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Elon Musk's Starlink cutoff controversy
I think it's a fascinating question. And it gets to a point of what I call a technopolar world, not unipolar, not bipolar, not multipolar, technopolar. In other words, for all of our lives, we've talked about a world where nation states, where governments are the principal actors with sovereignty over outcomes that matter critically for national security. Now, here you have the Russians invading Ukraine. One of the biggest challenges to the geopolitical order since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. And yet, a core decision about whether or not Ukraine will be able to defend itself is being made not by the United States or NATO providing the military support, but by a technology company. Now, the Ukrainian government is being quite critical of some of the decisions that Elon Musk has made in restricting the use for Starlink, for the Ukrainians.
I don't think that's fair criticism by itself. I think we need to recognize that Starlink's availability to the Ukrainians was absolutely essential in helping the government and the military leaders actually communicate with their soldiers on the front lines. And if it wasn't for Starlink, and if it wasn't for the role of many other technology companies, largely in the United States, not at all clear to me that Zelensky would still be in power today. Certainly the Ukrainians would have lost a lot more territory and they'd be in much worse position than they are. So I think that the Ukrainians still owe Elon a significant debt. But I also raise a much bigger question, which is, should an individual CEO, should an individual centibillionaire be making these decisions about outcomes of life and death for 44 million Ukrainians?
And they're the answer is much more concerning. Because, of course, Elon and all of these technology companies, they're not treaty signatories with NATO. They don't have any obligation to do anything other than Netflix and chill. And yet they're absolutely indispensable for national security in these countries as increasingly national security becomes a matter of not just what happens with bombs and rockets, but also what happens in the digital world, what happens in cyberspace, what happens in communications, in the collection of intelligence. As Elon and others become principal actors in a military industrial technological complex, accountability for those decisions is very deeply concerning if it's only in the hands of those individuals. Now, I think it's a little easier with SpaceX, because SpaceX is, after all, a company that is overwhelmingly funded by the US government, by the Pentagon and by NASA. And so ultimately, either legally through regulation or informally through pressure on the basis of providing those contracts, there is certainly a level of influence that the US government would be able to have over a SpaceX to ensure that Starlink is made available fully to the Ukrainians as US. and NATO's allies see fit.
Just as the American government would take vigorous exception if SpaceX and Starlink were suddenly having their technologies made available to American adversaries. Having said that, keep in mind that there is no other viable technology that is presently available. So, if it's not Starlink, it's nothing for the Ukrainians. And what about a country like Taiwan? Very concerned increasingly that we see the status quo on Taiwan eroding from the United States, as Biden says that he would defend Taiwan and as the Americans put export controls on TSMC, the semiconductor company, and from the Chinese side, as the Chinese keep sending over drones and aircraft to invade Taiwanese airspace. Well, if there were cyber attacks from mainland China into Taiwan, would Starlink be made available in Taiwan the way it has been in Ukraine, even though imperfectly in Ukraine? And the answer to that, I suspect, would be absolutely not, because it would prevent Elon Musk from doing effective business in mainland China, including Tesla. Would the Chinese use that leverage against Elon in a way that the American government had not been against SpaceX?
Absolutely they would. And so what does that mean? Does it mean that that just means Taiwan doesn't get that ability to defend itself? Or does the US government have to somehow, through force majeure, nationalize the technology and take it away from SpaceX or force SpaceX to provide Starlink to Taiwan? Or does the US government have to build its own alternative, where it has direct ownership of such a company and technology. Look, the fact is this is a very, very messy piece of geopolitical power where increasingly technology companies are acting as sovereigns. And until and unless those questions are answered, we are increasingly living in a technopolar world.
That's it for me. And I'll talk to you all real soon.
Elon Musk claims he's lifting weights to prepare to fight Mark Zuckerberg.
What We’re Ignoring: Revenge of the nerds
There’s growing evidence that the much-ballyhooed mixed martial arts battle between X-Man Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may actually take place.
Musk first posted that he would be up for a cage match against Zuckerberg in June. Since then, the two moguls have traded multiple barbs on the topic. Now Zuckerberg, who trains in jiu jitsu, has shared a screenshot of a conversation with his wife Priscilla Chan in which he crows about installing a training cage in their backyard. (Her response: “I have been working on that grass for two years.”)
Not to be outdone, Musk posted to X that he is preparing for the fight by “lifting weights throughout the day,” and that the "Zuck v Musk fight will be live-streamed on X. All proceeds will go to charity for veterans.”
Zuckerberg says he is "not holding his breath" because he offered a date of Aug. 26 but didn't hear back. No word yet on whether Threads will attempt a rival broadcast. Stay tuned. Or don’t.
Politics, trust & the media in the age of misinformation
Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, GZERO World takes a hard look at the media’s impact on politics and democracy itself.
In 1964, philosopher Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “the media is the message.” He meant that the way content is delivered can be more powerful than the content itself.
A lot’s changed since 1964, but the problem has only gotten worse. The ‘80s and ‘90s saw the rise of a 24/7 cable news cycle and hyper-partisan radio talk shows. The 21st century has thus far given us podcasts, political influencers, and the endless doom scroll of social media. And now, we’re entering the age of generative AI.
All of this has created the perfect ecosystem for information––and disinformation––overload. But there might be a bright spot at the end of the tunnel. In the world where it’s getting harder and harder to tell fact from fiction, news organizations, credible journalists, and fact-checkers will be more important than ever.
How has media changed our idea of truth and reality? And how can we better prepare ourselves for the onslaught of misinformation and disinformation that is almost certain to spread online as the 2024 US presidential election gets closer? Can trust in American’s so-called “Fourth Estate” be restored?
Ian Bremmer sits down with journalist and former CNN host Brian Stelter and Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor specializing in political history and partisan media.
Watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
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- Can we trust AI to tell the truth? - GZERO Media ›
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NATO membership for Ukraine?
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
Sweden will join NATO. Is Ukraine next?
Well, sure, but next doesn't mean tomorrow. Next means like at some indeterminate point, which makes President Zelensky pretty unhappy and he's made that clear, but he has massive amounts of support from NATO right now, and he needs that support to continue. So, it's not like he has a lot of leverage on joining NATO. As long as the Americans are saying it's not going to happen, that means it's not going to happen. No, the real issue is how much and how concrete the multilateral security guarantees that can be provided by NATO to Ukraine actually turn out to be. We will be watching that space.
Is Taiwan readying itself for an invasion by conducting its biggest evacuation drills in years?
I wouldn't say readying for an invasion. I would say, you know, sort of preparing for every contingency, and that means taking care of your people. I mean, the Americans weren't readying themselves for nuclear Armageddon by doing drills in classrooms and by, you know, having bomb shelters, but they had them because we were in a world where nuclear war was thinkable. Well, we're in a world where Chinese, mainland Chinese invasion of Taiwan is very unlikely, but thinkable. And of course, the Taiwanese have to think about it a lot more than you and I do.
Elon vs. Zuck. Thoughts?
Well, my thoughts are mostly about the battle of the social media platforms and the fact that of course you now have the big gorilla in the room with a Twitter competitor. And I've seen it pretty functional for the first several days. Obviously, massive numbers of people are on it, mostly because it's really easy to sign up. They're all coming over from Instagram and it's owned by the same person, by the same shareholders. Unclear to me who's going to win. If I had to bet, I would say that within 6 or 12 months, we're going to have a fragmented social media landscape politically, the way we do blogosphere or cable news, which is, I guess, good for consumer choice, but it's bad for civil society. What else is new?
Threads, Twitter, & the 2024 US election
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
Hi, I'm Jon Lieber, and this is US Politics in (a little over) 60 Seconds.
Meta last week announced the launch of Threads, a direct competitor to Twitter that reportedly already has reached a hundred million signups, a huge number in just a week. This long-awaited move by. One of the kings of social media could dramatically alter the media environment heading into the 2024 election.
Twitter is enormously popular and important in the political and media world in the US, but has increasingly become a source of consternation and stress for highly engaged political users, particularly those on the left, after the takeover of the platform by Elon Musk, who has pursued what has looked at times like a bizarre and at least partially ideological strategy to upend Twitter's content moderation rules, and in his personal feed, highlighted tweets that troll liberals and promote conspiracy theories. Other competitors to Twitter, like Mastodon or Bluesky, have not achieved mass reach necessary to pose a serious threat to Twitter's dominance of the online media ecosystem, while others like Truth Social remain niche corners of the Internet.
Other outlets like Telegram have grown in importance, but do not provide the open platform of the more dominant social media apps. All of these trends point to the increased atomization of the media landscape globally. In the last 50 years, the US has moved from three dominant national broadcast news networks to a patchwork of increasingly fragmented social media sites with very little gatekeeping and strong, and in some cases partisan, ideological communities.
The launch of a viable competitor to Twitter will accelerate this trend. Meta's content moderation will build off what is learned from managing Instagram and Facebook. This could make it more than just a convening site for people interested in talking about sports and politics, and instead give it a unique appeal for political liberals in the US who don't like where Twitter is going.
That's not to say that conservatives won't be found there too. Even in the height of their concerns about Twitter censoring conservative speech, major conservative figures and writers did quite well on the platform, expanding their reach even as they said they were being stifled. A more fractured online information environment will be even more difficult to moderate than a unified one and provides more avenues for echo chambers and allow politicians to more aggressively micro-target their messages and could render it much more difficult to restrict the spread of disinformation in the 2024 election, especially if Twitter and Threads become the domains of the political right and left, respectively, and if their corporate owners pursue different content moderation policies.
We'd also expect campaigns to start taking advantage of this fractured media landscape, as they have already, targeting different messages to the different audiences on their different channels, making it much more difficult to see what's actually happening on these campaigns as their messages go to increasingly smaller corners of the Internet.
Thanks for watching. This has been US Politics in (a little over) 60 Seconds.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets Tesla CEO Elon Musk in New York.
Elon Musk's geopolitical clout grows as he meets Modi
After Narendra Modi met Elon Musk on Tuesday, the Indian PM immediately took to Twitter to update his 88+ million followers about his friendly chat with the world's richest man. Musk, of course, is the owner of the social media platform, whose most popular politician is ... Modi.
The thing is, Musk not only controls Twitter, which has often tussled with India over censorship. He also calls the shots at Tesla, a big name in the electric vehicle business, and at Starlink, the satellite internet provider which has kept Ukraine online since the Russian invasion.
Visiting world leaders meeting captains of industry is nothing new. But Musk has unique geopolitical sway in today's "technopolar world" because his companies operate in both the "real" economy (i.e. they make physical stuff people want to buy) and the digital space, where public discourse takes place nowadays.
That makes Musk arguably more influential than most world leaders right now and any business leader in recent memory. As GZERO writer Alex Kliment puts it, he's William Randolph Hearst meets Henry Ford, all in one. No wonder he also recently met Xi Jinping and often talks to Vladimir Putin.
Whatever you think of Musk, his geopolitical clout is undeniable in a future "digital order" in which the digital space itself becomes the main arena for great-power competition and tech companies set the rules instead of governments. But his chumminess with three authoritarian leaders is no harbinger of democracy for the technopolar world.
DeSantis' 2024 strategy: dominate the internet
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
Is Ron DeSantis too online?
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his 2024 presidential bid this week on a Twitter Spaces event hosted by its terminally online CEO Elon Musk. Amid dropping poll numbers and headline after headline criticizing his unfriendly nature, DeSantis’s decision to launch his campaign on Twitter raises an important question: is the Florida Governor too online?
Twitter has been an important hub for conservatives for years and has become more so since Musk bought the platform and became its CEO. DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter instead of somewhere that caters to a more traditional media audience reflects the platform’s importance for conservatives and, perhaps more importantly, allows DeSantis to bypass the media and have more control over his announcement.
DeSantis, who last year was seen as the most credible challenger to former President Donald Trump within the GOP, has been described as standoffish, socially awkward, and even rude by colleagues from his time in the House of Representatives and the Florida governor’s mansion. Charisma is typically an indispensable quality for most people running for office, but DeSantis seems to be a rare example of an elected official who does not connect with people, and for the most part doesn’t even really seem to try.
Former president Donald Trump ripped DeSantis for needing a “personality transplant,” which he reminded readers are not medically available, which maybe helps explain why so much of the hype for DeSantis has come directly out of the internet, where human contact is less important. Trump himself is perhaps the most online person to ever hold public office. His reinstated Twitter account, which he does not even use, still has nearly 87 million followers despite his two-year ban.
Trump has maintained a unique ability to make his online statements matter offline, using the relatively new communication tool to steer national media better than anyone in history. Even the limited reach of his Truth Social account with its 5 million followers can still drive news cycles and provide him a platform for fundraising that DeSantis and other politicians would kill for.
This is a formidable challenge for DeSantis to overcome. Can the Florida governor out post the ultimate poster with his own brand of liberal trolling and conservative red meat? His two Twitter accounts (one personal, one governmental) have only a fraction of Trump’s following. He posts less than other prominent Republicans like Texas Governor Greg Abbott and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and his posts don’t have Trump’s attention-grabbing magic that induce both rage and glee across the political spectrum.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Ron DeSantis to announce 2024 bid on Twitter
After weeks of speculation, it’s officially official: Gov. Ron DeSantis will announce on Wednesday that he’s running for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.
While we all knew this was coming, we didn’t know how it would happen. We now have our answer. The governor of Florida, who has sought to make a name for himself nationally by taking on Disney and the so-called “woke” literati, will announce his candidacy on Twitter Spaces alongside Elon Musk.
The conversation will be moderated by David Sacks, a DeSantis backer and Musk confidant, which raises the question of what Musk’s role will be. Some have speculated that he may formally endorse DeSantis’ bid for the White House.
It’s an interesting approach for DeSantis, who remains extremely popular in the Sunshine State but carries less weight on the national stage. Perhaps he’s hoping that having access to the tech titan’s 140 million Twitter followers will help him tap into a crowd that approves of Musk’s conservative, contrarian bent but is turned off by Trump’s combative political style. It could also help him curry favor with the masses that may migrate to Twitter after Tucker Carlson, recently axed by Fox News, announced that he would be taking his show to Musk’s platform.
Still, even if this strategy pays off somewhat, DeSantis will be the underdog as Trump remains the leading Republican candidate in poll after poll. For more on what DeSantis is up against, read our analysis here.