Tech That Affects

 Tech Is Changing Politics

Technology keeps changing the rules. Politics profits from analytics and campaign targeting. Corporations use AI and demographics to crank up their sales figures. Farmers and other primary producers use modelling to increase outputs. Media and entertainment's use of tech to produce copy and images and video is pretty well established.

You can (sort of) draw up your Senate vote sheet at this page so you don't have to remember it. Technology being helpful. Sort of. You still have to print it and take it with you, an app would have been far easier. 

But tech can be helpful too. Sort of. We the populace (and electors) have been given a super-power, something that no previous generation has had. We have access to our politicians' lives, not just the stage-managed moments but also the unscripted bits, the gaffes and unguarded moments. 

We see them on the mainstream media (MSM) when that particular media outlet wants to emphasise a particular politician's failures or successes. (Depending on their affiliation.) But we also see them on social media, completely without filters sometimes. And sometimes we see carefully curated social media. . .  

To our parents, politicians were semi-inscrutable figures of power - to us, we can see that they're no different to us, and in many cases, we feel we could do the job better. (I won't mention any names, and see if you can think of any politicians that (for example) may or may not have knocked up one of their staffers while (for example) the guy that was supposed to hold them all to account for such breaches of  conduct keeps yapping on about it not being his job and he's not holding the hose, oh no. Yeah. Media has let us see the jerk slobs behind the suits. No wonder we have little confidence in any of them. )

And of course, the politicians are using AI and analytics to micromanage their campaigns and write their speeches. (Although, given the amateur electioneering we've seen to date, I'm concluding that the sitting government doesn't want to get back in, and the Opposition is having second thoughts too - and neither seems to be using any kind of campaign management whatsoever...) 

Also, you can't discount the relative ease with which deepfakes can be generated now. Alan Kohler (of The New Daily, see quote above) in this article points out that this is an election choice between lesser evils and the two leaders are seen as their respective parties' weak points due to personality. People are prepared for the worst. 

If either party commissioned a deepfake video of their opponent doing some wrong, then even if it was revealed that it was a fake, the damage to the candidate would lose them the election. Even if it was revealed that these were falsified footage, most people would be half inclined to still believe it anyway.

You also can't mention elections without also mentioning Facebook/Cambridge Analytica, of course. The effects of private data and wayyyyyyy too much tech being used to crunch it for questionable purposes are still ringing today.

There's a whole story here about the future of government but I think I'll save it for another article. (Or possibly a whole series.) 

But back to the upcoming election. MSM are trying all manner of tricks, from 'accidentally' switching poll scores to cover up their losing candidate's poor performance and then 'retracting' the 'accidental error' the next day, by which time the damage has been done and fewer people read the retraction than read the erroneous article; all the way to (and you can't make this up I swear) complete fabrications.

Journalists are asking smart-arse gotcha questions which shows how deeply contempt for the government has ingrained itself into the populace. 

On my other blogs I recently also did two articles about AI and the effect it's having on other things - geopolitical interactions, war, and more. In the 60s the saying was that the Vietnam war was the war that came to your living room was due to the then height of technology of mobile news crews embedded with the army and that's been true of every war since. 

And while it was a fledgling attempt by the USA to show the people at home how the military was out there working for Americans, it actually backfired as the public started to wonder why exactly their military was out there - what did it actually achieve? - and ended with America withdrawing from the conflict.

So now we see wars we were concerned with, at any rate. If we'd had every war in the world on-screen every day, we might have all started to feel a bit depressed because of the sheer number of wars that are active every day. 

Light At The End Of The Link

The First World (at least) is at a bit of a rupture point right now. The planet's similarly at a crisis point. There are a number of ways things could go, but the one thing I believe is that we've hit the limit switches. 

An economy depends, as posited by Karl Marx, on the Three Factors of Production: Land, labour and capital. And the Earth's been telling us pretty firmly that we can’t really open more land to exploit. This can mean several things might happen, and one that has to happen. The one that will definitely have to happen is that "the economy" will have to undergo a radical shift. 

There are a few alternative economic systems out there vying for the honour, none of them is perfect (neither is the economic system we currently have though, keep that in mind) but I'm pretty sure open-ended growth can't continue in a finite system, and we flew past the limits a decade or two ago and now there'll be a real rebound happening, in fact we're already seeing the effects of losing so many primary resources and it's taking the form of high real estate prices, high food prices, high clothing and utility prices. When this lot finally snaps, it'll make the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis look like cakewalks. 

This is going to be a pretty dark period, because capitalism and classical economics won't just lay down and pass away into the mists of history. One thing that has to happen is for existing fortunes to become worthless and powerless. You just know that isn't going to happen without a lot of effort to save themselves. . .

Finis

I hope this has given you some new things to think about. I aim to raise awareness of things we Earthlings should be aware of... (Well, technically we ARE all Earthlings, every human being on Earth - us and every animal, plant, microbe and plankton on the face of the planet. I like to think of us all as Earthlings. . .)

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