There will always be winners even in a losing game.
| Aldric Chen
I have renamed this column from From The Newshole to On The Radar.
Rewilding The Internet
I was catching up on newsletters and found that Kai Brach (Dense Discovery) had shared thoughts on Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon’s We Need To Rewild The Internet, published in Noema. Brach writes:
In We Need To Rewild The Internet, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon make a very compelling and urgent case for aggressively rewilding the internet, as Big Tech monopolies have turned what was once a thriving ecosystem into single-crop plantations: “highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within. … For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.”
Using apt analogies, Farrell and Berjon point to the many dangers of essential infrastructure being controlled by a handful of immensely powerful and profitable companies.
“Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers [American urban planner Robert] Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours. … As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.”
Borrowing ecological terms works really well here, I think. Those born before the ’90s remember the internet as more of a wild, complex ecosystem, with myriad cultures and subcultures using mostly open protocols in imperfect but creative ways to feed and sustain each other.
Farrell and Berjon eloquently explain how the concept of rewilding could be applied to the internet of today, emphasising the need for strong, proactive government action to bust monopolies on both the visible (e.g. app stores, browsers, search etc.) and invisible levels (e.g. DNS, cables, data centres).
I recommend reading Brach thoughts, and the original piece by Farrell and Berjon, which includes this:
Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine. When we interviewed Clark, he told us that “‘complex’ implies a system in which you have emergent behavior, a system in which you can’t model the outcomes. Your intuitions may be wrong. But a system that’s too simple means lost opportunities.” Everything we collectively make that’s worthwhile is complex and thereby a little messier. The cracks are where new people and ideas get in.
As the head of state, America’s president embodies the virtues of the republic. The more he is seen as a stubborn old man who leaves the real work to his courtiers, the more he will undermine Americans’ faith in their system of government. Representing America abroad, Mr Biden will project decrepitude—to the delight of China and Russia and the dismay of America’s allies.
There is another option. Mr Biden should withdraw from the campaign. That way, the election might refresh the body politic. The virtue of democracy is that voters can choose their rulers, but Mr Biden and Mr Trump offer a choice between the incapable and the unspeakable. Americans deserve better.
Between the incapable and the unspeakable.
…
In Doing Nothing About Biden Is the Riskiest Plan of All, Nate Silver points out that Biden is polling behind Democratic US Senate candidates, meaning that ardent Democrats are not in favor of his candidacy for president:
You don’t need another pundit telling you that Mr. Biden should quit the race, although I’m among those who emphatically think he should. But Democrats should be more open to what polls are telling them — and again, not just Biden-Trump polls. There is a silver lining for Democrats to be found in these surveys. Voters in these polls like Democratic candidates for Congress just fine. More than fine, actually: It’s Mr. Biden who is the problem.
The data is remarkably consistent. There are five presidential swing states that also have highly competitive Senate races this year: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. (Sorry, Florida and Ohio don’t count as swing states anymore — and Texas isn’t one quite yet.) In those states, there have been 47 nonpartisan surveys conducted since Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump emerged as their parties’ clear nominees in March.
In 46 of the 47 polls, the Democratic Senate candidate polled better than Mr. Biden. He and the Senate candidate performed equally well in one poll. Which means that Mr. Biden didn’t outpoll the Senate candidate in any of the surveys. (I’m using the versions of the polls among likely voters, and the version with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. included if the pollster made one available.)
None of the 47 polls — not a single one of them — showed the Democratic candidate trailing in the Senate race, though two showed a tie. In contrast, Mr. Biden led in only seven of the surveys, was tied with Mr. Trump in two and trailed in the other 38.
The contrast is remarkably consistent across blue-chip surveys, the dubious ones that voters probably should have some concerns about and everything in between. And the difference isn’t only at the margin. Mr. Biden is underperforming the presumed Democratic Senate nominee by a net of five points in Michigan, seven points in Wisconsin, eight points in Pennsylvania, 11 points in Arizona and an unlucky 13 points in Nevada.
precis: 'How is he likely to govern? A former lawyer with a bland rhetorical style and a tendency to modify his policies, Mr. Starmer is accused by critics on the left and right alike of lacking conviction. He is labeled an enigma, a man who stands for nothing, with no plans and no principles. His election manifesto, which The Telegraph hailed as “the dullest on record,” appears to confirm the sense that he is a void and that the character of his administration defies prediction.'
'But a closer look at Mr. Starmer’s back story belies this narrative. His politics are, in fact, relatively coherent and consistent. Their cardinal feature is loyalty to the British state. In practice, this often means coming down hard on those who threaten it. Throughout his legal and political career, Mr. Starmer has displayed a deeply authoritarian impulse, acting on behalf of the powerful. He is now set to carry that instinct into government. The implications for Britain, a country in need of renewal not retrenchment, are dire.'
Starmer famously purged leftists — like Jeremy Corbin — from Labour, and polices policy with a heavy hand.
'This purge has turned Labour into a mirror image of the Conservatives: obsequious toward big business, advocating austerity at home and militarism abroad.'
'The Labour Party’s offering, which promises to alter things so little that it is enthusiastically backed by prominent business leaders, can be seen as an extension of that principle to the country as a whole. Mr. Starmer’s nebulous invocation of growth and change, without any clear route to secure either, is a feature not a bug. A Labour Party made in his image can be expected to do little to upset the status quo.'
