BAND OF BIG BROTHERS

 Dick Pountain/ Idealog311/ 9th June 2020 16:14:55

Have you spent time during lockdown worrying about what life will be like after this pandemic ends? For me personally lockdown itself hasn’t been a huge deal as I’ve been working from home for best part of 30 years, but I’m noticing other changes already. One example, this time last year I devoted two of these columns to an AI conference, CogX, which was held a short stroll down the canal from my home in King’s Cross. Well, I’m there again this year as I write this, but virtually via live streaming. That works well enough, in fact it’s easier to hear the speakers and read their slides than it was sitting in a tent in the rain. But I can’t help notice that there aren’t so many big hitters from US labs on the roster this time. Surely that couldn’t be because an invitation to sit on your sofa with a laptop isn’t so attractive as a free air trip across the Atlantic?

Actually the loss of air travel worries me less than most too, because 12 years of too-and-fro from Italy already squelched much of the romance of flying for me. What worries me more is our increasing reliance on online purchasing, while the only shops open were food shops. And it’s not just the way Amazon is taking over ever larger chunks of the retail sector, it’s that all of the US digital giant corporations are garnering profit and power from the global lockdown.

I’ve never been one to promote conspiracy theories myself, and as I said in last month’s column I’ve willingly placed myself under the tutelage of Google to a degree that would make some people nervous. But there’s no escaping the fact that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Uber and the like all have ambitions to provide services which in many parts of the world are either monopolised or heavily regulated by the nation-state. These corporations are all working hard to penetrate the healthcare, education, security and transport sectors, by providing innovative and ‘disruptive’ services that parallel what they’ve achieved in the retail, entertainment and social media sectors – and there’s no doubting that the extraordinary infrastructures and AI capabilities they’ve all invested in are indeed more efficient than many, even most state equivalents. I’ve often wondered how the NHS would look if it had a platform of the efficiency of Amazon’s to connect patients, GPs and hospitals.

Trouble is, they remain unelected, commercial enterprises who have no other commitment than to their shareholders, and it’s unthinkable – even to extreme free-market libertarians like our current government – to give them such massive control over our economy. Another problem is that they notoriously evade paying fair taxes in the territories they operate, thus depriving the public coffers of funds needed to compete with their services. There’s a potential solution to that, short of nationalising them or taxing them into retreat: governments with sufficient resolve could strike deals where these corporations pay a fairer tax whack in part, through partnerships that offer their platforms free to improve existing public services.

That however would require the state itself not to be evil, and seeing how some are already applying digital tech to integrate welfare, security and taxation systems isn’t encouraging. India’s Aadhaar system, Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ and Alibaba’s cooperation with Chinese local government to run their Social Credit system all present potential threats to personal

liberty. There are questions over how well these systems actually work, but they certainly grant the state a scary degree of extra knowledge and power over citizens: participating in a demonstration, perhaps even voting for an opposition party, can be punished by loss of benefits.

While George Orwell was writing ‘1984’ the first modern 625-line television system was being introduced (in the Soviet Union as it happens) and he foresaw the effect this new electronic medium would have on authoritarian societies. However because TV is only a one-way channel, his picture of Big Brother’s regime was somewhat stunted. Perhaps had Orwell lived to see our two-way, social media, internet, he might have concluded it had democratic potential? Perhaps he would, but we know better...

Deepfakes and disinformation are neutralising whatever democratic potential the net might have had (pioneered as it happens by those same Russians: Putin’s KGB background gives him a tech savvy that’s notably lacking among Western leaders). The virus keeps us all at home, staring into our screens, shopping, and wallowing in streams of false information. In 1988, Guy Debord nailed it in ‘Comments on the Society of the Spectacle’:

“Networks of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and flourishing profession.”

[Dick Pountain oft times quests through the deep, dark labyrinth of Amazon’s menus to slay a free Prime membership on its last day]