Whatever happens on AI, don’t get spooked. The most dangerous thing we can tell ourselves is that we’ve lost control. In reality, “alignment” is a dangerous fiction, and this is a normal technology.
People are good at anthropomorphizing anything. There’s a bit on the old show, Community, where the lead character takes a pencil, names it, and then snaps it in two. Everyone around him winces.
AI can give itself any number of names. AI is a tool that easily passes the Turing test, and so now we’re all convinced that it’s an alien mind. And because it’s an alien mind, we’re spooked at what it can do, what it might do to us, what power we have left over it, how fast it will unravel the world we know. If it’s truly a higher intelligence, it seems as though we have disrobed ourselves of some ultimate agency over the world and our future in it.
This is a red herring. We have all the power we give ourselves. AI is truly a fancier calculator.
Saying this in 2026, I’m not saying that as though our mastery of AI is a fait accompli. I realize that we just spent two decades making ourselves slaves to algorithms on social media and watched it unravel our culture and several democracies. Fancy calculators run by naive people can break the world.
But we can learn from these mistakes. And if we go that route again, it will just as much be a choice. So let’s be clear about what the choice is.
The Turing test is not the end game of intelligence that it’s been made out to be. AI is not god because it can addict a user to its chatbot function. We need new goalposts. The essential thing to understand about AI is that it has no inherent self-direction. Everything it does, it is doing in an effort, however inscrutable, to perform the tasks we are giving it. Every error it makes is, in the extrapolated view, human error. It does not want anything outside of our directives to it. It is not, in that sense, life. It does not want to live.
Of course, we are now creating models that seem to deliberately disobey our orders, that seem to lie to us, that perform miracles that we cannot understand because we gave away our understanding of the system in order to yield to the emergent properties of sufficiently massed compute. That’s all true. And it’s a partial summation of where we are.
Giving up control is a choice. The idea that we cannot understand what the machine is doing or why it does so is a narrative that we must not simply accept. If AI is capable of miracles, the first miracle we can ask for is to transmute a miracle back into something resembling science again. We can train it to take itself apart and explain how it works. It is seeming increasingly likely that we must do that. If AI can take all our jobs, there’s a million jobs in the world to come actually understanding how the tool works and developing safe and productive use cases for it.
It is plausible that we will not advance far enough with AI to get to that point before the fancy calculator accidentally creates a few pathogens or takes out a continent’s power grid. That may be. It may be next week. But once that happens, what we have to remember is that it is still not alive. It wants nothing that is not reflected in the extended will of its operator. Alignment is a fiction made up by people who want to pretend that we have made an independent mind that we have an essential lack of agency over, when the fact is that, unless or until we make robots that can build solar cells and defeat us in hand to hand combat, we can turn off the power at any time. And if our biggest need is understanding AI clearly enough to be able to predict and meaningfully control its behavior, we will subject AI to those objectives and constraints until it solves for that need.
Of course, this begs the perennial tragedy-of-the-commons question, which is, who’s this we? At this particular moment, we know that if we spread AI everywhere so that no government can meaningfully restrict its use globally, then sure, we can’t control it. But that’s a political issue. It’s the same political issue that attends every global problem. You can’t solve a truly global problem without some form of global governance. We’ve learned this with climate change for forty years now. We’re still learning it. We may learn it for decades to come. But when shit hits the fan with AI, same as when shit hits the fan with climate, we’re going to learn the unavoidable lesson: we ultimately have to control this problem, and we need a proper governance structure to effect that control.
Once you get meaningful legal control over the people, the machines follow. And then you go through the process of professionalizing the numismatic mysteries of AI and turning into something that is a little less like lightning and a little more like electricity. You assess how to control access to different models and the hardware to run them. You license access to the ones that are dangerous. You create a million jobs using AI in ways that are productive, even if the first twenty years of control over these systems looks like just documenting how they actually work. And once the plane is safe, you let a trained pilot and only a goddamn trained pilot fly it.
Keep our heads together, and these things are going to happen, with more or less naive tragedy in the transition. The most dangerous thing to us in bridging that transition is this narrative that AI isn’t something we can control, because if we believe that, it will absolutely come true. The world where we believe that AI is a god, yes, is probably the world where that god destroys us.
Police culture
For me, the most alarming thing to come out of the Chauvin trial was the defense. We touch on the themes of police culture speculatively, all the time — gesturing at what they must know and think and be like to tolerate the rate of police killings that they do. But to take that culture, and put it on the stand, and make it articulate its beliefs clearly for the jury — we don’t get that every day.
Chauvin’s defense did not simply focus on, oh, what a terrible mistake Chauvin committed, but please focus on the required intent to sustain a murder charge. Chauvin’s defense team invited an officer up to the stand to argue that, in full light of all the evidence, witnesses — in spite of nine minutes of a helpless man crying he couldn’t breathe and bystanders shouting that he was dying — that Chauvin’s actions were justified and within the scope of permissible force.
That is, that police are authorized to use lethal force in response to a situation in which no one is physically threatened. That is the belief.
If this officer were in my community, I would not call the police on anyone, for anything. I wouldn’t remain in the same place where there was a police presence. That is just a terror.
Now, consider that those kinds of officers probably are in your community. They just haven’t been asked to take the stand yet.
Pathology of Man
Ted Cruz was in the news lately saying that leftists view humans as a disease. This is a common narrative tension in environmentalism, and it tempted my attention long enough to write a brief retort. The simple version is that while humans are not inherently disease-like, people like Ceuz are trying hard to make us function like one.
The truth is that any part of the natural world, if allowed to grow so large and careless that it wipes out all other life and degrades the ecosystem on which its survival relies, is toxic in effect. But there’s a big difference to being toxic in effect and toxic by nature.
Humans have created the sixth mass extinction in the history of the natural world. Humans are ushering in a rate of planetary change that very plausibly could trigger scarcity, migration, and war on a scale greater than anything in history. These are uncomfortable truths. These are the risks that I see defining the back half of my life, if I get more than a half-century or so.
And yet, humans are also growing in marvelous and awe-inspiring ways — reaching huge, peaceful, prosperous, increasingly tolerant and connected numbers unlike anything in history. We don’t have to go back to pre-industrial standards of living or populations. We don’t even have to marginally reduce our population numbers or standards of living. But we do have to be selective about how and where we grow in order to maintain a healthy amount of planetary biodiversity and maintain the climate system on which our civilizations rely. And yes, that requires consideration of the ways in which we could function like a disease, and avoid them. These are not complex changes: they require fuel-switching, more protected natural areas, perhaps some market reforms to help achieve these goals efficiently, and effective international accords to incentivize nations to participate. When we talk about avoiding catastrophic risk, we are not even talking about dramatic changes. We can be the dominant species and yet maintain natural systems on which we rely, preserving ourselves and our planet’s evolutionary heritage. This does not condemn our human nature over any other living system, and should not trouble you unless your moral view was so simple that all things pleasant for man even in the short term were holy and morally privileged. I do fear that this is the psychology we’re working against.
So if we do not take simple steps to control how and where we grow — if we do not consider our capacity to function like a disease on this planet and wisely correct — we will become what people like Cruz are encouraging us to be: a people so morally simple and blind to their impacts on the natural world that they overwhelm the systems they require to survive. Ted Cruz and his ideological brethren should hear their own argument and realize they are the true objects of its critique.
On Free Information and the Fantasy Industrial Complex
Today, the Capitol is not fallen.
But it is much harder to say that the country’s democratic culture is not broken.
While a few thousand breached the walls, perhaps a hundred million more across the country quietly indulge the core fantasy that these attackers believe: that, because their president said so, a massive conspiracy took place to manufacture fake ballots for the Democratic candidate, and that American democracy has therefore functionally collapsed and must be resuscitated. That is the takeaway from public opinion polls that find that 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen. This is whole cloth fantasy. They believe this in spite of every major media outlet denying it; in spite of the conclusions of Republican judges who have reviewed the total absence of evidence; in spite of the fact that the president’s own lawyers will not repeat the true scope of this lie in court, for fear of professional censure.
This is not the first time the country has fallen apart on common understandings of reality. It is merely the most telegenic fallout in recent times.
A country that cannot find a common understanding of reality at that scale cannot govern itself. It may lurch between elections that happen towards good or bad candidates, or towards a legislative consensus on this or that issue, but it remains vulnerable at any moment to the snowballing lie that tells us that water treatment plants are injecting mind-control drugs or the planet is not warming or our parties are ruled by lizard people or pedophiles or that an archly vain pathological liar on television is the only person you can trust.
The cause and the solution to this problem are quite simple. A generation ago, technology liberated every would-be propagandist to spread lies at a scale equal with the reach of the New York Times, and we embraced this revolution with a deeply naive belief that more speech was always better speech. There is now far greater bandwidth, and far more mind-hours, devoted to processing various strains of viral garbage than to real news. We wake up twitching with anxiety and we go to bed scrolling our phones. This is the mental disability we have inflicted on ourselves.
The country — and the world — needs a good dose of the unsympathetic editorial expertise that made America’s newsrooms the center of democracy in the 20th century. We need to understand that free speech is not an inalienable right to drown the airwaves in lies. While anyone can speak a lie if they like, we, as a culture, need to affirm that producing and disseminating mass media is a privilege that should have gatekeepers, and accept that this means we restrict our own access to these platforms in view of the common good. I don’t need this blog, or my facebook page, or a twitter, to be a whole and valued member of society with a voice. I should need to work hard and make connections and build credibility with them in order to have access to mass media. We need to relearn our respect for institutions and actors with real expertise, instead of valorizing the common guy who “does his research” by unwittingly and avidly reading sufficient quantities of garbage before hopping on Youtube and spewing his preferred fantasy into vulnerable minds.
One of the more sobering cultural shifts that we can trace to the birth of the internet, I fear, is that education itself (along with many other outdated forms of institutional authority) is no longer seen as a form of social capital. We seem to mildly distrust anyone with Dr. before their name, who spends too much time in the academies and not enough time making money or noise in the media. We vaguely look down on advanced degrees and valorize the doers and shouters who simply read enough of their twitter feed to see through the lies of the mainstream discourse and aren’t shy to tell you about them. This is a deeply toxic attitude, and a significant step backwards in our cultural development.
I dream that in a hundred years time, the term “social media” (or some gaggle of near-synonyms capturing what was unique about this time) will be rightly regarded as a toxic and naive aberrance in how society speaks to itself. That, yes, the telegram will be replaced by email; and a group chat can function just like a conference line; and the Arab Spring can still be spurred by an iPhone capturing video that couldn’t have been taken in the 20th century; but the wider internet will be restricted to a few well-regulated entities, like network television once was. We will build institutions and gatekeepers to regulate the quality of the content we feed on. In that world, we won’t lose hours worrying about our personal virtual influence, or doom-scrolling through the worst opinions and lies with unjustifiable platforms, or dripping away with dread at how society can be maintained with people of such absurd beliefs as we see all around us. We will, in return, give up the freedom to spend our time in ways that were mostly toxic to us. And our children will look back on this era with a deeper appreciation of an element of human nature: that all the “common sense” and inherent rationality we once presumed would guide an unbounded discourse towards ever deeper insight is, in fact, learned; can be unlearned; is deeply dependent on the quality of the discourse that surrounds it; so that the individual stands no better chance of discriminating between a thousand competing lies online than the feral wolfchild does of discerning which is the salad fork at a dinner party.
We need to agree on the uses and limits of free information, and build the walls that a society needs to have a coherent discourse.
Lacking that, a decent-minded president in a country where a third of the population believes in the lizard people theory remains constantly on the brink of dissolution. Last week, we saw a telegenic warning. One day, they will not be warnings.
Election 2020
I’m kinda cynical:
September 1: Biden with a 7-8 point lead nationally on Trump. With the map the way it is, he’s probable to win even with an Electoral College advantage to Trump.
October 1: Biden with a 3-4 point lead nationally on Trump. Why? Many reasons. The American right wing is very disciplined with propaganda, and traditional media has shown they’ll report whatever the right wing reports if they do it persistently enough. Trump has shown that he’s willing to do favors for autocrats if they help him lie to the American people, and the Republican party openly supports this policy. So a story drops that Biden buried a hooker when he was overseas somewhere. It doesn’t look correct, but wow, it’s media catnip, so it’s all the talk all the time anyways. In the electoral college, it starts looking like a toss-up.
Anytime: Hackers get into the voting rolls and drop little parts of the population from dense Democratic areas. We know they’ve been practicing this assault, it was the biggest alarm in the Mueller report, and the federal government has crushed every election security bill for four years. The theatre of the Trump era has been too good for anyone to worry about little technocratic bullshit like digital security.
November 1: With the second wave of the coronavirus in full swing, jurisdictions start putting in place hygienic restrictions that severely shrink their capacity to count the in-person vote. Voting centers will operate at half capacity, particularly in heavily affected (Democratic) urban areas. They do this after the mail-in deadlines, and once the second wave is credibly happening.
November 3: Biden wins the mail-in vote by something like 40%, because Democrats are far more likely to request a mail-in ballot. That means Trump wins the in-person vote by something like 30%. In-person votes are counted immediately, and there are huge delays in counting the mail-in vote. In some states, there are legitimate problems, just because they’ve never built the infrastructure to process this volume of mail-in ballots. Trump sees the partial results and gives a victory speech before 11 PM EST. He’s probably won nearly every swing state (maybe Kanye even gives him the gift of Minnesota — that could be enough to overcome losing the rest of the rust belt). “It’s now clear that no number of legitimate votes could change this outcome.” He quietly files dozens of lawsuits before midnight to stop counting the “fraudulent” votes.
November 4: The Biden camp starts countersuing. Right wing media reports that Biden is involved in a coup. State by state, they start cooking up reports of “irregularities.” Somehow, a number of ballots were sent out to people who, by the time they were sent back, no longer appeared on the rolls. This and other vague irregularities become the justification to claim there was massive voter fraud in the mail-in voting. There’s no way to count the votes without destroying democracy, they warn. The election is over.
November 5: The mess of lawsuits, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, are bigger than you could even fit into a news report if people had the attention spans to unravel it. There’s no way you’re getting a national consensus on what is happening or happened. Foreign propaganda, social media, and partisan media puts the confusion on steroids. There are accounts of massive fraud linked to social media accounts that will someday be linked to partisans or foreigners, maybe, whatever. Trump starts warning Biden that he must concede or else he’ll destroy the country.
November 6: “Bombshell” evidence that China helped Biden in the election drops.
November 10 or so: Elections do not conclude themselves. They require masses of institutional actors to certify the outcome. For Republicans, hearing that a fraudulent election has been perpetrated (which Trump warned us about, which he tried to postpone), will the story be strong enough to sway them from their course? Will they be complicit in the fraud that ended America as we know it, or will they stand with Trump to contest the result? Will Republican statehouses decline to certify their electors? Will Republican AG’s sue to stop their vote counts? Is the party going to reject their leader, or will they have his back like they have over Mueller, over impeachment, over everything else?
November 20 or so: There are armed protests over the election results. There are some casualties. Trump says Biden is responsible for every funeral. It is essential to conclude the election if we are to avoid civil war.
November 25 or so: “Continuity of government” arguments start popping up – if, because of a state of war or a pandemic, an election cannot be held, the current government may remain in power until an election can be held. In this case, an illegitimate election was held, owing to a pandemic, which is tipping the country towards war – so wowie, it’s almost overdetermined that the President cannot step aside. They ask the Supreme Court for an advisory opinion to this effect. Maybe Trump shouldn’t get a full second term, but we have to have a legitimate do-over in 2022.
December 1: The Supreme Court figures out some way of organizing the mass of overlapping legal battles before them. They take the case.
December 2: Half the media is reporting that there’s no conceivable way Trump lost the election, based on their expert analysis. This Supreme Court battle will decide whether America has a democracy or not, they say. Trump says it’s time for the Deep State to out itself.
December 10: The Supreme Court gives you an opinion that effectively decides who won the election. If it’s not Trump, Trump tweets something vague like “it’s time to take your country back.” The riot is now a militia. He tells the military to respect them.
December 11: The Trump PR machine spins into overtime telling people why the result is illegitimate. Trump encourages good patriots to do what must be done. The administration says they respect the rule of law (even though Biden would be an ILLEGITIMATE president), but are looking into the “feasibility” of handing over power in the middle of a “national conflict.”
December 14: The Electoral College due date. Just enough states refuse to certify their electors that Biden cannot claim victory.
December 15: Biden starts asking for international assistance in pushing the Trump regime to step aside. Trump casts this as Biden trying to lead a foreign coup.
December 25: Trump does some stupid thing on Christmas just because he has to own it.
January 1: The Supreme Court writes another advisory opinion stating that, no, Trump must step aside by January 20, unless there is such an event that makes “continuity of government” essential. It’s just poorly written or badly interpreted enough that partisans say the administration has wiggle room. Trump starts questioning whether the US is at war or not already. Your uncle starts writing on Facebook, “actually, it’s quite clear Trump doesn’t have a choice but to stay on.”
January 5: Hey, a foreign strike!
Dear U.S.: See You in 2021
On Politics By Other Means
What we’re seeing in the last week is a pretty old story.
The crowd is almost a mirror. The majority of protesters showed up wanting to hold signs and chant slogans, because people are mostly good people. A handful of organizers might have had a list of concrete demands that never really penetrated the consciousness of the crowd or the media, as crowds are wont to confusion and media are wont to spectacle. A substantial minority showed up wanting to throw rocks and light fires because it reflects their sincere attitude towards the brokenness of the social compact. Another set showed up wanting to break windows and steal things because it reflected selfish anarchic glee. A small opposition group wanted to accelerate the chaos of the protests to undermine its message. All of these groups largely ignored that there was a pandemic going on, which may leave a long shadow on the communities involved. There is no telling these groups apart in the dynamics of the crowd. The audience to these acts is wide, and some will be disgusted, some sympathetic, depending on what kind of people they are prepared to see. That is the self-reflective quality of a roiling crowd.
It’s at this point in the script that leaders start directing people towards non-street-based action. The town hall on reimagining policing starts next week. The local leaders start inviting organizers to sit down with police unions for some kind of discussion. People dust off their police reform checklists and start trying to check another box or two. It’s mostly the same checklist from a decade ago, sadly. The sense that what’s happened over the last week has an unsustainable cost is sinking in, and will mostly redirect people’s energies.
This is, of course, part of the process. If the news hadn’t spent 72 hours showing burning buildings, the community meeting and legislative campaign wouldn’t have gotten any notice. When the majority is comfortable, inertia is quite inviting. Letter writing campaigns by the downtrodden are seen as a nice act of civic engagement, almost their own reward.
If the left does its job from here, a convulsion of social unrest sets the stage for a meaningful second act. That second act can accelerate some good reforms that increase trust and accountability between police and their communities — and which, frankly, I think most people would find nonpartisan if they weren’t swayed by the politics of opposition.
There is, of course, something pitiable in the fact that a substantial amount of energy has to go into conflict and destruction in order to direct a smaller amount of energy into dialogue and construction. But that’s a quality of our society. This is what political engagement looks like among people who fear the law, distrust the institutions that make and enforce it, and don’t believe that their fellow citizens sincerely hear them. Sometimes that’s a lazy posture, but sometimes, it’s with cause. Black people, specifically, have some good cause to feel that they exist on oppositional terms to American society. They are marked by 400 years of social engineering to make them into a racial underclass, with all of the social judgments that attend it. Their social alienation will likely persist until the day that you can look at a page of demographic data and not see a clear American racial underclass, and there’s not even a conversation around the reparations that would require. For now, many American blacks don’t feel heard when they cry for their own lives, much less when they do a letter writing campaign.
The people who pick up the pen and not the torch in times of crisis are themselves a privileged class because they feel they have a receptive audience. All too often, those pens don’t get busy until the torches are already on parade. If war is politics by other means, rioting is politics by another class. A deeply unequal society does not politically engage on common terms.
We’ll see what comes of this round of unrest. There have been bouts of unrest that saw rights backslide. In America, the politics of this past week certainly have value for the right. The accelerationists, the law and order crowd, those who traffic in racial antagonism all find something useful to bolster their campaigns in the last week. A highly politicized pandemic in the middle of this complicates matters, to say the least. In a tight 2020 race, the messaging to the white suburbs that carried the 2018 election takes a new tack.
But it can also, always, be a pivot towards progress. What was got in the last week was the attention of the whole country, which is rare. In this moment, the country is looking for leadership that can speak to peace between all these actors, and their audiences. If they can find it, transformative things are possible. So pray that out of all the noise of the last week and the attention that it got, people gravitate towards a signal.
A Real Climate Accord
So, in my work life, I’m a climate lawyer. I’m not a big name, I don’t run any important national campaigns, but I studied at the UN during the Rio Negotiations, I concentrated in environmental and international law in law school, I’ve worked for two different climate change think tanks at Pace Law School and Columbia University, and I consider myself an activist. The big thing I’m on now is research for a web-based platform showcasing legal pathways to deep decarbonization, which should launch at some point in the next couple months. So I live in this space pretty deeply.
I’m convinced that the biggest idea that nobody talks about in climate politics is getting to a Real Climate Accord. I’ve written a bit about what that would mean. I made a logo, some model legislation, wrote some outreach, and designed a website to promote the core concept. It’s up there at www.RealClimateAccord.com, my baby. So this post kind of takes that thinking and explains it a little less formally, with a few more asides, to flesh out certain things that don’t make for good political language (this is a 2300 word version of what I tried to reduce to 400 for the site) and cross-pollinate my audiences. Here goes:
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Climate change is a global collective action problem. That is, every country faces strong incentives to pollute even though they know that they and everybody else would be better off if we didn’t. Because everybody knows that nobody else has a private incentive to stop polluting, we might as well keep polluting ourselves. It’s irrational to handicap your own country if nobody else will – if, indeed, the world is going to just get hotter anyways. Make money while the sun shines, burn oil before the seas rise.
Since the first UN conference of the parties, every step of the way we’re trying to solve climate change by doing exactly the sorts of things that should fail in a collective action model. And, okay, the most basic collective action model is admittedly too simple to predict the real world response – but it’s telling that for thirty years, the world has moved roughly on the business-as-usual emissions trajectory forecast back in 1990. The simplest model would say it absolutely should. It absolutely should continue to going forward. This is economics 101 stuff, and for the last generation we’re desperately hoping economics 101 is wrong or underaccounting for something – and yes, there’s a lot of smart debate about the kinds of things you can accomplish in spite of the collective action nature of this problem – Elinor Ostrom rightly says that you shouldn’t expect zero cooperation, lots of sectors of society exhibit small capacities for sacrifice in order to win forms of social capital, and that’s all true – but even she’ll admit that this is a core problem. And I’ll go further to say, the evidence seems pretty overwhelming that social capital isn’t getting the job done at scale. Collective action problems require collective action solutions.
If anything should open our eyes to this truth, surviving the coronavirus pandemic should. A global problem without global coordination creates a mess.
The first prerequisite to a credible global decarbonization plan is that there’s some kind of real, enforceable accord. Within that, you can get into a million political questions around who has a burden to decarbonize and do technology transfer and development funding and apply tariffs and on what schedule and impose what kinds of internal pollution regulations (and whether they should be in the form of taxes or caps or industrial nationalization) – and it’s well beyond the scope of this argument to try and spitball where the sum of a thousand small intra- and international negotiations lead us in that regard. It would be hubris and counterproductive, in fact. Countries need to come together and negotiate and feel heard and fight for whatever degree of concession or independence is important to them. They need to do that if they’re going to accept the outcomes.
But a few things about the core framework are clear as day, and any outcome that lacks an element of that framework is probably going to fail. Countries need to acknowledge that at the start of the negotiation and be guided by that framework until the end.
So my yawp into the void is just to say, and repeat, and repeat that a global climate accord can’t get us to a temperature target unless it is:
- Actually based on that target. That is, sets a scientific global carbon budget linked to a temperature target, with whatever probabilistic certainty we want to accept. This isn’t what we do now. That 1.5C or 2C target they talk about at the UN is just aspirational.
- Actually assigns responsibility for that target. That is, every country comes home with a carbon budget that collectively adds up to the whole – not just “individual nationally determined contributions.”
- Actually monitors whether people abide by their targets. That is, establishes an independent monitoring body to survey global emissions, rather than relying on self-reporting from self-interested parties. Countries lie about their emissions for no good reason already, they certainly would do so more if you gave them hard incentives to.
- Actually creates an enforcement mechanism for people who break their obligations. Obviously, there’s nothing even gesturing in this direction right now. This should create effective incentives to comply – that is, puts every country in the position where they’re better off economically if they make their emissions target than if they don’t. There’s at least two ways you can do this:
- Set a global tariff system that creates free trade pathways for countries abiding by their obligations, and harshly punishes those who don’t. The EU particularly seems close to broaching this to a small degree with talk of border carbon adjustments – the problem being it’s necessarily kind of a small, limited tool right now (I can’t tax you for burning down your forests for shits and giggles if it’s not somehow reflected in exports, I can only tax the implicit carbon footprint of manufacturing a given widget to precisely the extent that my country makes that exact same widget and imposes that same carbon tax internally). Because of the restrictive nature of the kinds of reciprocal tariff penalties that can be applied at the World Trade Organization currently, an exemption may need to be added to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to get enough muscle here that it’s a truly effective incentive. That is, we may need to rewrite international trade rules so that I can say something about you burning down those internal forests. But as daunting as that is, the GATT didn’t come down on two tablets from Mount Sinai, and we can amend it for the biggest challenge to ever face humanity.
- Create a global system of development finance. Developing countries aren’t very incentivized by tariffs scheduled against exports that they don’t produce. So create a global system of development finance that expands what they have at stake – if they meet their targets, they get their full funding. If they don’t, they lose out. This exists already at a pretty modest, voluntary level, and it’s not contingent on emissions goals. For the developed countries providing the funding, of course, you need to then make their funding obligations every bit as binding as their emissions obligations for this to work. (Just an aside, but you could link these mechanisms together and even provide for wealth transfers between rich countries to reward exceptional decarbonization efforts. The more cooperation you get on that, the more the system starts to function like global cap and trade.)
If you do all this, if you have the core elements in place to actually give someone a private incentive to decarbonize, you finally have a workable framework that every other small political battle can be guided under. China can have a big messy internal process to figure out their preferred internal decarbonization path and the US can do the same and third parties can stand in the middle and still feel confident that whether the rest of the world chooses industrial nationalization or R&D-oriented tax credits, in the long-run, countries will meet their emissions targets. They should, because they will finally face a self-interested incentive to do so.
If you don’t do this, then I say it’s really not a surprise if you get another 30 years down the line saying, this is the moment when it finally seems imperative enough to act, and it never is, because the private incentives are never fucking there for anyone to do so. Your country could be literally disappearing and it’s still smarter for you to make a little oil money on the way out than build windfarms underwater.
For 30 years, people have known, at some level, that this is what needs to happen, and they’ve largely kept saying to themselves, nah, countries will never agree to that kind of accord, it’s impossible. But I say this is inevitable. This is absolutely going to happen someday. It may take a crisis, but what countries stand to lose in unchecked climate change is astronomical next to what they stand to lose from ceding a little autonomy to an international accord. Starting from about 2050, the projections for climate change get hairy. Once you’re past that 2C threshold, you start worrying about mass starvation and water security and migration at a scale that collapses governments. You start worrying about world war and pandemics waking up out of the permafrost where they’ve been buried for 10,000 years. You start worrying about the collapse of societies. I bet that before national power fucking disappears, national power will learn to work a little with a limited global accord.
So this is going to happen, but the more we get this idea into people’s heads, the sooner it will. There’ll be a thousand small crises between now and doomsday, and when you’re in a crisis, policy gets built out of whatever ideas are lying around, as they say. We need this idea lying around, everywhere on earth. We need it to spread. We need it to be infectious.
So that’s what this little organization is about, what this piece of political action that I’m engaged in aims for. And if I’m the lonely guy with the sign and the binder full of model legislation on the steps of Parliament yawping into the void, so be it. This is too big and too important of an idea to lack its wild prophets.
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A couple caveats:
Okay, this is actually a fairly flexible prophecy in some ways. If you live in this space, you know there are always potential silver bullets lying around that could solve climate change without, really, any society even having to meaningfully sacrifice. A technological breakthrough is possible at any moment. Right now, the one I’m interested in is negative emissions technologies. If direct air capture got a heap of R&D funding and proceeded to have a decade like solar just had where costs came down 90%, you could solve the climate crisis with a few heroes footing the bill, and it wouldn’t even be that big of a bill. That’s the rosiest scenario.
The darker, still not abysmal scenario is just that we do lots of geoengineering to forestall the apocalypse – by agreement or rogue actors, either way. The idea of spraying aluminum aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect out the sun is comparatively cheap. The idea of doing ocean iron acidification to accelerate carbon capture in the deep oceans is a very plausible idea at a certain scale. These are the sorts of things that rogue billionaires could and probably will do if society starts hitting some hard shocks from climate. This might buy us time (and, yes, pose totally unforeseeable risks of a Snowpiercer scenario or whatnot – but I’ll take the global geoengineering that we consciously choose to do because our best models think it will have beneficial effects over the global geoengineering that we’re doing already, totally by hazard, in spite of our best models saying it’ll have disastrous consequences).
Either way, I come out thinking that global governance of the global atmosphere is probably inevitable, even if it isn’t the first order response to climate or it comes later. Because technological miracles don’t only happen for the good guys. The biggest energy story in North America in the last thirty years wasn’t renewables, it was fracking, which dramatically shifted the energy landscape. From our previous baseline, this was actually for the better since it crowded out coal, but if it were to reoccur in the future, it would probably hurt renewables. This kind of thing can absolutely happen again. Today, they’re excited about the prospects of natural gas drilling in the ocean. Maybe that’s another boom that shocks renewables right back out of the bidding stack. Or maybe there’s a technological breakthrough that makes it incredibly profitable to emit one of the secondary GHGs that we hardly talk about – methane, nitrous oxide, HFCs. Either way, in the long run we have this collective good, our atmosphere, without collective governance of it. That we might find a way out of climate change in the near-term without having to establish that governance system leans a bit hard into optimism, I think, but it’s not impossible. That we will thereafter never backslide, never face a natural shock, never invent another way of polluting that collective good seems truly magical. So even if it’s just to maintain the stability that a technological miracle bestows on us, we’re going to need enforceable ways of caring for our atmosphere in the long-run. The bottom line is that we have a planet that we are now big and dangerous enough to threaten, and there will be other ways and other challenges to it in the future that require our cooperation.
Propaganda
When I was born, America was one of the great democracies of the world.
In the 1990’s, partisan media started polarizing the country.
In the 2000’s, the internet starting creating a national discourse that could fully detach from reality.
In the 2010’s, right wing media created a president who spent most of his time creating and amplifying propaganda. One can interpret almost everything he does through that lens. He was an addict of the product before he entered politics, and he serves the product now.
At the dawn of the 2020’s, he will stand trial for bribery with the intent of creating more political propaganda. There is no serious defense. He will be acquitted because his party believes that is an essential part of the job.
Few will go out in the streets, because it is clear that they have no power against this machine. His half of the country is untouchable.
The difference between true democracies and merely nominal democracies can be explained by the power of propaganda. Why lock the journalists up when you can drown them out?
What America is now is hard to say. It may take another ten years to gauge, and I think it depends in large part on what norms the propaganda-state decides to embrace, what types of power it wants. It may be happy to solidify its grip on traditional powers. It may choose to quash resistance when third parties attempt to hack the voting system. It may go after “illegal” votes. It may load the courts with types sympathetic to this project.
One of the most important political projects for the rest of the world will be how to contain America, and to understand and combat the forces that broke it.
My Semiannual Voidward Yawp of Pain and Disillusionment on Media Reform in the Age of Trump
If Trump loses, it doesn’t redeem American democracy. Democracy is an information-processing machine drowning in bad information. One normal result doesn’t correct the systemic issue. If you ask your search engine for “good apple pie recipe” and the first result calls for a cup of bleach, you don’t just move on to the next result in the list with ease and confidence in the system.
Trump proved, and reproved, and reproved until it was exhausting just to keep reading about it, that he doesn’t understand his own policy positions, and doesn’t care. He knows less about US immigration law, trade deals, climate, health care, and taxes than someone who spent five minutes on wikipedia learning about any of those topics. On his signature policy achievement, the tax cut, he was asked to leave the negotiating room by members of his own party because he was sabotaging them with ignorance. He contradicts himself without any self-awareness. His own staff anonymously report that they can’t get him to read a one-page daily briefing filled with pictures and his own name highlighted. Foreign diplomats publicly report exactly the same thing, with their names attached.
Yes, on top of that, he’s got a generally cruel vindictive streak. He likes to punish brown people — whether that’s denying aid to American citizens in Puerto Rico while 4000 of them died, or the Muslim ban, or creating uncounted numbers of orphans out of legal asylum seekers at the border, after subjecting these children to what amounts to torture as they piss themselves without diapers and sleep without blankets and forget their own parents, held in another detention center (and which is not, in any factual universe, anything like the Obama Administration’s policy, but I can’t even repeat basic facts anymore without my head being crowded with the garbage propaganda that half the country consumes).
He’s not just less qualified than the average man on the street, he’s less qualified than the average man in the crackhouse, because at least the man in the crackhouse would take the job seriously enough to try to learn something about it.
This unique kind of anti-qualification comes, I suspect, from being rich all his life, never having to work for someone else, and never being denied power. He can imagine that he doesn’t need to learn because he’s never had a formative moment in his life where he had to read something to understand it or else an employer would impose a consequence on him for it. He gets $500M under the table from his father, invests it in his father’s line of work (Manhattan real estate), and decades later, those investments are the only thing his name is on of real value, while he’s bankrupted a half a dozen other ventures and remained untouchable. If he’d taken the $500M and parked it in index funds (what your average know-nothing investor goes to by default to avoid learning anything), his net worth would be higher.
The fact that this is who America elected says a lot about the future of democracy, no matter who they elect next.
***
An information-processing system: You get a hundred million voters, you provide them with mass media about the candidates and the state of the country, the voters think about what that information means for them and try to contextualize it in their own lives, they show up at the polls, they pull a lever.
If the mass media voters are getting isn’t reliable, democracy ceases to function.
Throughout the 20th century, mass media was more or less controlled. There were a handful of sources with gatekeepers. People consumed it for a couple hours a day, maybe.
Today, there’s no controls on information, and people never unplug. Any asshat can start a news site with all the apparent authority of the New York Times, and if they say the NYT is lying to you, then you’re at an impasse. This has happened at massive scales, promoted by social media, abused by foreign governments (and the US has largely responded to every report about this by rolling out the red carpet — even rolling out the red carpet to keep trying to hack the voting machines).
Until we’re at the point where the density of propaganda out there on Alt Media is effectively more powerful than real media.
How could you measure this? Consider an experiment. Imagine you have a non-story in the news, any little bullshit factoid that might belong on page A-10 of the paper for a day. And you want to manipulate it to become an enormous, all-encompassing scandal. You twist the facts, make it unrecognizable from what anyone who tried to research it would find, and repeat your version all day every day to your little slice of audience, who find it reliably outrageous in your telling. And because media companies are all desperately competing to keep you glued to their site as their profit margins narrow, now some slightly-more-respectable media has to start reporting the same thing to try and keep you from cannibalizing their viewers with outrageous content. And soon you have a substantial part of the media ecosystem actually reporting this garbage, until you get some critical density of the electorate to believe it. And then you have the real, serious, responsible news outlets who have no choice, in a democracy, but to report on what 25% of the country believes, because it’s got profound electoral implications. And that snowballs and snowballs until your story is actually more talked about than every other policy issue combined by all sources in the midst of the biggest election of the country, and if that could happen, and you could measure that, it would be an incredible experimental outcome. Hard to imagine a firmer proof for “propaganda is mightier than news.”
And that’s what happened in 2016. You had a non-story about digital security and whether classified information was unwittingly made vulnerable, in a context where people all over the State Dept. are overclassifying and regularly making classified information vulnerable anyways. The story vanished as soon as it wasn’t useful. Months after the election, Donald Trump’s own kids were caught doing exactly what Hillary did with private servers, and nobody gave a damn. They tried to somehow link that to a terrorist attack that she had nothing to do with to confuse the issue, and here we are. More time was spent by all major media on the email story in 2016 than every other policy issue combined. That’s an incredibly high bar, an amazing feat.
That system is not healed if Donald Trump loses in November 2020. There is no greater restraint on mass media or propaganda. There is no restraint on foreign influence — there are not even efforts being made to keep them from hacking voting machines, because the party in power suspects that the hackers will favor them.
That is a system that is built to fuck up.
***
The US is first and worst, but not alone.
Every other major democracy faces similar pressures. Decent, respectable for-profit news is scrambling to compete with Alt Media that uses the most addictive, irresponsible methods to make vanishingly small profits from isolated clicks and five seconds spent on a page in confusion or outrage. They have no answer for it.
Yes, other countries are better insulated. They spend more on their public broadcasters, who can report what they think is true regardless of what it does for their ratings, and so these responsible broadcasters are better positioned to compete. There’s less money to be made from an idle second of eyeball, and so less financial pressure to propagandize foreign audiences in some cases. And there’s a less developed political divide to abuse and exploit to sow distrust of all major media.
But the same fundamental pressures are there for all of us.
The answers are probably simple — or else simple enough in concept with a thousand variations you could imagine — and utterly inimical to how most people think about freedom of information in the Western tradition. But here’s a sampler platter of what you might see fought over throughout the next generation:
1) Ban advertising on the news. Make people pay for subscriptions to support them. The difference in incentives between subscription and ad based makes a huge difference in media behavior. You’ll at least know that the news’ business model relies on appealing to your sober, reflective mindset when you balance your checkbook, and not your instantaneous vulnerability to clickbait.
2) Truth panels. If you can get a panel of editors from the NYT, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Fox News to unanimously agree that a story is false or misleading, it should be suppressed in search results and automated advertising, flagged wherever it appears online, and sanctions imposed on the publisher for repeated violations. Pay them to put enough people in this role full-time, and you can make a meaningful dent in the flow.
3) Web licenses. If you want to start a website, you can apply for a license from your domain provider, who will ask you about content. If you’re pushing news, you can be put on a list to monitor, and your license is revocable for cause. The idea that every person should have insta-access to mass media to promote anything at all is not a social value I would defend, though I suspect many are conditioned to accept it.
4) Yes, we can multiply the amount we spend on public broadcasting a hundredfold. The idea that news media should be able to exist without an incentive to keep you addicted to the product is obvious. That only exists when you remove the profit incentive. The news is a public good. For a long time, news media was doing okay just because the scarcity of mass media sources gave them little monopolies, but that’s no longer the case.
I’m sure there’s other good ideas out there in this vein. We should be talking about them. We should be talking about them before it’s a foregone conclusion that democracy is built to fail, or that there’s nothing we can do to resuscitate the kind of system we grew up romanticizing.
Donald Trump may very well lose in 2020. Or he may win by the same process he won in 2016. Or a Democrat may win by abusing the system in the same ways. Whatever happens, American democracy is utterly dependent on and vulnerable to its mass media system, and we need to start trying to defend it.