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MOSCOW (AP) For most of his 27 years as Belarus authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenkos repressions and truculent statements frequently offended the West. This year, that belligerence is directly affecting Europe.

His government forcefully diverted an airliner flying between Greece and Lithuania that was carrying a political opponent. As the European Union imposed sanctions for that action, Belarus responded by easing its border controls for migrants from the Middle East and Africa, allowing them to head for the EU frontier.

That has forced Poland, Latvia and Lithuania to declare a state of emergency in their border zones to halt illegal crossings. Warsaw has sent thousands of riot police and troops to bolster security, leading to tense confrontations.

Lukashenko has since raised the stakes by threatening to cut off natural gas shipments from Russia that transit Belarus a potentially severe blow to Europe as winter settles in.

The moves are a dramatic escalation for Lukashenko, who became president in 1994 when Belarus was an obscure country that had existed less than three years.

His disdain for democratic norms and the countrys dismal human rights record has made Belarus a pariah in the West, bringing him the sobriquet of Europes last dictator.

The 67-year-old Lukashenko prefers to be styled as Batka Father or Dad a stern but wise patriarch.

Although he has made occasional moves toward rapprochement with the West, Lukashenko abandoned conciliation after massive demonstrations rose up against him in 2020 following an election to a sixth term as president. The opposition, and many in the West, rejected the outcome as rigged.

Tens of thousands of protesters were arrested, many of them beaten by police; main opposition figures either fled the country or were jailed; foreign journalists were driven out; and ordinary citizens reportedly were arrested for unauthorized mass gatherings, that included even birthday parties.

By suppressing opposition through such harsh actions, along with keeping much of the economy under state control, Belarus has become a neo-Soviet outlier, wary of its thriving NATO and EU neighbors. He alternately quarreled with and cozied up to Russia.

Hes noted for mercurial actions and provocative statements, which a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable assessed as outright bizarre.

In 2006, he threatened protesters by saying he would wring their necks like a duck. He also attracted uneasy notice this year in a Christmas season TV interview when he let his fluffy little dog walk on the table among the festive dishes.

His draconian dramatics spiked in May, when he ordered a Lithuania-bound Ryanair jetliner diverted to Minsk and arrested self-exiled opposition journalist Raman Pratasevich, who was aboard. Belarusian authorities said the action was taken after a bomb threat was made against the plane, but Western officials dismissed that as a preposterous attempt to disguise what they called an act of piracy.

The strapping Lukashenko presents a tough-guy image by frequently playing ice hockey, including a spring 2020 outing where he dismissed the coronavirus by asking a TV reporter if she saw any viruses flying around in the arena. He also advised Belarusians to kill the virus with vodka, go to saunas and work in the fields to avoid infection, saying Tractors will cure everybody!

Once well-regarded by his countrymen as an anti-corruption leader, Lukashenko lost their trust through decades of jailing opponents, stifling independent media and holding elections that gave him term after term in power.

Protests had broken out after some of the balloting, but not sizable or sustained enough to long withstand club-swinging police and mass detentions. Only after the 2020 vote did his opponents seem to harness the discontent: The economic deterioration and Lukashenkos cavalier refusal to act against COVID-19 added to their long-term dismay.

The protests lasted for months, petering out only when winter set in. But authorities didnt let up, reportedly arresting people for no obvious cause or on pretenses such as wearing clothing in the red-and-white colors of the opposition.

Lukashenko was born in a Belarusian village and followed a conventional path for an ambitious provincial Soviet. After graduating from an agricultural academy, he became a political instructor in the border guard service and eventually rose to director of a collective farm. In 1990, he became a member of the Belarusian Supreme Soviet, the republics parliament.

He was its only member in 1991 to vote against the dissolution of the Soviet Union. When he won the new countrys first presidential election three years later, he appeared in many ways to be stuck in time, keeping Belarus as an eerie and dysfunctional Soviet vestige.

While neighboring ex-Soviet republics adapted to capitalism, Lukashenko kept much of the Belarusian economy under state control. That initially won him support because Belarusians did not suffer the pain of shock therapy economic restructuring.

But ossified state control of industries couldnt keep up with the markets energy and flexibility; the Belarusian ruble was forced into repeated devaluations, and as of 2020, the average monthly wage was a paltry $480.

The countrys main security agency retained its symbolically baleful acronym of KGB. He also pushed a referendum that made the new national flag nearly identical to the one Belarus used as a Soviet republic.

Belarus still has capital punishment, unlike every other country in Europe, even echoing Soviet show-trial executions that take about two minutes in all: The prisoner is reportedly brought to a room, told all appeals have been rejected, forced to kneel and then shot in the back of the head.

When Lukashenko became president, Belarus had little experience of being an independent country; as a Soviet republic, it had been a piece of other empires with only a brief attempt at sovereignty after World War I. Sandwiched between Russia to the east and reformist, Western-looking Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, Belarus was in a strategic position.

Lukashenko leaned strongly east. In 1997, he signed an agreement with Russia on forming a union state of close economic, military and political ties, but stopped short of a full merger.

The agreement bolstered the economy in Belarus, which depends heavily on Russian oil at below-market prices. But Lukashenko harbored beliefs that Russia aimed to eventually take over Belarus entirely, and he was increasingly vocal about them.

As protests roiled the country in 2020 and Western pressure increased, Lukashenko had nowhere to turn for help but Moscow. Putin said he would be willing to send police to Belarus if demonstrations turned violent, but he never made that move.

This year, Lukashenko and Putin announced a broad range of agreements to solidify the union state, including a joint military doctrine. Although the agreements substantially increase Russias influence in Belarus, Lukashenko also gains assurance of support.

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'Europe's last dictator' raises the stakes with the West - Associated Press

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Those responsible for public safety must learn from similar tragedies in the past, including the Hillsborough Disaster

Author of the article:

The Houston Astroworld music festival tragedy where 10 concertgoers died is a grim reminder of the vital importance of crowd control.

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It is crucial for those responsible for public safety at such events to learn from similar tragedies in the past, the definitive one being the Hillsborough Disaster on April 15, 1989 in Sheffield, England during a soccer match, which claimed the lives of 96 people.

It is seldom one mistake that causes these tragedies. It is a series of blunders that leads to them.

Here is what happened in the Hillsborough Disaster.

First, there was a prior warning that was ignored.

In 1981, eight years before the event, some fans were hospitalized with bruised ribs due to crowd rushing.

Police at the time allowed fans to sit on the perimeter of the soccer field to watch the game in order to alleviate overcrowding.

When the police indicated that had they not done so there would have been deaths, the response from the football club was that this was nonsense and no one would have died.

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The disaster in 1989 occurred during a semi-final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

Three weeks prior to the event, the police superintendent who had extensive experience in crowd control at these events, was replaced by a new superintendent who had none.

Police briefings for the event focused on how to monitor, discipline and police the crowd for offences, not crowd safety.

The open seating areas in the stadium were essentially pens with six-foot-high spiked fences separating them to prevent fans from moving between them.

The front fences were significantly higher, with spiked overhangs preventing people from getting onto the field and interrupting the game.

The command centre was the only location where those in charge of the event could see what was happening and co-ordinate with officers on the site.

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The incoming crowd was not distributed among the various entry gates as well as had been done in the past.

The standing area known as Leppings Lane was unmonitored and left open, with fans proceeding through it without any direction.

As it became increasingly crowded, police observing what was happening radioed in their concern that people were being crushed as they entered through the turnstiles.

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One officer frantically warned, for (explicative) sakes if you dont open these gates people are going to die, a reference to opening the exit gates to allow more people inside by alleviating the crush of those coming in from outside the stadium.

At eight minutes prior to kickoff an order was given for the exit gates to be opened, allowing the crowd to enter to an open, central gateway where they could see the field.

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But the authorities didnt delay the kickoff, which would normally happen in a situation like this, as people in the back of the line still trying to get into the stadium kept pushing forward, not knowing the dire situation at the front of the crowd.

They were being told to just get in.

The match proceeded as scheduled. Six minutes later it was halted by the referee, although no emergency was declared, even though many people were essentially trapped in a spiked cage with no exits.

Instead, the police were ordered to form a line halfway down the field to prevent Nottingham Forest fans from rushing the field, as they expected people would interpret the Liverpool fans doing so as hooliganism.

A pathology report would later conclude that the delayed response and the lack of an emergency declaration resulted in 41 of the 96 deaths.

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For over two decades, the public perception of what had happened, fed by the government and the media, was that the primary cause of the tragedy was drunken hooliganism by the Liverpool fans, including claims of individuals urinating on police attempting to perform CPR on those who had been crushed in the overcrowding.

But a series of subsequent investigations culminating in a high court inquest conducted from 2014 to 2016 concluded that what had actually happened was not an accident caused by the behaviour of the crowd, but an unlawful killing of 96 people caused by the negligence of those in charge of crowd control, exacerbated by the design of the stadium.

The lesson being that when people are crushed to death in a crowd, it is not always the crowds fault.

Alex Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. and has a graduate degree in Disaster and Emergency Management. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca

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VEZINA: The Astroworld tragedy and the importance of crowd control - Toronto Sun

Protesters take part in the Womens March and Rally for Abortion Justice in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 2. The demonstration targeted Senate Bill 8, a state law that bans nearly all abortions as early as six weeks in a pregnancy, making no exceptions for survivors of rape or incest.

The SAFE Alliance in Austin helps survivors of child abuse, sexual assault and domestic violence. Back before Texas new abortion law went into effect, the organization counseled a 12-year-old girl who had been repeatedly raped by her father.

Piper Stege Nelson, chief public strategies officer for the SAFE Alliance, says the father didnt let the young girl leave the house.

She got pregnant, Nelson says. She had no idea about anything about her body. She certainly didnt know that she was pregnant.

The girl was eventually able to get help, but if this had happened after Sept. 1, when the state law went into effect, her options would have been severely curtailed, Nelson says.

In Texas, abortions are now banned as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The law, Senate Bill 8, is currently the most restrictive ban on the procedure in effect in the country. According to a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist national poll, Texas law is unpopular across the political spectrum.

Notably, the law also makes no exceptions for people who are victims of rape or incest. Social workers in Texas say thats causing serious harm to sexual assault survivors in the state.

Devastating for survivors of repeated rape and abuse

While many people dont realize they are pregnant until after 6 weeks, Nelson says this is a particular problem for those who are being repeatedly raped or abused.

Thats because to cope with the trauma of the abuse, they often grow numb to whats happening to their bodies.

That dissociation can lead to a detachment from reality and the fact that shes pregnant, Nelson says. And so, there again, she is not going to know that she is pregnant by six weeks and shes not going to be able to resolve that pregnancy.

Monica Faulkner, a social worker in Austin who has worked with sexual assault survivors, says not having the option of terminating a pregnancy will make recovering from an assault even harder.

The impact of finally coming forward and then being told there are no options for you is devastating, says Faulkner, who directs the Institute for Child and Family Wellbeing at the University of Texas at Austin.

Being forced to carry a pregnancy to term can be harmful financially, psychologically and, sometimes, physically. For survivors, that further strips away agency, Nelson says, after their sense of safety and control has already been violated.

And so when you have something like SB 8, Nelson says, what it is doing is, its further taking control and power away from the survivor right at the moment when they need that power and control over their lives to begin healing.

Faulkner says its important to give sexual assault survivors options on how to move forward in their lives. She says SB 8 clearly is taking away any choice that they have.

Public opinion, even in Texas, favors exceptions to strict bans

For decades, public opinion even in Texas has been pretty consistent about allowing some exceptions to laws that restrict abortion. Most Americans believe there should be exceptions to strict abortion bans.

Carole Joffe, a professor and sociologist who studies abortion policy at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, says that despite public opinion on the matter, most of the anti-abortion bills introduced across the country in recent years havent included exceptions for rape or incest.

What we have seen over the years is a dramatic escalation, she says. I think what Texas shines a bright spotlight on is what disdain we have for the needs of women and girls, or people who can get pregnant even if they dont identify as female.

The history of these types of exceptions is somewhat complicated. Joffe notes that toward the end of the 20th century, it was more common than now for states to include exceptions for rape and incest.

She says this trend to drop exceptions for rape and incest started about 10 years ago, after the Tea Party gained power in Congress and in many statehouses. As many legislatures became more politically conservative, anti-abortion groups started gaining more influence in the lawmaking process.

Anti-abortion movement has a tightening hold on state legislatures

Meanwhile, even as some state legislatures have been increasing the restrictions on abortion, the public views have really remained quite stable, Joffe says, with a sentiment that abortion should be allowed in cases of rape and incest. The kind of restrictions we are seeing are the product of growing power in state legislatures of the anti-abortion movement, she says.

In 2019, a coalition of anti-abortion groups sent letters to national Republican Party officials following the passage of a controversial abortion law in Alabama. In it, groups asked GOP leaders to reconsider decades-old talking points regarding exceptions for rape and incest.

In Texas, the growing power of hardline conservatives in the state has helped anti-abortion successfully push for more restrictive laws.

John Seago, the legislative director with Texas Right To Life an influential anti-abortion group that pushed for SB 8, says the political shifts in the Texas legislature have made it easier to enact stricter abortion laws.

In the last ten years, in Texas, our Republican majority has been growing, he says. And kind of right around 2011/2013 we were really having enough votes to pass strong legislation.

And by strong Seago means not having to compromise on things like allowing abortions when severe fetal abnormalities are detected. Texas got rid of those exceptions a few years ago. And now that the new law in Texas doesnt exempt rape and incest, Seago says, its more consistent with the underlying philosophy that groups like his hold.

We are talking about innocent human life that it is not their crime, it was not their heinous behavior that victimized this woman, he says. And so why should they receive the punishment?

The problem of pregnancies arising from sexual assault is not a small one. One study estimates that almost 3 million women in the U.S. have become pregnant following a rape.

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How the Texas ban on most abortions is harming survivors of rape and incest - Houston Public Media

She refers to herself as the one true thing youve ever known. In a scene set 13 years later, the older Fake-Jake stands outside in the snow (still wearing that regret-scented scarf), gazing longingly at the older, wiser narrator (the actual Taylor Swift) as she reads from her novel All Too Well. A poster declares it a stunning debut.

In case you havent got the message yet, Taylor wins.

Swift has built a career on turning crash-and-burn love affairs into superb tell-all pop songs. In her world, romances start like Mills and Boon and end like Burton and Taylor. Almost without exception, she is the injured party. Its emotionally, lyrically and musically compelling, but theres not much room for the idea of two sides to every story.

In a sense, Swifts campaign to re-record her past works is all about having the last word too. And in this its hard not to support her.

She was furious when Scott Borchetta, boss of her old label Big Machine, sold the rights to her first six albums in 2019 to music manager Scooter Braun, with whom shed had a long-running feud (Braun onsold a chunk of those rights to a private equity firm last November). So she has set about re-recording, virtually note-for-note, those six albums, to be released under her new and vastly improved deal with Universal.

Red (Taylors Version) is the second album to be released under this arrangement, following Fearless earlier this year, and its impact on the value of the original recordings is likely to be significant.

Writer-director Taylor Swift, centre, with Dylan OBrien and Sadie Sink, the stars of her short film All Too Well.Credit:Evan Agostini

The original 2008 recording of Fearless was dislodged from the Billboard top 200 album chart in April when the new version debuted at number one. The new version of Red has again made Swift the most streamed artist in the world. Her short film has racked up more than 32 million views on YouTube in just three days.

Perhaps most importantly, when it comes to licensing Swifts music for movies, TV shows and commercials in the future, its likely to be her versions that get precedence. No brand or show will want to risk a backlash from the fanbase like the one Jake Gyllenhaal has had to deal with over the past few days.

She may occasionally cast herself as the victim, but whether shes taking on a label or an ex-lover, Taylor Swift is anything but. The importance of controlling the narrative, and turning it to her advantage, is something she knows all too well.

Email the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin

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Taylor Swifts All Too Well short film: control the narrative, you win - Sydney Morning Herald

Are we all famous now?

I know thats a strange question. If everyone is famous, then no one is famous, right? Well, it depends on what exactly we mean by famous. Last month, I read a New Yorker essay by Chris Hayes, the host of All In on MSNBC, that sharpened the question. He asked, what happens when the experience of fame becomes a universal possibility?

Anyone whos on a social media platform like TikTok or Twitter or Instagram is always one viral post away from instant fame or what feels like fame, anyway. Most of us dont ever get it, but the specter of it is always there.

For Hayes, this means a lot of us are chasing validation in a place that can never really give it to us, because we dont really know or care about the people on the other side of the virtual wall. Like a celebrity interacting with fans, its hollow and one-sided, and while the people liking and sharing our posts satisfy our desire for attention, they cant satisfy our desire for genuine recognition.

I reached out to Hayes for this weeks episode of Vox Conversations to talk about why he thinks this is such a radical shift in human life, and one weve probably underappreciated. We also talk about his own uneasy relationship with fame and why, like the rest of us, he just cant back away from Twitter.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, theres much more in the full podcast, so subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

There have been a lot of think pieces about the transformative effects of the internet, and most of them began with the assumption that the biggest change is the discourse is more open than its ever been, that more people have a seat at the table. And thats certainly true, but you turn this around and say that the most significant change isnt who gets to speak, but rather what we can hear. Why is our ability to hear more, to absorb more noise and information and content, the most radical shift in our social lives?

I think for a few reasons. One is that, even though it is the case that more and more people can join the discourse, I think the people that make the argument about that being positive have a lot going for them, and a lot that Im sympathetic to. I mean, it really is the case that there has been a radical expansion of the voices that are in the media, and the kind of old gatekeeper universe has been torn down, largely, and theres a lot of good thats flowed from that.

I mean, Vox is kind of an example of all kinds of stuff getting published that I dont think would have been published a generation ago, right? At the same time, most peoples experience of social media is consuming, and this is just an empirical fact about the distribution of users. A hilarious percentage of tweets are produced by a very small set of users. (I account for an embarrassing number of those personally. Half of all tweets come from Chris Hayes now.) The kind of modal experience of social media is consumption, is seeing stuff, is getting stimulus about the world.

And youre just getting a lot. Michelle Goldberg made this point, she just wrote a column on this in the New York Times, sort of a related set of themes about the Facebook revelations, but she said, Maybe 15 years ago people were sending around Christmas cards with their whole family posing with guns. I just didnt know about it. Its possible that thats a new thing. Its also possible thats been happening all the time, and now I just see it, and Im like, Wow, thats weird. I dont like that.

Youre constantly being exposed to some set of stimuli, knowledge about the world, that is often designed to inflame and rage, but also just means theres a creepy level of surveillance we all have into everyone elses lives. I say this in the piece, that a not particularly industrious 16-year-old possesses the power to surveil on a level formerly reserved for the KGB. I mean, you could just pick someone at random, and Ive done this, when sometimes someone will end up in the updraft of the news and youll go look at their social media. Before you know it, its like youve got this picture of this person, that is the kind of thing that an intelligence agency would compile, or take a team to compile, a dossier of in a former life. So we are just constantly inundated with a sheer amount of information, particularly provocative information, about strangers.

I basically think theres two kinds of internet. Theres good internet and bad internet. The good internet happens between people who have actual relationships, where the internet is the medium to stay in touch. Then theres the bad internet. Bad internet is all the stuff that happens between strangers.

Some of those stranger interactions are great. Im very lucky that I learned things from the internet. But in the mean, I think that the proximity to strangers thats produced by the internet is rubbing up against something very deep in us as human beings, and producing some really combustible frictions.

A key question, for me at least, is trying to figure out how this chaotic, overwhelming discourse isnt merely changing what we can hear, but also changing how we think. If you believe that the limits of our language are the limits of our thought, then the memefied discourse of social media has probably not been great for our brains or liberal democracy. But, as you point out, we heard the same arguments about TV not that long ago.

Yeah. I think both are pretty true. I think that it is a perennial complaint of people who are encountering a new technology, particularly a new medium to communicate thought, to be wary of it or to focus on its downsides. But also, a lot of times theyre right and there is a profound effect that these various media have.

Theres a riff in I forget which part of Plato, where Socrates is talking about writing as being the enemy of good thought, and hes got a whole thing about like, No ones going to remember anything anymore.

The critique goes all the way back from an oral society to a written society. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, writes about the features of thought that were prioritized by an oral society, which was memorization. Its modes of thought were very aphoristic and very mythos-based, because those are the things that you could recall from memory.

I think it definitely changed human thought to go from an oral tradition to a writing tradition. For the better, for the worse, I dont know, but definitely changed it. Then I think Postmans argument about going from a kind of print society to one dominated by TV and the image, I think theres a lot to his critique about how it changes the way that we think, and shapes public discourse.

The question of whats better, whats worse, whats reversible or not, Postman says this is a change for the worse, but to identify that mass modes of discourse produce changes at the very level of conceptualization in people doesnt strike me as far-fetched, and seems an idea very worth taking seriously.

Lets zoom in on the particulars of the piece and then we can wind back towards the Postman stuff. You talk about how beings crave recognition above all else, but all the internet gives us, really, is attention. That might seem like a distinction without a difference to someone who hasnt read your piece yet, or hasnt thought much about this. So can you explain the difference between recognition and attention, and why one is worth pursuing and the other is hollow?

I think the distinction between that actually is really important, and has clarified a lot for me about just the way I feel about things. The recognition riff is drawn from the lectures of a Russian expat who went to Paris after the Bolshevik revolution from a wealthy Russian family that fled the Bolsheviks, named Alexandre Kojve. He ran this seminar in Paris at a school where he basically did a kind of week by week exegesis on Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, and it was attended by a whos who of French intellectuals, including Lacan, Ansart, and others. Lacan, by the way, once you read Kojves exegesis on Hegel, if you do read Lacan, you realize that like a lot of Lacan is just literally ripping off Kojve.

He was a weird guy. He was a bureaucrat. He ended up a very high-ranking bureaucrat in the ministry of trade, and basically is there at the inception of the EU. Hes got a lot of different theories, but one of the things that he talks about in his uses of Hegel is, whats the constituent human desire? The thing that makes us human is a desire for recognition. His specificity on this is that recognition is to be seen as a human by a human. He says, man can only therefore be social.

The reciprocity of the acknowledgement, the gaze, the investment of another human who looks at us and sees us as human is the thing that we crave above all else, that is actually what forms us as humans. I think theres a lot to that. Thats a very profound observation that is clarifying for me. He then goes on to talk about the master and the slave paradox of Hegel.

Theres not a ton on it in The Phenomenology of Spirit. But Kojves take on this has to do with the fact that theres this paradox in the master and the slave, in that the slave, because hes brought low by the master, hes forced to submit. And theres this whole weird thing about like this fight to the death that I couldnt quite even crack intellectually, but basically, the takeaway I have is that the slave submits and recognizes the master.

But fundamentally the paradox, and the kind of tragedy of the master, is that that recognition is meaningless because the master doesnt recognize the slave as human. The master is on the receiving end of recognition from a person he himself does not recognize as human, ergo, that recognition itself cant matter for him.

I think what ends up happening in the internet is that our profound desire for recognition to be seen as human by other humans is the lure that we chase, like the cartoon donkey with the carrot in front of us, to go out into the world and say, Look at me, here, I am human. This is my humanity. Recognize me.

And what we get, in a somewhat similar situation to the master and the slave, is we get these inputs and likes from people, that because they arent real to us as humans, cant actually feed that desire for recognition. Because we dont see them as humans. Because theyre strangers. Theyre just people out there in the ether. Were sort of compulsively chasing this desire for recognition and instead getting attention.

Attention is a broader category than recognition. Recognition is a specific and rarefied form of attention. I actually tend to think of it, as Ive been constructing this in my head, theres attention at the lowest level, then theres recognition, and theres love, as the three ascending forms of human engagement.

Attention is just someone notices you. Recognition is someone sees you, recognizes you as a person, and love is someone feels for you. We want to be recognized, we want to be loved, and were on the internet getting nothing but attention all the time, because thats kind of all the medium can produce.

You talk about how weve built this technology that creates a synthetic version of this most fundamental desire, but really, it almost seems like the web creates a synthetic version of human life as such, which is why most of what we do on there feels like this kind of pantomime, but a pantomime that mimics real life just enough to keep us coming back for more and more.

I think thats part of what is so tricky about it, because there are people that Ive interacted with online for literally decades. Jamelle Bouie, the New York Times columnist, and I have met in real life maybe a dozen times. Ran into him once on Marthas Vineyard. I remember once he did a book event with me. I used to see him around DC, but Jamelle is someone that Ive read for over a decade, who Ive interacted with, who Ive corresponded with about the things that hes writing or the things that Im writing or working on.

Hes someone that I feel quite close to, in a certain way, because of the internet. I mean, I imagine some earlier iteration, maybe it would have been that I wrote letters to him, he wrote letters to me, or something like that. And I dont want to overstate our closeness. Were not. I know him and respect him and feel quite warmly and fondly towards him. But what Im saying is that theres a kind of relationship there that I have with a bunch of people that, again, is in that good space that does feel both human, but also mostly enabled by the medium, but thats us, and its a narrow slice in there.

My point is that the genuineness of that, the genuineness that you can feel, where sometimes this will happen, someone will announce a child is born to them or some tragedy, and again, you will feel a genuine feeling of human tug, about a person whos fundamentally, IRL, a stranger, that you nonetheless feel approximate to, close to, invested in. Again, theres something so profound in that. Its more than, to me, a facsimile. Its actually like playing the same strings that are like the deepest chords of our soul, basically.

I think youre right. We want to be seen by other people with whom were interacting online. We want to be recognized. We demand it, but we cant really get it because its, by and large, an unequal relationship; we can only recognize the other, we cant be fully recognized by them.

Its almost like you have this kind of virtual wall between people online. It collapses everyone on the other side into almost an abstraction, a non-person, or some kind of avatar onto which we project whatever we want. Thats enough to satisfy or engage our attention. Its not enough to satisfy our soul, and I love that youre teasing that out here.

Correct. That point about attention to me, and heres where Ive been trying to give a lot of sustained thought to attention, because the writing project Im working on now really focuses on this, is that theres also something really profound about how attention works. This is, again, is an area that is very well trod. Tim Wus book, called The Attention Merchants, gets into some of this.

So, theres a very powerful market for our attention. But the thing thats really interesting about attention is our ability to control it is essentially constitutive of our consciousness as humans.

So the thing that actually makes us human beings is that we can, at will, shine the flashlight of mental focus on what we want to. If I say to you right now, to the listener, I say right now, conjure the image and the sound of a sprinkler on a lawn on a warm summer day. You can do that. Well, as far as we know, were the only species that can do that. Its possible, again, this is a long philosophical literature that maybe dogs are running around doing this or dolphins or whatever, but as best we can tell, this ability to at will, to take the flashlight of thought, shine it on the thing, conjure things, bring them forward, this is essentially constitutive of what it means to be conscious.

And yet, theres another part of our attention, what psychologists call preconscious attention, that we cant control. When a siren comes wailing down the street, the siren takes your attention against your will, involuntarily. Its designed to do so. Our lives online are this existential battle, like Odysseus tied to the mast as he passes the sirens, to wrest control back of the very thing that defines us as humans, which is the volitional control over our own mental focus, as it is constantly being battled for by enormously powerful supercomputers and corporations attempting to involuntarily extract it.

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