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Hello and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, tech news editor at the Guardian US. Thanks for joining me.
This week on my iPhone
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– New York Post: 190
– Loose: 121
Elon in the election campaign
Elon Musk is baffled by Donald Trump.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO funded a pro-Trump political action committee with tens of millions of dollars and planned a busy campaign schedule to boost the former president in Pennsylvania. He speaks with Trump several times a week and has urged other billionaires to endorse the Republican candidate en masse in private meetings, according to the new york times.
Taken together, Musk’s actions amount to something unprecedented in modern times: a man who is both the world’s richest and the owner of an influential mass media outlet throwing his weight behind a political candidate. He is no longer a billionaire who gets into politics. Elon Musk is a political actor who is here to stay.
Last weekend, Musk appeared with Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of Trump’s first assassination attempt. He is scheduled to make more stops in the Keystone State in the three weeks until the election. political reports. He is also offering a $47 referral bonus have anyone who gets registered voters in any swing state sign a petition put out by his political action committee, America Pac. Keep in mind that Musk forced all Tesla employees to return to the office five days a week in mid-2022. One wonders how he will conduct the company’s business with his plans to spend so much time in Pennsylvania .
The Tesla CEO is making contributions both online and in real life. You are using Twitter/X for your political purposes: took control @America for America Pac this week. Last month, it stifled the circulation of Hacked Trump campaign materials. published by an independent journalist. On Musk’s own feed, there are incessant endorsements of Trump and retweets from those who support him.
Trump seems enthusiastic about all of the above, sending out a fundraising email with the subject line “Elon! Elon! Elon! and asking his followers to buy the black-on-black “Dark Maga” hat that Musk wore in Pennsylvania while jumping for joy behind Trump.
As the world’s richest man fights for the Republican nominee, he’s taking a path familiar to Trump surrogates going down the rabbit hole. He is increasingly appealing to the fringe wings of the Make America Great Again movement. In Pennsylvania, Musk said: “This will be the last election in America if you don’t vote.” It is a joke reminiscent of an assault on the Capitol. He keeps repeating the phrase that he will go to prison if Kamala Harris wins.
Trump has expressed the same sentiment, albeit in a more optimistic version, commenting in July to a group of Christian supporters: “In four years, you won’t have to vote again. “We’ll fix it so well you won’t have to vote.” In a way to end democracy, that’s a hopeful thing to say. Musk’s version is the negative of Trump’s, full of election-denying fatality. The contrast is similar to the dynamic between Trump and JD Vance, who has offered extreme anti-abortion views in speeches and interviews, while Trump himself has attempted to sidestep the issue, repeating a line about returning it to the states.
Musk follows Trump even on scientific issues, which you would think would be of utmost importance to the tech company CEO. But in a interview this week with former Fox News host Tucker CarlsonMusk flirted with the anti-vaccine movement as he walked away from the cliff: “I’m not anti-vaccine in general… We shouldn’t be forcing people to get vaccinated,” he said, before praising smallpox and polio vaccines. Trump himself has called the Covid injection “one of humanity’s greatest achievements.” However, during this campaign, he said he will cut funding to schools with vaccine mandates and named Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most notorious anti-vaxxer, to his transition team.
In the same conversation with Carlson, Musk repeated a comment he had earlier retracted, wondering aloud why no one was trying to assassinate Harris.
Musk previously called Trump a “stone-cold loser.” Trump once vindictively said he could make the tech mogul “bend the knee.” The strange alliance has affected at least one of Musk’s businesses. With its shift to the right and the launch of the Hot Wheels-style Cybertruck, Tesla has gone from a brand coveted by Hollywood and Silicon Valley types to one beloved by police. It is a transformation very similar to that of Musk. The company’s value has dropped tens of billions of dollars.
We will closely follow Musk’s next steps in the election campaign.
Art on your Samsung TV versus art in a museum
What is the purpose of digital reproduction of a painting?
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Samsung announced yesterday that it had partnered to license two dozen paintings from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York to appear on the company’s Frame televisions. To promote the collaboration, the Korean electronics giant organized a tour of MoMA. We saw Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Claude Monet’s Huge Water Lilies, and And Then We Saw The Minotaur’s Daughter by surrealist painter Leonora Carrington.
Two weeks before the announcement, the Mauritshuis Museum in the Netherlands published a study that measured the neurological effects of art. Scientists discovered that original works of art stimulate a response in viewers’ brains 10 times stronger than that elicited by reprints of the same paintings.
Philosopher Walter Benjamin theorized the study’s results nearly 100 years ago. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in 1937, he argued that original works possessed an ineffable aura that their replicas could never match. Samsung seems to agree with him by inviting journalists on a private tour of MoMA to see the original works. So what’s the benefit of a piece of art on a Frame TV?
Robin Sayetta, MoMA’s head of business development, said during the tour that the partnership aligns with the museum’s goal to “expand and expand access to modern and contemporary art.” I would agree. Benjamin wrote of reproducing a work of art: “Above all, it allows the original to meet the viewer halfway.”
Opt out
Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column where we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance.
You have the cutest baby ever and you want the world to know it. But you’re also worried about what might happen to your baby photo once you post it to the nebulous world of the Internet. Should you publish it?
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What worries you?
Honor children’s consent
Avoid technological surveillance
Online Predators
Artificial intelligence
Dry
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We explain a variety of options to protect your child’s online privacy and their implications:
Cover your child’s face with an emoji (make sure you edit the image on your own phone, not on Instagram)
Take and share photos with children’s faces turned upside down
Send photos to friends and family directly using a shared iCloud or Google Photos album
Limit apps’ access to your photos
Send photos via encrypted messaging services like Signal
Set your accounts to private
Share photos in a closed group chat or Facebook group (10-20 people max, and you must know them personally)
For more information, read Johana Bhuiyan’s full column.