Doctor Strangememe Or: How Oliver Learned To Stop Worrying And Love AI

We see lots of “You can use AI for that” boosterism coming from the corporate right, desperate to convince investors in this stuff that the money they’ve thrown at generative AI will pay huge dividends. So I was bemused to see one Oliver Markus Malloy, apparently a progressive Democrat bigging it up (link to his piece here).

His core argument is that reactionaries (MAGA, its global network of far right allies and weird techbros) use this stuff, so progressives also need to use this weapon or get destroyed when the right brings its AI gun to a political knife fight. It’s classic arms race thinking - just as the rival imperial powers threw steel and sweat into the pre-World War One dreadnought-building race, he argues that progressives should respond to their rivals' AI by throwing scraped content into producing bigger, badder memes than the enemy (he also makes another argument that content created by AI can be art, not just derivative "slop" but it's his thoughts on political comms that concern me most).

I’m sceptical about the “this is an arms race we must win” argument. OK, we’re agreed that the corporate right/far right alliance has an advantage when it comes flooding the zone with clickbaity content quickly and at scale. The argument goes that by not adopting the same techniques & tools, progressives are ceding the information space to their enemies.

I'm not convinced that progressives should mirror their opponents in this reactive way. I'm not arguing that the far right doesn't use this stuff, or that the sheer volume of content it allows them to pump out doesn't work. After all, "Quantity has a quality all its own" as Josef Vissarionovich probably never said.

But before we decide that "we need some of that", maybe we need to think about what lessons we can learn from the last time the right used IT and big data to make historic gains. In the run-up to the United Kingdom's vote on whether or not to leave the European Union and Trump's first battle for the White House, we saw how bad actors like Cambridge Analytica were able to use big data to flood social media with vast quantities of targeted disinfomation and rage bait. 

The likes of Facebook and Twitter (as it then was) were overrun with trolls, bots and a blizzard of vaguely plausible but disingenous messages. Many of the messages contradicted one another but, because they were targeted at specific groups, members of other demographics who saw different messages didn't see the contraditions.

This IT-enabled flim-flam certainly played a role in selling different groups of the unsupecting voters a bill of goods (the mis-sold product being Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US).

So, what would've happened if progressives had a Cambridge Analytica equivalent of their own in the run up to the 2016 EU referendum and US presidential votes? Could they have swung the results in different directions? I'm not so sure, because what we were looking at then wasn't just a gap in capabilities but a gap in content and ethics. 

Remember what I said about micro-targeted and often contradictory messages? Yes, delivering those messages was a tech problem, but the content of the messages was as important as the medium. Tech aside, the innovation was to efficiently send contradictory messages tailored to appeal to different sets of voters and to amplify existing misinformation which was already out there in the wild, courtesy of years of mendacious campaigning in the right wing press. Think about that for a moment.

Using that tech wouldn't have worked (at least in the same way) if the people using it had been held back by the moral scruples to make an honest case. To use the example I'm most familiar with, the EU Referendum and the effectiveness of the Leave campaigns:

...But, as I discovered while knocking on doors during the campaign, many Britons believe all sort of bizarre things about the EU that have no basis in fact, and the source of which is ultimately newspapers – for example, that most immigrants to Britain come from the EU, that 20 per cent of the population are EU migrants or that 75 per cent of Britain’s laws are made in Brussels.

Before and during the campaign, the eurosceptic newspapers carried a strong message that EU migrants were causing enormous problems in Britain. They ran front-page after front-page of scare stories about how migrants and refugees were trying to get into the country – often conflating the two groups. Many of these articles were factually incorrect. Even on the day after the Orlando shootings in Florida, the Daily Mail – uniquely among UK papers – led its front page with ‘Fury over plot to let 1.5 million Turks into Britain’. The written press did a great job in reinforcing Vote Leave’s twisted message that thousands of foreigners – whether asylum-seekers, Romanians, Syrians, terrorists or Turks – were all hell-bent on entering the country.

From a piece by Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform.

Ultimately, the Leave campaigns' ability to leverage their big data advantge rested to their willingness to lie shamelessly without fear of retribution. As Charles Grant put it "They exploited the fact that in political advertising, unlike commercial advertising, there are no penalties for untruths".

So I'm not sure that, even with the same resouces, the other side would've been able to win big by upping its big data/social media game. Unless, of course, it was willing to lie as shamelessly itself. The tech was just the delivery system. The weapon itself was made of good old-fahioned lies and bullshit and its effectiveness relied on our old friend the bullshit asymmetry principle, AKA Brandolini's Law ("The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it").

There are two main reasons why I'm not pro-using the latest tech tools to "flood the zone with (our) shit" in an effort to emulate how the bad guys have been winning so far. The first reason is that it's lying and that's just straight wrong.* Secondly, it moves the fight onto the enemy's territory. If the opposing party has no qualms about lying on an industrial scale and you decide to get into a lying contest with them, you're going to lose. 

You'll lose because blurring the lines between lies and truth is more helpful to liars than it is to members of the evidence-based community. So long as there is still some shred of evidence or objective truth out there by which people can judge them, liars and propagandists are vulnerable. When both sides are unreliable and there's no objective standard of truth, you're into a world of "he said she said" and "they're all as bad as each other".** And, aside from direct disinformation, getting there is a win for bad actors from Cambridge Analytica to MAGA influencers to Russian troll farms. Yes, we're circling back to that famous Garry Kasparov quote:

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

In other words, creating a space where there are no objective standards to which the powerful can be held or which they can judged by. Believe me, you don't want to go there.

So how does this map on to the latest wave of AI-driven political comms? Well, the next image seems to have been a viral anti-MAGA hit. It allgedly upset the MAGA regime so much it led to a Norwegian tourist being refused entry to the Land Of The Free™ for having it on his phone (I think the US side eventually denied that this image was the reason but, honestly, I can wholly believe tat the MAGA crowd are thin-skinned and control-freakish enough to have barred someone for making fun of them):

Meme of J D Vance as a bald, bearded baby

 

And you'd need a heart of stone not to appreciate those pompous assholes being mocked, or the Streisand effect that kicks in when they try to suppress the mockery. 

The problem is ... as far as I know, the viral J D Vance memes were produced using Photoshop, not AI.

As far as I know. But even if they were the products of AI, would reaching for AI be worth it? Clearly you could do this in Photoshop or similar without colluding with the damage AI is doing to the environment, wholesale copyright theft, disrupting creative jobs (no, techbros "disrupting" isn't automatically a good thing - while it may be good to disrupt, say, a terrorist cell, disrupting the lives of people who are just trying to make a living without harming anybody else is a bad thing), widening the already obscene inequlities of wealth and power still further, all in the service of what may well be yet another a very expensive financial bubble.

And that's without considering that AI is asymetrically attractive to bad actors who want to generate big volumes of content quickly without being concerned by troublesome details like truth or ethics. Deepfakes, amplifying existing prejudices (even when there isn't a man like Elon "Roman salute my arse" Musk behind the curtain obviously tweaking his pet AI to let it express its inner MechaHitler)...

... the list of opportunities for plausibly deniable deception & generally messing with people's heads is long and depressing. What I'm seeing is another tech-enabled opportunity for people with no principles to flood the zone with shit in much the same way they did a decade ago. The opportunities for progressives and people who value strightforward messages anchored in reality and something approaching objective truth seem a lot more constrained.

 OK, beyond dumping on AI do I have any thoughts about what would work? Well, the ten years since the last tech attack seem to have been largely years of lessons not learned. But not everywhere. In Finland, they got the memo about going for the harmful content, actively pushing back against fake information, fake images and clickbait being used to attack the principle of informed consent with a programme of education and public infomation aimed at children and adults alike. Another lesson not learned in too many places by too many politicians is there are plenty of progressive policies which are poplar and can cut through, even against the screeching coordinated right wing media claque, if they're presented clearly and with conviction. Just ask Mr Mamdani. And remember the lesson of the J D Vance memes; these militant far right characters are freakishly weird. Stop normalising their batshittery and mock them - it's easy when you try and the best part is that we're quite smart enough to do it right now with without the help of AI.

 

*Yes, I know that technically there are cases where it may be right to lie (e.g. lying to a knife-wielding maniac about the whereabouts of his intended victim) but that's not the sort of scenario we're considering here.

**This both-sides-ism already happened during the Brexit debate - even though the vast majority of points made by the Remain campaign were broadly correct and borne out by subsequent events, the reaction of the Leaver campaigners to their lies being called out was to find a dodgy statement from one of the millions of Remainers (or to make one up) and shout "See! Both sides!" blithely ignoring the fact that they'd been caught red-handed themselves.

Cartoon apes want to be free.

Bitcoin, ethereum and other major cryptocurrencies have been hit by a huge crash over the last week, partly triggered by the shock collapse of a major coin.

The bitcoin price has lost 25% over the last month with its biggest rival ethereum down over 30%.

Other smaller cryptocurrencies have been even harder hit—sparking fears others could collapse entirely.
 

Now, as serious economic "shock therapy" warning signs flash, analysts at Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley have predicted prices of digital collectible non-fungible tokens (NFTs) could come under pressure. (Forbes)

As a complete outsider, one thing occurred to me, once I'd picked myself off the floor from laughing myself stupid at the plight of people whose idea of fun was tweeting "Have fun staying poor" at people who didn't fall for the latest iteration of the old get-rich-quick scam. That was how the whole idea of NFTs seems to be a great example of how clever people (or at least ones with specific smarts in areas like IT & cryptography) can also be really dumb. I'm reminded of the classic Larson cartoon of a geeky kid outside the Midvale School for the Gifted, stubbornly pushing at a door marked "pull".

My first thought about attempts to monetise a digital artworks by chaining it to a token of authenticity was how counter it runs to the principle that information wants to be free.* The legacy of some very smart digital pioneers is that reproducing digital information is trivially easy and almost costless. Attempting to make this process hard again is a difficult task which the smart people behind NFTs set themselves - and failed to achieve, as owning an NFT is not the same thing as owning the artwork or image, or text message, or tweet, or whatever else you decide to associated with it:

There is no possible way to see an NFT with your naked eyes. They are immaterial goods that you cannot see but own. NFTs are inherently treacherous and right-clickers, collectors, and artists worldwide are falling for their deception.

My second thought is how obviously mostly socially useless and scammy the NFT pioneers' project is. I say "mostly" because the quote above hints at how you could justify an attempt to make digital art, or any other digital creation, non-fungible. If you're an artist, or the creator of anything in the digital space, it would be easier to profit from your own hard work and talent if it wasn't possible for every rando on the internet to swipe your creation with a right click. If this was just a tool for creators to protect their creations from theft, I'd understand.

But it's not that. This is mostly middle men, trying to turn either someone else's work or some, usually ugly, mediocre, low-effort image they've created themselves into a something with the attributes of a gambling chip crossed with a share in a pyramid scheme which has value only if you can pursuade a horde of greedy and credulous people that it has value.

Other than that, I'll leave the commentary on this story to people who actually have a proper knowledge of IT, cryptography and finance, which I don't. But I think it's still legitimate even for me, as layperson, to take a firm view on this, based on the fact that there are plenty of explanations out there from crypto evangelists and from crypto sceptics who do have some background in this stuff. And I've found the arguments of the sceptics to be lucid where the evangelists are obscure, explanatory where the evangelists are defensive and disinterested, where the evangelists would have an obvious interest in pushing this stuff.

For an actually informed tear-down of NFT/crypto hype, explaining why this stuff mostly doesn't work as advertised (and would be a dystopian nightmare if implemented, even if it did work as advertised), see video below: 

*Here's the full orignal quote from Stewart Brand "On the one hand you have — the point you’re making Woz [Steve Wozniak] — is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other."

"Destination community wet"

No - me neither. Sounds more like random output from AI Weirdness or Botnik than something written by an actual human. It's getting hard to tell these days, as Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness pointed out recently:

These "I forced a bot to watch X" posts are almost certainly 100% human-written with no bot involved. Here's how you can tell. 1/12 https://t.co/4wVxfraqZS

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) June 14, 2018

When you find yourself wondering whether what you just read was written by a bot or just by a human pretending to be a bot pretending to be a human, maybe it's time to give up and go to the pub. If so, the Dolphin's OK and no wetter than the average pub, despite what it says on the brewery's web site.

Data guru for hire

Back in 2014, somebody in the Labour Party thought they'd been very clever when they out-bid Ukip for the services of a freelance "election guru":

The Labour party has hired a Bolton-based betting expert to be its general election data guru after a bidding war with Ukip.

Ian Warren, 44, a self-taught election forecaster, spent the past 10 years working as a sole trader betting on election outcomes in the UK and the US.

Just like blogger Nate Silver across the Atlantic, Warren correctly predicted the electoral college in the 2008 and 2012 American elections, earning big money for his secretive corporate clients and funding his PhD in statistics and criminology at the University of Manchester.

Maybe the phrase "secretive corporate clients" didn't ring any alarm bells in the days before Cambridge Analytica became a household name. So when the guru came up with a cunning plan to outflank Ukip, nobody thought to ask why a supposedly progressive party was being advised to ape a gaggle of extreme nationalist single-issue fanatics with a grand total of one MP who, as we've since discovered, never even had a workable plan for achieving the single goal they were set up to achieve.

No, the "Blue Labour" tendency lapped it up and duly added "very real concerns" about migration to Labour's austerity-lite offer, leaving Ed Milliband to crash and burn:

“While many retain their loyalty to Labour, a sizeable proportion is moving to Ukip,” said Ian Warren, an election data analyst who contributed to the Fabians’ research. “In many constituencies that Labour is targeting in 2015, almost half of all households are comprised of these groups… when asked whether they are comfortable living in close proximity to people from different cultures and backgrounds, they are more likely to say no.”...

...[Tom Watson] said it was very important for the “Blue Labour” agenda championed by Lord (Maurice) Glasman and Jon Cruddas, the policy chief, which is based on “faith, flag and family”, to be an element in its election manifesto.

Yeah, trying to out-Ukip Ukip really worked out well for everybody, didn't it? Thank you, o guru, we are not worthy.

Of course, it would take more than merely being disastrously wrong to dissuade a guru of Warren's stature from lecturing the Labour Party on the folly of not heeding his ineffable wisdom. Maybe the fact that he chose to deliver his lecture from the bully pulpit of Conservative Home should also have rung alarm bells:

One of the most important examples of ‘walking across the aisle’ comes from Mark Reckless in Rochester & Strood; a story which has largely been untold, but which I would like to speak to Mark about.

Mark’s back story is straight from Conservative central casting: Oxford, career as a barrister, Policy Unit at CCHQ, elected MP in 2010. However, in 2014 he defected to UKIP. All of a sudden, he was forced to canvass Labour streets in the hope of peeling voters away from them. I know this, because I did a report for UKIP at the time. The point being that he was now forced to take the time to see the world through the eyes of Labour voters in Strood – a demographic he hadn’t needed to win before.

I haven’t spoken to Mark, but I do know that the campaign team found this experience energising. It’s a pattern other UKIP candidates raised as Conservatives have seen. It’s powerful because, for those candidates and activists, it alters their perspective, forcing them to challenge their own preconceptions. Who knows, for some it may only serve to reinforce them but I know that, for others, the experience has been somewhat cathartic.

So when I witness the partisan and abusive nature of the election of Corbyn [because there's nothing partisan or abusive about Ukip, obvs], you’ll see me slowly walking away from the scene, shaking my head. Having advocated a listening and understanding approach for so long, I wonder whether it might be best to vacate the area for a bit and let both sides tear each other to pieces...

...Because if Labour thinks it can understand UKIP voters by hectoring them it’s going to continue to lose them, and will deserve to do so.

Fast forward to 2018. Mark Reckless has left the sinking ship that is Ukip, a turn of events which Ian Warren might find embarrassing, if he didn't have more important things to worry about right now:

Data based upon demographics, class, finances and ethnicity, was used to identify core groups of Labour voters to be targeted with UKIP-led messaging and was instrumental in deciding where Nigel Farage appeared to speak during the Brexit campaign.

Leave.EU, Cambridge Analytica, the RMT Union and Trade Unions Against EU, and Labour MP Kate Hoey – associated with Labour Leave – gained access to the information via Labour’s 2015 general election data guru before referendum campaigns were officially designated by the Electoral Commission.

Blue Collar workers, struggling families, students, and ethnic minorities were among those specifically designated valuable to tailored social media targeting and doorstep canvassing. The data provided specific postcodes to be targeted on and offline, in order to attract millions of votes across the country – enough to swing the divisive referendum result.

The postcode and demographic briefings are being released in full, in the public interest, to assist any concerned voters in establishing whether they were affected as Labour have remained largely silent on the issue of Cambridge Analytica and concerns over data profiling....

...The huge dataset, based on the information of millions of Labour voters across the country, was allegedly built using Mosaic demographics and the results of party canvassing. It is believed to have been amassed during 2015 by political consultant Ian Warren, before he passed it on in a series of detailed briefings and a postcode targeting spreadsheet in early 2016.

He first met with Cambridge Analytica to discuss the use of the information as part of Leave.EU’s campaign at the end of 2015.

Warren was head-hunted by Labour for the 2015 election campaign after his successful work with UKIP and continued to be closely associated with the party, polling members and working with Owen Smith on his leadership challenge during the remainder of 2016.

This is what Labour's privacy policy says about the personal information the party holds:

"We will never sell or share your personal information with other organisations for their direct marketing purposes without your explicit consent. We may share your data with third parties to perform services on your behalf and to help promote the Labour Party by serving you advertisements and content online about our politicians, campaigns and policies we think you might be interested in.”

Ian Warren insists that he's done nothing wrong, that the data he passed to Leave.EU was "bespoke" data created by himself and that "The data I used to inform this work for Leave.EU is NOT personal data; it is neighbourhood level data." But even if he is completely innocent of having breached data protection laws, it seems to me that he's guilty of having done more to help the people who put forward a failed bid for his services, Ukip, than he did to help the Labour Party, who were actually paying him.

They should ask for their money back, but I guess they'll have to make do with this uncharacteristic piece of humility from the great guru:

I am truly sorry to my friends in Labour for having to read this. There are some decisions I have made that I regret deeply; working with Leave.EU being one. But I have always acted professionally and in good faith, and will do so in the future. I am of course more than happy to speak with the party, and I am sure I will be soon. This whole thing is deeply embarrassing but the party should know one thing – neither I or the Labour party have done anything wrong here.

The cry of an innocent man, unjustly accused, or the squawk of chickens coming home to roost? Time will tell.

"We have heard rumblings"

It's not my place to tell other people how to do their jobs, but what the hell. Here's a template for schools, showing how not to communicate with parents:

"Re: staffing for next year. All staff are fully qualified and experienced teachers who we check carefully. We have heard rumblings from parents who may have concerns. Please come and speak to Mrs [redacted] so you can be reassured. No negative comments on here please. We always endeavour to listen and work with you. Thank you [redacted]."

"Why don't we just put any information that parents might need to hear in one place, on the school website?"

"Because we're down with the kids; we're all about social media, sharing and interactivity! Let's create a Facebook group and use that to keep in touch with parents! They'll love it! They can tell us how great we are, share cute photos and everything!"

"But what about parents who don't do Facebook?"

"La, la, la, not listening!"

"And if you invite people to interact, doesn't that create a systemic risk of people sharing things you'd prefer they spoke privately to staff about? Isn't the result just curated, fake interactivity, that pretends to welcome sharing and feedback, but patronises parents like naughty five year olds if they say anything that isn't positive?"

"BORING!!!"

For the record, I haven't used Facebook in about a decade and don't know the specifics of what the parents in question had been "rumbling" about. I just think the whole set-up is asking for trouble, as well as being annoying to non-Facebook users like me.

People shouldn't need a Facebook account in order to do important things like keeping in touch with their children's schools.

My new favourite Christmas song

King of toys and hippopotamuses, full of the light of that stood at the dear Son of Santa Claus

He was born in a wonderful christmas tree

Run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run

Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run

Rudolph, run, run

Rudolf the new born King.

I think Mariah Carey has finally lost Christmas. From a festive post on Janelle Shane's Letting Neural Networks be Weird. Our seasonal Bible reading is taken from Psalm 10010111:

And the wild beasts of the field exult about the sheep of thine anger

Their heart shall be abundantly satisfied with frogs...

Adaptive homeostasis

Back in 2012, I was confident that people would eventually grow tired of "Facebook ... (which will probably go into unlamented terminal decline as the intrusive, stalker-ish changes required to effectively monitor, control and monetise its users become annoying enough to make many of them abandon Facebook and adopt The Next Big Thing, whatever that turns out to be)."

How wrong I was. Facebook is still there. The creeping intrusiveness has accelerated. But instead of getting angry, or even mildly annoyed, people are calmly adapting to an environment where the most outrageous privacy violations are treated as something perfectly normal:

Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections...

...having acknowledged that people in your address book may not necessarily want to be connected to you, Facebook will then do exactly what it warned you not to do. If you agree to share your contacts, every piece of contact data you possess will go to Facebook, and the network will then use it to try to search for connections between everyone you know, no matter how slightly—and you won’t see it happen.

Kashmir Hill

Still not creepy enough for ya? Then check this out:

Facebook has a new strategy for combating revenge porn: It wants to see your nudes first, before an abuser has the chance to spread them.

As part of a new feature the social network is testing in Australia, users are being asked to upload explicit photos of themselves before they send them to anyone else, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

This is how the new feature works. First, you upload an explicit image of yourself to Facebook Messenger (you can do so by starting a conversation with yourself). Then, you flag it as a "non-consensual intimate image" for Facebook.

Louise Matsakis

Is it already too late to point out that absolutely none of this is remotely O.K?

Oops, did we just forget something?

Now that we're all alert to the menace of corporations reflexively hassling us in the most patronising ways imaginable, I'd like to share the text of an automated e-mail I just got from Wordpress. I must have inadvertently clicked, then abandoned, a paid upgrade button while setting up a free site, because I somehow provoked an e-mail with the subject line "Oops, did you forget this important step?":

Hi [Wordpress username],

It looks like you were this close to investing in an upgrade for your WordPresscom site, [yoursite.wordpress.com]. What a great decision you were about to make!
Did you forget to finish putting in your information?

If so, no worries. We just wanted to shoot you a quick reminder.

Feel free to click the link below to finish your upgrade and to build the site you’ve always wanted.

Click Here to Finish Upgrading Your Site

"We just wanted to shoot you a quick reminder", indeed. When you talk down to me like this, I just want to shoot you, period.

Independence day

That old popcorn blockbuster Independence Day was was an unoriginal, but popular, take on a well-worn Sci-Fi trope where squabbling humanity finally learns how to work together and forget its differences in the face of a looming alien menace. And just in time for Independence Day 2017, somebody's noticed an inhuman menace that makes me want to make common cause with humans everywhere - even the person leading the charge, a self-proclaimed American neocon:

...a phenomenon that’s grown more and more frequent over time: the stupendously annoying coercive forced-choice. It is presented by the pop-up window that offers you something you don’t want and didn’t ask for—be it an update or a service or a product or a website link—and then gives you a choice of responses. But the responses aren’t a simple “yes” or “no.” And definitely you never get to choose “go away and leave me alone forever.”

Instead, you get a variant of something snide and sarcastic, where the supposed “no” response reads something like “I don’t want this wonderful free service because I’m a moron.” Or you get a response that isn’t “no” at all but “later.”

I'm a liberal-minded lefty and even I approve this message.

If you really want to unite all humanity, harnessing our shared hatred of patronising nagware is clearly the way to go.

Whoa ... "No thanks, I'm not interested in saving money" it says here. Right, that does it. I am so going to nuke you, you condescending assholes ...*

via




*Image © 20th/21st Century Fox, I guess. Fair use, whatever...

Insecurity services

As somebody said recently, "The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough." Especially on your allies' critical infrastructure, it has emerged:

The hacking tool [used in the ransomware attacks on the UK's National Health Service] had been developed by the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s powerful military intelligence unit. The NSA had developed its ‘Eternal Blue’ hacking weapon to gain access to computers used by terrorists and enemy states. 

Looney Tunes Home Secretary, Elmer Fudd, reassured journalists  that no terrorists, paedophiles or cyber criminals have been compromised by the attack, before gwabbing a gun to get the wascally wabbit wesponsible.

Smart tech for dumb folk

“Marathon runner’s tracked data exposes phony time, cover-up attempt” [Ars Technica]. Don’t wear your FitBit while you cut the course in a marathon. In fact, don’t carry anything “smart” for any reason, because “smart” does not mean that you are the smart one.

Headline, plus perfect snark from Naked Capitalism. There's nothing I could add that would improve on this.

A little temporary convenience

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" said Benjamin Franklin. Maybe, since we gave up our privacy in return for a frictionless shopping and social media experience, we also stopped deserving nice things. Although, given the unequal bargaining power underlying our Faustian pact with the panopticon owners, it's not as if we were ever given much choice:

Surveillance capitalism has some of the features of a zero-sum game. The actual value of the data collected is not clear, but it is definitely an advantage to collect more than your rivals do. Because human beings develop an immune response to new forms of tracking and manipulation, the only way to stay successful is to keep finding novel ways to peer into people's private lives. And because much of the surveillance economy is funded by speculators, there is an incentive to try flashy things that will capture the speculators' imagination, and attract their money.

This creates a ratcheting effect where the behavior of ever more people is tracked ever more closely, and the collected information retained, in the hopes that further dollars can be squeezed out of it.

Just like industrialized manufacturing changed the relationship between labor and capital, surveillance capitalism is changing the relationship between private citizens and the entities doing the tracking. Our old ideas about individual privacy and consent no longer hold in a world where personal data is harvested on an industrial scale.

Those who benefit from the death of privacy attempt to frame our subjugation in terms of freedom, just like early factory owners talked about the sanctity of contract law. They insisted that a worker should have the right to agree to anything, from sixteen-hour days to unsafe working conditions, as if factory owners and workers were on an equal footing.

Maciej Cegłowski

Via.

A tip for the race to the bottom

From the annals of uninspired guesswork. "The human race is probably decades away from creating a robo-tailor" I supposed in January. By May, I wasn't so sure "...if they have a robo-cobbler next year, what might happen to the global garment trade, if a viable robo-tailor comes along the year after that?"

Now we're in July and the Graun is reporting that:

The jobs of nearly 90% of garment and footwear workers in Cambodia and Vietnam are at risk from automated assembly lines – or “sewbots” – according to a new report from the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

There are 9 million people, mostly young women, dependent upon jobs in textiles, garments, and footwear within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) economic area, which includes Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. These are the workers the ILO identifies as most susceptible to losing their jobs to the new robot workforce.

Sewbots are unlikely to appear in factories in Asia, the report says, but will be installed in destination markets like Europe and the US. It is such a big threat that the ILO urges Asean countries to start planning to diversify to “avoid considerable setbacks in development”.

Moving swiftly on from my miserable failure to cut it as a prophet, or even a pundit, the interesting thing about this story is the on-shoring aspect. The work that corporations in the rich world exported, because poorer people would do it for a relative pittance, may be about to come back. But most of the jobs aren't, because robots will be doing them.

At least the title of one of my posts still stands - "Robots win race to the bottom?"

Robots to win race to the bottom?

Is the end of the labour market's race to the bottom in sight? At the moment it's a global fact of life - corporations get their manufacturing (and sometimes call centre work, data entry and programming) done wherever local wages are cheapest. And if the cheapest country does well and local wages go up, well there's always an even poorer country somewhere to move operations to, and so on, until, one day in the future, we'll finally reach the bedrock of the very poorest country with the requisite skills and infrastructure becoming the workshop / call centre of the world.

But some recent headlines suggested to me that we might not see many more iterations of this process. Adidas is opening a new factory where shoes will be made, not by low-wage people in Asia, but by high-tech robots in Germany. If robots can make trainers more cost-effectively than people in the Global South, that's a lot of potential work that won't be going to the lowest bidder. And if they have a robo-cobbler next year, what might happen to the global garment trade, if a viable robo-tailor comes along the year after that?

In other news, McDonald's has denied that it has any plans to replace people currently doing minimum-wage McJobs with robots. This one looks less like a serious suggestion than the usual corporate sob story about how being obliged to pay the very lowest earners a little extra might force put-upon bosses to do something terrible.

But although it may be an empty threat this time around, you can see how an environment where cooking has been replaced by the production-line assembly and heating of standardised food product elements could be very robot-friendly. Just as they might delete the competitive advantage of low-wage economies globally, robots might also terminate the employability of many minimum-wage humans locally.

Not all, of course - some low-paid jobs, like being a cleaner, or helping in an old peoples' home senior living community, or in a children's daycare nursery require too much human interaction, or mobility in different environments, to be robotised any time soon. But there are plenty of low-paid jobs, in such robo-friendly environments Amazon's warehouses fulfilment centres, which will probably offer more opportunities for the sort of machines that can work tirelessly in controlled, largely predictable environments than for underpaid humans.

And if this does come to pass? Well, I guess we're looking at big changes from business as usual. The changes might be Utopian - redistribution of wealth globally and in-country, Universal Basic Incomes, Keynes's 15 hour working week and so forth. Or they might be dystopian - the sci-fi libertarians' nightmarish vision of a society divided between a few fabulously wealthy technocratic capital owners living in climate-controlled domes, being waited on by their robo-butlers (when they're not off cruising the Solar System in their gold-plated space yachts), versus an obsolete underclass, which has degenerated into a workless, hopeless, brutish unnecessariat, milling menacingly outside the gilded elite's gated compounds.

Given the low levels of political clout the have-nots can deploy, maybe our best hope for avoiding the dystopian outcome is if the robots come for the high-status jobs first. Influential people may see the displacement of a fast-food employee by a McBot as something regrettable happening to an undeserving nobody they don't know or care about, but when robo-lawyer starts terminating a few high-status jobs, done by Nice People Like Us, then the movers and shakers might discover that we are all in this together and that Something Must Be Done.

The medieval Internet

Quite a lot of people have noticed how rising inequality within states looks like a throwback to the hierarchical age of feudalism. The Null Device makes the more original observation that the hyper-modern technology of mass surveillance also has an ironically medieval vibe:

So, in the age of mass surveillance ... we may be facing a psychological retreat from modernity towards the mediaeval mindset; only instead of the omniscient God and His recording angels seeing every sinful thought in our fallible souls and recording it for the final judgment, it is the temporal powers with their intercepts and algorithms, and the judgment is potentially a lot closer. Most sinners will hope that, if they keep their heads down, they can squeeze through purgatory relatively quickly, while a hard core who know they are already damned will raise hell.

For the ways of man are before the eyes of the LORD, and he pondereth all his goings.

Proverbs 5:21

In the Peeple's Republic

Let me see if I've got this. A short while back, some people claimed to have invented this thing called Peeple, which would let you rate the people in your life. Some other people pointed out that this was a really horrible idea. But then turned out that that the thing was just a made-up thing, so those other people felt a bit silly for getting so upset about it. 

But then we found out that some people in China have invented a variant of the thing which is apparently a real thing and lets the Very Important People who live there rate all the less-important people in the country (they're making a list and checking it twice, they're gonna find out who's naughty or nice). The Chinese thing is called a Universal Credit Score and it's like the credit rating you'd get from Experian, except that you're not just rated on your financial credit-worthiness:

Things that will make your score deteriorate include posting political opinions without prior permission, talking about or describing a different history than the official one, or even publishing accurate up-to-date news from the Shanghai stock market collapse (which was and is embarrassing to the Chinese regime).

The Universal Credit Score starts to look all social media-ish and Peeply when you download the app. The app in question is called Sesame Credit (presumably no relation to Credit Sesame) and it lets you see your citizen status' score and post it on Weibo to impress your friends (although you need to check that your friends aren't the sorts of people who'd express unorthodox political views, because associating with subversives can have a negative effect on your citizen status rating).

Your citizen status score is expressed in points. And what do points mean? Prizes! Here are some of the featured prizes:

• At a score of 650, you may rent a car without leaving a deposit.
• At 700, you get access to a bureaucratic fast track to a Singapore travel permit.
• And at 750, you get a similar fast track to a coveted pan-European Schengen visa.

At the moment it's all about exclusive privileges for permium citizens, but once the thing is fully rolled out, any backsliders, deviants and malcontents will receive their due punishment:

It has also announced that while there are benefits today for obedient people, it intends to add various sanctions for people who don’t behave, like limited Internet connectivity. Such people will also be barred from serving in certain high-status and influential positions, like government official, reporter, CEO, statistician, and similar.

No wonder some of our own political elite are already in love with the Chinese way of doing things.

A word of caution, though - just as Peeple turned out to be not quite everything it was supposed to be, there are apparently still fewer than a million people listed on Credit China (which currently holds conventional credit rating scores, but will supposedly include citizen status rating information in future) and the number of people who've chosen to brag about their citizen status rating on Weibo is currently an underwhelming figure somewhere below 100,000, so I'm not sure whether, in a country with 1,393,000,000+ people, this yet counts as an actual thing.

If this does turn out to be an actual thing, it would confirm my idea of what sort of nightmare we're most likely to end up in - despite the ubiquitous surveillance, it'll look less like 1984's boot stamping on a human face than Brave New World's society of docile, contented, conformist consumers, kept in check by shiny distractions, peer pressure and a large doses of conditioning propaganda from a managerialist overclass.

It's the consumerist, elective element of this scenario that makes it seem more Huxleyite than Orwellian - first they offer you the rent-a-car and holiday deals and the opportunity to be the envy of all your friends. They'll only start revoking your personhood if you're not absolutely delighted with their amazing offers. 

It's kind of credible, because it's only a more formalised version of what we have at home - give up a little freedom in return for owning stuff you can't afford, a little privacy in return for finding out that somebody you barely know has posted an amusingly-captioned picture of a cat on social media and a little more of your freedom and privacy so that the security services can protect you from the vanishingly-small risk of falling victim to a terrorist outrage. You're getting something back in return for surrendering a little bit of your autonomy, not being beaten into submission by a black-uniformed goon. And everything will be OK, so long as you don't start asking difficult questions about whether what you're being offered is worth as much as what you're expected to give up.

It's a funny old world where the Communist Party of China seems to be trying to control the masses with the equivalent of a retail loyalty card, whilst the most vocal remaining proponents of the old Maoist maxim that 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun' are those God-fearing, tea-partying, National Rifle Association card-carrying folk on the American right. Somebody ought to tell those guys that when the gubbermint finally come to get 'em, the varmints won't be comin' in black helicopters to prise their guns from their cold, dead hands. They'll more likely be making them a suspiciously good offer on no-deposit car rental.

Days of future past

Engineers at McDonnell Douglas have put forward ideas for a rocket-liner called Hyperion which they claim could carry passengers, 170 at a time, from one side of the globe to the other in just forty-five minutes by the 'eighties. A trip from Los Angeles to Honolulu would take eighteen minutes.
You don't believe it will ever happen? There was a time when wise men proclaimed that if God had intended men to fly He would have given them wings.

The concluding sentences of Aircraft, John W R Taylor's 1971 potted history of aviation. To the primary-school aged me, this sounded like a perfectly reasonable extrapolation of trends being forged in the white heat of Concorde-era techno-optimism. Which only goes to prove Neils Bohr's point that prediction is difficult, especially if it's about the future.

These days, there's still plenty of extrapolation going on, although sub-twenty minute flights from LA to Hawaii are mostly off the agenda, replaced by techno-utopian/dystopian futures in which the machines have either liberated humanity from toil and oppression, made their human hosts desire inexplicable products like Internet-connected fridges, trashed our jobs with automated obsolescence or terminated us in a swarm of rogue killer bots.

The only prediction I'm making is that most of these predicted futures will one day sound as quaintly retro as the term "rocket-liner" sounds today. As quaint, say, as this:

Fetch the howitzer! Some fool's armed the robot with a pistol!

Which sounds like a failed prophecy of some whimsical robopocalypse, although it's really a sentence from Schott's Miscellany, illustrating three words of Czech origin commonly used in English.

Prostitution - the smart way to graduate debt-free

We will shortly be arriving at Late Capitalist Dystopia Central, where this train terminates - please ensure you have all of your belongings with you before leaving the train:

Wanted: Rich man to give poor student better life. Must provide cash allowance, luxury holidays and designer goods in return for.....?

Emma Jane Kirby meets the young British women funding themselves through university by dating rich older men via websites. And asks - who is exploiting who?

She meets those who sees sugar dating as the perfect transactional relationship in which both parties get exactly what they want including those at some of England's top Russell Group Universities. People like the student who had two sugar daddies at University so that she could fully concentrate on her studies and achieve a First Class degree. Her Mum didn't just know about it, she approved, calling it a " great, great solution" to the family's financial problems.

And we meet Sugar Daddies, to get their point of view:

" I pay my current sugar baby £2,000 a month plus £1,000 shopping allowance. Do I want sex as part of my arrangement? Yes, of course.....Expectations go both ways." 

BBC
 
Massive inequality + a breathtaking transfer of debt onto the shoulders of people who haven't even started earning properly = yet another exciting new opportunity for the sharing economy.

Welcome to the brave new transactional world where you can leverage your living space capital via Airbnb, your driving capital via Uber and your erotic capital via the sugar daddy site of your choice:

I'm enough of an optimist to think that one day, people will look back at this moment in history and ask in wonder 'How the hell did people ever think this kind of thing was OK?' But, for the moment, we're up against both the market fundamentalists who believe that if you lack the foresight to already be rich, you should be grateful for any opportunity to sell yourself to the highest bidder and the naivety of the liberal commentariat against which the gods themselves contend in vain:

The socialists of the early 20th century eyed monopolies like Vail’s with optimism: take them over and their highly organised and unitary status means you can use them to run the economy. Today, if you wanted to re-order the economy to deliver participation and choice alongside social justice, it’s the sharing models you would start from.

The arrival of sharing changes the game when it comes to the social potential of technology. It was hard to see a route from Apple and Google to “dotcommunism”. It is quite easy to see it, though, if you began with the sharing sites, and made them cheap or free.

Paul Mason, reassuring Guardian readers that sharing sites could be the new engines of social justice (just so long as you ignore the massive inequalities of power and resources that make them work in the first place).

If you began with a sharing site like sugar daddy dot whatever and make it 'cheap or free' (i.e. pretend that it's not powered by money and inequality of resources) then bang goes the pull of the sugar daddy's capital ('But what first, Debbie, attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?'), along with his disingenuous assertion that this is some kind of entirely voluntary transaction between equals. Dress it up in whatever self-serving language you like - it's still the sort of crude desperation-driven deal that Kurt Vonnegut tore into in his novel Bluebeard:

'...Did you say that in the war you were 'combing pussy out of your hair?'
I said I was sorry I'd said it and I was.
'I never heard that expression before.' she said 'I had to guess what it meant.'
'Just forget I said it.' I said
'You want to know what my guess was? I guessed that wherever you went there were women who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and the children and the old people, since the young men were dead or gone away.' she said. 'How close was I?'

One day, I hope, we'll see technology actually liberating people by disrupting existing hierarchies in favour of greater social justice but, as far as I can see, the style of disruption currently in fashion is the sort that disrupts the lives of the already powerless for the greater convenience of the already powerful. The most striking feature of this style of disruption is that the technical ingenuity comes with a huge side-order of breathtaking shamelessness. Again, Vonnegut completely nails it:

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities . The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.

The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

From Breakfast of Champions

I get (ironic) e-mail

Here's one weird new marketing trick you've probably never heard of (delivered, ironically, through the amazing new medium of bulk e-mail):

E-MAIL - the first communication medium of the 21st century!
Gain customer loyalty - Prospect new markets - Expand your brand - Increase sales via e-mail!
ADD E-MAIL* TO YOUR CONTACTS, CUSTOMERS, PROSPECTS, SUPPLIERS AND ENTER THE 21ST CENTURY *Commission vie privée 11018859 – CNIL 116441

Goodness me, whatever will they think of next? The 21st Century sounds way more exciting than wherever the hell I've been for the last fourteen years. Count me in! Where do I sign?

Sadly, just when I'm all fired up, another bulk e-mailer comes along to point out the fatal flaw in the otherwise excellent plan of spraying bulk e-mails in every direction:

Hi, my name is Alec.
I didn’t want to cold call your business as we all find that annoying...

Good point. I can see how that might happen.

...but I was hoping it would be possible to arrange a quick chat? I suspect you receive many generic emails offering business services, meaning I need to stand out. 

Sorry, Alec, you lost me at 'we all find that annoying'.

Big mother watch

... Facebook ... will probably go into unlamented terminal decline as the intrusive, stalker-ish changes required to effectively monitor, control and monetise its users become annoying enough to make many of them abandon Facebook and adopt The Next Big Thing, whatever that turns out to be*

* I may be wrong, but don't start calling me a dimwit until Facebook's clocked up another five years of rude health. 

Me, March 2012

With less than three and a half years to go, Facebook's not in intensive care yet, but it's apparently no longer cool enough for a rising generation of users. What I got wrong was the locus of off-putting privacy concerns - teens aren't that worried about sharing every detail of their their lives with advertisers, potential employers, malicious hackers and various arms of the security state, but the idea of being friended by mum and dad is clearly way too intrusive to tolerate.