This is The Morning Press, a Brain Iron dot com production. Here’s eleven minutes or so of news for today, Monday, March 11, 2024.
The US House of Representatives is expected to vote Wednesday on legislation that would force ByteDance, the China-based internet video-sharing company that owns and operates TikTok, to sell the popular social media app or see it banned from app stores. The bill, which does not yet have companion legislation in the Democratically-controlled Senate but does have the support of President Joe Biden, was unanimously voted out of committee with full bipartisan support last Thursday, after a campaign organized by TikTok itself to flood Congress’s phone banks with users protesting the proposed law appeared to backfire. TikTok sent a push-notification to millions of its users represented by congresspeople on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, encouraging them to call their representative to voice their opposition to the purported ban. The callers told staffers answering phones that they spend their whole day on the app, or that a ban would be devastating to their livelihood as content creators—complaints that only seemed to reinforce, in some lawmakers’ minds, the danger of allowing a company that exists at the pleasure of a foreign adversary so much influence over the minds and lives of American citizens. Despite broad bipartisan support, former president Donald Trump came out against any move to “get rid of TikTok” because, he claims, doing so would redound to the benefit of “Facebook and Zuckerschmuck,” referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who he claims helped steal the 2020 election, and labels a “true Enemy of the People.” Trump’s stated opposition is a shift from his previous stance, as in 2020 he took executive action to effectively ban the app from devices in the United States, but was rebuffed by the courts. It’s not clear yet whether Trump’s newfound appreciation for TikTok, which appeared to materialize after a meeting with conservative billionaire and TikTok investor Jeff Yass, will be enough to change House Republicans’ minds on the matter.
A brief editorial aside: Note to Congress: It is of course a problem that TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which, as a Beijing-based corporation, we must understand to be entirely beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, and therefore we can safely assume that whatever data TikTok is collecting about its users is available to the Chinese government. But forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to some group of investors based elsewhere wouldn’t prevent the Chinese government, or any other interested party, from buying access to any and all of the personal data that these apps and other technology companies compile about their users. Without a comprehensive new law to address consumer digital privacy that protects both the individual end user and by extension our national security, a TikTok ban or forced sale is an umbrella in a monsoon, and probably does more harm than good if it creates the impression that anything meaningful has been done or changed. After decades of clicking “Accept to Continue” at the bottom of pages of fine print that purport to explain how data will be used, but are rarely read and less frequently understood, the digital lives of Americans are up for sale to anyone willing to buy—whether that’s insurance companies, the FBI, or the NSA (links in the transcript to three recent stories)—and without a comprehensive privacy law, nothing will change. Setting aside the broader privacy concerns that will almost certainly not be addressed anytime soon, though—it is so thoroughly bonkers how very little we think about the forces behind our media diet. We don’t really think of the internet in the same way we think about the public airwaves—a limited resource divvied up and leased out by the government over which radio and television signals are broadcast—whereas the internet has functionally no such constraints in terms of access to bandwidth. A regulatory authority like the FCC was never tasked with regulating the communications networks that have sprung up on the internet, and I’m certainly skeptical of the idea that a government agency, even an absurdly well-resourced one, would be able to capably regulate the internet in the same way radio and television were once regulated. But surely, if 170 million Americans are on a social network, the public has an interest in knowing how and why they are being fed information, and by whom, and to what end. I don’t know what the threshold should be, but it seems like once a network has achieved a certain amount of penetration into the lives of Americans, it should become a regulatory concern subject to oversight. It doesn’t strike me as remotely crazy that massive communications networks with direct lines to the brains of hundreds of millions of American citizens must be subject to, at the very least, the same sort of regulatory framework that over the air broadcasters are. If you would find it weird and kind of unacceptable for a member of the Saudi royal family to suddenly decide to buy iHeartMedia and its 900 US radio stations, or for a Russian oligarch with ties to Putin and the Kremlin to buy Sinclair Broadcast Group and its 300 television stations, it tracks that we should be skeptical of a Chinese company owning an app that’s on the phones of 170 million Americans, many of whom spend many hours a day interacting with content on that app. But we have so totally divorced ourselves from the idea that we are consuming this stuff collectively in favor of the notion of the radical self-sufficient individual striking out online to create and curate a personalized bespoke experience of the digital world. But this simply isn’t true for most people—most people are instead subject to the same tidal forces of massive connected networks that makes at least keeping an eye on who owns the information distribution systems worthwhile in other broadcast mediums. It feels like we are these autonomous, individual actors capable of rational choice and responsible for our own individual well-being because we are holding the device in our hands, seeking out the world. It is a feeling of freedom, but a false one. And we should be warily and skeptically watching, through what remains of our institutions of collective civic action, the actors—state and private alike—who seek to hold and control our attention, even as it feels like we are simply being offered the freedom to choose what we consume.
President Joe Biden on Monday released a proposed $7.3 trillion budget for fiscal year 2025 that is less a serious attempt to get through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives than it is a sweeping election year policy platform designed to highlight differences between his and Republicans’ spending priorities. The budget would raise taxes on corporations and extremely wealthy Americans while expanding the Child Tax Credit and cutting taxes on families earning less than $400,000 per year, and would require borrowing in excess of one trillion dollars to cover revenue shortfalls. The House, in turn, has already released a budget blueprint of their own that has no chance of success in the Senate, with unspecified cuts of $11 trillion to nondefense spending that Republicans claim will balance the federal budget in ten years, but Democrats decry as “an assault on everything from health care to education.” In related news, the Senate on Friday voted through $460 billion in spending that President Biden signed on Saturday, a collection of six different spending allowances that puts Congress about halfway through its work of appropriating money for 2024. Another package of six bills must be passed before a March 22 deadline to fund the rest of the federal government and avoid a partial shutdown. The House Freedom Caucus is urging lawmakers to vote against the next package, as they did last week’s, but has not yet signaled a desire to oust Speaker Mike Johnson, whose cooperation with Democrats on funding the government they see as a betrayal of Republican promises to the base.
A brief editorial aside: The budgeting process in this country has obviously devolved into a shameful reflection of our larger political problems, and it’s the case that we should not be impressed by the mere fact that Congress and the White House continue to shambolically keep government funded and the lights on despite themselves—I recognize that, and still, no matter how much of a disaster it probably is to carry a national debt that is more than 120% of annual GDP, and how unsustainable it is to add a couple of trillion dollars to it every year, I remain sort of dubiously impressed that the institutional inertia of this massive ship of state keeps us more or less afloat, despite the constant efforts of our leaders working at cross purposes. At least we’re not Haiti, where gang warfare against the ruling government has forced the evacuation of US and international diplomatic staff amid violence and viral claims of cannibalism in the streets. Public economic life, the way we relate to civic institutions, what we think of when we think of what makes everything work—we have reassigned so much of that responsibility from the domain of government to the tech overlords and attention merchants, and one wonders if our more bloated than ever federal government is both somehow too large and too incidental to daily life to be meaningfully steered at all. Thus, the Freedom Caucus types who just want it all destroyed, and the institutionalists who are more or less content to pass continuing resolutions until the continents collide again and the earth is no longer fit for mammalian life. The whole thing seems to beg for a politician to come in with one big, maybe stupid idea, and make that the sole focus of his and his party’s purpose in political life—the rest of the boat is more or less taking care of itself, even as it perhaps slowly sinks to the bottom of the ocean. If one thing jumped out at me from the State of the Union and the Republican response, it was the total lack of imagination in calling for the United States to do something interesting. Biden still kinda hand-waves in the direction of the cancer cure moonshot, but even that was included as an afterthought. We’re left with the dispiriting reality of one faction of American politics dragging the dead corpse of the never-well-specified “Yes We Can” movement down the road while the best the MAGA types can offer in response is to try to jump on and hack some limbs off the body. Think about how plainly stupid an idea it was for Kennedy to insist that America should put a man on the moon, and how absurd it is that we eventually pulled it off. “Build the Wall” was its reactionary and stupid and wildly successful 2016 corollary, and maybe just because we were overdue for a big dumb idea that regular people could get excited about government doing that wasn’t all tied up in the bureaucratic nightmare of health insurance, which was the big idea of the last two Democratic administrations, or fighting a global war on terror, to dubious results. In the meantime, the world’s foremost big-dumb-idea-haver, Elon Musk, bought Twitter and somehow algorithm’ed himself into some very much smaller and worse and dumber ideas about how the world works, seemingly shrinking his imagination to the scope of a racist 4chan meme in the process, Apple gave up on a world-changing autonomous car in favor of a computer you strap to your face, and Google made the AI so politically correct that it started rewriting history to be more inclusive. All of our former impossible dreamers of a more-perfect future have a fiduciary responsibility to the board of directors. If Trump has taught us nothing else, let us hopefully learn at least that the public is starved for a big dumb idea at which to aim and pursue and fail spectacularly to achieve. The problem is not the ambition, the problem is who we allow to direct that ambition. In David Frum’s formulation, if liberals don’t enforce the border, fascists will enforce the border. I would add: it is simply not enough to oppose big bad ideas—big bad ideas must be countered with equally compelling good ideas, preferably specific ones, by people who know they are likely unachievable, but galvanize and motivate just in their scope and ambition.
In briefer news, Sweden officially became the 32nd member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization last Thursday, and saw its flag raised at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Monday, joining neighbor Finland in ending years of neutrality and military nonalignment, triggered by Russia’s war on Ukrainian sovereignty.
AirBnB announced Monday that it was banning the presence of indoor security cameras in rentals listed on its site by the end of next month. AirBnB said that the new policy will only affect a small number of its listings, as according to the platform’s existing rules, indoor security cameras must be disclosed by hosts, and the majority of listings make no such disclosures.
And in entertainment news, Oppenheimer won seven of the 13 Academy Awards for which it was nominated at last night’s Oscars, including the awards for Best Picture, Best Director for Christopher Nolan, Best Actor for Cillian Murphy, and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr. Barbie, the highest grossing film of last year, won just one category of eight nominations, with the Billie Eilish song “What Was I Made For” winning the Best Original Song prize.
A brief editorial aside: The Oscars telecast was bad. The sound was weird the whole night, with the orchestra turned up to eleven and the voiceovers too soft and the instruments often mic’d up so poorly that they were blowing out the speakers. The decision to bring out five actors for each of the acting categories to give three-to-five sentence hagiographies of the nominees that varied from the cute if cloying and sincere to the blandest possible platitudinous elevation of silly pretending work instead of just showing clips of the actors chewing scenery or crying or getting off a good one felt very deflating of the work itself. I’m sure they’re all very nice people, or at least I’m sure that they want to be believed to be very nice people, but they aren’t nominated because they’re good people who have meaningful friendships with other actors, they are nominated because they did superior work in the field of acting. Show some of the acting! Clips are fun and awesome! People love clips! This total diminishment of the stakes was brought to its absurd end point by Al Pacino, who, presenting the final award of the night, shuffled out to the microphone, mumbled “Ten wonderful films were nominated, but only one will take the award for best picture. I have to go to the envelope for that, and I will. Here it comes. And my eyes see 'Oppenheimer.’” He didn’t even announce who the nominees were, or at least explain why he wasn’t going to list them all. The winner was read before anybody even knew it was coming! No shot of the nominees doing their best hopeful-but-not-thirsty faces, no opportunity to see them transform in the moment, any chance of catching a glimpse at the mask slipping for a moment dashed by Pacino’s casual squinting fart of an announcement. The Oscars without clips and comically, pompously over-wrought drama is an Oscars without an idea of what it is supposed to be. Like all the other decrepit and dying American institutions, it only knows it’s not supposed to act like it always has, but has no idea what that means for a new identity. It, too, lacks the imagination to dare to be interesting by simply being itself, by being this unique object worthy of observation, and, yes, sometimes scorn and derision. We are not here to listen to Mary Steenburgen talk about what a brave and wonderful woman Emily Blunt is. We do not care if Mahershala Ali has warm feelings towards Mark Ruffalo. And Brendan Fraser fresh out of a local SuperCuts and Matthew McConaughey looking like Brendan just picked him up in the alley behind the SuperCuts on the way to the ceremony and Nic Cage just being his extremely weird self runs the gamut from extremely awkward to extremely awesome and awkward, but it is not as good as clips, because I would much rather look at fifteen seconds of Jeffrey Wright performing someone else’s very well written dialogue than listen to Encino Man gush about how staggered he is by Wright’s humanity. Show us, don’t tell us!
It’s now time for this day in cursed history, three-year-run edition. Today, March 11, we’ll be looking at the three March 11ths from 2010 through 2012. On March 11 in 2010, the Kyzyl-Agash dam in Kazakhstan burst, flooding the small village of Kyzyl-Agash below, resulting in the deaths of at least 43 of the village’s fewer-than-3000 residents, but that official number from the authoritarian government is heavily disputed, and opposition figures put the death toll at over 200. In 2011, on March 11, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami killed nearly 20,000 in Japan, and subsequently caused the Fukishima nuclear power plant meltdown in Okuma. And on March 11, 2012, United States Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales murdered 16 Afghan civilians and injured six more. Nine of the victims of what would be called the Kandahar Massacre were children. That’s this day in history for March 11, Cursed-Three-Year-Run Edition, 2010 through 2012.
Now, here’s a look at the weather.
Most of the United States took an hour and made it wholly disappear overnight Saturday into Sunday, in a wanton display of arrogance and contempt that will likely result in the earlier-than-otherwise-anticipated deaths of some small number of people—decent, hard-working people sacrificed at the altar of a so-called extra hour of daylight at the end of the day that is “extra” only in that it was stolen from the morning and handed to the evening, who, like all of us, deserved no such spoils, did nothing to earn it. Do not be fooled by the happy smiles and casual optimistic bliss of the daylight savings time patrons—these are not mere contented spring-and-sun lovers, but a desperately sad people seeking to mask their dread behind a facade of claimed complacency. There are monsters among us, evincing a faux-bliss at the death of standard time—beneath the sunny visage a nihilistic, yawning chasm that only devours, that took that hour and destroyed it, that looked upon the natural order and proclaimed itself superior for its lack of belief in anything greater than itself. The hour wasn’t theirs to take, but they took it, and they are proud instead of ashamed, gleefully holding the corpse of your murdered hour and declaring, in the fading seven pm March sun, how much better things are, now. Daylight savings time is ritualized human sacrifice, and is an abomination.
That’s the weather from here—how’s it look out your window?
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The Morning Press is eleven minutes or so of the news of the day, and is a production of the BrainIron dot com multinational media empire. Please direct comments and complaints to brainironpodcast@gmail.com, or visit the website at www.brainiron.com. For a transcript of today’s episode and links to the stories referenced, find The Morning Press at brainiron.substack.com. To support this and the other podcasting and blogging endeavors of the good website Brain Iron dot com, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at brainiron.substack.com. Have a wonderful day.
The Morning Press for Monday, March 11, 2024