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      Familiar vitriol, and Musk the enabler: key takeaways from Trump’s X interview

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      Donald Trump returned to the social media platform that skyrocketed his career for a live discussion with Elon Musk. The former president unleashed familiar rambling, vitriolic talking points to a sympathetic Musk.Here are key takeaways from the event.1. A terribly slow startThe event started about 45 minutes later than scheduled, with listeners struggling to join the live stream. The issues echoed the meltdown that took place during Ron DeSantis’s campaign launch on X last year, which experts at the time attributed to infrastructure issues on the platform after Musk laid off much of its workforce and shut down multiple data centers.On Monday, Musk attributed the delay to a cyberattack, namely, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in which bad actors deliberately flood a website with traffic to overwhelm its servers. That claim could not independently be verified, and it can be difficult to distinguish between a deliberate DDoS attack and a routine outage caused by an influx of legitimate traffic to a site.Trump, meanwhile, attributed the glitches to regular traffic, congratulating Musk for “[breaking] every record in the book with so many millions of people” on the live interview.2. The greatest hits Once the conversation got going, Trump rehashed the greatest hits, and biggest lies, from his rallies – absurdly claiming he oversaw the “greatest economy in the world”, lying about his own record, about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s records, and spreading conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic, his criminal cases and election security.His most dangerous lies were about immigration and climate change. He baselessly claimed that migrants arriving at the US southern border were dangerous, calling them “murderers” as well as “non-productive” people. Trump, who built his political career on promises to “build the wall” at the southern border, has ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric lately, and promised a dystopian vision for mass deportations and migrant labor camps if he is reelected.He also dismissed climate change as a threat, saying that rising sea levels would at best create more “oceanfront properties”. That latter point, which he has made before, is, of course, wrong – rising sea levels are more likely to destroy beachfront property, devastating coastal communities. Sea level rise is, however, an actual driver of global migration – as it creates climate refugees. 3. Trump derides HarrisTrump also seemed to sharpen his critiques of Kamala Harris, who he has struggled to attack as her nascent campaign gains momentum. The former president attempted to paint Harris as a “radical” leftist, falsely suggesting that she wanted to ban fracking and defund the police. He also came at her with classic sexism, insisting on calling her by her first name, rather than by her title or surname, as he does for Joe Biden. He also lingered on her looks, saying that she was a “beautiful woman” who looked like Melania Trump, his wife.And for a measure of intersectionality, he also repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s south Asian first name.  4. Musk the enablerThroughout the conversation, the two men lavished praise and admiration on each other. Trump, who has been a critic of electric vehicles, called Musk’s Teslas “incredible”. Musk, meanwhile, nodded along and agreed as Trump that it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry. At the beginning of the event, the tech billionaire had noted his belief that “no one is themselves in an adversarial interview” and that the conversation was “aimed at kind of open-minded independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind”.But in the end, the softball format seemed like it was aimed more at those who had already bought into Trump and Musk’s rightwing politics. At the end, Musk told Trump he was “on the right path”. More

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      Trump rehashes vitriol and falsehoods in rambling talk with Musk – as it happened

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      Elon Musk says X is suffering from “a massive DDOS attack” that he implies has delayed the broadcast of his interview with Donald Trump on the platform:DDOS stands for distributed denial of service and occurs when a site is flooded with traffic in an effort to make it inaccessible.This blog is closing now – thanks for following along. You can read our full story on the interview here:Donald Trump sat down with billionaire Elon Musk on Monday for a rambling and vitriolic interview that revisited many of the former president’s most divisive talking points.The interview on X, which is owned by Musk, got off to an inauspicious start, with technical issues that initially prevented many users from watching the conversation. Musk blamed the delay on a “massive” cyber-attack, but the cause of the glitch was not entirely clear.After the interview started more than 40 minutes late, Trump began the conversation by recounting the failed assassination attempt against him last month at Musk’s request. Although Trump previously said he would only share the story once at the Republican convention last month, he again discussed in detail his brush with death at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which he said he would visit again in October.“It was a miracle. If I hadn’t turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now, as much as I like you,” Trump told Musk.Trump then pivoted to discussing his usual anti-immigration views, warning about the “rough people” attempting to enter the country through the US-Mexico border.“These are people that are in jail for murder and all sorts of things, and they’re releasing them into our country,” Trump said. Extensive research has uncovered no link between immigration and higher levels of crime.Trump proceeded to attack his opponent Kamala Harris as the “border tsar” of the Biden administration, even though Democratic officials and immigrant rights experts have contested that characterization of her policy portfolio. He repeatedly mocked Harris as a “radical” Democrat who had “destroyed” California when she served as the state’s attorney general and later its senator.And he bizarrely complimented Harris for looking “beautiful” on the cover of Time magazine, comparing her to his wife, Melania, while noting that the image was a sketch.Hello, this is Helen Sullivan wrapping up our coverage of that interview.Let’s take another look at Trump’s claim on the numbers. His campaign Twitter / X account claimed it was the biggest interview in history, which is wrong by tens and tens of millions of viewers / participants.That interview had around 1.2 million people watching, which is less than the average Fox prime time viewership in May this year.At one point, Trump tried to claim that 60 million people were watching, and Musk did not correct him, but laughed nervously, and said instead that a hundred million would probably watch the recording.A few that were much bigger than that interview: Princess Diana and Martin Bashir in 1995, which had at least 28 million.Or Oprah and Michael Jackson in 1993, which about 90 million people watched worldwide.Emily Maitlis’s 2019 interview with Prince Andrew was watched by more than two million people.Donald Trump’s conversation with the world’s richest person, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was less of an interview and more of a chat between two ideologically aligned men who felt at ease talking for more than two hours before an audience of about a million accounts. After a belated start caused by what Musk said was a cyber-attack, they discussed Trump’s experience after an assassin opened fire at his rally in Pennsylvania, Musk’s views on the climate crisis, and the former president’s take on just about anything. One thing they did not do was break much news. The ex-president stuck to well-worn rhetoric on familiar topics, with little push back from Musk, who has endorsed his presidential campaign.Here are some highlights:

      Trump leveled baseless attacks against migrants, as he often does, describing them as “murderers”.

      The former president said that in October, he would return to Butler, the Pennsylvania town where a gunman opened fire on his rally last month.

      Musk prodded Trump to establish something called a “government efficiency commission”. The ex-president replied with praise for the Tesla boss’s penchant for laying off workers.

      In an attack that you can expect to hear from Republicans a lot in the months to come, Trump decried Kamala Harris as “a San Francisco liberal”.

      Harris’s campaign replied that Trump’s “extremism” is a “feature not a glitch of his campaign”.
      Now that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are off the air, Kamala Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello had this to say about their interview:
      Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com. Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.
      After just over two hours, Donald Trump has wrapped up his interview with Elon Musk.The conversation was wide-ranging and often rambling, with the former president and the Tesla CEO expressing their admiration for each other and discussing their political views. Trump repeatedly exaggerated various ills the country faced, as well as his record as president, while also attacking Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.The interview’s scheduled start time was delayed by about 40 minutes due to what Musk said was a cyber-attack on X. There were no further technical glitches once the conversation started.Conservative accounts are circulating these photos, saying it’s Trump talking with Elon Musk on X:Are they wrapping up? It’s been nearly two hours, and the conversation seems to be heading in that direction.The two men are trading compliments, with Musk saying to Trump: “Here’s to an exciting, inspiring future that people can look forward to and be optimistic and excited about what happens next. And that’s the kind of future that I think you will bring as president. And that’s why I endorse you.”To which Trump replied: “Well, I appreciate that. That endorsement meant a lot to me. Not all endorsements mean that much. To be honest, your endorsement meant a lot.”One wonders what endorsements Trump doesn’t think much of.There are more than a million people listening in to Trump’s interview with Musk, according to X’s counter.The number caught the attention of the former president: “I’m looking at the numbers, you get a lot of people listening. I hope you don’t get nervous, because you got a lot of people listening to you right now.”There was a brief pause as Trump seemed to read the number of people listening in. He then remarked: “I congratulate you. Do I get paid for this or not?”Trump seemed to imply that the listener count was up to 70m, but that’s much higher than what X’s counter shows.In an attack that you can expect to hear repeated by Republicans quite a lot over the next three months, Donald Trump assailed Kamala Harris as “a San Francisco liberal” who “destroyed” California.“She’s going to be worse than him,” Trump said, referring to Joe Biden.“She is a San Francisco liberal who destroyed San Francisco, and then as attorney general, she destroyed California,” he then said of Harris, who was the city’s district attorney before becoming the state’s prosecutor.But, as he often does, the former president overreached, implying that the sun shined over the famously sunny state no longer. “We’re talking about the sun. There’s nothing better than California. She has destroyed that,” Trump said.Fact checks: the economy and CovidTrump returned to many of his favorite lies about the economy while he was president, claiming he had the “best economy ever, maybe in the world”. That’s a complicated claim to fact check, because it is simply so broad. But to start – GDP growth was so-so under Trump, though unemployment was low. Even before the pandemic, when the economy was generally good – it was far from the most booming time in US history, let alone in the world …Trump blamed the Covid pandemic on China. There is still no determination on the origins of the pandemic.Musk and Trump are now discussing the climate crisis, with the Tesla CEO saying his views on the subject are “moderate in this regard”.Musk, who credits much of his wealth to the success of his electric car company, argues that fossil fuels are still essential for prosperity, but warns that their supplies are finite, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide poses its own risk.Trump replied by telling Musk that he fossil fuel-generated electricity powers the factories that produce his Teslas: “I’ve heard in terms of the fossil fuel, because even to create your electric car and create the electricity needed for the electric car, you know, fossil fuel is what really creates that at the generating plants … so you sort of can’t get away from it at this moment.”Trump mentioned AI – and the amount of energy it requires. And he was kind of right.As companies seek to build out AI technologies, the US will “need a lot of tremendous electricity, like almost double what we produce now for the whole country, if you can believe it”, Trump said.Indeed, the new computing infrastructure needed to power tech companies’ ramping up of AI technologies will eat up a lot of energy.As my colleagues reported last month, Google admitted that its data centers, a key piece of AI infrastructure, had helped increase its greenhouse gas emissions by 48% since 2019. Because AI programs are so complex, they require more energy than other forms of computing. It’s hard to nail down exactly how much.The conversation took a chummy turn after Musk brought up establishing something called a “government efficiency commission”.The Tesla CEO is clearly among the ranks of those who think that Washington overspends and under-delivers, and has gently prodded Trump to do something about that, if re-elected.“I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, the taxpayers’ hard earned money, is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission,” Musk said.“I’d love it for you. You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump replied, in an apparent reference to Musk’s penchant for pushing out staff at companies he’s taken over, including X. More

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      in US Politics

      Elon Musk’s X suffers tech failures at start of Donald Trump interview

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      As a high-profile conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk was about to begin, users of X, formerly Twitter, were confronted with the message: “This Space is not available.”Spaces, X’s livestreaming audio feature, was the chosen forum for the dialogue, but it wasn’t working. Clicking on the link to the broadcast, hosted by Trump’s dormant @RealDonaldTrump account, froze the site and rendered it unusable. Tweeters said they couldn’t dial in; some said their browsers had crashed.Musk, who owns X, wrote: “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down.” The rest of X appeared to be functioning normally.The interview was due to begin at 8pm eastern US Time; Musk said he would work through the technical difficulties to start half an hour later. The issues seemed to resolve in the interim, and clicking the link allowed users to join the broadcast.When X’s hold music finally stopped at 8.30ET, a rustling was heard from Trump’s microphone. Then silence overtook the livestream for another 10 minutes. Both the former president and Musk were muted. The interview started shortly after, with X eventually displaying more than 1 million concurrent listeners.Musk said: “The attack saturated all of our data lines. We think we’ve overcome most of that. As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.”Trump said he was happy with the mishap.“You broke every record in the book with so many millions of people. We view that as an honor,” he told Musk.The day before the event, Musk said he would “do some system scaling tests” in advance of the chat. On his feed, several of his tweets were labeled “streaming test”. However, an awkward silence descended on X when the interview was supposed to begin. One Washington Post reporter tweeted “So how’d they go” in reply to Musk’s disclaimer about the stress tests.The failure to launch the Trump interview is bad advertising for Musk’s X as a technological innovator, and for the social network as a functional advertising vehicle. The company filed suit last week against its some of the world’s largest advertisers for taking their business elsewhere, alleging an illegal monopoly.At times, Trump’s arguments also put Musk into a difficult corner, for example when the former president doubled down on his lies about climate change and Musk – the head of an electric carmaker – did little to correct him.X has endured similar failures before. The snafu with Trump’s interview mirrors the launch of Ron DeSantis’ ill-fated presidential campaign on the platform in May 2023. That conversation, too, was mired in technical difficulties. The Florida governor was nearly inaudible at the startamid harsh feedback noise. X users said their apps crashed or logged them out as they tried to listen. The feed cut out repeatedly, then began half an hour late with less than a tenth of the original listeners. Musk admitted the event had “broken the Twitter system”.The night of DeSantis’s floundering launch, Trump posted on his X competitor, Truth Social: “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign, which maintains its own Truth Social account, reposted Trump’s remarks the night of the former president’s delayed conversation with Musk.After Musk purchased Twitter for $44bn in 2022 and renamed it X, he gutted the staff, leaving just 20% of employees, with skeleton crews in place in key areas such as site reliability. In November of that year, he reinstated Trump, who had been banned from Twitter after the January 6 Capitol attack. Advertisers have fled amid a documented rise in hate speech on the social network. The billionaire has touted X as riding the cutting edge of politics and freedom of speech. More

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      Elon’s politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation

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      When Elon Musk took over as owner of Twitter, researchers and elections officials feared a rampant spread of misinformation that would lead to threats and harassment and undermine democracy.Their fears came true – and Musk himself has emerged as one of its main drivers.The tech billionaire has cast doubt on machines that tabulate votes and mail ballots, both common features of US elections. He has repeatedly claimed there is rampant non-citizen voting, a frequent Republican talking point in this election.Musk, the ultra-wealthy owner of Tesla and other tech companies, is scheduled to interview Donald Trump on Monday, where they are sure to find common ground on these election conspiracies. Musk is a vocal supporter of the former US president and current Republican nominee. He has restored the Twitter/X accounts of people banned under previous ownership, dismantling the platform’s fact-checking and safety features. Trump’s X account, which was suspended after the January 6 insurrection, was restored as well, though Trump has not returned actively to the platform.“Electronic voting machines and anything mailed in is too risky. We should mandate paper ballots and in-person voting only,” he wrote on X in July.Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer responded, asking if he could give Musk a tour of the large Arizona county’s facilities and run through the mail voting processes.“You can go into all the rooms. You can examine all the equipment. You can ask any question you want. We’d love to show you the security steps already in place, which I think are very sound,” Richer said.It wasn’t the only time Richer has sought to correct election misinformation Musk had shared. He previously tried to fix misunderstandings of Arizona voter data and rules for proof of citizenship.Social media platforms overall have taken less aggressive stances on fact-checking election falsehoods after an ongoing campaign by Republican lawmakers and their allies to attack the ways information was flagged by elected officials and researchers and how platforms responded.“I think X really kind of sticks out as a place where that change has been striking, and for it to come from the very top kind of just shows how much of an issue it is,” said Mekela Panditharatne, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s elections & government program.Musk shared a video that used an AI-generated voice for Kamala Harris, which raised concerns that it could fool some people into thinking it was real. Musk and the video creator defended it as parody.He has also written multiple times claiming that non-citizens are voting in US elections, which is illegal except in a few local elections. There are few instances of non-citizens voting, or even registering to vote. In late July, he shared a video of Elizabeth Warren talking about a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented people living in the US. “As I was saying, they’re importing voters,” he said, a nod to “great replacement” theory.Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot that Musk has billed as an “anti-woke” antidote to left-biased chatbots, has spread false information that ballot deadlines had passed in nine states, meaning the vice-president couldn’t get on the ballot in those places, which is untrue. Secretaries of state are urging Musk to fix this issue for the chatbot that doesn’t have election information guardrails that other chatbots, like ChatGPT, do.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s important that social media companies, especially those with global reach, correct mistakes of their own making – as in the case of the Grok AI chatbot simply getting the rules wrong,” Minnesota secretary of state Steve Simon told the Washington Post. “Speaking out now will hopefully reduce the risk that any social media company will decline or delay correction of its own mistakes between now and the November election.”Off the platform, a political action committee Musk created is mining personal information from voters in key states in what appears to users to initially look like a voter registration portal, CNBC reported. America Pac, a pro-Trump group backed by Musk’s enormous wealth, is targeting swing states voters. The data scraping is now being investigated by at least two states.Despite his endless claims about election fraud, Musk told the Atlantic this month he would accept the results of the 2024 election – with a caveat.“If there are questions of election integrity, they should be properly investigated and neither be dismissed out of hand nor unreasonably questioned,” he said. “If, after review of the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins, that win should be recognized and not disputed.” More

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      JD Vance is the baby of Big Tech and Big Oil. He’s no ‘working-class populist’ | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Initially hailed as an inspired choice to inherit the Maga movement, James David Vance has fast proved a liability to the Trump campaign: Democrats are successfully branding him as a creepy manosphere specimen; his stances on abortion, IVF and women without children have rightly made him a focal point for criticizing the right’s obsession with controlling women’s bodies. Then there’s the issue of whether he’s really the man to mansplain Appalachia to the rest of us, given that he grew up in a city in Ohio.But one story about the junior senator continues to be accepted at face value: Vance as champion of a new “right-populism” that puts the working class first. There are no policy proposals that would vindicate that image; what’s more, Vance’s career has been financed by a nefarious combination of rightwing tech bros and the fossil fuel industry: those who have no problem polluting the public sphere with misinformation and disinformation and those profiting from polluting the atmosphere. Both are prime promoters of the libertarianism that “right-populists” supposedly disavow.Vance claims to want to break with corporate donors who care only about cheap labor resulting from a continuous influx of migrants. No doubt the Republican party’s promise to reduce immigration is real, as is the cruel plan for mass deportations – whether it will result in higher wages is anyone’s guess. One thing is sure, though: the other supposedly populist policy – raising tariffs on cheap imports – will make the already worst-off even worse off.Meanwhile, there’s no talk of raising taxes on the wealthy, in particular closing the loopholes that infamously allow hedge fund and private equity managers to have lower tax rates than their secretaries. Instead, Trump promises to reduce the corporate tax rate even further.Vance touts Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán as his model; the latter stands for an unembarrassed use of state power to enforce public morality (no same-sex marriages in Hungary!) and industrial policies in the national interest. But Orbán has also introduced a flat-rate personal income tax and the world’s highest value-added tax – which of course disproportionately falls on poorer Hungarians. If this is indeed the model, America’s billionaires will have no problem with Vance’s supposed “working-class conservatism”.Vance talks the talk of extracting the American right from libertarianism; yet, if one follows the money, a different picture is revealed. His career has been financed by reactionary venture capitalists such as Peter Thiel as well as the fossil fuel industry, who share a desire for deregulation wrapped in propaganda about “American freedom”. Vance himself has worked as a venture capitalist and is now part of a Republican ticket committed to abolishing regulations of social media, cryptocurrency, and AI. The party’s platform calls for a repeal of Biden’s executive order on responsible and, not least, worker-friendly development of AI.The irony is that the great champions of freedom and unleashing tech power are at the same time advocates of monopoly power: they really don’t like Biden’s robust anti-trust approach. They also often crucially depend on state contracts. No doubt Palantir, Thiel’s “big data analytics” firm whose central promise is effective surveillance, will want to be helpful with mass deportations.It might not just be a crude desire for taxpayer dollars which animates Silicon Valley’s new Trumpists, though; it can also be a philosophical vision. That doesn’t make things any better. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, newly converted to Trumpism, authored the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which proclaims a belief in “accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development”. What many portentous pronouncements on human evolution boil down to is a simple demand: no restraints on developing AI, as well as an all-out commitment to nuclear power and a weird celebration of population growth as, according to Andreessen, “our planet is dramatically underpopulated”.Without naming its source, Andreessen quotes the manifesto of the Futurists – the artists who at the beginning of the 20th century worshiped technology as well as a kind of cleansing of the word through war – and who eventually became major promoters of Mussolini’s Fascism. Declaring himself a conqueror, not a victim, Andreesen rails against “a mass demoralization campaign … against technology and against life”, which supposedly has been going on for “six decades” “under varying names like … ‘sustainability’ … and … ‘social responsibility’”.The representatives of nothing less than life itself want to step on the pedal – and ask us to simply to trust a self-appointed elite of accelerationist visionaries.Vance might be the first champion of accelerationism in the White House – but he’s also an old-fashioned fossil fuel lobbyist who has weaponized climate in rightwing culture war. He’s associated renewables and electric vehicles with China – his (unsuccessful) Drive America Act suggested that buying gas and diesel cars is the only way of being a good patriot. Passively receiving wind and sunshine is also obviously not for real men; drilling makes for what scholars have called “petromasculinity”.Vance is all at once a nationalistic natalist (“breed, baby, breed!” for the nation), a promoter of fossil fuel industries (“drill, baby, drill!”), and a conduit of accelerationism (“break things, baby, break things!”). Given how unpopular he’s proven in polls, it does not seem like this is a vision for which Americans care. It’s also not the break with libertarianism that pundits praising the Republicans’ supposed turn to workers think it is. But there’s a hell of a lot of money backing it.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist More

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      Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living in a postmodern fiction? You’re not alone | Dan Brooks

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      Writing about the assassination of President John F Kennedy for Rolling Stone in 1983, 20 years after the shooting, the novelist Don DeLillo remarked: “Europeans and Middle Easterners are notoriously prone to believe in conspiracies … Americans, for their own good reasons, tend to believe in lone gunmen.” How times change. Since Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt on 13 July, social media have boiled over with talk of conspiracies, false flags and complex manipulations of state and psyche for unclear ends. After Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for president, various online conservatives argued that he was actually dead. Meanwhile, otherwise sensible observers blamed the media for creating the narrative that Biden had lost mental acuity and keeping Trump in the public eye – a kind of Rothschild conspiracy for people who took undergraduate sociology.It’s fun to scoff at such people, who believe that powerful forces secretly organise the world even as we confront evidence that human intelligence is no longer sufficient to run a branch of Chipotle. In fairness to the paranoid mindset, though, a lot of events from earlier decades’ fiction have been coming true lately. Consider Lisa’s prophetic line from the Bart to the Future episode of The Simpsons, original airdate 19 March 2000: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” It was funny at the time. I believe it was either Karl Marx or Nelson Muntz who said that history repeats itself: first as farce, then as whatever all this is now.The other week, Twitter user @ZeroSuitCamus posted a passage from an essay JG Ballard wrote for Vogue in the 1970s (incorrectly attributed to his 1975 novel High-Rise) about a future in which our daily activities are all recorded on video, and every evening “we sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters …” Here is the Instagram experience and its strange effects, complete with filter, algorithm and night-time scrolling, delivered to us decades before it became reality. David Foster Wallace predicted the filter, too, around page 111 of Infinite Jest, in which internet-enabled video calling makes everyone so insecure about their faces that they briefly adopt electronic face-improving technology, before it develops such a stigma that they all go back to voice-only telephony. Wallace’s 1996 novel about a form of entertainment so fascinating that it amuses its viewers to death raises some uncomfortable questions for any reader who gets screen time updates on their phones.All these texts – DeLillo, Ballard and Wallace for sure, and The Simpsons, too, in my opinion – fall under the category of “postmodernism”. The contours of the genre are still debated many decades after it emerged, but two key themes on which critics agree are (1) characters who find themselves at the mercy of impossibly complex systems; and (2) a sincere effort to acknowledge the importance of texts in modern life, which has since curdled into mere referentiality. I submit that these themes are no longer limited to literature and have become defining aspects of the way we live now.I also submit that it’s kind of weird that we have identified our own time as “postmodern” for three generations running. In the same way that the term “modernism” tells you something about how people thought of themselves in the years after the first world war, the fact that we regard ourselves as “post-” suggests a certain mindset. In many ways, our culture thinks of itself as existing after the important part of history – increasingly, after the good part. Latter-days thinking prevails, particularly on social media and in the arts, which seems resigned to rearranging the material already provided to us.I don’t think many of us are delighted to see previous generations’ satires coming true. Stories about technology-driven anomie and lives that had become unmoored from meaningful values were thrilling to readers in the 1980s and 1990s, but to be a character in such stories is a different thing. At the same time, we aren’t kicking against it – at least not much. There is that postmodern sense that the systems governing our world are too big and complex to do anything about them. We are all in a self-driving car that is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go.The bad news is that the conspiracy theories are false, and the car keeps veering toward pedestrians not because California billionaires are secretly priming the public for mandatory bicycles, but rather because someone saved money by skimping on quality control. Incompetence is more common than malice, even though it makes for a less compelling plot. The good news is that the sense that our world has become a work of postmodern fiction is also false. If it sometimes feels unpleasant to believe that what is happening in the news is real, it is also vital to remember that we are not characters in a story. What happens next is not written, even in outline form.The impossibly big systems are real and in many cases evil, as anyone who has travelled by air in recent years will attest. But they are nonetheless our systems, made and not given, and they can be remade. The end of the postmodern era will come not when the last Simpsons joke comes true, but when we realise the world imagined by the previous century is not enough for us – entertaining and fun to talk about, sure, but fundamentally less interesting than what we can come up with. Sooner or later, we must become authors again.

      Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana More

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      Bitcoin price hits six-week high after Trump backs cryptocurrency

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      Bitcoin has hit its highest level in more than six weeks after Donald Trump said at the weekend he would end the “persecution” of the crypto industry if he wins the US presidential election.The cryptocurrency’s price rose by more than 3% on Monday to peak at about $69,745, the highest since 12 June when the currency changed hands at more than $69,800.The increase comes after supportive comments from Trump at the Bitcoin 2024 convention in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said on Saturday he would make the US the world’s cryptocurrency leader and embrace a more pro-bitcoin stance than his rival, Kamala Harris.The former president said: “I pledge to the bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s anti-crypto crusade will be over … If we don’t embrace crypto and bitcoin technology, China will, other countries will. They’ll dominate, and we cannot let China dominate. They are making too much progress as it is.”He also said he would sack the chair of the US financial watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), on the first day of his presidency if he won the election. “On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler,” Trump said, to cheers of approval from the audience.Gensler is a noted sceptic about cryptocurrencies, despite aiding them in January by approving exchange-traded funds (ETFs) – a basket of assets that can be bought and sold like shares on an exchange – that track the price of bitcoin.The SEC chair said in a statement approving the ETFs that bitcoin was a “speculative, volatile” asset used for illegal activities including ransomware and terrorist financing. Since 2023 the SEC has launched more than 40 crypto-related enforcement actions.Speaking at the bitcoin convention, Trump said he would establish a crypto presidential advisory council and create a national “stockpile” of bitcoin using cryptocurrency the US government held that was largely seized in law enforcement actions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Never sell your bitcoin,” Trump said. “If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, the United States of America, to keep 100% of all the bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires into the future.”The Financial Times also reported on Saturday that Harris’s advisers had approached top crypto companies to try to “reset” the relationship between the Democratic party and the sector. Approaches had been made to the Coinbase crypto exchange, the stablecoin company Circle and the blockchain payments group Ripple Labs, the FT said. More

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      Elon Musk attends Netanyahu’s congressional address as his guest

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      Elon Musk attended Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on Wednesday as a guest of the embattled Israeli prime minister.A day earlier, the tech billionaire announced that his Starlink internet service was now active in a Gaza hospital, with the support of Israel’s government.Netanyahu’s congressional visit was met with thousands of protesters gathering near Capitol Hill to demonstrate against Israeli abuses during its war in Gaza. Lawmakers were divided over whether he should have been invited to speak.Musk has a history of courting rightwing leaders in countries that have overlapping business interests with his various enterprises. He previously hosted Javier Millei, Argentina’s president, at his Tesla factory and has been a cheerleader for his policies, while also cozying up to Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president.Musk previously met with Netanyahu during a visit to Israel last year, as the tech leader sought to quell accusations of antisemitism after personally endorsing a post on his social network X, formerly Twitter, that claimed Jews hate white people. Far-right content on the platform has also increased.Musk’s visit also appears to have helped pave the way for SpaceX to provide its Starlink satellite internet to Gaza, which he announced on Tuesday was now in service at a hospital. The single location, which was supported by Israel and the United Arab Emirates, also reflects the tight controls that Israel has put on communications technology in the area.In recent weeks, Musk has also thrown his support behind Donald Trump’s election campaign and played a direct role in advising the former president to select JD Vance, Ohio senator, as his running mate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Musk has continued to post conservative content and attacks against the presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, he appears to have tempered some of his support for Trump following Joe Biden dropping out of the race. Musk pushed back against a report he was set to donate $45m per month to a pro-Trump political action committee.Musk’s appearance as a guest of Netanyahu further aligns him with the Republican party line, which has thrown its support behind the Israeli leader as many Democrats condemn his actions. A number of progressive Democratic lawmakers declined to attend Netanyahu’s speech, with New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denouncing him as a “war criminal”. More