The Absolute Fake

 I have done my share of handwringing over the past year about the potential threat of AI deepfakes to our political environment—and even to our ability to rely on a sense of shared reality. In a recent post I cited a Wall Street Journal article with the alarming headline "Is Anything Still True? On the Internet, No One Knows Anymore." Last spring, I quoted Walter Lippmann's prescient warnings about the crisis for democracy that could arise in a world where we no longer distinguish truth from falsehood. The basic concern behind all these posts is simple: generative AI has made falsified images appear more realistic than ever before. Soon, we will be unable to detect any difference between the real ones and the fakes. And without a shared epistemic baseline, how will we be able to negotiate any of our political disagreements without resort to violence? 

A recent New Yorker article by Daniel Immerwahr, however, makes a cogent case that these fears are overblown. AI deepfakes are indeed concerning and often harmful, Immerwahr concedes—but not primarily because they have actually proved effective in misleading people. These images have been used to harass, sexually humiliate, and reinforce people's already-blinkered opinions; but they have not actually spawned the kind of epistemic crisis that I and so many other observers have feared, even as they have become increasingly lifelike and sophisticated. The reason, Immerwahr argues, is that convincing fakes are not actually a new phenomenon. It has been possible to sow disinformation across various mass media for centuries. The way in which most of us have always tried to disaggregate which of these claims are true and which are false is not actually by "seeing it with our own eyes," but by checking what we consider to be reliable sources—a process Immerwahr dubs "social verification."

Was It For This?

 The news that filled the headlines from Dublin yesterday was depressing for more than the obvious reasons. Of course, one never wants to open the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and see front-page images of right-wing extremists torching cars and rioting in the streets in an orgy of xenophobic violence. One doesn't want to see that happening in any country. But there's something about it occurring in Ireland—a country I have long idealized—that cut me especially close to home. 

Why did I have this distinctly strong reaction? After all, the Dublin riots were hardly the only or the worst manifestation of racist sentiment targeting migrants in the democratic West (I mean, just look around us here, in this country). But there's something especially disappointing about it in this case. 

Expectations

 There has been much consternation recently over the apparent disconnect between how the U.S. economy is actually doing and how Americans perceive it. On the one hand, we have low unemployment, rising wages, cooling inflation, and strong GDP growth that has defied warnings of recession. On the other, we have widespread economic discontent, according to polls and surveys assessing how Americans feel about the situation. And since people tend to blame the incumbent president for the current state of the economy, this spells trouble for Biden in the 2024 election—and therefore potentially the future of American democracy. 

As the AP article linked above and other commentators observe, the explanation for this discrepancy appears to still be inflation. Economists will say: but inflation is cooling! And it is. But inflation is measured year-over-year, and people have longer memories than that. They know that current inflation rates are measured against last year as a baseline, and that was in turn a terrible year for inflation. What they really remember is how relatively cheap things were two or three years ago, and they want to go back to that. And I certainly can't blame them. 

"The Worst of Them Many States"

I was talking to some new acquaintances at a family gathering in Minnesota this weekend, and I mentioned I live in Iowa. "Oh," they asked, "Whereabouts in Iowa?" "Iowa City," I replied. "Ah," they said; "well if you have to live in Iowa, that's the place to be." 

I have to admit, I didn't know what they meant. I like my recently-adopted town, but I always thought of it as a small outpost, not a center of civilization. Its "downtown" is made up of about two intersections, after all, and if it weren't for the university, it often feels there would be no one living there at all. 

Extremist Ragout

 I get the nauseous feeling that we are living in a moment of proliferating totalitarian ideas, spreading like wildfire on social media. Obviously, the use of these online platforms to seed extremist ideas is nothing new. But what is creeping me out right now, even beyond the usual baseline concern about rising political extremism that hums as perpetual background noise in our present reality, is the appearance of these ideas in the feeds of tremendously powerful and influential people; plus the eerie cross-pollination that we seem to be witnessing in the promotion of these ideas between the extreme left and the extreme right. That part is new.

Yesterday was an especially bad day for anyone worried about the rise of antisemitism and other forms of extremism online. First, we had the news about Elon Musk's latest comments. If there was any lingering shred of plausible deniability he might have invoked as to his views, prior to these posts, he eliminated it that day. He is now actively endorsing antisemitic conspiracy theories and purveying them to his followers. And the way he talks about them, specifically, shows that this was no one-time gaffe. This was not a case of merely liking the wrong tweet. It's clear that Musk is deeply embedded in the worldview of white nationalists and the web of the ultra-right. He is conversant in their terminology and appears to have embraced their core propositions. 

Two Poems

I.

There was one book he

Still hadn’t read

Ubu Roi

John Berryman said.

I wonder why?

It’s not that long

But so he says

In his Dream Songs.

Perhaps the French

Serves to disguise

The fact the play

Is pocket-sized.

I Don't Get It

 Maybe it's time for me to admit that I really just don't know or understand what's happening in the mind of the great American public. The past few weeks have brought a raft of data showing that the people of this nation, at least in the most relevant swing states that will determine the outcome of the next election, are thinking very differently about the 2024 race than I am. 

From what I can see, at my vantage point, this looming election is an existential choice that will decide the fate of American democracy. On one side, we have a basically normal candidate—flawed in some ways, admirable in others—who, whatever else he may do, is at least not likely to overturn our democratic institutions and become a dictator. On the other side, we have a would-be strongman, currently under multiple federal and state indictments for trying to subvert the last election, who has made no secret of the fact that his goal in a second term will be to persecute his enemies, eviscerate the independence of the Justice Department and transform it into a political weapon of the presidency, rip apart communities by expelling millions of undocumented immigrants, and empty the federal government of all but his most craven lackeys. 

Postmodern Dictatorship

 You'd never guess it from listening to his admirers and pro bono propagandists on the MAGA Right and the Greenwald Left, but Putin most likely killed 300 of his own citizens once upon a time, in order to tighten his grip on power. Remember the 1999 apartment bombings? The episode is decades-old at this point, but it perhaps still sheds some relevant light on the psychology of the man who invaded Ukraine. People who are still intent on finding a sympathetic explanation for Putin's actions, or who—on IR "realist" grounds—can only believe that states act for fundamentally rational reasons—should take heed of this incident. Maybe the take that Putin is just a power-hungry creep deserves more of a hearing?

As detailed in Masha Gessen's account and those of other journalists, a number of eerie circumstances around the 1999 apartment bombings suggest that Putin's friends in the Russian state played a role in the attack. For one thing, there were the FSB agents surprised in the apparent act of planting more bombs (later dismissed by the FSB itself as a training exercise). Then, there was the fact that one politician announced and began condemning the attack in the Duma—before it had actually occurred. Then there's the fact that a defector who escaped to Britain and wrote a book accusing Putin of involvement in the plot to blow up the apartment buildings was assassinated in 2006—most likely on Putin's orders. 

1985

 In his slightly tongue-in-cheek prophecy of the decade to come, 1985, Anthony Burgess (writing in 1978) accused George Orwell of getting the future wrong. "1984 is not going to be like that at all," he writes. He therefore offers his own bleakly comic view, in contrast, of what the future actually holds. Instead of a rapid descent into outright dictatorship organized around a cult of personality, Burgess appears to predict a gradual slide into pettifogging bureaucracy and self-righteous unionism. Instead of the 1980s being envisioned as a boot stamping on a human face forever, Burgess pictures it as a sort of endless wait at a DMV counter. And indeed, it must be said: his future is a fair extrapolation from some of the social trends most visible in Britain in the 1970s: rising inflation, depreciating currency, daily strikes and walk-outs in every major industry. 

The irony of the book, though, is that even as Burgess accuses Orwell of being mistaken in his prophecy, he appears to have been just as bad at guessing future trends. For the real 1985 would come to resemble Burgess's dystopia as little as it would Orwell's. Far from the trade unions acquiring ever greater power, they were crushed in Britain and the United States by a ruthless right-wing reaction. Elsewhere, Burgess conjures the phrase "right to work" as an expression of heroic individualism in a world dominated by closed shops, grievance politics, obligatory strikes, and ruinous wage-hikes—and he was right that the phrase would actually enter our politics; but it would not do so as a cry of protest against the hegemonic worldview, but as a cynical (Orwellian, really) slogan for a political movement that sought to bury the union movement even further, after it had already been mostly defeated. 

A Parcel of Rogues

 The news media seems largely to have met last night's GOP primary debate with a shrug. The consensus is that it was a dull affair that shed little new light on most of the candidates. I largely agree with that assessment, but with one glaring exception. And to me, it is such an important exception that I almost wonder if we were even watching the same debate. For even if the candidates largely echoed each other on most of the issues up for discussion, they divided in very significant ways over foreign policy. There were basically two sides on stage: there were the ordinary old-fashioned sort of excessively-hawkish-but-at-least-pro-democracy-and-pro-American Republicans, like Nikki Haley; and then there was the terrifying emissary from the party's Putinist future, the flabbergastingly unprincipled Vivek Ramaswamy. 

The news media did not even begin to do justice to the magnitude of the weirdness and eeriness of the views Ramaswamy was spouting on the stage. Here's the New York Times's sanguine recap of the Ukraine segment of the debate, for instance: after describing Nikki Haley's positions, they then summarize: "Most of the other candidates gave versions of the same responses." Well, yes, I suppose this is true in a numerical sense. The majority of the other candidates sounded similar to Haley. But one of them—Mr. Ramaswamy—presented such a frighteningly dissonant alternative that I would have thought it would surely be newsworthy. He went beyond repeating his now-familiar opposition to further U.S. military aid to Ukraine, and began actually parroting Kremlin talking points about the Ukrainian government and the country's eastern provinces. 

Self-Defense vs. Revenge

 In Robert Southey's dramatic poem about the medieval English Peasant's Revolt, Wat Tyler, he imagines the radical priest John Ball (he of the immortal phrase "when Adam delved and Eve span/who was then a gentleman?") as a kind of proto-Tolstoyan pacifist. In this regard, Southey was probably far more influenced by contemporary radical writers than he was by any historical sources about Ball. After all, Southey composed the work when he was only twenty years old and still a radical. According to Wikipedia, he is believed to have originally drafted it in 1794. This is the same year that William Godwin published Caleb Williams—and there are several passages in which one can detect the overt influence of that work. 

This is most readily apparent in Southey's themes of pacifism and non-resistance. Sounding much like Godwin's great novel of social protest and anarcho-pacifism, Southey's version of Ball harps frequently on the notion that the retributive justice of the court system is really just a glorified form of revenge. He asks at one point whether his listeners cannot "See in the sable garment of the law/Revenge conceal'd." This is pure Godwin. Then there is Southey's reference to the "blood-purpled robes of royalty," in which we seem to hear an echo of Godwin's phrase about "the gore-dripping robes of authority."  

Leaving the Planet

 A couple weeks ago, the New York Times ran a piece asserting that NASA engineers now believe we may be able to live on the moon by the year 2040. I, like most people, think this sounds awesome. I'm not against it. Still, the techno-utopian grandiosity of the proposal strikes me, and it seems to crystallize in a way the fundamental ambivalence of our current relationship with technology. We live in an era of unbounded excitement and optimism about the future potential of novel technologies, of a kind we have not experienced for at least several decades; yet at the same time we are perhaps more uneasy and perturbed by the direction and rapidity of this change than we have been in at least as long a time. 

I thought it was strangely apt, for instance, that Oppenheimer was the blockbuster hit of the summer. Obviously, it tapped into the zeitgeist—yet it was such a grand undertaking that Christopher Nolan must have been planning it years before he could have known how well it would suit our moment. One therefore has the sense that he was building better than he knew. And I don't just mean that we are experiencing an episode of renewed anxiety and concern about nuclear weapons—conflicts involving nuclear-armed powers in Ukraine and now in the Middle East obviously have a lot to do with this. But also, we are at a moment when the promethean powers of scientists in general are facing renewed skepticism. 

The Second Collapse

It was a day of massive protests around the country, with people in major cities and university towns across the United States gathering to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and waving Palestinian flags. Maybe many of them have their hearts in the right place. Maybe they mean by all this only to condemn indiscriminate IDF airstrikes in Gaza that seem to needlessly and disproportionately harm civilians. Or maybe they only mean to protest the ongoing occupation of the West Bank, and the exclusion of the Palestinian people who live there from any meaningful say in the government that controls most aspects of their lives. These are things that do indeed deserve to be protested.

But, whatever their true motives, by simply waving their "Free Palestine" and "From the Rivers to the Sea" signs, so soon after the October 7 massacre of 1,400 Israeli civilians, and without providing any additional context, many invite an inference of bad faith. They sound—whether intentionally or otherwise—like they are calling for the ethnic cleansing or genocide of Israeli Jews. And if this is not in fact what many of them will say they mean, if pressed to clarify—they seldom act proactively to disavow such a meaning. They seem to feel no moral obligation to distance themselves from any such calls for ethnic cleansing, treating the risk of this happening as so remote a danger as to be negligible. 

The Quintessential Experimental Novel

 Is it possible to go beyond what B.S. Johnson already accomplished in his second novel, 1964's Albert Angelo? Or does the story of the novel as literary form end there? Clocking in at only 180 pages (in the New Directions edition), the book is nonetheless the perfect distillation of every major experimental technique developed in twentieth century fiction, plus a new one thrown in for good measure. It may be the quintessential avant-garde novel that can never be transcended. 

How did he do it? What were his sources? Johnson cites Beckett as an influence, featuring a quote from The Unnamable as an epigraph. But the influence of Joyce is just as discernible, if not more so. Johnson borrows from Ulysses the device of shifting between forms, genres, and registers with each chapter—one section in prose, another drama, another verse, another stream-of-consciousness. But the book doesn't just stop with Joyce. It is also compounded of equal parts Donleavy, postmodern metafiction, and pure sui generis Johnson. 

The More Things Change

 In Bernard Malamud's classic novel The Fixer—a searing indictment of antisemitism told from the perspective of a Jewish man living in the autocratic Russian empire around 1905 who is falsely accused of ritual murder for political reasons—this persecuted protagonist in one scene meets in secret with a Russian official, who reveals himself to be an unexpected ally. Despite working for the czarist state, it turns out that this official is a closet liberal: attempting within the confines of the autocratic system to make what incremental progress he can toward greater legality and justice. 

This official admits, after recounting the recent resurgence of antisemitic persecution and political repression in this czar's government, that these events call into question his belief in human progress. He asks the fixer if he is familiar with the expression "the more things change, the more they stay the same," and says it applies amply to the Russia of 1905. On the one hand, he like many other members of the liberal intelligentsia had believed up till then that the country was on an inevitable path toward greater modernization. On the other, he was living to witness the resurgence of some of the darkest forms of reaction in his own time—the return of the medieval superstition of blood libel, for instance; the threat of murderous pogroms.