Dear Friends,
There are a number of new people here. Welcome!
Profound thanks to
and to for linking to Castalia recently — and especially to Lorenzen for taking in good grace some disagreements I had with one of his essays. By the way, it really means a lot when established writers shout out and promote less-well-known people, and there are some marquee names within the Substack sort of space who are just phenomenal about doing this.A word about what this Substack is. First of all, it’s very idiosyncratic. It’s just me writing because I really love to write. The heart of it, from my perspective, is the more literary materials — the short stories and essays on aesthetics. But politics is important. And once every week or two, for ‘Commentator,’ I read extensively through the news, try to spotlight the best articles I’ve found from across a wide range of sources, and offer my take on them in a genuine, conscientious attempt to try to think shit through. Almost everything here is free, but paid subscriptions are always welcome — as of course are comments and arguments. I typically post every other day but that’s whim-dependent.
All best,
Sam
INTELLIGENCE LEAKS AND THE GRINDING WAR IN UKRAINE
There’s so much going on right now, it’s like a joke. I’m feeling the need to write longer than I normally would on the news — and will spill over into a second day. What connects all the major stories this week is not just that they’re consequential but that they’re unprecedented — they all represent some sort of a line that’s never been crossed that’s now being crossed; and that means that my commentary (like everybody’s) ends up being very hypothetical, very conditional.
The major story this week — and the strangest — is the leak of U.S. intelligence. Fundamentally, I don’t understand it; and neither, it seems, does anyone else. The investigative journalism site Bellingcat digs at the back story of the leaks and finds that they first popped up in January on the gaming platform Discord “although with evidence that some documents could have been posted online even earlier.” The documents seem to have merrily circulated there for several months — trotted out to settle arguments between gamers and provoking no particular external attention — and then migrated to 4chan and to pro-Russian Telegram channels.
In their damage control, speaking to media outlets, Defense officials were surprisingly straightforward in conceding that the documents were genuine and the leaks real. “As many of these were pictures of documents, it appears that it was a deliberate leak done by someone that wished to damage the Ukraine, U.S., and NATO efforts,” said Mick Mulroy, described as a ‘former senior Pentagon official.’ The New York Times wrote that, “Behind closed doors chagrined national security officials were trying to find the culprit.”
The content of the documents appears not to change the overall picture of the war all that drastically. The U.S. is apparently bearish on Ukraine’s expected spring offensive, anticipating that Ukraine will achieve only “modest territorial gains.” Ukraine is running short on antiaircraft weaponry, particularly ammunition — which a recent $2.6 billion package is meant to rectify. The U.S. appears to know more than it should about high-level discussions in South Korea and Israel — implying that the U.S. is spying on its allies. That in itself shouldn’t be a surprise, despite a round of perfunctory international outrage, although it is noteworthy how extensive the U.S.’ intelligence-gathering apparatus really seems to be. More interesting is that U.S. intelligence knows a startling amount about Russia’s war-making capabilities, both through extensive human intelligence and through an advanced satellite technology called LAPIS that had been, according to The Washington Post, “among the more closely guarded capabilities in the U.S. intelligence arsenal.” The Post continues, “The documents also demonstrate what has long been understood but never publicly spelled out this precisely: The U.S. intelligence community has penetrated the Russian military and its commanders so deeply that it can warn Ukraine in advance of attacks and reliably assess the strengths and weaknesses of Russian forces.”
That means that, of course, in theory, Russia can repair the security breaches and negate what has to this point been the great advantage of the U.S./Ukrainian side. “The US have been consistently downbeat on Ukraine’s capabilities and they keep on getting it wrong. So that’s not new,” one European diplomat said to The Guardian in analyzing the files. “What is damaging is it reveals what the Americans do and do not know about the Russians. And that’s a problem.”
I haven’t seen anything cogent on the provenance of the documents, any explanation of whether they were leaked or stolen, any analysis of how they sat for months undetected in gaming chatrooms. It is amusing that, in a more innocent time, we were upset that the president and ex-president had classified documents in their homes; and that only a few months later ‘top secret’ documents are being used to settle arguments between Minecraft gamers and WowMao fans. Anyway. Even very experienced reporters are throwing up their hands. In The Washington Post, David Ignatius writes that “we’re in a wilderness of mirrors here,” and while he’s told by his administration sources that “the documents appear to be real” it becomes almost impossible for an outsider to figure out what’s genuine and what’s been doctored in the reposting.
The overriding consensus from the documents, though, is a degree of pessimism towards Ukraine’s war efforts — with Ukrainian casualties high and with Ukraine logistically strained. “The documents tell a chilling story,” Ignatius writes. “The West’s ‘arsenal of democracy’ isn’t close to matching Ukraine’s needs.” One analysis, focused on Donbas, described a “grinding campaign of attrition” that “is likely heading toward a stalemate.”
That echoes another, perfectly-public assessment written by RAND analyst and Russia specialist Dara Massicot for Foreign Affairs in February. Massicot claims that Russia’s failures in the initial invasion may be blinding analysts to Russia’s very estimable military capacities. “Just as the West overestimated Russia’s capabilities before the invasion, it could now underestimate them,” she writes. It becomes important to remember that Russia has to some extent fought with one hand tied behind its back, declining to truly fight for aerial superiority and waiting until late in the game to attempt to disable Ukraine’s infrastructure. “The story of Russia’s military performance is far more nuanced than many early narratives about the war have suggested,” Massicot writes. “The Russian military has learned from its mistakes and made big adjustments, such as downsizing its objectives and mobilizing new personnel.”
Meanwhile, though — in the article that landed reporter Evan Gershkovich in jail — The Wall Street Journal claims convincingly that Russia’s economy is far more fragile than it appeared to be throughout 2022. At an economic conference, the billionaire Oleg Deripaska said, “There will be no money next year, we need foreign investors,” and the article’s writers, Gershkovich and Georgi Kantchev, claim that much of Russia’s “dimming outlook stems from the bad bet by Mr. Putin last year that he could use Russian energy supplies to limit Western Europe’s support for Ukraine.” What looms large here is the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline — and, I would submit (following
’s reporting) the foresight of Biden in blowing it up, eliminating both a major source of Russian revenue and of Russia’s leverage over Europe.The overall understanding, from all reporting, all assessments, leaked or public, is just a sense of the abiding grimness of the conflict for both sides — for the Ukrainians of course but also for the contracting Russian economy. As the economist Vasily Astrov said to The Wall Street Journal, “This is a little bit like going back to Soviet times, doing everything ourselves. It will be nearly impossible to properly replace what’s missing.”
It’s worth just mentioning that as the war continues to stalemate, continues to take its grim turns, the temptation rises for both sides to turn to asymmetrical fighting. In St Petersburg, the Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky is blown up as he is giving a talk — which, along with the car bomb that killed Dasha Dugina last year, is the second such attack deep within Russia. Nobody exactly knows where the attacks came from, although that hasn’t stopped speculation. “It is clear to everyone who is behind it,” said the deputy speaker of the Russian parliament, and even U.S. intelligence has said that they believe Ukraine authorized the attack that killed Dugina. What else is there to say except that this is what war looks like? The Ukrainians appeared like such angels in the beginning, and I am adamantly on the side of arming and supporting Ukraine, but we should be aware that asymmetrical war leads to asymmetrical methods of fighting — and, given Russia’s rampant attacks on Ukrainian civilians, the temptation seems to have become overwhelming on the Ukrainian side to carry out terrorist attacks of their own on Russians.
A PUSHBACK AGAINST AI?
Meanwhile, the most consequential story at the moment (I hope) is the beginning of a concerted pushback against AI. I’ve been assuming that the cat is out of the bag, that the tech pressures to keep developing AI are so overwhelming that any note of caution gets drowned out, but, surprisingly enough, some countries and some techies are attempting to stop the machine.
Italy — yes, Meloni’s Italy — has temporarily banned ChatGPT citing privacy concerns, and The Future for Life Institute has issued a letter calling for a moratorium in AI development, initially signed by one thousand tech leaders, including, of all people, Elon Musk, and encouraging governments to step in if tech companies do not so voluntarily.
Such strange times — that I’m applauding an authoritarian move by a quasi-Fascist government, am thrilled at the visionary leadership of Elon Musk, who this same week tried to block all Substack reposts as ‘malware.’ And do I really think that AI should be banned or paused?
I guess that I do. I find the technology to be such an existential threat to humanity’s sense of itself that I would prefer the technology to not exist, for Pandora’s box to be closed. And if it seems heavy-handed of governments to impede research, well, this is why we have governments — to make difficult decisions that benefit the population as a whole. It is not really true that technology has to inexorably advance. There are certain breakthrough technologies that are tightly controlled — nation-states keeping possession of nuclear technology, the scientific community quietly turning away from cloning. The pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence seems like one of those. I don’t think it will disappear — I suspect that, for instance, the AI weapons race is here to stay — but it is possible for governments and militaries to keep control of tech for a very long time, and my belief is that AI will generate far more harm than good if it remains in the open market and is allowed to tear through the economy.
What’s surprising to me is the extent to which the AI pioneers themselves are wary of the technology and are trotting it out more as a way of preempting bad actors from getting to it first. In an admiring profile of Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, The New York Times presents Altman as being almost astonishingly ambivalent about his own product. A board adviser to OpenAI, quoted in the article, describes Altman as “constantly arguing with himself — in a single conversation he is both sides of the debate club.”
Altman, who seems to be fairly idealistic and a sympathetic sort of guy, has decided to trust in the free market and open exchange. “The question,” writes Cade Metz in The Times, “is whether the two sides of Sam Altman are ultimately compatible: Does it make sense to ride that curve if it could end in disaster? Mr. Altman is certainly determined to see how it all plays out.”
That’s of course the optimistic, democratic vision, but I’m just not sure I believe it. There are technologies — nuclear as the reductio ad absurdum — that can’t be trusted to the market and the public. Speaking as one side of his personal debate club, Altman worries that “the technologies his company was building could cause serious harm — spreading disinformation, undercutting the job market, or even destroying the world as we know it.” That’s the good angel over Altman’s shoulder that he should probably be listening to. The countervailing claim of OpenAI’s president that “if you’re equally upsetting both extreme sides, then you’re doing something right” is a silly thing to say and lacking all the sense of the magnitude of what we’re dealing with. As the Future of Life Institute’s letter more trenchantly puts it, “A.I. developers are locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict or reliably control.”
The compromise proposed by the Future of Life Institute may actually work. ChatGPT-3 and ChatGPT-4 are grandfathered in. OpenAI gets to keep its gains. (And this, by the way, probably explains the participation of Musk who is a co-founder of OpenAI and is, as Cornell professor James Grimmelmann says, being “deeply hypocritical” in suddenly developing qualms about AI.) The letter ends up being really directed at companies like Microsoft and Google, which are moving into the AI arms’ race. But I don’t feel particularly bad for Microsoft and Google and I’m not perturbed by Musk’s hypocrisy.
Since the new AI tools have been released, the dangers of AI have been screamingly clear — taking jobs, provoking cheating in school, sowing political discord, and so on. The impending tech arms race will tend to exacerbate all those, and, if it’s not exactly clear what protocols can be instituted to make AI completely safe, the bid for time and slowness seems like the wise move. Open AI has been an interesting experiment. Time to shut it down.
BURY MY HEART IN TENNESSEE
And one more set of incredible circumstances — the Tennessee State Legislature voting to expel two of its members for a gun control protest. This one really shook me actually, and together with several other domestic incidents this week (the Texas governor saying he would issue a pardon in the case of an Army sergeant found guilty for murdering a Black Lives Matter protestor; a Texas judge suspending the FDA’s approval of an abortion pill — a pill that has been on the market since 2000; a mob of protestors at San Francisco State University attacking a swimmer they deemed transphobic and barricading her for hours in a room) gave me the sense that we really may be approaching some irreparable breach in this country. I don’t actually think we’re headed for a ‘civil war’ — I have no idea what the regional breakdown would even look like for that — but an event like what happened in Tennessee gives me the very sick feeling that Americans, in some fundamental way, just cannot live with each other.
This one is basically about divisions between cities and more rural constituencies. Tennessee has a Republican supermajority in its legislature. However, the two expelled representatives are avowedly left, one from Nashville, one Memphis. Both are activists, and one has been arrested numerous times for non-violent protests. After a shooting in a Nashville church school, the two legislators joined protests for gun control outside the Capitol building, and then, accompanied by a third representative, led protests on the floor of the House itself. Through a bullhorn, Justin Jones shouted “No action no peace” and Justin Pearson shouted “Enough is enough.” Legislative business was disrupted, and then the supermajority retailed by expelling Jones and Pearson and falling just shy of the votes needed to expel the third representative, Gloria Johnson.
That meant that there were vacant seats in the legislature, and the Nashville Metro Council unanimously voted to restore Jones to his seat, which he reoccupied without having missed a day of work, while Memphis is expected to reinstate Pearson later this week.
In terms of refereeing this dispute, the Tennessee supermajority clearly acted badly: the expulsion vote was ridiculous and over-the-top. The Nashville Metro Council acquitted itself well by sticking up for its elected representative. “Our community members are more than capable of selecting their representative and their will should never have been undermined,” said a Council member ahead of Jones’ reinstatement vote. And people can argue about how severe a breach of ‘decorum’ the three representatives’ protest was, but, look, they were making a valid point. Hopes and prayers help no one. America has a real problem with mass shootings — and somebody needs to be emotional about it, somebody needs to try to get gun control through. As Tressie McMillan Cotton writes acidly in The New York Times, “This swift political action [of the expulsion vote] is the kind that the 71 percent of Americans who want stricter gun laws can only dream of happening.”
But the story cuts much deeper than the events themselves and speaks to fundamental schisms in the democratic process and questions about basic governing legitimacy. The activists more or less viewed the Tennessee State Legislature as an illegitimate body — if it refused to enact meaningful gun control legislation then there was no point in its continuing to convene. And the supermajority in turn regarded the protesting tactics of Jones and Pearson as illegitimate —and with startling speed undid a democratic election. Reading about this does feel very much like reading about the breakdown of democracy in the lead-up to the Civil War or during Reconstruction — like the caning of Sumner in Congress, the odd slow-motion sense from the history of that period that everybody was acting in the way they were compelled to act, and with their interests setting them inimically at odds with one another. Given their values, Jones and Pearson had to engage in protest even at the risk of violating ‘decorum’; given their commitment to a narrow meaning of law-and-order, the supermajority had to expel them; given their electoral responsibilities, the city councils and commissioners had to reinstate Jones and Pearson; and at every step the situation had to escalate further.
The intelligent point to make it here is that this is why we have all these wonderful, carefully constructed rules of civic discourse — all the checks and balances, parliamentary rules, ingrained respect for elected office, etc, so that when we get into difficult periods the system can still prevail. If a crisis like mass shootings hits, gun control legislation is supposed to go through the representative body. If the legislative body refuses to act, it really should be able to take in stride the protest of its own elected members. But it’s becoming obvious that everything is a bit far gone for this sort of appeal to democratic procedures. As Jones wrote on social media, “There comes a time when you have to do something out of the ordinary.” And I had the haunting sense this week that I really was watching something irrevocable happen — the breakdown of modes of civic discourse, the rejection by both extremes of the system as a whole.