Processing

Like so many other well meaning middle class lefties, I get an organic vegetable box. And not just any old veg box, a hyper localised community based north London vegetable bag scheme. The word ‘woke’ could be applied to every aspect of this scheme in a way that would guarantee Michael Gove would hate it on principle. I think I’ve made my point, it is truly righteous and unapologetically so. It is, of course, also managed entirely online. Putting aside the issues with exclusivity that this automatically imposes (and that I’m sure the scheme’s management committee have agonised about endlessly) it is relatively convenient. Apart from collecting my bag weekly and forgetting to book holidays, I don’t have much interaction with it day to day, although recently I have been so busy that I failed to notice that they’d moved to a new platform. When I finally caught up with their details of this move, I’m afraid I became the sort of middle aged moaner I never believed I could be (but secretly always have been). The reason for this outburst of grumpy old man syndrome? They’re changing my direct debit to a recurring card payment. So what? I put my card details in and forget about it right? No. My bank requests re-authentication of card payments every few months, which means a recurring card payment fails and I have to log back on to the website to input my payment details again. Even if my bank didn’t do this, I would have to re-input my card details every time I got a new card (either because it had expired or because it was defrauded due to being stored on an increasing number of websites that do recurring card payments). I never have to do that with direct debit. “So what?” I hear you say, “so you have to re-input your card details, it’s not a big deal. Is this all you’ve got to complain about when people are dying in horrific wars?” Well yes, there are horrific wars going on and I feel bad about that every day, but honestly nothing is going to be gained my me adding to the noise around that, although I may come back to that noise. Also my point isn’t that I have to input my card details every now and then and what a hassle that is, but that I have to do it when the technology already exists, and has existed for longer than internet commerce, to allow me not to have to do that. I keep being told that technology is going to make my life easier, so why do I keep finding examples of it making my life a bit more shitty?

Over the last few years all the great technological leaps forward we have been promised have turned out to be more effort for us. Crypto was supposed free us from the shackles of fiat currency and modern banking, building trust into the transactions, except it turned out you needed to know how to secure a crypto wallet in order for that ‘trust’ to mean anything and even if you mastered the technology, the chances were you’d just end up in a pyramid selling scheme. AI was supposed to write all the documents we couldn’t be bothered to write ourselves, except it turns out to be a bit shit, so we have to edit its output, or learn how to give it ‘the right prompts’ (in other words, pseudo programming with inconsistent outcomes). Hell, it turns out even self-driving cars need someone to drive them.

I think I wrote about this nearer the time, but in the early noughts when it was almost obligatory to have an iPod and spend hours converting your CDs to MP3s so you didn’t have to face the hassle of carrying around a CD Walkman and some CDs, I didn’t. I mean it wasn’t just my contrarian approach to trends, definitely being young and skint played a part, but mainly I didn’t see the point. I didn’t see why I should spend endless hours of my life ‘taping’ albums I already owned so I could listen to them. This struck me then as a failure of the technology that would ultimately be rectified, and it was, eventually. However, as in all things when it came to technology in the early noughts, Apple had set the trend, indeed the template, for how new technology should be adopted. The basic premise is, if you want to be an early adopter (which is a desirable thing to be obviously) you are going to have to work for your tech. I guess this was always an aspect of being an early adopter: you accept (in some cases even embrace) the fact that if you want to be first to use new technology, you’re going to be the one to find the bugs. This is born out of the DIY mindset of the home/college computing and garage startup communities. In those communities, early adopters were fellow geeks trying out beta versions of new tech to help out their friends or out of a sense of community duty, trusting that when their turn came, others would return the favour. Apple particularly has always leveraged coming ‘from’ this community, ever since Apple 1 kits were first assembled by home computing fans in the 1970s and in many ways they’ve been successful in retaining much of that community, for many years painting themselves in opposition to the always more corporate, always more overtly proprietary Microsoft. Along the way, they collected other niche communities, notably around design and creative industries, making sure everyone felt part of the club. There was always a sense that if you wanted to be in the club, you had to make sacrifices. In the bad old days that meant only being able to run the programmes that had been written for a Mac or only using files that were Mac compatible. So at the turn of the millennium there was a small army of devoted followers ready to sacrifice their spare time to be able to listen to their CDs at an inferior sound quality on a futuristic looking Walkman thing. A combination of all sorts of millennial nonsense meant that this small group of geeky types were somehow seen as mainstream cool for the first time. It was like Britpop but with tech. In the process, giving up your free time and labour to help develop/test/confugure your technology went from being something you did to be part of a community to something you did if you wanted the cool tech first. With the iPod, Apple enclosed the developer commons and made sure that we all thought it was a good idea to help them out. In the 19th and 20th centuries, countless giant corporations got massive by exploiting the labour of their workers, at the start of the 21st century, Apple got massive by exploiting the labour of their customers and capital has never looked back. All sorts of technology could be pushed out there without any content or real use case, often not entirely finished, but as long as it had a buzz about it, countless users could be relied on to find a use case for it/populate it/debug it. This is baked into the iOS release cycle, with no one who just wants to use their phone accepting the .0 release of a new version of iOS.

The car industry used to complain that it was only tech that was allowed to get away with this sort of thing, but then along came Elon Musk and cars were suddenly allowed to be sent out on the road needing regular massive software fixes. I mean it can’t be a coincidence that he’s the only space billionaire not to have flown in one of his own rockets. I joke, but obviously the Musk approach of building untested rockets and then blowing them up has entirely un-hilarious environmental consequences.

This world allows people to plough billions of dollars into something like ChatGPT and then claim that it is useful technology because people are using it. Weirdly ChatGPT has almost no actual use cases, but we’re told it’s the future and we should both be in awe of it and fear its apparent intelligence. Of course in the tech world that Apple built, OpenAI can rely on a veritable army of people willing to devote their spare time (or even their employer’s time if they can justify it) trying to find a use case simply because some rich bloke in California said there must be lots of them. Whenever I point out that ChatGPT is basically useless, someone responds by sending me some virtually unreadable copy that was generated by the LLM as an apparent rebuttal of my argument. To me this proves me right; to them it proves them right. Regardless, if someone cares about their output they are not going to just get ChatGPT to generate it and then send it out there unedited, they are going to have to trawl through it, fact checking and adding in a coherent narrative. Of course for the average tech evangelist this is all thoroughly acceptable, we have to make sacrifices for the technology to reach its full potential. So we carry on, increasingly doing the work that the technology is supposed to do for us in order to make it work. It is almost irrelevant whether AI becomes malevolent AGI and enslaves us all because we are already being trained to serve the machine.

This mentality doesn’t just work wonderfully for glorifying the provision of free labour and free ideas to the machines of capital, it is also really helpful for creating an impression that the machine is not at fault. In the 20th century we got used to the idea of corporate responsibility, which is a mechanism whereby a company becomes a form of being - a kind of meta person - and can therefore be blamed for any damage ‘it’ causes whether to people, property, the environment or the economy. Of course because it is not actually a person, a company cannot go to prison or be held truly accountable for its actions. Sure, companies can be fined and in very exceptional circumstances broken up, but largely they are just treated like giant children, who don’t really know better and occasionally need a slap on the wrist, whilst the board and executive that run the company (actual grown ups who allegedly do know better) get to make all the decisions that allow the company to inflict all the harms it does with impunity, because they are just acting ‘in the interest of the company’ (that interest being to make money for those same people). With the user developed product, this derogation of responsibility can be mediated through the product, especially if it is ‘AI’. In this instance the creators of the product can legitimately say they had not expected it to do a particular thing because they may genuinely not have. Much of the perception of ‘intelligence’ with current ‘AI’ comes from the fact that the level of complexity within the programme means that its programmers don’t know what it will do in many circumstances: a bit like assuming a coin is intelligent because you can’t predict whether it will land on heads or tails. But this unpredictability and the fact that it gets defined as intelligence is allowing companies to embed corporate (un)accountability in their products. Every time someone gets a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT to do something stupid (so literally every day) the response is that they didn’t use the right prompts or that the model will be ‘trained’ to get the right answer by more people inputting these kinds of things, making the outcome either the fault of the user or the ‘naïveté’ of the algorithm. Of course in the world that Apple built, we are are happy to take on the responsibility for the harms caused by the algorithm as well as feeding it data and cleaning up its mess all on our own time.

It is hard to see how this leads to better technology, or even vaguely useful technology. If the aim is to create enough novelty around wasting people’s time whilst making sure you’re indemnified against the product causing harm, you will never even bother to try and create technology that even vaguely reaches for the lofty goals claimed by almost all tech firms. In this context, it’s hard to see any of the headline technology of the last 30 years as anything that solves a pre-existing problem, more as a novel way of doing an existing task or even just a novelty in search of a purpose. There is technology that has made positive changes in that time, but with a very few exceptions, it isn’t anything created by the most profitable or highest value companies in the history of the planet. Yet we still allow ourselves to be sold the idea of incomplete, untested, purposeless technology as a marker of progress and its subsequent ubiquity as a sign that it was needed.

As with everything it has ever done, Apple is not the inventor of this kind of reassignment of corporate responsibility to the user, famously when the plastics industry first foisted their not-actually-disposable-at-all packaging on humanity and the planet, they funded the first anti-littering campaigns, placing the responsibility for the non-biodegradable litter that they had created squarely in the hands of the consumer. Famously it worked too. My 6 year old child knows that littering is wrong but can see no problem with getting endless amounts of plastic tat from shops and vending machines (she will sometimes accept my feeble attempts to save the planet as a reason why she can’t have it though - baby steps). The problem with all new technology is that it takes this relationship as the basis for all products and services, and indeed promotes it as desirable. So we end up believing that everything is either our fault or the fault of other ‘consumers’. Due to the ubiquity of technology in our daily interactions, this mindset has permeated throughout society. We blame Brexit on the people who were convinced that years of austerity and neglect would be undone by ‘taking back control’. We blamed the 2008 financial crisis on subprime mortgage holders and tax payers (at least that’s who we made pay for it). ‘We’ blame the atrocities of 7th October 2023 on the Palestinians. ‘We’ blame the ensuing genocidal actions on the Israelis (some, even more incorrectly blame it on Jews). In all cases we blame the ‘users’ rather than the products, the citizens not the country, the people not the system. This is simply the replication over and over of the reactionary lie that people's circumstances are purely a result of their own actions and nothing to do with the systems that cynical elites bind them in and force their complicity with.

Whilst this remains the case, we’ll continue to spend our time fretting about whether we put the recycling in the right bin or what actual practical value we might possibly extract from ChatGPT whilst the world burns at an ever more alarming rate. We march onwards like the members of some weird death cult, grinning at the destruction we’re not being paid to wreak. Unless we stop and ask what all this stuff is actually for and whether it does actually benefit us un any way, or whether it’s just more work for us to do to enrich corporations at the expense of our health and future.

So I’m not going to apologise for questioning the payment service my veg bag supplier uses, I’m not going to apologise for questioning the orthodoxy of progress attached to anything new, especially if it is a new thing that simply reinforces old structures of power, exploitation, consumption and destruction (as most seem to be). It’s probably going to be a bit annoying for everyone around me, but only if they don’t like thinking about things.

Poverty

There are many ways to lose money. Being a 21st century parent is basically a license to do so. There is a point at which children realise that almost every TV programme has toys associated with it and, given that your average 6 year old can binge watch a single series of an entire programme in a few days, that carries the potential of multiple new toy demands per month. Such things can be shrugged off/put off till birthdays or Christmas, when the child will have inevitably moved on to another programme (inevitably just days before said occasion, after you’ve already bought the toys for the now passed fad), but sometimes something sticks, or you need a goal with an attached reward. This can be a toy but generally in the lower cost bracket this could be a (video) game.

As with almost everything in tech, games manufacturers are actually even better at squeezing cash out of you than the traditional ‘analogue’ media/toy tie-ins (to which they are also often corollary). The ‘free’ game with in app purchases model is hardly new, but it really has been finessed into an almighty piss-take in the world of kids' gaming. Witness the countless games where the free download contains one out of a possible ten small furry creatures with giant doe eyes or two out of a possible 20 locations. These are pretty obvious though, and funnily enough will either be accepted (and entered into the pantheon of pester) or rejected pretty quickly by my daughter. In many ways the more interesting games are the ones where everything is ostensibly ‘available’ but you either have to wait a genuinely long time (for a child, like 7 hours or 28 hours) for some of the most exciting items/features (even after you’ve earned the in-game currency to pay for them) or they’re priced in the game’s second currency, which can only be accrued at a glacial pace through gameplay. Of course waiting can be avoided or second currency can be instantly accrued through the simple application of the parent’s credit card. My daughter has a zoo building game that applies both of these concepts together: you can only buy certain things with serious amounts of the second currency and even the things you can pay for with the primary currency (such as zoo expansion) take an increasing amount of time to arrive after purchase unless secondary currency is deployed to get instant results. Obviously as a lefty liberal parent I find this repulsive and infuriating in equal measure. How dare these people attempt to make money from a game. Well not that, I don’t mind paying for things, it’s just I expect value for my money, what’s my ROI? If I drop £6 to pay for a game my daughter is going to play for a month or so, that seems bearable, if I have to pay £2.50 just to get her unicorn breeding program accelerated and then another £2.50 to expand the zoo in under a(n actual human) weekend and so on, I want real tangible results. I want to see a real fucking unicorn in my living room at the end of all that expenditure.

Perhaps by thinking about ROI (but excluding my woefully 20th century expectation of actual real world returns) is the right way to go about this. What is the game teaching my child after all, but the reality of the 21st century economy? The sooner she learns that you don’t really get anywhere in life without a serious injection of generational wealth the better. If a zoo game can help her realise the harsh reality behind her privilege then so much the better right? Except of course it isn’t teaching anything harsh, it is gamifying privilege. Kids will either get bored and quit, pester their parents into funding their success or (if they’re really determined) grind out the hours in soul crushing tedium to reach a fraction of the attainable goals. These are the only options allowable in the current version of the game of life. Those who don’t have a benefactor of some form are destined to struggle through or drop out altogether. I’m pleased when my daughter gets bored of these simulacra of modern capitalist orthodoxy and drops out, but this is also a form of privilege. There is nothing in this system that allows you to drop out without a benefactor and that is what needs to change.

When I was a kid and I didn’t like the way the world was structured or I thought it was unfair, I was told by my elders and betters to grow up because that was how the world works. Now I’m very much grown up, I realise that their absolutist view of the world was not only miopically incorrect but also part of the problem I had originally identified. I realise that it is easier to tell a child that there is no alternative to the orthodoxy, but unless you truly believe that (or you are too afraid of change to contemplate it) then you are simply reinforcing the dominance of that orthodoxy. The broken system in which we live is largely sustained by the fact that the assumptions underpinning it (endless growth, trickle-down wealth, the efficiency of private enterprise, an ideal 2% inflation, etc) are treated as immutable constants in the equations of life, liberty and happiness. We look at the propaganda of the past, at the unquestioned belief systems that underpinned the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church for example and comfort ourselves that we could never be so deluded as to commit so unquestioningly to a belief system. Yet here we are in the streets protesting against the few feeble attempts our rulers have been allowed by their paymasters to implement in an attempt to to avert a species wide catastrophe because we are so entirely convinced that the system is good for us, even as it makes us poorer, less healthy and more lonely each and every year.

So I’m not sure what response I want most from my child when she runs up against cold hard capital. In many ways a child is the ideal capitalist subject: driven solely by novelty and a desire for continuous accumulation. Refusing them their every desire doesn’t teach them the limits of happiness through acquisition, it merely confirms their place in the capitalist caste system, whilst maintaining (or even enhancing) the desire for greater consumption. It would be great to find a way that she can transcend the urge to endlessly consume, but I can’t exactly cut her off from literally all of society. For now I’m just content that when she discovers there is a fiscal limit to her desires, she says “I wish there wasn’t any money.”

Perfidy

Recently my feed on LinkedIn (such as it is) has been peppered with posts about various of the most ‘popular’ conspiracy theories. This is all thanks to a single colleague who I connected with because, well they seem nice enough in person, and we’d really only ever talked about work at work. I mean it’s LinkedIn, we’re connected because we’re colleagues and I’m not going to disconnect with someone because I don’t agree with them, I’d have to disconnect with solidly 80% of my connections in data science if I was to go down that path. But also it’s LinkedIn, I thought I got to avoid this type of nonsense by not being on Facebook. I’m expecting my LinkedIn feed to be full of cutesy marketing videos, baseless claims about AI tools that are going to solve all the world’s problems by 2025, meaningless motivational nonsense and the occasional interesting post from friends whose job is actually doing something to make the world a better place.

Anyway here I am, confronted with the ‘truth’ in my LinkedIn feed of all places and I have to say I’ve learned a lot from it. For example I wasn’t previously aware that the ‘fascist’ government of Jacinda Ardern (famous for that classic fascist move of relinquishing power of her own volition before her democratic mandate had expired) was responsible for killing tens of thousands of New Zealanders and covering up the fatal impacts of the coronavirus vaccine (along with the current administration, the mainstream media and every other government around the world). Some people would think that this is simply a conspiracy theory, but I’ve seen a link to a website that explains it. I’ve seen a video of someone sat in a car near where a whistleblower is being arrested (apparently unable to walk round the corner and video the actual arrest) talking about it. It turns out that whilst the truth is relatively easy to find, it’s very hard to document in the manner that everything else is documented these days.

Last week, Davos week, I was learning about the German farmers and how their ‘fascist socialist’ government is oppressing them by raising the price of diesel and banning fertiliser at the behest of Klaus Schwab and the WEF. In protest, they’re driving their tractors to Berlin and apparently are willing to drive all the way to Davos if they don’t get what they want, because compared to a hike in fuel duty, the diesel cost of driving a tractor the 850km from Berlin to Davos is nothing. Apparently this too is being ignored by the global mainstream media, because when a nation’s farmers protest it is usually headline news around the world. It turns out this is part of a conspiracy to stop us all eating meat and make food the preserve of global elites. Why else is Bill Gates buying up so much farmland?

I know very few of the verifiable facts in this case. I suspect the German government has increased tax on diesel and hasn’t exempted farmers. Maybe they’re also banning certain types of fertiliser that are causing considerable environmental damage. What I find amazing is that this fits conveniently into a grand conspiracy theory: the Great Reset, which I have to say I don’t really understand. What are these global elites trying to achieve by making us live in 15 minute cities and eat less meat? What’s their end game? Surely it’s easier to lord it over the proles by just giving them shit jobs, selling them junk food, junk tech, junk culture and raking in the profits? Surely there are more subtle ways to get power, say by letting government ministers holiday for free on your island/yacht/space ship. Surely there are easier ways to make money, such as taking advantage of conflict to increase the price of fuel or get governments to pay you ’free money’ to deliver poor quality ‘public’ services. But no, apparently the global elites are more concerned with controlling us, so we are a bit more healthy and a bit less destructive of the environment.

The are two problems here, the first being there is clearly some basis in fact for the claims made in these conspiracy theories. Some policy makers do indeed think that we should eat less meat and use less diesel (although not nearly enough in my opinion), but that is not a conspiracy, merely a response to the recommendations of countless scientists, who have actually looked into this stuff. Obviously the conspiracy theorists will conclude that the scientists are in on it, which leads to the second problem: there are conspiracies, just not the ones popularised in these theories. They can be arrived at by a simple process of looking at facts. As a scientist, what is going to make me more money, doing independent academic research that shows the products of the biggest, most profitable companies on the planet are making that same planet uninhabitable, or doing ‘research’ funded by those very wealthy companies that casts doubt on the scientific consensus? As a scientist, what is my motivation for showing the cause and impacts of climate change? Why would I do what Klaus Schwab told me and why would I do it in collaboration with tens of thousands of scientists around the world? On the other hand if I’m an oil baron, hanging out with Klaus Schwab and my billionaire mates at Davos this week, what is my motivation to make people believe that the actions that would stop me accumulating obscene wealth at the expense of humanity’s survival are actually just part of a sinister global conspiracy? What indeed? It seems almost too obvious that those in power would help undermine the message that their wealth accumulation is killing people. Almost, but not. I suspect the reason people ignore the real ‘conspiracies’ is because they are so obvious as to be depressingly mundane.

The German farmers have every right to be angry, they should be protesting, against a system that forces them into debt to have to spend a quarter of a million euros on a tractor that relies on fossil fuels that will only rise in price, that has a support contract that means they have to pay the manufacturer for any repairs and can be sued if they attempt to repair their own tractor themselves. They should be protesting against a system that forces them to buy seeds that are genetically modified to need artificial fertilisers that are literally killing the land they are trying to grow things on. The people who make spectacular amounts of money out of these systems of exploitation must laugh all the way to the bank every time they hear people protesting based on conspiracy theories that add to their profits and obfuscate their impact. They must revel in the reputation washing that comes along with it. Bill Gates is the centre of many of the most preposterous conspiracies and he must love it, because the more he’s accused of putting 5G chips in our bloodstream via the covid vaccine or whatever, the more people look away from the very real harms caused by his extreme techno-solutionist neoliberalism, or even just his private jet use. There is a sinister conspiracy and if you like, you can see it centred around the WEF, after all that organisation believes “the world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of multinational corporations, governments and civil society organizations” (ie those who already have wealth and power), which is a fundamentally anti democratic position. The Great Reset was hilariously a policy put forward by the WEF as a way of mitigating the impacts of what they do. They saw it as throwing humanity a bone, a way to make the plebs feel considered as something other than resources, tiny cogs in the wheels of the apocalyptic money machine. So we should be angry at these people, they don’t really consider us as anything other than subjects, they don’t really have our best interests at heart and they do benefit from a system that oppresses, controls, manipulates and kills us. It’s called capitalism. I dream of a day when that conspiracy appears in my LinkedIn timeline.