Much to repair: Biden’s first day on the job

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. WhatsApp and services like it perform a crucial role in the mess that is the Internet. People want and perhaps even need smaller forums for communicating. But users are flooding into new platforms, raising tough questions about security and privacy. And we meet a Parisian street artist who, after witnessing brutal responses to protests, switched to depicting clashes with police. And the authorities don't much like what his work now reveals. First up, though.

My fellow Americans, a.

Moment we have all been waiting for.

In Washington yesterday, a new chapter began as Joe Biden was sworn in as America's 46th president.

I, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Do solemnly.

Swear that I will faithfully execute the inauguration. Displayed the unique circumstances in which he enters office surrounded by 25,000 National Guardsmen. The ceremony took place with neither crowds nor Mr. Biden's predecessor, but it still featured some familiar inaugural hallmarks, celebrity solos and a stirring poem written for the occasion by 22 year old Amanda Gorman.

Being American is more than a pride we inherit.

It's the past we step into and.

How we repair it.

The incoming administration used the moment to project an image of, well, to choose a word that was often repeated, unity.

On this January day, my whole soul is in this. Bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation.

Mr. Biden takes office not just at a moment of disunity in America's politics, but also a moment of multiple crises among the population.

President Biden laid out at least four big challenges facing the country.

Idris Kaloun is the Economist's Washington correspondent.

This is a time of testing.

The first is simply containing COVID 19. The pandemic has been raging for almost a year now. 400,000Americans have died.

Once in a century, virus that silently stalks the country has taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II, efforts.

To control the virus, to vaccinate enough people, to generate herd immunity have not been going well. He needs to get ahead on that immediately. The second that he brought up is the economic situation. Right now there are 10 million fewer Americans working than were before the pandemic started.

Millions of jobs have been lost, hundreds of thousands of businesses closed.

Another is the crisis of racial justice that we saw erupt over the summer in protests against police brutality.

A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us.

The fourth thing that he has to deal with that he emphasized quite a lot, is the lack of unity, the feeling of partisan rancor between Republicans and Democrats. He emphasized that this was a moment for national healing.

This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge. And unity is the path forward and we must meet this moment as the United States of America.

He acknowledged that although pay ons to unity might seem naive, that America still needed to try to do those things.

I mean, it's a long list that he got started on almost the second he set foot in the White House.

Yesterday. President Biden went to the White House and immediately went to work on a stack of executive orders.

I think some of the things we're gonn are going to be are bold and vital and there's no time to start like today.

So he signed one that started the process for America to rejoin the Paris Accords which set emissions targets for countries around the world. He signaled that it was the end of the Trump era by canceling funding for the border wall on Mexico that Trump had famously promised. He canceled the so called Muslim travel ban for the citizens of Muslim majority countries. And finally, while wearing a mask, while sitting behind the Resolute desk, something that President Trump had not done. President Biden signed an executive order mandating the wearing of masks in areas that the federal government had authority. That is intended to signal that this is a president that will take COVID 19 on much more seriously and someone who believes, unlike the previous administration, that it will be primarily the federal government's responsibility to coordinate policy as opposed to leaving it up to the states.

Okay, but that's comparatively easy stuff. We know that about executive orders and the like. But what about the more complicated stuff that will take congressional backing?

The first bill that is going to consume the Biden presidency is going to be another Covid relief measure. It's supposed to amount to $2 trillion in spending. It includes money for a vaccination drive, for testing, for contact tracing, and it includes some economic relief measures. They've signaled that the second big proposal they're going to try to get through Congress is going to be a infrastructure package. Based on what he has laid out during the campaign. We imagine that it would be also quite big, perhaps on the order of $2 trillion. And this would be not only where things like universal broadband and roads and bridges, traditional infrastructure, get their day, but also would be the primary vehicle for President Biden's main climate change agenda. Items, including massive investment in clean energy research, tax credits for wind, solar, all those sorts of things would probably come in that second bill.

Well, that's what he wants, but what is he likely to get? He does have a Democratic majority in the House and in the Senate, but it's by the slimmest of margins.

So there are two ways that Biden can get things through Congress. The first is to attract enough Republican votes to defeat a filibuster, which is basically a rule that allows 40 members of the Senate to stall any legislation. Another route that he has available to him is a procedure known as reconciliation. That's a budgetary measure which is immune to a filibuster and is often used by presidents with slim majorities to get some of their policy priorities through. It is a tougher route to take than the normal one. There are limits on what you can do. What we've seen so far is that he is not shying away from proposing some of the biggest, seeming, most ambitious legislation that he can. And I think the strategy here is to go big and let it get whittled down as you go through the process of a congressional negotiation.

And there's still the matter of former President Trump's impeachment trial. I mean, how do you think that will affect Mr. Biden's ability to get his agenda going?

So the main problem with impeachment is that it will take up time on the Senate floor because all the senators will have to be present to hear the evidence against former President Trump and decide eventually. That is floor time. That could be used to confirm President Biden's nominees, that could be used to confirm judges, that could be used to debate legislation. The Senate's on session that much, so that's the main problem. And the Biden administration has actually hinted at the fact that they are somewhat worried that impeachment might take up some of their time, but there's no indication that it is going to be stalled. It seems like it's going to start relatively soon. And probably what might happen is a split sort of schedule where the impeachment trial doesn't take up all the time that the Senate has available.

It's an understatement to say Mr. Biden has quite a lot of work to get done here. Do you think he's up to it? Do you think he is the man for this moment?

Biden comes to office with half a century of experience in Washington, D.C. he comes to office as the oldest man, at 78 years old, to occupy the presidency. He is an elder statesman. He might not serve more than a single term. He sees his role as someone who can turn down the flames of America's partisan warfare right now. And he sees himself as a bridge candidate between not only the flanks within the Democratic Party, but some conciliatory Republicans right now. Given the crises of the country faces, given the problems of hyper partisanship and mutual antagonism and loathing, you know, an attitude like that will make a marked shift from what we had before coming from the White House.

So with purpose and resolve, we turn to those tasks of our time, sustained by faith, driven by conviction, devoted to one another and the country we love with all our hearts. May God bless America.

And ultimately, you know, it might be naive to feel optimistic after the events of the last year, but I think that there is some grounds for optimism this time.

Thanks very much for your time, Idris.

Thanks for having me, Jason.

To hear more about the incoming administration and how President Biden will push to enact his sweeping agenda, listen to Checks and Ballots, our sister show on American politics. It's out every Friday wherever fine podcasts are sold and traded. Private messaging services and apps do a lot more than just pass private messages. WhatsApp and services like it all over the world are used to make payments, schedule plumbers, order groceries. Mostly, though, it is about messages by text, by voice, by video. During the pandemic, few services, online or off, have been as vital. Messaging apps, it's ever more clear, fulfill a basic human need. But new challenges to WhatsApp and questions over privacy and security have brought new scrutiny to them.

There are two main ways in which private messaging is different from social media. The first is that when you are messaging, you almost always have a very clear idea about who you are talking to. And the second is that there, for the most part, are no ads.

Hal Hodson writes about technology for the Economist.

For a long time, messaging services have been quietly crucial to how people with Internet connections live their lives. But because of recent events, these messaging services are stepping into the limelight a bit more.

And what effects have there been of that?

Well, if social media and online spaces, which we've paid so much attention to, especially over the last four years with Trump and Tweet and the alleged incitement of violence, if public and social media has these negative externalities about extremism, etc. What might be the problems that emerge from a private messaging ecosystem on which billions of people are chatting every single day, every single second?

By which you mean WhatsApp?

Yes. WhatsApp is the daddy of messaging apps all over the world, particularly in Europe, South America, Africa and many, many parts of Asia. But there are pockets where apps, apps that many of our listeners, particularly in the west, won't have heard of, are absolutely ubiquitous and exclusive. In South Korea it's Kakaotalk. In Japan and Taiwan it's an app called Line. And then of course In China there's WeChat. It is the original everything app. You can do everything from scanning Covid barcodes to say where you've been to investing. But the two messaging apps that have been in the news of late are Signal and Telegram because they have been the recipients of an absolute flood of new users, which Telegram's boss pal the greatest digital migration in history, rather grandiosely.

Why though? Why have people been flooding to those.

There'S basically been a giant viral storm about WhatsApp updating its privacy policy, but people perceive that to mean that WhatsApp was about to share more personal information about them with Facebook, so they would start sharing their contact book and their location and who they were talking to. And when Facebook and WhatsApp both say that's completely not true, that's not what this privacy policy meant. It was just about letting you chat with businesses if you want to. It's now been pushed back as a result of this outrage, but the damage has already been done. Between January 5th and January 12th, something like 34 million people around the world downloaded one of Signal or Telegram. They both in different ways purport to offer greater privacy in general.

And so do you think it is recent events that's really driving this so called migration or is there more at play?

There really has been a short term migration to Signal and Telegram, but in the longer term there has been a decline in the use of social media at the same time as there has been an increase in the use of messaging services. We got some data from a company called Sensor Tower. What their data shows is that social media use, the most popular social media apps worldwide use of them has declined by 6% in 2020. Use of the most popular messaging apps has grown by about 3%. The idea that social media use has declined in a pandemic is kind of insane to me because we've all been spending so much time on the Internet. What the heck is going on if we're not using social media more? And I think it's because messaging is just a more human adapted way to communicate online.

But as much as there may be a kind of psychological push, a needed space, a lot of people worry that because it's away from prying eyes, that more nefarious things can go on unwatched.

The Internet for the last 15 years has been a place where law enforcement can kind of just type in keywords and search it for bad stuff going on. And it is certain that within these private groups and in signal, those groups can be up to a thousand people. On telegram, they can be up to 200,000 people. It is certain that within those groups, people are talking about terrorist plots, people are sharing images of child sexual abuse. And for instance, the sort of right wing proud boys group in America has seen their public television telegram channels boom in followings after the de platforming of parler, right after the storming of the capitol. And so there's lots of concerns that these private spaces, as more and more people join them, as maybe social media has less allure, that that also means that the signal about bad stuff that's about to happen is also becoming harder and harder to find.

So how to strike that balance then? To give people the security they think they deserve, that they perhaps psychologically crave and maintaining sort of the rule of law?

There are a few possible answers, but one answer is for law enforcement to go back to essentially kind of digital shoe leather policing, you're going to have to infiltrate these private groups as an agent by pretending to be a member of the proud boys. That's very difficult. It's much more expensive than sitting there typing keywords into the Internet. There are some ideas basically to allow for these spaces to be searched only for very, very specific things like child sexual abuse material, to create a tiny, tiny window into the privacy of these groups that basically lets you answer a yes or no question. Is this kind of material being shared in there? If not, you know nothing. If yes, then you know that that's a group where child pornography is being shared.

Do you see this as a trend that will continue having started this way, towards ever more private, ever less public? It's kind of like a reversal of the entire social media push that the sort of global town hall goes back to just people chattering in small groups that no one can hear.

I do think it will continue. I don't think that this sort of global social commons, that is social media, will go away, but I do think that this is a realignment with, frankly, the environment that human speech and sociality evolved in. If you think about it, if I stand out on Speaker's Corner in Hyde park, there are rules of physics that are stopping my speech from spreading too far. The Internet completely blew that up, and it suddenly became free for speech to spread everywhere and anywhere. And all of a sudden we realized that the public sphere wasn't just Speaker's Corner or the newspapers in London, it was the whole world, and that anyone could just drop in and comment or do horrible things, say horrible things to anyone at any time for free. I do see private messaging as a sort of return to a more comfortable human way of discourse, essentially of remaking some of the boundaries that humans used to rely on and implicitly, without knowing they were, now we know that we need them, and I don't think we're going to stop needing them anytime soon.

Thanks very much for joining us, Hal.

Thanks, Jason.

A street artist in Paris is telling stories through his works that some authorities would rather not face. On the sides of buildings and underpasses across Paris. Ivan Kebadian uses his spray paint to document clashes between demonstrators and the police.

Ivan Kabadian is sort of a cool, unassuming guy. He wears clothes covered in paint, and he's really been at this since he was 13. He's now in his 30s, and he's finally getting recognition for his work.

Ali Jean Baptiste writes for the Economist.

His work has gained traction because it's reflecting what Parisians can see on their streets. And it's scenes that often can go unseen in the media.

And what's his art like?

His murals can be really big. Some will take up the side of a building. What you can see is often scenes of pure chaos. You'll see eyes dislodged by rubber bullets, tear gas, batons, breaking jaws. Most of the people in these scenes are faceless. It's a mix of straight lines and shadows. To me, the results are akin to blurry photos taken with a smartphone. He's inspired by global events like what? A big one for him was the killing of George Floyd, an African American whose death sparked a movement. But there's also a lot of focus on Paris and police brutality closer to home. For example, Adam, a young man who died while in police custody. His case prompted the start of France's very own Black Lives Matter movement. And then there's also Theo Luaca, who was left disabled after violent arrest. His first piece came together during a protest. He set out to paint something with some of his friends. It was going to be a rather casual day, but what happened was a car was set on fire near him. Police, police came onto the scene and people panicked. And his impulse was to paint what happened. So he started using simple black lines with the cans of spray paint he had. He started painting the car and the police and that was the start of his inspiration. When I asked him to describe his work, he said, I try to paint reality. In reality. He doesn't paint the kind of street art that people will want to pose in front of. And that's pretty deliberate. He wants his art to upset and surprise people. He wants people to look at his murals and see the degree of violence that can sometimes happen in Paris.

And so his work is getting more, more attention these days.

So Edvin isn't necessarily the French Banksy yet, but his work is being compared to the tradition of protest art that evolved in the 20th century. One of his most popular pieces is this huge undertaking. It was a 300 meter long mural that commemorated the Gilets Jaune. It was called l'verjaune, which means yellow winter. And it received a lot of media attention. It was meant to commemorate the Gilets Jaunes, especially the protesters that had been severely injured during riots. But nearly as soon as it came up, the piece was covered up. That's been something that Ivan has had to deal with throughout his career. He uses legal graffiti walls, but almost 2/3 of his pieces just end up being painted over.

And has that slowed him down, the fact that his art only gets a small airing?

It's been really frustrating for ITVAN to see hours of work be erased in minutes. But the images are getting a second life online as they get shared on social media. And he won't stop painting anytime soon. There's really been no shortage of inspiration. In 2019, for instance, over 2,000 protests were recorded in Paris, compared to just over 100 in London. Ultimately, what he's doing with his art is capturing the essence of the times, but also, and perhaps more importantly, trying to change them.

Ali, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the entire Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligence offer. The link is in the show Notes see you back here tomorrow.