Over the last year, odds are good that you've seen what's been dubbed "AI slop"—unhinged, nonsensical "art" generated by artificial intelligence tools. Maybe you've seen a bizarre cinematic animated mini-movie on Facebook, surreal pseudo-photographs on Instagram, or propagandistic images on what was once known as Twitter, now X. After seeing enough of this, a realization dawned on Jacob Silverman, a journalist in New York who covers technology and politics: if it's machines making this art, and bots who are showering them with likes, where do humans fit in?

The answer is that actual living people are being squeezed out of what Silverman has, in a recent Financial Times article, deemed the "hostile internet". Elon Musk's X will sell advertisements, and authority, to absolutely anyone; AI-powered chatbots are worryingly easy to manipulate; and it has never been easier for people suffering from mental illness to find positive reinforcement of their ideas, both from distant humans and AI. None of this is to the betterment of humanity.

Silverman joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy on The Jewish Angle to discuss these trends of digital devolution, and how we can navigate these murky waters on a sinking ship.

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
• Music: "Gypsy Waltz" by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

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Yoel Inbar rose to prominence in the fall of 2023, when he was in the process of getting hired at the University of California, Los Angeles. He didn't end up getting the job—and it was transparently about a podcast episode he'd recorded a year earlier, in which he criticized "diversity statements". The mandated letters have become part of the academic hiring process, page-long essays explaining how the candidate would contribute to campus diversity. Inbar wrote one for UCLA—and has been involved in hiring processes, finding them useful tools—but has been outspoken of the concept as a blanket rule, along with the broader scope of diversity, equtity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Now an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Inbar studies morality and judgments, particularly with respect to belief systems, political ideologies and social attitudes. While his flare-up with UCLA happened before Hamas's attack on Oct. 7, he has since followed closely how poorly designed DEI programs are for adhering to students with differing views on political and social issues—like the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Inbar sat down with Phoebe Maltz Bovy to share his story and discuss how the campus atmosphere has shifted for Jewish students and faculty in the last two years.

Related links

• Yoel Inbar's website and podcast, Two Psychologists Four Beers
• "Saskatchewan professor blogs his way through mandatory anti-racism 'boot camp'" (National Post)

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
• Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
• Music: "Gypsy Waltz" by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

Support our show

• Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
• Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
• Subscribe to The Jewish Angle

This month, the Federal Trade Commission in the United States finally brought a long-awaited antitrust court case against Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC is arguing that Meta has a monopoly on the social networking space, which has squandered competition in the market. Critics point out that this might have been the case a decade ago, before TikTok entered the scene, but is simply no longer true.

That Facebook no longer has a monopoly on digital friend networks is not the only erstwhile stereotype about social media. In the bygone era before "President Trump" was a real thing, social media was a land of promise and opportunity, filled with "girl boss" memes and alleged commitments to social capitalism. But in the years since, much of that naive whimsy has flown out the window, and nobody believes the tech giants are anything but capitalist overlords.

A similar awakening strikes the main character of Self Care, a satirical novel by Leigh Stein that came out in 2020, which focuses on the virtue signalling of a fictional tech company. With Meta in the spotlight again, and with The CJN's opinion editor, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, having recently read Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People (which is, in essence, the real-life memoir version of Stein's novel), we wanted to bring Stein on to discuss the slow evolution of social media between the two Trump administrations and what we can learn about the ways in which social media manipulates our beliefs and emotions in an effort to keep us endlessly scrolling on.

Related Links

• Learn about Leigh Stein's forthcoming novel, If You're Seeing This, It's Meant for You
• Read Phoebe's column on Careless People in The CJN

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
• Production team: Michael Fraiman (producer & editor)
• Music: "Gypsy Waltz" by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

Support our show

• Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
• Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
• Subscribe to The Jewish Angle

On the eve of Canada's federal election, U.S. President Donald Trump took to Truth Social, the little-used social media website he created, to recommend Canadians head to the polls and vote for... Donald Trump. "IT WAS MEANT TO BE," he typed, in all-caps, prompting the vast majority of Canadians to roll their eyes and remain in minimal voting lines, eagerly awaiting their election results to roll in well before bedtime.

In spite of Trump's demands, Canadians are prioritizing nationalism and sovereignty in this election, with a spotlight being shone on the distinctions between Canada and the United States. This has been a topic of interest for Phoebe Maltz Bovy, a dual citizen of both countries, who has been following the shifting aesthetic of patriotism since moving here in 2015. She sits down with David Polansky, an American writer and political theorist living in Toronto, to discuss these issues and more, including the Jewish community's shifting political affiliations and the dynamics of ethnic minorities within Canadian conservatism.

Related links

• Subscribe to David Polansky's Substack, Strange Frequencies, and follow him on Twitter
• Read his latest article, "Canada on the brink", in The Hub

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
• Production team: Michael Fraiman (producer & editor), Marc Weisblott (editorial director)
• Music: "Gypsy Waltz" by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

Support our show

• Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
• Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
• Subscribe to The Jewish Angle

The United States has historically been unusually resistant to antisemitism, for a number of reasons: some that speak well of America; others that are more the result of Americans preferring to pick on other marginalized minorities over Jews. But right-wing antisemitism has flourished in the age of social media and President Donald Trump's first term in office, and left-wing antisemitism has skyrocketed since Oct. 7.

Now the U.S. seems less apart from other countries vis-a-vis antisemitism. And with Donald Trump back in the White House, he's brandishing a shiny new executive order for combatting antisemitism. His administration has begun arresting immigrants and people on student visas—who are all in the country legally—for participating in the student encampment protests, or, in one case, co-authoring a student op-ed critical of Israel. His administration is also defunding a higher education institutions, starting with elite Ivy League universities such as Columbia and Harvard, ostensibly in the name of antisemitism.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The CJN's opinion editor, is a dual Canadian-American citizen, watching the chaos unfold from downtown Toronto. To better understand the nuances of the situation, she sat down with Emily Tamkin, a journalist based in Washington, D.C., who writes for the Washington Post, Slate, The New Republic and the Forward.

Hear their conversation in the debut episode of The Jewish Angle, a new weekly podcast by The CJN, that analyzes the uncomfortable new political realities for Jews in a rapidly evolving cultural landscape.

Related links

• Subscribe to Emily Tamkin's Substack, ET Write Home
• Read Tamkin's piece, "Trump’s Crackdown on “Antisemitism” is Making Jews Less Safe", in The New Republic
• Her article, "Is this extremist Zionist group trying to protect Israel — or just punish left-wing Jews?", in the Forward
• Phoebe reviews Tamkin's book Bad Jews in The CJN (from Oct. 2022)

Credits

• Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
• Production team: Michael Fraiman (producer & editor), Marc Weisblott (editorial director)
• Music: "Gypsy Waltz" by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective

Support our show

• Subscribe to The CJN newsletter
• Donate to The CJN (+ get a charitable tax receipt)
• Subscribe to The Jewish Angle