Niccolo Soldo

May 18, 2024

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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The bipartisanship on foreign policy that has coloured recent events in US Congress shows both a continuity and unity in American elite circles that affirm the concept that I term “Turbo America”. Billions more dollars have been earmarked for both Ukraine and Israel to continue their military efforts against their opponents, while billions more will go to help Taiwan in a form of preparation for a conflict with China that many see as inevitable (billions more will be disbursed to the MIC, as well). No significant change is on the horizon when it comes to US foreign policy.

Tweaks are made to policy, and one recent tweak was the “retirement” of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Vicki Nuland. As I argued in this essay, her removal from that position indicated a loss for Russia Hawks or “maximalists”, as I described them. A more sensible (if still hawkish) faction is now ascendant, one that is more realistic in the goals that the USA can achieve via their Ukrainian proxy force.

Vicki Nuland has not gone gently into that good night, and recently sat down for an interview with POLITICO. She answers questions on a variety of subjects, and reveals quite a bit about herself and the assumptions that dominant US foreign policy circles these days:

Can Ukraine win this war against Russia? And how do you define winning?

Let’s start with the fact that Putin has already failed in his objective. He wanted to flatten Ukraine. He wanted to ensure that they had no sovereignty, independence, agency, no democratic future — because a democratic Ukraine, a European Ukraine, is a threat to his model for Russia, among other things, and because it’s the first building block for his larger territorial ambitions.

Can Ukraine succeed? Absolutely. Can Ukraine come out of this more sovereign, more economically independent, stronger, more European than it is now? Absolutely. And I think it will. But we’ve got to stay with it. We’ve got to make sure our allies stay with it.

And we have to accelerate a lot of the initiatives that were in the supplemental, like helping Ukraine build that highly deterrent military force of the future, like deploying these longer-range weapons to strategic effect, like ensuring that the critical infrastructure and the energy sector are protected, like building up our own defense industrial base and that of our allies and Ukraine’s again, so that we and Ukraine are building faster than Russia and China.

It never ceases to be funny (at least for me) that Nuland and co. insist that neighbouring states being western liberal democracies somehow pose an existential threat to Russia. It’s NATO, NATO, NATO, NATO.

But can it get all its territory back, including Crimea?

It can definitely get to a place where it’s strong enough, I believe, and where Putin is stymied enough to go to the negotiating table from a position of strength. It’ll be up to the Ukrainian people what their territorial ambitions should be. But there are certain things that are existential.

Any deal that they cut in their interest and in the larger global interest has to be a deal that Putin is compelled to stick to. We can’t be doing this every six months, every three years. It has to actually lead to a deal that includes Russian withdrawal.

Putin is a master at what we call rope-a-dope negotiating, where he never actually cuts the deal. It has to be a deal that ensures that whatever is decided on Crimea, it can’t be remilitarized such that it’s a dagger at the heart of the center of Ukraine.

Two concessions here:

1. Ukraine will not be able to liberate all of its lost territory
2. Crimea is already gone

You’ve had a long career, especially when it comes to Europe. Where did the U.S. go wrong in its understanding of Russia?

With regard to both Russia and China, after the end of the Cold War, the prevailing wisdom among all of us — right, left and center — was that if you could knit Moscow and Beijing into the open and free global order that we had benefited from for so many years, that they would become prosperous, and they would become strong contributing members of that order. And that’s what we tried for a very long time.

That works if you have a leadership that is fundamentally accepting the current system. But once you have leaders who are telling their populations that this system keeps their country down, doesn’t allow it to have its rightful place, that has a territorial definition of greatness, that is bent on economic, political and or military coercion — that’s antithetical to this order, and then our policy has to change.

The assumption was that by opening up their economies, their political systems would also open up and they would be entrapped within Pax Americana. The Chinese saw what happened with Russia in the 1990s and calculated the following: “economic openness is good, political openness is not good”. This has worked for them. The Russians quickly learned that letting the country’s economic crown jewels fall into the hands of foreign states or anti-national actors was a bad move, and quickly changed course.

What is the lesson we should learn about foreign policy in general when it comes to the experiences we’ve had in Russia and China?

We should always try to talk both to leaders and to people, to the extent that we’re allowed. We should always offer an opportunity to work together in common interest.

But if the ideology is inherently expansionist, is inherently illiberal, is inherently trying to change the system that benefits us, we’ve got to build protections and resilience for ourselves, for our friends and allies, and particularly for those neighbors of those countries who are likely to be on the front line of that first push.

Nuland gives the game away here. The global order must serve US interests first, and all states must be ruled along western liberal democratic lines. “Expansionist” is immediately tossed out as it’s the USA that has been the most expansionist power since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Where do you see the Israel-Hamas war heading?

Essentially, there are two paths on the table. There is continuing this war with all of the destruction and horror and lack of clarity about how you end Hamas’ reign of terror.

The other path is the route that the administration and allies and partners and a lot of countries in the Gulf are pushing, and a lot of Israelis want, which is: a hostage deal leads to a long-term cease-fire, leads to a better future for Palestinians both in the West Bank and in Gaza, leads to Saudi-Israel normalization and a path to two states, and a region where the ideology and the violence that Hamas is offering is beaten by more opening, more opportunity, more peace, more stability.

No change, ergo, nothing is happening. The insistence on a formalized Saudi-Israeli deal is entirely about building a coalition to finally take on Iran.

One last excerpt:

I think what we want from the rest of the world is they see us leading in a manner that advances their own security, advances their own prosperity, creates this community of nations that can handle global problems — whether they are terrorist problems, whether they are health problems, whether they’re environmental problems — and we do it in a primarily self-interested but unselfish way, and we’re creating that community.

They should only fear us if they’re opponents of a largely liberal democratic way of advancing human prosperity. And in that context, if they are viciously invading a neighbor, if they are coercing a little state because they can, then I hope they would fear our reaction and the reaction that we will build with other democracies who want to protect the system that favors freedom.

There’s that conceit again.

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I keep bringing up BRICS because I continue to see quite a lot of people working under the false assumption that “multipolarism” is already the rule in global affairs, and that this organization is one of its key drivers.

This notion is being oversold, just as BRICS is too. When we see organizations akin to NATO, the IMF or the World Bank from the emerging counter-bloc to Pax Americana, then we can begin to talk about multipolarism. Yes, moves are being made, but these moves are very tepid thus far and don’t amount to much just yet. We are still living in an American-dominated world even if opposition to this dominance is becoming more popular and more entrenched in certain places. “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch” works best to describe my argument.

Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism has been very good on this subject, refusing to get high on the multipolarist supply, even if she, like I, would like to see such a world emerge (I am a true lover of diversity, unlike western liberals). She has posted this interview that explains how BRICS and the New Development Bank (NDB) aka “BRICS Bank” is nowhere near offering alternatives to the IMF or the World Bank, and that a “BRICS currency” is far, far away:

There has been talk for years about the possibility of the BRICS launching a new currency. What’s the latest?

Despite hopes that such a measure will be on the agenda of the next BRICS summit, to be held in 2024 in Kazan (capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, part of the Russian Federation) under the Russian presidency of Vladimir Putin, the creation of a common BRICS currency was not included in the final declaration adopted at the BRICS summit held in August 2023 in South Africa. It is true that in his closing speech at the summit, the Brazilian President announced that the BRICS had spoken in favour of a “working group to study a reference currency for BRICS.” He also declared, “the creation of a currency for trade and investment transactions between BRICS members increases our payment options and reduces our vulnerabilities.”

The Brazilian economist Paulo Nogueira Batista, who represented Brazil at the IMF from 2007 to 2015 under President Lula, and who was then vice-president of the New Development Bank (created by the BRICS) from 2015 to 2017, is among those hoping that the creation of a BRICS currency will be on the agenda at the 16th BRICS summit. In a communication dated October 2023, Paulo Nogueira Batista said:

“President Putin himself, as well as President Lula, have often spoken of de-dollarization and the possible creation of a common or reference currency for the BRICS. Since at least 2022, Russian experts have been working on the topic. The reason Russia is the originator of the idea is quite clear”.

Of course, Nogueira alludes to the sanctions Russia has been under since the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and especially since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Paulo Nogueira Batista goes on to summarise some of the progress made and the many obstacles encountered and concludes:

It is our good luck to have Russia presiding over the BRICS in 2024 and Brazil, in 2025 – precisely the two countries that seem to be most interested in moving towards the creation of a common or reference currency. If everything runs smoothly, the BRICS may be able to decide to create a currency at the Summit in Russia next year. By the Summit in Brazil, in 2025, the BRICS will perhaps be able to announce the first steps towards its establishment.

But there are other voices. Neoliberal economist, Lesetja Kganyago, Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, is far less optimistic than Paulo Nogueira. Here is what William Gumede wrote in Business Day newspaper on 21 August 2023, at the time of the BRICS summit:

“Kganyago has cautioned over the practicality of establishing a common currency in a trade bloc in which the members are spread over vastly different geographical locations. The success of the euro, the common currency of the EU, has been partially based on geographical proximity, similarity in economic and political institutions and regimes, and individual economies giving up their national currencies.

A BRICS currency will also require a BRICS central bank, commonality in monetary policy, alignment of fiscal policies, and synergy between political regimes across the trade bloc. Yet as things stand the BRICS currencies have mismatched central banking regimes and are not easily convertible — unlike the EU when the euro was established. China and Russia’s central banks are also state-controlled, whereas SA, India and Brazil have independent central banks. A big question is whether China or Russia would surrender sovereignty over their national currencies, which would be crucial to the success of a common currency. ”

We might add that it is hard to imagine India under Narendra Modi, who is likely to win the elections in May 2024, coming into conflict with the United States by endorsing the roll-out of a common currency, especially since Sino-Indian economic and military confrontations continue. Confronted with China, India is strengthening its relations with Israel, Washington, Australia and Japan, while supporting Russia in selling its oil and remaining a member of the BRICS. As Kganyago pointed out, India is keen to retain sovereignty over its currency. The same is true of Brazil, as monetary sovereignty enables both countries to maintain or strengthen their influence in their traditional areas of economic influence — Brazil with its neighbouring economies: Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, etc. and India with Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, etc.

I feel it is more crucial to assess what is currently in place than to speculate on the likelihood of a common BRICS currency materialising someday. What is certain is that, beyond the rhetoric of the Russian and Brazilian representatives, in practice, there has been no progress to date in setting up a common currency.

Apologies for the very long excerpt, but it is necessary in this case.

On the NDB aka “BRICS Bank”:

Paulo Nogueira’s hopes that Russia will give the NDB much greater strength from 2025 onwards need to be qualified by two major factors. Firstly, developments in the war in Ukraine and the international sanctions imposed on Russia by North America, Western Europe and Japan. Secondly, the NDB’s decision on 4 March 2022 to stop granting loans to Russia. The NDB has chosen to respect the sanctions by Washington’s partners and has refrained from granting new loans to Russia due to fears of a credit rating downgrade, since nearly 7% of NDB liabilities are in Russia (the downgrade by New York rating agencies did indeed transpire in mid-2022). This can be verified on the NDB website under the section, All Projects and in particular under all projects in Russia where it can be seen that the last project financed by the NDB in Russia dates back to 2021.

The BRICS Bank is complying with US-led sanctions against Russia. That says it all, really.

What is the status of the BRICS Monetary Fund, known by its acronym CRA?

Let’s return to the opinion expressed by Paulo Nogueira Batista about the BRICS and their Common Monetary Fund:

The BRICS are undoubtedly a major force in the world and have been so since the beginning, in 2008. We can indeed be a crucial factor in the consolidation of a post- Western and multipolar planet. This is what is expected of our countries.

One can ask, however, whether the BRICS have lived up to this kind of expectation. How have we fared since we first started working together in 2008, at the initiative of Russia? What can we achieve going forward? In trying to answer the first question I will be frank and sometimes even a bit harsh. Please do not see my words as arrogant or pretentious. They will be the expression of an expert opinion, fallible as all opinions. I hope my remarks will not be completely off the mark. Is it not true that self-criticism, although painful, may be beneficial in the end?

I will speak not as an academic researcher but as a practitioner, having been involved in the BRICS process since the beginning in 2008, from Washington DC, and up to 2017, when I left the post of Vice President of the BRICS bank in Shanghai.

Beyond speeches, declarations, and communiqués, we have achieved so far two practical and potentially very important things: 1) a monetary fund of the BRICS, named the Contingent Reserve Arrangement – the CRA; and, more significantly, 2) a multilateral development bank, called the New Development Bank (NDB), better known as the BRICS bank, headquartered in Shanghai.

The two existing BRICS financing mechanisms were established in mid-2015, more than 8 years ago. Let me assure you that when we started out with the CRA and the NDB, there was considerable concern with what the BRICS were doing in this area in Washington, DC., in the IMF and the World Bank. I can testify to that because I lived there at the time, as Executive Director for Brazil and other countries in the Board of the IMF. As time went by, however, people in Washington relaxed, sensing perhaps that we were going nowhere with the CRA and the NDB.

Paulo Nogueira Batista argues that the slow implementation of the CRA and NDB by the BRICS has meant that the leaders of the IMF and WB, who had previously expressed great concern about the potential for competition, have come to feel reassured.

…This is a long way from building the new international architecture that people need.

I’ll leave it to Yves to have the last word:

This post takes stock of how far BRICS have gotten, and seem likely to get over the near and intermediate terms, with their various new currency and new monetary organization initiatives. The short version is not very far. Even though it comes comparatively late in the post, author Eric Toussaint points out that two BRICS new programs, launched in the mid-teens, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement and New Development Bank, have not done much. One issue that Toissant does not spell out (no doubt due to space constraints) is both were very much oversold. Fans have called the Contingent Reserve Arrangement a “BRICS Monetary Fund” when it is no such thing. It’s a short term currency swaps facility. By contrast, the New Development Bank can in theory do more but it really can’t because permitted loans are in proportion to each member state’s paid in capital. And on top of that, the New Development Bank has been criticized by former senior officers for being cautious and slow-moving.

Keep this in mind when you come across people arguing (or declaring) that Pax Americana is over and that a multipolarist system is now in place and active.

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Zoomers are the first post-privacy generation in human existence. They will never know a world in which they can try to lose themselves without somehow being tracked. Roughly three years ago, I was speaking with the CEO and founder of a commercial digital advertising company from NYC. He told me that their technology was so powerful that they were able to figure out when people were getting up from their couches to go into another room simply via their own digital advertising software.

It’s very tough to wrap our heads around the complete loss of privacy. For me, I have trouble remembering how it was to be out of instantaneous reach via mobile phone. Pre-mass adoption of cell phones, people would effectively be out of reach i.e. disappear for hours at a time, as the only way to contact them was to call them at home (inb4 beepers, as I never had one). We are constantly tracked and monitored, and our personal data is sold by data brokers all over the globe. One customer of personal ad tracking data is the CIA, as Matthew Petti explains:

For years, the U.S. government has bought information on private citizens from commercial data brokers. Now, for the first time ever, American spymasters are admitting that this data is sensitive—but they’re leaving it up to the spy agencies on how to use it.

Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a “Policy Framework for Commercially Available Information.” Her office oversees 18 agencies in the “intelligence community,” including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all military intelligence branches.

In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to obtain mobile phone location data from phone companies. (During the case, the Reason Foundation filed an amicus brief against warrantless snooping.) As a workaround, the feds instead started buying data from third-party brokers.

Haines’ new framework claims that “additional clarity” on the government’s policies will help protect Americans’ privacy. Yet the document is vague about the specific limits. It orders the agencies themselves to come up with “safeguards that are tailored to the sensitivity of the information” and write an annual report on how they use this data.

more:

As national security journalist Spencer Ackerman points out in his Forever Wars newsletter, the framework doesn’t require the feds to delete old purchased data. Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) called on the NSA to purge all data that it bought without a warrant and without following the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy policies.

“The framework’s absence of clear rules about what commercially available information can and cannot be purchased by the intelligence community reinforces the need for Congress to pass legislation protecting the rights of Americans,” Wyden tells Reason. “The DNI’s framework is nonetheless an important step forward in starting to bring the intelligence community under a set of principles and policies, and in documenting all the various programs so that they can be overseen.”

Case in point:

Wyden has been aggressively pushing for transparency on data purchases over the past few years. In 2021, he uncovered that the Defense Intelligence Agency was buying Americans’ smartphone location data. That same year, he sent a letter to Haines and CIA Director Bill Burns complaining about a secretive CIA data collection program. (In an Orwellian turn, the letter itself was classified until 2022.) This year, Wyden revealed more details on NSA data purchases.

Some of this data is collected and sold directly by the apps. For example, an intelligence company called X-Mode once paid MuslimPro, an app that offers a daily prayer calendar and a compass pointing towards Mecca, to include a few lines of location tracking code. X-Mode then sold the data to U.S. government agencies. MuslimPro claims that it did not intend to sell the data to the government and ended the arrangement after the story broke.

So, yeah……app maker will sell your personal data to a buyer like the CIA.

In other cases, the data is siphoned from advertising markets. Every time a user opens a website with paid advertisements, their location and attributes appear on a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange, a virtual auction where companies buy ad space. Data brokers posing as advertisers scrape the listings for information on users.

“Any government with a halfway decent cyber intelligence program is participating in these RTB exchanges, because it’s such an immensely valuable source of data,” says Byron Tau, author of Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State.

As a demonstration of how powerful RTB data is, an intelligence contractor used data from the dating app Grindr to track gay government employees from their offices to their homes, Tau reported in his book.

The IRS is in on it too:

Lawyers for the Internal Revenue Service, on the other hand, have argued that users voluntarily handed over the information, so the government is free to use it. Tau points out that users don’t really know how their data is being resold, and even the RTB exchanges themselves aren’t supposed to be used for data scraping.

“A lot of these companies that are collecting data from the global population don’t have a real consumer relationship” with the people they’re spying on, Tau says. “Unless you know how to decompile software and you’re technically savvy, you can’t even make informed choices.”

In an increasingly digitized world, the right to privacy becomes wholly unworkable. Think digital payments by way of credit and debit cards vs. cash.

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It’s absolutely horrible now, practically useless, and everyone knows it. But it’s such a behemoth that no competitor has yet managed to dethrone it.

The tale here seems to be one that is as old as time: greed. This is how Edward Zitron explains it in his highly polemical take on the story, one in which he takes no prisoners:

The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. Jerry Dischler, then the VP and General Manager of Ads at Google, and Shiv Venkataraman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads on Google properties, had called a “code yellow” for search revenue due to, and I quote, “steady weakness in the daily numbers” and a likeliness that it would end the quarter significantly behind.

For those unfamiliar with Google’s internal scientology-esque jargon, let me explain. A “code yellow” isn’t, as you might think, a crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Steven Levy’s tell-all book about Google, refers to — and I promise that I’m not making this up — the color of a tank top that former VP of Engineering Wayne Rosing used to wear during his time at the company. It’s essentially the equivalent of DEFCON 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.

In emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was “significantly behind forecast,” the “timing” of revenue launches was significantly behind, and a vague worry that “several advertiser-specific and sector weaknesses” existed in search.

Anyway, a few days beforehand on February 1 2019, Kristen Gil, then Google’s VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakur, then Google’s VP of Engineering, Search and Discover, saying that the ads team had been considering a “code yellow” to “close the search gap [it was] seeing,” vaguely referring to how critical that growth was to an unnamed “company plan.” To be clear, this email was in response to Thakur stating that there is “nothing” that the search team could do to operate at the fidelity of growth that ads had demanded.

(Editor’s note: If you read those emails, start from the bottom and work your way up).

Shashi forwarded the email to Gomes, asking if there was any way to discuss this with Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, and declaring that there was no way he’d sign up to a “high fidelity” business metric for daily active users on search. Thakur also said something that I’ve been thinking about constantly since I read these emails: that there was a good reason that Google’s founders separated search from ads.

On February 2, 2019, just one day later, Thakur and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox, a Vice President of Search and Google Assistant, entering a multiple-day-long debate about Google’s sudden lust for growth. The thread is a dark window into the world of growth-focused tech, where Thakur listed the multiple points of disconnection between the ads and search teams, discussing how the search team wasn’t able to finely optimize engagement on Google without “hacking engagement,” a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to “abandon work on efficient journeys.” In one email, Fox adds that there was a “pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads want” and what search was doing.

When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests for growth, Fox added that all three of them were responsible for search, that search was “the revenue engine of the company,” and that bartering with the ads and finance teams was potentially “the new reality of their jobs.” 

Remember the days when the motto of Google was “do no evil”?

In the March 2019 core update to search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, was expected to be “one of the largest updates to search in a very long time. Yet when it launched, many found that the update mostly rolled back changes, and traffic was increasing to sites that had previously been suppressed by Google Search’s “Penguin” update from 2012 that specifically targeted spammy search results, as well as those hit by an update from an August 1, 2018, a few months after Gomes became Head of Search.

While I’m guessing, the timing of the March 2019 core update, along with the traffic increases to previously-suppressed sites, heavily suggests that Google’s response to the Code Yellow was to roll back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search results.

A few months later in May 2019, Google would roll out a redesign of how ads are shown on the platform on Google’s mobile search, replacing the bright green “ad” label and URL color on ads with a tiny little bolded black note that said “ad,” with the link looking otherwise identical to a regular search link. I guess that’s how it started hitting their numbers following the code yellow.

In January 2020, Google would bring this change to the desktop, which The Verge’s Jon Porter would suggest made “Google’s ads look just like search results now.” 

Search quality was reduced to boost a vital revenue stream.

These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology. 

These emails — which I encourage you to look up — tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.

This is a pretty good description, tbh.

The central villain of this story, according to the author of this report:

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google?

He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products.

When Raghavan joined the company, Yahoo held a 30.4 percent market share — not far from Google’s 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% of MSN Search. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4 percent and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten even by the newly-released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding nearly 2,000 employees — or 14% of its overall workforce. 

The man who deposed Ben Gomes — someone who worked on Google Search from the very beginning — was so shit at his job that in 2009 Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its own search technology, instead choosing to license Bing’s engine in a ten-year deal. If we take a long view of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline of the company, which went from being worth $125bn at the peak of the Dot Com bubble to being sold to Verizon for $4.8bn in 2017.

I don’t have anything insightful to say about this story….it’s just very funny to me.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a look at one of the world’s few remaining mobile hunter-gatherer groups, the Mbendjele BaYaka of The Congo:

We moved in a line, led by four men who searched the rainforest as they walked, barefoot. At the head of the snake, one of our guides cut narrow tunnels through the foliage with a machete. Two others followed, carrying large containers with the drinking water and food we would need for the week ahead. And at the end of the procession, the last guide made sure another researcher and I did not fall behind or get lost amid the maze of trees. We were exhausted. We had found nothing after seven hours of cutting through vegetation and wading through water and mud. I had lost count of the number of times we had turned back on a path or stopped to discuss alternative routes.

The men were looking for their home. It was a home that did not stay still but roved across the rainforest of the Likouala region as their community moved through the Northern Part of the Republic of Congo. Being members of the Mbendjele BaYaka, one of the few remaining mobile hunter-gatherer groups in the world today, these men had neither permanent houses nor private possessions. This, they told us, made the search challenging, even for insiders like themselves.

Less than a year ago, we had walked these same muddy trails, travelling each day to a temporary Mbendjele BaYaka settlement in the Congo rainforest. Back then, the settlement buzzed with children’s laughter. Women organised expeditions to gather firewood or helped collect payo (a bush mango) with the men who hadn’t left camp to try their luck catching an antelope. Gathered yams were piled next to leafy huts, and smoke (meant to keep poisonous ants away) rose toward the canopy.

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