“The enshittification of American power”

There is no question that the last century, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, the world has been characterized by US hegemony exercised through its military and economic power, and control over financial institutions. But in a long article in Wired with the above title, Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman argue that under the Trump regime, the US is starting to follow the pattern of big tech entities like Google and Facebook and that this is eventually going to lead to a decline in US power and influence in the world.

Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too.

People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from.
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Tom Lehrer (1928-2025)

The mathematician and musical satirist has died at the age of 97. The link gives some of his better known songs but the ones I like best are his parody of My Darling Clementine

and the song about Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel.

This was somewhat unfair to Alma, portraying her merely as someone whose chief talent was to work her way through many famous men. She was, in fact, an accomplished composer and author in her own right.

Just the facts

That seems to be this Scottish newspaper’s motto for headlines.

Here is the background to the story.

For those who are offended by the news headline, the paper asks a good question.

“We can’t look away from what is happening in Gaza”

In her Saturday newsletter sent out to Guardian subscribers that has the above heading, editor-in-chief Katherine Viner lays out a powerful indictment of Israel’s horrifying crimes in Gaza and the complicity of the US and other western countries that have allowed this to continue for so long. I am reproducing it in full, along with accompanying photographs. These were some of the photographs coming out that show small children with skeletal bodies as a result of Israel’s deliberate policy of starving the entire population. The first image is evocative of the Madonna and child of Christian iconography.

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, an 18-month old child in Gaza who faces life-threatening malnutrition. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Mohammed, seven, and Zeina, 10. Their mother says the family has been ‘silencing our hunger with water’. Photograph: Seham Tantesh/The Guardian

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“Died peacefully surrounded by family”

I have read the above line many times in newspaper reports of the deaths of celebrities, most recently that of Ozzy Osbourne.

A statement from the Osbourne family reads: “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.” No cause of death was given, though Osbourne had experienced various forms of ill health in recent years.

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Can AI treat loneliness?

Although I mostly live alone, I fortunately do not suffer from feelings of loneliness. That might be because I am an introvert, comfortable with solitude and being in my own thoughts and engaging in fundamentally solitary pursuits like reading and writing. It takes very little interaction with other people to satisfy my need for human companionship. But for those who thrive when engaging with others, solitude can be a real problem, leading to feelings of loneliness. Loneliness can also strike people when they are in the presence of others if they do not feel a sense of connection with them.

There has been some attention paid recently to the question of loneliness, with suggestions that its adverse effects go beyond just mental health.

A 2023 report issued by Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, presented evidence that loneliness increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death. Persistent loneliness is worse for your health than being sedentary or obese; it’s like smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day.

Estimates suggest roughly half the US population over sixty say they feel lonely. The causes of loneliness among older people are not surprising. Friends and family die, and as their physical capabilities decline, people go out less less, engage in fewer activities, such that their social circle starts shrinking and they find new friends harder to make.
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ICE unleashes the sadism

I was sickened to read how people are being treated in ICE detention camps.

Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.
…

Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.

“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.

Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers or adequate food.
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The killing fields of Gaza

While the events in Trump-world such as the Epstein files get a lot of attention in the US media, the real horror is what is happening in Gaza where it seems like Israel is engaged in the wholesale slaughter of Gazans. They are killing in large numbers the elderly, women, children. desperate people waiting for aid, first responders, medical workers, journalists, starving people trying to get food, people in cafes, any gathering of people, anyone else that they happen to feel like killing, and stops aid convoys trying to ease the suffering.

There used to be a time when the Israeli authorities would go through some form of ritual after each massacre of civilians, saying that it had been done inadvertently while they were seeking out militants. But that veneer of deniability had long worn thin and now they do not even bother, only saying it when they cross a fresh frontier, such as bombing a Catholic church. The Israeli government used to once boast that the Israeli Defense Forces were the most disciplined and ethical in the world. That was never true and is never true of any military. Any army of occupation inevitably ends up terrorizing the local population and the IDF is revealed to be just another army of cold-blooded murderers.
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The big unresolved question from the Scopes trial onwards

As I emphasized in my posts during the past week, the Scopes trial did not resolve any of the major legal questions involving evolution. But many of those questions were resolved in subsequent cases over the next 80 years, as I chronicle in my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial in 1925 and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005

But there was one issue raised by the prosecutor in his defense of the Butler Act (that forbade the teaching of evolution) that is still unresolved and that is what is appropriate to teach children in public schools and who should get to decide it. Should it be the public through its elected representatives? Should it be educators? What should be role of subject matter experts?

In many countries, especially those with a national educational system, the answer is simple: the government does. In general, there is a ministry of education that sets the standards, curriculum, and even lesson plans and teachers are trained in it. There is no real basis for legal challenge and in theory they could decide to teach anything at all. In reality, public opinion acts as a major constraint on teaching nonsense. But in the US, education is very much a local affair, with each local community having its own school boards that determine these things, and these can vary widely. The state can set overall guidelines, while textbooks and standardized tests provide some measure of uniformity, but not much.
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