Tag Archives: internet

Bubble Wrap: Unpacking our Digitalized Enclosures, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 May

Bubbles

For a bubble, even the gentlest touch is fatal.  Mehmet Murat ildan

The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.  Nadine Gordimer

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Oscar Wilde

What fools we mortals are to think that the plans we make are anything more than a soap bubble blown against a hurricane, a frail and fleeting wish destined to burst. Barbara Nickless

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.  Joe Klaas

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.  Flannery O’Connor

On a weekend when we celebrate the end of Ramadan and mourn the loss of the fallen on our various battlefields, I have spent much of the time cleaning out file cabinets filled with old letters.  Some of these letters were angry, some grateful, some filled with insight about the writer, the intended audience, the world at large.  But what was most revealing is the amount of care that went into them, page after page in longhand, people often younger than me committed to disclose and share, to make sense of a world which was often making none, to decipher and embrace the core of their being amidst a cacophony of conflicting and competing messaging, to transcend fleeting joys and hurts and find the north star within themselves to guide what would hopefully be a long life of care for self and service to others.

We rarely communicate like this anymore.   Our introspective longhand has become digital shorthand.   We have trouble sustaining attention of any sort let alone sustaining a train of thought that promises genuine insight, even possible breakthrough.   Our messaging is ubiquitous but thin; we “stay in touch” by dropping in and out of lives from which we extract highly-branded versions of key “incidents” but with less and less of the backstory that explains why such incidents actually matter and what longings might yet exist between what are often lengthening cracks revealing our obsessive efforts to convince others we’re OK when we may only be partially so.

As is often the case with these posts, I am preaching to the choir; but also to myself.

This week, for me, was immersed in communications-related issues.  It began with a “new” campaign-related initiative by the US Republican party and ended with what will hopefully be an important opening gambit in the UN Security Council examining how the cyberspace we are now reliant on to almost desperate degrees is digressing into “bubbles” of self-referential propaganda and even hate speech that directly threaten international peace and security.

The aforementioned campaign initiative was given a most interesting name:  The Truth over Facts Investigative Website which is designed primarily to highlight the gaffes of the US president’s political opponent, but which neither interrogates the president’s own slippery relationship to facts of any stripe nor breaks any new ground regarding our general confusion regarding how “facts” are and are not constitutive of a fuller “knowing” of the world and our own relationship to it, how “facts” divorced from context can just as easily reinforce our various cognitive bubbles as puncture them.

As someone whose long-ago graduate school experience was literally drowning in epistemological considerations related our diverse “ways of knowing” the world, I have long been a believer that data and truth are kissing cousins but not quite marriage partners.   I won’t waste your weekend on a protracted diatribe about the ways in which we misuse data by failing to properly contextualize it, or about the ways in which we use “facts” to place people in boxes that we don’t want them to escape or even use “facts” to justify an end to exploration rather than as the engine of its continued evolution.

But I will communicate this.  In my erstwhile-jaundiced view, the behavior of several leaders of major power governments during this pandemic has been nothing short of criminal, principally in its lack of humility, its unwillingness to consult and abide by those of greater knowledge, and its utter lack of urgency regarding the preservation of life.   It is certainly the case that scientists are learning more and more each day about the pandemic, its modes of transmission, effective treatment options, even the consequences of infection – from kidney failure in the sick to psychic depression in those merely fearful of sickness, but also with sustained periods of loneliness and of protracted economic uncertainty.

But the certainties that many seem to be looking for in this time of pandemic remain elusive. Yes, we have vaccine trials with results that are sometimes encouraging and we can generally ascertain when the viral “curve is flattening” and where relapses are most likely.  But do GDP or official unemployment statistics really communicate the “truth” about our collapsing and vastly unequal economies? Is “official” data on COVID-related deaths and infections the “truth” about our viral circumstances, or might matters actually be more dire due to people dying in places other than hospitals and tests yielding untrustworthy results?

It is alternately intellectually interesting and emotionally unsettling for me to watch public officials struggle with their COVID messaging in an environment where trust in officials is low across the board, where the “facts” of infection change regularly as we learn more about what works and what doesn’t, and when national political leadership seems more inclined to stoke anger and anxiety than coach it away.   As a result, too many people of all ideological persuasions feel abandoned to cope with the current uncertainty largely on their own, to pull the metaphorical blinds and double-down on the “bubbles” with which are most reassuring, even if those bubbles are riddled with half-truths, even if those bubbles only offer equally false choices between hard certainty on the one hand and conspiratorial make-believe on the other.

Our remaining confidence in authorities and experts seems now less about the credentials behind what we are being told and more about who is telling us, who we choose to believe, who is able and willing to confirm what it is that we have more or less already concluded about the world and what in it truly threatens us.

This week, the UN launched what it calls Verify, a useful initiative to combat the growing scourge of COVID-19 misinformation “by increasing the volume and reach of trusted, accurate information.”  Of course the test for Verify will be less about the accuracy and trustworthiness of the data it scrutinizes and more about the trust that the UN and its World Health Organization can garner as a responsible arbiter of the “truths” of COVID – what we know, what we don’t know, and why some of the rumors and conspiracies floating around the planet (and especially in the digital universe) do not pass the test either of facts or context.

Does the UN retain the capacity to do more than offer its version of competing narratives about the pandemic or, for that matter, the many other, science-relevant, global challenges also on its policy agenda?  Sadly for me, this is unclear.  As much of a proponent of science (and of the UN) as I have been all my life, I lament that we have misplaced so much of our capacity to educate people about what it is that scientific and medical experts can and cannot (yet) accomplish, to have an honest conversation with people about the nature and limits of scientific inquiry, the findings of science that might well eventually set us free but, in the short term, are almost as likely to “piss us off.”

We need to have those conversations in our schools, our communities and especially in bastions of social and political authority such as the UN.  No, our data is not static.  No, all of our facts are not situated in proper contexts.  No, our “authorities” are not always authoritative. Sometimes authorities do what we now mostly all do and much too often – re-purpose “truths” espoused as a manipulative pathway to get what we want rather than as a means of enriching our connections and the quality of our common life.

In reading this over, I recognize how naïve and old school it must seem to some readers, especially those who have given in to the modernist assumption that we can be expected to do no better than to encase ourselves in our bubbles of choice and then pray to whatever powers we might still acknowledge to preserve our bubble from puncture.  But puncture is inevitable.   Our bubbles might be lovely to behold but as even the reference dictionaries acknowledge, they are also fragile, temporary, fleeting, insubstantial, unable to withstand much in the way of the winds of change and the challenges of new lenses on truth that now buffer them routinely.

When those bubbles do finally burst, when disenchantment towards our governments and official expertise has been set loose, when the convenient untruths communicated by our digital media preferences start to unravel, when our resentments (and the entitlements to which they are often tethered) are allowed to overwhelm our collective solidarity even more than they already do now, then we have set the stage for fresh ugliness that even the excellent Security Council discussion on Friday on “digital threats” to peace and security could barely discern.  We have shaken and awakened our hunger, not so much for truth and the data to which it must remain attached, but for grievance-based vengeance, for our petty cancel culture and its righteous minions, for a “rules based order” created by powerful states and individuals who don’t play by the rules they advocate. And this is encouraged by a media and “information system” that often seems relentless in its attempts to manipulate emotions not help them reach maturity.

This is a larger problem even than the virus, even than the digital culture on which we increasingly rely and which now seems to offer many more opportunities to reinforce prejudice and distance than wisdom and connection.   We are being pushed into bubbles from many angles, but we often now offer little resistance and even less inclination to abandon their false security.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple as Oscar Wilde noted.  The question now is whether we have the “stomach” to pursue — with humility and even in longhand — the truths of our time along their winding, rocky path; and then create a post-COVID world of security, health, equity and beauty once we are fortunate enough to catch them.

 

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Crossing the Line: Humiliation and its Online Enablers, Dr. Robert Zuber

1 Oct

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We’re not going to hug it out. But we can listen to each other.  Mother of Heather Heyer who was killed in Charlottesville

Genuine dialogue, not rhetorical bomb-throwing, leads to progress. Mark Udall

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right. Jane Goodall

It is early on a Sunday morning, and I’m in the office monitoring a series of discouraging global events highlighted (or for us lowlighted) by what appear to be indiscriminate attacks by Cameroon security forces against protestors in the largely English-speaking South West, violence breaking out in towns and cities where we have long maintained a supportive presence.

While we wait anxiously for word about friends and colleagues, there are plenty of other matters to engage our small office. Puerto Rico is still largely under water, without provisions and in the dark.   Rohingya efforts to escape abuse in Myanmar have occasioned a series of fresh tragedies amplifying already unimaginable suffering.  Cholera and civilian casualties from bombing in Yemen, human rights violations in an increasingly intransigent Burundi, referendum-related violence in Spain and Iraq and perhaps more to come in South Sudan and the DRC — all find their way on our radar. (And the DPRK looms large for many of us, especially given President Trump’s categorical dismissal of dialogue earlier today.)

What exactly, we wonder often, is the matter with us? Why is so much of our interaction with each other devoted to inflaming grievances or conducted at the point of a gun?

The UN in general and the Security Council in particular are responding to some of this dissonance.  System-wide, we have witnessed hopeful signs including the Human Rights Council’s decision to set up an independent investigation of abuses committed by all sides in Yemen’s now three year conflict. In addition, we followed a solid event organized by the President of the General Assembly on Trafficking in Persons, highlighting the vulnerabilities of forced migrants (such as in Libya and Myanmar) to predators who often and additionally traffic in weapons, narcotics and even cultural artifacts.

The Security Council held its own fruitful discussions this week, including one (finally) on the abuses of Rohingya in Myanmar briefed by the SG Guterres and another looking at the how a freshly coordinated, UN counter-terror effort can help address some of the most difficult challenges facing the system, including terror recruitment and incitement to violence through the clever, if malevolent, use of the internet.

We had what are perhaps predictable reactions to these four events.   On Yemen and Myanmar, we were grateful for the movement and discussion, but also are mindful of how ponderous UN responses can be – how many lives urgently hang in the balance while we in New York and Geneva take our time sifting through the political barriers to meaningful action.  On trafficking, this is an issue that clearly lies within the UN’s leveraging and operational capacities and on which there is considerable consensus among delegations.  If we cannot stop the bombing — and our record here is not always promising — we can at least do more to ensure that those once victimized by war are not victimized yet again through some toxic combination of vulnerability and predation.

On the “whole of UN” approach to countering terrorism and violent extremism, we note with appreciation that the Counter-Terror Executive Directorate (CTED) continues to organize excellent events for Council members and others focused on a range of matters relevant to its mandate; from the value of sanctions and “dark web” threats to the identification and control of foreign terror fighters (especially on the internet) and strategies for squeezing sources of terror financing. CTED in its new “home” under the UN’s Counter-Terrorism Committee is helping states and other stakeholders solve difficult problems, achieve a common framework of understanding and action, and identify outstanding issues that compromise effectiveness.

One of those outstanding issues has to do with our classifications of things about which we disapprove, specifically how we define matters such as “terrorist” and “incitement” and how we establish (and defend) the lines that separate terror from more legitimate dissent, incitement from more garden-variety discord.

Ultimately, in a state-driven environment like the UN, these lines are largely left to be drawn by state authorities or, in more and more cases, by large corporations that control social media and its access.  And their record in this regard is not particularly reassuring.   Regarding governments, we recall the carnage in Syria justified by unspecific references to “terror” groups as well as the mass suffering in Yemen caused by “terrorists” whom the state now believes can be eradicated through military means. In the US, apparently, white nationalist demonstrations that result in death no longer rise to the level of “incitement” if my own government’s highest officials are to be believed.

And apparently the young girl murdered earlier today by (we assume) Cameroon security forces (small photo at top) crossed some state-interpreted line. Perhaps she unwittingly received controversial material over the internet, a commonplace preoccupation of that government.  Perhaps she was simply standing next to a sign calling for regional independence. Looking at the photo of her mangled face, I can’t fathom what that line might have been, how such a line could possibly be crossed to justify the end of such a young life.

Regarding the internet, a medium of extreme interest for both state and corporate entities, there are lines to worry about here as well.   At a session this week at New York’s Roosevelt House, a UN and university-based panel noted some of the real dangers when human dialogue is replaced by threatening sound bites and vicious trolls. One of the salient features of the modern age of internet-based communications noted on the panel is its impersonal and often anonymous nature, the perfect setting to attack and humiliate people, to as one panelist noted, “bring hate speech into our private spaces.”

The point of much internet “dialogue” is not dialogue at all, but simply a platform to “sell” ideas and attack those which are deemed to be contrary, to create a spider-like web and then devour anything and everything foolish enough to come close.  The larger technology companies which are ostensibly responsible for “monitoring” digital content and use have themselves profited from this online bonanza, one that was described at Roosevelt House as the “burning cross” of our contemporary era, used far too often to intimidate and humiliate, to preserve the prerogatives of cultural and political hegemons but not so much to expand dialogue and understanding among those who might otherwise decide simply to “write each other off.”

States and technology companies seem to have proven themselves – at least to this point — to be less than capable managers of the growing threat from an internet at least as conducive to intolerance and incitement as to fostering genuine dialogue among those with legitimate, if diverse needs and worldviews.  As we examine the lines defining terrorism and incitement, we cannot, we must not, allow ourselves to cross the one which characterizes our willingness to listen and respect.  The many fires that on the UN agenda that currently singe corners across our planet will never fully extinguish so long as we allow mediums allegedly meant to “bring us together” to be used, more and more, to objectify us and tear us apart.

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