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Bruno Maçães Profile picture
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22 Oct, 4 tweets, 1 min read
US election is a clash of two fantasy worlds. I would say two television series. Question is do viewers change the channel
Or better put: which channel can keep the show from being swamped by reality?
The storyline:
If Biden wins it is not because he promises a return to reality, it’s because he promises Americans a much more febrile and super-agitated dreamworld

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More from @MacaesBruno

Bruno Maçães Profile picture
18 Oct
ft.com/content/700355…
I can’t quite believe all these analysts saying the second wave took everyone by surprise
After rising for months, footfall in cafés, restaurants, retail and leisure venues started in early October to decline again in many European cities, including Paris, London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Madrid.
Read 4 tweets
Bruno Maçães Profile picture
18 Oct
Reading Latour’s Down to Earth for the first time. Not a bad book at all
So he argues the temporal arrow is now exhausted and being replaced by the opposing paths of escaping reality altogether or returning to the terrestrial
Latour wants to replace the clash between left and right with a new clash between terrestrialism and its ideological opposite (what I call virtualism)
Read 4 tweets
Bruno Maçães Profile picture
17 Oct
Media was very free during Trump years. Might find it more difficult during Biden - simply because asking questions will no longer be classified under resistance and could well be classified as promoting the interests of a foreign opponent
One of the reasons I never thought Trump posed any risk to US democracy - reminder that those like me who argued that back in 2016 were proved right - was the adversarial relation between Trump and the media. Not there for Biden
Yes, I am taking a victory lap. Was much easier in 2016 to say Trump posed a mortal threat to American democracy and the vast, vast majority of commentators took that view
Read 6 tweets
Bruno Maçães Profile picture
15 Oct
America is run by lawyers; China is run by engineers. Engineers are pragmatic. Their key text is the science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, in which, as in most of his books, survival is everything, and scientists make tough choices lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/…
Quite an interesting article, showing some popular arguments inside China, but also pointing out their contradictions
Chinese liberal Trumpists celebrate whenever he targets a big Chinese enterprise – Huawei or TikTok or WeChat – just as they approve ‘herd immunity’ as ‘the ultimate humanity’. Like Trump, they think the cure can’t be worse than the disease.
Read 7 tweets
Bruno Maçães Profile picture
15 Oct
Those people in Europe arguing for strong content moderation in tech platforms should look to yesterday’s episode as a cautionary tale. Sure we want to go down this road?
Imagine for the sake of argument that the rule announced by Twitter was applied across the ten largest platforms. Information about a public official not authorized by him could not be accessed on Google, FB, Amazon, Twitter, etc, etc
Could we still call this society a democracy? What would distinguish it from, say, China of the critical matter of free speech and information access?
Read 5 tweets
Bruno Maçães Profile picture
15 Oct
Twitter has now explained its decision, hours later, and the explanation is as stunning as the original act. First, it claims information whose obtainment has not been authorized - by those affected by it? - cannot be communicated on the platform
This by itself would undermine the foundations of a democratic society: the powerful and the privileged would be safely protected from every kind of scrutiny
Second, the cynicism is extraordinary: a network built and organized for the dissemination of unauthorized content has discovered it has reservations about it only in the case where the political stakes are exceptionally high
Read 5 tweets

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