Monthly Archives: July 2022

Many of his proposals could do a lot of good. Congress should, as he suggests, require tech companies to be more transparent about their inner workings. Audits of their algorithms and procedures, like inspections of industrial plants, would allow regulators and users to understand how tech products operate and assess what harm they may be doing.

Another promising idea is establishing a system of premarket certification for digital products. In the same way the Food and Drug Administration clears drugs for the market, a regulatory body could review and evaluate software and other digital products before they are released to ensure they comply with the law, and perhaps evaluate how they comport with community values.

Some proposals, however, seem more suited to the ivory tower than the real world. Susskind calls for a vast system of deliberative mini-publics, groups of ordinary citizens that would develop policies in areas like taxation of data processing. Its an idea that no doubt has great appeal in the seminar room, but Ive taken to looking at my fellow subway passengers and wondering how they would do hammering out data-processing taxation policy. Im skeptical.

Susskind also proposes a system for regulating the moderation of websites, including checklists of things moderators must do. He suggests disciplinary mechanisms by which moderators could be subject to fines or disqualification. As we saw this spring with the debacle of the Department of Homeland Securitys advisory board to combat disinformation, Americans, at least, have a deep resistance to the idea of government getting too involved in deciding what speech is acceptable. Even if Susskinds idea is a good one, its Orwellian overtones would doubtless make it, at least in the United States, a political nonstarter.

Susskind notes that he was too young for 1990s cyber-utopianism, but at times he seems to be engaging in a 2020s version, such as his vision of citizen panels churning out policy edicts to fix big techs problems. Still, in trying to make the world right, an excess of idealism is not the worst thing. As we take on the task of pushing back against the internets baleful influences which we must Susskinds intelligent book can serve as a valuable guide.

Adam Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, is the author of Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Courts Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America.

THE DIGITAL REPUBLIC: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century, by Jamie Susskind | 304 pp. | Pegasus Books | $28.95

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Review: The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century, Jamie Susskind - The New York Times

Key Takeaways

The Ethereum faithful took over Paris for EthCC[5] this week.

This week, thousands of builders, degens, and other cryptocurrency enthusiasts descended on Paris for the fifth edition of the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), Europes biggest Ethereum meet-up. In the years since EthCC launched, Ethereum has become a sprawling ecosystem holding billions of dollars in locked value. Its the main hub for DeFi and NFTs and settles trillions of dollars in transactions annually. Though various competitors have had moments in the sun over the past year, Ethereum is still the biggest and most widely-used smart contract network in the world, and its dominance over the blockchain ecosystem is such that multiple other Ethereum-adjacent networks tagged onto EthCC with their own side events this week.

Most crypto conference attendees will admit that the opportunity to connect with others at spin-off parties is as much of a draw as the main ticket, but even with dozens to choose from this time around, EthCC itself had a lot to keep Ethereum enthusiasts occupied. The three-day event welcomed speakers from some of the ecosystems top projects to Maison de la Mutualit, and demand was so high that many top industry heads were left ticketless.

The brutal European heatwave left many people exhausted well before the talks had wrapped up on the first day, but the conference only seemed to improve as it went on. Several Layer 2 projects used the occasion to announce their various ZK-Rollup developments, and beyond the main stage the venue was packed with the usual array of stalls, their hosts dishing out t-shirts, NFTs, and Ethereum-branded macarons to anyone whod stop by.

By far the most-attended talk of the week was the one from Vitalik Buterin himself. Contrary to his 2021 presentation on expanding Ethereum beyond DeFi, Buterin used his 40-minute slot to go deep on what the networks future will look like after the Merge and other major developments. The Ethereum creator explained that the protocol needs to overcome a few hurdles to set itself up for the future, summarizing the outlook as short-term pain, long-term gain.

Prysmatic Labs Terence Tsao used his slot to explain the complexities of the Merge to Proof-of-Stake, and PWNs Josef Je introduced himself as an early Silk Road fanboy turned Ethereum settler. After extolling the benefits of the psychedelics hed acquired with Bitcoin on the dark web, he went on to ask audience members who considered themselves a crypto native. Most people raised their hands, then he presented a list of the criteria he thought people needed to meet to earn such a titlesignificant crypto asset holdings, regular DeFi activity, and habitual crypto use for payments among them. In other words, he was more or less outlining the self-sovereign, decentralized lifestyle that Ethereum makes possible.

Je was a diehard who subscribed to the freedom-first ideology that sucks people into the space forever, and I wasnt surprised to hear the crowd cheering as soon as he mentioned mind-bending chemicals; blockchain might be a relatively new phenomenon, but its not hard to see the parallels it shares with the LSD-fueled counterculture movement of the 60s.

As for the party schedule, there was more than enough on offer for those looking to burn the candle at both ends. This was my first Ethereum conference, and I was taken aback by the number of ETH devotees I met over the course of the week. It seemed like Ethereums native asset was almost everyones heaviest bag, to the extent that conversations rarely touched on other ecosystems. This wasnt the kind of cringeworthy maximalist crowd you find spreading toxicity on Bitcoin Twitter; most of them struck me more as idealists who gravitated toward Ethereum a while ago and never really left.

A whale I ran into at MakerDAOs DAIvinity party told me he doesnt look beyond Ethereum or Layer 2 because dedicating his time elsewhere would be too much of a distraction, then he guided me through some of the most valuable blue chip NFTs hed acquired and the amount of ETH hed spent on each. Im annoyed I didnt grab a Hoodie [Crypto]Punk when they were only $200,000 the other week, he sighed, unwittingly pointing out the staggering returns early birds have enjoyed over the past few years (ETH was priced at $0.30 when it launched in 2015 and topped $4,800 in late 2021; today it trades closer to $1,600). The OpenSea baller wasnt the only one who made it clear his loyalty was to Ethereum. What do you think of Solana? one degen asked me at a ConsenSys happy hour. I hate it, but Im bullish, he said.

Another member of our team inadvertently ended up at a party that was mostly filled with venture capitalists and pretentious money types in designer suits rubbing shoulders with one another; when he got there, he was greeted by a Palau government employee who shilled him the countrys recently-launched digital ID program. The guy explained that it was easy to get an ID and change ones name to pass Binances KYC restrictions. We looked into this before we left Paris to see what we could dig up; our investigation is still ongoing.

Other than a super low-key Polychain-hosted event headlined by Justice, the hottest afterparty ticket in town was for rAAVE, Aaves late-night soire held a stones throw from the Sacr-Cur. I didnt hear about Justice until after the fact but got into rAAVE because I was fast to get to the secret passcode that was revealed during Stani Kulechovs Lens Protocol talk; others had less luck. Inside was a testament to Aaves place at the forefront of Ethereumland, with a sea of Aave-branded tees on view whenever the lights went up in place of the dark dancefloor and lasers. At some point, I got talking to someone else who wrote crypto content, and then they left me on the dancefloor to scope out some psilocybin from their friend. Then I realized it was approaching 02:00 and I had to be up for my Eurostar back to London four hours later. Although I stayed later than intended, at times rAAVE felt like more of an upmarket affair in the 8th arrondissement for people who think clubbing involves bottle service and sparklers than the sweaty throwdown it was trying to be (sorry guys, but its actually annoying when you clap in time with house music, and why on earth was there a closed-off VIP area if this was meant to be a party?)

For the few days I was at EthCC, I heard little talk of crypto prices. ETH came close to $1,600 during the event after dipping below $900 a month prior, igniting hopes of a possible extended Merge rally. But even after days of ETH outperforming the rest of the market, most people seemed more interested in talking about what they were working on or the development updates announced at the event. Maybe its the months-long market slump (ETH is still 66% down from its peak) and widespread macro fears, or maybe its the exhaustion everyone is feeling from reading about failed Ponzi schemes and reckless leveraged trading. Either way, whether ETH trades a multiple higher, lower, or at its current price in July 2023, Ethereumand EthCCwill still be around. The few thousand believers who flocked to Paris for this weeks conference probably arent going anywhere either.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH, AAVE, MATIC, and several other cryptocurrencies.

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Buterin said that Ethereum faces short-term pain, long-term gain as it prepares for the Merge and other major changes. Buterin Discusses Ethereums Future Ethereum is in a long and complicated...

Polygons new Layer 2 network is set to launch its testnet later this summer ahead of a full mainnet launch in early 2023. Polygon Reveals EVM-Compatible Layer 2 Polygon has...

The rally comes two days after Tim Beiko suggested a tentative September 19 launch date for Ethereums long-awaited Merge to Proof-of-Stake. Ethereum Rallies Amid Merge Hype Ethereum is breaking out....

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Ethereum Freedom and Parisian Psychedelia: Reflections on EthCC[5] - Crypto Briefing

Digital Art Luis Fernando Salazar is a Colombian contemporary artist who captures in his work the colours and sensations, he says: I like to represent the warmth of bright colours, the beauty of the world around us.

Writer of verses, he found his inspiration at the age of 8, drawing. At the age of 16, he began to write short verses in classical poetry. A lover of the mountains and nature, he wanted to capture his perceptions of the world around him in painting and drawing.

Very skilled since childhood, he began to create decorative objects for Christmas while he also learned pyrography on wood.

Then, in this ever-growing digital era, Digital abstract art has been the focus of his work, without losing his affinity for brushes and canvases. With not too many resources, Salazar decided to continue with his inspiration and creation in Digital Art composing with diverse methods, editing, assemblies, and diverse digital techniques to create a variety and artistic works that express his love, especially, for the colourful forms, many abstract and insinuating, I love giving the freedom for the observer to interpret my art he told to The European Times.

For the first time, a newsroom portrays these works and presents them to the public to share for inspiration.

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Luis F Salazar and Digital Art: "I love giving the freedom for the observer to interpret my art" The European Times News - The European...

In Chinelo Okparantas new novel, a young white man is disgusted by his bigoted, small-town parents. Some of his reactions are typical: He disavows their views and moves to New York City. Others, though, are decidedly strange: He starts calling himself G-Dawg, joins a self-help group for white people ashamed of their race and begins to identify as a Black man from Africa.

Yes, Okparanta knows the premise might cause offense.

When she began working on a novel about well-meaning white people who are blind to their own bigotry, Okparanta, who is Nigerian American, realized the topic was explosive. She was, after all, wading into a fraught debate about racism and identity politics at a moment when those issues were supercharged by George Floyds murder and the protests that followed. So she resorted to satire.

Humor was the safety measure I put in place so I didnt have to endure accusations of trying to write whiteness, she said. Im not attempting to write whiteness in any real way. I am writing about the pain that has been endured by being on the other side of whiteness.

The resulting book, Harry Sylvester Bird, published this week by Mariner Books, is bleak and biting, but often disarmingly funny one of a handful of new and forthcoming novels that use satire and surrealism to pick apart common assumptions about racial and cultural identity, and explore what it means to transgress those socially drawn boundaries.

Several of these new novels skewer the more subtle forms of bias that arise from racial blind spots and ignorance, or from a misguided desire to emulate or appropriate another culture.

Mithu Sanyals new novel, Identitti, out this month, satirizes debates about race and identity politics in academia. The plot centers on a South Asian doctoral student who is unmoored when she learns that her mentor a prominent South Asian post-colonial and race studies professor is not Indian, but white. In her forthcoming novel Yellowface, R.F. Kuang lampoons the lack of diversity in the publishing industry with a twisted story about a white writer who steals an unpublished novel written by a recently deceased Asian American author and tries to pass it off as her own book.

In his new novel, The Last White Man, out on Aug. 2 from Riverhead Books, Mohsin Hamid uses a surreal premise to examine racial identity as a socially constructed fiction. Set in an unnamed country, it tells the story of a white man who wakes up one morning with dark skin, a mysterious condition that spreads throughout his town and forces people to confront their latent biases.

Hamid, who was born in Pakistan, came up with the premise more than 20 years ago, when he found himself being seen with suspicion for having a Muslim name and brown skin after the Sept. 11 attacks. He returned to the story during the pandemic, and found that approaching it through the lens of fantasy gave him more freedom to examine the artificial fault lines around race.

Because I think that race is this imaginary thing, he said in an interview, if we start to intervene at the level of us imagining in the first place, there might be insights worth having.

Black novelists have long used surrealism, farce and satire to tackle taboos around race.

In 1931, the Black journalist and writer George S. Schuyler published an arch critique of white supremacy called Black No More, which features an ambitious Black man who undergoes a medical procedure to turn his skin white, but then finds whiteness alienating. In the decades since, Ishmael Reed, Charles Wright, Percival Everett, Mat Johnson and Paul Beatty have used comic surrealism to engage with subjects like slavery, lynchings and hate crimes, as well as the failures of the civil rights movement.

Humor and fantasy can act as a buffer of sorts when writing about issues that would otherwise be too painful, like police violence against Black people and colorism, said Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. His forthcoming novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, takes place in an alternate America where the for-profit prison system allows convicts to compete for their freedom in a gladiator-style, battle-to-the-death reality show.

By having that sort of surrealist, satirical conceit, it allows me to make a space where I have a lot of control and can still engage the same subject, he said.

The new crop of satires about race also reflects an ongoing debate about cultural appropriation and the conflicts over whether and how novelists should write across racial and cultural boundaries.

Okparanta said she wanted to explore racism from an unfamiliar vantage point.

As a Black person who has endured a lot of racism and microaggression, I wanted to understand how a well-meaning white person might still hurt you, she said.

She first came up with the premise of Harry Sylvester Bird in 2016, when she was teaching creative writing at Columbia University and held a seminar on the ethics of writing fiction about other races and cultures. Okparanta, who moved from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, to Boston at age 10, had recently published her debut novel, Under the Udala Trees, a lesbian coming-of-age story set in 1960s Nigeria during the countrys civil war.

As students debated novels like William Styrons The Confessions of Nat Turner and Arthur Goldens Memoirs of a Geisha, Okparanta was struck by how polarizing the issue was.

It got heated, she said, because there was the question of power: Who has the power to do it, and what does it mean if you use that power in a way that is not accurately representative of the culture that you are depicting?

A couple of years later, Okparanta was living in Lewisburg, a small town in Pennsylvania, where she often felt out of place as a Black woman and an African immigrant. She found herself thinking about her old idea, and began wondering what it would look like for a Black writer to create a white character who is unaware of his own racial blind spots an idea that felt even more potent in 2020, with rising political polarization and social unrest.

Harry Sylvester Bird opens in Tanzania, when a teenage Harry, on a safari vacation with his boorish parents, is horrified by how they treat the African guides and staff. Back in Pennsylvania, he decides he no longer wants to be white and starts identifying as a Black man, and later moves to New York for college, where he begins the next phase of his metamorphosis. He attends meetings of Transracial-Anon, a therapy group for white people seeking racial reassignment, which will eventually culminate in modifications to members hair and skin.

As Harrys story unfolds, Okparanta paints a portrait of an alternate America with unsettling parallels to our own, a country divided by growing extremism and nationalism, and reeling from the pandemic and from the rise of a hard-right white supremacist political movement called the Purists. His desire to shed his whiteness and be an ally sets him apart from the blatant bigotry and hatred of the emboldened white nationalists, yet Harry still makes unwittingly offensive comments about Black people. He fetishizes Black skin, and at one point, he marvels to his Nigerian girlfriend about how people in Africa can be so happy with so little.

Okparanta said she wanted to make Harry exaggerated, but not so cartoonish or unsympathetic that readers would dismiss his plight as farcical.

Even with the buffer of humor, Okparanta says shes braced for a backlash from readers and critics who might misread her purpose, or feel the novel fails as satire. Early reactions have been somewhat mixed. Kirkus Reviews called it a tart, questioning exploration of how deep racism runs, while a blistering review in The New York Times argued that the novel lacks the thrilling surrealism that animates successful racial caricature.

The novelist Tayari Jones, who praised the novel in a blurb for using humor as a weapon, a tool and a salve, said Okparantas satire succeeded because she approached the characters and subject with irreverence but also empathy.

She is not a white man having a racial crisis, but shes an astute observer of a society having a racial crisis, she said. She knows what it feels like to be an African person subjected to the Western gaze.

Okparanta said she wouldnt be surprised if some readers feel her satire goes too far. After all, she noted, when Voltaire published Candide, a coming-of-age adventure story that doubled as a vicious critique of the European power structures, the French nobility did not enjoy it.

Being that it is a satire, it will be understood and digested differently by different people in society, Okparanta said. Some groups might see the humor more readily than other groups.

Continue reading here:

A Crop of New Novels About Race and Racism Finds Freedom in Satire - The New York Times

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I was born in the Soviet Union. Every July 20, I celebrate the day my mother and I arrived in America.

Our family arrived in waves in the late 1970s. My grandmother and her sister were allowed out first. Then my father. Then us. We didnt know if we would see each other again. The Iron Curtain could be pulled shut at any time. We left family behind. My mother never saw her father again. Nothing about it was easy.

The late 70s were not Americas glory days. Inflation was high, crime was everywhere, there was an energy crisis. But more than any of that, there was a crisis of identity and the pervasive idea that America was not that great and not worth saving. Theres a reason Ronald Reagan was such a popular president, winning 49 states in his re-election bid: he reflected Americas greatness, and he did not for one moment allow Americans to forget how lucky they were.

TWITTER TARS AND FEATHERS PRINCE HARRY FOR CONDESCENDING UN SPEECH AGAINST AMERICA: GO HOME, LITTLE BOY

This July 4th, so many people took to social media to say they were disappointed in their country, that they didnt feel like celebrating it. They were mad about the Supreme Court. They were angry at their fellow Americans.

First Lady Nancy Reagan looks on as President Ronald Reagan is sworn in during ceremonies in the Rotunda beneath the Capitol Dome in Washington on Jan. 21, 1985. Reagan, forced indoors by a record inaugural freeze, reenacted his oath taking and sounded a second term dedication to his conservative principles. ((AP Photo/Ron Edmonds))

The luckiest people in history somehow dont know it. Their faces blue from holding their collective breath until they are given even more than they have already. The people who have woken up on 3rd base, who have been blessed through the accident of birth to live their whole lives in the greatest, freest country the world has ever known, are somehow still unhappy with their lot. Its sometimes too much to bear. For those of us who have family who have never tasted this freedom, this spoiled, miserable, ungrateful class of people can be particularly galling.

They dont know how lucky they are, and they dont know how their unappreciativeness looks to the rest of the world. Only the comfortable and the free can take to their Instagram and trash something so good.

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Ive spent my life as a free person in a free place but every July 20, and so many days in between, I think about how it all could have gone so differently. Our lives were on one track and then a miracle switched us to another one. I got to grow up American. I got to have American children. The people who hate on America, on our Independence Day, have never had the discomfort that comes with the lack of freedom. Their privilege shows in every word they say.

Its easy to dismiss them, these children throwing a tantrum. But theyre moving us away from each other. Theyre severing our collective binds. They target July 4th, Thanksgiving and all the other days when we should pause and reflect, so that we dont celebrate the obvious bounty of our lives. It keeps us angry and bitter, despite having everything. Our ungraciousness is good politically. It keeps people engaged. But it tears us apart.

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My Americaversary is a pause for me to say a quiet thank you to the country that took us in and has given us so much. But the calendar is filled with days for all of us to pause and do the same. Dont let the entitled few take it from us. We are lucky every single day to be Americans, and we cant ever forget that.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM KAROL MARKOWICZ

Karol Markowicz is a columnist at the New York Post. She has also written for Time, USA Today, The Observer, Heat Street, Federalist, Daily Beast and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @Karol.

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I'm proud to be an American because I've lived without freedom - Fox News

The Aam Aadmi Party-led-Delhi government has put up a flex board in Jamia Nagar in Delhi wherein it passed off an Islamic cleric from Bangladesh as an Indian freedom fighter. As per reports, the contentious banner was hung by AAP in Jamia Nagar ahead of the 75th Independence Day celebrations.

The Arvind Kejriwal-led party reportedly wanted to portray freedom fighter Mahmud Hasan Deobandi but ended up featuring Bangladeshi cleric Maulana Mahmudul Hasan on the flex board.

Mahmud Hasan Deobandi (1851-1920) was an Indian scholar and the founder of the Jamila Millia Islamia University. He was reportedly the first student of Darul Uloom Deoband.

Maulana Mahmudul Hasan (1950-present), on the contrary, is an Islamic scholar and public speaker from Bangladesh. He is a native of Charkharicha village in Mymensingh district. He was elected as the Chairman of Bangladesh Qawmi Madrasa Education Board (Befaq) in 2020.

While speaking about the matter, veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta tweeted This Arvind Kejriwal says We are the offspring (aulad) of Bhagat Singh. His sidekicks claim We are the true patriots. Of course.

Thats why they showcase a Bangladeshi Maulana, born in 1950 in East Pakistan, as an Indian freedom fighter. No, it is not an error, he emphasised. Despite being months since the incorrect banner was originally put up, the Delhi government did not bother to make the necessary changes.

After media reports highlighted the blunder by the party, AAP removed the Bangladeshi cleric from the poster, leaving an ugly gap in between.

The poster was put up ahead of the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav to be celebrated on August 15, 2022, to coincide with India completing 75 years of Indian independence.

In addition to the celebrations on 15th August, on August 14, the black day would be observed as Vibhishika Memorial Day or Partition Horrors Remembrance Day as announced by PM Narendra Modi last year.

The partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947 and resulted in the dissolution of the British Raj. According to official numbers, at least 2 million lives were lost during the partition and nearly 20 million people were displaced. The unofficial numbers are much higher than the official ones.

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AAP passes off a Bangladeshi Islamic cleric as an Indian freedom fighter. Here is what happened - OpIndia