DICK POUNTAIN Who’s responsible for Trump and Anonymous? People like us.
Who’s responsible for Trump and Anonymous? It’s people like us – who knows what will happen next?
encourage me to put down my smartphone when I’m at home, in favour of interacting with the world via voice – and anything that keeps me from getting sucked into the addictive vortex of social media is good news for my sanity and my online footprint, even if other privacy concerns remain.
Privacy in mind, I’ve banned Alexa from the bedroom – it’s creepy having something listening to you while you sleep – although I admit that the idea of a chatty, unseeing bathroom buddy rather appeals. When else would you want an AI to share pointless cat facts or tell you a story?
The second reason I’ve held out against Alexa is it initially felt like one of those gadgets doomed to fall by the wayside, and I pride myself on having been inoculated against nonsense and hype by years working for PC Pro.
This has been somewhat countered by my partner amusing himself by calling out “hey Alexa” whenever he thinks of a reason the voice assistant would be handy, such as to check the weather, play a song on Spotify, or fact-check a point I insist is correct. At this point, I’d get an Alexaembedded anything just to shut him up. For £50, that’s a steal of a deal, even before the cat trivia.
Privacy and utility concerns partially assuaged, here’s what finally tipped me over the edge – aside from a need for a birthday present for my nagging partner. Over the past few months, I’ve attended a host of tech conferences, and be it startups or massive corporates, they’re all pointing to Alexa – not Siri, Cortana or Google Home, but Alexa – as the future, with one energy company even building a Skill (Alexa’s version of apps) to let the voice assistant check your smart meter readings. It’s easy to see voice controls taking on the mantle of the smart home, rather than having 18 different apps installed to turn up the heating, turn on the kettle, and turn off the TV.
That’s handy, but it’s a Skill built by a healthcare startup that caught my eye. On show at a Re-Work Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit, an app called Ada has been ported to Alexa, letting you query its symptom checker, getting responses in a sane, calm manner. As a hypochondriac who assumes that every tiny ache and pain is terminal, this is the robot friend I’ve long needed: someone to reassuringly tell me I’m not dying as many times a day as I need to hear it – and perhaps catch when there is a genuine problem.
In other words, my partner’s birthday present isn’t the Echo Dot, it’s no longer having to put up with me frantic Googling obscure diseases amidst an anxiety-driven meltdown. Happy birthday. work@nicolekobie.com A few months ago (issue 269, to be exact) I wrote a column about the way the so-called “alt-right” in the US had built an alarmingly effective alternative web of sites that pumped a continual stream of fake news stories into the mainstream social and news media during the 2016 presidential election campaign. A US professor of communications, Jonathan Albright, mapped the topography of this dark web, which he dubbed a “micro-propaganda machine”, and The Guardian printed his map. This network employs advanced SEO and link-tweaking tricks to stay hidden.
Turns out that this was barely half the story, and after I found out the other half I rather wished I hadn’t, because I’ve been feeling slightly queasy ever since. I found out through a entertaining blog post by Dale Beran, a writer and comic artist who had the distinction of being an early user of the 4chan.org website. Now, I’ve personally only been on 4chan once – by accident when following some obscure search – and I began to feel uncomfortable after about three minutes, fled after five and spent the next half hour scrubbing against malware. It’s part jungle, part locked-ward and part circus – a good test of your antivirus software...
According to Beran’s extraordinary piece ( pcpro.link/272chan) 4chan was the breeding ground for the Anonymous hackers network, the Gamergate scandal, Bitcoin, and more recently for the alt-right micropropaganda network. Its denizens tend to be nihilistic, misogynistic, game-playing nerds with an extremely dark (and often very funny) sense of humour. Beran explains why they swung their considerable online skills behind Donald Trump: not because he was any good, not because they agreed with his politics, but because he’s so awful. The ultimate prank: elect a nutjob as president of the world’s sole superpower. They also supplied the Trump team with its mascot, that unpleasant cartoon frog, Pepe.
I recommend you read Beran’s piece, with couple of big Solpadeine and a glass of water to hand. But what I intend to pursue here is the effect of this apotheosis of fakery on the future of our affairs, which might go way beyond mere prankery. The overall effect of all this fake news and contempt for rational argument – which has started popping up not only in White House press briefings but everywhere from Sweden to Turkey to China – is to erode trust, perhaps the most valuable commodity in the whole world.
Surely a slight exaggeration? Everyone tells a white lie now and again don’t they? No need to get so worked up about it. Actually, I’m not worked up at all, because I don’t see this from a moral perspective. No, what terrifies me is that debt, credit, markets and even money itself, are all just forms of materialised trust. If I hand you a fiver, you not only trust that I didn’t forge it but, more importantly, you also trust everyone else to recognise its value and give you the equivalent goods in exchange. The very word “credit” is defined by Collins as “the quality of being believable or trustworthy”. Undermining trust is like putting sand into the engine-oil of the world economy.
The relationship between money, credit and trust is rather more complex than I suggest, as analysed by everyone from Adam Smith to Maynard Keynes. My favourite recent study is Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a lively and ground-breaking work by David Graeber (one of the masterminds behind Occupy) in which he says: “A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it.” That brings me to another dangerous online lifeform, the “gold bug”. You’ll have seen those websites where folk that argue that all our bank-created “fiat money” is worthless, bits on hard disk, and that gold is the only real source of value. A few years ago, this seemed either eccentric or mere goldsalesman hucksterism, but undermine trust and these arguments start to be believed. That way leads to Northern Rock. Once you believe nothing, in practice you’ll believe anything: say, that insulting China will resurrect America’s factories, or that leaving the EU will save the NHS from collapse. dick@dickpountain.co.uk
No, what terrifies me is that debt, credit, markets and even money itself, are all just forms of materialised trust