Together, they asked themselves — and the world – what happens when computers start to read our minds? Who owns our thoughts, anyway? This technology is being developed right now — but as of this moment, what happens to your neural data is a legal black box. So what does the fight to build protections for our brains look like? I sat down with Rafael and Jared to find out.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Rafael, can you tell me how your journey into neurorights started?

Rafael: The story starts with a particular moment in my career. It happened about ten years ago while I was working in a lab at Columbia University in New York. Our research was focused on understanding how the cerebral cortex works. We were studying mice, because the mouse  brain is a good model for the human brain. And what we were trying to do was to implant images into the brains of mice so that they would behave as if they were seeing something, except they weren't seeing anything.

Q: How did that work? 

Rafael: We were trying to take control of the mouse’s visual perception. So we’d implant neurotechnology into a mouse using lasers, which would allow us to record the activity of the part of the brain responsible for vision, the visual cortex, and change the activity of those neurons. With our lasers, we could map the activity of this part of the brain and try to control it. 

These mice were looking at a screen that showed them a particular image, of black and white bars of light that have very high contrast. We used to talk, tongue-in-cheek, about playing the piano with the brain. 

We trained the mice to lick from a little spout of juice whenever they saw that image. With our new technology, we were able to decode the brain signals that correspond this image to the mouse and — we hoped — play it back to trick the mice into seeing the image again, even though it wasn’t there. 

Q: So you artificially activated particular neurons in the brain to make it think it had seen that image?

Rafael: These are little laboratory mice. We make a surgical incision and we implant in their skull a transparent chamber so that we can see their brains from above with our microscope, with our lasers. And we use our lasers to optically penetrate the brain. We use one laser to image, to map the activity of these neurons. And we use a second laser, a second wavelength, to activate these neurons again. All of this is done with a very sophisticated microscope and computer equipment. 

Q: So what happened when you tried to artificially activate the mouse’s neurons, to make it think it was looking at the picture of the black and white bars? 

Rafael: When we did that, the mouse licked from the spout of juice in exactly the same way as if he was looking at this image, except that he wasn't. We were putting that image into its brain. The behavior of the mice when we took over its visual perception was identical to when the mouse was actually seeing the real image.

Q: It must have been a huge breakthrough. 

Rafael: Yes, I remember it perfectly. It was one of the most salient days of my life. We were actually altering the behavior of the mice by playing the piano with their cortex. We were ecstatic. I was super happy in the lab, making plans.

 And then when I got home, that's when it hit me. I said, “wait, wait, wait, this means humans will be able to do the same thing to other humans.”

I felt this responsibility, like it was a double-edged sword. That night I didn't sleep, I was shocked. I talked to my wife, who works in human rights. And I decided that I should start to get involved in cleaning up the mess.

Q: What do you mean by that?

Rafael: I felt the responsibility of ensuring that these powerful methods that could decode brain activity and manipulate perception had to be regulated to ensure that they were used for the benefit of humanity.

Q: Jared, can you tell me how you came into this? 

Jared: Rafael and I met about four years ago. I'm an international human rights lawyer based in Washington and very well known globally for working in that field. I had a single hour-long conversation with Rafa when we met, and it completely transformed my view of the human rights challenges we’ll face in this century. I had no idea about neurotechnologies, where they were, or where they might be heading. Learning how far along they have come and what’s coming in just the next few years — I was blown away. I was both excited and concerned as a human rights lawyer about the implications for our common humanity.

Q: What was your reaction when you heard of the mouse experiment?

Jared: Immediately, I thought of The Matrix. He told me that what can be done in a mouse today could be done in a chimpanzee tomorrow and a human after that. I was shocked by the possibilities. While implanting images into a human brain is still far off, there’s every reason to expect it will eventually be possible.

Q: Can you talk me through some of the other implications of this technology? 

Jared :Within the next few years, we’re expected to have wearable brain-computer interfaces that can decode thought to text at 75–80 words per minute with 90 percent accuracy.

That will be an extraordinary revolution in how we interact with technology. Apple is already thinking about this—they filed a patent last year for the next-generation AirPods with built-in EEG scanners. This is undoubtedly one of the applications they are considering.

In just a few years, if you have an iPhone in your pocket and are wearing earbuds, you could think about opening a text message, dictating it, and sending it—all without touching a device. These developments are exciting. 

Rafael:  I imagine that, we'll be hybrid. And part of our processing will happen with devices that will be connected to our brains, to our nervous system. And this could enhance our perception. Our memories — you would be able to do the equivalent to a web search mentally. And that's going to change our behavior. That's going to change the way we absorb information. 

Jared: Ultimately, there's every reason to expect we’ll be able to cure chronic pain disease. It’s already being shown in labs that an implantable brain-computer interface can manage pain for people with chronic pain diseases. By turning off misfiring neurons, you can reduce the pain they feel.

But if you can turn off the neurons, you can turn on the neurons. And that would mean you'll have a wearable cap or hat that could torture a person simply by flipping a switch. In just a few years, physical torture may no longer be necessary because of brain-computer interfaces. 

And If these devices can decode your thoughts, that raises serious concerns. What will the companies behind these technologies be able to do with your thoughts? Could they be decoded against your wishes and used for purposes beyond what the devices are advertised for? Those are critical questions we need to address.

How did you start thinking about ways to build rights and guardrails around neurotechnology?

Rafael: I was inspired by the Manhattan Project, where scientists who developed nuclear technology were also involved in regulating its use. That led me to think that we should take a similar approach with neurotechnology — where the power to read and manipulate brain activity needs to be regulated. And that’s how we came up with the idea of the Neurorights Foundation.

So in 2017, I organized a meeting at Columbia University’s Morningside campus of experts from various fields to discuss the ethical and societal implications of neurotechnology. And this is where we came up with the idea of neurorights — sort of brain rights, that would protect brain rights and brain data. 

Jared:  If you look at global consumer data privacy laws, they protect things like biometric, genetic, and biological information. But neural data doesn't fall under any of these categories. Neural data is electrical and not biological, so it isn't considered biometric data.

There are few, if any, safeguards to protect users from having their neural data used for purposes beyond the intended function of the devices they’ve purchased.

So because neural data doesn't fit within existing privacy protections, it isn't covered by state privacy laws. To address this, we worked with Colorado to adopt the first-ever amendment to its Privacy Act, which defines neural data and includes it under sensitive, protected data.

Rafael: We identified five areas of concern where neurotechnology could impact human rights:

The first is the right to mental privacy – ensuring that the content of our brain activity can't be decoded without consent.

The second is the right to our own mental integrity so that no one can change a person's identity or consciousness.

The third is the right to free will – so that our behavior is determined by one's own volition, not by external influences, to prevent situations like what we did to those mice.

The fourth is the right to equal access to neural augmentation.  Technology and AI will lead to human augmentation of our mental processes, our memory, our perception, our capabilities. And we think there should be fair and equal access to neural augmentation in the future.

And the fifth neuroright is protection from bias and discrimination – safeguarding against interference in mental activity, as neurotechnology could both read and alter brain data, and change the content of people's mental activity.

Jared: The Neurorights Foundation is focused on promoting innovation in neurotechnologies while managing the risks of misuse or abuse. We see enormous potential in neurotechnologies that could transform what it means to be human. At the same time, we want to ensure that proper guardrails are in place to protect people's fundamental human rights.

The post Who owns the rights to your brain? appeared first on Coda Story.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Isobel: Your book is called “The Hidden Globe.” Can you tell us what that means to you? 

Atossa: It’s a book about loopholes and how people, companies, and even countries use them, especially those with significant money and power. The idea of a loophole, the etymology of it, is actually a slit in a castle wall that you can shoot arrows out of while you're obviously protected by the wall. And I think that that's really important to remember when you're thinking about how these loopholes work today. They allow those employing loopholes to hide behind the wall while taking advantage of the provisions that are afforded to them.

Isobel: These loopholes — this hidden globe — often exist as a physical space though. How does that work? 

Atossa: Visualizing the physicality of these spaces was key in trying to express what it was I was thinking about. For years and years I had this hunch that there was something weird going on between countries. Something we were not talking about that didn’t totally correspond to our idea of a nation state. Power was being wielded in ways that didn’t adhere to our concept of national sovereignty. 

So if you look at the map of the world, you'll see 192 countries. But what isn't shown on the map is all the stuff in between and above and beneath. Maps don’t show that laws don’t necessarily go hand in hand with territory.

In a lot of cases, it does—if you rob a bank, for example, that’s a physical crime that would be prosecuted based on your location. But for more transnational activities where jurisdiction isn’t clear, it’s not necessarily “you’re in country X, so you’re bound by the laws of country X.” You might be in a free zone with its own laws or on a ship with a flag of convenience. There’s this uncoupling of land and law, where countries create alternate rules when it’s convenient.

Isobel: Dubai is an example of this. Can you explain how?

Atossa: Dubai has its own civil and Islamic laws, but they carved out a space for finance companies to operate in a familiar legal environment. They created a court from scratch and simply imported judges and rules. This new court—the Dubai International Financial Center—uses common law. Essentially, they made up new rules and created a new jurisdiction within the existing one, almost like nesting dolls.

Isobel: And sometimes these judges aren’t even physically present…

Atossa: Right, they don’t even always import the judges; some work remotely. I open the book with Swiss mercenaries, and there’s an analogy between those mercenaries and these judges who adjudicate cases over Zoom. They’re trained in one country and then “borrowed” by another. Mark Beer, one of the judges, actually lived in Dubai, but the others hopped around in places like the Caribbean, the UK, and Singapore. Countries want to hire these judges because companies want a familiar legal environment—not necessarily favorable rules, just consistency, so that they don’t risk fines or shutdowns over compliance issues. But it’s strange that companies can make up a court for themselves, while I don’t get to choose where to adjudicate my parking ticket.

Isobel: You grew up in Switzerland and you talk a lot about freeports — these hidden spaces in Geneva, the city of your childhood, where people can hide goods and assets. Did you ever go inside one of these places?

Atossa: I never actually got to visit the Geneva Freeport, even though it’s only a mile from where I grew up. I could get into places like northern Laos and Dubai, but not the Freeport. The idea of works of art hidden away where no one can see them—that was almost more offensive to me than, say, a country compromising its sovereignty. 

Art does what it does; it can be beautiful or disturbing. But then we layer abstraction on top of it—its speculative market value, its value to an individual or as part of the art market. Putting art in crates, where people can’t look at it, for tax reasons or so someone can obscure its value from an ex-spouse feels deeply wrong. 

Historically, freeports were for storage of things like grain, which had a shelf life. You couldn’t let goods sit in a freeport indefinitely, neither here nor there. But with art, due to both the nature of the items and storage technology, they can remain there for an incredibly long time. That’s the loophole—not that there’s storage, which is fine, but that an artwork can be both “in transit” while not moving at all. This is a legal fiction that exemplifies the world I’m writing about.

Isobel: I used to naively think that people bought art because they loved art or found pieces beautiful. I didn’t fully grasp, before reading your book, that actually art collecting often has very little to do with being an art lover.

Atossa: There’s been some recent reporting that art isn’t necessarily the investment it was once thought to be—not all works will appreciate like a Picasso might. But if you’re very wealthy, there are only so many places to put your money: real estate, stocks, and art is just another asset class. When financial affairs are handed over to accountants or family offices, art isn’t exempt; it’s yet another commodity. Owning a piece of art allows you to take out loans against its value or use it as collateral. So, while many rich people may appreciate art as we do, art also serves a function as part of a portfolio.

This is where freeports come in. If art is viewed as an asset, you don’t want it to get damaged, and you may not want people to know it exists. If there are only ten da Vincis, they’re worth more than if there were fifty. So there’s a game of obscuring value, existence, and location. There’s also a tax element: you may not declare it in the same way as other onshore assets if, for example, there’s a sales or use tax associated with it.

Isobel: Tell me more about growing up in Geneva. What was it like? 

Atossa: When I was a teenager, a lot of the kids I grew up with had parents who were diplomats, so they had diplomatic plates on their cars and some degree of immunity. I remember an ex-boyfriend who was speeding and nothing happened because of those plates. Or someone would be smoking pot and the cops would say, “I know who your mother is, I know who your father is,” and then do nothing. 

It’s not like they were doing anything outrageous, but there’s this awareness of different worlds within Geneva.

Isobel: You’ve lived in New York for two decades now but you wrote about how much you missed Geneva during the pandemic — how it was almost calling to you. What’s your relationship with Switzerland like now?

I don’t think Swiss people see me as truly Swiss. It’s that classic expat feeling: in Switzerland, I feel American; in the U.S., I feel Swiss. And with Geneva, you have this city that seems quiet and boring on the surface but, as my book discusses, there’s so much going on behind the scenes. Switzerland does have a lot going for it, and Geneva is now a more progressive city than other Swiss cities. It’s not just a capitalist hellhole. But I still don’t feel entirely at home there. It’s like a haunting, almost spooky feeling. Geneva’s a place that can freak you out if you overthink it. Most people don’t do that, but I have. 

Isobel: You called Geneva the “City of Holes,” which fits this idea of a place that’s quiet but full of hidden dramas.

Atossa: Exactly. It’s strange how everyone carries on as if it’s normal. But when you realize how much of the world’s coffee or finance goes through Geneva, it’s absurd. The city punches so far above its weight class, given its size and demographics.

Once you know about these hidden aspects, you can’t unsee them. You walk past a building with a plaque saying “Offshore Partners LLC,” and it’s hard not to think, “If walls could talk…” There’s so much you want to know, so much that you can’t know. There’s this blankness you encounter—almost like an invisible wall. You want to know, but Geneva has a way of keeping its secrets.

Isobel: I’ve been working on a lot of stories about tech elites, the technopoly and so on. And something I’ve come across again and again is a “bunker mentality.” This idea that the tech bros have that they want to create their own jurisdictions, their own walled-off communities that will protect them from government regulation — but maybe in the future will also protect them from apocalyptic climate chaos, or the ravages of societal breakdown. Can you explain this mentality? 

Atossa: I think these tech leaders have convinced themselves that they’re victims, that everyone hates them and they need to protect themselves at all costs. It’s a classic persecution complex seen throughout history among monarchs and dictators. With power comes paranoia.

Some of these people aren’t stupid; they see that things aren’t working for most people. That can lead to a reasonable fear of being pursued or facing consequences for their actions.

For the tech guys, their identity is tied to being hackers. They think of themselves as clever problem-solvers, whether it’s with code or social issues. They live in a world of nations that don’t align with their ideals, so they look for shortcuts to create a future they envision. The appeal of charter cities is that they feel like a hack. The original concept of charter cities came from [Nobel Prize-winning American economist] Paul Romer, who had some honest intentions. He believed that foreign laws could bring better infrastructure to developing economies.

But for the tech elite, they thought: “We don’t even need to lobby Washington; we can create our own rules.” These charter cities would be business-friendly, with no taxes and streamlined bureaucracy. The catch? It’s not democratic. If a corporation runs a charter city, that corporation effectively becomes the ruler.

This appeals to certain tech types who are disillusioned with democracy, probably because they fear the consequences if democracy were to take real effect.

Isobel: In your book you mentioned the longevity movement — this obsession with living forever that has gripped tech bros — and how it’s connected to the idea of charter cities. What’s going on there?

Atossa: Right, the longevity hackers are frustrated with regulations, like those imposed by the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], which slow down testing for new treatments. They want faster processes and are seeking places where they can expedite those trials. This is already happening in a Honduran charter city called Prospera. 

Isobel: You discuss outer space as a potential ultimate charter city. Can you elaborate?

Atossa: Absolutely. The ultimate charter city—or tax haven—could be in space. It’s an interesting thought, as it represents a frontier where these tech leaders could establish their ideal conditions without the constraints of current Earth-based systems.

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

The post The super-rich and their secret worlds appeared first on Coda Story.

Kenya is hosting unprecedented lawsuits against Meta Inc., the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Mercy Mutemi, who made last year’s TIME 100 list, is a Nairobi-based lawyer who is leading the cases. She spends her days thinking about what our consumption of digital products should look like in the next 10 years. Will it be extractive and extortionist, or will it be beneficial? What does it look like from an African perspective? 

The conversation with Mercy Mutemi has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Isobel Cockerell: You’ve described this situation as a new form of colonialism. Could you explain that?  

Mercy Mutemi: From the government side, Kenya’s relationship with Big Tech, when it comes to annotation work, is framed as a partnership. But in reality, it’s exploitation. We’re not negotiating as equal partners. People aren’t gaining skills to build our own internal AI development. But at the same time, you're training all the algorithms for all the big tech companies, including Tesla, including the Walmarts of this world. All that training is happening here, but it just doesn't translate into skill transfer. It’s broken up into labeling work without any training to broaden people’s understanding of how AI works. What we see is, again, like a new form of colonization where it's just extraction of resources, with not enough coming back in terms of value, whether it's investing in people, investing in their growth and well-being, just paying decent salaries and helping the economy grow, for example, or investing in skill transfer. That's not happening. And when we say we're just creating jobs in the thousands, even hundreds of thousands, if the jobs are not quality jobs, then it's not a net benefit at the end of the day. That's the problem.

IC: Behind the legal battle with Meta are workers and their conditions. What challenges do they face in these tech roles, particularly content moderation?  

MM: Content moderators in Kenya face horrendous conditions. They’re often misled about the nature of the work, not warned that the work is going to be dangerous for them. There’s no adequate care provided to look after these workers, and they’re not paid well enough. And they’ve created this ecosystem of fear — it’s almost like this special Stockholm syndrome has been created where you know what you're going through is really bad, but you're so afraid of the NDA that you just would rather not speak up.  

If workers raise issues about the exploitation, they’re let go and blacklisted. It’s a classic “use and dump” model.

IC: What are your thoughts on Kenya being dubbed the “Silicon Savannah”?  

MM: I do not support that framing, just because I feel like it’s quite problematic to model your development after Silicon Valley, considering all the problems that have come out of there. But that branding has been part of Kenya's mission to be known as a digital leader. The way Silicon Valley interprets that is by seeing Kenya as a place where they can offload work they don’t want to do in the U.S. Work that is often dangerous. I’m talking about content moderation work, annotation work, and algorithm training, which in its very nature involves a lot of exposure to harmful content. That work is dumped on Kenya. Kenya says it’s interested in digital development, but what Kenya ends up getting is work that poses serious risks, rather than meaningful investment in its people or infrastructure.

IC: How did you first become interested in these issues?  

MM: It started when I took a short course on the law and economics of social media giants. That really opened my eyes to how business models are changing. It’s no longer just about buying and selling goods directly—now it’s about data, algorithms, and the advertising model. It was mind-blowing to learn how Google and Meta operate their algorithms and advertising models. That realization pushed me to study internet governance more deeply.

IC: Can you explain how data labeling and moderation for a large language model – like an AI chatbot – works?  

MM: When the initial version of ChatGPT was released, it had lots of sexual violence in it. So to clean up an algorithm like that, you just teach it all the worst kinds of sexual violence. And who does that? It's the data labelers. So for them to do that, they have to consume it and teach it to the algorithm. So what they needed to do is consume hours of text of every imaginable sexual violence simulation, like a rape or a defilement of a minor, and then label that text. Over and over again. So then, what the algorithm knows is, okay, this is what a rape looks like. That way, if you ask ChatGPT to show you the worst rape that could ever happen, there are now metrics in place that tell it not to give out this information because it’s been taught to recognize what it’s being asked for. And that’s thanks to Kenyan youth whose mental health is now toast, and whose life has been compromised completely. All because ChatGPT had to be this fancy thing that the world celebrated. And Kenyan youth got nothing from it.  

This is the next frontier of technology, and they’re building big tech on the backs of broken African youth, to put it simply. There's no skill transfer, no real investment in their well-being, just exploitation.

IC: But workers aren’t working directly for the Big Tech companies, right? They’re working for these middlemen companies that match Big Tech companies with workers — can you explain how that works?  

MM: Big Tech is not planting any roots in the country when it comes to hiring people to moderate content or train algorithms for AI. They're not really investing in the country in the sense that there’s no actual person to hold liable should anything go south. There's no registered office in Kenya for companies like Meta, TikTok, OpenAI. And really, it’s important that companies have a presence in a country so that there can be discussions around accountability. But that part is purposely left out.  

Instead, what you have are these middlemen. They’re called Business Process Outsourcing, or BPOs, that are run from the U.S., not run locally, but they have a registered office here, and a presence here. A person that can be held accountable. And then what happens is big tech companies negotiate these contracts with the business. So for example, I have clients who worked for Meta or OpenAI through a middleman company called Sama, or who worked for Meta through another called Majorel, or those who worked for Scale AI but through a company called RemoTasks.  

It’s almost like they're agents of big tech companies. So they will do big tech's bidding. If the big tech says jump, then they jump. So we find ourselves in this situation where these companies purely exist for the cover of escaping liability.  

And in the case of Meta, for example, when recruitments happen, the advertisements don't come from Meta, they come from the middleman. And what we've seen is purposeful, intentional efforts to hide the client, so as not to disclose that you're coming to do work for Meta… and not even being honest or upfront about the nature of the work, not even saying that this is content moderation work that you're coming to do.

IC: What are the repercussions of this on workers?  

MM: Their mental health is destroyed – and there are often no measures in place to protect their well-being or respect them as workers. And then it's their job to figure out how to get out of that rut because they still are a breadwinner in an African context, and they still have to work, right? And in this community where mental health isn't the most spoken-about thing, how do you explain to your parents that you can't work?  

I literally had someone say that to me—that they never told their parents what work they do because how do you explain to your parents that this is what you watch, day in, day out? And that's why it's not enough for the government to say, “yes, 10,000 more jobs.” You really do have to question what the nature of these jobs is and how we are protecting the people doing them, how we are making sure that only people who willingly want to do the job are doing it.

IC: You said the government and the companies themselves have argued that this moderation work is bringing jobs to Kenya, and there’s also been this narrative that — almost like an NGO – these companies are helping lift people out of poverty. What do you say to that?  

MM: I think when you give people work for a period of time and those people can't work again because their mental health is destroyed, that doesn't look like lifting people out of poverty to me. That looks like entrenching the problem further because you've destroyed not just one person, but everybody that relies on that person and everybody that's now going to be roped in, in the care of that one person. You've destroyed a bigger community that you set out to help.

IC: Do you feel alone in this fight?

MM: I wouldn’t say I’m alone, but it’s not a popular case to take at this time. Many people don’t want to believe that Kenya isn’t really benefiting from these big tech deals.  It’s not a narrative that Kenyans want to believe, and it's just not the story that the government wants at the end of the day. So not enough questions are being asked. No one's really opening the curtain to see what is this work?  Are our local companies benefiting out of this? Nobody's really asking those questions. So then in that context, imagine standing up to challenge those jobs. 

IC: Do you think it’s possible for Kenya to benefit from this kind of work without the exploitation?

MM: Let me just be very categorical. My position is not that this work shouldn't be coming into Kenya. But it can’t be the way it is now, where companies get to say “either you take our work and take it as horrible as it is with no care, and we exploit you to our satisfaction, or we, or we leave.” No. You can have dangerous work done in Kenya, but with appropriate level of care,  with respect,  and upholding the rights of these workers. It’s going to be a long journey to achieve justice. 

IC: In September, the Kenyan Court of Appeal made a ruling — that Meta, a U.S. company, can be sued in Kenya. Can you explain why this is important?

MM: The ruling by the Court of Appeal brings relief to the moderators. Their case at the Labour Court had been stopped as we awaited the decision by the Court of Appeal on whether or not Meta can be sued in Kenya by former Facebook Content Moderators. The Court of Appeal has now cleared the path for the moderators to present their evidence to the court against Meta, Sama and Majorel for human rights violations. They finally get a chance at a fair hearing and access to justice. 

The Court of Appeal has affirmed the groundbreaking decision of the Labour Court that it in today's world, digital workspaces are adequate anchors of jurisdiction. This means that a court can assume jurisdiction based on the location of an employee working remotely. That is a timely decision as the nature of work and workspaces has changed drastically. 

What this means for Meta is that they now have a chance to fully participate in the suit against them. What we have seen up to this point is constant dismissiveness of the authority of Kenyan courts over Meta claiming they cannot be sued in Kenya. The Court of Appeal has found that they not only can be sued but are properly sued in these cases. We look forward to participating in the legal process fully and presenting our clients' case to the court for a fair determination. 

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that the Court of Appeal ruling was in regard to the case of 185 former Facebook content moderators, not a separate case of Mutemi's brought by two Ethiopian citizens.

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Global Witness’ investigation found that Google placed advertisements alongside articles by The Epoch Times, which are estimated to have generated close to $1.5 million in combined revenue for Google and the website owners over the last year. Global Witness believes that some of these articles breached Google’s own publishing policies that do not allow “unreliable and harmful claims” that “contradict authoritative scientific consensus on climate change”. Is it possible to have accountability in AdTech? I spoke to Guy Porter, senior investigator on the digital threat team at Global Witness and author of their latest investigation. Porter works in the climate disinformation unit, which leads investigations linking climate denial and disinformation to big tech and the platforms. 

NJ: Why is this investigation important?

Guy Porter: We think this is really important both because of scale and the apparatus that supports disinformation: Facebook advertising, Google monetization. Google commands the largest share of the digital advertising market and is helping to fund - and making money from - what we believe is opportunistic and dangerous information, Additionally, The Epoch Times is a big media empire. In 2019, it was one of the leading spenders on pro-Trump ads on Facebook. We're talking about big money.  Its publisher, Epoch Times Association reported a revenue of $128 million in 2022.

NJ: In response to your investigation in May 2024, which looked at Epoch Times spreading disinformation via Meta’s advertising platforms, the media organization responded saying that science around climate change, like anything else, was always a matter up for debate and that scientists often have differing opinions. How do you respond to that dizzying combination of free speech absolutism and climate change denial?

GP: The free speech argument is an unhelpful tactic that helps to delay climate action. These articles present these fringe views that are not peer reviewed as a growing consensus of scientific fact. We welcome people debating climate solutions. And we think that's really important to tackling the urgent climate crisis. But there are changes that need to be made to tackle monetization of this kind of content.
NJ: One of the changes you're hoping for is ad tech regulation. What would that look like? 

GP: Both the UN and also the EU Commission are looking at this really closely as we put forward in this investigation, advertisers are also suffering from limited transparency around AdTech. While there are tools that Google supplies to assure advertisers where their ads will appear, the system is opaque and advertisers rely on Google to stick to its own policies on climate denial.

NJ: One of the places where these ads denying climate change are running is in Brazil, where the impact of climate change has been relentless and devastating. Much of the climate disinformation is not disseminated in English: is that also why we need to pay attention to it?

GP: Absolutely. We also know from previous research by ProPublica that Google's performance in non English language websites is not great. The 2025 climate change conference COP is being held in Brazil – and we know that disinformation is rife around these meetings. We believe it’s crucial to protect the media ecosystem there.

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PB: Haiti, which is just 700 miles from the coast of Florida, is the United States’ ultimate other. Americans know very little about it. When I tell people that I lived in Haiti for a while, a few would say, “Oh, I've always wanted to go to Polynesia!” And I'd say, no, not Tahiti, Haiti. This is the same Haiti that is a four hour flight from JFK. I think that geographical proximity stands in sharp contrast to the wild American ignorance about Haiti, and I don't think that ignorance is unintentional. We'd rather not think about it as Americans. We would rather not know the manner in which the United States, our country, has subverted Haiti from the very get go.

Haiti is the only successful slave rebellion in history and what they managed to do was kick out Napoleon's own army. They were the first republic in the entire world to abolish slavery. And this was at a time when Thomas Jefferson was president in the United States, and the US had 60 more years until its Emancipation Proclamation. Haiti was way ahead of the United States on these issues, and it posed a terrible threat to these white imperial powers. These imperial powers built enormous wealth on ideologies of white supremacy — you saw this with England and India, France and Haiti and the United States with plenty of its own enslaved people. In that moment, the moment of its birth, Haiti was a pariah to the white imperial powers.

A lot of times there's a kind of obsession with the things that threaten us. I'm no psychologist, but the neuroses and the racism of the United States says a lot more about the United States than it does about Haiti; about the ways in which we remain threatened more than 200 years after the founding of the first black Republic. We remain threatened by the idea of black people governing themselves. You can see this in the ways that over the past 35 years, and even over the past 15 years, the United States has really done quite a lot of meddling with Haiti’s democracy, to put it mildly, which is what has led to its current state of violence and insecurity, and the complete dismantling of the state.

NJ: We see the same stereotypes and rhetoric each time this happens — foreigners and immigrants eat strange foods, they want your jobs, they are violent. Yet the American economy needs immigrant workers. When those workers express their cultural identity, or need health care, then immigration becomes an easy target for resentment. It’s like saying: come here, work in our factories, but don't be visible or have needs. Is that a correct characterization?

 PB: There's this wonderful Haitian saying: If you want to kill a dog, say it has rabies. That's what JD Vance is doing. What he's really doing is trying to foment fear among Americans, right? Foment fear of change, of black people, of the other and galvanize that fear. And so a great way to do it is to say that Haitians, they're diseased or they eat pets. These tropes have a very long history, of the third world being a place of diseases, or the savages.

NJ: “Savages” who are devoid of compassion for animals unlike civilized people, and only know how to hunt and kill. 
PB: Exactly! And this idea of eating pets is also interesting coming from the Republicans, who pride themselves on eating meat. Like Vance who received some flak for adapting to his wife's vegetarian diet. I think for a lot of Haitians have felt, like, what the fuck do I need to say? Should Haiti’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and all the Haitian pet lovers need to now come out and say, actually, we don't eat cats and dogs?

I know what you mean about the critical mass, it’s like saying — go ahead, you can be different in America as long as you act the same. But I have a feeling that a lot of the anti immigrant sentiment does not come from the people in towns like Springfield. It seems like the farther you are from actually knowing immigrants, the easier it is to scare you. These terrible lies are a great disservice to Haitians and immigrants, of course, but also to the people in towns like Springfield, even to those who might have voted Republican. Many people do try really hard to welcome immigrants, to make room, make resources available, and try to do the right thing.

I’m thinking of the incredible grace of the family of the boy who was killed in a vehicular accident in Ohio last year, by a person from Haiti. His death was a terrible and tragic accident, and even now, his family is showing up to city council meetings and asking for his death not to be used as a political tool.

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Coda: Russian authorities announced last week that YouTube's performance would be slowed down up to 70%. Today, it is almost inaccessible in Russia without a VPN, and uploading a short video can take hours. What's happening?

Darbinyan: YouTube is being slowed down across the country. This is done centrally through DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) equipment, via providers. If a provider knows that a user is connecting to a YouTube server, it starts reducing the traffic, the speed drops, and all 4K videos either start buffering or YouTube switches them to low resolution. This contradicts the authorities' claims that outdated Google servers, which haven't been updated for two years, are to blame. Server degradation doesn't happen overnight. Here, we see interference in the traffic by Roskomnadzor (The Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Internet censor).

C: Why are they slowing down YouTube and why now?

D: This has developed gradually. There have been many concerns about YouTube, not political ones related to social protests, but rather technical issues. How to block it? And how to block it without affecting other Google services, which, of course, could turn most Android devices into bricks. It apparently took them some time to figure this out. 

Currently, the blockage is not complete. YouTube is still the number one video platform in Russia in terms of users. This means that if it were completely blocked, most Russians would access it through VPNs and cross-border channels. This could potentially bring down the entire internet, as the load on cross-border channels would immediately increase when users connect to servers located abroad instead of their provider's server. Roskomnadzor is currently measuring and observing how the YouTube slowdown affects the load on cross-border channels. If the load increases, the blockages may be relaxed, but if the loads are small, they might push for a 100% blockage.

C: Is the goal to reorient users to Russian networks, like RuTube and VKontakte (the most popular Russian network, controlled by the state)?

D: I think so. What we see is a change in Kremlin's strategy. Instead of a harsh blockade, like the one that awaited Instagram and Facebook, the task now is to worsen the quality of video to intensify user migration to Russian alternatives. This might work, as not everyone has access to VPN services, which have become significantly limited. Not everyone is ready to use them. If this continues for many months, it will certainly encourage users to gradually move to other platforms.

C: What are the consequences for bloggers moving to Russian YouTube alternatives?

D: The authorities will definitely moderate and censor the content. Some videos might be deleted entirely, or an entire channel might be taken down. By moving to Russian platforms, a blogger becomes entirely dependent on Roskomnadzor and its will, losing control over their content. This will be more severe than dealing with YouTube's moderation team.

C: Is there a scenario in which they won't have to move to these platforms?

D: It depends on the resistance from users and content creators. If they say they are not ready to part with YouTube and arm themselves with VPNs, all of Roskomnadzor's actions will be in vain. But this situation will allow some of the audience to be lured away.

C: Besides VPNs, are there other ways to bypass these blockages?

D: Well, VPNs are, of course, the most robust tool not only for restoring access to information but also for restoring speed. Therefore, a good VPN channel will solve the problem of waiting for a YouTube video to load. Other tools like Tor can also help. I would like to remind you that Roskomnadzor has worked hard over the past six months to significantly narrow the choice of tools available to Russians.

C: Do you think this is a step towards something bigger for Roskomnadzor, in terms of internet blocking and increasing the so-called sovereignty of the internet?

D: Roskomnadzor and Russian censorship have distinctive features that set them apart from other countries, such as China. While it is becoming more like the Chinese model, it is still very different from the models in Iran or Turkmenistan, where the censorship system is even more severe. The key difference is that all allocated IP addresses in the country are conditionally divided into three lists: white, allowed ones, which belong to national state-owned companies; second, gray IP addresses, used by foreigners and foreign companies; and everything else. Everything else goes into the blacklist. With such a model, VPNs do not work at all because almost all addresses, except for the allowed ones, are blocked. However, for such countries, there are tools like Psiphon, which is not quite a VPN but rather a combination of proxy servers and proprietary development, which, in my opinion, is the only one that works under such total censorship conditions.

C: Why hasn't Russia implemented this yet?

D: Because Russia still has ambitions to trade with the whole world. Russia still sees itself as part of the international economic community. It wants to trade with India, China, Latin America, and Africa, unlike Turkmenistan. Therefore, trade is impossible without the internet. Implementing such a model would significantly limit the possibilities of foreign economic activity for state-owned companies and Russian legal entities.

Sovereign internet is essentially a barrier between Russian cyberspace and the global one. It has gateways that are, in one way or another, controlled by Roskomnadzor. But it is not only about censorship; it is also about active import substitution: replacing services, protocols, and cryptography, which Russian authorities are striving for.

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Historical debates are unusually important in this case, especially between Europe and its former colonies. South Africa’s ruling African National Congress party has long identified itself with the Palestinian cause, due in large part to South Africa’s history of apartheid. Germany said its role in the Holocaust obliged it to intervene on Israel’s behalf, describing the South African case as the “political instrumentalization” of the Genocide Convention. That move elicited a swift rebuke from South Africa’s neighbor Namibia, whose Herero and Nama communities were victims of the genocide perpetrated by Germany between 1904 and 1908, three decades before the Nazi Party grabbed power. 

To understand what’s happening at the ICJ, I spoke with A. Dirk Moses, professor of international relations at the City College of New York and senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Studies. His book, “The Problems of Genocide,” explores the history of the concept and its shortcomings in preventing states from harming civilians. 

Israeli officials have said that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is morally equivalent to the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, which killed about 25,000 people. The confirmed death toll in Gaza is now roughly the same. What do you make of Israel’s justification?

It's clearly Israeli policy to run that line with the Americans and the British and say, “You did this during the war in fighting the Nazis. We're also fighting Nazis, so, ergo, we can do the same.” That language is prevalent through [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s speeches. The implication is clear: “The Palestinians are the Nazis and they committed genocide on October 7. We're just defending ourselves in the same way as the Allies did in World War II. It wasn't pretty, a lot of German civilians were killed, but these things happen in war.” 

They're trying to avoid the narrative structure where the Israelis are the perpetrators of genocide and are then somehow related to the Nazis by process of association. Associating oneself with Allied bombing does not place you on the side of angels, however, as we now recognize that much — or at least some — of the Allied bombing of German cities like Dresden would be now classed as war crimes. These officials more or less admitted, “Well, we’re committing war crimes but not genocide in what we do in Gaza.”

A senior Israeli lawyer at the hearing said, “The Genocide Convention was not designed to address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities on the civilian population. The convention was set apart to address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional severity.” What’s the reason for this distinction? 

Firstly, I think the Israeli lawyer accurately depicted the intention of many state parties when the convention was negotiated, but we’d have different views on the context. Legally, there’s no hierarchy between crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide. But in public opinion, there is — and genocide is seen as “the crime of crimes.” The liberal view is that that's a good thing, that we need this exceptional crime for these most exceptional cases. My view is that this is an extremely problematic situation because "that which shocks the conscience of mankind" — language traditionally used in these humanitarian documents — is something that needs to resemble the Holocaust in order to truly shock us and therefore to trigger the genocide charge. But if the Holocaust is considered unique or exceptional, then, by definition, how many cases are ever going to approximate that? In other words, you define genocide out of realistic existence.  

The aim of the [U.N.] delegates — and they said this, if you read the transcripts of 1948 — in creating this very high threshold of exceptional violence is precisely so states can engage in the kind of warfare that Russia is engaging in, that Israel is engaging in and that America engaged in in Korea in the early 1950s, where they killed 2 million North Koreans and later killed millions with bombing and Agent Orange in Vietnam — and not be prosecuted for genocide. 

The delegates made a very strict distinction between military intention and genocidal intention. The military intention is to defeat, whereas genocidal intention is to “destroy as such.” That “as such” in the [U.N. Genocide Convention] definition means to destroy a group solely because of that group's identity attributes. I call this a nonpolitical reason because the group doesn't have to do anything — it just is. They’re being attacked just for being Jews, for example, not for anything they’ve done. The archetype of genocide is a massive hate crime, whereas the military or security intention is that you attack a group or members of a group that are engaged in a rebellion or an insurgency, like Hamas. 

The Israeli logic is quite consistent with traditions of international thinking: “We're engaged in a security operation and we're entitled to self-defense, and we're not attacking Palestinians as such just for being Palestinian. What we're trying to get at are these Hamas fighters, which have commingled themselves with the population or underneath it in the tunnels. If civilians get in the way, that’s regrettable, but international law allows proportionate collateral damage.” States have gotten away with this reasoning for most post-World War II conflicts.  

Shortly after the hearings began, the world began to take sides. Germany’s already offered to join Israel’s defense, which Namibia — its former colony — has condemned as hypocritical. How is there such disagreement over what constitutes genocide? 

Genocide is a legal concept. Although its archetype is the Holocaust, the purpose of it is to be applicable broadly. But it has an archetype, or an ideal type, known as the Holocaust. Because of this, and because the Genocide Convention was born at a particular time and place with one case in mind, the Holocaust is in the background when people use the concept of genocide. It's entailed, even subconsciously. You can't accuse Israel of genocide because it's the successor victim nation of the biggest genocide in world history. By definition they can't commit genocide. 

There’s a standoff between Global South and Global North in this respect. The Global South has always linked genocide and colonialism, whereas in the Global North, they haven't. Why would they resist the link? Genocide is tethered to the image of the Nazis there. France, Belgium, Britain and Germany were colonial empires, so the last thing they want to do is to say they have genocidal histories. They say: "It was only the Germans who had genocidal history, and now the Russians because of Ukraine, but the rest of us have clean hands historically. Yes, there were some dark sides to our colonial empires, but they were motivated by high-minded humanitarian ideals, bringing progress to people." Whereas people in the Global South, like Namibians, think that's just window dressing on the vicious, extractive, violent project of colonialism. They'll say there were colonial empires in Africa and the Nazis were a colonial empire in Europe — a very radical one, but nonetheless in the same flow of history. So you've got big framing contestations going on here, which you alluded to in your first question.

What's happening in Israel in a sense is the unfinished business of decolonization. In this case, the Indigenous people are still there — a lot of them — and resisting, some of them violently, notwithstanding the Israeli self-understanding that they are the real Indigenous ones. But that's not unique in world history. Name me a nation state in which there wasn't tremendous founding violence. Australia? The United States?

The dilemma for Israel with Gaza was that the refugees from [the Nakba in] 1948 were just pushed across the border. It means they want to come back. Gaza is not home. Neither is the Sinai, obviously. Right-wing Israelis realize that, which is why they want to deport Palestinians from Gaza. 

By bombing orchards, trees and agricultural territory, which have no military value, they are making northern Gaza uninhabitable — by design. I've seen the reports. It is also leading to famine because people can't feed themselves. Israeli forces are corralling people in the south to create a humanitarian catastrophe so that pressure builds up on the international community to do something. At the moment, the political pressure hasn't built up to that extent. Egypt won’t let in Palestinians and neither will other states. But what about in six months’ time, when we’ll have mass starvation if Israel doesn’t abide by the ICJ measures? Given the campaign against [the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees known as the] UNRWA and reports about the rate of aid entry, experts are predicting famine before too long. And right-wing Israeli politicians are openly calling for starvation as an incentive for Palesitnians to “voluntarily emigrate.” There'll be global outcry and pressure applied on Egypt. Because they're a debt-ridden country, their debts will be forgiven. "We'll pay for the city in the Sinai," say the Americans. Then you get the solution that Israel wants, which is to empty Gaza, or at least "thin it out." 

Do you think the archetypal status of the Holocaust drives states to speak in certain ways in order to have serious attention paid to formative national tragedies?

Exactly. In the public consciousness of international law, you have a hierarchy with genocide at the top, so obviously victim groups want to go for the gold standard. This is appalling because crimes against humanity are themselves extremely serious. That’s why they were a major indictment in the Nuremberg trials — they covered what is now called the Holocaust. Genocide wasn't one of the indictments at Nuremberg, it was crimes against peace, aggressive warfare, crimes against humanity and war crimes. 

I’m curious about your idea of “permanent security.” In the current war in Gaza, does this concept apply? How?

Security is legitimate. Permanent security is illegitimate. It's a utopian idea of absolute safety. What makes permanent security aspirations so problematic is that that can only be achieved by violating international law, by indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population. To make sure that groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad can never again pose a threat to Israel, the only solution is to remove the population, the entire population, which, of course, is what Israeli government ministers are saying.

The well-known book by Tareq Baconi, “Hamas Contained,” shows how there was a modus vivendi between the Israelis and Hamas. We know that Netanyahu was allowing in money to strengthen Hamas in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority. The last thing Netanyahu and the majority of the Israeli political class since the second Intifada [between 2000 and 2005] wanted was a functioning Palestinian state-like entity in the West Bank, lest it merge with Gaza into a single state. If Hamas is a monster, its “success” in Gaza is partly a creation of Israeli policy. 

As a scholar of genocide, what do you make of the ICJ case? 

Now that we have the court’s judgment on provisional measures, I think it’s overall a win for South Africa, as it finds their claim plausible that genocide is taking place. 

The U.S. and Germany had claimed that the case was meritless, but the decision referred to clear examples of incitement to genocide from the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, President Isaac Herzog, and then-Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz which had been pointed out by independent experts and members of working groups affiliated with the U.N. Human Rights Council. The court is suggesting these officials should be punished. It will be interesting to see the reaction in Israel.

The court avoids the issue of armed conflict by focusing on genocide. Instead of mentioning South Africa’s request for a ceasefire, it says “The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts” listed in the Genocide Convention, which implies that its armed forces are committing them, namely: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

I see international lawyers interpreting this omission in different ways — either that Israel should cease its campaign other than in directly repelling attacks, or continuing its campaign while allowing in humanitarian aid and reducing civilian casualties. Ultimately, the court is suggesting that Israel’s campaign could be genocidal and thus that it needs to cease those modes. This is an extraordinary judgment whose consequences we are yet to fully understand.

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The havoc we have wreaked on our environment is why the Anthropocene epoch may be our last. Humanity has been talking about the apocalypse for thousands of years. But in 2023, as we grapple with the hottest temperatures ever recorded, the imminent threat of climate disaster and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, there is a greater urgency to the questions some are asking about what the world would really look like without us. Would it be better to leave the Earth to the animals, to the trees, even to the rocks? And would the world be a safer and more benevolent place if we let AI robots run everything? 

In “The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us,” the American poet and critic Adam Kirsch interrogates the prospect of a world that is no longer dominated by humans — either because we have driven ourselves to extinction or because we have been replaced by artificial intelligence. Sitting in a sweltering Rome on the hottest day ever recorded in the ancient capital, I spoke to Adam Kirsch on the phone in New York City, where the air quality index hovered near hazardous because of the wildfire smoke drifting over from Canada. It was difficult not to talk about the “end times.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When did you first start thinking about a future without humans?

I began to want to write the book during the pandemic when, very quickly, I felt like my physical world contracted to the space of an apartment. It struck me how little of a difference that made to my life. So much of what I do and what most of us do can be done virtually rather than physically — whether it's work, leisure or consumption. I began to think about the idea that human life has already changed. It has already gone virtual and disengaged from the physical in ways that our ancestors would not have understood. And the transhumanists’ idea is just another step on that path. 

Let’s clarify for our readers what “transhumanists” think. They basically imagine a world where the human condition can be improved or even replaced by technology like AI, right? 

Transhumanism is the school of thought which says that in the future, we will be able to use technology to overcome the limitations of our physical bodies. Transhumanists look to a future where humans will give way to another species or another form of life that isn't embodied in flesh and blood. It isn't necessarily mortal, and it might be able to live indefinitely, as a record of information, or as a simulation, or in the virtual world. 

Or, alternatively, transhumanism says that we will just be able to escape the limitations of our bodies with genetic engineering. One of the most vivid strains of transhumanism right now is the idea that in a future with artificial intelligence, there might be minds that are not human minds at all. Minds that are actually born on computers and that have a very different relationship to reality and the physical world than we do. And that those minds will become the leading form of life on our planet and take over from us in a violent or benevolent way. 

Another group you look at in your book also considers what the world would look like if humans no longer dominated it. They are called “anthropocene antihumanists” and seem to believe that humans are a kind of cancer on the earth, multiplying like a parasite. And that the world would be better off without us.

Antihumanists say that humans have taken over from nature as the most important factor on the planet. They say we no longer live alongside nature, but we control nature and dominate it. This, they believe, is eventually going to lead to the decline or disappearance of humanity itself. And they think that would be a good thing. So antihumanism can be anything from saying we should stop having children to predicting that an environmental calamity is going to reduce us to just a few leftover populations. Philosophically, it can take the form of saying, ‘How can we think about the world in ways that don’t put humanity at the center of it?’ They give equal respect and agency to nonhuman things and even nonliving things, like objects or the ocean. 

Or a rock. It’s funny, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what a world without humans looks like. Especially as I grapple with the realities of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. I sometimes find myself fantasizing about what the natural world looked like before human civilization. Reading your book was an intense experience in that way, because it forces you to think about the Earth without humanity. What kind of place did it take you to psychologically, while you were writing? 

It's very difficult to imagine the disappearance of humanity as a real prospect — in the same way that it's sort of hard to imagine what it's like to be dead. We could all theoretically agree that at some point there will no longer be a human species, that we will have become extinct. And that just as the dinosaurs did, someday we will disappear. But to think about that happening tomorrow or next year plays havoc with all of our assumptions about what matters and how we go about our days. Thinking about these things is on a different track from daily life. In daily life, we're dealing with the world as it is — raising children and going to work. We’re not thinking about the future in an abstract or philosophical way.

Yes, it’s a kind of bizarre cognitive dissonance to think about a world millions of years from now when humans don’t exist and then go back to thinking about what to have for lunch. 

When the book was published in January, almost right away, all of the things that I was writing about started to become much more mainstream. First, there was ChatGPT, which led to  people talking about artificial intelligence in a very immediate way and talking about how dangerous it might be. And then came this summer that we’re having with all these broken temperature records and parts of the world becoming dangerously hot and endangering human life. Even to me — someone who's been thinking about this and researching and writing about it for a long time — when it erupts into your actual life, it seems like kind of a shock. We have a tendency to think about dire things or radical changes in the abstract and not deal with the concrete until we absolutely have to. 

I think we rely so much on shards of hope that seem to get slimmer and slimmer every year. You talk about hope a lot in the book. How hopeful would you say you are? 

I think that all of us rely on hope. We rely on the assumption that the future is going to be like the present because that’s the only way we know how to navigate the world. But one of the things that drew me to the people I write about in the book is that they're not afraid to think about things that seem frightening or impossible, that most people dismiss as science fiction or extremism. They’re thinking through the idea of, ‘What if the world actually was like this in the future? What if we actually did have computers that could outthink us or what if billions of people could no longer survive because of climate change? What would that do to our sense of ourselves and the way we live?’ And I think that that’s useful to think about. Both for its own sake and because it maybe also makes us more willing to take action in the present. 

There was one Franz Kafka quote in your book that really stood out to me. “There is hope — an infinite amount of hope — but not for us.” What does that mean to you?

What transhumanists and antihumanists are trying to say is, ‘Well, maybe in the future, there won't be us, but there will be something else that we can be hopeful for.’ They say that the disappearance of humanity might not mean the end of everything that we care about. They’re trying to nudge us into a new way of thinking that if we're not here, it might not matter that much — as long as something else is. Both of them think of humanity as a stage. That the normal progression of the human species is to supersede ourselves or eliminate ourselves, not by accident, but by necessity. 

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Three of the books, including the critically acclaimed graphic novel “Maus,” were flagged for review by the Nixa school board for potentially violating a new Missouri law that makes it illegal for school officials to provide minors with sexually explicit material. Librarians and educators who run afoul of the rule, which applies primarily to materials with strong visual components, like graphic novels and illustrated books, can face up to a year in prison and up to $2,000 in fines. The law did not apply to the other four books under consideration, which were flagged by community members for review by the board.

As I reported in April, Missouri’s law is part of a growing national movement, led by conservative parents’ rights groups, aimed at restricting access to books about gender, sexuality and race in public schools. In the first six months of the 2022-23 school year, state and local policymakers banned 874 books from classrooms and school libraries across the U.S., according to the nonprofit PEN America, which ranks Missouri as one of the nation’s top book-banning states. Since Missouri’s sexually explicit material law was enacted in August 2022, librarians fearful of criminal prosecution have removed nearly 300 titles from school library shelves.

In Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high schoolers decided to fight back against local efforts to ban books. Over the last 18 months, this student movement has led a campaign to defend books under siege by reading challenged titles, surveying students about their support for book bans and speaking up in support of contested books at school board meetings. Two of these students — Meghana Nakkanti and Glennis Woosley — attended the Nixa board’s June 20 meeting, where school officials voted on whether the Missouri law applied to three graphic novels: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir “Maus,” an illustrated adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets,” a coming-of-age autobiography by Craig Thompson. The board ultimately voted to retain “Maus” but decided to ban the other two books as well as four text-only novels that parents and community members challenged. 

What is it like to be at the frontlines of one of the nation’s most divisive culture war battles? I spoke to Nakkanti and Woosley to find out and to ask what they have learned from the rage of the book banners. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Both of you attended the June 20 meeting. The board decided not to ban “Maus,” but they did choose to ban “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets.” The board also banned the young adult novel “Unpregnant,” which is about pregnancy and abortion, and the children’s book “Something Happened in Our Town,” which is about police brutality. Which of these books generated the most conversation? 

Woosley: The conversation on “Unpregnant” was long. It’s the story of a girl, coming from a Christian conservative family, finding out that she is pregnant, and she’s a teenager. And so she and her friend try to get an abortion for her, and it takes place in Missouri in a very similar town as Nixa. So that’s why this book is so big and important around here. And she has to go to New Mexico to get an abortion. It’s a comedic book. And a lot of school board members were saying that they were taking the subject of abortion and making it light-hearted and normalized in ways they didn’t agree with. That was the main thing they talked about. Some of them also said that it was encouraging abortion, and they didn’t want students to be encouraged to have abortions. 

Did any students speak up? Was there space for that? 

Nakkanti: During their deliberation process, we were just flies on the wall. We weren’t allowed to say anything. But it was a very random conversation. One of the school board members took issue with the fact that Planned Parenthood is mentioned throughout the book and proceeded to describe how Planned Parenthood was created by a eugenicist. This was a fictional book, and it was like, that point has little to no pertinence to the subject matter at hand. And the same school board member took issue with the fact that there were no books about teenage girls who were pregnant and went to pregnancy centers. It was very bizarre. 

Woosley: She specifically had this mindset of, ‘there are books that are anti-police.’ So she was saying, ‘Why don’t we have books that are pro-police in our library if we have a book like that?’ 

Proponents say that the whole point of this law is to protect students from explicit sexual material. You are students. What’s your take? 

Woosley: I don’t like the law because it’s extremely vague. And because of that, what I don’t like is that some of these books that I am actually interested in reading I’m being restricted from reading. Thankfully, I come from a family that can provide me with those books. But I know a lot of my friends can’t do that. That’s why I don’t like the law, and I don’t think it’s benefiting us. It’s restricting people who want to read books from reading them. 

Nakkanti: I think the student body acknowledges that most of us don’t read. As high schoolers, we’re so busy with life and homework that we often don’t find the time to read. We say this all the time: Why do these people care so much? There are all these adults who probably have never even set foot in the high school or who have kids that are eight, who won’t be in the high school for six years, worried about this book that they think these kids are reading. It’s really not that serious.

Glennis, you will be a sophomore next year. You’re on break, you didn’t have to go to a long school board meeting over the summer. What’s motivating you to become involved in this? 

Woosley: My dad is a member of U-Turn in Education, which is one of the parent groups around here that is pro-books. And when I got into my freshman year in high school, I knew all about what was already happening. I heard about how all these students were going to meetings and speaking and keeping up with what has been happening. So I thought, I want to go and I want to try to help. Even if more books get banned, at least students are speaking out against what is happening. I think there’s real value in student voices being heard. 

Meghana, you’re going to go to college next year in another state. If you want to leave all of this behind, you probably could. I’m curious what you’re taking from this situation with you. 

I think the biggest thing that I’ve walked away with is the fact that speaking out isn’t always easy. And I know that a lot of people who live in environments where student advocacy is very welcome can’t necessarily relate to that reality. But here, some of us have to see if we’re being followed on the way home from board meetings. That’s not a reality for so many of the other school districts that we’ve been hearing about. Because they are in these urban centers that are primarily filled with groups that agree with them. 

I don’t think we’ve had a single win. We go to these meetings and we speak, and we lose every single time. But we show up anyway because we show up on principle. The school knows that there’s attention on them. Not only do we pay attention, but the country is paying attention as well.

You say you haven’t had any wins, but the board could have banned all the books.

Nakkanti: I guess they could have, but I think they’re trying to make everybody happy. Now it’s become very much like a two-party system in the worst way, where the individuals that need to be heard in my opinion — the students — are being completely disregarded because the board wants to appease these two pro- and anti-book-banning adult groups. Two groups that can vote and use their dollars to support their reelection campaigns. So it just becomes this game of politics with our library. It’s frustrating, but I guess it’s a microcosm of Washington.

At the same time, this spotlight on students can be sort of a double-edged sword. Meghana, you said some students have to worry about being followed home from school board meetings. Can you talk more about the pressures students have faced from adults because of their advocacy?

During the board’s May 2022 meeting, an adult came up to a person who was 16 at the time and told her that he could easily find her address and that she should ‘watch out.’ At this meeting, there was booing, jeering and clapping. Some of my friends weren’t sitting with students, and that’s where we heard all of this horrible commentary that these adults were making about kids who were minors at the time. I don’t think we took it too personally because they’re like 50 years old, and they’re making fun of children. So ultimately, we’re still winning. These adults can’t figure out how to process their frustration in a manner that doesn’t degrade the existence of other people.   

I think that meeting really damaged the credibility of the pro-book-banning folks because they were yelling at and threatening children. While there are some voices on the book-banning side that are loud, angry and even violent, I think there are a lot of good people who are pro-book ban but might be misguided. I think it’s made me more empathetic in many ways. I believe that the vast majority of these people are just fighting for something they believe but don’t acknowledge the harm of their actions. 

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The ban on legal and medical gender transition marks the latest escalation in Russia’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights. In November 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law prohibiting any activities that promote “non-traditional sexual relationships,” effectively outlawing any books, films, media and online resources that discuss LGBTQ+ people.

The bill outlawing gender-affirming care must still pass through Russia’s upper house of parliament and be signed by Putin, but in the event of its likely adoption, it will prevent transgender people from accessing life-saving treatments, ranging from psychological care to hormone therapy to voluntary surgeries. 

According to Egor Burtsev, a clinical psychologist who has worked with transgender and LGBTQ+ patients in Russia for over 10 years, the abolition of gender-affirming care amounts to “torture.” 

Burtsev, who left Russia in April 2022 out of concern for his safety and now lives in Lithuania, worries that the new law will precipitate a mental health crisis in Russia’s trans community, amplify the stigma that LGBTQ+ Russians have long faced and trigger violence against transgender people in Russia. To better understand the far-reaching consequences of a ban on gender-affirming care, I spoke with Burtsev on Telegram. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The Russian parliament has passed a law banning legal and surgical sex changes. What impact will this have on access to medical and psychological care for transgender people? 

What they are proposing is a complete abolition of gender reassignment procedures, surgeries and hormone therapy for transgender people. It is a complete ban. What consequences will this have? Transgender people remain, but the procedures are banned. A transgender person — someone who has been undergoing hormone therapy for 10,15 years, who’s looked completely different for a long time, socialized in a completely different way — is suddenly deprived of the possibility to receive hormone therapy. The body changes, not quickly, but it changes, there are all kinds of reversals, transformations. And the relationship with one’s body, for transgender people, is quite complicated. What we will see is the highest risk of depression, the highest risk of self-harm, the highest risk of suicide.

All possible channels of any kind of medical care will be cut off. Transgender people are not going anywhere. They can’t change how they feel, what their gender identity is, because the authorities ordered it. They're being thrown overboard. And I would equate this to torture: depriving transgender people of medical care, hormone therapy and any psychological help that might have been available before.

Trans people have been left completely without help and in a terrible position of fear, humiliation, discrimination, stigma.

Russia is not the only country adopting laws against gender-affirming care. In the U.S., for example, Florida recently passed a bill that made it illegal to provide gender-affirming care to trans children under 18. From a medical perspective, is it necessary to have any restrictions on who, and at what age, should be able to undergo a gender transition?

There is a wave of such anti-gender movements in the world right now. Conservatism and neoconservatism are coming to the fore. The wave of anti-trans movements is sweeping the world, and Russia has actively, happily joined in. Even some quite democratic countries are not succeeding on this front right now. But that doesn't mean that this situation won’t change, because democracy works somewhat differently. Democracy doesn’t work like this, with one vulnerable group receiving help while another gets discarded.

As for helping trans children under 18, that’s a very controversial issue. There is no uniform policy on this. It’s understandable that the first feeling the idea evokes is probably bewilderment: ‘How can we allow something like this to happen before a child turns 18?’ But as a psychologist who’s worked mostly in Russia, where gender transition was allowed from the age of 18, I usually recommend to parents to simply provide support, to call the person by their name and use their pronouns. And according to statistics, this dramatically reduces the risk of suicidal behavior — just accept the child, call them what they like. 

It is important to give people the right to decide for themselves, from a certain age, what will happen with hormone therapy and to give endocrinologists the opportunity to help people intelligently, clearly, taking into account their circumstances. 

Based on what you’ve seen in your practice, what have been some of the challenges — medical, interpersonal, social — for transgender people in Russia?

The first problem has to do with socialization. It begins with a person becoming aware of themselves and bringing themselves before society — this is the coming-out process. And the first problem is usually related to acceptance: by family, friends, colleagues, classmates and so on. Of course, there's the constant stigma. There is also a huge problem with accessing healthcare that has always been there. 

Because the stigma is so layered, so varied, trans people experience different challenges. Often  they experience trauma, stress and suicidal ideation. Episodes of depression can be pretty severe. A large percentage of transgender people experience depressive states. Anxiety is also extremely common. All of this happens because the stigma and the discrimination all over the world, and especially in Russia, are quite strong. 

Can you briefly explain the legal and medical process that a trans person in Russia needed to go through if they wanted to transition, before this law was passed? 

The transition procedure in Russia was one of the best in the world. We were even a little proud of it, because in recent years, Russia was preparing to adopt ICD-11. This is the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, in which ‘transsexualism’ is excluded from the list of psychiatric conditions. The removal of this psychiatric diagnosis was a huge victory for the trans community. Plus, with the exclusion of this diagnosis, the procedure for changing one’s gender marker has been simplified in many countries. That is, people simply come in, declare their desire to transition and have different procedures. 

We had commissions in Russia that issued permits [to transgender people]. The commission consisted of a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist and a sexologist. People came before these commissions, had conversations and were diagnosed. Afterwards, they received written permission to change the gender marker in their passport without any legal obstacles. The procedure was quite humane. Before that, less than 10 years ago, this process still required surgery. You had to have at least one surgical procedure. And, in many countries of the world, this requirement still remains.

There has been a lot of talk from the Russian government about protecting “traditional values.” Putin often says that soon, in the West, children will have a “Parent #1” and a “Parent #2,” instead of a mom and a dad. 

One of the major problems that Putin and some other politicians — or, rather, the entire State Duma — have is that they don't pay attention to science-based approaches. They don't look at the science, they don't look at the research, they don't know what they're proposing. They just engage in populism in the service of power. 

The whole world is moving toward greater diversity, there is no stopping it. We see it in our teenagers — who are 15-16 years old, who are not interested in politics because of their age, who are more interested in relationships and their own identities — and in how they construct their identities, how they look at relationships, how they experiment. They have a much more open view on things. The world, for them, is much more multilayered, not black-and-white like it is for government representatives, who tend to be quite old.

Does the government’s position reflect prevailing attitudes toward transgender people? 

I think in many ways it does. Because there is such a thing as propaganda, and propaganda shapes the average Russian’s public opinion. And if propaganda works, then quite a few people really are transphobic, homophobic. I'm afraid there will be a lot of violence against LGBTQ+ people and against transgender people. There will be murders, there will be violence. It's very scary. It's a nightmare.

So, fearing exactly that, LGBTQ+ people are now panicking and trying to escape to somewhere else. But trans people tend to be financially disadvantaged. It's very hard for them to move, they don't have the right documents, they don't always have passports. They find themselves trapped inside [Russia] with this society. 

But there is an alternative, there are, of course, people who are more progressive, who think for themselves. Some have left for now, but many have stayed in the country. They just shut down, they keep quiet, they don't actively speak out, because staying safe right now is paramount. As soon as there is a chance to exhale, we will hear those voices. And I really hope that someday the situation will begin to change for the better. We must all work together to change it.

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In response, India’s national council overseeing the curriculum claimed that the revisions were a routine exercise intended to ensure that material was introduced at the “appropriate stage.” It did not explain how the textbooks were edited or by whom.

Much of the current debate in India is similar to debates that have taken place for over a decade in the United States, over intelligent design for instance — which argues that the world was created with intent and is dubiously presented as an alternative to evolution theory — and how politicians and state legislatures shape what is taught in public schools.

In 2018, a minister in the Indian government said that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “scientifically wrong” because “nobody, including our ancestors, have said they saw an ape turning into a man.” A year later, the same politician said that he didn’t “want to offend people who believe that we are children of monkeys but according to our culture we are children of rishis.” A rishi is a Hindu sage or saint.

Controversy over textbook revisions in India are mostly about excisions from history, political science and sociology textbooks, as political parties in power seek to influence curriculums at both state and national levels. Science textbooks, however, have generally been spared. Indeed, an amendment to the Indian Constitution made in 1976, lists among the “fundamental duties” of every Indian citizen the obligation to “develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.”  

On June 15, 33 Indian political scientists who have contributed to school textbooks wrote to the director of the national education council to demand that their names be removed as authors because “this creative collective effort is in jeopardy.” The omissions and deletions, they argued, had violated the “core principles of transparency and contestation.”

They had taken their lead from Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palsikar, eminent academics — Yadav is now a politician — who had complained just days earlier that the textbooks they had worked on, “once a source of pride,” were now a “source of embarrassment.”

I spoke to Palsikar on the phone and asked him about the politicization of Indian schooling and the intent behind textbook revisions.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Following the spate of recent changes to textbooks, you've withdrawn your name as an author. Why did you do that?

When the most recent round of edits began last year, I warned that students wouldn’t benefit from these sorts of selective redactions. The edits subverted what Yogendra [Yadav] and I were trying to do when we contributed to the textbooks. We had to distance ourselves from the whole exercise.

The deletions are specific and seem to fit the governing party’s agenda. Though the official reason for revising textbooks is that the Covid pandemic has forced a reassessment of course loads, would you agree that there is an ideological motivation behind the revisions?

Yes, this is what we've been saying in our public expression of protest. If you closely follow the majority of the changes being made to textbooks in sociology, history and political science, they are being made to appease a certain political mindset. The revisions are ideological and partisan. They’re intended to satisfy the agenda of the ruling party. 

We don’t know who the people are who are making the edits, even though the textbooks display the names of prominent academics as authors and editors.

Yes, you’re right. Our names are on the books although we had nothing to do with the revisions. Students who read these books will think we’ve made these changes. That’s a lack of transparency. It appears as if our names are on the books to legitimize the process. We helped prepare these books back in 2006. We faced some objections and protests for political reasons, but no changes were made to our work. Now changes are being made to suit the demands by certain groups, and the national council that produces and monitors the textbooks is not being transparent. 

Do you think that the textbooks are being edited to appease the government’s “Hindu-first” nationalism?

‘Appeased’ is a mild way to put it. The edits are increasingly aggressive. In my view, the next step will be to overhaul the syllabus completely and to rewrite these textbooks under a new education policy. 

When you helped write the textbooks, there were strong passages about anti-Sikh violence in Delhi in 1984 and anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002. Studying these riots were a part of the curriculum. But the public conversation about such issues now is so polarized.

Textbook writing and curriculum formation have always been very contentious issues. What we tried to do was remain as objective and factual as possible in our treatments of controversial, hotly disputed topics, such as riots or the suspension of civil liberties. Our thinking was that these are textbooks for 12th grade students. They’re going to be voters. We wanted to introduce them to debates in Indian political history and contemporary Indian life without being partisan. We thought that a model had been created in which you appointed experts and let them treat the subject with autonomy.

In 2006, we were shielded from any direct state interference because there was a monitoring committee between us and the government. There was some discomfort in government circles, but we didn't face a backlash as long as the facts were accurate. My colleague Yogendra Yadav has written about a meeting we had with the education minister at the time. ‘You do your job,’ he told us, ‘and the government will do its job.’ Nobody asked me to change anything in the text.

Do you think you would have the same autonomy under the Modi government?

It's a hypothetical question, so my answer is presumptuous. But I would argue that these recent redactions show that the national education council has lost its autonomy. I don't have any experience of working with this present government, so I’m basing my assessment on my observations of the pressure I believe is being put on the media and on academia. This government is interfering far too much. It is trying to control culture, and I doubt if I would be allowed to work on textbooks now with the autonomy I had in 2006.

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While Israeli companies are perhaps the most high-profile purveyors of spyware, several companies headquartered in the United States and in Europe also sell surveillance technology. And persistent regulatory inconsistencies and blindspots suggest that there is still considerable reluctance, globally, to legislate to prevent the misuse of such technology. In Europe, this week, countries including France, Germany and the Netherlands have been arguing for the need to install spyware to surveil journalists if security agencies deem it necessary. 

As governments vacillate over regulation, human rights abuses continue. Last month, Israel was reported to be using facial recognition technology software called Red Wolf to deliberately and exclusively track Palestinians. Journalist Antony Loewenstein was based for several years in East Jerusalem. In his new book, “The Palestine Laboratory,” he explores how Israel has turned Palestine into a testing ground for surveillance tools that Israeli companies then export to governments around the world. I spoke with Loewenstein, who lives in Australia, over the phone.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

When did the privatization of the Israeli defense industry begin and why was that an important moment?

For the first decade of Israel's existence after 1948, it was all state run. The Six-Day War [in 1967], when Israel, in six days, took control of the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, really accelerated the defense industry. By the 1970s, there was a fairly healthy private Israeli arms industry. Some of the companies that had been public before were now private. But it's important to remember that both in the past, and also now, with organizations like NSO Group, most of these companies are private in name only. They are arms of the state. 

They are used by the state to forward and pursue their diplomatic aims. In the last 10 or so years, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, have gone around the world to countries that are not friends with Israel and have held out Israeli spyware as a carrot. Basically, Israel is saying, ‘If you are friends with us, if you help us, if you join with us in the U.N. in certain ways, if you don't criticize us so much, we will sell you this unbelievably effective spyware.’ And since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been huge numbers of European countries and others desperately coming to Israel, wanting defense equipment to protect themselves from any potential Russian attack.

How has Israel’s tech industry changed borders across the world?

Maybe the most prominent example, although not particularly well known, is the Israeli surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexico border. They were installed a number of years ago, and it doesn't make much of a difference whether it's a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. In fact, Biden is accelerating this technological border, so to speak, and the company that America has used is Elbit, which is Israel's biggest defense company. They have done a lot of work in the West Bank and across the Israel-Gaza border. And the reason the U.S. used Elbit as a contractor was because they liked what Elbit was doing in Palestine. I mean, the company promotes itself as being ‘successful’ in Palestine.

Does this border technology change the willingness of states to commit violent acts?

I don't think necessarily violence becomes less likely. But I think in some contexts, Israeli surveillance tech, what you see being tested on Palestinians, makes it far easier for regimes to not go down the path of killing people en masse. Instead, they just massively surveil their populations, which allows them to get all the information they potentially need without the need for the bad images, so to speak, of mass violence. However, I also think that with an almost inevitable surge in climate refugees and with global migration at its largest since World War II, a lot of nations will actually revert to extreme violence on their borders.

You can see what the EU has been doing in the last few years with the assistance of Israeli drones, unarmed drones. The EU has made the decision with Frontex, their border — so-called — security, to allow the vast majority of brown or black bodies on boats to drown. That's a conscious political decision. They don't feel that way about Ukrainian refugees. And just for the record, I think all people should be welcomed. But the European Union does not see it that way. And the idea that you could possibly in years to come have armed drones hovering over the Mediterranean, firing on boats, shooting boats out of the water, I think is very conceivable.

Does Israel’s defense industry pose a threat to its allies?

It does. To me, the relationship between Israel and the U.S. is like an abusive relationship. On the face of it, very close. I think they love each other. They're expressing admiration for each other all the time. Without the financial, diplomatic and military support from the U.S., Israel would arguably not exist. And yet, according to the most accurate figure that I could find, every single day the NSA, America's leading intelligence agency and the biggest intelligence agency in the world, has roughly 400 Hebrew speakers spying on Israel. Spying on their best friend. And rest assured, that works in reverse as well.

They don't really trust each other. More importantly, in the last few years, the Biden administration has talked about trying to curtail the power of Israeli spyware. A year and a half ago, they sanctioned NSO Group, the company behind Pegasus. A lot of the media was saying, ‘Oh, this is fantastic, the White House is now taking spyware seriously.’ But I think that’s misunderstanding the issue. America doesn’t want competition. They don’t want a real challenge to their dominance in spyware. They're pissed off that Israeli spyware, which has been sold to dozens and dozens of countries around the world, threatens their hegemony.

You wrote in the book about how the Covid pandemic has been a wake up call for Israelis to how they, too, are vulnerable to surveillance.

For many Israeli Jews, for many years, all the surveillance was happening over there. It was happening to Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli Jews didn't really feel it themselves. They were being surveilled, but they were either unaware of it or didn't seem to care. During the pandemic, Israel had lockdowns like a lot of other countries. A lot of Israel’s biggest defense companies — Elbit and NSO Group — pivoted to developing various tools to supposedly fight the pandemic. But it was still mass surveillance, mass monitoring, which they now used within Israel itself. 

For the first time, a lot of Israeli Jews discovered that they themselves were being monitored, that their phones had been hacked. Eventually, the occupation always comes home. Slowly, Israeli Jews are waking up to the reality that what's happening literally down the road in Palestine will inevitably bleed back into their own world.

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Threlkeld, a history professor at Denison University in Ohio, teaches a seminar for first-year students focused on how American history has been taught through the centuries, parsing textbooks to explain how national narratives evolve. The course dissects some of the country’s most notorious battles in the great culture war over historical memory — from the 1990s-era clashes about how to commemorate the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the conservative uproar in the mid-2010s over a U.S. history course framework emphasizing the country’s legacy of racism. The last few years of her course have coincided with a new front in America’s culture wars: how this legacy is discussed in public schools.  

Since 2021, at least 18 states have passed laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory or “divisive concepts” about racism and sexism. In the same period, universities and colleges have become a key battleground for conservative lawmakers intent on codifying an “anti-woke” view of history in the classroom, with nearly two dozen states introducing bills targeting history instruction and diversity training in higher education. 

Threlkeld’s students have been studying these fights in real time and reflecting on the future of a country afraid of its past. I spoke to her about what they make of this fraught political moment and the continuities between history wars of the past and present.

When you started teaching this class nearly a decade ago, what was the dominant history war captivating the public? And do you see any connections between that feud and what people are fighting over today?

Starting around 2010, the College Board decided to revisit the AP U.S. history framework. So they brought in historians and teachers and all the kinds of people you would expect. And it was a multi-year process that was all done by the College Board. And then in 2014, they released the revised framework around which schools could design the AP courses that fit with what they do in those districts. The right-wing reaction was exactly what you would expect, which was, ‘Why are these people listed and not these people?’ 

So for those first few years of teaching this class, I was able to show my students these reactions and to show them the responses from the College Board and the responses from school districts and ordinary teachers who were dealing with this in their classrooms every day. I could tell that students had never really thought about the politics behind all of this because they're just in class. They're just learning what they're being taught. One of the experiences that stays with me most strongly from this class is just seeing students realize how political history is.

Many students can probably study a specific battle over a textbook and not understand that history itself is often contested and politically weaponized. How do you explain this concept of history wars to your students? How do they react? 

It’s a hard thing to do. I’ve tried a lot of different ways over the years. The thing that I have done the last few times that I have taught the course is just to give them one of these bills. The last time I taught this course was the fall of 2022. And in the spring of 2022, the Ohio House of Representatives had proposed one of these ‘divisive concepts’ bills. So we talked through the process of how these bills work, and I just gave them the text and said, ‘Take a look at this and tell me what you think.’ And that was more powerful than anything I had tried before. 

Some of the other things I had done before were giving students two very different textbook excerpts of the same event and talking about why these excerpts would be so different. Even then, getting them to understand the political stakes always took more time. But with these bills, all I have to do is hand them the text of one, and they're just immediately thinking, ‘What is going on?’

Do students buy lawmakers’ rhetoric that these laws are intended to protect them from harmful and divisive concepts? 

Their first reaction is usually disbelief that anyone thinks that there are topics in U.S. history that high school and college students shouldn’t learn about. They are very thoughtful when it comes to thinking about younger children. But by the time students get to their age — 16, 17, 18 — they just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that there is something dangerous in learning about slavery or learning about racial discrimination of any kind. And some of them who come through this course and start to understand how little they know about American history, some of them are angry that they weren't taught the things that they're learning.

We do have some really interesting discussions about patriotism and what it means to be patriotic. Because they pick up on a lot of that rhetoric, too, that the purpose of public education is to make students patriotic citizens. And so, I do always get a couple of students who ask things like, ‘Well, how can I learn all these terrible things that the United States has done and still be patriotic?’ And I think that's an incredible question. Where a lot of them come to by the end of the semester is that they need to know these things in order to be patriotic. That being ignorant is not patriotism.

I grew up in California, but I have reported from and lived in the South. And while I was there, I learned that students were taught a very different version of Civil War history — including one that glorified the so-called ‘Lost Cause’ mythology of the Confederacy. For me, learning about the regional and geographic differences in U.S. history education was very eye-opening. Taking this a step further, I wonder what this course is like for students who aren’t from the U.S. Have they drawn comparisons to places they come from?

I love it when international students in this class feel comfortable enough to start talking about their experiences. At Denison, we have a lot of students from Vietnam, a lot of students from China, a lot of students from India. And when they do start to open up and start to reflect on the kind of history they were taught in high school, it's clear that they do understand how much of what they learn is controlled by the state.

I'm thinking about Vietnam in particular because I had this one really smart, thoughtful student in my class this past fall who was from Vietnam. And he was very conscious of the fact that in Vietnam, history education has been tied very closely to reunifying and rebuilding the country over the last 50 years. 

And so he was actually able to talk in a way that I don't think most 18-year-olds can about the political uses of history in that nationalist context. And for some of my students who are from the U.S., I could see the wheels turning in their heads, when they start to realize, ‘Oh, this stuff serves a political purpose. And what might be the purpose it's serving in my state? Let me think about that.’

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The post The politics of teaching US history appeared first on Coda Story.

“Yes, it’s disturbing,” admitted Tim O’Brien, Microsoft’s general manager of AI programs, when news of the patent hit the headlines. For some, the notion of talking to a loved one from beyond the grave elicited feelings of revulsion and fear, something that philosophy researchers Joel Krueger and Lucy Osler call “the ick factor.” In October 2022, the U.K. researchers, based at Exeter and Cardiff universities respectively, published “Communing with the Dead Online,” a research paper that looks at the role that chatbots could play in the grieving process. Since then, the capabilities of artificial intelligence large language models have snowballed — and their influence on our lives. Krueger and Osler say we should consider how chatbots might help us in our darkest days by continuing our relationship with loved ones after they’ve died. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What role could a chatbot potentially play after a person has died?

Lucy: Sadly, Joe's dad died while we were researching this, which added a very different texture to the writing experience. It changed a lot of the conversations we were having around it.

Joel: I started thinking more carefully about some of the ways I wanted not just to preserve his memory but to create more active, and maybe dynamic, ways of maintaining his presence in my life. I started thinking about what role chatbots and more sophisticated technologies might play  in maintaining a continuing bond with him. 

For what it's worth, I'm still undecided. I'm not sure I'd want a chatbot of my father. But I started thinking more about this issue in that very real context, as I was negotiating my own grief. 

Tell me about the ‘ick factor’ — this response that I’m even having right now, thinking about talking to a family member via a chatbot from beyond the grave.

Lucy: If someone turns around and says, ‘Did you know that we can now create a chatbot of the dead that impersonates someone's style of voice?’ A very common reaction is: ‘gross,’ ‘ew,’ ‘that's really scary.’ There’s that kind of knee-jerk reaction. But we think that there might be interesting and complicated things to unpack there. People have this instinctive ick factor when it comes to conversing with the dead. There’s an old Chinese ritual, where there would be a paid impersonator of the dead person at a funeral who would play the role of the deceased, and I think lots of Western ears find that kind of startling and a bit strange. Historically, we recognize that. But because something’s unfamiliar is not a reason to say well, that’s got no worth at all. Grieving practices come in all shapes and forms. 

Do you think talking with a chatbot, after someone has died, would interrupt the natural grieving process? Or the stages of grief like denial, bargaining and acceptance?

Lucy: Using a chatbot of the dead isn’t about denying someone has died. It's about readjusting to a world where you're very aware that they have died, without letting go of various habits of intimacy. You don't have to just move on in a very stark sense. We can have a kind of nuanced and ongoing adjustment to someone's death and take time to emotionally adjust to the absence we now feel, as we learn to inhabit the world without them.

Joel: We've always employed various technologies to find ways to maintain a connection with the dead, and this is just one new form of these technologies. There are lots of ways of getting stuck, and certainly, we can get trapped in those patterns of not accepting the loss. For instance, someone could wake up each day, go through the same pictures, watch the same videos, scroll the same Facebook page. It's unclear to me whether there's any greater threat when it comes to chatbots. Chatbots do provide a much richer form of reciprocity, a kind of back-and-forth in which the person may feel more present than if we're just looking at a picture of them. 

Yes — and there are now AI programs that allow you to talk and interact with a video or hologram version of the person that has died. 

Joel: Yes! Since our research came out late last year, the world has already moved on so much. And some of the grief technology now already seems worlds ahead of a chatbot that's confined to some little textbox on a screen or a phone. 

Lucy: If you think about the “Be Right Back” episode of “Black Mirror,” it has some interesting implications for what the near future might look like. But I think we should be able to say that a chatbot and a living robot replica of a dead partner are different things. 

What are things you worry about with tech companies offering these so-called ‘chatbots of the dead’? 

Lucy: I am much more concerned, for instance, about data being sold from these programs. Or about these things being created as to be deliberately addictive. 

Joel: Or targeted advertising used on them, when you’re grieving. Imagine if you had a chatbot of your dead father, let's say, that you could activate anytime you want. You might say, ‘Dad, I’m feeling kind of low today. I really miss you.’ And he says, ‘I'm really sorry to hear that sweetheart. Why don't you go get the new frappuccino at Starbucks for lunch, and that will help elevate your mood?’

Funnily enough, that’s something my dad probably would say. 

Joel: You can imagine those kinds of targeted ads being built into the technology or very subtle, algorithmically calibrated ways to kind of keep you engaged and potentially keeping you stuck in the grief process as a way of driving user engagement. 

I think our concern is more about the people who are designing the chatbots than it is about the individuals who are using them. The real focus needs to be on issues of transparency, privacy and regulation. The motivations that people have for designing this sort of tech should be as a tool, as a continuing bond, instead of something that they want you to come back to again and again and again. And I realize that sounds a bit hopelessly naive when you're talking about companies that are driven first and foremost by driving profit.

The post Chatbots of the dead appeared first on Coda Story.

Khan, who became prime minister in 2018, was a former superstar cricketer known for his dashing good looks and his complicated love life. He ran for office, though, as a religious conservative, eager to clean up corruption in Pakistan. He now faces corruption charges himself and was arrested for allegedly receiving free land as a bribe from a Pakistani real estate tycoon. 

Ousted from office in April 2022, Khan remained a powerful opposition figure with a large and fervent support base. In November, just months after he had lost a parliamentary vote of no-confidence, Khan was shot while leading a protest rally to the Pakistani capital Islamabad. 

He was in a wheelchair when he was arrested on May 9, 2023 by a paramilitary force on the steps of the Islamabad High Court, where he was appearing on a separate matter. After Khan’s release on bail, he blamed the Pakistani army chief for his arrest, claiming he had a personal vendetta against him. Khan’s supporters turned much of their fury, after his arrest, on the army. In Pakistan’s 75-year history as an independent nation, it is unlikely that the army, a venerated and feared institution, has ever been confronted with such a show of public disgust. One protester was interviewed holding peacocks he had taken from the lavish house of an army officer in the northeastern city of Lahore. Army officers, the protestor said, were living in grand style on the “people’s money.”

As videos of Khan’s arrest went viral, and in the face of growing violence nationwide, the Pakistani government chose to suspend mobile internet across the country for an “indefinite period” and ban access to sites such as Twitter, YouTube and much-used messaging services such as WhatsApp. At the time of writing, while the internet was largely restored, social media services were still being disrupted.

The economic impact of the internet shutdown on an already crumbling economy has been significant. P@sha, a trade association for Pakistan’s information technology industry, said the industry is losing $3 to 4 million every day that the internet is blocked. Pakistan’s central bank reserves currently cover barely a month’s worth of imports, and the crisis is so severe that the ratings agency Moody’s believes Pakistan could default on its debts without a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

I spoke to Hija Kamran, a digital rights advocate from Pakistan who has been working to defend the rights of Pakistani citizens to access information online for almost 10 years. Hija strongly condemns the current internet shutdown and is concerned about the long-term damage it will inflict on the international investment climate in Pakistan and on the country’s once-exciting tech startups industry.

What has been the impact of the internet shutdown since May 9, when Imran Khan was arrested?

The shutdown has drastically impacted the ability of people to work, to earn money, and in this economy that is very concerning. Fiverr, a global hub for freelancers, has literally just barred Pakistanis from getting any jobs on the website due to the internet shutdown.

The banning of entire websites such as Twitter and YouTube is effectively censorship. We know from past experience that when YouTube is banned in Pakistan, industry is left behind, and it can take years to recover. Countries around us that were starting at the same point have now raced ahead of us. And we are never going to be able to compete because censorship and control over people’s access to the internet hinders tech companies and puts investors around the world off investing in Pakistan’s economy.

But is the internet shutdown necessary right now because of the internet’s potential use to incite violent protests? 

Internet shutdowns, either complete shutdowns or partial shutdowns, do not help Pakistan in any way whatsoever. Right now, the justification for the shutdown is national security, but there is no evidence we can point to anywhere in the world that shows that shutdowns help to restore security. In Pakistan, once the authorities shut down mobile internet services, did the protests stop? People were still killed, and public property was still destroyed. 

Are the authorities afraid of disinformation being spread if they do not shut down the internet?

Disinformation cannot be stopped through internet shutdowns. There have been multiple instances when there has been political unrest and the government resorted to internet shutdowns. What that has done is to promote even more disinformation. The internet is a way for people to access critical information, to fact-check information and to connect with each other. People still talk, still find ways to send WhatsApp messages, but now there is no way to provide credible information to large numbers of people. So shutdowns only promote disinformation and misinformation and, as a result, promote chaos.

How will this shutdown hurt Pakistan’s economy?

We can agree that there is a lot of money in the technology sector globally. Just across the border in India, Google has been making a lot of investments, and Apple has opened its first store. These are the kind of investments that Pakistan, too, could see in the future, but the atmosphere is too uncertain, too volatile.

Our technology startups have been doing very well over the past few years, but continual crackdowns on internet access and internet shutdowns are a major hurdle that prevent startups from raising any funding.

What is the way forward?

Immediately unban all platforms that have been banned and open up access to the internet. And that must be the only way forward. After Imran Khan’s release, you would expect that now the internet would be restored. But again, the internet shutdown was not about his arrest, it was about the protests. The shutdown ends up hurting ordinary people and the economy. Students use mobile data and wireless devices. So when you suspend the internet, you are also depriving children from attending class or accessing educational material. You also deprive people of their livelihoods. These are the hidden costs of internet shutdowns.

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India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, abstaining from voting on half a dozen resolutions at the United Nations General Assembly that called for Russia to withdraw from Ukraine and end the war. In a tightrope balancing act, India has stated that the “sovereignty and territorial integrity" of the countries involved must be respected while simultaneously maintaining close defense and economic ties with Russia. A recent report from a Finnish think tank named India one of five “laundromat” countries that have significantly increased their imports of Russian crude oil, which they go on to sell — in the form of refined oil products — to other countries, including those in Europe that have committed to helping restrict Russia’s revenue stream from fossil fuel sales.

This was the diplomatic backdrop against which a small Ukrainian cultural festival was held in the Indian capital Delhi last week — a tentative step toward the people-to-people contact Dzhaparova described. I met Masha Kondakova, a Ukrainian film director, at a screening of her 2020 documentary, “Inner Wars.” In 2017, Kondakova began to follow three Ukrainian women who served on the battlefield, two as combatants in the Donbas region, fighting against pro-Russian separatists, and one as a doctor in the Ukrainian army. The resulting film is a rare and urgent look at life as a woman on the front lines of war.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to make a film about women soldiers?

I saw a lot of movies about war from the male gaze. I always saw the men as the main characters, and I thought, ‘no, wait a second,’ and I discovered that there are women fighters on the front lines in Ukraine. When I started to work on the movie in 2017, we had limited positions for women in the army.

For example, even if a woman was a sniper or working in a mortar squad, she would be registered as a kitchen worker or someone making clothes. This meant even if women were joining as fighters or combatants, we would not receive the same treatment as male soldiers. If you’re a veteran, the government helps you. It’s not the same if you’re registered as working in the kitchen. By 2018, things changed. The women that I filmed joined the army when there were no positions for them as combatants. So these rare women warriors had to be brave enough to fight at the front line and also brave enough to fight for their rights within the army. These women proved they had a place in the army.

I wanted to give these women their voices, to show their faces, to show that women too are war heroes.

You said things changed for women in the army in Ukraine in 2018. What specific challenges do women soldiers defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion now face?

Women form about 23% of the army in Ukraine. It’s huge. Today we have more than 50,000 women who serve in the army. Around 7,000 are fighters on the front line. There are many more women now who are combatants in the war. This is voluntary. It’s not an obligation, it’s a choice. The army has never been adapted to suit women. But women are resilient. A friend of mine, an actress, learned how to be a first responder and give medical help on the battlefield. Also, there are a lot of women who have learned how to shoot. Until the beginning of 2022, before the invasion, even the uniform was not adapted for a woman’s body. All of that is changing now.  

Are any of the women you filmed in 2017 on the front lines again? Have you been in touch with them?

Yes. One of the women I followed, Elena, was in Bakhmut. She is a senior sergeant in the mortar battery in the Donetsk region. When I spoke to her, she told me about this terrible moment when her 10-year-old son called her at 4 a.m. and said that he was scared. There were explosions in Kharkiv, where he lives. She was defending the country, she told me. But at that moment, she couldn’t protect her son.

You live in Paris now, but you still have family in Kyiv. When were you last able to visit them?

My father and mother are physicians. My sister is a pianist. They never talk too dramatically about the war. My mother and sister temporarily joined me in Paris, but my father didn’t want to leave Ukraine. He is 70 years old. He can’t fight but he said, “I will at least protect my house.” I last went to Ukraine in August. I heard the sirens. It was powerful and kind of scary. I visited places where buildings were destroyed, where it was horrible like in Hostomel and Bucha. But people were still walking around. People were still kissing on the street. Life is stronger than death, that’s what I learned.

On your visit to India, what sort of response have you received about the war in Ukraine?

I met two people who were very supportive, who told me they felt ‘very, very sorry.’ These people were young. I met one tuk-tuk driver who was around 60 years old and spoke Russian. He said, ‘I talked to Vladimir Putin and he said everything will be okay.’ I said, ‘Oh great, for which country?’ There is a war. We are free to take positions, and I respect that. But when he said, ‘Ukraine and Russia are together,’ I had to say, ‘no, it’s been a long time, almost a century.’

I don’t judge anyone. But if somebody believes Ukraine somehow belongs to Russia, please educate yourself. I know Russian propaganda is very strong. I also know that Russia and India have a long relationship. From my point of view, supporting Ukraine doesn’t mean you become an enemy of Russia. But when innocent people are dying in Ukraine, children, women, I don’t understand the tolerance. Ukrainians showed from the very beginning of the invasion that they wanted to remain sovereign. They don’t want to be the slaves of Russian imperialists.

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Currently fraught with delays, deadlocks and difficulties, the AI Act has the potential to be as powerful as the EU’s landmark GDPR act, which regulates data protection in the European bloc. And there are many marginalized groups who could benefit from the new legislation or suffer disproportionately if certain amendments don’t make it through. 

For migrants crossing Europe in search of a safer and more dignified life, the law could have huge implications. Currently, Europe’s borders are a highly digitized, unregulated gray zone for tech companies and border agencies to test the latest developments in surveillance technology and predictive algorithms. 

Europe’s borders bristle with drones, tracking and predictive technologies designed to make efficient guesses at which routes migrants might take. AI-powered lie detectors are also being deployed on arriving migrants, along with a vast range of other technologies. The European border could be described as a “testing ground,” said Petra Molnar, Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Centre. I spoke to her about what AI regulation could mean for people on the move — and for all of us. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So why is the AI Act relevant for migrants crossing Europe?

Globally speaking, there are very few laws right on the books that can actually be used to govern tech. And currently, the border is a particularly unregulated space, and it’s become a testing ground for a lot of things, including tech. So the AI Act — if we can push through certain amendments — is a really unique opportunity to try and think through how we can create oversight, accountability and governance on all sorts of technologies at the border. 

This act touches on pretty much everything from toys to predictive policing and AI-powered lie detectors. We really want to get policymakers to think about whether the act goes far enough to regulate or even ban some of the most high-risk pieces of technology because currently, it really doesn't. But unfortunately, we don't have high hopes that the migration stuff is going to be taken up in the way that I think it should.

Why not?

If you zoom out from the AI Act and you look at just the way that the EU has been positioning itself on migration, then you can see that securitization, surveillance, returns and deportations, importation of technology and facial recognition have all been really normalized. The EU doesn't really have an incentive to regulate tech at the border, because it wants to test out certain things in that space and then potentially use them in other instances. And the same with the private sector. 

It’s also important to remember that there are vast amounts of money floating around to fund these tech projects. There’s money to be made on border tech — so that disincentivizes regulation. At the moment, it’s a free-for-all. And in an unregulated space, there’s a lot of room for experimentation. 

What do you mean by experimentation? What kind of things are being tested out in Europe right now that you would like to see the back of?

We are trying to get the European Union to think about banning, for example, predictive analytics used for border enforcement. It’s a tool to assist border guards with their operations to try to push back people on the move. The European Border agency Frontex has already signaled its willingness to develop predictive analytics for its own purposes. 

So how does predictive border policing work?

It works by using AI to predict which route a group of people on the move might take to cross a border, so that border enforcement can decide, for example, whether to station a platoon in a certain place. It helps them with their operations and can lead to pushbacks, which can potentially lead to rights-infringing situations. 

Can you explain what the difference is between border agencies using this kind of technology to try to predict where people are and just using their own brains?

So for the past few years, reports about pushbacks have been marred with allegations of human rights abuses. And we’re still having that baseline discussion and debate around the humanitarian side of pushbacks. But with predictive border analytics, it’s as if we’ve skipped a few steps in that discussion. Because this technology adds a layer of efficiency to basically make it easier for border agencies to meet their needs and their quotas. 

So we haven’t even properly talked about the humanitarian implications of these violent pushbacks and already they’re using technology to ramp up their operations. 

Right. There’s also very little transparency about what exactly is happening and what kind of tools are being used. There needs to be a complete rethink about why we’re even leaning on these tools in the first place. 

Can you talk a bit more about how the border is sometimes considered a separate space — and why it could be exempt from things like the AI Act?

So often the border gets conflated with national security issues. The space is already opaque and discretionary, but as soon as you slap on that national security label, it becomes very difficult to access information about what’s really happening. Responsibility, oversight and accountability are all muddied in this space — and that gets worse when you add tech on top of that. 

You’ve talked before about how the concept of the border is moving away from the physical frontier to much further afield — and even beginning to exist in our own bodies. Can you just explain that a bit?

There’s this idea of the “shifting border.” Sometimes people call it border externalization. It’s not anything super new: The U.S. has been doing it for a while. The basic idea is that it removes the physical border from its geographic location and pushes it further afield. Either kind of vertically up — like when you're talking about aerial surveillance, the border is now in the sky. Or creating a surveillance dragnet that starts thousands of miles away from the actual border. For instance, the U.S. border actually starts in Central America when it comes to data sharing and surveillance. And the European Union is really leading the way in terms of externalizing its border into North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Niger, for example, gets a lot of money from the EU to do a lot of border enforcement. If you can prevent people from physically being on EU territory, where international human rights laws and refugee laws kick in, then half your work is done. 

So basically someone is criminalized and marked out as a potential migrant before they’ve even tried to come to Europe?

Exactly. Predictive analytics and social media scraping tries to make predictions about who might be likely to move and whether they’re a risk. Like, ‘Oh, they happen to go to this particular mosque every Friday with their family, so let's mark that as a potential red flag.’ So the border as a physical space just becomes a performance. Even our phones can become a border. You can be tracked in terms of how you're interacting on Twitter or Facebook or TikTok. So we have to actually move away from these rigid understandings of what constitutes a border.

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The Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church have worked in lockstep to promote a conservative idea of “family values.” Russia has taken upon itself the role of principal opposition to the supposed excesses of Western progressives. Its soft power strategy, particularly evident since the start of its war in Ukraine, is to persuade much of the world that it is defending “traditional values” on the frontlines of the global culture wars. 

Kristina Stoeckl, a sociology professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, has spent years embedding herself in the transnational Christian conservative movement. It’s an alliance that spans borders and religions and is dedicated to protecting conservative values, a worldview that leads it to lobby and agitate against policies that protect women, the right to abortion and LGBTQ rights, among others. 

Co-authored with Dmitry Uzlaner, Stoeckl’s new open-access book, “The Moralist International,” examines how the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church have built up international alliances and support for its version of Christian social conservatism, in part by emulating the strategies of international human rights organizations.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you explain what the moralist international movement is?

It’s a movement of transnational moral conservatives, often religious, that try to work against liberal institutions and international human rights movements, which they see as too heavily driven by progressive liberal goals. These moral conservative alliances are often rooted in different religious traditions, but you also now get right-wing actors that are hooking onto the movement. Like Italy’s Lega Nord, or Hungary’s Fidesz for example. 

In the book, you talk about the World Congress of Families, a United States-based coalition that promotes conservative Christian values around the world and historically has strong ties with Russia. Tell me a bit about embedding yourself in this movement. 

I'm a sociologist and I do empirical research and fieldwork, and being inside that conservative milieu for a long time — it's tiring. It's also challenging. What I’m trying to do is to reconstruct their meaning. I want to understand why they think what they think, why they say what they say, and not just dismiss things at face value as illogical lies or propaganda. 

Because for them, it makes sense. And as scholars, we should understand how they construct their world and their meaning. So that’s the spirit in which I approach that world. Now that we’ve published our book, I’m not sure if it will be possible to go back.

I attended World Congress of Families events in Tbilisi, Chisinau and Budapest. My sense from the research was that a lot of people come to this milieu or begin attending something like the Congress of Families because of a very specific set of grievances. Maybe, for example, someone is worried about abortion and just thinks it's wrong or it shouldn't happen. Interestingly, I came across other people, like environmentalists who just think the world is heading in the wrong direction. 

And what this moralist movement does is couch their grievance in a bigger story. 

So what is that bigger story? 

The international moralist worldview tells the whole story of the 20th century in a new way. It reframes ideas around the society we live in and the political divisions we face. It tells people that capitalism and communism have both been equally bad for family values because in both systems, women have to work. 

It talks about how rights pertaining to sexual orientation and gender identity are useful to the capitalist system because confusing our identities means we can more easily be controlled as consumers. One layer of this worldview after another is introduced. And then a proposal for a new order of things is proclaimed. 

So for that person who is against abortion — maybe they’re not against gay marriage at first. But then this story is told to them, that gay marriage and abortion are both part of a bigger design that’s bad for families. And it becomes one big narrative all packaged up. And that’s threatening for democracies because it prevents solutions. 

What kind of solutions does a worldview like that prevent?

Take domestic violence for example. Domestic violence is a real problem, both in Russia and in many other countries. But it can’t be discussed properly in this movement. Because if you start talking about women’s rights, you also talk about gender, and then you talk about homosexuality, and then it all goes down a slippery slope. Real solutions to real problems are blocked by ideology.

In the book, you describe Russia as a “norm entrepreneur” for international moral conservatism. Can you describe what that means?

For a while, Russia wanted to become a leading actor in that moralist international world. And it did quite well at first. So in places like the U.N., Russia was very effective in pushing certain resolutions. For instance, the resolution in the United Nations Human Rights Council that says that a better understanding of traditional values can contribute to the protection of human rights. That’s clearly an agenda to say, ‘Well, the West should stop pushing a certain definition of human rights, and other definitions are also legitimate.’ At one point, the Russian Orthodox Church started to become very attractive to conservative Christians outside of Russia. Especially for those who believe that laws against hate speech are threatening conservative Christians. Russia became a kind of hero when it passed its so-called gay propaganda laws. And so, Russia began to push for this conservative agenda abroad, by financing NGOs, and I think that for a while, transnational moral conservative alliances were thriving because Russia was leading the way.  

What’s been the response from this movement since the war?

So the Christian groups that used to engage directly with Russia — for example, the American Homeschool Legal Defense Association and [conservative activists] CitizenGO — I get the sense they’re trying to hide or obfuscate their relationship with Russia. But I don’t think they have changed their views.

What has been Russia’s goal in establishing and funding these transnational conservative alliances?

One goal is basically to disturb what they perceive as a Western-dominated liberal world order, made up of the United Nations, the international human rights regime and so on. They do that by sponsoring and funding NGOs in the West that criticize these institutions and say, ‘We don’t agree with the direction our society is taking.’ 

From the Kremlin’s side, I think the second goal — which hasn’t really worked out — has been to build more stable alliances. Perhaps, when they invaded Ukraine, they thought that sanctions wouldn’t happen and protests against the war wouldn’t happen because of the alliances they had built around traditional values. That has not really worked, but Hungary is an example of how the moralist alliance can effectively lead to the blocking of EU sanctions.

Now with the war in Ukraine, it’s all become a lot more difficult for Russia. But things might easily have gone another way. Think about Italy. The response to the invasion might have been different if, instead of the Brothers of Italy, Salvini or Berlusconi, who are much more pro-Putin, had won. Or if Marine le Pen had won in France. So for Russia, it was about weaving political alliances from the beginning. 

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Writer Brett Scott has been covering how the banks are working towards a cashless world and what’s in it for them. His 2022 book, Cloudmoney, chronicles “cash, cards, cryptocurrency — and the war for our wallets.” He’s skeptical about the idea that the world is heading, irrevocably, for a future where cash doesn’t exist, where we can pay for everything with the swipe of a smartwatch or the blink of an eye.

Scott argues that a cashless society would sound the death knell for small businesses, and wipe out any remaining privacy we have, paving the way for a fully-fledged surveillance system. He’s campaigning for us to hold on to cash —- old, slow, and dirty as it may seem — if we want to hold onto our freedom.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Was there a moment in your personal life where you were suddenly switched on to the implications of a cashless future?

I've had a high degree of tech skepticism since I was very young. I was always suspicious of being told that I had to endlessly update. I was then working in finance and I also had a background in economic anthropology. I noticed a lot of the conversation around cashless societies was deeply inaccurate. People had internalized this idea that digital money was an upgrade to cash. They say things like — “my grandmother still likes cash, but she’ll eventually have to get with the times.” But really, they’re two systems that work in parallel. 

Are you saying people shouldn’t use digital money?

I’m not saying that. I’m saying that if you didn’t have another option, the digital payments system would become very oppressive. Think of it like Uber versus bicycles. So we might like the Uber system and find it convenient, but we don't want our entire transport under the control of Uber, right? Uber can be a positive thing — so long as you have the choice to not use it. Bikes can’t take you on long trips, they’re more localized. But they have their advantages. You can get around when there are traffic jams, you have autonomy over a bike, you control it yourself — and you can’t be tracked while riding them. 

Have you been following what Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been doing recently? She’s had quite a lot of backlash for saying cash is still king. 

Well, she's actually — bizarrely enough — the only politician that I know right now who is channeling a pretty left-wing take on money. And she’s absolutely right in the sense that all digital money is private. Cash is a public form of money issued by central banks or state entities. Whereas anything you see in a bank account is privately issued by the bank. Think of bank deposits like digital casino chips. And I've almost never seen a politician that actually understands that. So when Meloni says that the “cashless society is like the privatization of payments,” it's absolutely true.

But she has had a lot of criticism. People are claiming she’s helping uphold Italy’s black market and all the criminality and tax evasion that goes with it.

If you want to create a hygienic society and destroy all forms of black market deviance, whether it's criminal or not, you’ll end up with corporate domination. Let's say you try to crush all forms of shitty behavior by forcing everybody to use the banking sector. Well, now you’ve created a whole bunch of new problems. You've created serious resilience problems in the economy. You’ve created credible new vectors for inequality. Your banking elites, your tech elite, suddenly now control everything: all access to economic interaction in your society. If you suddenly defer control of the entire system to an oligopoly of private sector players, that gives them enormous power. You have to maintain the cash system if you want to create counter-power to that.

Now all those players and a bunch of other people are going to argue that the cash system is allowing various forms of black market crime to exist. But the fact is, the cash economy has always been associated historically with the most marginal people in society. And a cashless society probably wouldn’t actually solve the problem of crime — it’s well known that the banking center is extensively used for crime all the time. 

What does a cashless society mean for the surveillance industry?

A cashless world leaves these huge data trails. There are well-known examples of intelligence agencies spying on payment networks. Right now, the worst excesses of that type of surveillance are dampened because there is an alternative, right?

You mean there’s currently a way to fly under the radar by using cash. 

Right. The thing about the cash system is that you can't steer people's behavior. Once it's out of the system, cash becomes far more localized and has a much more organic way that it moves around. But let's say there's a total implosion in the cash system, and it's allowed to happen. Maybe the world wouldn't necessarily immediately become some giant surveillance state –– but the potential for that outcome becomes much much greater. A cashless world has crazy potential for surveillance. And crazy potential for censorship.

What does a cashless society have to do with censorship?

It's about the ability to control people through their behavior. People’s activities can be monitored — but they can also be blocked by simply freezing their accounts. Think about the crazy levels of trauma faced by someone who can't get access to the banking sector in a society that won't take cash. Think about the crazy levels of economic terror that a person would face if they got excluded from the payment system in a cashless society. Right now we have a buffer against us if we get locked out of the banking sector, like if our cards are lost or stolen. We always have cash as a backup. 

What do you think will happen if no one starts to engage with the arguments against a cashless society?

I don’t think most people want a cashless society. If you ask people if they like digital payments, most people will say yes. But if you ask them if they want cash to be taken away from them most people will say no. People don't like having options removed from them. But many people aren’t able to articulate this, say, in the bougie coffee shop that only accepts digital payments. Many people feel a bit weirded out by the fact that they can't use cash — but often, they don't have an argument. They can't articulate it. And they have no ideological support from the political class and the business class. So they'll just think “oh, well, I guess I'm a bit old school or something.”

So how does a cashless society take shape?

It’s kind of a feedback loop. The bank stops taking cash, meaning small businesses can't deposit cash, which means they're less likely to accept cash. So then access to cash goes down. ATMs start closing. And so on. In order to stop this feedback loop, you have to actually act against it — and start putting in access to cash laws, like what Meloni is doing. And you also have to actually build a cultural movement that says it's totally okay to demand a non-automated form of payment. It has to go against this narrative that we all want a cashless world because it’s so convenient because it's cleaner, because it's faster, and so on. Because the reality is, for all this so-called convenience, people are more burnt out than they’ve ever been before. We have less time than we’ve ever had before. We’re more confused and disorientated than we’ve ever been. And this is what happens in an accelerating capitalist system. And if you don't sync up, you get thrown off the edge.

The post In a cashless society, banking and tech elites control everything appeared first on Coda Story.

The proposed ban is part of a sweeping legislative package that builds off of the conservative governor’s ongoing campaign to control the parameters of how America’s legacy of racism is taught in public schools. In announcing the policy, DeSantis — a former history teacher whose views on the Civil War prompted students to create a parody video in which they pretended to be him and argued that the war “was not about slavery,” according to the New York Times — declared that the changes “will ensure Florida’s public universities and colleges are grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization.”

In addition to eliminating diversity programs, the proposal would also give university presidents wide-ranging power over hiring, firing, and tenure decisions, and require colleges to prioritize majors that could lead to high-wage-earning jobs over degrees that promote “political agendas.”

Jeremy C. Young, a historian who works for the freedom of expression organization PEN America tracking censorship efforts in higher education, called DeSantis’ proposal an “all-out assault on the autonomy of higher education” that, if enacted, would impose the most draconian restrictions on public colleges and universities in the United States.

The proposed legislation is the latest attempt by DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender, to limit classroom instruction on the history of racism in America. On January 12, the Florida Department of Education banned an advanced placement course for high schoolers focused on African American studies because it included coursework about reparations — a move DeSantis, who also signed legislation in 2021 prohibiting the instruction of critical race theory in public schools, staunchly defended.

But the effort to codify a so-called “anti-woke” view of history into policy is not just a Florida phenomenon. Since 2021, at least 18 states have passed laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory or "divisive concepts” about racism and sexism. Other states have attempted to create hotlines or websites to report teachers who violate critical race theory or divisive concept bans. Experts tracking these legislative efforts say they show no sign of slowing down this year as lawmakers in statehouses across the country propose bills aimed at restricting how teachers discuss the country’s past and present.

To better understand the national picture of America’s history battles, I called up PEN’s Jeremy C. Young. We talked about what distinguishes DeSantis’ proposed legislation from the laws that have already passed and why he sees the policy as lifting a page from the global authoritarian playbook. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A lot of big news about higher education has come out of Florida in the last few weeks. DeSantis announced his intent to gut colleges of critical race theory and diversity programs, and the state’s Department of Education eliminated a high school advanced placement course on African American Studies. You have been monitoring these kinds of legislative actions across the country, and I’m curious how you compare these two efforts. Does one of them stand out to you as especially noteworthy or unprecedented?

It’s a race to the bottom. I think I would probably start with the higher education proposal, what DeSantis refers to as higher education reform, which would really result in the total capture and control of public higher education institutions in Florida by the state government.

Among other provisions, the proposals that DeSantis laid out would ban all diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory initiatives in colleges and universities. It would ban any funding for them, including from private sources. It would effectively end tenure protections for faculty by giving boards of trustees the power to hire faculty members separate from those recommended by the faculty hiring committees, and it would also allow them to call a tenure review at any time for a tenured faculty member, essentially eliminating the protections of tenure.

It would also rewrite the mission statements of colleges and universities by the state. It would force colleges and universities to deprioritize certain majors which are considered by the government to be furthering a political agenda. If enacted, that package of proposals would be the most draconian restrictions on higher education probably in the history of the United States.

What distinguishes this proposal from other attempts to exert control over public university systems or their curricula? What makes this one so extreme?

The part of this that is unique is the attacks on the institutional autonomy of universities. In the United States, free expression at universities is guaranteed in part by institutional autonomy. That is to say, the government does not have day-to-day control over the inner workings and decisions made at the university, and those decisions instead are delegated to Boards of Trustees who in turn make those decisions through a process of shared governance, where all stakeholders at the university — faculty, staff, students, alumni, administrators  — work together to build policies. And those policies are then adopted by the Board of Trustees. 

We have seen waves of legislation, including in Florida in the past couple of years, that have restricted classroom instruction. But these policies go further because they also restrict the ability of governing boards to make their own decisions about their university. If you have the governor at a state rewriting college mission statements, you no longer have institutional autonomy. If they can't write their own mission statements, then they don't have any meaningful autonomy at all. 

So what really sets this apart from some of these other laws that restrict what can be taught in public universities is this attempt to subvert the public university system’s autonomy. This autonomy is, as you said, part of what fosters academic freedom in higher education. And that academic freedom – freedom from government and political intrusion in higher education – is part of what makes a democratic society. 

Our reporting at Coda has explored how educational censorship and book bans have taken root in backsliding democracies, such as Hungary and Turkey. When it comes to higher education, I would imagine there are parallels.

Hungary has banned entire fields of study and Poland has banned political history centers because the government doesn't like the research that they do. And what is being proposed here —  the state government being able to make these decisions about deprioritizing majors, rewriting mission statements, banning initiatives — is absolutely right out of the global authoritarian playbook. There is no meaningful difference between those provisions and what we see in those other countries. 

What about the elimination of the African American Studies course for Florida high schoolers? Did you see that coming?

There have been political controversies around advanced placement courses in the past. Most notably in 2014, when the College Board proposed a revision of the U.S. history course that was criticized by many conservatives as being an overly negative portrayal of American history. And the College Board responded to that, including some threats in Oklahoma and other states to disapprove the course, by adding a section in the course called American Exceptionalism that featured glowing statements that were positive about American history. So it's not surprising to see the College Board make these changes. They've made changes like this before.

What is surprising is for the governor of Florida and the state education department to outright reject a course. That’s never happened in the history of the advanced placement program, which goes back to 1952. And it's worth noting that there was a pilot classroom of this course going on at a lab school at Florida State University. The governor's office told the school that they had to cancel the pilot class that students were actively taking. So the willingness to deprive students of access to this causal material, including students who are already taking the class, is really unprecedented.

And this is all happening in tandem with all sorts of other state restrictions on what can be discussed in the classroom — more than a dozen states have passed legislation banning the instruction of critical race theory, or “divisive concepts.” I saw a headline a few days ago about a bill in Iowa that would attempt to create a website registry for parents to report teachers who violated the state's divisive concept bill that passed two years ago. Have you seen that elsewhere? What kinds of bills are you seeing?

We have definitely seen a variety of hotline provisions, including in states that don't even have these bills on the books, such as Virginia. These hotline provisions would involve people essentially snitching on their neighbors, on the teachers in their students’ classroom, to some kind of state authority who would then threaten their job for saying something that a particular parent didn’t like. And these bills, they've continued to proliferate this year. The rate this year of introduction is almost as great as the rate last year. We've seen over 70 [educational gag order] bills introduced already this year.

When I was talking to people about book restrictions in school libraries for my Coda piece, I was largely focused on elementary school, middle school and high school. And I asked historians and censorship experts if there was a historical precedent for the current volume of school and library book restrictions and bans. Several experts told me that a 1980s-era moral panic around Satanism led to a wave of book bans, but the last time that the country saw something of this magnitude was during McCarthyism. Do you see that historical parallel in higher education too?

I think McCarthyism is the right comparison. The laws promoted during that era — requiring faculty members to sign loyalty oaths saying that they were opposed to communism or laws restricting the teaching of particular subjects and government intervention in creating new, politicized departments in universities — were all hallmarks of the early Cold War and McCarthy era. 

And interestingly, many of those speech-related cases related to the loyalty oaths led to some of the most shining Constitutional jurisprudence in our history defending free expression in educational settings and elsewhere. And so the hope is that there will be some sort of legal protections around some of these areas that are being challenged. But just as it did in the McCarthy era, many of those decisions weren't rendered until the 60s or 70s, so it could be a long time.

The post Why Florida’s new university restrictions are ‘straight out of the global authoritarian playbook’ appeared first on Coda Story.

Then the new year came, bringing with it Heger’s determination to cobble together a new parliamentary majority to see out his party’s four-year term. However, after going cap in hand to all possible partners, Heger conceded defeat on January 17 and said he would begin discussions about early elections this fall.

For Robert Fico, the former prime minister and one of Slovakia’s leading populists, a return to the ballot box couldn’t wait. Fico, who resigned from office in 2018 following the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, has said multiculturalism “is a fiction” and called for Slovakia to cease all aid to Ukraine. Now buoyed by growing support in the polls, Fico’s Smer party initiated a referendum on January 22 that would have cleared the way for early elections by amending the country’s constitution. Despite these efforts the plebiscite failed to meet the 50% turnout needed to validate the results.

Now Slovakia, a small country roughly the size of West Virginia, is holding its breath. With elections likely to be held on September 30, 2023, the race for power is expected to be rife with disinformation and old-fashioned scare tactics. The shadow of populism also looms. Fico’s Smer party is second in the polls to HLAS–SD, a social democratic party founded in 2020 by former members of Smer.

There is also a lot at stake. Slovakia is facing a cost-of-living crisis and its health care is in disrepair. The country is also on the frontline of Russian disinformation in Europe and its 5.4 million residents share a border with Ukraine. To better understand the mood in Slovakia and why the country might take another populist turn, I spoke to Juliana Sokolova, a Slovak philosopher and writer based in the eastern city of Kosice. Her key message: Slovakia’s descent is not guaranteed. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There has been a lot of political turmoil in Slovakia recently, but what is the general mood in the country?

At the moment, the political situation and the general atmosphere influence each other. To me, it feels like an intermediary period because we’re waiting for what’s going to happen. Of course, we know that there are people ready to vote because they are swayed by populist narratives but that is not something which surrounds me daily. There are also people who resist these narratives and have other views, so I wouldn’t say it’s completely bleak. It’s truly difficult to generalize at the moment because the situation is different depending on where you work or where you live.

If you look at the polls in Slovakia, there is support for populist narratives. Why is that the case?

Populism anywhere is successful because populists test issues and use ones that will resonate with people by arousing strong emotions, so it doesn’t arise randomly. It’s calculated and it’s the same in Slovakia. Of course, the issues are country-specific, but the mechanisms are the same. When I was growing up, the main nationalist and populist issue was around Slovak-Hungarian relations, they tried to create this idea of Slovak nationality away from the Hungarian minority and their language. Today, this topic no longer resonates, so they turned to the language of suspicion in relation to the LGBT community. They use the words “ideology,” or “agenda,” or “platform,” to create the idea that there is a scheme which is a threat to people.

The LGBT topic is one that has been pushed and massaged in Slovakia. It’s also a narrative across Russian disinformation media. It’s a mix of these factors, along with algorithmic targeting through the creation of sensationalist headlines, that have made the issue what it is. If you look back, 10 to 15 years ago people in Slovakia weren't saying LGBT was their main issue. It’s to an extent a created feeling.

Slovakia’s southern neighbor, Hungary, has become isolated on the world stage due to its position on Ukraine. Its Prime Minister Viktor Orban is also looking for friends. Could early Slovak elections help in this regard?

I do think Orban is waiting to see what is going to happen with Putin’s imperialist project and how it will impact the future of his own [illiberal] project. Fico dreams of being an Orban, that was always his ambition, but he wasn’t able to entrench himself in the same way Orban did in Hungary. Slovaks were also able to check Fico more than Hungarians were able to check Orban. But, yes, Fico is the same cut of populist with the same ambition. 

That said, Fico’s return to frontline politics is not a done thing. What is more likely in early elections is that the party that separated from Fico, HLAS, will make it. Now, that party is full of former Smer people who have tried to situate themselves on a more traditional spectrum, but we must remain suspicious of them. They have the ability to bend their views depending on possible power-sharing agreements. 

Slovakia is subject to a lot of Russian disinformation. Does this highly charged language and information pollution affect your work?

As a writer, you are very sensitive to the context in which you write, and even though it’s not always a conscious dialogue, it can affect your work. When the language of politics is stale and removed from life, you can feel the need to balance it out by using words that are fresh and strong. It’s also very useful to think about how we can describe the life we are living with different words. We often use clichéd or standardized sentences that block our thinking. A good example of this is the word “bubble,” as in social bubble. It has such a fixed meaning. So, we need other sentence structures and words that open new ways of speaking, and then maybe thinking. 

It’s also socially important to try and see how very manipulative and highly charged language can be neutralized or converted into something else. When it comes to Russian disinformation in Slovakia we have a big problem with the quality of education. I think our education system is not strong on fostering critical analysis of the media. This is very important. 

Given everything happening in Slovakia, a war next door, a contentious election coming up, disinformation swirling around, how do you see the country going forward?

It’s difficult because I’m not feeling gloomy, I cannot explain why. Of course, when you name all these things, our situation might not look great. But I do think that Slovak society is varied enough, that there are deeply entrenched progressive and educated groups and individuals operating throughout the country that can sustain us. The main thing for me is seeing what I can do to ensure that parties that employ controversial rhetoric have the least influence in the future government, that is a key priority. But I don’t have a sense that this country is heading to a dark place. 

The post A hard line Slovak nationalist plots his return to power appeared first on Coda Story.

A darker tale emerges from a company called Neuralink, owned by Elon Musk. While Musk roiled the internet with wild changes of direction and bewildering new rules of engagement at Twitter, Neuralink has been under investigation for allegations of animal abuse and suffering resulting from Musk’s orders to rush animal testing. The company is trying to invent implanted brain devices that will cure neurological impairments like enabling paralyzed people to walk again.

These may seem like something out of a sci-fi novel, but the underlying technology for both is not far-fetched. 

Implantable technology has evolved from life-sustaining things like pacemakers to what Dr. Katina Michael calls life-enhancing tech.

Michael is a professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. She is a leading scholar in emerging technologies, and has interests in how technologies are used for national security and the social implications that may result. I sat down to talk with her about the risks that come with that life-enhancing tech being implanted in the human body. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Devices like Apple Watches or Fitbits aren’t new. Can you give us a brief history of the blurring of the line between human bodies and technology?

Humans used to fit inside the machine, if you look back into the 1940s and the ENIAC, the first general purpose computer. And then silicon came into the picture and changed everything. More and more, we went from large-scale computers to mini computers to microcomputers to wearable computers. And now we are looking at biomedical devices, for example, that are embedded in the human body. So we've juxtaposed being inside the machine and the machine being inside us. 

I think what has happened is computers used to store what we think; computers now know what we feel. There's a complete difference here. I used to have to ask somebody via telephone, “What's your opinion on this? How does it make you feel?” But with embedded or wearable sensors, you don't have to ask that question anymore. We know when someone has sweaty palms, if they're stressed, if their pulse rate is high or low. 

The greatest invention that has allowed this to come closer and closer to the body, of course, is the smartphone. But now, that's not enough because it's too cumbersome, and it's not as accurate as if it could be embedded. There were many patents in the 1990s for personal digital assistants before smartphones came onto the scene. They used to have embedded PDAs in the upper tricep or wearable PDAs on a head-mounted unit. But now we're saying, well, why do we need this clunkiness? Why not brain-to-brain interfaces? Why not brain-to-computer interfaces?

Are there certain technologies that are emblematic of the trend of tech increasingly becoming part of the human body?

You can't go past Elon Musk's Neuralink. But to be honest, this is really late in the game. He created Neuralink in 2017. 

But going back 20 years, there was a company on the New York Stock Exchange by the name of VeriChip. The parent company was Applied Digital Solutions. They had a patent for an implantable device in the right tricep that indicated they would be exploring a variety of applications, such as being able to secure a physical space. Instead of using a radio-frequency identification card, you would use the implantable. There was a veripay system. Instead of using a credit card that you had to lug around in a purse, you could actually use a free arm to get a read on an implantable device.  

I visited the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, Spain in 2009 that was using a system for frequent visitors. There were over a hundred patrons that were chipped in that club. There have been hundreds of use cases since then. There's been SJ Railways in Sweden that created implantables for VIP customers on their trains. So instead of somebody coming past and scanning your ticket to see if you were a valid passenger, they would simply scan your arm. 

These are all companies that exist or have existed that have tinkered in the implantable space. So I'm not really looking for a Musk-like figure to come in and say, “Oh, look, we've demonstrated the business case for implants.” People have been demonstrating that since around 1998. We just don't know about it because it comes and goes as a fad. The thing is, when will the market be ready for that next leap?    

At what point does this become more widespread? 

It could be in a number of different scenarios. I often talk about the three C's — control, care and convenience. There's a fourth one called the cool factor.

We just have to look at the pandemic. The Western Australian police bought $3 million worth of anklet devices to put on people that weren't adhering to quarantine if they had Covid-19.

It could be we’re just fed up with all the wires. I have a device for this and that. The big suppliers are probably waiting for that one-stop-shop security device. You don't have to remember passwords or use biometrics or two-factor authentication. It's just you. Of course, there are risks with that kind of approach. The other line of thinking is, well, it's time. Why are we still holding our keys in our hands? We could enter our vehicle and our home with a proximity chip. It can't be that bad. Surely, someone's not going to chop off our arm to get access to a physical location. So there are all these reasons we're being told the benefits far outweigh the risks. 

What are those risks?

I am concerned about control. I'm worried about how care and convenience will be used as an argument: I'm doing this because I care about you, and you need it because you have dementia or schizophrenia or you're a harm to yourself or you're incarcerated. So I'm doing this for your own good, and I care about you. 

In totality, it points to what we define as “uberveillance.” 

Uberveillance. What is that? 

It's embedded surveillance. It's the ultimate form of surveillance. Big Brother on the inside looking out. Which is subject to misinformation, information manipulation and misrepresentation.

The problem is the context is missing. You can have this near real-time omnipresence, but never omniscience. You can't play God. You can't pretend to be a star in the heavens that can see everything that's going on and know what you're thinking. Uberveillance attempts to infer your context without asking you what you are doing. 

Okay, maybe 95% of the time I might get the story right because of inferences, patterns of behavior, habits. Human activity monitoring will show us each week that we participate in almost exactly the same things at almost exactly the same time. That other 5% we can't infer and shouldn't infer. Context is missing. We can't take innocent people and convict them of crimes. We need to give people their space. We're not robots. 

Here’s an example. I was awarded an Australian Research Council grant to study location-based services and implantable devices. I gave my students three days of my personal data: GPS data showing my altitude, the direction of travel, time stamps every 30 seconds and the X and Y coordinates of my location. And I told them, you tell me what I've been doing in these three days. I wanted to see how different their responses would be. 

They found I was in Kiama in Australia one day and then in Derby in the U.K. the next day and then came back to Kiama. They asked me, how did you travel to the U.K. and come back? Now, obviously, I had not. There were errors in the GPS data that happened naturally. For some reason, the GPS locked me to Derby. I wasn't there. Then they said, oh, my goodness, you were speeding at 260 kilometers per hour. No, I was not. My car was old. It does not go that fast. But nobody questioned the data. They were questioning me about my ability to be in ten places at once. They all got it wrong because we trust the data. 

What does that tell you about the potential risk of relying heavily on implantable technology like this? 

Most of the proponents of these technologies basically say deploy now, worry about the risk later. I'm not of that opinion. You don't want to go down a path or a point of no return. 

We start to try to constrain people in a particular way. They can't breathe. When you can't breathe, you just want out. And so my fear is that this kind of technology will be used to track in an inhuman way. It's inhuman. We're not machines. We shouldn't be replicating models of machines.

And even if we do place digital technology in the human body, the brain is not stupid. We will override based on our intuition and intelligence. Our brain is smarter than the machine. We know we're being mechanized and digitized. 

What’s the path forward with this technology?

Many of the people I've spoken to through research have said the ideal scenario is to keep that technology on the outside. So if you want to rip it off your head or you want to do away with it for 24 hours because you just don't want to be connected to the grid, you can. You have the autonomy. 

In the end, that's what we're talking about — human dignity, human rights, autonomy, our ability to make decisions for ourselves. But if you embed devices, this notion of switching off is not so easy. You can switch off, but remotely, someone’s still tracking it. That's not switching off completely. 

Once you embed that device, the manipulation heightens. The ability to control others is much more heightened than we realize. You can have control, convenience, care and cool. But the dominant theme is control. It doesn't matter what application. The underlying concept is control.

The post The machine is inside you appeared first on Coda Story.

Antisemitic incidents — assault, harassment and vandalism — in the U.S. climbed to an unprecedented level in 2021 and look set to rise again in 2022, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The number of incidents has averaged more than seven per day.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, said, in a recent interview to Michelle Boorstein and Isaac Armsdorf in the Washington Post, that “empirically, something is different. The level of public animosity towards Jews is higher than it’s been in recent memory.” 

Rothschild tries to figure out exactly why antisemitism has become different. A journalist, book writer and a frequent presence on cable news networks, Rothschild specializes in conspiracy movements, disinformation, antisemitism and QAnon. He believes the present moment is an interregnum between two conspiracy movement cycles.

We sat down — virtually — to discuss the attempted coup in Germany, aristocratic conspiracy theories, the centuries-long hate campaign directed at the Rothschild family (he’s writing a book on the European banking family, but there is no relation) and what’s next for QAnon. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

It does sometimes feel like we’re in a never-ending tailspin, what with the Musk takeover, the U.S. midterms, the Germany coup and the Ye news. But I guess for you, as a conspiracy theory expert, the past month must have been extra crazy. Or was it just another month at the office?

There's never a day where not much happens. During the runoff in Georgia, there was just cycle after cycle of these really ridiculous candidates, saying these disqualifying things over and over that built to a crescendo. A lot of people were really afraid about how it would turn out. But some of the worst conspiracy theorists and election-denier candidates did lose in the end. 

I think for the past few years we’ve become used to prepping for the most unlikely, outlandish scenario. But that didn’t quite happen this time. 

We looked down the precipice and we took a step back. Who knows if it will last. We're in a time where we're not completely rid of the last cycle of insanity yet. The next one hasn't really hit yet. For now, things seem a little bit calmer. 

People mistakenly think Kanye West’s outbursts contain something new. What’s your impression of where he might be getting these narratives?

Well, it's a really good question. The stuff he’s spouting, none of it is new. This idea of “Jews are too powerful and too wealthy” is as old as time.

One of the things he talks about is how there are 300 Zionists who run the world. That's a really specific reference to the conspiracy theory of the Committee of 300 — that there are 300 Jews who run the world. It’s not a number he picked out of thin air. Someone put that in front of him. 

It's really important to understand that there is an antisemitic industry and it never completely goes away. Is there anything that’s more popular than antisemitism? Right now, the answer is no. 

I personally feel we’re in a kind of holding pattern until we graduate to the next level of crazy. 

Right. We're in this weird time between conspiracy movements. The ideas around the “stolen election” are really sort of petering out. They tried to get it going with the midterms, but it didn't really take. QAnon’s branding, the iconography and the catchphrases are receding. So it’s a good time for public antisemitism to make a resurgence.

We’ve been seeing it called “the high tide of antisemitism.” Do you agree?

I would say certainly it hasn’t been this bad since before the Second World War. We're now at a point where there isn't an obvious enemy right now — there might be in the future — so it's easy to focus on “Jewish power.”

I’m interested in what you said about QAnon receding. Can you explain what you mean?

All the decoding, “Q-drops” and hashtag stuff is receding because ideas about the deep state, Covid being a hoax and the pedophile cabals are being talked about at a very mainstream level. The ideas behind QAnon no longer need to be hidden behind riddles. There’s just no need for QAnon. 

What do you think of the German coup attempt?

I knew about the Reichsburger movement because they were linked to QAnon. It’s kind of a grab bag of conspiracy beliefs. There’s a bit of Q, there’s some sovereign citizen, “the laws don't apply to us” stuff. But it’s also very German. They are monarchists, wanting to restore the Kaiser and go back to the German Confederation of 1871.

What gave you the idea to write a book about the Rothschilds?

I’d like to put “no relation” on the cover. The influence of Rothschild conspiracy theories is really still being felt. Look at Alex Jones, who has pushed Rothschild conspiracy theories for decades. He was inspired when he was a kid by a book called “None Dare Call It Conspiracy.” And that book was inspired by books that came out in the 1950s about Jewish influence on the Federal Reserve, which in turn was inspired by the work of people like Ezra Pound. So it’s just one cycle after another. And of course tropes about Jews and money go back thousands of years. 

I’m always curious about people who follow conspiracy theories for a living — day to day. What’s it like for you, particularly as you're Jewish?

I do find myself having to close the laptop and go outside or take a walk or water the plants or something. I live in Los Angeles, and there have been a lot of anti-Jewish incidents recently, with people hanging banners over the freeway saying “Kanye was right.” It's a reminder that there's always going to be a part of the public who looks at Jewish people with suspicion and paranoia and conspiracy. Jew hating never completely goes away. It's stuck around for century after century after century because people get something out of it.

The post Antisemitism has never been new appeared first on Coda Story.

A November 24 apartment fire in Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, killed at least 10 people and injured at least nine more. Reports that zero-Covid measures delayed firefighters from reaching the blaze prompted unprecedented protests around the country.

State media in China have been blaming foreign forces and trying to distract viewers, which are typical strategies, said Joshua Kurlantzick, the author of a new book, “Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World.” 

Chinese media outside the country have had a more interesting response.“They’re not trying to make a major effort to spin it, since it’s pretty hard to spin for foreign audiences,” said Kurlantzick, who is also a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. Instead, they appear to be flooding social media platforms like Twitter with “massive amounts of spam to make it harder for reporters and independent observers to access information about what’s going on.”

In his new book, Kurlantzick analyzes how China is working to become a global media and disinformation superpower through an arsenal of tactics, including through state media, disinformation campaigns and digital infrastructure. 

China’s information efforts “could give Beijing more influence over the information that publics in many states consume — on the internet, through social media, on television, and on the radio,” he writes. Beijing’s investments have paid off in some areas — but far from all of them, Kurlantzick found.

I recently spoke with Kurlantzick about his new book. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you give me your book’s elevator pitch? 

I started out thinking that China was building a very large disinformation and state media influence apparatus and was becoming fairly successful at influencing the domestic politics and societies of other countries over the past decade, which it hadn’t really focused on doing except in a few places like Taiwan. That was my original thesis. 

I had seen a big growth in China’s efforts to build up its media and wield information tools and disinformation. Pro-Beijing entrepreneurs were buying up the local Chinese-language media so that there were very few non-pro-Beijing options for Chinese media. 

And what I found is they have had some success, but in reality a lot of the funds and time spent to expand state media, making it credible and wielding disinformation and influence in other countries, has actually not worked and in many cases has backfired. China has developed this massive effort to influence other countries, but it has failed as often as not. 

What are the main elements of China’s media offensive? 

One element is actual state media, like CGTN, China Radio International and Xinhua. The Xi administration has spent a huge amount of money expanding them and trying to upgrade them by hiring quality foreign journalists. But those have almost completely failed. Xinhua has had more success. Xinhua has signed a lot of content sharing agreements with a lot of news agencies around the world. In developing countries, Xinhua is increasingly stepping into the void left by other news wires like the Associated Press, because Xinhua content is free or cheap. 

The second prong is control over information pipes, building cables, 5G networks, etc. China has had some success with that in Africa and other places, but they are losing out as Western countries increasingly crack down on a lot of their efforts. 

The third prong is an increasingly sophisticated use of disinformation. They have become more sophisticated at using bots and flooding sites with disinformation. For instance, Meta and Twitter recently reported efforts by China to spread disinformation online to influence the U.S. midterm elections in November. 

What’s in it for China? 

Beijing felt that the entire global media environment was dominated by outlets that were from liberal democracies — NBC, CNN, other major Western news outlets — and that those outlets didn’t cover China fairly. They wanted to be able to get China’s story out there. They wanted to promote China’s own model and also get their views out there and build networks that were capable of delivering this message. 

You wrote that the Chinese government tried and failed to make CGTN like Al Jazeera, which is owned by the Qatari government. What went wrong? 

They wanted CGTN to be regarded as a credible source of information, like Al Jazeera. But the idea that China could have had something like Al Jazeera was always something of a fantasy. Qatar is a small state, and it has significant foreign policy on a few certain issues. But outside of those issues, Qatar has basically left its Al Jazeera reporters alone. China was never going to be able to do that because virtually any issue could have an impact on China. 

You write about the dominance of Xinhua’s content sharing agreements, especially with local news outlets in Southeast Asia. What are the implications of those agreements for people in their daily lives? 

Xinhua has had success at reaching audiences, and so those Chinese-language readers are getting a skewed view. It’s dramatically cutting them off. But the greater danger is Xinhua increasingly developing content sharing agreements with local language outlets. Like in Thailand, now there are a lot of Thai-language outlets using Xinhua content. That’s going to become more common in Southeast Asia, except in Singapore, where outlets have the money to pay for the major global wires. 

That’s going to be a serious problem because you’re going to have Xinhua copy increasingly picked up by a lot of local news outlets in the local languages. Readers don’t really notice where it comes from. That’s going to skew the views of the general reading public, and that’s quite dangerous. 

The post How China became a global disinformation superpower appeared first on Coda Story.

But people from countries such as Iraq and Cameroon who are trying to come across another border with Poland have received a starkly different response. Further north along the EU member state’s border with Belarus, their pleas for help are being ignored. 

Initially angered by EU sanctions following Belarus’s rigged presidential election in August 2020, strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko lured people from around the world to his country on the false promise that they can get easy access to a safer future in western Europe. Hoping that an increase in asylum seekers will sow discord across the EU, Belarusian authorities have ferried men, women and children to the border with Poland and forced them to cross since mid-2021.

Poland’s response has been heavy-handed. As the number of attempted crossings swelled last fall, human rights groups documented unlawful cases of pushbacks by Polish border guards, a practice that continues to this day. The border area was also militarized, and an exclusion zone established.

European Union leaders in Brussels have been positive on Poland’s actions, as the issue of how to respond to migration is largely considered the business of individual member states. When Warsaw announced in January that it had started construction on a metal wall along the Belarusian border to keep people out, European allies issued no objections.

Despite the 18-foot-high and 116-mile-long barrier, people have not been deterred from seeking protection in the EU. But it has worsened conditions for asylum seekers who risk life-threatening injuries and death trying to scale it.

Now with surveillance technology being installed along the wall, and Poland fearful that Russia and Belarus will usher many more people to its borders, Aleksandra Łoboda, a member of the humanitarian organization Grupa Granica, warns against border militarization.

With temperatures falling, we spoke about the current situation on this part of the Polish border. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Aleksandra, what is the situation on the Poland-Belarus border right now?

Since the wall was raised, the Polish government’s narrative is that it has been a deterrent and the scale of the humanitarian crisis has reduced. We follow the situation very closely and we know that’s not true. What the wall has done is diminish the health of people who are trying to cross the border. We have been treating a lot of leg injuries from falls, a lot of cuts from the razor wire that lines the top of the wall. There are more and more cases of hypothermia. The situation is tough.  

We don’t have an estimate on how many people are crossing, but we do know how many people are asking us for help (we only provide humanitarian aid to people who are on the Polish side). So, every week it’s between 100-200 people. Last week, there were 149 requests for assistance. Also, take into consideration we are not the only initiative providing humanitarian aid, so the real number of people is even higher.

Over the last 14 months, 27 people are confirmed to have died on the Polish-Belarus border. We believe around 190 people are missing. We will never know how many people died on the border because so much of the evidence gathering has been left to grass roots organizations.

This month the initial installation phase of high-tech surveillance equipment along the wall was inspected by Polish authorities. How could this infringe on the rights of asylum seekers?

It’s a further attempt to militarize the border. This should not be the response to the humanitarian crisis. No wall can stop migrants crossing the border if they are seeking international protection. 

Building a wall and adding surveillance could contribute to even higher abuse of peoples’ rights, the rights to asylum, right to freedom from torture. If you want to get to the root of migration, you cannot just erect a barrier and hope the issue will disappear. 

When I was reporting near the Poland-Belarus border last year, there was a lot of disinformation swirling around about the people on the Belarus border. Has that continued?

The government is actively spreading disinformation and claiming that people who are crossing the Poland-Belarus border are economic migrants who do not need international protection. We have documented people who have been asking us for help and most of them come from countries affected by war and conflict, so this is one kind of disinformation.

Another is the line that the people who are trying to cross the border with Belarus pose a threat to national security. We have helped approximately 13,500 people from the border area, but the Polish community has accepted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, and it hasn’t posed a threat to national security. We have seen it is possible for Polish society to accept people from other countries, to accept a larger number of people who are fleeing wars and conflict. So, I think the government has proved that its own line is propaganda, disinformation. 

The EU has supported the Polish government’s actions on the Poland-Belarus border. How do you feel about that?

There is more than one humanitarian crisis on European borders. The EU needs to take a common approach, which should not focus on the militarization of borders but should examine how to implement the right to asylum, the right to international protection. As a bloc it needs to change its current policy in terms of migration. 

Looking ahead, the Polish government says it will build a temporary security wall with Kaliningrad to prevent migrants crossing over from the Russian enclave. How much is this on your radar?

We are closely monitoring the situation on the Poland-Kaliningrad border and for now, as far as I know, there have not been a lot of people trying to cross. We will monitor the situation and see what happens. Judging by the Poland-Belarus border there may be a real threat to peoples’ rights so we must keep an eye on it. 

Aside from migrants, a lot of Polish people don’t want Russians to seek asylum in Europe because of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Our message is that everyone has the same right, anyone who flees persecution from war and conflict can seek protection regardless of their nationality.

The post Along the Poland border with Belarus, ‘we will never know how many people died’ appeared first on Coda Story.

WeChat is an omnipresent Chinese messaging app, and Kokas, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, needed it to talk to Chinese sources for her research. But, as Kokas told me, it soon became “a very meta experience.” To have WeChat on her personal phone meant that “you were subjecting yourself to precisely the type of surveillance that you were writing about.”

In the book, Kokas analyzes how Chinese firms and the Chinese government gather data on U.S. citizens for political and commercial gain, putting U.S. national security at risk. China is able to do this, Kokas points out, in part because the U.S. government does not have substantial regulations in place to protect users and their data.

“By tracing how China and the US have shaped the global movement of data, I hope this book empowers citizens around the world to navigate the complex terrain created by Silicon Valley, Washington, and Beijing,” she writes.

I recently spoke with Kokas on the phone. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What do “digital sovereignty” and “data trafficking” mean in layman's terms? 

Digital sovereignty is the idea of control over a country’s digital resources. Digital sovereignty is something that we see in countries that are trying to protect their digital domain from oversight from other countries. The Chinese government has a more expansive vision called cyber sovereignty, which is that any digital space that a country touches should be part of their digital domain.

Data trafficking is the movement of data from one country to another without the consent of users and without their understanding of the implications of their data being moved between national data regimes. For example, if I sign up for TikTok here in the U.S. and I find out that my data has been accessed in another country, that would be data trafficking. 

My favorite line in the book is when you write, “Most people are simply not exciting intelligence targets.” So what are the implications of data trafficking for most Americans in their daily lives? 

People are afraid that they are individually going to be targeted, and there are some scary stories, but ultimately the more interesting data for the Chinese government and for Chinese firms is actually at scale. So while you might not personally be interesting, you plus all of your neighbors, or you plus all of the people in your state, yield really rich insights that can enable the tracking and mapping of a whole society.

And while most people aren’t that interesting, there are specific subgroups that face intensive targeting, like Hong Kong democracy activists, as well as Uyghur and Tibetan activists. 

I also think there are other layers that are significant. One is economic risk. U.S. companies can’t gather data in China the same way that Chinese companies can in the United States, and that creates a fundamental asymmetry in the development of the digital economy in ways that will have long-standing implications for the development of products. At a certain point, it’s not necessarily just about spying or surveillance. It’s about what types of products you can build.

The third issue is national security. These platforms are becoming essential in daily life and the functioning of society. For example, TikTok now functions as a form of critical communications infrastructure. Chinese firms have also become involved in gathering and using health data and agricultural data from the United States. If that breaks down or if the Chinese government decides to pull participation from these firms, which they can do, it leads to a fundamental destabilization of key areas in the U.S. and global economy — areas like communication, health, food production. 

That’s not a risk that I think most people want to take.

Do you think the United States is at fault for not better protecting user data? Or is China more at fault for taking advantage of those weaknesses? 

A lot of China’s ability to go into other countries and propose tech platforms that rapidly gather data builds on the fact that U.S.-based companies have already been there. A great example of this is TikTok being officially based in the Cayman Islands. This is a classic move by U.S. firms to escape U.S. government scrutiny. And TikTok adopted this, so while their headquarters are officially in Beijing, they’re domiciled in the Cayman Islands. The other thing that U.S. firms pioneered was a lack of algorithmic transparency. And that’s at the foundation of a lot of these business models from which many Chinese entrepreneurs learn to grow their businesses.

The first and most important thing the U.S. government should do is pass national data regulations that have actual enforcement requirements in place. But there are significant differences within the U.S. government about what is and is not acceptable in terms of government oversight over corporations, as well as oversight over data. And even if laws are passed, enforcement is still really challenging. 

You present these issues as being contested, but it seems that the U.S. isn’t putting up much of a fight. 

The title should be something like, “China is taking over the digital world, and the U.S. kind of agreed to it.” But people I interviewed in the U.S. government and tech corporations would argue that by not heavily regulating the U.S. digital landscape, U.S. platforms are able to grow and compete with China that way. The other aspect is this resistance to changing U.S. data governance policies because that would be “letting China win” by adopting too many aspects of the Chinese model. I don’t fully agree with that framework. 

You wrote that you felt a sense of urgency while working on the book. Why did you feel that way? 

A lot of people outside China haven’t experienced China’s digital control directly, so they don’t understand the seriousness of what it means for that model to be exported and how difficult it is to put the genie back in the bottle once it’s out.

The post China is gaining control of the world’s data as the US stands by appeared first on Coda Story.

“I’m a bit sleepy tonight, but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” he wrote. In case any readers had questions about West’s anti-Jewish hostility, he clarified: “I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also. You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda. 

The tweet capped off a banner week of antisemitism for West. A few days prior, he joined Fox News’ Tucker Carlson for an interview in which he rattled off several antisemitic tropes, and took to Instagram to suggest Puff Daddy is being controlled by Jews. 

West’s comments — broadcast to 31 million people on Twitter alone, roughly double the global Jewish population — drew off of age-old antisemitic conspiracies about shadowy Jewish power and capture of elite institutions. Unlike Father Coughlin, the American antisemitic radio host of the 1930s, West has the power of social media, not just airwaves, to broadcast his strain of anti-Jewish bigotry. But at the heart of both of their prejudices lies an enduring conspiracy about Jewish dominance and control.

This idea sits at the heart of almost all modern conspiracy thinking, according to Megan Black, an expert on antisemitism at the Western States Center, an Oregon-based organization that tracks extremism. I talked to her about the throughlines between Kanye’s antisemitism and white nationalist ideology, and why conspiratorial thinking almost always seizes upon Jews. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your colleagues at the Western States Center have written about how antisemitism forms the “theoretical core” of American white nationalism. Can you explain how you see Kanye’s expression of antisemitic ideology fitting into this framework, if at all?

Antisemitism provides a core animating logic for white nationalist ideology. 

What conspiracy theories and especially antisemitism do is they give people something to hold onto to make sense of what's going on in the world. So they can look at the problems in our society and rely on this age-old trope of blaming the Jews: ‘This is who's influencing you. This is who is pulling the strings and they are the problem.’ It provides a villain. And the Jews have been deployed in this way for centuries. So it's a very convenient narrative that's already baked into our psyches and even to a certain extent, baked into our understanding of the world. 

But the other thing that antisemitism does in these spaces is it helps make sense of things that in white supremacist logic otherwise wouldn't make sense. White supremacy depends on the idea that white people are superior. That they are in and of themselves inherently better than other people. And so when you live in a multiracial society where you have people who are not white managing to overcome the traumas of slavery and Jim Crow, achieve the civil rights successes that they achieved in the 1960s up until today, get elected into office and step into positions of leadership — all of that defies the logic of white supremacy. 

And so you have to find a way to explain to people why white supremacy doesn't always win out. And the thing that they go to is: ‘The only reason that Black people or immigrants or brown people are succeeding in this way is that they are backed by Jewish people. These people who can pretend to be white, who can pretend to be of us, but they're not of us. They're actually diametrically opposed to us. They are the reason that Black people have managed to do as well as they have. They are the ones that are undermining our white superiority, our white supremacy.’

That's why you have people going in and shooting up the Tree of Life Synagogue. They're targeting Jews because they see Jews as enabling the people they find inferior to them and can't abide the idea of living underneath or even in relationship with. This is why we see antisemitism as so core to the white nationalist logic. Because it really holds together all of the other racism that is so key to their hate.

Understanding all this, how can we make sense of Kanye’s comments? Is his rhetoric reinforcing the same white nationalist logic? That might seem counterintuitive to some people.

Kanye drank the Kool-Aid. You can be Black, brown, white, gay, straight, any identity, and still hold white supremacist views because what you're buying into is not the hope that your skin color will change. You're buying into the idea that this system of power can benefit you and that you, therefore, want to perpetuate it. Kanye sees value in this power structure because he thinks he can benefit from it. So he is willing to make racist remarks and make antisemitic remarks all in the hope of perpetuating this power structure that he sees as benefiting himself.

Ok. But of course, Kanye’s identity as a Black man has been a big part of this conversation. What do you make of his rhetoric when comparing it to the antisemitism that has been expressed in Black nationalist spaces? I’m thinking of figures like Louis Farrakhan, who has blamed Jews for slavery and Jim Crow, among other things. Is there anything new or novel about what Kanye is saying?

I definitely wouldn't call it new. I wouldn’t say that Kanye is treading new paths in the Black nationalist movement. I don’t want to comment a lot on what this is about for Kanye because it's really hard to figure out. But what he's doing tracks much more with the logic that we see, I think, in white nationalist circles and in increasingly authoritarian circles and QAnon spaces. 

This kind of antisemitic conspiracy thinking has been around for centuries. It's very easy to pick up. It's been seeded in our society for a long time, and it's a convenient way of thinking. So it's not surprising to me that Kanye picked this up and has made something of it. We see this in every fringe and extremist space, regardless of color. 

One of the things we talk about a lot at Western States Center is that almost all modern conspiracy thinking is patterned on antisemitism. It’s almost inherently antisemitic in that it often requires some kind of secretive global cabal of people who are pulling the strings on unsuspecting Black and brown people or some other disenfranchised group and seeking to overturn a dominant power structure that's almost always some version of white Christianity. That's essentially all conspiracy theories — at their heart they’re almost always about Jews.

This reminds me of a piece I wrote for Coda at the beginning of the pandemic about anti-vaccine rhetoric and antisemitism. I was seeing on fringe anti-vaccine spaces online that people were talking about the vaccine as part of a shadowy cabal trying to impose a “New World Order.” It's one of those things where you kind of have to understand the language to even know it's a signal. So for a person who doesn't have to spend their time in these online cesspools — lucky for them! — they might not hear this specific terminology and understand what it’s signaling.

Eventually, it will show itself. Like QAnon. At first, it took a while for the overt antisemitism to emerge. But like clockwork, it came along. Eventually, people connected the dots, and all of a sudden it was about the Jews. 

An idea that I find compelling about antisemitism is that it can resurface and become dangerous when Jews are actually most assimilated in a society, which is not necessarily true of other forms of prejudice. You can see the rhetorical dangers of Jewish assimilation because it perversely reinforces this trope about secret control and power: ‘Look at how great the Jews are doing, look at their influence in politics, media and culture.’ How do you see the assimilation of American Jews as contributing or related to this current wave of antisemitism?

When I do this work specifically around trying to connect the dots on antisemitism and racism and anti-Black racism, it's always important to talk about the ways in which these two forms of racialized othering and oppression show up differently. Because anti-Blackness shows up as this kind of ever-persistent form of racial oppression that never goes away and is always playing out in almost every kind of dynamic. And I think it's important for the way in which white supremacy functions and for the way in which antisemitism has been manufactured in this space that antisemitism is allowed to kind of slip down under the surface for a while and it gets resurfaced when it's convenient. 

It's convenient for white Jews to be allowed to assimilate because there's a lot of benefit that comes from that. Historically, that benefit has been: ‘We can use Jews to provide money lending,’ because Christian communities didn't believe in usury. And so they were like, ‘We'll just deploy these Jewish communities to do this for us. And then when they make enough money off of us, we will run them out of town and slaughter their families if they resist and then take their wealth,’ which is what happened for most of medieval history with the expulsions of Jews from various parts of Europe. It was always this moment of: ‘We've had this community here. They've been very useful and beneficial to us. But now there's something we're upset about — maybe the plague — and we don't understand where the plague is coming from so we're going to blame it on the Jews and we're going to run them out of town.’ 

So the way that antisemitism has played out historically, and I think continues to play out here in the United States, is that it's really useful sometimes to have Jews feel really comfortable, and then it's really useful sometimes to run them out of town and take all their resources.

It’s the macabre line of thinking many Jews are familiar with: Always have your passport renewed and your bags packed.

One thing this makes me think about is the role the U.S. plays in the American Jewish imagination. America in a way has served as an exception to the long history of violence that Jews have experienced in so many other countries, especially in Europe. So many American Jews, including myself, are here because their ancestors were fleeing persecution and found a safe haven here. That’s influenced how some Jewish Americans see the world and their place in it.

Liberal democracy: that is what distinguishes America as a sanctuary for Jews over most other places. Which is what makes the threat of white nationalism so anxiety-inducing. The very thing that is providing that protective umbrella is now being eroded in front of our faces.

One thing that strikes me about the conversation we're having is that it is fairly high level, just in terms of having to explain all these things to someone who sees a post on Instagram and isn’t aware of this long history of antisemitic thinking and the conspiracy at the heart of all conspiracies. How you begin to disrupt the antisemitism that can spread so quickly online and add the necessary historical context? The antisemitic conspiratorial worldview is addictive for some people, especially in moments of confusion and crisis.

Our way of getting the word out about this is through as many leadership development programs as we can throw together and put out in the world. The idea is that we engage folks in a cohort because it is so complex and it's so big and it's hard to figure out where to start. So we bring people together, students and artists and civic leaders and organizational heads and people for whom these issues are now or will be relevant at some point in the future. And we do kind of a deep dive. And the place where we find the most helpful to start often is a kind of a historical retrospective. We go back to 1492 and look at the fact that Columbus launched Western imperialism, westward expansion, colonialism in the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade, all of these things followed that date.

But that same year is the same year that Jews and Muslims were branded as impure of blood and were expelled from Spain under this idea of a biological difference. It was the first time we saw this notion of biological difference really being used to systematically oppress a group of people in Western history. And so we start there and we ask people to start to trace the development of this kind of antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry and bias. And the emergence of this kind of racism. We find that it’s going back and asking folks to just reframe their understanding of history and expand it a little bit to include more narratives than just the American one. But as you're saying, it's really big and that's really hard.

One thing that this Kanye situation is his comments are helping us connect the dots for people. We talked earlier about this language of globalists and this secretive cabal and how people can look at that and not quite know what they're talking about unless you're really in the know. 

But when someone comes along and connects all the dots for you the way that Kanye has, it makes my job a little bit easier. And so that is one thing that I see as moving the needle in terms of our work to combat antisemitism. We're able to call it for what it is.

The post ‘Kanye drank the Kool Aid’: Connecting the dots between antisemitism and white nationalism appeared first on Coda Story.

Last month, the website Dall:E (named after the Spanish artist Dali, and the Pixar character Wall-E, from the eponymous 2008 movie), announced that users were creating over two million AI generated images per day. The site added that it had fine-tuned its filters to reject violent or sexual content or other images that violate its policies.

But given the ease of access and increased sophistication of text-image generators, many experts predict that it won’t be long before the technology becomes yet another weapon in the arsenal of those looking to spread disinformation and propaganda. The technology already raises serious questions about copyright and the commercial use of artificially generated images.

Getty Images, for instance, unlike some of its competitors, banned the sale of AI generated illustrations on its site in September because of uncertainty around the legality of such images, while also announcing a partnership with a site that uses similar technology to enable the substantial and creative editing of existing images. The difference being emphasized here is that between image generation and image editing, even if the effect of the editing is to create an entirely different image.

In a recently released report, Democracy Reporting International observed that this “combination of a text model and a synthetic image creator raises the prospect that we will see a shift in disinformation strategies, moving from manipulation of existing content to the creation of new realities.” For the researchers the application of AI technology goes “beyond the manipulation of existing media” to the “production of fully synthetic content… eventually allowing for the quick and easy generation of fake visual evidence as a direct complement to false (news) narratives.”

Another significant concern, say critics, is that the AI technology will continue to reproduce stereotypes and biases that already exist within our society as it pulls from existing images online when it generates pictorial responses to textual commands. This would make it easier for those who want to create visual “evidence” to display alongside falsified narratives targeting marginalized communities.

Democracy Reporting International does offer recommendations on how to prepare for and respond to the growing mass of AI-created content. It argues that widespread digital literacy is essential if people are to recognize false narratives and disinformation. The researchers also suggest prebunking, that is being proactive in countering falsified images and text, rather than to merely react. 

I spoke with Beatriz Almeida Saab, co-author of the report, about the threat text-image generators represent and how best to mitigate potential damage. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

While preparing the report, what came up unexpectedly for you in your research?

The threat is not the technology itself, but the access to this technology. Because the technology to manipulate media has always been there, it's just a matter of how easy and fast you can do this. Plus, we've seen that people believe in much less sophisticated manners of manipulation. Our whole point is that it will get to the point where malicious actors will have easy access to this and it will be effortless. This kind of technology is open access meaning it's available for everybody. There's no regulation in place, meaning that if we are not discussing it at a policy level, how will we be prepared to see the consequences?

What would be your nightmare scenario with text-to-image generation?

A malicious actor creates a false headline, builds a story around it, and uses artificial intelligence (AI), specifically text-to-image generation models, to create an image that perfectly supports their false narrative, manufacturing realistic fake evidence. Consequently, this false narrative is harder to verify and debunk, so people will not change their minds as a shred of fake evidence supports the story, and there is no room for questioning an image. 

How does text-to-image generation differ from “deep fakes” that already exist? 

Deep fakes are typically used as an umbrella description of all forms of audio-visual manipulation — video, audio, or both. They are highly sophisticated manipulations using AI-driven technology, enabling those aiming to spread disinformation to make it seem that someone said or did something that they did not or that an event took place that never actually occurred. The main difference between deep fakes and text-prompt generated images is that deep fakes refer to sophisticated manipulations of existing audio-visual content. Text-to-image creation is novel as it moves from manipulating pre-existing media to the entire generation of new media, to the creation of an image that reflects the desired reality. 

Who is most directly impacted by the implementation of this technology? What responsibility do people on the frontlines of this new tech have?

On one level, everyone is impacted. The way we consume information, images, and everything online will change. We need to learn how to discern what is true from what is false online, which is very hard. A researcher we interviewed for the report pointed out that your brain will already process information just by consuming it, whether it's true or not. Your subconscious will process it, and it will stay with you. It also impacts what we call provenance technology stakeholders, who can detect media authenticity. So it impacts the way you debunk. It affects the way you fact check. It involves all these stakeholders because creating fake evidence to support a false narrative is very serious. 

The post AI image generators enable the creation of fake pictures to support fake news appeared first on Coda Story.

Several officers, some carrying assault weapons, surrounded the car, gestured for them to get out and interrogated them about what they were doing in the area. After persuading the police officers to let them go, Chin asked one of them how they had found them in the first place. 

“We have cameras back there,” Chin recalls the officer saying. “One of them recognized your license plate.”

Such advanced surveillance has become the norm in Xinjiang and around the country, according to Chin’s new book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control,” which he co-wrote with his Wall Street Journal colleague Liza Lin. 

The pair, both longtime China reporters, describe the building of a dystopian police state in Xinjiang, where China, many human rights groups say, is perpetrating genocide and crimes against humanity against the mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic groups. 

Under the guise of counterterrorism, they write, China has been using advanced artificial intelligence, facial recognition software, DNA collection, “Big Brother” programs and other tactics “to exert total control” over local populations. 

But surveillance is not limited to Xinjiang. Even in cities like Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, China is using surveillance to create a “digital utopia” where technology helps improve everything from traffic patterns to emergency responses. 

It’s “a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance,” they write, and it’s a model China appears to be exporting to other authoritarian countries. 

I recently spoke with Chin — now based in Taiwan — and Lin — now based in Singapore — about their new book. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What shocked you most about surveillance in Xinjiang? 

Chin: The shock came in two waves. The first was just seeing so much futuristic and untested technology being unleashed indiscriminately, and seemingly without hesitation or consideration of the side-effects, on an entire population of people. The second came when we realized the Communist Party was using it to reboot one of the most reviled institutions of the 20th century — the mass incarceration of a religious minority in gulag-style camps.  

How do you compare surveillance in Xinjiang to the rest of China? 

Chin: In Xinjiang, surveillance is truly totalitarian. It covers every Turkic Muslim in the region. It’s pervasive and constant, and its aim is to remold the individuals it targets. In the rest of China, Covid complicates the picture. Pre-Covid, the Xinjiang style of hard surveillance was reserved for half-a-dozen categories of people, including ex-cons, dissidents and the mentally ill. People outside that category experienced surveillance mostly in terms of “smart city” conveniences, like being able to scan their faces to pay for subway tickets. But under “zero Covid,” nearly everyone in China has been subjected to hard surveillance in the form of health codes that track and limit their movements depending on their exposure — similar to the way authorities in Xinjiang track exposure to the “ideological virus” of religious ideas.  

Lin: Over the last 20 years, the Chinese social contract was that we’ll give you higher salaries and better living standards and you’ll keep us in power. But in the past five years, with Chinese economic growth slowing, the Chinese government realizes that the old social contract is no longer working because you’re going to hit a point where not everyone’s income is rising. You’re an authoritarian government, but you still need to keep your citizens happy to stay in power. So the new social contract, outside of Xinjiang, is we’re using all this technology to make your life nice and efficient by doing things like clearing traffic jams and helping ambulances get to hospitals faster, and you give us your loyalty. And the government has always viewed Xinjiang as a place that breeds separatism. They always want to clamp down on it, and with digital technology, they’ve found an almost easy way to do it. 

To what degree do you fault or blame U.S. technology companies for their role in the use and abuse of surveillance technology in China? 

Chin: U.S. tech companies midwifed the Chinese surveillance state from its most embryonic state in the early 2000s, and they continue to nurture it with capital and components. They’ve done this for the same reason American companies always do things: it’s extremely profitable. U.S. chip makers say they can’t control how every single buyer uses their products, which is true. But can they try harder than they are? Almost certainly.

Lin: Western technology and capital have been the building blocks of China’s surveillance state. Right from the early years, when China was seeking a way to build up its capability, folks like Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks, Cisco, Siemens were there to sell to Chinese police. I would describe the feeling Western companies had towards China in the early days and even up to recent years as naive optimism and strategic corporate ignorance. Now, folks are talking about the possible regulatory risks to doing business in the market and scouring their supply chains for evidence of forced labor. 

How much further can China take surveillance? 

Chin: Beijing's ultimate goal is something like a perfectly engineered society — one that has no dissidents because everyone is satisfied, that automatically course-corrects without leaders having to intervene with force. They seem more likely to end up with something less than perfect, which will still require them to track and punish misbehavior. They also have huge technical and political barriers to overcome. It’s hard to say where all this will end up, but I think it’s safe to say the Communist Party isn’t done trying to optimize its control over Chinese society.

It seems that the Chinese public generally approves of China’s surveillance technology. To what degree do you think that approval is a result of state propaganda? 

Chin: It’s extremely difficult to disentangle public opinion from propaganda in China. To some degree, it may not really matter. State surveillance is, at heart, a propaganda project. Its aim is to persuade people that they’re being watched, along with everyone around them. That gives people a sense of security while at the same time encouraging them to modify their own behavior. To the Party, what matters is the belief, not how people come to hold it.

Lin: I had gone into this project thinking state surveillance is always a very bad thing. But a lot of Chinese people find surveillance attractive. Chinese state media are not shy about saying how amazing the surveillance is at finding criminals. There are stories in local papers about abducted or missing children who were reunited with their parents because of facial recognition technology. The surveillance state is as much a propaganda project as it is a tech and infrastructure one.

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In Stallard’s new book, “Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea,” she analyzes how leaders in Russia, China and North Korea manipulate and distort historical narratives about war as a way to maintain and strengthen their hold on power. Stallard drew extensively on her experience reporting on the ground in all three countries.

In Russia, Putin “has elevated the memory of the Great Patriotic War to the status of a national religion,” Stallard writes. Meanwhile in China, President Xi Jinping has used World War II as a marker of the end of China’s so-called “century of humiliation.” And war narratives are especially important in North Korea, where Kim Il Sung is falsely presented as a war hero who freed the country from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and secured a victory over the United States in the Korean War eight years later.

This is history, Stallard points out, stained with a “veneer of patriotism.”

I recently spoke with Stallard on the phone. She is currently based in Washington, D.C. as senior editor for China and Global Affairs at the New Statesman. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

You set out to explore how autocrats exploit history to stay in power. How would you summarize your reporting? 

It’s about how effectively and often how cynically the leaders of these regimes have manipulated historical narratives to suit their own political purposes and to position themselves as patriotic defenders of their countries — and everyone who opposes them, therefore, as traitors. But really, first and foremost, they do this to shore up their own power and their own popular support.

I understand that the title of your book — “Dancing on Bones” — comes from a Russian activist. What does the phrase mean and why did it resonate with you?

The rough backstory is that there was this Russian activist who, with his friends, founded this grassroots movement — the Immortal Regiment — which was basically intended to be an alternative to what they felt was the very bombastic, militaristic, official commemorations of the Second World War. It was about marching quietly with photos of your relatives. But once it became very popular, and the authorities had taken it over, he gave this very exasperated interview, saying “Guys just stop, stop. Like, we all have relatives who died. It’s dancing on bones.” And to me that really spoke to the very cynical manipulation of what are devastating and personal memories and experiences.

As a means of maintaining power, how does the exploitation of these historical narratives compare to other methods? How critical is this particular method to maintain power in these three countries?

The way I think about it is that there are all of these different elements that work together very effectively, so it’s difficult to strip one out and consider it totally discretely. Timothy Frye has a quote in his book “Weak Strongman” on Putin about how it’s much easier to be a popular autocrat than an unpopular one, which for me captures it quite neatly. If you removed all references to history tomorrow, would those regimes stand? I think so. But in terms of building resilience and making the regime more secure and making it less brittle, less fragile, I think the more you can also embed and draw on these popular ideas and some of the population buys in — even if it’s not a majority — it makes the regime more secure, more resilient.

What the historical narratives have going for them is that they endure, particularly in times when there are economic problems, when the country is facing difficulties, when you’re asking people to accept a degree of hardship and sacrifice within their own lives. It’s very helpful and quite effective to be able to frame that in terms of these past struggles and external enemies that you can blame for your problems. So it’s difficult to separate them, and I think it’s important to see them as part of a toolkit or an arsenal.

It would probably be impossible to measure how much all of this costs, but it would be interesting to know the approximate price tag of the manipulation of history.

In the North Korean case, that was one of the things that struck me. There is a price tag, like with rebuilding the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang. It’s an absolutely extraordinary building in scale and ambition. The Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities is another example. Obviously we don’t know what the budget was because there’s no transparency, but in a country where there are people right now who are desperately in need of sufficient calories and where children are stunted and chronically malnourished, it is a choice to spend a conservative estimate of what must have been millions on these museums. That is a choice, when that money could go elsewhere. 

What role does state media play in these campaigns? 

Each has a slightly different tone. One of the things Russia has done more effectively than China is to make particularly state television channels very entertaining, very watchable. If you can suspend your disbelief at the content, they really have put a lot of effort into having these very provocative, very dramatic talk shows and making their messaging very appetizing. Often Chinese evening television news is very dry. It’s not something you would turn to for entertainment. But they have become much more proactive in recent years in using other mediums — particularly I’m thinking about some of the big budget films in recent years. 

In the book’s conclusion, you said you were writing its final words in January with Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s border. Russia then invaded Ukraine at the end of February. Not specifically about Russia, you wrote, “This warped version of history is the backdrop against which future wars will be fought.” What was it like for you to watch what has happened since?

It was really surreal. When Putin said that morning that it was a denazification operation, partly I felt like, “Of course,” like I should have understood that this was where this was heading. I just didn’t expect that he would go through with it. But with hindsight, of course that’s how he would frame this. I did feel like this was the ideas in the book come to life. This is the worst case scenario. I had spent a lot of time thinking about it in this abstract, theoretical sense, but to see it being used to take real people’s lives and destroy towns and cities in Ukraine is really sickening. 

What are the implications of these campaigns for people who don’t live in China, Russia or North Korea? 

I think we should all be very wary, and it’s made me very conscious of how leaders in other countries like here in the United States, and in the U.K. where I’m from — how people who have power or seek power or want to stay in power, turn to history. These historical narratives are effective because they resonate, so they can be very dangerous in the hands of people who are in power. There’s a live debate here in the United States about whether we should also focus on the darker aspects of the past or whether that’s an unpatriotic thing to do. We should problematize — to use a horribly scholarly term — as much as we can. 

That reminds me of a quote in your book about history functioning as a comfort blanket in Russia. 

Yeah, it feels really nice. It’s nice to believe you’re the hero of the story, that your country is the greatest in the world. But we should be aware that that’s also what all these other countries tell their citizens, that they’re the heroes of the story, that their countries are the force for good. I want to emphasize the unexceptional nature of the desire to do this. Leaders in all countries do draw on various versions of the past, so it’s not an exceptional impulse, but it’s been taken to extremes in these three countries. It is absolutely not only autocrats who are attracted to this idea, so we should all really be on our guard against it. 

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