The Realignment: The Return of the Substack
Back from our two week hiatus: episodes, Bookshop, and more..
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Welcome Back to The Realignment
Hey everyone. Since we didn’t publish last week, we’ve added the episodes/response from last week in today’s edition and the format’s a bit different.
Two things to shout-out at the top:
1) Here’s the link to Saagar and my episode with Demetri Kofinas on his podcast, Hidden Forces. If you enjoyed Demetri and my conversation, this’ll be right up your alley. Hidden Forces has also interviewed a lot of our previous guests from a slightly different perspective, so we highly encourage everyone to check it out.
2) Here’s the link to Kara Frederick’s report on big tech from the right.
We’ve published four really great episodes in the last two weeks. The book’s are available at our Bookshop and we’d love to hear the audience’s response below or at realignmentpod@gmail.com.
This Week’s Episodes
Episode 201: Demetri Kofinas: What’s Next in Ukraine?
Episode 200: Kara Frederick: The Right vs. Big Tech, Combating Misinformation, & Nuanced Takes in Un-Nuanced Times
Aaron’s Response of the Week: Kara Frederick
Each week, our producer Aaron Visser will summarize/review one of the topics.
This Heritage Foundation report is not designed for the average Realignment audience member and certainly not for me. It’s loaded with euphemisms, such as “conversations around election integrity” or “citing vaccine data,” repulsive to anyone left of center. The report is about tech censorship, but clearly the issues are much larger. How can we live in a country that’s becoming ever more centralized, when we disagree on such core issues? These platforms try to be objective, censoring “misinformation,” but they act without any consensus about what constitutes misinformation. They’ve solved the trust gap with market power. Liberals won the zero sum battle over the digital space. The main concern of most is that not enough has been done to curb disinformation and right wing extremism. Mainstream Republican ideas are beyond the pale for them. But liberals have a point. Some of what’s now considered mainstream conservative ideas are pretty crazy, many conspiracies verifiably false. The internet is unique in spreading disinformation. It is logical for someone to try to put a stop to it. That puts tech companies in an awkward situation. They’re programmers who have to regulate politics and over time they bow to internal and external pressure to up the censorship. They’re pretty bad at it. Moderation doesn’t have a clean technical solution and any machine learning they’ve used has caught innocent people in its crosshairs. Between algorithms, flag systems, and human moderators, they’ve created a system that seems arbitrary, with little transparency.
Last Week’s Episodes
Episode 199: Peter S. Goodman: How Billionaires Devoured the World
Episode 198: Erich Schwartzel: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy
Aaron’s Response of the Week: Peter S. Goodman
Each week, our producer Aaron Visser will summarize/review one of the topics.
The topic of the book is Davos Man, the billionaire who not only makes a lot of money, but is also saving the world. I think we all agree these people are very annoying, but I don’t know if they’re worse than the selfish Scrooge McDuck type. I found myself agreeing with most of the content of the book, but with Goodman always going for outrage rather than insight, it could get quite dull.
Things he wants you to get mad about: Private equity, over financialization, austerity, tax cuts for the rich, 1990s free trade delusions, self congratulatory billionaires, evictions, layoffs, bailouts for the rich, fraud, monopoly power, CEO pay, Wall Street paying no consequences, Donald Trump, the assholes appointed by Trump, Brexit, Steve Schwartzman, and so much more. Some theses of his in the book: the rise of Populism can be attributed to Davos Man (true, but such covered ground at this point I don’t find it that interesting), Davos Man harmed our pandemic response (true also, but he might have the correlation backwards), and a lack of fairness in the economy.
One of my biggest criticisms of the book is that Goodman never manages to establish the link between Davos Man benefiting from the policies of the last 30 years and creating the policies of the last 30 years. I’m not saying that the wealthy don’t have their hands in their own tax policies, but it’s more complicated than Steve Shwartzmann wants tax cut, then writing a tax bill, then paying less taxes. The linguistics he uses often obscures the complex economic and political systems, focusing on villainizing individuals.
The Realignment Bookshop
As a reminder, we’ve created a Realignment Bookshop affiliate store showcasing books by guests, what we’re actively reading this year, and deeper dives into the featured topic of an episode.
If you purchase a book using our link, the show gets a 10% commission, a local, independent bookseller gets support, and you get an awesome book!
We’re reorganizing our book lists over the next few weeks, so for now, check out our primary one:
Let us know what you think about this or any other week’s episodes. Please share The Realignment with anyone who’d enjoy the podcast.