Big Brother

One of the world’s most popular social networks, X, has gone offline in Brazil – the country with the fifth largest digital population – after Elon Musk’s refusal to comply with local laws meant it was blocked by the supreme court.

Millions of Brazilian X users found themselves unable to access the network on Saturday morning as internet providers and mobile phone companies began to enforce the ban.

When the Guardian tried to access the network on its computer and mobile phone, it received a message reading: “Seems like you lost connectivity. We’ll keep retrying.”

Is the integrity of the encrypted-messaging application compromised by its chairman of the board?

The encrypted-messaging service Signal is the application of choice for dissenters around the world. The app has been downloaded by more than 100 million users and boasts high-profile endorsements from NSA leaker Edward Snowden and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk. Signal has created the perception that its users, including political dissidents, can communicate with one another without fear of government interception or persecution.

But the insider history of Signal raises questions about the app’s origins and its relationship with government—in particular, with the American intelligence apparatus. Such a relationship would be troubling, given how much we have learned, in recent years, about extensive efforts to control and censor information undertaken by technology companies, sometimes in tandem with American government officials.

The past few years have felt borderline dystopian. Covid lockdowns emptied cities and forced us apart from friends and family. Woke fervour has exploded on to the streets and has captured our institutions. We are constantly bombarded with propaganda telling us that normal, everyday views and behaviour are either racist or transphobic – or are a threat to the climate or public health. But despite the strangeness of this New Normal, there have been very few artists or satirists willing to really question any of it. Indeed, most of the artworld appears to be very much on side with this new regime.

Aren’t you sick to death of the Current Message? I know I am.

If you aren’t concerned about climate change, or whatever name The End of the World is going by this week, it doesn’t matter because you will be made to see or hear it. Or maybe the current message is Pride or Acceptance or Eat Bugs and Like It.

Federal infrastructure law empowers the feds to monitor impaired driving and shut off your car. What could go wrong?

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Conservatives continually step into the trap set by progressives. The process is simple and is repeated constantly, especially in California. Liberal activists envision some far-reaching policy or regulation — such as the elimination of internal combustion engines or a ban on new gas stove installations — but they do so incrementally.

A new manuscript edition allows us to see Orwell’s masterpiece anew.

‘The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary’, writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by 25 years in a forced-labour camp.’ That is what it is like to hold this brand new, manuscript edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four in your hands. You feel as if you are doing something you shouldn’t. You get to see Orwell’s own handwriting. His revisions and reworkings. His mind in motion. It is a clandestine and intimate experience, like having a glimpse into Winston Smith’s diary.