the Future of Life Institute’s Open Letter — is that they would like this cup to pass from them, for the U.S. government to consider AI from a national security point of view and for governmental agencies, like the FTC, to set up strong guardrails against AI’s use in the marketplace.
What’s becoming fairly clear is that, if no guardrails are installed, a whole host of jobs will simply disappear. That’s a subtext of the Hollywood writers’ strike and it’s buoyed by a report issued by OpenAI in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania estimating that “around 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of large-language models, while approximately 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted.”
Those numbers seem manageable, but they represent a deep threat to white-collar employment and to a whole sense of identity. Basically, for five hundred years — this is the ‘Baconian revolution’ — we have been turning ourselves into machines, convincing ourselves that thinking ‘like a machine’ is a high form of intelligence. The salient quote on this comes from Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote of a materialist-minded character, “He thought of himself as a cup, so he became a cup.” That’s what we’ve been doing to ourselves for a very long time and now we’re seeing what the end of the road looks like — the machine that can do everything we’ve aspired to and that makes us obsolete.
The direction to move from here is in the gaps of what the machine can’t cover — more physical, more emotive, more experiential sensibilities — but that takes time to adjust to. With AI loose on the market, what it’ll mean, particularly in the short-term, is a whole swathe cut through people’s livelihoods and sense of self.
UKRAINE’S WAR OF ATTRITION
War is a nasty thing, and we’re well into the part of the Ukraine conflict that’s all about attrition — who has the will and means to keep fighting long past the point of exhaustion.
There are several pieces around the web that paint a haunting picture of the cost of war. Visiting the southeastern Zaporizhzhia front, The New York Times’ Michael Schwirtz comes across a front-line soldier whose hands shake uncontrollably as the result of a concussion he suffered at the beginning of the war; and an officer who says that muck and fatigue had changed his appearance so drastically that, for a time, his iPhone’s face recognition system stopped working for him.
The Guardian, reporting from Kyiv, has a good piece on the impact of the war on Ukraine’s economy — one of the more underreported aspects of the conflict. Simply put, it’s been very bad. Unemployment was at 36% and inflation at 27% at the end of 2022. The World Bank reported a spike in poverty from 5.5 to 24.2%, with 7 million people pushed into poverty and the worst impact “out of sight in rural villages.” Meanwhile, costs have skyrocketed — with many goods up by 40 or 50%. As The Guardian writes the economic impacts are far-reaching but often hard to spot at first: “The reality of growing poverty in Ukraine stands in contrast to the surface bustle of Kyiv’s busy restaurants and bars where it is often hard to get a table, with many living a precarious existence.”
On the other hand — I am pleased to write — attrition seems to be clawing away just as much at the Russian side. Prighozin, the head of the Wagner Group, seems to be among those to break, claiming in a video that Wagner has 10% of the ammunition it needs and that he will withdraw from Bakhmut by May 10 if his demands are not met by the General Staff. In one of the splenetic videos he recorded, Prighozin shows the corpses of Wagner fighters he claims were killed in Bakhmut that day, and, addressing the military leadership, says, “Listen to me fucking bitch, these are someone’s fathers and someone’s sons. And these fuckers who are not giving us ammunition will be eating their guts in hell….[The Wagner fighters] came here as volunteers and are dying for you to get a free ride in your cabinets with redwood.”
There’s been suggestion throughout by Western media and Ukraine that the public schism between Prighozin and the military leadership is largely playacting, but it’s hard to entirely believe that. What’s happening seems to be the consequence of Putin’s failing to have genuine vertical control over his military. Instead, he has disparate forces, some of which like Wagner are technically not Russian military at all, and lasting fissures become inevitable.
On the other side of the line, Politico has a flattering piece pulling back the curtain on the Ukraine Defense Contact Group’s monthly meeting in Ramstein, Germany. In this account, the meetings — which The New Yorker also caught a glimpse of in October — are the real nerve center of the war. It’s completely clear from this presentation how the war is being fought — with the United States at the head of the table, Ukraine as a client state, and the defense chiefs of the coalition (comprising more than 40 nations) contributing armaments as they can.
In Politico’s account, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “leads the discussion, making opening and closing comments. Celeste Wallander [the Pentagon’s head of international security affairs] emcees, moving each presenter along.”
There’s no particular insight from the article on how the supply chain is working. There’s the usual complaint that the Germans have been laggard in their contributions. Some of the Europeans have been concerned about replenishing their own weapons stockpiles. But the sense is of a well-oiled, sustainable system — a coalition that’s significantly larger than NATO and that is perfectly willing to be led by Austin and “emceed” by Wallander. In terms of thinking about who will crack first, the strength of that coalition is (thinking from an avowedly American perspective) very encouraging.
The whole world is talking about a Ukrainian counter-offensive, and I’m sure that something or other will materialize during 2022, but, in a way, that’s not really the main point — and, as Ukraine’s defense minister Oleksiy Reznikov told The New York Times, “the expectation of the counter-offensive is overestimated, overheated.” At this stage the war is largely about attrition and about who has the appetite to keep going. As a soldier in Zaporizhzhia said to Schwirtz, “Of course, after a year and two months of war, everyone is tired. But without victory, no one is going to leave here.” If it’s really true that Wagner is losing some of its interest in fighting, that’s a tremendous gain for the Ukrainians. In the end, they’re fighting for their country and the Russians are not. If the supply chain holds, that means that time may be on their side.