DK_en 1x04 - Twilight of the gods

Episode first aired on October 27, 2017. Listen to the audio on Spreaker.com

Music: Wagner --Entrance of the gods in Valhalla, 10" then keep in background till next pause YouTube

Do you remember a while ago, when the future of the world was bright and firmly in the hands of these XXI century Olympian gods licensing their digital fire to us poor humans? They found out a user license is so more convenient than a gift, no more need for that pesky Prometheus to break their monopoly.

You may remember Twitter and the social networks were toppling dictatorships and assorted unwanted governments throughout Northern Africa, Google would Artificial Intelligence everything thanks to its intimate knowledge of us, Facebook was creating nothing less than a single worldwide community (word of Zuck I) and Mark Zuckerberg himself was becoming partial to presidential ambitions.

And think what a rad prez he'll be, so young, so disruptive, enough of those oldies screwing everything up. And then flying cars, groceries-delivering drones, robots working in our place but hey, who gives a damn, we'll all have Universal Basic Income, and the Singularity will come any day now and we'll be immortal, man.

The only thing missing may have been the mention of rivers of milk and honey, but I may have overlooked those and anyway that's so passé.

DEEP BREATH

How. Times. Change.

Music: Wagner --Sigfried Funeral March, 10" then in background till next pause
YouTube

Today, while we still have to understand what its business model is, Twitter proves its disruptive worth by (rolling drums) proposing to double the length of tweets. That is: we started from a meaningless self-imposed limit and now we change it. Just like that, for the sheer unadulterated hell of it: aren't we just too cool?

In the meanwhile, Twitter has become the kind of place where white supremacist propaganda is just fine, but if a female victim of harassment tweets a heartfelt "fuck you" to a male witness who claims he saw and heard nothing then she, the victim, gets her account suspended for 24 hours. Because you don't say "fuck you" on Twitter, it's so unladylike. I'm referring of course to Rose McGowan and Ben Affleck in the recent Weinstein scandal.

The same happens in Facebook, where a sentence like "white men are assholes" is hate speech, but one like "poor black kids should sit at the back of the bus" is not. And dare not publish a pic of a statue showing a dick or, god forbid, female nipples.

Says who? Says the Community Rules, that secret text only Facebook can see and change as it pleases. So much for the community.

As if this were not enough, Facebook must appear before the Congress and Senate Intelligence Commissions in the US to explain how on Earth some actors who would appear linked to the Russian government have been able to have an active role in the presidential election by buying hundreds of thousands of dollars in targeted electoral ads.

Of course no one is asking how Facebook and all other social platforms could lobby their way out of any regulation concerning political advertising. Facebook and the platforms lobbied well, but I wonder why they were so keen to gain this particular privilege.

That Facebook could be a powerful political tool was well known at least since the first Obama election. But as long as Republicans were deemed too dumb to use social networks for political propaganda, everything was fine. The Obama campaign was praised for running the most social-network-oriented election ever.

Then Trump won.

And all of a sudden, everybody understood that covert persuasion is OK only as long as you are the only one around who can pull it off.

Now not a day goes by without somebody complaining for Facebook's ability to target any demographic and any subset of the population. And not because Facebook's targeting does not work but because it does, and we all have had ample opportunity to understand what a shitty idea it was in the first place.

The West has been lambasting China, Russia, Turkey and whoever dared to assert state control over the social networks; we simply could not tolerate that.

Now the US are waking up to the fact that some level of state control is actually necessary, and the West falls in line.

For all these years, and with all the money that investors poured on social media, no one in the progressive West noticed that Facebook's campaigns are not only highly targeted, but also completely compartmentalized.

Facebook is a coin-operated propaganda machine where no one outside a campaign can know what the campaign is about. This is the what "dark posts" are all about. For some reason, no one has felt the need to question it until now

The intrinsically subversive nature of dark posts was there for anybody to see, but no one cared. Yes, Facebook was a propaganda machine, but it was our propaganda machine. And we are the good guys, we'd never use it for anything else than business as usual in mass media, like selling more or toppling the odd undesirable government.

As long as Barak Obama won the presidency by betting on social network audience, everything was nice and dandy. It is not by chance that Hillary Clinton ran the most social-network-oriented campaign in history.

It took Trump's election to understand that putting together hypertargeting, compartementalised opaque communication and complete absence of oversight was not the idea of the century, socially speaking.

Trump spent most of his money playing the foul-mouthed buffoon to traditional media. And, like with Berlusconi before him, traditional media repaid the buffoon with unlimited free coverage. Whatever issue Ms. Clinton wanted to bring to the table, all the media talked about was Trump's latest act.

By the end of summer, political pundits were singing Ms. Clinton's manifest destiny. At some point Nate Silver gave her victory a probability of 98%, if I remember well.

Then Trump won. He won by spending half the money that Clinton did, and by betting on mainstream media, plus a little investment for invisible, highly compartmentalised campaigns on social networks, just enough to secure the unconditional support of white suprematist of all denominations and the tactical demotivation of black democrats in key swing states and counties, not a difficult task with Clinton as an opponent.

And yet, even this was not enough to question the political role of social networks. Luckily, the Democrats' inability to accept they had bet on a weak candidate bore excellent fruit, politically speaking: nothing less than a Russian plot to subvert US democracy.

Apparently, actors that can be linked to the Russian government would have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in social network campaigns aimed at tipping the scale in favor of Trump.

This is an election that cost 1 billion 461 million dollars (source Federal Election Committee), of which 563million800.000 spent by Ms. Clinton, and 333 million 100 thousand spent by Mr. Trump.

From a financial point of view, what the Russian did was troll the predestined winner, but it's enough.

Now, the US has been having a, so to say, active role in my country's elections for the past 70 years. It's also a matter of historical record that the US meddled with the political process in about 60 different countries, and that's just after WWII.

Just ask anybody in America or the Middle East, or the Far East, what they think of foreign political interference. That's America the continent, not the country that names itself after it.

So, the same US that poured 5 billion dollars into government change in the Ukraine, that very same US find out they are not the only ones who can use social networks for political propaganda.

All of a sudden, unrestrained social networks become a problem, and everybody is asking for some form of regulation, especially when it comes to political advertising.

About effing time.

As for presidential ambitions, wealth has allowed Mr. Zuckerberg to rediscover the virtues of religion and copywriting. This is the same Zuckerberg that in thriftier times proclaimed himself proudly atheist and once famously dubbed his users "dumb fucks".

Of course, a god and a copywriter are useful to a political career, but when it comes to political stature, Mr. Zuckerberg is still capable of choosing Puerto Rico ravaged by the hurricane for a tour in his Augmented Reality when he can show off, have a laugh and high-five a female colleague. I daresay we are far from the decency required of a small-town clerk, but let's not give up hope, even George W. Bush made it president in the end.

That is, if we were inclined to think Mr. Zuckerberg anything else than a useful idiot in the hands of his investors. We have already seen the man can even wear a suit if it's the smart thing to do, and I have little doubt that, come election season, he'll fall in line and start walking the walk and talking the talk, like a good soldier.

In the meantime, anybody who cares to know is finding out that the overhyped singularity is only a technological version for rich white men of a millenarian cult.
Basically, it's the Matrix for billionaires but without the Kung Fu.

Assuming it's possible at all, it will be about the rich enjoying electronic eternity, while the rest of us make ends meet on a depleted planet with our Universal Basic Income, just to make it clear we are useless even as workforce, with the exceptions of the lucky few of us required to keep the datacenters shipshape.

And Uber, that just the other day was the paragon of cool, is starting to appear for what it is: a thin layer of piecework exploitation spread on a company whose core business is avoiding regulation, taxes, and sexual harassment lawsuits.

So what about Google, then? Google is trying to make everyone forget it's just as sexist as the next Hollywood producer, while its subsidiaries remind us that the only business model in town is grabbing personal data for free, in return for the marvels the Artificial Intelligences will extract from it. Eventually. Maybe. And anyway for a price. Because of course, what's the difference between playing Go and diagnose medical patients or writing legally-binding contracts. Or, you know, driving a car.

After twenty years of acclaim and dewy-eyed interviewers, the disruptor generation is showing its real face: people who had a two-cent idea but the right connections.

People who can invent the Juicero, a 400$ juice extractor that only works on proprietary packets of pre-cut fruit. Or Lyft, a bus system but only for the well-off. Or even Theranos: a company that boasts extra-low-cost blood exams that rises to a 9 billion dollar evaluation, before somebody notices the disruptive, proprietary tests simply do not exist, they are bought from competitors and resold.

A two cent idea, a few dozen million in venture capital and, bingo!, your intellectually unencumbered face suddenly becomes the very icon of the revolutionary youth fighting the evil forces of reaction.

All this, of course, not without lampooning those who instead of having a wonderful two-cent idea spend their time getting an education, or those who insisted that thinking should come before coding.
Let these guys sweat their degrees, they'll come in handy and cheap once the two-cent idea needs some actual work.

What should have been a new world is no different from brokers artificially inflating a stock waiting for some dumb buyer comes around. The only difference is that Wall Street is Evil, while startuppers are cool.

What should have been a knowledge economy is simply selling attention to advertisers, stuff that was already stale before personal computers came around.

Anything left? Oh, of course, Artificial Intelligence. Well, regarding Artificial Intelligence we are discovering two things:

1. Artificial Intelligence is a cool marketing name for backpropagation over Neural networks
2. backprop is a 30-year-old idea that is good for some things and bad for others.

and that's just for the technical side.

For the operational side, the myth of the Great Startupper, of the Great White Programmer, the one to "move fast and break things" to use the immortal words of Mark Zuckerberg, that myth gave us a generation of coders, not programmers. People who will type first and think later. And the result is that you can't throw a stone without hitting a conference on algorithmic bias and "Can we teach ethics to machines?" or some other technoethics babble, when the real issue is that ethics should be a programmer's quality in the first place, because you can only program what you are.

Feeling depressed? Why? Your life does not end the moment when you start calling bullshit, it begins anew.

At some point you wake up to the fact that he was not dark and tormented and she was never an indomitable free spirit: they were just common assholes after all, and you wasted precious years on them.

That is the moment when you can finally start looking for a decent partner.

These guys are not gods, never have been. They're just slobs like any of us, lucky enough to make it rich and now trying to get down in history through their hagiography.

But this is what the resistance is about: piercing the bubble, breaking the mirror, deactivating the reality distortion field. We are already witnessing the twilight of the gods, and we will see their end.

Now, don't get me wrong: twenty years from now Google, Facebook and friends will still be awash in money, and not one of these startup stars will ever have to work a single day ever. But we have passed peak disruption, sense is slowing seeping back into things.

Those who only yesterday were gods walking the Earth no longer hold the future in their hands. Which is terrific news: it means we can start to dream a new one.

A different future, based on something more than uncontrolled trafficking of personal data. A future that, quite simply, creates distributed wealth and not just a handful of billionaires.

A future that rewards production over rent, a future where ethics is demanded of creators, before we expect it in products.

A future where the financial incentives reward those who tackle real problems, not those who conceive new ways to make people click on ads.

It's a long road, but now we can see it's there.