Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: January 2020 Page 2 of 4

The End of Public Anonymity Is Close

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On January 24, 2020

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So, you may have heard of Clearview:

The app, says the Times, works by comparing a photo to a database of more than three billion pictures that Clearview says it’s scraped off Facebook, Venmo, YouTube, and other sites. It then serves up matches, along with links to the sites where those database photos originally appeared.

Clearview is only for law enforcement for now, but this is the future. Facial recognition, combined with other metrics like gait analysis, means the end of public anonymity.

There’s a strand of thinking which claims that no one has an expectation of anonymity in public, but the loss of it will be catastrophic. If someone knows who you are, and where you are, they can easily stalk you or rob you when they know you aren’t at home. This sort of technology in the wild (and even in the hands of cops) will lead to rapes and assaults. “I like how she looks. I wonder who she is? Cool, now that I know it’s easy enough to find out where she works and lives.”

It will wind up in the wild. It’s not too far from a reverse image search to this, and the images required for the training are in the wild, as Clearview notes.

Add this to corporate and government databases, with real-time scraping of public phone data and heat maps of public travel become possible. Add it to financial information (every time you use your credit, debit, and charge cards) and even finer grade surveillance is possible. Add in GPS data and/or security cameras and where you are at all times of day will be known.

The potential for abuse by corporations is massive: They already attention farm us, using conditioning techniques to make us click and buy and spend hours a day on social media. (Yes, this is very effective conditioning.) The abuse by your boss, well, just hope you never do–or have never done–anything your boss doesn’t approve of. You ain’t seen cancel culture yet.

The potential political abuses are, I trust, obvious.

And then there is the potential for abuse by parents, who already obnoxiously track their kids in ways that would look ludicrous to previous generations of children and which have, among other things, shown up as a generational decline in creativity.

The larger issue is this: People who are constantly under surveillance become super-conformers out of defense. Without true private time, the public persona and the private personality tend to collapse together. You need a backstage — by yourself and with a small group of friends to become yourself. You need anonymity.

When everything you do is open to criticism by everyone, you will become timid and conforming.

When governments, corporations, schools, and parents know everything, they will try to control everything. This won’t often be for your benefit.

Solutions for this are simple. Make it illegal. Make public images and data private by default and do not allow consumers to opt out of it without real payment per image or data piece. (This will gut training AI, which is good, because most current AI is bad (a topic for another time).)

People should have a reasonable expectation of anonymity. Software like this should be illegal.

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why Actual Principled People Are Difficult (Glenn Greenwald Edition)

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On January 22, 2020

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Glenn Greenwald

You may have heard that Glenn Greenwald, the founder of the Intercept, has been charged with cybercrimes by the Brazilian Federal Government. Glenn’s the reporter who broke the story of how Brazil’s ex-President Lula was taken down by Brazilian prosecutors. Moro, the chief prosecutor, was later rewarded by Bolsonaro with appointment as the Minister of Justice. All polls indicated that Lula would have defeated Bolsonaro.

The logic of the case is the same as the logic used by the US government to go after Assange, by the way: That Greenwald was in contact with and counseled hackers. Those people who are supporting Greenwald but don’t support Assange are hypocrites: Brazil is using the Assange precedent to go after Greenwald.

I support Greenwald, of course, as I have supported Assange, Manning, and Snowden.

Now this is the part of the piece where people (and with respect to Assange, I’ve done it) cavil a bit and say something like: “Despite Mr or Ms. X being problematic,” or some-such.

And it’s that I want to talk about, but not to condemn it. To explore it.

Because it’s almost always the case.

When Greenwald indicated he was going to oppose Bolsonaro, after the election, before he had revealed the evidence of Bolsonaro’s crime, I told him, twice, “This is dangerous.”

Bolsonaro’s so right-wing one might as well just call him a fascist. He celebrates policies of shooting political enemies. He’s a dangerous, dangerous man.

Glenn ignored me. I doubt the danger ever figured into his decision to go after Bolsonaro.

Meanwhile we have Manning, who is in jail for refusing to testify against Assange. When in military prison, Manning tried to commit suicide, she found it so unbearable. Despite that, knowing how awful it would be, she chose to go to jail rather than testify.

That’s bravery. (I note that all the Republicans refusing to testify under subpoena are sleeping at home, and haven’t been hit with fines intended to bankrupt them and cost them their home, as was Manning.)

Snowden pissed off the most powerful intelligence service and country in the world. He ran. Wikileaks helped him run, Greenwald published his revelations.

So I understand the caviling, but the point normal people don’t get is that these are all immensely morally brave individuals. They have actual principles they are willing to suffer for.

Most people don’t. They claim to have values, but they have never sacrificed anything meaningful for them, and never will. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. I’d say that even when it comes to their children, whom most people claim to love more than themselves, actions indicate that, well, they don’t.

People have preferences, not principles.

Most people.

Then you get people like Greenwald, Assange, Manning and Snowden. They are polarizing figures. They are loved or hated. They piss people off.

They piss people off precisely because they have principles they consider non-negotiable. They will not do the easy thing when it matters. They will not compromise on anything that really matters.

That’s breaking the actual social contract of “Go along to get along,” “Obey authority,” and “Don’t make people uncomfortable.” I recently talked to a senior activist who was uncomfortable even with the idea of yelling at powerful politicians. It struck them as close to violence.

So here’s the thing, people want men and women of principle to be like ordinary people.

They aren’t. They can’t be. If they were, they wouldn’t do what they do. Much of what you may not like about a Greenwald or Assange or Manning or Snowden is why they are what they are. Not just the principle, but the bravery verging on recklessness. The willingness to say exactly what they think, and do exactly what they believe is right even if others don’t.

They don’t compromise, and they often act without regard to the risks and dangers and whether or not anyone else agrees with them.

That’s what makes them what they are, and it is very rare that you get the good without the bad.

Ordinary people judge them by their own, ordinary standards. But these people don’t live by the standards of ordinary people, because ordinary people are mostly authority and herd followers. And those courtiers who have betrayed principle over and over again to become senior journalists and editors, well, people like Greenwald, Assange, and Manning are a rebuke to them that they can never even acknowledge consciously.

People with principles and bravery enough to stand on them, even in the face of great risk and against authority and the herd, are rarely comfortable people.

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The NYTimes Reveals More than It Means

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On January 20, 2020

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Watch this video. It’s only 39 seconds. It’s worth it.


What’s interesting to me about this video is NOT what Bernie says, it’s the reaction. It’s how genuinely uncomfortable the people interviewing him (The NYTimes editors) are.

They really think he’s saying something terrible. Something awkward. Something embarrassing.

What is he saying? “I ignore the social niceties, because I’m concentrating on helping people.”

To the people running the most important newspaper in the US, and probably in the world, this is embarrassing. Sanders manner is embarrassing to them.

These are courtiers. These are people who know how everyone should act.

The problem with Sanders, to them, is less the content of his policies (though they despise those too), than his display: his manners. It’s not what he does, it’s how he appears while he’s doing it.

This is straight, fifteenth century Italian courtier stuff. Straight Louis the XIVth Versailles stuff.

These are broken people. They are influential, they have a tiny bit of power, but they are broken. The system has shaped them (no one gets near the top of the NYTimes without having kissed ass all their life) into the perfect servants to power. Their judgment is pure aesthetics; pure look-and-feel. It is nearly void of content. Yes, they oppose Sanders’ policies, but if they became the elite consensus, these people would adapt and defend the elite as fiercely as they do centrist politics.

Broken people. Courtiers. Empty of principle, knowing only aesthetics and the pleasure of being hangers on to power.

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 19, 2020

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On January 19, 2020

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by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

Seattle city council bans most political spending by ‘foreign-influenced corporations’

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 1-13-20]

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy
(Vox, via The Big Picture 1-17-20]

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.

I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

…The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process.

Too damn bad the Vox author does not realize this is exactly the political process of demagoguery warned about by Hamilton, Madison, Adams and others at the beginning of the republic. And more – they warned that this process was likely to be initiated  by the rich, such as Leon Black (see below).

Green New Deal – An opportunity too big to miss

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Open Thread

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On January 18, 2020

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Feel free to use the comments to this post to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (Posting was light last week due to some business, but should resume a more regular schedule this week.)

Dozens of Extinctions from the Australia Wildfires, But That’s Not the Worst

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On January 15, 2020

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So a few humans got killed, and a lot of property got burned, but the real losers were the animals.

“Hundreds of species have been affected by these fires,” Legge says. “That includes many dozens of threatened species; some of these will be brought to the brink of extinction as a result of this event. And if they’re not made extinct by this event, I think this is the beginning of the end for them. Because this event will reoccur. It’s awful. It will be ecosystem collapse in a lot of cases. And we’re not exactly sure what we’ll end up with at the end of it all.” (my emphasis)

So here’s the thing: What is happening in California, the Pacific Northwest, Australia, the Amazon, and elsewhere is that the climate is changing.

Bit of a surprise, right? I mean, it’s called “climate change” for a reason.

But this means that the plants and animals that are in these places now, which have been adapted to a particular climate, which means not just temperature but rainfall, will no longer be viable. They will be removed. That’s just how this is going to run.

Now, if we were going to stop here, or even just continue a bit, whatever. It’d be awful, we’d lose biodiversity, but we’d recover.

But as the interviewee, Sarah Legge, notes later on:

Obviously, the driver here is climate change, leading to extended drought and high temperatures. Australia is looking at 3 to 4 degrees of warming. I’m frightened to even imagine the country in that scenario. If this fire event is what we experienced with 1 degree of warming, what on earth are we going to be experiencing at 3 or 4 degrees of warming?

Yeah. Only one-third to one-quarter through this. The worst is yet to come.

Note the bolded text in the first post “Because this event will reoccur.” This isn’t the last fire in Australia, or elsewhere.

There will be less dramatic reshaping of climate. Rains that don’t come, maybe even monsoons that don’t come. Less water or more water. Local areas will have wildly variable temperature changes–arctic temperature increases are already at three to four degrees celcius.

This will effect us and our agriculture. We grow crops in latitudinal bands, modified by soil and water availability. As those change, we’re going to have huge spikes in the prices of crops, and eventually (and eventually may be rather soon), famines. We tend to grow monocrops without genetic variability (corn, rice, wheat, etc.) Vat-grown food, which industry is pushing, is still going to require vast monocrops (though much of it will be algae), and much of it will still be vulnerable to these sorts of changes.

We’ve only just started this process. So far, very few humans have died, but the plants and animals are taking the brunt.

But that will change.

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

AOC Is Actually Serious About Building Progressive Power

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On January 13, 2020

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This matters. This is putting your money where your mouth is and refusing to play nice with your enemies.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already topped the fundraising charts in her short time in Congress, but the liberal darling won’t donate a cent of her millions to Democrats’ House campaign organization — a position that has rankled some of her colleagues, Fox News has learned.

Instead, Ocasio-Cortez is building her own fundraising operation for fellow progressive candidates to bypass the official Democratic Party infrastructure. Already, she’s actively funding primary challengers to oust certain Democratic colleagues.

Refusing to playing nice with your enemies? Yes. For as long as I’ve watched us politics, the DCCC has been hostile to progressives, usually underfunding them or refusing to fund them, and has pushed conservative Democratic candidates.

AOC mentioned this in March:

The Democratic party is a conservative centrist party (centrist in American terms, conservative in its ideology.) Independents are more left-wing than Democrats are, which is why Sanders did better with them than with Democrats in 2016. Those Democrats who whined about this are right: Sanders isn’t a Democrat, because he’s a left-winger and Democrats aren’t.

So for years, Democrats have constantly put their muscle and money behind centrist candidates and attacked left-wingers. The cry of the old Netroots was “More and better Democrats!” By this we meant, “more left-wing Democrats,” but the party was fanatically hostile to that and eventually crushed the insurgency–with a great deal of help from Obama.

Now another generation is taking their shot, and I’m glad to see they aren’t playing nice. The fight for the Democratic party is a fight, and to the victors goes the policy. People like Pelosi want to sell that policy to Wall Street and so on, people like Sanders and AOC want to use it to help ordinary people. It isn’t more complicated than that, and while tactical alliances can be made against Republicans, Pelosi and Biden have nothing in common with AOC or Sanders. They aren’t friends, they’re enemies. It’s just that in America’s two-party system, they cohabit.

But too many left-wingers have continued to think that Democrats like them, are friendly to them, or want the same things as they do.

They don’t. Democrats want the rich to get richer, they want to have slightly “smarter” wars than the Republicans (Libya rather than Iraq), and they want to not be cruel quite as openly as Republicans. Democratic policy is epitomized by Obama pretending to help home owners, but actually pushing them into bankruptcy to help banks.

Obama was a REAL Democrat. People like AOC and Sanders harken back to the politics championed by FDR and ended by Bill Clinton, husband of Hilary Clinton.

Don’t give money to your enemies.

AOC gets it.

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 12, 2020

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On January 12, 2020

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 12, 2020
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population (PDF)
Charles I. Jones, [Empty Planet, via Naked Capitalism 1-8-20]

To sustain a constant population requires a total fertility rate slightly greater than 2 in order to compensate for mortality. The graph shows that high income countries
as a whole, as well as the U.S. and China individually, have been substantially below 2 in recent years. According to the U.N.’s World Population Prospects 2019, the total fertility rate in the most recent data is 1.8 for the United States, 1.7 for China and for High Income Countries on average, 1.6 for Germany, 1.4 for Japan, and 1.3 for Italy and Spain. In other words, fertility rates in the rich countries of the world are already consistent with negative long-run population growth: women are having fewer than two children throughout much of the developed world.

“Americans’ happiness is correlated with spending on public goods”

[Boing Boing, via Naked Capitalism 1-9-20]

“Baylor University political scientist Patrick Flavin’s forthcoming study in Social Science Research finds that people in states with higher public goods spending (on ‘libraries, parks, highways, natural resources and police protection’) report higher levels of happiness. It’s not clear whether they are happier because they have better services, or whether people who choose to live in places where they don’t have to pay for their neighbors’ kids’ education, parks, etc, are selfish, miserable f*cks.”

The Carnage of Establishment Neoliberal Economics

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