All posts by Brian Martin

Brian Martin is professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and vice president of Whistleblowers Australia. He is the author of a dozen books and hundreds of articles on dissent, nonviolence, scientific controversies, democracy, information issues, education and other topics.
science, social dynamics

So what if machines can think better than humans

Should it be a big deal if computers become better at human mental achievements? So what if computers have better memories, process information more logically, are creative and display emotions?

                  Throughout recent history, machines have outdone one human capacity after another. Until two hundred years ago, humans (on foot or horseback) could travel faster than any machine. Then came the train, a self-powered vehicle that could go faster, and later there were cars. This is not to mention machines able to do things that humans can’t do at all without devices, like flying.

                  Humans can become highly skilled musicians, with amazing capacities for performing difficult compositions. Then came recordings of top musicians, tweaked to remove mistakes, the result being a sound more accurate and pure than any human can produce.

                  Humans can be very good cooks, and some cooks are celebrities. Yet for much everyday cooking, machines can produce greater quantities of uniform quality food than just about any human. Think corn flakes and sliced bread. In supermarkets, people buy machine-produced food, with little home produce available.

                  Chess is a complex game, and grandmasters can play at phenomenally advanced levels. But in 1997, a computer beat the world’s best player.

The game of go is even more challenging. A computer beat the world’s top go player in 2016.

                  Today, the frontier is human thinking, with computers becoming better and better at many capacities, such as composing text, creating pictures, recognising faces and analysing data. Defenders of human superiority point to areas where computers remain deficient or are prone to error. However, as AI continues to improve, human superiority will be harder to defend. Should we worry?

Humans keep striving

Even though machines can do better than humans in many domains, this hasn’t meant that humans give up striving and competing — with each other.

                  Athletes continue to train to extraordinary levels, trying to excel. In competitions, winning is prized. In running and swimming, speed and endurance are the goals, and it doesn’t matter that machines can travel on land and sea much faster than humans. Indeed, that comparison has almost been forgotten.

                  Elite musicians continue to devote thousands of hours of practice to becoming the most outstanding performers possible, and audiences attend concerts to hear talented soloists. That recordings and synthesised music can outdo most humans is beside the point. Audiences don’t flock to concert halls to listen to recordings.

                  People continue to play chess, and some devote intensive study and practice to become extremely good, even to the level of grandmasters, seeking to defeat other humans. Likewise for the game of go.

                  People continue to train their minds to extraordinary levels, for example in memorising long sequences of numbers, even though computers can do the same thing with ease. People continue to learn large numbers of facts, displaying their skills on television shows where memory feats and quick responses impress audiences.

                  In summary, even in domains where machines are superior, people keep striving to become good, better and extraordinary. But only some people.

Downsides of machine superiority

Although some people continue to exert their bodies, most rely on machines to get around and to help with washing, digging, building and gardening. Rather than use muscles, it has become commonplace to rely on labour-saving devices. The result: lower levels of physical fitness and increasing levels of obesity. Humans are tempted to rely on machines rather than their own bodies, and physical and social infrastructures — housing, roads, jobs — make physical activity something you have to go out of your way to do. Rather than walking or cycling, people drive, including to gyms and playing fields where they can get some of the exercise removed from daily life.

                  Machines can reproduce music at a higher quality and reliability than humans can perform it. Although some people train to become musicians of the highest level, most have become listeners. With high-quality music on demand, playing an instrument yourself can seem less appealing because of the contrast between self-produced sounds and the audio perfection everywhere around. Amateur music continues to be an important activity, but only for a minority.

                  Chess playing has perhaps been affected less by the advent of superior computer performance, because it’s now convenient to test and develop one’s skills by playing against the programme.

                  Machines that simulate thinking, namely AI, are the current anxiety, with alarm about massive job losses, surveillance and disaster from rogue AI. More prosaically, there’s a problem with widespread reliance on AI: people’s thinking skills suffer. Students aren’t learning to think for themselves, even to answer questions or write an essay. When AI becomes a widespread crutch, here’s a prognosis for human thinking capacities: decline for most people, while some continue to train for mental excellence.

                  In all these areas, machines seem to be beneficial, easing the need for bone-breaking toil, offering high-quality music on demand, and offloading tedious mental demands. But in these areas, there’s a downside: many humans become lazy, because effort is no longer required. As a result, their abilities to use muscles, create music and think go into decline.

The fairness test

Even after machines are able to outdo humans in specific domains, some people continue to refine their skills to achieve excellence. And when assessing excellence, there is a crucial test: no cheating by using machines.

                  In competitive sports, cheating is a cardinal sin. In some long-distance running races, competitors cheat by getting a ride for part of the race. Very bad! So far as drugs are concerned, anything that enhances performance is banned. Although some athletes have advantages through training and other support, the appearance of fairness is rigorously policed. The fact that machines can do better is irrelevant to the sporting contest. Humans only.

                  In public musical performance, technological aids are a no-no. A concert pianist would never contemplate using a synthesiser to help in difficult passages. In some compositions, recorded or synthesised sound is part of it. But for classical pieces, performers expect and are expected to do it all, authentically.

                  In chess competitions, covertly using a computer for assistance is treated as cheating. Unless computers are explicitly part of the contest, chess matches are strictly between humans.

                  In schools and universities, AI is causing huge headaches for teachers. How can students be encouraged to learn? Should AI be a tool for learning? While these matters are explored, one thing remains constant: students are expected to be judged by their own work. The educational contest is supposed to be fair, with every graduate producing acceptable work, on their own. It was always thus. Cheating on assignments and exams by having someone else do them has always been seen as wrong, as unfair, and so is having a machine do the work when everyone is expected to do it on their own.

                  If machines can think, or create a semblance of thinking, and do it far better than humans, the concern about fairness in human-versus-human interactions is likely to continue. How this plays out remains to be seen.

Humans are not the centre of the universe. Many of their capabilities are shared, to some degree, with other animals. And humans have constructed machines, some of which outdo humans. The downside: relying on machines often leads human skills to atrophy. This applies to the mind as well as the body.

A more important issue

Humans are their own worst enemies. Industrialisation has caused immense damage to the environment. Scientists, engineers and arms manufacturers have created weapons for torture and killing. There are alarms about the dangers from nuclear weapons and AI.

The issue should not be whether machines can do what humans can do, only better. It should be about what the machines are doing. Are they making life better, or causing damage? So, let’s worry less about machines having tremendous capabilities and more about what they are doing with those capabilities.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

For valuable comments, thanks to Paula Arvela, Kelly Gates, Olga Kuchinskaya and Qinqing Xu.

economics, politics

Pathologies of inequality

As the rich get richer, others suffer, but how this happens isn’t well known.

            Economic inequality can be toxic in many ways. The poor are the most obvious casualties. More generally, entire communities can be jeopardised by the political fallout from corrupted political institutions.

            These thoughts arise from reading four books that address inequality from dramatically different angles: waste, offshore finance, security, and tech platforms. Yet they have a common theme: the wealthy are indirectly causing havoc in society, and few people know about the scale of the damage because so much is done in secret. After describing the four books in turn, I’ll finish with a few thoughts about the implications.

Waste wars

Alexander Clapp’s book Waste Wars is a remarkable investigation of the afterlife of Western consumer products. Rather than countries handling their own waste, much of it is shipped to poor countries where it is dumped or deconstructed in highly risky and environmentally damaging operations.

            Clapp uses personal stories, including his own role, to motivate the topic, then delves into history and politics. The book has four main parts: (1) landfill in Guatemala; (2) e-waste in Ghana; (3) shipbreaking in Turkey; (4) plastic waste in Indonesia.

            For me, the highlight of his account is the story of electronics sent to Ghana, where a toxic deconstruction takes place, for example by burning plastics to extract copper. An entire community is supported by this noxious enterprise. Exporters get around anti-dumping regulations by labelling the material as used electronics; some doesn’t work, some does for weeks or a couple of years. As a consequence, another new industry has arisen in Ghana around using workable phones to run scams, with big scores from Western dupes used, ironically, to purchase new iPhones.

            Clapp tells how for decades China imported most of the world’s waste plastic, but then there was a shift. Chinese production of plastics became cheaper and in 2018 the government banned importing plastic waste, after which new destinations were found, including Indonesia.

            Waste Wars is an engaging study, giving close-up views of the lives of people dealing with waste or affected by it. The vivid detail almost obscures the big picture, a form of neocolonialism — exploitation of former colonies — hidden from Western publics, that makes recycling of consumer goods seem responsible, so long as the end of the waste journey is invisible.


Alexander Clapp

            There doesn’t seem to be much organised resistance to the waste trade. Some governments have legislated against it, but exporters can get around the rules, and some entrepreneurs (for example, in Turkey) seek waste.

            In summary, Clapp exposes the waste trade and its huge damage, and how it maintains a façade of responsibility. As he says, the driver is continually expanding production.

Offshore

The Cayman Islands are known as a place to have a bank account if you want to hide a large amount of money you don’t want others to know about, and don’t want it to be taxed. It’s called a tax haven. Switzerland is another favoured banking destination for ill-gotten gains, holding billions of dollars stolen by dictators from the countries they rule.

            Tax havens don’t get a lot of media attention, but there are some penetrating studies. By far the most engaging that I’ve read is Offshore by Brooke Harrington. An academic, she decided to learn about how wealthy people hide their cash by training to become a wealth manager. She did this because she knew something important about the wealthy: they don’t handle their own finances. Through discussions with experienced wealth managers, she learned about the secretive domain of tax havens.

            But she prefers the term “offshore finance,” because avoiding tax is just one of many functions of having money that others can’t access. It’s a convenient way of keeping your cash when going through a divorce or avoiding laws on campaign finance and environmental control. (The Tax Justice Network prefers the name “secrecy jurisdiction.”)

            There are many places where you can obtain this sort of protection. It used to be that the prime destinations were small jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands, but now the biggest harbour for illicit money is — I never would have guessed — the US.


Brooke Harrington

            “Offshore” really just means foreign. You live in one country and abide by its laws, including tax law, but you keep a stash of your money in a bank in another country where it’s taxed at a low rate, or not at all.

            Harrington says that offshore funds are huge, amounting to maybe 10% or more of the world’s wealth. And, she emphasises, this is an unproductive stash of funds. It’s not like an investment used to foster economic activity, but rather an extraction of potential investment from the world’s economy, money that might otherwise be spent on housing, healthcare and the like.

            Harrington says that offshore operations are not capitalist, but rather closer to feudal. The wealthy people who hide their money feel they are entitled to have their money, avoiding tax and regulatory scrutiny, while benefiting from services such as roads and schooling. Their sense of entitlement is so great that some think that laws and mutual-obligation expectations simply don’t apply to them. “Offshore finance survives and thrives based on a logic of predation rather than capitalism.” (p. 40)

            Secrecy is crucial to offshore finance. Without it, the whole operation would be in jeopardy. “Secrecy then enables the perpetrators to avoid legal and financial accountability.” (p. 42) Indeed, offshore accounts might be called secrecy accounts. Harrington notes that lists of the world’s wealthiest individuals are inaccurate, because there are so many billionaires whose assets are secret.

            “Thus, government and corporate leaders who appear in the offshore leaks should be understood not just as corrupt people who got caught: they are elites in revolt, engaged in a political project of refusing obligation to the societies that allowed them to become wealthy and powerful.” (p. 53)

            In 2016, a leaker released a stash of documents called the Panama Papers, comprising 2.6 terabytes of data and 13.4 million documents from the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca, showing accounts by many prominent individuals. This release generated headlines at the time, and later there were similar exposes with the Paradise and Pandora Papers. Despite these disclosures, Harrington says, much about offshore finance remains unknown.

            Harrington likens offshore finance to colonialism, with the difference that colonialism operated in the open, whereas offshore finance operates secretively, all the better to prevent “the revolt of the colonized” (p. 107). The colonised here refers to ordinary taxpayers who contribute to society and are exploited by the wealthy who avoid their obligations to the common welfare.

Losing control

Peace researcher Paul Rogers wrote the book Losing Control, first published in 2000. It is an analysis of global security, remarkable in anticipating future events, notably the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Rogers identified several key developments that drive military and security politics. First is the growth of economic inequality, exacerbated by the rise of neoliberalism. Second is environmental constraints on growth, especially climate change, which means that economic growth will never be able to bring Western-style affluence to all the world’s population. Third is a Western military paradigm based on controlling challenges by force, rather than addressing the driving forces behind discontent, namely inequality combined with resource constraints.

            Add to this Western welfare systems, which had served to pacify working-class populations excluded from the massive economic growth that mainly benefited the wealthy. These systems are highly attractive to the excluded in less affluent countries. Finally, to top it off, there is asymmetric warfare. It has become ever more difficult for Western militaries to defend against adversaries using non-standard tactics such as suicide bombings.

            Rogers anticipated the rise of anti-immigrant politics in the West, as government leaders stigmatised immigrants as the source of problems, rather than their own policies that exploited people around the world, causing resentment and desperation.


Paul Rogers

            Losing Control has gone through four editions, the latest published in 2021. (I commented earlier on the third edition.) Rogers continues his careful examination of security developments, showing the power of his analysis for understanding and anticipating trends. His central concern is growing inequality in the face of environmental constraints as central drivers of challenges to Western hegemony, lamenting that these challenges will continue as long as the Western response is trying to repress them rather than address the drivers. As he puts it, there is a

“widening socio-economic divide resisted by an increasingly knowledgeable but marginalised majority of the world’s people, environmental constraints set largely by the impact of human activity on the global environment, and a marked trend by elite communities to address these issues by seeking to maintain the status quo, through military force if necessary.” (p. 171)

The age of extraction

Years ago I commented on Tim Wu’s book The Attention Merchants, and hence was keen to read his latest book. It’s about tech platforms like Amazon, Meta and Google. The title is The Age of Extraction, and his argument is that today’s tech company behemoths are extracting enormous amounts of money from their operations. They are akin to monopolies.

            Consider Amazon, where you can buy just about anything, often at a lower price and with a quicker delivery than from any other seller. Wu says Amazon has become the modern-day equivalent of a town square, a place where shops and people congregate for mutual benefit. The town square thrived by remaining neutral to its tenants and consumers. But Amazon is different from town squares in one important way: it is a profit-seeking company. Its semi-monopoly position allows it to squeeze businesses by reducing returns to them.

            Wu describes Amazon’s strategy in five stages.

  • Make the platform essential by setting low prices for both buyers and sellers.
  • Eliminate rivals by under-pricing or buying them.
  • Replicate dependent businesses, for example printing books itself.
  • Make it difficult for buyers and sellers to leave.
  • Raise fees and prices, and have more ads, to capture data and attention.

 

This is a general strategy of big tech: grow and prevent others from growing to a large scale. A key tool is buying potential rivals. Platforms try to prevent users from leaving — that’s what matters most to them. What users do on a platform matters less than that they are doing something, because the platform always takes a cut.

            Wu says that we, the users, are seduced by convenience. It’s a boring topic, but important, because it discourages exit. “To resist convenience — to not own a mobile phone, to avoid using online maps — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not lunacy.” (p. 79)

            Tech platforms do not operate in secrecy. Yet, most people do not realise they are giant extraction machines, sucking money out of users and small businesses, driving competitors to the wall. It’s a sort of invisibility in plain sight, with convenience as one of the ways that users are diverted from concern about exploitation.


Tim Wu

            Wu argues that there needs to be a balance between corporate power-seeking and government regulation. Today, while platforms are in ascendance, government regulation is too weak. This leads to an alarming sequence, outlined by Wu (pp. 122-124).

  • Monopolies develop.
  • The monopolies increase their extraction of wealth from users, creating a two-tier economy of the wealthy and the rest.
  • Mass resentment emerges, driven by inequality.
  • The government fails to respond to majority concerns by continuing to allow monopoly businesses to extract wealth.
  • An authoritarian leader comes to power, promising to address common concerns.

The end point of growing inequality

Wu’s sequence is alarming because it fits the pattern seen in many countries with the rise of populist authoritarian leaders. Rather than address the underlying causes of discontent and resentment, especially inequality, authoritarian leaders find scapegoats. Immigrants, minorities and dissidents are good for this purpose.

            Harrington, in her study of offshore finance, says that it’s possible that the entire enterprise may correct its own injustices, but that “Another possible trajectory is more common historically: many systems that create extreme imbalances of power and wealth simply self-destruct.” (p. 116)

            Then there is Luke Kemp, author of the massive and crucially important study of societal collapse titled Goliath’s Curse. Kemp examined dozens of states and empires, which he calls Goliaths. They operate by extracting wealth from populations to serve a small ruling elite. However, Goliaths have a weakness: growing inequality. Combined with power struggles among elites and external shocks like natural disasters, Goliaths always collapse eventually. (Afterwards, paradoxically, most people are better off.) Kemp says the world is now in the grip of a global Goliath, which means the collapse will be global.

Inequality tactics

Some years ago, my colleague Susan Engel and I wrote an article about the methods by which the scale of economic inequality is hidden or justified. We discussed five methods that reduce the outrage that might be generated by awareness of inequality.

  • Cover-up. When people aren’t directly aware of inequality, they are less upset about it. Gated communities, for example, prevent mixing between the rich and the poor.
  • Devaluation. Poor people are called lazy, unambitious, incompetent and ignorant.
  • Reinterpretation. Inequality is said to be an inevitable part of economic growth, which will improve everyone’s situation.
  • Official channels. Government policies support the wealthy.
  • Intimidation and rewards. Those who challenge inequality — such as tax-haven whistleblowers — may be threatened or attacked. Those who support the wealthy are rewarded.

            The basic idea is that many people are angry or disgusted by extreme levels of inequality, of contrasts between the wealthy and the impoverished, so a range of methods serve to prevent such reactions. The four books discussed here reveal some of these methods as applied to specific cases.

            Waste Wars. The waste trade should be a scandal, but most people don’t know anything about it, so cover-up is the key method of reducing public outrage. As well, affluent people are lulled into believing they are doing the right thing by recycling their waste.

            Offshore. The key method by which offshore finance, and its contribution to extreme inequality, is through secrecy.

            Losing Control. Wars and anti-terrorism alarmism divert attention from inequality and resource constraints, which are driving revolts from the margins. Immigrants are blamed for social problems, a reinterpretation technique.

            The Age of Extraction. Platforms like Amazon extract money and data from ordinary people and put it in the hands of the wealthy. The level of extraction is not obvious, and buyers are attracted by price and convenience.

What to do?

Challenging economic inequality is not easy. The wealthy have a great deal of power and can use it to perpetuate their advantages. Nevertheless, they are vulnerable, because, as Harrington says, offshore finance “conceals both the real extent of economic and political inequality and its source: a radical and deeply unpopular agenda that is not just anti-democratic and opposed to the rule of law but also surprisingly anti-capitalist.” (p. 38)

            Challenges can be classified as counters to the five methods listed above.

  • Exposure. Revealing the extent and impact of inequality.
  • Validation. Treating the poor with respect, and making connections with them.
  • Interpretation. Presenting data on inequality and its damaging effects, countering lies and deceptive framing.
  • Mobilisation. Taking action against inequality, like the Occupy movement, and in support of greater equality, like the free software movement.
  • Resistance to intimidation and rewards. Continuing to speak out despite threats, and refusing to support exploitation by the wealthy.

All four books serve as exposés, fitting the categories of exposure and interpretation. The challenge is to put inequality on the agenda as a key driver of today’s social problems.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Susan Engel for useful comments.

harassment, media, tactics

Murdoch media on the attack

Getting attacked in the media is no fun. Ten years ago, it happened to me, beginning with a front-page story in The Australian. So when I heard about a new book titled Getting Murdoched, I just had to read it. It helped put my experiences in perspective.

            Rupert Murdoch is one of Australia’s highest-value exports. From his father, he inherited a major Australian media company, and built it into something far bigger and more powerful. Called News Corp, or News for short, it acquired newspapers and television channels, becoming the dominant mass media presence in the country. But Murdoch wanted more, and expanded to Britain and the US. To enable US operations, he took out US citizenship.


Rupert Murdoch

            This is the economic side of the picture. The other side is ideological. Murdoch’s media outlets are well known for their highly partisan, right-wing politics. This political slant is combined with appeals to prejudice, in a style designed to highlight scandal. Many see it as a degradation of journalism.

            Occasionally, I leaf through Sydney’s daily newspaper The Daily Telegraph. It is notable for being relentlessly critical of the Australian Labor Party, trade unions, indeed any progressive cause.

            On top of that, Murdoch’s media often go on the attack, targeting individuals who are emblems of what they oppose. Typical targets are women, human rights campaigners, Indigenous figures, and anyone who tries to challenge the Murdoch media. The stories of these attacks are told, with great care, in Getting Murdoched. There are many books about Murdoch and Murdoch media; this one focuses on their targets.

            The chapters in the book cover the main targets: progressive political figures, foreigners, critics of mindless patriotism, women, queers, “scumbag celebrities,” those who get in the way of Murdoch’s ambitions, climate campaigners, and finally “people who haven’t suffered enough.” It’s quite a roll call of attack victims, and the stories aren’t pretty.


Lachlan Murdoch

Attack stories

Here’s a sample of the many cases described in Getting Murdoched.

* Anita Heiss, a Wiradjuri woman, was attacked by Andrew Bolt in Melbourne’s newspaper the Herald Sun as being too white, as being a “political Aborigine.”

* Sarah Schwartz, “a young Jewish lawyer who has campaigned against Israel’s human rights abuses,” was the subject of a contrived controversy.


Sarah Schwartz

* Scott McIntyre, a journalist at Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service, tweeted comments about myths about Anzac Day, a public holiday commemorating Australian and New Zealand troops. After a pile-on by Murdoch media, he was dismissed.

* Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister: “The Australian waged an unremitting campaign over many months about an ancient, inconsequential issue from her days as a lawyer doing pro bono work for a union in which her then boyfriend was an official.”

* Trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney was engaged to promote US beer Bud Light. Fox News mounted a campaign leading to a national boycott.

* Welsh singer Charlotte Church sang at Rupert Murdoch’s third wedding. Nevertheless, for years she was “hounded by the British tabloids”; Murdoch journalists hacked her phone.

* Over six years, The Australian published numerous articles, mostly hostile, about individuals who had criticised the newspaper: Julie Posetti (35), Margaret Simons (138), Robert Manne (269), Julian Disney (128) and Paul Barry (117).


Julie Posetti

* British climate scientist Michael Mann was vilified by Fox News, reflecting the Murdoch media’s persistent support for climate sceptics.

* Bob and Sally Dowler’s daughter Milly went missing in 2002, in Surrey, England. Journalists at Murdoch’s News of the World hacked Milly’s phone and ran stories drawing on private information.

Methods

Dodd and Ricketson tell about the attacks in a clear, straightforward way. If you had heard about some of them before — for example, the media harassment of Yassmin Abdel-Magied, causing her to leave Australia — the treatment here provides a convenient summary.


Yassmin Abdel-Magied

Quite a few are likely to be unfamiliar. The authors are meticulous in their writing, as they need to be to avoid being sued for defamation.

            In the beginning, they summarise the four main Murdoch-media attack tactics.

  1. Publish many articles contesting every possible point, so the target’s ideas are swamped.
  2. Attack personally, repeatedly, without compassion.
  3. Ignore critics of the Murdoch media, even when they are newsworthy.
  4. Continue asserting things shown to be false.


Matthew Ricketson

Dodd and Ricketson tried to contact the subjects of their stories, to learn about the personal effects of being murdoched. Many were willing to comment, and for most the experience was unpleasant, often highly traumatic. Some of the targets were personally tough, but it’s not just a matter of refusing to give in. The trouble is that the target’s family, friends and colleagues are reading the stream of bile, and some of them are influenced by it. Furthermore, some attacks are against family members.

            Dodd and Ricketson save the most horrible story to the end: the widespread hacking of people’s phones in Britain, including royalty and the parents of missing children. When this was exposed, it caused widespread revulsion.

What to do?

Murdoch’s media empire is large, profitable and influential. When you’re a target of a ruthless, pitiless media onslaught, what can you do? That’s an individual decision. The bigger question is, what can be done about a rogue media organisation, one that has forsaken the classic media principle of holding the powerful to account, instead serving itself and the powerful by attacking those less powerful? Dodd and Ricketson examine options, few of them promising.


Andrew Dodd

            They conclude that governments can’t be relied upon to address abuses, because News has too much leverage. Courts can’t be the solution, because News has more money and staying power, and is willing to spend millions to make plaintiffs go away.

            Complaining to media regulators is usually a waste of time. In Britain, the chair of the Independent Press Standards Organisation testified that of 8000 complaints received, just one was upheld. Toothless indeed. If only people knew, they wouldn’t bother.

            There is some hope. Journalists from other media organisations can challenge Murdoch media. News constantly attacks the ABC, in part because ABC journalists expose News bias.

            Dodd and Ricketson propose a strategy: build a coalition to push for regulation (including of social media), support independent media, and encourage media literacy. Sounds good, but who will take the lead?

            For individuals under attack, Dodd and Ricketson note the advice given by Malcolm Turnbull, former Australian prime minister: respond to every falsehood quickly and strongly. This is contrary to the advice from many media managers to say nothing, called starving the story of oxygen. That was the advice I was given.

The Australian attacks

In January 2016, there was a front-page story in The Australian attacking one of my PhD students, Judy Wilyman, whose thesis had just been posted on the university’s website. The article’s title included a false claim.

This article triggered a wider onslaught. On the website of the newspaper, there were hundreds of hostile comments. The university’s Twitter account was swamped with criticisms. Soon there was a petition asking the government to sanction the university. A one-sided account was added to the university’s Wikipedia page. Opponents of Judy’s research, within the university, pushed for her thesis to be investigated.

            While Judy was the primary target, I was a secondary target, as was the university. Over the following weeks, The Australian published a series of attack articles, but interest from other mainstream media was limited.


One of many tweets on a Twitter account set up to attack Judy, me and the university

            Judy’s research had been under attack for years, so senior university officials knew there would be an attack when her thesis was posted online. We prepared. I wrote a commentary posted at the same time, anticipating the attack. I wrote a response that was published in The Australian, and a detailed analysis of the original attack article, as well as responsesto several related attack articles, putting everything on my website.

            Ironically, the attack turned out to have some positives. It triggered great interest in Judy’s thesis, which was eventually downloaded tens of thousands of times, far more than any other thesis at the university. For me, as a researcher into suppression of dissent, the attack offered a wealth of material for social analysis. The university administration, which defended its procedures and did not buckle, showed its commitment to academic freedom.

            This was just one experience of being murdoched. If there are any lessons, they are: (1) be prepared for an attack; (2) cultivate allies, especially your employer; (3) respond carefully to every claim; (4) use the opportunity to gain greater attention to your views.

            Unfortunately, few targets of murdoching are in such a good position. The attacks are often unexpected and unending, potential allies fade away, and the experience is so distressing that responding is emotionally difficult.

            If you are a potential target, for whatever reason, read Getting Murdoched and do what you can to prepare. And whenever you’re aware of someone else being savaged by the Murdoch media, or other media for that matter, reach out to support them. In the midst of an attack, messages of sympathy are greatly valued.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Jungmin Choi and Kelly Gates for helpful comments.

activism, emotions, media, politics

Outrage as a tool

Are you angry about something you saw online? Be careful, your emotion might be used as part of a campaign.

Imagine you run a chain of businesses in the US and decide to update your signage. You’ve already begun making the change at some shops, but then some social media campaigners start claiming this is a traitorous instance of wokeism, demanding that you revert to the old logo. Easy to ignore, right? Not if the campaigners are joined online by thousands of others, and they call for a boycott of your operations. It’s absurd, but it’s costing you a lot of money, so you acquiesce before the damage becomes too great.

            This is an actual case. It happened to the restaurant chain Cracker Barrel. What’s going on? Is it some sort of madness? Is it collective bullying, called mobbing? Yes, but why? Welcome to angertainment, a fusion of anger and entertainment, enabled by social media.

            This is the first of many stories in Ed Coper’s new book Angertainment. Coper is a long-time activist in Australia, helping set up the online site GetUp that supports progressive campaigns. He then took his expertise to other countries and campaigns, thinking social media was the ideal platform for left-wing causes. But the political climate shifted. Right-wingers became adept at using social media, and before long it became risky for anyone visible in the mainstream to support causes stigmatised by the right-wing mobs. Coper’s main focus is on those commonly called conservative, right-wing or MAGA. He says they have mastered the use of social media for manufacturing outrage when it isn’t warranted.

The uses of anger

Anger, directed outward, towards others, is called outrage. It can be used for positive purposes, to oppose injustice. People become angry when they see things they believe are unfair, such as discrimination, abuse, murder and torture. When outrage is harnessed and directed towards the sources of injustice, it lies at the foundations of social movements against oppression and exploitation.

            Coper is concerned about anger used in a different way, when it is directed for partisan political purposes, facilitated by social media. The first part of Angertainment covers social research on how people’s views are shaped. This might have been a boring tour of findings, but Coper spices up the journey with stories and colourful commentary.

            Social media platforms are not set up to serve the public interest, but rather to make a profit. They are less like libraries and more like bookshops. And what do they sell? Attention, because that’s what advertisers pay for. The longer you stay on Facebook or Instagram, or the more you use Google, the more money they make. These companies hire talented psychologists who devise ingenious ways to hook users. They do this by intermittent reinforcement. If you post a comment, you usually get just a few likes, but occasionally you get a huge number. It’s like hitting a jackpot. Experimenting to see what strikes a nerve, users learn that extreme content gets more hits. Outrage sells.

            Coper says emotions are contagious, especially collectively experienced emotions, and are even more contagious when they are experienced online concerning political issues. Social media enables using group anger for harm. Part of the problem is that outrage is easier to express online, because individuals are distanced from others. Also, people overestimate how angry others are: they mimic an imagined angry crowd. They would rather engage with others who have extreme views politically. Then there’s information overload, which makes people pay more attention to extreme content. The net result is that the more time people spend on social media, the more susceptible they are to angertainment.

            Coper says political operators in the US feign outrage to manipulate the news, and all that’s needed is to call something woke, as in the case of Cracker Barrel, with “the entire political project these days being an exercise in performative humiliation of your opponents.” (p. 152)

            Here is his summary of the elements of right-wing hysteria campaigns:

“1. Create fear-based emotive narratives and provocative lies.
2. Seed them into existing fringe social media conspiracy networks.
3. Spread them using fake accounts to game social media algorithms.
4. Drown out positive sentiment with troll armies.
5. Advertise them into people’s feeds using innocuous brands.” (p. 178)

It’s hard for me to know how influential such campaigns are. Right-wing hysteria has been around for a long time, for example during the McCarthyist anti-communist campaign in the 1950s. Are things worse today than before? Maybe not, but social media is a new element, and online campaigns introduce new dynamics. This is where Coper’s examination is most valuable.


Ed Coper

            It’s also questionable whether the political left is today a model of rational behaviour, promoting discussion rather than outrage. Coper claims that one side in the culture wars (the left) treats an issue as something to be discussed, whereas the other side (the right) treats it as theatre, as a spectacle. Such an assessment misses the rational voices on the right and theatrics on the left. Despite this one-sidedness, there is much to learn from Coper’s treatment.

Resistance

Best of all, he provides ideas for resistance to angertainment. These are basic things — like listening. Rather than attack someone because of what they say or represent, ask them what they think and listen to them. Stories, especially about shared human experience, reduce in-group favouritism.

            Coper says teaching people how to identify fake news doesn’t work. Better is to help people learn how the system operates, how angertainment is created and how it causes harm. That is precisely Coper’s aim in writing his book.

            A key skill worth acquiring is being able to ignore, to disengage. Social media algorithms are designed to foster engagement. Ignoring bait to engage is not easy, but it does counter the algorithms.

            On the other hand, Coper also says that angertainment needs to be directly countered, and for this he recommends finding compelling big ideas, ones that deal with people’s grievances. And while angertainment remains so prevalent, and changing the system is a long-term project, Coper says we should work within the system by promoting good content.

            This sounds almost contradictory: ignore provocations and disengage from social media, but also promote good content. Well, there are bound to be several ways to respond. Perhaps the biggest challenge is to get people off social media long enough to read a book. Who’s going to read Angertainment — engaging as it is — when they can’t resist doomscrolling? And for those of us not hooked on social media, how can we help others to kick the habit? I don’t have any good answers, but there are initiatives in schools to get students off their devices.

            Coper explains how social media campaigns can spill out into the mass media, but it can work the other way too, with confected outrage initiated in the mass media taken up in social media. Nevertheless, Coper is on to something important, something that people need to know more about.

Outrage dynamics

As I read Angertainment, one thing puzzled me: what’s the connection between angertainment, understood as weaponising popular outrage, and the sort of outrage dynamics that I had been studying for the past 20 years? In what I called the backfire model, powerful groups regularly use several methods to reduce public outrage from their actions. Consider torture, something most people see as horrible. Governments involved in torture typically use five sorts of methods to reduce public outrage.

  1. Secrecy. When people don’t know about something, they can’t be outraged by it.
  2. Devaluation. The victims of torture are called traitors, terrorists or criminals. When someone is seen as despicable, as less than human, as undeserving, then what is done to them doesn’t seem so bad.
  3. Reinterpretation. Perpetrators lie about what happens, minimise the consequences, blame others, and frame themselves as defenders of what is right.
  4. Official channels. When torture is exposed, and there is clamour to hold perpetrators responsible, official channels like investigative bodies and courts give the impression of offering justice, but often give only a semblance of it.
  5. Intimidation. Perpetrators threaten and attack those who speak out. Torture victims are often afraid to testify, fearing further harm.

All these methods were used by the US government and its supporters in the case of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, exposed in 2004.

            Now consider the outrage that drives angertainment. How are these five methods involved? A little reflection shows that each one is involved in its opposite. Consider the campaign against Great Northern, an Australian beer company, over its offer to match donations to buy private land for national parks. (Coper, pp. 182-184)

  1. Cover-up. Well, there’s no cover-up of the alleged wrong (support for the land purchases). Instead, it is trumpeted far and wide.
  2. Devaluation. The perpetrator (Great Northern) is the one denigrated and belittled — as woke.
  3. Reinterpretation. What the target of the campaign did (match donations) is blown up into something of great significance. This is the opposite of lying about or minimising the action.
  4. Official channels. These aren’t used to give an appearance of justice. Instead, they are ignored or rejected. An attack, based on a judgement, is mounted immediately without waiting for an investigation or adjudication.
  5. Intimidation. The target, the alleged perpetrator (Great Northern), is the one subject to intimidation.           

What can we do with this analysis? It provides a set of criteria for deciding whether outrage is over something important. The key is to look at the target of the campaign. Is it a powerful organisation doing something harmful? Or something else?

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Kelly Gates, Marina Granato, Suzzanne Gray, Anneleis Humphries, Olga Kuchinskaya and Elliot Temple for helpful comments.

social dynamics

Talking with strangers

Talking with strangers can be a valuable experience, but few take the initiative to do it regularly.

                  When I get on a local bus, few people are talking with each other unless they already know each other. It’s easy to tell. Passengers don’t sit next to strangers unless the bus is fairly full. That’s my opportunity. If I’m sitting next to someone, often I’ll try to strike up a conversation. If it’s a bus leaving the university, I’ll ask if they’re a student, what they’re studying, what year they’re in, what they want to do when they finish, whatever comes up.

                  I’ve been doing this for years, but only occasionally. In the past couple of months, I’ve been doing it more often because of reading Once Upon a Stranger by Gillian Sandstrom. Her book is an engaging account of the benefits of having conversations with strangers. It is also packed with easy-to-follow summaries of research findings, including her own.

                  Who is a stranger? Basically, anyone you don’t already know, and they’re around you in many places, while shopping and travelling. At least that’s the case in cities, where there are large numbers of people you encounter briefly and then never again.

                  Sandstrom’s message is that talking to strangers can make your life better, but most people are afraid to initiate conversations. She encourages you to go ahead and try doing it, knowing that practice will make you better at it.

                  Strangely, though, most people resist talking with strangers, persisting in false beliefs. Study after study shows that fears are unjustified. People think strangers won’t welcome their efforts, but actually most of them do. People are afraid of messing it up, not knowing what to say or fearing they will cause offence, but these sorts of things hardly ever happen.

                  Then there are the benefits of talking with strangers, including learning new things, having your life changed for the better — Sandstrom gives several personal examples — becoming happier and becoming kinder. It almost sounds like a near-guaranteed proposition. If only people knew how good it can be, maybe they would start trying. That’s Sandstrom’s hope.

                  Sandstrom says one thing that holds her back is a voice in her head, a voice of negativity, that says she’ll make a fool of herself, others won’t like her or she won’t be able to think of anything to say. She calls the voice Sid, and suggests ways to silence or ignore Sid. This resonates with the experiences of writers, many of whom are plagued by a negative voice in their heads saying they’re no good, will never be published, and why not wait until tomorrow to write. Self-doubt seems widespread and often manifests in negative self-talk. For writers, it’s useful to think of the voice as a duck. There is a notepad to encourage resistance. It says, “Shut the duck up!”

Obstacles

In recent years, there seem to be more obstacles to initiating conversations. The biggest deterrents are headphones, earbuds and phones. It seems rude to interrupt who seems to be attentively listening to something or other. The ubiquitous phones are so addictive that people’s eyes seem glued to them, and maybe they have lost some of their face-to-face skills.

                  The challenge is to interrupt, to start a conversation anyway, knowing that both you and the stranger will benefit from it. Not always easy.

                  The most promising opportunities are when it’s just you and one other person waiting for something. At a bus stop, if it’s just me and one other waiting, I might ask which bus they’re waiting for or where they’re going, or comment about the weather.


Getting on a Wollongong bus

                  I remember one time I was walking from the railway station to the university, which takes about 15 minutes, and looked for a conversation partner along the way. A woman I met turned out to be a perfect interviewee for one of my research students. Sandstrom has many stories like this.

                  The main text of Sandstrom’s book is about her personal experiences and relevant research. It’s all readable. I can’t say how persuasive she is, because I was already persuaded, but her encouragement helped me up my efforts. She tells about things she’s learned from strangers and about some interactions that changed her life. One led to her marriage.


Gillian Sandstrom

                  Then, in appendices, she provides lots of practical information, such as what topics to introduce and how to continue after an initial exchange. She lists things you can do to make it easier for others to initiate conversations with you, including looking up when you’re out and about — when your head is down, others won’t interact — putting away your phone, not using headphones, not being in a rush, and wearing something striking that strangers will want to comment on.

                  When my parents lived in Tucson, Arizona, they would go for walks in suburban back streets, where there wasn’t much traffic. They would wave to every car that went by, and most of the drivers waved back. Sandstrom tells of research that even just a smile or glance can make others feel recognised and improve their mood, so waving to drivers is a way to make the world a little bit nicer. But this would be unusual in many places.

                  Cultural factors influence interactions with strangers. My friend Marina says that in her experience Brazilians are warm and outgoing and often make connections in queues at banks and supermarkets, but at the same time are wary because strangers can take advantage of them: a stranger’s friendliness can be the prelude to a scam.

                  Needless to say, I fully support Sandstrom’s plea to talk more with strangers. Her arguments and evidence are solid, and accord with my experience. How many readers will be inspired to take more initiative and build connections remains to be seen.

                  Sandstrom has no political agenda, but it’s easy to see that talking with strangers is a method of building community, of countering the forces that atomise society by encouraging individualism and self-centredness. If community-building is important to you, why not join in?

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela, Marina Granato, Julia LeMonde and Erin Twyford for useful comments.

Comment by Wendy Varney

Many years ago I did a quick intensive Russian Language course at Moscow State University. We took our own cultural baggage from Australia – as you do  – only to find Russians staring at us strangely when we passed them in the street or on campus and smiled at them.
 
We mentioned this to our Russian tutor, herself a warm and friendly Muscovite. She was amazed and found it hilarious, exclaiming, “You what? You smile at people when you pass them? But why? We have a saying: Those who smile without reason are truly mad”! I should add that I have found Russians as helpful as any other nationality but it seems a little harder to break the ice. Stalin has a lot to answer for! 
corruption

Your book is wonderful!

It seemed like some sort of scam. It was an email from someone I’d never heard of, Mike Williams, praising one of my books and offering to promote it. Several things made me suspicious.

                  The praise for my book was excessive. Never before had anyone written to me in such a way. Williams seemed knowledgeable about my book, but this was too much. Here’s a typical paragraph taken from a much longer email.

“Your voice is calm but dangerous in the best way. There is no melodrama, just clarity. And clarity is disruptive. You mapped out the mechanics of outrage and resistance in a way that feels both academic and deeply practical. For people who care about social movements, civil resistance, institutional accountability, or even personal advocacy, this book is a tactical manual disguised as scholarship.”

Williams didn’t say how they’d come across my book or why it had attracted their interest. That was suspicious.

This is just one of dozens of dubious emails about my writing and research that began arriving in mid 2025. The senders of the first few dubious emails wanted to connect via WhatsApp or Telegram. Later came elaborate messages about my books. These senders give no web address or other contact information. There is no obvious way to check their authenticity.

I didn’t reply, instead filing the emails in a folder titled “AI fakes.” I assumed the messages had been written by AI and sent to me automatically. Why?

                  Though the emails were a nuisance, they were also fascinating. Eventually, assuming others were receiving similar solicitations, I looked online for commentary and found several posts about AI book club scams. Since the middle of 2025, authors have been receiving offers to feature their books in book club selections, and some of them have tried to figure out what was going on. They replied and discovered they were expected to pay a spot fee or participation cost for their book to be featured by a book club, something legitimate clubs never request. To test the process, some of them paid, but the book club promise didn’t eventuate. Here are some who’ve written about their experiences: Angela Hoy, Joanna Sommer, Claude Whitmyer and Pete Mitchell. (There are also numerous scams invoking the names of actual editors at publishing houses, astutely described by Victoria Strauss in a post, one of many on the blog Writer Beware.)

                  I was right to assume emails of this sort were scams, but there was an amusing part of the process. Some of the emails were praise for a book that I didn’t write. How did the sender get it wrong? In most cases, it was obvious. There is more than one author named Brian Martin. In fact, there are quite a few.

Brian Martins galore

Martin is a common last name in English-speaking countries. Brian is a moderately common first name, nothing like David or Robert, but frequent enough so that there are thousands of Brian Martins in the world. Using a Google Alert to see when my name pops up online, I’ve discovered Brian Martins who are journalists, tax agents, detectives, crime victims, sportspeople, relatives of the deceased, themselves deceased, and various others  — including criminals. Brian Martin, also known as the Hawk, was once called the most wanted man in Scotland. With so many Brian Martins out there, it’s no surprise that some are authors.

One message praised my book The Queen among Kings.

Not just one message; several different supposed book-clubbers wrote me about it. It didn’t take long to discover that The Queen among Kings was written by a Brian Martin who lives in Texas. I contacted him.


Brian Martin, author of The Queen among Kings

                  There’s research showing that when we have something in common with another person, like a birthday or a favourite sporting team, this makes us like them more. (Check out similarity/attraction theory.) It’s true of names. Having the same name is a good connection. Although it was strange to write to another Brian Martin, we got on fine.

What happened, apparently, is that the AI programme, a bot, saw Texas Brian’s new book The Queen among Kings, searched online to find the author and came across my online presence. A human wouldn’t make such a mistake, so I guessed that the bot was a simple one, not making full use of AI capacities. It wouldn’t be hard to instruct the bot to check that it was the correct author.

Then came more messages. Other Brian Martins had recently published books.

The Book of Hekate: A Devotional Guide to Magic, Liminal Space & the Keeper of the Keys

Between Worlds: A Life of Abduction, Addiction, and Awakening


Brian Martin, author of Between Worlds

A Defense of Thomas Jefferson and His Legacy


Brian Martin, author of A Defense of Thomas Jefferson and His Legacy

Barney Dreyfus: Pittsburgh’s Baseball Titan


Brian Martin, author of Barney Dreyfus: Pittsburgh’s Baseball Titan

Twenty Dollars and a Dream


Brian Martin, author of Twenty Dollars and a Dream

These are just the books about which I’ve received scam emails. There are quite a few others sharing my name who have written books. It seems that we Brian Martins have been busy!

Conclusion

AI scams are likely to become more common. Email spam and scams have been around for decades, and most are now screened out before they get to us. AI is more sophisticated, as it can readily target individuals, getting around spam filters. No doubt these sorts of scams will become ever more convincing. They are a type of digital pollution, and perhaps eventually many people online will only accept emails from a whitelist or use some other way to screen incoming messages.

One other thing. There are many good books out there, and maybe some of them are by someone named Brian Martin. But be careful, because already there are AI take-offs of legitimate books. Buyer beware.

Brian Martin, bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela and Suzzanne Gray for useful comments.

Postscript

For the sake of exposition, I’ve simplified the variety of AI scams I’ve received. Let me know if you’d like a copy of the ones I’ve received.

politics, science, social dynamics

AI futures

Will artificial intelligence be a wonderful boon to humanity, or is it a serious threat? And what can we learn from the history of new information technologies?

                  These questions are at the heart of Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus. Harari is a master of big picture thinking. His book Sapiens tells the story of human evolution and history in a strikingly original way, and became a bestseller. He followed up with two more major books, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. And now Nexus.

Harari looks at history from the perspective of information systems. He says humans became the Earth’s dominant species because of their unprecedented capacity for cooperation. When humans lived in small bands, cooperation was limited to those in their group, but what about other groups? What made it possible to trust strangers? Harari’s answer is stories: sets of ideas that are shared.

                  He says there is an objective reality, out there, and a subjective reality, what each person experiences in their mind. And there’s a third reality, intersubjective reality, which involves a shared understanding of the world. Examples include the days of the week, money and nations. If people stopped agreeing about such things, they wouldn’t exist. The idea of intersubjective reality may seem obvious or, on the other hand, contradictory. In any case, it’s fundamental to Harari’s thinking.

The next step is to see the world in terms of information systems, namely the ways people communicate with each other and with texts. Drawing on his knowledge of religion, Harari describes the difficulty of maintaining control over people’s beliefs. How can a religion ensure that its followers maintain the faith, given that faraway groups might change their teachings? One solution is a holy text, like the Bible, that cannot be changed. But then there’s the problem of different interpretations of the text. Those who provide authoritative interpretations can gain power within the faith.

Two purposes

Harari divides the purpose of information systems into two categories. One is seeking the truth, the other maintaining social order. You might think that the truth, a way of understanding the world that is more accurate, would be advantageous, but alas it often comes out second best. Information systems can enable false ideas to thrive and cause untold damage.

A common argument is that the solution to dangerous speech is counter-speech. However, Harari argues that it’s wrong to think more information is necessarily better. As an example of how wrong it can be, he uses the example of witch hunting in Europe, based on the spread of entirely imaginary threats. The invention of printing actually made it easier for delusional claims about witches to spread more widely, with devastating consequences.

“Witch hunts were a catastrophe caused by the spread of toxic information. They are a prime example of a problem that was created by information and was made worse by more information.” (p. 101)

In a pluralist society, there are many sources of information and many recipients, and no one monitors or controls all the information exchanges. The sources might be businesses, community groups, schools and government bodies. A school might contact a business or a public library without anyone else involved.

In contrast, in a centralist society, all information exchanges have to pass through the centre, which is like an all-seeing eye. Through this process, the centre gains great control over every part of society.

Harari calls the pluralist society a democracy, the centralist society totalitarianism or dictatorship. Harari sees these political systems as information systems and then looks at them historically. Two thousand years ago, before printing, communication between widely distributed groups of people was limited. This meant there were limits to both pluralist and centralist systems. Ancient Athens, where all male citizens participated in decision-making, was pluralist, but its political system couldn’t be scaled up to millions of people. The Roman Empire, where the centre attempted to control large populations, was limited by slow communication, with agents used to run things far from Rome.

                  Harari says that large-scale political systems only became possible with new information technologies: printing and, later, radio, television and the internet. With this framework, Harari lays the basis for looking at the significance of AI.

One more important concept: self-correction. Harari places great store on whether a system, after being set up, can correct itself. One of his examples is the US Constitution. Since it was passed in 1789, it has been amended dozens of times.

In contrast, the Catholic Church has a difficult time correcting its doctrine, because the Bible can’t be amended and the Pope is supposed to be infallible.

Harari says self-correcting systems are far better able to handle change. Pluralist systems, with their multiple avenues for decision-making and communication, are better at self-correction than centralist ones. So, what about AI?

According to Harari, AI is different from previous information technologies in one important aspect. Previous technologies like printing and radio were passive tools in the hands of humans, for better or worse. AI is different because it has agency: it doesn’t always do what its creators ask. If you start conversations with a chatbot, you won’t know in advance what it will say. It might flatter you, or possibly encourage your delusions, perhaps even encourage you to kill yourself. Another example: you ask AI to write a legal brief. That’s risky, because it might do something you don’t want, like make up non-existent legal cases.

                  Harari is worried about AI because it has the capacity to cause great harm, not from a superintelligent takeover of the world’s nuclear weapons but more likely from manipulating humans. Here’s how Harari’s concepts apply. A pluralist system, with its multiple nodes, has the capacity to control AI, to deal with possible dangers. However, a centralist system — like in Russia or China — is more susceptible to letting AI run things, and this might unleash wider AI manipulation.

A superintelligent AI: would it be self-correcting? Harari says not, and gives an example. When Facebook and YouTube algorithms went rogue, encouraging genocide in Myanmar, many humans raised the alarm, but the algorithms didn’t.

                  The problem is that computer systems, when they impose order on humans, think they have discovered truths about humans. For example, when an algorithm learns that outrage is popular, actually the algorithm is promoting outrage and not encouraging other human possibilities. Computers seem unable to take into account their own influence.

Harari’s goal in writing Nexus is to raise awareness of what’s happening with AI, and the need for controls. The trouble is that governments and corporations pushing AI development see this as a competition — a competition between humans. But they aren’t taking into account that the more important competition in the future may be between AI and humans, and that AI may end up dominant unless suitable controls are imposed.

                  There are parallels with previous technological developments. The rise of industrial technology enabled great productivity but also the capacity for massive pollution. Just as damaging were innovations in military technology, which enabled colonialism, world wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The development of surveillance technology has enabled the monitoring of entire populations, making dictatorial power easier to impose. But at least in those cases, it has remained possible for people to raise their concerns and campaign for controls or organise resistance. Although AI has agency, there’s one thing it apparently has a hard time doing: being a partner in discussions of how to make sure it serves the greater good — the greater good of humans, not AI.

It’s reasonable to be sceptical of warnings about AI taking over, of manipulating humans for its own ends. Scepticism is fine, but nevertheless it can be valuable to be aware of risks and discuss options. AI is not under popular control, and neither are the companies and governments developing it. Would you feel safer if AI were in control?


Yuval Noah Harari

 “Due to the superior abilities of AIs to create and disseminate information, the flood of ‘free’ AI speech threatens to void human freedom of speech by twisting, manipulating or silencing human speech — unless some restrictions are placed on AI activities. Human rights are better reserved for humans.” (p. 411)

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

education, health, media, politics, science

Pandemic school panic

During the Covid pandemic, there were unprecedented lockdowns. Businesses were closed and people were instructed to stay at home. Eventually everything opened again, but not all at once.

            When schools closed, students were expected to learn at home, remotely, but for many this was a poor substitute for in-class attendance. In the US, schools were one of the last places to reopen. This was strange because, from the very first reports about Covid in early 2020, it was known that the disease was vastly more dangerous to old people than to children. In fact, while children could contract Covid, many had few or no symptoms, hardly any died, and they rarely transmitted the infection to others.

            David Zweig lived in New York state and had two children of school age. He was personally affected. He worked as a freelance writer, and started investigating what was going on with school opening policies. He was struck by a double standard. After government officials opened restaurants and pubs, they wouldn’t allow schools to reopen. It didn’t make sense. Adults mixing with each other were at far greater risk than children doing the same.


David Zweig

            Zweig started collecting evidence about this. In May 2020, most European governments opened their schools and there was no surge in Covid cases. But US schools remained closed. Zweig thought this was an important story, but the mainstream US media were not reporting it. Not only that, he couldn’t get his story published in venues, like the New York Times, that had published his work before.

            Finally he got his story published in Wired, a popular magazine about information technology issues, and he began to hear from people across the country with the same concerns. He heard from parents, doctors and epidemiologists who were disturbed by policies that were harming children. Zweig followed developments closely, both in his local school district, where he and others made repeated efforts to convince officials to open schools, and across the country.

            He decided to write a book about the US school experience during the pandemic. It’s titled An Abundance of Caution, after a phrase used by officials to justify their stance. His book is a devastating critique of a misguided approach to risk.

            Some may disagree with Zweig, and say that his conclusion — that US schools policy during the pandemic is “a story of bad decisions,” to quote the subtitle of his book — is wrong. That would be difficult, given Zweig’s careful analysis. Yes, he’s a journalist and writer, not a scientist or policy guru, but he doesn’t rely solely on what he learned himself. He also draws on numerous scientific studies and interviews with leading experts. He spares no detail: An Abundance of Caution is a long book, clearly and engagingly written while packed with detail.

            Before the northern summer of 2020, most European schools had reopened, and there was no surge in Covid mortality. US schools remained closed for the remainder of the school year. The question over the summer was whether they would reopen in the autumn. Many did not, and most of those that did used extreme Covid-control measures, including mandatory masking, distancing, barriers between desks, and limited hours of attendance to cater for distancing requirements. In the craziest option, some schools opened for a limited number of students, who sat isolated from each other while they used Zoom, without a teacher in the classroom. Meanwhile, as Zweig reiterates, most European schools were open, often with no such measures to keep students away from each other.

            How could this discrepancy in practices be justified? Mostly, US officials simply ignored the European evidence. US media gave it little or no attention. Some defenders of US measures tried to justify them by saying US circumstances were different. Zweig examines all such justifications and demolishes them.

            “In a time when much of the public had been whipped into a state of fear, a person who claimed that a decision was made ‘out of an abundance of caution’ was absolved from having to provide evidence, or near any defense at all, and rendered any opposition morally suspect.” (p. 115)

     

       If we accept Zweig’s argument, how can the US policy be explained? He examines several factors. One was the US media’s one-sided emphasis on danger and fear. This was driven by fear-mongering by US public health officials, but Zweig blames the media for lacking curiosity about the evidence behind schools policy. He can say this because, as a journalist himself, he had investigated and written stories. Yet even after his stories were published, other journalists didn’t follow up, instead continuing to parrot official recommendations.

            Another factor was political polarisation. Zweig notes that most public health officials are politically left, called liberal or progressive in US terms. They reacted viscerally against anything proposed by those seen as right-wing. One of Zweig’s chapters is titled, “If Trump is for it, then we’re against it.” When Trump, in 2020, came out strongly in favour of reopening schools, this was enough for liberals to oppose it. The power of this political identification overwhelmed evidence. Zweig and others who pushed for consideration of the evidence supporting schools reopening were accused of being political reactionaries, even of murdering children.

            “In short, Trump’s advocacy for schools to open, ironically, made them less likely to open, simply because he was the one advocating for it. For Democratic politicians, members of the medical and public health fields, and those in the professional classes in general, regardless of their views on the matter, just the appearance of agreeing with Trump was enough to deter them from doing so.” (p. 153)

            The challenge for proponents of reopening was especially great in what are called blue states, where the Democratic Party held government, and the rhetoric of protecting children outweighed any appeal to evidence. One facet of the resistance to reopening was the stance of teachers’ unions, which in blue states came out fiercely opposed to in-person teaching, and there were protests by teachers. Zweig notes how remarkable this was, considering that other occupations, like doctors and firefighters, had done their jobs throughout the pandemic, accepting personal risk as part of their professional obligations. Zweig notes that opponents of in-class teaching condemned states like Florida that had reopened schools earlier, despite evidence that their Covid rates were no higher than elsewhere.

            The alignment between left politics and strong Covid-control measures wasn’t found everywhere outside the US. For example, in Sweden, the right-leaning political party supported stronger measures than the left-leaning government. Zweig concludes that schools policy was not driven by ideological considerations but rather by “tribalism.” In the US, being strongly in favour of keeping schools close signalled membership of the political left. Zweig: “The more fear, the more ‘seriously’ you took COVID, the more virtuous you were and the more you raised your status among other progressives or Democrats.” (p. 163) Because most health professionals were afraid to say anything that sounded like agreeing with Trump. “Public skepticism and criticism, therefore, was largely left to conservative mavericks like Rand Paul.” (160)

            Zweig’s goal is to expose the irrationality of US schools policy, including the willing disregard of evidence. As a side issue, he devotes one chapter to the harms caused by the interruption to participation in classes, which increased domestic violence, self-harm, loss of educational support, isolation and alienation. The harms were worse for those on lower incomes, without remote learning, and where parents needed to go out to work. These harms were readily apparent, yet played no role in schools policy, with statistics on Covid infection and death rates treated as all-important.

            Those who continually cried “follow the science” were actually the ones who based policy on a lack of evidence. There was no evidence supporting the six-foot distancing rule or the use of partitions between students. Not only that, but the premier medical research bodies in the US did not fund research concerning these measures, so investigations were left to others outside the research community.

            “Believing in the effect of interventions — and imposing them on the citizenry — without scientific validation meant we were following a model of public health that was faith-based, as opposed to evidence-based. This was even more bizarre because with European schools and American daycares, where many or most of these interventions were not in place, we had copious evidence that if they offered any benefit at all, it was not meaningful. Decisions were guided not just by faith in the unknown, but faith against observable reality.” (128)

            An Abundance of Caution provides a cogent message about the dangers of obsessively focusing on a specific danger. Zweig notes that the number of US children who died of Covid during the peak years of the pandemic was smaller than the number of US children who died of the flu in some non-pandemic years, yet there were no calls to close schools because of the danger from the flu. Even more children die from traffic accidents, but there are no calls to prevent them from travelling in cars.

            During the pandemic, public health authorities, often joined by political leaders, raised the alarm about Covid, seldom putting it in the context of other harms. There were daily media reports giving figures for the number of Covid cases and deaths, almost never accompanied by figures for cases and deaths from flu, cancer or heart disease. The fixation on Covid harms — which were real enough — led to harms from Covid-control measures being almost invisible. The harms to children from wearing masks, being prevented from socialising, not exercising, and having to learn from screens were apparent to many, but dismissed as unimportant due to the overwhelming concern about Covid.

            Most importantly, An Abundance of Caution offers a warning about political polarisation becoming so serious that people refuse to look at the evidence, instead making decisions based on the stance of their political tribe. Trump may be deluded but that doesn’t mean he is always wrong. According to Zweig, US schools became a symbol of risk, and those saying otherwise were ignored, censored and condemned, ironically by those claiming to “follow the science.” It seems to take a special sort of courage to stand up against those on your own side.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

harassment, reputation, tactics

Publish — and be careful

In Australia, it can be risky to publish comments about another person. They might sue you for defamation.

           I was first threatened with defamation suits in the 1980s, when writing about prominent advocates of nuclear power. Over the years, I learned about options for publishing on sensitive topics while reducing the risk of legal action.

            Because whistleblowers are often threatened with legal action for defamation, I wrote a leaflet titled “Defamation law and free speech,” with a lot of help from others, including a leading defamation barrister. Since it was posted online in 1996, I have received hundreds of queries from people who want to publish but are afraid of being sued. Nearly all of these are low-profile cases that never come to public attention. I’m not a lawyer and mainly comment on options before cases get to court.

Say it carefully

The first step in defamation-proofing is to clean up your language, getting rid of general claims, and instead giving specifics that you can back up. Instead of saying “He’s a corrupt bastard,” you might write, “He received a payment of $50,000 from the owners before approving their development,” or “He was recorded shouting at a teenage employee.” This sort of advice was an important part of “Defamation law and free speech.”

            And you’d better have evidence to back up every statement. In court, the defendant has to prove the validity of every contested statement. Instead of innocent until proven guilty, defamation laws say you’re guilty until you can prove you’re not.

Legal advice?

One option is to find a lawyer knowledgeable about defamation matters and ask them to check what you’ve written. There are two problems. Lawyers are expensive, and most of them are cautious, rightfully so. They are likely to recommend omitting anything that might offend the people you write about. You might end up saying almost nothing.

            If you’re a journalist and work for a large media company, you’ll have lawyers on tap to check what you’ve written. Even better, the company’s lawyers will be there to defend against legal actions. Most of the people I advise are not journalists and don’t have large cash reserves. They don’t want to spend a lot — but they do want to publish.

Send a draft?

Before publishing anything, it’s valuable to obtain comments on drafts of what you’ve written. This can help improve your expression and avoid mistakes. When your text is potentially defamatory, extra care is needed. You might be sued over the draft.

            Once, when a colleague was causing problems, I wrote a short account of his actions. I wanted others to read it but not give it to him, so I met with individuals in their offices and gave them a paper copy to read on the spot, asking for their comments and suggestions, taking back the copy afterwards. This alerted them to what had been happening in a careful way without releasing the document.

            Another option is to send copies by email, personalised. For a copy to Margarita Snell, in the header of the document I write “Draft, 4 January 2004, not for quotation or circulation. This copy for Margarita Snell only.” Then I make a pdf of the document and send it. If Margarita sends it to someone else, they will see the header on every page. If I were seriously worried that Margarita might remove the header, I wouldn’t send her the pdf.

            Dating your document is crucial, so there’s a record of when you created it. If it’s a draft and you later make corrections, you need documentation of the creation date of each version. Probably you’ll never need to prove when you created it, but it’s a good practice anyway. Sometimes you can be threatened with legal action over something you didn’t think was a problem.


Libel and slander are two forms of defamation

            In 1992, John Wright, a Sydney paediatric surgeon, contacted me. He wanted to write about his dismissal from the hospital where he worked. Preparing to post his story on my website was a delicate matter. Several doctors who had been his colleagues might have sued John as the author and me as the publisher. I mailed a draft of John’s account to each of them, saying, “I would appreciate any comment you may have to ensure the accuracy of the story,” and waited for responses. One made a specific request. A few responded with comments but no requests for change. One offered a general attack on John. Most didn’t respond at all. What to do?

            The general rule is to address each comment carefully and make changes when you think they are warranted. If you’ve made a mistake, fix it. If you’ve made a claim, and someone contests it, and you don’t have documentary evidence to back it up, then remove the claim or modify how you’ve expressed it.

            The general attack on John wasn’t too worrying. It came from one of John’s opponents, but didn’t point to any false statements. No need for changes. After publication, no one sued.

            Even if you send a draft and make changes based on comments, you could be sued later. Also, if the other person didn’t reply, you could be sued. But it’s less likely. A judge might ask the plaintiff, “Why didn’t you take the opportunity given to you to address defamatory comments?”

            One thing you need to know is that it’s safe to send defamatory text to the person you’re defaming. You can write to someone, “You’re a lying, thieving idiot,” and there’s no risk of them suing for defamation. It’s only when you say this to someone else — verbally or in writing, in a text message or picture, whatever — that you open yourself to legal action. Of course, it’s seldom a good idea to send someone an abusive message. It’s far better to be as polite as possible. The more you seem to be rational and public-spirited, the harder it will be for the other person to discredit you.

            In summary, the advantages of sending a draft to people who might sue are that you can improve the accuracy of what you write and reduce the risk of being sued.


Ben Roberts-Smith damaged his reputation by suing

            Sometimes, though, it’s better not to send a draft. You might want to surprise them. If they know about your text, they might apply to a court to prevent publication, put pressure on your employer, or make damning comments about you on social media, prejudicing your audience before they hear your viewpoint.

            To decide what to write and whether to send a draft, you need to have a sense of the other person’s thinking and behaviour. Are they rational or driven by emotion? If they are driven by emotion, they might sue even though they have no chance of success, just to cause you pain.

Assess your vulnerabilities

Usually, you want to avoid legal action, because it’s expensive even if you win, chews up vast amounts of your time and energy, and can be incredibly stressful. Relax – a bit – because if someone threatens to sue you, most likely nothing further will come of it. Many threats turn out to be bluffs.

            The next step is that you might receive a letter from a solicitor, called a letter of demand or a concerns notice. If you’ve already published comments, the letter might ask for a retraction and apology, and a payment. If you haven’t yet published anything, it might threaten legal action if you do. Even when you receive a letter like this, usually it doesn’t go any further. But sometimes you receive a writ, a court document initiating legal action. That’s more serious and you should seek legal advice. If you haven’t before, it’s time to learn more about defamation law.

            But even when you receive a writ, it’s unlikely you will end up in court. Many cases are dropped by the plaintiff. Others are settled.

            It’s unlikely that you ever want to get this far. Maybe you’re wealthy and don’t mind losing a lot of your money. Otherwise, going to court is no fun, and often only the lawyers come out ahead.

            However, it’s good to be prepared for the worst, so you can make sensible decisions about risking legal action. How much money do you have? Can you afford to lose it? Are others, for example children, dependent on your support? The more you have to lose, the more cautious you need to be.

            Ironically, you are best placed if you have few assets. If you lose in court, you could go bankrupt, but the person who sued you will get little or nothing because you can’t pay. That means they should be more reluctant to sue, because it’ll cost them a lot of money with little chance of getting any of it back.

Plan ahead

If you think you’ll be at risk of being sued, one option is to divest yourself of assets, so you’re a less attractive legal target. For example, you can put your house in your partner’s name, give your savings to a trusted friend who will help you when needed, and otherwise limit your financial vulnerability. You need to do this well in advance, several years, otherwise it might seem you are trying to avoid paying a specific debt.

            Another option is to find someone to speak out on your behalf, to be the author of your damning claims. Who would want to take this risk for you? Ideally, it is someone with no assets and little income, perhaps living on a modest pension. Or it’s someone living in another country who cannot easily be affected by a legal action in Australia.


Bruce Lehrmann hurt his reputation by suing

Prepare for backfire

Defamation law is supposed to be about protecting people’s reputations. The idea is that harming someone’s reputation by making unfounded claims will be penalised by payments, and that the risk of a defamation suit will deter people from making such claims.

            The trouble is that defamation law doesn’t work well to protect reputations, and sometimes suing for defamation can hurt your reputation — it can backfire. Imagine that a major newspaper publishes an article about you filled with false and misleading claims. So you decide to sue the newspaper. Big problem. The newspaper now publishes article after article about every stage of your legal action, recounting the original defamatory claims each time, which it can do safely because it’s reporting factual material. Even if you win in court (very unlikely unless you have plenty of money to run the case), your reputation is trashed by the publicity. That’s what’s happened in several high-profile cases, like solicitor John Marsden who won in court but further ruined his reputation.


John Marsden

            If you’re sued for defamation, you can turn this process against the suer by publicising everything that happens. You also need to publicise your good deeds and prestigious supporters, interpret the suit as censorship, and continue despite the danger. If you have a lawyer, you’ll need to ignore their advice not to say anything in public.

            When you’re sued, it’s counterintuitive to publicise it. The common reaction is to bunker down and prepare a legal defence. Nevertheless, a strategy of publicity can be potent. Sometimes it’s enough to make the suer back down. If they realise what’s happening — namely, that their threat to sue is actually harming their reputation — they may cut their losses by not proceeding.

            Trying to make legal action backfire is a risky strategy, but extremely potent when it works. If you ever get into this situation, you should study previous cases and use the insights from them to plan your own strategy.

Waiting for death

Robert Askin was a police officer who became a politician, rising to become premier of the state of New South Wales for a decade, 1965–1975. He was knighted for his services to Australia.


Sir Robert Askin

            Shortly after he died in 1981, an article appeared in the newspaper The National Times titled “Askin: friend to organised crime.” It documented Askin’s role in the rise of criminal activity in the state during his time as premier. Journalists knew all about this at the time, but never published anything because of the likelihood that Askin would sue.

            In Australia, the dead cannot sue for defamation, and neither can relatives on behalf of a dead person. It means that after someone dies, you can say anything you like about them with no legal risk. After Askin died, it was legally safe to sully his public reputation.

            If there’s something you want to say about someone and you don’t mind waiting, death provides an opportunity to say it. I’ve written an article about someone — a police officer, actually — who, years ago, threatened to sue over a colleague’s statements in a newsletter I edited. My article about this saga is ready to go. Every year, I check obituary columns to see if he’s still alive. One of these years, when I discover he has died, I’ll publish the article on my blog.

            There’s another possibility: I might die first. That’s not ideal for me, but it does mean I won’t be worried about defamation suits. I can arrange for the article to be automatically posted on my blog. Another option is to put the article on my website and ask a friend — in another country, just to be safe — to circulate the URL in the event of my death.

Conclusion

The risk of being sued for defamation can be worrying. It’s safer to say nothing at all! Actually, though, the risks are small and manageable if you take precautions. The chance that you’ll unexpectedly be taken to court and lose a lot of money is almost zero. There will be warnings along the way.

            The first and most important step is to be careful about what you say and write. If you are prone to sending out serious accusations — “He’s a liar and a thief!” — you are asking for trouble. Make sure what you say is accurate and, if you’re not sure, seek advice.

            There’s another reason to be accurate: your credibility. If you say things that are easily shown to be wrong or misleading, others will start to distrust you. It’s usually wise to apologise as soon as you realise you’ve made a mistake. A sincere apology can make a big difference to your credibility and bank balance.

            Despite the risks, you may feel the need to speak out on matters important to you and others. If so, seek advice from those who are experienced and knowledgeable. Assess your vulnerabilities, financial and emotional. Try to guess what those who might sue will do. See whether there are other, safer ways to get your message out.

            You may decide to publish no matter what. Fine. Sometimes nothing happens, and your worries gradually evaporate. And sometimes it turns out that no one cares about what you said anyway!

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

media, military, politics

Terrorism: three neglected perspectives

The Bondi Beach shootings on 14 December generated saturation television coverage and a stream of newspaper stories. Much of this coverage has been on terrorism, the terrorists and antisemitism, which are all important topics.


Flowers in tribute to the shooting victims

However, there are other relevant perspectives. Here are three that have received little attention and deserve more.

The first neglected perspective concerns terrorism by governments. Official definitions of terrorism usually treat it as political violence by insurgents, rebels and other nonstate groups. Yet if we consider terrorism as political violence that strikes terror in its targets, governments are far greater terrorists in terms of people killed and maimed. So say a range of scholars since the 1980s, who refer to “state terrorism” to distinguish it from the insurgent version. Governments are perpetrators of terrorism in wars, torture, genocide and, ironically, counterterrorism. For example, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan terrorised the populations in those countries. Nearly all torture is carried out by governments. Hamas is rightly called a terrorist organisation, but not the Israeli government, which has killed far more civilians and terrorised the Palestinian population.

Drone strikes are regularly used to kill alleged terrorists, but the strikes and continual drone surveillance cause target populations to fear death at any time. The Australian government, through US intelligence bases in Australia, contributes to this form of terrorism.

A second neglected perspective on terrorism concerns communication. Researchers Alex Schmid and Janny de Graaf wrote a pioneering book titled Violence as Communication, published in 1982. They argued that insurgent terrorism can be understood as a form of communication. In this picture, violence — killing and destruction — is not the primary aim of insurgent terrorists. Rather, violence is a means of gaining attention, and the Western media provide the essential link between terrorist actions and their audience, media consumers. The implication of this perspective is that massive media attention is exactly what insurgent terrorists want, and Western media and audiences unwittingly serve their goals.

Governments seldom advertise their own terrorising activities, but violent insurgents often do, even when this is counterproductive to their goals. The message that is conveyed is about violence, not about the goals of the insurgents, as Max Abrahms analysed in a 2006 article titled “Why terrorism does not work.” If attention-seeking killers received less coverage, they might be less attracted to using violence. Western media sometimes use discretion when reporting suicides, because of the risk of copycat behaviour. But there is little such discretion when it comes to nonstate terrorism.

A third neglected perspective concerns civil liberties and social change. It can be argued that when peaceful methods of engagement in social decision-making are stymied, a small minority may decide to use violence to gain attention to their views. Methods of nonviolent action, including protests, strikes, boycotts and blockades, can be understood as ways of challenging dominant power systems, with the goal of participating in genuine dialogue with power-holders. Nonviolence scholar Stellan Vinthagen calls this “dialogue facilitation.” From this perspective, protest is a way of engaging in politics without using physical violence — it is an alternative to terrorism. Ironically, when governments crack down on nonviolent protest, for example by criminalising blockades and banning strikes and rallies, they may be contributing to a turn to violence by a small minority of challengers.

In the dominant responses to the Bondi shootings, these three perspectives have been marginalised. State terrorism is ignored in the saturation coverage of insurgent terrorism, the media attention serves the misguided goals of nonstate terrorists, and government responses that criminalise protest may make future violence more likely. Given that these perspectives were first articulated decades ago, it is reasonable to predict that governments and media will continue to ignore alternatives to their usual approaches.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Julia LeMonde and Elliot Temple for useful comments.