Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the Commentator post for this week. These are basically riffs on politics. They are from a personalized, opinionated perspective - emotional where I genuinely feel emotional. There is real work in preparing these - of reading widely across the web, internationally, and across partisan divides. The aim is to come at these stories without pre-judgment - as much as that’s ever possible - and from a place of being conscientiously inquisitive about the world.
Best,
Sam
KHERSON AND THE ENDLESS, GRINDING WAR
The story of the week - more than SBF, than Twitter, than a ‘Florida retiree’ running for President - is of course the Ukrainian re-capture of Kherson. I really am amazed by this, actually - amazed that the Russians gave up the city without a desperate struggle, that Russia now has virtually none of its objectives from the start of the war.
The challenge at this stage of writing about the war in Ukraine - I can see that all the media outlets are dealing with their own sense of fatigue about it - is that the story is fundamentally always the same: the Ukrainian military better motivated and better organized at the tactical level; the Russian military demoralized and ineptly led; the discoveries of torture chambers, mass graves, mass looting everywhere that the Russians have left. There was a rare glimpse last week of the perspective of Russian front-line soldiers in an open letter sent by Pacific Fleet Marines stationed in Donetsk to the governor of their region. “Once again, we were thrown into an incomprehensible battle by General Muradov and his brother-in-law…so that Muradov could earn bonuses to make him look good in the eyes of Gerasimov [Russia's Chief of the General Staff],” the letter read. “As a result of the 'carefully' planned offensive by the 'great commanders,' we lost about 300 men, dead and wounded, with some MIA over the past 4 days. We lost 50% of our equipment. That's our brigade alone. The district command….are hiding these facts and skewing the official casualty statistics for fear of being held accountable." There’s nothing surprising about any of the contents of the letter - that’s the story that the Ukrainians, that investigative reports on the state of Russian troop morale, have been promulgating for a long time - but it is surprising that the soldiers actually sent the letter and that it appeared on a Russian military blog and that it stated so clearly the real contours of the war, graft by the upper echelons of the Russian military and complete indifference to the on-the-ground suffering even of Russian troops.
Just because the story is fatiguing - because the narrative lines are so clear-cut - does not of course make it any less important. In terms of thinking big-picture, we’re back to where we were at the start of the year, trying to read the tea leaves on Putin’s intentions - and the takeaway, as far as I can tell, is that Putin is actually surprisingly content with the state of things, that he has committed to a long, grinding war, and that we in the West have no choice except to continue to support the Ukrainians and to keep our eyes on the ball no matter how long this lasts. Foreign Affairs has a reasonable-enough piece on the state of the war, arguing that the war is moving from a war of defense to more politically-fraught war of reconquest while contending that the Ukrainian tactical advantages will continue to hold in that phase of the war and that the West must stay loyal even as Ukraine’s objectives shift. “More than seven months into the war, the United States and Europe still lack a positive vision for Ukraine’s future,” wrote Andriy Zagorodnyuk, former Ukrainian defense minister, in Foreign Affairs. “It is time to start: Ukraine can win big…..Ukraine’s repeat successes are not coincidences. The country’s military has structural advantages over its Russian adversary. The Russian military is extremely hierarchical and overly centralized….Ukraine, by contrast, is quick to adapt, with a NATO-style ‘mission command’ system that encourages lower-ranking officers and sergeants to make decisions.”
The reality that the West may well have to accept is that there is no off-ramp, that both sides, for different reasons, very much do want to continue fighting - the Ukrainians because they are flushed with victory and are determined to retake lost territory; the Russians because Putin seems to feel that he actually prefers to preside over a locked-in, closed, militaristic state existentially committed to a permanent war. From the perspective of the West, it’s easy to forget that the Ukraine war didn’t start on February 24th - that the war has been underway for eight years, albeit on simmer, and that there really is no reason (so long as the economics hold more or less where they are now) why Putin can’t treat the Ukraine war as a sort of permanent Donbass conflict, with the front somewhat expanded.
Some of Putin’s thinking seems to be decipherable from a long talk he gave at Russia’s Valdai Club in late October. The talk pointed in the direction of a permanent, limited war focused above all on the Donbass region. “I said at the outset, on the day the operation started, that the most important thing for us is to help Donbass,” Putin said. “We are witnesses to the events that have unfolded. They arose in the course and as a logical follow-up to the situation that has been taking shape up to this point. But the plan was there, and the goal is to help the people of Donbass. This is the premise under which we are operating.” Most ominously, Putin appeared to be wholly satisfied with how the war had played out on the home front - as an assertion of Russia’s independence from the Western sphere of influence and as the introduction of a new, closed system, not at all dissimilar really to the USSR. “Nothing fell apart, and the basis of the Russian economy and the Russian Federation turned out to be much stronger than anyone may have thought, maybe even ourselves,” Putin said, on the topic of Western sanctions. “This is an act of purification and understanding of our capabilities.”
The critical question, as The Council on Foreign Relations notes, is Putin’s ability to control the hard-liners in his regime who have bought into Putin’s own rhetoric, who see the invasion as a righteous war to annihilate Ukraine’s Nazi’s regime - and don’t quite seem to get that the war has more cynical aims, a permanent, limited war in which no one wins and no one loses but in which a hierarchical domestic control is assured. What’s so striking about Putin’s remarks at the Valdai Club is how reasonable he sounds, the moderate’s moderate - concerned, above all, about climate change, about cancel culture in the West, about the sovereign rights of all nations - “their identity and uniqueness.” How he squares these concerns with the use of alligator clips on civilians in Kherson is anybody’s guess, but the posture he’s taking is revealing - that he is the moderate, standing up not only to the perfidious West but to the hard-liners in his own camp, and finding just the right goldilocks solution, which so happens to be endless permanent war across Eastern Ukraine, with endless suffering to civilians and his own soldiers.
‘IT’S PRETTY GOOD IN THE PONZI BUSINESS’
It’s hard to think of a business catastrophe - the collapse of billions of dollars in wealth, a crash in a promising economic sector, the loss of transformative donations to all sorts of worthy causes - being greeted with such unrestrained glee and schadenfreude as the overnight tanking of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. As Douglas Murray writes his Spectator article ‘The Delicious Fall of Sam Bankman-Fried,’ “Reading such stories makes the whole city’s heart lift a little. This snippet of adversity makes everybody’s day that bit happier.”
The adults in the room are trying to be appropriately worried about FTX’s collapse - warning of “contagion across the industry” - but the issue is that nobody, above all Bankman-Fried, was ever able to take the financial reality of crypto all that seriously. As somebody I know, a prominent crypto investor, shruggingly remarked to me earlier this year, “It’s probably all a scam” - before suggesting that I put ‘like $1,000’ into it.
I guess I’m thinking about the crypto collapse the same way as everybody else - entirely as if it were a spec script. The overriding storyline - boy genius turns out to be transparent fraud; guy-who-pretty-much-admits-to-running-Ponzi-Scheme turns out actually-to-be-running-Ponzi-Scheme - is only so-so satisfying. The sense is that Bankman-Fried was just your classic con artist sociopath - a bit harder to see coming because he was so young and scruffy-looking and so endearingly bizarre - and that FTX was just another iteration of Enron or Madoff, fully outfitted with mark-to-market accounting and with a shell company fulfilling a significant chunk of FTX’s trades. But the spec scripts need a bit more than that. Hedonism pairs so nicely with financial fraud that the first place everybody seemed to look for an understanding of what happened was the unorthodox setup of Bankman-Fried’s ‘polycule’ in the Bahamas - the network of close associates who ran FTX and Alameda and, in CoinDesk’s reporting, “all are, or used to be, paired up in romantic relationships with each other.”
But the hedonism - polyamory, the enthusiastic use of amphetamines - turns out to have been a bit of a red herring. No less an authority than Bankman-Fried’s former therapist called The New York Times and reported that, in fact, Bankman-Fried and his associates were, if anything, ‘undersexed’; and that maybe if they had “more healthy dating relationships” then, who knows, the whole catastrophe could have been averted.
I’ve had millennials on the mind this week, and this whole chain of speculation has a distinctly millennial-ish feel to it, the ‘polycule,’ the interest in polyamory, the willingness to embrace a fluid interplay between work and life (and, incidentally, a fluid interplay between two ostensibly distinct companies). The overheated discussion of the polycule reminded me of the general bewilderment over Katie Hill’s bisexual ‘throuple’ relationship, which ended up costing her her seat in Congress, but, more than that, there was something kind of misguidedly, bizarrely utopian about the whole FTX enterprise, as if everybody had read The 4-Hour Work Week, The Ethical Slut, What We Owe The Future, and Satoshi Nakomato’s white paper and decided to construct their lives based on that. Most millennial of all was Bankman-Fried’s response. “I’m really sorry, again, that we ended up here,” he wrote by Twitter. “Hopefully things can find a way to recover. Hopefully this can bring some amount of transparency, trust, and governance to them. Ultimately hopefully it can be better for customers.” I somehow find it very difficult to imagine Jeff Skilling bleating out an apology like that on Twitter - or evincing the kind of sentiment that underlies Bankman-Fried’s post-collapse public expression, the idea that the $32 billion was never really a big deal, that what matters is that he really is a good person deep-down, and that everybody can move on from here with better transparency, corporate governance, etc. There seems to be, on Bankman-Fried’s part, an odd failure to understand what a fall like this really entails - the years of lawsuits and bankruptcy proceedings, the funds owed to over a million creditors, the discussions between the United States and Bahamas over extradition proceedings. There’s an ethos that Bankman-Fried held and that he seems to be surprised that everybody else isn’t sharing in - which is a good-humored understanding that a security or any kind of paper wealth is ultimately hollow; that business is ultimately a game; and that, when you get down to it, all of capitalism is pretty much a Ponzi scheme. “At some point I might have more to say about a particular sparring partner, so to speak,” Bankman-Fried wrote in reference to his rival Binance - and in a kind of closing statement for his entire corporate philosophy. “But you know, glass houses. So for now, all I’ll say is well played; you won.”
Most millennial of all - speaking to my generation’s dreams and nightmares - is the odd association between SBF and the Effective Altruism movement. These are the people who would seem to be least likely to see everything as a game - the hairshirt-wearers (and nutritional bar-eaters) of the 21st century. The sense was that the movement’s adherents were utterly genuine - “From an early age, he demonstrated a precocious moral zeal,” wrote Gideon Lewis-Kraus in a New Yorker profile of William MacAskill, the movement’s poster boy - but that some odd things started occurring within Effective Altruism once touched by money. The money was almost entirely that of Bankman-Fried, the dark star of Effective Altruism, who donated copiously, but had some ideas of his own in which virtue could be found not exactly by giving to the poor or skimping on meals. And, overnight, the concerns about global poverty and disease eradication seemed to pale before the overwhelming ethical considerations of an asteroid hitting the earth or of giving voice to ‘future people’ who were understood to be discriminated against because of having no say in present-day political processes. This was Longtermism - an astonishingly self-serving philosophical gizmo created by Silicon Valley and peddled, via Bankman-Fried, to the credulous Effective Altruism movement. As Lewis-Kraus acidly wrote in his MacAskill profile, “The shift to longtermism and the movement’s new proximity to wealth and power…..were not uncorrelated developments.”
A certain amount of the more high-brow schadenfreude surrounding the FTX collapse is really the hope that this will be the death-knell of Longtermism. Philosophically-minded people (self included) had railed against it - The Spectator, for instance, calls it “a thin and chilling philosophy,” Émile Torres, an apostate, calls it “an immensely dangerous ideology” - but the evident cynicism of Longtermism, its sacrifice of common sense for ‘hyper-rational’ projections about the future, seemed weak arguments compared with the cash Bankman-Fried was pouring into the movement and with the movement’s massive building campaign underway at Oxford University.
As spec scripts go, this seems the most promising storyline - the alliance between Bankman-Fried and the eternal altar boy, MacAskill. Nobody quite does penitence like MacAskill. On Twitter, he wrote, “If there was deception and misuse of funds, I am outraged, and I don’t know which emotion is stronger: my utter rage at Sam (and others?) for causing such harm to so many people, or my sadness and self-hatred for falling for this deception.” He also - and this is where a certain cognitive dissonance becomes apparent - posted highlighted sections of his own book to demonstrate that Longtermism could never, ever condone the fraudulent actions that Bankman-Fried was engaged in, although it must be admitted that, as endorsements of old-fashioned virtues, MacAskill’s precepts are less than fulsome. “First, in practice, violating rights is almost never the best possible way to bring about the best possible longtermist outcome,” writes MacAskill before continuing on to the somehow even-less ringing, “Second, plausibly, it’s wrong to do harm even when doing so will cause the best possible outcome.”
So, probably, this is where the story ends up - virtue restored, Bankman-Fried led off in handcuffs and cargo shorts from the island paradise, MacAskill seeing the error of Longtermism and beating the tambourine again for Effective Altruism, and a lot of court hearings and a lot of unhappy crypto creditors (the sorts of people nobody can bring themselves to care about too much). On a more macro level - and
has a witheringly smart piece discussing this - the SBF case is revelatory of a certain type of ultra-modern confidence scam, companies getting themselves evaluated by their ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance scores), founders linking themselves to woke causes, as a startling effective way of distracting everybody from what they're actually doing with their businesses. Far more so even than Madoff, who had his own marks, his own ways of wrapping himself in the goodwill of the community, Bankman-Fried was a master practitioner of this art. The profiles of Bankman-Fried never failed to discuss the Toyota Corolla he drove, his habit of sleeping in a beanbag chair, and Shellenberger is right in seeing that as far from being accidental. As Bankman-Fried himself wrote in the most chilling communication I’ve seen from him - in a response to a Vox reporter asking him about his skills at playing the ethics game, “ya. hehe. I had to be [good at it]. it’s what reputations are made of to some extent. I feel bad for those who get fucked by it. by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes it.”In other words, a perfect fraud for 2022 - the place where wokeism and tech collide. As Shellenberger writes, “In truth, the Bankman-Fried scandal shows that all do-gooder capitalism should set off red flags.” And, really, the convergence of tech and identitarian politics is less haphazard than one might think. Both are fundamentally eschatological movements - they believe in a future paradise (the one of technological materialism; the other of ever-unfolding social justice) and to that end are willing to sacrifice understanding of and respect for the past; common sense in the present; and, often, basic decency. It should also be pretty clear, as in the parable of Bankman-Fried and MacAskill, which is the dog and which is the tail being wagged. It’s the doctrine of technological materialism that brings in the money, that finances the whole operations; it’s the doctrine of social justice that does as it’s told and washes away the sins of the techies.
BANNING TIK-TOK, DEALING WITH CHINA
I went much longer than I meant to on Bankman-Fried - it is a resonant story! - so I think I’ll stick to three riffs for the Commentator section this week. This means skipping over the Twitter acquisition, the Meta and Amazon layoffs, as well as very worthy stories like the acceleration of protests in Iran and this really long, terrific ProPublica piece on a residential fire in Milwaukee (a gripping depiction of the ways that justice diverges for landlords and for tenants). As for the tech shakeups, I’m unconvinced that Musk’s garish takeover of Twitter is much more than the normal sturm und drag of an acquisition - although it is very disturbing for free-speech advocates that the power got to Musk’s head within days of the takeover and that he announced new moderation controls as soon as a comedian mocked him - and unconvinced that the layoffs across tech are anything other than a response to a likely recession. But I was surprised this week when a friend declared to me about social media, “I think that that whole thing is over.” The idea was that Twitter was combusting, Facebook was super-lame, that TikTok was “the only one left.” Recently, I came across an article by
called 'The Internet Is Already Over' and was the opposite-of-persuaded by it. As far as I could tell, Kriss' argument was just that because things change it's reasonable to expect that the internet will change as well. “In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible,” Kriss wrote. “The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book.” I’m not convinced that that’s true for the internet - I can feel myself spending more time online, not less, and I’m not even a ‘digital native’ in the way that everybody younger than me is - but there is an undeniable feeling that something or other is shifting in social media, that people do know that social media is terrible, that the platforms are coercive, the privacy invasions pathological, that social media is inimical to real creativity or even real discussion, and - and this may be the real kicker - that they are so easily manipulable by external enemies.I was really startled this week to come across an interview with an FCC commissioner calling for Congress to ban TikTok, an op-ed by Marco Rubio announcing legislation to follow through on the FCC commissioner’s recommendation, an article calling TikTok ‘digital fentanyl’ - and found myself agreeing with all of it. Banning TikTok really would be a head-spinning paradigm shift - the end of the era of free trade, of digital utopianism, the muscular assertion of national security priorities over and above the market.
But the reality is that the market is inseparable from national security concerns and that TikTok - like a variety of Chinese enterprises in the West - really is an infiltration and espionage endeavor. As Geoffrey Cain wrote for
, “Every day, every hour, every waking minute, TikTok is hoovering up seemingly infinite bits of information about its users—their tastes, hobbies, political views, sexual preferences, their facial structure, the sound of their voice." As Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner noted, "There simply isn't 'a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the CCP." But - really - everybody speaking on the record is being a bit coy. Those paying attention to TikTok have known from the beginning that TikTok isn’t in any way a private company; that two dozen directors of TikTok’s parent company previously worked for CCP propaganda outlets; that TikTok actively censors subject matter sensitive to the CCP, like posts on Tiananmen Square or Tibet or the Uighurs; that there is no reason whatsoever to believe TikTok’s untiring assertions that it does not allow the Chinese government to access customer data. Off the record, U.S.-based TikTok employees tell Cain, “TikTok is an American company on paper. It’s a Chinese company underneath” and “The Chinese execs, they’re in control, the American execs are there to smile, look pretty, push away criticism, but ByteDance [TikTok’s China-based parent company] is still calling the shots behind the scenes.”The intelligence community has been screaming for some time about China spying in plain sight in Western countries. This is the hoovering-up of information about private citizens, the use of ‘agents of influence’ abroad to discreetly advance CCP policy, the establishment of offices abroad to monitor dissidents, as reported in a Der Spiegel piece this week. But TikTok makes it almost too easy. As Forbes reports, TikTok had at least planned - ‘planned’ being maybe a light word - to track the location of American citizens.
So. Look. It’s not really pleasant for me to write advocating for banning tech platforms and for some sort of counter-espionage regime, but it’s completely clear that this is where we are. China is an imperial power interested in hegemony at Western expense and willing to go to great lengths to attain it. This isn’t some sort of Red Scare fear-mongering; this is just a simple reality that we need to not be naive about. The ‘end of the Cold War’ just wasn’t quite the seminal event that we all thought it was. Russia and China remain hegemonically-minded powers - Russia pursuing a crude, violent approach for asserting its sovereignty; China relying on economic as well as a certain kind of cultural infiltration. The first step - surprisingly difficult - is just to recognize that this is happening, that the free market wasn’t the panacea that we all, at some stage, naively hoped it would be; that there is room for fairly rudimentary types of national defense - e.g. banning an espionage tool disguised as a kids’ app; and that, at the end of the day, politics trumps economics. The surprise is that all of this seems so far-out - that we’re only now talking seriously about a move like banning TikTok.
As a society, we seem to be constitutionally incapable of dealing with what CCP China really is. The New York Times was kind enough to run a piece this week on what ‘zero-Covid’ lockdowns have meant - an estimated 340 million people under some sort of lockdown, individuals without masks sprayed with irritants and led away by the police, boarding school students prevented from visiting home for months, etc. And we also seem very unwilling to deal with tech in political terms - to understand that tech does not really exist in some kind of free-market space (that was a delusion of the ’90s), that it’s easily manipulable, easily controlled by very powerful entities, that we need to have difficult political conversations about the role of tech in our life, the same way as we do with anything else.