Angelenos! Iβll be at the Los Angeles Festival of Books TOMORROW (Apr 19) for a panel called βNature or Nurture: How Humans and AI Are Changing Each Otherβ with Adam Becker, Joanne McNeil, and Lucas Cantor Santiago.
Nearly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of Bush v Gore, I got involved in a bunch of ugly tech policy fights over voting machines. The hanging chad debacle in Florida prompted Congress to appropriate funds for states to purchase new touchscreen voting machines based on a robust, open standard. The problem was, those machines didn't exist.
The voting machine industry in those days was already very consolidated (it's far more consolidated today). They went shopping for a standards body that would publish a spec for a "standard" voting machine that could soak up those federal dollars in time for the 2004 election. The only taker was the IEEE, who unwisely offered to serve as host for this impossible rush job.
Once the voting machine reps were around a table at IEEE β largely sheltered from antitrust scrutiny thanks to the broad latitude enjoyed by firms engaged in standardization, which is otherwise uncomfortably close to collusion β they admitted what everyone already knew: there was zero chance they were going to develop a new standard in time for the election.
Instead, they decided they were going to publish a "descriptive standard." Rather than designing a new standard, they'd write down the specs of their own products β the same products that were considered so defective they needed to be replaced before the election β and call that the standard.
That was my first encounter with this issue as an activist. I had just started at EFF and a lot of our supporters were IEEE members, who were appalled to see their professional association being used to launder this incredibly politically salient, technically incoherent scam. We got a ton of IEEE members to write to the board, who shut down the standards committee and kicked the voting machine companies to the curb.
The voting machine companies weren't done, though. Diebold β one of the leaders in the cartel β knew that its voting machines were defective. They'd crash, lose their vote-counts and malfunction in other ways that were equally damaging to election integrity.
This was an alarming piece of news, but perhaps just as alarming is the way it came to light. A Diebold employee described this situation in a memo that was subsequently hacked and dumped by parties unknown. That memo, along with the accompanying tranche of extremely alarming revelations about Diebold's voting machine division, was the subject of one of the first mass-censorship copyright campaigns in internet history.
Diebold didn't dispute the veracity of these damning revelations: rather, it claimed that since the memos detailing its gross democracy-endangering misconduct had been prepared by an employee, that they were therefore works-made-for-hire whose copyright was held by Diebold, and thus anyone who reproduced the memo was infringing on the company's copyright.
Under Section 512 of the then-new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Diebold was empowered to send "takedown notices" to the web hosting providers whose users had posted the memos, and if the web hosts didn't remove the content "expeditiously," they would be jointly liable for any eventual copyright damages, which are statutorily set at $150,000 per infringement.
Every web host folded. No one wanted to take the risk of tens of millions of dollars in statutory damages.
(Incidentally: anyone who tells you that "online safety" requires us to make online platforms liable for their users' speech needs to explain how this wouldn't empower every crooked company whose dirty laundry had ended up online wouldn't just do what Diebold did. It's not technically insanity to do the same thing over again in expectation of a different outcome, but it is awfully stupid and reckless.)
That might have been the end of things, except for the kids at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Two students, Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, were outraged by Diebold and they had accounts on Swarthmore's webserver. So they uploaded thousands of copies of the leaked memos, but linked to just one of them from a page about the leak. As soon as that copy was deleted by Swarthmore's webmasters in response to a DMCA takedown from Diebold, the students updated the link to point to another copy. And another. And another.
That's where EFF got involved. We repped the Online Policy Group, whose page linking to the Swarthmore resources was taken down by a Diebold notice. We won. The memos became a matter of public record. The Swarthmore kids started a nationwide network called "Students for Free Culture." It was pretty danged cool.
That wasn't the end of the Diebold story, though. Diebold was and is a very diversified conglomerate that made a lot of tabulating machines: ATMs, cash-registers, medical monitoring devicesβ¦and voting machines. Every one of these machines produced a paper-tape of its tabulations as an audit trail that could be used to reconstruct its calculations if it crashedβ¦except the voting machines. The voting machines that kept crashing, and whose crashes presented a serious risk to the legitimacy of US elections in the wake of the worst electoral crisis in the country's history.
Diebold's stated reason for this was that adding a paper tape was haaaard (even though all its other machines had paper audit tapes). Not only was this a very unconvincing excuse, it was downright alarming in light of the promise of Walden OβDell (Diebold CEO and prominent Bush fundraiser) to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president":
Now, to be clear, I don't think that O'Dell was going to steal the election for Bush (that's the Supreme Court's job). Rather, he was just a loudmouth asshole CEO who supported the (up to that point) worst president in American history, and who also made garbage products that were not fit for purpose.
In the decades since, voting machines have been the subject of lots of scrutiny by the information security community, because they suck. Time after time, the most sphincter-puckering defects in widely used machines have come to light:
At Defcon, the amazing Matt Blaze has presided over the Voting Village, where it's an annual tradition for hackers to probe voting machines. This exercise has produced a string of terrifying revelations that precisely described how these machines suck:
https://www.votingvillage.org/cfp
Pretty much everyone I knew thought that voting machines were garbage technologyβ¦right up to the moment that the My Pillow guy, Tucker Carlson, and a whole menagerie of conspiratorial Trumpland mutants started peddling a bizarre story about how Hugo Chavez colluded with the Canadian voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems (who bought Diebold's voting machine business when they finally dumped the division) to rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden. They told so many outlandish lies about this that Fox ended up paying Dominion $787.5 million to settle the case:
That's when something very weird happened. A bunch of people who had been skeptical of voting machines since the Brooks Brothers Riot suddenly became history's most ardent defenders of those same garbage voting machines. The cartel of voting machine companies β who had a long track record of using bullshit legal threats to silence their (mostly progressive) critics β were drafted into The Resistance(TM), and anyone who thought voting machines were trash was dismissed as a crazy person who has been totally mypillowpilled:
There's a name for this: it's called "schismogenesis": when one group of people define themselves in opposition to someone else. If the other team does X, then your team has to oppose X, even if you all liked X until a couple minutes ago:
This schismogenic reversal persists to this very day. Every time Trump promotes another election denier to his cabinet, a federal agency, or a judgeship, the idea that voting machines are garbage becomes more Stop the Steal-coded, even though voting machines are, objectively, garbage.
Which is bad. It's bad because we are going into another election season where the stakes are β incredibly β even higher than Bush v Gore, and electoral authorities and state legislatures are making the world's most unforced errors in their voting machine procurement decisions, and if you've conditioned yourself to reflexively dismiss voting machine criticisms as conspiratorial nonsense, then you are part of the problem.
Just because some voting machine criticism is conspiratorial nonsense, it doesn't follow that voting machines are good, nor does it follow that every voting machine critic is a swivel-eyed loon or ratfucking Roger Stone protege.
Take, for example, Princeton's Andrew Appel, a computer scientist who's been publishing well-informed, well-documented warnings about defects in voting machines for years and years. Appel's latest is an alarming note about Georgia's new plan to "tabulate" ballots using OCR software:
The Georgia legislature has wisely banned the use of QR codes on the paper ballots generated by touchscreen voting machines. We have, at long last, progressed to the point where we use "ballot marking devices" (BMDs) that produce a paper record that can be hand-counted. The problem is that voters barely ever glance at these paper ballots before dropping them in the box to make sure the choices they made on the touchscreen are correctly reflected on the ballot β only 7% of voters carefully inspect their ballots!
This problem is greatly exacerbated if these ballot papers are tabulated by a machine that reads a QR code or barcode, rather than interpreting the human-readable information on the ballot. People are even less likely to pull out their phones and scan the QR code to ensure it matches the words on the paper. That means that a BMD could output different choices in the QR code than it prints in the human-readable part β and the Dominion BMD machines they use in Georgia run outdated software that's super-hackable:
So Georgia's state leg passed Senate Bill 189, which establishes that "The text portion of the paper ballot marked and printed by the electronic ballot marker indicating the electorβs selection shall constitute the official ballot and shall constitute the official vote for purposes of vote tabulation." In other words, you can't count by scanning QR codes, you have to actually interpret the human-readable text on these ballots.
These machines still suck, to be clear (the fact that they don't suck for the mypillovian reasons that Tucker Carlson believes doesn't mean they're good) β but thanks to SB189, they are way less dangerous to democracy than they might be.
But not if Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger gets his way. Raffensperger is another guy who was drafted into The Resistance(TM) after he refused to commit election fraud for Trump, but he's also not good. He can still be terrible in other ways β and he is.
Raffensperger has announced his plan to circumvent the Georgia legislature by using Dominion ICX touchscreens to produce ballots with QR codes, which will then be tabulated in Dominion ICP scanners β but then he's going to "verify" the tabulation by running those same ballots through optical character recognition (OCR) software.
As Appel points out, this is the same stupid plan that Raffensperger tried in 2024, where he called the OCR step an "audit" of the QR tabulation. Back then, he grabbed 200dpi "ballot image files" from the Dominion BMDs and ran them through OCR software run by a company called Enhanced Voting. Appel sums up the fundamental incoherence of this approach.
First, the BMDs are super-hackable, so we don't trust them to print the same info in the QR code as they print in the human-readable text (which no one looks at anyway). If we don't trust them to print accurate info in the QR code, then why would we trust them to accurately generate that 200dpi QR code that's generated for the audit? As Appel writes, "it would be fairly easy for an unsophisticated attacker to alter ballot-image filesβjust replace the ballots they donβt like with copies of the ones they do like."
Then there's the step where these files are zipped up and transferred to the outside vendor for the audit β a step that Raffensperger has not explained. And even if the files make it to the outside contractor safely, that contractor could "change the inputs (ballot images) or outputs (tabulations)."
So this is very bad. Voting machines suck. Raffensperger sucks.
And here's the stupidest part: as Appel explains, there is a much more secure way to do this, and it's very cheap:
Just use their existing Dominion ICP (polling-place) scanners to count preprinted, hand-marked optical-scan "bubble ballots" that the voter has marked with a pen.
This is what other states are doing. As Appel writes, "This doesnβt even require a software upgrade of any kind. Although it would be a fine idea to install a software upgrade that addresses known security vulnerabilities in the ICX and ICP, the ICP can count hand-marked ballots with or without the upgrade."
This is a purely unforced error, in other words. As such, it's part of a series of shitty vote-tech choices that politicians and officials have been making since Bush v Gore. Truly, we live in the stupidest timeline.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
Trump's day-one Executive Order blitz contained a lot of weird, fucked-up shit, but for me, the most telling (though not the most important) was the decision to defund all medical research whose grant applications contained the word "systemic":
Now, this is an objectively very stupid thing to so. As someone with a recent cancer diagnosis whose illness is still "localized" β and who will need a lot more intensive care should his cancer become "systemic" β I would very much like my government to continue to fund systemic research.
But of course, Trump wasn't intentionally killing research on systemic forms of cancer. Rather, he was indifferent to the collateral damage to this kind of research that arose in the pursuit of his real target, which is killing systemic explanations for social phenomena.
This is absolutely in keeping with neoliberal dogma, best expressed in Margaret Thatcher's notorious claim that "there is no such thing as society." In neoliberalism, we are all atomized individuals, members of homo economicus, driven to maximize our personal utility. All acts of seeming generosity are actually secretly selfish: you only tell your partner you love them because you hope it will make them fuck you and/or take care of you when you get sick; you only give alms to the poor in order to seem virtuous before people who can steer profitable business your way; you donate to cancer research as an insurance policy against your own eventual sickness.
This selfishness is a feature, not a bug. It's only by pursuing our selfish utility-maximization that we allow the market β a giant, distributed computer β to correctly assess who should be given the power to allocate capital and direct the activities of the lesser among us. When the invisible hand helps these born monarchs to pull capitalism's sword out of the market's stone, they are elevated to the position of power they were destined to hold, from which they can maximize all our social and material progress.
The project of neoliberal economics is to transform the social science of economics into a "hard science" grounded in empirical, mathematical proofs. Economism is a political philosophy that says that human society should only be considered through a lens of mathematical models. As such, it vaporizes all factors that can't be readily quantized and represented in a model:
It's a political philosophy with no theory of power, built on just-so stories. If you offer to buy a kidney from me and I agree to sell you that kidney, then we have arrived at a mutually satisfactory, voluntary arrangement in which the state should not intervene. Never mind that all the people who sell their kidneys are poor and desperate and all the people who buy the kidneys are rich and powerful. After all, can we really ever be sure that someone feels "powerful" or "desperate"?
This is an extremely convenient political philosophy if you happen to be in the market for a kidney, or for that matter, if you want to buy the labor or bodies of any kind of worker for any kind of use. It's a great philosophy if you never want to bargain with a union, because the union is interfering with the "voluntary" transactions between workers and their bosses, and the glittering equations (operating in a Cartesian realm with no room for "power" or other squishy factors) prove that this is "market distorting."
It's also an extremely convenient political philosophy if you are getting rich by stealing from people, or even murdering them. If you offer me a payday loan with a ten heptillion percent APR and I accept it, that's voluntary, it's the market, and there's absolutely no reason for anyone to pass comment on the fact that 100% of the people who take those loans are poor and 100% of the people who originate them are rich:
Likewise, if you're enjoying a wildly profitable monopoly, this philosophy acts as antitrust repellent: "if people didn't prefer my monopoly business practices, they'd shop elsewhere":
It's great news if you want to destroy the planet with immortal, infinitely toxic plastic packaging, because it lets you claim that the only problem with plastics is "littering" (irresponsible individuals) and not your products:
It's fantastic news if you're one of a few very large fossil fuel companies who are rendering the only planet in the known universe that's capable of sustaining human life uninhabitable, because it lets you blame the problem on our individual "carbon footprints" (not your depraved greed):
This is a philosophy that is violently allergic to systemic analysis. It must reduce everything to a set of individual choices, taken in a power-free vacuum: to litter, to labor, to borrow, to shop. Its adherents are so saturated in this ideology that they can't even see that it is an ideology.
Think of Noam Chomsky's interview with Andrew Marr:
Marr: How can you know Iβm self-censoring?
Chomsky: Iβm not saying youβre self-censoring. Iβm sure you believe everything you say. But what Iβm saying is if you believed something different you wouldnβt be sitting where youβre sitting.
A systemic view challenges everything about the neoliberal mindset. In 2011, the streets of Hackney (and beyond) erupted in an uprising of protest, which included some looting and arson, though the vast majority of mobilization was of marching and shouting protesters outraged at the murder of a Black man by London police.
In response, then-Prime Minister David Cameron declared all systemic explanations for the uprising to be off-limits, calling it "criminality, pure and simple":
"Criminality, pure and simple" has zero explanatory power. Where did this "criminality" come from? Why did it spike on these days? What happened to it after the uprising was crushed by police? Did it go away? Is it festering in the hearts of Britons up and down the country, awaiting some inaudible signal before detonating again?
How frightening it must be to believe in a world without systemic explanations! It's a world where inexplicable spirits sweep across the land, engendering population-scale effects that are the result of millions of people making voluntary, individual decisions, disconnected from any kind of social phenomena.
It must be terrifying, like living in a world secretly governed by demons or witches.
It's the world of the conspiracy fantasist.
Yesterday, I wrote about the role that the conspiratorial wing of the Trump coalition is playing in keeping the Epstein story alive, and the danger this poses to Trump:
Trump's conspiratorial base are hugely and reliably animated by stories about impunity for elite sex predators. As well they should be! Elite sex predators get away with all kinds of crimes β not just Epstein, but the whole universe of powerful men, from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump, who systematically abused women for decades and got away with it β bragged about it, even!
But despite these very real abusers, the conspiracists in the Trump base are mostly concerned with imaginary abusers β Qanon's shadowy cabal of adrenochrome-guzzling pedophiles, tirelessly freighting trafficked children from one nonexistent pizza parlor basement to the next, packed inside of very mid Wayfair home furnishings:
It's the world in which real suffering children (kids in cages, children rotting in Alligator Auschwitz, kids working the night-shift at a meat-packing plant) don't matter at all, while imaginary children (unborn children, Qanon victims, etc) take center stage.
Indeed, one of the strangest things about the Epstein case is that it's the rare instance in which right-wing conspiratorialists care about actual people, rather than imaginary ones.
The mirror-world dominates right-wing politics. It's a world in which systemic problems don't exist, because it's a world in which systemic power doesn't exist. It's a world where individual rich people with evil in their heart are to blame for our problems, not a world where a system of impunity for the powerful allows rich people to get away with hurting us.
This is why they call antisemitism "the socialism of fools." An antisemite blames their problems on a cabal of Jewish bankers, rather than the dominance of the political system by finance capital.
In response to yesterday's post, reader Garvin Jabusch wrote to say, "your phrase 'blame systemic problems on individuals' does a fantastic job of crystallizing how I feel about the BP-invented concept of the carbon footprint."
This is exactly right, and it's an important connection I'd never drawn before myself. Because while conspiracies have run rampant since time immemorial, the modern conspiracist is a conservative, trapped in the mirror-world:
The mirror-world warps reality, but that warpage has the same curvature as neoliberalism's "There is no such thing as society." Conspiracism β like neoliberalism β insists that the world runs on individual virtue and wickedness, not the systemic properties that make it easier or harder (or impossible) to do the right thing.
This is why Donald Trump banned the word "systemic." To any objective observer, it is plain that Donald Trump is an effect, not a cause. He's too stupid and impulsive to do anything except fill the Donald Trump-shaped hole in our politics, after 40 years of Democrat/Republican consensus that "there is no such thing as society" and insistence that every social problem is the result of a "distorted market" and can only be worsened by state intervention.
Both neoliberalism and conspiracism insist that the world is run by great men, not by social forces. By denying that anything can be "systemic," Trump can deny that he is systemic, merely a conveniently shaped monster suited to our monstrous times.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
It's been a year since Project 2025 became national news. At the time, I cited the great Rick Perlstein, an expert on the history of the conservative movement, who said that the most important thing about the P2025 document wasn't its extreme plans, but rather, it's total incoherence:
You see, Project 2025 isn't just one roadmap for turning America into a doomed, corporate/christofascist hellscape: it is several such roadmaps, with many policy prescriptions that directly and violently contradict each other.
For Perlstein, this was both revealing and important. Like all successful political campaigns, Trumpism is a coalition. Coalitions form when groups of people set aside their disagreements and join together. Virtually every important political change is downstream of a coalition.
The easiest kind of coalition to form is an oppositional one, where groups agree on what they don't want, without agreeing on what they do want. Think, for example, of the Andrea Dworkin wing of the feminist movement making common cause with Jerry Falwell to oppose pornography. Obviously, these people have a completely irreconcilable goals for what they want, but when it comes to porn, it's easy for them to agree on what they don't want.
That's fine when you're waging the campaign against something, but if you happen to win that campaign, you're in trouble. That's when the fight starts over who will get their way. That's the moment when winning coalitions become bitterly divided:
Now, some of these conflicts matter more than others. The least politically connected, least sophisticated (and most numerous) members of the conservative coalition have long been mollified by performative acts of cruel racism and gender discrimination. These could be enacted without any real impact on the power-players in the coalition, since they were insulated from discriminatory lending and hiring, immune to police violence, and could skip to another state or country to get abortion care, hire sex workers, etc. No one is ever going to deny Peter Thiel a mortgage, no matter how many twinks he bangs. Ted Cruz's daughter will always be able to get an abortion, no matter what Texas or federal law states. Clarence Thomas doesn't have to worry about getting pulled over because he "fits the description." As Wilhoit's Law says:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition β¦There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Project 2025 is an anthology, edited by the Heritage Foundation, collecting the post-victory aspirations of the most important members of the Trump coalition. As anthologists, Heritage's job was to choose which submissions to include and which ones to reject. Perlstein's key insight is that wherever Heritage included two or more directly contradictory plans in Project 2025, we can infer the groups that submitted those plans are each too powerful and important to sideline β they are equally matched combatants, and it's impossible to predict which one will get their way and which ones will eat shit in the aftermath of a victory.
There were so many contradictions in Project 2025: immigration policy, military policy, trade policy, monetary policy, tax policy, and more. As Perlstein pointed out, Project 2025 was a 900-page roadmap to the future fracture lines in the Trump coalition. These were the places where the opposition could break off parts of Trump's base, in the same way that Steve Bannon has been doing to the progressive movement (also an easily fractured coalition).
Since Trump won the presidency, House and Senate, he has done a remarkable job of keeping this brittle coalition together through a mix of flattery and bullying. But the fact remains that Trump's most important factions hate each other and are gunning for one another, and whenever Trump chooses one faction to win and another to lose, the losers are prone to turning on him:
Trump's lifelong strategy has been to race across a succession of rivers on the backs of alligators without losing a leg. He is the undisputed all-time historical champion of this bizarre sport, but no one can win that race forever, and your first loss is a career-ender.
I think a lot of people β including Trump allies β understand this, at least at a gut level. That's why the Epstein stuff is so huge now. It's impossible to overstate the extent to which the Trump base is organized around conspiratorial beliefs about elite pedophile rings:
These beliefs are a stand-in for an overall rage against elite impunity, the two-tiered system of justice that lets the powerful get away with anything. The sexual abuse of children is such a viscerally offensive crime, so the idea that rich and powerful people are getting away with it carries a lethal charge.
Conspiracy fantasies have their roots in traumatic reality. Without a long list of US military cover-ups, there'd be no room for UFO conspiracies. The credibility of antivax ("pharma companies want to kill you and regulators want to help them") is rooted FDA's failure to prevent the opioid crisis, and the million Americans who died as a result:
Conspiratorialism is a cognitive failure that occurs when you blame systemic problems on individuals. That's why they call antisemitism "the socialism of fools" β it's what you get when you blame Jewish bankers, rather than the finance sector's class warfare, for your problems:
Conspiratorialists have the right feeling, but the wrong facts. If you hate elite impunity, you should be furious about the Supreme Court ruling that presidents have "absolute immunity" from prosecution for the crimes they commit in office. But bad actors can exploit the failures of the conspiratorial mindset to make people who are legitimately enraged by elite impunity to direct that rage at imaginary "cultural Marxists" at universities.
As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, the right lives in a "mirror world" where child abuse is confined to largely imaginary children in nonexistent pizza parlor basements, while actual kids in Florida concentration camps, or border detention cages, or meat-packing plant night shifts, or living in hunger and without a home, are ignored:
It's not hard to understand why Trump wants to suppress the Epstein files. He had a long friendship with Epstein, and spoke glowingly of Epstein's taste in "beautiful womenβ¦on the younger side." Trump sent Epstein lewd drawings and imaginary dialogues about Epstein's "wonderful secret":
Not only that, it's likely that many of Trump's most important supporters were directly complicit in Epstein's crimes (participating in the rape of young women and girls) and indirectly complicit (covering up these crimes and helping to launder Epstein's money).
Can Trump convince the conspiratorial wing of his coalition that Epstein is a "nothingburger" and a fabrication of Biden, Obama, the Clintons, Emmanuel Goldstein and Snowball?
It's not impossible. As The American Prospect's Ryan Cooper points out, conspiratorialists possess an incredible ability to "believe just about anything, even if it literally kills themβwitness, for instance, the unvaccinated Texas GOP official who was posting anti-vaccine memes on Facebook right up until he died of COVID":
As ever, The Onion captures the spirit of the moment with a single, brilliant headline, "Elderly Woman Keeps Mind Active Justifying Trumpβs Actions":
But so far, the signs are not looking good for Trump. Writing for Wired, Jake Lahut speaks to many high-ranking Trump advisors, past and present, anonymous and named, who are concerned about the mounting fury from Trump's conspiratorial base:
As Lahut writes, Trump is flubbing this badly, but there may be no way for him to resolve the Epstein affair to the satisfaction of his base. They were already primed to be suspicious of whatever story they were presented with, and this latest incident all but guarantees that they will not accept whatever material Trump is eventually arm-twisted into releasing.
And that's not even the biggest disappointment Trump's conspiratorialists will confront. Trump has no intention of changing the system to make life better for this Christmas-voting turkeys. Arresting 11 million immigrants and any number of US citizens who fit the description will not help these people with their very real, material problem. Nor will banning abortion, giving tax breaks to the ultra-rich, or defunding the police at the CFPB who were in charge of shutting down rip-off artists at payday lenders, big banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, etc. So these people can only ever get angrier.
But the conspiratorial base isn't the only Trumpland faction that is being forced to eat shit after Trump's victory. In another Wired story, David Gilbert presents a snapshot of the pieces of the Trump coalition that have broken off, or are hanging by a thread:
There's Joe Rogan, who thinks (correctly) that Trump's immigration raids are unforgivably cruel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfmrEa0L08E
And there's Elon Musk, who is (correctly) furious that Trump wiped his ass with his promise of a balanced budget so he could hand trillions to the richest people in the history of the human race:
Each of these people is an avatar for a bloc in the Trump coalition, and they reflect the fury of the people who stand behind them. This is as Rick Perlstein prophesied a year ago: these groups hate each other and the only way for some of them to get what they want is for others to be totally betrayed.
Trump has been racing over those alligator-backs for so long now, it can sometimes feel like he'll never miss a step. But he's one snap away from losing a leg, and after that, it'll be a bloodbath.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
ITHACA and NYC! I'm heading your way for a zillion events from Sept 11-18. Here's a list of open-to-all CORNELL activities including two major keynotes; a movie night with dinner and discussion; and a public event at CORNELL TECH in NYC. I'll also be at the BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL on Sept 21.
Conspiratorialism is downstream of the trauma of institutional failures.
Insitutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture.
Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.
Monopolization is downstream of the failure to enforce antitrust law.
Start with conspiratorialism and trauma. I am staunchly pro-vaccine. I have had so many covid jabs that I glow in the dark and can get impeccable 5g reception at the bottom of a coal-mine.
Nevertheless.
If you tell me that you are anti-vax because you:
a) believe that the pharma companies are rapacious murderers who'd kill you for a nickel; and
b) believe that their regulators are so captured that every FDA official should probably be wearing a gimpsuit;
I'd be hard pressed to argue with you.
After all, the Sackler family flagrantly lied about the safety of their opioids. They bribed doctors to over-prescribe their drugs. They paid pharmacists bonuses for not asking nosy questions about people filling endless, gigantic refills. They reaped billions. They hired FDA officials and paid them to lobby their ex-colleagues to turn a blind eye, even as the country's morgues filled with the corpses of their victims. They made more billions, and they abused the justice system and got to stay disgustingly, dynastically rich, even as more than one million Americans died in the overdose epidemic they started:
The hucksters and grifters peddling anti-vax conspiracies are pushing on an open door. The existence of real, high-stakes, mass-casualty conspiracies, right there in the open, make traumatized people easy marks for con artists selling horse-paste and taint-tanning.
(Obviously, this is also the Epstein story: the reason it was possible to convince vulnerable people that elite pedos were hiding kids in a DC pizza-parlor's nonexistent basement was that elite pedos were hiding kids on an entirely real island that Donald Trump and other rich and powerful people liked to visit and everyone knew about.)
So that's part one: conspiratorialism is downstream of institutional failures.
Institutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture:
Why do our institutions fail? Because they have been neutered, deliberately made weaker than the processes and companies they are meant to oversee. Starve the FAA of resources and eventually it's going to run out of money to inspect airplane factories. When that happened, Boeing got to hire its own inspectors. The FAA let Boeing mark its own homework, and then planes started falling out of the sky. Hundreds of people were murdered this way (so far β there's a reasonable chance that many more of us are boeing to die):
When Trump's old FCC chair Ajit Pai decided to kill Net Neutrality, he was able to cheat like hell. He accepted over one million identical anti-Net Neutrality comments from "@pornhub.com" email addresses. He accepted millions of obviously fraudulent, identical anti-Net Neutrality comments whose reply addresses corresponded to darknet identity-theft dumps. These included the email addresses of dead people and of sitting US Senators who supported Net Neutrality:
Americans have no federal privacy protections to speak of. The last time Congress updated consumer privacy law was with 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. All other technological invasions of privacy are fair game. That's how it came to pass that when staffing agencies offer a nurse a shift, they are able to secure that nurse's credit report, discover how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and offer a lower wage to nurses who are economically desperate:
Regulators are captured out there, right in the open. The revolving door between government service and industry lobby groups spins and spins. Give a Maga influencer a million bucks and he'll get the DoJ to call off its case blocking your $14 billion merger:
Whether you're buying a glass bottle, sending something by sea-freight, taking vitamin C, getting an IV drip, watching pro wrestling, lacing up your athletic shoes, shopping for a mattress, seeing a movie, using social media, listening to music, reading a book, getting fitted for eyeglasses, or choosing a browser, you are trapped in a market totally dominated by five or fewer corporations β often just one corporation.
Monopolies raise prices. They lower wages. They reduce quality. The reason Google β which has a 90% market share in Search β sucks so bad is that they decided to make their product worse so that you would have to repeatedly search to get the information you're seeking, which creates more opportunities to show you ads:
The reason your glasses are so expensive is that one company, a French-Italian consortium called Essilor-Luxotica, bought and merged all the retailers, manufacturers, optical labs and insurers and then raised the price of glasses by 1,000%:
Companies argue that their mergers create "efficiencies." That's tech's story, for sure. Google last created a successful consumer product in 1998, when it fielded a revolutionary new search engine. Since then, virtually every in-house product it's created has tanked, but the company has managed to grow to a world-girding kraken by buying other people's companies: ad-tech, videos, maps, docs, mobile, and more.
The true efficiency of mergers isn't in companies getting better at making things that make you happy. The real purpose of boiling down a big, vibrant industry into a handful of sclerotic, inbred giants is so that they can agree on a common lobbying position, and stick to it.
Hundreds of companies are a rabble, a mob. They compete. They poach each others' best customers and best workers. They hate each other. They can't agree on anything, especially what lie they should be telling their regulators. Forced into "wasteful competition" (-P. Thiel), they must lower prices and raise wages, which leaves them with less money to spend lobbying. They can't capture their regulators.
But: stage an orgy of incestuous mergers, shrink the industry to five companies whose C-suites have all known each other all their lives, who are executors of one another's estates and godparents to one another's children, and the collective action problem vanishes. Nominal competitors suddenly start singing with one voice, demanding a unified set of privileges and exemptions from their regulators:
Without monopolization, regulatory capture would be much harder to accomplish, and much easier to halt. Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization.
And monopolization is downstream of the decision not to enforce antitrust laws.
The purpose of antitrust laws is, and always has been, to prevent monopolies. The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, and its author, Senator John Sherman, made the case for it thus:
If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.β
For 80-some years, antitrust law did exactly that. But in the 1970s, the fringe theories of a conspiratorialist named Robert Bork came to prominence, at first hesitantly under Jimmy Carter, and then with undisguised ardor and glee under Reagan:
Robert Bork claimed that monopolies were "efficient." He said that monopolies in the wild were almost never the result of cheating β rather, if a company managed to get all of us to buy its products, that was evidence that its products were the best. Bork insisted that it would be perverse to enlist the government to punish companies for making the most pleasing and successful products.
Bork was many things: a virulent racist who defended racial discrimination against Black people and a criminal who served as Richard Nixon's hatchet-man, illegally firing "disloyal" DoJ lawyers after every other Reagan official refused.
But above all, Robert Bork was a conspiracy-peddler. He didn't just disagree with the idea of the government going after monopolies β he claimed that a close reading of the country's antimonopoly laws revealed that these laws were never intended to fight monopolies. This, despite the fact that the laws plainly and clearly stated that their purpose was to fight monopolies. This, despite the fact that the bills' authors climbed to their hind legs in Congress and the Senate and gave long speeches about how their laws would fight monopolies.
Bork's theories about the beneficence and efficiency of monopolies were profoundly stupid. But Bork's theories about the meaning of America's antitrust laws were profoundly nuts. Bork insisted that up was down, water was not wet, and black was whiteβ‘.
β‘ Well, maybe not that last one.
But Bork β like so many conspiracy peddlers β was pushing on an open door. America's wealthy, would-be aristocrats loved the idea of securing monopolies and becoming "autocrats of trade." They funded Bork's theories, endowed economics chairs, sponsored conferences, and, above all, funded all-expenses-paid luxury junkets for judges to teach them about Bork's ideas. 40% of the US Federal judiciary attended one of these "Manne Seminars" and afterwards, their rulings changed to embrace Bork's pro-monopoly posture:
Conspiratorialism is downstream of traumatic institutional failures; and
Institutional failures are downstream of regulatory capture; and
Regulatory capture is downstream of monopolization; and
Monopolization is downstream of the decision not to enforce antitrust laws; and
The decision not to enforce antitrust laws was the result of a conspiracy.
The campaigns to fight "disinformation" are concerned with effects, not causes. The reason people are vulnerable to conspiratorial accounts of current affairs is that they have direct, undeniable experience of many actual conspiracies that inflicted deep harm and lasting trauma. If we want to armor the people we love against conspiratorial cults, it's not enough to argue over the implausibility of their belief that elite cabals are abusing the rest of us for fun and profit β we have to actually address the real elite cabals that really do abuse us for fun and profit.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.
I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.
The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:
Any time AI is used to predict crime β predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags β they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":
When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:
When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:
But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:
My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm β policing, health, security, customer service β we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.
AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system β from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors β is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.
All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.
AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:
For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:
In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).
So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.
(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)
I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighborβs ridiculous reason for egging my car":
The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.
According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Characterβ¦,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.
The funnel goes:
i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;
ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;
iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;
iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.
The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.
These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.
Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.
Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention β like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency β must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."
The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop β twice.
The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?
Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.β
This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."
We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.
This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car β you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.
When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."
Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.
The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable β everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:
Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."
The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.
Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:
The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:
Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances β trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes β and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.
II. Know red flags for bullshit
The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:
High-frequency posting
Emotionally charged framing
Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original
The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)
III. Don't trust screenshots
Screenshots of news stories, tweets, and other social media should come with links to the original. It's just too damned easy to fake a screenshot.
IV. "Know your platform"
It used to be that Twitter got a lot of first-person accounts from people in the thick of crises, while Facebook and Reddit contained commentary and reposts. Today, Twitter is just another aggregator. This time around, there's lots of first-person, real-time reporting coming off Telegram (it runs well on old phones and doesn't chew up batteries). Instagram is widely used in both Israel and the West Bank.
V. "Crisis actors" aren't a thing
People who attribute war images to "crisis actors" are either deluded or lying. There's plenty of ways to distort war news, but paying people to pretend to be grieving family members is essentially unheard of. Any explanation that involves crisis actors is a solid reason to permanently block that source.
VI. There's plenty of ways to verify stuff that smells fishy
TinEye, Yandex and Google Image Search are all good tools for checking "breaking" images and seeing if they're old copypasta ganked from earlier conflicts (or, you know, video-games). The fact that an image doesn't show up in one of these searches doesn't guarantee its authenticity, of course.
VII. Think before you post
Israel-Gaza is the most polluted media pool yet. Don't make it worse.
There's plenty more detail on this (especially on the use of verification tools) in Brooke Gladstone's radio segment:
The media environment sucks, and warrants skepticism and caution. But we also need to be skeptical of skepticism itself! As danah boyd started saying all the way back in 2018, weaponized media literacy leads to conspiratorialism:
Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them β they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.
It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote How To Lie With Statistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer. It's absolutely possible to lie with statistics, but it's also possible to use statistics to know the truth, as Tim Harford explains in his 2021 must-read book The Data Detective:
There's a world of difference between being misled and being brainwashed. A lot of today's worry about "disinformation" and "misinformation" has the whiff of a moral panic:
It's possible to have a nuanced view of this subject β to take steps to enure you're not being tricked without equating crude tricks like sticking a fake BBC chyron on a 10-year-old image with unstoppable mind-control:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me next weekend (Mar 30/31) in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON, then in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe! (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12), and beyond!
Last year, Ed Pierson was supposed to fly from Seattle to New Jersey on Alaska Airlines. He boarded his flight, but then he had an urgent discussion with the flight attendant, explaining that as a former senior Boeing engineer, he'd specifically requested that flight because the aircraft wasn't a 737 Max:
But for operational reasons, Alaska had switched out the equipment on the flight and there he was on a 737 Max, about to travel cross-continent, and he didn't feel safe doing so. He demanded to be let off the flight. His bags were offloaded and he walked back up the jetbridge after telling the spooked flight attendant, "I canβt go into detail right now, but I wasnβt planning on flying the Max, and I want to get off the plane."
Boeing, of course, is a flying disaster that was years in the making. Its planes have been falling out of the sky since 2019. Floods of whistleblowers have come forward to say its aircraft are unsafe. Pierson's not the only Boeing employee to state β both on and off the record β that he wouldn't fly on a specific model of Boeing aircraft, or, in some cases any recent Boeing aircraft:
And yet, for years, Boeing's regulators have allowed the company to keep turning out planes that keep turning out lemons. This is a pretty frightening situation, to say the least. I'm not an aerospace engineer, I'm not an aircraft safety inspector, but every time I book a flight, I have to make a decision about whether to trust Boeing's assurances that I can safely board one of its planes without dying.
In an ideal world, I wouldn't even have to think about this. I'd be able to trust that publicly accountable regulators were on the job, making sure that airplanes were airworthy. "Caveat emptor" is no way to run a civilian aviation system.
But even though I don't have the specialized expertise needed to assess the airworthiness of Boeing planes, I do have the much more general expertise needed to assess the trustworthiness of Boeing's regulator. The FAA has spent years deferring to Boeing, allowing it to self-certify that its aircraft were safe. Even when these assurances led to the death of hundreds of people, the FAA continued to allow Boeing to mark its own homework:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8oCilY4szc
What's more, the FAA boss who presided over those hundreds of deaths was an ex-Boeing lobbyist, whom Trump subsequently appointed to run Boeing's oversight. He's not the only ex-insider who ended up a regulator, and there's plenty of ex-regulators now on Boeing's payroll:
You don't have to be an aviation expert to understand that companies have conflicts of interest when it comes to certifying their own products. "Market forces" aren't going to keep Boeing from shipping defective products, because the company's top brass are more worried about cashing out with this quarter's massive stock buybacks than they are about their successors' ability to manage the PR storm or Congressional hearings after their greed kills hundreds and hundreds of people.
You also don't have to be an aviation expert to understand that these conflicts persist even when a Boeing insider leaves the company to work for its regulators, or vice-versa. A regulator who anticipates a giant signing bonus from Boeing after their term in office, or a an ex-Boeing exec who holds millions in Boeing stock has an irreconcilable conflict of interest that will make it very hard β perhaps impossible β for them to hold the company to account when it trades safety for profit.
It's not just Boeing customers who feel justifiably anxious about trusting a system with such obvious conflicts of interest: Boeing's own executives, lobbyists and lawyers also refuse to participate in similarly flawed systems of oversight and conflict resolution. If Boeing was sued by its shareholders and the judge was also a pissed off Boeing shareholder, they would demand a recusal. If Boeing was looking for outside counsel to represent it in a liability suit brought by the family of one of its murder victims, they wouldn't hire the firm that was suing them β not even if that firm promised to be fair. If a Boeing executive's spouse sued for divorce, that exec wouldn't use the same lawyer as their soon-to-be-ex.
Sure, it takes specialized knowledge and training to be a lawyer, a judge, or an aircraft safety inspector. But anyone can look at the system those experts work in and spot its glaring defects. In other words, while acquiring expertise is hard, it's much easier to spot weaknesses in the process by which that expertise affects the world around us.
And therein lies the problem: aviation isn't the only technically complex, potentially lethal, and utterly, obviously untrustworthy system we all have to navigate. How about the building safety codes that governed the structure you're in right now? Plenty of people have blithely assumed that structural engineers carefully designed those standards, and that these standards were diligently upheld, only to discover in tragic, ghastly ways that this was wrong:
https://www.bbc.com/news/64568826
There are dozens β hundreds! β of life-or-death, highly technical questions you have to resolve every day just to survive. Should you trust the antilock braking firmware in your car? How about the food hygiene rules in the factories that produced the food in your shopping cart? Or the kitchen that made the pizza that was just delivered? Is your kid's school teaching them well, or will they grow up to be ignoramuses and thus economic roadkill?
Hell, even if I never get into another Boeing aircraft, I live in the approach path for Burbank airport, where Southwest lands 50+ Boeing flights every day. How can I be sure that the next Boeing 737 Max that falls out of the sky won't land on my roof?
This is the epistemological crisis we're living through today. Epistemology is the process by which we know things. The whole point of a transparent, democratically accountable process for expert technical deliberation is to resolve the epistemological challenge of making good choices about all of these life-or-death questions. Even the smartest person among us can't learn to evaluate all those questions, but we can all look at the process by which these questions are answered and draw conclusions about its soundness.
Is the process public? Are the people in charge of it forthright? Do they have conflicts of interest, and, if so, do they sit out any decision that gives even the appearance of impropriety? If new evidence comes to light β like, say, a horrific disaster β is there a way to re-open the process and change the rules?
The actual technical details might be a black box for us, opaque and indecipherable. But the box itself can be easily observed: is it made of sturdy material? Does it have sharp corners and clean lines? Or is it flimsy, irregular and torn? We don't have to know anything about the box's contents to conclude that we don't trust the box.
For example: we may not be experts in chemical engineering or water safety, but we can tell when a regulator is on the ball on these issues. Back in 2019, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection sought comment on its water safety regs. Dow Chemical β the largest corporation in the state's largest industry β filed comments arguing that WV should have lower standards for chemical contamination in its drinking water.
Now, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that there are safe levels of chemical runoff in the water supply. There's a lot of water in the water supply, after all, and "the dose makes the poison." What's more, I use the products whose manufacture results in that chemical waste. I want them to be made safely, but I do want them to be made β for one thing, the next time I have surgery, I want the anesthesiologist to start an IV with fresh, sterile plastic tubing.
And I'm not a chemist, let alone a water chemist. Neither am I a toxicologist. There are aspects of this debate I am totally unqualified to assess. Nevertheless, I think the WV process was a bad one, and here's why:
That's Dow's comment to the regulator (as proffered by its mouthpiece, the WV Manufacturers' Association, which it dominates). In that comment, Dow argues that West Virginians safely can absorb more poison than other Americans, because the people of West Virginia are fatter than other Americans, and so they have more tissue and thus a better ratio of poison to person than the typical American. But they don't stop there! They also say that West Virginians don't drink as much water as their out-of-state cousins, preferring to drink beer instead, so even if their water is more toxic, they'll be drinking less of it:
Even without any expertise in toxicology or water chemistry, I can tell that these are bullshit answers. The fact that the WV regulator accepted these comments tells me that they're not a good regulator. I was in WV last year to give a talk, and I didn't drink the tap water.
It's totally reasonable for non-experts to reject the conclusions of experts when the process by which those experts resolve their disagreements is obviously corrupt and irredeemably flawed. But some refusals carry higher costs β both for the refuseniks and the people around them β than my switching to bottled water when I was in Charleston.
Take vaccine denial (or "hesitancy"). Many people greeted the advent of an extremely rapid, high-tech covid vaccine with dread and mistrust. They argued that the pharma industry was dominated by corrupt, greedy corporations that routinely put their profits ahead of the public's safety, and that regulators, in Big Pharma's pocket, let them get away with mass murder.
The thing is, all that is true. Look, I've had five covid vaccinations, but not because I trust the pharma industry. I've had direct experience of how pharma sacrifices safety on greed's altar, and narrowly avoided harm myself. I have had chronic pain problems my whole life, and they've gotten worse every year. When my daughter was on the way, I decided this was going to get in the way of my ability to parent β I wanted to be able to carry her for long stretches! β and so I started aggressively pursuing the pain treatments I'd given up on many years before.
My journey led me to many specialists β physios, dieticians, rehab specialists, neurologists, surgeons β and I tried many, many therapies. Luckily, my wife had private insurance β we were in the UK then β and I could go to just about any doctor that seemed promising. That's how I found myself in the offices of a Harley Street quack, a prominent pain specialist, who had great news for me: it turned out that opioids were way safer than had previously been thought, and I could just take opioids every day and night for the rest of my life without any serious risk of addiction. It would be fine.
This sounded wrong to me. I'd lost several friends to overdoses, and watched others spiral into miserable lives as they struggled with addiction. So I "did my own research." Despite not having a background in chemistry, biology, neurology or pharmacology, I struggled through papers and read commentary and came to the conclusion that opioids weren't safe at all. Rather, corrupt billionaire pharma owners like the Sackler family had colluded with their regulators to risk the lives of millions by pushing falsified research that was finding publication in some of the most respected, peer-reviewed journals in the world.
I became an opioid denier, in other words.
I decided, based on my own research, that the experts were wrong, and that they were wrong for corrupt reasons, and that I couldn't trust their advice.
When anti-vaxxers decried the covid vaccines, they said things that were β in form at least β indistinguishable from the things I'd been saying 15 years earlier, when I decided to ignore my doctor's advice and throw away my medication on the grounds that it would probably harm me.
For me, faith in vaccines didn't come from a broad, newfound trust in the pharmaceutical system: rather, I judged that there was so much scrutiny on these new medications that it would overwhelm even pharma's ability to corruptly continue to sell a medication that they secretly knew to be harmful, as they'd done so many times before:
But many of my peers had a different take on anti-vaxxers: for these friends and colleagues, anti-vaxxers were being foolish. Surprisingly, these people I'd long felt myself in broad agreement with began to defend the pharmaceutical system and its regulators. Once they saw that anti-vaxx was a wedge issue championed by right-wing culture war shitheads, they became not just pro-vaccine, but pro-pharma.
There's a name for this phenomenon: "schismogenesis." That's when you decide how you feel about an issue based on who supports it. Think of self-described "progressives" who became cheerleaders for the America's cruel, ruthless and lawless "intelligence community" when it seemed that US spooks were bent on Trump's ouster:
The fact that the FBI didn't like Trump didn't make them allies of progressive causes. This was and is the same entity that (among other things) tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr into killing himself:
But schismogenesis isn't merely a reactionary way of flip-flopping on issues based on reflexive enmity. It's actually a reasonable epistemological tactic: in a world where there are more issues you need to be clear on than you can possibly inform yourself about, you need some shortcuts. One shortcut β a shortcut that's failing β is to say, "Well, I'll provisionally believe whatever the expert system tells me is true." Another shortcut is, "I will provisionally disbelieve in whatever the people I know to act in bad faith are saying is true." That is, "schismogenesis."
Schismogenesis isn't a great tactic. It would be far better if we had a set of institutions we could all largely trust β if the black boxes where expert debate took place were sturdy, rectilinear and sharp-cornered.
But they're not. They're just not. Our regulatory process sucks. Corporate concentration makes it trivial for cartels to capture their regulators and steer them to conclusions that benefit corporate shareholders even if that means visiting enormous harm β even mass death β on the public:
No one hates Big Tech more than I do, but many of my co-belligerents in the war on Big Tech believe that the rise of conspiratorialism can be laid at tech platforms' feet. They say that Big Tech boasts of how good they are at algorithmically manipulating our beliefs, and attribute Qanons, flat earthers, and other outlandish conspiratorial cults to the misuse off those algorithms.
"We built a Big Data mind-control ray" is one of those extraordinary claims that requires extraordinary evidence. But the evidence for Big Tech's persuasion machines is very poor: mostly, it consists of tech platforms' own boasts to potential investors and customers for their advertising products. "We can change peoples' minds" has long been the boast of advertising companies, and it's clear that they can change the minds of customers for advertising.
Think of department store mogul John Wanamaker, who famously said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Today β thanks to commercial surveillance β we know that the true proportion of wasted advertising spending is more like 99.9%. Advertising agencies may be really good at convincing John Wanamaker and his successors, through prolonged, personal, intense selling β but that doesn't mean they're able to sell so efficiently to the rest of us with mass banner ads or spambots:
In other words, the fact that Facebook claims it is really good at persuasion doesn't mean that it's true. Just like the AI companies who claim their chatbots can do your job: they are much better at convincing your boss (who is insatiably horny for firing workers) than they are at actually producing an algorithm that can replace you. What's more, their profitability relies far more on convincing a rich, credulous business executive that their product works than it does on actually delivering a working product.
Now, I do think that Facebook and other tech giants play an important role in the rise of conspiratorial beliefs. However, that role isn't using algorithms to persuade people to mistrust our institutions. Rather Big Tech β like other corporate cartels β has so corrupted our regulatory system that they make trusting our institutions irrational.
Think of federal privacy law. The last time the US got a new federal consumer privacy law was in 1988, when Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, a law that prohibits video store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history:
It's been a minute. There are very obvious privacy concerns haunting Americans, related to those tech giants, and yet the closest Congress can come to doing something about it is to attempt the forced sale of the sole Chinese tech giant with a US footprint to a US company, to ensure that its rampant privacy violations are conducted by our fellow Americans, and to force Chinese spies to buy their surveillance data on millions of Americans in the lawless, reckless swamp of US data-brokerages:
For millions of Americans β especially younger Americans β the failure to pass (or even introduce!) a federal privacy law proves that our institutions can't be trusted. They're right:
Occam's Razor cautions us to seek the simplest explanation for the phenomena we see in the world around us. There's a much simpler explanation for why people believe conspiracy theories they encounter online than the idea that the one time Facebook is telling the truth is when they're boasting about how well their products work β especially given the undeniable fact that everyone else who ever claimed to have perfected mind-control was a fantasist or a liar, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA to pick-up artists.
Maybe people believe in conspiracy theories because they have hundreds of life-or-death decisions to make every day, and the institutions that are supposed to make that possible keep proving that they can't be trusted. Nevertheless, those decisions have to be made, and so something needs to fill the epistemological void left by the manifest unsoundness of the black box where the decisions get made.
For many people β millions β the thing that fills the black box is conspiracy fantasies. It's true that tech makes finding these conspiracy fantasies easier than ever, and it's true that tech makes forming communities of conspiratorial belief easier, too. But the vulnerability to conspiratorialism that algorithms identify and target people based on isn't a function of Big Data. It's a function of corruption β of life in a world in which real conspiracies (to steal your wages, or let rich people escape the consequences of their crimes, or sacrifice your safety to protect large firms' profits) are everywhere.
Progressives β which is to say, the coalition of liberals and leftists, in which liberals are the senior partners and spokespeople who control the Overton Window β used to identify and decry these conspiracies. But as right wing "populists" declared their opposition to these conspiracies β when Trump damned free trade and the mainstream media as tools of the ruling class β progressives leaned into schismogenesis and declared their vocal support for these old enemies of progress.
This is the crux of Naomi Klein's brilliant 2023 book Doppelganger: that as the progressive coalition started supporting these unworthy and broken institutions, the right spun up "mirror world" versions of their critique, distorted versions that focus on scapegoating vulnerable groups rather than fighting unworthy institutions:
This is a long tradition in politics: hundreds of years ago, some leftists branded antisemitism "the socialism of fools." Rather than condemning the system's embrace of the finance sector and its wealthy beneficiaries, anti-semites blame a disfavored group of people β people who are just as likely as anyone to suffer under the system:
It's an ugly, shallow, cartoon version of socialism's measured and comprehensive analysis of how the class system actually works and why it's so harmful to everyone except a tiny elite. Literally cartoonish: the shadow-world version of socialism co-opts and simplifies the iconography of class struggle. And schismogenesis β "if the right likes this, I don't" β sends "progressive" scolds after anyone who dares to criticize finance as the crux of our world's problems as popularizing "antisemetic dog-whistles."
This is the problem with "horseshoe theory" β the idea that the far right and the far left bend all the way around to meet each other:
When the right criticizes pharma companies, they tell us to "do our own research" (e.g. ignore the systemic problems of people being forced to work under dangerous conditions during a pandemic while individually assessing conflicting claims about vaccine safety, ideally landing on buying "supplements" from a grifter). When the left criticizes pharma, it's to argue for universal access to medicine and vigorous public oversight of pharma companies. These aren't the same thing:
Long before opportunistic right wing politicians realized they could get mileage out of pointing at the terrifying epistemological crisis of trying to make good choices in an age of institutions that can't be trusted, the left was sounding the alarm. Conspiratorialism β the fracturing of our shared reality β is a serious problem, weakening our ability to respond effectively to endless disasters of the polycrisis.
But by blaming the problem of conspiratorialism on the credulity of believers (rather than the deserved disrepute of the institutions they have lost faith in) we adopt the logic of the right: "conspiratorialism is a problem of individuals believing wrong things," rather than "a system that makes wrong explanations credible β and a schismogenic insistence that these institutions are sound and trustworthy."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Hypothetical AI election disinformation risks vs real AI harms
I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Feb 27) in Portland at Powell's. Then, onto Phoenix (Changing Hands, Feb 29), Tucson (Mar 9-12), and more!
You can barely turn around these days without encountering a think-piece warning of the impending risk of AI disinformation in the coming elections. But a recent episode of This Machine Kills podcast reminds us that these are hypothetical risks, and there is no shortage of real AI harms:
The algorithmic decision-making systems that increasingly run the back-ends to our lives are really, truly very bad at doing their jobs, and worse, these systems constitute a form of "empiricism-washing": if the computer says it's true, it must be true. There's no such thing as racist math, you SJW snowflake!
Nearly 1,000 British postmasters were wrongly convicted of fraud by Horizon, the faulty AI fraud-hunting system that Fujitsu provided to the Royal Mail. They had their lives ruined by this faulty AI, many went to prison, and at least four of the AI's victims killed themselves:
Tenants across America have seen their rents skyrocket thanks to Realpage's landlord price-fixing algorithm, which deployed the time-honored defense: "It's not a crime if we commit it with an app":
Housing, you'll recall, is pretty foundational in the human hierarchy of needs. Losing your home β or being forced to choose between paying rent or buying groceries or gas for your car or clothes for your kid β is a non-hypothetical, widespread, urgent problem that can be traced straight to AI.
Then there's predictive policing: cities across America and the world have bought systems that purport to tell the cops where to look for crime. Of course, these systems are trained on policing data from forces that are seeking to correct racial bias in their practices by using an algorithm to create "fairness." You feed this algorithm a data-set of where the police had detected crime in previous years, and it predicts where you'll find crime in the years to come.
But you only find crime where you look for it. If the cops only ever stop-and-frisk Black and brown kids, or pull over Black and brown drivers, then every knife, baggie or gun they find in someone's trunk or pockets will be found in a Black or brown person's trunk or pocket. A predictive policing algorithm will naively ingest this data and confidently assert that future crimes can be foiled by looking for more Black and brown people and searching them and pulling them over.
Obviously, this is bad for Black and brown people in low-income neighborhoods, whose baseline risk of an encounter with a cop turning violent or even lethal. But it's also bad for affluent people in affluent neighborhoods β because they are underpoliced as a result of these algorithmic biases. For example, domestic abuse that occurs in full detached single-family homes is systematically underrepresented in crime data, because the majority of domestic abuse calls originate with neighbors who can hear the abuse take place through a shared wall.
But the majority of algorithmic harms are inflicted on poor, racialized and/or working class people. Even if you escape a predictive policing algorithm, a facial recognition algorithm may wrongly accuse you of a crime, and even if you were far away from the site of the crime, the cops will still arrest you, because computers don't lie:
Trying to get a low-waged service job? Be prepared for endless, nonsensical AI "personality tests" that make Scientology look like NASA:
https://futurism.com/mandatory-ai-hiring-tests
Service workers' schedules are at the mercy of shift-allocation algorithms that assign them hours that ensure that they fall just short of qualifying for health and other benefits. These algorithms push workers into "clopening" β where you close the store after midnight and then open it again the next morning before 5AM. And if you try to unionize, another algorithm β that spies on you and your fellow workers' social media activity β targets you for reprisals and your store for closure.
If you're driving an Amazon delivery van, algorithm watches your eyeballs and tells your boss that you're a bad driver if it doesn't like what it sees. If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, an algorithm decides if you've taken too many pee-breaks and automatically dings you:
If this disgusts you and you're hoping to use your ballot to elect lawmakers who will take up your cause, an algorithm stands in your way again. "AI" tools for purging voter rolls are especially harmful to racialized people β for example, they assume that two "Juan Gomez"es with a shared birthday in two different states must be the same person and remove one or both from the voter rolls:
Hoping to get a solid education, the sort that will keep you out of AI-supervised, precarious, low-waged work? Sorry, kiddo: the ed-tech system is riddled with algorithms. There's the grifty "remote invigilation" industry that watches you take tests via webcam and accuses you of cheating if your facial expressions fail its high-tech phrenology standards:
All of these are non-hypothetical, real risks from AI. The AI industry has proven itself incredibly adept at deflecting interest from real harms to hypothetical ones, like the "risk" that the spicy autocomplete will become conscious and take over the world in order to convert us all to paperclips:
Whenever you hear AI bosses talking about how seriously they're taking a hypothetical risk, that's the moment when you should check in on whether they're doing anything about all these longstanding, real risks. And even as AI bosses promise to fight hypothetical election disinformation, they continue to downplay or ignore the non-hypothetical, here-and-now harms of AI.
There's something unseemly β and even perverse β about worrying so much about AI and election disinformation. It plays into the narrative that kicked off in earnest in 2016, that the reason the electorate votes for manifestly unqualified candidates who run on a platform of bald-faced lies is that they are gullible and easily led astray.
But there's another explanation: the reason people accept conspiratorial accounts of how our institutions are run is because the institutions that are supposed to be defending us are corrupt and captured by actual conspiracies:
The party line on conspiratorial accounts is that these institutions are good, actually. Think of the rebuttal offered to anti-vaxxers who claimed that pharma giants were run by murderous sociopath billionaires who were in league with their regulators to kill us for a buck: "no, I think you'll find pharma companies are great and superbly regulated":
Institutions are profoundly important to a high-tech society. No one is capable of assessing all the life-or-death choices we make every day, from whether to trust the firmware in your car's anti-lock brakes, the alloys used in the structural members of your home, or the food-safety standards for the meal you're about to eat. We must rely on well-regulated experts to make these calls for us, and when the institutions fail us, we are thrown into a state of epistemological chaos. We must make decisions about whether to trust these technological systems, but we can't make informed choices because the one thing we're sure of is that our institutions aren't trustworthy.
Ironically, the long list of AI harms that we live with every day are the most important contributor to disinformation campaigns. It's these harms that provide the evidence for belief in conspiratorial accounts of the world, because each one is proof that the system can't be trusted. The election disinformation discourse focuses on the lies told β and not why those lies are credible.
That's because the subtext of election disinformation concerns is usually that the electorate is credulous, fools waiting to be suckered in. By refusing to contemplate the institutional failures that sit upstream of conspiracism, we can smugly locate the blame with the peddlers of lies and assume the mantle of paternalistic protectors of the easily gulled electorate.
But the group of people who are demonstrably being tricked by AI is the people who buy the horrifically flawed AI-based algorithmic systems and put them into use despite their manifest failures.
As I've written many times, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, but we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"
The most visible victims of AI disinformation are the people who are putting AI in charge of the life-chances of millions of the rest of us. Tackle that AI disinformation and its harms, and we'll make conspiratorial claims about our institutions being corrupt far less credible.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
