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      The Guardian view on Trump and reality: from promoting alternative facts to erasing truths | Editorial

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      What does the public need to know? The Trump White House boasts of being the most transparent administration in history – though commentators have suggested that the inadvertent leak of military plans to a journalist may have happened because senior figures were using messaging apps such as Signal to avoid oversight. Last week, it released thousands of pages of documents on John F Kennedy’s assassination. Donald Trump has declared that Kennedy’s family and the American people “deserve transparency and truth”.Strikingly, this stated commitment to sharing information comes as his administration defunds data collection and erases existing troves of knowledge from government websites. The main drivers appear to be the desire to remove “woke” content and global heating data, and the slashing of federal spending. Information resources are both the target and collateral damage. Other political factors may be affecting federal records too. Last month, Mr Trump sacked the head of the National Archives without explanation, after grumbling about the body’s involvement in the justice department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents.The impact is already painfully evident. Cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have affected not only climate records but also an extreme weather risk tool. The purge’s results are absurd as well as damaging. A webpage on the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, appears to have been marked for deletion because it was mistaken for a reference to LGBTQ+ issues.Yet the disparity between the data dump on the Kennedy assassination and the removal of other material is not a contradiction. It speaks volumes about the administration’s approach to truth and knowledge, which it regards as contingent and a matter of convenience. (Tellingly, it is also axing the body that provides most federal funding to libraries.)The 1963 presidential assassination is not only an event around which multiple theories circle but one that helped feed a broader culture of conspiracy theorising and distrust in authority. That has metastatised to the bizarre and extreme claims embraced and even promoted by Mr Trump or figures around him, including birtherism, Pizzagate and QAnon. These increasingly fantastical narratives have had real-world consequences. Facts, science and rationality itself are under attack.In his first term, Mr Trump’s aides shamelessly promoted “alternative facts” while decrying actual facts as “fake news”. The Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over those four years. This time round, his administration is removing existing sources of information. Websites, datasets and other information vanished from federal health websites – such as that for the Centers for Disease Control – last month, though some has since reappeared. One scientist called it “a digital book burning”. The Union of Concerned Scientists has warned that “critically important science conducted at many US agencies, institutions, and universities [is] under increasing assault”.Ad hoc preservation of essential national information and records is usually the work of those faced with the destructive force of foreign invasions, jihadist insurgencies or dictators. But as this bonfire blazes, a motley but committed array of individuals – “nerds who care”, in the words of one – are fighting back by preserving data before it is deleted. Their admirable effort to defend the truth deserves support.

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      European universities offer ‘scientific asylum’ to US researchers fleeing Trump’s cuts

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      Laced with terms such as “censorship” and “political interference”, the Belgium-based jobs advert was far from typical. The promise of academic freedom, however, hinted at who it was aimed at: researchers in the US looking to flee the funding freezes, cuts and ideological impositions ushered in by Donald Trump’s administration.“We see it as our duty to come to the aid of our American colleagues,” said Jan Danckaert, the rector of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), in explaining why his university – founded in 1834 to safeguard academia from the interference of church or state – had decided to open 12 postdoctoral positions for international researchers, with a particular focus on Americans.“American universities and their researchers are the biggest victims of this political and ideological interference,” Danckaert said in a statement. “They’re seeing millions in research funding disappear for ideological reasons.”The university is among a handful of institutions across Europe that have begun actively recruiting US researchers, offering themselves as a haven for those keen to escape the Trump administration’s crackdown on research and academia.Since Trump took power in late January, researchers in the US have faced a multipronged attack. Efforts to slash government spending have left thousands of employees bracing for layoffs, including at institutions such as Nasa, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency. The government’s targeting of “wokeism” has meanwhile sought to root out funding for research deemed to involve diversity, certain kinds of vaccines and any mention of the climate crisis.In France, the director of the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris, Yasmine Belkaid, said it was already working to recruit people from across the Atlantic for work in fields such as infectious diseases or the origins of disease.View image in fullscreen“I receive daily requests from people who want to return: French, European or even Americans who no longer feel able to do their research or are afraid to do it freely,” Belkaid told the French newspaper La Tribune. “You might call it a sad opportunity, but it is an opportunity, all the same.”The sentiment was echoed by France’s minister for higher education and research, Philippe Baptiste, in a recent letter that called on research institutions to send in proposals on how best to attract talent from the US. “Many well-known researchers are already questioning their future in the US,” he said. “Naturally, we wish to welcome a certain number of them.”On Thursday, the Netherlands said it was aiming to swiftly launch a fund to attract researchers to the country.While the fund would be open to people of all nationalities, the country’s education minister, Eppo Bruins, hinted at the tensions that have gripped US academia in announcing the plans.“There is currently a great global demand for international top scientific talent. At the same time, the geopolitical climate is changing, which is increasing the international mobility of scientists,” Bruins said in a letter to parliament.“Several European countries are responding to this with efforts to attract international talent,” he added. “I want the Netherlands to remain at the vanguard of these efforts.”The Dutch effort comes after France’s Aix-Marseille University said it had set up a programme – titled Safe Place for Science – that would put aside funding for more than two dozen researchers from the US for three years.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We wish we didn’t have to do this,” said Éric Berton, the university’s president. “We’re not looking to attract researchers. But we were quite indignant about what was happening and we felt that our colleagues in the US were going through a catastrophe … we wanted to offer some sort of scientific asylum to those whose research is being hindered.”Two weeks after the programme was launched there have been about 100 applications, with researchers from Yale, Nasa and Stanford among those who have expressed interest. The university continues to receive about 10 applications a day, said Berton, many of them from researchers involved in studying climate, health or social sciences.Berton said he hoped universities across Europe would join his in providing a safe space for researchers. “I think that we need to realise the historic moment we’re living through and the serious, long-term consequences this could have,” he said. “Europe must rise to the occasion.”At VUB, the opening of the 12 postdoctoral positions was also aimed at acknowledging the global impact of Trump’s crackdown. Two research projects in which the university was involved – one delving into youth and disinformation and another investigating the transatlantic dialogue between the US and Europe – had been cancelled due to “changed policy priorities”, it said.For the university in Brussels, the openings were also a vindication of sorts. In a 2016 interview with Fox News, Trump had sought to characterise life in Brussels as akin to “living in a hellhole”, falsely accusing migrants in the city of failing to assimilate.“At the time, the statement elicited many emotional reactions in Europe,” the university said. “This gives additional symbolic meaning to the VUB initiative.” More

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      A French university is offering ‘scientific asylum’ for US talent. The brain drain has started | Alexander Hurst

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      In six weeks, the Trump administration’s “rapid scheduled disassembly” of American science has been as sharp and deep as its trashing of the US’s alliances and goodwill; Earth science, weather forecasting and early warning systems, medical research (including cancer research), Nasa. Academic grants more broadly have been cut, paused and subject to review for a long list of banned words (including such contentious terms as “political” and “women”).This has caused universities across the country to reduce their intake of PhD students, medical students and other graduate students, introduce hiring freezes and even rescind some offers of admission. More than 12,500 US citizens currently in other countries on Fulbright research grants recently had their funding paused, along with 7,400 foreign scholars currently hosted in the US, leaving them financially stranded. And, when it came to one foreign academic visiting the US, detaining them and refusing them entry.Even more worryingly, the administration is specifically targeting some universities, including pulling $400m in funding from Columbia University, and $800m from Johns Hopkins, forcing it to lay off 2,000 people. Furthermore, the legally dubious arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, and the cancelling of his green card, is sure to have a chilling effect on foreign students and researchers already in the US – and on the desire of others to go there in the future. As Christina Pagel, a German-British professor at University College London, writes: “This isn’t chaos.” Instead, the attacks on research appear to follow a three-pronged objective: to forcibly align science with state ideology; undermine academic independence and suppress dissent; and maintain geopolitical and economic goals.The Saturn V rockets that took US astronauts to space – and eventually the moon – in the 1960s owed their existence to Operation Paperclip, which brought 1,500 former Nazi scientists (such as Wernher von Braun, the former director of Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center) to the US. In the week after Donald Trump’s election, I wondered whether the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas may inadvertently get his wish (of a Europe that unified through opposition to the US) and suggested that Europe position itself to reverse the decades-long transatlantic brain drain by welcoming highly educated American researchers and scientists who were sure to find themselves under attack. This time, there is no moral quandary about it, no Nazi pasts to ignore; only as much advantage to be gained as can be in a world where the EU must hold the ground for liberal democratic society, joined by Canada to the west, and Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to the east.To some extent, EU governments and institutions are already picking up on the opportunity. For example, on 7 March, the University of Aix-Marseille announced Safe Place for Science, a three-year, €15m programme to bring 15 American scientists working in climate, health and astrophysics to its campus. According to a university spokesperson, more than 60 applications have been received, 30 of them coming within the first 24 hours. The university indicated that it has been in contact with other universities and the French government about expanding “scientific asylum” on both a national and European level, and to help coordinate welcoming and relocating different researchers.US federal government spending on all research and development (R&D) totalled roughly $195bn in 2024. That sounds imposing, but let’s put it into greater context. As of 2023, US GDP was $27.7tn and EU GDP was $26.5tn, when adjusted for purchasing power parity. Taken as a whole, both polities are roughly the same economic size. Let’s imagine that the EU were to put real money on the table to lure science of all kinds out of the US and to the continent. It wouldn’t need to match $195bn, euro for dollar, in part because more than half the US total is defence R&D, and the EU is already boosting defence spending … bigly. So, say it just picked a bold, round number that lends itself well to narrative, storytelling and headlines, and is enough to rope in the cuts happening in the US.A sum of €25bn a year would represent just under 0.1% of the EU’s GDP, and even less if the UK, Norway and Switzerland (all of which participate in the Horizon Europe research funding programme) were included. As it is, R&D spending in the EU lags behind the US – and a report ordered by the European Commission’s research department recently recommended more than doubling Horizon Europe’s €95bn, seven-year budget. What I’m suggesting goes further, yes. But not only is it well within the EU’s ability to afford, it would ultimately pay for itself: research found that non-defence R&D spending returned 200% for the US during the postwar period.But let me push the boundary of fantastical again, and suggest that the EU may lure not just American researchers, but American universities themselves. According to the Cross Border Education Research Team, US universities maintain 29 actual campuses in Europe (and far more if you include “centres” and study abroad programmes). There are dozens of American colleges and universities with enormous endowments that regularly splash out hundreds of millions of dollars at a time on new buildings. If US crackdowns (like the recent demands made of Columbia) on academic freedom, funding, and foreign students and faculties become more frequent, they may find the idea of second campuses in Europe tempting indeed.

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist

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      Russia will ‘undoubtedly’ discuss future Mars flights with Musk, Putin envoy says

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      Russian officials expect to hold talks with Elon Musk soon about space travel to Mars, Vladimir Putin’s international cooperation envoy said on Tuesday. The envoy’s comments, which Musk has not confirmed, also stated that Russia wanted to expand its cooperation with the US on space projects.“I think that there will undoubtedly be a discussion with Musk [about Mars flights] in the near future,” Kirill Dmitriev said at a business forum in Moscow, going on to praise Musk’s efforts to push the boundaries of human achievement.The proposed talks would once again put Musk, the world’s richest man and a senior adviser to Trump, in an outsized and largely unaccountable role in international politics. Musk has joined in on White House calls with international leaders since Donald Trump’s reelection, and prior to his new role in the administration reportedly was in regular contact with Putin.Musk’s ownership of SpaceX and control of the Starlink satellite communications system have increasingly allowed him to take on the role of power broker in space travel and international telecommunications. In the US, Nasa has come to rely on SpaceX for the majority of its launches, and recently fired workers have raised alarms about his growing sway over the agency. Musk has also used his leverage over international telecoms to assert his political influence, including limiting Ukraine’s military use of Starlink during the Russia-Ukraine war and recently clashing with Poland’s foreign minister over the technology.Dmitriev, who was named by Putin last month as his special envoy on international economic and investment cooperation, also claimed on Tuesday that Russia’s “enemies” were trying to derail Trump’s efforts to restore a dialogue with Russia. His remarks came as Trump held a call with Putin on Tuesday to discuss a potential ceasefire in Ukraine and eventual end to hostilities after Russia invaded the country in 2022.Dmitriev said Russia wanted to work with Musk as part of Moscow’s efforts to strengthen and develop Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, and state nuclear corporation Rosatom. Dmitriev stated he was in touch with Roscosmos, Russian businesses and the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRussia said in 2022 it would start work on its own Mars mission after the European Space Agency (ESA) suspended a joint project in the wake of Putin’s decision to send tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine. More

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      ‘It’s back to drug rationing’: the end of HIV was in sight. Then came the cuts

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      This year the world should have been “talking about the virtual elimination of HIV” in the near future. “Within five years,” says Prof Sharon Lewin, a leading researcher in the field. “Now that’s all very uncertain.”Scientific advances had allowed doctors and campaigners to feel optimistic that the end of HIV as a public health threat was just around the corner.Then came the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to US aid funding. Now the picture is one of a return to the drugs rationing of decades ago, and of rising infections and deaths.But experts are also talking about building a new approach that would make health services, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, less vulnerable to the whims of a foreign power.The US has cancelled 83% of its foreign aid contracts and dismantled USAid, the agency responsible for coordinating most of them.Many fell under the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) programme, which has been the backbone of global efforts to tackle HIV and Aids, investing more than $110bn (£85bn) since it was founded in 2003 and credited with saving 26 million lives and preventing millions more new infections. In some African countries it covered almost all HIV spending.View image in fullscreenThere is a risk, says Lewin, director of Melbourne University’s Institute for Infection and Immunity and past president of the International Aids Society, of “dramatic increases in infections, dramatic increases in death and a real loss of decades of advances”.There is no official public list of which contracts have been cancelled, and which remain. It appears that virtually no HIV-prevention programmes funded by the US are still in operation, save a handful principally providing drugs to stop pregnant women passing on the infection to their babies. Countries report disruption to the most basic measures, such as condom distribution.Some treatment programmes have been spared, but not those whose focus conflicted with the Trump administration’s war on “gender ideology” or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), such as those working with transgender communities. Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have been laid off, while worried patients are hoarding drugs or stretching supplies, according to UNAids surveillance. UNAids itself has lost more than half of its funding.Even programmes that have survived the cull have faced turmoil since February, with instructions to stop work rescinded but with no certainty that funding will continue.View image in fullscreenIn only one example, the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric Aids Foundation says it has had to halt HIV treatment for 85,000 people in Eswatini, including more than 2,000 children, and tests for thousands of pregnant women and babies to prevent transmission and begin life-saving medication.Access to drugs represents an “immediate crisis”, Lewin says. “If people with HIV stop the medications, then not only do they get sick themselves, which is tragic, but they also then become infectious to others.”As clinics on the frontline of treating the disease scrabble to secure access to basic drugs, scientists at this month’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco were hearing that HIV might soon be preventable with a once-a-year injection.The drug lenacapavir was already generating huge excitement in the field, after trial results showed that a six-monthly jab could prevent HIV. New results from the manufacturer Gilead suggest that a tweak to the formula and how it is given could see its protective effects last even longer.Nevertheless, Lewin says, the mood at the meeting, packed with many of the world’s leading HIV specialists, was “dire”.As well as programme cancellations, there are “huge concerns around science and what’s going to happen to the [US] National Institutes of Health, [whose] funding of science has been so significant on every level”, she says.Some scientists in receipt of US funding have been told to remove their names from DEI-linked research, she says, even though DEI is fundamental to the HIV response.View image in fullscreen“I don’t mean that in a sort of touchy-feely way, I mean that’s what we need to do: you need to actually get those treatments to these diverse communities.”In 2022, 55% of all new HIV infections were within “key populations”, such as gay men, other men who have sex with men, sex workers, transgender people, prisoners and people who inject drugs.Prof Linda-Gail Bekker, of South Africa’s Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, has seen US funding for three trials of potential HIV vaccines involving eight countries cancelled and only reinstated after an appeal to the US supreme court.“We’re running around like chickens without heads to at least get one going, because the vaccines are sitting in the fridge and will expire,” she says.She led the lenacapavir trial that showed it offered 100% protection to young women in sub-Saharan Africa, but now worries about HIV/Aids prevention “falling off the radar completely”.The global community had been making headway towards the United Nations’ goal of ending Aids by 2030, she says, with a five-year plan to use “amazing new innovative tools and scale them up”, which would have led to “less dependence on foreign aid and more self-reliance” as new infections fell and attention shifted to maintaining treatment for people with HIV.“All of that is hugely at risk now because, without these funds, our governments will have to step up but they will concentrate on treatment,” she says. “We know they will do that, because that is what we did for the first 30 years.”Efforts to control Aids were entering “the last mile”, which was always likely to be more expensive, she says. “The people who were happy to come into health facilities, they would have come into health facilities.”It would be difficult to rely on government funding to reach the remaining groups, she says, not only because of fewer resources but also because in some countries it means targeting groups whose existence is illegal and unrecognised, such as sex workers or sexual minorities, and young girls may be reluctant to use government clinics if they are not supposed to be sexually active.“I feel like the odds are very stacked against us,” says Bekker, adding: “We’re obviously going to have to re-programme ourselves [and] formulate a different plan.”Pepfar had pledged funding to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, to deploy 10m doses of lenacapavir in low-income countries. While the Global Fund has promised to maintain its commitment, it might receive fewer than the planned number of doses, Bekker fears.“Six months ago, I was saying the best thing we can do with lenacapavir is offer it to everybody in a choice environment. [Now] I think we’re gonna have to say who needs [injectable] prep,” she says, “and the rest have to do the best they can.“How do we make that decision? And what does that look like? It is back to sort of rationing.“When we started ARVs [antiretroviral drugs] way back in 2000,” Bekker recalls, “you would go, ‘you get treatment; you don’t, you don’t, you don’t’.“It feels terrible … but you have to get over that. You have to say it will be infection-saving for some people. And we’ve got to make it count.”View image in fullscreenFor Beatriz Grinsztejn, president of the International Aids Society, the disruption is critical and threatens many vulnerable people. But, she adds, it could present “an important opportunity for ownership – otherwise we are always left in the hands of others”.She worries about the impact of cuts to funding on younger scientists, with their potential loss from the research field “a major threat for the next generation”. But, she adds, the HIV community is “powerful and very resilient”.There have already been calls for new ways of doing things. It is “time for African leadership”, members of the African-led HIV Control Working Group write in the Lancet Global Health. There are now plans for Nigeria to produce HIV drugs and tests domestically.Christine Stegling, deputy director of UNAids, says it began “a concerted effort” last year to develop plans with countries about how their HIV programmes could become more sustainable domestically “but with a longer timeframe … now we are trying to do some kind of fast-tracking”.Governments are determined, she says, but it will require fiscal changes either in taxation or by restructuring debt.The goal of ending Aids by 2030 is still achievable, Stegling believes. “I think we have a very short window of opportunity now, in the next two, three months, to continue telling people that we can do it.“I keep on reminding people, ‘look, we need to get back to that same energy that we had when people were telling us treatment can’t be available in the global south, right?’ And we didn’t accept it. We made it happen.“We have national governments now who are also very adamant, because they can see what can happen, and they want to make it happen for their own populations.” More

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      Where has the left’s technological audacity gone? | Leigh Phillips

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      View image in fullscreenTechno-optimism – the belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity – is in vogue once more.In 2022, a clutch of pseudonymous San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) scenesters published a Substack post entitled “Effective Accelerationism”, which argued for maximum acceleration of technological advancement. The 10-point manifesto, which proclaimed that “the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness” was imminent, quickly went viral, as did follow-up posts.Effective accelerationism, or “e/acc”, exploded from being a fringe movement dedicated to pushing back against AI extinction-fearing “doomers” to being namechecked by major Silicon Valley CEOs such as Garry Tan, the CEO of start-up accelerator Y Combinator; Sam Altman, head of OpenAI; Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer; and Elon Musk.In 2023, Andreessen issued his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, expanding beyond the e/acc’s focus on AI to encompass all questions of technological progress. “We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology,” he writes, yet previously and for hundreds of years, we had glorified it. The enemies of techno-optimism are, he says, statism, economic planning and socialism. Andreessen tells us: “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential … It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag.”And last year saw the release of the Techno-Humanist Manifesto from the Roots of Progress Institute and Jason Crawford, who makes similar arguments for the liberatory power of technology, while also arguing that anything that can be for profit should be.But where is the left in all this?One would think that in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the market flounder and the state rise to the occasion with responses such as Operation War Speed’s vaccine development and rollouts, the left would be crowing about how it produced technological progress far better than all this market fundamentalism.It was the embrace of varieties of economic planning that produced the innovation needed to defeat the virus. For decades, large firms had gotten out of the business of vaccine development because it was insufficiently profitable. The mRNA vaccine delivery vehicle that is now recognized as revolutionary for the life sciences far beyond Covid had been sitting on the shelf for about a decade, spurned by uninterested, risk-averse investors.At the start of the pandemic, big pharma remained wary that transmission might fizzle out and they’d be left having spent billions on a white elephant. Instead, it was the advance purchase agreements, subsidies and coordination of the government – which does not need to turn a profit – via the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (Barda) and Operation Warp Speed that delivered the vaccine and saved the world.Meanwhile, free-market driven distribution of PPE, ventilators, medical fridges and oxygen had produced little more than corruption, bottlenecks and irrational allocation to those who could pay the highest price – not allocation where it was most needed. It was only when the White House deployed the Defense Production Act to enable the government to takeover distribution that the market’s deadly mess was cleared up.@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) 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      The left should be proudly flaunting the record of governments around the world in responding to Covid
      The left should be proudly flaunting the record of governments around the world in responding to Covid. It should make the case that all major technological and scientific advancements are best delivered by governments. And it should make the case that we – the people – should embrace faith in technological progress that is rooted in public investment.In other words, the left should be the real techno-optimists. But instead, in recent years, there has been a growing skepticism of technology on the contemporary left – from cynicism about space-faring to fear of genetic engineering and opposition to nuclear power.The left should be calling for government intervention to ensure decarbonization of data centers for AI. It should demand that we direct machine-learning research to prioritize the solving of grand scientific challenges such as prediction of protein folding instead of than bad fantasy-art fabrication and plagiarism. But instead, the most popular leftwing tech podcast calls for degrowth of generative AI and data centers due the latter’s carbon intensity.Progressives could be reminding the world of Neil Armstrong’s warning about the privatization of space – while still cheering on SpaceX’s work to develop reusable rocketry, radically reducing the cost of humans and payloads escaping our planet’s gravity well, all the better to deliver the space and planetary science we need to monitor and solve so many ecological challenges.We could be explaining how space colonization, a worthwhile multigenerational, perhaps millennia-long endeavor, will be public sector led or it will not happen, due to the risible likelihood of it being profitable. Musk won’t get to mars without Nasa. But instead the left declares space-faring to be settler-colonialism, oddly equating lifeless rocks with indigenous peoples.Environmentalists and green NGOs should be celebrating research into genetically modified crops that if successful will reduce pesticide use, nitrogen pollution, and land-use change. But instead, anti-GMO campaign groups vandalized an Italian research trial of rice-blast-resistant arborio (risotto) rice this summer, while Greenpeace successfully convinced a Filipino court to overturn approval of commercial cultivation of Golden Rice, a variety modified to combat vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness and even death in tens of thousands of children annually in Asia.This leftwing technophobia is something of an historic aberration. Traditionally, the left had always been enthusiastic about the potential of technology for liberation, to release us from drudgery and boundlessly expand our degrees of freedom – so long as technology was unfettered from the irrationality of profit and hierarchy and yoked to egalitarian reason. Prometheus plus Spartacus, as mid-century Marxist Hal Draper put it.We sometimes forget that the Communist Manifesto was itself a techno-optimist declaration of intent. It was a critique of capitalism but it was also a celebration of the new technologies, both industrial and social, that this system had set loose.From Karl Marx’s enthusiasm for the Industrial Revolution through to British Labour prime minister Harold Wilson’s call to harness the “white heat” of the Scientific Revolution, the conventional left position was that its programme would enable society to surpass the technological progress of mere capitalism. The point was not to retreat from capitalism, but instead to advance from it. We the people would develop the “forces of production” much more rapidly through conscious, democratic planning (albeit to greater or lesser degrees of such planning, depending on the flavour of leftist) rather than leaving such development to the fetters imposed by the risk-averse, poorly coordinated and unconscious anarchy of the market.@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline 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      The left should be the real techno-optimists. But instead, in recent years, there has been a growing skepticism of technology on the contemporary left
      Scientific, technological and industrial development would not only be faster, but broader, for the left would share the fruits of development with all humanity as rapidly as economic capacity would allow, rather than limiting their spread to those locations and populations where such production was profitable. A virtuous circle was then supposed to emerge as a result: with ever more humans benefiting from such progress, ever more humans would be able to contribute to science, engineering, medicine and agronomy, resulting in yet more progress. Liberation would beget ever accelerating liberation.It was instead the counter-Enlightenment right – aristocrats, the church, Burkean critics of the French Revolution – who were horrified at how technology and industry constantly revolutionized society, washing away ancient traditions and endlessly transforming social relations. The industrial engineering of the factory and the “social engineering” of democracy were the same thing to the reactionary, anti-modernist mind. The children of the Radical Enlightenment, both liberals and socialists, also made little distinction between social and technological progress, but thought them good, and were intent on carrying out French revolutionary Georges Danton’s commandment: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!” (“Audacity; yet more audacity; always audacity!”)Today, however, that leftwing optimism and confidence about humanity’s capacity for superior, entwined social, scientific and technological progress – once political economy was thoroughly democratized, has been lost, especially on the environmental left. It has been replaced by a techno-scepticism and cynicism about progress that varies from a soft neo-Luddism through to a more thoroughgoing Malthusian opposition to further economic development, prompted by a fear that we have long since outstripped the carrying capacity of the planet. Many believe industrial modernity was a mistake.(Note that these contemporary neo-Luddites should not be confused with the historical Luddites, the 19th Century stockingers – workers running stocking frame mechanical knitting machines – who engaged in riot and sabotage of automated textile machinery to protest employers’ use of such machines to drive down wages. It was the capitalist socio-economic relations surrounding this technology that the Luddites were protesting, not technology itself. If anything, today’s neo-Luddites should learn from their namesakes and focus less on the machines and more on who owns them.)All of this creeping anti-modernism threatens not merely human development and the expanding freedom that flows from it, but also undermines our ability to adequately respond to a range of existential threats, from climate change to pandemics. We are caught between the capitalist techno-hucksterism of Musk and the Malthusian technophobia of Greenpeace and friends.Thankfully, there is – to coin a phrase – a third way.In place of technophobia, the left’s traditional arguments around the “market alignment problem” still offer a better path toward enhancing human liberation. In place of both market fundamentalist neoliberalism and green-inflected neo-Luddism, the left should be talking once again about conscious design of the economy – and thence which technologies we want to develop and accelerate – through industrial policy, public ownership and other forms of democratic economic planning.As of 2024, we are roughly at the halfway point between the first climate treaty, 1997’s Kyoto Protocol, and the 2050 deadline for net-zero decarbonization of the economy. Yet due to policymakers’ overdependence on market-based mechanisms such as carbon-pricing (and the developing world’s understandable demand for fossil-fueled development), the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption has barely moved, dropping from 86% to 82%. But industrial policy domestically – building on Bidenomics’ version of the Green New Deal, the Inflation Reduction Act – and a properly egalitarian approach to climate finance and economic development internationally, can turn all this around.Our suite of antibiotics is rapidly failing and so in the absence of new discovery and development of new ones, as well as new diagnostic techniques and vaccines, clinicians warn that we are nearing a collapse of the foundation of antimicrobial protection upon which almost all of modern medicine depends. But decommodification of pharmaceutical production and, again, internationalism could solve the problem entirely.Similarly, pandemic monitoring and early warning systems require robust public-sector funding, restructuring of intellectual property rights, and even global democracy. All of this is optimized by a more muscular social democracy.@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) 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      There are so many areas where the left should have so much more to say about technology and progress
      Biodiversity loss threatens to undermine ecosystem services that we depend upon, but precision agriculture, new genetic techniques and “lab meat” can radically reduce humanity’s land-footprint, so long as there is strong state intervention to de-risk these new technologies.In order to overcome less well known but still profound risks from space debris and near-Earth asteroids, we need not cynicism about space, but a revival of space as primarily a public-sector enterprise and the sort of internationalism and global democracy that the left favours.But a left approach to technology is not just about avoiding harm, but about grand ambition. Getting to Mars and beyond, spreading life throughout the cosmos, is a gargantuan multi-generational endeavour, of the level of audacity that Danton commanded. Markets will never get us there if it isn’t profitable enough – and it is unlikely to be so.Artificial intelligence has already solved the hard problem of protein-folding, and soon it could radically enhance medical diagnosis, accelerate materials discovery, and reduce mineral exploration costs, and maybe even predict earthquakes, but much of this will require humans working alongside AI rather than AI replacing humans – meaning an increased cost over either humans or computers alone, which will thus tend to be far less attractive to capital. And so AI thus far appears to be primarily directed at much more profitable but far less freedom-enhancing endeavours such as enterprise software, theft from artists and musicians, and ever more panoptical state surveillance.To steal a phrase from artificial intelligence discourse, the market has an “alignment problem”. It is an algorithm independent of human control. And so it could be said that the techno-libertarians want to liberate themselves from all things that unconsciously dominate humanity – except for markets.There are so many areas where the left should have so much more to say about technology and progress, whether the challenges we face are existential threats or how to achieve the most soaring of ambitions.Neither Silicon Valley tech hucksters nor eco-austerity technophobes are up to the task.

      Leigh Phillips is a science writer and a political journalist More

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      in US Politics

      The left needs its own version of techno-optimism | Amana Fontanella-Khan

      by

      Today we live in an era defined by crisis. Indeed, we are facing multiple overlapping threats at once: from accelerating climate breakdown to the rise of authoritarianism across the world, we are in a situation that the historian Adam Tooze calls “polycrisis”. It is no wonder that hope is scarce, pessimism is high and despair is pervasive. As one meme that captures the grim, morbid mood of our age reads: “My retirement plan is civilisational collapse.”But not everyone shares this gloomy outlook. On the extreme other end of public sentiment sit Silicon Valley billionaires: they are some of the most optimistic people on earth. Of course, it’s easy to be optimistic when you are sitting on enough money to sway national politics. And yet, the source of their optimism isn’t simply money. It is also a deep-seated faith in unfettered technological advances.The left is rightly skeptical of the rosy “techno-optimism” advanced by the likes of Elon Musk, far-right mega-donor Peter Thiel and hedge fund billionaire Marc Andreessen. To tech oligarchs, technological advancement is best delivered by unfettered free market capitalism. The democratic state is a hindrance to be opposed, dismantled and destroyed – a set of goals that they now enjoy the power to achieve. Their ideology ignores inequality and glosses over the material harms their companies wreak on workers and the environment. Silicon Valley’s billionaire techno-optimism is clearly incompatible with leftwing values and should be rejected.But can and should the left advance its own techno-optimism? Can it put forward a vision of a brighter future that can compete with the grand visions of space exploration presented by Musk? Can it make the case that science and technology ought to be harnessed to deliver breakthroughs, abundance, sustainability and flourishing of human potential? And what would a progressive, leftwing techno-optimism look like? A techno-optimism that the 99% could get on board with, especially communities of color, and Black people who have historically been excluded, or even harmed, by scientific and technological breakthroughs? These are some of the questions that this new series, Breakthrough, launched by the Guardian examines.The left used to embrace technology. Indeed, the most leftwing prophet of all, Karl Marx, was so pro-technology that he is often described as “Promethean”, a reference to the Greek god who stole fire to give to humans. And it was feminist Shulamith Firestone who in the 1970s envisioned a day where we might have artificial wombs and be liberated from housework, thanks to automation: a feminist utopia delivered by technology.Some of the most groundbreaking sci-fi imagery that we encounter in books and movies like the Matrix, such as people living virtual lives entirely untethered from their bodies, were first popularized by JD Bernal, the Marxist scientist and futurist who designed the so-called Bernal spheres, for permanent space settlement, in 1929. Writing of Bernal’s influential book, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, Arthur C Clarke, considered one of the fathers of sci-fi, wrote that it was “perhaps the most remarkable attempt to predict the future of scientific possibility ever made, and certainly the most stimulating”. And it was all rooted in a firmly leftwing – and specifically, socialist – world view. And, of course, Star Trek, one of the most successful sci-fi series of all time, is widely considered to be depicting a socialist post-scarcity utopia.Today, however, the left is either fearful, agnostic or hostile towards technology. The green “degrowth” movement, for example, views industry and technology as the root of our climate crisis. For them, the solution to the climate crisis is not more technological growth and innovation, but less. As Kohei Saito, the author of the bestseller Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, said in an interview: “I was initially more optimistic about the development of technology” but, after reading degrowth theories, “[I] abandoned the possibility of green growth.”Saito goes on to say: “If we want to have more, in today’s sense, it will simply bring about ecological catastrophe.” Reducing consumption and production – austerity and retreat, in other words – is the only path forward for the degrowth movement. But this ignores the fact that technology can help us replace fossil fuels with other sources of clean, affordable and scalable energy that would allow for continued growth and advancement, without harming the environment.Meanwhile, leftwing leaders such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are very good at the necessary and essential task of confronting tech monopolies and billionaires, who concentrate economic and political power in their hands. But what is often lacking is a positive, bold vision for what a science and technology agenda for the 99% would look like – how technology in the right hands might help provide abundance for all.This is a lost opportunity. For all the pessimism and decline that we are witnessing – declining rates of graduation, declining birth rates, declining rates of homeownership and a rise in deaths of despair and skyrocketing rents – we also may well be on the brink of unprecedented breakthroughs and advances that could create record levels of wealth to be enjoyed by all, if these breakthroughs are accompanied by a political system that favors the wellbeing of all over billionaires. It may be hard to imagine such a system at the moment, given that corporate interests have seized nearly all levers of power, but it is nonetheless critical to do so. Do we have a political vision of how tech and science might work for us all?In 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) was recognised with not one, but two, Nobel prizes. Google’s DeepMind discovered 2.2m entirely new materials – 800 years worth of science in a few months. Last year saw the first time that sickle cell disease, a disease that was hitherto incurable and predominantly affects people of African descent, was reversed in a novel Crispr gene-editing therapy. Cancer and heart disease vaccines could be ready within the next five years. And now, for the first time, AI is solving the intractable protein-folding problem – one of biology’s greatest challenges – and designing new proteins, which is essential for discovering new drugs and understanding why certain diseases occur.View image in fullscreenSo why is it that technology is almost never invoked by the left as a solution to polycrisis in general, or the climate crisis in particular? Why is it that the only people who offer bold, inspiring visions for the transformative role of technology are the likes of reactionaries like Musk?There are, of course, reasons for this. Technology alone is no panacea. Nor does technology guarantee progress. In fact, periods of technological advancement have almost always been accompanied by violence, dispossession and war. Many leftwing philosophers in the post-war period, having witnessed the ravages of fascism and Nazism, equated technology – and even the very idea of progress itself, with violence.As the Frankfurt school philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – both of whom were Jewish intellectuals forced to flee Nazi Germany – argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Technology … aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.”And Black artists such as Gil Scott-Heron, witnessing the advances of the space age, asked what benefit the Apollo mission might have for those struggling to make ends meet back on Earth. In Whitey on the Moon, Scott-Heron writes:“A rat done bit my sister Nell.(with Whitey on the Moon)Her face and arms began to swell.(and Whitey’s on the Moon)I can’t pay no doctor bill.(but Whitey’s on the Moon)Ten years from now I’ll be paying still.(while Whitey’s on the Moon)”Those critiques continue to resonate with many today. Especially as we witness one billionaire after another fly into space, as life on Earth grows more perilous by the day. And as billionaires push not simply the frontiers of space, but of the human body itself, it is right to remind ourselves of the legacy and history of eugenics. We can only benefit from warnings – such as those made by Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres – that the pursuit of longevity and eternal life, as well as transhumanist projects such as Neuralink, risk perpetuating eugenicist ideals in the 21st century.Perhaps, though, we would do well to adopt the position of the Frankfurt school philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, who accepted many of the critiques that his colleagues made of the Enlightenment, but who also left space for the possibility that it could go either way. In a 1941 essay on technology, he wrote: “[Technology] can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty, scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil.”He envisioned a world in which technological progress might allow human flourishing and self-realization. In a world that is technologically advanced enough, “everyone could think and act by himself, speak his own language, have his own emotions and follow his own passions” once we are “no longer chained to competitive efficiency”.Perhaps the most important condition for us to flourish is to address our climate crisis. Today, to warm our homes and cook our meals, we still set fire to things. Those who cook on gas stoves heat their food over literal flames, as cavemen once did. If we are to move out of the fossil fuel era into a new, cleaner and sustainable era – while still maintaining our freedom to travel and fly and enjoy the material comforts that we do today – this will require a combination of political will and technology. Whether fusion energy, fission or a host of renewables, the path to a new era of energy production requires new technologies and breakthroughs. Right now, for example, Silicon Valley billionaires are investing billions in chasing the holy grail of limitless, clean fusion energy to power AI. Can and will the state match those efforts? And should the left make the case that it should?There is no inherent value in technology. It is neither good nor bad. It is up to us how machines are used. And indeed, who makes those machines, how, and to what ends are all political questions. While we push to change our political system and direct it towards a more equitable, inclusive and liberatory path, let us also, at the same time, push for technology to move in that direction, too.We live in dark, depressing and – frankly – terrifying times. Our planet’s fragile ecosystem is fast spiraling out of control. Our democracies are fracturing. And billionaires are seizing for themselves all of the spoils of the digital era. Technology might well be the thing that pushes us over the edge. But it could also, if we play our cards right, allow us to exit our era of polycrisis. But that won’t happen on its own. The path towards better technology – tech for the 99% – can only be achieved through a politics of the 99%. And it must start with a vision.It is time that the left deploy all of our energies and powers towards a political vision of abundance. Abundance that is delivered by a movement for the 99% that pushes for technological growth and development for the benefit of all.We hope this series might be a place for that political vision to be discussed, debated and laid out so that optimism about the future – in particular, techno-optimism – is no longer just something that the very rich in this world can have.

      Amana Fontanella-Khan is the Guardian US opinion editor More

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      Trump’s NIH pick makes pitch for good science – in this administration?

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      Donald Trump’s nominee to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, told senators he was committed to ensuring scientists “have the resources they need” – even as the $48bn agency he hopes to lead has become a focus of the administration’s ideological war and cost-cutting efforts.At a confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Bhattacharya made a pitch for free scientific inquiry and an examination of the chronic disease epidemic, now a cornerstone of Republican health rhetoric, while hoping to serve in an administration that has frightened scientists into self-censorship.“Science should be an engine for freedom – knowledge and freedom. It shouldn’t be pushing mandates for vaccines,” said Bhattacharya, referring to pandemic-era mandates, and articulating a vein of libertarian thinking that has rejuvenated Republican health rhetoric in the time since. “If science is a force for freedom and knowledge, it will have universal support.”Bhattacharya ignored the Republican party’s role in sowing distrust of the scientific establishment, argued “good data” would change minds and, in the words of one senator, strained credulity by asserting the US president would not ask him to do anything illegal.For a man whose pandemic-era rise was built on questioning authority, some assertions landed between wishful thinking and willful blindness. But for all of Bhattacharya’s remarkable answers, dissent was muted.Some in academia now see Bhattacharya as the least bad option to run the NIH. And, after confirming Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nation’s leading vaccine critic, to lead the department of health, there is little doubt Republicans have the votes.“Maybe I’m naive, senator,” Bhattacharya said in response to a question about vaccine skepticism, “but I believe very fundamentally that research, if replicable, if done right, is so persuasive will move people to take actions.”Bhattacharya was at one time a low-profile researcher at Stanford University, himself receiving $3.7m in NIH grants, according to an agency database. His star rose among conservatives when he advocated against lockdowns in 2020. He was ostracized by the scientific establishment and blacklisted by Twitter – only to be invited to the platform’s headquarters by the billionaire Elon Musk.In turn, he became a darling of the right: hosting his own podcast devoted to questioning medical consensus, working as an expert witness in courts (even if courts did not always find him convincing) and often appearing on Catholic radio programs.But Bhattacharya’s pitch for free scientific inquiry is in striking conflict with the administration’s actions. His nomination comes as the research world has been rattled by mass firings, funding freezes, censorship and a measles outbreak that claimed the first American life in nearly a decade.Some of the most pressing questions came from the Republican senator Bill Cassidy, a physician from Louisiana who has steadfastly refused to engage in the anti-vaccine conspiracy theories peddled by some colleagues.“There is now a child who died of a vaccine preventable disease in Texas,” Cassidy said about the measles outbreak.Would the nominee spend even more taxpayer dollars to research a link between vaccines and autism when the idea has been “exhaustively” debunked?“I don’t think there’s a link between the [measles, mumps and rubella] vaccine and autism,” said Bhattacharya. “The only reason I’m not saying wholeheartedly yes” – that federal dollars could be better spent elsewhere – is “there are people who might disagree with me.”“There are people who disagree that the world is round,” Cassidy retorted. “People still think Elvis is alive.”“My sense, my inclination is to give people good data,” said Bhattacharya. “That’s how you address those concerns.”“I’m not sure at what end point we say we have good data,” said Cassidy, appearing unsatisfied.At the NIH alone, the Musk-led “department of government efficiency” (Doge) fired roughly 1,200 workers. Bhattacharya characterized this as “personnel decisions” to which he was not privy. The administration has also frozen grant funding in a probably illegal scheme, is still gumming up orders to thaw funding and is seeking to cut $4bn from grants that primarily go to universities and colleges.Trump touted his campaign to end “the tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government” in his state of the union speech only the evening before – a policy that in practical terms is an ideological review of NIH grants.“I wasn’t involved in any decision making at the NIH up to this point,” was a common refrain for Bhattacharya when questioned about whether he would protect research funding.More broadly, the funding freezes and proposed cuts have sown chaos in the research world – academic institutions have frozen hiring, postgraduate researchers are struggling to find placements amid budget cuts, and delayed funding has many researchers worried their projects are on the verge of shuttering.Arguably the most pointed question of the hearing came from the Democratic senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire: “If directed by the president to take action that would break the law, would you follow the law or would you follow the president’s directive?”“Senator, I don’t believe the president will ever ask me to break the law,” said Bhattacharya.Hassan said: “Well, that strains credulity given, especially the last few weeks, and it’s a disappointing answer.” More