Fragmentos (06/12/24)

Tíbet, desinformación, Stasi, IA

“Tibetan Questions: Interview with Tsering Shakya” (New Left Review - 2008)

At the time, people were turning strongly to religion—something they were denied during the Cultural Revolution, but that they now had access to. There was a powerful impulse to fight for greater tolerance of religious practices. But the protests were also responding to changes taking place in Tibetan society under the reforms. There was a major debate at the time about the directions Tibet could take in the future—traditionalists believing that we must revert to time-honoured ways in order to preserve Tibet; younger, college-educated people feeling that it will only survive if we abandon such traditions, and seek a modernized Tibetan culture, creating new identities, new literature and art. In this view, it was Tibetan Buddhism and its traditions that had hampered the creation of a Tibetan identity that might have better resisted conquest and subjugation; and it was a new, stronger identity that was needed to overcome Tibet’s current condition. This indigenous critique of the Tibetan past—a self-examination mainly proposed by the younger, educated elite and writers—was seen by the conservatives as somehow a disguised attack by the Chinese on Buddhism. The two groups were not just divided by age, though: there were many young people who shared the conservative view. In general, those educated in the monastic community or through the traditional system were much more conservative than those who went to universities and colleges. These students did not join in the protests at all. Even now, many college-educated people tend to think the 80s protests were unnecessary—that the reforms were taking Tibet in the right direction, and the demonstrations did great damage in altering that course. (…)

The Plateau had been isolated from China by poor roads and communications, and the PRC leadership believed that the separate provisions made for Tibet in the 1980s accentuated its difference from the rest of the country. So the first policies adopted under Hu Jintao, Party Secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region from 1988 to 92, were aimed at economic integration—establishing infrastructural links by building roads, opening the Qinghai–Tibet railway, improving telecommunications and so on. Billions of dollars have been spent on the development of the region since 1990.

This means that the Chinese government is to some extent justified when it says that the Tibet Autonomous Region can only survive through government subsidies. The Regional government cannot even raise enough money to pay salaries to its own employees; its ability to levy taxes is very weak at present. All the major infrastructural initiatives—railways, roads, power systems—have been dependent on injections of funds from the central government. This chronic dependence on the centre is one of Tibet’s biggest problems—the region has no economic clout to negotiate with Beijing and has to follow its directives, because it is essentially the Central government’s money that is paying for the Region’s development. (…)

The Tibetan population in Qinghai and Sichuan is economically better off, because they are much more closely integrated with the rest of China, and they have more ways to supplement their income. The Autonomous Region also has the problem that there is very little border trade, from Tibet southwards to India and Southeast Asia. Historically, this was where Tibet’s trade was focused, since its goods found much more of a market in South Asia than China. The nearest port is Calcutta, which is two days away, but if you go across the rest of China it is eight to thirteen days. So, for example, wool produced on the Tibetan plateau cannot be exported profitably today since it cannot travel southwards—the borders are closed. The India–China trade relationship is at present essentially based on maritime rather than land routes. The reason for this is that, despite some improvement in relations, the border dispute between the two countries has not been settled. It is partly a security question, but also, neither India nor China are quite sure what will happen if that region is opened to border trade—whether the Indian market will penetrate more forcefully into Tibet or vice versa.

“Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation” (The New Yorker)

Sperber concluded that there are two kinds of beliefs. The first he has called “factual” beliefs. Factual beliefs—such as the belief that chairs exist and that leopards are dangerous—guide behavior and tolerate little inconsistency; you can’t believe that leopards do and do not eat livestock. The second category he has called “symbolic” beliefs. These beliefs might feel genuine, but they’re cordoned off from action and expectation. We are, in turn, much more accepting of inconsistency when it comes to symbolic beliefs; we can believe, say, that God is all-powerful and good while allowing for the existence of evil and suffering.

In a masterly new book, “Religion as Make-Believe” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philosopher at Georgia State University, returns to Sperber’s ideas with notable rigor. He analyzes beliefs with a taxonomist’s care, classifying different types and identifying the properties that distinguish them. He proposes that humans represent and use factual beliefs differently from symbolic beliefs, which he terms “credences.” Factual beliefs are for modelling reality and behaving optimally within it. Because of their function in guiding action, they exhibit features like “involuntariness” (you can’t decide to adopt them) and “evidential vulnerability” (they respond to evidence). Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, largely serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence. (…) As the German sociologist Georg Simmel recognized more than a century ago, religious beliefs seem to express commitments—we believe in God the way we believe in a parent or a loved one, rather than the way we believe chairs exist. Perhaps people who traffic in outlandish conspiracies don’t so much believe them as believe in them. (…)

Van Leeuwen and Mercier agree that many beliefs are not best interpreted as factual ones, although they lay out different reasons for why this might be. For Van Leeuwen, a major driver is group identity. Beliefs often function as badges: the stranger and more unsubstantiated the better. Religions, he notes, define membership on the basis of unverifiable or even unintelligible beliefs: that there is one God; that there is reincarnation; that this or that person was a prophet; that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate yet one. Mercier, in his work, has focussed more on justification. He says that we have intuitions—that vaccination is bad, for example, or that certain politicians can’t be trusted—and then collect stories that defend our positions. Still, both authors treat symbolic beliefs as socially strategic expressions. (…)

On the other hand, there’s research implying that many false beliefs are little more than cheap talk. Put money on the table, and people suddenly see the light. In an influential paper published in 2015, a team led by the political scientist John Bullock found sizable differences in how Democrats and Republicans thought about politicized topics, like the number of casualties in the Iraq War. Paying respondents to be accurate, which included rewarding “don’t know” responses over wrong ones, cut the differences by eighty per cent. A series of experiments published in 2023 by van der Linden and three colleagues replicated the well-established finding that conservatives deem false headlines to be true more often than liberals—but found that the difference drops by half when people are compensated for accuracy. Some studies have reported smaller or more inconsistent effects, but the central point still stands. There may be people who believe in fake news the way they believe in leopards and chairs, but underlying many genuine-feeling endorsements is an understanding that they’re not exactly factual. (…)

Does the spread of misinformation influence, say, voting decisions? Van der Linden admits, “Contrary to much of the commentary you may find in the popular media, scientists have been extremely skeptical.” So it’s possible that we’ve been misinformed about how to fight misinformation. (…) Findings like these require that we rethink what misinformation represents. As Dan Kahan, a legal scholar at Yale, notes, “Misinformation is not something that happens to the mass public but rather something that its members are complicit in producing.” That’s why thoughtful scholars—including the philosopher Daniel Williams and the experimental psychologist Sacha Altay—encourage us to see misinformation more as a symptom than as a disease. Unless we address issues of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we’ll make little headway against an endless supply of alluring fabrications.

“Who’s Afraid of Judith Butler?” (Parul Sehgal - The New Yorker)

“I grew up with that fear of it happening again,” Butler said. Most of their maternal line, Hungarian Jews, had been killed in the Holocaust. Butler proposed a conversation “about whether this current state is actually protecting the Jews from harm or exposing the Jews to harm.” The woman refused. Butler persisted—a coffee perhaps? “I’d like to understand more about your fear,” Butler said. “You and I both want to live without fear of violence. We’re just trying to arrive at it in a different way.” The woman started to cry. “We’ll meet, we’ll meet,” she said. Butler asked for permission to embrace her. “I recognized her,” Butler told me later. “She could have been my aunt. Her fear had been my own. Sometimes it is still my own.” (…)

School was a reprieve, although Butler was so disruptive in Hebrew school, so often accused of clowning, that they were assigned private tutorials with the rabbi. Butler recalls telling him at their first meeting that they wanted to focus on three questions: “Why was Spinoza excommunicated from the Jewish community? Could German idealism be held accountable for Nazism? And how was one to understand existential theology, including the work of Martin Buber?” Butler was fourteen.

Jewish education gave Butler what felt, initially, like an invitation into open debate and a consideration of what counts as evidence, what makes an interpretation credible. In high school, they travelled twice to Israel, as part of a program that was something of a predecessor to Birthright. It was the early seventies; Butler had been witnessing the civil-rights movement and was disturbed by what they saw as the racial stratifications within Israeli society. (…)

Butler has called identity politics a “terrible American conceit” that proceeds “as if becoming visible, becoming sayable, is the end of politics.” This critique didn’t necessarily register. “I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity,” Butler told Artforum. “Either people didn’t really read the book or the commodification of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it’s explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery.” (…)

At a lunch afterward with colleagues, Butler and Rankine talked about the struggle to move beyond despair and find what Butler called “generative potential.” Critical theory is not, for Butler, a matter of taking things apart, but it is a matter of taking time. It enables them to share with others what philosophy has allowed them to do and feel. “Philosophy for me has always been a way of ordering things,” they have said. It’s a way of “making things less dramatic so that I can see.” The new book, too, aims to drain the drama from its subject.

Some of Butler’s allies are impatient with their patience. “I worry that we have run out of time to be this sober,” the historian Jules Gill-Peterson, who has written a book chronicling hostility toward trans women, told me. This year, legislators throughout the U.S. have already introduced more than five hundred bills restricting trans rights. Gill-Peterson added, “At what point does that reasonableness and generosity, so characteristic of Butler, deactivate the reader’s political activation?”

“Deb Haaland Confronts the History of the Federal Agency She Leads” (The New Yorker)

Most Americans, if they think about the Department of the Interior at all, likely think first of its natural-resource agencies: the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But, to Haaland and the nearly four million other Native Americans in this country, it is best known for the Bureau of Indian Education, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, which handles the billions of dollars the federal government holds in trust for tribes, a financial arrangement dating back to some of the earliest negotiations of the Committee on Indian Affairs, led by Benjamin Franklin during the Continental Congress. In 1849, when Interior was founded, it took over management of those treaty and trust obligations, and it still manages the nation-to-nation relationships between the United States and its five hundred and seventy­-four federally recognized tribes. (…)

Jewell was succeeded by President Donald Trump’s first Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, who reported for duty by riding down the National Mall on a horse named Tonto, installed a taxidermied grizzly bear in his office and the arcade game Big Buck Hunter in the cafeteria, and then set about selling the mining rights to threatened-species habitats, overturning a coal-lease moratorium, and shrinking national monuments. (…)

Although Natives constitute less than three per cent of the American population, they are a potent voting bloc in some states: more than ten per cent of New Mexicans, roughly thirteen per cent of Oklahomans, some twenty per cent of Alaskans. Native issues have always been bipartisan—too far under the radar, for most Americans, to have become particularly polarizing—and, historically, Native voters have not been strongly aligned with either party.

But in the past two decades a handful of key races have come down to Native voters. Such voters helped Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, win her 2010 write-in campaign; reëlected Senator Jon Tester, of Montana, in 2018; and pushed Joe Biden over the top in Arizona in 2020. Increased wealth from the gaming industry has also fuelled tribal political power. In 1988, Indian casinos took in a hundred million dollars, mostly from bingo halls; in 2022, they took in nearly forty-one billion, from more than five hundred gaming operations in twenty-nine states. Flush with money to pay for lobbyists and to fund campaigns, Indigenous people began fielding more candidates than ever, and both parties started belatedly, and often awkwardly, targeting Native voters. (…)

Although Haaland is most consistently positioned as Native American, she identifies just as strongly as working class. Those identities often overlap: more than one in four Native Americans live below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate on some reservations is higher than fifty per cent. When Haaland was elected, she became one of the poorest members of Congress—she owned no home, had no savings account or investments of any kind, and was paying down tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. (…)

Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma and a member of the Chickasaw Nation, told me that he and Haaland have next to nothing in common politically (he describes the Green New Deal as “socialism masking as environmentalism”) but that she reminds him of his mother, a pioneering Indigenous politician. “Deb’s a force of nature,” he said. “A very excellent legislator—innovative, active, instinctively bipartisan, although certainly very progressive.”

“In Egypt, displaced Palestinians live in limbo” (Bruno Maçães - The New Statesman)

“This conflict has been going on for 76 years,” he explains. “The Palestinians have been subjected to occupation, aggression, house demolition, mass arrest, you name it. I was in Gaza on that day, on 7 October. The Palestinians were very joyful because for a moment they felt they are making the Israelis drink from the same glass we have been drinking for the past 76 years. This is an Arabic saying.” Both Abusada and other Palestinians in Cairo tell me that the reactions to Hamas’s attack in the Strip varied according to age. Older people woke up to the news on 7 October with a deep sense of foreboding. Among the young, who have never known any reality outside Gaza, for whom the very idea of leaving its walls was no more than a dream, there was a sense of joy when the news started to circulate. (…)

Egyptian security keeps a close eye on recent Palestinian exiles. During my time in Nasr, this is obvious. Palestinians are not concerned that Israel or Hamas might continue to make their life difficult in Cairo, but they do fear getting in trouble with Egyptian security forces. Political activity of any kind could land you in a high-security Egyptian prison. In a striking symbol of the Palestinian plight, those arriving from Gaza cannot even be deported; where would they be deported to? No country will take them, and Israel will not allow them back in Gaza or into the West Bank. They exist as invisible people in Cairo. With very few exceptions, they are not allowed to work or study, cannot receive residency status and must live on the charity of others or meagre savings which, after a year, have now been completely exhausted. There is no way to legalise your status in Egypt in order to find work. One Palestinian who left Gaza years ago and recently spent three months in Cairo told me that “the dark side is that [if] you are sitting without work, there is nothing to do but watch television 24 hours a day, follow the horror 24 hours a day, waiting for a ceasefire that never comes.”

“What the Origins of Humanity Can and Can’t Tell Us” (The New Yorker)

Accounts of the deep human past, in short, rest on assumptions about what it means to be human in the first place, giving them normative implications for modern society. As the historian Stefanos Geroulanos writes in “The Invention of Prehistory” (Liveright), European intellectuals have, in the past two and a half centuries, turned to prehistory to explain things like the structure of families, the basis of states, the prevalence of war, and the nature of sentiment. “The story of human origins has never really been about the past,” he says. “Pre-history is about the present day. It always has been.” When people wrote about distant times, what were they revealing about their own?

“"Small Yard, High Fence": These four words conceal a mess” (Henry Farrell)

The most basic of which is this: what exactly is a “foundational technology”? This is a good question, to which the U.S. government has no especially good answer that I have seen.

As best as I can make out (if there is an official definition somewhere I would love to be alerted to it), foundational technologies are technologies which create virtuous feedback loops from which many forms of national advantage flow, including, but not necessarily limited to, military advantage. Advanced semiconductors, “AI,” perhaps quantum, depending on your degree of excitability - all are plausibly valuable not just in themselves but because they can serve as a foundation for other uses and technologies that are as yet unknown. If you’ve played Civilization, these are the technologies at the base of the good stuff in your technology tree. Don’t develop pottery because it seems boring, and you’ll find you are out of luck when you want to discover optics a couple of centuries later.

And that suggests the problem, in a perverse and contrary fashion. Civilization players can look down the tree to see what comes next, and what comes after that. National security officials cannot. Who could possibly have guessed a decade ago that Claude Shannon’s 1940’s speculations about text prediction would combine with neural nets to produce large language models? And what is the next foundational technology going to be? If innovation were predictable in that sense, it would not be innovation.

And that’s just the beginning. If foundational technologies are hard to identify, so too, much of the time, will be the chokepoints that prevent access to them. (…)

The point is not that nothing can be done. It is that national security officials are increasingly operating in a complex policy environment, combining economic security and national security in ways that are very different from those they have been trained to think about and work on. Back in the Cold War, it was easier to ignore these complexities, focusing on the brutal logic of nuclear deterrence on the one hand, and the awkwardness of defending the Fulda Gap on the other. The economics were mostly subject to the politics. During the high era of globalization, you could forget these complexities for quite different reasons, delegating them to the Hayekian logic of the market, which, you believed was going to handle them much better than government by definition. Now, the U.S. is stuck between the two, managing national security in a world where (a) many of the key resources and problems are in the private sector and hence outside direct government control, and (b) where its economy is entangled with that of its adversary, so that actions will have unpredictable reverberations. (…)

Small yard, high fence is increasingly being overwhelmed by general issue hawkishness, thanks to the kinds of self-reinforcing expectations that Jervis identifies. Electoral politics, bureaucratic politics and business models all reinforce hawkish beliefs about China so that the only proposal that will beat harsh measures is one for even harsher measures. If you look at bipartisan reports of Congress’s “Select Committee of the CCP,” you’ll find lots and lots of proposals for high fencing, but little visible interest in keeping the yard small. No-one wants to be accused by their primary or election opponent of being a China wuss (…)

Equally, it has become clear over the last two years that technology restrictions are not nearly as effective as financial sanctions in cutting off adversaries. The U.S. has had a hard time in blocking Russian access to semiconductors, and has downgraded its aims to causing “friction” for the Russian economy. The effort to use the semiconductor chokehold to hamper China’s development of AI is at best highly imperfect. China has been able to import significant quantities, and to find other ways to train AI. It is very hard to find technological chokepoints that are effective and that will last even into the medium term, when you are trying to deploy them against a country with its own advanced manufacturing base. This isn’t the USSR.

“Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi” (The New Yorker)

The files have never seemed more relevant. One in five Germans now supports the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland, and authoritarian parties have been on the rise across Europe. Yet the archive has always faced opposition from two sides: politicians threatened by what its files might contain, and former East Germans who say that the files offer only a narrow, twisted view of their history—one that the West has been all too eager to promote. The Stasi files are like an endless police blotter: a meticulous, bewilderingly detailed account of an entire society’s deceptions and betrayals. (…)

Even in the giddy months of the Peaceful Revolution, as it was called, the Stasi files were a point of bitter dispute. One faction of the citizens’ committee wanted to preserve them; the other wanted to destroy them. East Germans feared that the records could still be used against them. West Germans worried that the files would expose some of their own intelligence agents. Only the Stasi knew what was in the files, and they warned that the information could destroy all of East German society. “They said, ‘These files are social dynamite—the whole country will blow up,’ ” Gill told me. “ ‘People will be killing their neighbors because they worked for the Stasi.’ ” (…)

The new Germany would have blind spots of its own: panhandlers camped outside Mercedes showrooms, drug users passed out on subway platforms. On the eve of reunification, Helmut Kohl promised East Germans an economic future of blühende Landschaften—blossoming landscapes. But the West didn’t merge with the East so much as colonize it, dismantling its industries and cultural institutions, and drawing away many of its best young workers. In areas that were hardest hit, like Saxony-Anhalt, a sense of Ostalgie has taken hold—a nostalgia for the East. The economy was more equitable under the G.D.R., some say, communities more tightly woven, women more empowered. (Ninety per cent of women were employed in East Germany, versus only sixty per cent in West Germany.) Like the MAGA movement in the U.S., far-right groups like Alternative für Deutschland have recently flipped the script of liberal triumphalism. When lockdowns and mandatory Covid testing were imposed during the pandemic, they said it was like living under the Stasi.

The Stasi files offer a startling corrective to such accounts—like cataract surgery on a societal scale. “That’s why this archive is so important,” Elmar Kramer, a spokesperson at the archive, told me. “There was no freedom of the press in the G.D.R., no freedom of speech. There was a shoot-at-will order at the Wall. You can see it right there.” Yet the files, in their way, give an equally distorted view of German life. Once they were released, every moment was seen through the lens of a surveillance camera, every decision through a prism of complicity and betrayal. If government support for reconstructing the files has flagged, it may be because the story they tell is too black-and-white. With one stroke, the files divided East Germany in two—into victims and collaborators, when almost everyone had been a little of both.

“Swing Vote of Global AI Competition: the Middle East” (Kevin Xu)

The global AI competition is often framed as a 1-on-1 battle between the US and China, with a “Cold War II” undertone as the backdrop. In this tussle, there is one region that is growing more powerful and critical to which side will eventually win (if there is any winning at all): the Middle East.

Akin to how a few thousand swing voters in a state like Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Virginia can decide the outcome of the US presidential election, a few countries in the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, are becoming the “swing vote” that could tilt the global AI competition in either the US or China's favor. (…)

The Middle East’s location – nestled in between three large clusters of Internet users from Europe, Asia, and Africa – to speak nothing of its own growing digital citizenry, presents perhaps the perfect location to train and deploy generative AI models and applications. As we explored in our recent post on the Houthis accidental slashing of the cables that connect data centers under the Red Sea, 80% of the web traffic between Asia, Europe, and Africa goes through the Middle East. That is a lot of traffic!

Dedicated GPU data centers fueled by cheap power makes it an ideal location for training large models. Proximity to millions of web users make the same data centers ideal for running inference workloads to deliver generative AI services. Being in the middle (literally) of so many dynamic regions also make it a good location to build backup data centers for redundancy and disaster recovery.

Geography may have played an indelible role in the ongoing political instability and developmental tragedy of the Middle Eastern region. But if it knows how to take advantage of the same geography to enable a future of artificial intelligence, then it can turn a curse into a blessing.

“Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster” (The New Yorker)

Pro-crypto donors are responsible for almost half of all corporate donations to PACs in the 2024 election cycle, and the tech industry has become one of the largest corporate donors in the nation. The point of all that money, like of the attack on Porter, has been to draw attention to Silicon Valley’s financial might—and to prove that its leaders are capable of political savagery in order to protect their interests. “It’s a simple message,” the person familiar with Fairshake said. “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if you are anti we will tear you apart.” (…)

This supposed army of crypto voters fed directly into the next stage of the assault: scaring politicians. Stand with Crypto built an online dashboard that assigned grades to U.S. senators and representatives—and to many of their challengers—which reflected their support for crypto. The scores seemed to inevitably be either “A (Strongly supports crypto)” or “F (Strongly against crypto),” though the data undergirding the grades were sometimes specious. “Most of them hadn’t really taken a side,” another Coinbase staffer told me. “So we’d, you know, look at speeches they’d given, or who they were friends with, and kind of make a guess. If you were friends with Elizabeth Warren, you were more likely to get an F.”

Nevertheless, Lehane insisted that Fairshake maintain a nonpartisan tone. The super PAC was careful to support an equal number of Democratic and Republican candidates, and, following Lehane’s advice, it planned to stay out of the 2024 Presidential race altogether. A venture capitalist who has advised the crypto industry told me that the group’s nonpartisan stance was essential, because, “if we want to get the right regulations in place, we have to get a bill through Congress, which means we need votes from both parties.” Moreover, Fairshake’s goal was to “create a nonpartisan cost for being negative on crypto and tech,” the venture capitalist added. “People need to know there are consequences.” (…)

The super PAC’s latest filings indicated that it had more than seventy million dollars to spend in the remainder of the election cycle. Its donations to political candidates are on par with those of the oil-and-gas industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and labor unions.