The The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth by Samuel C. Woolley

The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth by Samuel Woolley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Or NOT "break" it as in "damage," but "break" it as in "breaking news?" Truth, Freedom, Tech and Global PTS? Former visiting Tech Research Fellow at Cal’s CITRIS Samuel Woolley’s The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth makes us THINK. Think about truth, distortions, and the global and personal ways the “free” (monetized) internet, commercial, political and social media and increasingly “privatized” institutions and angry individuals affect our minds, bodies and actions.

Not get frozen in fear or sliced and diced in confusion; but broken open into a more humane and democratic way of experiencing people, places and minds that can make us more intelligent, empathetic and humane.

Samuel C. Woolley, UT Austin Journalism

 According to Wooley, there are “always people behind tech(nology)” with their own biases and algorithms often created for “scale” and profit, not human rights and democracy. In the face of “fake news,” ad sales stoking the internet, altered YouTube videos, bots impersonating humans and “Wild West” lack of government regulation and corporate responsibility; “computational propaganda” has been his research and writing focus; along with re-popularizing the critical thinking, media and digital literacy the present and future require.

These folks have all been asked to turn & talk to their neighbor - how many are checking their cellphones or staring into space instead?

A marvelous and readable in-depth survey of the quest for truth and democracy online, Reality Game balances privacy and security with PR firms out to make a buck spreading disinformation among lone rangers, agents provocateurs, savage and/or unsuspecting hordes of international groups and our own (FB and Google) utopian “dictatorships” who think they can dodge responsibility for the very real harms that result from their malaise. AI (Artificial Intelligence), robotic voices, traumatized Silicon Valley hate- and porn-weeders and troll-responders working on contract are all here.

“… even the most advanced machines and software systems are still tools. They are only as useful as the people, and motives, behind their creation and implementation,” Woolley says. We’re on the brink of cyber-disaster (again) politically in 2020 and have been in general for at least 14 years, but we have the tools and personal will available to us if we will USE them to keep on turning the industry, government and our fellow surfers around, holding them and ourselves accountable and making sure the changes we vote for and speak out about happen. 
 

Knowing many good, bad and ugly histories of the Arab Spring, Occupy Movement, (the "Battle for Seattle") and other semi-successes as well as journalist-stalking, trolling, doxxing, election tampering from Bolsonaro's Brazil back to Florida's "dimpled chads," and forward into "ethical design" by something more than "all white and all male" artificial intelligence engineers; Woolley is a young voice of wisdom and fact-finding as well as hope.

As upbeat an analysis as The Reality Game is, he still knows the tech industry, corporate and authoritarian governments and random individuals will be hard challenges to take on. But we will not go backwards. We will go forwards together.

 My Internet hero, Doug Engelbart, one of the inventors and designers of the mouse, internet networking and other "computational" tools for utopian and humanistic ends; is often overshadowed by millionaire digital and military industrialists’ mass marketing and use of "personal" isolated, product-centered models; but he went for goals like Woolley's as early as 1968.

He
"reasoned that because the complexity of the world's problems was increasing, and because any effort to improve the world would require the coordination of groups of people, the most effective way to solve problems was to augment human intelligence and develop ways of building collective intelligence. 

"Mother of all Demos," 1968

He believed that the computer, which was at the time thought of only as a tool for automation, ["number crunching," soon to replace human Hidden Figures like Katherine Johnson at NASA,] would be an essential tool for future knowledge workers to solve such [large-scale global] problems. He was a committed, vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and computer networks to help cope with the world's increasingly urgent and complex problems." (Wikipedia, "Douglas Engelbart," 1 March, 2020)

Katherine Johnson, NASA, 1983

Has Engelbart's exciting and beloved new tool, the Internet, been "weaponized?" It has, but Woolley explains how, so that we can choose to avoid some of the "computational propaganda" pitfalls.

Are we "augmenting" human intelligence or are we radically narrowing, herding, blunting and dumbing-down information for speed and greed? Are we just overwhelmed with data, information and images that we can't sift down into "knowledge," let alone share together and discuss civilly to create "wisdom.?" Are we using tech to "cope" with or create more global "urgent and complex problems?"

Dr. Samuel C. Woolley's a "qualitative" researcher in a quantitative world of bookselling, grant seeking, digital, academic and political "trolls;" but I believe his heart's in the right place, refusing to let the Truth get "broke" as long and he and fellow utopians and journalists stay with the upgrades, underlying motivations and "stay woke" to humans' and tech's more nefarious manipulations and distortions by "man" and machine, as well as possibilities for communication and solutions...

Soskin by Jim Heaphy

At the beginning of his book, he quotes Betty Reid Soskin, US National Park Service Ranger at the Rosie the Riveter Park site in Richmond, California: “Every generation I know now has to re-create democracy in its time because democracy will never be fixed. It was not intended to. It’s a participatory form of governance [and] we all have the responsibility to form that more perfect union.”

And I add our personal responsibility, too:

“…you better free your mind instead.” John Lennon,  
You Say You Want a Revolution.
 
Hannah Arendt said that Adolf Eichmann's main crime against (himself and his own) humanity was that "he didn't THINK." 

He “only obeyed orders” and acted like a machine, automaton or object. Going all the way back to Plato, Arendt said, one THINKS, particularly about political actions that will affect others, before taking action, if we are to be HUMAN, to be humane.

Engelbart, 2008, with first "mouse."

 Before we "like," "delete," “friend,” hit SEND, post a photo, ("just follow orders," "do my job...") forward a diatribe, design software or hardware, distort videos, fill in our ballots, stay home on election day or bend algorithms, do we THINK? Especially if we are in the 1%, privileged, powerful, wealthy, racially, sexually or religiously dominant class? Or the lowest echelon of the economy and networked universe, "off the grid," easily coerced or digitally illiterate?

Or just bored, lonely, angry, frustrated, alarmed, tired, cranky (et cetera) and can't imagine how our post might intimidate, isolate, humiliate or actually harm another human being or group of people with the words, images or actions that we send or repeat, thoughtlessly or intentionally?

See my post from Karam's 9/11 Backlash, if you can't imagine how words can chill or kill...

The Automation Revolution has overtaken the Industrial Revolution -- where do we go now?

“You say you'll change the constitution
Well you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well you know
You better free your mind instead…” © John Lennon, (1988), Imagine.

see also, Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, (2016,) Crown, NY, NY. and
Robert Scheer, They Know Everything about You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies are Destroying Democracy, (2015, 2017), Nation and Bold Type Books. 


 

3 - 3- 2016 Photo of murdered land rights activist Berta Caceres, UK Guardian. 

(So why ARE all these people wanting to emigrate from Mexico, South and Central America into the United States? Maybe because they want to keep their own land, reject slave labor in palm oil plantations or cheap clothing or goods-factory maquiladores and DON'T want to get beat up, raped or murdered by dictators, banana republic police thugs in "their own" countries... ) 

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The Truth about Freedom: A Book of Rediscovery by Angie Schubert

The Truth About Freedom by Angie Schubert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Think about truth, distortions, and the global and personal ways the “free” (monetized) internet, commercial, political and social media and increasingly “privatized” institutions and angry individuals reflect on our minds, bodies and actions. Schubert’s Truth about Freedom: A Book of Rediscovery is a first-person novella about a teen who’s lured and abducted through an online chat group by an abusive criminal troll, her escape from her horrific entrapment and her journey through some of her post-traumatic-stress symptoms into a kind family and some redemption.

Edited skillfully by one Nasús Aransu, this tells a “coming of age story” that’s just palatable and realistic enough to serve as a solid cautionary tale for young adults, and a reminder for everyone else that both evil and kindness still live; even in a wired, persistently dominator-modeled world.

If “the personal is the political,” The Truth echoes an emblematic legacy in our present reality as well. Although mostly available online right now, I recommend it, especially in light of cyber- and sexual bullying in our local high school (see last issue of The Berkeley Times' cover story re women, teachers, parents and feminist friends resisting harassment, demanding policy change and action) and beyond.

L'Ecole Polytechnique Massacre

It caused me some flashbacks, which almost all women who have gone past denial, self-blame, silence and guilt into truth have had and worked with in order to get to a relative Freedom.  

With a modestly “happy” ending in this volume, we still know many folks and fields on this planet are war-torn, enslaved financially, politically or physically; suffering, missing, raped or murdered.  

We will not go backwards. We will go forwards together. We have to keep telling these truths, making sure we all have knowledge, support and ways out.

Ft. McMurtry, Alberta, Canada

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