The oligarchs
Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic:
Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation…
A crunch point is imminent, when the European Commission finally concludes a year-long investigation into X. Tellingly, two people who have advised the commission on this investigation would talk with me only off the record, because the potential for reprisals against them and their organizations—whether it be online trolling and harassment or lawsuits—is too great. Still, both advisers said that the commission has the power to protect Europe’s sovereignty, and to force the platforms to be more transparent. “The commission should look at the raft of laws and rules it has available and see how they can be applied,” one of them told me, “always remembering that this is not about taking action against a person’s voice. This is the commission saying that everyone’s voice should be equal.”
At least in theory, no country is obligated to become an electoral Las Vegas, as America has. Global democracies could demand greater transparency around the use of algorithms, both on social media and in the online-advertising market more broadly. They could offer consumers more control over what they see, and more information about what they don’t see. They could enforce their own campaign-funding laws. These changes could make the internet more open and fair, and therefore a better, safer place for the exercise of free speech. If the chances of success seem narrow, it’s not because of the lack of a viable legal framework—rather it’s because, at the moment, cowardice is as viral as one of Musk’s tweets.
And Musk is only going to get more dangerous, not less.
H/t Tim Harris
This is why I mistrust abstract talk about. and appeals to, ‘free speech’ that ignores particular circumstances.
From the Applebaum article:
And they face the unholy Putin-Trump alliance, on both their Atlantic and Eurasian sides.
Democracy thrives on islands and in mountain valleys. Iceland has been a democracy for the last 1,000 years or so, and Switzerland has a similar record, with around 700 years of democracy. American democracy can be traced back to the British Isles and the English Revolution of the 1640s, transported to America by the Puritans. But just as the Eurasian steppe favoured the rise and triumph of Genghis Khan, and the Russian Tsars in the safety of their fortresses and the Kremlin, so the wide expanses of America, with its transplaqnted democracy from sea to shining sea, favousr the likes of the Trumporamus.
Preservation of democracy under these circumstances becomes a continuous battle; against the forces of darkness led by whatever Fuehrer.
Not quite right, Omar. Iceland came under the control of Norway, and then of Denmark, and became virtually a colony of Denmark. The Althing was abolished and only restored properly in 1875, though Iceland remained a possession of Denmark. Iceland became an independent republic only in 1944.
Some of the novels of that great writer Halldor Laxness give a good, though doubtless slanted, view of what life was like for the Icelanders under Danish rule, with the Danes monopolising all trade with the island. Poverty, poverty, poverty…
A British, then an American, force occupied the island in World War II to prevent the Germans from taking it over. The Nazis, as well as the writer Ernst Jünger (not a Nazi, though his very right-wing views contributed to the rise of Hitler), had a very soft spot for the Icelanders, who were supposed to be properly Aryan and purely Germanic, though there was in fact (if I follow the Nazis in attaching importance to ‘race’) a great deal of ‘blood’ brought from outside, particularly from Ireland, in the form of slaves, mostly woman, who were often forced to become concubines.
Quarrels & power & ‘geopolitics’! Incidentally, my wife, who is Japanese, was regularly taken to be Inuit from Greenland when she was studying the piano in Denmark with the Hungarian pianist Gyorgy Vasarhelyi, who had got out of Germany after having his house invaded in the early days of Hitler’s rule and having his piano thrown into a river.