[Note: This item comes from friend David Rosenthal. DLH]
I Was Once a Student Protester. The Old Hyperbole Is Now Reality.
By Zeynep Tufekci
May 11 2024
Two police cars idled across the street from the protest rally I was attending in front of the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, their red and blue lights flashing but their sirens silent. The police seemed more bored than annoyed. It was the early 2000s, and I had recently moved from Turkey to study at the University of Texas.
My fellow protesters were outraged. “This is what a police state looks like!” they started chanting.
I turned around, bewildered. Turkey was still emerging from the long shadow of the 1980 coup. For years, protests were suppressed, sometimes with deadly force. Even a whiff of disruption could get Istanbul shut down, with armored vehicles blocking major roads. Trust me, I said, this is not what a police state looks like.
When I told my friends back home that Americans thought it was outrageous for the police even to show up at a demonstration, it was considered yet more evidence that I had been recruited by the C.I.A.
“The American police showed up to a protest and did nothing?” one of my friends scoffed. “Just watched? No arrests? No heads bashed in?” Yeah, right.
In the two decades that have passed since then, American protests have changed a bit. America’s response to them has changed a great deal.
Many observers name Sept. 11 as the turning point when America’s police departments started becoming something more like a military force, but really, it was the Iraq War. That conflict turbocharged a policy that allowed police departments to get surplus military equipment at no charge. More than 8,000 local police departments have acquired over $7 billion worth of the kind of heavy equipment — mine-resistant armored vehicles, tactical gear, grenade launchers, weaponized aircraft, assault rifles — normally used in combat.
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Why do places like Preston, Idaho (population 6,000), and Dundee, Mich. (pop. 8,000), need armored vehicles designed to withstand mines?
If you acquire it, it will likely be used. Police officers are a lot less likely to sit in cars and watch protests from a distance these days.
I stayed in academia and made political resistance around the world one of my primary fields of study. The one lesson I learned above all else is that a disproportionate crackdown is often a protest movement’s most powerful accelerant.
I saw it in Occupy Wall Street in 2011, when a video of penned-in women being pepper-sprayed at close range turned a little-known demonstration into an idea with nationwide reach. I saw it in Gezi Park, Istanbul, in 2013 when people hoping to save the park from demolition were tear-gassed and arrested, their small encampment burned. It helped generate protests that rocked the nation. I saw it in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, when troopers showing up to a grieving community with armored cars and sniper rifles caused the outrage that fueled a national movement. And just think of what the photographs of police officers turning dogs and hoses on peaceful marchers did for the civil rights movement.
The United States now stands at another such inflection point. Across the country, university administrators — as well as some students, parents, trustees, donors and elected officials — have grown frustrated by protests over the war in Gaza. That’s no surprise; the protests are intended to be disruptive. Will authority figures rise to the moment and respond to the challenge with skilled leadership befitting institutions of higher learning? Or will they panic and enforce crackdowns way out of proportion to any actual threat?
It’s not looking good so far. At the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, state police officers in riot gear carrying M4 carbines — the kind of weapons used in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — and chemical-gas launchers were called in to disperse what many onlookers described as a small, peaceful group with a handful of tents. “None of these folks showed up when I lived on campus and white supremacists with tikki torches yelling ‘Jews will not replace us’ marched through campus as I hid my three kids,” Chad Wellmon, an associate professor at the university, wrote on social media.
At Dartmouth, police officers in riot gear were called in within hours after an encampment formed; in the ensuing confrontation they grabbed Annelise Orleck, the 65-year-old historian and former chair of Jewish studies, slammed her to the ground and arrested her. Until the Dartmouth community howled its objection, she was briefly banned from the campus where she had been teaching for 34 years. She still faces charges of criminal trespass.
At the University of Texas at Austin, officers in riot gear marched into campus on horses like the cavalry heading into war. At Indiana University, state police snipers were positioned on the roofs of campus buildings. Campus after campus is hosting similar scenes, including many pre-dawn raids on sleeping students. At Columbia University, an officer fired a gun. The N.Y.P.D. said it was an accident, and luckily nobody got hurt, but it’s not a comforting development.
It’s bad, and it’s getting worse. The ferocity of the crackdown exceeds the threat to public interest the encampments are accused of posing. It’s a violation of a longstanding social contract regarding how campuses handle demonstrations and a direct contradiction of the loving way that many colleges now depict campus activism of prior decades.
As hard as this may be to believe, absent the glare of publicity, these protests might have been unexceptional — the stuff of college life, for better or worse. Just last year, students at the University of California at Berkeley occupied a library slated for closing — bringing their tents, sleeping bags and air mattresses — for nearly three months. Congress didn’t see the need to hold hearings about it. In 2019, students at Johns Hopkins occupied a building for five weeks to protest the university’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its push for a private police force. Four students were arrested, but the administration quickly announced that the charges would be dropped. Why? Probably for the same reason that Police Chief Laurie Pritchett of Albany, Ga., once quietly arranged for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to be released from the city’s jail — against King’s wishes. He knew the clamor would subside and the protest would roll on to the next city.
I saw the utility of this approach when I was studying in Texas. When first a few dozen and eventually roughly 200 University of Texas students occupied an administration building overnight to protest the end of affirmative action in the state, the school’s administration extended an olive branch: a series of town halls in which to discuss the issue. The offer was good only if the students left the building, and so they did.
It was a de-escalation tactic that also served as an educational experience. The discussions were sometimes charged, but they produced ideas that helped the university expand its strategies to maintain racial diversity. Those strategies helped the university achieve better results than many comparable institutions.
I hear many people say that the current protests have gone too far for such niceties.
When members of a university community feel threatened it’s a serious problem. Antisemitism is real (as is racism against Muslims and Arabs), and some of the protesters’ tactics, like blocking other people’s passage, have clearly crossed a line. Certainly students who’ve been identified making threats of any kind should face consequences. But the solution to problems like these does not arrive wearing riot gear.
The truth is, protests are always messy, with incoherent or objectionable messages sometimes scattered in with eloquent pleas and impassioned testimony. The 1968 antiwar protesters may be celebrated now, but back then a lot of onlookers were horrified to hear people chanting in favor of a victory by Ho Chi Minh’s army. During the Iraq war, I attended demonstrations to which fringe political groups had managed to attach themselves, and I rolled my eyes at their unhinged slogans or crazy manifestoes.
There’s plenty of that going on here, too. I’m not a wide-eyed graduate student anymore. I’m well into the get-off-my-lawn stage of my career (and until recently, my office overlooked the lawn where Columbia’s protesters pitched their tents). I, too, am often tempted to get annoyed at these students — why this slogan, why this banner, why not something with broader appeal? Overall, however, I’ve been impressed by the sincerity of the protesters I’ve spoken to.
Judging from the new encampments springing up around the country, the harsh countermeasures of the last couple of weeks are counterproductive. But more than that, they are dangerous. Overreactions like this can lead to social breakdown — on both sides of the barricade.
Who will save South Africa from itself? Not the ruling African National Congress (ANC), whose 30 unbroken years of under-achievement have brought the country to its present sorry pass. Not “reformist” president Cyril Ramaphosa, widely considered a disappointment. And not Russia or China, either, to which Pretoria’s flailing regime, increasingly at odds with the west, looks for succour.
Three decades after Nelson Mandela’s historic poll victory formally vanquished apartheid, and less than three weeks before another watershed election, it’s all going wrong for the Rainbow Nation. Africa’s most developed country is now its most unequal, the World Bank says. Crime is rampant, corruption endemic, growth is tanking. More than 60% live in poverty. Unemployment among black people is 40%.
Voters face a choice on 29 May between a discredited, tarnished ANC, which is predicted to lose its parliamentary majority for the first time, and a broad array of disunited opposition parties. Like 1994, it is also a fundamental choice about what sort of South Africa they want – democratic or authoritarian, open or closed, free market or centrally directed, inclusive or exclusive.
The same pivotal choice faces other would-be 21st-century powers – countries such as Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Indonesia. As when Mandela completed his long walk to freedom, the international community, and the western democracies especially, are watching closely to see which way South Africa jumps. It has a chance to lead again.
The statistical story so far is an index of broken dreams. Reporting in 2022, the World Bank identified race, apartheid’s legacy and unequal land ownership as ongoing core problems. Even now, 30 years on, about 10% of the 60 million population controls 80% of the wealth.
Government attempts to level the playing field frequently misfire. Ramaphosa says about 25% of farmland is now owned by black South Africans. But critics argue the land restitution programme has sharply reduced productivity and employment. Government “equity targets” to ensure workplaces accurately reflect the country’s racial make-up attract similar controversy.
The official, overall unemployment figure is a dismaying 32%. Surveys suggest vast disparities between the average monthly incomes of black and white households are persisting. Housing and education are other big problem areas, where the discriminatory and segregationist practices of the past still disadvantage the least well off.
Yet at the same time, white South Africans, angry at the institutionalised bias of the Black Economic Empowerment regulations and spooked by violent crime, continue to vote with their feet. Nearly one-fifth of 1994’s total white population has emigrated, exacerbating present-day skills shortages. This has led to arbitrary curbs on capital export and pension payments, and declining tax revenues. Only about 12% of South Africans pay income tax. About 62% of the black population receives state grants (welfare benefits).
In his state of the nation address in February, Ramaphosa implicitly laid much blame for post-1994 failures on his predecessor, Jacob Zuma, who was briefly jailed amid corruption allegations in 2021. “For a decade, individuals at the highest levels of the state conspired with private individuals to take over and re-purpose state-owned companies, law enforcement agencies and other public institutions,” he said.
“Billions of rands that were meant to meet the needs of ordinary South Africans were stolen. Confidence in our country was badly eroded. Public institutions were severely weakened. The effects of state capture continue to be felt across society, from the shortage of freight locomotives to crumbling public services, from the poor performance of our power stations to failed development projects.”
It was an extraordinary confession, inadvertently highlighting Ramaphosa’s own ineffectiveness since taking office in 2018. Organised corruption remains a hugely destructive problem. The speech provided an odd preface to the coming election, in which Ramaphosa, as ANC leader, is seeking a second presidential term.
The main challenger is the liberal, centre-right Democratic Alliance, good for an estimated fifth of the vote. Unsustainable state spending, low growth and investment, crime and graft are key DA campaign issues. Yet if the ANC does fall below 50% support, it may be the land-expropriating, hard-left Economic Freedom Fighters and a new populist party, uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation), backed by Zuma, that do the most damage.
Messy coalition negotiations could lie ahead. By rights, in any modern democracy, the ANC’s record should “cast it into oblivion”, wrote Brian Pottinger, former editor of South Africa’s Sunday Times. “Not so in South Africa. To many, particularly poor and rural black people, [it] is a powerful, even mystical brand. There is nostalgic pride in the ANC’s 112-year-long struggle for black emancipation and dignity.”
Yet research shows loyalty to the ANC is weaker among post-1994 generations – the so-called “born frees”.
Pottinger believes that, while the country desperately needs change, the ANC is incapable of delivering it – and will double down on failure. “The ANC will stick to its catastrophic redistributive economic policies rather than pursuing growth, batten the hatches against capital flight and pre-emptively seek to chill free speech,” he predicted.
As western political confidence and business investment wanes, the ANC is relying ever more heavily on defence, security and commercial ties with Russiaand China. South Africa has refused to condemn Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and joined naval operations with China and Russia last year. Beijing is South Africa’s largest trading partner. Russian oligarchs have helped fund the ANC.
For all who value democracy, freedom and the rule of law, these are plainly the wrong choices. Exploitative great powers and dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will not save South Africa from itself. Nor will self-serving ANC elites. Only South Africans themselves can do that – by exercising en masse the power of the vote bequeathed to them by Nelson Mandela.
Parents are killed in front of their children. As they cry for help, the children die too. Panicked people fleeing attacks become moving targets. Entire communities are set ablaze and destroyed. Dislocation, hunger and thirst follow, a prelude to famine and death. Abandoned, terrified, unprotected, unseen, the people despair.
This is not a description of Gaza today. It’s Sudan, war-torn, desperate – and largely ignored. Upper estimates of the number of people killed there since a senseless civil war erupted just over one year ago reach 150,000. About 9 million residents, principally in the western Darfur region, have been displaced. Aid agencies say 25 million people are in need of urgent assistance. The future cohesion of a country already cleaved by the 2011 secession of South Sudan and conscious of next-door Libya’s disintegration is at stake.
On the Richter scale of modern horrors, such dire statistics make Sudan the world’s worst humanitarian emergency. There are many others of similar magnitude, of course – the conflict threatening to tear Myanmar apart, the anarchy besetting Yemen, the famine looming over Ethiopia, the endless, pitiless misery of Somalia and Haiti. Yet no matter how these vast human tragedies are measured and counted, they, unlike the hugely publicised, minutely scrutinised Israel-Hamas war, have a basic common denominator: neglect.
Sudan briefly caught the headlines last week, not because the world’s wealthier nations, their leaders and media outlets suffered a sudden fit of conscience, but thanks to an independent, well documented and very graphic investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW). It concluded that a seven-week campaign of killings and abuses early last summer by Sudan’s rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied Arab militias against the Massalit people and other non-Arab communities around West Darfur’s capital, El Geneina, involved multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity, and amounted to ethnic cleansing.
The RSF “systematically targeted unarmed civilians, especially boys and men, for killings. They also unlawfully killed people who had already been injured, including children and women,” HRW said. Large areas of El Geneina were destroyed. The attacks culminated in mid-June, as tens of thousands of civilians attempted to escape into Chad. “As part of this campaign, the RSF and its allies committed pillage, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, wilful killing… and forcible transfer. As a result of these heinous crimes, almost half a million refugees from West Darfur have fled to Chad.”
Extreme violence in Darfur is nothing new. Mass killings in the period 2003-4 – when an estimated 300,000 people died – were largely attributed to the RSF’s government-sponsored predecessors, the so-called Janjaweed Arab militias. Those massacres eventually led to charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity being brought by the international criminal court (ICC) against Sudan’s then dictator, Omar al-Bashir, and others in his regime. Now the conflict, rooted in ethnic, religious and territorial rivalries dating back hundreds of years, is reigniting, this time in the guise of a power struggle between Sudan’s army, which ousted Bashir in a coup in 2019, and the RSF.
It’s not over by any means. What happened in El Geneina last year, when the UN says 15,000 people may have died, could happen again imminently. El Fasher in North Darfur, the last major regional city under the control of the Sudanese army and home to an estimated 1.8 million people, including many refugees, is now besieged by the RSF. The fear is that another orgy of violence is about to erupt, unchecked by effective international intervention and largely unnoticed by the world beyond Sudan. The city is “on the precipice of a large-scale massacre”, the US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, warned recently. “History is repeating itself in Darfur in the worst possible way.”
Some countries, such as the UAE and Russia, are reportedly actively stoking the war. The Wagner group, the arm’s-length mercenary organisation used by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to extend its influence in the Sahel region in competition with the west, is said to have supplied missiles to the RSF early in the conflict. Russia has long coveted port facilities in Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
The UAE insists that it sends only aid, not weapons. Meanwhile, on the other side of this undeclared proxy contest, Egypt and Iran back the Sudanese army commander, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the RSF leader and former Janjaweed chief, Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti.
Human Rights Watch proposes a new UN mission to protect civilians, more sanctions on named RSF leaders, an international arms embargo on Sudan and accelerated ICC war crimes investigations. That is entirely right and sensible. But will it happen, in whole or in part? It’s doubtful. The US, UK and the EU have taken only limited action so far. After Ukraine and now Gaza, it’s obvious their attention is elsewhere. But that neither explains nor justifies indifference. Attitudes would be rather different if all this were happening in Europe, not Africa.
The HRW report’s conclusion is blunt yet accurate: “UN security council members have wilfully failed in their responsibilities to prevent further atrocities.” Commentators complain that the world ignores Sudan. The truth may be worse. The world knows but doesn’t really care.
In just the past few months, the rift between the U.S. and China has expanded at an astounding rate. TikTok is set to be banned if it does not divest from its U.S operations. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to battling a surge of cheap Chinese clean energy exports. The Commerce Department is cracking down on chips sent to Huawei.
And yet plenty of critics still insist China’s advancements in its manufacturing abilities—especially in developing and selling electrified vehicles—somehow aren’t legitimate. Or that they’re just the byproducts of a government with too much cash that wants to elbow its way into the rest of the world.
I’ve personally been privy to conversations with auto industry insiders, engineers and pundits alike. Many of them believe China’s industries are not sustainable, and the cars it wants to foist on the public are cut-rate spyware machines designed to murder American citizens whenever the Chinese Communist Party flips the kill switch.
It would be naive to assume that China doesn’t have its finger on the scale for EV production. But believing that the success of China’s electrified vehicle industry is all the sole result of a brutish government forcing its citizens to buy its domestic products rings false in an almost childlike, sour-grapes way.
I spent a week in China for the Beijing Auto Show, the country’s biggest car industry event. As a guest of the Geely Group along with a few other international journalists, I drove more than a dozen vehicles, sat in many more, and had a lot of important conversations. The real story is far more nuanced than a simplistic “Us vs. Them”; a story of a China that has fraudulently over-invested in electric cars and is desperately seeking a space to dump their inferior products.
That narrative is false. Western automakers are cooked. And a lot of this is probably their damn fault.
Shanghai Is Hot, Yet Quiet
I knew Shanghai was hot, but I don’t think I quite understood the scope of the Bund’s hotness until I stepped out of the terminal of the Shanghai Pudong International Airport.
Shanghai shares nearly the same latitude as New Orleans, and like its geographical American counterpart, much of the city is next to water, making it just as humid and swampy. I was jumpy and jetlagged, dripping with sweat, my shirt already sticking to my back but relieved that I had made it through customs and passport control.
I was in a new place that was as foreign as it was familiar. Western brands like Peet’s Coffee and KFC littered the terminal, with queues of Chinese folks and international tourists alike sucking down localized versions of iced coffee and tea lattes or chomping down on chicken sandwiches that were significantly more flavorful than what I could get at home.
The very first car I saw in the arrivals and pickup lane of the airport was a white Ford Explorer parked in the middle of a pedestrian crossing; it was almost like I hadn’t left Ohio. It was so familiar, this car was identical to the one back home, save for the Chinese characters on the rear hatch that designate the JMC-Ford joint venture that made the crossover.
The second I looked away from the Explorer, I realized just how different everything was. The arrivals area was just as busy as any airport in any cosmopolitan world city, but the engine and exhaust noises I’d typically hear back home, or even in Europe, just weren’t there.
Most cars in the pickup area were green-plated “new energy vehicles,” made by brands of all sorts, from BYD or Geely, and even Western brands like Buick and Chevrolet. It’s quite a sight: a nation swept up in an electric car mania, as evidenced by the near-silent crossovers, vans, and sedans aggressively flying over speed bumps while dodging pedestrians headed to rideshare, taxis, or public transportation.
Some of the China-only cars I had read about and reported on before, I was finally seeing in person. “Oh wow, that’s a Buick Velite 6; I’ve been reading about those online, they’re everywhere, here in China. Or at least, everywhere in the passenger pickup area,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. For a split second, I wondered: were the reports overblown? Was China’s love affair with Western cars still strong?
Of course, it would be silly to jump to that conclusion within the first five minutes of being in China, but the presence of so many Buicks felt antithetical to the idea that I’ve been told that no one wanted Western brands, including its EVs.
Right?
My time in China would revolve around a tour of Geely’s world headquarters in Hangzhou and several roundtables with executives from Geely’s brands. Then, we’d fly to Beijing for a day at the auto show and experience a full day at a racetrack to sample more than a dozen vehicles, including the latest models of all brands that Geely Holding Group controls, except Volvo and Polestar.
We’d drive from Shanghai to Hangzhou via the iconic Hangzhou Bay Bridge, a ride that was more than two hours long. I’d spend it in the back of a Zeekr 009, a van I’ve driven on a track in the U.S. I knew it was a fast van that cornered surprisingly flat, but that’s not really the use case of that vehicle.
The 009 is part of a luxury MPV (minivan) segment that essentially only exists in Asia, and arguably has been perfected by China. Instead of Cadillac Escalades or Lincoln Navigators, black car operators use vehicles like the Buick GL8, Toyota Alphard, Denza D9, Voyah Dreamer, or the Zeekr 009.
And in context, the Zeekr 009 felt so at home. It’s not a cheap van. I’d reckon that the one I was in was well north of $80,000, but the 009 felt so much more mature than the last Escalade or Navigator for-hire car that would have been roughly the same price. It was more than just the ambiance of the 009’s interior, with its tiger wood trim, full Alcantara headliner, real metal finishes brightwork and finishes in the interior, or first-class airline-style middle captain’s chairs that both cooled and massaged me, lulling me to sleep before I knew what happened next. The 009 felt like a low-slung Rolls-Royce with sliding doors, so I understood why it was such a popular option for Chinese businessmen.
The visitors’ center at its headquarters had examples of its latest models. Some of them were premium models from Zeekr and Lynk & Co, meant to battle brands like Acura or Audi.
Others were more mainstream, like Geely’s Galaxy subbrand, meant for middle-income value-conscious Chinese buyers, or potentially to be rebadged as Protons in places like Malaysia.
No matter the price point, they all felt incredibly convincing. They’re high-tech, well-executed machines in ways I hadn’t experienced from European or American manufacturers.
For example, take the Honda Accord-sized (and similarly priced) Geely Galaxy E8. Fully electric and on the same SEA (Sustainable Experience Architecture) platform as some Polestar models, the E8’s interior comes standard with a full-width 4K OLED display that serves as a central hub for all of the car’s functions. True, there are plenty of concerns that could be leveled at the E8 for its screen-only interface, but that does this screen a disservice.
Using it is akin to staring at a TV screen or a high-quality gaming monitor. The interface feels like it’s done with intentionality and care; important details like speed gear position are easily seen, whereas the HVAC and stereo controls are easily at hand and not buried in acres of menus. The screen itself is incredibly responsive, matching the inputs with as little latency as a high-end smartphone.
On the screen, an animation of the car sits in the midst of an ocean, overlooking a mountain range; It’s bright, it’s pretty, and it feels as if Galaxy E8’s interior is more like a remodeled living room, rather than the front seat of a car.
I was impressed. But when I got to the auto show, I realized I hadn’t seen anything yet.
The Beijing Auto Show is A Tour De Force
Thankfully, Beijing’s more than 700 miles from the balmy Shangai-Hangzhou area, and further inland location made for a comparatively cooler time. Unfortunately, Beijing’s traffic was infinitely worse than Shanghai’s. Despite leaving the hotel at 8:30 a.m., it took us more than an hour and a half to drive just nine miles to the New China International Expo Center.
The show itself was packed, incomparable to the ghost-town auto shows back home during their press preview days. Everywhere I looked, there were people: influencers, Chinese media, international media. Clearly, China missed the memo that these events are dead.
I’d later learn that the auto show had more than 100 new model debuts and concepts. That’s a far cry from the Detroit Auto Show last September, which only featured one fully new model. Two other models were refreshed versions of current cars already on sale. None were electric.
In China, the showroom floor was filled to the gills with new electrified models from every single domestic automaker. They all had something to prove, and by god, they were trying. There were hundreds of models on the floor from dozens of brands, most of them just as compelling as what I had seen the day before from Geely.
Most brands had doors that closed with a solid thunk, with soft-touch materials in the correct places, when appropriate to the vehicle’s price point. And no matter the price point, they all had responsive, integrated vehicle interfaces that were quick, pretty, and ubiquitous.
A basic infotainment system in any given moderately priced Chinese EV beats the brakes off some systems in cars that cost six figures.
There are reasons for that, but namely, Chinese EVs are so good now—as is much of its urban infrastructure—that concerns about range or charging just aren’t as pertinent to the average consumer as they once were.
Zeekr representatives said that now, the brand must figure out ways to attract consumers that don’t involve range or charging speed. Hell, the whole Chinese car industry has the same conundrum. Thus, all of its domestic brands (and some foreign ones) have ingratiated themselves with Chinese tech companies, and the two have moved in lockstep to figure out just what that means.
Of course, China has a lot of EV brands. Probably too many EV brands. But some of those brands are entanglements between China’s automakers and its tech companies.
Take JiYue, a combination of Geely and Baidu, a company often dubbed China’s Google. Its connected services and vision-only self-driving has a Full Self-Driving style car on the road, while Tesla waits to jump in. Or IM Motors, a premium brand that’s a result of a tie-up with SAIC and e-commerce giant Alibaba.
Then there’s the Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance, a collaboration between BAIC, Chery (aka Luxeed), Aito, and Changan, and smartphone and tech giant Huawei. The latter can either help design and market the cars themselves or add full-stack in-car solutions for a vehicle’s infotainment car architecture, all using the same Harmony OS that Huawei uses on its smartphones.
Whatever the flavor, these models are superconnected, full of high-end processors and tech meant to woo discerning Chinese buyers.
Just from what I saw, I understood why there were so many people at the Chinese domestic brands. Li Auto’s booth had a consistent queue to view L6 compact PHEV crossover, released at the show.
Even its current production models, like the L9 and Mega MPV, had lines of Chinese and International Media poking and prodding the cars. Changan’s Ford Maverick-sized convertible coupe SUV with a bed stayed swarmed the entire show. Xiaomi’s SU7 had a two-hour wait. Some international journalists gave up and stopped trying to see the car.
Western brands didn’t enjoy that fervor, though.
Nobody Cares About Western Brands in China
All of the press conferences for the model debuts were in Chinese, and I didn’t always have a translator or interpreter at hand. When I could, I wandered around, looking to see what else I could learn while in China.
The first stand I stumbled upon was Buick’s. It unveiled two GM Ultium-based concepts, the Electra L and Electra LT. It had also unveiled a PHEV version of its popular GL8 van. But where the hell was everyone? It was barely 10 a.m., on the first day of the Beijing Auto show; two concepts were just revealed sometime earlier that morning, yet there were only a handful of spectators at the Buick stand. There was no information on either concept. No one seemed to care.
Same story with the other Asian brands. Mazda’s latest model, EZ-6 (which isn’t really even a Mazda, but a restyled Changan Deepal SL03), had some of the usual influencers and journalists shooting quick walkaround content for their channels, but after that died down, most moved on to something else. Ditto for Toyota’s bZ3x and bZ3c near-production models.
“Chinese people don’t really care about concepts here,” Will Sundin of the China Driven internet show told me. “They want something they can buy and drive right away.” As we walked around, he elaborated on why Western manufacturers were losing so much ground in China. Sundin blamed it partially on Western brands’ inability to electrify quickly while offering low-quality software and mediocre value in their products.
Chevrolet showed off the same Equinox EV preproduction prototypes it had at the LA Auto Show in 2022. Both were locked and unavailable for in-depth viewing by the general public until a third unit showed up the next day of the show.
Also, the Equinox EV is still not on sale. By comparison, Li Auto’s L6 was available for viewing and purchase at Li Auto storefronts before the car’s official reveal at the Beijing Auto Show. Li Auto says it has 40,000 orders for the PHEV.
World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target
Exclusive: Planet is headed for at least 2.5C of heating with disastrous results for humanity, poll of hundreds of scientists finds By Damian Carrington
Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed.
Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.
Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.
“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” said Gretta Pecl, at the University of Tasmania. “[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”
But many said the climate fight must continue, however high global temperature rose, because every fraction of a degree avoided would reduce human suffering.
Peter Cox, at the University of Exeter, UK, said: “Climate change will not suddenly become dangerous at 1.5C – it already is. And it will not be ‘game over’ if we pass 2C, which we might well do.”
The Guardian approached every contactable lead author or review editor of IPCC reports since 2018. Almost half replied, 380 of 843. The IPCC’s reports are the gold standard assessments of climate change, approved by all governments and produced by experts in physical and social sciences. The results show that many of the most knowledgeable people on the planet expect climate havoc to unfold in the coming decades.
The climate crisis is already causing profound damage to lives and livelihoodsacross the world, with only 1.2C (2.16F) of global heating on average over the past four years. Jesse Keenan, at Tulane University in the US, said: “This is just the beginning: buckle up.”
Nathalie Hilmi, at the Monaco Scientific Centre, who expects a rise of 3C, agreed: “We cannot stay below 1.5C.”
The experts said massive preparations to protect people from the worst of the coming climate disasters were now critical. Leticia Cotrim da Cunha, at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said: “I am extremely worried about the costs in human lives.”
The 1.5C target was chosen to prevent the worst of the climate crisis and has been seen as an important guiding star for international negotiations. Current climate policies mean the world is on track for about 2.7C, and the Guardian survey shows few IPCC experts expect the world to deliver the huge action required to reduce that.
Younger scientists were more pessimistic, with 52% of respondents under 50 expecting a rise of at least 3C, compared with 38% of those over 50. Female scientists were also more downbeat than male scientists, with 49% thinking global temperature would rise at least 3C, compared with 38%. There was little difference between scientists from different continents.
Dipak Dasgupta, at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, said: “If the world, unbelievably wealthy as it is, stands by and does little to address the plight of the poor, we will all lose eventually.”
The experts were clear on why the world is failing to tackle the climate crisis. A lack of political will was cited by almost three-quarters of the respondents, while 60% also blamed vested corporate interests, such as the fossil fuel industry.
Many also mentioned inequality and a failure of the rich world to help the poor, who suffer most from climate impacts. “I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the global south,” said a South African scientist, who chose not to be named. “The world’s response to date is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools.”
About a quarter of the IPCC experts who responded thought global temperature rise would be kept to 2C or below but even they tempered their hopes.
“I am convinced that we have all the solutions needed for a 1.5C path and that we will implement them in the coming 20 years,” said Henry Neufeldt, at the UN’s Copenhagen Climate Centre. “But I fear that our actions might come too late and we cross one or several tipping points.”
Lisa Schipper, at University of Bonn in Germany, said: “My only source of hope is the fact that, as an educator, I can see the next generation being so smart and understanding the politics.”
For a long time, having children has been a young person’s game. Although ancient records are sparse, researchers estimate that, for most of human history, women most typically conceived their first child in their late teens or early 20s and stopped having kids shortly thereafter.
But in recent decades, people around the world, especially in wealthy, developed countries, have been startingtheirfamilies later and later. Since the 1970s, American women have on average delayed the beginning of parenthood from age 21 to 27; Korean women have nudged the number past 32. As more women have kids in their 40s, the average age at which women give birth to any of their kids is now above 30, or fast approaching it, in most high-income nations.
Rama Singh, an evolutionary biologist at McMaster University, in Canada, thinks that if women keep having babies later in life, another fundamental reproductive stage could change: Women might start to enter menopause later too. That age currently sits around 50, a figure that some researchers believe has held since the genesis of our species. But to Singh’s mind, no ironclad biological law is stopping women’s reproductive years from stretching far past that threshold. If women decide to keep having kids at older ages, he told me, one day, hundreds of thousands of years from now, menopause could—theoretically—entirely disappear.
Singh’s viewpoint is not mainstream in his field. But shifts in human childbearing behavior aren’t the only reason that menopause may be on the move. Humans are, on the whole, living longer now, and are in several ways healthier than our ancient ancestors. And in the past few decades, especially, researchers have made technological leaps that enable them to tinker like never before with how people’s bodies function and age. All of these factors might well combine to alter menopause’s timeline. It’s a grand experiment in human reproduction, and scientists don’t yet know what the result might be.
So far, scientists have only scant evidence that the age of onset for menopause has begun to drift. Just a few studies, mostly tracking trends from recent decades, have noted a shift on the order of a year or two among women in certain Western countries, including the U.S. and Finland. Singh, though, thinks that could be just the start. Menopause can come on anywhere from a person’s 30s to their 60s, and the timing appears to be heavily influenced by genetics. That variation suggests some evolutionary wiggle room. If healthy kids keep being born to older and older parents, “I could see the age of menopause getting later,” Megan Arnot, an anthropologist at University College London, told me.
Singh’s idea assumes that menopause is not necessary for humans—or any animal, for that matter—to survive. And if a species’ primary directive is to perpetuate itself, a lifespan that substantially exceeds fertility does seem paradoxical. Researchers have found lengthy post-reproductive lifespans in only a handful of other creatures—among them, five species of toothed whales, plus a single population of wild chimpanzees. But women consistently spend a third to half of their life in menopause, the most documented in any mammal.
In humans, menopause occurs around the time when ovaries contain fewer than about 1,000 eggs, at which point ovulation halts and bodywide levels of hormones such as estrogen plummet. But there’s no biological imperative for female reproductive capacity to flame out after five decades of life. Each human woman is born with some 1 to 2 million eggs—comparable to what researchers have estimated in elephants, which remain fertile well into their 60s and 70s. Nor do animal eggs appear to have a built-in expiration date: Certain whales, for instance, have been documented bearing offspring past the age of 100.
This disconnect has led some researchers to conclude that menopause is an unfortunate evolutionary accident. Maybe, as some have argued, menopause is a by-product of long lifespans evolving so quickly that the ovaries didn’t catch up. But many women have survived well past menopause for the bulk of human history. Singh contends that menopause is a side effect of men preferring to mate with younger women, allowing fertility-compromising mutations to accumulate in aged females. (Had women been the ones to seek out only younger men, he told me, men would have evolved their own version of menopause.) Others disagree: Arnot told me that, if anything, many of today’s men may prefer younger women because fertility declines with age, rather than the other way around.
But the preponderance of evidence supports menopause being beneficial to the species it’s evolved in, including us, Francisco Úbeda de Torres, a mathematical biologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, told me. Certainly, menopause was important enough that it appears to have arisen multiple times—at least four separate times among whales alone, Samuel Ellis, a biologist at the University of Exeter, told me.
One of the most prominent and well-backed ideas about why revolves aroundgrandmothering. Maybe menopause evolved to rid older women of the burden of fertility, freeing up their time and energy to allow them to help their offspring raise their own needy kids. In human populations around the world, grandmother input has clearly boosted the survival of younger generations; the same appears to be true among orcas and other toothed whales. Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, argues that the influence of menopausal grandmothering was so immense that it helped us grow bigger brains and shaped the family structures that still govern modern societies; it is, she told me, sufficient to explain menopause in humans, and what has made us the people we are today.
Some researchers suspect that menopause may have other perks. Kevin Langergraber, an ecologist at Arizona State University, points out that certain populations of chimpanzees can also live well past menopause, even though their species doesn’t really grandmother at all. In chimpanzees and some other animals, he told me, menopause might help reduce the competition for resources between mothers and their children as they simultaneously try to raise young offspring.
Regardless of the precise reasons, menopause may be deeply ingrained in our lineage—so much so that it could be difficult to adjust or undo. After all this time of living with an early end to ovulation, there is probably “no single master time-giver” switch that could be flipped to simply extend human female fertility, Michael Cant, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter, told me.
Perhaps, though, menopause’s timeline could still change—not on scales of hundreds of thousands of years, but within generations. Malnutrition and smoking, for instance, are linked to an early sunsetting of menses, while contraceptive use may push the age of menopause onset back—potentially because of the ways in which these factors can affect hormones. Menopause also tends to occur earlier among women of lower socioeconomic status and with less education. Accordingly, interventions as simple as improving childhood nutrition might be enough to raise the average start of menopause in certain parts of the world, Lynnette Sievert, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me.
Changes such as those would likely operate mostly on the margins—perhaps closing some of the gaps between poorer and richer nations, which can span about five years. Bigger shifts, experts told me, would probably require medical innovation that can slow, halt, or even reverse the premature aging of the ovaries, and maintain a person’s prior levels of estrogen and other reproductive hormones. Kara Goldman, an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive scientist at Northwestern University, told me that one key to the ovarian fountain of youth might be finding drugs to preserve the structures that house immature eggs in a kind of dormant early state. Other researchers see promise in rejuvenating the tissues that maintain eggs in a healthy state. Still others are generating cells and hormones in the lab in an attempt to supplement what the aging female body naturally loses. Deena Emera, an evolutionary geneticist at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, in California, thinks some of the best inspiration could come from species that stay fertile very late into life. Bowhead whales, for instance, can reproduce past the age of 100—and don’t seem to succumb to cancer. Maybe, Emera told me, they’re especially good at repairing DNA damage in reproductive and nonreproductive cells alike.
“The word for world is forest” — Ursula K. Le Guin
In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.
So-called “scientific forestry” was that century’s growth hacking. It made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the understory bare.
Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, with hopes of extending the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchyand order, James C. Scott, know what happened next.
It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered.
The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.
That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.
The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.
They’ve concentrated into a series of near-planetary duopolies. For example, as of April 2024, Google and Apple’s internet browsers have captured almost 85% of the world market share, Microsoft and Apple’s two desktop operating systems over 80%. Google runs 84% of global search and Microsoft 3%. Slightly more than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung, while over 99% of mobile operating systems run on Google or Apple software.Two cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure make up over 50% of the global market. Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests.
Two kinds of everything may be enough to fill a fictional ark and repopulate a ruined world, but can’t run an open, global “network of networks” where everyone has the same chance to innovate and compete. No wonder internet engineer Leslie Daigle termed the concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.”
Walled Gardens Have Deep Roots
The internet made the tech giants possible. Their services have scaled globally, via its open, interoperable core. But for the past decade, they’ve also worked to enclose the varied, competing and often open-source or collectively provided services the internet is built on into their proprietary domains. Although this improves their operational efficiency, it also ensures that the flourishing conditions of their own emergence aren’t repeated by potential competitors. For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control. They can afford to, using the vast wealth reaped in their one-off harvest of collective, global wealth.
“That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the ‘pathology of command and control.’”
Taken together, the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures. Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design: Key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience, generality and create room for innovation.
Initially funded by the U.S. military and designed by academic researchers to function in wartime, the internet evolved to work anywhere, in any condition, operated by anyone who wanted to connect. But what was a dynamic, ever-evolving game of Tetris with distinct “players” and “layers” is today hardening into a continent-spanning system of compacted tectonic plates. Infrastructure is not just what we see on the surface; it’s the forces below, that make mountains and power tsunamis. Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.
In 2019, some internet engineers in the global standards-setting body, the Internet Engineering Task Force, raised the alarm. Daigle, a respected engineer who had previously chaired its oversight committee and internet architecture board, wrote in a policy brief that consolidation meant network structures were ossifying throughout the stack, making incumbents harder to dislodge and violating a core principle of the internet: that it does not create “permanent favorites.” Consolidation doesn’t just squeeze out competition. It narrows the kinds of relationships possible between operators of different services.
As Daigle put it: “The more proprietary solutions are built and deployed instead of collaborative open standards-based ones, the less the internet survives as a platform for future innovation.” Consolidation kills collaboration between service providers through the stack by rearranging an array of different relationships — competitive, collaborative — into a single predatory one.
Since then, standards development organizations started several initiatives to name and tackle infrastructure consolidation, but these floundered. Bogged down in technical minutiae, unable to separate themselves from their employers’ interests and deeply held professional values of simplification and control, most internet engineers simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?
Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.
What Is Rewilding?
Rewilding “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces,” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More ambitious and risk-tolerant than traditional conservation, it targets entire ecosystems to make space for complex food webs and the emergence of unexpected interspecies relations. It’s less interested in saving specific endangered species. Individual species are just ecosystem components, and focusing on components loses sight of the whole. Ecosystems flourish through multiple points of contact between their many elements, just like computer networks. And like in computer networks, ecosystem interactions are multifaceted and generative.
Rewilding has much to offer people who care about the internet. As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in their book “Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery,” rewilding pays attention “to the emergent properties of interactions between ‘things’ in ecosystems … a move from linear to systems thinking.”
It’s a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [that] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: Hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command and control.
“The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.”
Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?
Rewilding is a positive vision for the networks we want to live inside, and a shared story for how we get there. It grafts a new tree onto technology’s tired old stock.
What Ecology Knows
Ecology knows plenty about complex systems that technologists can benefit from. First, it knows that shifting baselines are real.
If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own. Global land-dwelling insect populations are dropping about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the same five websites. You may have even written your own blog.
But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web) is normal. As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural.
Ecology knows that shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides. People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. If the internet for you is the massive sky-scraping silo you happen to live inside and the only thing you can see outside is the single, other massive sky-scraping silo, then how can you imagine anything else?
Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached. What scale is needed for rewilding to succeed? It’s one thing to reintroduce wolves to the 3,472 square miles of Yellowstone, and quite another to cordon off about 20 square miles of a polder (land reclaimed from a body of water) known as Oostvaardersplassen near Amsterdam. Large and diverse Yellowstone is likely complex enough to adapt to change, but Oostvaardersplassen has struggled.
“Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments … that madden the creatures trapped within.”
In the 1980s, the Dutch government attempted to regenerate a section of the overgrown Oostvaardersplassen. An independent-minded government ecologist, Frans Vera, said reeds and scrub would dominate unless now-extinct herbivores grazed them. In place of ancient aurochs, the state forest management agency introduced the famously bad-tempered German Heck cattle and in place of an extinct steppe pony, a Polish semi-feral breed.
Some 30 years on, with no natural predators, and after plans for a wildlife corridor to another reserve came to nothing, there were many more animals than the limited winter vegetation could sustain. People were horrified by starving cows and ponies, and beginning in 2018, government agencies instituted animal welfare checks and culling.
Just turning the clock back was insufficient. The segment of Oostvaardersplassen was too small and too disconnected to be rewilded. Because the animals had nowhere else to go, overgrazing and collapse was inevitable, an embarrassing but necessary lesson. Rewilding is a work in progress. It’s not about trying to revert ecosystems to a mythical Eden. Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity. But rewilding, itself a human intervention, can take several turns to get right.
Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or organizations operating their own mail servers again instead of off-the-shelf solutions like G-Suite. But some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs, as we discover (yet again) that relying on one app to host global conversations creates a single point of failure and control. New systems are growing, like the Fediverse with its federated islands, or Bluesky with algorithmic choice and composable moderation.
We don’t know what the future holds. Our job is to keep open as much opportunity as we can, trusting that those who come later will use it. Instead of setting purity tests for which kind of internet is most like the original, we can test changes against the values of the original design. Do new standards protect the network’s “generality,” i.e. its ability to support multiple uses, or is functionality limited to optimize efficiency for the biggest tech firms?
As early as 1985, plant ecologists Steward T.A. Pickett and Peter S. White wrotein “The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics,” that an “essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change.” Some internet engineers know this. David Clark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who worked on some of the internet’s earliest protocols, wrote an entire book about other network architectures that might have been built if different values, like security or centralized management, had been prioritized by the internet’s creators.
But our internet took off because it was designed as a general-purpose network, built to connect anyone.
Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine. When we interviewed Clark, he told us that “‘complex’ implies a system in which you have emergent behavior, a system in which you can’t model the outcomes. Your intuitions may be wrong. But a system that’s too simple means lost opportunities.”Everything we collectively make that’s worthwhile is complex and thereby a little messier. The cracks are where new people and ideas get in.
Internet infrastructure is a degraded ecosystem, but it’s also a built environment, like a city. Its unpredictability makes it generative, worthwhile and deeply human. In 1961, Jane Jacobs, an American-Canadian activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” argued that mixed-use neighborhoods were safer, happier, more prosperous, and more livable than the sterile, highly controlling designs of urban planners like New York’s Robert Moses.
“As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.”
Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours.
As Jacobs wrote: “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.”As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.
Ecosystems endure because species serve as checks and balances on each other. They have different modes of interaction, not just extraction, but mutualism, commensalism, competition and predation. In flourishing ecosystems, predators are subject to limits. They’re just one part of a complex web that passes calories around, not a one-way ticket to the end of evolution.
Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect it from snooping or tampering.
TunnelVision, as the researchers have named their attack, largely negates the entire purpose and selling point of VPNs, which is to encapsulate incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in an encrypted tunnel and to cloak the user’s IP address. The researchers believe it affects all VPN applications when they’re connected to a hostile network and that there are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user’s VPN runs on Linux or Android. They also said their attack technique may have been possible since 2002 and may already have been discovered and used in the wild since then.
Reading, dropping, or modifying VPN traffic
The effect of TunnelVision is “the victim’s traffic is now decloaked and being routed through the attacker directly,” a video demonstration explained. “The attacker can read, drop or modify the leaked traffic and the victim maintains their connection to both the VPN and the Internet.”
The attack works by manipulating the DHCP server that allocates IP addresses to devices trying to connect to the local network. A setting known as option 121 allows the DHCP server to override default routing rules that send VPN traffic through a local IP address that initiates the encrypted tunnel. By using option 121 to route VPN traffic through the DHCP server, the attack diverts the data to the DHCP server itself. Researchers from Leviathan Security explained:
Our technique is to run a DHCP server on the same network as a targeted VPN user and to also set our DHCP configuration to use itself as a gateway. When the traffic hits our gateway, we use traffic forwarding rules on the DHCP server to pass traffic through to a legitimate gateway while we snoop on it.
We use DHCP option 121 to set a route on the VPN user’s routing table. The route we set is arbitrary and we can also set multiple routes if needed. By pushing routes that are more specific than a /0 CIDR range that most VPNs use, we can make routing rules that have a higher priority than the routes for the virtual interface the VPN creates. We can set multiple /1 routes to recreate the 0.0.0.0/0 all traffic rule set by most VPNs.
Pushing a route also means that the network traffic will be sent over the same interface as the DHCP server instead of the virtual network interface. This is intended functionality that isn’t clearly stated in the RFC. Therefore, for the routes we push, it is never encrypted by the VPN’s virtual interface but instead transmitted by the network interface that is talking to the DHCP server. As an attacker, we can select which IP addresses go over the tunnel and which addresses go over the network interface talking to our DHCP server.
We now have traffic being transmitted outside the VPN’s encrypted tunnel. This technique can also be used against an already established VPN connection once the VPN user’s host needs to renew a lease from our DHCP server. We can artificially create that scenario by setting a short lease time in the DHCP lease, so the user updates their routing table more frequently. In addition, the VPN control channel is still intact because it already uses the physical interface for its communication. In our testing, the VPN always continued to report as connected, and the kill switch was never engaged to drop our VPN connection.
The attack can most effectively be carried out by a person who has administrative control over the network the target is connecting to. In that scenario, the attacker configures the DHCP server to use option 121. It’s also possible for people who can connect to the network as an unprivileged user to perform the attack by setting up their own rogue DHCP server.
The attack allows some or all traffic to be routed through the unencrypted tunnel. In either case, the VPN application will report that all data is being sent through the protected connection. Any traffic that’s diverted away from this tunnel will not be encrypted by the VPN and the Internet IP address viewable by the remote user will belong to the network the VPN user is connected to, rather than one designated by the VPN app.
Climate change truly is a major existential threat, one we’re clearly notaddressing fast enough. But as individuals, there’s little we can do to stop it on a grand scale — it will require global cooperation to overcome. Nonetheless, the accompanying feelings of helplessness when faced with such a daunting crisis can make many feel paralyzed with despair. So what can be done?
“Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto,” a new book from University of Tokyo philosophy professor Kohei Saito, offers more than a diagnosis of the systemic problems that brought us to this moment; it lays out, in clear and well-researched language, how those problems can be thoroughly addressed. In 2020, when “Slow Down” was originally published in Japan, it went by the far more fitting title “Capital in the Anthropocene” — with “Anthropocene” being the proposed geological era that began when human activity started radically altering natural conditions on the planet.
“My idea is really not state socialism, but associated model production.”
Saito’s argument, as translated by Brian Bergstrom, is that climate change exists because humans as a species prioritize economic growth instead of economic sustainability. Capitalism itself, Saito asserts, is unsustainable. Even though well-meaning liberal politicians like to push for Green New Deals in the hope of continuing non-stop economic growth without the consequent ecological harm, Saito argues capitalist societies need to perpetually consume resources to remain prosperous.
As a result, capitalism itself inevitably brings about planet-wide problems like climate change, habitat destruction, plastic pollution and other environmental issues. The only solution is for humanity as a whole to slow down our obsession with work, productivity and materialism. Notably, Saito stresses that the bulk of the burden to consume less falls on the wealthiest among us.
Saito doesn’t take credit for these observations. Philosopher Karl Marx developed a philosophy in the 1860s that Saito describes as “eco-Marxist” (particularly in Saito’s previous work, “Karl Marx’s Eco-Socialism”). While the German philosopher’s early works like “The Communist Manifesto” urged the working class to insist on receiving its fair share of the benefits of industrialism, Marx’s later writings praised Indigenous peoples in the Americas, India and Algeria for living in communes that stressed sustainable environmental practices.
As such, “Slow Down” is that rare hybrid among ideological manifestos: It opens new insights into an existing ideology while uplifting something distinct of its own. Salon spoke with Saito about “Slow Down” and the relationship climate change has to economics.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
For those who are totally unfamiliar with the works of Karl Marx, can you please explain how one must distinguish between his early works and the later works that you describe as “eco-Marxism”?
Marxism is known for socialism, and socialism is often described as the exploitation of the working class. Capitalism has a tendency to increase technologies and promote innovations because of market competition. But Marx thought that once the workers take over power and kick out the capitalists, they can utilize the development of productive forces for the sake of themselves — more wealth, more well-being.
But there is one problem: Sustainability. Because as Marx started to study natural sciences later in the 1850s and 1860s, he came to realize the development of technologies in capitalism actually don’t create a condition for emancipation of the working class. Because not only do those technologies control the workers more efficiently, they destabilize the old system of jobs and make more precarious, low skilled jobs. At the same time those technologies exploit from nature more efficiently and create various problems such as exhaustion of the soil, massive deforestation, and the exhaustion of the fuels, and so on.
Marx came to realize that this kind of technology undermines material conditions for sustainable development of human beings. And the central concept for Mark at that time in the sixties is metabolism. He thinks that this metabolic interaction between humans and nature is quite essential for any kind of society, but the problem of capitalism is it really transforms and organizes this entire metabolism between humans and nature for the sake of profit-making. Technologies are also used for this purpose. So technologies are not for the purpose of creating better life, free time and sustainable production, but rather it exploits workers and nature at the same time for the sake of more growth, more profit, and so on.
My point is basically Marx was quite optimistic when he was young in terms of the development of technologies, but later he came to realize actually technologies have more damaging impact on both humans and nature. So he became more critical of that possibility of solving those problems of poverty and ecological problems using technology. That’s how the issue of degrowth and eco-socialist ideas came to be central for his ideas.
There’s another distortion in Marxist thought, what you described as “the monster known as Stalinism.” What ideological corrections do you offer to the Marxist model to avoid a repetition of history?
So I advocate for a kind of eco-socialism, that kind of socialism that is more sustainable, that is not based on exploitation of nature. Because in the 20th century, Stalinism and other kinds of socialist experiments was a disaster. It was un-democratic. It was a dictatorship of the Communist Party, but at the same time it was also destruction of the environment.
I think their ideas were rather based on the development of progress through technology, and productive force is the condition for the working class emancipation. And the most efficient way of developing these technologies and productive forces is the monopoly of the means of production by the bureaucrats and the party. It just created a kind of the central planning, which is very top-down and authoritarian and anti-democracy. At the same time, they didn’t care about the environment, so it basically destroyed nature.
In Marx’s later works, he quite intensively studied natural sciences. He also studied at the same time other societies, non-Western societies, that were more sustainable. He came to realize that these societies were not driven toward endless growth. They were communally managing land. They were also democratically redistributing wealth. So he came to realize that more of a kind of bottom-up management of the commonwealth is good for people and creates a more equal society. It’s also good for the environment. It was more sustainable because that’s why those [Indigenous] societies lasted for many, many years. In America, they lasted many, many years before those people coming to conquer the land.
Marx came to recognize that not necessarily Western societies are more progressive in creating a better society for the workers, but rather Western society also need to learn from non-Western societies. This is another very radical transformation for Marx in his late years. But then he came to realize not a top-down Soviet style dictatorship is necessary for the sake of establishing socialism, but rather more democratic, horizontal management of commonwealth lands, water, forests and other resources. That is quite essential for creating a better society.
And he actually uses the term association — not socialism or communism. He often describes the future society with “association.” And so my idea is really not state socialism, but associated model production. This is why I still use the term “communism,” because the society based on capital is capitalism and a society based on the commonwealth, the democratic management of commonwealth is actually to be called “communism.”
Could you elaborate on how the degrowth philosophy that you say has been implemented in locations like Quito, Ecuador or Barcelona, Spain, as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic.
My book, originally in Japanese, was published like three years ago, so it was published in the middle of pandemic. Japan is also a captive society and it’s a very conservative society. I didn’t expect that this call for going back to Marx and reviving the tradition of communism combined with new idea of degrowth would attract so much attention and interest from people.
But it was, I think, because of the pandemic, that we came to recognize how destructive our economic activities were. It was obviously deforestation and that kind of thing. Ugly business was a main cause of the pandemic. Now at the same time, the climate crisis was deepening. So it was a moment we saw how our daily life was quite clearly destructive, but at the same time, we had to stop the economy for the sake of protecting our lives. Shutting down departments, shopping malls and restaurants and so on.
We used to believe that it’s impossible for the state or for the society to intervene in the market and say, “You know, we shouldn’t be making profit because human lives are more important or nature is more important.” But in the middle of the pandemic, we did this. We came to realize that these things are actually possible. And once we started working from home, once we stopped taking trains and going to hang out with people, buying new clothes all the time and so on, we came to realize, ‘Why did we consume so much? Why did we work so hard?’
The pandemic created some kind of space for reflection upon our previous life, the massive consumption, massive production, and massive waste. This is really the moment when the degrowth idea appeared more attractive, because people could spend more time with family, friends — not necessarily friends because of the pandemic, but maybe with friends — they could read more books and newspapers, and they enjoyed different ways of life that are not necessarily consumptionist.
At the same time, a new crisis is coming — the climate crisis — and it will accelerate inflation. It will create a bigger economic inequality. And various natural disasters will also create a food shortage, which might lead to various kinds of conflicts. Geopolitical tension will increase, and so on. My claim in my book is basically this crisis cannot be simply overcome by investing in new green technologies. It is like early Marx: We overcome the crisis of capitalism by technologies, the state should intervene, the Green New Deal must be new investments, blah, blah, blah. But I don’t think that works.
My idea is basically we need to learn from the experience of the pandemic — that capitalist society is driven for the sake of creating more profit, not necessarily able to provide what is necessary. Because what is necessary, like medicine and education and hospital masks and so on — are not necessarily profitable. Capitalism doesn’t produce what is necessary unless it is profitable.
This gap creates disparities for us to tackle. My idea is basically degrowth is focusing on what is necessary rather than what is profitable. We should share more with the commonwealth like public transportation, the education system, the medical care system. These necessary things, essential goods, must be shared more equally instead of some rich people monopolizing all the wealth of the planet.
Can you explain the “Netherlands Fallacy” — namely, the idea that the Netherlands proves that socialism can be ecologically sustainable and prosperous. Can you elaborate on why that is indeed a fallacy?
I don’t know why it’s really the Netherlands. It can be the U.S. Fallacy or whatever, but it’s traditionally called the Netherlands Fallacy. The Netherlands had some environmental pollution and basically they overcame this issue with new technologies. Everything seems fine, but the problem is this fallacy. The solution to some kind of environmental damage was simply externalized to somewhere else. It was shifted basically to the global south.
One contemporary example is electronic vehicles, EVs, which are today very important; Tesla making massive profits, and so on. For the sake of a decarbonized society, I totally agree that we need more electronic vehicles and we need to produce them more, and that gasoline should be abandoned as fast as possible. I totally agree. But the problem is, are electric vehicles totally sustainable?
The answer is obviously no. It is not just that usage of electric vehicles still consumes electricity, which might be produced by using fossil fuels, but the problem is — instead of fossil fuels — we also need a lot of rare metals: Lithium, copper, cobalt. And those rare metals are often located in the global south: Latin America, China, Russia, Africa and so on. And in these places now, the extraction of metals are creating very poor working conditions for even children.
Child labor is obviously a problem in Congo, where a lot is massively extracted, but also the problem of environmental pollution, massive deforestation and the lithium use uses a lot of water. Chile is now suffering by wildfires, but they are also suffering from drought. And then mining lithium consumes a lot of water when people actually need water for their lives, and also for producing food, and so on.
People like us and affluent people in the global north can continue a very comfortable life by buying new electric vehicles like Tesla instead of Toyota. And they think that, “Okay, we did something good for the environment. I feel my responsibility for the next generations and so on.” They are actually falling into this fallacy of believing their sustainability. No, they’re not. Their behavior is not sustainable because the real problem is only hidden: massive extraction of the lithium in the global south. It’s still causing quite a damaging impact upon people and the environment. So the metabolism between humans and nature, it’s still distorted and disrupted in a quite serious manner.
And my idea of degrowth is not a negation of technology. We need electric vehicles. I repeat again because this is open to misunderstanding that degrowth denies technology to try to go back to nature or something like that. This is absurd, but at the same time, I clearly want to say that there are too many cars.
We need to shift to a society where we share electric vehicles with neighbors. So sharing cars. And we also need to invest in more green technologies like public transportation and also bicycles. And the bicycles of today are kind of dangerous because all the roads are created for the sake of cars. So the city urban planning is centering around all industries, and that needs to be challenged, that needs to change. And these are idea that degrowth will create a more eco-friendly, pedestrian friendly kind of society. The new kind of fair mobility is a central idea of degrowth. But this is just one example we need.
My basic point is that often technologies simply hide the true environmental impacts, and we needed technological development, but at the same time, we need to reduce our excessive consumption. Otherwise we will fall into the Netherlands Fallacy.
[Note: This item comes from friend David Rosenthal. DLH]
It’s Time to Tax the Billionaires
By Gabriel Zucman
May 3 2024
Until recently, it was hard to know just how good the superrich are at avoiding taxes. Public statistics are oddly quiet about their contributions to government coffers, a topic of legitimate interest in democratic societies.
Over the past few years, I and other scholars have published studies and books attempting to fix that problem. While we still have data for only a handful of countries, we’ve found that the ultrawealthy consistently avoid paying their fair share in taxes. In the Netherlands, for instance, the average taxpayer in 2016 gave 45 percent of earnings to the government, while billionaires paid just 17 percent.
Why do the world’s most fortunate people pay among the least in taxes, relative to the amount of money they make?
The simple answer is that while most of us live off our salaries, tycoons like Jeff Bezos live off their wealth. In 2019, when Mr. Bezos was still Amazon’s chief executive, he took home an annual salary of just $81,840. But he owns roughly 10 percent of the company, which made a profit of $30 billion in 2023.
If Amazon gave its profits back to shareholders as dividends, which are subject to income tax, Mr. Bezos would face a hefty tax bill. But Amazon does not pay dividends to its shareholders. Neither does Berkshire Hathaway or Tesla. Instead, the companies keep their profits and reinvest them, making their shareholders even wealthier.
Unless Mr. Bezos, Warren Buffett or Elon Musk sell their stock, their taxable income is relatively minuscule. But they can still make eye-popping purchases by borrowing against their assets. Mr. Musk, for example, used his shares in Tesla as collateral to rustle up around $13 billion in tax-free loans to put toward his acquisition of Twitter.
Outside the United States, avoiding taxation can be even easier.
Take Bernard Arnault, the wealthiest person in the world. Mr. Arnault’s shares in LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate, officially belong to holding companies that he controls. In 2023, Mr. Arnault’s holdings received about $3 billion in dividends from LVMH. France — like other European countries — barely taxesthese dividends, because on paper they are received by companies. Yet Mr. Arnault can spend the money almost as if it were deposited directly into his bank account, so long as he works through other incorporated entities — on philanthropy, for instance, or to keep his megayacht afloat or to buy more companies.
Historically, the rich had to pay hefty taxes on corporate profits, the main source of their income. And the wealth they passed on to their heirs was subject to the estate tax. But both taxes have been gutted in recent decades. In 2018, the United States cut its maximum corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent. And the estate tax has almost disappeared in America. Relative to the wealth of U.S. households, it generates only a quarter of the tax revenues it raised in the 1970s.
So what should be done?
One obstacle to taxing the very rich is the risk they may move to low-tax countries. In Europe, some billionaires who built their fortune in France, Sweden or Germany have established residency in Switzerland, where they pay a fraction of what they would owe in their home country. Although few of the ultrawealthy actually move their homes, the possibility that they might has been a boogeyman for would-be tax reformers.
There is a way to make tax dodging less attractive: a global minimum tax. In 2021, more than 130 countries agreed to apply a minimum tax rate of 15 percent on the profits of large multinational companies. So no matter where a company parks its profits, it still has to pay at least a baseline amount of tax under the agreement.
In February, I was invited to a meeting of Group of 20 finance ministers to present a proposal for another coordinated minimum tax — this one not on corporations, but on billionaires. The idea is simple. Let’s agree that billionaires should pay income taxes equivalent to a small portion — say, 2 percent — of their wealth each year. Someone like Bernard Arnault, who is worth about $210 billion, would have to pay an additional tax equal to roughly $4.2 billion if he pays no income tax. In total, the proposal would allow countries to collect an estimated $250 billion in additional tax revenue per year, which is even more than what the global minimum tax on corporations is expected to add.
Critics might say that this is a wealth tax, the constitutionality of which is debated in the United States. In reality, the proposal stays firmly in the realm of income taxation. Billionaires who already pay the baseline amount of income tax would have no extra tax to pay. The goal is that only those who dial down their income to dodge the income tax would be affected.
Critics also claim that a minimum tax would be too hard to apply because wealth is difficult to value. This fear is overblown. According to my research, about 60 percent of U.S. billionaires’ wealth is in stocks of publicly traded companies. The rest is mostly ownership stakes in private businesses, which can be assigned a monetary value by looking at how the market values similar firms.
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