Writing's a fight and this boy needs a battle
News outlet.
In US news from The Guardian, Democratic congresswoman Katie Porter grills JP Morgan’s billionaire CEO, Jamie Dimon, on the real-world consequences his bank’s low wages.
It’s as if JP Morgan’s billionaire CEO and those like him are from another species. They’re so removed from the real world, so starved of oxygen, they’ve gone blind to any hardship.
I agree with most of George Monbiot’s analysis of neoliberalism in The Guardian. He’s right to say that “the freedom we were promised turns out to be freedom for capital, gained at the expense of human liberty”.
Where I differ is in my understanding of the “extremes of surveillance” adopted by the neoliberal project.
For me it’s more than the Amazon wristband designed to monitor employee movements. It goes much deeper. For me there are a series of psychological and social technologies, institutions that have internalised that surveillance in us. We don’t even realise we have been socialised into behaving a certain way, manipulated into thinking certain things, made to understand things that are entirely manufactured as “natural” phenomena.
My previous employer wanted me to install an app on my phone. It was presented as entirely natural, offered under the guise of efficiency, so I could punch in and out of shifts. It used company wifi, and needed access to the GPRS on my phone. I refused, I didn’t trust the company not to misuse the information gathered, or the access granted. I wasn’t forced to install the app, but I was made to feel like my concerns were somehow the territory of the paranoid conspiracy nut.
My phone, like everyone I know, contains all kinds of personal information. It’s part of my “transactive memory”, and no employer should have that kind of access to any employee. That app represents a level of intrusion that most other employees in the company accepted as entirely natural.
While the app represents an example of an external intrusion I resisted. It doesn’t address the issue at the core of the intrusion. The internal, unavoidable, surreptitious intrusion. The behaviours that are integral to, and encouraged by, our digital devices.
I was recently asked to write about “why digital matters?”
I started by asking three questions. Question one. What’s the difference between a physical book and a book on your kindle? Is it the convenience of having a thousand stories there in your hand? Number two. How is a photograph different from the images you take with your digital camera? Could it be the immediacy of seeing the image you just snapped? Finally. Why is the music played from a disc different from the music you stream from Apple? Is it the idiosyncrasy of the playlists you compile?
Digital has certainly made things easier, faster, and more personal. But is that enough to explain the profound shift in behaviour digital has brought? I would argue not. In mathematics there is something called a factorial. A factorial is the product of an integer, multiplied by all the integers below it. For example factorial five is 120: 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120.
I think digital can be explained in the same way. Factorial digital is intimacy. Digital multiplied by convenience, multiplied by immediacy, multiplied by idiosyncrasy, equals intimacy.
Intimacy conjures up feelings of affinity and warmth, rapport and affection. It invokes feelings of love. Why? Because our devices allow us to connect intimately with our passions.
Increased levels of sharing, unprecedented levels of access, is inherent in the devices that have been brought to market throughout the neoliberal project. From the VCR to the iPhone we have been sold devices that make things easier, faster, and more personal. They have fundamentally changed the way we behave, the way our brains are wired.
Hard won rights of the past have been given away without even a thought. We have willingly consumed the morality of a machine that, I want to say controls us, but control is the wrong word, the word I think is governs?
We have willingly consumed the morality of a machine that governs our behaviour.
We unquestioningly give away gigabytes of information about ourselves for free access to a platform. Why? That feeling of intimacy we get from the feedback loop of share and like.
My social media is like my own personal advertising campaign. In return for me “getting out there”, and being able to reach the world, my social media platforms fill my timelines with adverts it judges are of interest to me.
What are the algorithms that push these adverts doing to me? Are they feeding a view I have of myself? Am I constructing who I am based on what they push? Are they sculpting me to service their needs?
The devices we’ve let into our lives have allowed us to reach beyond the very narrow circle of people we physically know. They persuade us that there are myriad possibilities, while simultaneously honing our view of the world.
What was once intrusion is now sharing.
All of that amounts to a paradigm shift in human existence. We all want to be liked. We all crave approval. Is that desire being used to shape us? Probably yes. Is that desire making us accept things that are against our own interest? Again, probably yes.
Will I stop using them? Defiantly not.
We can only live in the world we have. We can be passive and allow it to happen to us, or we can be active and aware. We can wake up to the ways the “extremes of surveillance” are governing our behaviour.
I don’t think we can fight it.
That’s like fighting Tyler Durden. You just end up punching yourself in the face. We can only point a finger, make a claim, call out what we see.
There’s a lot to think about in Sam Levin’s article. Most interestingly that there was no such thing as “neutral” AI.
The idea that you can do AI or technical ethics without a point of view is silly … The bias is deep inside the code.
It’s obvious but until it’s called out, you’re not looking for it, and if you’re not looking for it, things will continue unchecked.
It does occur to me that bias is a byproduct of our attempt to replicate the world in our image. and these tendencies are a hangover from our primal past. In the discourse around these issues, people are being asked to evolve beyond the human self. Even those excluded because of bias, have their own biases. Surely the point is not to exclude all bias, that’s like trying to exclude oxygen from water. If you exclude oxygen, it’s not water.
Should we not then, to be unbiased, include all of the biases?
Aditya Chakrabortty’s article in The Guardian doesn’t go far enough. Amoral and venal doesn’t even come close.
The idea Iain Duncan Smith or Jacob Rees-Mogg or Boris Johnson or any of them could find anything close to a sense of duty is laughable, about as likely as you shitting in your own mouth. They’re psychopaths with their dicks shoved through a glory-hole of chaos, waiting for a toothless corpse to nosh them off.
Their disdain for everyone but those they see in the mirror will be their undoing. I’d like to think they’ll be castrated by the teeth of history, but who’ll be left to write a history after these lot are done.
Julia Carrie Wong in The Guardian reports “Facebook employees were aware of concerns about improper data-gathering practices” by Cambridge Analytica months before the Guardian first reported, in December 2015″.
The plot thickens like dehydrated honey on the chin of beetle.
Peter Beinart’s long read in The Guardian is a beautifully nuanced explanation, debunking the myth that anti-Zionism is antisemitic.
I’ve always found Leigh Bowery fascinating. A long time ago I was asked “which fashion designers do you like?” When I replied Leigh Bowery, the wannabe designer I was talking to looked at me and scoffed, “he’s not a designer”.
These days I’d be inclined to agree with her. He wasn’t a fashion designer, he was something more interesting, an artist who used his body and fabrics as their medium.
This article by Mattha Busby presents a deeply confused piece of opinion conflating wrangles over Brexit with John McDonnel’s view of Winston Churchill. As if characterising Churchill as a villain could somehow negate any position, let alone the Labour position on Brexit.
Laura Kuenssberg injects a squirt of capsaicin into the conjunctiva with her comment on Twitter, “these remarks at @politic event could stir a lot of trouble”, especially when framed by partisan political editors.
Both Kuenssberg and Busby misquote McDonnel. He actually said Winston Churchill was “more villain than hero”. A subtle but substantial difference. Yes Churchill was a great wartime leader, but there are many more situations in which his actions could, at best, be described as villainous.
Both Kuenssberg and Busby could do worse than listen to an episode from season two of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast, “The Prime Minister and the Prof”. They might also benefit from taking a few minutes to read Tom Heyden’s article for the BBC “The 10 greatest controversies of Winston Churchill’s career”. What are the odds both know Churchill’s history but choose wilful ignorance of the bad stuff.
Both Gladwell and Heyden offer a very different view of Churchill. Yes he did great things for this country, but he also had some very unsavoury attitudes, and took some “villainous” action. To wilfully ignore and misrepresent this aspect of Churchill is an act of “villainy” all of its own.
Damian Carrington’s piece in The Guardian warns “Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature'”.
Reading this makes me sad, scared, but most of all angry. We have the worst kind of self-serving politicians trying to isolate us from Europe under the guise of trade with, who knows? What they should be doing is finding ways to integrate, and partner with other countries to do something about this.
I agree with Paul Mason, “Brexit is a failed project”. Labour should “back a second referendum, and vote to remain”.
You can imagine the right-wing press’ response. Labour does a massive u-turn. Labour betrays the people. But the truth is, Labour has to step into the vacuum, and lead the country out of the mess caused by the Tories.
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