Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, technology news editor at the Guardian US. Thank you for joining me.
This week on my iPhone
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Elon on the campaign trail
Elon Musk is stumping hard for Donald Trump.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has funded a pro-Trump political action committee with tens of millions of dollars and planned a packed campaign schedule to boost the former president in Pennsylvania. He speaks to Trump multiple times per week and has urged other billionaires to endorse the Republican candidate en masse in private gatherings, according to the New York Times.
Taken together, Musk’s actions amount to something unprecedented in modern times – a man who is both the richest in the world and owner of an influential means of mass communication throwing all his weight behind a political candidate. He is no longer a billionaire dabbling in politics. Elon Musk is a political actor here to stay.
Last weekend, Musk appeared with Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the first assassination attempt on Trump. He’s slated to make more stops in the Keystone state in the three weeks until the election, Politico reports. He’s also offering a $47 referral bonus for anyone who gets registered voters in any swing state to sign a petition put forward by his political action committee, America Pac. Keep in mind that Musk forced all Tesla’s employees back to the office five days a week in mid-2022. One wonders how he will conduct company business with his plans to spend so much time in Pennsylvania.
The Tesla CEO is making online contributions as well as IRL ones. He’s bending Twitter/X to his political ends: He seized the handle @America for America Pac this week. Last month, he stifled the circulation of hacked materials from the Trump campaign published by an independent journalist. In Musk’s own feed, it’s nonstop endorsements of Trump and retweets of Trump’s boosters.
Trump seems thrilled about all of the above, sending a fundraising email with the subject line “Elon! Elon! Elon!” and soliciting supporters to buy the black-on-black “Dark Maga” hat that Musk wore in Pennsylvania as he jumped for joy behind Trump.
As the richest man in the world fights for the Republican nominee, he’s taking a familiar path for Trump surrogates that go down the rabbit hole. He’s making more and more appeals 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’s a quip redolent of storming the Capitol. He keeps repeating the line that he’ll go to prison if Kamala Harris wins.
Trump has put forward the same sentiment, though a rosier version, remarking in July to a group of Christian supporters: “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.” In a democracy-ending way, it’s a hopeful thing to say. Musk’s version is the negative of Trump’s, full of election-denialist doom. 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 skirt the issue, repeating a line about handing it back to the states.
Musk follows Trump even on matters of science, which you might think would be paramount to the CEO of technology companies. But in an interview this week with ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Musk flirted with the anti-vaxx movement while pulling away from the cliff: “I’m not anti-vaccine in general … We shouldn’t force people to take vaccines,” he said, before praising the smallpox and polio vaccines. Trump himself has called the Covid shot “one of the greatest achievements of mankind”. During this campaign, though, he’s said he will cut funding to schools with vaccine mandates and appointed Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nation’s most notorious anti-vaxxer, to his transition team.
In the same conversation with Carlson, Musk repeated a remark he had earlier backed away from, wondering aloud why no one was attempting to assassinate Harris.
Musk previously called Trump a “stone-cold loser”. Trump once vengefully said he could make the tech mogul “bend the knee”. The odd alliance has affected at least one of Musk’s businesses. With his rightward shift and the release of the Hot Wheels-esque Cybertruck, Tesla has changed from being a brand coveted by Hollywood and Silicon Valley types to one beloved by cops. It’s a transformation much like Musk’s own. The value of the company is down tens of billions of dollars.
We’ll be following Musk’s next steps on the campaign trail closely.
Art on your Samsung TV v art in a museum
What is the purpose of the digital reproduction of a painting?
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Samsung announced yesterday that it had struck up a partnership to license two dozen paintings from the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to appear in the company’s Frame TVs. To promote the collaboration, the Korean electronics giant organized a tour of MoMA. We saw Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Claude Monet’s enormous Water Lillies, and surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur.
Two weeks prior to the announcement, the Mauritshuis Museum in the Netherlands published a study measuring the neurological effects of art. Scientists found that original works of art stimulate a response in viewers’ brains 10 times stronger than the one elicited by reprints of the same paintings.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin theorized the results of the study 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 would seem to agree with him in inviting journalists on a private MoMA tour to see the original works. What, then, is the benefit of a piece of art on a Frame TV?
Robin Sayetta, head of business development at MoMA, said during the tour that the partnership aligns with the museum’s goal of “broadening and expanding access to modern and contemporary art”. I would agree. Benjamin wrote of the reproduction of a work of art: “Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway.”
Opt Out
Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance.
You’ve got the cutest baby ever, and you want the world to know it. But you’re also worried about what might happen to your baby’s picture once you release it into the nebulous world of the internet. Should you post it?
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What are you concerned about?
Honoring kids’ consent
Avoiding tech surveillance
Online predators
Artificial intelligence
Hacking
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We take you through a range of options to protect the online privacy of your child and their implications:
Cover your child’s face with an emoji (be sure to edit the picture on your own phone, not on Instagram)
Take and share pictures with children’s faces turned away
Send photos to friends and family directly using a shared iCloud or Google Photos album
Limit the access apps have to your photos
Send photos over encrypted messaging services such as Signal
Set your accounts to private
Share photos in a closed group chat or Facebook group (10-20 people max, and you should know them personally)
For more, read the full column by Johana Bhuiyan.