What Happened: June 29, 2021

The Big Story

It’s a banner day for Facebook after a federal judge dismissed two antitrust lawsuits against the company. Wall Street celebrated by raising the social media platform’s stock by nearly 5%, putting its valuation over $1 trillion for the first time. The two antitrust cases, one brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the other by 45 state attorneys general led by New York were summarily thrown out by the Obama-appointed judge James Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., who criticized the weakness of the complaints. He deemed them too weak to go to trial. “The FTC’s complaint says almost nothing concrete on the key question of how much power Facebook actually had, and still has,” Boasberg wrote. “It is almost as if the agency expects the court to simply nod to the conventional wisdom that Facebook is a monopolist.” But the FTC, equipped with the judge’s guidance, now has the chance to regroup and refile within 30 days. The second case was dismissed due to the states taking too long to file their claims. With multiple pieces of legislation pending, and the FTC having another chance to file, this isn’t the end of the road for antitrust actions under the Biden administration but an indication of how much resistance they will meet even in a political atmosphere that is nominally more receptive to corporate regulation.

Read it here: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/judge-s-facebook-ruling-embarrasses-ftc-states 

In today’s Back Pages: It’s All Real Life

The Rest

Days after U.S. airstrikes targeted Iranian-aligned militias, U.S. troops in Syria came under rocket attack on Monday. No one was reported wounded in the attack on a U.S. base on the Al-Omar oil field in eastern Syria. American forces in the area responded with retaliatory artillery strikes that hit Al Mayadeen, a town under the control of Iranian-backed militias, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization based in London.

As Ethiopia’s government announced an immediate unilateral cease-fire in the country’s civil war, rebel forces took to the streets to celebrate in Mekelle, capital of the country’s Tigray region. United Nations officials estimate that tens of thousands of people have been killed in the fighting, which began last November and has left more than a million people displaced from their homes and some 900,000 facing famine, according to the U.S. government.

Israel’s Yair Lapid, who’s scheduled to become prime minister in two years in an agreed-upon leadership rotation, got a warm welcome in the United Arab Emirates this week where he was traveling in his current capacity as foreign minister. Lapid’s visit was the first by an Israeli minister since the two countries established diplomatic ties last year under the Abraham Accords. The Biden administration was initially positive about the visit, but later U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken indicated that further Arab-Israeli normalization efforts would be predicated on Israel reaching an agreement with the Palestinians. Lapid has publicly questioned whether such a goal can be achieved. “The Palestinians have to want progress themselves for someone to be able to help them, and that’s not the situation now in the Palestinian Authority or Hamas,” he told The Jerusalem Post.
Read it here: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/lapid-dedicates-israeli-embassy-in-abu-dhabi-672352

Oakland’s director of violence prevention, Guillermo Cespedes, was being interviewed in front of City Hall Monday afternoon when, most inconveniently, he was held up on camera by two armed assailants who attempted to rob both him and the local television news team. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the incident occurred only hours after Oakland’s police chief “warned of worsening crime amid cuts to the police budget.” A police report was filed but did not mention Cespedes.
Read it here: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Armed-robbers-held-up-news-crew-as-it-interviewed-16280448.php

In a major escalation at one of the world’s most volatile hot spots, India has moved some 50,000 troops to the Chinese border, bringing the total combat forces there to at least 250,000. India also deployed fighter jets to the country’s north and moved naval warships into the Indian Ocean to monitor sea lanes used for trade with China. The buildup comes after a deadly clash last June between U.S. ally India and U.S. strategic adversary China, when the two countries battled in the Himalayan border region.

The world of young-adult literature, contrary to what the uninitiated might expect, blends the political attitudes of the Soviet secret police with the social graces of a cannibal colony. You can see those tendencies on display in this anecdote related by Tablet’s Yair Rosenberg about the campaign against a Black Jewish diversity officer who committed an unforgivable sin.

This looks VERY bad. On June 10, after anti-Jewish crimes spiked, the Black Jewish diversity officer for the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators @scbwi posted a condemnation of antisemitism. Today, she was fired, apparently for not mentioning Islamophobia? Yikes. pic.twitter.com/qwYAFKKlWp

— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) June 28, 2021

While politicians and generals act as if the U.S. military is a hive of extremism, justifying programs of surveillance and reeducation to stave off imminent threats to the country, there continues to be no evidence that this is actually the case. A new study conducted by a tech company called Moonshot, which was founded to identify people searching for “extremist content” online, finds that “active duty troops are less prone than the American public as a whole to seek out information about violent extremism.”
Read it here: https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2021/06/us-troops-base-less-likely-seek-extremist-content-americans-general-study-finds/175006/

Arizona’s Republican Rep. Paul Gosar is defending his decision to attend a fundraising event with the zoomer white nationalist Nick Fuentes. After Fuentes promoted the event on social media and brought it to wider attention, Gosar tweeted Tuesday, “Not sure why anyone is freaking out. I’ll say this: there are millions of Gen Z, Y and X conservatives. They believe in America First.” Fuentes, who identifies himself with the American First label, also espouses Holocaust denial among his other political beliefs. Gosar appeared at a previous event with Fuentes in February. 

The Back Pages

There are few illusions today more durable and more dangerous than the belief that “the internet is not the real world.” To borrow an internet term, it’s “a cope,” an attempt to console oneself with a comforting lie rather than face the harsh truth.

You hear it argued by otherwise smart and sensible people that whatever is most deranged about the digital world is not as bad as it seems because, at the end of the day, it is not fully real. The “very online” description is applied both to outlandish online subcultures such as “otherkins,” who identify as a nonhuman trans species, and—perhaps more pertinently—to the political preoccupations of young social-media-obsessed activists. These kinds of people, so the thinking goes, may command a lot of attention online, but they don’t wield much influence in the real world. This is what New York’s likely next mayor Eric Adams was getting at when he told supporters, “Social media does not pick a candidate. People on social security pick a candidate.” A nice line, no doubt, but one that rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the internet is and how it connects to human societies.

For one thing, even if Adams is right today, it’s only a matter of time before the people currently using social media are themselves drawing social security (through Bitcoin or digital gruel or whatever currency the government uses for payments in 2050). More to the point, the evidence of the past decade points directly to the elevation of fringe fantasy and role playing in culture and politics reshaping the normative assumptions of the mainstream.

Just a few days ago, a white, British-born internet personality went viral when they came out as a gender nonbinary transracial Korean person. If it was just a troll, they were committed enough to the bit to go ahead and get the surgery to “become Korean.” Which is to say that the line between “serious” and “troll” is as fluid and permeable as the one between “real life” and online.

There is only this world and everything it contains. The internet can seem like an alien technology but, if anything, that’s too comforting a notion. Not only is the world online not merely some kind of fantasy, it’s not even separate from us. Like every other technology, the internet is what Marshall McLuhan called an “extension of the human.”

“Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of ‘what the public wants’ played over its own nerves,” McLuhan wrote in “The Medium Is the Message,” the first chapter of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The passage continues: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.” 

Don’t kid yourself—it’s all real.

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