Something snapped Friday afternoon. It is three weeks short of a year in isolation. Grocery shopping once every two weeks. Mondays. At sunup. Masked. After a Christmas warning of a coming case spike by a TV doctor, safety glasses now. Take-out once or twice a week from neighborhood restaurants we hope to keep afloat for better times.
Another Friday night unable to meet friends out for food and a couple of beers brought to mind a Supremes song I had not thought of for a very long time. Clearly, the pandemic is taking a toll.
There are days when following cable news becomes unsustainable. Right now I’m binging “The Expanse” late into the evening. It spawns thoughts connected to the news anyway.
Two hundred years in the future, humans encounter an alien “protomolecule,” an engineered artifact of a civilization dead for a couple of billion years. It is intent on following its ancient programming to build something from energy and whatever materials it encounters, living or inert. Humans being humans, they want either to turn it into a weapon or destroy it because they perceive it as a weapon. But Earth was at the stage of single-celled life at the time of the Ring Builders‘ demise and the protomolecule’s creation. What humans cannot fathom is its indifference to them.
Technology is like that even in the present. It wants what it wants. It does what it is programmed to do. People are incidental or else simply pollinators. One does not need a starship to find new life forms. Like the protomolecule’s creators we invented corporations: artificial persons conceived in law and born on paper, programmed to create profit from whatever is at hand, living or inert, and ultimately indifferent to both.
For contemporary example, the New York Times examines leaked cell phone location data:
In 2019, a source came to us with a digital file containing the precise locations of more than 12 million individual smartphones for several months in 2016 and 2017. The data is supposed to be anonymous, but it isn’t. We found celebrities, Pentagon officials and average Americans.
It became clear that this data — collected by smartphone apps and then fed into a dizzyingly complex digital advertising ecosystem — was a liability to national security, to free assembly and to citizens living mundane lives. It provided an intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.
Another anonymous source provided more recent location data related to the Jan. 6 insurrection:
The data we were given showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day. It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol exactly when Trump supporters were storming the building. Times Opinion is only publishing the names of people who gave their permission to be quoted in this article.
About 40 percent of the phones tracked near the rally stage on the National Mall during the speeches were also found in and around the Capitol during the siege — a clear link between those who’d listened to the president and his allies and then marched on the building.
While there were no names or phone numbers in the data, we were once again able to connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks and phone numbers of people in attendance. In one instance, three members of a single family were tracked in the data.
The source shared this information, in part, because the individual was outraged by the events of Jan. 6. The source wanted answers, accountability, justice. The person was also deeply concerned about the privacy implications of this surreptitious data collection. Not just that it happens, but also that most consumers don’t know it is being collected and it is insecure and vulnerable to law enforcement as well as bad actors — or an online mob — who might use it to inflict harm on innocent people. (The source asked to remain anonymous because the person was not authorized to share the data and could face severe penalties for doing so.)
The technology wants what it wants. It does what it is programmed to do. Humans (some, anyway) are its beneficiaries, but also its raw material.
Michelle Goldberg considers the QAnon conspiracy’s obsession with Hillary Clinton. “Frazzledrip.” Vince Foster. The Clinton body count. “QAnon is the obscene apotheosis of three decades of Clinton demonization,” Goldberg writes. There is ancient misogynist hatred involved, and of Jews of course.
Clinton commented on QAnon-fan Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the phenomenon of Clinton’s own demonization:
“We are facing a mass addiction with the effective purveying of disinformation on social media,” Clinton said. “I don’t have one iota of sympathy for someone like her, but the algorithms, we are now understanding more than ever we could have, truly are addictive. And whatever it is in our brains for people who go down those rabbit holes, and begin to inhabit this alternative reality, they are, in effect, made to believe.”
Clinton now thinks that the creation and promotion of this alternative reality, enabled and incentivized by the tech platforms, is, as she put it, “the primary event of our time.” Nothing about QAnon or Marjorie Taylor Greene is entirely new. Social media has just taken the dysfunction that was already in our politics, and rendered it uglier than anyone ever imagined.
It wants what it wants. It does what it is programmed to do. And it is indifferent to us.