Uppåt på Wall Street – Target rapportrusar

USA-börserna stängde uppåt på onsdagskvällen efter en något svängig handel som både präglades av reviderad sysselsättningsdata, och senare på kvällen Feds protokoll från det senaste mötet. Target fanns bland vinnaraktierna efter att detaljhandelskedjans delår imponerade på investerarna.

I ”Robinson” står ett videosamtal hem på spel, och tävlingen går ut på att deltagarna ska skjuta pilbåge. Det gäller att komma så nära mitten av tavlan som möjligt, och den som kommer närmast i första omgången får välja bort en motståndare som får kliva av. Så fortsätter det tills en deltagare återstår. Pelle Flood blir den som får välja bort en motståndare först, och han väljer Zayera Kahn som precis innan uttryckt att hon är grym på pilbåge men att hon kommer att ge bort sitt samtal om hon vinner. Men att bli bortplockad först gör henne rasande. Efter det konfronterar hon Pelle. – Bara för att jag sa att jag inte behövde samtalet och skulle ge bort det tycker inte jag att det gjorde mig mindre tävlingssugen, säger Zayera. Ifrågasätter vem han skulle valt istället Enligt henne hade det varit rimligare att plocka bort den som var sämst. – Då har det med tävlingen att göra, inte med mina personliga motiv. Det är där jag känner mig påhoppad. Jag ville tävla och jag ville också få en chans att skjuta igen, fortsätter hon. Men Pelle köper inte riktigt Zayeras argument, som han uttrycker är tagna som ”från ett dårhus”. – Jag förstår att du gärna ville skjuta pilbåge, och där tror jag att jag värderar att ringa ett videosamtal jämfört med att få skjuta en pilbåge lite olika, säger Pelle. Han frågar henne vem han skulle valt istället, enligt henne. – Det är en idiotfråga. Vem jag tycker att han skulle valt istället? Det är upp till honom, och den här snubben är smart. Han borde vetat bättre, han borde valt någon annan. Varför är jag plötsligt ett target? säger Zayera. ”Mogen respons från en 49-årig kvinna” Zayera köper å andra sidan inte heller Pelles argument, och den slutar med att hon reser sig och går. – Jag försöker vara pedagogisk och förstående, mjuk och försiktig. Så som man ska vara mot arga, galna barn, och jag är ändå villig när vi väl är hemma i Sverige att betala så hon får en, två timmar på en pilskyttebana, så att hon får chansen att skjuta lite pil, säger Pelle sarkastiskt. – Zayera verkar inte vilja lyssna och rusar iväg, vilket jag ändå tycker är en passande och mogen respons från en 49-årig kvinna som själv tog upp konflikten, fortsätter han.

Efter den senaste tidens börsrally föll New York-börsen tillbaka tydligt under tisdagen tyngd av nedgångar i teknikjättar som Microsoft och Apple. Detaljhandelsbolaget Target rusade mot strömmen efter en stark rapport.

Viva Wine har genom sitt dotterbolag Norwegian Beverage ingått ett avtal att förvärva den norska vinleverantören Target Wines. Köpeskillingen uppskattas till 43 miljoner norska kronor och baseras på utfallet för räkenskapsåret 2023. Det framgår av ett pressmeddelande.

Kontraktet mellan det kinesiska styret och befolkningen har de senaste åren varit tydligt: ekonomiska möjligheter och ”välstånd åt alla”, i utbyte mot kraftiga begränsningar i den politiska friheten. Men med en tillväxt som inte tar fart som den ska och en inrikespolitik som skakat en rad sektorer i grundvalarna, har kontraktet blivit allt otydligare. Det skriver Financial Times. – I grund och botten är det en fråga om tillit, säger Kinaexperten George Magnus till tidningen. A once optimistic society now worries about the future as Xi Jinping’s promise of ‘common prosperity’ starts to fade By Sun Yu and Joe Leahy in Beijing

Financial Times, 2 November 2023 In Yuxinzhuang village, a warren of narrow streets on Beijing’s outskirts known for its vibrant community of migrant workers, Zhou wolfs down noodles in a tiny Muslim restaurant. The 30-year-old father of one has a job setting up shell companies with fake cash flow for struggling small business owners, who then use them to raise new loans to pay off their previous creditors. But even this dubious line of business, which should thrive in a downturn, is suffering from China’s economic slowdown. Last month, Zhou’s income fell to a fraction of last year’s levels. Zhou, who did not want to give his full name, now plans to return to his family farm in the poorer central province of Henan and sell organic eggs. “I don’t know who to blame for the economic downturn but all I know is that this year the economy is really bad,” he says. “Lay-offs everywhere.” As China’s economic growth slows, stories such as Zhou’s abound. The country’s 296mn migrant workers are facing slowing wage growth, its new university graduates are struggling to find jobs, the urban middle class has lost money in a policy-induced property meltdown and the rich are reeling from Beijing’s crackdowns on the internet, finance and health sectors. National security regulations are worrying foreign companies, many of which have stopped investing. Only those working in some areas of the government or sectors deemed strategic, such as semiconductors, are being spared. Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong who embarked on an unprecedented third term in March, claims everything is going to plan. The country is marching towards “national rejuvenation” and “high-quality development” as the party’s “common prosperity” policy reduces inequality. But beneath the triumphant rhetoric, many observers wonder whether policymaking is adrift. The Communist party used to allow its people abundant economic opportunity in exchange for heavy restrictions on their political freedom. Now the so-called social contract is no longer clear. In the place of growth and opportunity are vague promises of security and “a better life”. But with about 600mn people struggling to get by on less than $140 a month, will that be enough? A once optimistic society now worries about the future. “The old contract was a pretty simple one which is: ‘We’ll stay out of politics, we won’t express sensitive opinions, provided we can expect to be prosperous in the future’,” says George Magnus, author of Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy, and a research associate at the University of Oxford’s China Centre.  That “has been undermined and not just by the fact that China’s old development model is not really working anymore but also by the government’s own culpability for not addressing the issues,” he says. “Fundamentally, it’s an issue of trust.” After securing his second term as party secretary at the 19th party congress in 2017, Xi signalled a “new deal” for China, according to a paper at the time by Evan Feigenbaum, of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.  Chinese Marxists think in terms of contradictions — the dialectical opposition of different forces or influences, Feigenbaum wrote. During the reform and opening up period that followed the end of the Mao era, the party concentrated on economic growth, or resolving the “contradiction” between the people’s “ever-growing material” needs and the country’s “backward social production”, according to an account of Xi’s comments at the congress in state media. But Xi declared China was facing a new challenge. After decades of rapid growth, he said the “principle contradiction” was “between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life”. These “needs”, he said, included “demands for democracy, rule of law, fairness and justice, security, and a better environment”.  Security was the keyword, analysts say. When Xi became party leader in 2012, the organisation was concerned that the growing private sector was empowering entrepreneurs and eclipsing the apparatchiks. In 2013, the party circulated an internal memo, Document Number Nine, attacking western constitutional democracy and other ideas, such as universal human rights and ardently pro-market “neoliberalism”. In the ensuing years, Xi has rooted out dissent and enforced party discipline through endless anti-corruption campaigns while pursuing a more assertive foreign policy, alienating large trading partners such as the US.  “The so-called anti-corruption campaign is just . . . an instrument [the Communist party] wants to use to purge everyone who is not loyal,” says Xu Chenggang, senior research scholar at Stanford University’s Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. This tightening of control is pervasive, from limits on the publication of economic data and investigations of foreign consultancies under data and anti-espionage laws, to the detention of a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the sinicisation of religion and culture, analysts say. “Security is a requisite for development. That’s been a pretty clear part of the social contract under Xi Jinping,” says Drew Thompson, a China expert at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. But it was in 2021, as the economy was recovering from the first shock of the onset of Covid-19, that Xi launched one of his most decisive campaigns yet to meet the people’s aspirations for a “better life” — what he called “common prosperity”.  Beijing cracked down on the internet empire of billionaire Jack Ma, leading him to largely disappear from public, and the country’s other important internet groups, shutting down overnight the whole industry of online tutoring and restricting online gaming for children. In a speech on common prosperity at the party’s central committee for financial and economic affairs in August 2021, Xi expounded on the policy’s deeper aims. Cadres must “resolutely oppose the unlimited sprawl of capital” and “uphold the dominant role of the public sector”, he said, while also somehow mobilising “the zeal of entrepreneurs”.  Tellingly, this was not a call for a European-style social welfare state. The party was pursuing its long-term strategic objectives of building China “into a great modern socialist country”, he said, but it must not “fall into the trap of ‘welfarism’ that encourages laziness”. The result of the top-down attempt to re-engineer society was disastrous for investment sentiment, especially when it coincided with increasing geopolitical tensions with the US, Beijing’s zero-Covid policy and the “three red lines” — a scheme to force deleveraging in the over-indebted property sector. China’s tech stocks listed in the US have fallen 70 per cent between February 2021 and today. While some of that is due to external factors, domestic policy has not helped. In June, the youth unemployment rates hit 21.3 per cent before the government stopped releasing the figures, a likely byproduct of the shrinking of the internet sector that was a big employer of young graduates. Official data for average primary market housing prices shows them drifting lower in September. “The tragedy of Xi Jinping’s economic policy is he has identified some problems China needs to fix but has gone about it the wrong way,” says Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. Back in Yuxinzhuang village, a woman surveys the destruction outside her small grocery shop. The flats across the road are being torn down because they were constructed years ago on former village land without the correct zoning, she says.  Some migrant worker residents suspect the real purpose is to drive them out of Beijing. The capital is one of China’s “first tier” cities, where most migrant workers do not have the money or qualifications to qualify for hukou, the household registration stamp that would give them full access to public services such as health and education. “It’s had a huge impact on us,” says the woman, who is from eastern Shandong province, of the demolitions. Sales have plunged as people leave the area, she adds. For most economists, the structural challenges facing China’s economy have been apparent for more than a decade — especially its reliance on debt-fuelled investment in infrastructure and property and the relatively low share of domestic consumption in gross domestic product. With property no longer a driver, many are wondering what will replace it. An electric vehicle boom is one bright spot. But high-end manufacturing, though favoured by Beijing, will not generate enough jobs.  Even as total debt — household, corporate and government — hit 281.5 per cent of GDP in the second quarter, according to calculations by Bloomberg, productivity advances have slowed and the demographic outlook has worsened, with the population officially declining for the first time last year. The government has set a target for growth in GDP this year of 5 per cent, its lowest in decades. The IMF estimates this could fall below 4 per cent in the years to come. Economists point to a list of reforms that could turn the situation around. Bert Hofman, a former Beijing-based country director for China at the World Bank, in a blog post titled “Diminishing Expectations” lists sweeping fiscal, financial, retirement age and pension, state-owned enterprise and hukou reforms. “None of these reforms are easy, and each one cuts into the interest of some groups in society . . . but the package as a whole should increase the pie for all,” he says. Others say if the government is serious about really implementing “common prosperity”, it would have ended hukou, which they say has turned rural and migrant workers into “second-class” citizens. While there has been some reform of the system, abolishing it could increase urbanisation, revive property demand and increase people’s average incomes, analysts say. Hofman writes that about 65 per cent of the population lives in urban areas but about 20 percentage points of this are migrant workers. About 25 per cent of the labour force still works in agriculture. “It gives the lie to common prosperity,” John Burns, an honorary professor of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong, says of hukou. “Rural people have paid the price for all this prosperity in the cities.” China’s average annual pension per head for urban residents was Rmb50,763 ($6,936) in 2021, about 22 times the rural equivalent, while civil servants received Rmb77,804. The average annual healthcare disbursements for urban residents in 2021 totalled Rmb4,166, about 4.4 times the rural equivalent. But today’s economic malaise reaches beyond the rural and urban poor. Upper-middle-class people talk of losing millions of renminbi in property and failed wealth management plans, while the wealthy elites complain about a lack of investment opportunities and increasing government interference. One mining company owner in southern Guangdong province says local authorities kept borrowing money from him with no intention of paying it back, giving him cheap land instead. This had little value given the property crisis so he ended up investing his money in a chicken farm out of reach of the officials. “There has been a lot of talk about the government supporting the private sector,” he says. “In reality we are under pressure to bail out cash-strapped local governments.” In the rural eastern province of Anhui, a woman mourning China’s former premier Li Keqiang, who died suddenly on Friday, captures the complexity of people’s feelings about China’s leaders. The government’s focus on security — Beijing has constructed one of the world’s most extensive surveillance states — has meant far less crime in her local area, says the woman. “Thanks to the surveillance system, I can now hop on a public bus without worrying about being pickpocketed,” she says, after placing flowers at Li’s ancestral home in Jiuzi village.  But she, like many of the mourners, betrays a yearning for a leadership more sympathetic to her daily struggles. Many saw that in Li, who until March was Xi’s number-two official, saying he spoke out for the poor.  “He was a great premier,” she says, choking with emotion. Unlike Xi and many other senior leaders, Li grew up in a modest neighbourhood, where traditional Anhui beef noodle shops still ply their trade.  Seen as a pro-market reformer who was supported by former president Hu Jintao, Li was once believed to be a contender for the presidency but the party chose Xi, who took it in a more austere direction. “Some senior leaders wanted to build a strong nation at the expense of ordinary people’s wealth and opportunities,” says a second mourner at Li’s former childhood home in the nearby provincial capital of Hefei. “Premier Li wanted to make ordinary people rich first and then create a strong nation.” Some political scientists argue that the party’s emphasis on social issues and common prosperity rather than growth has been a power play aimed at rolling back the private sector, which grew too powerful under previous presidents, providing 80 per cent of China’s employment. Stanford’s Xu says common prosperity created a convenient platform to blame entrepreneurs for the troubles of the poor while undermining their influence. The problem was that it got mixed in with a slowdown brought on by the zero-Covid policy and property woes. “If we put all of this together, now the Chinese economy is in deep trouble,” Xu says. Most analysts argue the government has temporarily softened its crackdown on the private sector as it tries to stabilise the economy.  Many economists are now looking to the third plenum, an important party meeting that occurs one year after a new leadership takes office and which is expected to be held before the end of this year, for signs of the government’s broader plans for the economy, though few are optimistic on the prospect for deeper reforms.  “The fact that there is maybe this sense of drift or lack of confidence in the future, I think, is a corrosive phenomenon that we’re not used to seeing in China and, politically, I should think that the government ought to be worried about it,” says Oxford’s Magnus. Few think that growing frustration with the economy will imminently lead to social unrest, however. Thompson points out that it took the “grossest violations of civil liberties” during China’s extended Covid lockdowns to spark the so-called “white paper protests” in November 2022, when people in many cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, held blank sheets of paper symbolising everything they could not say.  But more likely is a loss of China’s former optimism that will be challenging to reignite or, says Xu, a slow slide into passive cynicism. The second Li mourner, in Hefei, who works for a real estate company and soon expects to lose his job, speaks to the uncertainty being felt in communities across China: “We just don’t know what tomorrow will bring.” Data visualisation by Keith Fray. ©The Financial Times Limited 2023. All Rights Reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.

29-åringen fick nyligen speltid i Newcastles reservlag efter runt 14 månaders frånvaro. Nästa vecka tar Janne Andersson ut sin sista trupp som förbundskapten, inför de avslutande EM-kvalen mot Azerbajdzjan och Estland. Återstår att se om Krafth redan nu är aktuell för en blågul comeback. Senast Krafth spelade i landslaget var i Nations League i juni 2022. Däremot är ljumskskadade Alexander Isak inte tillgänglig. Han spelar troligen inte igen förrän i slutet av månaden enligt ett uttalande i tisdags från Newcastles manager Eddie Howe. Newcastles skadelista förlängdes redan efter två minuter när Matt Targett gick sönder och tvingades byta. Miguel Almiron gav Newcastle ledningen och innan den första halvleken ökade Lewis Hall. Victor Nilsson Lindelöf var på nytt med i Uniteds startelva. Matchen pågår. Jarrod Bowen firar sitt 3–0-mål när West Ham slog ut Arsenal ur ligacupen. Arsenal, som till helgen möter Newcastle borta i ligan, vilade flera ordinarie spelare mot West Ham – och föll med 1–3 på bortaplan. Bland annat började engelske landslagsmittfältaren Declan Rice på bänken i återbesöket på Londons Olympiastadion efter sommarens miljardövergång till Arsenal. Aaron Ramsdale fick efterlängtad speltid i målet, men släppte in en boll redan efter en kvart. Det var inte mycket han kunde göra åt Ben Whites misslyckade försök att nicka undan Jarrod Bowens hörna. Med god marginal nickade White bollen in i eget mål. Värre skulle det bli för Ramsdale och Arsenal. Mohammed Kudus ökade till 2–0 varpå Bowen prickade in 3–0. Rice, Gabriel Martinelli och Bukayo Saka kom in för Arsenal, men då var det för sent. Först på tilläggstid reducerade sent inhoppande Martin Ødegaard.

1 563. Exakt så många gånger har 90-årige Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal berättat sin livshistoria. På skolor och universitet, i kommunhus och teatrar har han vittnat om hur det var att som jude växa upp i Tyskland under nazismen. Nu sveper en ny våg av antisemitism in över Tyskland. Det handlar inte bara om högerextrema åsikter, utan även det vissa kallar ”woke antisemitism”. – Återigen är vi judar tacksamma måltavlor för alla idioter, säger Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal till Der Spiegel, som skildrar antisemitismens återkomst. Hamas' terror and Israel's counterattacks have unleashed levels of anti-Semitism not seen in years in Germany. Jews are living in fear and now wonder if they should leave the country. The political response so far appears to be doing little to change the situation. By Jörg Diehl, Deike Diening, Maik Großekathöfer, Tobias Rapp and Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt October 30, 2023 Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal, a 90-year-old with a wild mane and alert eyes, is one of the last living Holocaust survivors. He is sitting in his living room in Bendestorf, a community in the state of Lower Saxony, and talking about the anti-Semitic incidents that have occurred in Germany recent days. "We Jews are once again easy targets for all the idiots walking our streets," he says. The house where he lives with his wife Dagmar is nothing short of a fortress. The window panes are made of bulletproof glass, and more than 20 surveillance cameras have been installed on the property, with their images appearing on a monitor placed next to the fireplace. After the sun goes down, spotlights illuminate the property. Buterfas-Frankenthal says he has received two dozen death threats over the years. One caller smeared him as a "Jewish swine" and told him he had built a box for him, even testing it out by gassing a pig that weighed 85 kilograms. Buterfas-Frankenthal has made it his life's work to tell the story of his survival under National Socialism. For 30 years now, he has been a guest speaker at schools and universities and appeared in theaters and town halls to warn against xenophobia and anti-Semitism. For his commitment, he has been bestowed with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, First Class, the World Peace Prize and the European Human Rights Medal. Photos of Helmut Kohl, Willy Brandt, Václav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev are all hanging in his basement. He's met them all. He has told his story in public precisely 1,563 times, most recently in Hesse last week. But something was new: For the first time, he had police protection, he says. Two officers in black accompanied him as he spoke to high school students in a movie theater in the college town of Marburg. And in nearby Giessen, two patrol cars were parked on campus as he told of Nazi atrocities in the lecture hall. Buterfas-Frankenthal finds it "absolutely appalling" that police officers must now provide him with protection when he speaks about the Holocaust and the importance of not forgetting what happened. Does this make him worry about his children and grandchildren? "If they want to emigrate, they should let me know," he says. "I'll give them the money." Since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7 and murdered more than 1,400 Jews, including elderly people and children, Germany has also been gripped by a new wave of anti-Semitism. In Berlin's Neukölln neighborhood, Palestinian terror sympathizers happily handed out baklava on the day of the attack, and a snack bar in the town of Bad Hersfeld in the state of Hesse, cut prices in half for two days after the horrific attack. In Berlin's central Mitte district, Molotov cocktails landed in front of the Kahal Adass Yisroel Synagogue. In Duisburg, meanwhile, police arrested an Islamist they suspect may have been planning to drive a truck into a pro-Israeli demonstration. And at a solidarity rally in Munich, an Iraqi threatened: "Fucking Jews, we're going to kill you all." Previous escalations of the Middle East conflict, including those in 2014, 2017 and 2021, have seen hatred and violence spill over into Germany. But the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic outbursts have likely never been as massive or as numerous as they are now. Police have counted some 1,800 politically motivated crimes since Hamas attacked Israel. "What we are experiencing now is a watershed," says Thomas Haldenwang, the president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, which tracks extremism in the country. German politicians are shocked, and their reaction has been in line with what the country's difficult history demands. "We must now show what 'Never Again' really means," Chancellor Olaf Scholz said during a visit to the New Synagogue in Dessau, wearing a kippa on his head. "It is intolerable that Jewish people are today once again living in fear – in our country, of all places," German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at a rally held at the Brandenburg Gate on Sunday. But will words be followed with actions? The pressure against supporters of Hamas and other anti-Israeli activists in Germany is set to be increased. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is preparing to ban certain events and to deport Islamists. "Anyone who glorifies the terror of Hamas and anyone who threatens Jews will be prosecuted with the full force of the law," says the politician, a member of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). Efforts to protect Jewish and Israeli institutions have also been strengthened. The tone of politicians has so far been resolute, but overall, the policy response feels a little helpless. If Israel is unable to prevent an attack like the one perpetrated by Hamas, then how will Germany be able to provide a security guarantee that excludes the possibility of terror against Jews? "Protecting Jewish life is a responsibility of the state – but it is also a civic duty!" the German president admonished on Sunday. But what happens if fewer and fewer citizens are fulfilling their duty? When the appeal fades? It's not just the open hatred on the streets that frightens Jews. It's also the bitter realization of how many minds in which anti-Semitism has taken root - among those born in Germany, among immigrants, among staunch neo-Nazis and even among cultured people who consider themselves to be intellectuals. In Hamburg's Harburg district, one young man with immigrant roots shouted at television cameras: "I'm for Adolf Hitler, gas the Jews!" And in the Dorstfeld district of Dortmund, neo-Nazis hung a banner from a balcony reading: "Israel is our misfortune." In Berlin, apparently leftist youth could be heard chanting: "Free Palestine from German guilt." Something has indeed shifted in Germany, the country that perpetrated the Holocaust. Solidarity with Israel and the Jews appears to have become threadbare. Not among the country's leaders, but clearly with many people. Hostility toward Jews has gripped broad strata of society. Even before the new war in the Middle East, anti-Semitism had risen noticeably in Germany. In 2023, for the first time in years, the authors of Germany's "Mitte" study, which probes the German population for anti-democratic and xenophobic attitudes, found a dramatic increase in openly anti-Semitic positions. Some 11.8 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that "the influence of Jews is still too great today." It was clear red flag. "What was long considered unspeakable has become permissible again," says Bielefeld conflict researcher Andreas Zick, who coordinates the study. He says this is partially linked to the rise of the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and others subscribing to the exclusionary "völkisch" identity of nationality based on blood. Furthermore, during the coronavirus pandemic, anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives seemed to spread as rapidly as the virus. There were myths of powerful people in the background, such as George Soros or the Rothschilds, who supposedly wanted to use the vaccine to exert broad control. Some protesters even wore yellow stars with the words "unvaccinated." Felix Klein, the government's federal commissioner for Jewish life in Germany, described the pandemic as an "accelerant for anti-Semitism" in Germany. These days, hatred of Israel and Jews among young people from immigrant communities and radical Muslims in particular is becoming increasingly obvious. From October 7 until the middle of this week, police had counted 1,254 politically motivated crimes, which they ascribed to the category of "foreign ideologies" – secular ideologies imported to Germany from outside the country – in addition to 172 categorized as "religious ideology." A new variant of anti-Semitism is rearing its head on the left, cloaked in the guise of solidarity with the Palestinians. It has a new quality and goes beyond the hostility to Israel that anti-imperialists on the left have harbored for decades. Meron Mendel has coined the term "woke anti-Semitism" to describe it. Mendel, the director of the Anne Frank Education Center, which raises awareness about the consequences of discrimination and prejudice, and also a historian and father of three, is currently on a book tour. It has taken him across Germany, to places like Hohenems, Freiburg, Schorndorf and Heidenheim. His book, out in German, is called "Talking about Israel." As of October 7, it has taken on a whole new urgency. Mendel, 47, who grew up on a kibbutz, is now no longer just the academic observer and chronicler. In a phone conversation, he describes lying in bed at night being haunted by the images of massacre victims. A few days ago, he says, he did a reading at a "left-leaning immigrant club" in Bavaria, and Palestinians also sat in the audience. He says he was surprised: "Their thoughts were exclusively with the victims of the Israeli counterattacks in Gaza." He, on the other hand, still finds himself preoccupied by the "civilizational abyss" that opened up during the Hamas attacks. "How can men who are fathers torture and murder children?" he asks. For many years, Mendel criticized the government of Israel, campaigning against the occupation and in favor of an independent Palestinian state. But now he is shocked by the "complete lack of empathy" among those who, as he says, focus exclusively on Palestinian matters. "They completely ignore the lives of Jews," he says. Mendel says elements of the cultural scene are also finding it surprisingly difficult to clearly condemn Hamas, "as if they were left-wing freedom fighters and not a fundamentalist terrorist organization." Documenta 2022, the leading international art show in Kassel, Germany, already demonstrated that things were changing for the worse. The show was widely criticized that year for including anti-Semitic works: One included a soldier with a pig's face and a scarf bearing the Star of David. Now, Mendel says, all you have to do is look at the long list of international artists and intellectuals who signed an open letter in Artforum magazine. They include famous artists like Nan Goldin, gender studies pioneer Judith Butler and fashion designer Martin Margiela. In the letter, they call for "Palestinian liberation" and describe themselves as witnessing a "genocide." But there is no condemnation of Hamas' crimes, "not even in the fine print," Mendel complains. Only after several days was the letter amended to include a few meager words of regret for the Israeli dead. Mendel bitterly notes that he currently finds more common ground with conservatives than with leftists, despite the fact that he has always seen himself as being a part of the left. In the worldview of young activists, in particular, an exaggerated form of anti-racism has become a central pillar of their thinking. Fed by postcolonial discourses and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, they divide the world into black and white, privileged and disadvantaged, perpetrators and victims. In their eyes, the Israelis are privileged and the Palestinians disadvantaged. Apparently, even the most brutal massacres can be disregarded with the help of that thinking. And that, it seems, can set the stage for scenes like the one that unfolded in front of Germany's Foreign Ministry this week, where a group of activists dressed in hipster clothing gathered on the streets, chanting: "Free Palestine from German Guilt." Terms like the "cult of guilt" had previously only been heard in Germany from the extreme right wing. Extremists have been claiming for decades that German elites bow to Israel and the world because of the Nazi crimes. But now, it appears that some on the left are also longing for Germany to be freed from the its problematic history. Marina Chernivsky is a psychologist who runs OFEK, a counseling center for victims of anti-Semitism that has offices in five German states. She says the number of requests at her center has increased thirteen-fold since October 7. "We've been experiencing exceptionally high volume for three weeks," says Chernivsky, who was born in Lviv, Ukraine, grew up in Israel and came to Berlin in 2001. The Jews contacting the counseling center have reported verbal assaults, threats and attacks – on the streets, on the internet, at universities and in schools. They have also voiced concerns about whether their children are still safe. And discussed the traumas that the terror in Israel has caused them. Chernivsky says there is a lack of general sympathy from the broader population. It also doesn't come as a surprise to her. "Empathy for Jews," the psychologist says, "has always been fragile." Sitting back in his living room in Bendestorf, Ivar Buterfas-Frankenthal, the Holocaust survivor from Lower Saxony, wonders what "the Lord God actually still has in mind for his chosen people." The Jews, he says, have been blamed for all the evils of the world for 2,000 years. He says he doesn't know what it would mean for Jews in Germany if the Israeli army were to launch a ground offensive against Hamas. "Perhaps it's also something I would prefer not to think all the way through." He says he is at least as concerned about rising support for the AfD in Germany. Honorary party chair Alexander Gauland once played down National Socialism by describing it as a "speck of bird poop" in German history. Björn Höcke, the extremist right wing leader of the Thuringia state chapter of the AfD, called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a "monument of shame." As Buterfas-Frankenthal sees it, AfD voters have "very little going on upstairs." He hopes that Germans will eventually wake up and realize this. Buterfas-Frankenthal is planning to make appearances in the coming weeks in Bremen, Kiel, Stade and Braunschweig. He is also planning to speak to prospective police officers to raise awareness about anti-Semitism. For a few weeks now, his childhood memories have been available as digital learning material for students in grades five and up. The title is: "What does anti-Jewish discrimination feel like?" It's likely that the lessons to be learned from Buterfas-Frankenthal have seldom been as important as they are now. But frequent travel is becoming increasingly difficult for him at the age of 90. On January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Buterfas-Frankenthal is planning to speak at Hamburg's St. Michael's Church. It is to be his last public appearance. Going by the situation today, it too will likely take place under police protection. © 2023 Der Spiegel. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group. Read the original article at Der Spiegel.

De israeliska styrkorna står troligen inför en svår och utdragen strid mot Hamas. Resultatet kommer att bli blodigt och debatten om ifall det mänskliga lidandet var värt det kommer fortsätta efter kriget. Men – om det skulle lyckas – finns ett unikt tillfälle att åstadkomma en bättre situation i Gaza, skriver Steven Simon, tidigare rådgivare för Mellanösternfrågor i Vita huset, i Foreign Affairs. Israels egna efterkrigsplan tycks bestå av hård blockad mot Gaza med återkommande lufträder. Troligen skulle kontrollen över Gaza falla i händerna på krigsherrar eller någon organisation som axlar Hamas mantel, resonerar Simon. Han argumenterar för att både Israel och palestinierna på Gaza skulle tjäna på att överlämna ansvaret till en tredje part och skissar en plan där USA skulle leda en grupp med representanter från Israel, Egypten, Jordanien, Saudiarabien, EU, FN och Palestinska myndigheten. Dessa skulle se till att kontrollen över Gaza överlämnades i ordnade former från Israel till FN med hjälp av en resolution från säkerhetsrådet, likt den som användes i Kosovo. A Plan to Return the Gaza Strip to Palestinians and Keep Israel Safe By Steven Simon 18 October, 2023 Israel’s offensive against the Gaza Strip is ramping up. After the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas spilled out of Gaza to stage a brutal attack on Israel on October 7, the enclave is now under siege. Israel has cut off the delivery of electricity, water, fuel, and food. Israeli warnings have led hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza to flee their homes, and Israeli bombs have killed thousands already. And all this ahead of a much-anticipated ground invasion that will likely lead to significant casualties on both sides. Some analysts, such as Marc Lynch in Foreign Affairs and Hussein Ibish in The New York Times, have argued that “invading Gaza will be a disaster” and that Israel “will be walking into a trap.” They could well be right. Military operations in urban terrain are notoriously difficult and deadly. And Hamas, as a social movement and not just a militant outfit, will be impossible to fully uproot. But Israel may yet achieve its maximalist war aim of destroying Hamas’s leadership and military capacity. The Israel Defense Forces has now deployed 350,000 reservists and 170,000 active-duty personnel. Although the bulk of these forces will be allocated to the northern front facing Lebanon and the militant group Hezbollah, there will be plenty of soldiers left for operations in Gaza. Meanwhile, Hamas can deploy at best 15,000 fighters. The IDF has complete control over Gaza’s airspace, coastline, and land border. In order to smash Hamas, the Israeli public is prepared to tolerate high casualties in addition to the significant losses it has already incurred. And Israel has the support of essential outside players, not least the United States. It is hard to envisage more favorable conditions for the difficult campaign Israel is contemplating. This raises a major question: what happens if Israel does manage to defeat Hamas? Although the Biden administration views a ground offensive and the blockade of Gaza as a risk to regional stability—and worries about an unfolding humanitarian disaster—the United States’ ability to alter Israel’s course at this point is limited. Israel might have narrowed its own options if it is shown to be responsible for the October 17 bombing of Al Ahli Arab hospital in northern Gaza that killed hundreds. But if the planned Israeli assault is a fait accompli, the United States and its partners must start to think carefully about a range of scenarios, including a Gaza without Hamas. The incapacitation of the militant group will be bloody, but Hamas’s removal could provide a fleeting opportunity to bring about a new dispensation in Gaza that is better than what came before it. Whether it will have been worth the human suffering will be debated after the war. But if Israel defeats Hamas, the United States should work with regional and international powers to find a way to transfer Israeli control of Gaza to the temporary stewardship of the United Nations, backed by the strong mandate of a UN Security Council resolution. This UN mission would then help return Gaza to Palestinian control. Unless the ultimate objective is revival of the Palestinian Authority and its control of Gaza, Arab countries will be reluctant to participate in such a day-after plan. It will still be a hard sell in Israel, where distrust of the UN runs deep. But such a process would not just spare Palestinians in Gaza the prospect of an indefinite Israeli occupation and repeated rounds of destructive skirmishes—or even wars—with Israel, it would also, by restoring Palestinian Authority administration in Gaza, preserve the possibility of a two-state solution that now appears so unattainable. The opportunity to establish a better arrangement in Gaza would in large part be a function of the defeat of Hamas. But other developments may make such an outcome more likely. Israel is now ruled by a new emergency coalition government that includes centrists, who in the past have endorsed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and feature two former IDF chiefs of staff, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot. The Israeli war cabinet reflects a diversity of views that can help serve as a counterweight to the extreme right, which moved to the foreground of Israeli politics after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed a new government late last year. The Biden administration’s new eagerness to reassert a U.S. role in the Middle East—beyond its fitful attempts to constrain Iran’s nuclear program—will also help. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in particular, wants to demonstrate the utility of diplomacy as an instrument of policy and the current crisis is tailor-made for this goal. He is currently shuttling among regional capitals. Although the war in Gaza has scotched the mooted normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia as facilitated by the United States, the negotiating process has opened lines of communication that make the coordination of policies among the three countries regarding the future of Gaza a real possibility. Israeli forces now face a potentially long and grinding campaign in the territory. The outcome of this campaign remains uncertain. Hamas fighters know this dense urban landscape, riddled with tunnels and potential booby traps, better than their IDF opponents. External forces, including Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, may launch attacks on Israel in the hope of complicating any Israeli advance in Gaza. But the preponderance of strength remains with Israel. Buoyed by the support of its superpower backer, the United States, Israel may well succeed in its goal of flushing out Hamas’s leadership and destroying the group’s ability to rule Gaza. Much will then depend on who controls the ground after Israel withdraws. Israel’s answer to this question is not clear. Its postwar plan seems to involve a tight blockade of Gaza that sharply restricts imports, rigid controls on the movement of people across the boundary between Israel and Gaza, and a system of opportunistic raids and airstrikes launched from Israel on targets within Gaza when deemed necessary by emerging intelligence information. Control of Gaza would presumably devolve to warlords or a Hamas successor organization that can rule over the rubble but be unable to kill Israelis. Such an arrangement may not prove especially durable. After all, Hamas acquired an arsenal and constructed a sprawling network of tunnels despite stringent Israeli controls and the close surveillance of Gaza. It is hard—perhaps impossible—to seal off Gaza in a long-term, impermeable way. Israel would make itself a jail warden, presiding indefinitely over an immense prison camp (to which Gaza has long been compared). For Israel, and for the Palestinians in Gaza, handing off control to a third party would be the better course of action. Otherwise, the situation will eventually revert to a grimmer version of the status quo ante, only with many more people dead on both sides and Gaza’s vital infrastructure pulverized. There is at least one alternative to this bleak forecast. The United States could lead a contact group, a clutch of neighboring states and selected outside powers, namely Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the EU, the UN, and the Palestinian Authority. The group would develop a plan to transfer control of Gaza from Israel to the UN once combat operations have ceased. This would be an enormous undertaking for the UN, whose institutional capacity is already strained, encumbered by a rigid and complicated bureaucracy. Setting these defects aside, the key step at this stage would be the securing of a UN mandate in the form of a Security Council resolution authorizing member states to organize a transitional administration for Gaza, maintain civil order and public services in coordination with Israel, and develop a plan for elections in the West Bank and Gaza. China and Russia, veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, may stymie such a resolution. But ensuring that the request for a mission came from, say, Egypt and was endorsed by the Palestinian Authority (an observer state at the UN) might make it easier for China and Russia to abstain in a Security Council vote or even support the endeavor. There are precedents: a 1999 Security Council resolution placed Kosovo under temporary UN administration, mandating two entities—the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, which served as a transitional administration, and the Kosovo Force, which was a NATO force carrying out the instructions of the Security Council. Moreover, a UN mandate does not dictate the requirement for a UN mission. Here, the precedent of a 2023 Security Council resolution authorizing a Kenyan peacekeeping force in Haiti permits a non-UN mission to draw, on a reimbursable basis, from UN supply stocks. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe had such an authority for its monitoring mission in Ukraine from 2014 to 2022 and the African Union for its forces in Somalia from 2007 to 2022. This procedure gives the organizers of the mission, such as the contact group, free rein to build the best team possible. And because the mission may not be a UN one, skeptical Israelis may be reassured of its utility. If the Security Council were to approve a resolution that mandates a transitional arrangement in Gaza, the subsequent mission would have to be appropriately sized, structured, and defined. Since time would be of the essence, the contact group, in coordination with UN agencies, would have to identify and recruit donor states, and equip and deploy the peacekeeping and “protection of civilians” units. Essential equipment, such as vehicles and computers, would be drawn from UN stocks. The mission’s rules of engagement would have to permit firing in self-defense, and the peacekeepers’ primary function would be policing. The force itself would have to comprise troops from Arab states, in part to minimize language barriers but also to reinforce the notion that the mission is led by Arabs. Applying the rule of thumb of five peacekeepers per 1,000 civilians, the force would have to be sizable, upwards of 10,000 troops or more. The UN mission headquarters would liaise with Israeli authorities, UN headquarters, and the contact group. The interim UN-backed administration would bear some resemblance to the UN governance mission in Kosovo, where the UN has managed relative success in a fragile environment, and to the UN mission in Libya, where it backs one of two rival governments. There is no shortage of UN agencies and nongovernmental organizations capable of organizing elections. With the election of a new president and a new Palestinian legislative body, the UN mission would shift from its Kosovo-like role to one more like the UN mission in Libya, where the international organization supports an elected government. The UN mission would require a powerful head, someone capable of standing up to both Israelis and Palestinians who could deal with senior officials from outside powers—somebody like Sigrid Kaag, the deputy prime minister of the Netherlands, who previously served as a high-ranking UN official and envoy in Syria and Lebanon. The political aim here would be to revive a moribund Palestinian Authority that lost its authority over Gaza in 2006, the last time elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council were held. The current president of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, was last elected in 2005. Despite the suspicion and doubt with which many Palestinians regard Abbas and the PA, Arab states will not cooperate with any attempt to reset the administration of Gaza without a role for the body. Nor will the major powers of the global South—with the possible exception of India, which has grown closer to Israel in recent years—approve of such a plan if control of the territory did not return in some form to Palestinians. Indeed, many Arab states as well as those in the global South might demand more than elections and the reassertion of PA control over the territory; they might demand that Israel make territorial concessions and halt settlement construction in the West Bank. Without securing gains on the ground, a restored PA in Gaza will lack credibility and appear like a mere puppet regime. Israel may balk at the prospect of making such concessions, but the centrist members of the unity government might help tip the balance. None of these measures will matter without swift action to rebuild a devastated Gaza. This is where Saudi Arabia becomes critical to the success of the transfer of Gaza from Israeli control to the UN and the subsequent consolidation of the Palestinian Authority’s hold over both the West Bank and Gaza. The cost of reconstruction will be substantial. Public infrastructure—including hospitals, schools, roads, electrical substations, water pipes, sanitation systems, and government offices—will probably be in ruins. To clear the rubble alone will take time and money. The United States will certainly try to be a generous contributor and, with Israeli cooperation and a functioning House of Representatives, Congress will appropriate the necessary funds. Saudi Arabia, however, not only has the funds to make a difference, but its participation will also lend the enterprise the kind of regional legitimacy that will strengthen the Palestinian Authority. Many hurdles stand in the way of such an arrangement coming to pass. China and Russia may choose to obstruct the passing of the necessary resolution at the Security Council. Arab states may be unwilling to join what many of their citizens see as an occupying force in the strip. And Israel may refuse to make concessions to the Palestinians in the wake of Hamas’s attacks and an Israeli military victory. But one purpose of diplomacy is to probe intentions and spur the consideration of a wider range of options in a contingency. This is what the moment requires. The alternative is Gaza as an eternal dystopia, with violence metastasizing around the broader region, and states less able to deal with all manner of social and environmental disarray—in other words, a Middle East transformed, but not quite as Washington envisaged it. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of Foreign Affairs. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. Read the original article at Foreign Affairs.

Vi känner alla till att internet är trasigt, skriver Katie Notopoulos för MIT Technology Review. Stora vinstmöjligheter gör att de stora plattformarna ignorerar övertramp, nya typer av mobbning uppstår och lokalnyheterna försvinner. – Människor var aldrig tänkta att ingå i samhällen med två miljarder individer. Om man kategoriserar Instagram som ett samhälle i en någon skruvad form så har vi gett ett företag i uppgift att styra ett samhälle som är större än något som någonsin funnits under mänsklighetens historia. Det är klart att det kommer att misslyckas , säger Yoel Roth, tidigare säkerhetschef på Twitter. Men att stänga av Facebook eller logga ut för att ”gå utomhus och röra vid gräset” är inte lösningen, resonerar Notopoulus. Hon argumenterar för att ett skifte är på väg. Ett tecken är att folk börjat förstå att man behöver betala för saker, ett annat att allt fler använder mer nischade och mindre forum. Lösningen på internet är mer internet: fler appar, fler sajter och forum att besöka, mer variation, fler röster och mer glädje. If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms. By Katie Notopoulos 17 October, 2023 We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. For the first time in years, it feels as though something truly new and different might be happening with the way we communicate online. The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening. The question is: What do we want to come next? There’s a sort of common wisdom that the internet is irredeemably bad, toxic, a rash of “hellsites” to be avoided. That social platforms, hungry to profit off your data, opened a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed. Indeed, there are truly awful things that happen on the internet, things that make it especially toxic for people from groups disproportionately targeted with online harassment and abuse. Profit motives led platforms to ignore abuse too often, and they also enabled the spread of misinformation, the decline of local news, the rise of hyperpartisanship, and entirely new forms of bullying and bad behavior. All of that is true, and it barely scratches the surface. But the internet has also provided a haven for marginalized groups and a place for support, advocacy, and community. It offers information at times of crisis. It can connect you with long-lost friends. It can make you laugh. It can send you a pizza. It’s duality, good and bad, and I refuse to toss out the dancing-baby GIF with the tubgirl-dot-png bathwater. The internet is worth fighting for because despite all the misery, there’s still so much good to be found there. And yet, fixing online discourse is the definition of a hard problem. But look. Don’t worry. I have an idea. To cure the patient, first we must identify the disease. When we talk about fixing the internet, we’re not referring to the physical and digital network infrastructure: the protocols, the exchanges, the cables, and even the satellites themselves are mostly okay. (There are problems with some of that stuff, to be sure. But that’s an entirely other issue—even if both do involve Elon Musk.) “The internet” we’re talking about refers to the popular kinds of communication platforms that host discussions and that you probably engage with in some form on your phone. Some of these are massive: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, X. You almost certainly have an account on at least one of these; maybe you’re an active poster, maybe you just flip through your friends’ vacation photos while on the john. The internet is good things. It’s Keyboard Cat, Double Rainbow. It’s personal blogs and LiveJournals. It’s the distracted-girlfriend meme and a subreddit for “What is this bug?” Although the exact nature of what we see on those platforms can vary widely from person to person, they mediate content delivery in universally similar ways that are aligned with their business objectives. A teenager in Indonesia may not see the same images on Instagram that I do, but the experience is roughly the same: we scroll through some photos from friends or family, maybe see some memes or celebrity posts; the feed turns into Reels; we watch a few videos, maybe reply to a friend’s Story or send some messages. Even though the actual content may be very different, we probably react to it in much the same way, and that’s by design. The internet also exists outside these big platforms; it’s blogs, message boards, newsletters and other media sites. It’s podcasts and Discord chatrooms and iMessage groups. These will offer more individualized experiences that may be wildly different from person to person. They often exist in a sort of parasitic symbiosis with the big, dominant players, feeding off each other’s content, algorithms, and audience. The internet is good things. For me, it’s things I love, like Keyboard Cat and Double Rainbow. It’s personal blogs and LiveJournals; it’s AIM away messages and MySpace top 8s. It’s the distracted-­girlfriend meme and a subreddit for “What is this bug?” It is a famous thread on a bodybuilding forum where meatheads argue about how many days are in a week. For others, it’s Call of Duty memes and the mindless entertainment of YouTubers like Mr. Beast, or a place to find the highly specific kind of ASMR video they never knew they wanted. It’s an anonymous supportive community for abuse victims, or laughing at Black Twitter’s memes about the Montgomery boat brawl, or trying new makeup techniques you learned on TikTok. It’s also very bad things: 4chan and the Daily Stormer, revenge porn, fake news sites, racism on Reddit, eating disorder inspiration on Instagram, bullying, adults messaging kids on Roblox, harassment, scams, spam, incels, and increasingly needing to figure out if something is real or AI. The bad things transcend mere rudeness or trolling. There is an epidemic of sadness, of loneliness, of meanness, that seems to self-reinforce in many online spaces. In some cases, it is truly life and death. The internet is where the next mass shooter is currently getting his ideas from the last mass shooter, who got them from the one before that, who got them from some of the earliest websites online. It’s an exhortation to genocide in a country where Facebook employed too few moderators who spoke the local language because it had prioritized growth over safety. The existential problem is that both the best and worst parts of the internet exist for the same set of reasons, were developed with many of the same resources, and often grew in conjunction with each other. So where did the sickness come from? How did the internet get so … nasty? To untangle this, we have to go back to the early days of online discourse. It’s also very bad things: 4chan and the Daily Stormer, revenge porn, fake news sites, racism on Reddit, eating disorder inspiration on Instagram, bullying, adults messaging kids on Roblox, harassment, scams, spam, incels. The internet’s original sin was an insistence on freedom: it was made to be free, in many senses of the word. The internet wasn’t initially set up for profit; it grew out of a communications medium intended for the military and academics (some in the military wanted to limit Arpanet to defense use as late as the early 1980s). When it grew in popularity along with desktop computers, Usenet and other popular early internet applications were still largely used on university campuses with network access. Users would grumble that each September their message boards would be flooded with newbies, until eventually the “eternal September”—a constant flow of new users—arrived in the mid-’90s with the explosion of home internet access. When the internet began to be built out commercially in the 1990s, its culture was, perversely, anticommercial. Many of the leading internet thinkers of the day belonged to a cohort of AdBusters-reading Gen Xers and antiestablishment Boomers. They were passionate about making software open source. Their very mantra was “Information wants to be free”—a phrase attributed to Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and the pioneering internet community the WELL. This ethos also extended to a passion for freedom of speech, and a sense of responsibility to protect it. It just so happened that those people were quite often affluent white men in California, whose perspective failed to predict the dark side of the free-speech, free-access havens they were creating. (In fairness, who would have imagined that the end result of those early discussions would be Russian disinformation campaigns targeting Black Lives Matter? But I digress.) The culture of free demanded a business model that could support it. And that was advertising. Through the 1990s and even into the early ’00s, advertising on the internet was an uneasy but tolerable trade-off. Early advertising was often ugly and annoying: spam emails for penis enlargement pills, badly designed banners, and (shudder) pop-up ads. It was crass but allowed the nice parts of the internet—message boards, blogs, and news sites—to be accessible to anyone with a connection. But advertising and the internet are like that small submersible sent to explore the Titanic: the carbon fiber works very efficiently, until you apply enough pressure. Then the whole thing implodes. In 1999, the ad company DoubleClick was planning to combine personal data with tracking cookies to follow people around the web so it could target its ads more effectively. This changed what people thought was possible. It turned the cookie, originally a neutral technology for storing Web data locally on users’ computers, into something used for tracking individuals across the internet for the purpose of monetizing them. To the netizens of the turn of the century, this was an abomination. And after a complaint was filed with the US Federal Trade Commission, DoubleClick dialed back the specifics of its plans. But the idea of advertising based on personal profiles took hold. It was the beginning of the era of targeted advertising, and with it, the modern internet. Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2008. That year, Google’s revenue from advertising was $21 billion. Last year, Google parent company Alphabet took in $224.4 billion in revenue from advertising. Our modern internet is built on highly targeted advertising using our personal data. That is what makes it free. The social platforms, most digital publishers, Google—all run on ad revenue. For the social platforms and Google, their business model is to deliver highly sophisticated targeted ads. (And business is good: in addition to Google’s billions, Meta took in $116 billion in revenue for 2022. Nearly half the people living on planet Earth are monthly active users of a Meta-owned product.) Meanwhile, the sheer extent of the personal data we happily hand over to them in exchange for using their services for free would make people from the year 2000 drop their flip phones in shock. And that targeting process is shockingly good at figuring out who you are and what you are interested in. It’s targeting that makes people think their phones are listening in on their conversations; in reality, it’s more that the data trails we leave behind become road maps to our brains. When we think of what’s most obviously broken about the internet—harassment and abuse; its role in the rise of political extremism, polarization, and the spread of misinformation; the harmful effects of Instagram on the mental health of teenage girls—the connection to advertising may not seem immediate. And in fact, advertising can sometimes have a mitigating effect: Coca-Cola doesn’t want to run ads next to Nazis, so platforms develop mechanisms to keep them away. But online advertising demands attention above all else, and it has ultimately enabled and nurtured all the worst of the worst kinds of stuff. Social platforms were incentivized to grow their user base and attract as many eyeballs as possible for as long as possible to serve ever more ads. Or, more accurately, to serve ever more you to advertisers. To accomplish this, the platforms have designed algorithms to keep us scrolling and clicking, the result of which has played into some of humanity’s worst inclinations. In 2018, Facebook tweaked its algorithms to favor more “meaningful social interactions.” It was a move meant to encourage users to interact more with each other and ultimately keep their eyeballs glued to News Feed, but it resulted in people’s feeds being taken over by divisive content. Publishers began optimizing for outrage, because that was the type of content that generated lots of interactions. On YouTube, where “watch time” was prioritized over view counts, algorithms recommended and ran videos in an endless stream. And in their quest to sate attention, these algorithms frequently led people down ever more labyrinthine corridors to the conspiratorial realms offlat-earth truthers, QAnon, and their ilk. Algorithms on Instagram’s Discover page are designed to keep us scrolling (and spending) even after we’ve exhausted our friends’ content, often by promoting popular aesthetics whether or not the user had previously been interested. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that Instagram had long understood it was harming the mental health of teenage girls through content about body image and eating disorders, but ignored those reports. Keep ’em scrolling. There is an argument that the big platforms are merely giving us what we wanted. Anil Dash, a tech entrepreneur and blogging pioneer who worked at SixApart, the company that developed the blog software Movable Type, remembers a backlash when his company started charging for its services in the mid-’00s. “People were like, ‘You’re charging money for something on the internet? That’s disgusting!’” he told MIT Technology Review. “The shift from that to, like,If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product … I think if we had come up with that phrase sooner, then the whole thing would have been different. The whole social media era would have been different.” The big platforms’ focus on engagement at all costs made them ripe for exploitation. Twitter became a “honeypot for a**holes” where trolls from places like 4chan found an effective forum for coordinated harassment. Gamergate started in swampier waters like Reddit and 4chan, but it played out on Twitter, where swarms of accounts would lash out at the chosen targets, generally female video-game critics. Trolls also discovered that Twitter could be gamed to get vile phrases to trend: in 2013, 4chan accomplished this with#cuttingforbieber, falsely claiming to represent teenagers engaging in self-harm for the pop singer. Platform dynamics created such a target-rich environment that intelligence services from Russia, China, and Iran—among others—use them to sow political division and disinformation to this day. “Humans were never meant to exist in a society that contains 2 billion individuals,” says Yoel Roth, a technology policy fellow at UC Berkeley and former head of trust and safety for Twitter. “And if you consider that Instagram is a society in some twisted definition, we have tasked a company with governing a society bigger than any that has ever existed in the course of human history. Of course they’re going to fail.” Here’s the good news. We’re in a rare moment when a shift just may be possible; the previously intractable and permanent-­seeming systems and platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could actually grow. One positive sign is the growing understanding that sometimes … you have to pay for stuff. And indeed, people are paying individual creators and publishers on platforms such as Substack, Patreon, and Twitch. Meanwhile, the freemium model that YouTube Premium, Spotify, and Hulu explored proves (some) people are willing to shell out for ad-free experiences. A world where only the people who can afford to pay $9.99 a month to ransom back their time and attention from crappy ads isn’t ideal, but at least it demonstrates that a different model will work. Another thing to be optimistic about (although time will tell if it actually catches on) is federation—a more decentralized version of social networking. Federated networks like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta’s Threads are all just Twitter clones on their surface—a feed of short text posts—but they’re also all designed to offer various forms of interoperability. Basically, where your current social media account and data exist in a walled garden controlled entirely by one company, you could be on Threads and follow posts from someone you like on Mastodon—or at least Meta says that’s coming. (Many—including internet pioneer Richard Stallman, who has a page on his personal website devoted to “Why you should not be used by Threads”—have expressed skepticism of Meta’s intentions and promises.) Even better, it enables more granular moderation. Again, X (the website formerly known as Twitter) provides a good example of what can go wrong when one person, in this case Elon Musk, has too much power in making moderation decisions—something federated networks and the so-called “fediverse” could solve. The big idea is that in a future where social media is more decentralized, users will be able to easily switch networks without losing their content and followings. “As an individual, if you see [hate speech], you can just leave, and you’re not leaving your entire community—your entire online life—behind. You can just move to another server and migrate all your contacts, and it should be okay,” says Paige Collings, a senior speech and privacy advocate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And I think that’s probably where we have a lot of opportunity to get it right.” There’s a lot of upside to this, but Collings is still wary. “I fear that while we have an amazing opportunity,” she says, “unless there’s an intentional effort to make sure that what happened on Web2 does not happen on Web3, I don’t see how it will not just perpetuate the same things.” Federation and more competition among new apps and platforms provide a chance for different communities to create the kinds of privacy and moderation they want, rather than following top-down content moderation policies created at headquarters in San Francisco that are often explicitly mandated not to mess with engagement. Yoel Roth’s dream scenario would be that in a world of smaller social networks, trust and safety could be handled by third-party companies that specialize in it, so social networks wouldn’t have to create their own policies and moderation tactics from scratch each time. The tunnel-vision focus on growth created bad incentives in the social media age. It made people realize that if you wanted to make money, you needed a massive audience, and that the way to get a massive audience was often by behaving badly. The new form of the internet needs to find a way to make money without pandering for attention. There are some promising new gestures toward changing those incentives already. Threads doesn’t show the repost count on posts, for example—a simple tweak that makes a big difference because it doesn’t incentivize virality. We, the internet users, also need to learn to recalibrate our expectations and our behavior online. We need to learn to appreciate areas of the internet that are small, like a new Mastodon server or Discord or blog. We need to trust in the power of “1,000 true fans” over cheaply amassed millions. Anil Dash has been repeating the same thing over and over for years now: that people should buy their own domains, start their own blogs, own their own stuff. And sure, these fixes require a technical and financial ability that many people do not possess. But with the move to federation (which at least provides control, if not ownership) and smaller spaces, it seems possible that we’re actually going to see some of those shifts away from big-platform-mediated communication start to happen. “There’s a systemic change that is happening right now that’s bigger,” he says. “You have to have a little bit of perspective of life pre-Facebook to sort of say, Oh, actually, some of these things are just arbitrary. They’re not intrinsic to the internet.” The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy. My toxic trait is I can’t shake that naïve optimism of the early internet. Mistakes were made, a lot of things went sideways, and there have undeniably been a lot of pain and misery and bad things that came from the social era. The mistake now would be not to learn from them. © 2023 Technology Review, Inc. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.