The Dark Future of Freedom

by Emile Wolfaardt

Is freedom really our best option as we build a future enhanced by digital prompts, limits, and controls?

We have already surrendered many of our personal freedoms for the sake of safety – and yet we are just on the brink of a general transition to a society totally governed by instrumentation. Stop! Please read that sentence again! 

Consider for example how vehicles unlock automatically as authorised owners approach them, warn drivers when their driving is erratic, alter the braking system for the sake of safety and resist switching lanes unless the indicator is on. We are rapidly moving to a place where vehicles will not start if the driver has more alcohol in their system than is allowed, or if the license has expired or the monthly payments fall into arrears.

There is a proposal in the European Union to equip all new cars with a system that will monitor where people drive, when and above all, at what speed. The date will be transmitted in real time to the authorities.

Our surrender of freedoms, however, has advantages. Cell-phones alert us if those with contagions are close to us, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and smart algorithms now land our aeroplanes and park our cars. When it comes to driving, AI has a far better track record than humans. In a recent study, Google claimed that its autonomous cars were ‘10x safer than the best drivers,’ and ‘40x safer than teenagers.’ AI promises, reasonably, to provide health protection and disease detection. Today, hospitals are using solutions based on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to read scans. Researchers from Stanford developed an algorithm to assess chest X-rays for signs of disease. This algorithm can recognise up to fourteen types of medical condition – and was better at diagnosing pneumonia than several expert radiologists working together.

Not only that, but AI promises to both reduce human error and intervene in criminal behavior. PredPol is a US based company that uses Big Data and Machine Learning to predict the time and place of a potential offence. The software looks at existing data on past crimes and predicts when and where the next crime is most likely to happen – and has demonstrated a 7.4% reduction in crime across cities in the US and created a new avenue of study in Predictive Policing. It already knows the type of person who is likely to commit the crime and tracks their movement toward the place of anticipated criminal behavior.

Here is the challenge – this shift to AI, or ‘instrumentation’ as it is commonly called, has been both obfuscatious and ubiquitous. And here are the two big questions about this colossal shift that nobody is talking about.

Firstly, the entire move to the instrumentation of society is predicated on the wholesale surrender of personal data. Phone, watches, GPS systems, voicemails, e-mails, texts, online tracking, transactions records, and countless other instruments capture data about us all the time. This data is used to analyse, predict, influence, and control our behaviour. In the absence of any governing laws or regulation, the Googles, Amazons, and Facebooks of the world have obfuscated the fact that they collect hundreds of billions of bits of personal data every minute – including where you go, when you sleep, what you look at on your watch or phone or other device, which neighbour you speak to across the fence, how your pulse increases when you listen to a particular song, how many exclamation marks you put in your texts, etc. and they collect your data whether or not you want or allow them to.

Opting out is nothing more than donning the Emperor’s new clothes. Your personal data is collated and interpreted, and then sold on a massive scale to companies without your permission or remuneration. Not only are Google, Amazon and Facebook (etc.) marketing products to you, but they are altering you, based on their knowledge of you, to purchase the products they want you to purchase. Perhaps they know a user has a particular love for animals, and that she bought a Labrador after seeing it in the window of a pet store. She has fond memories of sitting in her living room talking to her Lab while ‘How Much is that Doggy in the Window’ played in the background. She then lost her beautiful Labrador to cancer. And would you know it – an ad ‘catches her attention’ on her phone or her Facebook feed with a Labrador just like hers, with a familiar voice singing a familiar song taking her back to her warm memories, and then the ad turns to collecting money for Canine Cancer. This is known as active priming.

According to Google, an elderly couple recently were caught in a life-threatening emergency and needed to get to the doctor urgently. They headed to the garage and climbed into their car – but because they were late on their payments, AI shut their car down – it would not start. We have moved from active priming into invasive control.

Secondly, data harvesting has become so essential to the business model that it is already past the point of reversal. It is ubiquitous. When challenged about this by the US House recently, Mark Zuckerberg offered that Facebook would be more conscientious about regulating themselves. The fox offered to guard the henhouse. Because this transition was both hidden and wholesale, by the time lawmakers started to see the trend it was too late. And too many Zuckerbucks had been ingested by the political system. The collaboration of big data has become irreversible – and now practically defies regulation.

We have transitioned from the Industrial Age where products were developed to ease our lives, to the Age of Capitalism where marketing is focused on attracting our attention by appealing to our innate desire to avoid pain or attract pleasure. We are now in what is defined as the Age of Surveillance Capitalism. In this sinister market we are being surveilled and adjusted to buy what AI tells us to buy. While it used to be true that ‘if the service is free, you are the product,’ it is now more accurately said that ‘if the service is free, you are the carcass ravaged of all of your personal data and freedom to choose.’ You are no longer the product, your data is the product, and you are simply the nameless carrier that funnels the data.

And all of this is marketed under the reasonable promise of a more cohesive and confluent society where poverty, disease, crime and human error is minimised, and a Global Base Income is being promised to everyone. We are told we are now safer than in a world where criminals have the freedom to act at will, dictators can obliterate their opponents, and human errors cost tens of millions of lives every year. Human behaviour is regulated and checked when necessary, disease is identified and cured before it ever proliferates, and resources are protected and maximised for the common betterment. We are now only free to act in conformity with the common good.

This is the dark future of freedom we are already committed to – albeit unknowingly. The only question remaining is this – whose common good are we free to act in conformity with? We may have come so far in the subtle and ubiquitous loss of our freedoms, but it may not be too late to take back control. We need to self-educate, stand together, and push back against the wholesale surrender of our freedom without our awareness.

What Is Love? An Inquiry Reexamined

By Keith Tidman

Someone might say, I love my wife or husband. I love my children and grandchildren. I love my extended family. I love my friends.

All the while, that same someone might also avidly announce, I love…

Conversation. Mozart’s music. Cherry blossoms. Travel abroad. Ethnic cuisine. Democracy. Memories of parents. Sipping espresso. Paradoxes. Animal kingdom. Mysteries of quantum theory. Hiking trails. Absence of war. A baby’s eye contact. Language of mathematics. Theatre performances. History. African savanna. Freedom. Daydreaming on the beach. Loving love. And, yes, philosophy.

We’re free to fill in the blanks with endless personal possibilities: people, events, occasions, experiences, and things we care deeply about, which happen providentially to get elevated by their singular meaning to us on an individual level. The neurons that get triggered in each of us, as-yet unexplainably making what you uniquely experience by way of love as different from what everyone else definably feels — the subjectivism of sensation.

A hazard in applying the word ‘love’ across manifold dimensions like this is that we may start to cloud the concept, making it harder to distinguish love from competitor sentiments — such as simply ‘liking’, ‘fancying a lot’, or maybe ‘yearning’. Uncertainty may intrude as we bracket sentiments. The situation is that love itself comes in many different kinds. Steeped in a historical, cultural, spiritual, scientific, rational, and emotional melding pot. Three of the best-known semantic variants for love, whose names originate from Greek, descend to us from early philosophers.

They are Eros (pictured above on his pedestal in London), which is intensely passionate, romantic, and sexual love (famously fêted by the arts). Intended also for species proliferation. Agape, which is a transcendent, reciprocated love for God and for all humanity, sometimes couched as a form of brotherly love. And philia, which is unconditional love for family and friends, and even one’s country. As well as ‘companionate’ love enjoyed, for example, by a couple later in life, when passion’s embers may have cooled. Philia evokes a mix of virtues, like integrity, fairness, parity, and acquaintance.

Those terms and definitions imply a rational tidiness that may not be deserved when it comes to the everyday, sometimes-fickle interpretation of love: when and how to appropriately apply the word. The reality is that people tend to parse ‘love’ along sundry lengths, widths, and heights, which can be subjective, even idiosyncratic, and often self-servingly changeable to suit the moment and the mood. Individual, family, and community values are influential here.

Love may even be outright ineffable: that is, beyond logical explanation and the search for the source of societal norms. Enough so, perhaps, to make the likes of Aristotle, St. Augustine, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, and Simone de Bouvier — among other romantics and misanthropes, who thought about and critiqued the whimsicality of love — turn in their graves.

At the very least, we know that love, in its different kinds, can be heady, frenzied stuff, seemingly hard-wired, primal, and distractingly preoccupying. Of course, the category of love might shift — progressively, or abruptly — in accordance with evolving experiences, interactions, and relationships, as well as the sprouting of wholly novel circumstances. Arguably the biology, chemistry, and synapses of the brain, creating the complexities of mind, deterministically calling the shots.

Some contest that the love that others may claim to feel is not actually love, but something akin to it: either friendship, or impassioned obsession, or veneration, or lust, or appreciation of companionship, or esteem, or simply liking someone or something a whole lot. Distinctions between love and alternative sensations, as they wax and wane over time, are for the individual person to decide. We correctly accede to this element of individuality.

Love, as for all the other emotions just mentioned, has a flipside. Together, opposites make wholes — their serving as the source of what’s possible. Along with love can come dispiriting negatives, like possessiveness, insecurity, distrust, noxiousness, suspicion, sexist hindrances, jealousy, and objectification.

There can be a tension between these latter shadowy forces and such affirmative forces as bright-spiritedness, cleverness, romanticism, enchantment, physical attractiveness, empathy, humour, companionability, magnetism, kindness, and generosity. Such a tension usually lessens with the passage of time, as the distinctions between the good and the bad become less hazy and easier to sort from among.

There’s another form of tension, too: Individual values — acquired through personal reflection, and through family and community convictions, for example — may bump up against the stressors of love. Among love’s influences is sometimes having to rethink values. To refine norms in order to accommodate love. There may be justifiable reasons to believe we gain when we inspiringly and aspiringly love someone or something.

The gradations of moral and behavioural values challenge our autonomy — how we calculatedly manage life — as the effects of love invade our moment-to-moment decision-making. Choices become less intentional and less free, as we deferentially strive to preserve love. We might anxiously attempt to evade what we perceive, rightly or misguidedly, as the vulnerabilities of love.

When all is weighed, love appears wittingly compelling: not to cosset self-seeking indulgences, but rather to steer us toward a life affectionately moored to other people and experiences that serve as the fount of inspiration and authentic meaning. In this way, rationality and love become mutually inclusive.

Europe’s Deadly Ethical Dilemma: Energy or Ethics?

A political cartoon depicting Putin's relentless desire to crush democracy by any means, including using Russia's extensive oil profits to do so. Via https://usrussiaukraineconflict.weebly.com

By Martin Cohen

Energy or ethics? On the morning of February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine after months of rising tensions and failing diplomatic talks between Russia and Ukraine. In the days that followed, Russia attacked from the air, land, and sea — killing thousands of people, mostly civilians, and devastating the lives of more than 44 million people.

Outside Russia and a handful of satellite countries, most people think that's plain wrong. But here’s the more tricky ethical dilemma: European countries pay about $850 million per day - repeat, per day! - for Russian oil and natural gas. Since February, this money has financed Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for Ecological Transition, was reported earlier this month saying that

‘It is very difficult to explain to European public opinion and Ukrainian society that we are still importing Russian energy that finances this war,’ and that such energy imports create ‘obvious moral tension’.

Indeed it does. And to reduce the ‘moral tension’, political leaders and an uncritical Western media have insisted that cutting the energy imports would be difficult, and would dramatically put up prices for consumers.

Take gas. The universal mantra about Europe needing Russian gas is misleading. Europe (like the US) has plenty of its own gas IF it stops burning it – to make electricity. Burning gas to make electricity is in any case a wasteful and short-term practice. 

Another argument offered for continuing to buy Russian energy is that Russia is a major supplier of diesel fuel and that if that supply were lost, operating diesel-powered trucks and farm equipment would become much more expensive. Journalists happily repeat such things. Yet typically, in Europe, the price of diesel is more than half made up of tax. 

Put another way, the choice is between continuing to fund atrocities like that in Bucha last week, in which the world saw "lifeless bodies, bloodied by bullets, and some with hands bound, had been left strewn about or shoveled into makeshift mass graves"  and a temporary interruption of government tax receipts. 

Diesel is only a small part of European energy from Russia though. The bigger questions are about coal, oil and above all gas.

Take coal. Today there is a a whopping carbon tax on coal: 42.33 Euro/t-CO₂ leading EU countries to drastically cut down their production and (to a lesser extent) their consumption of coal over the past two decades to meet climate change targets. However, rather hypocritically their reliance on imported coal, especially from Russia, has shot up. (The explanatory factor here is that European coal industries used to be unionised and expensive. Climate Change policy enabled governments to outmaneuver the powerful unions.) 

Nonetheless, the point is that today, as Alexander Bethe, chairman  of the German association of coal importers, has said, hard coal imports from Russia to Germany can easily be substituted. In a matter of months at most. Bethe named the US, Colombia, South Africa and Australia among the countries most likely to fill the gap.

‘There is a well-functioning world market. There are sufficient quantities available. Germany imported about 18 million tons of hard coal from Russia last year. That is only about 2% of the total world trade.’

Ethics is linked to what is possible. Cutting the flow of money to the Russians is seen in current circumstances as deeply troubling - and thus we are assured repeatedly that alternatives do not exist. Yet in fact they do. 

But what about Russian gas? As far as generating electricity goes, Europe has an internal market into which renewables, nuclear and coal could all - immediately - replace gas. The failure to do this is again a political decision.

Politicians seeking advice on what is possible in the energy sphere are being bamboozled by two powerful lobbies who are now blocking what on the face of it is the moral imperative to stop buying Russian energy. One lobby is the nuclear industry who have explicitly linked the ‘inability’ to stop buying Russian energy to their programme of new nuclear power stations: a message that the UK, for example, has eagerly adopted.

But the other lobby, particularly important in leading the otherwise liberal media away from campaigning to stop the energy imports from Russia… is the green one. It is the climate change lobby that insists that even now, power stations must run on imported Russian gas rather than European or American coal. The strength of the green lobby is so great that in the UK for example, the coal units of the country's largest power station, Drax, are idling now just when they could be operating and reducing the need for Russian gas. That said, during Boris Johnson's surprise visit with President Zelensky in Kyiv on April 9, the United Kingdom set an example for EU leaders of what can in fact be accomplished in sympathy with Ukraine, with the prime minister declaring an embargo on Russian energy.

More generally though in  Europe, the ‘virtuous’ carbon taxes have led electricity companies to burn (Russian) gas and coal rather than their own (as well as, of course, to use expensive renewable energies). 

The result is a strange kind of alliance that sociologists call a Baptist and Bootlegger coalition. The term describes the shared interests of the baptists who believe alcohol is evil, and the bootleggers who want scarcity to lead to higher profits. Bizarrely, at the moment, people who are convinced that they have to stop the world overheating have - whatever their intentions! - ended up on same side as a Russian army conducting a horrific ‘special operation’ on its neighbour. It’s a bitter irony indeed.

Picture Post #73 The Children's Hospital in Ukraine

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

This is actually a still from a video, which is partly a matter of practicality – I was looking for a particular image to sum up the futility and horror of the Russian ‘Special Operation’ in Ukraine – but also a small aesthetic statement too. For today war-reporting, and news is seen more through moving images than still ones.

The trouble with that is that our attention is constantly distracted. We see terrible scenes but barely absorb them before (perhaps mercifully) the camera has moved on.

Anyway, this scene that creates this still image, is rather hidden in the video, which generally pans around the courtyard of the Maternity and Children’s Hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. Indeed, most of the photographer’s attention is on several burning wrecks of cars and this sad figure just appears to the side, walking slowly with a body in wheelbarrow. I don’t know if the body is alive or dead – I assume the former from the care being taken with the sheets, but within such a tragic scene it hardly seems to matter.