What makes war between the US and China or Russia inevitable?

Battle of Lepanto

There is a dangerous and not so new idea currently making the rounds that not only is conventional war between the great powers inevitable, but that it would be much less of an existential threat to humanity than we have been led to believe and even might be necessary for human progress.

The appearance of this argument in favor of war was almost predictable given that it was preceded by a strong case being made that war was now obsolete and at least in its great power guise was being driven out of history by deep underlying trends towards prosperity and peace. I am thinking here mostly of Steven Pinker in his Better Angels of Our Nature, but he was not alone.

The exact same thing happened in the 19th century. Then, voices arose that argued that war was becoming unnecessary as values became global and the benefits of peaceful trade replaced the plunder of war. The counter-reaction argued that war had been the primary vector for human progress and that without it we would “go soft” or de-evolve into a species much less advanced than our own.

Given their racist overtones, arguments that we will evolve “backward” absent war are no longer made in intelligent circles. Instead, war has been tied to technological development the argument being that without war in general and great power war in particular we will become technologically stuck. That’s the case made by Ian Morris in his War What is it Good For? where he sees the US in shepherding in the Singularity via war, and it’s a case made from opposite sides of the fence regarding transhumaism by Christopher Coker and Steve Fuller.

The problem with these new arguments in favor of great power conflict is that they discount the prospect of nuclear exchange. Perhaps warfare is the heir of technological progress, but it’s better to be the tortoise when such conflicts hold the risk of driving you back to the stone age.

That said, there is an argument out there that perhaps even nuclear warfare wouldn’t be quite the civilization destroyer we have believed, but that position seems less likely to become widespread than the idea that the great powers could directly fight each other and yet some how avoid bringing the full weight of their conventional and nuclear forces down upon the other even in the face of a devastating loss at the hands of the other. It’s here where we can find Peter W. Singer and August Cole’s recent novel Ghost Fleet: A novel of the Third World War that tells the story of a conventional war, mainly at sea, between the US and China and Russia.

It’s a copiously researched book, and probably gives a good portrait of what warfare in the next ten to fifteen years will look like. If the authors are right, in the wars of the future drones – underground, land, air, and sea will be ubiquitous and AI used to manage battles where sensors take the place of senses- the crew of a ship needs never set sight on the actual sea.

Cyber attacks in the future will be a fully functional theater of war- as will outer space. The next war will take advantage of enhancement technologies- augmented reality, and interventions such “stim tabs” for alertness. Advances in neuroscience and bioelectronics will be used at the very least as a form of enhanced, and brutal, interrogation.

If the book makes any warning (and all such books seem to have a warning) it is that the US is extremely reliant on the technological infrastructure that allows the country to deploy and direct its’ global force. The war begins with a Chinese/Russian attack on American satellites, which effectively blinds the American military. I’ve heard interviews where Singer claims that in light of this the US Navy is now training its’ officers in the art of stellar navigation, which in the 21st century is just, well… cool. The authors point out how American hardware is vulnerable as well to threats like embedded beacons or kill switches given that much of this hardware has come out of Chinese factories.

The plot of Ghost Fleet is pretty standard: in a surprise attack the Chinese and Russians push the US out of the Pacific by destroying much of the American navy and conquering Hawaii. Seemingly without a single ally, the US then manages to destroy the Chinese fleet after resurrecting the ships of its naval graveyard near San Francisco- a real thing apparently, especially a newfangled battleship the USS Zumwalt, which is equipped with a new and very powerful form of rail gun. I am not sure if it helped or hindered my enjoyment of the book that its’ plot seemed eerily similar to my favorite piece of anime from when I was a kid- Star Blazers.

The problem, once again, is in thinking that we can contain such conflicts and therefore need not do everything possible to avoid them. In the novel there never seems to be any possibility of nuclear exchange or strategic bombing and with the exception of the insurgency and counterinsurgency in Hawaii the war is hermetically contained to the Pacific and the sea. Let’s hope we would be so lucky, but I’m doubtful.

Ghost Fleet is also not merely weak but detrimental in regards to the one “technology” that will be necessary for the US to avoid a war with China or others and contain it should it break out.

If I had to take a vote on one work that summed up the historical differences between the West and everyone else, differences that would eventually bring us the scientific revolution and all of the power that came with it, that work wouldn’t be one of science such as the Principia Mathematica or even some great work of philosophy or literature, but a history book.

The thing that makes Herodotus’ The Histories so unique was that it was the first time that one people tried to actually understand their enemies. It’s certainly eurocentric to say it, but the Greeks as far as I am aware, were first and unique here. It wasn’t just a one off.

Thucydides would do something similar for the intra-Hellenic conflict between Athenians and Spartans, but the idea of actually trying to understand your enemy, no doubt because so much about being an enemy lends itself to being hidden and thus needs to be imagined was brought to its’ heights in the worlds of drama and fiction. The great Aeschylus did this with the Persians as well with his tragedy named for that noble people.

It’s a long tradition that was seen right up until The Riddle of the Sands a 1903 book that depicted a coming war between the British and the Germans. Much different than the dehumanizing war propaganda that would characterize the Germans as less than human “Huns” during the First World War, The Riddle of the Sands attempted to make German aggression explicable given its’ historical and geographical circumstances even while arguing such aggression needed to be countered.

In Ghost Fleet by contrast the Chinese especially are reduced to something like Bond Villains, US control of the Pacific is wholly justified, its’ characters largely virtuous and determined. In that sense the novel fails to do what novels naturally excel at; namely, opening up realms to the imagination that otherwise remain inaccessible, and in this specific case the motivations, assumptions, and deep historical grievances likely to drive Chinese or Russian policy makers in the run up to and during any such conflict. Sadly, it is exactly such a lack of understanding that makes war great power wars and the existential risks to humanity they pose, perhaps not inevitable, but increasingly more likely.

The Kingdom of Glass Walls: A Fable

Oct4

The-Emperors-new-clothes

There once was a king of extraordinary vanity who liked to spend his time riding throughout the great city he ruled on his gilded coach allowing all who saw him to marvel at his attire which was woven of gold thread and bejeweled with diamonds and sapphires.

The vain king especially liked parading himself in the neighborhoods of the poor reasoning that their sight of him would be the closest thing to heaven such filthy people would have before they died and met God’s glorious angels. It was during one of these “tours” that a woman threw a bucket of shit out of her window which landed squarely on the king’s head.

Who knows if it was by accident as the poor peasant girl claimed that she was merely emptying onto the streets the overflow of her commode when the bucket slipped from her hands and fell onto the king? In any case the king awoke from unconsciousness after the blow a changed man with his vanity transformed.

The changed king adopted the unusual style of doing away with all prerogatives of royal privacy and ordered the bricks of his castle walls be replaced with the most transparent glass. Anyone could now literally see all the doings of the royal household as if the court were now fish in a bowl to the great annoyance of the queen.

The king soon went so far as to abandon his former golden attire for no clothes at all. The queen at this point wanted to have the royal doctors declare the king mad on account of him having been hit by a bucket on the head, but there were powerful courtiers in the court who decided that the king was to remain on his throne.

After having a dream that his city-kingdom had been invaded by an enemy that feared the naked king was planning a surprise attack he had the defensive walls of the city leveled, so that no one could might think he meant them ill. Having experienced how liberating it felt to be open to all the world through his glass or torn down walls and nakedness the king wished that all his subjects could experience what he had.

He thus offered to pay out of his own treasury the cost of any of his subjects replacement of their walls of wood, brick or straw with walls of glass. Many of his subjects took the king up on the offer, for who would not want their cold house with walls of straw or dilapidated wood to be replaced with walls of clean, shiny glass?

But then a bug was placed in the king’s ear from a powerful anonymous courtier : “He with nothing to hide has nothing to fear” and with that the suspicion entered the king’s mind that the only people who would have kept their opaque walls must be hiding something.

Criminals and bandits soon found ways game this system largely by using disguises and fake scenes painted on their glass walls while those with enough money found that with the proper “donation” they could keep their brick houses if they just put in a few more windows. However most law abiding persons now completely surrounded by glass had left themselves open to all sorts of peeping toms, shisters, and burglars. And with the walls of the city taken down some said they could see the torch lights of an army on the nearby hills at night.

Citizens began to complain that perhaps replacing the walls of their homes with glass and tearing down the walls of the city was not a good idea. Just then the king announced to everyone’s’ surprise that he had fallen in love with a pig and wished to divorce the queen and marry his newly beloved scrofa domesticus.

At this the queen and even more importantly the powerful courtiers had had enough. The king was arrested and placed in a dungeon, although, not to be accused of cruelty, he was allowed to keep his pig with him. New walls much thicker than before replaced the castle’s walls of glass and the walls around the city were rebuilt.

A decree went out from the court declaring that no citizen was allowed to replace the glass walls of their homes. The queen claimed that such total transparency among the subjects was necessary to catch criminals and even more so spies from neighboring kingdoms who meant to do the city harm, and after many years the people forgot that things had ever been different or that they had once been ruled by a transparent king.

Stalinism as Transhumanism

Sep24

New Soviet Man 2

The ever controversial Steve Fuller has recently published a number of jolting essays at the IEET,(there has been a good discussion on David Roden’s blog on the topic), yet whatever one thinks about the prospect of zombie vs transhumanist apocalypse he has managed to raise serious questions for anyone who identifies themselves with the causes of transhumanism and techno-progressivism; namely, what is the proper role, if any, of the revolutionary, modernizing state in such movements and to what degree should the movement be open to violence as a means to achieve its ends? Both questions, I will argue, can best be answered by looking at the system constructed in the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1953 under the reign of Joseph Stalin.

Those familiar with the cast of characters in the early USSR will no doubt wonder why I chose to focus on the “conservative” Stalin rather Leon Trotsky who certainly evidenced something like proto-transhumanism with quotes such as this one in his essay Revolutionary and Socialist Art:

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

It was views like this one that stood as evidence for me of the common view among intellectuals sympathetic to Marxism that it was Trotsky who was the true revolutionary figure and heir of Lenin, whereas Stalin was instead a reactionary in Marxists garb who both murdered the promise latent in the Russian Revolution and constructed on the revolution’s corpse a system of totalitarian terror.

Serious historians no longer hold such views in light of evidence acquired after the opening up of Soviet archives after the USSR’s collapse in 1991. What we’ve gained as a consequence of these documents is a much more nuanced and detailed view of the three major figures of the Russian Revolution: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin all of which in some ways looked at violence as the premier tool for crafting a new social and political order.

Take the father of the Russian Revolution- Lenin. The common understanding of Lenin in the past was to see him as a revolutionary pragmatist who engaged in widespread terror and advocated dictatorship largely as a consequence of the precarious situation of the revolution and in the atmosphere of danger and bloodshed found in the Russian civil war. In fact the historical record presented in the archives now makes clear that many of the abhorrent features of state communism in Russia once associated with Stalin in fact originated under Lenin, obscenities such as as the forerunner to the KGB, the Cheka, or the Soviet system of concentration camps- Solzhenitsyn’s gulag archipelago. Far from seeing them as temporary expedients in precarious situation of the revolution and the atmosphere of danger and bloodshed found in the Russian civil war, Lenin saw these innovations as a permanent feature of Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which Lenin had reimagined as the permanent rule of a revolutionary, technocratic elite.

Trotsky comes off only a little better because he never assumed the mantle of Soviet dictator. Trotsky’s problems, however, originate from his incredible egotism when combined with his stunning political naivete. His idea was that in the 1920’s conditions were ripe to export the communist revolution globally barely grasping just how precarious the situation was for the newly victorious communist revolutionaries within even his own country. Indeed, to the extent that both domestic communist in non-Russian countries identified with Soviet communism and prematurely pushed their societies towards revolution this only ended up in empowering reactionaries and leading to the rise of fascist parties globally who would come quite close to strangling the infant of state communism while it was still in its cradle.

Then there’s Stalin who those sympathetic to communism often see as the figure who did the most to destroy its’ promise. The so-called “man of steel” is understood as a reactionary monster who replaced the idealism of the early Soviet Union with all the snakes that had infected czarist Russia’s head.

This claim too has now been upended. For what is clear is that although Stalin reoriented the USSR away from Trotsky’s dream of world revolution to focus on “socialism in one country” the state Stalin managed to create was perhaps the most radical and revolutionary the world has yet seen.

The state has always played a large role in modernization, but it was only in the types of communists regimes which Stalin was the first to envision that the state became synonymous with modernization itself. And it wasn’t only modernization, but a kind of ever accelerating modernization that aimed to break free of the gravity of history and bring humanity to a new world inhabited by a new type of man.

It was his revolutionary impatience and desire to accelerate the pace of history that led Stalin down the path to being perhaps the most bloody tyrant the world has yet know. The collectivization of Soviet agriculture alone coming at the cost of at least 5 million deaths. What Stalin seemed to possess that his fellow revolutionaries lacked was a kind of sociopathy that left him flinch-less in the face of mass suffering, though he also became possessed by the paranoia to which tyrants are prone and towards the end of his reign killed as much out of fear as he did as a consequence of his desire to propel the USSR through history.

Here I return to Fuller who seems to have been inspired by state communism and appears to be making the case that what transhumanism needs is a revolutionary vanguard that will, violently if necessary, push society towards transformative levels of technological change. Such change will then make possible the arrival of a new form of human being.

There is a great deal of similarity here with the view of the state as presented by Zoltan Istvan in his novel The Transhumanist Wager though that work is somewhat politically schizophrenic with elements of Ayn Rand and Bolshevism at the same time, which perhaps makes sense given that the Silicon Valley culture it emerged from was largely built on government subsidies yet clings to the illusion it is the product of heroic individuals such as Steve Jobs. And of course, The Transhumanist Wager exhibits this same feature of believing violence necessary to open up the path to radical transformation.

One of the important questions we might ask is how analogous was the Russian situation with our own? What the Soviets were trying to do was to transform their society in a way that had been technologically experienced elsewhere only under a brand new form of political regime. In other words the technological transformation – industrialization- was already understood, where the Soviets were innovative was in the political sphere. At the same time, modernization to be accomplished in the Soviet Union needed to overthrow and uproot traditional social forces that had aligned themselves against industrialization- the nobility and the clergy. A strong state was necessary to overcome powerful and intransigent classes.

None of these characteristics seem applicable the kinds of technological change taking place today. For one, the type of complete technological transformation Fuller is talking about are occurring everywhere nearly simultaneously- say the current revolutions in biotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence where no society has achieved some sort of clear breakout that a revolutionary movement is necessary to push society in the direction of replicating.

Nor does the question of technological transformation break clearly along class or even religious lines in a world where the right to left political spectrum remains very much intact. It is highly unlikely that a technological movement on the right will emerge that can remain viable while jettisoning those adhering to more traditional religious notions.

Likewise, it is improbable that any left wing technological movement would abandon its commitment to the UN Declaration and the world’s poor. In thinking otherwise I believe Fuller is repeating Trotsky’s mistake- naively believing in political forces and realignments about to surface that simply aren’t there. (The same applies to Zoltan Istvan’s efforts.)

Yet by far the worst mistake Fuller makes is in embracing the Stalinist idea that acceleration needs to be politicized and that violence is a useful tool in achieving this acceleration. The danger here is not that justifying violence in the pursuit of transhumanist ends is likely to result in widespread collective violence in the name of such goals, but that it might start to attract sadists and kooks whose random acts of violence “in the name of transhumanism” put the otherwise humane goals of the movement at risk of social backlash.

At the same time Fuller is repeating the grave error of Stalinism which is to conflate power and the state with the process of technological transformation. The state is many and sometimes contradictory things with one of its’ roles indeed to modernize society. Yet at the same time the state is tasked with protecting us from that very same modernization by preventing us from being treated as mere parts in a machine rather than as individuals and citizens.

Fuller also repeats the error of the Stalinist state when it comes to the role and efficacy of violence in the political sphere for the proper role of violence is not as a creative force that is able to establish something new, but as a means of resistance and protection for those already bound together in some mutual alliance.

Still, we might want to take seriously the possibility that Fuller has tapped into a longer term trend in which the ways technology is developing is opening up the possibility of the reappearance of the Stalinist state, but that’s a subject that will have to await for another time.

The debate between the economists and the technologists, who wins?

Sep7

Human bat vs robot gangster

For a while now robots have been back in the news with a vengeance, and almost on cue seem to have revived many of the nightmares that we might have thought had been locked up in the attic of the mind with all sorts of other stuff from the 1980’s, which it was hoped we would never need.

Big fears should probably only be tackled one at a time, so let’s leave aside for today the question of whether robots are likely to kill us, and focus on what should be an easier nut to crack and a less frightening nut at that; namely, whether we are in the process of automating our way out into a state of permanent, systemic unemployment.

Alas, even this seemingly less fraught question is no less difficult to answer. For like everything the issue seems to have given rise to two distinct sides neither of which seems to have a clear monopoly on the truth. Unlike elsewhere however, these two sides in the debate over “technological unemployment” usually split less over ideological grounds than on the basis of professional expertise. That is, those who dismiss the argument that advances in artificial intelligence and robotics have already, or are about to, displace the types of work now done by humans to the extent that we face a crisis of permanent underemployment and unemployment the likes of which have never been seen before tend to be economists. How such an optimistic bunch came to be known as dismissal scientists is beyond me- note how they are also on the optimistic side of the debate with environmentalists.

Economists are among the first to remind us that we’ve seen fears of looming robot induced unemployment before, whether those of Ned Ludd and his followers in the 19th century, or as close to us as the 1960s. The destruction of jobs has, in the past at least, been achieved through the kinds of transformation that created brand new forms of employment. In 1915 nearly 40% of Americans were agricultural laborers of some sort now that number hovers around 2 percent. These farmers weren’t replaced by “robots” but they certainly were replaced by machines.

Still we certainly don’t have a 40% unemployment rate. Rather, as the number of farm laborer positions declined they were replaced by jobs that didn’t even exist in 1915. The place these farmers have not gone, or where they probably would have gone in 1915 that wouldn’t be much of an option today is into manufacturing. For in that sector something very similar to the hollowing out of employment in agriculture has taken place with the decline in the percentage of laborers in manufacturing declining since 1915 from 25% to around 9% today. Here the workers really have been replaced by robots though just as much have job prospects on the shop floor declined because the jobs have been globalized. Again, even at the height of the recent financial crisis we haven’t seen 25% unemployment, at least not in the US.

Economists therefore continue to feel vindicated by history: any time machines have managed to supplement human labor we’ve been able to invent whole new sectors of employment where the displaced or their children have been able to find work. It seems we’ve got nothing to fear from the “rise of the robots.” Or do we?

Again setting aside the possibility that our mechanical servants will go all R.U.R on us, anyone who takes serious Ray Kurzweil’s timeline that by the 2020’s computers will match human intelligence and by 2045 exceed our intelligence a billionfold has to come to the conclusion that most jobs as we know them are toast. The problem here, and one that economists mostly fail to take into account, is that past technological revolutions ended up replacing human brawn and allowing workers to upscale into cognitive tasks. Human workers had somewhere to go. But a machine that did the same for tasks that require intelligence and that were indeed billions of times smarter than us would make human workers about as essential to the functioning of a company as Leaper ornament is to the functioning of a Jaguar.

Then again perhaps we shouldn’t take Kurzweil’s timeline all that seriously in the first place. Skepticism would seem to be in order because the Moore’s Law based exponential curve that is at the heat of Kurzweil’s predictions appears to have started to go all sigmoidal on us. That was the case made by John Markoff recently over at The Edge. In an interview about the future of Silicon Valley he said:

All the things that have been driving everything that I do, the kinds of technology that have emerged out of here that have changed the world, have ridden on the fact that the cost of computing doesn’t just fall, it falls at an accelerating rate. And guess what? In the last two years, the price of each transistor has stopped falling. That’s a profound moment.

Kurzweil argues that you have interlocked curves, so even after silicon tops out there’s going to be something else. Maybe he’s right, but right now that’s not what’s going on, so it unwinds a lot of the arguments about the future of computing and the impact of computing on society. If we are at a plateau, a lot of these things that we expect, and what’s become the ideology of Silicon Valley, doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen the way we think it does. I see evidence of that slowdown everywhere. The belief system of Silicon Valley doesn’t take that into account.

Although Markoff admits there has been great progress in pattern recognition there has been nothing similar for the kinds of routine physical tasks found in much of low skilled/mobile forms of work. As evidence from the recent DARPA challenge if you want a job safe from robots choose something for a living that requires mobility and the performance of a variety of tasks- plumber, home health aide etc.

Markoff also sees job safety on the higher end of the pay scale in cognitive tasks computers seem far from being able to perform:

We haven’t made any breakthroughs in planning and thinking, so it’s not clear that you’ll be able to turn these machines loose in the environment to be waiters or flip hamburgers or do all the things that human beings do as quickly as we think. Also, in the United States the manufacturing economy has already left, by and large. Only 9 percent of the workers in the United States are involved in manufacturing.

The upshot of all this is that there’s less to be feared from technological unemployment than many think:

There is an argument that these machines are going to replace us, but I only think that’s relevant to you or me in the sense that it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t happen in our lifetime. The Kurzweil crowd argues this is happening faster and faster, and things are just running amok. In fact, things are slowing down. In 2045, it’s going to look more like it looks today than you think.

The problem, I think, with the case against technological unemployment made by many economists and someone like Markoff is that they seem to be taking on a rather weak and caricatured version of the argument. That at least was is the conclusion one comes to when taking into account what is perhaps the most reasoned and meticulous book to try to convince us that the boogeyman of robots stealing our jobs might have all been our imagination before, but that it is real indeed this time.

I won’t so much review the book I am referencing, Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future here as layout how he responds to the case from economics that we’ve been here before and have nothing to worry about or the observation of Markoff that because Moore’s Law has hit a wall (has it?), we need no longer worry so much about the transformative implications of embedding intelligence in silicon.

I’ll take the second one first. In terms of the idea that the end of Moore’s Law will derail tech innovation Ford makes a pretty good case that:

Even if the advance of computer hardware capability were to plateau, there would be a whole range of paths along which progress could continue. (71)

Continued progress in software and especially new types of (especially parallel) computer architecture will continue to be mined long after Moore’s Law has reached its apogee. Cloud computing should also imply that silicon needn’t compete with neurons at scale. You don’t have to fit the computational capacity of a human individual into a machine of roughly similar size but could tap into a much, much larger and more energy intensive supercomputer remotely that gives you human level capacities. Ultimate density has become less important.

What this means is that we should continue to see progress (and perhaps very rapid progress) in robotics and artificially intelligent agents. Given that we have what is often thought of as a 3 dimensional labor market comprised of agriculture, manufacturing and the service sector and the first two are already largely mechanized and automated the place where the next wave will fall hardest is in the service sector and the question becomes is will there be any place left for workers to go?

Ford makes a pretty good case that eventually we should be able to automate almost anything human beings do for all automation means is breaking a task down into a limited number of steps. And the examples he comes up with where we have already shown this is possible are both surprising and sometimes scary.

Perhaps 70 percent of financial trading on Wall Street is now done by trading algorithms (who don’t seem any less inclined to panic). Algorithms now perform legal research and compose orchestras and independently discover scientific theories. And those are the fancy robots. Most are like ATM machines where its is the customer who now does part of the labor involved in some task. Ford thinks the fast food industry is rife for innovation in this way where the customer designs their own food that some system of small robots then “builds.” Think of your own job. If you can describe it to someone in a discrete number of steps Ford thinks the robots are coming for you.

I was thankful that though himself a technologist, Ford placed technological unemployment in a broader context and sees it as part and parcel of trends after 1970 such as a greater share of GDP moving from labor and to capital, soaring inequality, stagnant wages for middle class workers, the decline of unions, and globalization. His solution to these problems is a guaranteed basic income, which he makes a humane and non-ideological argument for. Reminding those on the right who might the idea anathema that conservative heavyweights such Milton Friedman have argued in its favor.

The problem from my vantage point is not that Ford has failed to make a good case against those on the economists’ side of the issue who would accuse him of committing the Luddite fallacy, it’s that perhaps his case is both premature and not radical enough. It is premature in the sense that while all the other trends regarding rising inequality, the decline of unions etc are readily apparent in the statistics, technological unemployment is not.

Perhaps then technological unemployment is only small part of a much larger trend pushing us in the direction of the entrenchment and expansion of inequality and away from the type of middle class society established in the last century. The tech culture of Silicon Valley and the companies they have built are here a little bit like Burning Man an example of late capitalist culture at its seemingly most radical and imaginative that temporarily escapes rather than creates a really alternative and autonomous political and social space.

Perhaps the types of technological transformation already here and looming that Ford lays out could truly serve as the basis for a new form of political and economic order that served as an alternative to the inegalitarian turn, but he doesn’t explore them. Nor does he discuss the already present dark alternative to the kinds of socialism through AI we find in the “Minds” of Iain Banks, namely, the surveillance capitalism we have allowed to be built around us that now stands as a bulwark against preserving our humanity and prevent ourselves from becoming robots.

Why aren’t we living in H.G. Wells’ scientific dictatorship?

Aug9

HG Wells Things to Come

One of the more depressing things to come out of the 2008 financial crisis was just how little it managed to effect our expectations about the economy and political forms of the future. Sure, there was Occupy Wall Street, and there’s been at least some interesting intellectual ferment here and there with movements such as Accelerationist Marxism and the like, but none have really gone anywhere. Instead what we’ve got is the same old system only now with even more guarantees and supports for the super rich. Donald Trump may be a blowhard and a buffoon, but even buffoons and blowhards can tell the truth as he did during last Thursday’s debate when he essentially stated that politicians were in the pocket to those with the cash, such as himself, who were underneath it all really running the show.

The last really major crisis of capitalism wasn’t anything like this. In the 1930’s not only had the whole system gone down, but nearly everyone seemed convinced that capitalism, (and some even thought the representative democracy that had emerged in tandem with it) was on the way out.

Then again, the political and economic innovation of the early 20th century isn’t the kind of thing any of us would wish for. Communists, which to many born after 1989 may seem as much like antiquated creatures from another world as American revolutionaries in powdered wigs, was by the 1930’s considered one of the two major ways the society of the future would likely be organized, and its’ competitor over the shape of the future wasn’t some humane and reasoned alternative, but the National Socialism of Hitler’s dark Reich.

If one wants to get a sense of the degree to which the smart money was betting against the survival of capitalism and democracy in the 1930’s one couldn’t do much better than that most eerily prescient of science-fiction prophets – H.G. Wells. In many ways, because he was speaking through the veneer of fiction Wells could allow himself to voice opinions which would have led even political radicals to blush. Also, because he was a “mere” fiction author his writings became one of the few ways intellectuals and politicians in liberal societies could daydream about a way out of capitalism’s constant crises, democracy’s fissiparousness and corruption, and most importantly for the survival of humanity in light of the nation-state’s increasingly destructive wars.

Well’s 1933 The Shape of Things to Come, published not long after the Nazis had come to power in Germany, is perhaps his best example of a work that blurs the boundaries between a work of fiction and a piece of political analysis, polemic, and prediction. In the guise of a dream book of a character who has seen the future of the world from the 1930’s to the middle of the beginning of the 22nd century, Wells is able to expound upon the events of the day and their possible implications- over a century into the future.

Writing six years before the event takes place Well’s spookily imagines World War II beginning with the German invasion of Poland. Also identifying the other major aggressor in a world war still to come, Wells realizes Japan had stepped into a quagmire by invading China from which much ill would come.

These predictions of coming violence (Wells forecast the outbreak of the Second World War to be 1940- one year off) are even more chilling when one watches the movie based upon the book, and know that the bombings of cities it depicts is not some cinematographer’s fantasy, but will no doubt have killed some of those who watched the film in theaters in 1936- less than five years later.

Nevertheless, Wells gets a host of very important things, not only about the future but about his present, very wrong. He gets it ass backwards in generally admiring the Soviet Union and seeing its’ problem not being the inhuman treatment by the Communist regime of its citizens, but the fact that they have wed themselves to what Well’s believes is an antiquated, dogmatic theory in Marxism.

Indeed, Wells will build his own version of dictatorship in The Shape of Things to Come (though versions of it can be seen in his earlier work) using the ideas of two of Soviet communism’s founders- Trotsky’s idea of a global revolutionary movement which will establish a worldwide government and Lenin’s idea of an intellectual nucleus that will control all the aspects of society.

Nor, did Wells really grasp the nature of Nazism or the strange contradiction of a global alliance of fascist regimes that ostensibly worship the state. Wells saw Hitler as a throwback to a dying order based on the nation-state. His only modernity being

“…control by a self-appointed, self-disciplined élite was a distinct step towards our Modern State organization.” (192)

Wells therefore misses the savagery born of the competition between world shaping ideologies and their mobilization of entire societies that will constitute the Second World War and its aftermath.

Ironically, Wells mistakenly thinks WWII will be short and its fatalities low because he gets his technological predictions right. He clearly foresees the role of the importance of the tank, the airplane, and the submarine to the future war and because of them even anticipates the Nazi idea of blitzkrieg. At one point he seems to have a glimmer of the death spirit that will seize over humankind during the war when he compares the submarine to a sacrificial altar:

The Germans supplied most of the flesh for this particular altar; willing and disciplined, their youngsters saluted and carried their kit down the ladder into this gently swaying clumsy murder mechanism which was destined to become their coffin. (70)

Nevertheless, he fails to see that the Second World War will unleash the kinds of violence and fanaticism formerly only seen in religious wars.

Two decades after Wells’ novel many would think that because of the introduction of nuclear weapons wars would be reduced to minutes. Instead conflict became stretched out across multiple decades. What this is should teach us is that we have no idea how any particular technology will ultimately affect the character of war – especially in terms of its intensity or duration- thus those hoping that robotic or cyber weapons will return us to short decisive conflicts are likely seeing a recurrent mirage.

Wells perhaps better understood than other would be revolutionaries and prophets of the time just how robust existing societies were despite their obvious flaws. The kind of space for true political innovation had seemingly occurred only during times of acute stress, such as war, that by their nature were short lived. A whole new way of organizing society had seemingly revealed itself during World War I in which the whole industrial apparatus of the nation was mobilized and directed towards a particular end. Yet the old society would reassert itself except in those societies that had experienced either defeat and collapse or Pyrrhic victory (Italy, Japan) in the conflict.

Wells thus has to imagine further crises after economic depression and world war to permanently shatter Western societies that had become fossilized into their current form. The new kind of war had itself erased the boundary between the state and the society during war, and here Wells is perhaps prescient in seeing the link between mass mobilization, the kinds of wars against civilians seen in the Second World War and insurgency/terrorism. Yet he pictures the final hammer blow not in the form of such a distributed conflict but coming in the form of a global pandemic that kills half of the world’s people. After that comes the final death of the state and the reversion to feudalism.

It is from a world ruled by warlords that Wells’ imagined “Air Dictatorship” will emerge. It is essentially the establishment of global rule by a scientific technocracy that begins with the imposition of a monopoly over global trade networks and especially control over the air.

To contemporary ears the sections on the Air Dictatorship can be humorously reminiscent of an advertisement for FedEx or the US Navy. And then the humor passes when one recalls that a world dominated by one global straddling military and multinational corporations isn’t too far from the one Wells pictured even if he was more inspired by the role of the Catholic Church in the Dark Ages, the Hanseatic League or the what the damned Bolsheviks were up to in Russia.

Oddly enough, Wells foresaw no resistance to the establishment of a world-state (he called it The Modern State) from global capitalists, or communists or the remnant of the security services of the states that had collapsed. Instead, falling into a modernist bias that remains quite current, Wells sees the only rival to the “Modern State” in the form of the universal religions which the Air Dictatorship will therefore have to destroy. Wells’ utopians declare war on Catholics (Protestants oddly give no resistance) forcefully close Mecca and declare war on Kosher foods. And all this deconstruction to be followed by “re-education” Wells thinks could be done without the kinds of totalitarian nightmares and abuses which are less than two decades away from when he is writing The Shape of Things.

I am not particular fan of the universal confusion called post-modernism, but it does normally prevent most of us from making zingers like Wells’ such as this:

They are going to realize that there can be only one right way of looking at the world for a normal human being and only one conception of a proper scheme of social reactions, and that all others must be wrong and misleading and involve destructive distortions of conduct. (323)

Like any self-respecting version of apocalypse, Wells imagines that after a period of pain and violence the process will become self sustaining and neither will be required, though most honorably for the time Wells thinks this world will be one of racial equality that will never again suffer the plague of extreme want.

Analogous to the universal religions, after the establishment of the Modern State all of humankind will become party to ultimate mission of the scientific endeavor which the protagonist in the movie version sums up manically in this crazy speech at the end of the film:

For man, no rest, he must go on. First this little planet and its’ winds and ways, and then all of the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets above and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he conquers all the depths of space and all of time still he will not be finished.

All the universe or nothing! Which shall it be?

(As a side note Ken Stanley Robinson seems to think this modernist’s dream that the destiny of humanity is to settle the stars is still alive and kicking. In his newest novel he is out to kill it. Review pending. )

To return to our lack of imagination and direction after 2008: we, unlike Wells, know how his and similar modernist projects failed, and just how horribly they did so. Nevertheless, his diagnosis remains largely sound. It might take a crisis the scale none of us would wish for to engender real reform let alone the taking of radically new directions. Given historical experience such crises are much more likely to give rise to monsters than anything benign.

Anarchists seem to grasp the shape of the time but not its implications. In a globalized world power has slipped out of the grasp of democratic sovereignty and into the hands of networked organizations- from multinational corporations, to security services, to terrorists and criminal groups able to transcend these borders. Yet it is tightly organized “machine like” organizations rather than decentralized/anarchic ones that seem to thrive in this feudal environment, and whereas that very feudalism and its competition makes achieving a unified voice in addressing urgent global problems even more difficult, and where despite our current perceptions, war between the armed groups that represent states the gravest existential threat to humanity, we, unlike Wells, know that no one group of us has all the answers, and that it is not only inhumane but impossible to win human unity out of the barrel of a ray gun

The death of our Republic is inevitable, but what should replace it?

Jul4

Happy two hundred and thirty ninth birthday, America! Although it’s more accurate to claim the country is younger and date the current republic’s birth from the adoption of the constitution in 1787. Amazingly, it’s a constitution that in most respects remains essentially the same despite all the enormous changes that have happened in the centuries since it was written.

Americans are constantly claiming that their country is “exceptional” which has to bug the hell out of non-Americans and is only really true if exceptional is taken to mean something like weird. What makes us so weird is that we’re a country whose identity is based not on some real or imagined ethnicity, religion, or ancient civilization, but on allegiance to a set of political documents and the system of government those documents sanction. What unites a gun toting bible-belter and an atheist card carrying member of the ACLU is adherence to the same document, though their interpretations of it are radically different. Lately, it seems, this tug of war over the constitution is about to tear the document in two.

The tension of mutually contradictory interpretations was on full display in the recent fight over marriage equality where both sides, in all sincerity, believed their case justified by the very same document. The constitution considered by members of the right as a “Christian document” and one that enshrined authority over the question of marriage to the states, or that same constitution, and much more so the Declaration of Independence that came before it, considered by those on the left fighting for equal rights as what Martin Luther King Jr called a “promissory note” that held within itself the extension of the rights implicit in the Declaration and their extension to all citizens.

This dispute over the constitution’s meaning is at the root of the current fight over the Confederate flag, a debate which otherwise appears so superficial that seen in this light makes much more sense. What I think very few white Americans, myself included, have understood is to what extent the Confederate States of America claimed for itself the mantle of the constitution and its “true” meaning and turned what most of us have seen as the nation’s greatest hypocrisy and sin- the existence of slavery in a country supposedly founded on the principles of freedom and equality- as its’ justification.

For African Americans, the Confederate flag represents not just the brutality of slavery, but a claim of possession to a narrative of American history that claims freedom and equality is a privilege of whites alone. Something that is radically different than romantic ideas of the Confederacy as a tragic lost cause and rebellion against authority that we’re so prevalent in my youth. At a bare minimum the state capitals of governments whose insurrection against the Union resulted in deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers should never have been flown such a flag.

Full throated affection for the Confederacy when combined, as seems to often be the case, with strong American nationalism or patriotism always seemed contradictory to me as a Yankee. How could one worship the Confederacy while at the same time loving the Union that crushed it? What was lost on me was that such a view was not contradictory in so far as one thought that it was the Confederacy that had fought to defend the “real” and “legitimate” constitution. In other words that there was this dark and inegalitarian interpretation of the constitution and the American story that existed side-by side with the progressive (if far less than radical) understanding that I had always been taught. Since its beginnings and for a long time to come the greatest internal danger to the republic (in terms of violence) will continue to emerge from this ancient dispute over the constitution’s meaning and come from those who think they are acting in defense of some lost and ultimately inegalitarian version of it.

Yet such a conflict as a danger to the Republic itself, a sort of replay of the Civil War, seems very unlikely to be the way the Republic will ultimately end, and end it must just as every other system of government and civilization has eventually passed from the scene. On that score, the political scientists Francis Fukuyama and David Runciman recently held a fascinating public discussion that grappled with the question of not just American democracy’s future, but the future of democracy itself.

Fukuyama is of course famous for his 1989 essay and subsequent book “The End of History and the Last Man” which argued that history seemed to have a direction moving politics ever closer to what we would consider democratic forms. After 9-11 that view has taken a shellacking as trends towards democratization have gone into reverse. Fukuyama still thinks that democracy holds the greatest attraction as a system of government globally, though the process of democratization will likely be very slow and move forward in fits and starts. His biggest concern isn’t the arrival of some real alternative system of government out of a place like China, Russia or the Middle East to rival democracy in its attractiveness. Rather, his concern is with what he calls political decay- a phenomenon he finds particularly troubling in the United States.

Fukuyama is not some kind of anarchist outsider but an essentially a conservative thinker which makes his view that the financial crisis essentially enable political capture by elites who stymied any efforts at real reform all the more troubling. What he considers the archaic system of American government enables a “vetocracy” in which any special interest with deep enough pockets can initiate legal action to block or delay indefinitely policies regardless of such vetoes impacts on the public good. The system is therefore both hobbled and weak while at the same time being open to capture to manipulation and gaming on account of its monetized elections and revolving door. It is perhaps the worst mixture government for the long term health of society- too weak to make difficult decisions in the nation’s long term interests and too corrupt to make good ones.

David Runciman is much less well known than Fukuyama but he shouldn’t be having written one of the most thought provoking tracks on democracy in recent years- The Confidence Trap. Runciman’s point in his discussion with Fukuyama build off of the argument he had presented in that book. That argument basically is that the greatest danger to democracy is its success. Runciman points out that the public sense of democracy has always been that it is failing miserably, which in a sense it is.

Yet it is that system’s very fickleness that gives rise to its sense of lacking direction and failure that allow democracies during periods of extreme crisis to respond with a flexibility its more stable rivals do not possess. The problem Runciman sees and adds to the fear of decay identified by Fukuyama is that democracy’s technocrats have become extremely adept and preventing crises from getting to the point that the public is jarred into pushing forward systemic change, and the system and society therefore rots over time.

A possibility that troubles Runciman is that the time scales of the potential crises facing democracy seem to have decoupled from the elections that remain the primary route through which democratic change is effected. Potential crises are either now too extended in time – like global warming, or possess the lightning speed of technology in comparison to which electoral cycles can seem almost testudine. Are we superficially preventing the full onset of crises only to face much more systemic ones we will not have the wherewithal to respond to in the future?

Some had hoped that if politics would not change itself, technology would end up changing the way we did politics. Yet the promise of technology to transform democracy in the early days of the internet have also proven to be false- technology is convenient and immediate – like an app- whereas politics seemingly by its nature is anything but.

Another point Runciman mentions but does not elaborate upon to this degree which seems particularly relevant today is the extension of democracy’s concerns not merely in terms of time but of space. Many of the most important issues facing us are global in scope. Thus the great hope of some democracy advocates that the European Union offered was as an emerging model for how democracy could be extended into the international sphere. It is a hope now dashed by the crisis in Greece. The EU is not a nascent new form of transnational democracy, but appears to be a new form of technocratic hegemony exercised in the interest of the strongests states.

The public at large has become exhausted with politics to the extent that some have argued we turn our decision making over to our increasing intelligent machines. Perhaps the ultimate end of not just the American Republic but democracy itself will come when our current systems of electoral competition are replaced by bureaucratic mechanism administered rationally and impartially by AI- an aloocracy. Or we’ll rule the world from our smart phones and their descendants deciding everything by means of constant referendum. The problem here is that most of the questions that face us can’t be algorithmically decided because they are questions of values, nor is it clear transforming decision making into something like referendum represents real freedom rather than surrendering our ability to think and debate to the equivalent of an electronic mob. Which leaves me with the questions: what system might replace our Republic that would actually be better than a reformed version of it that actually lives up to our more just and egalitarian aspirations for it?

Is Pope Francis the World’s Most Powerful Transhumanist?

Jun27

Francis-with-book-

I remember once while on a trip to Arizona asking a long-time resident of Phoenix why anyone would want to live in such a godforsaken place. I wasn’t at all fooled by the green lawns and the swimming pools and knew that we were standing in the middle of a desert over the bones of the Hohokam Indians whose civilization had shriveled up under the brutality of the Sonora sun. The person I was speaking to had a quick retort to my east coast skepticism. Where I lived, he observed, was no more natural than where he did, for the constant need for air conditioning during much of the year in a place like Phoenix was but the flip side of the need for heat in the cold months in the backwoods of my native Pennsylvania. Everywhere humankind lives is in some sense “unnatural”, every place we have successfully settled it was because we had been able to wrestle nature’s arm behind her back and make her cry “uncle”.

Sometime around then, back in 2006, James Lovelock published what was probably the most frightening book I have ever read- The Revenge of Gaia. There he predicted the death of billions of human beings and the retreat of global civilization to the poles as the climate as we had known it throughout the 100,000 or so years of of species history collapsed under the weight of anthropogenic climate change. It was not a work of dystopian fiction.

Lovelock has since backed off from this particular version of apocalyptic nightmare, but not because we have changed our course or discovered some fundamental error in the models that lead to his dark predictions. Instead, it is because he thinks the pace of warming is somewhat slower than predicted due to sulfuric pollution and its reflection of sunlight that act like the sunshields people put on their car windows. Lovelock is also less frightened out of the realization that air conditioning allows large scale societies- he is particularly fond of Singapore, but he also could have cited the Arabian Gulf or American Southwest- to seemingly thrive in conditions much hotter than those which any large human population could have survived in the past. We are not the poor Hohokam.

The problem with this more sanguine view of things is in thinking Singapore like levels of adaptation are either already here or even remotely on the horizon. This is the reality brought home over the last several weeks as the death toll from an historic heat wave sweeping over India and Pakistan has risen into the thousands. Most societies, or at least those with the most people, lack the ability to effectively respond to the current and predicted impacts of climate change, and are unlikely to develop it soon. The societal effects and death toll of a biblical scale deluge are much different if one is in Texas or Bangladesh. Major droughts can cause collapse and civil war in the fragile states of the Middle East that do not happen under similar environmental pressures between Arizona or Nevada- though Paolo Bacigalupi’s recent novel The Water Knife helps us imagine this were so. Nor has something like the drought in California sparked or fed the refugee flows or ethnic religious tensions it has elsewhere and which are but a prelude of what will likely happen should we continue down this path.

It is this fact that the negative impacts of the Anthropocene now fall on the world’s poor, and given the scale of the future impacts of climate change will be devastating for the poor and their societies because they lack the resources to adjust and respond to these changes, that is the moral insight behind Pope Francis’ recent encyclical Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home . It could not have been more timely.

I have to say that much of the document has a beauty that is striking. Parts such as this:

The Psalms frequently exhort us to praise God the Creator, “who spread out the earth on the waters, for his steadfast love endures for ever” (Ps 136:6). They also invite other creatures to join us in this praise: “Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars! Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens! Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created” (Ps 148:3-5). We do not only exist by God’s mighty power; we also live with him and beside him. This is why we adore him.

Lines like these reminded me of the poetry of Walt Whitman, or perhaps better even that most eloquent atheist Lucretius. And there are points in the letter where the relationship of God to non-human animals is portrayed in almost post-humanist terms, which makes a lot of sense given the pope’s namesake. But the purpose of Laudato Si isn’t to serve as poetry or even as a reminder to Christians that care for the natural world is not only not incompatible with their faith but a logical extension of it. Rather, the purpose of the pope’s letter is to serve as a moral indictment and a call to action. Pope Francis has, rightly and justly, connected our obligations to the global environment with our obligations to the world’s poor.

The problem with religious documents, even beautiful and uplifting documents such as the Laudato Si is that as a type they do not grapple with historical or moral ambiguity. Such documents by their nature try to establish continuity with the past, as in claiming the church contained whatever teaching is being communicated all along. They also by their very nature try to establish firm moral lines not only for the present and future but also in the past rather than grapple with the fact that we are more often confronted with much more ambiguous moral trade-offs -and always have been.

What Laudato Si lacks is ironically the same acknowledgement that New Atheists so critical of Christianity often lack, namely the recognition that the history of our understanding of nature or the universe through science is part and parcel of the history of Christianity itself. It was Christians, after all, who having won over the Roman elites in the 3rd century AD managed to do what all the natural philosophers since Thales had never managed to, namely, to rid nature of “gods” as an explanation for everyday occurrences thus opening up a space for our understanding of nature as something free of intention. Only such a dis-enchanted nature could be considered predictable and machine-like by thinkers such as Newton, or made a subject for “interrogation” as it was by the philosopher Francis Bacon in the 17th century. And it’s with Bacon that we see how morally complicated the whole conquest of nature narrative Pope Francis grapples with in Laudato Si actually is.

It was Christianity that inspired Bacon’s quest for scientific knowledge – his search for what he believes to be the lost true knowledge of Adam that will give us mastery over nature. The very purpose of this mastery for him was a Christian and charitable one “the relief of man’s estate”. And yet such mastery and relief cannot be won without treating nature as an object to be tamed or forced into the constraints of a machine. The universe as clock.

Tragically, it wouldn’t only be the natural world that the West would subjugate in its quest to escape the pain and privation often inflicted by nature, it would be other human beings as well. The conquest and exploitation of non-Western societies that began, not coincidentally, at the same time as the Scientific Revolution would be justified on the grounds that civilization itself and human progress found such conquest necessary as a means of escaping the trap of nature.

For a long time indeed the argument that the “civilized” had a right to exploit and take from “savages” was a biblical one. When responding to his own rhetorical question of how it could be that English settlers in the New World had the right to seize the lands of the Indians who also were “sons of Adam” the Puritan John Winthrop answered:

That which is common to all is proper to none… Why may not Christians have liberty to dwell among them in their wastelands and woods (leaving such places as they have manured for their corne) as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites? (117)

The point Winthrop was making was drawn from God’s command of Adam to a life of labor, which was considered the birth of society by John Locke and made the basis of property- that anything not developed and claimed was without value or ownership and there for the taking.

This was not just a matter of Protestant reinterpretations of the Bible. Before Winthrop the Catholic Columbus and Spanish understood their mission and the distinction between them and Native American along millenarian lines. In 1493 Pope Alexander IV gave the New World to Spain and Portugal (as if he owned them). During the opening phase of the modern world Christianity and any globalizing scientific and capitalist project were essentially indistinguishable.

Centuries later when the relationship between Christianity and science was severed by Charles Darwin and the deep time being uncovered by geology in the 19th century neither abandoned the idea of remaking what for the first time in history was truly “one world” in their own image. Yet whereas Christianity pursued its mission among the poor (in which it was soon joined by a global socialist movement) science (for a brief time) became associated with a capitalist globalization through imperialism that was based upon the biological chimera of race- the so-called “white man’s burden”. This new “scientific” racism freed itself from the need to grapple, as even a brutally racist regime like the Confederate States needed to do, with the biblical claim that all of humankind shared in the legacy of Adam and possessed souls worthy of dignity and salvation. It was a purely imaginary speciation that ended in death camps.

The moral fate of science and society would have been dark indeed had the Nazis racial state managed to win the Second World War, and been allowed to construct a society in which individuals reduced to the status of mere animals without personhood. Society proved only a little less dark when totalitarian systems in the USSR and China seized the reigns of the narrative of socialist liberation and reduced the individual to an equally expendable cog in the machine not of nature but of history. Luckily, communism was like a fever that swept over the world through the 20th century and then, just as quickly as it came, it broke and was gone.

Instead of the nightmare of a global racist regime or its communist twin or something else we find ourselves in a very mixed situation with one state predominant -the United States- yet increasingly unable to impose its will on the wider world. During the period of US hegemony some form of capitalism and the quest for modernity has become the norm. This has not all been bad, for during this period conditions have indeed undeniably improved for vast numbers of humanity. Still the foundation of such a world in the millenarian narrative of the United States, that it was a country with a “divine mission” to bring freedom to the world was just another variant of the Christian, Eurocentric, Nazi, Communist narrative that has defined the West since Joachim de Fiore if not before. And like all those others it has resulted in a great amount of unnecessary pain and will not be sustained indefinitely.

We are entering an unprecedented period where the states with the largest economies (along with comes the prospect of the most powerful militaries) China and at some point India- continue to be the home of 10s of millions of the extremely poor. Because of this they are unlikely to accept and cannot be compelled to accept restraints on their growth whose scale dwarfs that of the already unsustainable environmental course we are already on. These great and ancient civilization/states are joined by states much weaker some of which were merely conjured up by Western imperialist at the height of their power. They are states that are extremely vulnerable to crisis and collapse. Many of these vulnerable states are in Africa (many of those in the Middle East have collapsed) where by the end of this century a much greater portion of humanity will be found and which by then will have long replaced Europe as the seat of the Christianity and the church. We are having a great deal of difficulty figuring out how we are going to extend the benefits of progress to them without wrecking the earth.

Pope Francis wants us to see this dilemma sharply. He is attempting to focus our attention on the moral impact of the environmental, consumer and political choices we have made and will make especially as we approach the end of the year and the climate summit in Paris. Let us pray that we begin to change course, for if he doesn’t, those of us still alive to see it and our children and descendants are doomed.

Though I am no great fan of the idea that this century is somehow the most important one in terms of human survival, we really do appear to be entering a clear danger zone between now and into the early years of the 22nd century. It is by sometime between now and then that human population growth will have hopefully peaked, and alternatives to the carbon economy perfected and fully deployed. Though the effects of climate change will likely last millennia with the halting of new carbon emissions the climate should at least stabilize into a new state. We will either have established effective methods of response and adaptation or be faced with the after effect of natural disasters- immense human suffering, societal collapse, refugee flows and conflicts. We will also either have figured out a more equitable economic system and created sustainable prosperity for all or tragically have failed to do so.

What the failure to adapt to climate change and limit its impact and/ or the failure to further extend the advances of modernity into the developing world would mean was the failure of the scientific project as the “relief of man’s estate” begun by figures like Francis Bacon. Science after a long period of hope will have resulted in something quite the opposite of paradise.

However, even before these issues are decided there is the danger that we will revive something resembling the artificial religious and racial division of humanity into groups where a minority lays claim to the long legacy of human technological and cultural advancement as purely its own. This, at least, is how I read the argument of the sociologist Steve Fuller who wants us to reframe our current political disputes from left vs right to what he “up- wingers” vs “down wingers” where up wingers are those pursuing human enhancement and evolution through technology (like himself) and down wingers those arguing in some sense against technology and for the preservation of human nature – as he characterizes Pope Francis.

The problem with such a reframing is that it forces us to once again divide the world into the savage and the civilized, the retrograde and the advancing. At its most ethical this means forgetting about the suffering or fate of those who stand on the “savage” side of this ledger and taking care of oneself and one’s own. At its least ethical it means treating other human beings as sub-human, or perhaps “sub-post human”, and is merely a revival of the Christian justification for crimes against “infidels” or white’s rationale for crimes against everyone else. It is the claim in effect that you are not as full a creature as us, and therefore do not possess equivalent rights. Ultimately the idea that we can or should split humanity up in such a way is based on a chronological fantasy.

The belief that there is an escape hatch from our shared global fate for any significant segment of humanity during the short time frame of a century is a dangerous illusion. Everywhere else in the solar system including empty space itself is a worse place to live than the earth even when she is in deep crisis. We might re-engineer some human beings to live beyond earth, but for the foreseeable future, it won’t be many. As Ken Stanley Robison never tires of reminding us,the stars are too far away- there won’t be a real life version of Interstellar. The potential escape hatch of uploading or human merger with artificial intelligence is a long, long ways off. Regardless of how much we learn about delaying the aging clock for likely well past this century we will remain biological beings whose fate will depend on the survival of our earthly home which we evolved to live in.

In light of this Fuller is a mental time traveler who has confused a future he has visited in his head with the real world. What this “up-winger” has forgotten and the “down-winger” Pope Francis has not is that without our efforts to preserve our world and make it more just there will either be no place to build our imagined futures upon or there will be no right to claim it represents the latest chapter in the long story of our progress.

In this sense, and even in spite of his suspicion of technology, this popular and influential pope might just prove to be one of the most important figures for the fate of any form of post-humanity. For it is likely that it will only be through our care for humanity as a whole, right now, that whatever comes after us will have the space and security to actually appear in our tomorrow.

The Man Who Invented the Future

Jun7

joachim circle trinity

It is strange how some of the most influential individuals in human history can sometimes manage to slip out of public consciousness to the extent that almost no one knows who they are. What if I were to tell you that the ideas of one person who lived almost 900 years ago were central to everything from the Protestant Reformation, to the French Revolution, to Russia and America’s peculiar type of nationalism, to Communism and Nazism, to neo-liberal optimists such as Steven Pinker and now Michael Shermer, to (of most interest to this audience) followers of Ray Kurzweil and his Singularity; would you believe me, or think I was pulling a Dan Brown?

That individual was a 12th century was a monk named Joachim de Fiore, very much for real, and who up until very recently I had never heard of. In some ways this strange monk not only was a necessary figure in formation all of the systems of thought and political movements listed above, he also might seriously be credited with inventing the very idea of the future itself.

Whether you’re a fan of Game of Thrones or not put yourself for a moment in the mind of a European in the Middle Ages. Nothing around you has what we would consider a rational explanation, rather, it can only be understood in reference to the will of an unseen deity or his demonic rival. It is quite a frightening place, and would even be spatially disorienting for a modern person used to maps and ideas regarding how the different worlds one sees while looking at the ground or up towards the sky, especially at night, fit together. It would have seemed like being stuck at the bottom of a seemingly endless well, unable to reach the “real” world above. A vertical version of Plato’s famous cave.

Starting in the 13th century there were attempts to understand humankind’s position in space more clearly, and some of these attempts were indeed brilliant, even anticipating current idea such as the Big Bang and the multiverse. This was shown recently in a wonderful collaboration between scholars in the humanities, mathematicians and scientists on the work of another largely forgotten medieval figure, Robert Grosseteste.

Even before Grosseteste was helping expand medievals’ understanding of space, Joachim de Fiore had expanded their notion of time. For time in the medieval worldview time was almost as suffocating as the stuck-in-a-well quality of their notion of space.

Medievals largely lacked a notion of what we would understand as an impersonal future that would be different from the past. It wasn’t as if a person living then would lack the understanding that their own personal tomorrow would be different than today- that their children would age and have children of their own and that the old would die- it was that there was little notion that the world itself was changing. It would be a tough sell to get a medieval to pay for a trip into the future, for in their view whether you’d travel 100 or 1000 years forward everything would be almost exactly the same, unless, that is, the world wasn’t there to visit at all.

Being a medieval was a lot like being on death row- you know exactly how your life will end- you just wouldn’t know when exactly you’ll run out of appeals. A medieval Christian had the end of the story in the Book of Revelation with it’s cast of characters such as the Antichrist and scenes such as the battle of armageddon. A Christian was always on the look out for the arrival of all the props for the play that would be the end of the current world, and if they believed in any real difference between the present and the future it was that the world in which these events were to occur would be what we would consider less technologically and socially advanced than the Roman world into which Christ had been born. History for the medievals, far from being the story of human advancement, was instead the tale of societal decay.

Well before actual events on the ground, improvements in human living standards, technological capacity and scientific understanding, undermined this medieval idea of the future as mere decadence before a final ending, Joachim de Fiore would do so philosophically and theologically.

Joachim was born around 1135 into a well of family with his father being a member of the Sicilian court. Joachim too would begin his career as a court official, but it would not last. In his early twenties, while on a diplomatic mission to the Byzantine Emperor, Joachim broke away to visit the Holy Land, and according to legend felt the call of God.He spent the Lenten season in meditation on Mt Tabor where “on the eve of Easter day, he received ‘the fullness of knowledge’”. (3)

He became a monk and soon a prior and abbot for of Corazzo one assumes on account of his remarkable intelligence, but Joachim would spend his time writing his great trilogy: The Harmony of the New and Old Testaments, Exposition of Apocalypse, and the Psaltery of Ten Strings eventually receiving a dispensation from his work as abbot by Pope Clement III so he could devote himself fully to his writing.

Eventually a whole monastic order would grow up around Joachim, and though this order would last only a few centuries, and Joachim would die in 1202 before finishing his last book the Tract on the Four Gospels his legacy would almost fully be felt in the way we understand history and the future.

Joachim constructed a theory of history based on the Christian Trinity: the Age of the Father – from Adam to the birth of Christ, the Age of the Son- from Christ until The Age of the Spirit. There had been examples of breaking history into historical ages before, what made Joachim different was his idea that:

“… Scripture taught a record of man’s gradual spiritual developments, leading to a perfected future age which was the fulfillment of prophetic hope.” (13)

“… one to be ushered in with a New Age of guidance by the Holy Spirit acting through a new order of meditative men who truly contemplated God. “ (12)

What is distinct and new about this was that history was spiritualized, it became the story of humankind’s gradual improvement and moving towards a state of perfection that was achievable in the material world (not in some purely spiritual paradise). And we could arrive at this destination if only we could accept the counsel of the virtuous and wise. It was a powerful story that has done us far more harm than good.

Joachim trinitarian tree circles

Joachimite ideas can be found at the root of the millennia fantasies of the European religious wars, and were secularized in the period of the French Revolution by figures like the Marquis de Condorcet and Auguste Comte. The latter even managed to duplicate Joachim’s tri-part model of history only now the ages only now they were The Theological, The Metaphysical, and the Positive Stage which we should read as religious, philosophical and scientific with Joachim’s monks being swapped for scientists.

Hegel turned this progressive version of history into a whole system of philosophy and the atheist Marx turned Hegel “upside down” and created a system of political economy and revolutionary program. The West would justify its imperial conquest of Africa and subjugation of Asia on the grounds that they were bringing the progressive forces of history to “barbaric” peoples. The great ideological struggle of the early 20th century between Communism, Nazism, and Liberalism pitted versions of historical determinism against one another.

If postmodernism should have meant the end of overarching metanarratives the political movements that have so far most shaped the 21st century seem not to have gotten the memo. The century began with an attack by a quasi- millenarian cult (though they would not recognize Joachim as a forbearer). The 9-11 attacks enabled an averous and ultimately stupid foreign policy on the part of the United States which was only possible because the American people actually believed in their own myth that their system of government represented the end of history and the secret wish of every oppressed people in the world.

Now we have a truly apocalyptic cult in the form of ISIS while Russia descends into its own version of Joachimite fantasy based on Russia’s “historical mission” while truth itself disappears in a postmodern hall of mirrors. Thus it is that Joachim’s ideas regarding the future remain potent. And the characters attracted to his idea of history are, of course, not all bad. I’d include among this benign group both singularitarians and the new neo-liberal optimists. The first because they see human history moving towards an inevitable conclusion and believe that their is an elite that should guide us into paradise – the technologists. Neo-liberal optimists may not be so starry eyed but they do see history as the gradual unfolding of progress and seem doubtful that this trend might reverse.

The problem I have with the singularitarians is their blindness to the sigmoid curve – the graveyard where all exponentials go to die. There is a sort of “evolutionary” determinism to singularitarianism that seems to think not only that there is only one destination to history, but that we already largely know what that destination is. For Joachim such determinism makes sense, his world having been set up and run by an omnipotent God, for what I assume to be mostly secular singularitarians such determinism does not make sense and we are faced with the contingencies of evolution and history.

My beef with the neo-liberal optimists, in addition to the fact that they keep assaulting me with their “never been better” graphs is that I care less that human suffering has decreased than the reasons why, so that such a decrease can be continued or its lower levels preserved. I also care much more where the moral flaws of our society remain acute because only then will I know where to concentrate my political and ethical action. If the world today is indeed better than the world in the past (and it’s not a slam dunk argument even with the power point) let’s remember the struggles that were necessary to achieve that and continue to move ourselves towards Joachim’s paradise while being humble and wise enough to avoid mistaking ourselves with the forces of God or history, a mistake that has been at the root of so much suffering and evil.

Freedom in the Age of Algorithms

Jun1

modern-times-22

Reflect for a moment on what for many of us has become the average day. You are awoken by your phone whose clock is set via a wireless connection to a cell phone tower, connected to a satellite, all ultimately ending in the ultimate precision machine, a clock that will not lose even a second after 15 billion years of ticking. Upon waking you connect to the world through the “sirene server” of your pleasure that “decides” for you based on an intimate profile built up over years the very world you will see- ranging from Kazakhstan to Kardasian, and connects your intimates, and those whom you “follow” and, if you’re lucky enough, your streams of “followers”.

Perhaps you use a health app to count your breakfast calories or the fat you’ve burned on your morning run, or perhaps you’ve just spent the morning by playing Bejeweled, and will need to pay for your sins of omission later. On your mindless drive to work you make the mistake of answering a text from the office while in front of a cop who unbeknownst to you has instantly run your licence plate to find out if you are a weirdo or terrorist. Thank heavens his algorithm confirms you’re neither.

When you pull into the Burger King drive through to buy your morning coffee, you thoughtlessly end up buying yet another bacon egg and cheese with a side of hash browns in spite of your best self nagging you from inside your smart phone. Having done this one too many times this month your fried food preference has now been sold to the highest bidders, two databanks, through which you’ll now be receiving annoying coupons in the mail along with even more annoying and intrusive adware while you surf the web, the first from all the fast food restaurants along the path of your morning commute, the other friendly, and sometimes frightening, suggestions you ask your doctor about the new cholesterol drug evolocumab.

You did not, of course, pay for your meal with cash but with plastic. Your money swirling somewhere out there in the ether in the form of ones and zeroes stored and exchanged on computers to magically re-coalesce and fill your stomach with potatoes and grease. Your purchases correlated and crunched to define you for all the machines and their cold souls of software that gauge your value as you go about your squishy biological and soulless existence.

____________________________________________

The bizarre thing about this common scenario is that all of this happens before you arrive at the office, or store, or factory, or wherever it is you earn your life’s bread. Not only that, almost all of these constraints on how one views and interacts with the world have been self imposed. The medium through which much of the world and our response to is now apps and algorithms of one sort or another. It’s gotten to the point that we now need apps and algorithms to experience what it’s like to be lost, which seems to, well… misunderstand the definition of being lost.

I have no idea where future historians, whatever their minds are made of, will date the start of this trend of tracking and constraining ourselves so as to maintain “productivity” and “wellness”, perhaps with all those 7- habits- of- highly- effective books that started taking up shelf space in now ancient book stores sometime in the 1980’s, but it’s certainly gotten more personal and intimate with the rise of the smart phone. In a way we’ve brought the logic of the machine out of the factory and into our lives and even our bodies- the idea of super efficient man-machine merger as invented by Frederick Taylor and never captured better than in Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant 1936 film Modern Times.

The film is for silent pictures what the Wizard of OZ was for color and bridges the two worlds where almost all of the spoken parts are through the medium of machines including a giant flat screen that seemed entirely natural in a world that has been gone for eighty years. It portrays the Tramp asserting his humanity in the dehumanizing world of automation found in a factory where even eating lunch had been mechanized and made maximally efficient. Chaplin no doubt would have been pleasantly surprised with how well much of the world turned out given the bleakness of economic depression and soon world war he was facing, but I think he also would have been shocked at how much we have given up of the Tramp in us all without reason and largely of our own volition.

Still, the fact of the matter is that this new rule of apps and and algorithms much of which comes packaged in the spiritualized wrapping of “mindfulness” and “happiness” would be much less troubling did it not smack of a new form of Marx’s “opiate for the people” and divert us away from trying to understand and challenge the structural inadequacies of society.

For there is nothing inherently wrong with measuring performance as a means to pursue excellence, or attending to one’s health and mental tranquility. There’s a sort of postmodern cynicism that kicks in whenever some cultural trend becomes too popular, and while it protects us from groupthink, it also tends to lead to intellectual and cultural paralysis. It’s only when performance measures find their way into aspects of our lives that are trivialized by quantifying – such as love or family life- that I think we should earnestly worry, along, perhaps, with the atrophy of our skills to engage with the world absent these algorithmic tools.

My really deep concern lies with the way apps and algorithms now play the role of invisible instruments of power. Again, this is nothing new to the extent that in the pre-digital age such instruments came in the form of bureaucracy and the rule by decree rather than law as Hannah Arendt laid out in her Origins of Totalitarianism back in the 1950:

In governments by bureaucracy decrees appear in their naked purity as though they were no longer issued by powerful men, but were the incarnation of power itself and the administrator only its accidental agent. There are no general principles behind the decree, but ever changing circumstances which only an expert can know in detail. People ruled by decree never know what rules them because of the impossibility of understanding decrees in themselves and the carefully organized ignorance of specific circumstances and their practical significance in which all administrators keep their subjects. (244)

It’s quite easy to read the rule of apps and algorithms in that quote especially the part about “only an expert can know in detail” and “carefully organized ignorance” a fact that became clear to me after I read what is perhaps the best book yet on our new algorithmically ruled lives, Frank Pasquale’s The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information.

I have often wondered what exactly was being financially gained by gathering up all this data on individuals given how obvious and ineffective the so-called targeted advertisements that follow me around on the internet seem to be, and Pasquale managed to explain this clearly. What is being “traded” is my “digital reputation” whether as a debtor, or insurance risk (medical or otherwise), or customer with a certain depth of pocket and identity- “father, 40’s etc”- or even the degree to which I can be considered a “sucker” for scam and con artists of one sort or another.

This is a reputation matrix much different from the earlier arrangements based or personal knowledge or later impersonal systems such as credit reporting (though both had their abuses) or that for health records under H.I.P.A.A in the sense that the new digital form or reputation is largely invisible to me, its methodology inscrutable, its declarations of my “identity” immune to challenge and immutable. It is as Pasquale so-aptly terms a “black box” in the strongest sense of that word meaning unintelligible and opaque to the individual within it like the rules Kafka’s characters suffer under in his novels about the absurdity of hyper- bureaucracy (and of course more) The Castle and The Trial.

Much more troubling, however, is how such corporate surveillance interacts with the blurring of the line between intelligence and police functions – the distinction between the foreign and domestic spheres- that has been what of the defining features of our constitutional democracy. As Pasquale reminds us:

Traditionally, a critical distinction has been made between intelligence and investigation. Once reserved primarily for overseas spy operations, “intelligence” work is anticipatory, it is the job of agencies like the CIA, which gather potentially useful information on external enemies that pose a threat to national security. “Investigation” is what police do once they have evidence of a crime. (47)

It isn’t only that such moves towards a model of “predictive policing” mean the undoing of constitutionally guaranteed protections and legal due process (presumptions of innocence, and 5th amendment protections) it is also that it has far too often turned the police into a political instrument, which, as Pasquale documents, have monitored groups ranging from peaceful protesters to supporters of Ron Paul all in the name of preventing a “terrorist act” by these members of these groups. (48)

The kinds of illegal domestic spying performed by the NSA and its acronymic companions was built on back of an already existing infrastructure of commercial surveillance. The same could be said for the blurring of the line between intelligence and investigation exemplified by creation of “fusion centers” after 9-11 which repurposed the espionage tools once contained to intelligence services and towards domestic targets and for the purpose of controlling crime.

Both domestic spying by federal intelligence agencies and new forms of invasive surveillance by state and local law enforcement had been enabled by the commercial surveillance architecture established by the likes of corporate behemoths such as FaceBook and Google to whom citizens had surrendered their right to privacy seemingly willingly.

Given the degree to which these companies now hold near monopolies hold over the information citizens receive Pasquale thinks it would be wise to revisit the breakup of the “trusts” in the early part of the last century. It’s not only that the power of these companies is already enormous it’s that were they ever turned into overt political tools they would undermine or upend democracy itself given that citizen action requires the free exchange of information to achieve anything at all.

The black box features of our current information environment have not just managed to colonize the worlds of security, crime, and advertisement, they have become the defining feature of late capitalism itself. A great deal of the 2008 financial crisis can be traced to the computerization of finance over the 1980’s. Computers were an important feature of the pre-crisis argument that we had entered a period of “The Great Equilibrium”. We had become smart enough, and our markets sophisticated enough (so the argument went) that there would be no replay of something like the 1929 Wall Street crash and Great Depression. Unlike the prior era markets without debilitating crashes were not to be the consequence of government regulation to contain the madness of crowds and their bubbles and busts, but in part from the new computer modeling which would exorcise from the markets the demon of “animal spirits” and allow human beings to do what they had always dreamed of doing- to know the future. Pasquale describes it this way:

As information technology improved, lobbyists could tell a seductive story: regulators were no longer necessary. Sophisticated investors could vet their purchases. Computer models could identify and mitigate risk. But the replacement of regulation by automation turned out to be as fanciful as flying cars or space colonization. (105)

Computerization gave rise to ever more sophisticated financial products, such as mortgage backed securities, based on ever more sophisticated statistical models that by bundling investments gave the illusion of stability. Even had there been more prophets crying from the wilderness that the system was unstable they would not have been able to prove it for the models being used were “a black box, programmed in proprietary software with the details left to the quants and the computers”. (106)

It seems there is a strange dynamic at work throughout the digital economy, not just in finance but certainly exhibited in full force there, where the whole game in essence a contest of asymmetric information. You either have the data someone else lacks to make a trade, you process that data faster, or both. Keeping your algorithms secret becomes a matter of survival for as soon as they are out there they can be exploited by rivals or cracked by hackers- or at least this is the argument companies make. One might doubt it though once this you see how nearly ubiquitous this corporate secrecy and patent hoarding has become in areas radically different from software such as the pharmaceuticals or by biotech corporations like Monsanto which hold patents on life itself and whose logic leads to something like Paolo Bacigalupi’s dystopian novel The Windup Girl.

For Pasquale complexity itself becomes a tool of obfuscation in which corruption and skimming can’t help but become commonplace. The contest of asymmetric information means companies are engaged in what amounts to an information war where the goal is as much to obscure real value to rivals and clients so as to profit from the difference in this distortion. In such an atmosphere markets stop being able to perform the informative role Friedrich Hayek thought was their very purpose. Here’s Pasquale himself:

…financialization has created enormous uncertainty about the value of companies, homes, and even (thanks to the pressing need for bailouts) the once rock solid promises of governments themselves.

Finance thrives in this environment of radical uncertainty, taking commissions in cash as investors (or, more likely, their poorly monitored agents) race to speculate on or hedge against an ever less knowable future. (138)

Okay, if Pasquale has clearly laid out the problem, what is his solution? I could go through a list of his suggestions, but I should stick to the general principle. Pasquale’s goal, I think, is to restore our faith in our ability to publicly shape digital technology in ways that better reflect our democratic values. That the argument which claims software is unregulable is an assumption not a truth and the tools and models for regulation and public input over the last century for the physical world are equally applicable to the digital one.

We have already developed a complex, effective, system of privacy protections in the form of H.I.P.A, there are already examples of mandating fair understandable contracts (as opposed to indecipherable “terms of service” agreements) in the form of various consumer protection provisions, up until the 1980’s we were capable of regulating the boom and bust cycles of markets without crashing the economy. Lastly the world did not collapse when earlier corporations that had gotten so large they threatened not only the free competition of markets, but more importantly, democracy itself, were broken up and would not collapse were the like of FaceBook, Google or the big banks broken up either.

Above all, Pasquale urges us to seek out and find some way to make the algorithmization of the world intelligible and open to the political, social and ethical influence of a much broader segment of society than the current group of programmers and their paymasters who have so far been the only ones running the show. For if we do not assert such influence and algorithms continue to structure more and more of our relationship with the world and each other, them algorithmization and democracy would seem to be on a collision course. Or, as Taylor Owen pointed out in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs:

If algorithms represent a new ungoverned space, a hidden and potentially ever-evolving unknowable public good, then they are an affront to our democratic system, one that requires transparency and accountability in order to function. A node of power that exists outside of these bounds is a threat to the notion of collective governance itself. This, at its core, is a profoundly undemocratic notion—one that states will have to engage with seriously if they are going to remain relevant and legitimate to their digital citizenry who give them their power.

Pasquale has given us an excellent start to answering the question of how democracy, and freedom, can survive in the age of algorithms.

Truth and Prediction in the Dataclysm

Feb22

The Deluge by Francis Danby. 1837-1839

Last time I looked at the state of online dating. Among the figures was mentioned was Christian Rudder, one of the founders of the dating site OkCupid and the author of a book on big data called Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One’s Looking that somehow manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply disturbing at the same time.

Rudder is famous, or infamous depending on your view of the matter, for having written a piece about his site with the provocative title: We experiment on human beings!. There he wrote:

We noticed recently that people didn’t like it when Facebook “experimented” with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how websites work.

That statement might set the blood of some boiling, but my own negative reaction to it is somewhat tempered by the fact that Rudder’s willingness to run his experiments on his sites users originates, it seems, not in any conscious effort to be more successful at manipulating them, but as a way to quantify our ignorance. Or, as he puts it in the piece linked to above:

I’m the first to admit it: we might be popular, we might create a lot of great relationships, we might blah blah blah. But OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s doing. Neither does any other website. It’s not like people have been building these things for very long, or you can go look up a blueprint or something. Most ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be better. Experiments are how you sort all this out.

Rudder eventually turned his experiments on the data of OkCupid’s users into his book Dataclysm which displays the same kind of brutal honesty and acknowledgement of the limits of our knowledge. What he is trying to do is make sense of the deluge of data now inundating us. The only way we have found to do this is to create sophisticated algorithms that allow us to discern patterns in the flood. The problem with using algorithms to try and organize human interactions (which have themselves now become points of data) is that their users are often reduced into the version of what being a human beings is that have been embedded by the algorithm’s programmers. Rudder, is well aware and completely upfront about these limitations and refuses to make any special claims about algorithmic wisdom compared to the normal human sort. As he puts it in Dataclysm:

That said, all websites, and indeed all data scientists objectify. Algorithms don’t work well with things that aren’t numbers, so when you want a computer to understand an idea, you have to convert as much of it as you can into digits. The challenge facing sites and apps is thus to chop and jam the continuum of the of human experience into little buckets 1, 2, 3, without anyone noticing: to divide some vast, ineffable process- for Facebook, friendship, for Reddit, community, for dating sites, love- into a pieces a server can handle. (13)

At the same time, Rudder appears to see the data collected on sites such as OkCupid as a sort of mirror, reflecting back to us in ways we have never had available before the real truth about ourselves laid bare of the social conventions and politeness that tend to obscure the way we truly feel. And what Rudder finds in this data is not a reflection of the inner beauty of humanity one might hope for, but something more like the mirror out of A Picture of Dorian Grey.

As an example take what Rudder calls” Wooderson’s Law” after the character from Dazed and Confused who said in the film “That’s what I love about these high school girl, I get older while they stay the same age”. What Rudder has found is that heterosexual male attraction to females peaks when those women are in their early 20’s and thereafter precipitously falls. On OkCupid at least, women in their 30’s and 40’s are effectively invisible when competing against women in their 20’s for male sexual attraction. Fortunately for heterosexual men, women are more realistic in their expectations and tend to report the strongest attraction to men roughly their own age, until sometime in men’s 40’s where males attractiveness also falls off a cliff… gulp.

Another finding from Rudder’s work is not just that looks rule, but just how absolutely they rule. In his aforementioned piece, Rudder lays out that the vast majority of users essentially equate personality with looks. A particularly stunning women can find herself with a 99% personality rating even if she has not one word in her profile.

These are perhaps somewhat banal and even obvious discoveries about human nature Rudder has been able to mine from OkCupid’s data, and to my mind at least, are less disturbing than the deep seated racial bias he finds there as well. Again, at least among OkCupid’s users, dating preferences are heavily skewed against black men and women. Not just whites it seems, but all other racial groups- Asians, Hispanics would apparently prefer to date someone from a race other than African- disheartening for the 21st century.

Rudder looks at other dark manifestations of our collective self than those found in OkCupid data as well. Try using Google search as one would play the game Taboo. The search suggestions that pop up in the Google search bar, after all, are compiled on the basis of Google user’s most popular searches and thus provide a kind of gauge on what 1.17 billion human beings are thinking. Try these some of which Rudder plays himself:

“why do women?”

“why do men?”

“why do white people?”

“why do black people?”

“why do Asians?”

“why do Muslims?”

The exercise gives a whole new meaning to Nietzsche’s observation that “When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back”.

Rudder also looks at the ability of social media to engender mobs. Take this case from Twitter in 2014. On New Years Eve of that year a young woman tweeted:

“This beautiful earth is now 2014 years old, amazing.”

Her strength obviously wasn’t science in school, but what should have just led to collective giggles, or perhaps a polite correction regarding terrestrial chronology, ballooned into a storm of tweets like this:

“Kill yourself”

And:

“Kill yourself you stupid motherfucker”. (139)

As a recent study has pointed out the emotion second most likely to go viral is rage, we can count ourselves very lucky the emotion most likely to go viral is awe.

Then there’s the question of the structure of the whole thing. Like Jaron Lanier, Rudder is struck by the degree to which the seemingly democratized architecture of the Internet appears to consistently manifest the opposite and reveal itself as following Zipf’s Law, which Rudder concisely reduces to:

rank x number = constant (160)

Both the economy and the society in the Internet age are dominated by “superstars”, companies (such as Google and FaceBook that so far outstrip their rivals in search or social media that they might be called monopolies), along with celebrities, musical artist, authors. Zipf’s Law also seems to apply to dating sites where a few profiles dominate the class of those viewed by potential partners. In the environment of a networked society where invisibility is the common fate of almost all of us and success often hinges on increasing our own visibility we are forced to turn ourselves towards “personal branding” and obsession over “Klout scores”. It’s not a new problem, but I wonder how much all this effort at garnering attention is stealing time from the effort at actual work that makes that attention worthwhile and long lasting.

Rudder is uncomfortable with all this algorithmization while at the same time accepting its inevitability. He writes of the project:

Reduction is inescapable. Algorithms are crude. Computers are machines. Data science is trying to make sense of an analog world. It’s a by-product of the basic physical nature of the micro-chip: a chip is just a sequence of tiny gates.

From that microscopic reality an absolutism propagates up through the whole enterprise, until at the highest level you have the definitions, data types and classes essential to programming languages like C and JavaScript. (217-218)

Thing is, for all his humility at the effectiveness of big data so far, or his admittedly limited ability to draw solid conclusions from the data of OkCupid, he seems to place undue trust in the ability of large corporations and the security state to succeed at the same project. Much deeper data mining and superior analytics, he thinks, separate his efforts from those of the really big boys. Rudder writes:

Analytics has in many ways surpassed the information itself as the real lever to pry. Cookies in your web browser and guys hacking for your credit card numbers get most of the press and are certainly the most acutely annoying of the data collectors. But they’ve taken hold of a small fraction of your life and for that they’ve had to put in all kinds of work. (227)

He compares them to Mike Myer’s Dr. Evil holding the world hostage “for one million dollars”

… while the billions fly to the real masterminds, like Axicom. These corporate data marketers, with reach into bank and credit card records, retail histories, and government fillings like tax accounts, know stuff about human behavior that no academic researcher searching for patterns on some website ever could. Meanwhile the resources and expertise the national security apparatus brings to bear makes enterprise-level data mining look like Minesweeper (227)

Yet do we really know this faith in big data isn’t an illusion? What discernable effects that are clearly traceable to the juggernauts of big data ,such as Axicom, on the overall economy or even consumer behavior? For us to believe in the power of data shouldn’t someone have to show us the data that it works and not just the promise that it will transform the economy once it has achieved maximum penetration?

On that same score, what degree of faith should we put in the powers of big data when it comes to security? As far as I am aware no evidence has been produced that mass surveillance has prevented attacks- it didn’t stop the Charlie Hebo killers. Just as importantly, it seemingly hasn’t prevented our public officials from being caught flat footed and flabbergasted in the face of international events such as the revolution in Egypt or the war in Ukraine. And these later big events would seem to be precisely the kinds of predictions big data should find relatively easy- monitoring broad public sentiment as expressed through social media and across telecommunications networks and marrying that with inside knowledge of the machinations of the major political players at the storm center of events.

On this point of not yet mastering the art of being able to anticipate the future despite the mountains of data it was collecting, Anne Neuberger, Special Assistant to the NSA Director, gave a fascinating talk over at the Long Now Foundation in August last year. During a sometimes intense q&a she had this exchange with one of the moderators, Stanford professor, Paul Saffo:

Saffo: With big data as a friend likes to say “perhaps the data haystack that the intelligence community has created has grown too big to ever find the needle in.”

Neuberger : I think one of the reasons we talked about our desire to work with big data peers on analytics is because we certainly feel that we can glean far more value from the data that we have and potentially collect less data if we have a deeper understanding of how to better bring that together to develop more insights.

It’s a strange admission from a spokesperson from the nation’s premier cyber-intelligence agency that for their surveillance model to work they have to learn from the analytics of private sector big data companies whose models themselves are far from having proven their effectiveness.

Perhaps then, Rudder should have extended his skepticism beyond the world of dating websites. For me, I’ll only know big data in the security sphere works when our politicians, Noah like, seem unusually well prepared for a major crisis that the rest of us data poor chumps didn’t also see a mile away, and coming.

Utopia or Dystopia

where past meets future

Tag Archives: Politics