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    [post_date] => 2019-11-14 19:08:41
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    [post_content] => Launched with a hashtag, a new movement seeks to raise awareness of how fundamentalist Christianity is polarizing the national discourse.

In thousands of evangelical elementary schools across the United States, children begin each day by reciting three pledges — one to the American flag, another to the Christian flag, and a third to the Bible. The latter two might come as a shock to people who are unfamiliar with white Christian fundamentalist subculture, but they are standard practice in these schools, approximately 2,000 of which are subsidized by taxpayer funds.

The version of the pledge to the Christian flag typically recited in fundamentalist and evangelical schools, which usually self-identify simply as Christian schools, ends with “one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again with life and liberty for all who believe.” This is hardly a pluralistic sentiment. One wall in the elementary building of the K-12 Christian school I attended in the 1980s and ‘90s was emblazoned with part of Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” We schoolchildren knew exactly what those words meant. We were raised to be the generation that would take back America for Christ, “saving” the country from the godless liberals who, we were told (explicitly and often), killed babies and were destroying the institution of the family, and whose preferred policies, we were told, would bring divine punishment on our nation.

Eighty percent of white, born-again Christians — that is, white evangelicals and fundamentalists — voted for Donald Trump in 2016. More than 90 percent of them object to his impeachment, and polls consistently show him at over 70 percent in their favorability rating. If you want an answer to the question of where President Trump’s white evangelical base was radicalized, it’s right here. And while this demographic is down to 16 percent of the population, it remained 25 percent of the electorate in the 2018 midterms and is advantaged by gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the Electoral College.

Ex-evangelicals (or “exvies”) like myself have been trying to draw attention to the problem of evangelical authoritarianism in recent years, bringing the insights that come with lived experience to the table. Using hashtag campaigns like #EmptyThePews,  #ChurchToo, #ChristianAltFacts, and #ExposeChristianSchools to achieve collective visibility we have, in conjunction with the efforts of researchers who have been monitoring the Christian Right for decades, made some progress in changing the national conversation around evangelicalism. A change in the discourse is essential if we are to shift the Overton window back from the extremes to which the Right has taken it over the last few decades.

For too many pundits, commentators, and gatekeepers, the answer to “where were they radicalized” is found in taboo territory. Christianity as it is practiced by millions is not always a social good — indeed, it is sometimes downright harmful to both individuals and society. But the Americans who most need to have that conversation are often unable to engage with the idea that the Christianity they view as “authentic” is anything less than perfect. And so we continue to see hand wringing, pearl clutching, and an increasingly desperate barrage of unhelpful think pieces about the “crisis” of young people leaving the church and about evangelical hypocrisy.

Repeating that the “coastal elites’” reading of the Bible is “correct” and “heartland evangelicals’” reading of the Bible is wrong will not, despite the former’s best intentions, convince evangelicals to withdraw their allegiance from Trump. The vast majority of white evangelicals are not going to listen to mainline Protestant, liberal Catholic, moderate to liberal evangelical, or Jewish commentators who quote Bible verses exhorting readers to treat foreigners with kindness. And fellow conservative evangelicals like Michael Gerson, a George W. Bush administration alum who helped create the monster of which Trump is a symptom — but who now sees Trump as a liability — are not going to rein them in. And none of this does anything to reverse the normalization of Christian extremism that now dominates the American public sphere.

Hashtags like #EmptyThePews can harness the democratic potential of social media — which still exists, despite the anti-democratic forces that exploit it for nefarious purposes — to break through these barriers. Indeed, hashtags may prove critical in the fight for human rights and democracy, the greatest threat to which, in the United States, is undoubtedly represented by the Christian Right and the Christian nationalist ideology to which its members adhere.

In August 2017, I launched #EmptyThePews out of frustration with the response from conservative white evangelical leaders to the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, at which protestor Heather Heyer was killed. Prominent Christian Right voices either remained silent on Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comments, or even went so far as to assert on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network that there was “not a racist bone” in Trump’s body. Opining on how, as authoritarians, white evangelicals typically refuse to listen to any criticism, I observed that the only things they’re really afraid of are declining church attendance numbers and losing the youth. We should, therefore, throw their alienation of young Americans and their loss of members in their faces.

On August 16, 2017 I tweeted, “If you left Evangelicalism over bigotry and intolerance or this election specifically, please share your story with the hashtag #EmptyThePews. The hashtag trended, representing perhaps the first viral ex-evangelical hashtag, and my call for stories received a robust response.

If you left Evangelicalism over bigotry and intolerance or this election specifically, please share your story w/ the hashtag #EmptyThePews
— Chrissy Stroop (@C_Stroop) August 16, 2017


Ruth Tsuria, a communications scholar who is working toward the publication of a peer-reviewed academic article on #EmptyThePews, said that the hashtag has created a community and provided it with a platform to discuss the bigoted and discriminatory behaviors its members experienced in church. Akiko Bergeron*, a former Southern Baptist who was an early adopter of the hashtag, told me: “Finding the Exvangelical community and using #EmptyThePews has been an enlightening and enriching experience for me. I have met others of different faiths and no faith at all. I have met people that have never been welcomed in evangelical churches because they don’t fit the rigid mold expected by a white patriarchal and authoritarian system. I have been changed for the better.”

But can #EmptyThePews create a lasting impact beyond this community? Can it help change the ways in which we discuss religion and society at a time when a large faction of Christians are unswervingly devoted to a president who continually undermines democracy and the rule of law?

While no one can control the ways in which a hashtag is used once it’s out in the world, I framed #EmptyThePews not as anti-religious, but as means of creating a coalition for those of us who leave toxic versions of Christianity — whether for better religion or for no religion at all. Even so, the hashtag does flip the predominant script about American secularization in our elite media. Peter Beinart contends, for example, in a sloppily-argued article for The Atlantic, that religion is a social good for its ability to foster good citizenship and national cohesion, full stop. Those who abandon it, he indicates, are divisive and probably disproportionately responsible for American polarization. In fact, Beinart frames the issue of asymmetric polarization in the United States precisely backwards — our polarization is driven from the right, and, I maintain, the Christian Right above all. #EmptyThePews points to the necessity of abandoning and confronting anti-democratic Christianity. Some religion embraces pluralism, but fundamentalism, in its intolerance, undermines pluralism, and white evangelical Protestantism is a variety of fundamentalism.

Two years after its launch, I still believe in the message, the protest quality, and the storytelling capacity of #EmptyThePews and similar hashtags as a means of inspiring people to confront the threat to democracy, human rights, and pluralism represented by right-wing evangelicalism and the Christian nationalism it fosters. As more stories of leavers of high-demand, anti-pluralist, fundamentalist religious groups are highlighted in the public sphere, we might begin to see prominent media outlets and personalities grappling seriously with the nexus of authoritarian religion and the authoritarian politics currently on the ascendant in America.

Andrew L. Seidel, a constitutional attorney with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American, notes that representation matters when it comes to attaining social equality. “It is absolutely critical to showcase heathens, apostates, heretics, dissenters, and ex-believers. Conservative and insular religions only survive as closed information loops.” The hashtag “tells the truth about what happens behind the closed doors of the churches,” he said, adding: “The truth might hurt the church, but that doesn't make the truth anti-religious.” Indeed, as Seidel argues throughout The Founding Myth, there can be no freedom of religion without freedom from religion.

In addition to providing Trump with his most enthusiastic and immovable base, right-wing, mostly white American evangelicalism has been shown in recent years to have widespread issues with sexual abuse and cover-ups, and even with child marriage. This kind of born-again Protestantism is, like all fundamentalisms, ultimately incompatible with democracy; it must be defeated politically if we are to have a functional democracy in the United States. The first step to achieving that defeat must be the ability to name the problem and discuss it frankly.

My hope for #EmptyThePews and similar hashtag campaigns is that they will help to make those conversations possible in the upper echelons of America’s public sphere, and sooner rather than later. Without that shift in our national conversation, we could well be doomed to at least a generation of authoritarian rule imposed on the majority by the minority of America’s unreconstructed, waving their flags and worshipping at their megachurches.

*Akiko's surname is a pseudonym.
    [post_title] => If we want to save American democracy, we must have a very difficult conversation about evangelical Christianity
    [post_excerpt] => Born-again Protestantism is, like all fundamentalisms, ultimately incompatible with democracy; it must be defeated politically if we are to have a functional democracy in the United States.
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(CC BY 2.0)
The claim that social media is a neutral platform for the amplification of free speech does not hold up to scrutiny. 

Does it matter that Mark Zuckerberg dines with far-right politicians and activists, or that he genuinely seems to believe their websites are trustworthy fact-checkers? Does it matter that Jack Dorsey personally overrules Twitter bans on white supremacists but allows Donald Trump to ignore the acceptable use rules that the rest of us must obey?

Yes and no. Yes, it matters because the political preferences and blind spots of social media C.E.O.s influence their businesses. And no, because leaders’ opinions matter less than how right-favoring ideas, incentives and ways of organizing are baked into social media’s business models in ways those executives don’t even seem fully aware of.

We know that Facebook’s Washington D.C. lobby-shop and electoral integrity work is dominated by Republican party operatives and members, and we know Twitter prefers to give Nazi sympathizers a blue check mark rather than the boot. Google funds climate change deniers and YouTube is a right-wing radicalization engine. There is no shortage of evidence that America’s West Coast tech unicorns qualify as liberal only on a narrow range of identity issues. They’ll stand up for LGBTQ rights, but they’ll come down hard on any union activism among their own employees.

Less obvious is the fact that social media itself is structurally right-wing. Not because its CEOs are tech-bro libertarians or even because of their suspiciously agile pivot to Trump, but because social media affords advantages to the ideas, feelings and organizing principles of the hard-right. Oh, and also because of the money.
Structure
First, some heavy lifting. Social media as we currently organize it is trivially easy to weaponize in ways that favour autocracy and damage democracy. Political scientist Henry Farrell* and information security expert Bruce Schneier recently explained why democracies are so easily harmed by disinformation attacks while autocracies are actually strengthened by them. It’s because democracies and autocracies rely on people having two different kinds of shared knowledge; and social media disinformation disrupts one and favours the other.

In an autocracy, you know who’s in charge and what they want, but you’re not sure who the different political movers in society are, how much power they have and who you could form a coalition with. Certainly, political conflict occurs in societies that are dominated by the power vertical, but mostly off-stage or in ways only insiders can interpret. That’s why we still use the term ‘Kremlinology’ to describe the study of subtle public signs of largely secret power struggles. In an autocracy, shared knowledge about other people’s political views is low. This makes it risky and difficult to organize an opposition. In 2010, democracy activists in Tunisia had very little idea how many other people felt the same and were prepared to rise up against the regime until Mohamed Bouazizi, that fateful vegetable seller, set himself on fire and triggered the entire Arab Spring. Social media did help those protests to go viral — though its role has been exaggerated — but autocratic rulers learned quickly how to turn social media against citizens.

The main tactic autocrats use is "flooding," sending huge numbers of often contradictory political messages via automated social media accounts to drown out discourse and make it impossible to figure out who’s friend, who’s foe, or who’s even a human. The Chinese government strategically uses social media flooding both as a censorship tool — "who knows what’s really true?" —  and to distract and divide people, weakening them as a political force. Autocracies are strengthened by divisions that prevent people coming together as a political force. The tactics autocrats use at home can quickly become part of their strategy abroad. Russia is known to have used flooding to undermine shared belief in the validity of electoral politics in Ukraine and also in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany. Social media makes flooding cheap and successful because increasing the quantity of noise degrades the quality of discourse. It might even make it impossible to sustain. When a tactic becomes a strategy, things can change, sometimes very quickly.

An aside: I recently heard a well-connected U.K. conservative saying something I’ve heard from at least a dozen people in powerful positions: "Social media doesn’t do anything new. It just lets people express themselves, for good and for ill." Wrong. Different technologies — embedded in different business models — have different affordances. They encourage certain kinds of behavior, ways to make money and means to concentrate power. Those who benefit from these affordances seem to be almost unaware of the advantages thus bestowed, as though they’re used to playing the game of life on "easy." The same person later regretfully confided that yes, it was dreadful their own party was going to fight an election campaign that would pit parliament against "the people," but no, there was nothing to be done about it. Nothing at all.

Farrell and Schneier’s article explains that democracy is so vulnerable because flooding destroys precisely the kind of information democracy depends on. In a stable democracy we disagree about who should be in charge, but we share — and depend on — common knowledge about who the political actors are, how much support they have and how we can form coalitions. That shared knowledge allows us to have a functioning political opposition. We also share the knowledge that our electoral systems are basically fair, that outcomes approximate what enough people really feel, and that if we lose this year’s election we still have a good chance of winning the next one. If that knowledge goes away, then the institutions that depend on it can, too.

All very interesting, you might say, but this shows that social media helps autocrats, and autocracy can be of the left, too, at least in its self-justifying propaganda. What is peculiar to how social media helps right-wing autocracy?

Social media is structurally disposed to weaken our real-life horizontal ties with one other, to poison our ability even to imagine a social contract, to disrupt our drive to discover shared interests and shape them into collective political action. Social media is great for democracy only if you think democracy is a an exercise in ticking all the boxes for crowning a strongman. I say social media is inherently right-wing because it is structurally predisposed to making social democracy impossible.

Social democracy depends on the ability to form rolling coalitions of different groups around broadly shared goals. If I’m the middle-class parent of a disabled child, I can make common cause with an unemployed miner hundreds of miles away. We both want the state to be a social safety net for when life throws us a curveball. We don’t want all the same things, but we agree on enough to vote for or even belong to the same political party. And it’s not purely transactional. In our kinder moments, we feel solidarity, even though we are in different places and belong to different social classes. But what happens if I start seeing that ex-miner as an enemy, and vice versa? If our tribal identities have become so narrow and hardened that we no longer feel we’re on the same side? Hell, that we no longer even live the same world? If the broad-based coalitions that built social democracy can no longer recognize each other as allies, then it’s devil take the hindmost in a world of an unchecked and punitive state. Goodbye fraternity, hello Koch brothers.

Social media is the ideal medium and amplifier for the actively divisive and zero-sum politics of the hard, populist right. It disadvantages any politics based on compromise, on solidarity, on a forgivingly broad concept of who ‘the people’ are. Social media’s methods structurally favour Duterte, Trump, Orban et al the way tennis disinterestedly favours athletes with long arms.
Methods
Facebook and Google act as advertising consolidators, collecting vast amounts of personal data on users and renting that data and access to their users to advertisers. So the more you use their services, the more data they can gather and ads they can sell. This is called adtech, and it is social media’s chosen business model.  The official version regarding the unique selling point (USP) of adtech is that social media firms can target ads to us more closely because they know so much about us. The private, and more accurate, USP to advertisers is that they have finely segmented the markets we inhabit in order to identify the tiniest possible groups for advertisers to target. The key to adtech is market segmentation— i.e., breaking people down into ever smaller groups to sell things to. We sell things to people by convincing them of the importance and uniqueness of their group. What sells is making people feel they are different, special and even superior. They deserve things most others don’t. In society at large we call this "fomenting division." Social media, the pill we swallow to ingest adtech, is based on creating and exploiting social division. So too, it turns out, is the right-wing project whose goal and working methods are to create in-groups and out-groups for an ever-smaller number of people who count as ‘people’. Social media’s business model is to make us feel more divided than ever, and monetize the finest of distinctions we can be made to feel.
Feelings
And what keeps us clicking? Strong emotions like fear, anger and even hate. By now, most of us know that YouTube and others drive "engagement" by presenting the most emotive content, with most of us barely three clicks away from politically extremist content.

Social media divides us ever more finely, all the better to market our profiles to its real customers, the advertisers, and then it makes us internalize distinction and divisions by force-feeding us hateful clickbait.

Xenophobia and conspiratorial distrust create clicks. These are the signature emotions of the far right. It's anger with no purpose except to be monetized. Clickability almost always leads to the dark side. The political radicalization that helps make social media so wildly profitable is almost exclusively to the right. As well as fomenting division and making political solidarity harder to evoke, the dark emotional palette social media spatters everywhere has a deeper effect on what we think politics is actually for.

Firehosing is a technique used by disinformation merchants to pump out a stream of often contradictory lies. No one has the time, energy or resources to dispute each lie, and airing out lies to debunk them can make even more people believe them. This method is used by anti-vaxxers, far-right media sites and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Firehosing floods what used to be a conversation with wacky grimdark lies that cumulatively insist that nothing really works, everyone is on the make and no organization or authority can be trusted. It implies that nothing we do to collectively improve the state of the world can work, because someone, somewhere is gaming the system and that someone is probably brown or female or educated.

Firehosing helps explain why people who think the government should slash taxes and drop environmental regulations also think it should kidnap immigrants’ children and micro-manage women’s uteruses. The world of the firehose is one in which reality is not true and almost everyone is bad. In this world, the only useful way to use state power is to punish, to coerce, and to hurt. It reinforces a world where states can do no positive good because it will be taken advantage of — someone, somewhere is getting stuff for free that you have to pay for. If the only effective state power is violence, the only role of politics is to decide who to target. This isn’t an intentional effect of the medium, but it is a real world consequence of the quality and sheer volume of the messages it transmits. Social media is rightwing because its amplified nihilism makes far-right misanthropy sound like a fundamental truth and ushers its dream into being; a world where the state exists only to punish outsiders and throttle the poor, not to rebalance wild excesses of inequality.
Organizing
But if social media companies are making money from advertisers, and advertisers – most of them aggregators – are making money from the companies whose ads they place, who is making money from the emotive content that keeps people clicking? Who is paying to feed the beast? All those videos, images and stories that trigger and sustain the outrage cycle aren’t going to just make themselves.

New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel asked whether the Democrats can compete with Trump’s Twitter feed and concluded that “one of the few ways to power right now is to never, ever stop making content."
A Photoshopped image of a dog getting the Medal of Honor. Sharpiegate. A Fourth of July military parade. They’re all attention spectacles.
To "win" social media you must spew out content optimized for virality. Individuals can only do so much. Volunteer organizations don’t have the time and are too busy firefighting (and, let’s be honest, infighting). The organizations manning the firehose are top-heavy political outfits with strong message control – typically the preserve of the hierarchical right — and astro-turf fronts pretending to be grassroots organizations. Yes, there is an ecosystem of ad aggregators and content amplifiers. But the optimal organizational form to create firehose content at scale isn’t the pyramid of large and unwieldy membership organizations so beloved of the left, but a thorn — rigid, narrow and sharpened to a point — all the better to sink deep into the flesh of the body politic.

Social media lets small, well-funded organizations convert grey and dark money into attention. It makes big money’s ideas look like they’re backed by the masses. People on the left almost never have hundreds of millions of dollars sitting around waiting for a vast, anonymizing influence engine to convert money into power. People on the right do. Fake organizations are more effective than real ones. Sock puppets, amplification accounts and automatic reply-guys work 24/7, never disagree with the leader, get disillusioned or split into factions. Social media makes fake organizations look real, and real ones look like dinosaurs. Only on the right is there a sufficient concentration of capital with the means and motivation to exploit this.
Ideas
None of this can be unknown to those running the big social media companies. Their job is to understand what works on their websites in ways we outsiders can only guess at. Science writer James Gleick recently observed that “people on the left and people on the right BOTH understand that Facebook’s policy of allowing lies benefits the right.” Monetizing lies drives profit. How can anyone possibly defend that?

In the US, free speech absolutism is a feature of the right. Liberals argue for laws banning hate speech and incitement, while conservatives and the far right insist freedom of expression is enshrined without condition in the U.S. constitution, even if that means people are hurt or sometimes die. This year, as the clamour has grown against Facebook’s damage to democracies around the world, the company has doubled down on its insistence that advertising is protected speech. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, has said: “We believe that ads are a big part of [freedom of expression]."

Social media executives’ insistence that their companies are just neutral bystanders but that the most important value of all is free speech shows how closely aligned their interests now are to the right. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t invite Tucker Carlson home to try and understand the alien mindset of America’s hard right, but because they share a common financial interest in protecting the peculiar political ecosystem of which Facebook is the apex predator.

Social media companies share ideas with the right not because they are awkward fellow travellers but because they share fundamental interests. But just as my conservative acquaintance couldn’t admit, even to themselves, that social media’s affordances privilege the ideas and organizations from which they personally and politically benefit, so social media executives seem to believe their pursuit of self-interest is simply the acting out of self-evident philosophical imperatives like the absolute value of freedom of speech.

But guess what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether Mark Zuckerberg holds his nose when he dines with the far right, if Jack Dorsey torments himself about open Nazis he keeps inviting back in, or if Susan Woijicki truly believes YouTube is a force for good. It is wholly irrelevant whether these individuals believe they are speaking in good faith or how deep any self-deception may go. Their interests are fully those of their companies, and their companies exist to make money. Their companies are once-in-a-century concentrations of capital whose only imperative is survival and growth. Capital doesn’t care if the boss still thinks he’s one of the good guys, if, in his heart of hearts, he’s truly not a racist but just happens to run a company that monetizes racism. Capital doesn’t care if he can’t sleep at night. Capital calls to capital everywhere.

Social media empires are big business and history shows us that big business doesn’t have a problem with the far right. They want many of the same things; to act unfettered, to weaken horizontal social ties, to re-shape the world in their own twisted image. Social media driven by adtech will only, always serve capital, however many beanbags they have in the office.

* Henry Farrell is the writer's brother.


    [post_title] => Social media's right wing bias is baked in to its business model
    [post_excerpt] => Social media lets small, well-funded organizations convert grey and dark money into attention. It makes big money’s ideas look like they’re backed by the masses.  
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    [post_content] => Robert McNamara was a product of the so-called greatest generation, who believed in his place in the world. The boomers challenged him for lying about Vietnam and for his contribution to the military-industrial complex. And then the boomers voted for Trump. So who's making America great, again?

Did the twentieth century offer any poetry finer than a standardized test? Surely all those bubbled-in letters spell out something, but multiple choice itself is a love language. Plaintively, with each whirl of a No. 2 pencil, we plead that those letters will trace a path to the perfect score, to the perfect job, and to one perfect nation under God, indivisible as helmed by the Best and the Brightest — by intrepid men who bubbled impeccably. In his critically-acclaimed 2003 documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, director Errol Morris interviews one such man who climbed the rungs of standardized testing into power. In his capacity as Secretary of Defense to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara was a severely gifted number-cruncher who escalated American military involvement in the Vietnam War even as he knew that it was unwinnable — a fact that he denied repeatedly, until the publication of the Pentagon Papers proved he had known all along. The film was released just as the coalition invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were descending into a Vietnam-like quagmire, making McNamara a timely interview subject. 



It seems doubly prophetic that the film was released in 2003. This was the same year Facebook launched — and the internet began its stranglehold on our public, private, and political lives. While McNamara never digitally ranked the university’s hottest women during his own time at Harvard, as Zuckerberg notoriously did, he did help integrate IBM into global warfare during his time as an analyst in the Pacific theater during WWII and while Secretary of Defense to Kennedy and Johnson during the Vietnam War. Today, the automated war machine is something more subtle, as Facebook allows bad actors — whether state leaders or individuals — to promote propaganda and lies, and even help throw a presidential election. 

Morris, a baby boomer, engages McNamara in a deeply disturbing conversation about what the latter's generation left Morris's to sift through. As a millennial, when I first saw the movie in 2003, I felt I was watching the good guy from the generation that brought us Woodstock go after the bad man who brought us napalm. Today, I cannot say I look at the baby boomers as a merry band of Robin Hood types who sought to rescue the nation from the military-industrial complex. The 16 years since the documentary have seen the rise of one particular baby boomer who is, in many ways, antithetical to both McNamara and Morris. On the one hand, Donald Trump is nothing like my childhood idealization of my parents’ generation, protesting war and burning bras. On the other, Trump is nothing like McNamara: he is the wily byproduct of outer-borough nepotism who defies all statistical analysis. Watching The Fog Of War in 2019 almost made me nostalgic for what I now realize was a sense of progress that I had in 2003. It made me wonder what I have learned as the lofty aspirations of the Great Society have degenerated into the bitter pandemonium of Making America Great Again. 

I offer — it seems appropriate — eleven lessons: 
The fog of institutional faith rolls in before the fog of war
A little background: during World War One, the U.S. Army administered IQ tests, which begat the S.A.T., which begat the need for rudimentary computers to analyze the results, which begat IBM government contracts, which begat a bureaucracy primed for battle by December, 1941. This automated war machine had previously been marketed to America as a political platform to better manage America — the New Deal. The IBM punch card led the charge into the theater of war; attendant propaganda shorthanded a push for achievement. Science education would win the Cold War! The best and the brightest would protect us from falling dominoes in Southeast Asia! A moonshot could redeem humanity! Before he conveyed this militarized optimism, McNamara tested his way from UC Berkeley to Harvard Business School to celebrated Army analyst in the Pacific Theater of World War Two, a mascot for the meritocracy. Why listen to a damn thing he says? Well, look at those test scores!
Nothing lends political credibility quite like the private sector 

Robert McNamara was the C.E.O. of Ford Motor Company when John F. Kennedy tapped him for the position of Secretary of Defense. In the United States, shaped by the Protestant work ethic, a rich person is by definition considered to be a smart person. In Fog of War, Morris shows archival footage of journalists ingratiating themselves to McNamara by complimenting him on his intelligence; during the 2016 presidential election campaign, the media reported on Donald Trump’s private plane, his luxurious residential properties, his hotels, and his private golf courses. In The Fog of War, as McNamara accepts the cabinet position, Kennedy says that McNamara has chosen to serve his country at “great personal sacrifice” — which is code for giving up the extremely generous salary of a C.E.O. in the private sector in exchange for a civil servant’s salary. 
The Greatest Generation™ and the baby boomers double-teamed successive generations
The Vietnam War inspired a libertarian insurgency on the right and a counterculture from the left, with adherents to both questioning the enormous role big government (as the right calls it) and the military-industrial complex (as the left refers to it) played in policy implementation that affects our lives. This wide loss of faith in the government saw its first expression in anti-war demonstrators chanting “hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids have you killed today?” — but Watergate dealt the death blow. The revelations that came out during the impeachment hearings into the Nixon presidency alienated Americans across the political spectrum, and on both sides of the generation gap. In 2016, the same generation that drove Nixon out of office voted Trump in. In a New York Times op-ed about baby boomers who voted for Trump, the writer and activist Astra Taylor suggests we “call it the coming gerontocracy.” The hippies told us never to trust anyone over 30; frankly, I wouldn’t trust anyone already receiving Medicare or Social Security — they’ll kick the ladder right out from under you.    


America remains a sucker for postcolonial civil conflict in countries it scarcely understands 
Near the end of The Fog of War, McNamara talks of dining with his North Vietnamese counterpart in 1995, who told him, “Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you had, you’d know that we weren’t pawns...Don’t you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1,000 years? We were fighting for our independence and were determined to do so to the last man.” As McNamara recollects this tense conversation, it’s almost like he’s saying, Right but you said that wouldn’t be on the test. While McNamara openly — astonishingly — concedes his ignorance, he refuses to concede his mode of thinking had been wrong, or that “each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life.” On October 6, Trump abruptly announced that he was pulling U.S. military support out of the Kurdish-held territory northeast Syria, leaving the Kurds — who had sacrificed more than 11,000 combatants in the fight against ISIS — extremely vulnerable to a massacre at the hands of Turkish forces, who were poised to cross the border. Supposedly to preempt this from happening, Trump wrote a widely-circulated (and widely-ridiculed) letter to Turkey’s President Erdogan. “Let’s make a deal! You don’t want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy...Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” Erdogan, according to several reports, promptly threw Trump's letter into the garbage. 
Statistics are amoral
The most visually eloquent moment of Morris’ documentary comes as McNamara explains the impact of the U.S. firebombing 67 Japanese cities during the Second World War, while, in the accompanying footage, numbers are shown raining down from bombardiers. Stomach-churning statistics follow, unmistakable as atrocities — in some Japanese cities, up to 90 percent of the population was killed by U.S. aerial bombardments. McNamara concedes as much, but he also justifies the bombings. The war between the U.S. and Japan, he explains, was “one of the most brutal in history.” The Americans could not afford to lose, and that was why he “didn’t fault” Truman for using the atomic bomb. McNamara asserts that General Curtis LeMay would have been prosecuted as a war criminal if he had lost the war in the Pacific, just as he (McNamara) would have been prosecuted had the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam. 

After World War Two, discharged from the U.S. military, McNamara went to work for Ford Motors. There he crunched the numbers again and mandated that all the company’s cars must have seat belts. He applied the same logic that justified the deaths of 2 million Japanese civilians to the saving of 15,000 American lives annually — according to the National Transportation Board. 

Trump is cagier with numbers; we haven’t even seen his tax returns. But we do know this: he has 65.9 million Twitter followers. 
We’ve gone from fireside chats to a dumpster fire — but at least there’s no draft!
For good reason, Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s is the subject of much discussion these days: polarized political ideologies, hysteria, and a U.S. president who won’t shut up on that newfangled media outlet called Twitter. The Great Depression required large-scale political and economic solutions. After the Second World War, the G.I. Bill allowed (white) men to receive a free college education. In today’s privatized, post-Raegan, gig economy hell, apparently 70 percent of us want universal healthcare and 58 percent want debt-free education, but far fewer Americans—I’m hazarding a guess here—pine for a government capable of sending us to certain death in Guam. The Greatest Generation™ may have basked in the glow of a welfare state, but it also tolerated the draft and a powerful government that operated far away from a free press with the likes of Seymour Hersh poking around its files and exposing war crimes like My Lai. Given that many Americans want a government that provides us with more, we also need to be mindful of what such a powerful government can take from us. 
The Space Race might be over, but we found a black hole!
Fittingly, one of the bright spots of the Trump era has been a literal black hole: in April, the very first image of one was captured by an international team. Meanwhile, the American century’s certainty of measurable progress has collapsed; we are a dying star and this black hole has a name: the algorithm. All the numbers, all the metrics have been automated and programmed to produce more and more data and metadata, so that discernible political reality has collapsed under its own weight, and space-time warps into phenomena like Pizzagate. On December 4, 2016, a man fired multiple rounds of ammo into Comet Ping Pong, a D.C. pizza joint thinking he was busting up a sex-trafficking ring run by Hilary Clinton. This rumor had been spread as “news” by Twitter bots and Trump supporters, much in the same way the Obama birther “movement” was spawned. Uncannily, in NASA illustrations, the silhouette of a star-death is orange and flailing.
No one is at the wheel anymore
Our economic reality is the same: our war machine has collapsed into a Ponzi scheme of a service economy. Corporations that boast of high valuations do not created anything, post no profits, and offer employees few benefits. As Rick Wartzman, author of The End Of Loyalty: The Rise And Fall Of Good Jobs In America, pointed out, “We're now at a point where fewer than 7 percent of private sector workers are unionized in this country. And it's just clearly not enough to have the kind of collective voice and countervailing power against corporate power that, again, was able to lift wages and benefits for all folks, not only those carrying union cards but other blue-collar workers and even white-collar workers in the past.” Fewer Americans have health insurance with every passing year, yet we have apps to manage apps. The cruelest irony is this: the data sucks! Remember the 2016 electoral polls results that showed Hillary Clinton's victory was a dead certainty? 

Still, we remain in thrall to irrelevant figures — like the stock market — and use such indexes as magical thinking to ward off evil premonitions of decline and fall. Reporting on a paper the Fed published earlier this year, Forbes, not exactly known as a bastion of Sanders supporters, published an article titled with Trumpian hyperbole, “America's Humongous Wealth Gap Is Widening Further.” It gave the following statistics: 
In 2018, the richest 10 percent held 70 percent of total household wealth, up from 60 percent in 1989. The share funneled to the top 1 percent jumped to 32 percent last year from 23 percent in 1989. ‘The increase in the wealth share of the top 10 percent came at the expense of households in the 50th to 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution.' Their share dropped to 29 percent from over the same period. The bottom 50 percent saw essentially zero net gains in wealth over those 30 years, driving their already meager share of total wealth down to just 1 percent from 4 percent.
But who cares when the DOW is up over 27,000? McNamara’s tyranny of numbers is complete. 
Keep it casual!
Though an egghead as surely as he breathed, McNamara kept a common man image close at hand. The very same meritocracy that enabled his rise, ensured he could always do so. He could always claim, no matter how many diplomas he’d earned, no matter how many companies he’d run, that he was a middle-class Irish striver and a family man. Today we have Trump who is, as Fran Lebowitz deliciously put it, “a poor person’s idea of a rich man” — from the Fifth Ave apartment that looks like Versailles vomited to the McDonald’s catering for Clemson’s triumphant football team at the White House. Populism is always essential in the American political arena, as the imminent spectacle of all 19 Democratic candidates chowing down on corn dogs across Iowa soon will prove. 


The meritocracy was a Western
The American meritocracy has closed, like the American frontier. Much like the frontier, the illusion of accessibility was the most potent part of its myth of inevitable progress and increase. The barriers, too, were the same: race, class, gender. As with a Western, when you step back a bit, you may ask, why on earth is this our chosen narrative of progress? What is the enduring appeal of genocide and discrimination in this country? Yet, there is an almost sweet naïveté in the notion that something as simple as a test could identify all our future leaders from all walks of life! Similarly, there is a grand romance to thinking an empty continent simply awaited discovery and settlement! But the problem is the continent was not empty, and not everyone could take that test, let alone access the tools to excel at it. And the results of the test themselves were impoverished scraps of data that correlated to achievement insofar as they granted that selfsame access. Nothing succeeds like success!  
R.I.P. public service
The ideal of civil service, as illustrated by Kennedy’s founding of the Peace Corps or Carnegie’s philanthropy, is dead. The Trump administration’s scandals, shameless profiteering from the private sector, and virulent partisan politics have painfully gutted agencies ranging from the foreign service to the Department of Justice. In her recent testimony to Congress over influence-peddling in Ukraine, former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch said:
Before I close, I must share the deep disappointment and dismay I have felt as these events have unfolded...Today, we see the State Department attacked and hollowed out from within. State Department leadership, with Congress, needs to take action now to defend this great institution, and its thousands of loyal and effective employees.
She added that she feared “harm will come when bad actors in countries beyond Ukraine see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system.” The integrity of institutions has eroded at a terrifying pace; and that wealth of experience and culture of service cannot simply be rebooted in an election cycle or two. The sort of service to mourn is not the type exemplified by McNamara — an executive who traded outstanding profits for unthinkable power — but that of the 2.79 million civil servants who get out of bed, make the federal government run, and will never have an Oscar-winning documentary that motes they "sacrified" a big corporate salary. 

Today marks the release date for Errol Morris’ newest political documentary, American Dharma. His subject this time is another creature of his times — Steve Bannon. As the historical narrative passes over the event horizon and into the black hole of Twitter, I am reminded of that fabled ghost in the American propaganda machine — the myth of American exceptionalism. Morris’s movie makes the following thesis statement on the origins of McNamara’s power and how it tied into his own sense of exceptionalism: he was the very embodiment of the American meritocracy. Meritocracy, this vaunted bubbler would have us believe, identified the talent that enabled America’s successful prosecution of World War Two; triumph in the Cold War; and stewardship of the Free World. As ludicrous as this sounds, the fact of the matter is, that I see how someone could have felt this way in the thick of it all. I see how someone might have taken a test, served in the Army, gone to college, gotten a job, bought a house, made a life, and felt pretty great about the whole system. Yet, in the thick of 2019, from my own considerably privileged perch, I don’t see how anyone could feel that sense of purpose and belonging from the service economy that isolates and social media that distorts — and I wonder what Gen Z will make of it all, another 16 years from now. 
    [post_title] => The fog of overachieving: from Robert S. McNamara to Donald J. Trump
    [post_excerpt] => Watching The Fog Of War in 2019 almost made me nostalgic for what I now realize was a sense of progress that I had in 2003. It made me wonder what I have learned as the lofty aspirations of the Great Society have degenerated into the bitter pandemonium of Making America Great Again. 
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    [post_content] => Once, the purpose of philanthropy was to elevate civil society. Today, it is used by the wealthy to purchase power and influence — often at the cost of civil society. Now a young generation of Americans who were born into rich families are searching for new models for the wealthy to give and effect change.

Recently, philanthropic donations from prominent organizations or individuals have become controversial. Leading cultural institutions, such as London’s Tate Museum and the Guggenheim in New York, renounced donations from the Sackler family, because their role in the opiate epidemic could no longer be disputed. Prestigious universities, like Harvard and MIT, are under fire for having accepted large sums from Jeffrey Epstein, even after a Florida court convicted him in 2008 of procuring underage girls.

Exposing the problem of “third-rail donors” is important, but public outrage at the rich getting richer by giving to the poor also obscures more fundamental questions: is philanthropy, even by those with ostensibly altruistic motives, such as Bill Gates, compatible with democracy? Does it serve or subvert it? Are there newer models that might better serve the public interest? And how should wealthy channel their resources for the common good?

During America’s Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, inequality became so stark that it became an issue in the public discourse. Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie implored the wealthy to ask, “What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?”  Carnegie became a philanthropist in order to lift up the less fortunate but at the time his generosity was not well received. Eugene V. Debs, the famous socialist and labor leader, railed against him:
We want libraries, and we will have them in glorious abundance when capitalism is abolished and workingmen are no longer robbed by the philanthropic pirates of the Carnegie class. Then the library will be as it should be, a noble temple dedicated to culture and symbolizing the virtues of the people.
Most of the labor movement, however, took a more practical view. Samuel L. Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, once responded that,
After all is said and done, [Carnegie] might put his money to a much worse act. Yes, accept his library, organize the workers, secure better conditions and particularly, reduction in hours of labor and then workers will have some chance and leisure in which to read books.
Carnegie’s philanthropic program created one of the most important civic institutions in the United States and in the rest of the English-speaking world — the branch library. His example, however, remains exceptional, not least because he endeavored to bolster the public sector. During the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, civil society activists enlisted the wealthy to help champion causes that would lead to new public policy and civic institutions. Their ideals and achievements heavily influenced President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, under which Congress enacted public works and welfare policies, like Social Security, that are taken for granted today but which were revolutionary at the time.

Contemporary philanthropy in the United States does not address inequality, or promote progressive public policy. In Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better, political philosopher Rob Reich notes two surprising things: at most, 30 percent of giving in the United States goes to poverty-fighting programs; and the higher your income, the less likely you are to give your money to those programs. The wealthy tend to give to cultural institutions and higher education, while the less wealthy are more disposed to give to poverty alleviating institutions like soup kitchens.

Reich then asks a question that only seems rhetorical: would society benefit more from altruistic philanthropy or private consumption? Does the tax-deductible charitable work a foundation or wealthy individual undertakes contribute more to society than the taxes the public coffers would receive from a major purchase, or from inheritance taxes? Furthermore, why should the public subsidize a wealthy person’s priorities and discretionary spending?

At a recent panel, Reich recounted a story told in Mark Dowie’s 2002 book, American Foundations An Investigatory History: when George Soros set up his Open Society foundation, there was disagreement about what its priorities should be. Soros allegedly pounded his fist on the table and said, “This is my money at the end of the day, and we’re going to do it my way.” A junior staff member then chimed in,
Excuse me Mr. Soros, roughly half the money in this foundation is not yours but the public’s – if you hadn’t placed your money in this institute, half of it would be in the U.S. Treasury.
According to Reich, foundations and charitable giving cost the US roughly $50 billion per annum in foregone taxation. As Reich says, big philanthropy is then essentially an exercise of power that is unaccountable, nontransparent, donor-directed, tax-deductible. It’s a plutocratic exercise of power in a democratic society.

Over the past 100 years, the changing economic and political landscape has affected and been affected by the role of philanthropy. In Nicholas Lemann’s essential Transaction Man: the rise and the decline of the American dream, the author explores reasons for the decline of the big corporation and big government, and the rise of unregulated finance and private sector solutions (or lack of solutions) in their place. Lemann writes about the series of policy decisions that led to a disintegration of the social compact. A confluence of factors led to a receding welfare state, made easier by a growing distance from the lessons of the Great Depression. However, Lemann shows that the status quo is not the inevitable result of the march of progress. Transaction Man, with his eyes fixed on the bottom line, is the manifestation of years of shifting priorities.

Anand Giridharadas perfectly illustrates how this new transactional ethos affects philanthropy in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, (Penguin Random House, 2018). Most conspicuously it is to “do well by doing good.” As Giridharadas writes, “In the journey from Adam Smith’s theory to that of the win-win, the entrepreneur is transformed from an incidental booster of the common good into a unique figure specially capable of tending to it.” Winners Take All brings the reader along to the ubiquitous conferences and panels where tech entrepreneurs, thought leaders, politicians, corporate executives and philanthropists contemplate the challenges of the world, then enthusiastically agree with one another’s often market-based solutions.  “If the logic of our time had applied to the facts of an earlier age,” writes Giridharadas, “someone would have put out a report suggesting that ending slavery was great for reducing the trade deficit.”

Giridharadas unfortunately overlooks a major reason for the neoliberalist bent to current philanthropy. As Jane Mayer explains in her important 2016 book Dark Money, liberal philanthropy is the consequence of very intentional conservative philanthropy. Mayer charts the weaponization of philanthropy by the Kochs and other conservative billionaires, in their successful attempt to move previously radical libertarian positions about money and government into the mainstream.

Not all philanthropic foundations exist to promote policy that undermines government regulation or benefits respective industries. Most, however, seem to perpetuate the notion that the private sector is better positioned to offer solutions. Rob Reich and Nicholas Lemann are not the only ones challenging this received wisdom. Many, like Holly Fetter, are searching for new models for the wealthy to give and effect change.

Fetter grew up wealthy, but felt unable to reconcile her class with her more progressive politics. As she tells it: “When I went to an Occupy rally, I then went home and actually googled “rich kid social justice.”  She founded the Stanford University chapter of the Resource Generation, a community of young people, 35 and younger who are in the wealthiest 10 percent and are committed to wealth redistribution that aids progressive causes. The tagline on their website reads, “Got class privilege and want social justice?”

Patriotic Millionaires is another group of the very wealthy people seeking systemic change. The quote framing its homepage, by former AOL executive Charlie Fink states, “Because my country – our country – means more than my money.” It includes links to a conference that calls for taxing the rich, and an article titled Equalizing Capital Gains is Essential for Equality.

The North Star Fund is a 40 year-old New York City-based social justice foundation that provides more options for rich people who want to make the world more equitable. Their work includes the participation of communities to which they have contributed grant money totaling $57 million.

Rachel Sherman, a sociologist who has been studying the habits of the wealthy, feels that there is something important about this political moment. In an interview with The Conversationalist she said, “Sanders and Warren talk about inequality and that it is silence about wealth, the fact that it’s kind of uncouth to talk about money, that allows so much inequality to hold together.” She emphasized the importance of not attacking individual rich people, or pointing out the “good” wealthy person who spends her money “appropriately.” Her work has raised this issue of what kind of person is a good wealthy person, and if we deem them so, would we then think they are entitled to their wealth? Sherman points to Warren Buffet as an example, saying: “It doesn’t matter that he’s lived in the same house he bought in 1951; there is nothing you can do to be entitled to that much money.”

Sherman makes an apt analogy to engaging with white privilege and says, “If we can get rich people to not feel personally defensive…it is very analogous to white people feeling defensive about white privilege – ‘I’m not racist so it’s fine.’  You may not be a rich asshole, but you are still benefiting from class privilege.” She feels it is extremely important to depersonalize wealth and “show that this is a moment where we actually have shared interest in having a more egalitarian society and it is something we can do collectively.” She reflects that the new younger wealthy class, like Resource Generation, are able to catalyze this kind of conversation by openly saying “this is not about me personally — it’s not my fault — we just need to recognize the structural reasons [for inequality].”

With the 2020 elections looming, inequality, and the role of government in addressing it, have risen to the surface for the first time in several generations. The spate of books about the role of philanthropy and the private sector attest to this. Problematic contributions by the Sacklers, the Kochs, and others with dubious intentions or sources of wealth, should highlight the urgency of reassessing redistribution of wealth more generally. Rather than relying on the wisdom and moral clarity of the very wealthy to fix societal ills, perhaps new models of philanthropy, or their tax contributions as citizens, should replace them.
    [post_title] => Is philanthropy subverting democracy?
    [post_excerpt] => Contemporary philanthropy in the United States does not address inequality, or promote progressive public policy. Instead it has become transactional — a means for the rich to purchase power and influence.
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    [post_content] => The Syria crisis has provided a clear issue for Democrats in pursuing their impeachment inquiry. 

When Nancy Pelosi took the 'extraordinary' step of initiating impeachment proceedings against President Trump on September 24, the consensus among even those who had for months been calling upon her to do so was that the Republican-dominated Senate would block his removal from office. Over the ensuing three weeks, however, a series of seismic occurrences have upended received wisdom. As prominent historian and journalist Heather Cox Richardson wrote yesterday in a long Facebook post, it feels "as though the nation has shifted." The immediate catalyst for this shift was Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. military support from the Kurdish stronghold in northeastern Syria, and to suspend military aid to the Kurds. This, coming on the back of some stunning revelations about Trump's dealings in Ukraine, have finally cracked the wall of Republican support for the president.
'I want you to do us a favor though'
The original reason for the impeachment hearings was a whistleblower complaint from an unnamed CIA officer who had been assigned to the White House. According to the complaint, which several media outlets published in its entirety, Trump indirectly told the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, that he wanted Ukraine to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden. During their phone conversation, Trump used a phrase that could be the 10 words that sink his presidency: "I want you to do us a favor though." The "though" implies that Trump was asking for a quid pro quo — a personal service for his own benefit. Then it emerged that Trump had held up the release of a $400 million military aid package to Ukraine. Since that aid package had been approved by Congress in July, the president was in effect withholding taxpayer money for his personal use.

Trump tried, of course, to obfuscate by claiming the whistleblower had made false accusations and insisting that his conversation with Zelensky had been "a perfect phone call." Republican senators continued to defend Trump. Their constituents still supported the president, believing his claims that the allegations regarding the phone call were untrue or misunderstood. Since impeachment is a political process and not a trial, GOP lawmakers were not going to risk being voted out of office by angry Trump supporters. The impeachment inquiry would continue, but with little chance of the president being forced out of office.
The Syria debacle
On October 6, Trump announced abruptly that he was withdrawing U.S. military support for Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria. The Kurds were U.S. allies; they had fought and destroyed the Islamic State, which cost the lives of an estimated 11,000 soldiers. Turkey, however, regarded the Kurds as terrorists. As soon as American commandos pulled out of the Kurdish stronghold, Turkey launched a military attack that has shocked the world with its brutality.

Besides the horrific moral implications of abandoning the Kurds after they had saved the U.S. from deploying its own troops to fight the Islamic State, Trump's decision to pull out of northeastern Syria is a diplomatic and security catastrophe. America has given up its leverage in the region, indicated to any future allies that they cannot be trusted, and possibly provided an opportunity for ISIS to resurrect itself.

Kurdish forces that were guarding 11,000 captured ISIS fighters had to abandon the prison camps in order to fight Turkish forces; many of those ISIS prisoners simply walked out of the camps — presumably to fight another day; indeed, there has already been a spike in ISIS attacks against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the anti-Assad forces that were also U.S. allies. Meanwhile Putin rushed to fill the territorial vacuum, deploying Russian soldiers to the area. Some of them posted triumphal videos taken at abandoned U.S. military bases.
Cracks in the wall
Even stalwart Trump supporters were appalled at the extent to which Trump had undermined American security and its national interests. Senator Lindsey Graham, a national security hawk, issued scathing tweets accusing the president of creating "a complete and utter national security disaster."

I worry we will not have allies in the future against radical Islam, ISIS will reemerge, & Iran’s rise in Syria will become a nightmare for Israel.
I fear this is a complete and utter national security disaster in the making and I hope President Trump will adjust his thinking.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) October 16, 2019

When Fox News reported Graham's criticism, it became clear that Trump's support was weakening. Swing voters might not understand the significance of Trump's phone call with Zelensky, but they certainly understand the significance of their president making them vulnerable to terrorist attacks committed by the so-called Islamic State.

This was Nancy Pelosi's moment. At a fraught White House meeting regarding the Trump administration's Syria policy, she stood to confront the president, pointing her finger at him as his aides hung their heads. An unnamed White House photographer caught what has already become an iconic image, the subject of in-depth analysis by art historians and culture critics, and which Pelosi promptly posted as her new header on Twitter.



Trump is now an embattled president, and he knows it. But his base remains loyal, and that will probably never change. The question is whether the institutions of the state, after three years of relentless assault, remain sufficiently robust to support the democratic process of impeachment.
For more analysis of this extraordinary historical moment:

 	
How the President's military men turned on Trump
 	
Impeachment: A daily podcast
 	
Our Republic is Under Attack From the President
 	
A Letter to Kurdish Soldiers From a U.S. Military Wife

    [post_title] => The ground beneath Trump's feet
    [post_excerpt] => Besides the horrific moral implications of abandoning the Kurds after they had saved the U.S. from deploying its own troops to fight the Islamic State, Trump's decision to pull out of northeastern Syria is a diplomatic and security catastrophe. America has given up its leverage in the region, indicated to any future allies that they cannot be trusted, and possibly provided an opportunity for ISIS to resurrect itself.
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    [post_content] => 'The game is rigged, and it does not reward people who play by the rules.' — Ramona (Jennifer Lopez)

In 2019, sex workers are some of the most powerful women in America. That’s the reason Hustlers has been cleaning up at the box office. Every movie theater in America is now an ersatz strip club, catering to a gaze that doesn’t objectify its subjects so much as shower them with solidarity and aspiration. You love to see it: a swaggering, unabashed admission that beauty is capital, and women deploying everything used to deny them power – their bodies, sexuality, and financial precariousness — in order to reclaim their own.

The film, for those who have not heard of or seen it, stars an ensemble cast featuring Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B.; the women play strippers working at Scores, the iconic New York City club, which is frequented by wealthy Wall Street men. Angry at the decline in their income after the 2008 financial crisis, the women engage in a Robin Hood-type con: they target rich customers, the men who caused or became rich from the very crisis that is now depriving them of income; they drug them, steal their credit card numbers, and charge them to the limit. The plot of the movie is ripped from the headlines, so to speak: it was reported by Jessica Presley for New York Magazine, in a 2015 feature titled The Hustlers at Scores.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZXYLoog1TI

Even before Hustlers took over both movie theaters and the cultural discourse, Stormy Daniels, the nom de film for porn actress Stephanie Clifford, was able to humiliate Donald Trump and reveal some of his financial arrangements. She steadfastly rejects any shaming over her work, whether it is stripping or starring in porn films. Cardi B, star of the charts, stage, and screens big and small, openly relishes the way her body allowed her to earn money and command attention: "When I was dancing, I had so much fun. I felt powerful in the club. I felt free.” Stormy Daniels and Cardi B weaponize their lack of shame. Their power, and that of the characters in Hustlers, comes from exposure —  not of their bodies per se, but of the transactional mentality behind gender relations under capitalism.

Thirteen years have passed since Omar Little, a character in the acclaimed television series The Wire who made his living by robbing drug dealers, succinctly dispatched a lawyer’s attempt to stake out a moral argument while questioning him in court with the observation, “I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It’s all in the game though, right?” In 2019, Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) gives the feminist-specific take on the same respectability politics around white-collar and underground criminality: she tells Destiny (Constance Wu) that she doesn’t feel guilty about drugging and robbing Wall Street men because they “stole from everybody, and not one of them went to jail.” Later, she says, “this whole country is a strip club.” In other words, it’s all in the game.

The women of Hustlers are firing their shots not only at men, or the brokenness of capitalism. They are also calling out white women who use femininity as a scam — although the latter pretend otherwise, and would certainly deny the accusation vehemently. White women like Caroline Calloway and Tavi Gevinson, for example, attained notoriety for using Instagram to portray lifestyles, fashion, travels, and an overall gestalt of effortless cool and joie de vivre. The women present very different images, but they both monetized their personal brands to obtain six-figure book advances, payment for featuring products in their posts —  and, in Gevinson’s case, a free apartment in Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhood. All of this was predicated on fan bases built on enticing people’s attention and admiration, using faces, bodies, outfits, and the impression of unobtainable glamour.

You know who else got a free apartment for being beautiful and alluring, but unavailable? Ramona –  one of the strippers in Hustlers. Gavinson’s hustle may centered on what she is wearing, while Ramona’s is more about what she is not wearing;  in the end, however, Gavinson’s fashionable Rodarte trousers are the briefcase to Ramona’s bodysuit shotgun. They are all in the same game of commanding attention in a visual medium.

As New York-based culture critic Larissa Pham observed of Calloway and Gavinson, “crafting and monetizing a brand is now the easiest way to enter a profession.” A lot of people are trying to cash in on this game, but their success is predicated on being able to deny plausibly that their business model is predicated on self-commodification. Part of the controversy around Calloway’s fall from grace and Gavinson’s breaking of the fourth screen is based on the revelation that their online presences had a commercial angle. The key to influencing is not looking like you’re trying to influence, and certainly never manufacturing artificial enthusiasm for a product when your authentic taste, reactions and voice are what “inspire” people. By contrast,  the working class women in Hustlers know that their looks are the best opportunity they have, and they never pretend otherwise

The difference between white women who are online influencers and women of color who make their living performing in a strip club is this: only the former can indulge in the delusion that their looks are not a commodity. This kind of plausible deniability is deeply rooted in toxic white femininity, which is based on a combination of good intentions and obliviousness to ugly social phenomena — like racism, for example. In the now-notorious article that Gavinson wrote last month for New York Magazine, she admits that her integrity and sense of self have been undermined by the performative process of building her personal online following and platform: “I haven’t believed the purity of my intentions ever since I became my own salesperson.” Her success as a publisher, editor, writer and actor felt “less real if I considered that I could only support myself using [my] face.” The disconnect around needing to commodify one’s looks is only possible from a place of privileged obliviousness. There’s no need for respectability politics if your race, size, and class already render you inherently respectable.

Hustlers is a hit because it portrays women of color using their bodies as their path to seizing the means of reproduction (if you will). To be clear, Hustlers is not and cannot be an indictment of capitalism – it is after all, a major studio film, a product that is going to make a lot of white people a lot of money. Can the subaltern executive-produce a film? I hope so, but Megan (daughter of billionaire Larry) Ellison is not the example I would choose for my answer. But in a moment of maybe-she's-born-with-it/maybe-it's-sponcon, when we pretend that race, size, and beauty aren't forms of capital, the real service Hustler offers is in showcasing women's agency, savvy, and — yes — sheer physical grace, when capitalizing on themselves.
    [post_title] => 'Hustlers' is a lesson in feminism from women of color
    [post_excerpt] => A Hollywood hit film starring Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B as strippers who rip off their Wall Street customers holds salutary lessons about capitalism, commodification, feminism, and racism. 
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    [post_content] => Raised in the heart of the Jewish American consensus, millennial Jews were taught to be fervently committed to Israel. Now, they are leading the push to criticize Israeli policy and question the community's Israel-centric politics. 

Talk to two Jews and you’ll get three opinions. It’s an old Jewish joke, but when the subject is Israel, a difference of opinions is often not considered amusing. Those who express unpopular opinions risk a type of excommunication, with friends and relatives severing relationships while professional networks become inaccessible.

I’ve been asked on many occasions why some otherwise-progressive Jews are so passionately supportive of Israel, even as others wonder why an increasing number of Jews in the diaspora reject Israel-centric politics. Many Jews prefer to avoid the subject. Israel is consistently ranked at or near the bottom of issues for Jewish American voters; perhaps paradoxically, there is no issue that elicits more ferocity within the Jewish community. 

The Jewish conversation on the subject of Israel/Palestine is confusing in part because things are changing rapidly. In the decades after the 1967 war, the consensus within the mainstream Jewish community was almost unwaveringly supportive of Israel — no matter what type of government the country had, or what its policies. The fabric of this broad communal agreement is now fraying, as younger Jews become increasingly aware of Palestinian life under Israeli control. They have a long way to go, but they are slowly moving the discussion about Israel-Palestine in the direction of universalism and solidarity. 

My own journey from right-wing supporter of Israel to leftist might provide some insights for an outsider trying to understand the context of Jewish Americans’ shifting communal position on Israel-Palestine.

I grew up in central North Carolina. We were almost always the only Jewish family anyone we knew had ever encountered. Our synagogue was (and is) a somewhat dilapidated brick building, too big for the tiny congregation that remains in the town, and too cash-strapped to care for its own cemetery. But it was a lovely place, and I spent hours in the small library, full of dusty history books about Israel and the Holocaust. Israel was inseparable from my Jewishness, and my Jewishness was inseparable from me.

At synagogue, Israel was the backdrop. At Jewish summer camp, it was the alpha and omega. Israel and Zionism symbolized a strength and self-assuredness that I could only imagine at home. It seemed to answer all the questions I had about the world and myself. At school, I fielded questions from evangelical peers about whether or not I had horns. At camp, I dashed around doing mock army drills and combat-crawled in wet grass. At home, friends glued a quarter onto the ground and laughed as I tried to pick it up. At camp, we learned about our heroic return to our homeland, and discussed making aliyah — a Hebrew word that means rising up, and which in this context refers to immigrating to Israel —  to fulfill our dreams. We rarely discussed the Arab Palestinians who lived there, and almost never thought of them.

For many American Jewish children, summer camp is a core component of their Jewishness. According to the Foundation for Jewish Summer Camp (tagline: Jewish Summers. Jewish Future.) about 15 percent of Jewish children, or around 90,000 kids, went to Jewish summer camp in 2017. Not all Jewish summer camps are the same; the ideology and curriculum varies from socialist to religious nationalist. The same is true for all Jewish institutions, although the majority espouse views that are more conservative than those held by the Jewish public. The message at my camp was clear. From raising the Israeli flag every morning, to singing the prayer for the State of Israel, our responsibility was to carry on the mission that the movement had pursued since its founding a century earlier.

I brought this fervent commitment with me when I traveled to Israel for my gap year between high school and college. While we traveled freely inside the Green Line, we were prohibited from traveling into the occupied Palestinian Territories — beyond the wall that Israel had constructed. A friend and I took this rule for a dare. We found a host to stay with on CouchSurfing, messaged her some vague lies about being Christian bloggers interested in Bethlehem, and woke up early to head to the Palestinian bus station outside Damascus Gate n East Jerusalem. We snickered roguishly to ourselves as we boarded the bus, which ferried mostly Palestinian passengers between Jerusalem and the West Bank. Our snickering died down as we pulled into Bethlehem and saw the graffiti-covered grey walls of what I would later know as the separation barrier. Our hilarity turned to fear when we realized that our host, a pro-Palestine activist, had set up several meetings for us with local organizers. Our little lie had blown up in our face. We had no choice: we were “bloggers” in a strange land; we had to go along, and play the part.

What I learned during those meetings changed my life. In his living room, an old man told me his story about the Nakba — Arabic for “catastrophe” — which is what Palestinians call the 1948 war that sent 800,000 Palestinians into permanent exile. I had never heard about the Nakba before that encounter. I had heard many stories about Jewish-Israeli experiences during the Second Intifada of 2000-02, but now I was hearing from Palestinians about their traumas from that time. In these and in countless subtler ways, the plain fact of Palestinian life and personhood seeped through the cracks of my nationalist worldview. I returned to my program the next day, and experienced my first ever night of insomnia.

A few months later, I reached college and, not knowing what else to do I joined the “Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue Committee.” I showed up and, at first, couldn’t help myself from repeating the talking points I’d learned as a child at synagogue and at Jewish summer camp. In retrospect I can’t believe anyone put up with me. But over time, my talking points gave way to questions, especially for the Palestinian members of our group. Not only were they real, they were my friends. And slowly, I began to organize.

At college, I could finally place my experiences into a broader pattern. Thousands of Jews, despite Israeli and American Zionist attempts at separation, have managed to escape what journalist Peter Beinart calls, “The American Jewish Cocoon,” the well-funded strategy by the mainstream community to shut our eyes to the reality of the Israeli occupation. While Palestinian organizers have, unsurprisingly, long worked hard to wake up American Jews from their comfortable slumber on this issue, the past decades have seen a groundswell in Jewish reciprocation. Entire organizations work to bring Jews out of our cocoon. Growing awareness of the dire realities for Palestinians has sparked conflict in the Jewish community over the nature of our relationship to Israel, with millennials taking a leading role in pushing for a new, more critical conversation.

This growing dissent against the pro-Israel consensus butts up against conservative Jewish communal institutions that are fighting back. They have increased pro-Israel investment in Democratic races, for example, and created McCarthy-style lists of pro-Palestinian activists on college campuses. These conservative pro-Israel activists hold political views that are far to the right of those held by the majority of Jewish Americans. But while Trump attempts to wrest Jews away from the Democratic party and progressivism in the name of supporting Israel, there is no evidence to show that Jews might abandon unbroken decades of supermajority support for it. 

What we are seeing now is a generational changing of the guard. All the efforts to hide the brutal realities of Palestinian life from plugged in and angry Millennials and Gen Z are doomed from the outset. Young Jewish Americans are, like their non-Jewish peers, increasingly progressive regarding nearly every political issue. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Jewish institutions remain in the hands of older Jewish people whose views are far more conservative. Fears of irrelevance stalk their boardrooms. The question is whether these organizations will remain in the cocoon, despite the obvious cost of alienating the younger generation, or come out with the rest of us. Either way, the majority of Jews will continue to live and vote according to their values.

 
    [post_title] => How Israel became the most divisive issue for Jewish Americans
    [post_excerpt] => Raised in the heart of the Jewish consensus, a young American journalist describes how and why a seminal trip to Israel during his gap years led to a political awakening. 
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    [post_date] => 2019-09-27 14:24:25
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    [post_content] => A deep forensic investigation into one of the greatest aviation tragedies in history highlights the critical role of transparency and the role of the law in a conspiracy-minded, 'post-truth' society.

Besides the initial shock and horror of what happened, there was, of course, the visual carnage. Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down on July 17, 2014 in Ukraine, over a war zone controlled by Russian and pro-Russian forces, killing everyone on board.  Photographs of the bodies of the 298 innocent victims, many of them children, are seared onto the world’s collective memory. 

The recovery of the bodies was a grotesque nightmare made more appalling by the ongoing conflict in the area. Even from a distance, one felt abused by what was going on — to this day, I still think about the Ukrainian emergency workers who did most of the work; they were initially criticized as uniformly careless and incompetent, but in fact they had been more dedicated than anybody thought. 

What happened to the flight felt like a curse, a sacrifice to the deranged god of war. 

Then, of course, came the questions. Who had shot the plane down, and why?

I work for Bellingcat. It is an online investigative collective that became famous for the thorough forensic research it did to debunk the lies and conspiracy theories that Russia disseminated in an attempt to prevent the truth about MH17 from being discovered and made public — we work with open source materials and know how to scour the web for clues more quickly and efficiently than many established, but often times not nearly as flexible, news organizations. Although the legal process is ongoing, we know that the Russian military was involved in bringing the plane down. We also know that Russia has been doing all it can to delegitimize the legal proceedings surrounding what happened — and not always succeeding.

Russia’s obfuscations, painfully obvious as they are, are also indicative of our collective need to adopt a strategy called legal realism. — an approach to the law that is based on empirical evidence. Being a legal realist means dealing with legal facts in a non-sensationalist but also holistic manner. It’s taking the facts of a case into account while also understanding why a case is important and who or what it impacts — i.e., not treating it in isolation. For example, if a president abuses power, you establish the abuse and take into account the corrosive effect such a case has on democratic institutions.

In a world of deep fakes, demagogues, and eroding trust in our established institutions, legal realism is essential — it provides a way for us to re-establish that trust, and to strengthen rule of law.
The arm of the law is long for a reason
The internet is home to many conspiracy theories about MH17. Some of them were created and spread with the help of Russian propaganda, while others are the product of the independent tinfoil hat brigade. 

The explanation that emerged from the forensic analysis is clear: Russian forces mistook MH17 for a military plane and shot it down; and then the Russian government denied that it was at war with Ukraine — although it was, and still is. But many people reject this explanation; perhaps it strikes them as too banal. 

Conspiracy theories are comforting because they provide an overarching framework to the brutal chaos of war — and of life in general. It wasn’t a mistake, it was a cunning plot by Ukraine and Hitlary Kkklinton (an influential woman must always have some role to play) to frame Russia! It was a cover-up for doomed flight MH370! It was the lizard people!

Unfortunately, the lengthy and cumbersome legal investigation into the fate of MH17 has had the unintended side-effect of fueling this madness. I am often asked, for example, why it has taken so long to bring charges against anyone. They claim is that if the case was really so clear, investigators would not have needed years to look into the matter. 

I’ve written about aviation and aviation safety on and off for years, so I remind people that even a seemingly straightforward crash that does not take place in a war zone can take years to investigate. When a crash in a war zone involves a local power that is very keen to throw investigators off the scent, the investigation becomes extremely complex. 

This is just one reason why legal realism is so important, although fake narratives are sexier and more dramatic.

There is one thing that feels better than drama, though, and that’s the righteous calm of acceptance. This is why I try not only to explain the legal process surrounding disasters, but to  remind people that mistakes are actually very common. 

One of the most stunning examples of a near-mistake prevented by pure courage is exemplified by the story of Soviet Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who in 1983 prevented a nuclear holocaust because he recognized an alert of incoming missiles was in fact a computer error. Petrov, who died earlier this year at the age of 77, was a hero — that one guy with nerves of steel who had the courage to make a decision that conflicted with his orders, and which ultimately held billions of lives in the balance. Very few people have that courage, which is why we are at such risk of catastrophe by human error.

A major part of being realistic about the legal process is accepting human nature. The accurate version of the events of July 17, 2014 might be simple and therefore more grim, but the history of civilization bears it out. 

The judgments of history, however, rarely bring closure. 
Don’t mistake legal justice for the sense of justice
What can make up for the lives lost on MH17? What can make this tragedy more bearable? I am often told that the answer is “nothing” — and that the pursuit of legal justice is therefore meaningless, or, better yet, performative. “Even if Russia did it, nothing is going to bring those people back,” people have told me in the immediate wake of the tragedy in Moscow, that formidably gorgeous city where legal norms, not to mention the norms of reality, are constantly in flux.

We’re inculcated with the belief that legal justice brings closure and peace — otherwise, we think, what is the point? People feel cheated if they do not receive justice.

The purpose of legal justice is not to bring closure, but it is nonetheless very important. By enforcing the law, we enforce the very concept of a law-abiding society — if you need a lesson in why that’s important, look no further than the social dislocation and random lawlessness in Russia itself, a country that went from legal chaos to legal nihilism after the fall of the Soviet Union. Legal nihilism is not symbolic, it really means the difference between whether or not the police will protect you or hit you up for a bribe, or whether a judge will collude with a prosecutor to withhold crucial evidence from trial and hand down a draconian sentence, something I’ve seen happen time and time again when I was a journalist working in the country.

And if you want to know what happens when the concept of a law-abiding society is completely thrown out the window and institutions crumble, look no further than the Russian-occupied parts of eastern Ukraine, where MH17 was shot down. 

Via armed conflict and destabilization, carried out by Russia and some willing cohorts within Ukraine, parts of eastern Ukraine were effectively severed from the Ukrainian capital. The sham “governments” created there do not clearly answer to anyone, in fact, chaos is deliberately built into their very existence and is a feature and not a bug (no matter what Russian propaganda will claim). While this has obviously resulted in a prolonged war — it has also resulted in tragic byproducts of said war, of which MH17 is only the most famous example. 

The fate of MH17 emphasizes and reinforces that we need a credible legal system that operates transparently. Without one, bodies rain out of the sky. Remember — the people who shot down the plane that day were there illegally, answering to God-knows-who, obviously given free reign to shoot at whoever they thought was a threat. In this case, the “threat” turned out to be a passenger liner.

And if you think that lack of respect for the law is some sort of “exotic” problem, that only happens “in those countries over there”  — I bring you the whole of the Trump administration. The president’s most fervent supporters will actually support me on this one; they’re the ones yelling at his rallies for the president to break the law. 

What they don’t understand is that civilization is fragile. When legal norms break down, we are all left vulnerable.
    [post_title] => When a plane fell from the sky, the lies rose up to meet it
    [post_excerpt] => Few crimes have affected the modern world like the MH17 tragedy, when a Malaysian Airlines passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot out of the skies over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.  
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    [post_content] => How to fix our disturbingly unequal relationship with smartphones

 A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk in Austria on smartphones and cybersecurity.

 “Put up your hand if you like or maybe even love your smartphone,” I asked the audience of policymakers, industrialists and students.

Nearly every hand in the room shot up.

“Now, please put up your hand if you trust your smartphone.”

One young guy at the back put his hand in the air, then faltered as it became obvious he was alone. I thanked him for his honesty and paused before saying,“We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship.”

We are right not to trust our phones. They serve several masters, the least of whom is us. They constantly collect data about us that is not strictly necessary to do their job. They send data to the phone company, to the manufacturer, to the operating system owner, to the app platform, and to all the apps we use. And then those companies sell or rent that data to thousands of other companies we will never see. Our phones lie to us about what they are doing, they conceal their true intentions, they monitor and manipulate our emotions, social interaction and even our movements. We tell ourselves ‘it’s okay, I chose this’ when we know it really, really isn’t okay, and we can’t conceive of a way out, or even of a world in which our most intimate device isn’t also a spy. 

Let’s face the truth. We are in an abusive relationship with our phones.

Ask yourself the first three questions that UK non-profit Women’s Aid suggests to determine if you’re in an abusive relationship:

 	
Has your partner tried to keep you from seeing your friends or family?
 	
Has your partner prevented you or made it hard for you to continue or start studying, or from going to work?
 	
Does your partner constantly check up on you or follow you?

If you substitute ‘phone’ for ‘partner’, you could answer yes to each question. And then you’ll probably blame yourself.

 If this feels dangerously close to trivializing abuse and intimate partner violence, then stick with me just a minute more. What our smartphones and relationship abusers share is that they both exert power over us in a world shaped to tip the balance in their favour, and they both work really, really hard to obscure this fact and keep us confused and blaming ourselves. Here are some of the ways our unequal relationship with our smartphones is like an abusive relationship: 

 	
They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact – ‘user engagement’ – that keeps their hold on us strong. Working with social media, they insidiously curate our social lives, manipulating us emotionally with dark patterns to keep us scrolling.
 	
They tell us the onus is on us to manage their behavior. It’s our job to tiptoe around them and limit their harms. Spending too much time on a literally-designed-to-be-behaviorally-addictive phone? They send company-approved messages about our online time, but ban from their stores the apps that would really cut our use. We just need to use willpower. We just need to be good enough to deserve them.
 	
They betray us, leaking data / spreading secrets. What we shared privately with them is suddenly public. Sometimes this destroys lives, but hey, we only have ourselves to blame. They fight nasty and under-handed, and are so, so sorry when they get caught that we’re meant to feel bad for them. But they never truly change, and each time we take them back, we grow weaker.
 	
They love-bomb us when we try to break away, piling on the free data or device upgrades, making us click through page after page of dark pattern, telling us no one understands us like they do, no one else sees everything we really are, no one else will want us.  
 	
It’s impossible to just cut them off. They’ve wormed themselves into every part of our lives, making life without them unimaginable. And anyway, the relationship is complicated. There is love in it, or there once was. Surely we can get back to that if we just manage them the way they want us to?

 Nope. Our devices are basically gaslighting us. They tell us they work for and care about us, and if we just treat them right then we can learn to trust them. But all the evidence shows the opposite is true. This cognitive dissonance confuses and paralyses us. And look around. Everyone has a smartphone. So it’s probably not so bad, and anyway, that’s just how things work. Right?
Feminism is a secret super-power
Feminists are often the canary in the coalmine, warning us years in advance of coming threats. Feminist analysis of Gamergate first exposed the online radicalization of legions of angry young men for whom misogyny was a gateway drug to far-right politics. More practically, when the US military finally realised the enemy could use running app, Strava, to track the habits and route-maps of soldiers based in hostile environments, domestic violence activists collectively sighed. They’d been pointing out for years that the app is used by stalkers and aggrieved exes to track women. I’m not the first person to notice that in cyber-security, feminism is a secret super-power. Checking every app, data-set and shiny new use-case for how men will use it to endanger women and girls is a great way to expose novel flaws and vulnerabilities the designers almost certainly missed. So, while looking at our relationship with our phones through a feminist lens may be disconcerting, it’s incredibly useful, and in a deliciously counter-intuitive way.

Feminists know about power. Specifically, they know a lot about unequal power relationships; how they are systematically used, and how they are rationalised or explained away as ‘just the way things are’. Long before individual men abuse women, they internalise the logic of “unequal power relationships between men, women and children embedded in social organisations like the family”. Abuse isn’t just pathological. It’s political. Where others might just see some behavioral problems that need fixing, one to one, a feminist sees the abuse of women and girls as something inevitable – even intentional – in patriarchy. So, just as we don’t fix climate change by individually eschewing plastic straws, we don’t fix our smartphones’ designed-in lack of trust by individually trying to spend a bit less time on Twitter.

But that’s just entry-level feminist analysis. It explains why individual solutions won’t fix the structural problem of our trust-wrecking smartphone business model, but it doesn’t get at why the model exists.
Emotional labour holds up patriarchy just as ‘attentional labour’ fuels surveillance capitalism
Australian philosopher Kate Manne points out how misogyny is based on the care, attention, support and service women are expected to give to men. Emotional labour is the currency that patriarchy extracts from us and stockpiles for the winners. There’s a clear parallel between the emotional labour of women under patriarchy and the ‘attentional labour’ extracted from all of us under surveillance capitalism. We’re required to keep clicking on ads, serving up our behavioral data and spending hours every day scrolling, tweeting, liking, surveying and high-fiving.

 Because if we ever stop? Well then the whole damn thing will come falling down. Without adtech the internet will fail. Without the freemium model, there will be no services, no content, no innovation. Big Tech and the phone companies and all the downstream data-brokers have to lie to us about how our devices really work – and who they really work for — because otherwise everything good they’ve built would go away. We must go on sharing more of our lives with devices we love but cannot trust, because even trying to fix it will cause the whole social order to combust. Next thing you know, women will be wearing trousers and thinking they can vote.

Which is to say, everything is impossible until it’s inevitable. One more thing feminists have taught us; to get out of an abusive relationship you first have to see it for what it is. And to change the economic and political order a corrupt business model depends on, you first have to realise that it can be done. Twenty or thirty years ago ‘rape in marriage’ was considered an oxymoron in most Western countries, something that couldn’t be a crime because those in power couldn’t even conceive of wives being able to with-hold consent. Today we have changed mindsets so much it’s almost hard to imagine ourselves back into that moment. And we can do it again.
What would a trustworthy smartphone be like?
We have to imagine a future we want to live in so we can build it.

 A smartphone worthy of both our love and our trust would be a smartphone that is primarily loyal to us. It wouldn’t share our data with random companies that want to exploit or manipulate us, or with governments whose acts can harm us. It would tell us in plain language what it’s doing and why. It wouldn’t run background software on behalf of organizations that don’t work for us, and it wouldn’t hide what it was doing because it knew we wouldn’t like it. It wouldn’t be pockmarked with vulnerabilities that hostile agents exploit and sell to the highest bidder. It would give access to our data as and when we wanted, but also not bug us too much with opt-ins. That’s because it would use machine-learning to understand and enact what we want, instead of to manipulate us into serving others first.

A smartphone worthy of our love and trust would want the best for us and would actively help us to achieve it. Smartphones can be our second and third and fourth brains. They help people with memory loss or processing deficits to build work-arounds. Similarly, they could help the rest of us extend our memories and build our concentration. Instead of monetizing our distraction, a trustworthy smartphone would help us do the sustained intellectual and creative work that gives our life meaning. It would deepen and broaden our relationships, not exploit them for a social graph. It would dive into immersive storytelling and communication with the goal to make new ways for us to love and be loved.

A smartphone worthy of our love and trust would not just waste less time or wreck less privacy or extract fewer monopoly rents. It would work with us to make us better humans and help squeeze our species through the narrow survival gate of the next hundred years.

 Yes, this is all very utopian. But you know what else was? Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a feminist utopia written in 1915 that imagined and helped make possible the world of 2015. Imagining better futures is the only way we have ever managed to shrug off settled wisdom and build better lives. 
How do we get there?
There are different ways to configure the financial and political ecosystems our phones dwell in and suck us into. We can pay the full cost of them while also reducing the gargantuan, irrational and once-in-a-millennium returns on capital Big Tech has made for the past twenty years. We can treat the services that run on them more like utilities, with revenue caps and universal service requirements, because that is how grown-up countries deal with life-critical public goods. We can wildly ramp up privacy and data-portability and competition rules, and we can start actually enforcing them. All this requires a change in mindset, what some would call a revolution.

Seeing that our relationship with our smartphones is not healthy and not right is the first step. Understanding that we are not individually at fault for it is the next. Abusive relationships depend on mystification, “the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident.”  Using a feminist lens brings the unequal power relationship into focus, shows just how weird it is and reminds us how we’ve dealt with this kind of problem before.  It’s not for us to tweak who we are, but for our phones to radically change so they are worthy of our love and trust.

 
    [post_title] => This is  your phone on feminism
    [post_excerpt] => Let’s face the truth. We are in an abusive relationship with our phones.
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    [post_modified] => 2023-11-06 13:59:23
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