Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I'm Blake Montgomery, Guardian US tech news editor. Thanks for joining me.
This week on my iPhone
Average daily updates: 270
Apps with the most total notifications:
– news: 391
– New York Post: 190
– Dull: 121
Elon on the campaign trail
Elon Musk is stumping hard for Donald Trump.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has donated tens of millions of dollars to a pro-Trump political action group and plans a packed campaign schedule to boost the former president in Pennsylvania. He speaks with Trump several times a week and in private meetings has urged other billionaires to endorse the Republican nominee as a whole. The New York Times.
Taken together, Musk's actions are unprecedented in modern times – throwing his full weight behind a political candidate who owns the world's richest and most influential public relations firm. He is no longer a billionaire in politics. Elon Musk is a political actor here.
Last weekend, Musk appeared with Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the first assassination attempt on Trump. He will make further stops in the Keystone State in the three weeks leading up to the election. Politico reported. He's also offering a $47 referral bonus to get registered voters in any swing state to sign a petition put forth by his political action group, America Pac. Note that Musk forced all Tesla employees into the office five days a week by mid-2022. One wonders how he will manage company business with plans to spend so much time in Pennsylvania.
The Tesla CEO makes online contributions and IRL contributions. He's Bending Twitter/X for His Political Purposes: He took over the @America handle this week in America Pak. Last month, he blocked the circulation of hacked materials from the Trump campaign released by an independent journalist. On Musk's own feed, it's nonstop endorsements of Trump and retweets from Trump's boosters.
Trump seems thrilled about all of the above, “Elon! Elon! Elon!” And asking supporters to buy the black-on-black “Dark Maga” hat that Musk wore in Pennsylvania, Trump jumped for joy behind.
The world's richest man is taking a familiar route for Trump surrogates down the rabbit hole as he fights for the Republican nomination. He is increasingly appealing to the fringes of the Make America Great Again movement. In Pennsylvania, Musk said: “This will be America's last election if you don't vote.” It's an oddity to hit the Capitol. Kamala Harris has been repeating the line that she will go to jail if she wins.
Trump has expressed the same sentiment, albeit in a rosier version, telling a group of Christian supporters in July: “In four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll fix it fine, and you won't have to vote. To put an end to democracy, it is a hopeful thing to say. Musk's version is Trump's negative, electoral denial doom. Like the contrast between Trump and JT Vance, who has offered strong anti-abortion views in speeches and interviews, while Trump has tried to avoid the issue, repeating a line about giving it back to the states.
Musk even follows Trump on scientific matters, which you might think is crucial for a CEO of a tech company. But Musk flirted with the anti-vaccination movement while walking away from an interview with Tucker Carlson this week, a former Fox News anchor: “I'm not anti-vaccine in general … We shouldn't be forcing people to get vaccines,” he said, before praising the smallpox and polio vaccines. Trump himself called the Covid shot “one of the greatest achievements of mankind”. During the campaign, he said he would cut funding to schools along with vaccination 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 reiterated his earlier backtracking point, wondering aloud why no one had tried to kill Harris.
Musk previously called Trump a “stone-cold loser.” Trump once said he could make the tech king “bend the knee” in retaliation. The odd alliance has affected at least one of Musk's businesses. With his shift to the right and the launch of a Hot Wheels-esque cybertruck, Tesla has gone from being a brand favored by Hollywood and Silicon Valley types. Beloved by the guards. It's a transition similar to Musk's own. The company's value dropped by several billion dollars.
We'll be following Musk's next steps on the campaign trail closely.
Art in the museum on your Samsung TV V Art
What is the purpose of digital reproduction of a painting?
After the newsletter promotion
Samsung yesterday announced a partnership deal to license two dozen paintings from the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to appear on the company's frame TVs. To promote the collaboration, the Korean electronics giant organized a tour of MoMA. After Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Claude Monet's magnificent Water Lilies, and Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, we saw The Minotaur's Daughter.
Two weeks before the announcement, the Mauritshuis Museum in the Netherlands published a study measuring the neurological effects of art. Scientists have found that original works of art evoke a 10 times stronger response in the brains of viewers than those elicited by reproductions of the same paintings.
Philosopher Walter Benjamin theorized the results of the study nearly 100 years ago. In his 1937 book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he argued that original works have an indescribable aura that their copies can never match. Samsung seems to agree with him, inviting journalists on a private MoMA tour to see the original works. So what's the point of an artwork on frame TV?
Robin Chayetta, MoMA's head of business development, said during the tour that the partnership is consistent with the museum's mission to “broaden and expand access to modern and contemporary art.” I agree. Benjamin wrote of the reproduction of a work of art: “Above all, it helps the original viewer meet the viewer halfway.”
quit
Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column that shows you how to navigate your online privacy and opt out of tracking.
You've got the cutest baby ever and you want the world to know it. But you're worried about what might happen if you post a picture of your child in the nefarious world of the Internet. Do you want to post it?
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What are you worried about?
Respecting children's consent
Avoidance of technical surveillance
Online predators
Artificial intelligence
Hacking
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We walk you through several options for protecting your child's online privacy and their implications:
Cover your child's face with an emoji (make sure you edit the picture on your own phone, not on Instagram)
Take and share pictures with the kids facing away
Send photos directly to friends and family using a shared iCloud or Google Photos album
Limit apps' access to your photos
Send photos through encrypted messaging services like Signal
Set your accounts to private
Share photos in a closed group chat or Facebook group (10-20 people max, whom you need to know personally)
To learn more, read John Buyan's full column.
