Internationale Politik Quarterly: “Von der Leyen’s Not-So-Geopolitical Commission”

These two embarrassments, coupled with a vaccination roll-out slower than in the UK and US (though faster than most developed countries) and an ongoing inability for the EU to stop the dismantling of the rule of law in Hungary and Poland, has prompted the renewal of an all-too-familiar narrative in the Anglo-American media: an EU facing the most serious crisis in its history. This, of course, is an absurd exaggeration—particularly given the euro crisis a decade ago. But it’s not an exaggeration to say the EU seems to be failing to meet the expectations it set itself to transform into a more geopolitically powerful entity.

The problem is that while leaders like Macron have tasked the Commission to make the EU more geopolitically strong, he and others still refuse to give the Commission the tools that would make it strong. For the last decade, the European Council has consistently opposed measures that would strengthen the Commission, because it would mean diluting the power of national governments. And they have purposefully put weak people into positions of power in Brussels, then expressed surprise when the outcomes were weak.

Dave Keating

This article reminded me of a scene from the excellent TV series Borgen, where top Danish politicians planned to remove a competitor from their own party by… assigning him a position at the European Union! That series was filmed around a decade ago, so the problem seems as old as the European Union, and still unresolved.

Scientific American: “Until recently, People accepted the ‘Fact’ of Aliens in the Solar System”

In other words, in many quarters there was no “are we alone?” question being asked, instead the debate was already onto the details of how the life elsewhere in the cosmos went about its business.

In the 1700s and 1800s we had astronomers like William Herschel, or the more amateur Thomas Dick, not only proposing that our solar system, from the Moon to the outer planets, was overrun with lifeforms (Dick holding the record by suggesting that Saturn’s rings held around 8 trillion individuals) but convincing themselves that they could see the evidence. Herschel, with his good telescopes, becoming convinced that there were forests on the Moon, in the Mare humorum, and speculating that the Sun’s dark spots were actually holes in a glowing hot atmosphere, beneath which, a cool surface supported large alien beings.

Even though we might question some of their scientific standards, people like Herschel and Dick were indeed following the philosophy of life being everywhere, and elevating it to the level of any other observable phenomenon. Herschel was also applying the best scientific instruments he could at the time.

Caleb A. Scharf

The debate around the existence of extraterrestrial life has been reignited recently after the Israeli astronomer Avi Loeb doubled down on his hypothesis that the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua is in fact a light sail transiting our solar system. There is little hard evidence to support such a claim, and to me this resembles a publicity stunt to promote other projects he is involved in, such as Breakthrough Starshot.

ProPublica: “Sheryl Sandberg and Top Facebook Execs silenced an Enemy of Turkey to prevent a Hit to the Company’s Business”

The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly. When the Turkish government attacked the Kurds in the Afrin District of northern Syria, Turkey also arrested hundreds of its own residents for criticizing the operation.

Publicly, Facebook has underscored that it cherishes free speech: We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world, the company wrote in a blog post last month about a new Turkish law requiring that social media firms have a legal presence in the country. More than half of the people in Turkey rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family, to express their opinions and grow their businesses.

But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey’s military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with the government’s demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were centered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights.

Jack Gillum & Justin Elliott

Timely article, considering the recent fight between Facebook and Australian legislators over the local news business. Another piece of evidence, in a long string of incidents, highlighting how the leadership makes decisions and how willing they are to discard principles when the business is at stake. To Facebook, free speech is nothing more than a catchy phrase inserted into PR statements to appease the American public. The company can block entire countries or political movements with the flip of a switch, but by all means, let’s freak out over the death of the open web whenever a country plans to introduce a new tax on Facebook!

Li’s Newsletter: “Building the Middle Class of the Creator Economy”

Ever since Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson first published his “Long Tail” theory in 2004, the idea has been endlessly reinforced, contradicted, and debated. He argued that the internet’s removal of physical limitations (local audiences, scarce shelf space) would empower niche products and creators to flourish.

In the search category, the phenomenon has proven true: Google has revealed that on a daily basis, 15% of all queries have never been searched before, a figure that has remained stable since 2013.

But for content platforms, the move to digital content hasn’t been correlated with a burgeoning long tail: the top creators are massively successful, while long-tail creators are barely getting by. On Spotify, for instance, the top 43,000 artists—roughly 1.4% of those on the platform—pull in 90% of royalties and make, on average, $22,395 per artist per quarter. The rest of its 3 million creators, or 98.6% of its artists, made just $36 per artist per quarter.

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A 1981 paper by Sherwin Rosen, an economist at the University of Chicago, offers a prescient explanation of how the “superstar phenomenon” would become more pronounced as a result of technology. Rosen argued that in markets with heterogeneous providers, like most creator economies, success accrues disproportionately to those on top: lesser talent often is a poor substitute for greater talent […] hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance. This phenomenon is further exacerbated by technology which lowers distribution costs: the best performers in a given field are freed from physical constraints like the size of concert halls—and can address an unlimited market and reap a greater share of revenue.

Li Jin

Interesting topic, followed up with many good proposals for combating this concentration at the top of the creator economy. This issue is equivalent to income inequality in a national economy, and some of the solutions are similar: a better distribution of incomes by platforms, including decoupling creator payouts from audience demographic, diversifying the sources of revenue and creating passive income opportunities. Other measures remind me of the roles of music labels for musicians, subsidizing artists’ early steps with advances and providing support and guidance at the start of their careers. Financial incentives for people looking to become creators may be one of the most important steps, as it allows newcomers to focus on developing their products instead of constantly worrying about income.

ProPublica: “The Big Thaw: How Russia could dominate a Warming World”

A great transformation is underway in the eastern half of Russia. For centuries the vast majority of the land has been impossible to farm; only the southernmost stretches along the Chinese and Mongolian borders, including around Dimitrovo, have been temperate enough to offer workable soil. But as the climate has begun to warm, the land — and the prospect for cultivating it — has begun to improve. Twenty years ago, Dima says, the spring thaw came in May, but now the ground is bare by April; rainstorms now come stronger and wetter. Across Eastern Russia, wild forests, swamps and grasslands are slowly being transformed into orderly grids of soybeans, corn and wheat. It’s a process that is likely to accelerate: Russia hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food.

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The lyrics to Russia’s modern anthem suggest that at least some of its leaders have anticipated this moment: Wide spaces for dreams and for living are opened for us by the coming years. As if to fulfill that vision — and perhaps with the expectation of needing more land to execute his climate ambitions — Vladimir Putin declared in 2013 that the remaking of Russia’s East is our national priority for the entire 21st century, and that the goals that have to be attained are unprecedented in their scope. In laying out that ambition, he surely had history in mind. There was the outpost Russia built at the Sea of Okhotsk in the 1700s; efforts to drive out Chinese settlers of the Qing dynasty in the 1800s; the founding of the Jewish Autonomous Region, which ultimately brought as many as 40,000 Yiddish-speaking Jews to the area around Birobidzhan, in 1934; and even the longstanding banishment of workers and prisoners alike to Siberia and the Far East under Stalin and afterward.

Abrahm Lustgarten

While most countries are bracing for the damaging effects of global warming, or are already struggling with extreme heat or extreme cold events, Russia is making long-term plans to benefit from this warming trend. It controls after all the largest land area in the world and one of the least populated, which could become a prime destination for tens of millions of climate refugees in coming decades, and a huge food producer for those staying behind. The thinning ice in the Arctic is already allowing icebreakers to sail the Northern Sea Route in the middle of winter, opening huge commercial opportunities for Russian ports in the far north. In upcoming negotiations to agree upon global mitigation measures and stricter targets for emissions, Russia may prove the most stubborn opposer of coordinated actions.

Wired UK: “Facebook’s Australia news ban is the best decision it’s ever made”

But there’s a trickier tangle that taxation alone won’t unpick. For many, Facebook and Google are part of the mythical “open web” – one where hyperlinks can be freely posted on any website. That makes sense on, say, Wikipedia, but it does not make sense on Facebook and Google which, despite their scale and mission statements, are essentially closed advertising ecosystems. Sure, news organisations can choose to post articles and videos on Facebook. And in return, people on Facebook may play those videos and click on those links. Rarely, they might click on an advert on the news organisation’s website or pay to subscribe to that publication. Or, if you’re the Epoch Times, you can game Facebook’s engagement algorithm to transform yourself from a low-budget far-right newspaper founded by an obscure Chinese spiritual movement into one of the most-read publications on the planet. If Facebook prioritised social wellbeing over engagement, this wouldn’t have happened.

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For years it has been clear that the web, which has been shaped in Facebook and Google’s image, is in no way open. Facebook is not a social network. Google is not a search engine. They are an advertising duopoly. In the US, more than half of advertising spend now goes to big digital platforms. In the UK, Amazon, Facebook and Google account for almost 70 per cent of digital advertising spend. If Facebook doesn’t want news on its platform, that’s Facebook’s prerogative. If Google wants to hand giant wads of cash to Rupert Murdoch to secure deeply troubling pay-to-play deals, that’s Google’s prerogative. It’s an irresistible tug-of-war: there would be no Facebook or Google without the terabytes of stuff we shout into the void every hour of every day. And yet, without Facebook and Google, there would be no void to shout into.

James Temperton

Almost six months after issuing the threat, Facebook followed through and blocked links to Australian news sites, not only in the country, but globally. The decision was reversed this week, as the two sides continue to negotiate in the coming months.

The New York Times: “Pfizer’s vaccine works well after one dose, and doesn’t always need ultracold storage”

Although regulators in the United States have held fast to the requirement that people receive two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine three weeks apart, the British government decided to prioritize giving as many people as possible an initial dose, allowing delays of up to 12 weeks before the second dose. The Israeli study could bolster arguments for emulating that approach in other countries.

Published in The Lancet on Thursday and drawing from a group of 9,100 Israeli health care workers, the study showed that Pfizer’s vaccine was 85 percent effective 15 to 28 days after receiving the first dose. Pfizer and BioNTech’s late-stage clinical trials, which enrolled 44,000 people, showed that the vaccine was 95 percent effective if two doses were given three weeks apart.

Katie Thomas

Another study being passed around as proof that regulators should delay the second vaccine dose to offer more people partial protection, because a single dose is supposedly enough. I have quickly skimmed through the study, but there are obviously several issues with this conclusion: