John Le Carré on Learning a Foreign Language

By JOHN LE CARRÉ

The Guardian, July 2nd, 2017

...The decision to learn a foreign language is to me an act of friendship. It is indeed a holding out of the hand. It’s not just a route to negotiation. It’s also to get to know you better, to draw closer to you and your culture, your social manners and your way of thinking. And the decision to teach a foreign language is an act of commitment, generosity and mediation.

It’s a promise to educate – yes – and to equip. But also to awaken; to kindle a flame that you hope will never go out; to guide your pupils towards insights, ideas and revelations that they would never have arrived at without your dedication, patience and skill.

To quote Charlemagne: “To have another language is to possess a second soul.” He might have added that to teach another language is to implant a second soul.

Of course, the very business of reconciling these two souls at any serious level requires considerable mental agility. It compels us to be precise, to confront meaning, to think rationally and creatively and never to be satisfied until we’ve hit the equivalent word, or – which also happens – until we’ve recognised that there isn’t one, so hunt for a phrase or circumlocution that does the job.

No wonder then that the most conscientious editors of my novels are not those for whom English is their first language, but the foreign translators who bring their relentless eye to the tautological phrase or factual inaccuracy – of which there are far too many. My German translator is particularly infuriating.

In the extraordinary period we are living through – may it be short-lived – it’s impossible not to marvel at every contradictory or unintelligible utterance issuing from across the Atlantic. And in marvelling, we come face-to-face with the uses and abuses of language itself.

Clear language – lucid, rational language – to a man at war with both truth and reason, is an existential threat. Clear language to such a man is a direct assault on his obfuscations, contradictions and lies. To him, it is the voice of the enemy. To him, it is fake news. Because he knows, if only intuitively, what we know to our cost: that without clear language, there is no standard of truth.

And that’s what language means to a linguist. Those who teach language, those who cherish its accuracy and meaning and beauty, are the custodians of truth in a dangerous age... 

Anne with an E_series

A coming-of-age story about an outsider who, against all odds and numerous challenges, fights for love and acceptance and for her place in the world. The series centers on a young orphaned girl in the late 1890’s, who, after an abusive childhood spent in orphanages and the homes of strangers, is mistakenly sent to live with an elderly woman and her aging brother. Over time, 13-year-old Anne will transform their lives and eventually the small town in which they live with her unique spirit, fierce intellect and brilliant imagination.

Here is a captivating Canadian series about human kindness and the power of imagination, based on Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables. The three-season series was created by Moira Walley-Beckett for CBC Television provides so much scope for the imagination. Absolutely delightful. Take my word for it.

The Laundromat_film

When her idyllic vacation takes an unthinkable turn, Ellen Martin begins investigating a fake insurance policy, only to find herself down a rabbit hole of questionable dealings that can be linked to a Panama City law firm and its vested interest in helping the world's wealthiest citizens amass larger fortunes. A dazzling story of money, greed and corruption.

The Laundromat is a 2019 American biographical comedy-drama film directed by Steven Soderbergh with a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns. It stars Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, Jeffrey Wright, David Schwimmer, Matthias Schoenaerts, James Cromwell, and Sharon Stone. It is based on the book Secrecy World, about the Panama Papers scandal, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jake Bernstein.

Ten new words every day

Everyone knows the English language is changing. Every three months, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) publishes updates to its online dictionary. One recent update contained 900 new words, new expressions, or new meanings for existing words. But where do they all come from?

New words are created in many different ways. We can make a new word by combining two words, like gastropub (gastronomy + pub), vlog (video + blog) or emoticon (emotion + icon). Sometimes we put two words together in a new way, for example road rage or toy boy.

We also find that nouns can change into verbs. Take the word text. Text was always a noun (from about 1369, according to the OED), but it is now very common as a verb, to text somebody. Other new words already existed but with a different meaning. For example, tweet was the noise that a bird makes, but now we use it more often (as a verb or a noun) for a message that people put on the social networking site Twitter.

Another way in which we make new words is by ‘adopting’ words from foreign languages, like barista or latte (imported from Italian when coffee bars became really popular in the UK in the 1990s), or patio or siesta (taken from Spanish).

A lot of new words come from the names of brands or companies, for example we skype each other and we google a word. We also need more general words to describe new technology or new gadgets: wi-fi, ringtone, and smartphone are some recent examples; or new technological ways of behaviour, like cyberbullying, or the most recent twalking (talking + walking) which refers to distracted walking while texting.

The invention of new words is not a new phenomenon. The word brunch (breakfast + lunch) first appeared in 1896, newspaper (news + paper) in 1667, and English speakers started to use the word café (from French) in the late 19th century. The difference now is how quickly new words and expressions enter the language and how rapidly we start to use and understand them.

Source: Adapted from 900 new words in 3 months, Oxford University Press

Related article: New English Words

The Future Was Supposed to Be Better Than This

By DAVID SAX

The New York Times,  Nov. 25, 2020

At the end of September, the Centers for Disease Control posted a list of recommendations for how Americans can safely celebrate Thanksgiving this year. Eat all the pie you want (but only with your immediate family). Attend parades and big games (but only on TV). Shop till you drop (from the couch). Skip the flight back home (Zoom with your relatives instead). Give thanks (while maintaining social distance).

As a Canadian, I experienced this virtual version of Thanksgiving in October, preceded by the Jewish High Holy Days a few weeks before that. Normally, on the night before Yom Kippur, I would dress in a suit and walk to a nearby synagogue, to hear my brother in law sing the Kol Nidre prayer. But rising case numbers here in Toronto made that unwise, so my wife and I sat on the couch and streamed the Higher Holidays program put on by the college Judaism organization Hillel, and Reboot, a creative nonprofit I’m affiliated with.

The program featured an array of voices representing a cross section of the Jewish experience, from Iraqi cantors and L.G.B.T.Q. rabbis, to a short film about Black Lives Matter. It was beautiful, meaningful and just one of hundreds of online services we could have tuned into that night. The promised future of Judaism!

Except I couldn’t bring myself back to spend another moment in front of a screen the next morning. My neighbor told me about a service in a nearby park, so we walked over and sat six feet apart. The congregation was far more traditional than what I am used to, and I could barely follow along with the Hebrew, but as the sun shone down, and we sang Avinu Malkeinu, a 1,500-year-old prayer for forgiveness, the feeling of those collective voices behind their masks sent a shiver down my spine. Here, for the first time since March, I was experiencing something that was real, visceral and unable to be digitized. It wasn’t futuristic. In fact, it was about as timeless a moment as it gets.

It feels like we heard for years that when it came to work, school, God or groceries, the virtual future — the moment when we’d use screens and technology for everything in life — was around the corner. Then one day in March, that future appeared at our doorstep uninvited.

As experts try to forecast what the world will look like once the virus is behind us, it’s now common to hear that we are just at the start of this “new normal.” Offices and downtowns will be abandoned as many of us permanently work from home. Education will be delivered from a screen. Gyms will flounder, while Peloton flourishes. Ghost kitchens and delivery apps will take the place of shuttered restaurants. The physical, analog world that existed before the pandemic is but a fading relic.

The problem with these predictions is that they are the same ones that have been used to sell us software and devices for the past several decades, with the same promises of efficiency. They almost always typically fall short when they meet the real world.

Seven years ago, the tech investor Marc Andreessen claimed that retail stores would soon go out of business, as e-commerce ate their lunch. But while Amazon and other online retailers grew rapidly during this time, and their growth exploded during the initial peak of the pandemic lockdown, e-commerce in the U.S. still only accounts for around 16 percent of retail sales. Malls, shopping streets, bookstores and others icons of physical retail, though battered and fighting for survival, are still open and in many cases doing brisk business. Shopping remains a deeply human action that can serve as education, entertainment and community building all at once.

That same thing can be true with work. “Office centricity is over,” proclaimed Tobias Lütke, the chief executive of the e-commerce software firm Shopify, in May, declaring that the firm had no intention of returning to its beautiful and brand-new offices, just blocks from where I live in Toronto. But many of us have found that remote work is anything but dreamy. We cannot concentrate, we feel unmotivated, we have children quite literally crawling all over us. We deeply miss having somewhere to go, a reason to shower and dress up, and most importantly, a collective sense of purpose forged with the people we work with side by side.

Perhaps nowhere has seen the promised Eden of technological futurism run into the hard ground of earthly reality more harshly than in education. In 2018, Vivek Wadhwa, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation in Silicon Valley, predicted that “the future of education is virtual,” powered by AI enabled VR headsets. Instead, the online learning most students, teachers and parents experienced this spring, and are unfortunately continuing this fall, is best characterized as a vast disappointment. Technical failures abound at every turn, work is left untouched and many feel abandoned. In a recent survey of educators from 59 countries, over half said that the experiment in e-learning had resulted in students learning less than they would if they were in school.

I saw this with my own kids, who started kindergarten and second grade in mid-September, in-person at our local public school. Each day in lockdown was a long battle with a poorly designed software interface, punctuated by vocal battles over assignments. “I miss school,” my daughter said one night in April. I reminded her that she was attending school, just online. “No, Dad, real school!” she replied, breaking into tears, “Online’s just the work, without any of the fun!”

Now, she and her brother put on their masks and run laughing into the schoolyard to meet their friends each morning, while their brave, brilliant teachers prepare them for another day in the world. It turns out that school is more than just facts transferred from textbook or website to learners. It is an immersive environment that facilitates learning through a purposefully designed physical space and carefully crafted relationships that equals something far greater than the sum of its parts. Something that cannot be fully conveyed through a flat piece of glass.

While the digital tools we have clung to these past months are not going away, it is a false assumption that this state of emergency is a sign of the future. Learning, playing, socializing and spending all our time on the same screen, in the same pair of sweatpants, in the same house, day after day after day, isn’t the desirable utopian future we had hoped for. It’s a prison of digital luxury.

The pandemic has caused us to see the value of the real world; in the mundane joy of a drab office, the miracle of a creaky public school classroom. It’s given us a new appreciation for the singular experience of sitting around a holiday table — talking politics with relatives that we both love and cannot stand, eating way too much turkey and pie and experiencing the emotional and physical fullness that feast induces. Reality is still where the action is, and though we are forced to stick to the virtual for our safety, as soon as the pandemic ends most of us will come running back to the world beyond our screens.

David Sax is the author of “The Revenge of the Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter.”

The Holidays Must Look Different

Holidays must look different this year. Lives are at stake. This year’s holiday season will be hard. But shared sacrifice will keep coronavirus outbreaks from spreading further.

• THE NEW YORK TIMES, Oct. 29, 2020

Credit...

Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Getty Images

In some ways, the coronavirus is still a mystery. Scientists can’t say for certain why it’s deadly or debilitating in some people but has virtually no effect in others. They don’t know exactly how long immunity lasts or whether (or when) a vaccine will stop its spread and bring this wretched chapter to a close.

But they do know this: The virus spreads most rampantly between people who gather indoors, in close quarters, to talk or laugh or sing, without wearing masks. Experts say the wave of outbreaks now sweeping the nation has been caused by precisely these types of gatherings.

As gut-wrenching as this may be, one of the most obvious ways to mitigate further viral spread will be for as many people as possible to stay home this holiday season. Even before the recent spike in cases, scientists knew that holidays were risky business. Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day weekend were all followed by measurable spikes in case counts. The fall and winter holidays are likely to be much worse, because they tend to involve more travel and indoor gatherings.

In normal times, some 50 million Americans usually travel at least 50 miles for Thanksgiving dinner, according to AAA and as noted in The Atlantic. This year, especially, the need to draw loved ones close feels urgent, and the idea of sacrificing one more sacred tradition in a year when we have already sacrificed so much feels deeply unfair. But skipping or severely curtailing in-person holiday celebrations now is as much a civic duty and an act of solidarity as wearing a mask in public or standing at least six feet apart.

The coronavirus is surging again, not just in a few hot spots but across the US, with an average of 59,000 new cases per day — as high as that number has been since August. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have labeled indoor gatherings with far-flung relatives as “higher risk” and is advising people to keep these get-togethers as small as possible and to hold them outdoors if they can. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease control expert, has said that, for safety’s sake, he won’t be seeing his own children this Thanksgiving.

It’s tempting to view the coming holiday season as a well-earned respite from a year filled with hardships. But, as others have argued, those hardships are precisely the point. Children have all but lost a year of schooling, small business owners have seen their livelihoods destroyed, people everywhere have watched loved ones die alone, in nursing homes and hospital wards where restrictions related to Covid-19 prohibited visitors. Failed leadership and failed policy have exacerbated all of these tragedies. Individual or family sacrifices, made for the greater good, have helped.

Taking unnecessary risks now would be an affront to all those sacrifices. What will have been the point of closing schools, hobbling industries or swapping so many human interactions for so many virtual ones? So much of it will have been for naught if a surge of holiday travel gives way to a tsunami of outbreaks and, ultimately, more death.

It’s true that not all gatherings are the same and that individual families can minimize their risks by taking precautions — by keeping gatherings small, by holding them outdoors and by testing and quarantining before and after travel. But those things are all much easier to do for families of means, who are more likely to have spacious, easily ventilated kitchens, space to gather outside, easy access to diagnostic testing and the ability to quarantine.

What’s more, low risk is not the same as no risk, and when it comes to the coronavirus, all risk is ultimately shared. The danger is not individual — it’s collective. The decisions you make are not only about whether you might infect your own grandmother, they’re about whether your family gathering will seed an outbreak that could ultimately infect someone else’s grandmother. The more people gather from far and wide, around densely packed tables, to eat and talk and occasionally shout, the more the coronavirus will spread. That’s an indisputable truth that no amount of wishful thinking or careful planning can undo.

The Walk

 

Little Amal, a young refugee, embarks on a remarkable journey – an epic voyage that will take her across Turkey, across Europe. To find her mother. To get back to school. To start a new life. Will the world let her? Can she achieve what now seems more impossible than ever?

In 2021, from the Syria-Turkey border all the way to the UK, The Walk will bring together celebrated artists, major cultural institutions, community groups and humanitarian organizations to create one of the most innovative and adventurous public artworks ever attempted.

At the heart of The Walk is ‘Little Amal’, a 3.5-metre-tall puppet of a young refugee girl, created by the acclaimed Handspring Puppet Company. Representing all displaced children, many separated from their families, Little Amal will travel over 8,000km embodying the urgent message “Don’t forget about us”.

At this time of unprecedented global change, The Walk is an extraordinary artistic response: a cultural odyssey transcending borders, politics and language to tell a new story of shared humanity – and to ensure the world doesn’t forget the millions of displaced children, each with their own story, who are more vulnerable than ever during the global pandemic.

Ammonite, a film by Francis Lee

My favourite film at the SEFF, an unmissable work of art, by the director of God's Own Country.

Miss Liberty doubts

 

Pop Singer Is Still Missing Amid Chechnya’s ‘Gay Purge’

Human rights activists are demanding answers on the three-year anniversary of the disappearance of Zelimkhan Bakaev, a high-profile pop singer from the Russian region of Chechnya.

In April 2017, the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta alleged that Chechen officials were arresting and violently torturing men they believed to be gay in what was described as a “gay purge”.

“There is little doubt he was targeted because of his sexual orientation,” the group said. Chechen singer Zelimkhan Bakaev was last seen on August 8 in the Chechen capital of Grozny, and Human Rights Watch said his family had been unable to get answers from authorities about what happened to him.

Chechen authorities have repeatedly denied the violent campaign against the country’s LGBT community, but last month a 30-year-old Russian man became the first to publicly identify himself as a victim.

Maxim Lapunov said he was living and working in the Chechen capital of Grozny when he was jailed and tortured by police in March.

Human Rights Watch’s Tanya Lokshina said at the time Lapunov was “incredibly brave and courageous” and other victims hadn’t come forward because of the risk of violent retribution from their families.

The Russian LGBT Network said last month the persecution of the region’s gay people was continuing despite global outcry.“Russian authorities at different levels made numerous statements about the fact that not a single victim filed an official complaint and that made it easy for officials to dismiss the [reports] as rumours,” she said.

They said since March this year more than 150 people had contacted them for assistance, 79 had fled Chechnya and 53 people had found safety outside of Russia.

Reports have emerged claiming that pop singer Zelimkhan Bakaev has become the latest victim of Chechnya’s anti-gay purge. The singer, aged 25, reportedly went missing in August 2017, and hasn't been heard from since by his family and friends. After fears began to grow for his safety, LGBT human rights groups previously thought that Bakaev had been detained. However, sources now believe the Russian singer was brutally tortured to death by authorities shortly after his arrival into the country because of his sexuality.

Chechnya's Islamic, anti-gay leader has denied involvement in the disappearance of Russian pop singer Zelimkhan Bakaev. 

The singer was feared to be a victim of Chechnya's anti-gay purge after he went missing in August 2017 while visiting the country for his sister's wedding.

While Chechen officials kept quiet about the disappearance, Ramzan Kadyrov has now claimed that the singer was 'dealt with' by family members.  

In a speech to an audience of uniformed security men that aired on state television channel Grozny TV, President Kadyrov denied involvement and claimed the singer's parents were blaming him for the disappearance.

Youth turnout swells, despite obstacles

The coronavirus pandemic and new requirements in Republican-led states have created voting obstacles for college students this year. Yet youth participation in the American election appears to be on the rise.

By DAN LEVIN

The New York Times International Edition, 31 October 2020

With many American campus quads resembling ghost towns and childhood bedrooms serving as lecture halls, politically active college students have moved their get-out-the-vote efforts online, hosting debate watch parties on Zoom, recruiting poll workers over Instagram and encouraging students to post their voting plans on Snapchat.

Young voters, traditionally a difficult group for politicians to get to the polls, are showing rare levels of enthusiasm in this election, even as college students have faced new obstacles to casting their ballots — some stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, and others from elected officials seeking to impede college voting.

At Bard College in New York State, students sued to bring a polling station to campus. Residential advisers at the University of Pittsburgh used Zoom to register new voters. And at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, students have signed up as poll workers to help their fellow Badgers navigate some of the nation’s toughest voter identification laws.

“We’ve had to exhaust every possible option to continue energizing voters,” said Roderick Hart, a junior at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

“In the past, we had massive rallies and all these people walking around with clipboards registering kids to vote,” Mr. Hart, 20, said. “But now, social media is really our only way of connecting everybody at once, considering we’re not on campus.”

Despite the difficulties, efforts to mobilize the youth vote, along with greater accessibility through early-voting hours and mail-in ballot options, appear to be paying off, with potentially significant implications for races nationwide.

More than five million voters under 30 have already cast ballots for the Tuesday election, including nearly three million in 14 key states that could decide the presidency and control of the Senate, according to data compiled by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. That is more than double the number of ballots cast by young voters at a similar point in the 2016 presidential election, mirroring an increase in early voting among all demographics because of coronavirus concerns. The early-voting numbers for young people are particularly notable in states such as Texas, where, by a week ago, nearly two-thirds as many had cast early votes as the total number of young voters four years ago, according to Tufts researchers.

A national poll conducted by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School found that 63 percent of youth voters surveyed said they would “definitely be voting,” suggesting turnout similar to 2008, when enthusiasm for Barack Obama’s candidacy led to higher levels of youth voting than in any election since 1984.

Energized by issues like climate change and the Trump presidency, college students emerged as a crucial voting bloc in the 2018 midterms, when their turnout rate of 40.3 percent, according to the Tufts Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, was more than double the rate four years earlier.

Faced with those surging numbers among a voting group that leans heavily Democratic, Republican lawmakers in numerous states, including several battlegrounds, have taken actions that they said were intended to prevent voter fraud — including enacting restrictive ID rules and byzantine voter registration requirements — that have also made it more difficult for college students to cast ballots.

Elected officials have also moved to diminish the electoral power of campuses through redistricting, as well as by limiting early voting sites, purging voter rolls or refusing to permit polling stations on campus. And the logistics of the pandemic could alter where young people cast their ballots, potentially affecting races where candidates, typically Democrats, count on support from students living in their districts — but many of those students are now at home.

“Every aspect of students’ ability to vote is under attack,” said Maxim Thorne, managing director of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, a nonprofit group focused on protecting voting rights for young people. “You have to fight these battles on every front, whether you’re in a state as blue as New York or as red as Georgia.”

In New Hampshire, where six in 10 college students come from outside the state, a rate among the nation’s highest, a Republican-backed law took effect last fall requiring newly registered voters who drive to obtain an in-state driver’s license and auto registration, which can cost hundreds of dollars annually. The law passed after years of calls by state Republicans to clamp down on voting access for college students.

“They are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience,” the state’s Republican House speaker said in 2011 when discussing plans to tighten up voting requirements.

Republicans in North Carolina enacted voter ID requirements in 2018 that recognized student identification cards as valid but proved so cumbersome that large state universities were unable to comply. A later revision relaxed the rules, and a federal judge blocked the law in December, but confusion lingers.

“The thing that’s hard is, everybody’s like, ‘ No I can’t vote today because I don’t have my ID with me,’ and you have to explain they don’t need that,” said Kate Fellman, executive director of You Can Vote, a nonpartisan group in North Carolina.

In Wisconsin, Republicans have imposed some of the toughest restrictions, including a requirement that IDs used for voting expire within two years, which invalidates most student IDs issued by four-year schools. The University of Wisconsin, which has around 40,000 students in Madison, created a second form of ID that complies with the voter law. When the pandemic shuttered campus last spring, the school developed a digital version of the voter ID, and students can now print them out at campus polling sites.

Not all colleges are so enthusiastic about ensuring students can vote. In September, the University of Georgia canceled plans for in-person voting on campus, citing concerns about social distancing and insufficient space during the pandemic.

After an uproar from student voting groups and local officials — who noted that the school had chosen to allow up to 23,000 fans to attend home football games — the university reversed course and agreed to house voting booths in the basketball arena.

At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., students and the school sued in September to get a polling site on campus; the closest place to vote was at a church located down a dirt road in the nearby town of Red Hook.

A New York State Supreme Court judge originally denied their petition, citing a Republican member of the Dutchess County Board of Elections who said it was too close to the election to change polling locations. Yet the very next day, the board moved two other polling sites in Red Hook.

On Friday, the judge reversed her decision and ordered the polling site to be moved to Bard’s main student center.

“For the first time on this campus,” said Sadia Saba, 21, a senior who was a plaintiff in the case, “students feel like their voices are being heard in the political process.”

On Democracy and the Internet

Social media’s business model is a threat to democracy – it’s time to change it. These companies are eroding our democratic institutions. The creator of Facebook’s ‘Like’ button says only public pressure and collective action can put a stop to it.

By JUSTIN ROSENSTEIN

30 October 2020 

In 2008, I helped create Facebook’s “Like” button. We were motivated by a simple question: “Can we spread more positivity and love in the world?” We wanted to build a feature that offered people more human connection.

Over a decade later, we have overwhelming evidence that social media – and its prioritization of Like-ability over truth – has had catastrophic, unintended consequences. We’re weeks away from an unprecedented US general election, which has become a referendum not only on political leadership, but also on the legitimacy of democracy. How did we get here? In no small part because social media platforms have degraded meaningful connection, threatened people’s ability to vote in fair and free elections and undermined faith in, and the future of, democracy.

As long as technology companies are incentivized to maximize profits, technology will be built that rewards shareholders at the expense of society

This is not fake news. For millions who have felt the effects, it’s not news at all. We have seen social media destabilize elections worldwide. We have felt our conversations become polarized. We have measured increasing rates of depression and cyberbullying, and seen both change the lives of our children. We have heard early social media employees speak out, myself included, most recently in the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.

What haven’t we seen? Systemic change.

Social media and its content-recommendation algorithms are designed to maximize the amount of attention we give them. The more of your attention companies mine, the more ads they can sell and the more money they make. Unfortunately, outrage, blame and salacious lies are more engaging than nuanced truth.

As I’ve said before, prioritizing profit at the expense of the public good is not new. Because trees are worth more money dead than alive, people cut down trees. Because whales are worth more dead than alive, people kill whales. And because humans are worth more staring at screens than out living rich lives, platforms keep us staring.

As long as technology companies are incentivized to maximize profits, technology will be built that rewards shareholders at the expense of society. Absurdly, they have a legally-binding fiduciary duty to do so. Without radical changes to corporate incentives, companies will continue to degrade and threaten the future of democracy.

When it comes to elections, companies default to blaming bad content and bad users. Disinformation and manipulation existed long before social media, but social media’s structure and algorithms favor them, profit from them and enable their virality. Lies spread six times faster than truth on Twitter. In 2016, Facebook admitted that 64% of the growth of extremist groups occurred due to their own recommendation algorithm. A 2020 study found that misinformation on Facebook is three times more popular than during the last US presidential election.

In this year’s election, both presidential candidates have poured money into social media ads. Biden blitzed Facebook over the summer. Trump pre-purchased YouTube’s homepage for early November. Since June, they have spent a combined $100 million [€85 million] in ads on Instagram and Facebook.

But because of social media platforms' algorithms and incentives, it’s not legitimate election content that goes viral. It’s the lies, fear, fabricated conspiracy theories and threats of violence. These have resulted in fears of social unrest on and after election day. Twitter and Facebook’s efforts to flag the most egregious false and dangerous posts have not kept pace with relentless misinformation campaigns that are undermining people’s very faith in democracy.

I know that social media companies didn’t set out to become vehicles for dangerous political propaganda. But they have not made the deep structural changes to address it – and we, the people, are bearing the costs.

Despite what companies would lead you to believe, the solution is not hiring more content moderators or training better AI to detect misinformation. These are band-aids. The system is broken. Real change requires changes to the structure of social media companies' corporate governance. The solution to saving our democracy from these companies is, in fact, to apply the principles of democracy directly to these companies.

Imagine, for example, if Facebook reported to a Board of the People instead of a Board of Directors. This Board of the People, made up of diverse stakeholders from many walks of life, would decide the company’s high-level goals, what metrics mattered and when to hire a new CEO. Instead of defining success on financial metrics, the Board could ask to optimize for metrics that strengthen democratic institutions and individual lives, like users reporting greater empathy for other people’s perspectives, reduction in loneliness and increased quality of mental health.

Over the last decades, countries worldwide have used such advanced democratic processes to empower citizens to make change. In both 2015 and 2018, Ireland celebrated after amending its constitution under the guidance of a Citizens' Assembly, a representative sample of the Irish population that worked through structured collaboration and facilitated processes. In 2020, Taiwan gracefully managed its Covid-19 outbreak through digital democracy tools that built trust and leveraged citizen participation.

Does this sound utopian? It is compared to what we have now. It is also possible.

Companies can choose to change, but we can’t wait for them to do so. Public pressure from social media users, from politicians and governments, and from company employees is vital. Public pressure starts with a global understanding of the harm these platforms cause our families and our institutions. It accelerates when people refuse to accept the status quo and demand changes for our public good. It succeeds with collective action: when we, the people, change our own use of social media and demand change from our public officials.

This work has begun. Governments and politicians have increased pressure on platforms, including new anti-trust and public accountability measures. Inside social media companies, employees have begun walking out and standing up against policies, actions and platform features that do not align with the public good or collective ethics. The Social Dilemma was the top movie on Netflix in September – unprecedented for a documentary. Millions of people worldwide have watched it, often with their families and spoken up about the negative impacts social media platforms have had on their lives.

We’ve seen the impact of public pressure in recent social movements, like the call to #End SARS in Nigeria and reform the police in the United States and in changes caused by the #MeToo movement. The more pressure companies feel from users, regulators and employees, the more leverage we have to force real change.

In the United States, we’ve begun voting in an election where the stakes are exceptionally high, and trust in democracy is exceptionally low. If social media is going to dominate our public square, we have to ensure democratic principles take priority over profits. We, the people, have a right to govern the institutions that shape our lives. That’s what it means to live in a democracy.

Justin Rosenstein is a prominent voice in the documentary The Social Dilemma and the founder of One Project, a social venture aiming to advance democracy to meet the challenges of the Internet age and enable global collaboration through advances in civics, economics, technology, and culture. Previously he co-founded Asana and helped build some of today’s most-used tech features, including Google Drive and Facebook’s “Like” button.

"Untitled"

‘Untitled’ (2018), oil painting on canvas by Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie / Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

 

The Social Dilemma_documentary

This highly-acclaimed documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations and discussing some of the pressing topics of our time: digital manipulation, screen addiction, and surveillance capitalism. Food for thought. A must watch! 

This Year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry Honors a Revolution

With Crispr, two scientists turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race.

By

 Walter Isaacson

, The New York Times, Oct. 7, 2020

Emmanuelle Charpentier, left, and Jennifer Doudna may have made the most important biological advance since the discovery of the structure of DNA.Credit...Miguel Riopa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled “The Double Helix” on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama, filled with colorful characters, about ambition and competition in the pursuit of nature’s wonders. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.

She would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, later told her was the most important biological advance since he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. She worked with a brilliant Parisian biologist named Emmanuelle Charpentier to turn a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as Crispr, it ushered in a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.

For this accomplishment, on Wednesday they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is a recognition that the development of Crispr will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, the computer and the internet. Now we are entering a life-science era. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study the code of life. It will be a revolution that will someday allow us to cure diseases, fend off virus pandemics and (if we decide it’s wise) to design babies with the genetic features we want for them.

Crispr is especially relevant in this year of the coronavirus. The gene-editing tool that Dr. Doudna and Dr. Charpentier developed is based on a virus-fighting trick used by bacteria, which have been battling viruses for billions of years. In their DNA, bacteria develop clustered repeated sequences, known as Crisprs, that can remember and then destroy viruses that attack them. In other words, it’s an immune system that can adapt itself to fight each new wave of viruses — just what we humans need in an era that has been plagued by repeated viral epidemics.

The award is also a great testament to the growing power of women in the life sciences. When Rosalind Franklin made the images that helped James Watson and Francis Crick discover the structure of DNA, she became just a minor character in the early histories, and she died before she could share a Nobel Prize. Until now, only five women, beginning with Marie Curie in 1911, have won or shared the Nobel for chemistry, out of 184 honorees. When this year’s prize was announced, Dr. Charpentier said it would “provide a message specifically to young girls who would like to follow the path of science and to show them that in friendship women can also be awarded prizes.”

Crispr is now being used to treat sickle-cell anemia, cancers and blindness. And this year, Dr. Doudna and her research teams began exploring how Crispr could detect and destroy the coronavirus. “Crispr evolved in bacteria because of their long-running war against viruses,” Dr. Doudna told me. “We humans don’t have time to wait for our own cells to evolve natural resistance to this virus, so we have to use our ingenuity to do that. Isn’t it fitting that one of the tools is this ancient bacterial immune system called Crispr? Nature is beautiful that way.”

In November 2018, He Jiankui, a young Chinese scientist who had been to some of Dr. Doudna’s gene-editing conferences, shocked the world by using Crispr to help produce the world’s first “designer babies.” He edited human embryos to remove a gene that produces a receptor for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. There was an immediate outburst of awe and then shock. After more than three billion years of evolution of life on this planet, one species (us) had developed the talent and temerity to grab control of its own genetic future. There was a sense that we had crossed the threshold into a whole new age, perhaps a brave new world, as when Adam and Eve bit into the apple or Prometheus snatched fire from the gods.

Crispr raises some tough moral questions. Should we edit our species to make us less susceptible to deadly viruses? In the midst of this coronavirus plague, most of us probably think that would be a wonderful boon. Right? Should we eliminate disorders such as Huntington’s, sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis? That sounds good, too. And what about congenital deafness or blindness? Or being short? Or depressed? Hmm. How should we think about that? A few decades from now, if it becomes possible and safe, should we allow parents to enhance the IQ and physical strength of their kids? Should we let them decide eye color? Skin color? Height?

After helping to discover Crispr, Dr. Doudna has become a thought leader on these moral issues. That’s the main message we should take from this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry: New technologies can be a huge benefit to the human race, but in order to make sure they are used wisely, it’s important for people to understand them. By shining a light on gene editing, the Nobel committee is bringing a needed awareness of the wonders of nature — and of the technology that will increasingly determine how nature works.