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RT reported that the UK’s so-called “National Data Analytics Solution” will see an algorithm process whichever of 30 separate data points have been recorded about a person in local and national police databases in order to predict which members of the population are most likely to commit a crime or be victimized by one, after which the state will dispatch local health and social workers to offer “counseling” to them in an attempt to prevent the computer’s envisioned scenario from transpiring. This program is being likened to the 2002 film “Minority Report” and carries with it a vibe of China’s controversial “social credit” system, albeit without any “rewards” being offered for law-abiding behavior. In fact, one can actually make the claim that instead of the UK copying China to a degree, it was actually China that learned from the UK seeing as how the island nation’s mass surveillance system used to be far ahead of the communist nation’s one.

The problem with “pre-crime” technology, however, is that it straddles the fine line between security and liberty in what is supposed to be a “democracy”, therefore making it uncomfortably out of place in the UK while being much more natural to implement in centrally controlled societies like China’s. While the European country insincerely pretends to be a “democracy” in the Western sense of how this system is commonly assumed to function, the East Asian one makes no such pretenses and is proud of having a different organizational model, which should be doubly disturbing for any British citizen because it means that their “democratically elected government” is actually less forthcoming about its nationwide surveillance strategy than comparatively more centralized China’s is. No value judgement is being made about either country’s governing system, but the purpose of this comparison is to point out the surprising similarities between the two that are usually lost on most observers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Dystopian Future of Facebook

November 8, 2018

The Dystopian Future of Facebook

Photo Source thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0

This year Facebook filed two very interesting patents in the US. One was a patent for emotion recognition technology; which recognises human emotions through facial expressions and so can therefore assess what mood we are in at any given time-happy or anxious for example. This can be done either by a webcam or through a phone cam. The technology is relatively straight forward. Artificially intelligent driven algorithms analyses and then deciphers facial expressions, it then matches the duration and intensity of the expression with a corresponding emotion. Take contempt for example. Measured by a range of values from 0 to 100, an expression of contempt could be measured by a smirking smile, a furrowed brow and a wrinkled nose. An emotion can then be extrapolated from the data linking it to your dominant personality traits: openness, introverted, neurotic, say.

The accuracy of the match may not be perfect, its always good to be sceptical about what is being claimed, but as AI (Artificial Intelligence) learns exponentially and the technology gets much better; it is already much, much quicker than human intelligence.

Recently at Columbia University a competition was set up between human lawyers and their AI counterparts. Both read a series of non-disclosure agreements with loopholes in them. AI found 95% compared to 88% by humans. The human lawyers took 90 minutes to read them; AI took 22 seconds. More incredibly still, last year Google’s AlphaZero beat Stockfish 8 in chess. Stockfish 8 is an open-sourced chess engine with access to centuries of human chess experience. Yet AlphaZero taught itself using machine learning principles, free of human instruction, beating Stockfish 8 28 times and drawing 72 out of 100. It took AlphaZero four hours to independently teach itself chess. Four hours from blank slate to genius.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What I Don’t Like About Life in Post-9/11 America

September 13, 2018

What I Don’t Like About Life in Post-9/11 America

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”―Edward Abbey, American author

Life in a post-9/11 America increasingly feels like an endless free fall down a rabbit hole into a terrifying, dystopian alternative reality in which the citizenry has no rights, the government is no friend to freedom, and everything we ever knew and loved about the values and principles that once made this country great has been turned on its head.

We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties.

We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade the citizenry to march in lockstep with a police state.

Osama Bin Laden right warned that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

These past 17 years have proven Bin Laden right in his prediction.

What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation is being locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

This is not freedom.

This is a jail cell.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

To be or not to be the change

May 14, 2018

To be or not to be the change

Coming up on Small Farm Future – some posts on the hows and whys of social transformation towards more sustainable societies, which have been prefigured in recent posts like this one on ‘self-systemic’ agriculture and my previous one on utopias – perhaps particularly in relation to the ensuing discussion about individualism and collectivism. Here, I’ll look at the question of transformation via personal consumption choices in societies of mass consumption, which I touched on a while back. That discussion prompted Peter Kalmas, climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution to get in touch and kindly send me his book.

Maybe first I should set out a brief position statement. As I see it, the world is beset with enormous inequities, creating a lot of human misery, and looming environmental crises, creating yet more human (and non-human) misery. The dominant paradigm for tackling these problems involves lifting people out of poverty through growing the capitalist global economy, and mitigating the environmental problems caused by this economic growth through technical innovation. I don’t think this will work on either count – it won’t lift many people out of poverty and it won’t succeed in mitigating environmental problems. If we continue down this path, it seems to me likely that there will be major breakdowns in human social systems and in the Earth’s biophysical systems. In fact, there already are. These may proliferate in all sorts of surprising and dystopian ways, but I don’t see much point in speculating about how such ‘collapse’ scenarios may unfold. I do see a point in speculating about alternative scenarios that may create better outcomes, and in particular about how such scenarios may emerge from present social processes, because that may give some kind of a handle on how to increase the probability of those better outcomes occurring. So that, generally speaking, is what I want to focus my writing around.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A small farm utopia

May 8, 2018

A small farm utopia

When I made a case for a small farm future somewhere or other a while back, I got a tweeted reply “Your utopia is my dystopia”.

I found this slightly odd since the case I try to make for small-scale farming isn’t that it’s the best of all possible worlds – more like the best of a bad job given the circumstances we face. Though to be fair I do tend to emphasise some of the positives of small farm societies and some of the negatives of the big farm society we currently live in, if only to try to even up the score a little from our present tendencies towards urban romanticism. I’d acknowledge that the genre of back-to-the-land ruralism is shot through with utopian elements, and it doesn’t always work out for those who try it. But sometimes it does. Maybe one reason working a small farm retains its romantic appeal is because working outdoors on your own account to furnish for your material needs is quite a plausible way of becoming a fulfilled human being.

But in a wider sense, I think the whole language of ‘utopia’ is problematic. Every political philosophy with a vision for the future is utopian in the sense that it propounds some kind of idealised narrative of the better world it seeks. And there are surely few philosophies as utopian as contemporary capitalism, with its disingenuous belief in market exchange as the guarantor of prosperity, liberty and prudence. So there’s a case for claiming back ‘utopia’ from its pejorative connotations. In this post, however, I want to take a different tack and make the case that small-scale (or what I’ve called self-systemic) farming furnishes a kind of necessary material logic for a plausible utopia.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Defying Dystopia: Shaping the Climate Future We Want

January 17, 2018

Defying Dystopia: Shaping the Climate Future We Want

We live in an age of dystopias on demand. Whether it’s Black Mirror, The Hunger Games or The Handmaid’s Tale, there is no limit to satiating our desires for dark, apocalyptic visions of the future. Unfortunately the scariest experience does not involve the world of the imaginary; it just requires reading the latest climate science.

In one such piece in July 2017, New York Magazine managed to pull together all the possible worst-case climate scenarios in a longread called “The Uninhabitable Earth.” Through interviews with climate scientists, it painted a world of bacterial plagues escaping from melting ice, devastating droughts and floods so frequent they are just called “weather,” and biblical-like tableaus of entire nations on the move. The piece is bleaker than the darkest of sci-fi, because there is no way of dismissing it as fiction.

Facing our fears of climate crisis is one of the biggest challenges we face as activists. Not a week goes by without warnings of an “ice apocalypse” or a “point of no return.” We are bombarded with bleak visions of the future. And it’s a challenge that we continue to struggle with — one we have mainly filled with demands for action. For a long time, the answer was to provide easy actions that people could take so they could feel empowered. But it was soon evident that no amount of energy-saving lightbulbs was going to halt the capitalist juggernaut. Now the answer, from the left at least, is that we must confront capitalism to overcome climate change. Yet this can hardly be described as an easy win, or likely to allay our fears of a dangerous future.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Myth and dystopia in the Anthropocene

December 6, 2017

Myth and dystopia in the Anthropocene

The sleeping ice giants of Antarctica are stirring. Will we wake up before they devour us?

Calving front of the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina. Credit: Flickr/Etienne Berthier, Université de Toulouse. CC-BY-2.0.

In the autumn of 1913, Karl Jung dreamt of a monstrous flood of yellow waves cascading down from the North Sea through north-west Europe and down onto the Alps. Later in his apocalyptic dream-vision the swirling yellow seas turned blood red amidst “the floating rubble of civilisation, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands.”

Nine months later Jung had a similarly dramatic dream, but this time with a different emphasis: “An Arctic cold wave descended and froze the land to ice…The whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region totally deserted by human beings.”

I thought of Jung’s pre-World War One visions when I read of the stirring of the sleeping ice giants of East Antarctica earlier this year. According to recent research, one of those glaciers—the Totten (larger than the state of California)—is moving slowly towards the Southern Ocean as a result of global warming, with the potential to raise sea levels by 3.5 metres in future decades.

This figure is a worst case scenario, but a sea level rise of even a fraction of that figure could lead to extraordinarily worrying outcomes. In the case of the Totten glacier, warm ocean water is seeping up from the bottom of the sea into the cavity beneath this vast ice giant, which could destabilise the surrounding ice sheet even further. That’s important because East Antarctica has long been regarded as more stable than West Antarctica in terms of its melting ice.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The American dystopia didn’t begin with Trump

May 17, 2017

The American dystopia didn’t begin with Trump

Media narrative includes myths fostered by Obama

The dystopian classic, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is streaming on Hulu, sparking lots of false comparisons between the misogynistic dictatorship in the miniseries and the presidency of Donald Trump.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Dystopia is here. It’s not just the “imagined place” of the dictionary definition or a future state of dystopian novels. It is very real and right now, at least for those of us trying to follow national politics.

And it’s not just Donald Trump. It’s Barack Obama, it’s Ted Cruz, it’s the New York Times, it’s Breitbart News. It is an alternate universe detached from the world we live in but intruding into it in painful and dangerous ways.

It is a media narrative of political conspirators colluding with a dictatorial archenemy, of an intemperate and delusional leader overturning the institutions of democracy, of a “deep-state” resistance to constitutional authority.

It is a dystopia of rampant hypocrisy, where obstructing legislation, supporting a law-enforcement official who strays beyond the limits of his authority, or boycotting a president’s appointments is evil and undemocratic until it’s your party that wants to do it.

Two dystopian classics have shot back to the top of best-seller lists because the media suggest the authoritarian surveillance societies they portray have arrived. The 1948 novel “1984” and the 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” are touted as descriptions of where we are headed under Trump.

While the author of “Handmaid,” Margaret Atwood, and the cast of the Hulu miniseries based on it see a Trump administration as the realization of the misogyny depicted in the novel, it’s obvious the U.S. is not about to become a Puritanical theocracy like that in the book.

Critics on both the left and the right dispute the media meme that “Handmaid” is a depiction of the Trump era.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Dystopian Fiction of Yesterday is the NWO of Tomorrow: “The Shift is Toward Totalitarianism”

March 30, 2016

Dystopian Fiction of Yesterday is the NWO of Tomorrow: “The Shift is Toward Totalitarianism”

1984

Many of the things that are happening this very moment have direct parallels in literature of the past. Whether it is an account such as the “Gulag Archipelago” by Solzhenitsyn or a work of “fiction” such as “1984” by George Orwell is irrelevant. Elements of the history or the storyline (regarding the former and the latter works) are now becoming thoroughly inculcated into the fabric of modern reality.

All of the measures taken by the Soviet Union to crush and control its population are beginning to manifest themselves today in the United States. The courts are “stacked” to reflect the decision of the regime and not to rule by law. The Military Industrial Complex contracts are still being shuffled, along with government policies that just happen to substantiate those business interests with kickbacks for all. Laws serve political and corporate interests, and the lawmakers themselves do not represent any of their constituents: they are self-serving thieves, selling out their country and its populace for money and power.

The police departments have (for all intents and purposes) been “federalized,” with budgets and marching orders becoming increasingly dependent upon federal and not local or state policies. Sheriffs who follow their appointed roles as duly-elected law enforcement officials upholding Constitutional guidelines are being “phased out” of existence. The changed demographics of “forced” insertions of illegal aliens and “refugees” into populations are rapidly negating the remainder of the two-party system to ensure that the Democratic party takes control ad infinitum.

Orwell envisioned it. His work is labeled a work of fiction, although all of the measures Oceania pursued are either currently in place in the United States or they’re being developed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

My Wealthy Country Became A Dystopia Overnight: 6 Realities

March 7, 2016

My Wealthy Country Became A Dystopia Overnight: 6 Realities

But as we like to point out in these articles, there’s always an apocalypse somewhere. We’re talking about countries in which life was fairly normal a few years ago, until the day when everything fell apart. Today’s example: Venezuela. Once on the road to becoming an economic powerhouse, Venezuela is now one of the poorest and most dangerous countries on Earth. We sat down with one citizen to learn what happens when your country’s economy and government just … stop working.

6: Any Economy Can Suddenly Collapse

Above and below are pictures of our source’s local grocery store in the middle of an average day:

AnonymousNothing but Doritos. Worse than nothing at all, really.

Those weren’t taken on the eve of some big national drinking party. Food simply … doesn’t show up anymore. On the rare occasions the stores have stock, people queue up in block-spanning lines that would make Weimar-era Germans wince. All to get their hands on flour, soap, or the almost-mythical Coca-Cola.

AnonymousThey debate sightings like it’s some sugary Bigfoot.

Our source took that picture illegally, by the way. Photos of bread lines, he says, “‘promote discomfort and give a bad name to the country.’ I faced the risk of receiving a ticket or having my camera taken.”

AnonymousThat’s what zoom lenses are for.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China Just Launched the Most Frightening Game Ever — and Soon It Will Be Mandatory

December 22, 2015

China Just Launched the Most Frightening Game Ever — and Soon It Will Be Mandatory

(ANTIMEDIA) Oceania, China — As if further proof were needed Orwell’s dystopia is now upon us, China has now gamified obedience to the State. Though that is every bit as creepily terrifying as it sounds, citizens may still choose whether or not they wish to opt-in — that is, until the program becomes compulsory in 2020. “Going under the innocuous name of ‘Sesame Credit,’ China has created a score for how good a citizen you are,” explains Extra Credits’ video about the program. “The owners of China’s largest social networks have partnered with the government to create something akin to the U.S. credit score — but, instead of measuring how regularly you pay your bills, it measures how obediently you follow the party line.”

In the works for years, China’s ‘social credit system’ aims to create a docile, compliant citizenry who are fiscally and morally responsible by employing a game-like format to create self-imposed, group social control. In other words, China gamified peer pressure to control its citizenry; and, though the scheme hasn’t been fully implemented yet, it’s already working — insidiously well.

Zheping Huang, a reporter for Quartz, chronicled his own experience with the social control tool in October, saying that “in the past few weeks I began to notice a mysterious new trend. Numbers were popping up on my social media feeds as my friends and strangers on Weibo [the Chinese equivalent to Twitter] and WeChat began to share their ‘Sesame Credit scores.’ The score is created by Ant Financial, an Alibaba-affiliated company that also runs Alipay, China’s popular third-party payment app with over 350 million users. Ant Financial claims that it evaluates one’s purchasing and spending habits in order to derive a figure that shows how creditworthy someone is.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lord of the Flies: Dystopia is Arising

September 13, 2015

Lord of the Flies: Dystopia is Arising

Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – zero – Voltaire

I was driving around Denver yesterday doing my “boots on the ground” due diligence scouting of the local housing market. I continue to see some “sold” and “under contract” signs but I’m seeing a pile-up forming in new “for sale,” “price reduced,” and “for rent” signs. The traffic update on the sports radio reported a back-up at an intersection in Denver caused by a fist-fight that had broken out between two drivers. This country is sliding back into neanderthal times.

The U.S. economic system is slipping into dystopia and the Government/Fed is doing everything it can to try and prevent the process. The two most obvious signs of this are the perpetual market interventions by the PPT to prevent a stock market dump and the relentless propaganda flowing through the mainstream media which originates from the policy-implementing elitists (business and political). Both efforts are insidious attempts to force control over our system

Overnight the S&P 500 e-mini futures were halted twice. The SPX mini is the Fed’s choice intervention tool because it can direct the market with minimal capital requirements. The e-mini is hyper-sensitive to big orders and tends to lead the big SPX directionally because of this. The emini trading was halted after a sudden plunge in the futures at 5:51 a.m. EST, after which a massive buy order (the PPT) hit the tape and spiked the eminis straight up. The market was halted again after the spike up stalled and the emini was about to plunge again. You can see the action here: E-mini Market Halt

The graphic linked above was provided by Nanex’s Eric Hunsader. Prior to the market’s first market halt, Hunsader tweeted: “emini getting tossed around like a rag doll:”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Mad Max: Fury Road” Is a Resource-Conscious Blockbuster for Our Time

June 4, 2015

“Mad Max: Fury Road” Is a Resource-Conscious Blockbuster for Our Time

Who ruined Mad Max’s world? The new film isn’t afraid to lay blame — and suggest a way forward.

When the first Mad Max was released back in 1979, the era’s reigning existential threats were nuclear winter and, to a lesser extent, peak oil. Set in a not-too-distant dystopian future and against the harsh backdrop of rural Australia, viewers’ ability to map their own fears onto the screen was crucial to that film’s success.

The film doesn’t just rebuke the greedy.

Although the fears have changed, you could say the same thing about Mad Max: Fury Road, the series’ long-awaited fourth installment. Released this month in the midst of California’s historic drought and increasingly bleak studies about the likelihood of catastrophic climate change, the film plays more on viewers’ anxieties about a carbon bomb than a nuclear one.

Director George Miller’s pitched focus on resources reflects today’s embattled context to a tee. Mad Max is not only a rollicking, white-knuckle action flick on spiked 6-foot wheels. It also carries an important and all-too-timely message, shouted defiantly by no less than an aged, graffiti-scrawling woman wielding a shotgun: “You cannot own a human being!” nor the planet on which they live.

Miller’s eponymous antihero, Max Rockantansky (Tom Hardy), inhabits a parched dystopia created by dual resource crises. Invoking political strategist James Carville, the movie’s opening-by-way-of-background announces, “It’s the oil, stupid,” briefing viewers on the water wars, oil shortage, and subsequent state suppression that jolted humanity into chaos. As the world’s supplies of fossil fuels and water dwindle, its citizens are reduced to a single instinct: survival.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Internet Of Things: A Dystopian Nightmare Where Everyone And Everything Will Be Monitored On The Internet

March 2, 2015

The Internet Of Things: A Dystopian Nightmare Where Everyone And Everything Will Be Monitored On The Internet

Can you imagine a world where your home, your vehicles, your appliances and every single electronic device that you own is constantly connected to the Internet? This is not some grand vision that is being planned for some day in the future. This is something that is being systematically implemented right now. In 2015, we already have “smart homes”, vehicles that talk to one another, refrigeratorsthat are connected to the Internet, and televisions that spy on us. Our world is becoming increasingly interconnected, and that opens up some wonderful possibilities. But there is also a downside. What if we rapidly reach a point where one must be connected to the Internet in order to function in society? Will there come a day when we can’t even do basic things such as buy, sell, get a job or open a bank account without it? And what about the potential for government abuse? Could an “Internet of Things” create a dystopian nightmare where everyone and everything will be constantly monitored and tracked by the government? That is something to think about.

Today, the Internet has become such an integral part of our lives that it is hard to remember how we ever survived without it. And with each passing year, the number of devices connected to the Internet continues to grow at an exponential rate. If you have never heard of the “Internet of Things” before, here is a little bit about it from Wikipedia…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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