In the aftermath of the horrific events in Las Vegas, today’s post suggests that Americans should emulate the British “stiff upper lip” attitude and should work to keep calm in the face of mass violence. This is not easy, given how horrific such events are, and of course such a stoic reaction will likely be unrealistic for those who actually had loved ones impacted by the tragedy. Furthermore, this proposed sense of calm should not involve an illogical and inhumane degree of apathy and complacency in the aftermath of outrageous violence. Nor does it suggest an abandonment of the desire to find policy solutions to address and mitigate the problem of gun violence.
Category: Russia
A Few Thoughts on Bots
Anne Applebaum, the award-winning historian and Washington Post columnist, was at the forefront of covering a plethora of nefarious Russian-orchestrated cyberattacks that have sought to distort political outcomes around the globe. Long before the 2016 presidential election, she made Americans aware of the Russian government’s online efforts to propagandize and deceive.
Her recent column notes that bad actors have perpetuated substantial online mischief and fraud by exploiting the difficulty we all face in distinguishing humans from automatons on the Internet. Robotic online mobs posing as humans and targeting real people through the Internet is a threat posed by “artificial intelligence” that has not been addressed in many dystopian science-fiction stories, but it is a growing real-world problem.
Technology and the Clash of Civilizations
I recently revisited the famous 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs by Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” . In this post I review the historical context of its publication, the degree to which its ideas have or have not proven prescient regarding current geopolitics of the 21st Century, and the ways in which his theory can be used to examine how different civilizations have experienced and responded to the digital revolution of the Internet age.
Two of the main intellectual paradigms for understanding the post-Cold War world were Huntington’s concept (which described inevitable future conflicts between civilizational blocs around the globe) and Francis Fukuyama’s view of “The End of History,” which observed that governments around the world seemed to be converting en masse to democratic politics and market economics.