Shared posts

12 Jan 07:48

Not nobody

by Scott Lemieux

JMM:

I also think that the withdrawal from Afghanistan remains one of Biden’s shining moments even though I know absolutely no one agrees with me.

The United States remained in Afghanistan for ten years after anyone had any good explanation for why we were there. Obama wanted to leave. But he got rolled by the Pentagon. Biden knew that the only way to really leave was to leave. Someone had to bite the bullet. He bit that bullet and paid a big price and didn’t look back.

Biden refusing to give into the Blob and withdrawing from Afghanistan was correct and something he deserves much more credit for than he’s gotten, and the narrative that there was some non-“chaotic” way of winding down a war in what was (a decade of propaganda and immense expense to the contrary) an instantly failed state is just stupid. However poorly it worked out politically on the merits it was right and always will be.

The post Not nobody appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

31 Dec 06:16

Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for Fri, 29 Dec 2023

31 Dec 05:52

WHEEL SMASHING LORD 3-65 to 3-66

by Abbadon

“Once, a long time ago, in my youth, I served as a caravan guard crossing the deserts of Qeen, a trip of around a half turn all in all, crossing through the kings road. I made the crossing about four or five times – the men in that caravan were hardened and bolstered by both youth and good, boisterous courage, fed by the frequent clashes with bandits, desert beasts, and other hazards that the crossing was known for.

One night we stayed in an errant ruin to shelter from a sandstorm. There was something about the place that set the hackles ablaze with ill feeling. Thorough examination of the area presented nothing, but into many of the stones of that place we found a curious marking – a single indentation, coiled and sinuous, as though something had been sealed in there, inside the stone itself, perhaps for millennia. Though we could not explain how, each man of that expedition, and there were fifty something of them, reacting almost instinctively with almost violent repulsion. Without any reason to think so, we somehow knew what had been encased in that stone was older than time itself.

We lost three men in the sandstorm trying to escape that place, but given no other quarter, we had no choice but to bivouac there. It was one of the most harrowing and uneventful nights of my career. The company parted soon after. We lost the stomach for the work.”

– Graves, belligerent knight

31 Dec 00:47

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Afterlife

by Zach Weinersmith
Zephyr Dear

Literally and unironically this.



Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Why does St. Peter have to stand at that podium all day? Is he in Hell?


Today's News:
31 Dec 00:45

The Insufferable Bros Who Run Corporate America

by Matt Stoller
Zephyr Dear

🥰☕🥰📈🥰✴️🥰☕♨️🧏♨️🧏🥰💰📈🥰🧽🥰🧽🥰👐🥰🧏🥰☕🥰🧗🥰✴️♨️💰☕🥰📈🥰🧽🥰☕🤸🥰🧽🥰🧽🙎🤸🧽🥰☕🤸☕🥰🥰🧽🥰✴️🤸🧗🥰☕🥰📈💰📈💰😭💰😭🧏🥰🧽💰🧽💰🧽💰😭💰🧽💰✴️🥰☕🥰💰📈🥰☕💰☕🥰💰🧽💰🧏🥰🧽🥰🧽💰🧽🙎🤸✴️☕🥰☕🥰🧏♨️🧏♨️🙎🥰📈👩‍⚖️💰☕♨️🙎🥞🙎🥞👐🛀👐🥞👐😢👐😢👐🥞🧏🧽🧏🥰💰🧽💰🧎😇🙎🥰☕🥰🧏🥰♨️🧏♨️🧏💰💰🧽💰🧽🙎👐🧗🧏🧏✴️✴️🙎✴️♨️💰🥵👩‍⚖️🥰♨️🙎♨️✴️☕👐🥞🙎♨️😔🥰🧏🧏🧏

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here.

Today’s subject is a near secret trial about a big merger, whose outcome will be determined between Christmas and New Year’s, the slowest period for news.

The firm being sued is called IQVIA, it’s a corporation that few outside of the pharmaceutical industry have heard about, but one that controls how doctors learn about medicine. And as you’ll see, even if you don’t know them, IQVIA, and its frat-boy executives, know a LOT about you.

And now, on with the bro-down.

This is a page from the FTC’s complaint in the case. It’s wholly redacted.

Directing a Doctor’s Pen

Americans spend $600 billion on pharmaceuticals a year, and every dollar goes out under a prescription by a doctor. “The most expensive piece of medical equipment,” goes a saying, “is a doctor’s pen.” And doctors, though imagined as pure scientists in white coats, are targets for aggressive marketing campaigns, because getting information to doctors about which pills to give patients is big business.

Given the trends in American business towards monopolization since the 1980s, it won’t surprise you to learn there’s one corporation that stands between pharmaceutical firm marketing divisions and the doctor with the pen. It’s called IQVIA, and it is the result of a series of mergers, with the original seed company being IMS Health, co-founded by Arthur Sackler in the 1950s. Yes, that Sackler.

IQVIA is now embroiled in a fight with the Federal Trade Commission over a merger that will determine the future of this $600 billion of spending, and more broadly, which medicines get developed and sold worldwide. Specifically, the FTC alleges IQVIA is trying to monopolize advertising to health care professionals (HCP) by buying up two of the three key firms that run online advertising targeted at doctors. These firms have vaguely titillating names. There’s Lasso, for which IQVIA paid a rumored $400 million, and DeepIntent, for which it forked over an apparent $800 million. (The remaining one is PulsePoint.)

That fight has happened at trial over the past month in a courtroom in Manhattan, where lawyers for the FTC sat across from a host of well-heeled firms in various parts of the pharmaceutical marketing world to argue about corporate power in health care, and debate whether the acquisition of DeepIntent is legal. The judge - a smart and guarded man named Edgardo Ramos - will issue a decision by next Friday, on December 29th, one of the most news dead days of the year.

As with the Google search trial, this is happening very quietly, almost in secret. Trials, especially of such importance, should be public, but this one mostly isn’t. Reporting is sporadic, if there’s any at all. DeepIntent isn’t a public company, so this trial isn’t really of interest to Wall Street traders, which means a lot of reporters who would ordinarily care, simply don’t know it’s happening.

There’s no web or audio feed, and I had to buy trial transcripts, which cost roughly $200/day, just to get access to what should be public record. Even buying and reading the transcripts is limited; witnesses are routinely questioned in closed session. (Most of the transcripts are here.) And much of the evidence you’d see if you were in the court room, like various sordid emails, and at least one presentation that refers to data as a weapon and uses a picture of the Death Star, is not online. IQVIA, like Google, fights against public disclosure where its market power is concerned.

And yet, there is a story here. As I read the trial transcripts, redactions and all, I’m realizing that pharmaceutical marketing is the most bro-style shit-talking industry I’ve ever seen. This fact shouldn’t be a surprise, I mean, a standard tactic to push expensive pills was to hire former cheerleaders to flirt with dorks in white coats, such that ‘pharma girls’ actually became a gag on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. And of course this is the industry where Martin Shkreli made his fortune.

But the story of IQVIA and how it is seeking to monopolize the space, explains so much about the twisted culture of corporate America. In this trial, executives were confronted with emails in which they used middle finger emojis towards rivals and talked about “blowing minds” in the industry. At one point, an executive texted a colleague at a rival firm, “Are we preparing a bag of cash right now?” with the response being “how big? 😉.” They then joked about how much money they would both make ‘integrating’ the two firms. Bro-ing down is fine at a tailgate, but when paired with a legal regime tolerant of consolidation, it means bros come to control the industry designed to help doctors learn which medicine to prescribe.

Ok, so what’s this case actually about, and why does it matter?

IQVIA has $14 billion a year in global revenue, which is a little over 2% of all pharmaceutical spending in America. It gets this revenue largely because it has the most important storehouse of medical data in the world, including information on nearly every medication prescribed to every patient in the U.S., the doctor who prescribed it, the pharmacy at which it was dispensed, the disease history of the patient, its pricing, and hundreds of other touch points. Nearly every major pharmaceutical firm, and most governments, depend on IQVIA to understand how to develop, finance, track, and deploy medical treatments.

Where does IQVIA get this data? Lots of places. But as one source told me, one key area is from the payment processing systems that connect pharmacy software, doctors, and insurance companies, which are called switches. “IQVIA is basically a dark web data broker,” he told me. “They pay the switches to collect all the pharmacy claims data and then aggregate and resell the data in all kinds of different ways, mostly to Pharma. Their data is absurdly expensive.” So it’s data about you and me, and from independent pharmacies and insurers, but IQVIA gets it all, without our permission.


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A different source in the pharmacy business told me that IQVIA “is so dominant that they extract physician prescribing data from pharmacies for exactly $0 in payment- while generating revenues in excess of $50,000/pharmacy from sales of that data.” And that power is intentional. “IQVIA is a company of dozens of mergers,” he added, “and many name changes. International Market Statistics, then IMS, then spun off as IMS Health, then merged with Opus Health, as well as Quintiles to form Quintiles-IMS, then a rebrand to IQVIA. IQVIA needs to have like 20 years worth of mergers reversed, IMO.”

IQVIA is in virtually every crevice of the healthcare industry. For instance, a big part of their business, bought in 2016, is to run clinical trials for pharmaceutical firms like Pfizer, using their storehouse of data and knowledge of patient populations. IQVIA is the largest contract research organization in the world, and profit margins in this industry, I’m told from a source, are something like 50-70%. During Covid, for instance, IQVIA ran 200 clinical trials for therapeutics and helped epidemiologists set up the protocols for reopening the National Basketball Association and Olympics. They sell data to the Food and Drug Administration, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and have employees in over 100 countries. IQVIA even helps pharma firms plan their medical portfolios and helps them do mergers.

The culture of IQVIA is aggressive and frankly, full of the kind of pointless lying that instantly makes me suspicious. I’m not exaggerating. In its initial response to the FTC, the firm actually denied that it was “formerly IMS Health.”

It’s a merger, you see, and therefore, I don’t know, new or something? I suspect the reason for this denial is because IQVIA doesn’t want anyone to think that its original corporate form was founded by Arthur Sackler. It’s a very weird denial. On the firm’s website, IQVIA names IMS Health and Quintiles as predecessor corporations and its ‘proud heritage of innovation and discovery.’

So that’s who IQVIA is. But why is the firm in a trial?

In 2020, IQVIA, though it profited quite nicely from the Covid crisis, had a problem. Traditionally, direct sales to doctors involved a variety of practices, some above-board, some sleazy - like sending attractive sales reps to flirt with doctors. All of these techniques relied on IQVIA data, to plan out sales campaigns. During the pandemic sales reps couldn’t visit doctors. Instead, pill makers had to turn to the internet, and in particular, targeted online advertising to doctors, known as HCP (health care provider) marketing.

The backstory is that in the late 2010s, entrepreneurs started advertising platforms for pharmaceutical firms, which is, as it came out at trial, a very high-margin business, especially after the explosion of targeted advertising during Covid. Today, there are three main ad middlemen, DeepIntent, Lasso, and PulsePoint. Each of these ad platforms do for health care advertising what Google does for the rest of the internet, putting medical ads on the hundreds of thousands of websites and apps that doctors use, ensuring that advertisers reached the right doctors with the right medicines (cancer drugs for oncologists, and so forth), and tracking what those doctors prescribe. This business gives them control of what doctors see in ads, but also helps move money to medical websites and services that doctors frequent.

IQVIA’s strategy, according to the FTC, is to monopolize the space by buying two of the three leading firms - Lasso and DeepIntent - that do this specialized form of advertising to doctors. With the DeepIntent purchase, the Federal Trade Commission stepped in, filing a Clayton Act claim that IQVIA was seeking to reduce competition by buying up most of a market. This was likely the first time a government entity, or really anyone, had said no to IQVIA executives.

The FTC is making three basic claims in its case. First, there’s indirect evidence that this merger violates the law, just a basic increase in market concentration. Lasso and DeepIntent are the top two players in the market, much more than the 30% market share necessary to show that there’s a lessening of competition. Second, there’s direct evidence as well. Sales documents and internal chatter show Lasso and DeepIntent frequently and commonly directly compete for business, and so combining them would lessen competition. And third, most interestingly, IQVIA itself, if it gets DeepIntent, has an incentive to cut off its “gold standard” store of data to the only independent adtech firm remaining in the market, PulsePoint. It will become the dominant vertically integrated monopolist in the health care provider advertising platform world, much as Google became the middleman in general purpose advertising after it bought DoubleClick and AdMob (among others).

IQVIA’s best counter argument is that there is no specialized market of advertising to doctors, and thus, there’s no market to monopolize. Sophisticated advertisers like pharmaceutical firms can as easily use Google and Facebook to reach their target audience, as well as specialized ad firms such as The Trade Desk, AdTheorent, and Amobee. Moreover, goes the argument, it’s easy to start a new business and compete with IQVIA, so the idea there would be a reduction in competition is “speculative.”

The whole case turns on market definition, in other words. And this one is also at a moment of technological inflection, when it’s hard to measure market shares, but where, according to the FTC, monopolization is happening in its incipiency but where IQVIA by contrast argues there’s dynamism and new firm entry.

IQVIA uses this exhibit to show how the FTC has cherry picked a narrow market.

Why was there such a big opportunity in health care adtech? Why couldn’t pharmaceutical advertiers just use, say, Google, or other general purpose ad platforms to reach doctors? The FTC argues Google, and other general purpose targeted ad firms, aren’t set up very well for the task. The search giant helps consumer packaged goods companies target people that might buy, say, soup, or Apple products, but it is leery of putting pharmaceutical claims in its ad for political reasons, which made it not a viable platform for reaching doctors with very specific marketing claims.

Plus, HCP advertising is a wholly different beast. It’s highly regulated, and complicated. As one industry participant put it, you don’t “want a diabetes-related ad to show up to a cancer specialist,” and you need to “understand the physician's prescribing behavior in terms of what the specialization of their practice or the hospital affiliation is, and so on and so forth.” Sometimes the targeting gets very specific, such as finding, as one data provider put it, not just “an oncologist, but an oncologist who sees non-small cell size lung cancer patients and they want to target the guys that see the most.” Google doesn’t do that.

The explosion of HCP advertising during Covid did not go unnoticed at IQVIA, which sold data to these new ad platforms. And here I found the evidence presented by the FTC persuasive. Everyone in the industry understood the end goal was consolidation in the hands of IQVIA. For years, like most acquisitive firms, the data giant already had an internal antitrust compliance program, which is a signal of its intent, since you don’t hire antitrust lawyers to train your executives on how to talk unless you intend to do a bunch of acquisitions that might be unlawful.

And as early as 2020, Frank Lin, who later became an IQVIA executive, was musing on how the firm should “lock up the 1-to-1 programmatic market” with a purchase of multiple companies in the space, including DeepIntent. Lin’s firm, acquired by IQVIA, had a ‘data everywhere strategy,’ one of whose principles was “We are not here to compete but to dominate.”

The next year, an IQVIA executive wrote a colleague about the potential of buying up the whole ad platform space, noting that DeepIntent, PulsePoint, and Lasso held the top three spots in the market, and that “we can hold that easily with IQV data,” implying they could cut off data to rivals. A few months later, the CEO of IQVIA North America, Jon Resnick decided to purchase both Lasso and DeepIntent, texting “Let’s buy both. Famous last words.” Resnick knew what he was saying, because in internal slide decks IQVIA executives recognized that they were buying up rivals, regularly calling Lasso, PulsePoint, and DeepIntent ‘the Big Three’. The roll-up strategy was brazen, with Lin talking to a colleague about the roll-ups and exclaiming, “You are shitting me.” That colleague responded with "Our team and industry are going to 💩 themselves."

In court, the FTC and IQVIA both had experts fighting over market share definition, with IQVIA using disgraced economist Mark Israel to dispute whether it even was a market. But all that testimony was speculative nonsense, as paid econometric models tend to be. More interesting were the internal discussions from the actual market participants.

Bro shit-talking was not, in general, good for IQVIA’s case. There was, for instance, the trash talk among direct competitors. “I hate those small dicks, we are going to take every one of their clients,” said Lasso’s CEO, Greg Fields about his rival. I want to "make sure DeepIntent goes fucking upside down" and "destroy them so bad,” he added. Indeed, as a PulsePoint executive said during trial, "in the vast majority of cases we either lose, or fail to win, business from or to DeepIntent and Lasso.” The situation is not, as IQVIA argued, a fluid market with dozens of competitors and lots of new firms entering. No, this was a three car race, and they hated each other, until they were rolled up.

The most interesting FTC claim is that IQVIA will now have an incentive to cut off data from its sole remaining rival in HCP adtech, PulsePoint, and it will also have an incentive not to buy data from potential data providers who compete with its business. This is what’s called a vertical claim, and it’s the kind of argument the commission just won at the Fifth Circuit in its Illumina-Grail case. The vertical argument is important because it was the vertical roll-ups that allowed big tech to dominate markets, and enforcers and courts, until recently, haven’t really taken on vertical questions for decades. (It’s also guideline five in the new merger guidelines, saying a combination that creates a firm that might “limit access to products or services that its rivals use to compete” is unlawful.)

The evidence here is also compelling. PulsePoint, the remaining adtech firm in the market, told the court “that 70-80% of of their clients relied on IQVIA data,” so losing access to that data would cause clients to move to rivals. (A Merck executive testified on this point, but in closed session.) More importantly, internally at IQVIA, discussion of cutting off access to data seemed to be routine. One IQVIA executive discussed how to think about a “unified IQVIA plus DMD plus MDG,” which “could include sunsetting our support for working with PulsePoint.” One email discussed hypotheticals on what would happen if “competitors are barred from using IQVIA data,” to which another executive noted he already shut down certain advanced forms of access. There was even a policy document that listed items to consider when reviewing whether to share data, with the second one being “Vendor is a direct competitor.”

This evidence is how the FTC is arguing that this was a monopolization strategy. And each time the FTC would present these internal emails or presentations to an IQVIA executive, the witness would use a variant of ‘You’re misreading it,’ ‘I was kidding,’ ‘I don’t know what that meant,’ or ‘That’s out of context.’ Of course, I only have access to the public stuff, not what is redacted or was heard in closed session, so maybe there was something I’m missing.

IQVIA’s counter-arguments weren’t ridiculous, but had a whiff of old-school Bork-ian ‘mergers are efficient’ musty odor. “The leading antitrust scholar in the world,” said their lawyer Chantale Fiebig of Weil Gotshal, “reminds us that at all times we must remember that if we believe that markets generally work well when left alone, that intervention is justified only in the relatively few cases where the judiciary can fix the problem more reliably, more cheaply, or more than the market can fix itself.” That is pretty much straight from Robert Bork’s 1978 Antitrust Paradox, but it is not what the Clayton Act says.

The practical arguments were better. IQVIA’s lawyers claimed that if they buy DeepIntent, the firm will have lower costs, be able to offer data more cheaply, and give better customer service. None of that has any implications on competition, but it was an attempt to argue vertical mergers are efficient. In terms of market definition, which was a better counter to the FTC’s case, they pointed to other firms in the market outside of the Big Three, and even went through an in-court demonstration with the judge about how easy it is to upload a list of doctors to Facebook and start advertising to them. A Google executive testified, and one argument from IQVIA was that the government in the Virginia is claiming that Google is a monopolist in adtech, which doesn’t make sense if IQVIA is also a monopolist in adtech. They even paid a doctor/economist at Harvard Medical School, professor Anupan Jena, to argue the merger will save lives.

There was also a refreshing moment of truth when one of the lawyers for DeepIntent, Alex Okuliar, a former advisor to Federal Trade Commission Chair Maureen Ohlausen and current co-chair of Morrison Foerster’s Global Antitrust Law Practice Group, admitted the old model of antitrust is based on gut feel. "Your Honor,” he said, “I close with an observation as a former antitrust enforcer. I was often called on to decide whether or not to challenge a deal. In addition to thinking about the law, the merits of the case, and the interests of the people, I always asked whether the case seemed credible at a gut level.” After all the debate over economic efficiency and fancy standards over the last decade, I respect Okuliar’s candor that the old model of antitrust is just vibes.

So what happens now? Judge Ramos kept his cards close to his chest, though he did not grant IQVIA’s attempt to deem the FTC itself unconstitutional, which is now a routine claim by especially aggressive firms. (IQVIA and DeepIntent lawyers also made other dumb claims, like the FTC is unconstitutional because there aren’t any Republican commissioners on board right now.) Ramos was also sympathetic to the idea that the FTC has a lower burden of proof in this hearing, for technical reasons that matter in administrative law and will very much upset the defense bar. And in general, his questions were tough, and slightly more skeptical of IQVIA’s lawyers. This case should be a slam-dunk, but with these cases, you just never know. I have no idea how the judge will rule, though if I had to guess I imagine he’s leaning slightly to the government’s side.

All that said, reading through this trial and learning about this weird part of the adtech world, did teach me about why corporate America, and the pharmaceutical industry, is so bloated and over-priced. Fundamentally, the data IQVIA has, through its payment of the owners of switches, is our data, and yet IQVIA gets to monetize it and use it as a competitive weapon. None of us, not the pharmacy, or the doctor, or anyone else, consented to give our data to help a would-be monopolist festival of bros as they joke about bags of money. And until the FTC under Lina Khan filed suit, no one had ever told these guys ‘no’ to their strategy of destroying rivals to squeeze out cash, and so they act with impunity to do so. And why wouldn’t they? If these executives weren’t rolling up this new market, someone else would. And that will remain the case, until and unless a judge puts a stop to it, as per the Clayton Act.

Then IQVIA will have to compete on the merits, and there will actually be some choice and innovation in how the information about our health you and I give to our providers is used.

UPDATE 12/29/23: The FTC won the court battle, with Judge Ramos ruling for the government in its request for a preliminary injunction to block the merger. We don’t know the details of the decision because the full opinion will be redacted to block confidential business information. It’ll be public at some point after January 5th.


Thanks for reading. Send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or comments by clicking on the title of this newsletter. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues of BIG, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation and democracy. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

cheers,

Matt Stoller

31 Dec 00:44

Out with a Bang as FTC Beats the PharmaBros

by Matt Stoller

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here.

Today I was going to write the annual review of BIG. But some bigger antitrust news hit yesterday - Lina Khan’s FTC won an important court fight over a merger, and it looks like this might start reshaping corporate America. And that’s not all. There were two other rulings - one on crypto and one on private equity - that are helping to move us towards a better society.

Generally speaking we don’t choose to see court decisions - except extremely high-profile ones on social questions - as part of politics. But judges are politicians, and they often make policy just as much as they rule on factual questions.

So that’s what this issue is about. I’ll write the year end review of BIG and monopolies/finance in 2023, as well as predictions for 2024, in a day or so.

On Monday, I did a profile of an important merger trial that otherwise got zero press, where a $40 billion medical data corporation called IQVIA was trying to monopolize the business of advertising to doctors by buying an adtech company called DeepIntent. This acquisition was the same strategy, in miniature, that Google pursued fifteen years ago when it rolled up the general advertising market by purchasing DoubleClick, among other firms. The FTC challenged IQVIA’s buy-out of DeepIntent as unlawful, and yesterday an Obama appointed judge named Edgardo Ramos ruled in favor of the government, granting a preliminary injunction to block the merger.

Ramos didn’t release the full opinion, just the decision, as he didn’t want to divulge confidential business information. Ramos will let the parties redact what they want, and then publish the opinion at some point in January. It’s likely an important ruling, but since I don’t know what it says, I can only speculate on the legal questions. Practically, what this means is that the merger cannot be consummated unless IQVIA wins in the administrative court at the FTC. Typically parties abandon acquisitions after losing at the preliminary injunction stage, but they don’t have to, and maybe IQVIA won’t. But I think this one’s over.

Ok, so why does this decision matter? A few reasons. First, it’s a win for enforcers, and a real blow to the immensely arrogant antitrust bar. It took me awhile to understand the IQVIA case, but after reading the transcripts I realized the key theme was a culture of entitlement that is pervasive in corporate America.

The lawyers in the case were fancy, ex-government, and paid large sums of money. Yet they were quite… mediocre, with one arguing that the case, in his ‘gut,’ was meritless. There were very bro-y executives talking about bags of money and domination. It was as if none of these people had ever been told no when trying to grab something they wanted from someone less powerful than they are. It was beyond their comprehension that laws are anything more than polite suggestions. They hate Lina Khan, and as I found out when speaking to a room full of angry lawyers in April at the American Bar Association, they hate you and me. But it’s not personal, fundamentally the anger comes from a rage towards the concept of equality under the law, the idea that the peasants have rights.

More practically, this loss discredits the main argument from Wall Street. Dealmakers, and thinkers like Larry Summers, have often said that while Biden antitrust enforcers are aggressive, if corporations are willing to go to court, the government is likely to lose because judges won’t let them rewrite the law. This narrative was so strong that Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter were questioned in Congress as to whether they were even trying to win. It’s always been a narrow and bad faith critique, but this victory, plus, the win in the Fifth Circuit over Illumina, should put that narrative to rest. Antitrust lawyers will tell their clients to go to court at their peril.

Second, this case had a few unusual legal elements, such as blocking an acquisition in which a firm was buying a supplier. These kinds of mergers weren’t challenged for forty years until Trump’s 2018 AT&T-Time Warner challenge, which means the dominant business model in everything from streaming to big tech to health insurance to shipping has become vertically integrated monopolies. When the government did start challenging these mergers, it lost, from AT&T-Time Warner to UnitedHealth Group-Change to Microsoft-Activision. But then Illumina-Grail happened. I suspect this one is another win, though we won’t know the legal details until the full decision is released.

Third, the Antitrust Division has a monopolization case against Google in Virginia, and the Texas AG has one in Texas, over the search firm’s vertical consolidation of the adtech space. This decision will help those cases, because it’s a very similar argument in a similar industry, which is to say, IQVIA does adtech in a healthcare vertical.

Fourth, this decision could buttress adoption of the new merger guidelines by the courts. The FTC didn’t rely on the new guidelines for its arguments, as they weren’t in force when the commission brought the case. But guideline five - mergers that “limit access to products or services that its rivals use to compete” are often unlawful - as well as guideline two on direct rivals being a signal of competition - were in play.

I’m sure there are other things I’m missing, since the decision isn’t public yet. (There is likely something on the standard the FTC must use in getting a preliminary injunction, which will annoy the defense bar. But I don’t know.)

And yet, that’s not all that happened over the past few days. Here are two other decisions by judges that are creating useful case law.


BIG is a reader-supported newsletter focused on the politics of monopoly and finance. This is journalism and advocacy that challenges power, so please consider a paid subscription. Lies are free, the truth costs a few bucks. You can subscribe by clicking here.

Subscribe now


A Crypto Loss

Judge Jed Rakoff, who is a legend on the bench on laws around finance, ruled on Thursday that a bunch of crypto assets are securities, and thus subject to basic securities regulation. The specific case here is over the Terra/Luna Ponzi Scheme by Do Kwon, and whether by offering crypto assets Kwon was engaged in securities fraud. Rakoff ruled that he was doing so. There’s been a fight between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the crypto world since 2021 over this question, so Rakoff’s ruling is a major win for the SEC. It also conflicts with an earlier ruling by Judge Analisa Torres over a different crypto purveyor named Ripple Labs, during which Torres said crypto assets sometimes aren’t securities. The appeals court will have to clear up the conflict.

I honestly can’t believe we’re still having this debate after the Sam Bankman-Fried debacle, which is the biggest and most high-profile fraud, but not the only one. Crypto is obviously a scam. But as we’re finding out, our faith in the rule of law is so feeble that it’s hard to shut down an ‘industry’ that has been operating illegally for over a decade, even with a dedicated regulator like Gary Gensler, even when that ‘industry’ has no value or purpose except money laundering, speculation and fraud, and even after the major Ponzi schemes blew up. The reason for this is some bad judging, but also that the right-wing has not spent the time rethinking financial regulation the way they have begun reconsidering antitrust. So Republicans in Congress simply have no framework for doing something about financial scams. It’s too bad, but hopefully it’s changing as crypto boosters like Patrick McHenry retire and Republicans get more concerned over common ownership by asset managers.

The Rent Is Too Damn High, Private Equity Edition

In October of 2022, ProPublica published a blockbuster article over rent-fixing software called YieldStar made by a firm named RealPage. YieldStar allowed large property managers to collude with one another over prices and vacancies. Since then, multiple antitrust lawyers have brought price-fixing cases, supported by the Antitrust Division. These cases have been consolidated in Tennessee.

It’s a remarkable set of claims alleging a vast conspiracy. As stated in the judicial order, “as of December 2020, RealPage ‘had over 31,700 clients, including each of the 10 largest multifamily property management companies in the United States.’” By the end of 2022, YieldStar was being used to price 4 million apartments in the United States.

And it wasn’t just a software package, RealPage sought to get its clients to raise rents instead of competing against each other based on price. The firm hired and assigned ‘pricing advisors’ to ‘closely monitor clients' conformance with RealPage's pricing recommendations,’ challenging the property managers when they didn’t raise rents enough.

Ok, so that’s the case. The judge, an Obama appointee named Waverly David Crenshaw Jr., mostly ruled for the plaintiffs, which means this case is going to discovery and a possible trial. But here’s what’s interesting. Crenshaw also ruled that the owner of RealPage, a private equity firm called Thoma Bravo, must also be a defendant, because the firm was aware of and potentially participated in the scheme. It’s no different, argued the judge, than private equity giant Bain Capital’s role in the Varsity Brands cheerleading antitrust case. So this is now the second judge putting liability on the private equity owner for a price-fixing or monopolization scheme by a subsidiary. And there could be a third, as the FTC has a case against private equity firm Welsh Carson for monopolizing certain aspects of healthcare in Texas.

Judges to the Rescue?

So multiple cases have good outcomes, and set up for a different legal environment. This is how good case law develops, and ultimately reshapes corporate behavior. It’s slow, and it would be even better if Congress and state legislatures acted. It’s also subject to the whims of judges, many of whom are still libertarians by instinct and training. But enforcement, by both public servants and private plaintiff lawyers, sets up the possibility to improve our laws.

To put it differently, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. And we’re starting to put points on the board.

Thanks for reading. Send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or comments by clicking on the title of this newsletter. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues of BIG, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation and democracy. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

cheers,

Matt Stoller

23 Dec 18:14

Best TV of 2022

by Abigail Nussbaum

2022 was a weird TV year. On the business side of things, the wheels seem to be coming off the bus of the streaming boom. Everyone is suddenly figuring out that churning out an endless stream of expensive, star-studded content just to keep people paying their subscription dollars (and now with more services than ever vying for those dollars) is not a sustainable model. First off was Netflix, posting its first official downturn early in the year, and following it up with cost-cutting measures: more shows cancelled out of the blue, fewer auteur passion projects, and perhaps a pivot to ad-funded subscription models. But the OG streamer’s troubles were soon dwarfed by its younger competitors’. The WB/Discovery saga just keeps getting more embarrassing, and more distressing for creators, with projects not only cancelled once they’re already in production or in the can, but disappeared out of existence, buried where no one will ever be able to access them. And Disney+, despite having the backing of the world’s most powerful entertainment conglomerate, despite possessing an extremely desirable content library, and despite producing a nonstop stream of work within the worlds of the two biggest entertainment franchises ever, is apparently having so much trouble recruiting new subscribers that the company’s CEO was ousted and replaced with his own predecessor, in a desperate—and, I suspect, doomed—attempt to right the ship.

It’s too soon for any of this upheaval to be reflected in the actual shows being produced, but nevertheless there was a certain centerlessness to a lot of this year’s TV, a feeling of crumbling from within. For years I and many other critics have complained about the baleful effect that the streaming model has had on the craft of writing for television. How, absent the restrictions of a timeslot and commercial breaks, and with the expectation that a ten- or twelve-episode season will be watched over a single weekend, writers seem to have forgotten how to structure an episode or a season. In 2022, these problems seemed to come to a head. A lot of this year’s shows reflect the unspoken assumption that their sins of poor structure and slack pacing will be obscured by the binge experience. And in a year with so many standalone miniseries—as multiple true crime, grifter, and techbro projects came to fruition—I repeatedly found myself having the thought that these shows barely had enough material to fill a feature film.

These problems afflicted even projects that I otherwise enjoyed, and marred ones that I had every expectation of enjoying. HBO’s new flagship series, House of the Dragon, was clearly made under the assumption that extra-length episodes are the hallmark of a prestige drama. Would I have found the show as emotionally deadened and tedious if it were not consistently delivering 60+ minute installments, usually with a lot of slack and padding? Maybe, but I’ve found myself a lot of more forgiving of shows that rarely go over 45 minutes. And there have been series this year that felt tremendously exciting at their outset, only to laboriously struggle across the finish line, having stretched their story out well past its tolerance. The Resort, a trippy time travel mystery with a top-notch cast from the creators of Palm Springs, felt like a shoe-in for this list in its early episodes, but by the time the season came to a close my interest had dispersed.

So if there’s a unifying theme among this year’s best shows, it is that they manage to buck the trend and feel like their creators have thought about things like structure, pacing, and how to deliver a story in installments. There’s a bias here towards shows with shorter episodes, but more than that, towards shows that have episodes, that respect the viewers’ time and the demands of the story. It’s hard to tell what the streaming contraction will mean for TV (besides, that is, that there will be less of it), but I’d like to believe that one effect will be to elevate those creators who don’t use the medium of streaming as an excuse not to think about the craft of storytelling.

Best Show of the Year: Andor (Disney+)

I debated about this choice. Not just because of an anti-Star Wars bias (though as I discussed in my review of the show last month, the fact that it is a Star Wars series made it hard for me to admit just how good it is), but because of a recency bias. Do I think Andor is the best TV show of 2022 because the thrill of its greatness has barely had a chance to dispel as I sit down to write this list? Maybe, but part of the reason for that excitement lingering is that Andor is a rare thing in 2022, a show that got people talking with excitement, not just urging each other to watch it but discussing it, finding hidden moments of brilliance, and reflecting on its themes and ideas. It’s been a minute since we had a show that captured the zeitgeist in this way, and that feels worth celebrating.

But of course, Andor isn’t just buzzy. It’s very very good. It’s a story about radicalization, not just of its title character, future Rebellion captain Cassian Andor, but of his community, of the other resistance operatives he meets, and of people, like the rich, elegant senator Mon Mothma, who are still capable of living comfortable, mostly-free lives even in the midst of a fascist takeover. In a setting that has always taken the division between Empire and Rebellion for granted, Andor asks what it takes to make people choose a side. It does so with tremendous skill across the board, in its performances (imagine finding a new way for Andy Serkis to wow audiences in 2022), dialogue, visuals, and music. Per my complaints above, this is not just a show with episodes, but with multi-episode mini-arcs, a structure that shouldn’t feel revolutionary, but whose effect in 2022 was almost soothing—here, finally, was a creator who had given some thought to how his story would unfold in the audience’s mind. And it’s a show that builds on nearly half a century’s worldbuilding to create a meaty, thought-provoking story about life under autocracy and the price of resisting it. Whether it’s following the middle managers of a fascist regime as they efficiently prop up a reign of terror, or depicting a thrilling escape from gamified nightmare of a factory prison, or moving you to tears with the funeral of a beloved character that doubles as a call to resistance, Andor has clearly thought deeply about its world and situation, and the story it produces is one of the most exciting and substantial I’ve seen this year.

Rest of the Best:

The Bear (Hulu) & Julia (HBO Max)

I’m grouping these two shows together because they’re both about the same thing—the intersection of cooking and commerce—and yet so different that I can’t help being amused, not just by the contrast, but the fact of their both having premiered in a single year. Julia is a lighthearted, traditionally structured drama about Julia Child’s early efforts to translate her bestselling cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, into the then almost unheard-of genre of a cooking show. The Bear follows a burned-out haute cuisine chef as he struggles to save—and perhaps transform—his late brother’s struggling Chicago sandwich shop. They approach their subject from opposite directions—cooking as an elevated hobby versus a codified artform; introducing diners to new and unfamiliar foods versus perfecting a humble, familiar dish; stumbling into a career as a privileged dilettante with money to burn versus trying to make a living in a cutthroat market; embracing imperfection versus striving to eliminate it.

Taken together, the two shows create a panoramic view of the foodie movement and how it has evolved over the last century—sometimes in extremely baleful ways, such as when Child is accused of setting yet another unachievable standard that women have to meet, or when a rapturous review of the restaurant in The Bear causes it to be inundated by hipsters who crowd out its neighborhood clientele. But even separately, these are two extremely well-made, enjoyable shows—The Bear is perhaps more formally innovative, while Julia sticks the landing a bit better—about a subject that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention in fiction as it deserves.

(If you’ve watched these two shows and still want more cooking-themed entertainment, I highly recommend Mark Mylod’s movie The Menu. It’s probably the slightest of the three works, but as I wrote in my review last month, it has some interesting things to say about how capitalism can leave both artists and audiences feeling hungry.)

Better Call Saul (AMC)

The last gasp of the antihero drama trend of the 00s was arguably the best because it learned from, and rejected, the mistakes of its predecessors—not least, its parent show, Breaking Bad. In some ways, Better Call Saul was an anti-antihero show, because it not only made us love its flawed, sometimes amoral hero, conman turned lawyer turned criminal attorney Jimmy “Saul Goodman” McGill, but gave us hope for his redemption. The show’s final season was a brilliant heist story, proceeding towards its conclusion of mingled triumph and calamity with a logic that felt both inevitable and exhilarating. But once that story came to an end, Better Call Saul lingered with its characters—Jimmy, but also his wife and partner-in-crime Kim Wexler, one of the best female characters on television—and showed us how they live with themselves, what they become in the wake of the things they’ve done, and how they can find a form of salvation when they, and we, least expect it. As I wrote in my review of the final season, Better Call Saul ended as a love story, and that’s not only a great ending for this show, but for a genre that had seemed to outlive its purpose.

Los Espookys (HBO)

HBO cancelled this weird little show after its second season, which is as unsurprising as it is tragic. It’s hard to believe that we got even two seasons of a surreal, mostly-Spanish-language supernatural workplace comedy that one canny reviewer described as Scooby Doo by way of Jorge Luis Borges. Los Espookys follows the titular team as they fake supernatural occurrences at the behest of such clients as a primary school teacher who wants to scare her students into paying attention to her, or an annoyed cemetery manager who wants the ghosts of his residents to assure their relatives that they don’t mind being buried in the wrong graves. But it adds the wrinkle that in the show’s world, the supernatural actually exists—one of the team’s members is a mer-person who regularly converses with (and asks annoying favors of) the moon, and a running theme throughout the series is the brainwashing of a succession of women to act as a news program’s perfectly-coiffed, personality free hostess. This is all delivered in a dry, Wes Anderson-ian tone that also conveys a lot of warmth, especially towards those who are queer or just a bit weird. Los Espookys was a gem, and though its cancellation is hardly a surprise, the two seasons it did give us deserve to be discovered by more people.

Pachinko (Apple TV+)

I didn’t have great hopes for this series, having been largely underwhelmed by its source material, Min Jin Lee’s epic historical melodrama about several generations in a family of Korean immigrants to Japan. But the adaptation makes so many smart choices. It intercuts between the story’s various time periods instead of presenting them chronologically, creating interesting resonances (once again, we see the importance of good structure). It gives heroine Sunja, who travels from colonized Korea to Japan at the beginning of the 20th century, more personality and agency than she had in the novel, where she seemed to exist mainly in order to suffer uncomplainingly. It creates a dark, star-crossed romance between Sunja and her married lover Hansu, who in the novel was merely a boring plot device. And it beefs up the story of Sunja’s grandson Solomon, who in 1980s Japan must struggle not only with Japanese prejudice but the expectations of his American bosses. The result is a gripping multigenerational saga that both captures a period and setting that American media doesn’t tend to depict, and tells utterly universal stories in a way that repeatedly tugs at the heartstrings. It also has the best opening credits in a year that delivered some stellar examples of the form.

The Patient (Hulu)

The logline for this show was “serial killer kidnaps psychiatrist so he can go to therapy”. I’m pretty burned out on the serial killer genre (that’ll happen once you realize that the real story is usually “the victims were poor/POC/women/sex workers/queer (circle all that apply) so the cops didn’t bother to work the case”) so I figured this was not the show for me. A better sales pitch might have been “what if Misery was about psychiatry instead of novel-writing, and also a lot less misogynistic?” A two-hander between Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson, The Patient is about the limits and capabilities of the therapeutic process. Is it possible for Gleeson’s killer to change when he’s keeping his therapist chained in a basement and threatening to kill him if his progress isn’t all that he hopes? Is it possible for Carell to treat someone he fears and is considering trying to kill? Delightful worldbuilding touches help to flesh out the characters—Gleeson’s foodie-ism, Carell’s Jewish heritage, the conflict between his Orthodox son and Reform wife. They make what could have been a cheap gimmick into a deeply felt drama that is also a tense thriller.

Reservation Dogs (FX)

The problem with delivering a first season as thrilling and perfectly formed as Reservation Dogs did is, how do you follow it up? Some shows would try to level up, but Reservation Dogs—perhaps recognizing that its world has so many stories still to be told—chose to go deeper. If there’s a thread running through the season, it is the persistence of grief—in the teenage foursome who are the show’s main characters, who are still rocked by the suicide of their friend; but also among their parents and elders, who continue to feel the absence of one of the teens’ mothers, who died in an accident more than a decade ago. But there’s so much else that happens in the season—wannabe-breadwinner Bear’s first day at work as a roofer, which becomes a meditation on absent fathers; an activity for the reservation’s teens led by a pair of influencers who are at once self-aggrandizing and entirely earnest about connecting with their Native heritage; a terrifying episode in which the sweetest member of the group ends up in a group home for juvenile delinquents, very nearly getting swallowed up by a system that clearly can’t wait to put him in jail. With each episode, Reservation Dogs continues to reveal, with its inimitable, quasi-surrealist humor, the challenges of growing up Native American, and the community that keeps these characters going.

Severance (Apple TV+)

Severance had what is perhaps the highest concept of 2022—what if your employer could mandate the surgical separation of your personality, creating a you that exists only for work, with no memory of the outside world and no distractions during work hours, while in the outside world you had no memory of work? I had some issues with how this concept was executed—for a show about labor exploitation, Severance sure seemed myopically focused on the middle class—but on the character level, there’s no denying that it was developed in interesting ways. In its first season, Severance was about its “innie” characters, people for whom the office is their whole world, and who can be easily fobbed off with trinkets and meaningless rewards, developing solidarity and class consciousness, and inching their way towards rebellion. The result was both an engrossing Lost-esque science fiction mystery, as more, and more bizarrely deranged, details about the characters’ employer were revealed, and a touching twist on the workplace drama.

Station Eleven (HBO Max)

I already mentioned this limited series in my list of the best TV of 2021, but what the hell, the last three episodes aired this year, and it hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it deserved. If Pachinko is an example of how to adapt a middling novel into a great show, Station Eleven takes a book that was already great and makes it better—more generous towards even its most flawed characters, more moving in how it draws connections between characters who in the novel never even met, and more thoughtful about its central question. The novel Station Eleven is based on was about finding beauty and art after the end of the world. The series asks a further question: what do we owe the past? What hold should we allow it to have over us? Though all the show’s characters have survived the pandemic that has depopulated the planet, they are starkly divided between those who remember the old world and are desperately trying to hold on to its remnants, and those who want to be free of the dead past’s grip. Where the novel brought this conflict to a violent head, the show tries to find a peaceful resolution, to suggest that art is a constantly renewing resource, one that can mean new things in a new world.

Honorable Mentions:

Interview With the Vampire (AMC) – The second attempt at Anne Rice’s overheated vampire tale is slyer, queerer, more diverse, and more upfront about the racial realities of its setting than either the original novel or the 1994 film adaptation. It’s also a rollicking good yarn with an all-around excellent cast and a surprising amount of laugh-out-loud moments. Even if you know the story, this take on it feel fresh and exciting.

Our Flag Means Death (HBO Max) – The internet’s darling, this queer, comedic twist on the pirate tale—improbably based on a true story—gathers some of the best comedy talent on TV and delivers a top-notch tale of high seas adventure, workplace shenanigans, and romance.

Shining Girls (Apple TV+) – Lauren Beukes’s serial killer time travel novel seems like an impossible challenge for a screen adaptation, but this take on it is masterful. Elisabeth Moss is unsurprisingly brilliant as a women coping not just with the aftermath of an assault but with a sense that the world is changing in impossible ways, and Jamie Bell is terrifying as a man whose contempt for women is evident in his every action.

Show That Everyone Loves and I Can’t See the Point Of: For All Mankind (Apple TV+)

There are a few contenders for this crown. I think Hacks is nice but wildly overpraised. I gave up on The White Lotus after two episodes. And beyond some impressive directorial flourishes, I don’t get the excitement over Barry. But for the differential between rapturous praise from everyone in my vicinity (including critics I highly respect and whose taste usually aligns with mine) and my own reaction of indifference, verging on distaste, nothing beats For All Mankind. I just don’t get what anyone sees in this turgid soap opera about a bunch of toxic people who maintain a decades-long stranglehold on the American space program, repeatedly bringing to space their tedious intergenerational drama, which inevitably ends up getting other, nicer people killed. In the third season, constipated alpha male Joel Kinnaman hires his dead best friend’s son to go to Mars with him, ignoring the fact that the younger man has a drug problem (and also that, unbeknownst to him, he once had an affair with Kinnaman’s wife, which he is constantly trying to rekindle). Through a confluence of events, this ends up with Kinnaman’s daughter pregnant on Mars, his wife dying in an explosion, and him even more constipated. Back on Earth, the first female president is a gay, closeted Republican who rises to power with the help of Lee Atwater and the Moral Majority, becomes the victim of a reverse Lewinsky-gate (because Democrats and Republicans are the same, don’t you know), and invents Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Other people keep falling over themselves to call For All Mankind a masterpiece, but I see something snide, almost cynical. It’s a show that clothes itself in the guise of inspiration, and delivers cheap irony instead.

Show That is Better Than it Has Any Business Being: Stranger Things (Netflix)

For three seasons, Stranger Things was fine. A slick nostalgia machine buoyed by a stellar cast and some top-notch moments of action and adventure, it was enjoyable without being that good. And, seeing as it continues to be one of the biggest hits of the last decade, and Netflix’s flagship show, there was no reason for it to get any better. And then, implausibly, in its fourth freaking season, it did. Suddenly, the show’s nostalgia had bite, using references to Stephen King and slasher movies to talk about its setting, a mostly-white 80s suburb, sliding towards moral panic and reactionary politics. Suddenly, it discovered a villain with a compelling story and a surprising connection to the show’s heroes. Suddenly, it figured out how to manage its increasingly unwieldy cast, while introducing some instantly iconic new characters. (Justice for Eddie Munson!) Hell, to contradict just about everything I’ve said in this post, I don’t even mind the super-sized episodes, most of which are just too much fun to feel self-indulgent. There are, to be sure, still some perennial Stranger Things problems: as the younger cast matures, the justification for the parent characters’ centrality in the story gets thinner and thinner; Eleven continues to be the most underdeveloped lead character on television; and somewhere along the line, Mike became utterly pointless. But season 4 of Stranger Things finally delivers on the promise that was unfulfilled in the previous three. And as if that were not enough, it also introduced a whole generation to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”.

Show That I Liked Better Than the Other, Similar Show That Everyone Else Raves About: The Afterparty (Apple TV+)

Look, I enjoy Only Murders in the Building. It’s a perfectly pleasant little show. But it’s nowhere near as good as the praise it’s gotten, for the simple reason that while it’s quite a good comedy, it’s a rather poor mystery and send-up of the true crime podcast genre. You know what show is a good mystery and genre parody, while also being quite hilarious? The Afterparty, which is basically the show everyone keeps telling me Only Murders in the Building is, and almost unheralded. Set in the hours after a high school reunion, each of the show’s episodes retells the events of the titular party from the point of view of a different character, in order to work out who killed the host. Each episode is told in different style matching the teller’s personality—an action movie for the former jock whose marriage is on the rocks, a musical for the wannabe rap star. It’s a clever concept, well-executed by a truly stacked cast. And, unlike a lot of other shows this year, The Afterparty doesn’t lose steam before the finish line. Each episode reveals new details about the night of the murder and the lingering high school drama that has left most of the characters with a motive for violence, and the revelation of the killer is smart and satisfying. If you enjoyed Only Murders in the Building, I think you’ll like The Afterparty even more.

Show That Remembers What an Episode Is: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+)

It’s not that I don’t have reservations about the latest NuTrek show. After several series that crowed about (and took heat from the usual suspects for) their diversity, it feels a bit weird to go back to a show with not just a white male lead, but one as obviously cast in the Captain Kirk mold as Anson Mount’s Christopher Pike. And I’m getting increasingly tired of the revived franchise’s seeming allergy to taking Trek forward into the future, so Strange New Worlds being yet another TOS prequel makes me sigh. But one thing you have to give this show is that it’s putting all its eggs in the standalone episode basket, and mostly doing a good job of it. There are some solid science fiction hours here, some good action storytelling, and even some clever homages and twists on classic Star Trek episodes (very few science fiction shows in 2022 would spend one of only ten episodes on a body-swap sex comedy that is also a prequel to “Amok Time”, and we are all the poorer for it). And yeah, the episode that was basically a straight-up ripoff of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” was a bit embarrassing for all concerned, but I suppose even that’s a good sign in its way—if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. Strange New Worlds may not be the second coming of Star Trek or The Next Generation, but it’s aimed in their direction, and that’s a very exciting thing, not just for a show in this franchise, but for any show airing in 2022.

Best UK original of a hit US show: Ghosts (BBC)

CBS’s remake of Ghosts, about a couple who inherit a house that is haunted by a troupe of quirky spirits, has been a major hit, and rightly so: it’s got a winning cast who make the most of their kooky premise, and is usually quite funny. But it only takes a few minutes of going back to the UK original, which aired its fourth season in 2022, to remember how much richer it is. The difference isn’t along the lines of the UK and US Office—the original Ghosts is just as gentle and warm-hearted as the remake (unsurprisingly, as it was created by the same team who delivered BBC children’s shows Horrible Histories and Yonderland). But the original Ghosts isn’t as hemmed in by the strictures of an American sitcom. It’s willing to let its characters be weird in specific, historically appropriate ways rather than forcing them into the tropes and comedic style of pre-set sitcom types. It’s willing to let its humor breathe rather than constantly delivering gag lines. And it’s willing to sit with moments of sadness and loss without wrapping everything up in a neat bow after 22 minutes. I enjoy both shows, but the original Ghosts is something special, and it deserves more attention in its own right.

20 Sep 18:20

The internet is already over

by Sam Kriss

A sort of preface

There’s a phrase that’s been living inside my head lately, a brain parasite, some burrowing larva covered in thorns and barbs of words. When it moves around in there it churns at the soft tissues like someone’s stuck a very small hand blender in my skull. It repeats itself inside the wormy cave system that used to be my thoughts. It says you will not survive. You will not survive. You will not survive.

Earlier this year, an article in the Cut reported that the cool thing now is to have messy hair and smoke cigarettes again. You might remember it; the piece was widely mocked for a day or two, and then it vanished without a trace, which is how these things tend to go. But the headline was incredible, and it stuck with me. A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any Of Us Survive It? Everyone else seemed to focus on the ‘vibe shift’ stuff, but the second part was much more interesting. To talk about survival—what extraordinary stakes, for a piece that was, in essence, about how young people are wearing different types of shoes from the shoes that you, as a slightly older person who still wants to think of themselves as young, wear. Everything is stripped back to the rawest truth: that you are a fragile creature perishing in time. And all you need to do is apply Betteridge’s Law for the real content to shine through. No. None of you will survive.

There was an ancient thought: that Zeus feeds on the world. ‘The universe is cyclically consumed by the fire that engendered it.’ Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing. As it happens, this was the first thought, the first ever written down in a book of philosophy, the first to survive: that nothing survives, and the blankness that birthed you will be the same hole you crawl into again. Anaximander: ‘Whence things have their origin, thence also their destruction lies…’ In the Polynesian version, Maui tried to achieve immortality by taking the form of a worm and slithering into the vagina of Hine-nui-te-po, goddess of night and death.1 He failed. Hine-nui-te-po’s pussy is full of obsidian teeth; when she stirred in the night those teeth sliced clean through his body. He dribbled out again, a loose mulch of the hero who conquered the Sun.

You will not survive is not only a frightening idea. The things I hope for are doomed, and everything I try to create will be a failure, but so will everything I despise.2 These days, it repeats itself whenever I see something that’s trying its hardest to make me angry and upset. There’s a whole class of these objects: they’re never particularly interesting or important; they just exist to jab you into thinking that the world is going in a particular direction, away from wherever you are. One-Third Of Newborn Infants Now Describe Themselves As Polyamorous—Here’s Why That’s A Good Thing. Should I get upset about this? Should I be concerned? Why bother? It will not survive.3 Meet The Edgy Influencers Making Holocaust Denial Hip Again. Are we in trouble? Maybe, but even trouble is ending. Everyone That Matters Has Started Wearing Jeans Over Their Heads With Their Arms Down The Leg Holes And Their Faces All Cramped Up In The Sweaty Groin Region, And They Walk Down The Street Like This, Bumping Into Things, And When They Sit Down To Eat They Just Pour Their Subscription-Service Meal-Replacement Slurry Over The Crotch Of Their Jeans And Lick At The Dribblings From The Inside, And They’re Covered In Flies And Smell Bad And Also They’re Naked From The Waist Down Because Their Trousers Are On Their Heads, That’s Part Of It Too—We Show You How To Get The Look! How proud they are of their new thing. ‘The strong iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles, who would not live long.’

In fact, one of the things that will not survive is novelty itself: trends, fads, fashions, scenes, vibes. We are thrown back into cyclical time; what’s growing old is the cruel demand to make things new. It’s already trite to notice that all our films are franchises now, all our bestselling novelists have the same mass-produced non-style, and all our pop music sounds like a tribute act.4 But consider that the cultural shift that had all those thirtysomething Cut writers so worried about their survival is simply the return of a vague Y2K sensibility, which was itself just an echo of the early 1980s. Angular guitar music again, flash photography, plaid. We’re on a twenty-year loop: the time it takes for a new generation to be born, kick around for a while, and then settle into the rhythm of the spheres.

Every time this happens, it coincides with a synodic conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter, the triumphant present; Saturn, senescence, decline. The son who castrates his father, the father who devours his sons: once every twenty years, they are indistinguishable in the sky. Astrologers call this the Great Chronocrator. The last one was at the end of 2020, and it’ll occur twice more in my lifetime: when these witless trendwatchers finally shuffle off, they’ll be tended on their deathbeds by a nurse with messy black eyeshadow and low-rise scrubs. Jupiter and Saturn will burn above you as a single point, and with your last rattling breaths you’ll still be asking if she thinks you’re cool. You don’t get it. ‘For oute of olde feldes, as men seith, cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere.’ We are entering a blissful new Middle Ages, where you simply soak in a static world until the waters finally close in over your head.

The things that will survive are the things that are already in some sense endless. The sea; the night; the word. Things with deep fathoms of darkness in them.

The internet will not survive.

The argument

1. That it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the internet

In 1977, Ken Olsen declared that ‘there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.’ In 1995, Robert Metcalfe predicted in InfoWorld that the internet would go ‘spectacularly supernova’ and then collapse within a year. In 2000, the Daily Mail reported that the ‘Internet may be just a passing fad,’ adding that ‘predictions that the Internet would revolutionise the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate.’ Any day now, the millions of internet users would simply stop, either bored or frustrated, and rejoin the real world.

Funny, isn’t it? You can laugh at these people now, from your high perch one quarter of the way into the twenty-first century. Look at these morons, stuck in their grubby little past, who couldn’t even correctly identify the shape of the year 2022. You can see it perfectly, because you’re smart. You know that the internet has changed everything, forever.

If you like the internet, you’ll point out that it’s given us all of human knowledge and art and music, instantly accessible from anywhere in the world; that you can arrive in a foreign city and immediately guide yourself to a restaurant and translate the menu and also find out about the interesting historical massacres that took place nearby, all with a few lazy swipes of your finger. So many interesting little blogs! So many bizarre subcultures! It’s opened up our experience of the world: now, nothing is out of reach.

To be honest, it’s difficult to reconstruct what the unbridled techno-optimists think; there’s so few of them left. Still, those who don’t like the internet usually agree with them on all the basics—they just argue that we’re now in touch with the wrong sort of thing: bad kids’ cartoons, bad political opinions, bad ways of relating to your own body and others. Which is why it’s so important to get all this unpleasant stuff off the system, and turn the algorithm towards what is good and true.

They might be right, but you could go deeper. The internet has enabled us to live, for the first time, entirely apart from other people. It replaces everything good in life with a low-resolution simulation. A handful of sugar instead of a meal: addictive but empty, just enough to keep you alive. It even seems to be killing off sex, replacing it with more cheap, synthetic ersatz. Our most basic biological drives simply wither in its cold blue light. People will cheerfully admit that the internet has destroyed their attention spans, but what it’s really done away with is your ability to think. Usually, when I’m doing something boring but necessary—the washing up, or walking to the post office—I’ll constantly interrupt myself; there’s a little Joycean warbling from the back of my brain. ‘Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience.’ But when I’m listlessly killing time on the internet, there is nothing. The mind does not wander. I am not there. That rectangular hole spews out war crimes and cutesy comedies and affirmations and porn, all of it mixed together into one general-purpose informational goo, and I remain in its trance, the lifeless scroll, twitching against the screen until the sky goes dark and I’m one day closer to the end. You lose hours to—what? An endless slideshow of barely interesting images and actively unpleasant text. Oh, cool—more memes! You know it’s all very boring, brooding nothing, but the internet addicts you to your own boredom. I’ve tried heroin: this is worse. More numb, more blank, more nowhere. A portable suicide booth; a device for turning off your entire existence. Death is no longer waiting for you at the far end of life. It eats away at your short span from the inside out.

But lately I’m starting to think that the last thing the internet destroys might be itself. I think they might be vindicated, Ken Olson and Robert Metcalfe and even, God forgive me, the Daily Mail.

In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book. Soon, people will find it incredible that for several decades all our art was obsessed with digital computers: all those novels and films and exhibitions about tin cans that make beeping noises, handy if you need to multiply two big numbers together, but so lifeless, so sexless, so grey synthetic glassy bugeyed spreadsheet plastic drab. And all your smug chortling over the people who failed to predict our internetty present—if anyone remembers it, it’ll be with exactly the same laugh.5

2. That exhausted is a whole lot more than tired

You know, secretly, even if you’re pretending not to, that this thing is nearing exhaustion. There is simply nothing there online. All language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces, spat-out enzymes to digest the world. ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.’ Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves; that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world. It’s a parcel of time you give over to the machine. Make the motions, chant its dusty liturgy. The newest apps even literalise this: everyone has to post a selfie at exactly the same time, an inaudible call to prayer ringing out across the world. Recently, at a bar, I saw the room go bright as half the patrons suddenly started posing with their negronis. This is called being real.

Whoever you are, a role is already waiting for you. All those pouty nineteen-year-old lowercase nymphets, so fluent in their borrowed boredom, flatly reciting don’t just choke me i want someone to cut off my entire head. All those wide-eyed video creeps, their inhuman enthusiasm, hi guys! hi guys!! so today we’re going to talk about—don’t forget to like and subscribe!! hi guys!!! Even on the deranged fringes, a dead grammar has set in. The people who fake Tourette’s for TikTok and the people who fake schizophrenia for no reason at all. VOICES HAVE REVEALED TO ME THAT YOUR MAILMAN IS A DEMONIC ARCHON SPAT FROM BABYLON’S SPINNING PIGMOUTH, GOD WANTS YOU TO KILL HIM WITH A ROCKET LAUNCHER. Without even passing out of date, every mode of internet-speak already sounds antiquated. Aren’t you embarrassed? Can’t you hear, under the chatter of these empty forms, a long low ancient whine, the last mewl of that cat who wants to haz cheezburger?

When I say the internet is running dry, I am not just basing this off vibes. The exhaustion is measurable and real. 2020 saw a grand, mostly unnoticed shift in online behaviour: the clickhogs all went catatonic, thick tongues lolling in the muck. On Facebook, the average engagement rate—the number of likes, comments, and shares per follower—fell by 34%, from 0.086 to 0.057. Well, everyone knows that the mushrooms are spreading over Facebook, hundreds of thousands of users liquefying out of its corpse every year. But the same pattern is everywhere. Engagement fell 28% on Instagram and 15% on Twitter. (It’s kept falling since.) Even on TikTok, the terrifying brainhole of tomorrow, the walls are closing in. Until 2020, the average daily time spent on the app kept rising in line with its growing user base; since then the number of users has kept growing, but the thing is capturing less and less of their lives.

And this was, remember, a year in which millions of people had nothing to do except engage with great content online—and in which, for a few months, liking and sharing the right content became an urgent moral duty. Back then, I thought the pandemic and the protests had permanently hauled our collective human semi-consciousness over to the machine. Like most of us, I couldn’t see what was really happening, but there were some people who could. Around the same time, strange new conspiracy theories started doing the rounds: that the internet is empty, that all the human beings you used to talk to have been replaced by bots and drones. ‘The internet of today is entirely sterile… the internet may seem gigantic, but it’s like a hot air balloon with nothing inside.’ They weren’t wrong.

What’s happening?6 Here’s a story from the very early days of the internet. In the 90s, someone I know started a collaborative online zine, a mishmash text file of barely lucid thoughts and theories. It was deeply weird and, in some strange corners, very popular. Years passed and technology improved: soon, they could break the text file into different posts, and see exactly how many people were reading each one. They started optimising their output: the most popular posts became the model for everything else; they found a style and voice that worked. The result, of course, was that the entire thing became rote and lifeless and rapidly collapsed. Much of the media is currently going down the same path, refining itself out of existence. Aside from the New Yorker’s fussy umlauts, there’s simply nothing to distinguish any one publication from any other. (And platforms like this one are not an alternative to the crisis-stricken media, just a further acceleration in the process.) The same thing is happening everywhere, to everyone. The more you relentlessly optimise your network-facing self, the more you chase the last globs of loose attention, the more frazzled we all become, and the less anyone will be able to sustain any interest at all.7

Everything that depends on the internet for its propagation will die. What survives will survive in conditions of low transparency, in the sensuous murk proper to human life.

3. That you have been plugged into a grave

For a while, it was possible to live your entire life online. The world teemed with new services: simply dab at an app, and the machine would summon some other slumping creature with a skin condition to deliver your groceries, or drive you in pointless circles around town, or meet you for overpriced drinks and awkward sex and vanish. Like everyone, I thought this was the inevitable shape of the future. ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.’ We’d all be reduced to a life spent swapping small services for the last linty coins in our pockets. It’s Uber for dogs! It’s Uber for dogshit! It’s picking up a fresh, creamy pile of dogshit with your bare hands—on your phone! But this was not a necessary result of new technologies. The internet was not subordinating every aspect of our lives by itself, under its own power. The online economy is an energy sink; it’s only survived this far as a parasite, in the bowels of something else.

That something else is a vast underground cavern of the dead, billions of years old.

The Vision Fund is an investment vehicle headquartered in London and founded by Japan’s SoftBank to manage some $150 billion, mostly from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which it’s poured into Uber and DoorDash and WeWork and Klarna and Slack. It provides the money that effectively subsidises your autistic digital life. These firms could take over the market because they were so much cheaper than the traditional competitors—but most of them were never profitable; they survived on Saudi largesse.

Investors were willing to sit on these losses; it’s not as if there were many alternatives. Capital is no longer capable of effectively reproducing itself in the usual way, through the production of commodities. Twenty-five years ago manufacturing represented a fifth of global GDP; in 2020 it was down to 16%. Interest rates have hovered near zero for well over a decade as economies struggle to grow. Until this year, governments were still issuing negative-yield bonds, and people were buying them—a predictable loss looked like the least bad option. The only reliable source of profits is in the extraction of raw materials: chiefly, pulling the black corpses of trillions of prehistoric organisms out of the ground so they can be set on fire. Which means that the feudal rulers of those corpselands—men like King Salman, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques—ended up sitting on a vast reservoir of capital without many productive industries through which it could be valorised. So, as a temporary solution, they stuck it in the tech sector.

It didn’t matter that these firms couldn’t turn a profit. The real function was not to make money in the short term; it was to suck up vast quantities of user data. Where you go, what you buy; a perfect snapshot of millions of ordinary lives. They were betting that this would be the currency of the future, as fundamental as oil: the stuff that rules the world.8

They were wrong, but in the process of being wrong, they created a monster. Your frictionless digital future, your very important culture wars, your entire sense of self—it’s just a waste byproduct of the perfectly ordinary, centuries-old global circulation of fuel, capital, and Islam. It turns out that if these three elements are arranged in one particular way, people will start behaving strangely. They’ll pretend that by spending all day on the computer they’re actually fighting fascism, or standing up for women’s sex-based rights, as if the entire terrain of combat wasn’t provided by a nightmare head-chopping theocratic state.9 They’ll pretend that it’s normal to dance alone in silence for a front-facing camera, or that the intersection of art and technology is somehow an interesting place to be. For a brief minute, you’ll get the sociocultural Boltzmann entity we call the internet. ‘But nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.’

The tables are already being cleared at the great tech-sector chow-down.10 Online services are reverting to market prices. The Vision Fund is the worst performing fund in SoftBank’s history; in the last quarter alone it’s lost over $20 billion. Most of all, it’s now impossible to ignore that the promise propping up the entire networked economy—that user data could power a system of terrifyingly precise targeted advertising—was a lie. It simply does not work. ‘It sees that you bought a ticket to Budapest, so you get more tickets to Budapest…All they really know about you is your shopping.’ Now, large companies are cutting out their online advertising budgets entirely, and seeing no change whatsoever to their bottom line. One study found that algorithmically targeted advertising performed worse than ads selected at random. This is what sustains the entire media, provides 80% of Google’s income and 99% of Facebook’s, and it’s made of magic beans.

A dying animal still makes its last few spastic kicks: hence the recent flurry of strange and stillborn ideas. Remember the Internet of Things? Your own lightbulbs blinking out ads in seizure-inducing Morse code, your own coffee machine calling the police if you try to feed it some unlicensed beans. Remember the Metaverse? The grisly pink avatar of Mark Zuckerberg, bobbing around like the ghost of someone’s foreskin through the scene of the recent genocides. Wow! It’s so cool to immersively experience these bloodmires in VR! More recent attempts to squeeze some kind of profit out of this carcass are, somehow, worse. Here’s how web3 is about to disrupt the meat industry. Every time you buy a pound of tripe, your physical offal will be bundled with a dedicated TripeToken, which maintains its value and rarity even after the tripe has been eaten, thanks to a unique blockchain signature indexed to the intestinal microbiome of the slaughtered cattle! By eating large amounts of undercooked offal while trading TripeTokens on secondary markets, you can incentivise the spread of your favourite cattle diseases—and if one of the pathogens you own jumps the species barrier to start infecting humans, you’ve successfully monetised the next pandemic! Once you get sick, you can rent out portions of your own intestinal tract to an industrial meat DAO in exchange for SlaughterCoins. Because SlaughterCoins are linked via blockchain to the progressive disintegration of your body, they’re guaranteed to increase in value! And when your suffering becomes unbearable, local abattoirs will bid to buy up your SlaughterCoin wallet in exchange for putting you out of your misery with a bolt gun to the head! Yes, the future is always capable of getting worse. But this future is simply never going to happen. Not the next generation of anything, just a short-term grift: the ship’s rats stripping the galley of all its silverware on their way out.

4. That the revolution can not be digitised

If you really want to see how impotent the internet is, though, you only have to look at politics.

Everyone agrees that the internet has swallowed our entire political discourse whole. When politicians debate, they trade crap one-liners to be turned into gifs. Their strategists seem to think elections are won or lost on memes. Entire movements emerge out of flatulent little echo chambers; elected representatives giddy over the evils of seed oils or babbling about how it’s not their job to educate you. And it’s true that the internet has changed some things: mostly, it’s helped break apart the cohesive working-class communities that produce a strong left, and turned them into vague swarms of monads. But as a political instrument, all it can do is destroy anyone who tries to pick it up—because everything that reproduces itself through the internet is doomed.

Occasionally, online social movements do make something happen. A hand emerges from out of the cloud to squish some minor individual. Let’s get her friends to denounce her! Let’s find out where she lives! You can have your sadistic fun and your righteous justice at the same time: doesn’t it feel good to be good? But these movements build no institutions, create no collective subjects, and produce no meaningful change. Their only power is punishment—and this game only works within the internet, and only when everyone involved agrees to play by the internet’s rules.11 As soon as they run up against anything with a separate set of values—say, a Republican Party that wants to put its guy on the Supreme Court, #MeToo or no #MeToo—they instantly crumble. And if, like much of the contemporary left, you're left with nothing on which to build your political movement except a hodgepodge of online frenzies, you will crumble too.

The post-George Floyd demonstrations might be our era’s greatest tragedy: tens of millions of people mobilised in (possibly) the largest protest movement in human history, all for an urgent and necessary cause—and achieving precisely nothing. At the time, I worried that the mass street movement risked being consumed by the sterile politics of online; this is exactly what happened. Now, even that vague cultural halo is spent. Whatever wokeness was, as of 2022 it’s so utterly burned out as a cultural force that anyone still grousing about it 24/7 is a guaranteed hack. More recently, there’s been worry about the rise of the ‘new right’—a oozingly digitised political current whose effective proposition is that people should welcome a total dictatorship to prevent corporations posting rainbow flags on the internet. You can guess what I think of its prospects.

5. That this is the word

Things will survive in proportion to how well they’ve managed to insulate themselves from the internet and its demands. The Financial Times will outlive the Guardian. Paintings will outlive NFTs. Print magazines will outlive Substack. You will, if you play your cards right, outlive me. If anything interesting ever happens again, it will not be online. You will not get it delivered to your inbox. It will not have a podcast. This machine has never produced anything of note, and it never will.

A sword is against the internet, against those who live online, and against its officials and wise men. A sword is against its false prophets, and they will become fools. A sword is against its commentators, and they will be filled with exhaustion. A sword is against its trends and fashions and against all the posturers in its midst, and they will become out of touch. A sword is against its cryptocoins, and they will be worthless. A drought is upon its waters, and they will be dried up. For it is a place of graven images, and the people go mad over idols. So the desert creatures and hyenas will live there and ostriches will dwell there. The bots will chatter at its threshold, and dead links will litter the river bed. It will never again be inhabited or lived in from generation to generation.

A conclusion, or, where I’m going with all this

I am aware that I’m writing this on the internet.

Whatever it is I’m doing here, you should not be part of it. Do not click the button below this paragraph, do not type in your email address to receive new posts straight to your inbox, and for the love of God, if you have any self-respect, do not even think about giving me any money. There is still time for you to do something else. You can still unchain yourself from this world that will soon, very soon, mean absolutely nothing.

Subscribe now

As far as I can tell, Substack mostly functions as a kind of meta-discourse for Twitter. (At least, this is the part I’ve seen—there are also, apparently, recipes.) Graham Linehan posts fifty times a day on this platform, and all of it is just replying to tweets. This does not strike me as particularly sustainable. I have no idea what kind of demented pervert is actually reading this stuff, when you could be lying in a meadow by a glassy stream, rien faire comme une bête, eyes melting into the sky. According to the very helpful Substack employees I’ve spoken to, there are a set of handy best practices for this particular region of the machine: have regular open threads, chitchat with your subscribers, post humanising updates about your life. Form a community. I’m told that the most successful writing on here is friendly, frequent, and fast. Apparently, readers should know exactly what you’re getting at within the first three sentences. I do not plan on doing any of these things.

This is what I would like to do. I would like to see if, in the belly of the dying internet, it’s possible to create something that is not like the internet. I want to see if I can poke at the outlines of whatever is coming next. In a previous life, I was a sort of mildly infamous online opinion gremlin, best known for being extravagantly mean about other opinion writers whose writing or whose opinions I didn’t like. These days, I find most of that stuff very, very dull. I wonder if it’s possible to talk about things differently. Not rationally or calmly, away from the cheap point-scoring of online discourse—that would also be boring—but with a better, less sterile kind of derangement. I’m interested in the forms of writing that were here long before the internet, and which will be here long after it’s gone. Not thinkpieces or blogs, but the essay, the manifesto, the satyr, and the screed. Ludibria, pseudepigrapha, quodlibets. Or folktales. Prophecy. Dreams.

1

I am very disappointed that this scene never appears in Disney’s Moana.

2

It’s the same thought that, in Marx’s 1873 postface to Capital, Volume I, ‘includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction.’ Or Hegel’s famous line on the flight habits of nocturnal birds. Or Baudrillard after the orgy, sticky and spent, announcing that the revolution has already happened and the Messiah has already been and gone.

3

As a general rule: by the time you hear about any of this stuff, by the time it’s in general discursive circulation, whatever was motive and real in the phenomenon has already died. Every culture warrior spends their life raging at the light of a very distant, long-exploded star.

4

Every few weeks, there are ads for some new band plastered over the Tube. The acid, whipsmart voice of twenty-first century youth! Then you listen, and they’re just ripping off the Fall again. ‘You think your haircut is distinguished, when it’s a blot on the English landscape.’

5

Chances are, though, that it won’t be remembered at all. Gregory of Tours was a Roman aristocrat, the son of a Senator, raised on Virgil and Sallust, but in his dense ten-volume History he never bothers to even mention the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The old imperial world had ended so decisively that its passing wasn’t even considered particularly important; the new world of barbarian kings (governing through a system of ecclesiastical administration inherited from the empire, and that still functioned, if haphazardly, with only the most nominal connections to central authority in Italy or the Bosporus) had become the only possible world order, even as the cities shrank and Mediterranean trade vanished. Syagrius, magister militum in the Roman rump state around Noviodunum, becomes the King of the Romans; his imperial holdout becomes the Kingdom of Soissons. It took several centuries for people to decide that anything particularly significant had happened when Odoacer overthrew the teenaged Romulus Augustulus in 476 AD. This is why the internet has not been a true revolution: everyone online is still obsessing over how much has changed, and fondly remembering the time before we all spent all our waking hours staring at phones.

6

Actually, I have two slightly overlapping theories on what might be happening. The main one is above; the second, which is weirder and makes less sense, has been shoved down here. Samuel Beckett describes a version of the internet and its exhaustion, one made of small pebbles. Here is Molloy on the beach, this limping old bird in his shabby overcoat, rolling in the sand. ‘Much of my life has ebbed away before this shivering expanse, to the sound of waves in storm and calm, and the claws of the surf.’ He has sixteen stones in his pocket, and every so often he puts one in his mouth to suck on it for a while. ‘A little pebble in your mouth, round and smooth, appeases, soothes, makes you forget your hunger, forget your thirst.’ The problem: how to make sure that when he next reaches into his pocket, he doesn’t take out the stone he’s just sucked? How to make sure he’s getting the full enjoyment out of each of his sixteen stones? Novelty is mysteriously important, even though ‘deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same.’ For a while, his coat and his trousers and his mouth are turned into a series of machines for creating sequences of stones. Supply pockets and store pockets, modes of circulation: curated algorithms, organising the world and its information. Beckett spends half a dozen pages (in my edition) describing these systems, as each of them arrives in a flash of divine inspiration and fails in turn. Eventually, Molloy has exhausted every possible arrangement of atoms and voids. ‘The solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed. It was a wild part of the coast.’ In The Exhausted, his grand study of Beckett, Deleuze comments on the distinction between the exhausted and the merely tired. ‘The tired has only exhausted realisation, while the exhausted exhausts all of the possible.’ To exhaust the world as it is you only need to experience it: wander through reality, and get bored. But for true exhaustion, you need to know that everything that could be is as empty as everything that is. To reach exhaustion, you need some kind of device, made of ‘tables and programmes,’ a technics. Something like Molloy’s overcoat. ‘The combinatorial is the art or science of exhausting the possible, through inclusive disjunctions.’ The ars combinatoria is also the system of formal logic, revealed in holy visions to Ramon Llull in his cave on Puig de Ronda in 1274, eventually refined by Gottfried Leibniz, that powers the device you’re using to read this now. Exhaustion is the mode of life integral to a computerised society; the internet comes to us already long worn out, combining and recombining stale elements, shambling through the dead zones of itself.

7

You could compare this process to Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: as each individual actor, follows its incentives and inflates the organic composition, the entire system ends up stumbling into crisis.

8

People claim to be deeply worried by this stuff, but I think you secretly like it. You like the idea that your attention is what creates the world. You like the idea that the entire global economy is predicated on getting to know you, finding out what you like and dislike, your taste in music and your frankly insane political opinions and the gooey little treats you buy. Global capitalism as one vast Buzzfeed personality quiz. The faceless empire of yourself.

9

One of the largest shareholders in Twitter is the Kingdom Holding Company, chaired by Prince al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud. For some reason, people seemed to think that replacing him with Elon Musk would shift the tenor of the site to the right.

10

When I was younger, my brother and I had a running joke about a lemon that could connect to the internet. Not for any particular reason: a light would blink just below the lemon’s skin, and it would do nothing, just slowly rot in your fruitbowl. A few years ago, that lemon would have immediately secured half a billion dollars in first-round funding. Now, not so much.

11

The ‘cancelled’ always participate in the theatre of their own cancellation. In Greco-Roman sacrifices, the animal was expected to nod before being led to the altar; the victim had to consent to its slaughter. And that nod always happened, even if a priest had to induce it by pouring a vase of water over the animal’s head.

09 Sep 14:44

9/9 Flashback: To Wong Foo

by Fred Clark
"Give Bob Dole a big kiss for me!"
22 Apr 18:47

Nancy by Olivia Jaimes for Fri, 22 Apr 2022

14 Feb 19:22

by dorrismccomics
31 Dec 21:29

Guerilla Abortion Tactics

by Erik Loomis

So I had a long-held political theory that is clearly incorrect.

That theory was that if the Supreme Court did in fact overrule Roe, it would cause a massive uproar in America, with nearly unprecedented levels of protest and reaction that would transform American politics.

This is obviously not going to happen.

There are a few reasons for this. First, most liberals are going to have access to abortion and are going to be happy with that, more than they will be outraged by the banning of abortion in half of the states. Never mind the reality that the post-Roe world is going to be worse for women than the pre-Roe world. This is where a lot of liberals are at, something that has built up over the years now as blue and red states so strongly differ on everything.

Second, a lot of liberals are saying they are “tired” and “hopeless.” I’m not really sure what to do with this. I put this theory on Twitter after the oral arguments around the Mississippi case and this was the overwhelming response–it would not lead to a transformative moment in American politics and these were the reasons why people didn’t feel that it would. As for being tired and hopeless, well, OK, but I don’t see what difference it makes. Women may well be tired of being objects of conservative attack. But that’s not going to change. It’s either fight or give up. I find the “tired” claim particularly odd, largely because even during the Trump years, the daily lives of people weren’t changed that much except in one large way–the overwhelming media onslaught. And I think this is what people are ultimately talking about here–they want politics to go back to some kind of “normal.” But that’s not going to happen. The signs from 2017 that read “I’d rather be having brunch” should be taken literally. I don’t blame people for that. I would also prefer brunch to political activity. But I’m not also not making claims to being tired either–and I actually do have reasons to have those claims given how many personal right-wing hate campaigns I’ve undergone over the past 15 months, most of which I have kept out of the public eye as much as possible, including on this site.

But you can’t blame people for how they feel, which I am sure is genuine. This is one reason why I refuse to watch politics on TV–I think people doing this is an unabashed negative, including the emotional wear.

So we can say all of this while also saying….what the hell are we going to do about the decline of abortion rights in this nation, especially after the post-Roe landscape just leads to worse and worse restrictions, up to and very much including a national ban on abortion that is likely the next time Republicans have a trifecta?

This is not really a place where traditional political tactics are that effective. I am sure the DNC will use this opportunity to fundraise for Democratic candidates. And OK, that’s fine. But we know that just electing Democrats isn’t enough. Arguably, it isn’t even going to be possible given the gerrymanders and voting rights restriction bills.

I’m both surprised and not surprised that there isn’t more of a focus on protesting. Now, I don’t doubt there will be a one-off protest day in favor of Roe, but that’s obviously not going to make any difference in itself. When I said long ago that I thought all hell would break loose, I was thinking serious protests, like shutting down the country, direct action well beyond people showing up holding signs, etc. I don’t think people have the imagination for a lot of this anymore. It’s not part of the culture, a lot of people are cynical, and there’s a big theme among liberals that protests don’t really matter. The answer is that it depends on the protests, the tactics, the organizing beforehand, the building of leadership, all this stuff. And while there are amazing people working on these things, there’s not enough of them.

So my initial theory about the overturning of Roe will almost certainly be proved wrong. But I hope not.

But what we do need, no matter how we handle this, is a diversity of tactics. That’s where I think a lot of our politics falls short. We don’t have a diversity of tactics. The ridiculousness about registering people to vote as the ultimate political action is a great example of this because it rests on two assumptions–a) that registering people to vote is a good thing even if they don’t vote for our side and b) that there are masses of unregistered voters who would vote for our side if we could get them registered. One thing that has been made clear since 2016 is that you can have record number of voters but the masses are no more likely to vote for justice than those already registered to vote. Look at the numbers of the Virginia elections this fall for instance, which set easy records for participation and were disastrous for Democrats. And I don’t think that registering people to vote who are likely to not vote for justice is any kind of positive political action.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with registering people to vote, but it’s not really an effective political tactic. Voting has its place too, but it’s not enough. And neither is just protesting in one-off events. Yet these are about the limits of what we do. No wonder people feel tired and hopeless. They don’t have the tactics to feel differently.

This is a very long prelude to this article from a couple of weeks ago about what is clearly going to have to be part of the response, a sort of underground railroad of abortion activists who are putting their own personal freedom on the line to help women and defy unjust laws. These are awesome Mexican women who are ready to go all the way to help their counterparts in their terrible northern neighbor to gain access over their own bodies.

Verónica Cruz spent years defying the law in Mexico, helping thousands of women get abortions. Now that Mexico has declared that abortion is no longer a crime, Ms. Cruz and activists like her are planning to bring their mission to a country moving in the opposite direction: the United States.

Abortion restrictions have been multiplying across the United States for years, including just over Mexico’s border in Texas. Now the Supreme Court is considering a case that could diminish or completely overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion. That would likely set off new restrictions in at least 20 states.

But in much of Latin America, where access to abortion has long been severely limited, highly organized feminist groups have distributed abortion-inducing drugs for years, making it harder for governments to enforce bans on the procedure.

Ms. Cruz and other activists are planning to help shuttle Texans and other Americans seeking abortions into Mexico, and to build networks to ferry the abortion pills north of the border or send them by mail — something they’ve already started doing and now plan to expand.

“We aren’t afraid,” said Ms. Cruz. “We are willing to face criminalization, because women’s lives matter more than their law.”

This right here is the attitude we need more of. I don’t care if I go to jail because this law is unjust is real leadership that puts the pedal to the metal on forcing the hands of the oppressor. This was the attitude of the IWW members in the free speech fights of the 1900s and 1910s and the attitude of civil rights activists willing to flood jails in the 1960s. Make them jail you!

Now, a lot of this is possible because we live in a world of mailed pharmaceuticals and that can include mailed abortion inducing drugs shipped from overseas addresses. So the article goes into this in some detail. Moreover, such tactics really stick it to the fascists and they know it:

Anti-abortion groups acknowledge that criminally punishing activists who distribute the pills, especially if they are from Mexico, may prove difficult. They would have to be caught and arrested in Texas, or extradited, experts say.

“This is a really terrible, lawless attack on life,” John Seago, the legislative director for Texas Right to Life, said of the Mexican activists’ plan to help women in Texas get abortions, adding that such efforts would “make it absolutely more difficult to do it, to enforce these laws.”

Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, the leader of Aid Access, an Austria-based group that provides abortion pills to women across the world, confirmed she has been prescribing the medication to women in Texas — who then receive the drugs by mail from a pharmacy in India — even after the state’s law went into effect this month.

But don’t overstate the risks these women are willing to take–because until very recently abortion was effectively banned in most of Mexico so they were already taking these risks.

In September, days after Texas began enacting a new ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that abortion could no longer be treated as a crime. Ms. Cruz and her colleagues soon hatched a plan to work with Texas reproductive groups on making it easier for women in the state to end their pregnancies at home.

Dozens of activists are meeting in January to work out the strategy. One of them, Crystal P. Lira, said she has already brought pills from Tijuana to California, and then shipped them to Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts and Texas.

Ms. Cruz said the new Texas laws would not stop them from crossing the border with abortion drugs — even if it means risking jail time.

“If that’s the only way that people will become conscious that what the government is doing is a major violation of human rights,” she said, “then yes.”

These women are awesome. This is the definition of transnational solidarity networks. What absolute heroes.

So here’s a few questions to close this post. First, am I right or wrong about what will happen when Roe gets overturned? Second, what tactics should we use to fight against the oppression of women? Third, what can we learn from these Mexican badass women that we can apply to our larger struggles against oppression, both in terms of how we help those who are being oppressed and how we can fight against our own oppressions? Fourth, how do we fight against this idea of politics making us “tired” and then we just give up even as the fascists are frothing at the mouth and ready for another bite of your freedom?

I look forward to an interesting conversation in the comments over all this.

11 Aug 04:04

Backstage

by Zack Jordan
Zephyr Dear

this comic is so good!!!


Though most Citizens think of Network drones as mindless automatons, this could not be farther from the truth. Every machine in the Network possesses some level of intelligence and personality. Some, in fact, are quite staggering in their intellectual capability.
02 Aug 09:40

Todo apps are meant for robots

by w1nter
28 May 21:02

Collections: Teaching Paradox, Europa Universalis IV, Part IV: Why Europe?

by Bret Devereaux

This is the fourth and last part of our series (I, II, III, IV) examining the historical assumptions of Europa Universalis IV, Paradox Interactive’s historical grand strategy computer game set in the early modern period. Last time we looked at how Europa Universalis IV often struggles to reflect the early modern history of places and peoples outside of Europe but how those struggles fit into a fairly clear pattern of efforts by Paradox to steadily convert what began as a European history simulator into a world history simulator. While that slow process has had uneven results over the years, it has steadily transformed EU4 into a real rarity: a game that actually makes a serious attempt at world history.

One of EU4’s loading screens, featuring the Grand Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang.

Before we dive in, I need to clarify some terms. I’ve tried to avoid a lot of the games jargon so that these posts will be intelligible to people who haven’t played the game, but as I wrote this I realized that I am going to have to clarify one thing. I have in the past two posts alluded to ‘resources’ of administrative, diplomatic and military ‘points’ which are used to develop provinces, fully absorb conquered territories (called ‘coring’ them), and a number of other things (including developing new technology and adopting new ideas). Collectively, these are called ‘monarch points’ (because they are, in part, generated by the skill of your ruler, although the ruler’s abilities in this regard were much more important when the game released and are far less important now) and they are meant to reflect in a very abstract way your overall state capacity. The state can, after all, only do so many things at once and so these monarch points are meant to throttle your activity to reflect that.

I bring them up here because we’re going to be talking about how this single currency (really, three separate currencies, but we can treat them together) is going to impact the game design and I want to be able to just say ‘monarch points’ and not have to type out a huge explanation of them each time.

We also need to bring forward one other thing we discussed in part II. To summarize the conclusions of that post, EU4 presents a model of international relations where security is only achievable for most states by aggressive expansion, creating a zero-sum game where the only way to avoid becoming a victim of the intense military competition was to become the victimizer, violently expanding into your neighbors (and even very distant overseas peoples) before they did the same to you (or more obliquely, conquering your weaker neighbors so as to deter your stronger ones from attempting the same of you). As we noted, this isn’t an unreasonable model of state-action during this period – the patterns it creates map on quite well to what is known in international relations political science as ‘interstate anarchy’ (from the neorealist school of IR thinking), which create situations where war is normalized and polities are forced to match the militarism of their neighbors. We are going to be bringing that thread forward here, because it provides part of EU4‘s answer for one of the more central questions that historians (and political scientists) ask about this period.

Why Europe?

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Institutionalized

It is not hard to see why this question is so influential. At the beginning of the early modern period (say, c. 1400 or 1450), Europe was unexceptional. Not the poorest part of the globe, but far from the richest, Europe was most notable for having relatively fragmented, relatively weak states. Compared to the more prosperous and densely urbanized regions of Eurasia, Europe was fairly clearly a backwater.

Yet, by 1840 or so, all of the military and economic great powers were European states (with the First Opium War demonstrating with stunning clarity that the last of the great powers of East Asia could no longer defend itself; note that I am classifying the Ottoman Empire as a European power for this purpose. The Ottomans were – and had always been – part of the European state system, even if they were also part of other state systems). While European imperialism had not reached its zenith yet by 1840, it was clear that the tipping point had already been passed some time prior, creating a situation where there were no non-European powers (understood to include some of Europe’s now independent colonies) which could effectively compete with the great powers of Europe.

What on Earth happened? is thus a question the historical record very clearly demands, not only because of how the rise of Europe reshaped global politics (with continuing ramifications) but also because of the potential implications for modern political thinking and statecraft. After all, if whatever factors caused Europe’s rise could be replicated by modern states, they would be fools not to; likewise avoiding whatever mistakes were made by non-European states.

EU4 covers almost this entire time period (it ends in 1821 rather than 1840) and so it must supply an answer to the question ‘how did that happen?’ EU3, the game’s predecessor had a hard-coded deterministic approach; while it set Europe behind technologically at the start, it gave every culture group a hard-coded penalty to technological development speed with essentially forced Europe (the ‘Latin’ tech group being the only one that moved at full speed, covering Western Europe; all other tech groups suffered research penalties, larger as they got further away from Europe) to leapfrog ahead. Other cultures were provided no option to ‘keep up’ save for adopting European culture (a nonsense mechanic; as we’ll discuss in a moment, at various points various non-European powers ‘kept up’ just fine without any attempt to ‘westernize‘). This is not great as a model. While this kind of pure cultural explanation used to be (decades ago) quite common in assessments of this question and still occasionally appear in deeply frustrating popular works (we’ll touch on the most popular modern such work in a bit), their explanatory power against the detailed record of history is relatively weak. We’ll talk about more current explanations in a moment, but to be brief, such ‘cultural’ explanations generally rely both on supposed virtues Europe only occasionally showed (it is difficult to say, for instance, that the Europeans of the 1500s were particularly rational or particularly free as Europe prepared to descend into brutal wars of religion under the leadership of increasingly absolute monarchs, for instance), but also fail to explain why other states in some periods and places kept up with Europe’s sudden ascent, despite supposedly lacking those ingredients and generally making no effort to obtain them (attempts to ‘westernize’ in that sense belong to a later historical period and are much more complex than the term implies).

As I noted at the beginning, though, Paradox’s development style has changed over the years from such ‘railroaded’ results (where key historical changes are hard-coded like this) to an effort to simulate historical forces. So how does EU4 compare? As in EU3, Europe starts ‘behind’ much of Eurasia at the beginning of the game though not by nearly so much as it probably ought. Europe starts even in technology with much of the agrarian societies of Eurasia, but it receives no obvious cultural hard-coded research bonus. Development is a bit trickier, with Europe starting with province development scores that are often as high as other peer states (rather than being something of a backwater), leading to the ‘great power’ list (largely driven by development scores) having perhaps too many European powers. But even with the higher-than-probably-historical development scores in parts of Europe (and lower-than-probably historical scores for parts of Asia in particular which were quite urbanized in this period), the small and fragmented nature of European states means that they still start behind in comparative military and economic power, particularly compared to juggernauts like Ming and will rapidly find themselves looking up at, not down upon, strong centralizing states like the Ottomans. So far, so good.

Two factors enable European states to catch up and then eclipse other states. The less important of these factors are the statistics assigned to military units. Each culture-group has their own unique set of infantry and cavalry units (everyone shares artillery and ships) with modestly different stats based on tech level. The ‘Western’ (read: Western European) units are notable for being generally very poor in cavalry until very late in the game (due to complex factors within the game’s battle calculations, cavalry is very strong early but its importance wanes as the game goes on; Europe gets good at cavalry just in time for cavalry to not matter very much). European infantry is subpar at game start, becomes roughly average by mid-game and surges into the lead in the late game. The consequence of this is that, for a given ‘tech level,’ by 1820, a European army will have a fairly modest combat advantage over a non-European army.

Via the EU4 Wiki, the ‘pip’ values (essentially combat power) of infantry units at various tech levels. The color of each line indicates the associated culture group; the very high purple line is ‘High American’ a tech group introduced to translate a counter-factual game mode from Crusader Kings II games (which can be imported into EU4); High American cultures do not ever appear in normal EU4 games and so the purple line can be disregarded.
Note that the dark blue line, reflecting western European armies, begins at the bottom by some distance, but ends at the top.

(Players of the game may be chafing a little bit at this description from experience – ‘the difference isn’t modest, it’s huge!’ No, it’s modest, check the stats. What causes European armies to stomp all over everyone else in the game isn’t the differences in stats (‘pips’) within tech levels (which are small enough to be easily swamped by differences in drilling, discipline, general skill or just raw numbers), but Europe’s tendency to end up several tech levels ahead of everyone else. Even fairly small differences in military tech levels can lead to substantially large disparities. Consider that tech 25 European infantry (despite being the strongest at that tech level) is weaker than tech 30 Native American infantry (which is the weakest at that tech level) and that’s before even accounting for the bonuses provided by the military technology directly. In practice, that tech-30 army with weaker units will easily defeat a similarly sized tech-25 army with stronger ones because of the substantial bonuses to morale, tactics and general’s skills in the intervening tech levels. Tech level is far more impactful than unit types; playing a non-European power and ‘keeping up’ in tech makes this obvious as overcoming the small advantages in ‘pips’ is easy if you keep up in tech level.)

Far, far more substantial are institutions, the awkwardly named not-quite-obvious technology bonus that Europe receives. Briefly, at fifty year intervals, key ‘institutions’ (a mix of technological, social and economic innovations) spawn and begin diffusing through the map from a central point. States that do not have all currently existing institutions take a stacking penalty to the cost of raising their technology level (up to 50% per missing institution). That penalty has even wider implications however; the resources used to upgrade in technology are those same monarch points used to develop provinces or fully absorb (in game terms, ‘core’) new territory. Consequently, increased costs in technology can have ripple effects if a player tries to ‘keep up’ anyway while behind on institutions, because that means foregoing development and other options which require these same resources.

So far, this seems like a much better system than the hard-coded culture-based research penalties of EU3. But the devil is in the details. Because these institutions radiate out from a central point where they were ‘discovered,’ states very far from that origin point may find it takes many decades for that knowledge to ripple out, with very few options to accelerate the process (you actually can ‘force’ an institution to spawn in your province once it is spawned somewhere else, that but requires investing a couple thousand of those same monarch points with all of the same effects as the last paragraph noted. It is often still a better investment than overpaying for technology over decades – at least you get a very developed province out of the deal – but hardly efficient compared to just being fairly proximate to the start locations of key innovations).

Naturally we have to finish out our Vijayanagar game as well, though I only took it through 1750. Here we are in 1715. We have formed Bharat (which functions as a ‘national union’ tag formable by any culture in a Hindu culture group that manages to establish control over the entire sub-region) and between the Mughals and Bharat, all of the intervening states have been absorbed, leading to the first large class the result of which is this map – victory allowed Bharat to annex much of the Indus River basin.
Note that Doti and Gugh (orange-brown and purple in color) are vassals of Bharat here. The strategy I am engaging in is called ‘vassal feeding’ – taking land in war by seizing it in the name of vassal states. Absorbing vassal states uses diplomatic power, in contrast to the administrative power required to absorb land directly via conquest. Vassal feeding thus allows a player to expand more rapidly by spreading out the monarch point cost between the two.
Also, at this point the game is effectively over – the collapse of Ming means that, barring some truly silly decisions, Bharat has no real peer competitors anymore and has effectively escaped the conditions of anarchy (shifting into hegemony, one of the other neorealist state systems).

And – you knew this was coming, didn’t you – nearly all of the institutions tend to spawn in Europe. Of the eight institutions in the game, one is available everywhere in Afroeurasia at game start (‘Feudalism’) and so mostly serves as a permanent 50% research penalty to the New World. Two (Renaissance and Printing Press) are hard-coded to only occur in specific European regions (Italy and Germany, respectively). One (Colonialism) requires the state to have the ‘Exploration’ idea tree, which generally only is taken very early in the game by European states; a player could try to pull this innovation out of Europe by burning their first idea group on ‘Exploration,’ but the nature of the map gives most states outside of Western Europe few reasons to explore and few benefits to doing so. One more (Enlightenment) is heavily weighted towards Europe, but not exclusively so. Two others (Global Trade and Industrialization) are set to appear in the highest valued trade node in the world which, for the reasons discussed last week, will almost always be one of the three European end-nodes. Consequently, in most normal games, all institutions will spawn first in Europe and then radiate outward. That propagation is often very slow (sometimes taking close to a century for an innovation to make its way from Europe to China), meaning that states essentially suffer research penalties based almost entirely on their distance from Europe.

On the one hand, that set of mechanics produces a historically recognizable set of changes. Europe begins technologically behind, but will tend (in fits and starts as institutions appear and propagate) to catch up and then overtake the rest of the world. And because the same resources (the monarch points) are involved, European states will tend to have a surplus of those ‘monarch points’ to develop their provinces (because their technology is effectively cheaper), leading Europe to also tend to increase province development substantially more rapidly than the rest of the world, reflecting rapid European urbanization. The outcome of these mechanics looks something like historical outcomes.

On the other hand, this system bears essentially no resemblance to what we generally suppose to have been the historical forces that actually motivated those changes, as we’ll discuss in a moment. It also makes a mess of the actual geography of competitiveness in the period. As multiple scholars have noted (see below), outside of Europe (again, understood to include the Ottomans), the states which were most able to ‘keep up’ with European developments in this period were China and Japan – at times both states achieved and held effective parity with the West. But in this system, both China and Japan are at extremely deep disadvantages, being likely some of the last states to gain access to each institution and as a result falling behind even relative to parts of South and South-East Asia. That is, to put it charitably, not what happened.

Briefly, how might I fix institutions? First, ‘Feudalism’ which exists to create a semi-permanent research penatly for the New World, ought to be renamed; I might suggest ‘iron-working’ as a better descriptor of the technological gap as it really existed. Second, at least some of these institutions should already be present outside of Europe and thus be able to be independently discovered in different places. The Renaissance reflects, for instance, a recovery of classical learning; but China and India in this period do not need to recover their classical learning, having never lost it. They should thus start with the Renaissance, if it is to remain an institution. That of course also means breaking up the strict ordering of institutions and the hard region-locking of them; make them fully contingent on conditions and then let the chips fall where they may. But what about this system and how it speaks to the ‘Why Europe?’ question?

And that means it is time to talk about…

Why Europe?

There is a massive amount of literature to explain what is sometimes called ‘the Great Divergence‘ (a term I am going to use here as valuable shorthand) between Europe and the rest of the world between 1500 and 1800. Of all of this, most readers are likely only to be familiar with one work, J. Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), which is unfortunate because Diamond’s model of geographic determinism is actually not terribly well regarded in the debate (although, to be fair, it is still better than some of the truly trash nationalistic nonsense that gets produced on this topic). Diamond asks the Great Divergence question with perhaps the least interesting framing: “Why Europe and not the New World?” and so we might as well get that question out of the way first.

I am well aware that when EU4 was released, this particular question – and generally the relative power of New World societies as compared to Old World societies – was a point of ferocious debate among fans (particularly on Paradox’s own forums). What makes this actually a less central question (though still an important one) is that the answer is wildly overdetermined. That is to say, any of these causes – the germs, the steel (through less the guns; Diamond’s attention is on the wrong developments there), but also horses, ocean-going ships, and dense, cohesive, disciplined military formations would have been enough in isolation to give almost any complex agrarian Old-World society military advantages which were likely to prove overwhelming in the event. The ‘killer technologies’ that made the conquest of the New World possible were (apart from the ships) old technologies in much of Afroeurasia; a Roman legion or a Han Chinese army of some fifteen centuries earlier would have had many of the same advantages had they been able to surmount the logistical problem of actually getting there. In the face of the vast shear in military technology (though often not in other technologies) which put Native American armies thousands of years behind their Old World agrarian counterparts, it is hard not to conclude that whatever Afroeurasian society was the first to resolve the logistical barriers to putting an army in the New World was also very likely to conquer it.

(On these points, see J.F. Guilmartin, “The Cutting Edge: An Analysis of the Spanish Invasion and Overthrow of the Inca Empire, 1532-1539,” in Transatlantic Encounters: European and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, eds. K. J. Andrien and R. Adorno (1991) and W.E. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America: Firearms, Forts and Politics” in Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion and Warfare in the Early Modern World, eds. W.E. Lee (2011). Both provide a good sense of the scale of the ‘technological shear’ between old world and new world armies and in particular that the technologies which were transformative were often not new things like guns, but very old things, like pikes, horses and metal axes.)

This isn’t the place to discuss every response to ‘Why Europe?’ (that would be a graduate seminar, at least), but I think it is worthwhile to hit some of the major theories I think are worth dealing with. It’s worth noting at the outset that while historians presenting an argument about what caused the Great Divergence tend to present arguments in monocasual form (‘look at the impact of this‘), if you talk to them, most historians I’ve discussed the point with tend to blend these theories (they are mostly not mutually exclusive); I’ll give a sense of my own blend at the end.

Frag Out

The first argument is about fragmentation. The balance of political systems, military technologies (castles and cavalry), and geography in Europe created persistent European fragmentation through much of the Middle Ages. Even after the period of rapid consolidation in the 1400s and 1500s, European geography didn’t lend itself towards a single dominant state emerging (contrast China, where a bunch of big navigable rivers all connected to the same coastline encourage larger regional consolidation, though by no means make it certain). Consequently, Europe remained unusually politically fragmented (and still is). One argument for the Great Divergence then is that this fragmentation, combined with the pressures of the competition we discussed last time, forced European states, when faced with existential pressures, to innovate rapidly to survive. New innovations in military technology could not be avoided – even if they destabilized the existing political systems – because failing to take them up meant falling potentially fatally behind. Consequently it was impossible for any European state to choose stability over progress, not because they were enlightened (they weren’t) but because they had to survive. This argument is most closely associated with W. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (1982), but the impact of fragmentation on firearm development specifically is also important and we’ll come back to it. Of note, McNeill argues that the European flourishing of relatively free markets and a degree of free expression was not so much a product of European ruler’s tolerance of these things or some general European commitment to them (there is little evidence of either), but a product of their inability to be rid of them; markets and ideas suppressed in one country could and did simply shift over the border into the next.

Fragmentation does have some odd but significant effects on the trajectory of games in EU4 and that comes back to ‘monarch points.’ Meant to reflect state capacity, monarch points are used both to acquire new technology levels and develop provinces and absorb new land. But a well run state in the game will only ever gain marginally more monarch points per month than a poorly run one, as the bulk of monarch points come from the base value every state has along with ruler skill (which is functionally random for most states). Consequently, a tiny ‘one-province minor’ (or ‘OPM’ in the community lingo) is going to be gaining almost as many of these points as mighty France or Ming. Such small states lack the military power to expand and technology can only be pushed so far ‘ahead of date,’ leaving province development as the remaining way to use those points. Consequently very small states tend to develop their handful of provinces very highly and so European fragmentation does drive its urbanization.

Except that creates a pattern where the areas of most intense fragmentation (generally the German regions of the Holy Roman Empire) develop the largest and most developed provinces. But this is exactly wrong. If we take development to mean improves in something like economic productivity and infrastructure, these developments were most rapid not in the fragmented Holy Roman Empire, but in the larger, consolidated states of Great Britain, France, the Dutch Republic (which, do not forget, had a vast colonial empire) and so on. The industrial revolution, after all, began in Britain and spread first on the continent to Belgium and France. Likewise, if development is taken to mean urbanization and population growth, there is no indicator that small states were any further along in that either; if anything, the small states of the Holy Roman Empire lagged behind France, Britain and the Low Countries.

Consequently, while fragmentation has some effects in contributing to the rising economic power of Europe in most EU4 playthroughs, those effects happen because of pure game mechanics untethered to any identifiable historical forces. What we do not see are situations where existential warfare in the context of extreme fragmentation provide meaningful bonuses to technology or where states are given the option to preserve stability by avoiding economic or technological development – situations that would be more concordant with McNeill’s arguments. In the end, I suspect this goes to Paradox’s stated preference to avoid situations where producing historical results requires the AI to be taught to play badly. By McNeill’s thesis, most non-European states ought to be, in many cases, trading long term technological and economic advancement for stability, taking the short term benefit over the long term one. Historical actors didn’t know that is what they were doing, but a player would and so training the AI to make those stupid decisions, while it might fit the historical theory, would break with Paradox’s core design philosophy.

Firearm Up

All of which bring us to technology, particularly military technology and a debate known in military history circles as the military revolution, which serves as another answer to the ‘Why Europe?’ question. The core of this question, well stated by K. Chase is, “Why was it the Europeans who perfected firearms when it was the Chinese who invented them?” G. Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500-1800 (1988; 2nd ed. 1996) sets out a technological argument mostly confined to Europe, where the development of cannon (a technology that had spread from China), led to a change in fortifications (to trace italienne or ‘star forts) which demanded larger infantry based armies, which spurred development in firearms for those armies to use; the defensive stalemate this technological package (cannon + star forts + big infantry armies + guns) spurred colonial expansion at sea as an effort to get resources to fund these huge armies and Europeans found the military package that this ‘military revolution’ had given them basically unbeatable abroad. Much of the last 40 years of writing on the topic has been responses and refutations to portions of this argument, though Parker has never quite been fully forced from the field. That said, Parker is also careful to clarify that the Ottomans, China and parts of India kept pace with this rapid change; it would take the industrial revolution (rather than the military one) for them to fall behind (the military revolution is generally dated from c. 1450 to 1700 or so; the industrial revolution from 1760 to the mid-1800s though industrialization obviously continued after that). Chronology, as we are going to see, matters a lot here.

One notable response to Parker is the aforementioned K. Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (2003). Chase argues that the key factor is not Parker’s technological interaction (though I’d note that the two theories are not quite so mutually exclusive as Chase argues they are), but rather the threat profile. Chase notes, very persuasively, that firearms just weren’t a very good answer if your major threat was steppe nomad horsemen. Sure, firearms c. 1800 would do the job, but no one directing resources in 1550 could know that. So societies where the major threat was other agrarian states with big infantry armies invest heavily in firearms while states whose major threats are nomads do so to a lesser degree. Since – in a way no one could realize in 1550 – firearms had the potential for much greater power in the long run, Western Europe (one of the few areas of the belt of complex agrarian societies running over Eurasia that did not have major steppe nomad threats due to Eastern Europe being in the way) found itself, by mostly dumb geographic luck with the ‘killer app’ of the 1600s and following. In short then, Chase argues that Europe’s military advantage (and thus its dominant position) was a consequence of environment – being relatively shielded from regions of Steppe which would give rise to dangerous nomads – which in turn motivated European to embrace the new technology (guns) with greater long-term growth potential. The weakness of the thesis is that other places similarly insulated (namely Japan) didn’t have an indigenous military revolution (though they adopted it enthusiastically when it showed up), while Mamluk Egypt, which in this formulation ought to have been as eager on firearms as the Ottomans very clearly wasn’t for what seem pretty clearly to be cultural reasons (Chase anticipates and attempts to fend off this argument, but it is one of his weaker arguments in an overall excellent book).

Via Wikipedia, an illustration from a Ming era (1639) military manual showing instructions for volley fire drill. Volley fire, and the synchronized discipline necessary to produce it, is one of the core developments in the European military revolution, but also developed in China. In the relative dates and influences, see Andrade (op. cit.) below.

Most recently, T. Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation and the Rise of the West in World History (2016) blends the fragmentation explanation with a look at firearms particularly through a contrast between China and Europe. He helpfully demonstrates the weaknesses of many under-cooked ‘cultural’ explanations (property! rule of law! despotism!), by showing that at times China (and the Ottomans) kept up, at other times fell behind and at points surged back ahead but that the key factor here was conflict and fragmentation not far slower changing culture. Periods of hegemony saw wars of expansion but also military stagnation as the state prioritized stability over innovation in military affairs. But periods of fragmentation in China saw technological leaps that kept pace with (always fragmented) Europe. In the process of charting these developments, Andrade also rescues some of Parker’s key European innovations from Chase’s dismissal, most notably trace italienne forts and broadside warships. Andrade also emphasizes that successful use of firearms is also dependent on ‘statecraft’ factors; strong states (which may be small; we mean ‘strong’ here to mean well organized internally) are a required factor for success. Of course 1400-1700 was a period where the modern European strong administrative state was, by fits and starts, emerging and developing itself to an administrative parity with the strong states of other parts of the world. In essence then, Andrade argues that rapid advancement in military science was a product of internally strong states kept in conditions of existential danger; as he puts it (op. cit., 302-3):

Rates of warfare thus correlate with military effectiveness, but we mustn’t forget the many other factors that come into play: state-craft, knowledge networks, economic organization, fiscal structures, communications and transportation infrastructure, and so much more. Warfare explains a lot, but not everything

(I should note here I have simplified a lot to just the word ‘firearms’ in all of this – these authors are not just talking weapons, but a complex mix of chemistry, manufacture, tactics, systems of drill and discipline and so on.)

Here I can say with some confidence that Paradox’s developers are at least aware of Parker’s arguments but perhaps not the more recent scholarship on firearms development. Most of Parker’s key developments are name-checked either in the names of units (e.g. Maurician Infantry referring to infantry using Maurice of Nassau‘s countermarch volley-fire technique), buildings (with ‘Bastion’ and ‘Star Fort’ being upgrades to castles which are more resistant to artillery) and technologies. And there’s clearly an effort to create a period of offensive dominance between the introduction of artillery (at tech-level 7 which becomes available c. 1492) and the appearance of upgraded forts (at lech-level 14, which becomes available in c. 1583), but the upgrade only marginally increases siege time (adding around two months to the total siege time). The historical impact of these technological interactions was much stronger, leaping from Machiavelli’s insistence in 1519 that “No wall exists, however thick, that artillery cannot destroy in a few days” – reflecting the inability of castles to stand up to cannon – to the sieges of 17th century bastion fortresses lasting months if not years (Parker, op. cit., 13 notes the siege of Breda in 1624 lasted nine months and was fairly short; the siege of Ostend, in Flanders in 1601 lasted three years despite ample artillery available to the attackers). Consequently, state consolidation doesn’t occur in a flurry as a window opening in 1490 and them slamming shut by 1590 – the historical pattern – but rather as a continuous process which only becomes marginally easier or more difficult over time.

The other problem is that these technological interactions are extrapolated to the whole world, but of course Parker’s thesis relies on the precise interactions being confined largely to Europe, since the base technology (gunpowder) was not unique or indigenous to Europe. This is a point where Andrade’s more recent work is particularly useful, as he demonstrates how European castle design was particularly vulnerable to the new cannon (and thus incentivized European states fighting other European states to push artillery development), but the indigenous fortress traditions of China and India, with much thicker walls often using rammed-earth construction, were already very resistant to early cannon, making artillery development seem like a dead end in China, rather than the tectonic technological shift it was in Europe (Andrade, op. cit., 75-114; note that the moment those new European cannon got to China, the Chinese bought and copied them in a period that Andrade terms “An Age of Parity.” They knew a good thing when they saw it and Chinese metallurgy was more than up to the task of replicating European designs and in some cases improving on them.)

Via Wikipedia, a model of a Chinese city wall, made using rammed earth construction finished over with stone or brickwork. Andrade argues, persuasively in my view, that such walls drastically limited the utility of siege cannon, as the earth interiors of the walls absorb the energy of impact much better than thinner European castle walls, and the earthwork fill is essentially ‘self-sealing.’ Brick-faced earthwork walls would be a core feature of the later European trace italienne fortifications designed to resist cannon.

How might this be done better? I think the development of conventional arms (cavalry and traditional non-firearm infantry) might be split off from the development of firearms (including artillery) to create a balancing question for each state. Conventional arms development might be balanced to be far more effective against cavalry-heavy armies (like nomads), while early artillery might be more or less useless against them. Next, set Indian and East Asian powers to start with the ‘bastion’ fort-type, and dial up the ‘castle’ fort-type’s profound vulnerability to cannon. Those things, combined, create that strong incentive for European states to pursue firearm development, but force other states with thicker walls and more nomad exposure to diversify (and thus potentially risk falling behind).

Map Painting to Riches

Finally, there is the colonialism and trade explanation, perhaps most notably set out by K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000). Pomeranz focuses his chronology later, noting (as Chase and Andrade do) that Europe really only begins to outstrip China beginning in the 1750s. What he argues is that the key difference was the colonial empires that the European states had spent the previous two and a half centuries building (and also the use of coal instead of timber as a heating material) which by the 1700s brought in tremendous resources in primary products (raw materials and agricultural goods) which freed up land in Europe’s interior to produce other goods more intensively, leading first into the second agricultural revolution and then the industrial revolution, which would provide European states with insurmountable economic advantages (which in turn enabled more colonialism).

This really isn’t modeled much at all in EU4. European overseas imperialism- either in the form of port-and-fort trade networks reaching east (frustratingly represented in the game as consisting far more substantially of large stretches of territorial control rather than the isolated fortified trading posts of the era) or settler-colonialism – does feed significant income back to European states as an EU4 game progresses. But that income doesn’t feed back into development (which is produced by monarch points; the mechanism for turning money into monarch points is very limited); money can be used to build province improvements (buildings), but not to develop the underlying province resources. This dovetails with the relative underdevelopment of the game’s approach to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as well; the movement of literally millions of (brutally enslaved) people from Africa to the Americas doesn’t result in shifting development or increased manpower in those regions. As grim as it might be, a system that transferred development from West Africa to European colonies in the Americas might more nearly simulate what was happening (Paradox’s ancient warfare game, Imperator, does almost exactly this with ancient slavery, so we’ll talk about that when we get there).

As I said, my own view of the evidence is something of a hybrid of most of these models explaining the rise of Europe. The rapid European development of firearms-based warfare created a feedback loop in terms of state centralization (cannon and muskets broke the power of the rural nobility, enabling centralization, which enabled more cannon and muskets, repeat until state-building complete then let dry; see Lee, Waging War (2016), ch. 7&9), while the fragmented agrarian state-on-state warfare in Europe encouraged firearm development particularly leading to an uncommonly effective military package (though not an unbeatable one in the 1600s and early 1700s) corresponding fairly substantially to the elements of Parker’s military revolution. That package enabled European states to set up and hold on to port-and-fort toeholds on other continents they might otherwise have lost (though early on, often only at the sufferance of local rulers, a balance of power that shifts almost imperceptibly until it shifts all at once). The networks of global trade and exploitation that created – because empire must be a product of military strength first – in turn fed a second feedback loop, providing the resources for greater intensification of both state power and economic development which then fed into the industrial revolution. The products of that second cycle, emerging in the late 1700s and the early 1800s, at last proved sufficient to overwhelm the large, complex agrarian states of Eurasia which had, up until that point, generally been able to maintain rough parity with Europe.

Crucially, all of this was an engine of change which was clearly destabilizing (it would, in the final account, consume all of the real monarchies of Europe and render the handful of survivors into powerless constitutional monarchs), but which no European prince, no matter how ‘absolute’ was in a position to shout ‘stop’ because of the intense competition inside of the cockpit of Europe. Any individual European monarch would have been wise to pull the brake on these changes, but given the continuous existential conflict in Europe no one could afford to do so and even if they did, given European fragmentation, the revolutions – military, industrial or political – would simply slide over the border into the next state.

Back to the Model

EU4‘s model manages to capture basically none of this. Indeed, some of the most important technologies that were historically distinctly European and important – broadside warships and trace italienne forts – are in EU4 general technologies available to everyone equally (which incidentally makes it flatly impossible for the game to capture the Portuguese cartaz-system (c. 1500-c. 1700) which was the main way that the Portuguese and later European powers wrested control over trade in the Indian Ocean; it only worked because Portuguese warships were functionally unbeatable by anything else afloat in the region due to differences in local styles of shipbuilding). Of the main institutions, only four of them (Colonialism, Global Trade, Manufactories and Industrialization) can be really connected to any of these processes and of these, at least two can hardly be said to have started in Europe. The Phoenicians (a Levantine, which is to say West-Asian people) were doing overseas settler-colonialism from at least 800 B.C. and potentially for a couple of centuries earlier and as J.L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (1989) lays out, global trade was not new in this period, although the scale of commerce and its management by a handful of European states was. In a real sense, European merchants, long confined to the rump-end of Eurasia were only now entering into a stream of global commerce which had run, in fits and starts, since at least the Roman period if not earlier.

What seems to have happened here is that the developers have taken a set of developments within Europe, which were very important within Europe (like the Enlightenment, or the Renaissance or the Printing Press) and invested them with tremendous explanatory power for what happens between Europe and the rest of the world, when that simply doesn’t seem to have been the case. In essence, the wires for the “Europe and the World” course and the “European Intellectual History” course appear to have gotten crossed. The various developments and intellectual currents they cite absolutely would be included in a course focused on Early Modern Europe (indeed, I have taught that survey and we talked about all of these in depth save for the industrial revolution, which sat mostly after our time frame and so was only alluded to in the final lecture). But in a global world history course covering the period 1440-1821, only some of these trends would be world-historic ones and their stories would in some cases not start in Europe.

Back to our Bharat, another war with the Mughals now means that the entire Indus basin is under Bharat’s control, while in the east the last of the Bengal region has been secured, which is important for the trade networks we saw last time. In a bit of realpolitik maneuvering, Bharat ended its alliance with the rapidly expanding Tsang, causing the latter to be pounced upon by its neighbors and brought back down to size – one example of the ways that a regional hegemon can reshape their neighborhood to their benefit.
Note that the pace of expansion here has clearly picked up. This is a result of the game’s systems as well. Every war in EU4 requires a casus belli – a cause for war – which can effect the peace deals at war’s end. Towards the end of the game, stronger casus belli unlock which lower the cost of demanding territory, allowing wars to become more total, even when fought between large powers. That shift is presumably meant to make the Napoleonic Wars and their near-unlimited nature possible. For more on that, check out Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as we Know It (2007)

That is not to say there is no Great Divergence (an absurd position I still see sometimes adopted in internet arguments but which is impossible to sustain in the face of European imperial expansion; something happened, the question is merely ‘what was it?’ and ‘why?’), but rather that EU4 does not provide a very compelling set of systems to explain it.

There is one exception to this, however, and that goes back to EU4‘s strongest feature: its model of interstate anarchy. While it does not explain why European states were in a position to be able to expand overseas, EU4 does encapsulate one argument as to why they did so. The solution it adopts is that European states had no choice but to expand militarily and economically overseas in order to survive, that for western European states directly exposed to other colonial powers whose armies were funded by the wealth of the Americas or trade in Africa and beyond, deciding not to do colonialism meant handicapping yourself in an all-or-nothing game of military power. And that is an argument that both Parker (1996) and McNeill (1982) – both discussed above – make. EU4 represents empire as a game nearly every large state is already playing and so the question of differing results falls not on the desire to expand and exploit neighbors (which is the assumed goal of all states) but on the different abilities to do so. And this too is not a position without a scholarly basis; it is a clear part of Azar Gat’s model of human conflict in War in Human Civilization (2006) and part that I think clearly holds up. As noted above, Europeans were not the inventors of imperialism, slavery or settler-colonialism, though they did become some of the largest scale practitioners of all three.

But when we move beyond asking about the willingness to expand to asking about the ability of European states to do so, the game falters. In particular, the placement of institutions as the key mechanism setting Europe apart causes the game to drift perilously close to (bad) arguments of the sort made by Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture (2001); VDH attributes western success to a shifting mix of key culture features the core of which are representative government, civic militarism, and freedom in expression, criticism, debate, markets and trade, which he argues gave rise to a cultural affinity for decisive battle which he argues in turn results in superior military performance. And in some of the ‘institutions’ of EU4, you can see something similar to (but not quite identical with) parts of that thesis (with the Renaissance and Enlightenment institutions seeming to align with the free debate and even a bit of the representative government and Global trade and Industrialization seeming to connect to the free markets and trade). But while Carnage and Culture sold very well to the general public and was lauded in popular press (in part due to the timing of its publication; a lot of people in 2001 wanted to read that ‘the West’ was inherently superior and destined for ultimate victory after the shock of 9/11), the book has been almost universally rejected by historians and a work of shoddy and deeply irresponsible pseudo-scholarship.

Briefly, Hanson’s thesis fails at every level, from basic errors in his battle narratives (he gets the number of ‘free Greeks’ at Plataea wrong, for instance, catastrophically misunderstands what the Roman corvus boarding-bridge was, and his reconstruction of the Battle of Midway bungles the crucial minute-to-minute chronology), to grander errors in the overall argument. Arguments that political freedom is a characteristic ‘western’ value over 2,500 years of history ignore that such freedom was almost completely absent for the middle 1,700 years or so (more than half!). The fact that the West does not, in fact, have superior military performance for most of those 2,500 years is also glossed over in deceptive rhetoric but is fatal to the thesis in fact. Hanson argues that shock infantry is a distinctly western fighting style when it is clearly not; shock infantry shows up in Japan and shield walls and pike lines in China and even the ancient Near East. Hanson’s notion of a countervailing ‘eastern’ way of war is pure orientalist bunk supported only by his ignorance of warfare outside of the western tradition. Even a casual acquaintance with pre-modern Chinese warfare, for instance, reveals quite a lot of decisive large-scale infantry engagements. I could go on at some length, but I think this will suffice; do note that this is by no means a comprehensive accounting of the book’s failings. In short, this is a theory of the matter which EU4 would be well advised to steer clear off – it is not taken seriously by historians for good reason.

Via Wikipedia, the Terracotta Army, dating to the late third century BCE. But yes, tell me about how disciplined, close order infantry engaging in decisive battles is distinctive to Europe and no where else. Presumably this is just a very large, very well armed and armored interpretive dancing troupe?

(Of course I do not expect you all to just take my word for it. For an in-depth critique of Carnage and Culture, note S.J. Willett, “History from the Clouds,” Arion 10.1 (2002), 157-178. The fatal problems in the book’s thesis are also addressed head-on in the first chapter of J. A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (2004). Suffice to say, I do not think any part of Carnage and Culture‘s main thesis survives the critiques offered.)

The Power of Simulation

The great power of a game like Europa Universalis IV in wrapped up in the persuasive potential of simulation. It is one thing to be told how something works, but quite another to see it play out with your own eyes and yet something still far more persuasive to watch the same processes play out differently each time, shaped by the basic assumptions of the simulation. But that power can also be a trap because the simulation is not, in fact, shaped by natural laws but rather by assumptions within the design. A simulation is not a real-world experiment, but rather a thought-experiment.

Now I have been, particular this week, sometimes rather harsh with EU4, but I want to reiterate that I think the game’s positives put it well above par with historical games. I could even imagine using it in class precisely as a thought experiment in interstate anarchy if the game itself weren’t so complex and long to play. And the tremendous amount of effort that went into getting names, provinces, states and regions correct makes EU4 an excellent stimulator of wiki-walks for players who find themselves wondering who the Timurids were, what the Sejm was, why they’ve never heard of Ayutthaya and so on.

And the last screenshot of this Vijayanagar into Bharat run. At this point, there’s honestly not a lot of fun left in the game because all sense of threat is essentially removed.
One thing that EU4 – and indeed, nearly all of Paradox’s games – struggles to simulate is the demands of controlling very large frontiers. In practice here, further expansion into the Iranian Plateau ought to impose crushing and impractical logistical burdens; these frontiers are nearly unguardable and merely keeping all of this territory ought to push Bharat to its limits. But because war is a binary state in the game (you are either at war or not), in part because all polities are states, there isn’t a significant level of low-scale conflict along frontiers during peacetime, making it possible for the entire army to be focused one war target at a time. For this period, that isn’t too much of a problem, but the lack of endemic small conflicts is much more striking in Crusader Kings II and III.

But that care and attention to accuracy in geographic detail, combined with the power of the simulation, also pose a real problem, in that it is also all too easy for a player to assume that, since the developers bothered to get the borders of 15th century Vijayanagar right, that the systems in place that produce the surging European dominance in the late game are also right. And unfortunately, while EU4 does place competitive pressures in the mix, most of the factors it has on offer to produce eventual European hegemony aren’t based on the best history. And the game presents these outcomes as substantially mechanistic and inevitable (e.g. certain institutions are mechanically restricted to appearing in Europe), rather than contingent on either long-term underlying structures or on events.

And, as we’ve already discussed, EU4 presents a particular vision of history as being about the affairs and concerns of states, with little time or attention paid to the regular people whose lives those states shape. This is nowhere more apparent than how the ‘rise of Europe’ is treated – the game only rarely gives any sense of what it was like for people to find themselves on the business end of colonialism or imperialism (European or otherwise), although it can give a sense of the experience of being a state in that position, which is still far more than most strategy games where you are never placed in the position of being a minor, technologically disadvantaged power. And I do want to stop and note how unusual and quietly radical that design decision is: many EU4 players, new to the game or at least new to playing outside of Europe will find themselves in the unenviable position of being on the receiving end of militarily superior European forces, put in the same no-win situations that faced Native Americans, West Africans, South Asians and others. Fight the Europeans and you lose. Refuse to deal with the Europeans and be victimized by those who do. Cling to closely to a European protector and lose your independence. In many cases, all possible roads lead to catastrophe, which is, sadly, one of the true lessons of history. To quite Star Trek (of all things), “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.”

That said, this lesson is only delivered at the level of states. We never really see the human cost of those dilemmas. For the teacher and the student alike, the antidote to this state-centric narrative are primary source narratives of the lives and conditions of regular people, which can deliver home the frequently nasty reality of state action and conflict.

That said, the history of states is a valid lens of historical analysis. I absolutely teach some of my courses with a primary focus on this lens, but then of course I have other courses I teach (when universities let me – I have this syllabus for a course on ‘War and Society in the Ancient Mediterranean World’ which I am dying to talk a department into letting me teach, but alas on the adjunct-treadmill I am mostly confined to the Big Survey Courses). And just so, Paradox has other grand strategy games! And while I have noted how EU4 is limited in how it portrays the agency of real people, how it focuses on their problems, the next game in the series (chronologically, not in release date), Victoria II aims squarely at those limitations.

And so that is where we are going to go next. That’s right folks – Victoria II confirmed.

(For those who have asked, the announcement that Victoria III is a real thing that is really going to happen isn’t going to change my schedule here. If anything, I want to talk about Victoria II even more to set up what I think are its particular strengths in the great hope that Paradox will build on those strengths in the sequel.)

06 Jan 22:48

Boilerplate Advice

by Venkatesh Rao
Lately there’s been a gradual uptick in young(er) people asking me for “advice” and a steady decline in my energy to be helpful in any way. So I made up a convenient boilerplate advice table to blow them off with. Some notes follow after. I posted a draft version of this on twitter earlier, where […]
06 Jan 17:46

Deleting Facebook permanently

by joshmanders

Article URL: https://blog.spacehey.com/entry?id=4054

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25659480

Points: 137

# Comments: 128

17 Jul 05:07

Portland

by Josh Marshall

Yes, we are wondering what’s going on in Portland too. Here’s where to start. We’ll try to bring you more tomorrow.

11 Jul 21:47

Dark Satanic Millian Liberalism

by Scott Lemieux

Jamelle Bouie makes a great point here. Republican opposition to enhanced unemployment benefits and support for deadly premature openings aren’t rooted so much in a desire for more immediate economic growth as a fear of anything that gives employees too much power:

Back in March, when Congress was debating pandemic relief, Senator Rick Scott of Florida spoke out against a Democratic plan to greatly expand federal unemployment insurance. “The moment we can go back to work, we cannot create an incentive for people to say ‘I don’t need to come back to work because I can do better some place else,’ ” Scott said at a news conference in support of an amendment that would strike the program from the bill. “These employers are going to need these workers to rebuild this economy, so we cannot pay people more money on unemployment than what they would get in their jobs.”

Most Republican senators voted to remove the unemployment expansion at its full size, but it survived. Billions of dollars of benefits have gone to tens of millions of Americans. The increase in aid was so great that, as The New York Times reported last month, the federal poverty rate declined even as the jobless rate reached incredible heights. And there’s also no evidence that additional benefits are keeping people who want to work from working.

But while that is important, I’m less interested in the trajectory of the Cares Act than I am the nature of Scott’s opposition. The Florida senator (and former governor) wasn’t so much concerned with the ability of people to work as much as he was with the ability of employers to discipline them. Workers are kept on edge — and willing to accept whatever wage is on offer — by the threat of immiseration. This, for politicians who back both big business and existing social relations, is a feature and not a bug of our economic system, since insecurity and desperation keep power in the hands of capital and its allies. Even something as modest as expanded unemployment benefits is a threat to that arrangement, as they give workers the power to say no to work they do not want.

This is the reactionary tendency that John Holbo called “dark satanic Millian liberalism” in his legendary essay about David Frum’s Dead Right:

The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’. Of course, crouching to protect themselves and their loved ones from the eternal lash of risk precisely won’t preserve these workers from risk. But the point isn’t to induce a society-wide conformist crouch by way of making the workers safe and happy. The point is to induce a society-wide conformist crouch. Period. A solid foundaton is hereby laid for a desirable social order.

Let’s call this position (what would be an evocative name?) ‘dark satanic millian liberalism’: the ethico-political theory that says laissez faire capitalism is good if and only if under capitalism the masses are forced to work in environments that break their will to want to ‘jump across the big top’, i.e. behave in a self-assertive, celebratorily individualist manner.

“It’s important for ordinary workers to risk death lest they get too uppity” is right at the core of Reagan Republicanism, which Donald Trump and his millions have distilled into its purest poison essence.

04 Jul 21:30

Even In New York We’re Dropping the Ball

by Josh Marshall

I mentioned yesterday that New York’s COVID numbers were moving in the wrong direction – albeit from extremely low levels and within the range that could simply be statistical noise. Today they’re a bit better. Let’s hope they keep in that direction. But New York, which currently is doing vastly better than any other state in the country, makes a different point. Even here, where daily cases are in the hundreds and the percentage of positive tests hovers around 1% it is not remotely good enough.

Germany currently has about the same number of cases per day as New York City, despite having roughly ten times the population. Italy and France have some variation. But they’re in the same ballpark relative to population.

To put this yet another way, if we adjusted Germany’s number of cases yesterday (283) to approximate the US population that would be 1,132 cases vs the actual number of cases in the United States yesterday which was 57,562. (The differential is likely much greater when we figure that the percentage of positive tests is vastly higher in the US.) If we took that Germany number from yesterday and scaled it in the reverse direction to approximate the population in New York State we’d get about 70 cases. Yesterday New York had 918 cases and today it was 726. So even New York, which is doing about the best of any part of the US, is still clocking cases at roughly ten times the rate as Germany and most of Europe. Of course the percentage of positive tests being returned in these countries is vastly lower than in New York, which again is the lowest in the US.

Just for the sake of running out the numbers, Germany had 238 cases. If Florida has the same population as Germany it’s currently daily case count would be between 40,000 and 45,000 cases. So 238 vs 42,500. That’s how bad we’re doing.

Remember that outbreak in Beijing about a month ago which some feared presaged a second wave in China? China was able to stamp it out with a total of just over three hundred cases most of which were discovered over a two to three week period. To put that in perspective that’s the number of cases in New York City on a good day. In other words, an outbreak that sparked a massive response in Beijing wouldn’t even have registered in what is now one of the most COVID-clean big cities in the US.

You can run these numbers in an infinite numbers of comparisons. They all return the same value: we’re failing horribly. There aren’t a few countries showing it’s possible. Virtually every other country anything like us is doing vastly better.

This isn’t just a competition to see which country can get the lowest possible incidence of the disease past a level of diminishing returns. The returns remain very significant. At the prevalence currently in New York you’re never too far away from a string of bad luck that can catapult you back into the bad zone. Just as important a lot more normal life becomes possible when you get the numbers down to near eradication levels. Schools, shopping, indoor dining all start to become possible and fairly safe because each interaction has dramatically less risk. (Again, remember we’re talking here about 1/10th the number of infectious people even compared to New York. That makes a big difference.)

Obviously a disease like COVID is never really going to be eradicated anywhere as long as it’s raging in other parts of the globe. Even with travel bans there are still lots of people moving around. But at super low levels you can probably stamp out clusters pretty successfully when they arise.

Even in the areas where we’re doing pretty well we’ve still gotten complacent. We’re failing. It’s not a matter of permanent lockdowns. It’s just a matter of having a strategy, following the evidence, being dedicated and getting popular buy-in. In other parts of the world they’re having health and economy. We have neither.

30 Jun 23:30

COVID and patience

by Paul Campos

One thing that doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of attention in all the discussions about what to do about school in the fall (primary/secondary and higher ed) is that the preliminary development work on various vaccines seems to be going well. COVID-19 is apparently turning out to be a good candidate for developing an effective vaccine, because it mutates relatively slowly, thus providing less of a moving target for researchers than many other viruses.

Right now, it looks like the odds of having some sort of at least somewhat effective vaccine by the end of the year are looking pretty good, as are the odds of developing even better vaccines over the course of 2021. In addition, various therapies for people who have contracted COVID-19 are also advancing quickly.

It’s a remarkable international research effort, in an age of almost instantaneous information sharing, which has helped fuel rapid technological advances in vaccine and therapeutic drug development.

Given all this, the current failure of the US federal and many state governments to develop and deploy a containment strategy is all the more tragic. It is quite possible, and even likely, that the medical situation is going to be far better as early as this fall. Right now, the emphasis should be on hanging on until it is better, not on learning to live with a virus that contemporary medical science could well partially or wholly defeat in the very foreseeable future.

My view is that plans to fully open colleges and universities this fall make no sense at all, given ongoing developments. Is one semester of remote learning, with all its many admitted disadvantages, worth enduring if a medical solution to the pandemic is almost visibly on the horizon? To me, that question answers itself.

The situation with primary and secondary schools is more complicated, because these schools play a very different and much more comprehensive role in the nation’s daily life than higher ed. But even there, a few months more of patience could well reap enormous benefits very soon.

The current pessimism about slowing down a first wave that never declined that much — and is now cresting to even greater heights — in what has become a third world country with nukes is very understandable. But luckily, the USA isn’t going at this alone — the whole world is fighting COVID-19, and there’s every reason to think it will win the battle in the not too distant future.

Remembering that can help us get from here to there with much less damage than we in this country are on the verge of incurring.

12 Jun 15:59

How Timber Companies Destroy Rural Oregon

by Erik Loomis

If you spend time in rural Oregon, you hear a lot of bitterness. Those damn environmentalists stopped our logging by prioritizing owls over people and now our towns have gone to hell.

Oregon is an interesting state in the sense that fifty years ago, the entire place, including Portland, was basically a natural resources-based economy that was largely interconnected economically. It also had a unique form of funding counties through timber taxes that came out of the O&C lands, which was a revoked railroad grant that included much of the state’s private timber lands and that was managed by giving the counties a chunk of the timber money. This is what funded schools, police, fire, etc. These services have declined significantly, especially in southern Oregon. Part of this is that this led to an anti-tax mentality that has been reinforced by right-wing Californians moving there. Some of these counties, especially Douglas County, have almost no social services at this point because people are angry and pissed and won’t tax themselves as they blame Salem and the Portland liberals and the environmentalists.

Here’s the problem with all of this–it was never true. The spotted owl primarily lived on federal lands because the old growth timber it requires was long gone in the private lands except for very small pockets. There were a few specific mills by 1993 that still relied on giant old-growth logs, but not very many. If you look at the employment numbers before and after the listing of the spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act, you see it made almost no difference, especially when compared to the real reasons for the decline in the industry–automation and the export of unprocessed logs to Japan. From my Washington Post piece on this:

Working-class environmentalism thrived in an era when workers believed they were assured a stable future. Yet transformations in the nation’s economy in the 1970s curtailed this shared effort. Deindustrialization, automation, outsourcing and a renewed era of union-busting weakened the New Deal coalition, as well as the bonds between labor and environmentalism, putting workers on the defensive. And after 1973, efforts by environmentalists to clean up industry fueled employers’ narratives that any such regulation would close factories and move jobs abroad.

Yet many of these jobs were disappearing regardless of environmental regulation. Beginning in the 1970s, the timber industry began engaging in rapid improvements in efficiency and automation, drastically cutting the number of workers needed. In 1978, the timber industry employed 136,000 people in Oregon and Washington. Four years later, that number declined to 95,000. The number of workers needed to produce the same amount of lumber fell by about 20 percent between 1982 and 1991.

Changing export policy also transformed the industry. Beginning in 1962, the timber industry began shipping unprocessed logs to Japan rather than processing them in the United States. While the amount of timber being shipped increased, the number of workers needed plummeted and thousands of jobs were lost. Exports exploded during the Reagan years, and between 1979 and 1989, lumber production in the Northwest increased by 11 percent — while employment dropped by 24,500.

Blaming environmental regulation for those losses, however, was largely a lie. The Endangered Species Act didn’t precipitate an immediate loss of jobs. By 1994, after most logging in the national forest was shut down, some 91,000 workers were still employed in the timber industry; most of the jobs had disappeared over the previous 20 years for unrelated reasons.

To reiterate, environmental protection did not cause significant job losses in the Oregon timber industry.

I bring this up today because of this outstanding ProPublica piece on Falls City, a small town in the Coast Range, and how the timber industry has decimated places like this because these now giant operations that serve as profit machines for shareholders don’t pay the level of taxes that they used to. Moreover, it’s important to note that the Coast Range, a once gloriously beautiful and ecologically complex place that is now a giant timber plantation, was completely unaffected by the owl and yet these towns are horrible. Here’s an excerpt:

Wall Street real estate trusts and investment funds began gaining control over the state’s private forestlands. They profited at the expense of rural communities by logging more aggressively with fewer environmental protections than in neighboring states, while reaping the benefits of timber tax cuts that have cost counties at least $3 billion in the past three decades, an investigation by OPB, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica found.

Half of the 18 counties in Oregon’s timber-dominant region lost more money from tax cuts on private forests than from the reduction of logging on federal lands, the investigation shows.

Private timber owners used to pay what was known as a severance tax, which was based on the value of the trees they logged. But the tax, which helped fund schools and local governments, was eliminated for all but the smallest timber owners, who can choose to pay it as a means to further reduce annual property taxes.

The total value of timber logged on private lands since 1991 is approximately $67 billion when adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis of data from Oregon’s Department of Forestry. If the state’s severance tax had not been phased out, companies would have paid an estimated $3 billion during the same period. Instead, cities and counties collected less than a third of that amount, or roughly $871 million.

Polk County, home to Falls City, has lost approximately $29 million in revenue from timber sales on federal land. By comparison, the elimination of the severance tax and lower property taxes for private timber companies have cost the county at least $100 million.

“You have that tension between this industry that still employs people, but we’re losing some of the benefits of that relationship,” Falls City Mayor Jeremy Gordon said. “As those jobs diminish, there’s less and less support to subsidize that industry in the community.”

The entire thing is absolutely outstanding. The takeaway is clear–do not blame environmentalists for job losses and the economic struggles of natural resource communities. Blame the real problem–capitalism and the politicians capitalists buy, which in this case included former Oregon governor John Kitzhaber, who signed the legislation that changed the tax formula to make it more friendly to the timber industry.

05 Jun 17:35

Machine learning app turns face sketches into realististic photos

by Mark Frauenfelder

University researchers from Hong Kong and China created an application called DeepFaceDrawing that "allows users with little training in drawing to produce high-quality images from rough or even incomplete freehand sketches."

Image: YouTube

27 May 00:08

Biden’s Agenda

by Scott Lemieux

Generally, questions like “can you name even one Joe Biden policy proposal?” are not being asked in good faith — actually discussing the policies can easily lead to a transition to “but he doesn’t mean it” or whatever for people determined to root for Daddy Trump to own the libs from the “left.” But anyway for those interested this is a good deep dive into what he’s actually proposing:

That conflict between what the left wants and what Biden wouldn’t give them became the dominant narrative about him in the mainstream press. Biden was defined by the things he was against, rather than by the substantial overlap between his policy ideas and those of his progressive critics. Biden is a mainstream Democrat, and as the Democratic Party has grown broadly more progressive in recent years, he is now running on arguably the most progressive policy platform of any Democratic nominee in history.

It’s a detailed and aggressive agenda that includes doubling the minimum wage and tripling funding for schools with low-income students. He is proposing the most sweeping overhaul of immigration policy in a generation, the biggest pro-union push in three generations, and the most ambitious environmental agenda of all time.

If Democrats take back the Senate in the fall, Biden could make his agenda happen. A primary is about airing disagreements, but legislating is about building consensus. The Democratic Party largely agrees on a suite of big policy changes that would improve the lives of millions of Americans in meaningful ways. Biden has detailed, considered plans to put much of this agenda in place. But getting these plans done will be driven much more by the outcome of the congressional elections than his questioned ambition.

The point about labor is interesting, because that’s one area where Biden is likely to be better than Obama at making it a top legislative priority.

At any rate, the key point here is that how Democrats do in the Senate will do much more to determine what the legislative accomplishments of a Biden administration will look like. The difference between Prime Minister Sanders or Warren and Prime Minister Biden would be pretty substantial. The differences between them as presidents would be much less so.

22 May 19:16

State Incapacity Authoritarianism

by Scott Lemieux

Since Trump won the Electoral College, there have been dismissals of the threat he posed to democratic norms. The most recent of these comes from Ross Douthat, who essentially argues that Trump is too incompetent to be authoritarian: “real political authority, the power to rule and not just to survive, is something that Donald Trump conspicuously does not seem to want.” While it’s true that Trump’s response to COVID-19 has been focused on trying to evade responsibility, as Chait says incompetence and authoritarianism are more compatible than such arguments allow:

But effective public management and effective attacks on democratic norms are different skills. Douthat undersells the very real success Trump has had in the latter area. Trump has not “suddenly discovered how to use his authority for dictatorial or democracy-defying purpose,” he asserts.

Well no, perhaps not “suddenly.” He has instead worked his way there through trial and error. But Trump’s progress after three years is undeniable.

Trump’s first success came immediately: He disabled the norms walling off presidents from private interests. Restraints that were once so strong that Jimmy Carter had to sell off his peanut farm lest any pro-peanut bias infect his decision-making have essentially disappeared altogether. The entire Republican congressional party, and much of its judicial wing, have lined up behind Trump’s claim that he doesn’t need to even disclose his financial interests, let alone cut them loose. Conservatives literally use “Emoluments Clause” as a punchline — after all, it was never enforced before, since nobody until Trump bothered violating it. Just about the only small price Trump pays anymore is regular stories by David Fahrenholdt detailing the government overpaying at his properties.

He has likewise disabled congressional oversight. Where previous presidents skirmished over the boundaries and extent of Congress’s authority to probe their administrations, Trump has dismissed it wholesale. The fact that Congress has political rivalries with the executive — the very dynamic the Founders intentionally counted on to restrain overreach by any branch of government — is, for Trump, proof that competing branches have no legitimacy. “These aren’t, like, impartial people. The Democrats are trying to win 2020,” he said, by way of explaining his blanket refusal to respect any subpoena.

His apparently successful purge of inspectors general has stripped away yet another layer of accountability. It has met the usual response from the GOP: initial scolding from a couple members, followed by silence, followed by a chorus of approval. “He is certainly within his authority. He gets to hire and fire under the Constitution all people in the executive branch,” said Mitch McConnell, laying out the party line.

The problem, of course, is that the president’s formal authority is terrifyingly vast. The Saturday Night Massacre was within the president’s formal authority. So is replacing the Justice Department with pure partisan loyalists who harass his rivals and protect his allies. That is why a system of norms was built to restrain that authority in the first place.

William Barr’s reign at the Justice Department has been the most effective fulfillment of Trump’s ambitions. Trump’s impulsiveness has certainly impaired Barr’s work by making the ruse so obvious, a fact that Barr has even had to complain about loudly. It’s now forgotten, but three months ago, Barr threatened to quit if Trump wouldn’t stop tweeting out demands that the Justice Department become a weapon of vengeance.

Trump hasn’t stopped, and Barr hasn’t quit. He continues to patiently lay the predicate to criminalize all of Trump’s Deep State enemies, and to exonerate his allies. Paul Manafort has skipped to the front of the line and had his sentence reduced to “home confinement” (i.e., what most of us are doing these days anyway). The prosecutors of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn have quit after Barr undercut them, and even if Barr’s maneuvers fail, both will likely win pardons. The message sent across the bureaucracy is crystal clear.

His success at dismantling congressional oversight into his systematic looting of the federal treasury and weaponization of the Justice Department is hardly a trivial matter. And he’s also succeeded at delivering what his core supporters actually want:

It is true that Trump has frequently undercut his ambitions with his ineptitude. Shortly before the pandemic arrived in the United States, conservative economist Tyler Cowen coined a phrase to describe the future of American libertarianism. The phrase he came up with was “State-capacity Libertarianism.” He sketched out a worldview that was skeptical of redistribution, hostile to “the polarizing left,” (hence the libertarian part) but eager to expand the government’s ability to efficiently manage infrastructure, control climate change, and other public goods. He gave a nod to the influence of Trumpist libertarian Peter Thiel.

Trump has delivered in spades on the hostility to the left and to redistribution. (One suspects these are the core demands for most libertarians — certainly they are for Thiel.) The state capacity, not so much. The actual governing synthesis Trump has produced could be called “State Incapacity Authoritarianism.”

State Incapacity Authoritarianism, like its inverse, sounds a bit like an oxymoron. But in practice, the pieces fit together well enough. Its key constituents get out of it the things they want most. Trump and his cronies get looting. The business class gets lavish tax cuts and self-regulation. Republican believers get to humiliate and defy the liberals.

You can dismiss it all as lacking “authority,” and you might be right. But the truth about authoritarians is that, while they usually promise to make the trains run on time, they often fail to deliver. Making the failure not matter is the point of it.

And while it’s true that one of the most important things Trump has done — ensure a Supreme Court majority remains hostile to voting rights and allows Republican state legislatures to insulate themselves from democratic elections — is a goal broadly shared by the Republican establishment, that doesn’t make it less authoritarian.

22 May 01:09

TI removes access to assembly programs on the TI-83 Premium CE

by dTal
Zephyr Dear

So much for Zoom Math...

20 May 20:33

Wear Your Damn Mask

by Josh Marshall

Very early in the crisis I was working on a post about masks before the US made its big shift in favor of masking. This was partly based on my own observations but I was also reading the commentary of the Turkish-American sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. The story seemed to be one of American but also really Western complacency and arrogance. The general wisdom seemed to be: ‘yes, they wear masks in Asia. It’s a good system of social signaling, demonstrating that you take the epidemic seriously. And certainly there’s no harm but masks don’t actually work.’

Then we decided masking does work.

In some quarters this has been presented as based on new knowledge about COVID, particularly the number of asymptomatic carriers and the infectiousness of asymptomatic carriers. But this is mostly a cop-out inasmuch a lot of the logic of masking is based on the idea that many people won’t know they’re ill or won’t know they’re infectious. A substantial amount of the rethink was based on the impossibility of rejecting out of hand the strategies practiced in East Asia when countries in East Asia were all doing so much dramatically better than we were in the United States as well as in most of Europe.

I’m still trying to pull together the information and we don’t yet have anything definitive. But there seems to be a growing mix of inferential evidence and early studies that suggest not only that masks do have an effect but that they may have a bigger effect than many of us expected. Masking may even be playing a significant role in preventing new outbreaks or acceleration of transmission in areas that are moving back toward semi-normal economic and social life.

If you see data or studies on this front, pointing in any direction, please drop me a line with the information. Meanwhile, wear your mask.

15 May 00:44

Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap

by epistasis
14 May 14:48

"Tonight We Riot" is a brutal 8-bit side scroller about worker liberation

by Thom Dunn

There's a lot of overlap between the friends of mine who are fervent video game enthusiasts, and those who are the most belligerent anarcho-syndicalists / anarcho-communists / other Revolutionary Leftist sects — and they have all been singing the praises of "Tonight We Riot," the video game that even Variety calls, "an unapologetically political, socialist game about worker liberation in the face of overpowering capitalism." The official description reads:

A revolutionary crowd-based retro brawler

In a dystopia where wealthy capitalists control elections, media, and the lives of working people, we’re faced with two choices -- accept it or fight for something better.

Tonight We Riot doesn’t have just one hero. Instead, you play as a movement of people whose well-being determines the success of your revolution.

Essentially, it's a retro 8-bit throwback to games like "Streets of Rage," he game is the brainchild of Pixel Pushers Union 512, a worker-owned video game cooperative out of Texas. Except instead of controlling one character with a melee weapon and a limited life, you get a chance to control the entire rioting crowd as they work together to lob molotov cocktails at the bootlicking mechs sent by the evil capitalist overlords determined to quash their solidarity.

I'm not much of a gamer myself, but I might have some free time on my hands soon with this quarantine, and this looks pretty damn delightful to me. You can check it out on Nintendo eShop, Itch.io, Steam, or Good Old Games.

Tonight We Riot [Pixel Pushers Union 512]

05 May 07:25

Flexport is hiring software engineers in Amsterdam (we can get you a visa)

by thedogeye