The New Yorker

https://www.newyorker.com

  • The MacGyvers Taking on the Ventilator Shortage | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/the-macgyvers-taking-on-the-ventilator-shortage

    But Rosie the Riveter isn’t gone—she’s just working from home. The other day, Bruce Fenton, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, posted a call for volunteers on the Web site Medium. He was leading something called the Ventilator Project—a crowdsourced effort to address the shortage. The project’s two goals, Fenton wrote, were to help existing ventilator manufacturers ramp up production, and to design an open-source plan for a cheap and simple emergency ventilator that hospitals can use. As inspiration, he reminded everyone that the Apollo 13 astronauts created a carbon-dioxide scrubber from spare parts.

    The Ventilator Project’s three hundred and fifty volunteers do most of their brainstorming on the chat app Slack. A few proposals: repurposing CPAP machines (sleep-apnea masks) as ventilators, rigging single ventilators to treat multiple patients, and using grounded airplanes as treatment facilities, in order to take advantage of the overhead oxygen masks. Many participants are medical professionals, such as Stuart Solomon, a Stanford anesthesiologist who is mobilizing equipment that functions similarly to ventilators (like anesthesia machines). Fenton has also recruited lawyers, in the hope that, should a solid design emerge from the project, mass production of these ventilators—and their use in hospitals—won’t be stalled by regulators such as the F.D.A. And he has called on “engineers, builders, and MacGyver types who can build a legit ventilator” out of “Home Depot type parts.”

    #Crowdsourcing #Respirateurs

  • How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/how-does-the-coronavirus-behave-inside-a-patient

    The temple was two hundred and fifty years old, the attendant informed me. That would date it to around the time when accounts first appeared of a mysterious sect of Brahmans wandering up and down the Gangetic plain to popularize the practice of tika, an early effort at #inoculation. This involved taking matter from a smallpox patient’s pustule—a snake pit of live virus—and applying it to the pricked skin of an uninfected person, then covering the spot with a linen rag.

    The Indian practitioners of tika had likely learned it from Arabic physicians, who had learned it from the Chinese. As early as 1100, medical healers in China had realized that those who survived smallpox did not catch the illness again (survivors of the disease were enlisted to take care of new victims), and inferred that the exposure of the body to an illness protected it from future instances of that illness.

    #immunisation

    • Drôle d’interview qui ressemble plus à une discussion entre copines, la jeune journaliste et la vieille féministe gauchiste (maoïste, dit-elle). Les questions sont presque plus intéressantes que les réponses. Il est question de mayonnaise et de #Marie_Kondo dont #Barbara_Ehrenreich a critiqué le mauvais anglais.

      Well, I think what I said was really stupid—ill considered and written quickly and I was mortified. Some editor had asked me to write something about Marie Kondo, so I watched part of her show on Netflix, and I was appalled. I hope that’s not intrinsically bad. I’ll admit something to you—one thing that was also going on was that my mother would just throw all my clothes out of the chest of drawers and onto the floor when she thought things were messy. Something about that got triggered with Marie Kondo and I felt this sort of rage, not that that’s an excuse or anything.

      #Rebecca_Solnit aussi.

      Bizarre !

  • The Faces of a New Union Movement | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-faces-of-a-new-union-movement

    Haag is part of a wave of young workers who have been unionizing in sectors with little or no tradition of unions: art museums, including the Guggenheim and the New Museum, but also tech companies, digital-media brands, political campaigns, even cannabis shops. At Google, around ninety contract workers in Pittsburgh recently formed a union—a significant breakthrough, even if they represent just a tiny fraction of the company’s workforce. More than thirty digital publications, including Vox, Vice, Salon, Slate, and HuffPost, have unionized. (The editorial staff of The New Yorker unionized in 2018.) Last March, Bernie Sanders’s campaign became the first major-party Presidential campaign in history with a unionized workforce; the campaigns of Eric Swalwell, Julián Castro, and Elizabeth Warren unionized soon after. At Grinnell College, in Iowa, students working in the school’s dining hall unionized in 2016, becoming one of the nation’s only undergraduate-student labor unions. Sam Xu, the union’s twenty-one-year-old former president, said, “Mark Zuckerberg was running Facebook out of his dorm room. I’m running a union out of my dorm room.”

    The American labor movement has been reinvigorated in recent years, with the teacher-led Red for Ed strikes, the General Motors walkout, and the Fight for $15’s push to raise the minimum wage. A Gallup poll last summer found that sixty-four per cent of Americans approve of unions—one of the highest ratings recorded in the past fifty years. The highest rate of approval came from young people: sixty-seven per cent among eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds. Rebecca Givan, an associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, said that many young people are interested in joining unions because they’re “feeling the pinch”—many “have a tremendous amount of student debt, and, if they’re living in cities, they’re struggling to afford housing.” Givan added that many feel considerable insecurity about their jobs. “The industries that they’re organizing in are volatile,” she said. Jake Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Washington University, said, “Underemployed college-educated workers aren’t buying what was until recently the prevailing understanding of our economy: that hard work and a college degree was a ticket to a stable, well-paying job.”

    #Syndicats #Gig_economy

  • The TikTok-Ready Sounds of Beach Bunny | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/02/the-tiktok-ready-sounds-of-beach-bunny

    On the video-sharing platform TikTok, there are nearly seventy-four million posts hashtagged #promqueen. Hundreds of thousands of these are set to a track of the same name, from 2018, by a young indie-rock band from Chicago called Beach Bunny. TikTok, which encourages users to post short, surrealist interpretations of memes and dance moves, has become an incubator of musical talent, or at least of persona and digital acumen. Earlier this year, it helped send the rapper Roddy Ricch’s song “The Box”—which features a curious squeaking sound, perfect for TikTok—to the top of the Billboard charts. But, unlike the idiosyncratic hip-hop that typically takes hold on the platform, “Prom Queen” is a doleful ballad. The song dramatizes teen-age self-doubt and has the inverse effect of a pep talk. “Shut up, count your calories,” Beach Bunny’s front woman, a twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate named Lili Trifilio, sings in a disaffected tone. “I never looked good in mom jeans.” TikTok users, most of whom are in their teens or early twenties, have used the song as a backdrop for videos both literal and abstract. In one, a young woman presents an array of prom dresses, prompting her followers to help her decide which to buy. In another, someone splices together short clips of the food she’s eaten that day—quite literally counting her calories. One user attempts to follow a Bob Ross painting tutorial; another tries to cover up his face tattoos with makeup, sporting a sly grin.

    Of all the confessional, female-fronted indie-rock bands to flourish in the past decade, Beach Bunny is perhaps the most shrewdly tailored to the whims of the social Internet, where everything, especially the misery and humiliation of youth, is molded into a bite-size piece of comic relief. On “Painkiller,” a song from Beach Bunny’s 2018 EP, also called “Prom Queen,” Trifilio name-checks pharmaceuticals that might make her feel better: “I need paracetamol, tramadol, ketamine. . . . Fill me up with Tylenol, tramadol, ketamine.” It sounds like it could be from the soundtrack of “Euphoria,” HBO’s breakout show about teen-age dereliction. Trifilio is a potent lyricist who tends toward despondency, but her songs are deceptively snackable—each is a two-minute burst of honey-butter melody, often with a title that incorporates hashtag-worthy slang.

    Acts of earlier eras could more easily be traced to their predecessors, often by the artists’ own admission, but Beach Bunny comes from a generation for which stylistic influence is absorbed through lifelong exposure to a mass jumble of online reference points. Trifilio got her start in music by performing acoustic-guitar covers and uploading them to YouTube, as so many of her peers did before TikTok began pulling aspiring talents into its slipstream.

    TikTok is a new platform, but its catchy, looping clips make use of an old music-industry trick. Psychologists and music-theory scholars have long studied the brain’s response to repeated exposure to music. As early as 1903, Max Friedrich Meyer, a professor of psychoacoustics, showed that a piece of music’s “aesthetic effect” for participants in a study was “improved by hearing the music repeatedly.” In 1968, the social psychologist Robert Zajonc coined the term “mere-exposure effect” to describe this phenomenon. According to Zajonc’s findings, appreciation of a song increased the more the subjects heard it, no matter how complex the music was or how it aligned with their personal tastes. This insight is the driving force behind the marketing of popular music in the modern era: FM radio stations and popular streaming playlists are most successful when they program a small pool of songs, inducing the mere-exposure effect as quickly as possible.

    On TikTok, the length of a video is restricted to sixty seconds, but most clock in at less than half a minute. The app allows a seamless scroll through videos, demanding rapid-fire consumption. It also groups together clips that contain the same song, encouraging you to listen over and over again. The app’s success at making hits is partly due to its ability to accelerate the mere-exposure effect, making songs familiar at warp speeds. Without TikTok, it’s unlikely that a song like “Prom Queen” could have reached the velocity it did. The official video for the song now has more than seven million views on YouTube.

    With increased exposure comes increased scrutiny, and the micro-virality of “Prom Queen” caused some listeners—maybe ones who caught only a snippet of the track—to question its message. In one verse, Trifilio sings, “I’ve been starving myself / Carving skin until my bones are showing.” Last summer, Trifilio pinned a lengthy comment underneath the song’s YouTube video. “Since this video is blowing up I feel the need to address something,” she wrote. “The lyrics are a criticism on modern beauty standards and the harmful effects beauty standards can have on people. . . . You are already a Prom Queen, you are already enough.” The message was about two hundred words—a longer piece of writing than any Beach Bunny song.

    #Tik-Tok #Musique #Culture_numérique

  • Big Tech Is Testing You | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/02/big-tech-is-testing-you

    Large-scale social experiments are now ubiquitous, and conducted without public scrutiny. Has this new era of experimentation remembered the lessons of the old ? Dr. John Haygarth knew that there was something suspicious about Perkins’s Metallic Tractors. He’d heard all the theories about the newly patented medical device—about the way flesh reacted to metal, about noxious electrical fluids being expelled from the body. He’d heard that people plagued by rheumatism, pleurisy, and toothache swore (...)

    #sport #santé #publicité #nourriture #émotions #consommation #comportement #manipulation #éthique #algorithme #GoogleSearch #Facebook #eBay #Amazon (...)

    ##santé ##publicité ##Google

  • How TikTok Holds Our #Attention | Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker (30/09/2019)
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/how-tiktok-holds-our-attention

    #ByteDance has more than a dozen products, a number of which depend on A.I. recommendation engines. These platforms collect data that the company aggregates and uses to refine its algorithms, which the company then uses to refine its platforms; rinse, repeat. This feedback loop, called the “virtuous cycle of A.I.,” is what each TikTok user experiences in miniature. The company would not comment on the details of its recommendation algorithm, but ByteDance has touted its research into computer vision, a process that involves extracting and classifying visual information; on the Web site of its research lab, the company lists “short video recommendation system” among the applications of the computer-vision technology that it’s developing. Although TikTok’s algorithm likely relies in part, as other systems do, on user history and video-engagement patterns, the app seems remarkably attuned to a person’s unarticulated interests. Some social algorithms are like bossy waiters: they solicit your preferences and then recommend a menu. #TikTok orders you dinner by watching you look at food.

    Article très complet sur le réseau social qui a le vent en poupe. #médias_sociaux

  • The Ultra-Wealthy Who Argue That They Should Be Paying Higher Taxes | Sheelah Kolhatkar, The New Yorker, 30 décembre 2019
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/06/the-ultra-wealthy-who-argue-that-they-should-be-paying-higher-taxes

    In an age of historic disparity, Abigail Disney and the Patriotic Millionaires take on income inequality.

    #lol (a priori)

    Abigail en défenseuse véhémente de la tradition #Disney également citée dans le 5e épisode de cette série d’émissions super. https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/walt-disney-grandes-traversees

  • Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of Trump | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/mike-pompeo-the-secretary-of-trump

    Pompeo, an evangelical Christian who keeps an open Bible on his desk, now says it’s possible that God raised up Trump as a modern Queen Esther, the Biblical figure who convinced the King of Persia to spare the Jewish people.

    #etats-unis

  • Irak : l’influent général iranien Qassem Soleimani tué dans un bombardement ordonné par Donald Trump
    https://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/proche-orient/irak/irak-l-influent-general-iranien-qassem-soleimani-tue-dans-un-bombardeme

    La tension entre Etats-Unis et Iran grimpe encore en Irak. Le Pentagone a confirmé jeudi 2 janvier avoir, sur ordre du président Donald Trump, mené une frappe aérienne à Bagdad qui a tué l’influent général iranien Qassem Soleimani.

  • A Day of Reckoning for Michael Jackson with “Leaving Neverland” | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-day-of-reckoning-for-michael-jackson-with-leaving-neverland

    It is hideous, but true, that allegations of this sort have historically been treated differently when the accused is a virtuosic and deeply beloved male performer: Miles Davis allegedly beat his wives; Jimmy Page allegedly had a relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl; the late rapper XXXTentacion allegedly battered his ex-girlfriend when she was pregnant; Chuck Berry was convicted of transporting a minor across state lines for “immoral purposes”; and on, and on, and on, until the entire history of Western music collapses in a haze of abuse and transgression, unable to survive any sort of moral dragnet

  • Bond Touch Bracelets and the New Frontiers of Digital Dating | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/bond-touch-bracelets-and-the-new-frontiers-of-digital-dating

    Few things feel as fraught, in the modern age, as the long-distance relationship. The hazards of digital romance have been well chronicled, perhaps most prominently in the documentary and subsequent TV series “Catfish,” which exposed viewers to a new and expansive genre of horror. To “catfish” someone, in common parlance, is to meet a person online through dating apps, social-media sites, or chat rooms, and to seduce them using fake photos and fictional biographical details. On the reality-TV version of “Catfish,” lovesick victims confront those who deceived them, in grim, emotional scenes of revelation and heartbreak. Throw teens into the mix, and the narrative can turn even more ghastly. One thinks of the tabloid story of Michelle Carter and her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, two teen-agers whose relationship developed mostly over text and Facebook message. In 2017, Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging Roy to kill himself—even though the pair had met only a handful of times. Messages between the couple revealed the kind of twisted emotional dynamic that can emerge in the absence of physical proximity.

    Despite these stories, digital-first (and digital-only) relationships continue to thrive. With online dating now a fact of life, a new bogeyman, virtual-reality dating, has taken its place, threatening to cut the final cord between romance and the real world. The platform VRLFP—Virtual Reality Looking For Partner—advertises itself as the perfect solution for daters who’d rather not deal with the hassles of Tinder flirting or late-night bar crawls. (“Grab a coffee, visit an amusement park, or go to the moon without leaving your home and without spending a dime,” the VRLFP site reads. “VR makes long-distance relationships work.”) This is to say nothing of the companies designing humanoid sex robots, or the scientists designing phone cases that feel like human flesh.

    Perhaps the most innocuous entry in the digital-dating marketplace is a new product called Bond Touch, a set of electronic bracelets meant for long-distance daters. (Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello, one of the most P.D.A.-fluent couples of our time, were recently spotted wearing the bracelets.) Unlike the cold fantasias of VR courtship, Bond Touch bracelets are fundamentally wholesome, and they reduce long-distance relationships to a series of mundane concerns. How can you sustain a healthy amount of communication with a long-distance partner? How can you feel close to someone who’s physically distant? And how do you simulate the wordless gestures of affection that account for so much of personal connection? Created in Silicon Valley by a developer named Christoph Dressel—who is also the C.O.O. of an environmentally minded technology firm called Impossible—the bracelets are slim, chic devices that resemble Fitbits. By wearing one, a person can send a tap that generates a light vibration and a colored blink on the screen of a partner’s bracelet. The bracelets are also linked through an app that provides information about a partner’s weather and time zone, but their primary function is to embody presence. Like Facebook’s early “Poke” feature, they impart the same message as a shoulder squeeze or a gaze across the room at a party: “I’m here, and I’m thinking about you.”

    In theory, the bracelets could service any form of long-distance relationship—military members and their families, partners separated by jobs or school, siblings living in different cities—but they seem to be most popular among teen-agers who’ve forged romantic relationships online. Bond Touch is a hot topic of discussion in certain corners of YouTube and Reddit, where users provide excessively detailed reviews of their bracelet-wearing experience. These users seem less concerned with simulating touch or affection than with communicating when they don’t have access to their phone, namely during class or at part-time jobs. They often develop Morse-code-like systems to lend layers of meaning to their taps. “When I really want his attention, I just send a very long one, and then he’s, like, ‘What do you want?’ . . . Three taps means ‘I love you,’ ” one YouTuber, HeyItsTay, explains, in a video that’s garnered over 1.8 million views. Safety is also a chief concern: almost all of the vloggers explain that Bond Touch is an effective way of letting someone know that you’re O.K., even if you’re not responding to text messages or Instagram DMs.

    Something like a Bond Touch bracelet ostensibly solves a communication problem, but it also creates one—the problem of over-availability, in which no one can be unreachable and no sentiment goes unexpressed. (One can imagine the anxieties that might arise from a set of unanswered taps, and the bracelets have already inspired plenty of off-label uses. “Great way for cheating in class,” one user commented on HeyItsTay’s Bond Touch video.) Not all technology is corrosive, of course, but there is something disheartening about a relationship wherein digital bracelets are meant to replace the rhythms of conversation and the ebbs and flows of emotional connection. The problem has less to do with the bracelets themselves than with the trend that they advance. In lieu of facetime, we seem willing to accept even the most basic forms of emotional stimulus, no matter how paltry a substitute they present.

    Reading about Bond Touch, an episode of the 2019 breakout comedy “PEN15” came to mind. The show is set in the era of the dial-up connection, and at one point its main characters, the awkward middle schoolers Anna and Maya, experiment with AOL Instant Messenger. Maya meets a guy named “Flymiamibro22” in a chat room, and their conversation quickly sparks an infatuation—and, eventually, something resembling love. “I love you more than I love my own DAD!” Maya tells Flymiamibro22 in a violent flurry of messages. Flymiamibro22 is a self-described “gym rat,” but in reality he’s one of Maya’s classmates and friends, Sam, posing online as an older guy. At the peak of her obsession, Maya begs her crush to meet her in person, and they arrange a date at a local bowling alley. FlyMiamiBro never materializes, but Sam reveals his true identity soon after, at a school dance. This admission produces a rush of fury and humiliation. But it also, finally, leads to catharsis, the growth and wisdom that flows from a confrontation with reality. That sort of confrontation seems increasingly avoidable today.

    Carrie Battan began contributing to The New Yorker in 2015 and became a staff writer in 2018.

    #Pratiques_numériques #Sites_rencontre #Dating #Bracelet #Culture_numérique

  • Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/blood-and-soil-in-narendra-modis-india

    Un très long et très bien informé article sur le fascisme de Modi, et la façon dont l’extrême-droite du RSS a su mobiliser la fureur hindouiste pour détruire la démocratie. Avec des exemples sur les médias et la haine anti-musulman.

    On ressort ébranlé et plus que jamais convaincu que nous avons là toutes les représentations du fascisme telle qu’il a existé dans les années 30 est bien à l’œuvre en Inde.

    On August 11th, two weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent soldiers in to pacify the Indian state of Kashmir, a reporter appeared on the news channel Republic TV, riding a motor scooter through the city of Srinagar. She was there to assure viewers that, whatever else they might be hearing, the situation was remarkably calm. “You can see banks here and commercial complexes,” the reporter, Sweta Srivastava, said, as she wound her way past local landmarks. “The situation makes you feel good, because the situation is returning to normal, and the locals are ready to live their lives normally again.” She conducted no interviews; there was no one on the streets to talk to.

    Other coverage on Republic TV showed people dancing ecstatically, along with the words “Jubilant Indians celebrate Modi’s Kashmir masterstroke.” A week earlier, Modi’s government had announced that it was suspending Article 370 of the constitution, which grants autonomy to Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. The provision, written to help preserve the state’s religious and ethnic identity, largely prohibits members of India’s Hindu majority from settling there. Modi, who rose to power trailed by allegations of encouraging anti-Muslim bigotry, said that the decision would help Kashmiris, by spurring development and discouraging a long-standing guerrilla insurgency. To insure a smooth reception, Modi had flooded Kashmir with troops and detained hundreds of prominent Muslims—a move that Republic TV described by saying that “the leaders who would have created trouble” had been placed in “government guesthouses.”

    The change in Kashmir upended more than half a century of careful politics, but the Indian press reacted with nearly uniform approval. Ever since Modi was first elected Prime Minister, in 2014, he has been recasting the story of India, from that of a secular democracy accommodating a uniquely diverse population to that of a Hindu nation that dominates its minorities, especially the country’s two hundred million Muslims. Modi and his allies have squeezed, bullied, and smothered the press into endorsing what they call the “New India.”

    Kashmiris greeted Modi’s decision with protests, claiming that his real goal was to inundate the state with Hindu settlers. After the initial tumult subsided, though, the Times of India and other major newspapers began claiming that a majority of Kashmiris quietly supported Modi—they were just too frightened of militants to say so aloud. Television reporters, newly arrived from Delhi, set up cameras on the picturesque shoreline of Dal Lake and dutifully repeated the government’s line.

    As the reports cycled through the news, the journalist Rana Ayyub told me over the phone that she was heading to Kashmir. Ayyub, thirty-six years old, is one of India’s best-known investigative reporters, famous for relentlessly pursuing Modi and his aides. As a Muslim from Mumbai, she has lived on the country’s sectarian divide her whole life. She suspected that the government’s story about Kashmir was self-serving propaganda. “I think the repression is probably worse than it’s ever been,” she said. She didn’t know what she might find, but, she told me, “I want to speak to those unheard voices.”

    #Inde #Narendra_Modi #Fascisme #Hindouisme

  • Inside the Biggest-Ever Hedge-Fund Scandal | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/empire-edge

    How a doctor, a trader, and the billionaire Steven A. Cohen got entangled in a vast financial scandal.

    Patrick Radden Keefe a ressorti cet article des archives du New Yorker quand il a appris que Steven Cohen allait devenir le propriétaire des Mets. On comprend pourquoi à sa lecture.

    Ayant publié « Addiction sur ordonnance » par Patrick R. Keefe, et ayant lu cet été son livre « Say nothing » sur les troubles en Irlande du Nord, je savais que le journalisme qu’il incarne est passionnant, intriguant, que ses histoires sont construites comme des thrillers, avec des personnages haut en couleur. Et de longues enquêtes minutieuses auprès des témoins.

    Je dois dire que je n’ai pas été déçu... je n’ai pas pu décrocher de l’article avant la fin (et il est long, un mini-livre en fait). La construction, le style, les rebondissements, les doutes et l’accroche au fil de l’éthique sont des constantes de l’écriture de Patrick Radden Keefe.

    Ne le dites pas à ma mère, mais je suis au fond très fier d’avoir repéré son article sur les Sackler, cette bande de voyous déguisés en pharmaciens, autant pour son style que pour le contenu. Et de l’avoir fait traduire et publier en français. (https://cfeditions.com/addiction)

    Le livre « Say nothing » est en cours de traduction chez Belfond (oui, C&F éditions n’avait pas les moyens ;-).

    Et il est parmi la liste des dix principaux livres de 2019 du New York Times. Un film est en préparation. Préparez vous à la déferlante Patrick Radden Keefe...

    En attendant, jetez un oeil sur « Addiction sur ordonnance » pour voir comment les dessous du capitalisme sauvage peuvent aussi donner lieu à l’écriture d’un thriller et vous happer comme un roman.

    #Patrick_Radden_Keefe #C&F_édition #Addiction_ordonnance #Journalisme

  • What Are Borders For ?

    For most of history, they marked sovereignty or self-determination. Now their purpose seems to have changed.

    In northern Vermont in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, where I grew up in a town whose name was French but where everyone spoke English, the nearby Canadian border was not imposing. Dirt roads crossed the line where New England’s maples become Quebec’s, with no signs to warn passing hikers when they were under foreign trees. On the main highway north to Montreal were a pair of what looked like tollbooths, adorned with flags stitched with a big red leaf or stars and stripes. And when bored customs officers asked you to halt your vehicle, the inquisition to which you were subjected—at least if your Saab or pickup truck bore Vermont plates—was perfunctory. Documents often weren’t required. You could expect to be asked two questions: where you were headed and if you had any liquor.

    There were benefits, in high school, to living near a province more libertine than our wholesome state. On Monday mornings, louche upperclassmen sometimes turned up in the cafeteria with tales of having dashed north, over the weekend, to where the drinking age was eighteen, for a case of Molson Ice. But the pull of difference was matched with a sense, at least as strong, that the border didn’t so much divide two nations as amble over a contiguous region. Sure, people on our side of the line pronounced Gallic place names in mountain English. (Calais sounded like “callous.”) But our shared climate and past helped feed a sense, among humans who also shared the complexion of February snow (this no doubt helped), that we had more in common with one another than with citizens of our vast nations who lived in far-off Vancouver or Phoenix.

    Such cross-border ties are extremely common, of course, among the many millions of people who live near one of the hundreds of boundaries on earth. Most of the oldest borders date from a couple of centuries ago; many count their age in decades. And the ease with which many people straddled them was until very recently exemplified along the now notorious gran linea to our south, which before the nineteen-nineties neither the United States nor Mexico saw fit to mark with anything more forbidding, along most of its length, than an occasional rock pile in the desert. In a part of the continent once thought too dry to cultivate, that porosity was no less vital for Hispanic ranchers and Native Americans than for the builders of what became an agricultural juggernaut, in California and across the U.S. West, which has long depended on willing workers from the south.

    Now Donald Trump’s dream of “sealing” that border has pulled it into the center of our national life. But as the scholar Matthew Longo underscores in “The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security and the Citizen after 9/11,” although the policies that Trump is pursuing may stand out for their cruelty, they aren’t nearly so much of a departure as we may like to think—either from aims held by his predecessors, or from larger trends in how borders have been changing. In fact, Trump has revealed a new consensus among our political classes—and among hundreds of nations on earth—about what borders are, and what they’re for.

    For most of the twentieth century, the “hard boundaries” that did exist were militarized for actually military reasons. These included contested frontiers like Kashmir and a few Cold War hot spots, like the D.M.Z. crossing the Korean peninsula, where opposing armies and world views stared each other down through rolls of concertina wire. Now such scenes are replicated along borders dividing countries whose shared system of government is democracy and whose armies are at peace. This is seen in the more than two thousand miles of heavily guarded barbed wire that India has erected between itself and Bangladesh; or the electrified fence with which South Africa confronts Zimbabwe; or the potato fields that Hungary has laced with menacing barriers to keep out refugees. Since the start of this century, dozens of borders have been transformed from mere lines on a map into actual, deadly features of the landscape. These are places where, as the geographer Reece Jones notes in his book “Violent Borders,” thousands of people each year are now “losing their lives simply trying to go from one place to another.”

    The once obscure field of “border studies” has won new impetus from the global refugee crisis. But a surge of recent scholarship, of which Longo’s book is perhaps the standout, makes clear that there’s much to be gained from zooming out to examine the history and present of borders everywhere. The ways that borders are evolving in the twenty-first century, in step with changing technology, have profound implications for the future of human rights and international relations—and for the vision of sovereignty that’s shaped both since the first governments embraced the principle of jurisdiction over a strictly defined area of earth.

    Many ancient cultures espoused ties to particular landscapes and the resources or fishing holes they contained. But for several millennia after our species’s first city-states flourished along the Tigris, few such seats of political power presumed to identify precisely where, in the no man’s lands between their cities’ walls, one’s realm ended and another’s began. This continued as certain of those city-states, later on, became empires. When, in the second century A.D., Rome’s legionaries lodged a ribbon of limestone across Britannia’s north, they cared little if Scottish shepherds ambled south with their sheep or hopped Hadrian’s Wall. That boundary, like the famous Ming-dynasty battlements outside Beijing that we call the Great Wall of China, was a military installation—erected to slow invaders from adjoining lands, yes, but also to project power outward.

    The builders of these walls never presumed their domains’ edges to be anything more than provisional; they were less concerned about preventing people from crossing or inhabiting their realms than with maintaining access, when they did, to their taxes and toil. The Mayans may have walked the fields and forests, in Meso-America, to mark where one of their ahawlels’ lands ended. But Malaysia’s negeri city-states—in which rulers maintained firm control over the river systems but made little effort to control the hinterlands beyond their banks—were more indicative of a planet whereon, until several hundred years ago, few people conceived of political territory as exclusive real estate. As medieval fiefs evolved into early states in Europe, their edge-lands were still comprised of what their minders called “marches,” and what we came to call frontiers—contested zones where who was in charge, and whether laws obtained at all, was often in doubt.

    The key moment in the transition to what scholars call the modern state system arrived in the middle of the seventeenth century, with the famous treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War. The Peace of Westphalia was signed by a hundred and nine principalities and duchies and imperial kingdoms, all of which agreed, in 1648, that states were now the only institutions allowed to engage in diplomacy and war, and that they would also now be accorded the right to “absolute sovereignty” over their territory. There’s a reason that the great majority of political maps we’d recognize as such date from this era: Westphalia gave states a vested interest in laying claim, with the help of the mapmakers they employed, to jurisdiction over a defined patch of sod. This led to some beautiful maps—and implanted in people’s minds, for the first time, shapes like the one we now associate with France. But few efforts were made to make those maps’ borders clear to inhabitants. The question of whose sovereignty certain shepherds lived under, in notoriously liminal zones like the Pyrenees or Alsace, would remain murky well into the era when sovereignty began to be transferred from kings to laws.

    As the Harvard historian Charles S. Maier recounts in “Once Within Borders,” a factor that helped change this, in the nineteenth century, was the spread of new technologies—the telegraph, the railroad—that enabled central governments, even in countries as vast as the United States, to think that they might actually be able to govern all of their territory. Another was a series of increasingly bloody wars in Europe and elsewhere that culminated, between 1914 and 1918, in a conflict that saw humankind kill off some sixteen million of its members. Near the end of the First World War, Woodrow Wilson proposed that the international community might prevent such horrors if it followed his Fourteen Points, which became central, in January, 1919, to the Paris Peace Conference. Key among them was the principle that some of the globe’s borders be redrawn “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.”

    This vision was born from a war fuelled by the desire of Bosnians and others for self-rule. It also reflected an idea—that any national group should aspire to and defend a sovereign bit of land—that’s animated countless struggles since, for “self-determination” or its opposite. But this idea also had its drawbacks. One was the danger, as another world war soon made clear, of imagining a map of Europe that furnished for each of its language groups what the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel termed a Lebensraum, or “living space.” Another was that Wilson’s dictum pointedly did not extend beyond Europe—and especially not to Africa, whose vast acreage had only recently been carved into territories. Those territories were anything but “clearly recognizable” to the colonial owners who tacked a big map of the continent to the wall of a Berlin ballroom, in 1884, and drew their borders with scant regard for the language groups and ancestral homelands they crossed.

    Such are the tortured roots of our current international system. The United Nations’ expectation that each of its member states respect the territorial sovereignty of its neighbors has formed, since 1948, the core of its efforts to maintain world peace. That most of the U.N.’s members have bought into this notion is why, in the late twentieth century, many of the world’s borders came to resemble the United States and Canada’s. In the nineties, there was a brief turn from this project, as celebrants of globalization hailed a borderless world augured by, for example, the European Union’s opening of internal frontiers. Now that vision has collapsed, eroded by mass migration and anxiety. For scholars like Longo, we have entered an era of “bordering” without precedent.

    What changed? For Longo, the answer, in large part, is 9/11. Since the attacks in New York, he argues, there has been a profound shift in how borders are conceived, installed, and sustained. The most obvious change has been a physical escalation. Over the past eighteen years, for example, the U.S Border Patrol grew to employ twenty thousand agents, becoming the nation’s largest enforcement agency. Throughout the world, anxiety about terrorism has helped drive a trend toward states erecting boundaries to deny entry to potential bad actors. It has seen one prominent U.N. member state, Israel, build some four hundred and seventy miles of barriers, through the territory of its Palestinian neighbors, whose purpose is “security” but which in effect seizes land not regarded by the U.N. as its own. These developments have occurred at a time when the number of people worldwide who’ve been displaced by violence is at an all-time high—some seventy million, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

    Many of those refugees hail from a region destabilized by the United States’ invasion of Iraq, in 2003, and its War on Terror. In the early two-thousands, Mumbai, Madrid, Bali, and London experienced their own terrorist attacks, and, as Longo details in his book—which is distinguished by his efforts to actually speak with the officials responsible for executing the ideas that he’s interested in—those countries gladly followed the United States’s lead. Dozens if not hundreds of states around the world turned questions of customs and immigration enforcement, once left to anonymous bureaucrats, into pressing matters of national defense.

    Not a few scholars of politics and law, in those years, began to try to understand what was happening to the world’s borders. Perhaps the most prescient was Wendy Brown, whose book “Walled States, Waning Sovereignty,” was published in 2010. Brown noted the burgeoning popularity of walled borders, years before Trump’s rise, and predicted that nativist politicians would continue to build boundaries that, she argued in a preface to the 2016 edition, would “not merely index, but accelerate waning state sovereignty.” What she meant was that nation-states were reacting to their dwindling ability to control the movement of information, money, and humans over their territory by building “visual emblem[s] of power and protection that states increasingly cannot provide.” But by doing so, they only highlighted their lack of control, enriching the traffickers and syndicates that have profited from having to find new ways to get their desperate clients and wares, obstacles be damned, where they want to go.

    About the latter point, Longo can’t disagree. But he has a different argument to make about what “bordering” tells us about the future of states. Sovereignty, to his mind, hasn’t so much waned as transformed. Governments today have never known so much about the people they govern, or been more determined to know more about those entering their territory. For these same reasons, they’ve come to share the once indivisible responsibility for policing their edges. This is the second plank of the post-9/11 shift: with the hardening of physical barriers came the rise, unprecedented in history, of cross-border collaboration in the name of surveillance. This obtained even in the most neutral of boundaries. In the summer of 2003, I returned home from a visit to Canada and was asked for the first time, by an officer dressed in the stiff new duds of the Department of Homeland Security, to hand over my passport. I can still recall being struck, as he scanned its barcode into a computer, by a thought that now seems quaint: the government was endeavoring to track and store data, accessible in real time, about every time any person left or entered the U.S.

    Borders were once where sovereignty ended, or began. Now they’re places where states partner with their neighbors to manage and monitor who and what moves between them. This trend toward “co-bordering”—the joint management of overlapping jurisdictions—is a momentous change, Longo writes. It’s also a product of our era, in which national defense has become a matter less of confronting rival states than of working out more efficient ways to, in the words of one Pentagon official, “magnify our focus down to the individual person level.” At the U.S.-Mexico border, one U.S. official says, this means working with his Mexican counterparts to build a “layered detection system that focuses on risk-based screening, enhanced targeting and information sharing.” Another puts it this way: “The wider we make our borders, the more effective we’ll be.” The quote neatly summates what Longo calls the trend to “thick” borders, witnessed around the world.

    In the U.S., these trends have been formalized in treaties to which we’re now party with both Mexico (the 21st Century Border Initiative, signed in 2010) and Canada (the Beyond the Border agreement, from 2011), which allow for joint surveillance and policing hundreds of miles to either side of where the respective countries meet. The agreements also foster more electronic forms of coöperation: the building of “inter-operable” databases that contain biometric and biographical data for the hundreds of millions of people who call the continent home or have visited its shores. In a 2012 report, D.H.S. put it tersely: “Our vision for the northern border cannot be accomplished unilaterally.” The fact that Canadian Mounties are now empowered, with cause, to board an American vessel off the coast of Maine suggests a rather different vision of sovereignty than the one conjured by “America First.”

    Europe is even further ahead. The E.U.’s member states haven’t merely banded together to head off migrants—whose fingerprints whatever E.U. state they land in is rule-bound to collect. They’ve also made data on the inhabitants of the Schengen Area, which lacks border checks, available to one another. Across the sea in North Africa, Tunisia and Egypt have been pushing for regional border-security arrangements to confront continued instability in Libya. The member nations of the East African Community—Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan—now maintain shared patrols around Lake Victoria. Even India and China, never models of trusting bonhomie, have since 2013 had an accord in place “to improve security along their 4,056-kilometer border . . . [and increase] cooperation on a military-to-military basis.”

    As in the nineteenth century, technology is what has enabled the state to maintain—or aspire to—control. In recent months, a few U.S. cities banned the use of facial recognition on their streets. But an arguably bigger story about the same technology—by which F.B.I. and ICE agents have been making extensive use of millions of driver’s-license photos culled from state D.M.V.s—highlights how our laws will struggle to keep pace with overreach. (Another example can be glimpsed in the D.H.S.’s push to legalize and expand its officers’ practice, recently revealed, of collecting DNA from detained migrants.) In China, facial recognition is already being used on a mass scale. And in Xinjiang, the home region of the oppressed Uyghur minority, the state has even taken to installing an app on the smartphones of everyone who resides in or enters the region. The app transmits to Communist Party police users’ private habits, as well as their daily travels around the Internet.

    Data has already made tech companies rich, and its strategic import to modern governments is plain. “Data is the new oil,” one Brazilian researcher explains. “Every government has become dataholic.” This emerges, in Longo’s account, as the reason that borders, quite apart from their use for the staging of populist or authoritarian dramas, have become so important: they’re where it’s legal for the government to capture the information that its bureaucracies covet. There was a time when you had to commit a crime, or be suspected of committing one, to have your fingerprints and photograph taken by an officer of the state. Now all you need to do is take a trip.

    For many scholars, the solution to all this lies in addressing the violent inequality that’s pushed a quarter billion people to leave their countries for a better life. This, for anti-capitalist academics like Reece Jones, would entail some familiar-sounding steps. The most prominent is open borders—one of those odd issues where, less for moral than for macroeconomic reasons, libertarian and left-wing positions congrue. Lifting limits on migration has been espoused by writers as divergent in outlook as the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, the author of the 2008 book “Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders,” and Suketu Mehta, whose important new book “This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto” cites the same strong evidence: more immigrants means more jobs. In rich countries where productivity is declining as fast as the birth rate, Mehta insists, “the immigrant armada that is coming to your shores is actually a rescue fleet.”

    But even if we begin to understand this, the main reason that hard borders aren’t going anywhere, Longo argues, has nothing to do with either economics or populism. It has to do with technology’s still-growing role in what nation-states do. In 1975, Michel Foucault famously identified what he called the “oldest dream of the oldest sovereign,” the panopticon: that circular prison whose sight lines were such that a warden at its center could keep tabs—or pretend to—on every subject in his realm. Now even the world’s most liberal governments have tools for gathering information that would have made the Stasi blush. Governments controlled by data, rather than vice versa, begin to process people as “readable texts” rather than as citizens. Borders, in turn, become the places in which those bureaucracies can most easily produce the “data double” that we’ve all become. Longo underscores what this means. “A central aim of this book,” he writes, “has been to identify the grand strategic shift away from nation-states and toward individuals. But what if this foretells the end of the individual too, now at the expense of the sub-individual, a subject composed of data points?”

    It’s a troubling suggestion, not least because of the stark divide that’s already emerged between countries willing to share those data points and those that aren’t. This digital “firewall,” invoked by several of Longo’s sources, excludes anyone whose government doesn’t have the capacity or will to issue passports whose chips and barcodes possess their holders’ vital information. It threatens to turn humans without data, in a word, into humans without rights. With rich countries now admitting foreign nationals based on how much they “trust” the data attached to their passport, such divides will only further inflame the perceived split between nations that have joined modernity and those outside it.

    To explain what this all portends, Longo turns to another hazy episode from history that Foucault used to illuminate his theories of modern society. It involves the moment when many medieval towns were spurred by rapid growth, in the eighteenth century, to do away with their walls—losing their ability to down their gates at night and to monitor, during the day, entries and exits. This change, in Foucault’s account, introduced to those towns a new anxiety about vagrants and outsiders. The shift gave birth to modern policing; armed guards turned their gaze from the horizon to the streets below them. The question for the sovereign state, then as now, wasn’t whether or not to have walls—it was where to put them. The answer, in the centuries since, has evolved with shifts in ideology and geopolitics and technology alike. But the conclusion reached by our republic and most nation-states today, whether spurred by populist strongmen or their own bureaucracies’ needs, about whether to wall their territories’ edges or more aggressively surveil what they contain, is plain: do both. In our new age of “bordering,” the border is drawing nearer, all the time, to the edge of the body itself.

    https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/what-are-borders-for
    #frontières #souveraineté #droits_humains

    ping @mobileborders

  • Et si la fin du monde était une bonne nouvelle ?
    https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/climat-et-si-la-fin-du-monde-etait-une-bonne-nouvelle

    Tout juste dix ans plus tard, ces raisonnements paraissent antédiluviens. Deux barrières mentales identifiées par cette étude demeurent néanmoins des obstacles à l’action : la première concerne nos habitudes, la seconde le sentiment d’impuissance. “Les habitudes quasi automatiques sont extrêmement résistantes au changement, notait l’étude. Les gens pensent aussi que leur action est trop limitée pour faire une quelconque différence, et ils choisissent de ne rien faire.”

    Une observation que reprend Wallace-Wells dans son livre : “La posture intellectuelle de l’impuissance semble particulièrement nous convenir.” Alors que le doute et le déni autour du dérèglement climatique ont reculé, ils ont été remplacés par des sentiments – tout aussi paralysants – comme la panique, l’angoisse et la résignation.

  • In Trump’s Jaded Capital, Marie Yovanovitch’s Uncynical Outrage in the Impeachment Hearings | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/in-trumps-jaded-capital-marie-yovanovitchs-uncynical-outrage

    In hours of spellbinding testimony, on the second day of the House’s public impeachment hearings, Yovanovitch offered a decisive rebuttal to that way of thinking. She said that she had been surprised and appalled when Trump succumbed to a foreign disinformation campaign and fired her as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine based on false allegations trafficked by Rudy Giuliani, his private lawyer. She had taken on corrupt interests inside Ukraine, and those parties had, in turn, targeted her—and, unbelievably, it had worked. The President, the most powerful man in the world, had gone along with it. “It was terrible,” she said. Yovanovitch said that she was shocked when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo failed to issue a statement in her defense, although she had spent thirty-three years in the Foreign Service. She said that she was intimidated and incredulous when the President attacked her in a phone call with a foreign leader. She said that she felt threatened. These are simple truths, which is why they were so powerful. So was the question she posed to the members of the House Intelligence Committee arrayed on the dais in front of her: “How could our system fail like this?” That, of course, is a question for which Americans as yet have no real answer.

    #trump #yovanovitch #impeachment #US

  • Blood Gold in the Brazilian Rain Forest | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/11/blood-gold-in-the-brazilian-rain-forest

    La destruction des terres de Kayapo n’est qu’une partie de ce que Zimmerman appelle le « pillage » de l’Amazone. En plus de l’exploitation minière et de l’exploitation forestière, les producteurs de soja et les éleveurs de bétail ont nettoyé d’immenses étendues de forêt, principalement par le feu. L’Institut national de recherche spatiale du Brésil, qui surveille les dégâts, estime qu’un cinquième de la forêt tropicale amazonienne au Brésil - le plus grand « poumon vert » au monde, qui absorbe des milliards de tonnes de dioxyde de carbone - a été détruit depuis les années soixante-dix. Les réserves autochtones servent de rempart contre la destruction, d’îles verdoyantes au milieu de champs de soja industriels et de ranchs bien définis. Mais plus les peuples autochtones vivent près des Blancs, plus ils sont vulnérables. Dans ces régions, la seule chose qui fasse obstacle à la destruction de l’Amazonie est la capacité de quelques milliers de dirigeants autochtones à résister aux attraits de la culture de consommation. À Turedjam, cette bataille est en train de se perdre. « C’est comme si les quatre cavaliers de l’Apocalypse avaient été relâchés », a déclaré Zimmerman.

    #brésil #déforestation #écologie #environnement #kayapo

  • Trump’s Baffling Plan to Pillage Syria’s Oil | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trumps-baffling-plan-to-pillage-syrias-oil

    “In a major policy flip-flop, the President said that he is not only keeping American forces in Syria to «secure» its oil fields, he is willing to go to war over them. «We may have to fight for the oil. It’s O.K.,» he said. «Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight. But there’s massive amounts of oil.» The United States, he added, should be able to take some of Syria’s oil. «What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly,» he said. The goal would be to «spread out the wealth.»”

    #syrie #oil #Trump #EI