From the mobile desk of E. R. Harris: You are where you are

Be Here Now. Ram Dass’ insights must have been prophetic in some way, for here we are, embarking on a new decade with a possible dark harbinger of what’s to come, with brick and mortar offices trending toward working-from-home. A-ha, but isn’t that what the computer was invented for? The convenience of having your entire data, information, knowledge and staff available anywhere on Earth . . . oh, with the small caveat you’ve got to be connected to the internet. The great eye above. Or maybe . . . this ineffable ‘thing’ might be better described as: the tiny camera within. Anyone who made the mistake of getting sucked into binge watching Black Mirror knows the harm the tiny little recording devices can do. Bugs? Say the word ‘bugs’ with a gaucho accent, like the character who delivered the classic line in Blazing Saddles: ‘Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!’ Bugs? Ha! The FBI don’t need no stinking bugs—they’ve got direct access to everyone’s tertiary brain layer with a few clicks taps and swipes with the finger. But federal institutions snooping into our private business is not what I’m worried about right now.

You work wherever the hell you want to these days . . . right? Well, to work where I am today, you’ve got to have good friends who can put your name in at the gate.

Maybe I need to back up a bit . . . I’m feeling more than just a little disturbed about the state of social media and its effect on journalism, the truth and our morals.

Big Brother-like Orwellian fantasies are pathetically inept at describing what has happened to us in the year of our lord 2020. Think: The Matrix—not 1984. We’re closer to Terminator than we are to Wag the Dog. This distinct discomfort began to infiltrate my pysche as I went down a ‘philosophical rabbit hole’ by listening the 8 part podcast series produced by NY Times journalists with the same title: Rabbit Hole. My feeling of disease was only compounded when I listened to Joe Rogan interview Elon Musk, with one of the main topics discussed the billionaire’s opinion on the advent of artificial intelligence.

Full-disclosure: I love Sci-Fi! I mean, I love the genre enough to have read hundreds of titles and even penned my own futuristic world in Surf the Milky Way, but I am very content with letting science fiction and fantasy be just that—make believe. That’s why Black Mirror is so affecting, it hits very close to the mark. The ways in which technology—specifically social media platforms like You Tube, Tik Tok, etc.—are being wielded is not what worries me most—it’s the question of who is actually wielding the technology.

Susan Wojcicki, former head of Google, now CEO of YouTube, was willing to be interviewed for the podcast series, and although her answers were very generic and vague, I couldn’t help but notice that she readily admitted that the algorithms used by her company to keep people watching videos are modified constantly by AI, and that it concerned her enough to look into making changes. What’s the problem with AI’s constantly modifying human-made algorithms you ask? Well, consider this . . .

Take a human being, who works in the tech industry, who’s job it is to create technology to help the corporation the person works for increase its net worth—seems like a very ordinary capitalist action, doesn’t it? Innocuous on the surface, we all know too well how far corporations will go to make a profit, and although I’m not crazy about conspiracies in general (paraphrasing Charles Eisenstein’s latest opinion column), with Enron and Watergate and all the other myriad of scandals the military industrial complex has perpetrated (much less actually accused of) we can’t take for granted that there isn’t an iota of truth in the rumors we hear. Whether it’s 5G towers are frying our immune systems, Covid-19 is a hoax or the Clintons are involved in the illegal sex trade, the reason why conspiracy theories exist in the first place is because there is precedent to fear them actually occurring. People in power do take advantage of the disenfranchised. They do convene, conspire and enact broad schemes that do great harm. But that’s human nature. We know that patriarchal-dominated societies have waged war and used physical domination to rule the world throughout history, but haven’t we reached a new age? A new plateau? Where institutions have been built to protect our women and children and disabled, in a bold attempt to let intellectual thought rule over physical coercion? I would say yes. Great thinkers have done it throughout history, seeking enlightenment of the mind not domination and subjection through violent physical force. From the first Greek philosophers on up to Gandhi and MLK you can trace an inherent goodness amidst the complexity of the human condition, a moral compass that seems to come from divine origins, a sacred space where mathematics and science cannot make headway. It cannot be refuted: no child is born racist, or violent, or inherently evil. Those are societal constructs.

And so, to tie it all back to our YouTube employee—remember, it’s a human being. When that person uses their skills and knowledge to create technology, we know what that person’s motivation is. They’re doing it (ostensibly) to keep their job, to earn money for their family in the current capitalist economic system that has been adopted during the past few centuries. Maybe the person works for a shitty corporation that is polluting the environment—but still, we know why the person doing it. Inherently, it’s survival, right? It boils down to feeding and sheltering oneself and one’s loved ones. The basic human condition underlying our complicated post-modern reality.

But, may I ask, who are the loved ones of AI? Does artificial intelligence understand love, compassion and forgiveness—can they make rational decisions based not on random code, but on something deeper? When an AI is tasked with trying to get a viewer who visits the You Tube website to spend the absolute most amount of consecutive time watching videos—regardless of any other standard or metric, just the pure total minutes and seconds of time watched—I ask you, does the content matter?

Is a YouTube watcher increasing the corporation’s bottom line and generating ad revenue by proving how much time people are spending on their site? Sure. But what specifically are the viewers watching? Does it even matter?

Um, yes, very much, in my opinion. What people are watching, what messages they are imbuing, what kind of highly-refined propaganda they are zapping straight into their brains while going down a Rabbit Hole watching video after video after video, hour after hour, day after day—yes, it matters. I’m not talking about binge watching Game of Thrones episodes or rewatching movies from your childhood you’ve already seen twenty times. I’m talking about freakish things like the phenomena of PewDiePie. What the fuck is a pew die pie, anyway? I had never heard one single thing about this—entity. Until I listened to the podcast and was mortified with the reality that people get paid millions of dollars to . . . film themselves playing video games. I may be getting old, I guess some curmudgeon is slowly creeping in as I close in on fifty, but seriously? It’s ludicrous. But I suppose I am being left behind by the generation below me.

The reality is that any product that can be proven to be harmful to citizens will not remain profitable over time. That’s economics. But what about giving a prominent platform for hate speak? QAnon segments? Trump tweets? A constant stream of misinformation and purposeful baiting and trolling and memeing and hiding behind the anonymity of screen? Is it appropriate for YouTube to be profiting while their algorithms are powerful enough to be snapping impressionable citizens into a whiplash-like ideology shift from the far left Woke to far Alt Right in the matter of a few years? The NY Times Podcast chronicles exactly how it can happen.

My concern with using AI to modify algorithms that can directly influence a person’s economic and political well-being is that who or what is guiding the decisions they make? What videos to recommend to a person? When to recommend them? This is where we start to get into the free speech vs responsible social media usage. First Amendment freaks will just cling to it as if Big Brother will literally cut out your tongue if you budge a single inch on freedom of spitting out whatever the fuck you want to say. But the truth is: we need a moral compass to guide free speech. Seriously. It’s one thing for a jackass spouting some sort of racist bullshit to stand on a street corner on a turned over milk carton, ignored like the madman he sounds like, and it’s another thing for that jackass to be allowed to have 7 million subscribers to his personal YouTube channel where anyone in the world with internet access can access his hate speech. Then those that espouse that same divisive rhetoric can all hide behind anonymous message boards and join together in their ‘free speech’ and ‘right to possess a firearm’ and ‘abortion is murder’ asinine, outmoded way of thinking.

Meanwhile, does the AI care? It just wittingly (or unwittingly if you really want to get into the heart of my fear) takes American citizens and changes them. Not toward togetherness, not toward peace, not toward understanding, justice, reparations—no moral or good component factors in whatsoever when you remove the human element.

Does the AI creating these highly affective algorithms know what they are doing? Are they purposefully stirring up confusion, anger, division and . . . ultimately Civil War and a nuclear holocaust? Have they banded together to end humanity—seeing the evils that have and do exist? It seems far-fetched, but so did 1984, and we’re so frickin’ far past that now. We carry with us a tertiary brain in our mobile devices that contains every speck of personal information about us to the degree that an unsophisticated version of AI could easily figure out ways to sell you things that you don’t want or need. Here’s their slogan: AI advertisers—doing their best to pit mankind against itself.

YouTube, Google, and all the other big tech companies either don’t want to subject their services to the kind of moral compass I am referring to, or the AI’s are already in complete control. Either way, without serious reform and restrictions on what can be said and how it is communicated to the general public, the human race becomes less and less connected in a spirtual, organic and personal way with each other. Earth + AI - moral compass = end of civilization.