In the Libyan city of Derna, Anna Foster describes the flood devastation and lack of international aid.

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Social-media platforms’ attempts to break into commerce have largely flopped. Will TikTok Shop fare any better?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The young conservatives trying to make eugenics respectable again The very common, very harmful thing well-meaning parents do The real issue in the UAW strike The Senate’s deep and dirty secret

“Silicon Valley Math”

A chamoy-pickle kit for $17.98; 352 sold so far. An ab roller wheel for $24.29; 8,592 sold. A one-piece professional V-shape-face double-chin-removal exerciser for 89 cents; 81 sold. Such is a sampling of the items featured on my TikTok Shop tab on Wednesday morning.

Earlier this week, TikTok Shop, a feature that allows audiences to purchase a baffling array of items through a stand-alone Shop tab and from videos on their feed, rolled out to TikTok users in the United States. Now many of the app’s livestreams are “QVC-like places where sellers are nonstop pitching products to live audiences,” as my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce recently wrote. TikTok’s latest move is an attempt to shift the app’s identity—and a sign of the company’s confidence in the loyalty of its users. Yes, we can riddle feeds with often-ludicrous product promotions, the Shop feature seems to be saying, and people will still keep coming back for more.

TikTok is the latest in a series of prominent platforms that have tried to pivot to e-commerce. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and even Google have tried to launch shopping functions, with varying—though generally low—degrees of success. “Every advertising company tries its hand at commerce, because they think that there’s some huge prize to be had if you can actually own the transaction and know what people are purchasing,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, told me. But though the potential gains are tantalizing, it’s hard to pull off: Instagram booted its shopping feature from the navigation bar and shut down its live-shopping feature earlier this year. Facebook similarly shut down its livestream-shopping function last year. Live-shopping services on YouTube have also struggled to gain traction.

Platforms moving to e-commerce need to build product pages and figure out details such as order fulfillment, secure checkout processes, customer service, and other logistics. That’s a lot for tech companies whose primary expertise lies in other areas. “It’s never worked for anyone else,” Kodali said. “Why would it work for [TikTok]?” (A spokesperson for TikTok told me that there are upwards of 200,000 sellers on TikTok Shop, and more than 100,000 registered creators, but declined to share more information beyond what’s posted on the company’s press site.)

American customers, by and large, don’t seem all that eager to shop on social-media apps instead of on trusted e-commerce websites. In China, where TikTok’s parent company is based, shopping via livestream is a huge trend—an estimated $500 billion in goods were reportedly sold on streams last year. But just because shopping on social media is big in China doesn’t mean it will translate to American audiences; Kodali noted that Chinese e-commerce trends do not have a track record of blowing up in the United States. And TikTok’s own norms may make commercial activity a hard sell. Caroline told me today that, although the app’s culture of authenticity may help some users sell things, “you could see shopping being a bit of an odd fit: This app was supposed to be where I watched relatable videos from everyday people, and now they’re trying to make money off of me?”

Still, Caroline told me, “people spend a tremendous amount of time on TikTok, and I don’t see them quitting en masse over TikTok Shop. I think it’s more of a question of how much users will tolerate, and how successful it’ll be in the long run.” In-app shopping, she added, is a “white whale” for social platforms.

Commerce and social media have long been intertwined: Much of social-media influencers’ role boils down to recommending products. But audiences follow these influencers because they trust them and because these people have a track record of offering useful or interesting information. On TikTok Shop, meanwhile, almost anyone can start selling things. I currently have five followers, and perhaps one dayI too could apply to set up an account to start hawking one-piece professional V-shape-face double-chin-removal exercisers. (I probably wouldn’t do that.) And some reporters have already identified safety and integrity concerns with the feature.

If other apps have failed to grow e-commerce businesses and there doesn’t seem to be a strong consumer appetite for these services in the U.S., why is TikTok trying to get into the retail game? Part of it might be a simple grasp at big numbers, combined with a healthy dose of the hubris that powers the tech world. American retail is a multitrillion-dollar industry: If tech executives are engaging in what Kodali called “Silicon Valley math”—calculating the total size of a market and estimating the percentage of it they can capture—they may extrapolate big revenues. And to large tech companies, it may seem relatively easy and worthwhile to create a checkout module and order pages if it means getting even a small slice of the retail pie. Social-media companies have a long history of foisting new products that they hope will prove good for their business on users who did not ask for them—consider the metaverse.

Tech companies have been throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall for years, seeking out new revenue streams where they can. TikTok Shop may be another such investment: a grasp at revenue just in case it works. Social-media apps are always mimicking features from other apps. Instagram is trying to be like Twitter and Snapchat; LinkedIn is emulating TikTok; Facebook is trying to be like everyone. And TikTok seems to be the latest app trying to become Amazon.

Related:

TikTok is doing something very un-TikTok. The endless cycle of social media

Today’s News

Tropical-storm warnings are in place for millions of people in New England and Canada as Hurricane Lee approaches. In remarks from the White House, President Joe Biden expressed respect for the United Auto Workers strike and emphasized that record profits for auto companies have not been “shared fairly” with workers. Corpses are decaying under rubble in the Libyan city of Derna, where at least 10,000 people are believed to be missing due to devastating floods.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Don’t Let Love Take Over Your Life

By Faith Hill

If you have a romantic partner, maybe you’ve noticed that you two spend an awful lot of time together—and that you haven’t seen other people quite as much as you’d like. Or if you’re single (and many of your friends aren’t), you might have gotten the eerie feeling that I sometimes do: that you’re in a deserted town, as if you woke one morning to find the houses all empty, the stores boarded up. Where’d everyone go?

Either way, that feeling might not just be in your head. Kaisa Kuurne, a sociologist at the University of Helsinki, told me she was “a little bit shocked” when she started mapping Finnish adults’ relationships for a 2012 study, investigating whom subjects felt close to and how they interacted day to day. Subjects who lived with a romantic partner seemed to have receded into their coupledom.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

In another fascinating addition to the annals of Sam Bankman-Fried, my friend and former colleague David Yaffe-Bellany reports in The New York Times that while on house arrest, the FTX founder crafted a set of byzantine documents explaining himself, which he gave to the crypto influencer Tiffany Fong for reasons unclear. Bankman-Fried’s apologia took the form of a 15,000-word, 70-page unpublished Twitter thread, replete with links to Alicia Keys and Rihanna music videos as well as jabs at former colleagues; another file featured a screenshot from the Christopher Nolan movie Inception. A favorite detail of mine from the article: Apparently, Bankman-Fried told Fong that his parents were installing a pickleball court for him while he was on house arrest.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Footage and eyewitness accounts have conveyed harrowing scenes from the storm-struck Libyan town of Derna: overflowing morgues and mass burials, rescuers digging through mud with their bare hands to recover bodies, a corpse hanging from a streetlight, the cries of trapped children. Two aging dams to Derna’s south collapsed under the pressure of Storm Daniel, sending an estimated 30 million cubic meters of water down a river valley that runs through the city’s center and erasing entire neighborhoods. Some 11,300 people are currently believed dead—a number that could double in the days ahead. An estimated 38,000 residents have been displaced.      

Libya has seen no shortage of suffering and misery since the 2011 revolution that toppled its longtime dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Yet Storm Daniel promises to be a singular event. Already, Libyan commentators inside the country and out are pointing to the apocalyptic loss of life in Derna as the product not simply of a natural disaster, but of Libya’s divided and ineffectual governance. The west of the country is run by the internationally recognized Government of National Unity; the east, including Derna, falls under the rule of the renegade strongman Khalifa Haftar.   

[Read: Photos from Libya’s devastating floods]

Derna has become an emblem of ills that afflict many of Libya’s 7 million inhabitants: infrastructural decay, economic neglect, unpreparedness for global warming. But to understand the scale of its destruction requires seeing the city in its particularity—as a stronghold of opposition to Haftar’s violent consolidation of power in eastern Libya, and before that, a hub of intellectualism and dissent. Derna’s suffering is not entirely an accident. Though for that matter, neither is Libya’s.

Founded on the ruins of the Greek city of Darnis, Derna has always been a place apart in Libya, distinguished by its cosmopolitanism, creative ferment, and fierce independence. It sits along the Mediterranean coast, at the base of the aptly named Jabal Akhdar, or Green Mountains, which constitute Libya’s wettest region and account for anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of its plant species. A port city of 100,000, Derna is famous for its gardens, river-fed canals, night-flowering jasmine, and delicious bananas and pomegranates.

Muslim Andalusians fleeing persecution in Spain helped build the city in the 16th century, leaving their imprint on the designs of mosques and ornamental doors in its old quarter. Waves of other settlers would make their way there across the Mediterranean. By the early 20th century, Derna had become a font of literary output and nationalist agitation. Poets and playwrights gathered in a weekly cultural salon called the Omar Mukhtar Association to rail against colonial rule across the region, and after 1951, against the Libyan monarchy.

An officers’ coup ousted that monarchy in 1969, and the country’s new ruler—Colonel Muammar Qaddafi—naturally took a wary view of the coastal city’s troublemaking potential. By the 1980s, he had made Derna a place of despair, its arts scene eviscerated, its prosperous traders dispossessed, its youth crushed by unemployment. Many of Derna’s young men joined the Islamist insurgency against Qaddafi that spread through the Green Mountains in the 1990s. The dictator responded by shutting down the region’s water service and detaining, torturing, and executing oppositionists. By the mid-2000s, the city’s rage was channeled outward, as hundreds of young men flocked from Derna to Iraq to fight the American military occupation. The U.S. military captured documents attesting to the militancy of these recruits, also revealed in a U.S. diplomat’s 2006 cable titled “Die Hard in Derna.”

[Read: How Qaddafi fooled Libya and the world]

In the years after  Qaddafi’s fall in 2011, Derna became the site of violent infighting among Islamists, including a radical faction that sought to make the city an outpost of the Islamic State. Haftar, a Qaddafi-era general and defector, began his military campaign under the guise of eliminating jihadist militias and restoring security. But his sweep was actually a bid for national power, and Derna’s fighters were among its staunchest opponents. He was determined to subdue the city. With remorseless, siege-like tactics and substantial foreign assistance, including air strikes and special-operations forces from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and several Western countries, he did so in 2018, though at the cost of destroying swaths of the city and displacing thousands.

In the years since, Haftar has kept Derna under a virtual military lockdown, ruled by an ineffective puppet municipality and deprived of reconstruction funds, human services, and, crucially, attention to its decaying infrastructure, including the two dams that collapsed during Storm Daniel. Studies and experts had long warned that the dams were in dire need of repair.

Derna’s officials and Haftar’s military authority reportedly issued contradictory instructions as the storm approached: Some advised an evacuation and others ordered a curfew. The confusion suggests a lack of coordination within the eastern government, which, a Libyan climate scientist told me this week, habitually paid little attention to expertise. Haftar will exert tight control over relief and reconstruction efforts in the weeks ahead, funneling contracts to companies run by cronies and family members.

Having obstructed Haftar’s ambitions, Derna has become a particular target for repression. But Haftar’s style of rule—kleptocratic, authoritarian, extractive—has made for poor stewardship of eastern Libya’s infrastructure and natural environment, leaving other communities vulnerable to climate-induced extreme weather events as well.

Haftar’s militia controls a body called the Military Investment Authority, which is essentially a profit-making enterprise for the Haftar family. The authority has taken control of eastern Libya’s agriculture, energy, and construction, with dire consequences for the environment. Climate activists from the east have told me that under Haftar’s watch, the deforestation of the Green Mountains has accelerated. Elites and militias have cut down trees to build vacation residences and businesses, and to sell the wood as charcoal. Urban development and new settlements have expanded into once-forested areas to accommodate people displaced by war.

The absence of tree cover, other human-induced transformations to the Green Mountains, and irregular patterns of rainfall caused by climate change are worsening the damage that floods can wreak. Those that hit the eastern city of Al-Bayda in late 2020 displaced thousands of people. And without the cooling effect of the mountains’ sizable forests, the average mean temperature in the area has risen, which in turn raises the risk of wildfires among the trees that remain. Already, soaring heat waves set forests aflame near the towns of Shahat and Al-Bayda, in 2013 and 2021 respectively.

In most countries, civil society and other grassroots actors can help address such ecological concerns. But in Haftar-ruled east Libya, climate and environmental activists face an extremely repressive security machinery that either stifles their involvement or confines it to politically safe initiatives, such as tree planting.  

“Young people are willing, but they are afraid,” an official from the region told me candidly in July. “There is no state support.” A member of a climate-volunteer group in the east told me this week by phone that Haftar’s government had blocked their group’s attempt to obtain weather-monitoring equipment from abroad, citing “security concerns.”

I’ve heard variations on this theme time and time again during my research in Libya—an arid, oil-dependent country that is among the world’s most vulnerable to the shocks of climate change, including floods and rising sea levels, but also soaring temperatures, declining rainfall, extended droughts, and sandstorms of increasing frequency, duration, and intensity.  

According to one reputable survey in which higher numbers correlate with greater climate vulnerability,  Libya ranks 126th out of 182 states, just after Iraq, in the lower-middle tier. Despite the recent inundation of Derna and the east, water scarcity poses the gravest climate-related risk to the majority of its inhabitants: Libya ranks among the top six most water-stressed countries in the world, with 80 percent of its potable-water supply drawn from non-replenishable fossil aquifers by means of a deteriorating network of pipes and reservoirs. And yet Libya has done little to address its climate vulnerabilities.

[Read: We’re heading straight for a demi-Armageddon]

The country’s political rivalries, corruption, and militia-ruled patronage system have stymied its response. The eastern and western camps engage in only modest exchanges of climate-related information and technology. Even within the internationally recognized government in Tripoli, the ministry of the environment and a climate authority within the prime minister’s office have been jockeying for control of the climate file. (They reached a modest modus vivendi in recent months, some insiders told me this summer.)

Derna’s plight is so extreme that perhaps—so activists and commentators hope—it will not be ignored, as countless other Libyan calamities have been, but may instead lead to lasting and positive change. Derna holds a lesson for Libya’s elites, if they are listening, about the costs of division and self-aggrandizement. Momentum toward such recognition, however tragic its origins, would be in keeping with the city’s storied and sometimes controversial role as beacon of dissent.  

“It’s a revolutionary city,” a climate scientist with family roots there told me this week.

Survivors of floods that struck eastern Libya tell Al Jazeera they remain without aid and struggle to find loved ones.

Flash flooding tore through the coastal city of Derna on Sunday, leaving entire neighbourhoods in ruins. 10,000 people are still missing while officials say the death toll has surpassed 11,000

Large parts of the city of Derna were destroyed after two dams burst, with thousands killed.

A further 10,100 people are reported missing in Libya's Mediterranean city after a storm caused devastating flooding.

A new volcanic eruption in Hawaii, deadly flooding in coastal Libya, a devastating earthquake in Morocco, scenes from China Fashion Week in Beijing, a tunnel deep underground in Germany, wheelchair basketball in Germany, a penny farthing race in England, an end-of-summer cattle drive in Germany, and much more

The death toll in Libya's coastal city of Derna has soared to 11,300 as search efforts continue following a massive flood fed by the breaching of two dams in heavy rains, the Libyan Red Crescent said Thursday.