These types of posts (as well as the Techno-optimism one) are just fantastic. Please keep writing them. They create small narratives which dont exist anywhere else. Maybe later it could be interesting to compare these small narratives to the big narratives from folks like Mark Blyth and Peter Zeihan?
I feel like I want to unfollownypu from Twitter and just subscribe directly to you on Substack. In my mind you've sort of cultivated a cult like following on Twitter based on some of your past post and now have to write to please that very specific slice of thoughts and viewpoints based on what gets the most likes and retweets and engagement. I think it might be weird to word it this way but this feels more like old school noahpinion
I saw the birth of Arab techno-authoritarianism up close during the Arab Spring. I'll never forget how the police one day in Bahrain just cleared out the main protest area. They sealed off the area for about a week and then voila, they disappeared and let all the protestors return. After that is when the late night knocks on the door and subsequent disappearances started. Rumor was they installed a series of hidden cameras that was using some type of rudimentary facial recognition (read: humans) to identify, categorize, and target the protesters. Then all sorts of sketchy coincidences started to be reported all over the region which could only be explained by the presence of spyware.
Almost 10 years later its way worse but guess what? Nobody will talk about it because almost all legal correspondence is monitored. Even app downloads are reported to the authorities.
This is a really well thought out and clearly reasoned post that articulates an economic history of Big Tech's possible effects in a way that I've been struggling to, for a while. Good job.
From the point of view of the history of ideas as opposed to technology - it's really unfortunate that Big Tech grew up in the Bay Area alongside the 60's/70's Counterculture. Both camps mutually created an atmosphere of airheaded thinking and "futurism" mixed with marketing culminating in Wired and Steve Jobs, who will go down as one of the most successful narcissistic bullshitters in US history (speaking of the 1984 ad). I can't help but think that if Big Tech had grown up along, say, Route 128 and Kendall Square instead of Sand Hill Road and the Mission District liberals would have better understood what it actually was, and much sooner.
One thing that worries me, is that all the information is out there, but people still get deluded by conspiracy theories. A large segment of the population got sucked in. How can democracy function if people can't protect themselves from being duped?
The promise of technology is to empower people. People are wielding that power irresponsibly.
This is a really insightful post and I fully enjoyed reading it. One note that I might make is that the color revolutions began with the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine happened almost a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If technological advance makes it easier for lone wolf actors to do terrible things and cause distraction, (synthetic viruses, etc), that might be one way that surveillance states could have a competitive advantage over more free societies. If free societies can’t figure out a way to also prevent mass destruction by lone actors, it could be their downfall. What a depressing thought.
Good piece. It reminds me of this essay from 2018 arguing along similar but not identical lines that tech enabled authoritarianism vs liberal democracy would be the big geopolitical cleavage of the twenty-first century. Let’s work to make sure liberal democracy wins!
>Already things like Clearview AI (created by NRx transsexual Hoan Ton That and funded by Moldbug funder Peter Thiel) are in existence. It can take footage from any public security camera and automatically identify a person based off of their government identification photos and publicly available social media posts. Bark AI is another system of surveillance that was allegedly created so that lazy and invasive parents could spy on their grown children. It monitors all messages sent and received on social media and can automatically identify hate speech, sexual content, “bullying,” and more. In other words, the NSA is no longer encumbered by the inability to analyse anywhere near all of the data they collect. It is now possible to have AI classify all incoming data, and to automatically act on it directly or by alerting human overseers. In the next few decades this will be refined and censorship will be automatic as will hate speech enforcement. If it is possible that my real name is not on a list already for white advocacy, for whatever children I manage to have in this ant-farm that will not be a possibility. In fact, it will be trivially easy to drive the right off of the internet entirely.
>
In the last 20 years, progress on drones and robotics has taken off. The media fails to report on this but the reality is that autonomous military robots who are resistant to gunshots and other hazards of war are coming quickly. The effect of this is not hard to understand. Whatever freedom the common man is accorded today for fear of his weaponry and his integral part in the armed forces will no longer be necessary. The police will not be able to decide to not enforce gun control or hate speech laws (not that that would happen anyway, since police are 100 IQ and domesticated) because a Robocop will simply be sent to the last social conservative’s pod to “reeducate” him.
>Whatever human underclass that will still exist will become hopelessly more slavish due to biological engineering. While they may be made more intelligent, their temperaments will be made more sub-human than the average of today, which is already quite a problem. There will not even be an impulse of rebellion in these “people.” Nor will there be anything higher than the will to pleasure. People like myself, rare as we are, will be totally exterminated. If I were born 100 years later my parents would have simply picked the most obedient embryo. In the beginning this will be sold to parents as a good childhood behavior genotype. Based off of the temperament PGS, the doctor will say, “this is the one that will be the least likely to commit crime or get in trouble at school.” This is because it’s probably true that thought criminals are just intelligent street criminals. To think independently there must be not only intelligence, but an independence of spirit – a defiant temperament. This is not to say that most thought criminals are real criminals, only that they have a will that fails to truly subordinate to the power structure. And so this is a factor in committing crime, and that is how the power structure will sell the extermination of this precious temperament. Only among the elite, which consist of a number of people less than the Dunbar number, will this not be the case. They will select for genotypes fit for the elite lifestyle. While they complete the project of turning the underclass into farm animals, it is possible that they choose for their own children to have more active and independent temperaments. This not happening is one of the scenarios in which the human race collapses and dies. There will be no one even semi-fit to rule and accordingly there will be no more civilization. The human mass will find itself incapable of organizing itself for the lack of talent. At this point we may hope that good machines take over.
- "The more China goes from strength to strength while increasing its social control, and the more its democratic rivals seem to lapse into division and chaos, the more I worry." Are you implying all of Scandinavia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are experiencing division and chaos? Idk, I feel like there's lots of democratic examples, but only only one China; So, you should be explicit about the countries you're choosing to compare and explain why.
Add to this Moore's Law, that AI doubles its capacity every 18/24 months, and we see how this is a race we humans can lose.
What I think is badly needed now is for Biden and others to form an alliance with EU, Australia and others, as described in the Economist article ( https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/11/19/the-china-strategy-america-needs ) and make sure EXPORT of any of these systems developed in China are forbidden, with the threat of sanctions. So, if Hungary wants to buy it, they'll be badly punished.
This seems spot on, and reminds me of a conversation with a friend who's a Falungong political asylum seeker in the US. From her perspective, the American media over the past election cycle has looked increasingly, and alarmingly, reminiscent of state-controlled propaganda back in China - the striking difference being that the echo chamber is split into two camps, and seems to have arisen mostly organically and chaotically, perhaps with help from content recommendation algorithms that have generated so much profit for businesses. These technologies have already been co-opted by malicious external actors to foment divisions, while China's weaponizing of these tools for internal control, like you describe, is also a terrifying reality. It seems the remaining question is if this advantage would enable Orwellian states to emerge pre-eminent, without first giving rise to crippling social debility or unrest.
These types of posts (as well as the Techno-optimism one) are just fantastic. Please keep writing them. They create small narratives which dont exist anywhere else. Maybe later it could be interesting to compare these small narratives to the big narratives from folks like Mark Blyth and Peter Zeihan?
I feel like I want to unfollownypu from Twitter and just subscribe directly to you on Substack. In my mind you've sort of cultivated a cult like following on Twitter based on some of your past post and now have to write to please that very specific slice of thoughts and viewpoints based on what gets the most likes and retweets and engagement. I think it might be weird to word it this way but this feels more like old school noahpinion
A really fun read! Was reading this this morning and it kinda reminded me of this post https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013068/algorithms-create-a-poverty-trap-lawyers-fight-back/
(Don't give up on twitter, BTW, you find really good links!)
I suspect someday we will be ashamed of being complicit in the Chinese genocide of the Uighurs.
Or maybe we wont, maybe AI will erase it from the history books.
I saw the birth of Arab techno-authoritarianism up close during the Arab Spring. I'll never forget how the police one day in Bahrain just cleared out the main protest area. They sealed off the area for about a week and then voila, they disappeared and let all the protestors return. After that is when the late night knocks on the door and subsequent disappearances started. Rumor was they installed a series of hidden cameras that was using some type of rudimentary facial recognition (read: humans) to identify, categorize, and target the protesters. Then all sorts of sketchy coincidences started to be reported all over the region which could only be explained by the presence of spyware.
Almost 10 years later its way worse but guess what? Nobody will talk about it because almost all legal correspondence is monitored. Even app downloads are reported to the authorities.
This is a really well thought out and clearly reasoned post that articulates an economic history of Big Tech's possible effects in a way that I've been struggling to, for a while. Good job.
From the point of view of the history of ideas as opposed to technology - it's really unfortunate that Big Tech grew up in the Bay Area alongside the 60's/70's Counterculture. Both camps mutually created an atmosphere of airheaded thinking and "futurism" mixed with marketing culminating in Wired and Steve Jobs, who will go down as one of the most successful narcissistic bullshitters in US history (speaking of the 1984 ad). I can't help but think that if Big Tech had grown up along, say, Route 128 and Kendall Square instead of Sand Hill Road and the Mission District liberals would have better understood what it actually was, and much sooner.
One thing that worries me, is that all the information is out there, but people still get deluded by conspiracy theories. A large segment of the population got sucked in. How can democracy function if people can't protect themselves from being duped?
The promise of technology is to empower people. People are wielding that power irresponsibly.
Throw in bioweapons cheap enough for anyone in the top 5% to make one and we'll basically have to end privacy to survive. It's just a matter of time.
This is a really insightful post and I fully enjoyed reading it. One note that I might make is that the color revolutions began with the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine happened almost a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If technological advance makes it easier for lone wolf actors to do terrible things and cause distraction, (synthetic viruses, etc), that might be one way that surveillance states could have a competitive advantage over more free societies. If free societies can’t figure out a way to also prevent mass destruction by lone actors, it could be their downfall. What a depressing thought.
Good piece. It reminds me of this essay from 2018 arguing along similar but not identical lines that tech enabled authoritarianism vs liberal democracy would be the big geopolitical cleavage of the twenty-first century. Let’s work to make sure liberal democracy wins!
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-07-10/how-artificial-intelligence-will-reshape-global-order?amp
This is just a discount version of "The power singularity" https://juliusbranson.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-power-singularity/
>Already things like Clearview AI (created by NRx transsexual Hoan Ton That and funded by Moldbug funder Peter Thiel) are in existence. It can take footage from any public security camera and automatically identify a person based off of their government identification photos and publicly available social media posts. Bark AI is another system of surveillance that was allegedly created so that lazy and invasive parents could spy on their grown children. It monitors all messages sent and received on social media and can automatically identify hate speech, sexual content, “bullying,” and more. In other words, the NSA is no longer encumbered by the inability to analyse anywhere near all of the data they collect. It is now possible to have AI classify all incoming data, and to automatically act on it directly or by alerting human overseers. In the next few decades this will be refined and censorship will be automatic as will hate speech enforcement. If it is possible that my real name is not on a list already for white advocacy, for whatever children I manage to have in this ant-farm that will not be a possibility. In fact, it will be trivially easy to drive the right off of the internet entirely.
>
In the last 20 years, progress on drones and robotics has taken off. The media fails to report on this but the reality is that autonomous military robots who are resistant to gunshots and other hazards of war are coming quickly. The effect of this is not hard to understand. Whatever freedom the common man is accorded today for fear of his weaponry and his integral part in the armed forces will no longer be necessary. The police will not be able to decide to not enforce gun control or hate speech laws (not that that would happen anyway, since police are 100 IQ and domesticated) because a Robocop will simply be sent to the last social conservative’s pod to “reeducate” him.
>Whatever human underclass that will still exist will become hopelessly more slavish due to biological engineering. While they may be made more intelligent, their temperaments will be made more sub-human than the average of today, which is already quite a problem. There will not even be an impulse of rebellion in these “people.” Nor will there be anything higher than the will to pleasure. People like myself, rare as we are, will be totally exterminated. If I were born 100 years later my parents would have simply picked the most obedient embryo. In the beginning this will be sold to parents as a good childhood behavior genotype. Based off of the temperament PGS, the doctor will say, “this is the one that will be the least likely to commit crime or get in trouble at school.” This is because it’s probably true that thought criminals are just intelligent street criminals. To think independently there must be not only intelligence, but an independence of spirit – a defiant temperament. This is not to say that most thought criminals are real criminals, only that they have a will that fails to truly subordinate to the power structure. And so this is a factor in committing crime, and that is how the power structure will sell the extermination of this precious temperament. Only among the elite, which consist of a number of people less than the Dunbar number, will this not be the case. They will select for genotypes fit for the elite lifestyle. While they complete the project of turning the underclass into farm animals, it is possible that they choose for their own children to have more active and independent temperaments. This not happening is one of the scenarios in which the human race collapses and dies. There will be no one even semi-fit to rule and accordingly there will be no more civilization. The human mass will find itself incapable of organizing itself for the lack of talent. At this point we may hope that good machines take over.
One thing:
- "The more China goes from strength to strength while increasing its social control, and the more its democratic rivals seem to lapse into division and chaos, the more I worry." Are you implying all of Scandinavia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are experiencing division and chaos? Idk, I feel like there's lots of democratic examples, but only only one China; So, you should be explicit about the countries you're choosing to compare and explain why.
Add to this Moore's Law, that AI doubles its capacity every 18/24 months, and we see how this is a race we humans can lose.
What I think is badly needed now is for Biden and others to form an alliance with EU, Australia and others, as described in the Economist article ( https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/11/19/the-china-strategy-america-needs ) and make sure EXPORT of any of these systems developed in China are forbidden, with the threat of sanctions. So, if Hungary wants to buy it, they'll be badly punished.
This seems spot on, and reminds me of a conversation with a friend who's a Falungong political asylum seeker in the US. From her perspective, the American media over the past election cycle has looked increasingly, and alarmingly, reminiscent of state-controlled propaganda back in China - the striking difference being that the echo chamber is split into two camps, and seems to have arisen mostly organically and chaotically, perhaps with help from content recommendation algorithms that have generated so much profit for businesses. These technologies have already been co-opted by malicious external actors to foment divisions, while China's weaponizing of these tools for internal control, like you describe, is also a terrifying reality. It seems the remaining question is if this advantage would enable Orwellian states to emerge pre-eminent, without first giving rise to crippling social debility or unrest.
I'm starting to think the only way out is starting a counterculture in democratic societies of being pointedly against using Big Tech.