As a kid growing up in the first generation to not know a world without the internet, I had always thought humanity was headed for a golden age of wisdom, learning, and truth for all. That there was no way evil people could control the masses any longer for their own means via ignorance.
How sadly wrong I was. It is becoming more and more clear to me that for the average person, technology has become nothing more than another tool for the propagandists of the world to influence their minds. It turns out that having a supercomputer in your pocket at all times does not magically induce the ability for critical thinking.
Apropos Dune quote: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
I don't think people set-out to not think, it's just we're by default lazy thinkers. Cognitive dissonance pushes us to find our own contained, biased circles within the internet, where we can 'think' without the requirement of resolving conflicting thoughts. Because, no matter what weird views we might have, there is bound to be a few hundred people out there that share them. The internet just made it easier to find them.
Thinking is expensive. Somewhere around 20% of our bodies energy use is our brain working. It's probably been an evolutionary advantage in many cases to offload our thinking to the right people for most of history.
Surprisingly, this is why reading Orwell's "1984" is mandatory in many high schools across the country. Clearly they aren't doing a good job of teaching it, as you and many others share that view (or did for some period of time).
Looked at from a different angle, "1984" could be viewed almost as a how-to-manual, just as Machiavelli's "The Prince" is today.
Liar's Poker was written as satire. Michael Lewis found it perplexing that some of his audience thought the characters in there to be ideals to emulate.
Like Lily Allen's The Fear, could be taken as a satirical bash against a consumerism she is disgusted with, or it could be interpreted as autobiographical, blaming society for her being the way she is as if to remove herself from being at fault.
I'm in the same boat. But my naivete was in thinking it would be easier to dispel lies when facts where easily linked to. The propagandists' workaround was to just attack facts.
The thing is, "facts" aren't just mined out of the ground, and people underestimated how much our concept of what a "fact" is was affected by our information infrastructure. There is very little true foundation of facts to build on; scientific inquiry and reason are structures just like anything else, and can be disrupted by new media.
You're not wrong, but I also think that culturally we've made a big mistake by not acknowledging that there's a gradient here.
There /is/ an objective reality, and we can measure it to varying degrees of accuracy. The air temperature at a given place and a given time, for instance. Of course there's always the possibility of it being wrong (e.g. a passing hot air current, a faulty thermometer, etc.), but to live as though you can't record the temperature is absurd. It paralyses action based on evidence, rather than ideology, if everything is considered equally suspect.
Yes, we're going to get it wrong sometimes, and that has a cost. But there's also a cost to thinking that you can't ever get it right, and that is letting people the who routinely dismiss inconvenient evidence have their way all the time. I think we've swung too far towards the latter.
You only think that there is an objective reality, and others may think differently. Thus, even if there is an objective reality, facts are nonetheless subjective because the actual basis for believing in facts is subjective.
If you like maths, Tarski's undefinability theorem suggests that anything which is a fact about our objective reality cannot be shown to be a fact from within reality.
You're espousing what some have termed the "Kantian correlationist" perspective. A very reductive summary is:
"...correlationism is a form of scepticism for it asserts that whether or not things-in-themselves are this way is something we can never know because we can only ever know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves."[1]
It's worth noting that some philosophers, particularly Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux (whose work the above quote is given in the context of), have argued strongly against correlationism. Though they don't claim we might ever have a completely unfiltered view of what objectively is, they argue that the absolute limitations on knowledge of reality imposed by correlationist thinkers are mistaken, and that we can make progress by degrees towards an ever fuller perspective on reality. So, even though you assert
>Thus, even if there is an objective reality, facts are nonetheless subjective because the actual basis for believing in facts is subjective.
as a factual (somewhat ironically), it should be noted that this too is disputable. Also I would argue that Tarski (or any formal mathematical result) does not necessarily have implications about "our objective reality." As Alain Badiou would say, mathematics is ontology - i.e. the language with which we might speak most precisely about "what is" - but this does not entail that mathematical concepts are real in the Platonic sense.
I agree strongly with gp that we shouldn't err on the side of formally foreclosing on the possibility of finding truths about the world. It literally legitimizes ignorance to espouse the correlationist worldview.
Philip K Dick was once asked 'what is reality'. He replied 'reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away'.
The problem with beliefs that don't reflect reality are that unlike the lies, the reality you don't believe in can still hurt you. Whatever you think about the true nature of reality, it's a good idea for our politics to include a recognition of the things that can hurt us regardless of our beliefs in them.
At best that's correct in a very narrow sense; my point is that extrapolating that model wholesale into the realm of politics has had real and very dangerous repercussions.
Technology doesn't change who and what people are, it just empowers them.
“The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." (Einstein, 1945)
One of the biggest surprises for me was to see that with most people connected to the internet, it can be used as a tool to intensify bullying and revenge porn.
I thought it would forever be a refuge from bullying. I also grew up on mostly semi-anonymous networks like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve
100% this (though I do remember a world without the internet, not for very long). I think Snowden was a loss-of-innocence moment for a lot of people our age.
> In Latvia, SCL said it ran a campaign in 2006 designed to stoke tensions between Latvians and ethnic Russian residents: “In essence, Russians were blamed for unemployment and other problems affecting the economy,” an SCL document said. Nix confirms the firm’s role, saying that its research found that such tensions would “influence voting behavior.” <
Now suppose they had not discovered this and exploited it. The fact remains that if this could influence voting behavior then someone else could have come along -- someone who did not know about this study, someone who genuinely despised the Russians, or Latvians -- and become popular in the elections.
It would be a sad comment on humans if that is what it took.
You know what's crazy? Our historic attraction to witch hunts stoked by fear and doubt of what is different than ourselves is no different today than it was 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000 years ago. We just disseminate the propaganda a lot more efficiently now.
What I fail to understand is how so many people are still so ignorant despite having almost free access to all the world's information with zero requirement to actually pay for school. You don't even have to walk down to the library and pay for a library card to access it!
Witch hunts in 2017 just take place in the form of elections. But otherwise, no different today than they were in biblical times.
Most people aren't bright or educated enough to understand what you're saying, the best they can do is pick people or groups to trust. They are far more moved by pathos than logos.
Many only use logos to retroactively justify decisions already made by pathos; and ethos comes into play to undermine the credibility of those with a logos that would negatively impact our own pathos.
Basically a witch hunt because nobody wants to accept that others may have differences than us and that's okay! It doesn't make them dangerous, it doesn't make them criminals.
Every culture, every nation, every race and both sexes have their bad apples, their despots, their angry, disaffected troublemakers. They are the few. They are not the majority in any case. So now we're ostracizing huge groups of people based on the the largest voting class's perception of a tiny fraction of a massive group that they perceive is different than them.
It's the equivalent taking out a social media campaign to whip up a frenzy boycotting MacDonalds because one pissed off spotty white kid who works there, who you slighted on Facebook for spitting in your food, hunted you down and torched your car in retaliation and happened to be caught on CCTV wearing his MacDonalds uniform while he was doing it.
Cambridge Analytica is using social media to effect massive swings in consumer sentiment against whole segments of the population in order to swing votes in a way that's favourable to an agenda that is so far unclear, except that it seems to be tearing whole nations apart and in turn flipping the world order on its head. How it will play out is unclear, but it doesn't feel like this is heading anywhere good.
We’re talking about people who wanted to promote a guy they’ve been funding who believes that nuclear war is good for humanity (and, incidentally, has a collection of 14,000 human urine samples) to be the president’s science advisor.
I would be truly astonished if they're the ones pulling the strings. They're just the public faces. The puppet masters using them and their company to effect global change in some as yet unknown favour.
As I said in a previous post, technology doesn't change, but empower us. Unfortunately that power doesn't usually reside in the hands of people who would use it best, but the people who want it most and have the least regard to the consequences of attaining that power.
Your misgivings about the future strike me as wise, given the power of the technology in play, and quality of the people using it.
Yes, just reading that sentence shocked me. It's despicable and I can't imagine ever hiring someone who worked for such a company.
Later on, it's not much better...
> SCL’s original description of its work in Nigeria echoes some of those concerns. According to a 2016 version of its website, SCL advised the PDP to try to dissuade opposition supporters from voting. This was achieved, the website said, “by organizing anti-poll rallies on the day of the election.”
Forum voor Democratie [0], a party that can best be described as the Dutch New Right [1] party, used Cambridge Analytica for their campaign. As a party that joined they elections for the first time, they suddenly got two seats, while many other small parties like the Pirate Party have been struggling to get a seat for years. They described their tactic as being "inspired by Trump social media tactic". [2] I was skeptic at first but this event showed to me that at least they're a bit successful in manipulating potential voters.
I think it is important to note that the company probably has a significant interest in such stories being published, though that may seem counterintuitive at first. It's better for them to overstate the effectiveness of their methods (as I have heard many people suspect) and seem evil than to appear benevolent and ineffective.
As a far left person, I'm firmly on the camp that believes that hyping up Cambridge Analytica's run of the mill operations (they were for Cruz, and he lost, lol) mainly benefits Clinton fans who want to believe that she lost for reasons beyond her control and that these are some geniuses.
Seeing Clinton lose, and hearing all these stories about grassroots campaigners being turned away, about Bill Clinton being told that his rural votes were gone forever, about "the Mook Mafia", about the "Ada algorithm", about Nate Silver being brutally wrong in the primaries and the NYT being brutally wrong about the chances of winning on the day of the election, and betting markets being wrong on Brexit... part of me thought this is where we draw the line. We need to go back to basics, start reacting to our circumstances, realize that something has gone very wrong, and stop blindly trusting "the data".
Instead this narrative cropped up that said "actually, we need even more even better data". And people seem to find it more palatable.
Folks can data dredge and present their results as significant. Lay people trust the conclusions. They had the data, but they didn't understand that the data presents a narrow view. They trust it blindly.
Worse are the people that treat conclusions drawn from polling and surveys as scientifically rigorous.
Happens all the time with Vox, NYT, Quartz, you-name-it articles. Policy is enacted from information like this.
It seems the USA was the big enchilada, the top prize, after populating the bottom shelf of their trophy wall with Latvia, Trinidad and Nigeria, then the UK above that.
It isn't "just politics" - people can die over crap like this. How'd you like to be an ethnic Russian living in Latvia when this guy decides demonizing your entire cohort would be a good way to "influence voting behavior?"
> How'd you like to be an ethnic Russian living in Latvia when this guy decides demonizing your entire cohort would be a good way to "influence voting behavior?"
It doesn't seem like they're even doing very much innovative work with data/technology. Rather that they're just running operations based off old CIA stuff but with a lot of money behind them.
Tools can be used for good and bad. This is a very nice example of how to use a good tool for a bad purpose.
The bigger question is what can be done about it, what specifically is there that breaks the law and if there isn't anything is there a law that we'd like to see created that would tackle this without making things worse in other respects?
Interesting question - I wonder if any of the candidates in the French Presidential election upcoming are using Cambridge Analytica (Le Pen?). Not that we could easily find out...
They easily might. The problem is that if this becomes acceptable everybody will be doing it sooner or later, it will become just another weapon in the arsenal. Influencing an election like this ought to be made illegal very rapidly or it will end up destroying democracy as we know it.
Even Switzerland would not be immune to these tactics (and they have what I think is the best functioning democracy on earth at the moment).
I don't think that's enough. If this is a fight, which it is, the cockroaches are going for your throat, and this approach amounts to a light sparring session.
It reminds me of the film Manhattan, where Woody Allen's character is at a cocktail party, and a group is ruminating about what to do with a group of Skinheads that popped up in NY. His party acquaintances suggest they use satirical literature in the paper. Allen's character, dismayed by their solution, suggests baseball bats. He had the right idea.
As long as we let cockroaches hide behind legal technicalities, as they do MAJOR damage, they will continue to do so, and the damage will continue.
Laws should evolve to serve the people. If monsters like this are allowed to say, 'But it's legal,' it should not be legal. People like Nix are much worse than some racist frat boys, but I'm reminded of this:
"The way we interpret the First Amendment need not be simplistic and empty of nuance, and was not always so. The Supreme Court unanimously held over eighty years ago that “those words which by their very utterance inflict injury … are no essential part of any exposition of ideas.” And in 1952 the Court upheld an Illinois statute punishing “false or malicious defamation of racial and religious groups.” These rulings, while never officially reversed, have shrunk to historical trinkets. But they mark a range of the possible, where one can be a staunch defender of full-throated discourse but still recognize the difference between dialogue and vomitus."
Something I realised the other day, is that the campaign of dehumanization and extrajudicial punishment that the USA carried out against African Americans doesn't really have a name, like Fascism or Nazi-ism.
Yeah there's "slavery" and then "Jim Crow" but what do you call the stuff since the 1950s? Mostly it's referred to by the inverse, the Civil Rights Movement, but what did they move against?
If this is free speech then the idea seems to have undergone something of a scope creep in recent years. To me that implies an individual without fear of reprisal for stating their opinions, not mobilising significant financial resources to organise voter harassment and help the spread of politically-motivated mistruths.
We already see similar problems kept in check by the existence of advertising standards and anti-corruption practices; I suspect that we can at least begin to tackle this particular one legislatively with the same sort of thinking.
Agreed. I prefer the idea of a spotlight (if not forced transparency via whistleblowers and leakers) to that of immediately "removing" certain people from society. Even now, there's an unhealthy attraction (on both sides of the spectrum) to immediately punishing or isolating political opponents; the "punch a Nazi in the face" meme is one such example.
When one is willing to make some exceptions for due process and established procedure for one side, there inevitably comes equal or greater abuse from the other. Case in point: the Obama Administration's use of Executive Orders to bypass Congress; such EOs were (and can be) easily revoked by the Trump Administration since none are law. What was once cheered is now condemned, with all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain the change of heart.
What Nix and Cambridge Analytica are doing may be morally repugnant, but it's not illegal. Making new laws to dictate morality and punish such offenders is absolutely not the way to go, as history has shown repeatedly.
If this isn't illegal then that means you can look forward to democracy being murdered, is 'free speech' (for a very contorted definition of speech, namely: speech specifically created to destroy the bedrock of our society) in all its forms worth standing by?
What kind of effective countermeasures would you propose?
And with effective I mean something equally effective to making this illegal.
Where it stands now. The solution is to keep the spotlight on the cockroaches, and inform your friends and family of what's going on. Protest. Make your voice heard.
Just because you find it offensive and consider it a threat to society doesn't mean it should be illegal; that was the argument behind Prohibition, Blue Laws, and the current War on Drugs.
Prohibition and war on drugs are about what people do to themselves. This is about what entities operating behind a shroud can do to whole countries. Different story altogether.
Free speech is me standing on a soapbox next to the local equivalent of the whitehouse, being able to make unpopular political opinions heard. It is not wholesale subversion of voters for the highest bidder in hard to detect ways using advanced technological measures.
So what happens when a similar company uses the technology to promote a value or practice that you support? Let's say, democracy in Russia or women's rights in Saudi Arabia? Or, for example, suppose American culture undergoes a massive regression over the next 8 years: what about a company that promotes pro-LGBTQ viewpoints and legislation within the United States?
How are you going to legislate what is "good" use of the technology and what is "bad"?
It's not about a value I support or do not support, it is about actively meddling with the cornerstone of our societies: the functioning of democracy and the one-man-one-vote principle. As soon as you allow attacks on that all bets are literally off. So any use of such technology to influence voters (in fact, any undeclared influencing of voters with specific intent on behalf of a group not immediately associated with a campaign) ought to be illegal.
This is a very important thing: the only reason we have non-violent transfer of power in our countries even in hotly contested elections is because people believe the results are arrived at through a fair process. As soon as that belief breaks there is a good chance that the next close election, especially in winner-takes-all or first-past-the-post systems will result in riots or worse.
Incidentally, this is why Trump was playing with fire around his potential loss of the elections.
"the functioning of democracy and the one-man-one-vote principle. As soon as you allow attacks on that all bets are literally off"
I agree with your comments on free speech, but it would probably be worth starting with the blatant voter suppression efforts of Trump's party that have been going on for decades first.
(Well, to correct myself, going on for centuries, but in their current form for decades)
There are conditions in which I would consider limits. If you look to the origins of the concept of free speech, and in particular the false equivalence, "the marketplace of ideas", you'll find that those who proposed free speech didn't (for the most part) consider it utterly unlimited.
Jill Nelson's essay is particularly good as concerns Mill:
How sadly wrong I was. It is becoming more and more clear to me that for the average person, technology has become nothing more than another tool for the propagandists of the world to influence their minds. It turns out that having a supercomputer in your pocket at all times does not magically induce the ability for critical thinking.