For those of us who observe these developments with concern, and believe that there are at least some things in the old order worth preserving, the response to these momentous changes should be serious introspection. Here are three questions, in roughly ascending order of difficulty, to which we should, at a minimum, have a decent answer:

1. Why did the old dispensation lose the support of so many people?
2. Where does the popularity of radical (and, yes, often irresponsible) alternatives to it come from?
3. What might a future look like that addresses these shortcomings in a more responsible way—one that doesn’t insist on returning to a past that is likely gone forever but can credibly promise that we will more fully live up to the most deeply held values and the most oft-repeated promises of our political order?

These questions are incredibly hard to answer. Based on the many pieces I have read and the many conferences and convenings I have attended over the past months, nobody (including me) seems to have a particularly developed or convincing answer to them, especially when it comes to the more difficult, forward-looking ones. But the thing that shocks me the most isn’t that we don’t yet have the answers; it’s that nobody wants to admit the extent to which we are stumbling around in the dark.

By taking the side of Ukraine in its war against Russia through January 2025, the United States had generated tremendous power against the aggressor Russia and its patron China. At insignificant financial cost, and with no risk to American troops, American policy helped the Ukrainian armed forces to deliver a broader security that the United States could not have achieved on its own. The Ukrainians fulfilled the entire NATO mission, absorbing a Russian invasion and destroying the greater part of the Russian army of 2022. They deterred a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by showing how difficult offensive operations are. And they upheld, as great sacrifice, the legal principle that borders are real and states are sovereign.

It is precisely that order that Musk-Trump dismantles.

It is difficult to be certain of U.S. policy to Ukraine, since the Americans contradict one another and themselves faster than any chyron or twitter feed can follow. But two underlying principles did emerge during the Munich Security Conference. The first was that Ukraine, like the rest of Europe, was to be seen not as an American ally but as an American colony. Humiliating discussions of the disposition of Ukraine’s resources made this clear. The second was that the war could be ended by direct discussions between Americans and the Russian aggressor. There was no sign of any serious substantive preparations, on the American side, for such negotiations.

PODCAST:

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, many users looked for alternatives, fuelling a wave of online migration from the social media platform. Musk says he’s using Twitter, now named X, to champion free speech and that “cancel culture has been cancelled”. But his closeness to Donald Trump and his use of X to support far-right political ideologies around the world, have driven even more people to explore new options.

How do these alternative platforms differ from traditional social media, and what does the future hold for these online spaces? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Robert Gehl, Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance at York University, Canada, about the evolving landscape of decentralised social media.

In 2018, technologists working at the World Wide Web Consortium built a new protocol for social media called ActivityPub. It would give birth to the Fediverse, a decentralised form of social media. Robert Gehl likens the Fediverse to email.

 ”A friend of mine can have a Gmail account, another friend can have an Outlook account with Microsoft. I could have an account with ProtonMail. And even though these are three different companies and three different locations in the world, I can email all my friends and they can email me back because all those email servers agree to speak a shared protocol.“

ActivityPub does the same, but for social media. Somebody could set up a server that speaks that protocol and invite their friends to sign up. Somebody else could set up a different type of server, and those two could connect using ActivityPub’s protocol. Gehl explains: “You can build a big network out of all these little servers that removes a centre.”

Examples of platforms on the Fediverse include micro-blogging site Mastodon, image-sharing site Pixelfed and video-sharing platform PeerTube. By comparison to these decentralised systems, traditional social media platforms like X, Instagram or YouTube centralise user data, content, moderation and governance and control how information is organised and distributed to their users.

Other alternative platforms, which aren’t part of the Fediverse, include Bluesky, which  launched to the public in 2024. Bluesky grew out of Twitter, and Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, used to be on its board. However, Gehl says analysts still see Bluesky as a quite centralised because of the way it’s designed.

 ”They’re building an architecture where all posts are accessible and then they let people build filters to go to that big stack of posts and pull out the things that they want to see …  I personally find Mastodon and the Fediverse to be a little bit more compelling because they’re federated systems. When you run a federated social media system, you install the software like Mastodon, and then it pulls in messages from the network as need be … so you don’t have the entire network on one box.“

Listen to the interview with Robert Gehl on The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also includes an introduction with Nehal El-Hadi, interim editor-in-chief at The Conversation Canada.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood and Gemma Ware, Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Do we need to rethink the definition of privacy online?

This was the question that Sheila Warren, Project Liberty Institute’s new CEO, posed at a panel at Future House in Davos, Switzerland, during The World Economic Forum last month.

The panel featured Meredith Whittaker, President of the messaging app Signal, and Kenneth Cukier, Deputy Executive Editor of The Economist. (You can watch the entire session here.)

Traditionally, online privacy refers to the ability of individuals to control their personal information and determine how it’s collected, used, shared, and stored online.

Rosenbaum: Thank you for doing this. I’ve been obsessing about social media lately…

Jobs: (sharp glance)You mean that digital wasteland that’s eating our kids’ minds?

Rosenbaum: Exactly. And I keep thinking: You saw around corners. You saw the Mac when others saw command lines. The iPhone, when others saw keypads. What do you see now?

Jobs: (pauses, considering)You know what everyone gets wrong about innovation? They think it’s about technology. It’s not. It’s about human beings — what they need before they know they need it.

The late afternoon light is hitting Silicon Valley just right as we walk.

“Social media is a crisis masquerading as a success story,” he says as we climb a slight incline. “But everyone’s looking at it wrong.”

New platform will advance effective democracy-building work within higher education

Campus Compact and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), in partnership with More Perfect and the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, announced the Higher Education Democracy Exchange (HEDx), a multi-functional, virtual platform that aims to unite colleges and universities in advancing the civic mission of higher education, promoting democratic knowledge and engagement, and connecting civic learning to public problem-solving across campuses nationwide.

The HEDx platform will offer four core functions:

1. Civic Indicator Dashboards: A data-driven resource that will aggregate data from national and campus-level sources to illustrate higher education’s contributions to supporting and advancing democracy, including contributions and opportunities for alignment to five Democracy Goals;
2. Civic Credential Clearinghouse: A hub connecting students, faculty, and staff to professional development opportunities that enhance their civic knowledge and marketable skills;
3. Resource Hubs: Curated tools and resources designed to scale impactful civic and community-based practices; and
4. Civic Experts Network: A platform for peer-to-peer connections, coaching, and strategy building, providing access to a diverse pool of civic leaders and experts.

For those of us who observe these developments with concern, and believe that there are at least some things in the old order worth preserving, the response to these momentous changes should be serious introspection. Here are three questions, in roughly ascending order of difficulty, to which we should, at a minimum, have a decent answer:

1. Why did the old dispensation lose the support of so many people?
2. Where does the popularity of radical (and, yes, often irresponsible) alternatives to it come from?
3. What might a future look like that addresses these shortcomings in a more responsible way—one that doesn’t insist on returning to a past that is likely gone forever but can credibly promise that we will more fully live up to the most deeply held values and the most oft-repeated promises of our political order?

These questions are incredibly hard to answer. Based on the many pieces I have read and the many conferences and convenings I have attended over the past months, nobody (including me) seems to have a particularly developed or convincing answer to them, especially when it comes to the more difficult, forward-looking ones. But the thing that shocks me the most isn’t that we don’t yet have the answers; it’s that nobody wants to admit the extent to which we are stumbling around in the dark.

By taking the side of Ukraine in its war against Russia through January 2025, the United States had generated tremendous power against the aggressor Russia and its patron China. At insignificant financial cost, and with no risk to American troops, American policy helped the Ukrainian armed forces to deliver a broader security that the United States could not have achieved on its own. The Ukrainians fulfilled the entire NATO mission, absorbing a Russian invasion and destroying the greater part of the Russian army of 2022. They deterred a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by showing how difficult offensive operations are. And they upheld, as great sacrifice, the legal principle that borders are real and states are sovereign.

It is precisely that order that Musk-Trump dismantles.

It is difficult to be certain of U.S. policy to Ukraine, since the Americans contradict one another and themselves faster than any chyron or twitter feed can follow. But two underlying principles did emerge during the Munich Security Conference. The first was that Ukraine, like the rest of Europe, was to be seen not as an American ally but as an American colony. Humiliating discussions of the disposition of Ukraine’s resources made this clear. The second was that the war could be ended by direct discussions between Americans and the Russian aggressor. There was no sign of any serious substantive preparations, on the American side, for such negotiations.

Whether America really wants to focus on deterring China in Asia, or whether it just wants to retreat from the global stage and focus on bullying Canada, Panama, and its own minorities, that doesn’t change the cold hard fact that America is retreating from its role as the guarantor of European security. And whether or not Trump’s people actually think Russia is a threat to Europe, that doesn’t change the fact that Russia is a threat to Europe. And whether Trump’s people truly care about free speech, that doesn’t change the fact that Europe’s people are angry about recent immigration waves, and if that anger isn’t accommodated through the democratic process, Europe’s stability could be in danger.

In other words, both the challenges that Europe faces, and the fact that the U.S. is not going to help with those challenges, are clear and obvious. Europe must either stand on its own against the threats that face it, or capitulate to those threats.

Musk and DOGE are providing a real-time management case study. Unfortunately, all of the lessons are about what not to do. The quickest way to improve your management skills is to look at what DOGE is doing, and do the complete opposite.

It is a fundamental error to believe that DOGE is a government efficiency project. Cutting 1 in 4 federal employees would cut federal government spending by 1%. Cost savings are incidental. DOGE is a political control project. Firing and terrorizing public employees is a means to weakening state regulation of private interests and strengthening a personalist presidency.

Picking fights with longtime friends instead of working with them against joint adversaries is a recipe for American weakness and global instability

NATO is in serious trouble, and with it, the post-Cold War international order. For the first time in the alliance’s 75 year history, its most powerful member is pulling back, and may be effectively pulling out.

In Brussels, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth lectured that the United States could not be “focused on the security of Europe,” because “consequential threats to our homeland” means the U.S. must focus “on security of our own borders.” But countering Russia in Europe and managing the U.S.-Mexico border are not trade-offs; the U.S. can and should do both.

Big worries — and some investment advice

If a pandemic breaks out, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on orders from the White House, refuse to publish data on its spread, will it still kill people?

Yes, of course. And that’s why I would be very cautious about buying TIPS — Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities.

Which brings me to TIPS. These are U.S. government bonds whose future repayments are indexed to the Consumer Price Index, just like Social Security checks. So TIPS protect investors against future inflation, which can erode the purchasing power of ordinary bonds.

But let’s be more precise here: TIPS protect you against future inflation that the U.S. government admits is happening. That has never been an issue in the past, because despite claims from right-wing conspiracy theorists, America has never cooked its economic books.

But there’s a first time for everything.

Not all of it is his fault, but warning lights are flashing, and his policies aren’t helping.

So the deck is a bit stacked against him. But so far, Trump’s proposed policies — big tax cuts, tariffs, and yelling at the Fed to cut interest rates — look exactly what America doesn’t need in order to keep inflation down and growth high.

So Trump is in danger of piling self-inflicted wounds on top of existing bad luck. As a result, the Trump economy could end up as a severe disappointment. Already, warning signs are flashing.

The national debt is a huge problem again
I’ve been warning for a couple years now that the national debt was about to become a problem again. For two decades, Americans didn’t worry much about the debt, because interest rates were low. If interest payments are low, you basically don’t even notice debt piling up, because it doesn’t do anything — it just sort of sits there as a number in Microsoft Excel.

This isn’t single-party rule, but it’s not democracy either.

With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America. If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America.

But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Rather than fascism or single-party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition. In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals.

Unlike in a full-scale dictatorship, in competitive-authoritarian regimes, opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they often seriously vie for power. Elections may be fiercely contested. But incumbents deploy the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt, or sideline their opponents—disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power. This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and in contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Impotence and Unfreedom, Together

Ukrainians, for that matter, have little incentive to give up their country. Trump can threaten them with cutting US arms, because stopping things is the only power he has. But Ukrainians must now expect that he would do that anyway, given his general subservience to Putin. If the US does stop support for Ukraine, it no longer has influence in how Ukraine conducts the war. I have the feeling that no one in the Trump administration has thought of that.

It is quite clear how American power could be used to bring the war to an end: make Russia weaker, and Ukraine stronger. Putin will end the war when it seems that the future is threatening rather than welcoming. And Ukraine has no choice but to fight so long as Russia invades. This is all incredibly simple. But it looks like Trump is acting precisely as is necessary to prolong the war and make it worse.

Thus far he and Hegseth have simply gone public with their agreement with elements of Russia’s position. Since this is their opening gambit, Russia has every incentive to keep fighting and to see if they can get more. The way things are going, Trump will be responsible for the continuing and escalation of the bloodshed, quite possibly into a European or open global conflict. He won’t get any prizes for creating the conditions for a third world war.

Many people have wished for decades that someone would run the government more like a business. Is this what they meant? Or are Elon Musk and his group of 25-year-old coders doing something different?

Probably the most salient difference is that they’re going to be tech, data and speed first.

The focus on these guys being young misses the point. It’s like a McKinsey team. The fundamental concept is just that you throw them at the problem, they gather as much data as possible about where the money is going or who’s doing what, very simple, straightforward questions. Arguably difficult answers, but straightforward questions — and then you use that information to create some sort of ranking, saying this is good, this is bad, and then you try to solve the bad. So the playbook, in some sense, is extremely simple.

The difference here is that they’re applying it to areas like the government, where maybe it has never been applied, or it’s really hard to apply because the downstream implications are extremely complex. It could cut off cancer research, or genomics departments are getting axed, or AIDS assistance elsewhere in the world.

Trump, who is renowned for tying up the courts in litigation, will defend his birthright citizenship order, and all the others, until he has exhausted his options. He’s likely to win a few and thereby expand presidential power. But I’m worried about the ones he will lose. In these cases, what is there to prevent him from simply defying the courts and doing as he pleases? Will the courts’ tiny U.S. Marshal Service arrest the scofflaw president? What will occur if the marshals and the Secret Service square off?

I cannot predict what will happen when Trump goes down the road to defiance. However, I do believe that the best response will come from the tens of millions of people who should rally, march, and protest. For no matter what Trump does, we are still a nation of, by, and for the people. We need to get ready to raise our voices.

In the lead up to the 2024 election, corporate media could not stop telling us that this election was all about inflation—especially the price of eggs. And after the election, corporate media patted themselves on the back with headlines that blared: “Why high prices toppled Democrats,” “Hey stupid, it wasn’t just the economy. It was inflation” and “Egg-flation helped Trump win as Americans count cost of groceries.”

Given that inflation obsession, you would expect that after a new report was released Wednesday showing prices are exploding—and especially for eggs–it would cause the corporate media in one voice to demand answers from Trump about his plans to reduce these costs?! Yet as of now we are not seeing that.

But just look at what we learned Wednesday from Trump’s Labor Department. Prices rose last month 0.5% from December, which marks the largest monthly increase in a year and half—going back to August 2023. This jump in inflation-as The Wall Street Journal noted—was well ahead of economists’ expectations for a milder increase of 0.3%. (This makes you question whether Trump will allow his administration in the future to reveal accurate inflation data?!)

Here’s why unemployment is higher, wages are lower and growth less robust than government statistics suggest

Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between “economic reality” as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground. Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.

What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?

In the February darkness, a glimpse into a terrifying moment unlike any other in our history…

But these are not portents I sense in the February night. The peril is upon us and as far as I can tell, few are prepared for it, fewer still call it what it is, and even fewer seem willing to do anything to stop it.

A new government in Washington is dismantling our democracy. Piece by piece. With hammer blows and shivs and clubs and with memos and executive orders and the complicity of political leaders who do not lead. Greed and self-interest and hate and ignorance are at work everywhere you look.

An assault on the role of the Congress is relegating it to merely a role supporting an all-power executive and the majority in both houses is willingly going along with it. The treacherous and the ill-equipped and the repugnant are being put in charge of great government agencies without regard to the threat they pose. (Why? Ask the members of Congress who are making judgments based on their own political well-being and who have set their oaths alight, sending them off as charred embers into the wind.)

There isn’t one neat trick to defeating Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s war on the federal government.

US tariffs – both threatened and imposed – on trade partners including China, Canada, Mexico and the EU quickly set off waves of retaliatory measures. The latest commodities in the sights of president Donald Trump are steel and aluminium – with tariffs of 25% announced for all imports. But not only do these taxes disrupt well-established trade flows, they ignite concerns over the very future of globalisation.

Yet amid this uncertainty, it’s possible that there may be a silver lining. Trump may inadvertently be paving the way for a realignment of trade relationships and the emergence of new economic blocs. Such partnerships could foster more resilient and regionally focused economic cooperation.

Trump’s decision to levy tariffs on its major trading partners disrupts the fundamental tenets of the gravity model of trade. According to this theory, trade between two nations is largely determined by their economic size and proximity. For instance, introducing tariffs to the close economic relationship between the US and Canada, underpinned by their shared border, effectively increases the distance between the two by raising costs and reducing the volume of bilateral trade.

However, these disruptions can inadvertently encourage diversification of trade relationships. As companies and governments seek to mitigate the risks associated with tariffs, they may begin to explore new markets and alternative supply chains. This could ultimately lead to a more dispersed and – potentially – more stable global trade system.

Yet as Trump continues to test the limits of his power, he is learning it is not so easy to defy gravity. Already, the president has dialled down tariffs on Canada and Mexico, while China has struck back with retaliatory measures.

One positive spin-off of the trade war may be the reinforcement of regional alliances. With traditional trade flows disrupted, countries are increasingly incentivised to strengthen ties with neighbouring economies.

North American outlook

Canada and Mexico, long considered natural trading partners of the US, might pivot towards deepening their economic cooperation. They may also look to bilateral agreements with other partners as well as seeking new markets, strengthening ties with China and Japan.

The USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) provides a strong foundation for trade. But attempts to dismantle this arrangement could see Canada and Mexico accelerating efforts to build closer economic ties with other regions, reducing their exposure to the US market.

Trump’s planned tariffs on steel threaten to undermine the USMCA. After all, it is designed to foster integrated supply chains and low-tariff economic cooperation among the three countries. This is likely to escalate trade tensions across the bloc, forcing a reassessment of the trade agreement’s key terms and destabilising the established relationships.

European Union outlook

The imposition of tariffs on the EU could lead to deepening integration among its member states. Faced with new pressures from the US, the EU might accelerate initiatives aimed at consolidating internal trade, harmonising regulations and promoting intra-European supply chains.

Member states, with France at the forefront, are already advocating for a united response to counteract US protectionism. They hope to signal a strong political commitment to resist the pressures from Trump.

Asia-Pacific outlook

China, as the world’s second-largest economy behind the US, may seek to expand its trade relationships in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. As China’s economic growth model is export-led, it may seek stronger partnerships with regional players and invest in new trade agreements. This could potentially give rise to an even more integrated Asian economic community.

A new economic order

Whatever else plays out, these tariff wars signal a reordering of the global economic landscape. Such disruptions, though painful in the short term, can create long-term changes that rebalance economic systems. The natural trading partner hypothesis reinforces this view by highlighting how countries with shared cultural, historical and geographical ties are likely to deepen their economic relationships in the face of external shocks.

Table of US trade

In this new order, traditional superpowers may find themselves challenged by unified responses from other nations. By imposing tariffs, the US risks isolating itself from these emerging alliances, while its major trading partners may become united in their efforts to counterbalance rising American protectionism.

---

Read more: Brics: growth of China-led bloc raises questions about a rapidly shifting world order

---

The ripple effects of the US tariff row extend well beyond the directly involved countries, with significant implications for global trade networks. For the UK, already coping with the aftermath of Brexit, this new environment offers both challenges and opportunities.

With US-led protectionism disrupting traditional trade channels, the UK could seize the opportunity to diversify its export markets by forging stronger ties with the EU and digging deeper into its Commonwealth alliances. It could reinforce its position as a hub for international commerce while continuing to cultivate its relationship with the US. Managing Trump is a delicate balancing act for prime minister Keir Starmer, as both are expected to be in office for four years.

A word of caution – negotiating international trade agreements is a complex and lengthy process. This is the hard lesson learned by the UK. Its trade with the EU (its most important commercial partner) shrank after Brexit, driving the quest for new trading partners and agreements. But these fruits are slow to materialise.

The UK formally requested accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in February 2021, but only signed the accession protocol in July 2023.

And we should not forget that in 2024 the UK halted its trade talks with Canada after two years of negotiations, due to disagreements over the standards on some agricultural products.

Tariffs come with challenges, but they might also be the beginning of a slow and painful change towards a more balanced and robust global economic order.

Borders between one kind of life and another

Two cars down sleeps a Ukrainian soldier. Spare a thought for him and for the other Ukrainian soldiers on my train, on their way to the front. They are, in every sense of the word, holding a line, not only for themselves and their country, but for all of us. But for their resistance, it would be a worse and more tyrannical world. They have been giving us a chance to stay on our side of the line for three years now, and at horrible cost. By comparison to what they have done for us, we have done very little for them.

Think about what lines you will cross and that you will not cross. They are not as obvious, perhaps, as a line on a map, or a line of trenches at the front. But we cannot pretend that they are not there. And if we cross them, we will no longer be ourselves.

Trump’s chaos blitz; Econ data isn’t fake; China’s tech cluster; Abundance ideas; AI and antitrust; AI in science

1. Trump moves fast and breaks things

In Trump’s first term, lots of people liked to say that his blizzard of inflammatory statements represented a DDoS attack on the media — he just kept saying new things so fast that the media didn’t have time to correct or push back on the previous set.

2. No, the economic data isn’t fake (sigh)

Every once in a while, someone writes a long screed claiming that the government’s economic data are all wrong, that you’ve been tricked, and that actually the economy is terrible when everyone is telling you it’s good. This inevitably results in a bunch of people who are sort of perma-mad about wokeness or Palestine or whatever yelling “See, I told you so!”, and declaring that actually the economy is horrible after all.

3. China’s 21st century tech cluster

In recent years, Chinese companies have become extremely competitive in consumer products like electric cars, phones, and drones. At the same time, they’ve also become competitive in various high-value component and machinery products like computer chips, robots, lidar, and batteries. How did they suddenly get good in all of these things at once? One common explanation is that these are the industries Xi Jinping has chosen to subsidize. But Kyle Chan has a different theory — two different theories, actually.

Why it matters: Trump and Musk believe powerfully in maximalist action and language, carried out by strong (mostly) white men as blunt, uncompromising instruments to prove new limits both to power and what’s possible, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a “Behind the Curtain” column.

• “Fix Bayonets,” Steve Bannon, a first-term Trump official whose “War Room” podcast makes him one of the most widely followed outside MAGA voices, texted us. “We are ‘Burning Daylight’ — short window to get this done.”

Trump, first in business and then politics, and Musk, first in business and now politics, are feeding off each other’s natural instincts to do, say and operate by their own new rules.

Part 2: The Trump-Musk formula

Yascha Mounk and Arlie Hochschild discuss why white working class communities voted for Trump.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Arlie Hochschild discuss the fear of empathy among the American left, the impact of the loss of pride among white working class communities, and how to understand the deep story of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024.

Sometimes it takes a crisis to reveal one’s true character. This is especially true of people who occupy positions of leadership, both in the private and public sectors. Are they courageous, or are they cowards? Worse yet, are they complicit in doing grave harm?

During the current crisis of American democracy, we know who’s in the complicit category: House Speaker Mike Johnson and almost all other Republican lawmakers. Several CEOs: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Rupert Murdoch. And many Fox News personalities.

PODCAST:

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, many users looked for alternatives, fuelling a wave of online migration from the social media platform. Musk says he’s using Twitter, now named X, to champion free speech and that “cancel culture has been cancelled”. But his closeness to Donald Trump and his use of X to support far-right political ideologies around the world, have driven even more people to explore new options.

How do these alternative platforms differ from traditional social media, and what does the future hold for these online spaces? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Robert Gehl, Ontario Research Chair of Digital Governance at York University, Canada, about the evolving landscape of decentralised social media.

In 2018, technologists working at the World Wide Web Consortium built a new protocol for social media called ActivityPub. It would give birth to the Fediverse, a decentralised form of social media. Robert Gehl likens the Fediverse to email.

 ”A friend of mine can have a Gmail account, another friend can have an Outlook account with Microsoft. I could have an account with ProtonMail. And even though these are three different companies and three different locations in the world, I can email all my friends and they can email me back because all those email servers agree to speak a shared protocol.“

ActivityPub does the same, but for social media. Somebody could set up a server that speaks that protocol and invite their friends to sign up. Somebody else could set up a different type of server, and those two could connect using ActivityPub’s protocol. Gehl explains: “You can build a big network out of all these little servers that removes a centre.”

Examples of platforms on the Fediverse include micro-blogging site Mastodon, image-sharing site Pixelfed and video-sharing platform PeerTube. By comparison to these decentralised systems, traditional social media platforms like X, Instagram or YouTube centralise user data, content, moderation and governance and control how information is organised and distributed to their users.

Other alternative platforms, which aren’t part of the Fediverse, include Bluesky, which  launched to the public in 2024. Bluesky grew out of Twitter, and Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, used to be on its board. However, Gehl says analysts still see Bluesky as a quite centralised because of the way it’s designed.

 ”They’re building an architecture where all posts are accessible and then they let people build filters to go to that big stack of posts and pull out the things that they want to see …  I personally find Mastodon and the Fediverse to be a little bit more compelling because they’re federated systems. When you run a federated social media system, you install the software like Mastodon, and then it pulls in messages from the network as need be … so you don’t have the entire network on one box.“

Listen to the interview with Robert Gehl on The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also includes an introduction with Nehal El-Hadi, interim editor-in-chief at The Conversation Canada.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood and Gemma Ware, Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Do we need to rethink the definition of privacy online?

This was the question that Sheila Warren, Project Liberty Institute’s new CEO, posed at a panel at Future House in Davos, Switzerland, during The World Economic Forum last month.

The panel featured Meredith Whittaker, President of the messaging app Signal, and Kenneth Cukier, Deputy Executive Editor of The Economist. (You can watch the entire session here.)

Traditionally, online privacy refers to the ability of individuals to control their personal information and determine how it’s collected, used, shared, and stored online.

Rosenbaum: Thank you for doing this. I’ve been obsessing about social media lately…

Jobs: (sharp glance)You mean that digital wasteland that’s eating our kids’ minds?

Rosenbaum: Exactly. And I keep thinking: You saw around corners. You saw the Mac when others saw command lines. The iPhone, when others saw keypads. What do you see now?

Jobs: (pauses, considering)You know what everyone gets wrong about innovation? They think it’s about technology. It’s not. It’s about human beings — what they need before they know they need it.

The late afternoon light is hitting Silicon Valley just right as we walk.

“Social media is a crisis masquerading as a success story,” he says as we climb a slight incline. “But everyone’s looking at it wrong.”

New platform will advance effective democracy-building work within higher education

Campus Compact and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), in partnership with More Perfect and the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, announced the Higher Education Democracy Exchange (HEDx), a multi-functional, virtual platform that aims to unite colleges and universities in advancing the civic mission of higher education, promoting democratic knowledge and engagement, and connecting civic learning to public problem-solving across campuses nationwide.

The HEDx platform will offer four core functions:

1. Civic Indicator Dashboards: A data-driven resource that will aggregate data from national and campus-level sources to illustrate higher education’s contributions to supporting and advancing democracy, including contributions and opportunities for alignment to five Democracy Goals;
2. Civic Credential Clearinghouse: A hub connecting students, faculty, and staff to professional development opportunities that enhance their civic knowledge and marketable skills;
3. Resource Hubs: Curated tools and resources designed to scale impactful civic and community-based practices; and
4. Civic Experts Network: A platform for peer-to-peer connections, coaching, and strategy building, providing access to a diverse pool of civic leaders and experts.