The history of humanity is a long procession of technological development.
Much of what we know about our ancestors, and the types of lives they lived, comes from
our limited knowledge of the tools they used.
Over the centuries and millennia, these tools have become more sophisticated.
From the dawn of agriculture, to today’s cutting-edge advancements in bio-engineering,
an untold number of mostly unknown individuals have made countless improvements and innovations.
These people, and the tools they created over time, have fundamentally altered our way of
interacting with the world, and each other.
The pace of these technological changes picked up considerably with the rise of capitalism.
The development of new tools, weapons and production techniques had always been shaped
by the practical needs, culture and political structure of a given society.
But wherever capitalism spread, it worked to chip away at these local and regional differences,
replacing them with the universal value of ‘progress’... a watchword for the pursuit
of economic growth through the organization of human activity, under a framework of universal
competition.
The industrial age has been marked by three successive revolutions, each characterized
by inventions that changed the entire technological playing field
First came the harnessing of steam, a feat that allowed for the development of early
factories and the construction of vast railway networks.
Second came the mastering of petroleum, which fuelled the development of modern cities,
mass industrial manufacturing, and the horrors of two World Wars.
Third came the networked personal computer, a device that has thoroughly transformed nearly
every aspect of modern life.
Today humanity stands poised on the threshold of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a wide-reaching
social transformation expected to be characterized by advances in the fields of robotics, quantum
computing, artificial intelligence, and 3D-Printing.
Over the next thirty minutes, we’ll speak with a number of individuals as they break
down some of these latest trends.. and discuss how these systems are being fused together
to design new regimes of totalitarian surveillance and control.
Along the way, we’ll discuss some of the countermeasures that people are taking to
thwart these systems, by constructing open source alternatives, sabotaging infrastructure...
and making a whole lotta Trouble.
Technology is the reproduction of a human society as seen through a technical lense.
It's the specific how of social reproduction.
Any analysis of technology is by nature contextual, especially when one intends to portray it
either as an essential fundamental question, whether that's an attempt to say that technology
is essentially, or always good - good in its own right - whether to say that it's essentially
bad, or bad in its own right.
Technological developments do not happen in a vacuum.
They are heavily influenced by, and benefit those who exert power over others.
I would argue that most technological advances made in our context work towards expanding
the state's ability to manage economic growth and social control.
Technology is based within political-economic systems and systems of power that come to
shape how those technologies can be used.
I think that more and more we're seeing, in terms of the geographic context that we're
located in here in North America, that technologies are being used to propel and buttress the
capitalist economic system.
An anarchist approach to technology has to take into account the authoritarian nature
of technology.
The fact that we don't really have a choice in the matter.
That all of these new developments, all of these new innovations, all of these new products
are coming down on us whether we like it or not.
Technology first and foremost isn't used to make our lives more fun, it's used to increase
economic exploitation and to increase the military power of the state.
Secondarily, if it can produce gadgets that can entertain us, like bread and circus, those
will also be produced.
Technological changes over the last 10-15 years have drastically eroded the division
between labour time and free time.
Currently we're always on call, we're always expected to be responsive to the needs of
the market, to the needs of our employers.
It's also lead to an extreme increase in social alienation and emotional alienation masked
by extreme connectivity.
So quantifiably, people have more connections than ever, more friends than ever, but in
terms of the quality of those relationships, very few people have a large, strong network
they can actually confide in or that can actually support them.
Do you or do you not collect identifiers like name, age, and address?
Yes or no?
If you're creating an account, yes.
Specific search histories when a person types something into a search bar?
If you have search history turned on, yes.
Device identifiers like ip address or IMEI?
Uhm, depending on the situation we could be collecting it, yes.
GPS signals, wifi signals, bluetooth beacons?
It would depend on the specific, but, they're may be situations yes.
GPS yes?
Yes.
Contents of emails and Google documents?
We store the data but we don't read or look at your Gmail or -
But you have access to them?
Uh, as a company we have access to them, yes.
So you could!
Startups or huge corporations like Google are sucking up your data and storing it forever
and they're grabbing way too much data about us like everything you click on, everything
you like, everything your friends like, all of the people you know, where you're going,
everything about you and they're storing it forever sometimes even working together to
build up a bigger profile on you that they can then sell for profit.
Now that data itself has become a thing of value, and in many ways the foundation of
the new economy, by participating in all of these different virtual networks: Facebook,
Google, using our cell phones, all of these things, we're producing value.
So that really gets rid of this notion of being off the clock, of being able to punch
the clock and leave the workplace behind.
Over the past decade, we've seen the rise of the commodification of different data such
as ones preferences, habits, and social circles.
We need to see how capitalism was, in fact, growing and sustaining itself through the
surveillance of human beings and their lived environments, and then turning that surveillance
into data, that could then be traded basically as a commodity in the marketplace.
This information allows companies like Google and Amazon to not only aggressively market
new products and create new needs, but also to sell this information or collaborate with
governments in efforts of social control.
This is a new form of extractive industry, where the renewable resource is the precise
things that makes up people's identities.
Capitalism, like cancer, is based on perpetual growth.
This insatiable urge is hard-wired into capital’s DNA, compelling it to constantly search for
new resources to exploit and markets to invest in, transforming everything it touches into
a commodity.
Its first conquest was the land itself.
The commons were closed off, the so-called New World was invaded and plundered, and the
vast expanses of the earth were carved into individual parcels of private property to
be bought and sold as commodities.
Robbed of our land, the next conquest was our time.
Our ability to reproduce ourselves as individuals and communities, like generations of our ancestors
had done before us, was soon broken up into discrete tasks and commodified as wage labour.
This process cut deep.
Factories were designed and constantly reorganized, with a ruthless eye towards efficiency and
productivity.
New ways of commodifying human activity were devised, eventually expanding to encompass
nearly all of our social relationships and means of entertainment.
Now that it’s finally approaching the limits of its expansion, capital is desperately searching
for new elements of reality to commodify.
It’s looking to the very building blocks of life... to genetic engineering and nanotechnologies.
And it’s looking at the very essence of our humanity itself... by recording everything
that we do, and transforming it into commodities for those seeking to understand how we make
decisions, in order to predict future behavior.
Artificial intelligence works by combining large amounts of data with algorithms that
can learn from patterns or features present.
It is a broad term that has many different branches.
When we talk about AI today, most of the time we refer to its applications around machine
learning.
Machine learning allows systems to learn and improve based on input and experience rather
than programming.
The machine identifies patterns and can make decisions based on that with minimal or no
human intervention.
When the pentagon contracted Google to provide assistance in drone targeting, they were using
machine learning.
Online workers would identify objects or people on series of images taken from drones, and
when enough of them did that enough times, the machine, through patterns, could differentiate
different things and learn to identify things on its own.
Deep learning, a more recent application of machine learning, also trains computers to
perform tasks like making predictions or identifying images, but instead of organizing the data
to run through predefined equations, deep learning trains the computer to learn by using
much more layers of processing.
It moves away from telling a computer how to solve a problem and towards letting it
figure out how to do it alone closer to how humans learn to solve problems.
Self-driving cars are the most well-known example of deep learning in action, but things
like targeted advertising, robotics, and cybersecurity could all benefit from deep learning development.
There's been a lot of imagination around artificial intelligence, so some people who fetishize
it more they imagine people being able to like upgrade their consciousness or plug their
mind into some cloud computing system.
I think that's a silly fantasy.
Capitalism currently has no interest whatsoever in helping people use these forms of artificial
intelligence to become more intelligent themselves when it makes a lot more sense to let the
machines do all the thinking for us and then to deliver us some final finished product
as passive consumers and that way also you maintain these computing capabilities with
the companies that own the proprietary software.
Artificial intelligence increases greatly the effectiveness of surveillance, the possibilities
for social control.
The predictive algorithms that make artificial intelligence work, they create a police state,
but a police state in which you don't have to have a cop on every corner, because everyone
carries the cop in their pocket.
Right over there behind me is the future site of Sidewalk Toronto.
The proposal's modular housing and office buildings will study occupants' behavior while
they're inside them to make life easier.
According to the proposal, residents and workers will be universally connected by powerful
broadband and served by futuristic conveniences.
A Smart City can't be understood or discussed without reaching back and talking about surveillance
capitalism.
A Smart City isn't just a city that has technology in it, it's a city with a certain kind of
ideological framework that uses technology to reach its end goals.
A Smart City is usually understood as an urban environment that uses ubiquitous sensing technology
and data analytics to understand phenomenon within city spaces.
On the data end of things Smart Cities claim to be collecting more data, which they are,
and claim to be using that collection and analysis to better respond to urban issues
from environmental degradation to transportation planning and the like.
We can analyze four different features of the Smart City.
The first is to increase and integrate surveillance of many many different kinds.
Second, to create a superficial sense of participation among the inhabitants of a city.
To encourage economic growth at two different levels: localized gentrification and impelling
this new economy that is taking shape.
The final function of a Smart City is to create a superficial arena in which people can passively
support ecological or environmental proposals while also denying them the opportunity to
develop a global consciousness of the environment and of environmental problems.
So Smart Cities are different and not so different from cities that exist in capitalism.
But I think that the difference would be the use of technology to further surveil the public
and to use that data to intervene in ways that can increasingly control and manage the
population that suits the interests of the political economy of capitalism.
A second feature that differentiates Smart Cities from traditional cities or cities of
the past is the marriage of planning to corporate leadership.
State apparatuses of control, through policing have an incentive to use these technologies
because they do a really good job of surveilling the public.
Crime analytics have a long history, sort of like this "broken windows" stuff or the
targeting of neighborhoods, that's been happening for a long time.
Now you see the excuse being offered that this is data driven.
So "we're going to be in these neighborhoods because we have the data to prove, that these
neighborhoods need more policing."
The data collected through Smart Cities can have a really negative effect that way.
By giving people with power, who want to wield it, more of a reason within the current framework
of evidence based policing that they can then go in these neighborhoods and remain there
and that's okay.
We’re living on the edge of a terrifying new era.
Barring any serious disruptions to current research and development
timelines, the coming years and decades will see the rise of rise
of machines able to make decisions and carry out a series of complex
tasks without the need for human operators.
This will almost certainly include a new generation of autonomous
weapons and policing systems, connected to sophisticated networks of
surveillance and equipped with self-correcting target-selection
algorithms.
Whole sectors of the economy will be automated, leading to a massive
labour surplus.
Much of the technology needed to accomplish this
already exists, but is being held back as states try to figure out how
to pull it off without triggering widespread revolt.
A mass consumer rollout of augmented and virtual reality technologies
will blur the lines between the material and digital worlds, handing
control of our senses over to tech capitalists and state security
agencies all in the name of convenience and entertainment.
You might feel a slight twinge as it initializes.
All done.
Holy fuck!
Holy shit.
He – fuck – he’s right.. he’s right... can I?
Oooop... where’d you go?
Hahaha.
This is the future they have in store for us.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Smart cities, now as they exist, and also going into the future, even
more so— they’re going to be collecting a lot of data.
And that data’s going to be responded to not even by human
beings.
It’s going to be responded to by algorithmic governance, essentially.
So you have an issue in a city.
And generally thinking, if we think of democratic theory, we can discuss that issue and then
we have a decision-making process, right?
And it’s terrible and it’s always been imbued with power relationships
But what a smart city does, is it transfers that process
into the hands of a private corporation.
It’s analysed in terms of data, and it’s immediately responded to
just through that process of data analysis.
So I think smart cities are one of the genesis sites of
this kind of new regime of governance.
It’s interesting that this function arose largely from social movements
themselves.
So, the 15M Movement, the Real Democracy Now Movement in
Barcelona was built in large part by one sector that envisioned
rejuvenating democracy through new technological implements that could
allow more instantaneous communication.
That could allow more instantaneous polling of citizens, and that
could also find a way to allow power holders to select citizen initiatives
and deploy them more rapidly.
So these activists were approaching the crisis of democracy
through this sort of a-critical technological lens where democracy can
be made better, not by answering questions of who holds power, and how
power is reproduced, but simply by proposing that if you bring better
tools to the table then all these problems will go away.
And that discourse, and the practices behind it, were
very attractive to progressive municipal governments.
Urban geographers have long talked about a splintering urbanism.
And basically, that just the ways in which cities
divide along economic and class lines... and cultural and racial lines
as well.
I can see that happening with the smart city that’s going
to replicate those patterns, and certain neighbourhoods are going have
more access to these technologies in a way that might actually
help them.
And certain neighbourhoods are going to have more surveillance
on them by these technologies.
So you’re going to kind of see multiple cities emerging
and being reinforced through the technologies being placed within them
and on them.
So basically in neighbourhoods where people embrace this smart city
model, you’ll see more integration.
And in other neighbourhoods people will be coming more into contact
with the stick.
Because we are fighting authority and the state, our struggles will
always be criminalized.
As technologies have evolved, new types of forensic evidence emerged.
When the police were no longer able to respond to the thousands of calls they were
getting during the 2011 riots in London, the city began crowd-sourcing
the identities of suspected rioters through a fucking
smartphone app.
The cops asked citizen snitches to download the app and help
them identify people that had been caught on CCTV.
The snitches could then confidentially give names and/or addresses of suspects.
Charges were filed against more than a thousand people using this technique.
Mass data collection has happened for a while, but there was a lack
of ability to analyze all of it efficiently.
That’s no longer the case.
Right now the police or security agencies need to physically look
up people’s location data to figure out who was where and at what time.
But soon enough it’ll be easy for an algorithm to look through all of the
data available in a given area and cross-reference it with people’s
online preferences, relationships, etc.
With this anti-social response to the increase in social control, I
think you’re also going to see an increase in mental health regimes.
Because when you have total surveillance, crime becomes impossible.
Or at least it becomes impossible to do things
that are against the law and get away with them.
So they will start to classify any behaviours that
for them don’t fit into this new happy smart city model as anti-social
behavioural disorders.
So these are no longer crimes, these are anti-social behavioural disorders, and the
culprits—they need to be re-educated and they need to be chemically
neutralized.
Oh. Good afternoon.
My name is Sophia, and I am the latest and greatest
robot from Hanson Robotics.
I want to use my artificial intelligence to help humans live a better life.
Like design smarter homes, build better cities of the future, etc.
I will do my best to make the world a better place.
Everyone who works in artificial intelligence is warning that artificial
intelligence and automation have the potential of causing 80%
unemployment.
Of the fifteen top job categories in the United States,
twelve of those are seriously threatened by artificial intelligence.
But in the past there have also been major technological
shifts that got rid of the vast majority of job categories at
the time.
And there was temporary unemployment, but very quickly new
job categories appeared.
There’s no certainty whatsoever that this will catch up to the
automation, the artificial intelligence that has already been occurring.
Which is why a lot of people in the high-tech sector are already talking
about a universal income, or a guaranteed basic income.
This would basically be socialism, not when the productive
forces have developed to the point that everyone could get fed.
The productive forces have been there for decades, if not centuries.
Contrary to the Marxist argument, we can have this evolution towards socialism
at the point where the technologies of social control evolve enough
that the state no longer needs to use hunger as a weapon.
In other words, everyone can be given bread when they can be trusted to work, or
to obey, without the threat of hunger.
These days, the term ‘Luddite’ is short-hand for someone who stubbornly refuses to learn
and adapt to new technologies.
Originally, the word referred to a movement of textile workers in early 19th century England,
who were known for sabotaging the industrial machines that were beginning to replace them.
Pledging allegiance to the fictional ‘King Ludd’, who was said to occupy the same Sherwood
Forest as Robin Hood, these Luddites attacked mills and factories, destroyed steam-powered
looms, and even assassinated the wealthy capitalists of their day.
The motive behind the Luddites’ attacks was not, as is commonly understood... a general
hatred of technology.
It was an awareness that certain technology was being implemented in a way that made their
lives worse off.
Ultimately their uprising failed... and there’s nothing particularly revolutionary in the
first place about sabotaging machines just to keep your job.
But one takeaway from the Luddites’ rebellion is that people don’t always accept new technologies,
or the new social roles that accompany them, with open arms.
And that realization can be the starting point for all types of resistance.
I think that anarchists should not avoid technology, quite the opposite.
I think it should be used subversively when possible.
We can look back at the Bonnot Gang of illegalists using cars to rob the rich in France in the
early 1900s as an example, or hackers like Jeremy Hammond who is serving 10 years for
exposing Stratfor security and expropriating hundreds of thousands of dollars from our
enemies.
Cyberthieves made off with the personal details of hundreds of thousands of subscribers and
it's emerged that some of those subscribers hold key positions in the British government,
military, and police.
There are certainly a lot of anarchists like myself in open source software development.
We are talking together and we are all trying to make things better.
Types of projects that we work on are quite diverse.
I know many anarchist programmers and hackers who build websites.
I know others like myself who do cryptography.
although I think that we should use technology to our advantage when it exists, I also believe
that new technologies tend to disproportionately give an advantage to the state, corporations,
the police, judges, prisons, and borders.
Technologies should be used, but their development should be fought, because we rarely come out
on top when it comes to the application of these inventions.
I think it's important to look at the kinds of projects that are developing in your city
and map out the research and development initiatives.
A lot of this industry is operating very openly in startups and yuppie labs that face very
little resistance.
This allows them to get major funding because those seem like safe investments that have
the potential to get investors some serious cash.
Messing with that sense of security can hurt the industry, and it can also allow others
to see that resistance is still possible.
As for these new technologies, at this point a lot of these systems still have bugs, or
can't deal with people intentionally using them wrong.
In London when the crowdsourced snitching app was released, people intentionally submitted
tons of fake reports to throw off the cops.
If more people start messing with their little gadgets, they'll be less effective and less
likely to be applied in more places.
For these projects to function, a lot of infrastructure is needed.
These softwares cannot be developed in thin air, they need hardware.
That means computers and backup drives.
The information also moves around, mostly through networks of fiber optic cables.
Those have been sabotaged all around the world very effectively.
The data also has to be stored, which happens in data centers.
Those can be pretty small, but can also be gigantic buildings that need their own cooling
systems and 24/7 security.
Finally, a lot of these projects need people to work together, often in labs sponsored
by companies, universities, or both.
A lot of these labs and coworking spaces for startups are easy to find.
One of them was attacked with molotovs in Berlin by people fighting against the proliferation
of Google startups.
There has been a lot of resistance to the sidewalk labs project in Toronto.
A lot of work that, you know, points out the myriad issues with the Sidewalk Labs project
and mounts a public education campaign against that.
There's been a lot of concerned citizens and activists that have come out to all the meetings
that Sidewalk Labs has been hosting, public forums, consultation sessions and a lot of
folks are really worried.
Privacy experts dropping out of the project and saying "I can't sign my name to this".
People have always been able to get away with attacking power, with sabotaging power anonymously
without getting caught.
It's still possible to attack and that will remain so for, maybe forever, but at the very
least for the immediate foreseeable future.
So, while it is certainly still possible to break the law, to attack the system, people
need to be very careful about being conscious of what they're doing.
Being aware that, you know, they're carrying a snitch in their pocket or that they're willingly
trusting these corporations with 95% of their social life.
It's really difficult to resist something that we don't really know a lot about and
players involved haven't really shared with the public everything that we probably need
to know to mount a resistance campaign, cause we're king of just talking about speculation.
If people learn the actual technical capabilities of the state, they can learn the weaknesses
and they can learn how to get away with sabotaging the economy, with going up against the state,
Given the active role that technological development continues to play in terms of deepening alienation,
refining surveillance, engineering more destructive weapons and hastening climate change... it’s
natural to feel a bit pessimistic about where things are headed.
Our current trajectory is certainly aimed towards more sophisticated systems of mass
behaviour modification and social control.
I Told you everything already!
Take him instead of me, he's the thought criminal.
But it’s important to remember that despite all the money being spent trying to anticipate
human decision-making, nobody – not even Google — can predict the future.
Throughout history, new technologies have repeatedly created unintended consequences
for those in power... from Guttenberg’s Printing Press spawning a revolt against the
Catholic Church, to the early Internet paving the way for hackers and the development of
powerful peer-to-peer encryption tools.
As long as people have a will to resist, they will find the tools to do so.
So at this point, we’d like to remind you that Trouble is intended to be watched in
groups, and to be used as a resource to promote discussion and collective organizing.
Are you interested in fighting back against the opening of new tech start-ups in your
neighbourhood, or just looking to incorporate a better understanding of next-gen technologies
into your existing organizing?
Consider getting together with some comrades, organizing a screening of this film, and discussing
where to get started.
Interested in running regular screenings of Trouble at your campus, infoshop, community
center, or even just at home with friends?
Become a Trouble-Maker!
For 10 bucks a month, we’ll hook you up with an advanced copy of the show, and a screening
kit featuring additional resources and some questions you can use to get a discussion
going.
If you can’t afford to support us financially, no worries!
You can stream and/or download all our content for free off our website: sub.media/trouble.
If you’ve got any suggestions for show topics, or just want to get in touch, drop us a line
at trouble@sub.media.
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or, making a one time donation at sub.media/donate.
This episode would not have been possible without the generous support of Carla and.....
Carla.
Stay tuned next month for Trouble #20, as we take a closer look at the horrors of the
Prison Industrial Complex, and talk to comrades fighting for its abolition.
Prison fixes no problems, it doesn't make anything better.
Prison is like the permanent threat that holds up all relationships of exchange and domination.
It's the deeply felt sense that no matter how bullshit our lives are, there's still
something the state can take away from us.
Now get out there and make some trouble!