Controlling Problematic Individuals

When Simone Biles stepped aside in the Olympic Games, was she engineering world peace by depriving the competition of a focal point for their jealousy?

If you have access to the intellectual work of well-educated or talented people, should you act like Robin Hood and distribute their work to a group of angry, jealous, deprived, uneducated or untalented people so that they can decorate themselves with it and quiet the flames of their rage?

When flames of rage occur at all levels of the economic scale and emotional stupidity doesn’t discriminate according to pay grade, such a system might lead to the economically rich stealing from the talented poor — does that serve a social good? What if the poorer people don’t know it is happening.. does that change the calculation?

I have a lot of questions and not a lot of answers, but given the acceleration of art creation and distribution enabled by tech today, these questions must be bothering a lot of people, even though I haven’t seen any public discussions about them.

My guess is that these disruptive discussions are quarantined on university campuses and not allowed in the public/internet sphere, but I find the resulting shallowness on the internet unnerving.

More often than not, the media fans the flames of heated yet shallow discussions, delivering the worst of both worlds without resolving the cognitive dissonance.

I often read headlines and think, “Whoever approved that should be fired” and I wonder if the editor was assisted by a software package to make their decision. A few days ago, I jotted down some hate-filled, flame-fanning, clickbait headlines on the front page of The Guardian.

• “Three Americans Produce Enough Carbon to Kill One Person”
  • climate propaganda that conflated some ridiculous statistics in a meaningless way.
• “Head of German Cycling Team Sent Home for Racist Slur”
  • the coach had shouted “Catch the camel riders!” as his team approached the Algerian team

This is certainly bad style, but would it have been racist if the Algerian coach had shouted, “Catch the sausage eaters!”? I can see that implying that a country is non-technologically advanced is an insult, but when neither camel riding nor sausage eating is particularly shameful, I’m not sure that these statements qualify as racist — an insult to a person’s genome. Rude and unsportsmanlike, sure, but I’d have to know more about the history of the usage of the term ‘camel rider’ in Germany to know if it is racist. If it is something that people said to immigrants on the street to make them feel like outsiders, then it is certainly xenophobic, but given their history, and their primarily Turkish, Polish, and Russian, non-camel-associated immigrant populations I’d be surprised if there has ever been an Arabian immigrant who was insulted by a German angrily calling him a camel rider. I could be wrong. There are a lot of nice Turkish carpet shops, so maybe a German got angry at a price and called a Turkish person a camel rider under his breath without knowing that camels aren’t really associated with that country, but I doubt that. Turkey is a popular vacation destination, so he’d know better. If the coach had yelled, “Catch the Mariachis!” at a group of Mexican bicycle racers, would that have been racist? Being a Mariachi is kind of cool and unique as is camel riding. “Catch the Trump voters!” would certainly be more insulting than camel riding or sausage eating while “Catch those cowboys!” wouldn’t be insulting at all. I think I’m digging myself into a hole here.

Covert racism and xenophobia are far more insidious in my opinion.

For example, there is an article on Quora about French people eating rare songbirds that have been fattened up on millet. Is this for real? Why should I trust that this person didn’t just make this up as a political wedge.. or to pollute an information platform with misinformation or show off how good he is a making stuff up? It does seem that Quora has been flooded with click bait of late.

Either way, the Guardian headlines made me wonder who had decided to use the platform to promote anti-American and anti-German hatred for their British audience and if their appearance had anything to do with the ousting of The Guardian’s chief executive. Her removal was announced in a press release that described a move towards a more ‘reader centric strategy to grow the distribution of their publications.’ Today ‘reader-centric’ often means tailoring a person’s newsfeed to their individual cookie history and if they think you like or need to see hate-filled clickbait to fulfill their propaganda goals, you’ll get more of that type of material.

Rather than being manipulated by such tailoring, I’d like an app that categorizes news articles with tags that help me identify what I want to read, so that when I visit a site like The Guardian and my cursor hovers over an article, a bubble will notify me if I am looking at an article that is

• bull shit = lies
• dog shit = low quality
• chicken shit = cowardly
• horse shit = unfair
• bat shit = crazy
• ape shit = aggressive
• bear shit = obvious
• jack shit = nothing
• cat shit = toxoplasmosis
• pig shit = politics
• bird shit = female banter

Perhaps I could have a filter that allows me to decide how much mind warping cat shit and ape shit pig shit I want to consume on a given day — just to mess up the media organization’s social engineering models.

What do I mean by social engineering models? Let me explain. Once upon a time, people were limited to analyzing financial, social, and physical systems with classical, analytic equations that had a set of initial conditions and boundary conditions. Today, people have access to ‘models’ in which the rules of individual interactions and boundaries change all of the time.

Suppose that you have a method of identifying people who have a high likelihood of committing a crime or becoming cult leaders and you have a method of neutralizing the threat they pose to their community by feeding them certain types of news articles or giving them a lot of internet attention — turning them into a type of minor celebrity, at least from their own limited perspective. Should you use this method on a widespread scale? What if the system that creates the illusion of minor-celebrity status also catches non-criminals in its web?

Is it ethical? After all, the reason that those people have a high likelihood of committing a crime, becoming a cult leader, or being vulnerable to an attention trap is because they were wronged or ignored in some substantial way.

Both Hitler and Manson formed cults because they were angry about their art/music careers not taking off, but should all potential Mansons be neutralized through the illusion of artistic celebrity status or pre-emptive prison?

When he was arrested, my 34 year old cousin was a punk rock performer and not a Charles Manson, but he seems to have been locked up in prison for his commitment to counterculture.

I don’t know the details, but the insider, family gossip is that he got a very raw deal. It just doesn’t seem possible that such a guy could get a 45 year federal sentence for forwarding a single email with a picture of a naked underaged woman he didn’t know, unless you know all of the surrounding details.

The short version of the story is that he was selling marijuana and the feds wanted him to snitch on his supplier, so they decided that he was an irredeemable scumbag and entrapped him by having a nude picture of an underage girl sent to him by email. Perhaps the picture was funny and he didn’t know she was underage, perhaps he was high on marijuana at the time, but he stupidly forwarded it to his band-mates and it was on this basis that a swat team was sent to his home.

There were also rumors that the girl in the photo was the daughter of an influential man who helped make sure that he got locked up, but with the number of covert operations being used by law enforcement, I wouldn’t believe such a backstory unless I knew this young woman’s family personally.

The word on the street was that he got a 45 year sentence because he was too afraid to snitch on the guy who supplied him with marijuana, so what they did was charge him with ten counts of child pornography: one count for opening the email they sent him, one count for not automatically deleting it, and 8 counts for ‘attempt to distribute’, as when he clicked on the forward button to his friends. Why this was an ‘attempt to distribute’ and why the email was blocked is unknown to me. The situation sounds a bit like entrapment and when I was a kid that was considered to be illegal.

Maybe they just wanted to make sure that guys like him were locked up when the riots started in 2020. Politically, he was definitely what you’d call ‘antifascist’ and perhaps the fact that he owned a gun and lived near the police station made some people paranoid about him. By the time they showed up at his door with a swat team, he was mentally fragile and he threatened to shoot himself in order to avoid being taken to jail.

When I googled his name, the headlines all read: “After a standoff, man was arrested for child pornography from his home in a shipping container near the police station.” They certainly made him sound scary, but I don’t remember my cousin as being a scary or creepy guy. He was certainly not a criminal mastermind or psychopath. He was just looking for an easy way through life that didn’t conflict with his core beliefs. He didn’t like seeing people or animals hurt by *the system* and he and his girlfriend worked in an animal shelter for several years before he started a vegan sandwich shop. His business wasn’t sustainable and his girlfriend left him, so he turned back to his childhood love of punk rock music and fixing motorcycles, lawn mowers, and cars. That’s what I saw when I looked at him. He always cleaned up well for family gatherings.

I don’t know him particularly well, but when he was 13, he lived with my family after his family was struck by a terrible tragedy involving antidepressant medication that culminated in his anesthesiologist father’s suicide and the death of two of his childhood friends. Their physician mother set their house on fire and murdered them after attempting to poison her physician husband. His mother was indirectly responsible for the tragedy and she wasn’t able to keep him under control, so she paid a *reform school* to kidnap him from his bed at night and take him away to their facility in the desert. He escaped from the reform school, ended up on the street, and my family adopted him for a few years.

From my perspective, he was just a kid from a privileged community who liked SHARP (anti-racist) punk rock music and whose mom wanted him to take his ADHD medication so that he could do well in school, but he didn’t like taking the medication because it made him feel numb and unable to feel the music he liked. His younger brother dutifully took his ADHD medication and became an MD/PhD neuroradiologist.

Does that mean that kids who don’t take their ADHD medication are destined to live in shipping containers and get caught in federal dragnets? I mean, if he was truly a dangerous pervert, he would’ve worked harder to make himself appealing and not live in a shipping container. That’s hardly a chick magnet, and I know that he wasn’t destitute. His father’s death had left him with a trust fund and my guess is that he was just trying to live in a minimalist fashion and not feed the system that he felt had betrayed too many people.

For someone who was exposed to as much trauma as he was, I wouldn’t begrudge him the healing catharsis of punk rock music or marijuana for that matter. I think he was dealing with his broken heart with the best tools available to him.. up until he was entrapped and arrested.

It makes me sad that no one was able to save him from this.

I find it doubly upsetting to compare this situation to the case of a guy I went to high school with who became a youth pastor. He was seriously predatory, sexting with teen girls he mentored and inviting them over to his nice, suburban home. When he was caught, he was clearly guilty, but he organized a deal that kept him out of prison because his father had a career as an undercover police officer.

I don’t know why I buried this sad story at the end of a meandering perseveration about the impact of automation on social engineering. Perhaps I just have the sense that this is connected in some way to what happened to my cousin. My guess is that he was resisting automated media programming and got flagged by automated criminal identification algorithms. He was eaten by the very system he was afraid of for his whole life.

……

the image in the header is from : https://www.peakpx.com/en/hd-wallpaper-desktop-npggj