AI, bots, algorithms and social media ?
2023, we’re still here. A month has gone by, not one vote came through. I’ll hold a hand up to not buying a campaign on fakebook nor was I ceaslessly promoting the idea, hoping against hope, that a good idea, like a coconut, will move across the sea between us and land on the island of your soul, take root and prosper, a concept less and less of us experience.
The idea, when discussed with most people, in the flesh, seems to be acceptable, even possible. Yet out here in the sea of humanity, to flog a metaphor, there’s minimal attraction, minimal traffic. People I know do not see my posts, they find it hard to find pages when searching. Yet, I’ll be receiving two to three posts a day on the most trivial things they do, leading me to believe that I am part of a “social network”
I had hope that in the earlier days of suppression and distraction the mind behind the actions was human and that if I could speak to that mind about a system that liberates humanity from invasive government, pervasive corruption and unbridled capitalism, that they may be pursuaded. An idea is a dangerous thing in the world of the tyrant.
Now we live in this world of algorithm manufactured content, the routers of information that determine what I receive and what you know about me, what I do or believe. This is a dispassionate system that receives a parameter and obliterates discourse at the speed of light or amplifies it to a planetary strobe of brilliance. It shares no common history or any human aspiration other than that of the party controlling the algorithm. That aspiration today is the maintenance of the system where men (and the occassional woman) receive “godlike powers” to govern countries and continue the global denial of self evident facts in the service of vast global corporations and the obscene wealth they generate for a tiny minority. (which is the dream that underwrites the fantasy everyone else makes a ladder out of)
What I want, we need, is a return to democracy where government acts on humanity’s behalf in defence of the basic systems of all life on this planet. It is not a co-conspirator in corporate crime and espionage, but an agent for bringing together every resource possible to mitigate escalating crisis in all those fundamental life support systems.
Time is running down, we have everything we need to self regulate and engage everyone in the project of living harmoniously on this planet. This technology that enables democracy can scale to sustainability, we just have to move away from the vast bulk of cholesteral - the sticky, sleazy mess of the adolscent internet.
Dedicated to the 234 scientists from 66 countries making up Working Group 1 who helped create the vast doomsday books of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, 2021. One of those voluntary scientist reviewers who juggled an academic career, research and life was Australian Joelle Gergis who has written “Humanity’s Moment” A Climate Scientists Case for Hope. Available to purchase wherever good books are sold or the Library, that place where you meet amazing people through the words they share. Thanks to all of those volunteers for the exhausting effort they put into trying to council humanity out of this slow, suicidal murder of the planet (as we know it today)
