How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic

As the US grapples with an ongoing bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle, the country’s health agencies are ramping up surveillance efforts and working to develop a vaccine if needed

By Grace Wade
26 April 2024

Dairy cows at a farm in the US
Shutterstock / Roman Melnyk

As a bird flu virus continues to spread among dairy cattle in the US, the country’s health agencies are actively preparing for the possibility of an outbreak in people.

“The risk [of bird flu] remains low at this time, but we continue to be in a strong readiness posture as new data becomes available,” said Vivien Dugan at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at a meeting of health officials on 25 April.

A top priority is tracking the virus’s spread. So far, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has confirmed H5N1, a subtype of the bird flu virus, in dairy cows on 33 farms across eight states, and in six cats on farms in three of those states.

Genetic sequencing found that only one of the 260 samples from sick dairy cows so far has a mutation indicating H5N1 has adapted to infecting mammals, said Rosemary Sifford at the USDA during the meeting. However, this marker has been seen before in other sick mammals, and it didn’t impact the ability of the virus to transmit between mammals. Plus, the other 10 samples from the same herd where this one was collected didn’t have the same mutation.

“It very much remains an avian virus with no significant changes… In other words, it is not becoming a [cow] virus,” said Sifford

The CDC has tested 23 people with close contact to the animals for the virus, according to data presented at the meeting. Only one of them was positive – a dairy worker in Texas whose only symptom was eye redness. To boost testing capabilities, the CDC recently increased funding to genetic sequencing centres in six states, said Dugan.

Another key measure being taken is ensuring the safety of the milk supply in the US. Milk from infected cattle contains high amounts of the virus. While milk from sick animals shouldn’t be entering the milk supply, initial testing from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found that 1 in 5 milk samples contain genetic traces of bird flu.

“Importantly, that doesn’t mean the samples contain intact, infective virus,” said Donald Prater at the FDA. The testing method used detects any genetic material, including that of dead virus.

The vast majority of milk sold in the US is pasteurised, a process that kills pathogens with high heat. No study has assessed pasteurisation’s effectiveness against H5N1, but studies of similar influenza viruses suggest it would be, said Prater. This is why people should avoid consuming or touching raw milk products.

Two vaccine candidates for H5N1 are also in the works. Initial testing by the CDC indicates both are effective in lab tests against the current strain in cattle, said Dugan.

As part of a pre-established protocol, the US Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) is stockpiling materials for a bird flu vaccine, said David Boucher at ASPR in the meeting. This includes manufacturing the part of the vaccine, called the antigen, that mounts an immune response to the virus. ASPR and its commercial partners have already filled hundreds of thousands of vaccines for H5N1 that, if needed, can be quickly dispensed for clinical testing or emergency use, he said.

“Based on the CDC’s current risk of the situation, vaccination is not a tool needed at this time. We do want to be ready if that changes, though,” said Boucher. Enough material is stockpiled to churn out an additional 10 million doses, too. And ASPR has contracts with vaccine manufacturers to ramp up production even more so if necessary.

“If we need to pull any of these levers, we are ready to do so,” said Boucher.

From petri dish to plate: meet the company hoping to bring lab-grown fish to the table

People want more seafood than the oceans can sustainably supply, so a German firm aims to plug that gap with cultivated fish – but are consumers ready to buy it?


Sophie Kevany in Hamburg
Sun 28 Apr 2024 

THE GUARDIAN

The redbrick offices, just north of Hamburg’s River Elbe and a few floors below Carlsberg’s German headquarters, are an unexpectedly low-key setting for a food team gearing up to produce Europe’s first tonne of lab-grown fish.

But inside Bluu Seafood, past the slick open-plan coffee and cake bar, the rooms are dominated by gleaming white tiles, people bustling about in lab coats, rows of broad-bottomed beakers and pieces of equipment more at home in a science-fiction thriller. A 50-litre tank (a bioreactor) is filled with what looks like a cherry-coloured energy drink. The liquid, known as “growth medium”, is rich with sugars, minerals, amino acids and proteins designed to give the fish cells that are added to it the boost they need to multiply by the million.

You can maintain the same nutritional benefits, but without the possible microplastics or other contaminationSeren Kell

The aim is to one day sell the resulting product – which will be actual fish rather than a plant-based substitute – to shoppers as a more environmentally friendly alternative to depleting the sea in order to meet demand.

“With cultivated fish, you can also maintain the same nutritional benefits, like the omegas, but without the possible allergens, microplastics, or other contamination,” says Seren Kell, science and technology manager at the Good Food Institute (GFI).

The fish grown in the bioreactor is then mixed with plant-based ingredients to make fish balls and breaded fingers.

Atlantic salmon cells are taken out of a cryotank in the Bluu Seafood lab. Photograph: Henrik Gergen/Bluu

At this early stage, the company’s first planned destination for its products is not the local restaurants but Singapore, a country where cultivated meat is already so well known, you can chat to taxi drivers about it, says Bluu Seafood co-founder and marine biologist, Sebastian Rakers.

“When we told our taxi driver that we were working on cultivated fish, he said ‘I know that, it’s the future. Many chefs would like to put it on the menu here.’”

Singapore is committed to reducing its reliance on food imports. Lab-grown fish and meat are part of a national strategy to locally and sustainably produce 30% of the country’s food by 2030. That plan, says Rakers, is “on everyone’s lips”.

Lab-grown chicken can already be found in select quantities on restaurant menus in Singapore and America, with other types of meat expected soon. But while trends suggest many people are switching away from meat, the perceived health benefits of fish could be an advantage for lab-grown producers.


“Fish has a ‘health halo’,” says Kell. “But there is a growing awareness that seafood is not sustainable. In the EU there is certainly a question over diminishing fish stocks, and cultivated seafood could benefit from that.”

A recent report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates there is a 28m-tonne gap between how much seafood people want and what can be supplied. One sign of a serious search for an alternative source of production, adds Kell, is a major EU research project called Feasts, funded by the Horizon programme, that included cultivated fish research in its latest €7m (£6m) funding offer.

Prototype fish balls. The fish Bluu Seafood grows in the bioreactor is mixed with plant-based ingredients to make fish balls and breaded fingers. Photograph: Anna Brauns/Bluu

The type of lab-grown product will matter too, with items such as fish balls, fingers or nuggets a better bet for making it to mass markets, says Hanna Tuomisto, a sustainable food systems professor at the Helsinki Institute, who studies cellular agriculture. Because of their cellular mix, whole pieces of lab-grown meat and “finless fish” are more complex and therefore more costly to produce.


“A chicken nugget, with undifferentiated cells, is easier to produce than the more complicated and time-consuming process of producing a whole piece of cultivated meat or fish that needs muscle and fat cells,” she says.

A clear advantage to bringing manufactured fish to the market over meat, is a potentially narrow price gap between the lab grown product and the real thing.

“If the holy grail is to match price parity with conventional animal products, then there is a narrower gap for say tuna or salmon [than for cultivated chicken],” says Kell.

Last year, a tasting menu allowing diners to try cultivated chicken at Washington DC’s China Chilcano restaurant cost $70 (£56), compared with a Peruvian-style roasted organic whole chicken at $44. In US supermarkets, you pay about $4 (£3.20) for a pound of traditional chicken. Bluu Seafood estimates a portion of its fish balls will cost about $20 in restaurants, compared with $15 for the regular version.

Dr Sebastian Rakers, CEO at Bluu Seafood. Photograph: Henrik Gergen/Bluu

Price gaps may be even narrower for pieces of whole salmon, says Justin Kolbeck, CEO and co-founder of Wildtype, a cultivated-seafood producer hoping to receive US regulatory sales approval soon. “Salmon is at least $10 [a pound] and prices for premium salmon can exceed $80. That’s one reason I think the economics are different for cultivated fish.” He declined to go into detail about possible prices for his products.


A crucial factor in whether or not cultivated fish takes off is public appetite for it. An unscientific poll on the street near Bluu Seafood’s Hamburg headquarters suggested not everyone was in favour, although most people were positive. “Yes, I would try it, at least once,” says a woman in her 20s. However, another says she “would not pay for lab-grown fish if it was half the price”. She expressed a concern, which may be insurmountable for some, over the comparatively untested nature of cell-based products.

A more precise 2023 consumer study in Japan, the world’s fifth largest seafood consumer, found about 88% of respondents would be unwilling to pay a higher price for cell-based seafood. The other 12% said they would be prepared to pay more, and, of those, about 8% said they would pay “a much higher price”. They will soon have the opportunity to make that choice with one company promising to begin selling lab-grown eel in Japan by 2026.

The same study found that willingness to pay more was determined by an understanding, or not, of lab-grown foods. Those already aware of cell-based seafood “were over 14 times more likely to agree to pay a higher price”, it said.

Rakers had consumer awareness in mind when he made the decision to launch in Singapore. “It’s nice to have your product in a place where people understand it, where people are ready to buy,” he says.

However, it may simply be the novelty that gets people to part with their money in the first instance. As Prof Tuomisto says: “I would probably pay anything just to try it.”

Inside the labs at Bluu Seafood. The company hopes to hit ‘an industrial level of fish cell production’ in the next few years. Photograph: Anna Brauns/Bluu


The prospect of his product one day leapfrogging other cultivated meats to supermarket shelves is not impossible, Rakers says, but not just because it’s better for the ocean, fish populations and free of contaminants.


In the face of climate change and food insecurity, New Zealand considers lab-grown fruit

“Fish have a much higher regeneration capacity than mammals,” he says. “Up to 70% of lost tissue can be fully regenerated.” They can even regrow inner organs, he says. To be able to fully regenerate, fish need to reproduce cells and recruit cells quickly to cover wounds. “That is a real advantage for us. It means we can get more activated cells faster. We think we can hit an industrial level of fish cell production by 2026 or 2027.”

Because the cells Rakers and his team produce will be mixed with seasoning and other plant-based proteins to make fish balls, fingers and other products, the final food volumes will be higher than the cell output. But Rakers says the aim is to keep the fish cell ratio as high as possible. “The more cultivated fish meat we add, the cleaner our ingredient list. It’s not like plant-based fish, where you have to mimic fish. It is fish.”

SPACE

Interview

‘We live in a golden time of exploration’: astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger on the hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life

Austrian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger has spent her life hunting for signs of life in the universe. Here she talks about aliens, space exploration and why studying cosmology is like eating pizza


Emma Beddington
Sat 27 Apr 2024

The ObserverAlien life

Staring into the abyss… Am I really reaching anyone out there?” Lisa Kaltenegger is laughing about the unsatisfactory experience of teaching astrophysics over Zoom during Covid lockdowns, but she could be talking about her vocation: trying to discover if there’s life beyond our solar system.

Kaltenegger founded the Carl Sagan Institute in 2015 to investigate just that. A burst of sunny energy and infectious enthusiasm on a grey day, she’s speaking to me from the legendary extraterrestrial life researcher’s old office, now hers, overlooking the leafy Cornell campus in upstate New York. The institute brings together researchers across a range of disciplines to work out what signs of life on other planets might look like from here, so that we recognise them if (or when) we find them.

It’s a big job at the forefront of exceptionally hard science. Kaltenegger collaborates with Nasa, has won multiple awards and published extensively over two decades. But her latest project is no peer-reviewed paper: it’s a pop science book about the search for life. Alien Earths – at least the UK edition – has a cover of brightly coloured orbs; inside there are cartoonish line drawings and a bookmark with planet stickers, which Kaltenegger mentions delightedly. It’s not a kids’ book (though interested teens and younger enthusiasts will love it), some of the concepts are necessarily complex, but it’s a joyful, eye-opening introduction to a topic many are too intimidated to tackle.

That includes me. I’ve always considered the universe – terrifying, unknowable, probably hostile – none of my business, but reading Alien Earths, several surprising things happened. Initially, it made me cry: overwhelmed at the vastness, the age, the mystery, of the universe. But gradually, as I began to grasp the basics, I started seeking out, not avoiding, news stories about space. Within weeks, my husband, my son and I had were enthusiastically debating the possibility of alien life. It’s exactly the kind of conversation I would previously have checked out of entirely, but Alien Earths left me both empowered to believe I can grasp the basics of the cosmos, and truly curious to know more.
If life is everywhere and it leaves signs in the atmosphere, then we will find itLisa Kaltenegger

Sagan was a great populariser of cosmic exploration, but what pushed Kaltenegger to follow in his footsteps? She wanted to step back and think about the big picture to see if there was anything she was missing in the search for life, she says, and realised the best way to do so was “telling a friend”: (a nice description: that’s just how the book’s chatty tone feels). But she was also keen to communicate something she thinks gets lost in the general pessimism of the age. “We live in this incredible golden time of exploration. We are so close to a change in our understanding of the cosmos. We are living it, and we are explorers.”


If, like me, this has passed you by, let me explain, thanks to my newfound Alien Earths confidence. For life to exist, you need a rocky planet with an atmosphere in the “habitable zone”: neither too hot nor too cold. One in five of the stars you see in the night sky (around 20bn in the Milky Way) has a planet in the habitable zone, but learning anything about them is exceptionally hard, because they are so distant. Even detecting planets outside our solar system (exoplanets) requires a sort of educated guesswork, based on observing how light from a star changes.

The first exoplanet was detected in 1995; now more than 5,000 have been identified. In Alien Earths, Kaltenegger’s excitement is infectious as she relates how she discovered that the Kepler telescope had detected two potential candidates for life; it’s even more palpable as she talks. “We had no idea how long we’d have to wait for planets that are rocks within the habitable zone. And then Kepler found them and they found two. I was like, if they already found two…”

Out of this world: a mirror being fitted to the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021. Photograph: Laura Betz/AP

The next leap forward was the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched on Christmas Day 2021. Kaltenegger explains: “With this big telescope, for the first time in history we have the chance to figure out what’s in the air of other planets that could be Earths.” That means we could soon know if we’re not alone. “If life is everywhere and it leaves signs in the atmosphere, then we will find it,” she says. Among the candidates she has her eye on is our closest neighbour, the Proxima Centauri system. “Even the next star over has a planet that could potentially be another Earth; it’s just on our doorstep.” I find myself getting goosebumps when she talks about how close we might actually be. “I think about it like a history book. There are going to be two sections of this history book in the long run – the time before humankind knew whether or not they were alone and the time after. We are on that edge.”

Of course, plenty of people believe we already know, and last year’s claims at a Congressional hearing relating to alien crafts and “non-human” life have only fanned the flames (despite Pentagon denials). The book makes extremely short shrift of UFO sightings (“The subject is full of poor observations”), but what does Kaltenegger make of our enduring obsession? “To me, the fascination is based on an excitement and hope that we might not be alone in the cosmos. But now we have entered a completely new golden era of exploration where we don’t have to stake all our hopes on supposed top-secret government programmes or phenomena that could be created by a variety of events, like weather patterns. Instead, we have now found planets circling other stars and can actually read their light fingerprint.”

Preparing for what the JWST might find is at the heart of Kaltenegger’s work. Using biology, geology, astronomy, astrophysics and the knowledge of how life on Earth evolved, her team models how the atmospheres of other habitable planets might look. They “melt rocks” and grow microorganisms, explore all the possible colours of life. “I wonder if our imagination can cover even a fraction of the possibilities,” she says at one point and I’m struck by how much of her work is speculative, imaginative, creative. That’s not how I imagined astrophysics, I say. “I agree. I think this is also why a lot of people don’t want to go into science. They think it’s stifling, it’s rigid, it’s dry and, at least at the forefront of science, it’s not that way, because you have to imagine – it’s an educated guess.”

Reaching the best educated guess involves casting the net as widely and diversely as possible. That’s one of the guiding principles of the institute. Experts from different disciplines bring specific expertise and insight and so do people from different backgrounds. “If you have six people with exactly the same training, same ethnicity, same gender, they will probably produce six times the same solution for a problem. The more diverse you can make it, the more solutions you will find.” The launch of the JWST, she says, involved “people from everywhere, literally the whole globe. I think sometimes it’s not so visible how it takes an international village – or a huge city! – to get these space telescopes going. But that village exists.”

Kaltenegger’s career and philosophy defy the historic view of science – “an ivory tower, a white male in a white coat” – but that hasn’t been without challenges. A brilliant student growing up in Austria, she was advised against studying science, then as an engineering undergraduate (she took her physics degree simultaneously, only possible, she laughs, because the city of Graz was small enough to bike between campuses), she and the only other female student were sometimes ignored by “Stone Age” teachers. There’s an anecdote in Alien Earths about men grousing she only got a job “because I was a woman”; another about a hiring committee quizzing her on whether she had kids (her daughter actually features proudly in one of the book’s illustrations – she shows me). Mostly her professional experiences have been supportive – one early boss firmly stopped her doing the photocopying – but she’s obviously no pushover either. In her first job, she tells me: “The first time I made the coffee, I made it so bad. It was super funny, they were like, ‘Oh, you know what, you don’t have to!’ It was a little bit devious.”

One of the most important purchases setting up the Carl Sagan Institute was ‘two really good espresso machines’

Speaking of coffee, it is almost a character in its own right in Alien Earths, it features so heavily. One of the most important purchases setting up the institute, Kaltenegger says, were “two really good espresso machines”. She truly loves coffee, but the real purpose was to stimulate connection. “If you have really good coffee, people will congregate and talk about what they’re doing. And there are always cookies and dark chocolate in my office – not even a question, there’s always food.”

Kaltenegger must be an incredible teacher, not just because of the snacks, or the lecture on impostor syndrome she casually mentions giving students (“I know you’re good enough. You’re great! Come back to my office whenever you’re in doubt.”) In Alien Earths, she conveys complex concepts and numbers too big to comprehend in a way anyone – even me – can grasp, using imagery. If our solar system were a cookie, our nearest planetary neighbour is nearly 9,000 cookies (four football fields) away, for example. There’s a thought experiment where she invites readers to wonder whether a banana is an alien; the expansion of the universe after the big bang is like “raisins in raisin-bread dough” and explaining how little of the cosmos we can see or grasp, she says we’re “like a piece of pepperoni on a pizza trying to imagine the whole pizza’s shape” (still with the snacks). There’s something very generous about her desire to bring us along for the “amazing ride we’ve all been on”, and are still on.

I notice, too, how often she describes movement in the universe as a dance; it’s quite poetic. “Actually, being Austrian, I went to dance school,” she laughs (Latin was her speciality). “This kind of influenced my thinking about gravity, because it is basically a dance, give and take. It’s really funny how the thing I did such a long time ago – and I still love to dance! – also shaped my perception. You want to have as diverse a team as you humanly can, because you never know what actually brings the idea that might solve a problem.”

Kaltenegger is optimistic we’ll soon solve enough of those problems to move from the first to the second half of that history book she imagines. But even if life proves elusive, and getting an answer takes longer and is harder than predicted, she’s happy imagining her work “will allow somebody to do it in the future”. It was important to show in the book how collaborative and interconnected the search for life is, “not just globally, but through time. Ideas vibrate through time and are still influencing what we do and see.” On tough days, she says, she imagines a future cosmonaut on their first mission.“They have this very old, funky star map, as a memento. And the first couple of dots, I made those.”

Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger is published by Penguin at £25. Buy it for £22 at guardianbookshop.com

Anger at party funding scandal in Japan threatens to bring down PM Kishida

Despite talk of a Nobel peace prize, Japan’s leader is facing a backlash among voters as key byelection approaches

Fumio Kishida’s popularity has declined in the face of the weakening yen, the high cost of living and Japan’s falling birth rate.

 Photograph: Yoshio Tsunoda/AFLO/REX/Shutterstock


Justin McCurry in Tokyo
Sun 28 Apr 2024 

THE GUARDIAN

In the past fortnight Fumio Kishida has been mentioned as a possible recipient of the Nobel peace prize and praised for a speech to congress in which he urged the US not to retreat into isolation.

But since his return to Tokyo after a successful summit with Joe Biden, Japan’s prime minister has been buffeted by domestic political headwinds that this weekend could spell the beginning of the end of his administration.


Kishida, who came to office in late 2021 promising a “new capitalism”, a more robust Japan on the international stage and solutions to the country’s demographic crisis, faces the toughest test of his premiership when voters go to the polls in three byelections on Sunday.

His Liberal Democratic party (LDP) was unable to find candidates for the votes in two constituencies, where the LDP incumbents were tainted by scandal - and is pinning its hopes on the Shimane 1st district.

The rural constituency on the coast of the Sea of Japan is considered a conservative stronghold, but it is a measure of the size of the problems facing Kishida that speculation is mounting that his party could be unseated.

Despite wooing his American audience – a feat that earned him a bump in his approval ratings – Kishida has little else to endear himself or his party to Japanese voters.

The yen is in freefall against the dollar, the cost-of-living crisis shows little sign of easing, and there are questions over how to fund policies to address Japan’s low birth rate and its biggest military build-up since the end of the war.

But the longest shadow is cast by a funding scandal, first reported last year, that has become a focal point for public anger amid growing doubts about Kishida’s ability to lead the LDP to victory in the next lower house elections.

While that vote is not due for well over a year, the scandal, in which 85 LDP lawmakers were found to have siphoned unreported profits from the sale of tickets to party gatherings into slush funds, has denied Kishida any room for manoeuvre.

Fumio Kishida bids farewell to members of the US congress following his speech on 11 April. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

Instead, defeat in Shimane, added to certain victory for non-LDP candidates in Sunday’s other byelections, could trigger an early challenge to his leadership when the party holds presidential elections in September, with the winner automatically made prime minister.

Victory in the byelection, on the other hand, could give Kishida enough momentum to call a “put up or shut up” snap election this summer.

But days before the Shimane vote, Japanese media reported that the LDP candidate, a former finance ministry bureaucrat, was trailing his rival from the main opposition Constitutional Democratic party.

That, say analysts, reflects a wider dissatisfaction with Kishida’s administration, whose approval ratings have plunged to record lows well under 30% - the point at which Japanese governments are said to be entering choppy electoral waters.

“If the LDP loses Shimane … Kishida is likely to come under pressure from within his party in a way that he has not yet experienced since winning the party leadership race [in September 2021],” said James Brady, vice president of the Teneo advisory firm.

“The party’s response to the slush fund issue has been consistently unconvincing to the public, and there is little reason to think that the planned reforms would change that trend.”

Attempts to repair the damage inflicted by the funding scandal, and the promise of reform to political funding laws, have also failed to defuse criticism in the media, with one newspaper describing Kishida’s response as “utterly unacceptable”.

While 39 LDP lawmakers were punished, Kishida escaped sanction despite evidence that his own faction had also under-reported ticket sales – apparent double standards that risk sparking a factional power struggle that would leave him bloodied as he attempts to retain his party’s endorsement as LDP president this autumn.

Kishida may have taken comfort from the suggestion last week by the US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell that he should be the joint recipient, with South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, of the Nobel peace prize for their attempts to address their countries’ bitter historical legacy and show a united front against nuclear-armed North Korea.

But even as he implored the US to overcome “self-doubt” over its global leadership – with a cautious eye on the possible return of Donald Trump – his focus was on the storm that awaited him in Japan.

Greeted by cheers as only the second Japanese leader to address a joint session of congress – the first was Shinzo Abe – Kishida could not resist a gentle dig at his parliamentary colleagues back home: “I never get such nice applause from the Japanese Diet [Japan’s version of congress].”

South Africa marks 30 years since apartheid amid growing discontent


Polls predict ANC likely to lose parliamentary majority, due to high unemployment and wealth inequality


Associated Press in Pretoria

Sat 27 Apr 2024 

South Africa marked 30 years since the end of apartheid and the birth of its democracy with a ceremony in the capital that included a 21-gun salute and the waving of the country’s multicoloured flag.

Any sense of celebration on the momentous anniversary was however set against a growing discontent with the current government.


As head of state, president Cyril Ramaphosa presided over the gathering in a huge white tent in the gardens of the government buildings in Pretoria.

He also spoke as the leader of the African National Congress party, which was widely credited with liberating South Africa’s black majority from the racist system of oppression that made the country a pariah for nearly half a century.


The ANC has been in power ever since the first democratic, all-race election of 27 April 1994, the vote that officially ended apartheid.

But this Freedom Day holiday fell against a poignant backdrop: analysts and polls predict that the waning popularity of the party once led by Nelson Mandela is likely to see it lose its parliamentary majority for the first time, as a new generation of South Africans make their voices heard next month in what may be the most important election since 1994.

“Few days in the life of our nation can compare to that day, when freedom was born,” Ramaphosa said in a speech centred on the nostalgia of 1994, when black people were allowed to vote for the first time, the once-banned ANC swept to power, and Mandela became the country’s first black president. “South Africa changed for ever. It signalled a new chapter in the history of our nation, a moment that resonated across Africa and across the world.

“On that day, the dignity of all the people of South Africa was restored.”

The president, who stood in front of a banner emblazoned with the word “Freedom”, also recognised the main problems South Africa still has three decades later with vast poverty and inequality, issues that will be central yet again when millions vote on 29 May. Ramaphosa conceded there had been “setbacks”.


The 1994 election changed South Africa from a country where black and other people of colour were denied most basic freedoms, not just the right to vote. Laws controlled where they lived, where they were allowed to go on any given day and what jobs they could have. After apartheid fell, a constitution was adopted guaranteeing the rights of all South Africans no matter their race, religion, gender or sexuality.

But that has not significantly improved the lives of millions, with South Africa’s black majority, which makes up more than 80% of the population of 62 million, still overwhelmingly affected by severe poverty.

The official unemployment rate of 32% is the highest in the world, and the rate for young people between the ages of 15 and 24 is higher than 60%. More than 16 million South Africans – 25% of the country – rely on monthly welfare grants for survival.

South Africa is still the most unequal country in the world in terms of wealth distribution, according to the World Bank, with race a key factor.

While the damage of apartheid remains difficult to undo, the ANC is increasingly being blamed for South Africa’s current problems.

In the week leading up to the anniversary, countless South Africans were asked what 30 years of freedom from apartheid meant to them. The dominant response was that while 1994 was a historic moment, it is now overshadowed by the joblessness, violent crime, corruption and near-collapse of basic services such as electricity and water that plagues South Africa in 2024.

It is also poignant that many South Africans who never experienced apartheid and are referred to as “Born Frees” are now old enough to vote.

Outside the tent where Ramaphosa spoke in front of mostly dignitaries and politicians, a group of young black South Africans born after 1994 and who support a new political party called Rise Mzansi wore T-shirts with the words “2024 is our 1994” on them. Their message was that they were looking beyond the ANC and for another change for their future in next month’s election.

“They don’t know what happened before 1994,” said Seth Mazibuko, an older supporter of Rise Mzansi and a well-known anti-apartheid activist in the 1970s.

“Let us agree that we messed up,” Mazibuko said of the past 30 years, which have left the youngsters standing behind him directly affected by the second-worst youth unemployment rate in the world behind Djibouti.

He added: “There’s a new chance in elections next month.”

The demise of Twitter: how a ‘utopian vision’ for social media became a ‘toxic mess’

In the early days it was seen as a place for ‘genuine public discourse’, but users have fled since Elon Musk took over. What went wrong?



Kate Lyons

Sat 27 Apr 2024

THE GUARDIAN

If anything is emblematic of the demise of Twitter, it is the rise and stall of the account of Oprah Winfrey.

Oprah joined the platform in 2009, tweeting for the first time live from her wildly popular TV show: “HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY.”

It was “a breakthrough moment” for the platform, says Axel Bruns, professor in the digital media research centre at Queensland University of Technology.

“That really was the moment where numbers absolutely took off.”

These days, Oprah still has an account on the now-renamed X, with 41.7m followers. But since November 2022, a month after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the site was finalised, she has posted just once – in January 2023, when she told Chelsea Clinton she was “still laughing out LoUD for real 😂” over Clinton accidentally wearing two different black shoes to an event.

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Debates about X have reignited in the last week, as the Australian government has taken the platform to court in an effort to get it to remove a video of a Sydney bishop being allegedly stabbed as he officiated a church service last week.

X says it has complied with orders to remove footage of the stabbing (though ironically, the post announcing its compliance had a comment directly underneath in which someone had shared the full and graphic video) and Musk has been scathing about Australia’s requests for the footage to be taken down. X has been contacted for comment.

The disinformation hurricane surrounding the Bondi stabbing marks the end of Twitter as a breaking news destination

Van Badham

But as the debate has raged about what responsibility social media platforms have for stopping the spread of violent or extremist content, another question has emerged: what even is Twitter/X any more?

What has become of a site that was once utterly indispensable to the news cycle and political debate and now is increasingly abandoned by those who once checked it religiously?
The beginning: ‘a utopian vision’

In Twitter’s early years, it had lofty goals, says a former employee at Twitter Australia, who does not wish to be named.


“I think back then it was definitely a utopian vision. Like so many of these founders, they really saw themselves as disruptors, as creating a space for genuine public discourse,” she says. “I think people really enjoyed it back then – it was a really fast-moving, innovative platform, you could get breaking news, you could follow and connect with people you really admired. It always had pockets of being a toxic swamp, even early on, but it wasn’t entirely like that.”

“It had social cachet,” she says. “Remember when everyone was obsessed with having a blue tick … and people who didn’t have one pretended not to care?”

Exact numbers of active monthly users are not available, but while Twitter/X has never had the broad mainstream appeal of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or TikTok, for years it had an outsize impact on the world of news and politics.

“It’s a very specific and limited audience,” Bruns says. “But the kind of audience you could reach on Twitter were journalists, politicians, activists, experts of various forms … often the people who are influential in other communities both online and offline.”

Belinda Barnet, senior lecturer in media and communications at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, says: “It became a company that really made itself absolutely central to the news cycle. In essence, it became a tool that journalists in particular just couldn’t afford to do without.”

This was partly because the functionality of Twitter – specifically @ mentions and hashtags – made it so good for breaking news.

Elon Musk’s battle over the Sydney church stabbing video is not about freedom of speech. It’s to titillate his followers

Belinda Barnet

In Japan, for instance, Twitter became big partly because in 2011, when the country was hit by the devastating tsunami, people were using it as a way of communicating and organising, the former Twitter employee says.

“It became a real lifeline for people, it’s the way people were getting rescued,” she said.

Pew research from 2021 found that 69% of US Twitter users said they got news from the site, 46% said the site had increased their understanding of current events and 30% said it had made them feel more politically engaged.

The breaking news functionality was not without its issues. While the immediacy of the platform gave voices to dissidents and citizen journalists, making it crucial for uprisings like those seen in the Arab spring, it also allowed politicians to circumvent the traditional mediation of journalists, says Bruns.

“There are quite a few politicians who essentially stopped giving interviews to journalists, because then they also have to expose themselves to critical questions, and basically just posted their announcements on Twitter.”

There have always been issues around misinformation and trolling, says Barnet, but the company adopted measures to try to combat some of the worst of the effects, by implementing what she calls the “three pillars”: blue tick verification of users, moderation policies and a trust and safety team.

“These things all worked in concert to make it reasonably reliable during a breaking news event, which is why people went there. Misinformation did go viral on the old Twitter, but they would often just kill the trend before it got anywhere,” she said.
The present: Musk’s wild west

All three of these pillars were dismantled swiftly after Musk acquired the platform at the end of 2022, Barnet says.

The trust and safety teams were among those fired by Musk in the wild weeks after he acquired the company for US$44bn and walked into the headquarters on his first day holding a ceramic sink. A video of Musk’s entrance was posted to the site with the caption: “Let that sink in”.

Many of those who had been blocked from the site for breaching its online rules, including Donald Trump, had their accounts reinstated (though Trump’s account was later blocked again).

The verification process changed dramatically. Instead of people being granted blue ticks because they were a public figure or worked for a recognised news site, ticks were now available for purchase.

The approach to moderation also changed. Musk’s spat with the Australian government reveals something about his vision for X, which he sees as a bastion of free speech.

“They’re very reluctant to engage in any kind of moderation,” says Bruns. “To some extent that represents a broader sense in the US about free speech that it is an absolute good above all. Whereas elsewhere in Australia and Europe and many other places there’s much more about needing to balance the rights of free speech and the right to freedom from harmful speech. And for many otherwise quite liberal people in the US, that sounds like censorship, essentially.”

Ironically, X has suspended accounts of people who have criticised Musk, including the accounts of several high-profile journalists from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post who had been critical of him in 2022. At the same time, he banned an account tracking the whereabouts of his own personal jet using publicly available data.

“Elon wants it both ways,” says Barnet. “He wants it to be the original Twitter, which was indeed, absolutely crucial to the news cycle”, but also to “take away the pillars, the processes that Twitter had worked out over years and years are what is conducive to a community that can find facts.”

“I think it’s turning into a toxic mess,” says Barnet.

The future: an uncontrollable place

Research from Pew found that in the first few months after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, 60% of US Twitter users took a break of a few weeks or more from the platform. A quarter of those surveyed said they did not see themselves using the site at all within a year.

Even the most prolific tweeters were using the platform less, with a 25% dip in the number of tweets they posted per month.

Whether the trend has continued is a harder question to answer, in part because under Musk, it has become prohibitively expensive for researchers studying social media to keep up their work.

For many years, Twitter made application programming interfaces (APIs) available to academic researchers and private sector organisations for a price. About a year ago, the cost to access these APIs skyrocketed.

What a surprise! Free speech absolutist Elon Musk doesn’t really love free speech

Arwa Mahdawi

Aaron Smith, director of data labs at Pew, says that his centre has developed a “fairly rich body of work” on Twitter over many years, but since the prices for accessing tweets increased – he says the annual fee to access the API is now “larger than our team’s entire research budget for a couple of years” – they have not been able to do any more research about the platform.

Bruns says academics are in the same boat. “You just can’t do any particularly explorative research, looking for hate speech bots or misinformation on the platform. Essentially, [X] pretty much priced themselves out of the market.”

He says this is a shame, as academic research on Twitter used to enable the platform to identify and clean up pockets of hate speech and misinformation, which will now go even more unchecked.

“It’s certainly already starting to transform into something that’s more similar to … platforms like Gab or Parler, or even [Trump’s] Truth Social where you’ve got far, far right people furiously agreeing with each other and furiously hating on everyone else.”

Even the former employee has since deactivated her account. “I think what it is now is a really dangerous space, it’s uncontrollable,” she says.

“I miss it sometimes. I always thought it was an amazing newswire for journalists and citizen journalists … I don’t know, I find myself sitting with breaking news and wondering where to go. There’s a hole that has been left behind. I’m hoping someone will try and fill that gap.”

‘Stormy weather’: Biden skewers Trump at White House correspondents’ dinner

US president made fun of Republican frontrunner’s legal woes while critics of his handling of Gaza war protested outside


David Smith in Washington

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 28 Apr 2024 

Joe Biden has shown no mercy to Donald Trump with a series of barbed jokes about his election rival, telling a gathering of Washington’s political and media elites: “I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner on Saturday night provided the ideal platform for Biden to continue a recent run of taking the fight to Trump with more aggressive rhetoric, cutting humour and personal insults.


But the jovial mood inside the room contrasted sharply with raucous demonstrations outside the Washington Hilton hotel. Hundreds of protesters shouted “Shame on you!” at White House officials, journalists and celebrities as they arrived at the dinner, condemning Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza and the media’s coverage of it.


US faculty speak up and stand alongside student Gaza protesters

Read more

As speculation about a debate between the two men intensifies, Biden – wearing tuxedo and black tie – opened his roast with a direct but joking focus on Trump, calling him “sleepy Don”, in reference to a nickname Trump had given the president previously.

“The 2024 election is in full swing and yes, age is an issue,” noted Biden, 81. “I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old.”

The president also skewered Trump over a recent speech in which he described the civil war battle at Gettysburg as “interesting”, “vicious”, “horrible” and “beautiful”. Biden said: “Speaking of history, did you hear what Donald just said about a major civil war battle? ‘Gettysburg – wow!’ Trump’s speech was so embarrassing, the statute of Robert E Lee surrendered again.”
View image in fullscreenPeople demonstrate in support of Palestinians in Gaza, during a protest near the annual White House Correspondents’ Association in Washington DC. Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters

Biden then made a reference to Trump’s falling out with his former vice-president, Mike Pence, who defied him over the 2020 election result. The president said: “Age is the only thing we have in common. My vice-president actually endorses me.” Vice-president Kamala Harris, sitting nearby on stage, laughed and applauded.

The president moved on to Trump’s criminal trial in New York, where he is accused of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to adult film performer Stormy Daniels. Biden said: “Donald has had a few tough days lately. You might call it Stormy weather.”

And then he brought up Trump’s recent scheme to sell “God Bless the USA Bibles” for $59.99. “Trump’s so desperate he started reading those Bibles he’s selling. Then he got to the first commandment: ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’ That’s when he put it down and said: “This book’s not for me.’”

Biden also poked fun at his own age and delivered some one-liners at the expense of the media. “Some of you complained that I don’t take enough of your questions. No comment.”

He added: “The New York Times issued a statement blasting me for ‘actively and effectively avoiding independent journalists’. Hey, if that’s what it takes to get the New York Times to say I’m active and effective, I’m for it.”

The president also struck a serious note, urging the media to stayed focused on the implications of November’s election. “I’m sincerely not asking you to take sides,” he said. “I’m asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment. Move past the horse-race numbers and the gotcha moments, and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalise our politics and focus on what’s actually at stake.”

There was also some gallows humour from Colin Jost, a comedian on the TV variety show Saturday Night Live, six months before an election that could see the return of Trump, who boycotted this event during his presidency and has called the media “the enemy of the people”. Jost said: “I’m honoured to be here hosting what is, according to swing state polls, the final White House correspondents’ dinner.”


Jost’s wife, the actor Scarlett Johansson, was among the 2,600 guests at the dinner along with Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Jon Hamm and Chris Pine. The comedian said: “The last time I was in DC I left my cocaine at the White House. Luckily, the president was able to put it to good use for his State of the Union.”

Biden’s age was naturally a target. “I’m not saying both candidates are old, but you know Jimmy Carter is out there thinking, ‘I could maybe win this thing.’ He’s only 99.”

Both speeches were well received. Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, praised Biden while taking a dig at his age: “The president made it through the speech so that’s a win for him at such a late hour. It’s never easy as a politician to deliver a joke. We’re not made to be funny. Don’t expect us to be funny. So any time you’re a politician, you get even a slight laugh, that’s a win.”

Earlier, guests ran the gauntlet of anti-war demonstrations outside the hotel, taking place after more than two dozen Palestinian journalists in Gaza released a public letter last week calling on their colleagues in the US to boycott the dinner.

“Shame on you!” protesters draped in the traditional Palestinian keffiyeh cloth shouted, running after men in tuxedos and suits and women in long dresses holding clutch purses as guests hurried inside for the dinner.


The demonstrators chanted “Shame on you for breaking bread!” and “Every time the media lies, a journalist in Gaza dies”. They held signs that said, “ABC: All Bullshit Constantly”, “CNN: Criminal News Network”, “Two-faced genocide Joe” and a giant banner that read, “Stop media complicity in genocide”. They laid out dozens of blue press vests, broken cameras and projected images of Palestinian journalists who have been killed.

Protester Ramah Kudaimi, 37, said: “It is shameful that while over 133 Palestinian journalists have been killed over the past almost seven months by the Israeli military, doing nothing more than covering what’s happening, the genocide in Gaza, journalists here in the US are partying it up with White House officials including President Biden in this moment when they are so complicit in what’s happening by continuing to send weapons to Israel, by continuing to refuse any sort of accountability for the war crimes Israel’s committing.”

Another demonstrator, who gave her name only as Yara, 24, said: “135 Palestinian journalists have been murdered at the hands of Israel since 7 October. They’ve asked to boycott this dinner. That call is not coming from organisers in DC; that is coming from the Palestinians in Gaza so we are asking that people heed that call and boycott the dinner tonight.”

She added: “It symbolises that everyone in that room does not care about the freedom of the press if they don’t care about the murder of press.”

Biden’s speech, which lasted about 10 minutes, made no mention of the ongoing war or the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. One of the few mentions came from Kelly O’Donnell, president of the correspondents’ association, who noted the deaths of journalists covering the war.

UK

Top Tory MP defects to Labour in fury at NHS crisis


Exclusive: Ex-health minister Dan Poulter, who also works as a hospital doctor, says Conservatives have become ‘nationalist party of the right’‘I’m resigning as a Tory MP and crossing the floor. Only Labour wants to restore our NHS’


Toby Helm 

Political editor

Observer.

Sat 27 Apr 2024 

A Tory MP and former health minister has staged a dramatic defection to Labour, saying the Conservatives have become a “nationalist party of the right” that has abandoned ­compassion and no longer prioritises the NHS.

Dr Dan Poulter, the MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, who works part-time as a mental health doctor in an NHS hospital, announced he was resigning as a Tory MP and would be taking the Labour whip until the next election in an exclusive interview with the Observer.

He said he would not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election. But, writing in the Observer, he says he envisages a role advising the Labour party on its policies on mental health while focusing more on his NHS work.

Poulter said his experiences on more than 20 night shifts over the last year in a severely overstretched accident and emergency department had been “truly life-changing” and persuaded him to defect to the only party he believed was now really committed to investing in improving the NHS.

He said: “I could not go on as part of that. I have to be able to look my NHS colleagues in the eye, my patients in the eye and my constituents in the eye. And I know that the Conservative government has been failing on the thing I care about most, which is the NHS and its patients.”

The Observer understands that discussions between Poulter and senior Labour figures have been going on for many months at the highest levels about the timing and organisation of his likely defection, as well as advisory roles he could play in future in developing the party’s health policies, with the benefit of his first-hand inside knowledge.

 

Poulter as a health minister in 2013: he said his party’s values had changed since the departure of David Cameron as prime minister. Photograph: Anna Gordon/The Observer

The defection has, however, been kept the tightest of secrets, with only half a dozen people in the party knowing it was coming before the Observer broke the news.

The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, celebrated the move on social media. “It’s fantastic to welcome Dr Dan Poulter MP to today’s changed Labour party,” he posted on X. “It’s time to end the Conservative chaos, turn the page, and get Britain’s future back. I’m really pleased that Dan has decided to join us on this journey.”

A one nation Tory on the left of the party, Poulter has regularly made his disquiet clear about the direction of government policy since David Cameron’s premiership, and it is understood that he has been frustrated by subsequent Tory prime ministers’ lack of interest in his views on NHS reform.

The shock defection – the first by a Tory MP to Labour since Christian Wakeford crossed the floor in 2022 – is another severe blow to Rishi Sunak before Thursday’s council and mayoral elections, in which the Tory party is expected to lose up to a half of its remaining local authority seats.

Heavy losses and failure to hold on to key mayoralties such as the West Midlands and Tees Valley are likely to reopen speculation about a possible pre-election leadership challenge to the prime minister.

In the run-up to the next general election, the future of the NHS will be a vital battleground, and Labour is known to be keen to use Poulter’s inside knowledge to maximum effect.

Poulter was first elected to parliament in 2010 and served as a health minister under Cameron from 2012 to 2015.

Since then, he says, he has seen a progressive “rightward drift” in the party’s policy and thinking that has left him feeling increasingly uncomfortable.


He described Liz Truss’s brief and disastrous premiership as a “shattering moment” for moderates in the party like him, and for middle-ground voters. “It is very difficult to forget that,” he said, adding that his constituents had become poorer directly as a result of Truss’s mistakes on the economy.

“The Conservative party’s values have changed over the past eight years,” he said. “The values of the Conservative party under David Cameron were different values and the priorities were very different. David Cameron undoubtedly had a very strong commitment to the NHS.

“Since he ceased to be prime minister eight years ago, the health service has ceased to be an area of priority for the Conservative party, and that is now showing in the strain on the frontline and the deterioration of care for patients.”

He added: “It feels to me that the Tory party has gone from being a pragmatic, centrist, centre-right party which focused on and understood the importance of public service and the state to deliver certain things … and had a compassionate outlook on key issues. It has gone from that and feels like it has become a nationalist party of the right, much more of what we see in Europe.

Poulter, then a Conservative candidate, on his way to vote in the 2010 election. Photograph: NearTheCoast.com/Alamy

“It is not to say all [Tory] MPs are like that. There are good MPs, but it feels that the party is ever moving rightwards, ever presenting a more nationalist position rather than a position that actually focuses on what a lot of people want to see, which is a level of compassion from government but also well-run public services.”

I am resigning from the Tory party and crossing the floor. Only Labour wants to restore our NHS

Dan Poulter

Poulter said he wished Sunak well in what was a very difficult job and that the prime minister had always been very civil towards him.

But he lavished praise on Starmer for reforming the Labour party since 2019 and for his clear commitment to the ideals of public service. In the case of the NHS, he said, the party’s focus on preventive care, child health and the social causes of poor health were key.

“One of the things I really like about Labour party policy on the NHS is the focus on the social determinants of poor health and actually recognising that tackling poverty, poor housing, all those issues, particularly giving children from poorer backgrounds better chances and focusing on child health,” he said. “That is something Labour understands that the Conservatives really don’t – and that, for me, is something that makes the Labour party the party that can be trusted with delivering the reforms that are needed to get the NHS back on its feet.”

Meanwhile Starmer vowed on Saturday night to retain the pensions triple lock for at least five years if he enters Downing Street, in a pre-election pitch to older voters.

Writing in the Sunday Express, Starmer said: “Britain’s pensioners deserve better. They deserve certainty, and for politicians to be straight with them so they can plan their lives.

“That’s why I’m guaranteeing that the pensions triple lock will be in the Labour manifesto and protected for the duration of the next parliament.

“That guarantee will ensure pensioners can enjoy their golden years. Money to spend on the grandkids, on days out, on holidays – all the things that bring colour to our lives.”

The Observer view on overtourism: sometimes, the planet’s hotspots are best left unvisited

From Everest to Machu Picchu, we can’t get enough of those ‘must-see’ places. It’s time to show some restraint

Observer editorial

Sun 28 Apr 2024

Climbing Everest used to be an even more dangerous pursuit than it is today, requiring huge bravery, endurance and skill. Even then the mountain could kill. A century ago, it claimed the lives of two of Britain’s finest climbers, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine.

The world’s highest mountain eventually succumbed to human challenge when, almost three decades later, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay carried the flags of Britain, the UN, and Nepal to its summit on 29 May 1953. Sporadic trips involving handfuls of explorers continued over succeeding years.

But the slopes of Everest have been transformed in recent years. Its peaks and ridges are now regularly flooded with tourists vying to reach its 29,032ft (8,849 metre) summit. In 2023, more than 1,200 people – paying fees of around £40,000 a head – attempted the feat. Of these, more than 600 succeeded. A place once synonymous with remote, unsullied grandeur has become a high-end tourist trap, leaving its once pristine slopes littered with tattered tents, abandoned gear and human waste. Everest tourism may generate hundreds of millions of pounds for Nepal, but this comes at a heavy cost.

Overtourism is not confined to the Himalayas. Last week, Venice became the world’s first city to introduce an entry fee, a €5 day-trip ticket that each of the 30 million sightseers who visit every year will have to buy to gain access to St Mark’s Square, the Rialto Bridge and its other wonders. Tourists may be happy to contribute to the city’s upkeep but many locals see the move as a step towards the transformation of Venice into a Veniceland, a Disneylike simulacrum.

Hosts of other sites face similar problems – from Dubrovnik to Yellowstone and from Machu Picchu to Cornwall. Maya Bay in Thailand was closed for four years after waves of tourists – who arrived after seeing it in the Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Beach – began wrecking its coral reefs. Iceland imposed temporary closures of Fjaðrárgljúfur, a canyon popularised in Justin Bieber’s 2015 music video, “I’ll Show You”, after it triggered an abrupt and damaging influx of visitors

The causes of overtourism – the arrival of too many sightseers in one place at the same time – are complex. Elements include: the huge growth of the middle classes in India and China; cheap airfares; and the rise of social media, which has created a generation obsessed with taking selfies in front of great works of art or architecture. This last factor has forced the Louvre to consider moving the Mona Lisa to its own room where visitors can pose more freely in front of the world’s most famous painting.

In many ways, such interest should be welcomed. Visiting other countries brings benefits. Travellers learn about other cultures and create powerful, lasting memories of their times there. Unfortunately, the price is becoming hard to pay. Overtourism now threatens to destroy pristine wildlife areas and precious historical sites, the very features that attract tourists in the first place. Studies indicate that 80% of travellers now visit only 10% of the world’s tourist destinations. This concentration reveals a dangerous skew in priorities.skip 

The warning signs are clear and alarming. The solutions, sadly, are less obvious. Stricter controls of cruise ships that can suddenly drop vast numbers of passengers in fragile locations is an option. Imposing city taxes like Venice’s is another. Properly assessing the economic value of our environment would also help assess the damages. At the same time, tourists themselves need to show restraint and occasionally consider local as opposed to distant attractions. Our planet houses many marvels. Care needs to be taken in opening up their wonder.

‘Eugenics on steroids’: the toxic and contested legacy of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute


Founded in 2005 and lauded by Silicon Valley, the Nick Bostrom’s centre for studying existential risk warned about AI but also gave rise to cultish ideas such as effective altruism



Andrew Anthony
Sun 28 Apr 2024

The Observer
Technology

Two weeks ago it was quietly announced that the Future of Humanity Institute, the renowned multidisciplinary research centre in Oxford, no longer had a future. It shut down without warning on 16 April. Initially there was just a brief statement on its website stating it had closed and that its research may continue elsewhere within and outside the university.

The institute, which was dedicated to studying existential risks to humanity, was founded in 2005 by the Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom and quickly made a name for itself beyond academic circles – particularly in Silicon Valley, where a number of tech billionaires sang its praises and provided financial support.

Bostrom is perhaps best known for his bestselling 2014 book Superintelligence, which warned of the existential dangers of artificial intelligence, but he also gained widespread recognition for his 2003 academic paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”. The paper argued that over time humans were likely to develop the ability to make simulations that were indistinguishable from reality, and if this was the case, it was possible that it had already happened and that we are the simulations.

I interviewed Bostrom more than a decade ago, and he possessed one of those elusive, rather abstract personalities that perhaps lend credence to the simulation theory. With his pale complexion and reputation for working through the night, he looked like the kind of guy who didn’t get out much. The institute seems to have recognised this social shortcoming in its final report, a long epitaph written by FHI research fellow Anders Sandberg, which stated:

“We did not invest enough in university politics and sociality to form a long-term stable relationship with our faculty… When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate.”

Nick Bostrom: ‘proudly provocative on the page, wary and defensive in person’. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

Like Sandberg, Bostrom has advocated transhumanism, the belief in using advanced technologies to enhance longevity and cognition, and is said to have signed up for cryogenic preservation. Although proudly provocative on the page, he was wary and defensive in person, as if he were privy to an earth-shattering truth that required vigilant protection.


His office, located in a medieval backstreet, was a typically cramped Oxford affair, and it would have been easy to dismiss the institute as a whimsical undertaking, an eccentric, if laudable, field of study for those, like Bostrom, with a penchant for science fiction. But even a decade ago, when I paid my visit, the FHI was already on its way to becoming the billionaire tech bros’ favourite research group.

In 2018 it received £13.3m from the Open Philanthropy Project, a non-profit organisation backed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. And Elon Musk has also been a benefactor. Bostrom’s warnings on AI were taken seriously by big tech. But as competition has heated up in the race to create a general artificial intelligence, ethics have tended to take a back-seat.

Among the other ideas and movements that have emerged from the FHI are longtermism – the notion that humanity should prioritise the needs of the distant future because it theoretically contains hugely more lives than the present – and effective altruism (EA), a utilitarian approach to maximising global good.

These philosophies, which have intermarried, inspired something of a cult-like following, which may have alienated many in the wider philosophy community in Oxford, and indeed among the university’s administrators.


According to the FHI itself, its closure was a result of growing administrative tensions with Oxford’s faculty of philosophy. “Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy decided that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed,” the final report stated.
Torres has come to believe the work of the FHI and its offshoots amounts to a ‘noxious ideology’ and ‘eugenics on steroids’

But both Bostrom and the institute, which brought together philosophers, computer scientists, mathematicians and economists, have been subject to a number of controversies in recent years. Fifteen months ago Bostrom was forced to issue an apology for comments he’d made in a group email back in 1996, when he was a 23-year-old postgraduate student at the London School of Economics. In the retrieved message Bostrom used the N-word and argued that white people were more intelligent than black people.

The apology did little to placate Bostrom’s critics, not least because he conspicuously failed to withdraw his central contention regarding race and intelligence, and seemed to make a partial defence of eugenics. Although, after an investigation, Oxford University did accept that Bostrom was not a racist, the whole episode left a stain on the institute’s reputation at a time when issues of anti-racism and decolonisation have become critically important to many university departments.

Cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried after being arrested in the Bahamas in December 2022. He later received a 25-year jail sentence for defrauding FTX customers out of billions.
Photograph: Dante Carrer/Reuters

It was Émile Torres, a former adherent of longtermism who has become its most outspoken critic, who unearthed the 1996 email. Torres says that it’s their understanding that it “was the last straw for the Oxford philosophy department”.

Torres has come to believe that the work of the FHI and its offshoots amounts to what they call a “noxious ideology” and “eugenics on steroids”. They refuse to see Bostrom’s 1996 comments as poorly worded juvenilia, but indicative of a brutal utilitarian view of humanity. Torres notes that six years after the email thread, Bostrom wrote a paper on existential risk that helped launch the longtermist movement, in which he discusses “dysgenic pressures” – dysgenic is the opposite of eugenic. Bostrom wrote:

“Currently it seems that there is a negative correlation in some places between intellectual achievement and fertility. If such selection were to operate over a long period of time, we might evolve into a less brainy but more fertile species, homo philoprogenitus (‘lover of many offspring’).”
Bankman-Fried’s downfall has done little for the moral arguments put forward by the FHI and its associate groups

Bostrom now says that he doesn’t have any particular interest in the race question, and he’s happy to leave it to others with “more relevant knowledge”. But the 28-year-old email is not the only issue that Oxford has had to consider. As Torres says, the effective altruism/longtermist movement has “suffered a number of scandals since late 2022”.


‘What if everybody decided not to have children?’ The philosopher questioning humanity’s future

Just a month before Bostrom’s incendiary comments came to light, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was extradited from the Bahamas to face charges in the US relating to a multibillion-dollar fraud. Bankman-Fried was a vocal and financial supporter of effective altruism and a close friend of William MacAskill, an academic who has strong links to the FHI and who set up the Centre for Effective Altruism, where Bankman-Fried worked briefly.

It was MacAskill who was said to have persuaded Bankman-Fried a decade ago to seek to earn as much money as possible so that he could give it away. The entrepreneur seemed to follow the first part of that injunction, but then went on to spend $300m in fraudulently earned money on Bahamian real estate. His downfall and subsequent 25-year prison sentence have done little for the moral arguments put forward by the FHI and its associate groups.

If that wasn’t enough, the coup last November that briefly dislodged Sam Altman as the CEO of Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, was attributed to company board members who were supporters of EA. Altman’s speedy return was seen as a defeat for the EA community, and, says Torres, “has seriously undermined the influence of EA/longtermism within Silicon Valley”.

All of this, of course, seems a long way from the not insubstantial matter of preserving humanity, which is the cause for which the FHI was ostensibly set up. No doubt that noble endeavour will find other academic avenues to explore, but perhaps without the cultish ideological framework that left the institute with a bright future behind it.