The Spoils of Information War

Last week was the election, and my contribution to post-election commentary just went out in a different article:

Russia’s 21st Century Warfare on our 18th Century Election System

Trump has exposed a critical design flaw in our 18th century election system: since corporate social media has pulled our country into rhetorical echo chambers, surgically targeted disinformation can determine the outcome of an election.

LAWSONRYJesse Lawson

Here are my unstructured thoughts from this week:

• They spent a decade crying about Sharia Law coming to the United States—not because it scared them, but because they wanted first-mover advantage.
• The thing that unites a significant bloc of Trump followers is the same thing that unites other far-right authoritarian momentum surges: the metastasizing pull of evangelical fanaticism.
• The Russians have been whispering sweet masculine fictions of racial and gender superiority into the tired ears of millions of men, and in their suffering under the strain of unfair and unjust capitalism, they’ve grown especially resistant to any fact that reminds them of their insecurities.
• One thing I hope everyone can start thinking about is the fact that a growing number of Americans are using LLMs as search engines. That means they are relying on accuracy and authenticity in programmatically generated content—for which we have no auditable insight into the training data.
• When the owners of the means of connectedness proclaim their political neutrality, they are telegraphing their political maneuvering.

Around the Net

1. Timothy Snyder on the illusion of the strongman:

Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't.  In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it. 

The Strongman Fantasy (text and audio)

And Dictatorship in Real Life

Thinking about...Timothy Snyder

2. Rick Perlstein shares his experience with a popular venture capitalist and his unimaginative view for a world dominated by, well, venture capitalists:

Basically, the manifesto is an argument, dressed up in the raiment of morality, about power: Andreessen and people like him should get to make decisions to reorder life as we know it without interference from anyone else. Which will be quite relevant to know for the saga ahead, once you see the style of moral judgment this most powerful of human actors displays behind closed doors.

My Dinner With Andreessen

Billionaires I have known: Part One of a three-part series

The American ProspectRick Perlstein

3. Mike Caulfield shares how this election was a "Hyperreal Election", where voters seem to have made real choices based on non-real circumstances:

When I look at this election I am struck how little real policy and real gains in people’s lives mattered to their perceptions. I know that this was an anti-incumbent cycle, but it’s still intensely weird that the party that oversaw the miraculous “soft landing”, full employment, record stock prices, a manufacturing renaissance, the re-empowering of unions, and increases in real wages was not the party that voters saw as having the “economy candidate”.

Inflation and the Hyperreal Election

Daily lives means daily lives

The End(s) of ArgumentMike Caulfield