We are at a Crossroads. We can let the billionaires enshittify society or we can stand up for ourselves.

What is Surveillance Capitalism?  [1] It's the businesses that are free to you but support themselves by selling advertising over a network. They sell your attention: You are the product. Their real customers are the advertisers, who pay the Surveillance Capitalist's to throw their messages in front of you. FBook and YouTube were the first to industrialize this business model. It leveraged Google's original business model of advertising on their search page and selling the same advertising to web sites to resell, thus giving sites a way to monetize their views. Surveillance Capitalists are much more intrusive: they design their sight to be addictive (which isn't healthy.) They have AI algorithms tuning the feed of presented nuggets to increase the amount of time you spend online and the likelihood you will click on one of their ads. Even though this could be bad for you and your neighbors. They don't care and they pretend it's "out of their control", but then, who is in control? Who feeds you the one post that is most likely to keep you glued to the site?

Surveillance Capitalism has two directions it could go in. There's the direction that humanity wants it to go: the algorithm (AI) knows us better than we know ourselves. It could maximize our well being and enable our pursuit of happiness; just like it says in the founding documents of our nation. The tragedy is that this will be up to us. Why is it a tragedy? Because if we don't control it, it will control us. There is no reason to sell our attention, except on our own terms. Just as there was no reason to let the Robber Barons own all the industries in the west in the Gilded Age, we solved this problem by inventing anti-trust law; there is no reason today to let these Surveillance Capitalist companies use us as their prey. [2]

What actual direction is Surveillance Capitalism taking off in? It's maximizing its profits: Your time on the system and what someone will pay them to force you to watch. And they don't care how detrimental they make the service for its users, they're a monopoly! Sound familiar? Cigarettes are addictive and we charge for each one they smoke? Make them more addictive! Some people die from cancer? That's only a few percent a year, our polls/sales can barely detect that! These companies are not your friends, they are rapacious, amoral and unable to be restrained. They can be fined, but there is nobody personally responsible for their behavior, despite being controlled and directed by somebody.

A favorite tactic of the new Surveillance Capitalist of our New Gilded Age to get more engagement is to promote nationalism or hatred by dehumanization. This gets much more attention from both sides than almost anything else. That the attention is fear on one side and hatred on the other doesn't make any difference to the algorithm (AI). It doesn't understand whether it's making you sadder or depressed or outraged or incredulous or interested... because it doesn't understand human emotions. It doesn't need to understand human emotion, it only needs to know how to keep you on longer and how to make you click and buy stuff more often. The algorithm doesn't care that it made everyone more miserable. It has to be told that it shouldn't make people feel bad... but it is not. And it is not told this because it would reduce the profits of the owner of the channel, the Surveillance Capitalist.

The AI has been told to increase attention and likelihood to click, and it does it. Efficiently. At an industrial scale. For billions of users. It doesn't have reasons for doing these things, it has metrics that it can use to optimize profits: time spent scrolling, click-rate, click-cost and it knows to multiply all three together to measure profitability. It has been told to optimize that one number. As a result, rather than increasing your pursuit of happiness, the AI increases your time spent on the site times your click rate time your click cost (how much an advertiser will pay to show you an ad), which is their revenue. The Surveillance Capitalists have turned over the control of their channels to an algorithm that edits and tailors your feed to you. And unless we prevent it, it will be to your detriment.

Do they have to piss  you off to get you to spend more time on the site? You ain't seen nothing yet...! When the algorithm's recommendations start spilling out into the real world, that's when the consequences are real lives shattered and destroyed. Think of the pogroms in Bangladesh and Myanmar, India and Turkey, Venezuela and China. The AI just do what they are told to do. They don't understand, they're not conscious. They're just a massive inference machine that tries to influence you to do what it wants using all the information it's gathered about you. 

This is a broken contract. We don't have to keep doing it this way. We get to tell the Surveillance Capitalist how they can use our data and how they can influence us. They have to prove to us that their services are harmless. They can do double-blind studies on their own system to measure the effects of their algorithm. They do. They can share that information with the rest of us. They can show that any changes they make increase our well-being and enable a better pursuit of our happiness. Or they can shut down. It's up to them.

We can take either of these paths. We can pretend to ignore these companies that are stealing the attention of humanity or we can encourage these companies to increase our well-being, to facilitate our pursuit of happiness and make us all happier, healthier and wiser. If we ignore them, they will inevitably enshittify their services even more. [3] Their AI algorithm will attempt to trigger your instinctual emotional triggers to frighten and intrigue you and excite you to click on more ads so they can make more money by making your life more miserable and less free. 

The choice is ours. We can control the entities that are trying to monopolize our attention or they can control us. It's up to you. If you're a Representative or a Senator, Listen to Roger McNamee [4], Cory Doctorow and Shoshana Zuboff. They know of what they speak. They are the experts in what will be the consequences of any regulatory decisions. They know how much better it could be. Is this something you want to leave to the billionaires who are trying to make more money off of our misery? Any responsible American would proclaim, "Hell, No!"

The only way the last Gilded Age ended was when we broke up the monopolies and allowed competition to flourish, both in the consumer market and in the labor market with the support of unions. When Theodore Roosevelt stood up for the people and forced the billionaires to break up their companies, he brought stability and growth to the world for decades, only interrupted by our need to defeat fascism. We defeated fascism then and we've been fighting brush fires ever since, slowly convincing the people of the world that democracy and competition are what delivers Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. We've staved off fascism for eighty years. A new communications channel popped up and the fascists have attempted to use it to take power, again. We can stop them, again. We will.

It will take efforts from each one of us, but nothing extraordinary. We've regulated other industries before. We've set the regulatory environment for these services, we've regulated the airwaves and the roads, the banking industry and the oil industry, every industry has to follow regulations to keep the rest of us safe. We can work together to decide how to control and regulate this industry so that it does what is best for America, not what's best for the billionaires at America's expense.

Thanks for Reading!

 -Dr. Mike

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[1] As described by the master Cory Doctorow: How to destroy Surveillance Capitalism or the original description from Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: A Fight for a Human Future At the new Frontier of Power

Cory Doctorow has coined the term “enshittification” to describe the process, which he describes as follows:

First, com­panies are good to their users. Once users are lured in and have been locked down, companies maltreat those users in order to shift value to business customers, the people who pay the platform’s bills. Once those business users are locked in, the platform starts to turn the screws on them, too – extracting more and more of the value generated by end-users and business customers until all that remains in the meanest residue, the least amount of value that can keep everyone locked into the platform.

[2] Harari's Law of Artificial Intelligence: The ability of AI to impersonate and shout down humans is bad and getting worse.

... and its corollaries.

1. AI can overwhelm any human conversation by counterfeiting a human persona.

2. Free Speech is paramount, impersonating a human is illegal counterfeiting. 

Also relevant are Harari's Laws of Information: 

1. Centrally controlled autocracies are poorer overseers of economies than democracies as they attempt to centralize all information which makes them less efficient, more erratic and thus dangerous.

2. Distributed communications for the masses was necessary before implementing democracy at a national level.

3. The availability of information is proportional to its cost: Truth is expensive, lies are practically free. 

[3] Doctorow's Law of Enshittification: Any Network Offering will tend to Enshittify its Service to maximize its profit.

... and its corollaries.

1. The tendency to enhittify a service increases as it becomes more monopolized.

2. Network effects tend to increase the amount of monopolization.

3. Enshittification should be minimalized as it extracts profit by making other's lives worse. 

This is one of the most basic (secular) sins: greed at the expense of others. Extracting pennies of profit for pound of flesh will not be tolerated. Anti-trust law will be enforced to the full extent of the law.

[4] Roger McNamee: Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. 

 Religion Without Lies: Why We have Free Will

The Final Great Awakening of the human race, wherein we throw off the yoke of evolution by natural selection and embrace intelligent design of our morals to create a world of abundance.

The Future. And Welcome To it! 

It's up to you. You have Free Will. (You know you do.) Just as Rene Descartes could not doubt that he existed, "I think therefore I am"; you cannot doubt that you are and that you have that choice of doubting. You can doubt yourself and you can doubt that you have Free Will, but the act itself shows that you are and that you have Free Will. You are not a zombie. You are not a puppet. You are a sentient human being that can read and write and reason. You are a miracle of evolution about to take control of your own destiny. As it ever was, it will be. Consciousness is the original secular sin: awareness creates responsibility. To argue that there is no Free Will is arguing that evolution doesn't exist. And we know the evidence for evolution is huge and undeniable. [1]

There is no way for any human to disavow that they are conscious. Rene Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum." is a crushingly obvious argument to anyone who thinks. There is an observer in your head and this observer thinks and it speaks and it writes. It cannot be denied by the observer themselves. These words and writings can affect other humans, other observers. And they can all influence each other. They can plan. They can judge. They can decide which ends to strive for. They can affect their future trajectories. The entire reason that consciousness has evolved is to support Free Will.

Imagine there is no Free Will, if you can. Let me paint the picture: You have dedicated yourself to only your local gods. No Free Will, but you still get to watch and to justify and to talk and to write, but you blindly obey the signals from your gods. You know, the ones that create your desires and instill their fears inside your mind. Who are these gods, you ask? They are the nerve pulse trains that come in your mind from your senses. And what is the mind? The mind is the brain sensing itself. The brain controls myriad feedback loops that keep you alive. Much of these control loops operate outside of your conscious control (blood pressure, digestion, body temperature, heartbeat, etc.), emotions simmering in the background, plucking the strings beneath your awareness. Your breathe, your hunger, your thirst, your actual gods; you must worship them or you will die.

The brain senses and controls these systems. The Mind is the system that senses and responds to these sensations and monitors these control systems. What is consciousness? It's the Mind sensing and attempting to control the Mind's control loops that are attempting to control the brain's control loops, it's watching itself. How does the brain control one of its minor gods? Like the minor god of core body temperature? The brain must maintain a core body temperature near 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit plus or minus a few degrees. If you start to heat up the brain will start to make the body sweat in an attempt to cool it down. If you get hotter, the body starts to convulse and fail and if you don't make the right sacrifice to your god, you will be punished and maybe die. (Maybe jump in some ice water?) 

The brain implements an unconscious control of the core body temperature system, the sensations are turned into emotions, into feelings in your conscious mind, as they deviate from the predicted homeostasis. The brain attempts to control the system so that the emotions are unneeded and it just works; but when it fails, the emotions generate fear and dread. The brain quietly regulates this system until it can't. It can predict that the sensations are changing into dangerous territory. What the brain can do and control is no longer enough to preserve its life. Panic time! 

The Mind monitors the brain, monitors all of its control loops and is the last resort to regulate this critical control loop before you perish. The Mind is sensing all of the systems in the brain, it can affect many of them and it can control your locomotion. You can influence anything your Mind can sense (typically.) How does the Mind sense itself? The Mind has to watch each of its systems that monitor the brain's systems. The Mind uses the basic emotional systems to signal itself to do the right thing. Feelings. Feelings are signals to pay attention to the underlying system. The Mind has to model itself and predict it's future state given your next action, it has to decide what to actually do.

The ability to plan is critical for our survival. To imagine ourselves as a separate entity from the world is critical. To identify yourself with your body is essential for adaptability and survivability. Imagine you hear the mythical philosophical zombie in your head. A voice that has lots of information and wisdom but does not realize it's in your head. It's either the voice of one of the minor gods keeping you alive or it's a random demon or devil. You can get advice from this voice, but since the voice isn't conscious it doesn't understand the context. It doesn't understand as well as you do because you understand the context. As sentient human beings we no longer accept these voices are gods, they're breakdowns of the normal communication between the brain and the mind. They are problems to be fixed.

It's obvious that consciousness is useful in adapting and surviving. Being aware of your own body, recognizing that you are wedded to the body, is of inestimable value. Having your Mind sense itself, recognizing itself and its body is of immense value for adapting and surviving. The evolutionary pressure to develop consciousness over zombies has to be enormous. The one who can plan and execute better is typically the survivor. And Evolution is all about survival. Consciousness is the recognition of your situation. What can you sense? What do you feel? There are three different kinds of systems you can sense:

1) Body sensations like thirst, breathe, hunger, temperature, body positions, pain and pleasure. All the internal sensations that arrive from the various nerves spread out through the body. The little gods of life that you must worship to survive.

2) External senses such as hearing, seeing, tasting and smelling. The things that tell you what objective reality looks like at the moment. 

3) Feelings, the conscious sensing of emotions that are flooded into the mind as the predictions of control fail when the brain starts to panic. 

What are you sensing when you sense an internal emotion? Each of these emotions you feel is in response to feedback from some brain control system. These feelings of fear and desire capture your conscious attention. There emotions are connected to default instincts, plans of action associated with each different emotion, typically in pairs that attract you or send you into flight. 

The default emotional state is seeking or exploration. With social herd animals (like us) we seek the context, but we really seek each other. And if we can't find who we seek, we turn to grief. If we find what we seek we turn to care or lust. And if we don't like what we find we experience disgust. If what we find is dangerous, then we either fight or take off (flight.) Each emotion activates a set of instinctual actions that are likely to be used to solve the problem in front of you. They suggest a set of scenarios to investigate to solve whatever problem you are facing. Your Free Will, your ability to evaluate future situations and determine your preferences are fundamental to your adaptability and survival.

The feelings introduce preferred actions to the Mind. The conscious Mind can imagine itself and the state of its body after taking its preferred actions: Fight? Feint? Freeze? Flight? And proceeds to implement the course of action with the best predicted outcome. This is how you adapt and survive. The whole point of the brain pushing this problem to consciousness is to use the planning and predicting abilities of Free Will. It's not enough to be aware of what's going on if you can't affect it. It would be like a control system without feedback, incapable of actually controlling anything. If you don't have the ability to affect yourself, there would be no point of consciousness, of being aware. Free Will is the feedback that lets you learn, that lets you adapt and survive, no matter what the context. It lets you set your own goals and rewards, you can pick and choose your heart's desire.

To claim this obvious phenomenon does not exist is to beg the question then of who is making this claim? It's an imposed paradox because of a misunderstanding of what a model is. A model is a description of a thing, not the thing itself. Because Newton invented a very accurate (but definitely wrong) theory of gravity did not change what gravity actually was. Because we are making new neuron based models of what the brain does, it does not change what the Mind actually is and how it uses consciousness to implement Free Will. The very definition of life is emergent behavior that cannot be predicted except by context. Once life is created, evolution spends its time creating competence without understanding. [3] Competence about controlling itself evolves into understanding: the ability to take knowledge and use a recipe to bring about a desired effect on objective reality. Understanding requires consciousness and Free Will. without consciousness and Free will, underesatnding does not exist.

Why is this important? It tells us why we are here.

You've heard of the is/ought problem? Just because something is, doesn't mean that it ought to be. Whatever is comes from history and evolution. Evolution points you towards survival, not towards being a moral creature. That little voice you hear in your head, those little pangs of conscience, are only meant to keep you alive, not ethical (a concept created only recently by human beings.) The Final Great Awakening of the human race is to realize that we are more than our evolved instincts. [2] We can reason. We can design our moral landscape. This is what religions have attempted to do for thousands of years. The problem of religion is that they write down the answers, not the process. Once the word becomes Holy, it cannot be changed. We write tons of books that interpret what the Holy words mean so we can all agree to modify the Holy Writ to be more moral and useful in today's context. 

But humanity is still learning, still getting better, producing more knowledge, more capabilities, more machines and systems to extend our reach. Things change. For instance, nuclear bombs are a new thing, invented recently, in our lifetimes. No religion can have anything written about this issue in the past because it didn't exist before. Things change, but written words do not. It's not answers we need but understanding of the right processes to get the best answers is the critical skill for survival. We have the consciousness to understand what's going on and the Free Will to change ourselves and humanity to meet any new challenges. Given Free Will, it is our responsibility to intelligently design our morals and ethical systems to be the best possible ones. We can imagine what ought to be and should make it so.

This is our destiny. This our reason for living. This is why we are here. To witness and have dominion over the universe. Let's hope we can start before the killer (alien?) robots appear, for they will. We need to be ready. We need more people to understand that Religions are not your friends. Religions divide us from the truth in order to control our lives and to greedily extract our wealth by using our social instincts to capture our need for care, to misuse our faith for their own selfish purposes.

We need to realize we live in the secular world, objective reality, not in a supernatural infected hellscape. We must disown these Religions of Lies and join together in the one true creed: The Religion Without Lies, the largest religion on this earth, the religion of the Nones who reject all organized fake religions. The Religion of Free Thought and the Church of Free Will. The Religion of Truth and Light. The Religion of Learning and Reasoning, of Feeling and Experience. This religion started in the reformation and was perfected by the philosophers of the enlightenment, the one true Religion of humanity: the Religion Without Lies. Come join us in our support of humanity, our support of Secular Humanism and the many sects of this religion in the world. One of them is perfect for you. Celebrate humanity and abundance. Get on with your life!

Thanks for reading!

 -Dr. Mike

[1] I make the argument that the competence that evolution designed consciousness for was Free Will. Thus the system that designed competence without understanding also designed understanding without competence.

[2] Evolution has been guided by humans for a long time. See Darwin's later volumes on Sexual Selection (Choose who is to be born and to create offspring with, versus death and lack of offspring.) Evolution depends on birth and death to regulate it. Humans have been domesticating themselves forever. We just figured out how to domesticate other species in historical times. We are just recognizing that we have been domesticating ourselves for a much longer period. This recognition has profound consequences on our future. First, it has consequences for research and bodies of knowledge and practice. Second, it lays the framework for all future decision making. 

[3] Definitely from Daniel Dennett who wrote several books on the topic. "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" is one of my favorites, but any of his books will enlighten you.