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    ‘I do not think ethical surveillance can exist’: Rumman Chowdhury on accountability in AI

    Rumman Chowdhury often has trouble sleeping, but, to her, this is not a problem that requires solving. She has what she calls “2am brain”, a different sort of brain from her day-to-day brain, and the one she relies on for especially urgent or difficult problems. Ideas, even small-scale ones, require care and attention, she says, along with a kind of alchemic intuition. “It’s just like baking,” she says. “You can’t force it, you can’t turn the temperature up, you can’t make it go faster. It will take however long it takes. And when it’s done baking, it will present itself.”It was Chowdhury’s 2am brain that first coined the phrase “moral outsourcing” for a concept that now, as one of the leading thinkers on artificial intelligence, has become a key point in how she considers accountability and governance when it comes to the potentially revolutionary impact of AI.Moral outsourcing, she says, applies the logic of sentience and choice to AI, allowing technologists to effectively reallocate responsibility for the products they build onto the products themselves – technical advancement becomes predestined growth, and bias becomes intractable.“You would never say ‘my racist toaster’ or ‘my sexist laptop’,” she said in a Ted Talk from 2018. “And yet we use these modifiers in our language about artificial intelligence. And in doing so we’re not taking responsibility for the products that we build.” Writing ourselves out of the equation produces systematic ambivalence on par with what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” – the wilful and cooperative ignorance that enabled the Holocaust. “It wasn’t just about electing someone into power that had the intent of killing so many people,” she says. “But it’s that entire nations of people also took jobs and positions and did these horrible things.”Chowdhury does not really have one title, she has dozens, among them Responsible AI fellow at Harvard, AI global policy consultant and former head of Twitter’s Meta team (Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency and Accountability). AI has been giving her 2am brain for some time. Back in 2018 Forbes named her one of the five people “building our AI future”.A data scientist by trade, she has always worked in a slightly undefinable, messy realm, traversing the realms of social science, law, philosophy and technology, as she consults with companies and lawmakers in shaping policy and best practices. Around AI, her approach to regulation is unique in its staunch middle-ness – both welcoming of progress and firm in the assertion that “mechanisms of accountability” should exist.Effervescent, patient and soft-spoken, Chowdhury listens with disarming care. She has always found people much more interesting than what they build or do. Before skepticism around tech became reflexive, Chowdhury had fears too – not of the technology itself, but of the corporations that developed and sold it.As the global lead at the responsible AI firm Accenture, she led the team that designed a fairness evaluation tool that pre-empted and corrected algorithmic bias. She went on to start Parity, an ethical AI consulting platform that seeks to bridge “different communities of expertise”. At Twitter – before it became one of the first teams disbanded under Elon Musk – she hosted the company’s first-ever algorithmic bias bounty, inviting outside programmers and data scientists to evaluate the site’s code for potential biases. The exercise revealed a number of problems, including that the site’s photo-cropping software seemed to overwhelmingly prefer faces that were young, feminine and white.This is a strategy known as red-teaming, in which programmers and hackers from outside an organization are encouraged to try and curtail certain safeguards to push a technology to “do bad things to identify what bad things it’s capable of”, says Chowdhury. These kinds of external checks and balances are rarely implemented in the world of tech because of technologists’ fear of “people touching their baby”.She is currently working on another red-teaming event for Def Con – a convention hosted by the hacker organization AI Village. This time, hundreds of hackers are gathering to test ChatGPT, with the collaboration of its founder OpenAI, along with Microsoft, Google and the Biden administration. The “hackathon” is scheduled to run for over 20 hours, providing them with a dataset that is “totally unprecedented”, says Chowdhury, who is organizing the event with Sven Cattell, founder of AI Village and Austin Carson, president of the responsible AI non-profit SeedAI.In Chowdhury’s view, it’s only through this kind of collectivism that proper regulation – and regulation enforcement – can occur. In addition to third-party auditing, she also serves on multiple boards across Europe and the US helping to shape AI policy. She is wary, she tells me, of the instinct to over-regulate, which could lead models to overcorrect and not address ingrained issues. When asked about gay marriage, for example, ChatGPT and other generative AI tools “totally clam up”, trying to make up for the amount of people who have pushed the models to say negative things. But it’s not easy, she adds, to define what is toxic and what is hateful. “It’s a journey that will never end,” she tells me, smiling. “But I’m fine with that.”Early on, when she first started working in tech, she realized that “technologists don’t always understand people, and people don’t always understand technology”, and sought to bridge that gap. In its broadest interpretation, she tells me, her work deals with understanding humans through data. “At the core of technology is this idea that, like, humanity is flawed and that technology can save us,” she says, noting language like “body hacks” that implies a kind of optimization unique to this particular age of technology. There is an aspect of it that kind of wishes we were “divorced from humanity”.Chowdhury has always been drawn to humans, their messiness and cloudiness and unpredictability. As an undergrad at MIT, she studied political science, and, later, after a disillusioning few months in non-profits in which she “knew we could use models and data more effectively, but nobody was”, she went to Columbia for a master’s degree in quantitative methods.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the last month, she has spent a week in Spain helping to carry out the launch of the Digital Services Act, another in San Francisco for a cybersecurity conference, another in Boston for her fellowship, and a few days in New York for another round of Def Con press. After a brief while in Houston, where she’s based, she has upcoming talks in Vienna and Pittsburgh on AI nuclear misinformation and Duolingo, respectively.At its core, what she prescribes is a relatively simple dictum: listen, communicate, collaborate. And yet, even as Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI, testifies before Congress that he’s committed to preventing AI harms, she still sees familiar tactics at play. When an industry experiences heightened scrutiny, barring off prohibitive regulation often means taking control of a narrative – ie calling for regulation, while simultaneously spending millions in lobbying to prevent the passing of regulatory laws.The problem, she says, is a lack of accountability. Internal risk analysis is often distorted within a company because risk management doesn’t often employ morals. “There is simply risk and then your willingness to take that risk,” she tells me. When the risk of failure or reputational harm becomes too great, it moves to an arena where the rules are bent in a particular direction. In other words: “Let’s play a game where I can win because I have all of the money.”But people, unlike machines, have indefinite priorities and motivations. “There are very few fundamentally good or bad actors in the world,” she says. “People just operate on incentive structures.” Which in turn means that the only way to drive change is to make use of those structures, ebbing them away from any one power source. Certain issues can only be tackled at scale, with cooperation and compromise from many different vectors of power, and AI is one of them.Though, she readily attests that there are limits. Points where compromise is not an option. The rise of surveillance capitalism, she says, is hugely concerning to her. It is a use of technology that, at its core, is unequivocally racist and therefore should not be entertained. “We cannot put lipstick on a pig,” she said at a recent talk on the future of AI at New York University’s School of Social Sciences. “I do not think ethical surveillance can exist.”Chowdhury recently wrote an op-ed for Wired in which she detailed her vision for a global governance board. Whether it be surveillance capitalism or job disruption or nuclear misinformation, only an external board of people can be trusted to govern the technology – one made up of people like her, not tied to any one institution, and one that is globally representative. On Twitter, a few users called her framework idealistic, referring to it as “blue sky thinking” or “not viable”. It’s funny, she tells me, given that these people are “literally trying to build sentient machines”.She’s familiar with the dissonance. “It makes sense,” she says. We’re drawn to hero narratives, the assumption that one person is and should be in charge at any given time. Even as she organizes the Def Con event, she tells me, people find it difficult to understand that there is a team of people working together every step of the way. “We’re getting all this media attention,” she says, “and everybody is kind of like, ‘Who’s in charge?’ And then we all kind of look at each other and we’re like, ‘Um. Everyone?’” More

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    Failure to launch: Twitter glitches deal double blow to Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis

    The screen kept saying “Preparing to launch”. But this wasn’t one of Elon Musk’s space rockets that soars through the stratosphere and settles into a comfortable orbit. This was one that blew up on the pad in a dazzling ball of flame.The eccentric billionaire had invited Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, to the somewhat niche Twitter Spaces – a dedicated audio streaming feature on the social media platform – to announce his run for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.For Musk it looked like an easy win in his effort to make Twitter the public square, especially one that attracts rightwing blowhards, and steal a march on Fox News. For DeSantis it seemed like a chance to make a bit of political history, show off his tech savvy and poke his rival Donald Trump, once the undisputed world tweeting champion.Even better, DeSantis could hold court in an audio-only format without having to meet and greet real people, famously not his strength. But what liberals may have feared as the ultimate alliance of two anti-woke supervillains proved to carry all the menace of a damp dishcloth.Once people had got beyond the “What is Twitter Spaces?” stage, they were greeted with blank windows, broken snatches of conversation and other technical glitches.The site creaked and buckled under the demand of more than half a million users.Moderator David Sacks, a Republican donor and friend of Musk, tried to find a silver lining: “We’ve got so many people here we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign.”The debacle was a fresh blow to the credibility of Musk, whose Tesla brand has lost its shine of late and who, having laid off dozens of Twitter staff, seemed to be on the end of divine retribution from the tech gods.It was an even bigger political disaster for DeSantis, who has built the entire theory of his candidacy around the idea that he is an efficient chief executive of Florida who pays attention to detail. Even Trump used to be able to put out 280 characters on Twitter, admittedly often in a seemingly random order.Comedian Trevor Noah once likened DeSantis to Terminator 2, an upgrade on the Trump model that was more efficient and more lethal. But here was the robot in meltdown with smoke pouring out of its ears.Soon, with delicious irony, the phrase “Failure to Launch” was trending on Twitter itself, while one headline observed: “Ron’s Desaster.” Both Trump and Joe Biden seized on the flop to score points and raise funds. A Trump campaign spokesperson said: “Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter nearly half an hour of malfunctions, DeSantis finally got going. He declared: “I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback.” But by then thousands of people had given up and tuned out.The governor went to have a dig at Trump. “Government is not entertainment,” he said. “It’s not about building a brand or virtue signaling.”Predictably he griped about coronavirus pandemic measures and the media. An unhealthy chunk of the conversation was devoted to promoting Twitter. The governor said: “I think what was done with Twitter was really significant for the future of our country.”And improbably at the end he said of crash-prone Twitter Spaces: “This is a great platform.”The sorry experience did little to suggest that Musk knows how to run a social media platform or that DeSantis is capable of governing a global superpower armed with nuclear weapons.Perhaps their sole consolation is that they had both been upstaged in the evening news bulletins by the death of rock’n’roller Tina Turner at the age of 83. They could have done worse than fill their long silences with her posthumous plea: We Don’t Need Another Hero. More

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    With DeSantis campaign event, Musk seeks to shore up a sinking Twitter

    The news that Ron DeSantis will launch his presidential campaign during a live Twitter appearance with Elon Musk marks the tech billionaire’s latest attempts to shore up engagement with the social network at a moment of crisis for the company.The event – which will take place Wednesday on Twitter Spaces, a live stream feature that is often broadcasted at the top of Twitter’s feed – was confirmed by Musk on Tuesday afternoon. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal CEO Summit, Musk called the Florida governor’s decision “ground breaking” and said it won’t be the last political event that Twitter will host.When asked if Musk plans to interview other candidates, particularly Democrats, he said “absolutely”.“It’s important that Twitter have both the reality and perception of a level playing field as a place where all voices are heard,” he said. “This will be the first time something like this will be happening on social media with real time questions and answers. Let’s see what happens.”For Musk, the upshot of DeSantis’s appearance will be increased visibility for Twitter at a moment when the company’s relevance is dwindling. The social network has floundered since Musk took over, rolling out mass layoffs and launching new projects amid runaway profit losses. Musk previously claimed the company was losing $4m per day and undertook massive cost-cutting measures, including firing more than half the company’s workforce.In the months since, Twitter under Musk’s leadership has continued to struggle – with advertisers fleeing the increasingly unstable platform and the company facing lawsuits for not paying rent in multiple office locations around the world. Increasing outages have suggested the platform’s basic infrastructure is struggling amid the growing job cuts.In an attempt to make the flailing platform more profitable, Musk launched a subscription service for verification that largely failed. He also ventured into journalistic endeavors with the Twitter Files – an exposé project published on the platform that he said is now dead. Musk has also spoken publicly about his desire to turn Twitter into an “everything app”, similar to China’s WeChat, that would roll social media in with payments and other services.Now, Musk may be courting additional revenue streams by platforming conservatives. Earlier this month, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced he would be reviving his popular show on the site, although Musk said on his own account that there was no deal signed between the platform and Carlson.Musk told the audience at Tuesday’s event that the Twitter event does not amount to his endorsement of DeSantis or any candidate. But while Musk has described himself as a moderate who has voted for Democrats in the past, he has been vocal about his disdain for Democrats and progressives, actively participating in the far-right’s culture war against progressivism.His tweeted missives are often in line with major Republican talking points – decrying Covid restrictions and denigrating the media. In November, he urged his followers to vote for a Republican Congress. As DeSantis rolls back trans rights, including access to gender affirming care, Musk has echoed Republican misinformation equating gender affirming care and puberty blockers with sterilization. Under his management, Twitter has reinstated the accounts of far-right organizers and Neo Nazis, as well as rightwing politicians including Donald Trump, who had previously violated the social media company’s rules.Speaking on Tuesday, Musk said his vision is for Twitter to act as a “public town square where more and more organizations … make announcements”. For the billionaire, ever the provocative tweeter, that public town square must come with limited constraints on what is said.“I’m not going to mitigate what I say because that would be inhibiting freedom of speech,” Musk said, answering a question about his recent controversial tweets about George Soros. “That doesn’t mean you have to agree with what I say. For those who would advocate censorship … if you succeed in that, it’s only a matter of time before it gets turned on you.” More

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    When the tech boys start asking for new regulations, you know something’s up | John Naughton

    Watching the opening day of the US Senate hearings on AI brought to mind Marx’s quip about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Except this time it’s the other way round. Some time ago we had the farce of the boss of Meta (neé Facebook) explaining to a senator that his company made money from advertising. This week we had the tragedy of seeing senators quizzing Sam Altman, the new acceptable face of the tech industry.Why tragedy? Well, as one of my kids, looking up from revising O-level classics, once explained to me: “It’s when you can see the disaster coming but you can’t do anything to stop it.” The trigger moment was when Altman declared: “We think that regulatory interventions by government will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.” Warming to the theme, he said that the US government “might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities”. He believed that companies like his can “partner with governments, including ensuring that the most powerful AI models adhere to a set of safety requirements, facilitating processes that develop and update safety measures and examining opportunities for global coordination.”To some observers, Altman’s testimony looked like big news: wow, a tech boss actually saying that his industry needs regulation! Less charitable observers (like this columnist) see two alternative interpretations. One is that it’s an attempt to consolidate OpenAI’s lead over the rest of the industry in large language models (LLMs), because history suggests that regulation often enhances dominance. (Remember AT&T.) The other is that Altman’s proposal is an admission that the industry is already running out of control, and that he sees bad things ahead. So his proposal is either a cunning strategic move or a plea for help. Or both.As a general rule, whenever a CEO calls for regulation, you know something’s up. Meta, for example, has been running ads for ages in some newsletters saying that new laws are needed in cyberspace. Some of the cannier crypto crowd have also been baying for regulation. Mostly, these calls are pitches for corporations – through their lobbyists – to play a key role in drafting the requisite legislation. Companies’ involvement is deemed essential because – according to the narrative – government is clueless. As Eric Schmidt – the nearest thing tech has to Machiavelli – put it last Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, the AI industry needs to come up with regulations before the government tries to step in “because there’s no way a non-industry person can understand what is possible. It’s just too new, too hard, there’s not the expertise. There’s no one in the government who can get it right. But the industry can roughly get it right and then the government can put a regulatory structure around it.”Don’t you just love that idea of the tech boys roughly “getting it right”? Similar claims are made by foxes when pitching for henhouse-design contracts. The industry’s next strategic ploy will be to plead that the current worries about AI are all based on hypothetical scenarios about the future. The most polite term for this is baloney. ChatGPT and its bedfellows are – among many other things – social media on steroids. And we already know how these platforms undermine democratic institutions and possibly influence elections. The probability that important elections in 2024 will not be affected by this kind of AI is precisely zero.Besides, as Scott Galloway has pointed out in a withering critique, it’s also a racing certainty that chatbot technology will exacerbate the epidemic of loneliness that is afflicting young people across the world. “Tinder’s former CEO is raising venture capital for an AI-powered relationship coach called Amorai that will offer advice to young adults struggling with loneliness. She won’t be alone. Call Annie is an ‘AI friend’ you can phone or FaceTime to ask anything you want. A similar product, Replika, has millions of users.” And of course we’ve all seen those movies – such as Her and Ex Machina – that vividly illustrate how AIs insert themselves between people and relationships with other humans.In his opening words to the Senate judiciary subcommittee’s hearing, the chairman, Senator Blumenthal, said this: “Congress has a choice now. We had the same choice when we faced social media. We failed to seize that moment. The result is: predators on the internet; toxic content; exploiting children, creating dangers for them… Congress failed to meet the moment on social media. Now we have the obligation to do it on AI before the threats and the risks become real.”Amen to that. The only thing wrong with the senator’s stirring introduction is the word “before”. The threats and the risks are already here. And we are about to find out if Marx’s view of history was the one to go for.What I’ve been readingCapitalist punishmentWill AI Become the New McKinsey? is a perceptive essay in the New Yorker by Ted Chiang.Founders keepersHenry Farrell has written a fabulous post called The Cult of the Founders on the Crooked Timber blog.Superstore meThe Dead Silence of Goods is a lovely essay in the Paris Review by Adrienne Raphel about Annie Ernaux’s musings on the “superstore” phenomenon. More

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    Will Democracy Survive the Rise of China?

    The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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    Montana becomes first US state to ban TikTok

    Montana has became the first US state to ban TikTok after the governor signed legislation prohibiting mobile application stores from offering the app within the state by next year.The move is among the most dramatic in a series of US escalations against TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance. TikTok has come under increasing scrutiny over its ties to China, amid concerns that such links could pose a national security threat.The federal government, and more than half of US states, have prohibited the app on government devices and the Biden administration has threatened a national ban unless its parent company sells its shares.The company has previously denied that it has ever shared data with the Chinese government and has said the company would not do so if asked.TikTok said in a statement that the Montana bill “infringes on the first amendment rights of the people of Montana by unlawfully banning TikTok”, and that the company intends to “defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana”.In March, TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, was forced to defend his company’s relationship with China at a bipartisan congressional hearing, with lawmakers also grilling the CEO on the social network’s impact on the mental health of young people.TikTok is one of the world’s most popular social networks with more than 100 million US users, and questions remain about how such bans will be enforced and what their impact will be on creators who use the platform.Montana’s new law, which will take effect 1 January, prohibits downloads of TikTok in the state and would fine any “entity” – an app store or TikTok – $10,000 per day for each time someone “is offered the ability” to access the social media platform or download the app. The penalties would not apply to users.Montana’s ban is expected to face legal challenges, and will serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America that many national lawmakers have envisioned.Gianforte also prohibited the use of all social media applications that collect and provide personal information or data to foreign adversaries on government-issued devices. Among the apps he listed are WeChat, whose parent company is headquartered in China; and Telegram Messenger, which was founded in Russia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOpponents consider the measure to be government overreach and say Montana residents could easily circumvent the ban by using a virtual private network, a service that shields internet users by encrypting their data traffic, preventing others from observing their web browsing. Meanwhile, internet freedom advocates and others have criticized the US crackdown as amounting to censorship.Keegan Medrano, policy director for the ACLU of Montana, said the legislature “trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment”.NetChoice, a trade group that counts Google and TikTok as its members, called the bill unconstitutional.“This is a clear violation of the constitution, which prohibits the government from blocking Americans from accessing constitutionally-protected speech online via websites or apps,” Carl Szabo, who serves as the group’s vice president and general counsel, said in a statement. More

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    Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong

    Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Smith’s first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, captures the drama with light prose and a breezy tone. He observes that internet news morphed from being a vehicle for the left into the tool of the right. It’s a lesson worth remembering.Technology is agnostic. The market yearns to build the better mousetrap. Secret sauce seldom stays secret for long. Barack Obama demonstrated a then-unparalleled mastery of electoral micro-targeting; in turn, the first Trump campaign harnessed Facebook and social media in a manner few envisioned.Traffic is the narrative of an industry and its personas. Smith spills ink on the overlapping relationships between the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous rightwing website, Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge. He stresses that ideology tethered to accessible if potentially inflammatory content gains eyeballs and clicks. Kittens are cute. Listicles are good for laughs. On the other hand, dick pics get stale quickly unless there’s a story behind them. Brett Favre is the exception that proves the rule.Smith recounts discussions with Steve Bannon, the dark lord of Trumpworld. He describes a Trump Tower meeting, amid the 2016 campaign. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, “exuded confidence, but it didn’t feel like a winning campaign”, Smith observes. “He didn’t seem to have much to do.”But there was more to the confab than atmospherics. There was insight.“Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, Bannon told me, based on the candidate’s political views.” Rather, “Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it.”Charisma counts. Said differently, Hillary Clinton was only a candidate. Unlike Trump, she did not spearhead a movement, evoke broad loyalty or elicit passion. Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born socialist, stood in marked contrast. And he didn’t give speeches at Goldman Sachs or summer on Martha’s Vineyard.Sanders connected with the white working class and Latinos. A creature of the beer track, he came within two-tenths of a point of beating Clinton in Iowa then clobbered her in New Hampshire. The Democratic primary extended into July. The performance of the senator from Vermont presaged Clinton’s election day woes.“BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement,” Smith writes. “Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie, he asked me.”Smith’s answer satisfied no one, not even himself: “I told Bannon that we came from different traditions.”Greed, sex and ambition also marble Smith’s tale. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and a $10m investor in Semafor, faces a dozen federal criminal counts. The company plans to repurchase his shares. Tainted money is a flashpoint for aggrieved creditors.The pursuit of coolness, cash and desirability seldom respects boundaries. Like moths, journalists gravitate to flames only to be burned. In one chapter, Smith recalls the plight of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson.Johnson came from the Blaze, the hard-right brainchild of Glenn Beck, purveyor, Smith says, of “deranged conspiracies about Barack Obama before [Fox] pushed him out in 2011”. As for Johnson, he generated clickable copy. “He had a gift for traffic,” Smith writes. Johnson also had a plagiarism problem. In hindsight, he flashed warning signs. Apparently, Smith elected to ignore them.“I wasn’t really worried about whether Benny would fit in,” he admits. “I should have been.”Johnson was not another David Brooks or George Will. He was not “a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country”. Rather, Johnson crystallized something new, “a conservative movement more concerned about aesthetics than policy, motivated by nostalgia and culture more than by the overt subject matter of politics”.These days, owning the libs takes precedence over policy debate. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mien matters more than ever.Smith writes: “I sometimes wonder now if Benny was headed toward the kind of rightwing populism that Donald Trump came to embody.”Perhaps. Then again, “bullshit” and looks have always populated politics and the ranks of politicians. Smith’s words, again. After BuzzFeed, Johnson bounced to the National Review then on to the Daily Caller. He is now at Newsmax and Turning Point USA, the $39m non-profit led by Charlie Kirk.Elsewhere, Smith recalls an offer made by Disney in 2013, to purchase BuzzFeed for $450m with the “potential of earning $200m more”. Smith’s colleagues rejected the deal. The Disney chief, Bob Iger, exploded: “Fuck him, he loses, the company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”He was prescient.“By 2022, the internet had splintered,” Smith notes.America now faces a rerun of the last presidential election, Biden v Trump again.In his conclusion, Smith writes: “Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.”Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was the web. Sometimes, creative destruction is just destruction, slapped with a gauzy label.
    Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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    Biden team to propose strict vehicle pollution limits to boost EV sales

    The Biden administration will propose strict new automobile pollution limits requiring that all-electric vehicles account for as many as two of every three new vehicles sold in the US by 2032 in a plan that would transform the US auto industry.Under the proposed regulation, expected to be released by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday, greenhouse gas emissions for the 2027 through 2032 model years for passenger vehicles would be limited to even stricter levels than the auto industry agreed to in 2021.“This is a massive undertaking,” said John Bozzella, the president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, told the New York Times, which first reported on the proposed limits. “It is nothing short of a complete transformation of the automotive industrial base and the automotive market.”The auto industry is expected to push back against the plan, which comes nearly two years after carmakers pledged to make electric vehicles comprise half of US new car sales by 2030 as part of a history-making transition from gasoline-powered engines to battery-powered vehicles. Environmental groups have applauded the ambitious limits proposed by the Biden administration.The proposal would require at least 54% of new vehicles sold in the US to be electric by 2030, four percentage points higher than the 2021 goal that the industry previously agreed to, and up to 67% of new vehicles by 2032. The 2021 agreement came after strong pressure from President Biden, who signed an executive order setting a target for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be zero-emissions vehicles.The president also wants automakers to raise gas mileage and cut tailpipe pollution between now and model year 2026, which would be a significant step toward his pledge to cut US planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.Electric vehicles accounted for only 7.2% of US vehicle sales in the first quarter of the year, but the share of EV sales is on the rise – last year it was 5.8% of new vehicle sales.The EPA declined to offer details ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, but confirmed in a statement that, as directed by Biden’s order, it is “developing new standards that will … accelerate the transition to a zero-emissions transportation future, protecting people and the planet”.The proposed regulation isn’t expected to become final until next year. More