To the Editor:
Re “The Only Phone You Need Is a Dumb One,” by August Lamm (Opinion guest essay, Feb. 2):
Three cheers for Ms. Lamm, an anti-tech activist.
I am a boomer who grew up meeting people face to face, talking with family members at the dinner table, playing outdoors, writing with a ballpoint pen and going to the library to get information. So it’s refreshing to see a young person striving to restore our basic sanity — our basic humanity, in fact — by encouraging us to dump harmful, unnecessary technology.
We’re living in a dangerously dizzying time in which high tech threatens to end our very existence.
Dennis Quick
Charleston, S.C.
To the Editor:
August Lamm announces that she is “on a mission … to get people off their smartphones.” Why has she made it her mission to change the lives of strangers who have never asked for her intervention? Because “we’ve become so used to selecting partners on a sterile, simulated interface that we’ve lost the ability to make spontaneous, messy connections in real life.”
But I often make spontaneous, messy connections in the real life of cyberspace, which lets me make these connections based on mutual interests and values rather than mere propinquity.
The only opinion I need about how to live my social life is my own, supplemented by suggestions from friends who actually know something about me.
Felicia Nimue Ackerman
Providence, R.I.
To the Editor:
August Lamm is 29 years old, so she may be too young to know: Seventy years ago, everyone in the United States smoked, or at least it seemed that way. Today, far fewer Americans smoke. I suspect that social media is headed in the same direction.
Today, it seems as if Americans cannot ignore social media or the telephones that distribute social media, even though they are addictive, bad for the people who use them and bad for those of us who have to be around those who use them. A significant industry has been erected to perpetuate, promote and defend their use.
I suspect that 70 years from now, we will look back on social media in a similar manner: a toxic relic visible mainly in old shows from this time.
To the Editor:
Re “The Six Principles of Stupidity,” by David Brooks (column, Feb. 2):
I think it’s a mistake to think of the Trump cabal as stupid. Even President Trump himself, who seems at least willfully ignorant, has an instinctual intelligence about how to manipulate people through their emotions.
Mr. Brooks’s six principles of stupidity assume that negative outcomes are unintended. But what if they are intended? What if the whole point of Trumpism is to burn everything down? Wreck the economy with tariffs? Great! Drive wedges between different segments of society to the point where civil war seems acceptable? Awesome!
The question is, Who would benefit from everything burning down? The classic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” offers an answer. When the Depression hits Bedford Falls, it’s the local oligarch, Mr. Potter, who benefits. He’s the one scooping up assets at fire sale prices.
So, who will benefit from the wreckage of Trump policies? The people at the top of the economic food chain, our society’s apex predators, some of whom were in the front row at the inauguration. They can weather short-term disruptions and even a depression, all of which afford them the opportunity to accumulate more wealth and more power just as Mr. Potter did.
Seen through this lens, Mr. Trump’s policies are designed to produce their obvious negative outcomes. And that’s not stupid. It’s strategic. If we organize resistance to Trumpism assuming it’s driven by stupidity, we’ve already lost. In fact, that would be stupid.
Jay Piscioneri
Seattle
To the Editor:
“The Six Principles of Stupidity” brought to mind the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s famous (and infamous) footnote from “Critique of Pure Reason”: “Deficiency in judgment is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy.” Mere weeks into the second Trump administration and, oh how we wish there were a remedy.
Lawrence Buhagiar
Ottawa
Musk Has Seen ‘State Capture’ Before
To the Editor:
Re “What Is ‘State Capture’? A Warning for Americans,” by Tyler McBrien (Opinion guest essay, Feb. 8):
In South Africa, my native country, the corrosive effect of “state capture” after 2016 continues to ripple through its political and economic establishment. State capture is the graphic description of a process of systematic corruption whereby a group or person takes control of public institutions, bending public policy toward their own interests.
In South Africa, this was done by the Guptas, an Indian family who used their wealth to undermine the foundations of a democratic state to enrich themselves — seemingly with the knowledge and even cooperation of the country’s president, allowing the unchecked corruption of a democratic state despite parliamentary checks, a Constitution and political oversight.
Given this history, it is interesting to see a fellow South African immigrant doing the same in the United States. Watching Elon Musk upend political checks and balances to seize institutions in whose functioning he has a huge financial interest, all of this with the support of President Trump and the indifference or paralysis of a Republican-dominated Congress, leaves me baffled, in despair and with a far better insight into what happened in my home country.
Andrea van Niekerk
Palo Alto, Calif.
The Autocrats’ Playbook
To the Editor:
As a co-author of a book about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian takeover of Turkey, I find the actions of President Trump and Elon Musk to be uncannily scripted from the same autocrat’s playbook. Mr. Erdogan fired 200,000 public servants in 2016. He managed to take over the judiciary and fashion the government to his image and likeness, playing off nationalism and religious sentiment.
In the process, he initiated persecution against the Fethullah Gulen’s Hizmet movement, which stood in his way of authoritarian rule by advocating democracy and civil society. That oppression continues to this day and has caused immense suffering to good and dedicated people and their families, just as Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are doing.
Mr. Erdogan shut down Hizmet’s well-respected international aid, medical care and educational projects, just as Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have done with U.S.A.I.D., causing further suffering to people on the margins.
History indeed can repeat itself, and, unless we want to condemn ourselves to relive it, we need to firmly oppose the Trump-Musk scenario. The lesson from Mr. Erdogan is that he went step by step, and no one in his political party stood up against him until it was too late.
James C. Harrington
Austin, Texas
The writer is the founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project.
