📈 first Derivative [88]
Thursday | June 1, 2023
💉☠️ I completely forgot about this essay I read in Harper’s a few months ago that would’ve gone along well with the reading in the last issue. Novelist and curmudgeon Michel Houellebecq writes smartly about euthanasia and assisted suicide in Europe which, I will tell you now, he is not a fan of. (If you have trouble with that hyperlink try this)
Happy reading,
-TK
🌗⛏🛰 NATO declares space an “operational domain” as space warfare and commercial activity are leaving the realm of science fiction and quickly becoming matters of tactics and engineering. While the international norms governing nations’ space activities are only loosely established, the pressing shared concern over space debris is an opportunity to establish concerted efforts that could lead to a shared set of rules. (WSJ | Doug Cameron | Mar 2023) (Foreign Policy | Robert A. Manning | May 2023)
The most important international legal document here is the Outer Space Treaty with parties including the US, Russia, and China which established in 1967 that:
The exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind. … Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
As relations between the major space powers hit a low and technology continues to advance, the ideals set out in the OST are quickly becoming outdated. Look to the US’s unilateral commercial activity in the case of SpaceX’s Starlink which while being a commercial venture by a private company has also been used in the Ukraine war in a way that is definitely seen by adversaries such as Russia and China as a military threat.
Space is headed toward an anarchic scramble for advantage amid conflicting rules and claims to the cosmos, mirroring the fragmentation of the rules-based order into contending blocs and regions. The brief moment of post-Cold War idealism about space is gone.
President Trump established the US Space Force in 2019 as the sixth military service branch to defend US interests in space against emerging threats.
In space, the threats from China range from ground-launched missiles or lasers that could destroy or disable U.S. satellites, to jamming and other cyber interference and attacks in space, said Pentagon officials. China has invested heavily in its space program, with a crewed orbiting station, developing ground-based missiles and lasers as well as more surveillance capabilities. This is part of its broader military aims of denying adversaries access to space-based assets.
In the Ukraine conflict, Russia has expressed its willingness to target space assets, including commercial communications systems, adding to the U.S. urgency of developing warfighting tactics. Russia has previously destroyed one of its own satellites with a ground-launched missile.
The problem of space debris will demand more international coordination and may be a logical entry point to building out a more comprehensive set of international rules and norms governing outer space
Arguably, the most urgent issue is removing space debris, a mutual risk to all space-faring nations. As of May 2022, there were 5,465 satellites in orbit, belonging to some 100 nations. 3,433 are U.S. satellites, about 2,900 from the private sector. The advent of tiny CubeSats like those used for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband devices, has vastly increased the numbers. Musk plans to launch 42,000 of them, while Google and Amazon each plan to launch about 3,000.
These satellites are all vulnerable to at least 27,000 pieces of space debris, tracked by U.S. Defense Department’s Space Surveillance Network, and some 500,000 or more tiny pieces less than two inches in length. Even small pieces of debris traveling at about 17,000 miles an hour can do catastrophic damage to satellites, which travel at the same speed. Last December, a launch of Starlink CubeSats barely missed colliding with a Chinese space station. Last November, a Russian anti-satellite test created 1500 pieces of debris that came so close to the ISS that those aboard—including Russia’s own cosmonauts—had to take shelter.
🏳️🌈💰 As we enter into another Pride Month, conservatives are organizing highly visible and effective boycotts against brands like Bud Light and Target for LGBT-centric marketing. Richard Hanania argues these can be seen as largely emotional backlashes that stem from conservatives’ foundational intellectual dissonances on LGBT issues. (Semafor | David Weigel | May 2023) (Substack | Richard Hanania | May 2023)
The Bud Light boycott has really stuck in my mind the last few weeks, not so much for the particulars of what happened, but for the fact that it feels like something new. Time will tell, but it does seem like an early sign of a sort of social Minsky moment in conservative common knowledge. For one of the first times, it’s serving as a mass-marketed, collective, highly visible option for them to act against, not Bud Light per se, but to express a whole family of grievances in a way that is at the same time easy, relatively private, and not merely speech but financially consequential for the boycotted party.
“What we did with Bud Light and Target comes right from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,” Daily Wire host Matt Walsh told listeners before the holiday weekend, citing the left-wing organizer’s advice to pick a target, freeze it, and personalize it…
Why the backlash now? Jon Schweppe, the policy director of the conservative American Principles Project, said that the debate had changed as the LGBTQ rights movement focused more on transgender rights and visibility. There were corporations who “wanted to show support for Pride,” he said, “but not wade into the trans kids debate”…
DeSantis got credit, too, as did the burgeoning conservative media, and the new owner of Twitter — a multi-billionaire who’s rolled back restrictions on speech that mocks “transgender individuals.” Accounts like End Wokeness, with 1.1 million followers, are now making pro-LGBTQ products infamous (in between Musk-approved tweets about “interracial violent crime”) in ways that the prior ownership might have sought to prevent
On the last point about Twitter, Hanania makes an interesting argument about this:
But in the short run, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re finally starting to see successful right-wing boycotts at the exact moment Twitter censorship policies changed.
The “liberals read, conservatives watch TV” framework has a lot of explanatory power, which is why I keep coming back to it. We can see the early decades of the LGBT debate as the “reading” stage, where written arguments dominated, as when Andrew Sullivan successfully made what turned out to be his influential case for gay marriage in The New Republic. Now we’re in the TV stage, if we remember to think of “TV” as a shorthand for everything audiovisual, including things like memes and viral TikTok videos. As long as social media censorship policies aren’t tilted in favor of the left, conservatives have a strong natural advantage over LGBT. A lot of arguments for non-conventional identities and orientations can sound plausible when put in essay form, but people recoil from their physical manifestations. This explains the success of LibsofTikTok.
Hanania also goes on to connect that Twitter point to some interesting insights about the dissonances at the heart of modern conservatives’ stances on these issues. I don’t know if I’m ready to buy that Twitter is causing all of this but it’s interesting to consider that having lost the intellectual debate on these issues, conservatives are reorganizing themselves not around literature but image and visual media as speech. I’m still pondering it all over but it’s hard not to think of how it might connect to the idea of secondary orality and how these images and videos, often bite-sized, are shared in tribalizing ways and become canon for online subgroups.
Conservatives ended up in a position where they had backed themselves into a corner rhetorically, which made them unable to effectively debate the issue in the arenas of bureaucratic politics and media think pieces. At the same time, liberal victories had some natural implications that produced audiovisual content that inspired a public backlash. Of course, what LGBT success actually looked like in the real world didn’t matter when audiovisual content was carefully curated by social media censors or a mainstream press that was sympathetic to the cause. But Elon’s takeover has changed the dynamic…
on what basis can we hide from kids the fact that some adults are gay or trans? You can only rationally do so if you think the cis-hetero individual should be thought of as the default, idealized form of a human being. We only protect children from models that are bad, which means that conservatives seek to put LGBT issues in the same category as drug use or violence. Otherwise, the “groomer” slur doesn’t make any sense…
New York magazine also had a good interview re: the boycotts
🎭📚🖋 A well-written, stylistic obituary for the novelist Martin Amis (FT | Janan Ganesh | May 2023)
No writing is “just” stylish, he thought. If a sentence gives the reader pleasure, it is because it contains moral or psychological truth.
I have to confess upfront that I’ve read absolutely nothing by Martin Amis but I still found myself deeply enjoying Ganesh’s writing and insights about him in this piece.
There is no causal link between outward plainness and inner wisdom. And the belief otherwise can land entire societies in trouble. Take Back Control. Get Brexit Done. Make America Great Again. It was simple prose that led mature democracies astray over the past decade.
How did Theresa May, that sphinx without a secret, become prime minister? Because the British political class assumed that someone so nondescript must have hidden depths. It was the Brown error again. This happens in workplaces all over the world. I am afraid it happens in journalism. A spurious weight is accorded to the drab and the plodding. This writing must be serious. It’s awful.
🛩💥 A shortage of experienced pilots and flight controllers may be responsible for the recent spike in close calls at airports this year. (WSJ | Andrew Tangel, Micah Maidenberg, Alison Sider | May 2023)
Taken together with the FAA outage earlier this year, and the Southwest Airlines debacle, these reports are starting to feel like the alarm bells of a complex system under too much strain. Good video dramatizing what these close calls can look like.
The officials tossed around theories for the close calls, many focusing on strains stemming from the sudden bounceback in travel after the pandemic. Some cited a lack of experience among newer pilots or distractions facing air-traffic controllers. Staff across the aviation industry may be fatigued from intense work schedules, went another line of discussion. Or, as some current and former government officials believe, complacency has simply set in…
But if a pattern of serious close calls involving airliners at U.S. airports early this year keeps up, it would top any annual total of such incidents in more than two decades, according to a public FAA database…
Many industry officials worry that inexperience among pilots and flight controllers is compounding any problems. Starting in early 2020, carriers grounded much of their fleets and slashed their schedules as would-be passengers stayed home before Covid-19 vaccines emerged. Airlines urged employees to take buyouts or retire early, and legions of experienced pilots obliged.
Another second-order effect we can thank COVID for. Safe travels this summer.
🤖🎤 An interview with Grimes covering her thoughts on AI and opinions on songs that have been made with the help of AI trained on her voice. I wrote back in fD84 about Grimes’ announcement that she’d split royalties 50/50 with anyone who made a successful AI-generated song using her voice. Since then, she’s launched software and distribution to help people take advantage of her offer, resulting in over 15,000 vocal transformations and over 300 completed songs submitted to streaming services. (NYT | Joe Coscarelli | May 2023)
People keep getting really upset, being like, “I want to hear something that a human made!” And I’m like, humans made all of this. You still have to write the song, produce the song and sing the vocal. The part that is A.I. is taking the harmonics and the timbre of the vocal and moving them to be consistent with my voice, as opposed to the person’s original voice. It’s like a new microphone.
And the FT’s pop critic, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, takes us on a fun DIY journey of making an AI voice, in his case for the singer Tom Waits. (FT | Ludovic Hunter-Tilney | May 2023)
I have had a nice time shorting TGT
Nice choice of front picture....