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When Trump first landed in the White House in 2016, even he seemed surprised to be there. Without a transition staff in place, the Obama administration team helped shepherd in the new president while positions sat unfilled. Whereas Hillary Clinton had a complete digital site built to usher in her new presidency that would never be seen, Trump had none. But for his second term, Trumps team was more prepared. On the first day of his presidency, he appeared on WhiteHouse.gov with a heros welcome. In a video worthy of Michael Bay, helicopters fly through the mountains before delivering Trump to the White House lawn to herald a new age. Fighter jets thunder overhead. Trump squints into the distance. A bald eagle flies by. [Screenshots: White House/YouTube] The 100 days that have followed have proven blindsiding to anyone who thought Trumps second term would constitute little more than a few tax cuts to the rich. In this brief window, Trump has rewritten the propaganda playbook for the modern political age by marrying well-proven tactics from decades past with a savvy approach to our current media landscape. His approach to governing is as much a practice of world-building as it is policy building. He has woven together imagery, rhetoric, and technology to create an unnervingly convincing (if in large part illegal!) vision of the world he wants to sell (or force upon) his constituents. Trump has leveraged craftily designed aesthetics to position his destructive policies as necessary and his self-concerned personality as heroic, all while he dismantles the institutions in place to question him. A playbook from the pastand present From the earliest days of the presidency, weve witnessed a mass erasure of both the topics and people that the administration doesnt support. It happened in the digital world with the deletion of trans rights pages from WhiteHouse.gov and stories about Navajo Code Talkers removed from the pages of the Department of Defense. In the physical world, the erasure shows up as Trump eliminates civil rights artifacts from Smithsonian institutions and scrubs the Black Lives Matter mural from 16th Street in Washington, D.C. Many of these deletions are part of an executive order around restoring truth in American history. Fascists routinely erase history to write a new one. And when it comes to this, and all of Trumps other communication tricks, theres not much thats original about them. [Screenshot: whitehouse.gov] All the techniques he uses are techniques of the past. The aesthetics are aesthetics of the present, says Barbie Zelizer, the Raymond Williams professor of communication and director of the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania. Shes also co-editor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism. Zelizer believes that the entire ethos of Trump’s messaging is anchored in the early Cold War when, in the name of national security, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy declared an all-out war on communism and anyone suspected to be supportive of it. Zelizer points out that Trumps statement from 2016I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any votershas historical precedent from this era. In 1954, pollster George Gallup described McCarthys unchecked appeal to the public with a similar framing: Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, [voters] would probably still go along with him. The key word uniting the messaging of Trump and McCarthy? Enmity. Its us versus them. When he is able to claim accolades for himself or for his administration, it is always based on an assumption that his administration is winning out over the enemy, says Zelizer, who notes there is always an enemy beyond (like China) and an enemy within (like student protestors or the judges upholding our legal system). And whomever the enemy is at any pointif thats democratic leaders, or the media, or universities, take your pickthey’re all substitutes in a rotation. Where Zelizer sees Cold War influence, Edel Rodriguezthe Cuban-born illustrator and leading visual critic of Trumpsees the influence of the UFC and WWE. Without a hint of irony, Rodriguez points to the machismo-laden, fight-first mentality of this programming as parallel to both power-assertive fascist leadership and the greater Trump media strategy. He also admits to their strange appeal. I watch Ultimate Fighting videos because theyre nuts. But its drama. Its something, he says. And on the other side, you have the Democrats doing
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E-Commerce
Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency has torn through Washington at breakneck speed. During the first 100 days of President Donald Trumps second term, DOGE has played a central role in cutting more than 200,000 federal jobs. The organization has over that same time implemented aggressive cost-cutting measures (including to foreign food aid and medical research), overhauled longtime government cybersecurity systems, and targeted federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for elimination. Most of these changes have been driven, in part, by AI toolsa move that has sparked serious concerns among experts. Critics say the rushed, untested use of artificial intelligence could lead to wrongful firings, mishandling of sensitive data, and lasting damage to core public services. It’s misguided for us to think that people who control technology and the associated power levers are naive about AI’s capabilities, says Julia Stoyanovich, director of the Center for Responsible AI at New York University. And their goal is not to do things better, or to make it so that everything is more efficient; rather, their goal is just to reduce the size of government, to reduce government spending, and to do this in a way that is just disorienting to everybody in society. Musk, who said earlier this month he would step back from DOGE to focus more on Tesla after the EV maker posted a dismal quarterly earnings report, has advocated for deploying AI to boost government efficiency. In practice, that has meant feeding sensitive Department of Education data into AI systems to identify programs for elimination; pushing to use AI to reassess benefits programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs; creating a chatbot for the U.S. General Services Administration to analyze contract data; and deploying AI toolsincluding Grok, the chatbot developed by xAI, which Musk ownsto monitor federal employee communications for critical sentiment toward Musk or Trump. According to one anonymous government official who spoke to The Washington Post in February, the end goal is something even more drastic: the replacement of the human workforce with machines. (Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to Fast Companys requests for comment.) To critics, such efforts represent a reckless and dangerous gamble. Experts warn that AI-driven government downsizing risks violating civil rights, mishandling some of the most sensitive personnel data in the country, and introducing hidden biases (even if accidentally) into critical decisions. As CNN reports, federal agencies, with their aging systems and complex missions, are ill-suited to abrupt automation, and without deep understanding of the underlying data, AI systems could misfirecutting essential staffers and services based on flawed outputs. David Evan Harris, a chancellors public scholar with the University of California, Berkeley, tells Fast Company theres also a massive alarm bell going off around the question of data protection and whether DOGE is safeguarding the information it is plugging into outsize AI systems supplied by companies like Anthropic and Musks xAI. It’s very unclear what kinds of security protocols the DOGE team is using, he says, and if they are taking any steps to make sure that private data of government employees and U.S. citizens, and even confidential data about U.S. government programs is not being turned into training data or retained improperly by any of these AI companies that they’re working with. Perhaps even more concerning, as Harvard researchers Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders argued in The Atlantic in February, replacing federal civil servants with AI could fundamentally weaken democratic governance by concentrating executive power. As they see it, with fewer human workers exercising independent judgment, future leaders could reshape government agencies at the push of a buttonsidestepping traditional checks and balances designed to prevent abuses of power. Still, there are signs the momentum around DOGE may be shifting. This month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against DOGE, seeking records about the agencys use of AI across federal programs, citing concerns about mass surveillance and politically motivated misuse. Meanwhile, a group of Democratic lawmakers wrote a letter to Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, demanding more information on DOGE’s AI practices. And despite Musks sweeping promises, analyses suggest the agencys impact has been overstated: According to recent estimates published by The New York Times, DOGEs touted cost savings might not actually amount to much, given that all the agency-related firings, rehirings, and lost productivity will cost some $135 billion this fiscal year. Public sentiment appears to be souring as well: A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 57% of Americans disapprove of Musks efforts with DOGEa significant uptick over February, when 49% disapproved. These factors might force a reckoning for DOGE, but time is short. Once AI is entrenched in government operations, undoing the damage could be even harder than preventing it. The AI industry is famous right now for being locked in a race to the bottom and throwing caution to the wind so that they can launch products as fast as possible, says Harris. Combining that race to the bottom with DOGEs race to use AI for anything they can possibly think of is really concerning.
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E-Commerce
Middle management can be exhaustingparticularly at the beginning of a managerial career. On the one hand, these employees have to get down into the weeds and help members of their team do their jobs in the most effective ways. They may have some inexperienced reports who need help and development to work effectively and independently. On the other hand, their daily work is governed by layers of leadership above that restrict their autonomy and require them to convince others that new things they would like to try are worth the effort. This combination creates a situation in which middle managers can feel locked in. They are constantly solving problems from their direct reports while determining how to carry out new orders from above. A heavy workload combined with a lack of autonomy can lead to burnout. If you oversee middle managers, here are some things you can do to help detect whether there is a problem and intervene quickly: Tap into your network One significant problem middle managers have is that they may lack a good peer group. Frontline employees often band together and create a social group that creates camaraderie at work and may also extend to lunch outings or happy hour gatherings. Middle managers (particularly when they first ascend into a supervisor role) often lose that social connection. With their promotion, they go from being one of the frontline staff to being one of them. Yet they may not be embraced immediately by other managers. So they not only struggle with the difficulties of the tasks they are given, but they may face that struggle alone. It’s important to create a good social network that middle managers can plug into. This gives them the benefit of a community to talk to, and members of that team can alert other leaders if they see a colleague struggling. Watch for defections When managers start to burn out, they lose resilience. Resilience enables people to maintain a calm and even disposition, even when things go wrong. It enables managers to work closely with team members who need more training or who have made a mistake. As emotional resilience breaks down, managers are more likely to react to mistakes and requests for assistance with anger and annoyance. They may be more likely to punish mistakes rather than use them as learning opportunities. These reactions are likely to create frustration among this managers direct reports. As a result, members of this supervisor’s team may look for other jobs, either by transferring elsewhere in the company or leaving altogether. Exit interviews with frontline employees can help to detect this problem by gathering information about why people are leaving. If a manager is burning out, it will be more effective to work with them to help reestablish their resilience rather than putting them on a punitive performance improvement plan that does not address the emotional component of the problem. Ask better questions When you meet with your direct reports, you might expect to get information from them that would help you to see whether they are exhibiting signs of burnout. Unfortunately, most leaders often ask generic questions like How are you doing? While some workplaces create enough psychological safety to allow employees to feel comfortable talking about fatigue with the job, most new managers will put on a brave face and say they are fine. To address this, it’s important to ask a few questions that require longer answers; these can provide you with insight into how your middle managers are handling the strain. One valuable approach is to ask your reports how they handled a particular situation, rather than how are they doing. This question gets your them to relive the situation in front of you, to describe what happened and how they addressed it. A lot of what youre listening for in this response is the emotion behind it. If you see anger or frustration on the part of your supervisee, that’s a signal that they are having difficulty with the stress of the job. If they talk about losing patience with particular employees, that may also be a warning sign. Use these conversations as a way to encourage middle managers you work with to talk with you when they are feeling overwhelmed. One of the best ways to help your team feel better about their work is for them to know that they are not dealing with stresses alone, and that you are available if they need help.
Category:
E-Commerce
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