POSIWID

Explaining Layoffs

2025-10-30T19:07:00.005+00:00

Earlier this year, I posted (not for the first time) an important question How soon might humans be replaced at work. Recent layoffs from Amazon, Salesforce and other tech companies might seem to provide an answer to this question, especially as these companies have explicitly blamed AI for making people redundant.

However, other explanations are available, and Danielle Kaye's article The AI job cuts are here - or are they? includes several sceptical voices, noting that business has always experienced cycles of hiring and firing. Management may be happy to take the credit for the former while avoiding taking responsibility for the latter, thus AI may provide a convenient excuse. Furthermore, explanations of this kind are designed for several different audiences, including investors, customers, and the surviving workforce. Employees who remain may get the message that their jobs are also at risk unless they come to terms with the corporate appetite for AI. Amazon employees themselves are protesting this - see www.amazonclimatejustice.org (HT Karen Hao).

After I originally posted this, Robert Amstrong made a similar point in the FT. Putting lay-offs down to AI sounds better than saying we need to keep margins high so we’re sacking some low performers and politically safer than saying unpredictable Trump tariff policy means we are hiring less young people.

Meanwhile tech companies themselves have a vested interest in hyping the value (or potential value) of AI, therefore claiming to have gained productivity benefits from their own internal AI deployments. For further scepticism on this point, see recent articles by Lindsay Clarke (who was also quoted in my February 2025 post).

Update: A couple of US senators, one from each main party, apparently convinced by the AI ate our jobs narrative, have introduced a bill entitled AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act. This would require companies and government agencies to report on the number of layoffs that can be attributed to automation. Brandon Vigliarolo notes the difficulty of separating one layoff cause from another, so there may be more than a hint of sarcasm when he suggests that Hawley and Warner's bill may become essential.

Robert Armstrong, Lay-offs and AI (Financial Times, 3 November 2025) HT Rachel Coldicutt

Lindsay Clarke, Oracle goes all-in on AI, customers still figuring out how they'll use it (The Register, 16 October 2025)

Lindsay Clarke, AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay (The Register, 29 October 2025)

Kali Hayes, Tech CEOs suddenly love blaming AI for mass job cuts. Why? (BBC News, 30 March 2026)

Danielle Kaye, The AI job cuts are here - or are they? (BBC News, 29 October 2025)

Brandon Vigliarolo, Senate bill would require companies to report AI layoffs as job cuts reach 20-year high in October (The Register, 6 November 2025)

Related posts: Data-Driven Data Strategy (February 2025), How soon might humans be replaced at work? (July 2025)

On Censorship

2025-10-03T07:04:00.006+01:00

At City St George's University this week for a discussion on Truth, Trust and Tricksters in the Age of AI, organized by Index on Censorship, the Institute for Creativity and AI and Global (Dis)Order.

One of the panelists, Kenneth Cukier of the Economist, recounted his attempt to get an AI tool to produce an image to illustrate a point about silo-busting. The tool refused on the grounds that this would be an image of destruction. Cukier regarded this as an example of censorship - the tool was denying his ability to express his ideas freely.

As I suggested in the subsequent discussion, we might also regard this as the tool censoring itself. Self-censorship has been a feature of many authoritarian regimes in the past, and is perhaps emerging in new forms today, especially as people may fear the consequences of their words being taken out of context and blasted around the Internet.

One of the features of agentic AI is presenting the AI device as an autonomous agent. It may appear to be working for Crukier, but it is ultimately controlled by whichever big tech assemblage has developed and disseminated it. Which brings me to a critically important question I have asked several times previously - Whom Does The Chatbot Serve? (Towards Chatbot Ethics, May 2019)

In any case, all communication and creation is necessarily selective. However many images the AI tool does in fact produce, there is a much larger quantity of possible images it has decided or been programmed not to produce. There must be huge amounts of material that the editors of the Economist choose not to publish, for whatever reason, and it would be absurd to frame all these editorial decisions as forms of censorship or self-censorship (although of course some of them may well be).

However, attempts to reduce the quantity and reach of misleading content will often be framed as censorship by those promoting such content, as Jacob Weisberg's latest article demonstrates. There are some difficult issues here, and it is sometimes hard to avoid taking a political side.

See also Thinking with the Majority (May 2021), Amplification and Attenuation (October 2021)

Jacob Weisberg, Algorithm Nation (New York Review of Books, 23 October 2025)

The Purpose of Conspiracy Theory Is What It Does

2025-09-08T08:56:00.000+01:00

In his latest article, David Robert Grimes traces the history of the anti-vaccine movement. Ever since Edward Jennner's early experiments, using a relatively mild disease (cowpox) to protect against a much more serious one (smallpox), people have expressed scepticism, fear, scorn and outright opposition to all forms of vaccination.

Vaccine hesitancy has increased significantly in the last few years, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and Jim Reed's article also notes that the sheer quantity of vaccinations that are being pushed onto people has resulted in a degree of vaccine fatigue, even among NHS workers.

Those who believe in the efficacy of vaccines, and in the important contribution that vaccine makes to public health, tend to see the anti-vaccine movement as fueled by conspiracy theories, immune to scientific argument because the adversary in this game plays according to rules that are not generally those of science WHO 2007.

In relation to another area that has promoted strong opposition in some quarters, the idea of eating insects as a source of protein, Riley Farrell's article quotes Stephan Lewandowsky, who suggests arguments based not on the content of the beliefs but on their purpose. You're not going to be successful if you say, Uncle Bruce, you're crazy… don't believe this utter nonsense. But instead, you can ask: What function do your beliefs serve? Why are you believing this?

Many politicians and internet celebrities take strong positions on vaccines, bug eating and other topics, and some of these may be cynically driven by the desire to build support and revenue rather than their own private beliefs - for example vaccinating their own families while attacking vaccines for everyone else. For such people, the purpose of these positions may be clear, although they probably won't acknowledge it. But as for Uncle Bruce, it's not at all clear what kind of answer Professor Lewandowsky would expect or accept, or what arguments this would lead to.

Underpinning all of these movements is a distrust of authority, especially governments, big business and scientists. And yet a willingness to trust the biggest businesses on the planet - the tech platforms and their Generative AI tools that add fuel to these theories, and generate income for themselves. Obviously.

Riley Farrell, How eating insects became a conspiracy theory (BBC 4 September 2025)

David Robert Grimes, The strange history of the anti-vaccine movement (BBC 5 September 2025)

Jim Reed, Rise of vaccine distrust - why more of us are questioning jabs (BBC 16 January 2025)

WHO Bulletin 27 November 2007 86(2):140–146. doi: 10.2471/BLT.07.040089

The Nature of Lists

2025-08-25T18:56:00.002+01:00

As previously noted on this blog, lists may be constructed for various purposes, but the list then becomes a thing in its own right.

One of the open questions of our time appears to be the existence or non-existence of a list, supposedly maintained by Jeffrey Epstein, possibly with the assistance of Ghislaine Maxwell. And the presence or absence of certain names on this list, if it exists. Interviewed in prison recently, Maxwell has denied the existence of such a list.

Fintan O'Toole notes the obsession of conspiracy theorists with the supposed existence of documentary evidence.

This naive faith is the other side of the American paranoid imagination. Even while it conjures the vast potency of the conspirators, it also takes it for granted that, inside the archives of the deep state, they have carefully preserved detailed proof of their plots to assassinate JFK, hide the visitations of aliens, and enable the satanic child abusers. Crackpot realism has a strange trust in the bureaucracy. In it, that most dully bureaucratic of words—files—becomes a magic elixir of truth.

But surely the more important question is about the relationships that Epstein maintained with a number of wealthy and well-connected people, and the extent to which he had any kompromat over them. Not whether he kept all their names in a grubby little notebook, like he was a villain in a B-movie.

If the list only ever existed in Epstein's head, as suggested by the satirical website Newsbiscuit, does that count?

Wikipedia: Jeffrey Epstein client list,

Luc Cohen, Andrew Goudsward and Jack Queen, Ghislaine Maxwell told DOJ she is unaware of any Epstein 'client list' (Reuters, 23 August 2025)

Fintan O’Toole, ‘A Guy Who Never Dies’ (New York Review of Books, 12 August 2025)

Jeffrey Epstein’s amazing memory (Newsbiscuit 29 August 2025)

The Ethics of the Possible - Chatbotic Sermons

2025-08-01T23:15:00.001+01:00

Interesting piece by Deena Prichep, in which clergy agonize as to the ethics of using a chatbot to construct a sermon.

The first point is that it is easy - perhaps too easy. ChatGPT currently advertises its sermon-writing services as follows:

Your preaching companion. Transform Your Message into Impactful Sermons. Just provide your topic, choose from three tailor-made outlines, and let's co-create a captivating sermon. Fully adaptable to your congregation's needs - denomination, duration, tone, and language.

And for busy clergy the results seem almost touched by the Holy Spirit (aka Ghost in the Machine). Prichep quotes a Lutheran pastor whose first reaction was Oh my God, this is really good. (I may be doing my own research here, but I think there may be something in the Bible about taking the name of the Lord in vain.)

But just because you can doesn't mean you should. One of the arguments in favour of letting a large language model write your sermons for you is that it frees up your time to do more important things, like pastoral care. But are these things really more important? Brad East argues (following Calvin) that the primary task of ministry is the service of Word and sacrament, and that use of Artificial Intelligence shortchanges something essential.

So the underlying principle here seems to be that it might be okay to use AI tools for less important tasks but not for your most important task.

However, there are some other issues with the use of AI tools, including the environmental cost. And East notes the possiblity that large language models might fabricate material as well as pushing a particular agenda, although one might think preachers have always been able to do this without the aid of technology.

Brad East, AI Has No Place in the Pulpit (Christianity Today, 27 September 2023)

Deena Prichep, We asked clergy if they use AI to help write sermons. Here's what they said (NPR 17 July 2025) HT Carissa Véliz

Deena Prichep, Encore: Religion and AI, what does it mean when the word of God comes from a chatbot? (NPR 19 July 2025)

John Rector, The Ghost in the Machine (19 June 2024)

Brad Turner, Beatitudes or Platitudes (Milton Church of Christ, 19 December 2021)

The Social Value of Reality TV

2025-07-27T10:31:00.002+01:00

As well as being a pioneer of heavy metal, Ossy Osborne was one of the early stars of reality TV. The MTV show The Osbornes, running from 2002 to 2005 and featuring Ossy, Sharon and two of their teenage children, was described as a reality sitcom. Previous fly-on-the-wall programmes had been presented as documentaries, albeit with some dramatic elements, but this one was edited for drama.

Reality TV receives a lot of criticism and disparagement. Some people have commented on the relationship between Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the Victorian engineer who build a system of sewers to pump effluent out of Londoners' homes, and Sir Peter Bazalgette, the creative director of Endemol responsible for Big Brother.

The BBC reports some sociologists as arguing that reality TV can have some social value.

Reality TV ... can be a tool for greater social understanding. Danielle Lindemann

It can potentially offer benefits to viewers and society because it can lead to wider conversations about the world we want to live in. Jacob Johanssen

However, Dr Johanssen has previously expressed criticism of the way participants in reality shows are exploited and shamed, both by the programme makers and by the audience (via social media). He frames reality TV as a neoliberal update on Guy Debord's notion of the spectacle.

Nathan Briant, The sisters from UK's first fly-on-the-wall series (BBC News, 21 June 2024)

Jacob Johanssen, Immaterial Labour and Reality TV: The Affective Surplus of Excess. (In: Briziarelli, M. and Armano, E. (eds.). The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism. pp. 197–208. London: University of Westminster Press 2017). https://doi.org/10.16997/book11.l

Alex Taylor, How reality TV changed the way we think - for the better (BBC News, 26 July 2025)

Caitlin Wilson, Ozzy Osbourne: From Prince of Darkness to reality TV's favourite dad (BBC News, 26 July 2025)

The Urge to Persecute

2025-07-21T23:24:00.002+01:00

People have always sought to project evil onto their neighbours, and that desire now extends to random strangers on the Internet. Malcolm Gaskill shows how the science of witch-hunting took a leap forward in the Enlightenment period, thanks to the meticulous assembly and analysis of data to confirm or confound hypotheses, and describes how one seventeenth century German woman was found innocent of witchcraft only after the intervention of her son, who was able to use these same tools in her defence. Of course it helped that her son happened to be one of the greatest intellectuals of the period, Johannes Kepler.

Empiricism made witchcraft possible as an actionable crime before it made it an impossible one. Kepler saved his mother through formidable concentration, sticking to a firm line of reasoning and dissecting his opponents’ arguments, point by point.

In this week's news, two tech executives were spotted cuddling one another at a Coldplay concert, drawing attention to themselves by ducking in a guilty fashion when they realized they were being shown on the big screen. Internet sleuths were able to discover their identity, public shaming ensued, and jobs and marriages were lost - an example of what Cathy O'Neil calls Networked Shame. In his commentary on the incident, Brandon Vigliarolo noted our willingness to persecute someone for a perceived wrong despite not knowing the full story.

Vigliarolo then went on to remind us of the eagerness with which other tech executives are pushing mass surveillance, which will apparently keep everyone on their best behavior through the use of constant real-time machine-learning-powered monitoring.

Because we can trust machine learning to know the full story before jumping to conclusions, can't we?

See also: Witnessing Machines Built in Secret (November 2017), Metrication and Demetrication (August 2021), The Purpose of Shame (April 2022)

Malcolm Gaskill, Money, Sex, Lies, Magic (London Review of Books, 38/13, 30 June 2016)

Malcolm Gaskill, Social media witch-hunts are no different to the old kind – just bigger (Guardian, 13 October 2016)

Cathy O'Neil, The Shame Machine (New York: Crown, 2022)

Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Picador 2015)

Geoff Shullenberger, The Scapegoating Machine (The New Inquiry, 30 November 2016)

Brandon Vigliarolo, Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line (The Register, 16 September 2024)

Brandon Vigliarolo, Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state (The Register, 18 Jul 2025)

Just About Managing

2024-11-14T00:18:00.001+00:00

In the UK from 2013 to 2016 there were old Etonians in three important posts: Prime Minister, Mayor of London, and Archibishop of Canterbury. Justin Welby had spent much of his life in the oil industry, and had only been a bishop for just over a year when appointed to the top job in the Church of England. Initially praised for his crisp business-like approach, and expected to drive improvements across the Anglican congregation, some critics thought he ended up achieving very little, reduced to bland words and sleight of hand.

When you spoke to him, you sensed he was a CEO who had mentally allocated you five minutes before passing on to the next matter to be dealt with. That is agenda-driven episcopacy, rather than a listening episcopacy. You can’t run a church with a handbook full of business buzzwords. Pepinster

Mr Welby has undoubtedly seen it as a big part of his job to hold together very different factions within the Church of England and, even more difficult, in the wider global Church, the Anglican Communion of 85 million people. ... He has expended a huge amount of energy in this endeavour of finding common ground through 12 years during which there has been other momentous social change, and at times has shown himself to be an astute political operator. Maqbook

But his failure to tackle the safeguarding issue properly has damaged the Church and brought an end to his tenure. Martyn Percy argues that the safeguarding measures that Welby oversaw are ill-thought-out and arbitrarily enforced, and deter the sort of volunteers on whom the church has traditionally relied for local good works

And Ian Paul thought Welby was a poor leader overall. Justin managed to make enemies of every single group. He made enemies of liberals by talking about evangelism. He made enemies of evangelicals by talking about sexuality. He made enemies of conservatives by talking about new forms of church.

So much for his management skills then.

Andrew Anthony, The Church of England is beset by shame and division. Can it survive? (Observer 17 November 2024)

Stephen Bates, Just About Managing (The Tablet, 16 March 2017) (Note: link is to the archived page because of trojan warning on live page)

Stephen Bates, Justin Welby: why archbishop chosen for his managerial skills had to go (Guardian 12 November 2024)

Aleem Maqbool, Church at precarious moment after Welby resignation (BBC News, 13 November 2024)

Catherine Pepinster, Why did Justin Welby fall so tragically short? Because he was preoccupied with efficiency, not listening (Guardian 13 November 2024)

Harriet Sherwood, The C of E’s CEO: how will history judge Justin Welby’s tenure as archbishop of Canterbury? (Guardian 13 November 2024)

Wikipedia: Old Etonians

The Purpose of Surveillance

2024-08-04T19:55:00.000+01:00

While surveillance has been a recurring topic on this blog, the technological environment has developed significantly over the past twenty years.

Once upon a time, the only form of real-time surveillance involved so-called closed circuit systems (CCTV), providing a dedicated watcher with a view of what was going on at that moment, although these systems now generally include a recording function, often operate retrospectively, and feed into an open-ended ecosystem of discipline-and-punish. As I noted in May 2008, the purpose of CCTV had extended from monitoring to include deterrence and penalty, and in the process it had ceased to be closed circuit in the original sense.

Fiction has provided some alternative models of surveillance and control. As well as Fritz Lang's 1960 film The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, there are the Palantíri in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, which are indestructable stones or crystal balls enabling events to be seen from afar.

The data company Palantir. whose founders included Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, was originally established to provide big data analytics to the intelligence community. Geoff Shullenberger suggests that Palantir might be understood as an application of the ideas of Leo Strauss (who inspired Thiel): an enterprise that acknowledges the deep, dangerous undercurrent of human violence and harnesses the reams of data generated by the internet to monitor and control it. Meanwhile Moira Weigel notes the contribution of Adorno (who inspired Karp): Adorno’s jargon anticipates the software tools Palantir would develop. By tracing the rhetorical patterns that constitute jargon in literary language, Karp argues that he can reveal otherwise hidden identities and affinities—and the drive to commit violence that lies latent in them.

Geoff Shullenberger, The Intellectual Origins of Surveillance Tech (Outsider Theory, 17 July 2020)

Moira Weigel, Palantir goes to the Frankfurt School (Boundary2, 10 July 2020)

Related posts: Surveillance and its Effects (May 2005), What's in a Name - CCTV (May 2008), As Shepherds Watched (April 2024)

Surveillance@DemandingChange, Surveillance@POSIWID

Data and the Genome

2023-11-24T20:27:00.004+00:00

The word data comes from the Latin meaning that which is given. So one might think it is entirely appropriate to use the word for our DNA, given to us by our parents, thanks to millions of years of evolution. DNA is often described as a genetic code; the word code either refers to the way biological information is represented in the molecular structure of chromosomes, or to the way these chromosomes can be understood as a set of instructions for building a biological entity. Watson and Crick used the word code in their 1953 Nature article.

However, when people talk about the human genome, they are often referring to a non-biological representation in some artificial datastore. In other words, given by biology to data science.

Shannon E French objects to talking about data stored on DNA like it’s some kind of memory stick, and Abeba Birhane sees this as part of the current trend that is so determined to present AI as human-like at all costs, describing humans in machinic terms has become normalised.

Elsewhere, Abeba Birhane is known for her strong critique of AI. As well as important ethical issues (algorithmic bias, digital colonialism, accountability, exploitation/expropriation), she has also raised concerns about the false promise of AI hype.

we have arrived at peak AI hype accompanied by minimal critical thinking
— Abeba Birhane (@Abebab) June 12, 2022

But describing humans (or other biological entities) in machinic terms, or treating them as instruments. is far older than AI. When we replace animals with technical devices (canaries. carrier pigeons, horses), the substitution implies that the animals had been treated as devices, the replacement often justified by the argument that technical devices are cheaper, more efficient, or more reliable, or don't require regular breaks - or are simply more modern. Conversely, when scientists try to repurpose DNA as a data storage mechanism, this also seems to mean treating biology in instrumental terms.

But arguably what is stored or encoded in the DNA - whether in its original biological manifestation or more recent exercises in bioengineering - is still data, regardless of how or for whom it is used.

Abeba Birhane, Atoosa Kasirzadeh, David Leslie and Sandra Wachter, Science in the age of large language models (Nature Reviews Physics, Volume 5, May 2023, 277–280)

Abeba Birhane and Deborah Raji, ChatGPT, Galactica and the Progress Trap (Wired, 9 December 2022)

Grace Browne, AI is steeped in Big Tech's 'Digital Colonialism' (Wired, 25 May 2023)

J.D. Watson and F.H.C. Crick, Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (Nature, 30 May 1953)

Related posts: Naive Epistemology (July 2020), Limitations of Machine Learning (July 2020), Mapping out the entire world of objects (July 2020), Lie Detectors at Airports (April 2022), Algorithmic Intuition (November 2023)

Algorithmic Intuition - Gaydar

2023-11-22T22:35:00.005+00:00

When my friend A was still going out with women, other friends would sometimes ask if he was gay. An intuitive ability to guess the sexuality of other people is known as gaydar. There have been studies that appear to provide evidence that both humans and computers possess such an ability, although the reliability of this evidence has been challenged. For example, some of these studies have relied on images posted on dating sites, but images that have been crafted and selected for dating purposes may already reflect how a person of a given sexuality wishes to present thenselves in that specific context, and may not reflect how the person looks in other contexts.

The latest study claims to assess sexuality from brain waves. This has been criticized as gross and irresponsible (Rae Walker) and as unscientific (Ababa Birhane). Continuing a debate that had started with other methods of algorithmic gaydar.

More generally, there is considerable disquiet about computers attempting to segment people in this way. For a start, there are many parts of the world where homosexuality doesn't only lead to social disapproval and harassment, but also criminal penalties and sanctions. Even though the algorithms may be inaccurate, they might be used to discriminate against people, or trigger homophobic actions. Whether someone actually is gay or is a false positive is almost beside the point here, either way the algorithmic gaydar may result in individual suffering.

Furthermore, these algorithm appears to want to colonize aspects of subjectivity, of the subject's identity.

WyssBernard: I’m not going accept a machine determination as to what I identify as. ?¿
Abeba Birhane: just let people be or let people identify their own sexuality

In an interview with the editor of Wired, Yuval Noah Harari wonders whether an algorithm might have guessed he was gay before he realised it himself. And if an algorithm had been the source of this wisdom about himself, would this not have been incredibly deflating for the ego?

And Lawrence Scott describes how his Facebook timeline started to be invaded by images of attractive men, suggesting that the algorithm had somehow profiled him as being particularly susceptible to these images.

to be continued

Isobel Cockerell, Facial recognition systems decide your gender for you. Activists say it needs to stop (Codastory, 12 April 2021)

Isobel Cockerell, Researchers say their AI can detect sexuality. Critics say it’s dangerous (Codastory, 13 July 2023)

Lawrence Scott, Hell is Ourselves (The New Atlantis #68, Spring 2022, pp. 65-72)

Nicholas Thompson, When Tech Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself (Wired, 4 October 2018)

Wikipedia: Gaydar

ChatGPT and the Defecating Duck

2023-09-19T23:10:00.000+01:00

For dog owners, the intelligence of dogs shows itself (among other things) in their ability to learn tricks. For cat owners, the intelligence of cats shows itself (among other things) in their disdain for learning tricks.

When Alan Turing conceived of a way to tell computers and humans apart, now known as the Turing Test, he called it the Imitation Game. His first example was to ask a computer to write poetry - specifically a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. And his idea of a plausible answer for the computer was to say: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry.

No doubt many people have tested ChatGPT with exactly the same question. When Jessica Riskin tried it, she was not impressed by its efforts. She found Turing’s imaginary machine’s answer (Turing imitating a machine imitating a human) infinitely more persuasive (as indicator of intelligence) than ChatGPT’s. Turing’s imagined intelligent machine gives off an unmistakable aura of individual personhood, even of charm.

An earlier article by Professor Riskin described a mechanical automaton that attracted large admiring crowds in 18th century Paris. This was a generative pretrained transformer in the shape of a duck, which appeared to convert pellets of food into pellets of excrement. The inventor is careful to say that he wants to show, not just a machine, but a process. But he is equally careful to say that this process is only a partial imitation.

Whereas ChatGPT's bad imitation of poetry is real shit.

Jessica Riskin, The Defecating Duck, or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artifical Life (Critical Enquiry, 2003)

Jessica Riskin, A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head (New York Review of Books, 25 June 2023)

Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind 1950)

The Mad Hatter Works Out

2023-07-12T00:05:00.006+01:00

An interesting exchange on Twitter between the mainstream media and the owner of Twitter, which came to my attention via @RMac18 and @karaswisher.

Over a year ago, an American professor wrote a column on MSNBC noting a trend of far right groups using fitness chat groups to recruit and radicalize young men.

One of the co-founders of Open AI (yes, him) chose to interpret this as asserting that you're a nazi if you work out. There are several possible interpretations of this tweet.

The most unlikely explanation is that a person with a good STEM education and (supposedly) a high IQ has committed a serious error in elementary logic. As in some cats are grey therefore all grey objects are cats.

A slightly more plausible explanation is that the tweet was produced on their behalf by a large language model (LLM), operating a symmetric bi-logic (Matte-Blanco) rather than conforming to classical logic. In the dream world of the unconscious, or in the hallucinations of chat algorithms, the idea that all grey objects are cats might seem perfectly reasonable.

You might just as well say, added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, that I breathe when I sleep is the same thing as I sleep when I breathe! It is the same thing with you, said the Hatter.

However, the most likely explanation is that the message was deliberately designed to flout logical validity in order to generate the desired affective response - simultaneously appealing to audience A and provoking audience B. (I guess I must be in audience B.) Chasing clicks, as @zsk suggests elsewhere.

Many of the responses adopt similarly dodgy logic, including those that observe (ad hominem) that there are some fat and flabby people on the far right.

Arwa Mahdawi, Why is EM borrowing insults from white supremacists? (Guardian, 11 July 2023)

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Pandemic fitness trends have gone extreme — literally (MSNBC, 22 March 2022)

For more on LLM and Matte-Blanco, see my post From Chat GPT to Infinite Sets (May 2023)

Delayed Success - Evolution

2023-04-23T10:29:00.000+01:00

Andreas Wagner notes the long time that elapsed between the first appearance of grass and its ecological dominance. He argues that delayed success holds a profound truth about new life forms.

Evolution works across enormous timespans. Regarding humans as the pinnacle of evolution only works if you forget this.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people offered predictions about where and in what form the virus would end up, without considering the fact that everything would change and mutate many times before anything ended up anywhere. And some people thought that we didn't need to worry about the less efficient or effective variants, because they would eventually disappear.

It is said that a Chinese leader (perhaps Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai), when asked about revolutionary action in France, opined that it was too early to tell, and this quote is often understood to refer to the French revolution two hundred years earlier. Even if this actually referred to the much more recent events of the 1960s, the story accords with the belief that the Chinese government is able to take a much longer view of such matters than democratically elected governments can.

But even a few thousand years of Chinese history is nothing at all in evolutionary timescales.

Andreas Wagner, Sleeping beauties: the evolutionary innovations that wait millions of years to come good (Guardian, 18 April 2023)

Related posts: Rates of Evolution (September 2007), Explaining Natural Selection (January 2021)

What Does A Patent Say?

2023-02-18T22:33:00.001+00:00

There is a narrative about accelerating technological change, which appears to be supported by an increasing volume of patent activity. I have expressed my doubts about this metric in previous posts.

Death of Software (November 2004)
Evolution or Revolution (May 2006)
Rates of Evolution (September 2007)
Hedgehog Innovation (February 2023)

In their latest book, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke also call out the unreliability of this metric.

The number of patents is also an imperfect measure of innovation. ... no correlation between the number of patents in a technological field and the annual performance improvement of that field ... The number of patents does not reflect how disruptive the patented innovation is or whether it's toxic or beneficial. ... Furthermore, patent numbers do not account for the Tech Barons' distorting the innovation paths and monopolizing knowledge. Ezrachi and Stucke p 150

Although despite this caveat, they appear to take the metric seriously when evaluating cities on their support for innovation pp 208-211, p268 n30.

They also suggest a further twist.

It should be noted that not all patents have been transformed into products and services. Some of the technologies may have been developed but not necessarily implemented, Still, they offer a valuable indication as to the assets a company is trying to secure and the direction in which its technology is heading. p238 n1

This is supported by a newspaper article by Sahil Chinoy, which includes a quote from law professor Jason M Schultz.

A patent portfolio is a map of how a company thinks about where its technology is going.

Tech watchers have often interpreted patent applications in this way. In my post Guardian Angel (May 2008), I discussed a patent application that attracted a lot of attention at the time, both because of its content and because of some of the people involved. (Bill Gates obviously, who else?)

But with all respect to Professor Schultz, that's not actually the purpose of a patent. The primary purpose of a patent is not to enable the inventor to exploit something, it is to prevent anyone else freely exploiting it.

(The purpose of the patent system may be to reward inventors and encourage invention, but that's an entirely different question.)

As reported by Dani Deahl and Sarah Perez, Amazon took out a patent to prevent people doing in Amazon shops exactly what Amazon had always encouraged them to do in everyone else's shops! See my post on Showrooming and Multi-sided Markets (December 2012, updated June 2017).

And in some cases, a patent is just staking a precautionary claim to an invention that is not currently viable, to make sure nobody else can profit from it.

Obviously this kind of patent game is not the only method used by Tech Barons to suppress innovation that is inconvenient to them, and Ezrachi and Stucke document many others. Sometimes it just means taking over an inconvenient service and shutting it down, as eBay did with decide.com. See my post Predictive Analytics for the Smart Consumer (April 2014).

Meanwhile, if the Tech Barons actually wanted to do something totally devious and evil, do you really think they would submit a patent application for the world to see?

Sahil Chinoy, What 7 Creepy Patents Reveal About Facebook (New York Times, 21 June 2018) subscribers only

Dani Deahl, Amazon granted a patent that prevents in-store shoppers from online price checking (The Verge, 15 June 2017)

Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation and how to strike back (New York: Harper, 2022)

Sarah Perez, Amazon, now a physical retailer too, is granted an anti-showrooming patent (TechCrunch, 16 June 2017)

Related post: How soon might humans be replaced at work (November 2015)

Who Codes Whom?

2022-08-19T12:58:00.000+01:00

@daily_barbarian (Geoff Shullenberger) describes René Girard as politically ambivalent.

He codes as right-wing in his insistence on the necessity of social order, but as left-wing in his insistence that any such order is founded on violence.

When I ask who is doing the coding here, and for what purpose, he replies

People of all sorts who encounter his work and attempt to place it in the conventional categories. I’ve seen many on the left use the first point to call him a reactionary, and some on the right use the second to call him naïve about power.

Quite so. But the fact that other people don't know how to categorize Girard doesn't imply any contradiction or ambivalence on his part. What it does show is that the conventional categories (rightwing, leftwing) are becoming increasingly muddled. (There are several other arguments for moving away from this conventional way of framing politics - for example recent work by Latour.)

But what I want to talk about here is the elision. Instead of people of all sorts code him ..., we get simply he codes. As if Girard is somehow responsible for his own classification.

Classification is a political act, but categories are often treated as objective facts rather than subjective opinions (Bowker & Star). Hence my question about who and why.

One domain in which the act of coding hasn't always received sufficient attention is in data and intelligence, but this is now changing thanks to great work by @abebab and others. See links to my other posts below.

And in the political domain, commentators are increasingly willing to challenge the coding that underpins certain alleged social facts. See for example Global Media Literacy. And those wishing to politicize the COVID pandemic can find more than enough complexity in the coding of health and pharma data that might support any given measure. (Politicizing such matters is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is itself a political choice.)

Anon, Opinion: Beware the data on American right-wing violence (Global Media Literacy, 23 May 2022)

Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out (MIT Press 1999)

Related posts: Framing a riot (August 2011), Limitations of Machine Learning (July 2020), Mapping out the entire world of objects (July 2020), Near Miss (April 2021), Purpose of Shame (April 2022)

The Dogs of WWW

2022-07-12T12:59:00.001+01:00

@kkomaitis and @j2bryson discuss the anniversary of the New Yorker cartoon On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog.

Obviously this is no longer true. Konstantinos Komaitis raises the important topic of surveillance capitalism and government snooping. There is more than enough data to know how many dogs you have, what you call them, how often you take them for walks, which other dogs and dog-owners you meet in the park, and how much you spend on dog-food and veterinary bills.

Joanna Bryson also raises the topic of deep fakes. Does this mean that some of those cute dogs we see on the Internet don't even exist? Or perhaps shifting our understanding as what counts as existing?

The title of this post is a reference to the words Shakespeare gives to Mark Antony:

Cry Havoc!, and let slip the dogs of war.

In its original meaning, crying havoc is a signal for looting and plunder. On the internet, this would include stealing your data and stealing your identity.

In its article on the dogs of war, Wikipedia reproduces a Punch cartoon from 1876, showing Russia threatening war against Turkey in revenge for its losses in the Crimean War twenty years previously. Isn't history interesting?

Wikipedia: On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, The Dogs of War, Crimean War (1853-1856), Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878)

The Government Inspector

2022-07-06T13:46:00.000+01:00

Around £550 million has been spent on purpose-built facilities to conduct post-Brexit checks. Most of this money came from UK taxpayers, with the remainder being covered by local authorities and other organizations. However, following a recent change in policy by the UK government, these facilities will no longer be required.

The one in Portsmouth cost £25 million. It is designed specifically for government inspections, nothing else, Mike Sellers, director of Portsmouth International Port, told the Guardian. The cheapest option would be to demolish it.

The Government Inspector was an 1836 play by Nikolai Gogol, described by Wikipedia as a comedy of errors, satirizing human greed, stupidity, and the extensive political corruption of Imperial Russia.

The main character, Khlestakov, personifies irresponsibility, light-mindedness, and absence of measure. Remind you of anyone?

Joanna Partridge, Portsmouth’s £25m border post stands empty after minister’s imports U-turn (The Guardian, 5 July 2022)

Wikipedia: The Government Inspector

Progress Bar

2022-06-09T22:41:00.003+01:00

There are algorithms whose primary purpose appears to be to generate affect - for example, to reduce the anxiety of those waiting. For example, the progress bar that is displayed when something is loading or downloading. Other examples include indicators at bus stops, on railway platforms or next to lifts, showing either the current location or the expected time of arrival.

Sometimes these indicators misbehave. The progress bar suddenly jumps from 60% to 90% and then gets stuck. One moment the bus is five minutes away, the next moment it is seven minutes away. These glitches reveal that the indicators are not unmediated truth but fictions functioning as truth.

The algorithm of the progress bar depends not only on the code generating it but the cultural calculus of waiting itself, on a user seeking feedback from the system, and on the opportunity - increasingly capitalized on - to show the user other messages, entertainments or advertising during the waiting phase. Finn p34

Jason Farman compares these indicators with earlier symbols, such as the spinning cursor, which provided no such feedback.

These symbols keep us from seeing how the system is actually working; we’re not given a behind-the-scenes view of how the process is actually progressing, so we are kept at arm’s length, spinning or twiddling our thumbs as we wait. Farman

In other contexts, such as digital games, progress bars are designed to motivate the players.

Feedback is a system that tells players how close they are to achieving a goal and can come from points, levels, a score or a progress bar; this provides motivation to keep playing. Pulos quoting McGonigal, 2011, p. 21

And if the progress bar gets stuck on 99%, what then? In her PhD thesis, Kate Starbird discusses a meme that circulated on Twitter during the 2011 political uprising in Egypt, with progress bars showing variations of installing freedom and uninstalling dictator, in some cases linked to messages encouraging patience and/or persistence.

As things turned out, President Mubarak was uninstalled, but many of the protesters were unhappy with subsequent events, and there was a further uprising in 2013. So how much progress has Egypt made in installing freedom and democracy? Unfortunately, democracy isn't something that was uploaded to the cloud by the ancient Greeks, just waiting to be downloaded into any country with sufficient memory.

Jason Farman, Delayed Response (Yale University Press 2018). Extract: Spinning in Place

Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want (MIT Press 2017)

McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. New York, NY: Penguin Press

Alexis Pulos, FARMING AND FIGHTING AS PRACTICE AND PEDAGOGY: A PROCEDURAL FIELD ANALYSIS OF DIGITAL GAMES (University of New Mexico, PhD thesis 2013). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cj_etds/45

Kate Starbird, Crowdwork, Crisis and Convergence: How the Connected Crowd Organizes Information duringMass Disruption Events (Atlas Institute, PhD thesis 2012)

Wikipedia: Progress Bar, Progress Indicator, 2011 Egyptian revolution

Time and Propinquity

2022-05-16T10:08:00.008+01:00

In an interview with Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode, Adam Curtis describes Jim Garrison as "godfather of modern conspiracy theories" (7:44), and "one of the ideologists of our time" (8:18).

Garrison's method was searching for patterns, following a principle he called Time and Propinquity. As Curtis comments: "Funnily enough, that's exactly how artificial intelligence works." (8:30)

Cut to Jeremy Bentham, whose hedonic calculus also referenced propinquity. Social media algorithms are designed to maximize arousal and excitement, so this can be regarded as a form of hedonic calculus. Whereas Bentham's aim was to maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect (greatest happiness, greatest number), social media platforms will try to leverage any affective response that promotes engagement and supports their commercial goals, including outrage.

In an interview with Michael Brooks, Curtis acknowledges that his documentary method also involves making connections and drawing parallels. He regards his role as asking “have you thought about looking at the world this way?”, pulling back a bit and looking at what is happening in a different way. But, he insists, that is not the same as a conspiracy theory.

Curtis spotlights a number of interesting characters from different parts of the world in different decades. Sometimes there are family connections - Afeni and Tupac Shakur, George and Ethel Boole (plus Geoffrey Hinton) - or crossed paths (Michael de Freitas and Stokely Carmichael). Sometimes a character we met in Act One appears back on stage in Act Three (Bernard Kouchner). Are these significant juxtapositions or merely coincidences? Curtis doesn't answer this question directly, but he does claim that this collection of material serves to explain something important about where we are today and how we got here.

The selection of archive material is not dependent not only on Curtis's editorial judgement, but also on what was captured, preserved and available. For some scenes, we might ask - who filmed this, why did these people consent to being filmed, and to what extent are these scenes representative of the vast number of other scenes that were never filmed or properly archived? What conclusions can we draw from the fragments that happened to be available to him?

I met a traveller from an antique land ...

Ben Brooker, The world according to Adam Curtis (Overland, 25 March 2021)

Michael J Brooks, What Does The Future Hold? An Interview With Adam Curtis (The Quietus, 12 February 2021)

Adam Curtis, Can't Get You Out Of My Head (BBC 2021)

Adam Curtis, From Tupac to Dom Cummings: meet the cast of characters in Adam Curtis's new series (Guardian, 6 Feb 2021)

Kermode and Mayo, Adam Curtis interviewed by Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode (29 January 2021)

Sam Knight, Adam Curtis Explains It All (New Yorker, 28 January 2021)

Adam Koper, Thoughts on Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head (26 February 2021)

Adam Koper, A critical conceptualization of conspiracy theory (Constellations, 2023)

Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion - Jim Garrison the Great Accuser (2020)

Wikipedia: Chekhov's Gun, Hedonic Calculus

Related posts: All Chewed Over By Machines (May 2021), Optimizing for Outrage (March 2021)

Arendt on Racism

2022-05-16T07:46:00.002+01:00

Following yet another mass shooting in the United States, @DanielTorday quotes Hannah Arendt on the purpose of racism.

Hannah Arendt: “Racism has proved to be the the most ingenious device for preparing civil war that has ever been invented.”

Racism is not a mental illness.
Racism is a long-developed plan to destroy a culture from within. pic.twitter.com/FyZ6IXfcoG
— Daniel Torday (@DanielTorday) May 15, 2022

Arendt's legacy on the question of racism is complex and disputed, and there is much commentary on a controversial article she wrote in 1959, criticising some of the measures enacted by the Eisenhower administration to protect black students attending a white school in Little Rock, Arkensas, and affirming the right of white parents to send their children to all-white schools.

However, if we can overlook her naive and wrong-headed opinions about American racism, there is still a valid question about what kinds of anti-racist measures might be most effective in defusing the situation and reducing the risk of civil war. While I completely reject the argument that the victims of oppression should be encouraged to keep their heads down and avoid provoking their oppressors, there is still an important question about how best to achieve and maintain racial justice and social harmony, and how to challenge racist rhetoric without causing its supporters to double-down.

Meanwhile this is how news media presents the perpetrator of the Buffalo shooting.

Noting that in AP copy, 18-year-old Michael Brown was an “18-year old Black man,” while 18-year-old Payton Gendron is a “white teenager.” pic.twitter.com/53Jt1vWuqf
— Dr. Thrasher (@thrasherxy) May 15, 2022

Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Little Rock (Dissent, 1959)

Connor Grubaugh, Hannah Arendt on Anti-Racism as a Totalitarian Ideology (Tablet, 18 November 2021)

Edward Helmore, It was by design: Black residents try to come to terms with horror of shooting (Guardian, 15 May 2022)

Julian Honkasalo, Hannah Arendt on the origins and consequences of ideological racism (Kone Foundation, 16 March 2017)

Kevin Miles, Anti-Black Racism in Arendt, and Philosophy’s Dangerous Commitment to Purity (APA Blog, 7 July 2016)

David Smith, Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation (Guardian, 24 September 2017)

Jason Stanley, Buffalo shooting: how white replacement theory keeps inspiring mass murder (Guardian, 15 May 2022)

Lynne Tirrell, Words matter. Trump bears a responsibility for El Paso (Guardian, 10 August 2019)

Michael Tomasky, The Buffalo Shooting Is the Latest White Rage Backlash, Brought to You by the GOP (New Republic, 16 May 2022)

POSIWID - The Acronym

2022-04-24T19:56:00.000+01:00

POSIWID stands for Purpose Of System Is What It Does

Although the phrase is associated with Stafford Beer, credit for the acronym is claimed by the engineer Bill Livingston.

I heard Stafford give a speech in Orlando in 1986 where he used 'The purpose of a system is what it does'. Using the concept so much I found the phrase ungainly I came up with POSIWID as a code word. In 1993 when I went to see Stafford in Toronto, I presented him with a pen I had engraved with POSIWID. He sort of chuckled and that was the end of it.

POSIWID is always used as an absolute. That is, no assignations about purpose are invented. What it does is, by definition, its purpose. I have never encountered a disconfirming example, nor have any of the thousands that have adopted the concept. Of course, it all started with Ashby. Bill Livingstone

Following my post yesterday on Some Key Features of POSIWID, I received some suggested variations on the acronym.

The simplicity of the phrase belies its depth acknowledging that a system can't have a purpose, as that would allude to object intention. So more like: function of a system is what it does, or...

Purpose Of A System Is The Effect Detected #POSITED

...by whoever looks for it 🤓
— ComplexWales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿💙 (@ComplexWales) April 24, 2022

Beer should have answered his own question and added three more letters to this already long acronym: #FTS (For The System).
An observer can ask:
1⃣ - What is this system doing for me?
2⃣ - What can I do for this system?
3⃣ - What is this system doing for that system?
— The Kihbernetics Institute (@Kihbernetics) April 24, 2022

William Livingston, Have Fun At Work (FES 1988). Review by James R Fisher (September 2006)

Some Key Features of POSIWID

2022-04-23T09:01:00.010+01:00

The Plurality of POSIWID

A system doesn't necessarily have a single purpose, and different observers may detect different purposes. Or even different systems.

POSIWID should be plural (January 2010) - with thanks to Chris Bird

Constructing POSIWID (April 2022) - with thanks to Harish Jose

What You Measure Is What You Get - WYMIWYG

Label: Target-Setting

Inertia

Large organizations have strong feedback loops that maintain and restore the status quo against the most forceful and ingenious interventions.

Enterprise POSIWID (March 2012)

Corporate Grind (November 2014)

And is the Aim of Human Society (September 2021) to maintain its equilibrium?

Conspiracy

POSIWID appears to encourage the creation of conspiracy theories - looking for the hidden agenda that will explain actions - especially when the official story doesn't seem to add up.

But it is one thing to search open-mindedly for a hidden agenda, and another thing entirely to presume its existence without evidence. Sometimes it is not conspiracy theory but chaos (cock-up) theory that best explains some complex series of events.

Label: Conspiracy

Sometimes a dreadful event is so politically convenient for certain parties or interest groups that they may be accused (by their opponents or by conspiracy theorists) of having engineered the event themselves.

See Visible Problems (June 2010), The Value of Chaos (December 2021)

Invisible Hand

Economists and Marxists may regard the whole sociopolitical system as having a higher purpose, beyond the control of individual actors.

Are Markets Tools? (January 2012), Culture War - What is it Good For? (July 2021)

Determinism

Biological determinism (e.g. evolutionary biology). As I see it, one of the main problems of evolutionary biology is that for any plausible hypothesis, one can invent any number of equally plausible alternatives. Explaining Bodies (February 2013)

Technological determinism (December 2020)

Labels: Determinism, Indeterminacy

Delayed reaction

Sometimes it takes a while for another purpose of a complex system to emerge.

Example: Walter Wolfgang Returns (August 2006)

See also: Delayed Success - Evolution (April 2023)

Or perhaps purposes are tacked on afterwards (October 2006)

Absence of purpose

Absence-of-purpose at one level may be sustained by a deeper purpose. POSIWID helps us to search for a purpose, but doesn't reveal what kind of purpose we might find.

Example: Pact with the Devil (June 2006)

Whole system

There is an interesting relationship between the purpose (effect) of the individual and the purpose (effect) of the system. We cannot infer a strong purpose for an individual based on a very low probability effect. But the aggregate effect of the whole population may have a reasonably high probability.

See Purpose and Probability (September 2005)

There are also interesting questions about the purpose of diversity, which can only be addressed relative to the whole system.

Label: Diversity

Reframing purpose

From failure to success, from stalemate to victory - see Political Theatre (May 2012), Culture War - What is it Good For? (July 2021)

Label: Framing

Symmetrical POSIWID

For gardeners, the worm's purpose is to chew up grass cuttings and vegetable peelings and torn-up cardboard and produce compost.

For worms, the main purpose of the gardener is to provide a regular supply of grass cuttings and vegetable peelings and torn-up cardboard.

So there is a pleasing symmetry between the purpose of the gardener and the purpose of the worm. For religious folk, both the worm and the gardener are fulfilling God's purpose.

The Mirror of POSIWID (July 2008)

Identity versus viability

The primary purpose (POSIWID) of closed systems is to maintain their identity, and to resist all challenges to this identity. However, in complex dynamic environemnts, viability often requires responding creatively to change. Identity is therefore often in conflict with viability.

Example: Tribal Identity (October 2005)

Simplicity and complexity

If things seem unnecessarily complicated, this may be the result of some conscious or unconscious motive. Gagan Saxena notes that sometimes bad websites, phone-trees and policies have a dark purpose.

See Badly Designed Websites (August 2010)

Sometimes a corporate bureaucracy appears to be designed to make life difficult for employees and customers; even if such a design is not consciously planned, it may be sustained by the short-term benefits it confers (such as cost-saving or corporate convenience).

See Contradiction and Ambivalence (June 2011), Enterprise POSIWID (March 2012)

Denial

This is not who we are (September 2021) - yeah, right

What is the purpose of denial, and what does it achieve? For example, climate change denial. When a famous scientist stakes his reputation on denying some widely accepted environmental belief. Is this akin to other forms of denial, such as AIDS denial or Holocaust denial? Given that a given belief is a basis for collective support for a given position, denial appears to have the effect (and therefore the implicit purpose) of undermining this position.

Purpose of Denial (May 2005)

Label: Denial

Amplification

If you know the effect that your actions are likely to have, and you go ahead anyway, this only makes sense if the alternative is far worse. Or if you imagine you won't get caught. For example, concealing or destroying evidence. POSIWID thinking therefore acts as an amplifier, accentuating the whisper of suspicion into a bawl of accusation.

Example: Erasing the tapes (September 2007)

Communication and Rhetoric

If a communication has diverse effects, how shall we determine the underlying purpose of the communication? Who is the real audience?

Real Audience (November 2006)

There is also a question as to whether the effects can be attributed to the rhetoric or to something behind the rhetoric.

Scarcity and Poverty (January 2011)

Are the effects of a communication more important than whether it is true or not? (Note Foucault's notion of Fiction Functioning in Truth)

Discourse Wars (June 2020)

And if a communication causes people to be upset or angry, can we assume this was the purpose all along?

Label: Outrage

Adam Curtis

Finally, let me put in a plug for Adam Curtis, whose documentary films provide a huge wealth of material on this subject. I still need to post something on his latest series.

See also POSIWID - the Acronym (April 2022)

The Purpose of Shame

2022-04-09T02:06:00.001+01:00

Weapons expert @mathbabedotorg Cathy O'Neil is best known for her account of algorithms as weapons (of math destruction). Her new book tackles a related topic, the use of shame as a weapon.

Many people have written about the psychology and sociology of shame. O'Neil's focus is on how shame is manufactured and mined, how organizations gain commercial and sociopolitical benefit from propagating shame, how individuals are coopted into circuits of shame, and (to quote her subtitle) who profits in the new age of humiliation.

One use of the shame machine is to persuade people to buy products and services. O'Neil describes her own experience being targetted with fat-shaming advertisements. Such advertisements are designed to make people feel ashamed, and to believe that the advertised product will somehow help. She also notes how shame can undermine a person's capacity for rational evaluation, and trigger impulsive actions.

Shame is also used socially, to reinforce social norms. In some cases this is centrally planned - for example, in China where people are publicly shamed for acts that are officially disapproved, such as jaywalking. In other cases, this can be the result of what O'Neil calls Networked Shame, where people feel empowered to shame strangers, supposedly for their own good. As if pointing out the health risks of obesity to a fat person is somehow being kind and helpful to them.

Immediately following the 2020 US presidential election, Judith Butler noted how Trump and his supporters saw the left as a shame machine.

Shame occupied a permanent and necessary place in the Trumpian scenario insofar as it was externalized and lodged in the left: the left seek to shame you for your guns, your racism, your sexual assault, your xenophobia! The excited fantasy of his supporters was that, with Trump, shame could be overcome.

Of course shame was not really overcome, it was merely redirected onto others, using a version of the Shame Machine that Geoff Shullenberger calls the Scapegoating Machine, tracing back to René Girard. (O'Neil also references Girard.)

So shaming the Other becomes a political tool. Making people feel ashamed that they need help is a lot cheaper and more convenient than actually helping them, so politicians make unfortunate circumstances shameful (addiction, homelessness, single parenthood, etc) as a way of signalling that people in such circumstances don't deserve our help. And by creating a sense of Us and Them, it reinforces loyalty to populist politicians. Shullenberger credits Peter Thiel, a former student of Girard, for helping to plan Trump's successful 2016 campaign, and notes that like the social media platforms on which it has thrived, Trumpism channels violence mainly toward victims it wishes to marginalize.

While there is nothing new about public humiliation and scapegoating, the Internet and social media clearly provide new affordance to those wishing to shame others. Is that merely an unfortunate side-effect of an otherwise beneficial and beneficent technology? Not surprisingly, O'Neil doesn't think so.

Digital titans, led by Facebook and Google, not only profit from shame events but are engineered to exploit and diffuse them. In their massive research labs, mathematicians work closely with psychologists and anthropologists, using our behavioral data to train their machines. Their objective is to spur customer participation and to mine advertising gold. When it comes to this type of intense engagement, shame is one of the most potent motivators. ... It spurs traffic and boosts revenue.

One possible remedy, suggests O'Neil, is to redirect shame back towards the powerful, or what she calls punching up. She notes how Google could itself be shamed, for example in relation to its treatment of Timnit Gebru, and notes at least the possibility of what she calls healthy shame. She ends, not with a plan to end all shame, but with some recommendations for detoxifying shame.

Judith Butler, Is the show finally over for Donald Trump? (The Guardian, 5 November 2020)

Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (New York: Crown, 2016)

Cathy O'Neil, The Shame Machine (New York: Crown, 2022)

Geoff Shullenberger, Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection (Cyborgology, 13 August 2016) The Scapegoating Machine (The New Inquiry, 30 November 2016)

Related posts: Weapons of Math Destruction (October 2016), Ethical Communication in a Digital Age (November 2018), Dark Data and the US Election (November 2020)

The Lipstick Effect

2022-04-03T23:02:00.002+01:00

In November 2001, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Emily Nelson noted a correlation between economic downturn and lipstick sales.

Lipstick sales are red hot. So why is no one smiling? The reason is that women traditionally turn to lipstick when they cutback on life's other luxuries. They see lipstick, which sells for as little as $1.99 at a supermarket to $20-plus at a department store, as a reasonable indulgence and pick-me-up when they feel they can't afford a whole new outfit. "When lipstick sales go up, people don't want to buy dresses," says Leonard Lauder, chairman of EstéeLauder Cos.

Psychologists may think this has something to do with sex, arguing that the only reason women wear lipstick is to get laid. For example, Hill et all argue that "conditions of economic resource scarcity should prompt individuals to increase effort directed toward attracting mates, particularly for women".

Meanwhile, management scientists think it may have something to do with work, because of course women will wish to create a favorable impression of themselves in the workplace. For example, Netchaeva and Rees argue that "women with high economic concern elect to improve their professional appearance more frequently than their romantic attractiveness".

Both of these explanations see lipstick in instrumental terms, as a means to an end. Whereas economists may see lipstick simply as a consumer product, whose purpose may be as much to enhance the mood of the woman herself as to enhance the way she is treated by other people. As Elliot notes, "rather than lose the spending habit consumers simply trade down to cheaper items to cheer themselves up". And Murgea notes how quickly the lipstick can change the person's image, therefore serving as a rapid mood enhancer.

What exactly is the consumer behaviour that economists (and cosmetic executives) are interested in? Zurawski notes that when shoppers stop buying high-end luxury, "a well-documented side effect is the tendency to compensate by buying more high-end versions of lower-priced items".

If a relatively expensive lipstick is still cheaper than even a relatively cheap pair of shoes, then switching from one product to another may be a clue that the two products perform a similar function for the purchaser. Economists call this substitution.

So what exactly is the purpose of the lipstick? Is it to enhance the body image? Or is it to enhance what philosophers call the body without image?

Larry Elliott, Into the red: 'lipstick effect' reveals the true face of the recession (Guardian 22 December 2008)

Mike Featherstone, Body Image / Body Without Image (Theory, Culture and Society, 23/2-3, 2006)

Sarah E Hill et al, Boosting Beauty in an Economic Decline: Mating, Spending, and the Lipstick Effect (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2012, Vol. 103, No. 2, 275–291)

Aurora Murgea, Lipstick Effect in Romania (Annales Universitatis Apulensis Series Oeconomica, 14(2), 2012)

Emily Nelson, Rising Lipstick Sales May Mean Pouting Economy and Few Smiles (Wall Street Journal, 26 November 2001). See also John J Xenakis, Is the Lipstick Debate a Sign of the Times? (Web Log, 11 September 2008)

Ekaterina Netchaeva and McKenzie Rees, Strategically Stunning: The Professional Motivations Behind the Lipstick Effect (Psychological Science, Vol. 27, No. 8, AUGUST 2016, pp. 1157-1168)

Lu Zurawski, The Lipstick Effect And The Epidemiology Of Payments (Forbes, 16 May 2020)

Related post: Playboy models and economic crisis (October 2008)