When Artificial Intelligence Takes Over, We'll Say, "You didn't take it. I gave it to you."

One of the earliest posts I wrote on this blog as about how technology -- particularly drones -- have put us under the the gaze of the state in a way we thought was only possible in science fiction: "Drones, 1984, and Foucault's Panopticon." I've written a lot more about drones, 1984, Foucault, and surveillance in subsequent posts.

Since that time, I've also internalized what I understand to be Foucault's central premise: the temptation to have power over other people is enormous, and it's particularly difficult to resist when it is accomplished in the guise of something else, something that we tend to consider very positive -- observing, comprehending, recording, organizing.

That has spiritual implications at the level of individual experience -- the observing, comprehending, recording, organizing that we do as we seek to navigate the external world -- and that is something I plan to write about in a future post.

But it also has implications for the ways in which we are subjected to observing, comprehending, recording, organizing. I've become more and more aware of the way that the many tiny bits of data that we now slough off each day, like so many dead skin cells, add up  -- in the hands of large computer operators (Big Data) -- to terrifyingly complete and intimate pictures of our personal lives. 

Some time in late 2020, I watched the documentary, The Social Dilemma, on Netflix: "This documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations." The whole documentary is insightful, and the commentary by Jaron Lanier is particularly good. My key takeaway from that documentary was: don't talk about "if" artificial intelligence (A.I.) takes over, as if it is something in the distant future; AI is already operating on us in the form of the social networks that we participate in day after day.

What I've particularly struggled with since then is this: how can we ordinary people use social media to benefit us, without all of it falling into the maw of A.I.?

It made me think of this picture that one of my kids drew when they were about three (above).

(At the time it was amusing, and my main feeling was pride at how clever my child was. It reminded me of Grendel, and I wondered if they had been reading Beowulf behind my back. Now I'm more terrified .... )

The thing that is so painful is that, each day as any of us interacts with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin -- or even this blog -- not to mention every Google search or credit card purchase, we are not being strong-armed into coughing up our deepest secrets -- we're willingly surrendering them! (To quote Roy in the movie Matchstick Men, "You didn't take it. I gave it to you.")

So, yes, Foucault ... power, observing, comprehending, recording, organizing. Yes: drones. Yes: Big Brother; yes: surveillance. 

But maybe the BIG question we each need to ask ourselves when we wake up each morning is:

"How much – and what type – of data will I surrender today?"

2016: Why was everyone reading these posts?

Posts on nuclear disarmament, the global peace movement, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), social justice, and more.

Well, okay, not everyone . . . but a lot of people read an unusual combination of posts on Scarry Thoughts on 2016. Here's what I'm discovering . . . .

Can "Lutheran" Be a
#BlackLivesMatter Denomination?

Three Popular Posts

The post that lit up the most was a report on a letter about the need for anti-racism work, and for examining white privilege, within one of the mainline Protestant denominations in the US: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

(See below for two other ELCA-related posts in my 2016 top ten.)

Somewhat surprisingly, the second most frequently read post was from three years ago: "Ownlife" - A Notion Too Dangerous for the State to Tolerate? I think the reason it continues to strike a chord with people is that people feel life accelerating, and their personal space shrinking. This become terrifying in an age of big data and government surveillance.

Drones, 1984, and
Foucault's Panopticon

And in a related development . . . 

The third most frequently read post is even older: it was one of the first posts I ever wrote, back in 2010.

I'm not sure whether so many people read it because they're concerned about drones, or because they are disciples of Foucault, or because they are realizing we live in a surveillance state. Maybe all three.


Nuclear Disarmament

I have written a lot on the need for nuclear disarmament in recent years. Four posts attracted a lot of attention:

Meetings in DC in September, 2016, led me to write NUKES: Your Call to Your Congressman Matters.

What Would a Nuclear
Weapon Do to Chicago?
(Go ahead, guess . . . ).

A post from 2 years continues to help people the grasp the terror of what nuclear weapons promise to do where they, themselves, live: What Would a Nuclear Weapon Do to Chicago? (Go ahead, guess . . . ).

And a post from my trip last year to the cities where atom bombs were used: Nagasaki: Impressions.

People continue to use this page to learn about my sister's book: Reviews of "Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom" by Elaine Scarry .

(A lot more to come on this in 2017.)

PEACE DAY 2016: What comes first?
Demilitarization? or Development?

Global Peace Movement

This past year, I wrote a number of posts related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the peace movement.

I have a lot of work to do in the coming year to develop ideas that will be helpful to the global peace movement.


More on Church and ELCA

In addition to the #BlackLivesMatter post mentioned above, people read two other posts a lot:

ELCA Resolution on Palestine / Israel: What Does It Mean for Us?

"Personal Success Story"? "White Privilege"? or Both?

I have high hopes that we are going to see exciting things in the ELCA and other denominations in 2017.



Please share this post with others . . . .

Selected Scarry Thoughts

I'm currently living in Berkeley, CA. Below are some of the issues I'm working on.

Anyone who has had to write a speech knows that the hardest part is to land on the main idea. Once you've got that right, the rest practically writes itself.

(See "The way to respond to ISIS is not through violence." )

What I'm feeling particularly energized about is the potential for thousands of people who have decided that we can really say no to ALL war to become active participants in spreading this good news.

(See News Worth Spreading: "There IS An Alternative to War!" )





There is an eerie similarity between events in the book Paul Revere's Ride and events in our world today. I'm thinking particularly of how a network of mass resistance springs into action.

(See American Rebellion: Just Think What They Would've Done with Twitter!)












One thing that is clear to me is that the way community forms on Twitter bears the closest resemblance to the characteristics of community formation that we, as activists, need to work with from now on.

(See Twitter Community for Activism: What Do We Understand?)



"Could it possibly be that we're not supposed to try to hang onto people? Is is possible that we're supposed to prepare people, and then let them go?" 

(See What I Learned in Church (7 Habits) )













The panopticon was a prison design that reversed the old paradigm, in which prisoners were stored away, "out of sight, out of mind," and instead arrayed them in a way in which they could be observed as efficiently as possible by the fewest number of managers.

(See Drones, 1984, and Foucault's Panopticon)

The biggest idea coming out of the 2013 Drone Summit? We will only deal successfully with the crimes being committed using drones when we understand them as part of the much larger war against communities of color . . . .

(See Drone Gaze, Drone Injury: The War on Communities of Color )

I believe Easter is God's gift to humanity of victory over death, hopelessness and frailty, and I believe that God is alive and in our midst. The witness of the Guantanamo lawyers has confirmed me in those beliefs.

(See Easter Victory: The Guantanamo Lawyers )






So as I watched Ziggy for the first time last night, I asked myself, "What is it? What is it? What is the frisson that one feels? It's part charisma, part sexuality, partly the thrill of gender-bending, partly adolescent rebellion . . . . But what is it that Ziggy did (and does) for so many people?" (It can't be a single thing, can it?)

(See "You're NOT alone!" (Ziggy the Subversive) )

Faced with chorus of voices saying, "Isn't it time for you to tone it down? Can't you be more reasonable? What is it you want, anyway?" Jesus kept right on doing what he was doing. And that was a sign to us about how to live our lives . . . .

(See WWJD? Occupy! )







This past fall, a friend said to me, "It's good that you came to the demonstration; it would be even better if you brought a sign!" That was the start of something I've enjoyed a lot. And a lot of those signs have found their way into my blog posts.

(See Scarry Signs )






How might an uprising against inequality and dismantling the military-industrial complex dovetail?

(See WHERE'S MINE? Inequality in the US and the Military-Industrial Complex )

More than anyone else, the beneficiaries of permawar are the politicians who thrive on the power to make and control wars. The number one prime beneficiary is the President, as well as presidential aspirants. But it doesn't end there . . . .

(See J'ACCUSE: The Beneficiaries of Permawar )




 

I don't think Alanna and I ever talked about what it must be like to be trying to escape a shower of sparks and hot ash. But she seemed to know that the sparks and hot ash are too important a part of the picture to be left out.


(See The Children Are Waiting )

I'm marveling at the adjacency of a piece of public art -- one with a very clear message about the risk of human ambition and self-absorption and heedlessness -- to the center of political power in the city of Chicago.

(See NUCLEAR WEAPONS: Who will bring us down to earth? )

Hibakusha is a word that has traditionally been used to refer to people affected by the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagaski.  It is now being broadened to recognize the many additional victims of acute affects of nuclear radiation (including fallout from tests and radioactivity from mining and processing). In fact, we are all subject to the impact and threat of nuclear radiation spread indiscriminately by nations and corporations.

(See HIROSHIMA: What does it mean to say, "We are ALL 'hibakusha'?")






Before there was the NATO5 -- or the NATO3 -- there was NATOin5. People tweeted their summaries of NATO in just 5 words (hashtag: #NATOin5). It all started with an interview between Eric Zorn and Andy Thayer about NATO ....

(See #NATOin5)

At the end of the first day of the 2012 CODEPINK drone conference, I came to a realization: the fundamental problem that we had all gathered to address is that drones render killing 100% invisible. And as long as the killing is invisible, we lose the most powerful tool we have for fighting the killing: the disgust and outrage of the general public.

(See Make Drone Killing 100% VISIBLE!)

Cook County Jail is the perfect example of the nationwide injustice that Michelle Alexander described in her groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration, focused principally one people of color, in which "crimes" (often related to drug possession or other low-level offenses) become the mechanism for entrapping people in a cycle of incarceration that is brutalizing and often begins a downward spiral of lifetime discrimination.

(See Free Them All )

 Years later, during the time I was busily traveling to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, and many other places, I had occasion one day to flip open my (real) passport, and all the extension pages, filled with visa stamps, cascaded out. The memory of Expo 67 and my "globetrotting" came rushing back to me . . .

(See O Canada! (We'll always have "Expo" . . . . ))

Ever since I went there to study Chinese as a junior in college, I've considered Taiwan my "second home."


(See Taipei c. 1979 )





 


What people in Asia (and others) have seen for the past century is that something is happening in the Pacific, and it's being driven in part by advances in naval (and, subsequently, aviation and electronics) technology, and in part by powerful nations (principally, but not limited to, the U.S.) proximate to the area.

(See The Imperialized Pacific: What We Need to Understand)

Oil companies are valued by the market based on their reserves. The problem with this approach is that the total reserves claimed by the oil companies is FIVE TIMES what can possibly be burned without driving up the temperature of the atmosphere up by a catastrophic amount and, as McKibben puts it, "breaking the planet." How can the value of oil companies be a function of reserves that can never be used?

(See The REALLY Big Short: The Jig is Up with Oil Companies)





 

Eventually, in large part due to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the United States was converted from a country in which a small number of people thought slavery needed to be ended into a country determined to act to end slavery. This literary work took the movement wide, and it took it deep.

Why is a novel an important tool for creative resistance?


(See Creative Resistance 101: Uncle Tom's Cabin )


 


A campaign exists to bring about a democratically-elected Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) in Chicago. The campaign would involve the people in electing the watchers of the police, and put the ultimate control of (and responsibility for) the police in the hands of the citizens of Chicago.

(See Does a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) need to be part of a "new plan of Chicago"? )
 

When Chicagoans fully succeed in fully connecting the dots -- especially to the crimes being committed in their name with their tax dollars and the weapons produced by their favored corporate citizen, Boeing -- I think there will be some new and different phone calls taking place . . .

(See What's New in Chicago: Connecting the Dots - US Aid, Boeing Weapons, Gaza Massacre, Chicago Complicity )








Steven Salaita has forced us to speak quite openly about three rather distinct things that get treated (incorrectly) as if they were the same thing: the state of Israel (and whether you criticize it or support it); the ideology of Zionism (and whether you criticize it or support it); and the religion of Judaism (and whether or not you share in its values and beliefs).

(See "What good is a tweet?" (The Packing and Unpacking of Meaning and the Steven Salaita Case) )

For the members of this congregation,

who will continue gathering as a people of God in a new place,
that today will mark not only the end of an era
but also the beginning of new opportunities for worship and service.

(See A Prayer for St. Luke's (Annotated and Illustrated) )

PROBLEM: How does an entire country exorcise a national delusion?

It suddenly occurs to me that everyone in the US should be studying the behavior of England toward India, and asking ourselves, "What might this tell people in the US about coming to our senses?"

The Sikh parade at the Gateway to India on the occasion of the departure
of British troops from India on 28 February 1948. (Source: Wikipedia)

Long ago, my sister Elaine told me of two statements made by the poet Stephen Spender when he was lecturing at the University of Connecticut, both concerning E.M. Forster.

The first is that Forster was the kind of person who you thought of when you were wrestling with a profound moral problem.  You would be lying awake at three in the morning, and you would ask yourself, What would Forster say about this . . . ?

The second is that Forster's novel A Passage to India changed public opinion in Britain overnight when it came out in 1924.

E. M. Forster, by Dora Carrington
(Source: Wikipedia)

I recently re-watched the 1984 David Lean film based on the book. I found it entertaining, and it certainly showed the racism and imperialism of the British in India. But I didn't quite see it as earth-shaking.

Then I picked up the book itself, and read it carefully.  I was particularly intrigued by the role of the one character in the book who seemed un-infected with ideas of racial and cultural superiority, or by the desire to enjoy power.

I hope people will read the book. (I've appended some study questions below.)

A Passage to India is about a delusion. It's about a specific delusion troubling one single character in the book, but its larger message is that somehow an entire country had let itself be taken in by a delusion about race and culture and power. And it reminds that -- before too much longer -- something was done about it by the British, at least in part, at least with respect to India.

Of course, the departure of the British from India in 1947 was the consequence of many forces, and most of the time we think of the activism that occurred in the years immediately leading up to their departure, the Quit India Movement led by Gandhi. But what was done along the way to prepare the ground?

At a time when the US is reaping the consequences of decades of violence and dominance it has inflicted on Iraq and other countries of the Mideast and South Asia, does A Passage to India hold clues for an exorcism of the US national delusion?

At a time when the US is waking up to the fact that black lives matter, is A Passage to India one resource to be used in spurring what will certainly be a long, difficult course of change?


Related Posts

The United States is like that alcoholic family member, for whom every circumstance is an excuse to hit the bottle. Except, with the US, the bottle is violence.

(See It's Time for the United States to Stop Hitting the Bottle)

Anyone who has had to write a speech knows that the hardest part is to land on the main idea. Once you've got that right, the rest practically writes itself.

(See "The way to respond to ISIS is not through violence." )





Maybe a good next step is to read Coates' book and sit with it . . . listening to what comes up . . . but not jumping immediately into "solving."

(See On Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates (A Confession))

Eventually, in large part due to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the United States was converted from a country in which a small number of people thought slavery needed to be ended into a country determined to act to end slavery. This literary work took the movement wide, and it took it deep.

Why is a novel an important tool for creative resistance?


(See Creative Resistance 101: Uncle Tom's Cabin )




Study Questions for A Passage to India

(1) Mrs. Moore becomes a symbol in the book. What does she represent? (Why?) ... How important is this symbolism to the book? ... Did this symbolism feel convincing to you?

(2) Where does Mrs. Moore "go"? (Something seems to change. What is it?)

(3) Forster depicts the social and interpersonal reality of institutionalized domination. How "new" (revealing) do you suppose this was to the British public in 1924? ... What is special about the way a novel is able to illuminate this?

(4) Does Aziz feel real to you? How so? ... Relative to his subjugation by the British, is he just a "dreamer"?

(5) Do you think Forster understands/respects Indian culture? (Is it necessary to this undertaking that he do so?)

(6) Where's the hope? (Does it lie in the behavior of some individuals? Does it lie in a political idea?)

(7) Michel Foucault and Edward Said both make the point that observing (and describing, and related activities) is concomitant with power dominance. In this novel, the observer becomes the observed. What does this bring up for you?

(8) Fielding points out the distinction between Adela's interest in "India" and interest (or liking for) actual Indians. What does this bring up for you?

(9) There's scant reference to organized Christianity (particularly missionaries) in the book. Does the book bring up anything for you about mission work in new contexts?

(10) Having now read A Passage to India . . . what will you do differently?

Drones, ISIS, and Permawar

 Let's be clear: there will always be an "ISIS" out there.

The Obama administration had no sooner re-entered the Iraq War, ordering air strikes in northern Iraq against ISIS, than it announced that it "needed" to send the military into Syria.

Oh, we're not doing anything "risky" in Syria - just having a look. In other words, using spy planes and drones to get visual control over even more of the Middle East.

The U.S. narrative goes something like this:

* Somebody "bad" (e.g. ISIS) is doing bad stuff.

* The U.S. wants to "help" -- without overcommitting. We'll just start with a few advisers (to instruct, not to fight) and a few drones (to survey, not to kill).

* One thing leads to another and there's yet another fight. (Lucky we were there . . . )

Does it every occur to us that we've got the narrative (and the causality) backwards? That the truth is something like this?

* Permanent war is what suits us.

* All we need is the next excuse for more war.

* To find an excuse, we need "eyes" there. (Send in the drones.)

* Any bad actor will do as a reason for drone surveillance.

Once again, I return to the wisdom of Michel Foucault. Total surveillance is not just playing an incidental or supporting role in total state control and permanent war. Total surveillance is the infallible and essential heart of total state control and permanent war.


Related posts

In the old order of things, power places itself on display, and hopes that the population sees fit to obey. In the new order of things, power compels every member of the population to display himself or herself . . .  In the new order of things, the courts are bypassed and the instruments of discipline -- observe, classify, examine -- run rampant.

(See "Surveiller et Punir" Indeed!)

The U.S. can get more "bang for the buck" out of each pair of boots it puts on the ground, because -- through the magic of robotics -- it can back up those boots with Hellfire missiles and 500-lb. bombs. For the folks back home, it helps maintain the illusion that the U.S. isn't really intervening in a way that risks escalation. For the population of the affected areas of Iraq, it helps maintain the balance of terror -- because those armed drones are just part of a much larger fleet of drones that is patrolling the skies over Baghdad.  ("Is that drone overhead aiming . . . or just 'looking'?" From the ground, one has to assume they're all aiming . . . . )

(See Armed Drones Over Iraq: A Force Multiplier (Which Is Precisely Why They Are So Dangerous) )


The United States perpetuates a state of permanent war. The names change -- hell, sometimes they change by just a single letter -- but the result is the same. Call it "permawar."

(See #Permawar) 

Why U.S. Society is Caving in to the Lure of Wall-to-Wall Surveillance

I was reuning with high school friends last week. One of them is now a principal in a suburban elementary school. He loves his work -- and I can't think of a better person to be shaping young lives.

Over a diner breakfast one morning, he said, "You know, Joe, we now have cameras throughout the school. So when a parent calls and says their kid had a problem, we can pull up the video and see exactly what happened." He told me that many schools installed camera systems in the wake of the Newtown shootings. (See for instance Schools beef up security after Newtown; cameras, panic buttons installed)

For him, as a principal, total visibility into the school is great. (Just imagine trying to settle a he-said, she-said dispute without being able to go back to replay.)

And the technology supports crisis management, if that should become necessary. (Local police are able to link in to the system.)

Of course, there are limits. There are no cameras in the bathrooms. (Yet.)

My friend is aware of my work on the issues of surveillance and drones. We talked about some of the philosophical and ethical issues. In general, the children in an elementary school are assumed to require the oversight and direction of school staff, so it is not unreasonable to have adults watching the children. On the other hand . . . .

I proposed a thought experiment: "Can you envision a situation in which a parent came to you about an issue, and you might elect to not make use of the video record? What would it be like to engage the people involved in resolving the conflict without being impacted by that video?"

(I think that my proposal was stimulated by the fact that what had been really interesting to me was listening to his descriptions of engaging with young boys who were engaging in troublesome behavior. As he recounted the way he talked to them, I thought, "He is not coming at them from a position of power and threat; he's using empathy, humor, modeling.")

We talked about the work of Michel Foucault, and his insights about how observation -- especially total observation -- is the tip of the iceberg in a system of one-way control. From the time I started focusing on the problem of drones -- about four years ago -- the work of Foucault and the alarm he raised about the "panopticon" society has been in the front of my mind.

How does someone who holds in his hands the power to see everything resist the temptation to control, and instead focus on the need to understand?

This conversation helped crystallized for me the broad insight: "Surveillance is useful and also threatening."

I hope a large number of people will take this up and struggle with it.


Here's more on the issue as it relates to schools: "Privacy vs. Security: Are you prepared for the thorny issues surrounding student surveillance?" by David Rapp in Scholastic. 


Related posts

The panopticon was a prison design that reversed the old paradigm, in which prisoners were stored away, "out of sight, out of mind," and instead arrayed them in a way in which they could be observed as efficiently as possible by the fewest number of managers.

(See Drones, 1984, and Foucault's Panopticon)

In the old order of things, power places itself on display, and hopes that the population sees fit to obey. In the new order of things, power compels every member of the population to display himself or herself . . .  In the new order of things, the courts are bypassed and the instruments of discipline -- observe, classify, examine -- run rampant.

(See "Surveiller et Punir" Indeed!)



A large number of people are marked for exclusion and deprivation -- and worse -- because they have characteristics that are susceptible to the whole apparatus of power:  they are easily recognizable as  NOT "normal" or "right" or "acceptable" . . . under the gaze of surveillance this condition is recorded and propagated . . . for perpetual recording and processing within the data centers of power . . . accompanied by intermittent acts of physical and cultural injury -- random, senseless -- to reinforce their unshakeable status. 

(See Drone Gaze, Drone Injury: The War on Communities of Color)

Re-reading George Orwell's 1984 recently made me see at least 15 ways 2013 is like the world he describes in the book . . . .

See 2013 = 1984 ?