democracy

Manipulation In The Age of AI – And How We Got Here.

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We understand things better when we can interact with them and see an effect. A light switch, as an example, is a perfectly good example.

If the light is off, we can assume that the light switch position is in the off position. Lack of electricity makes this flawed, so we look around and see if other things that require electricity are also on.

If the light is on, we can assume the light switch is in the on position.

Simple. Even if we can’t see, we have a 50% chance of getting this right.

It gets more complicated when we don’t have an immediate effect on something, or can’t have an effect at all. As I wrote about before, we have a lot of stuff that is used every day where the users don’t understand how it works. This is sometimes a problem. Are nuclear reactors safe? Will planting more trees in your yard impact air quality in a significant way?

This is where we end up trusting things. And sometimes, these things require skepticism. The world being flat deserves as much skepticism as it being round, but there’s evidence all around that the world is indeed round. There is little evidence that the world is flat. Why do people still believe the earth is flat?

Shared Reality Evolves.

As a child, we learn by experimentation with things around us. As we grow older, we lean on information and trusted sources more – like teachers and books – to tell us things that are true. My generation was the last before the Internet, and so whatever information we got was peer reviewed, passed the muster of publishers, etc. There were many hoops that had to be jumped through before something went out into the wild.

Yet if we read the same books, magazines, saw the same television shows, we had this shared reality that we had, to an extent, agreed upon, and to another extent in some ways, was forced on us.

The news was about reporting facts. Everyone who had access to the news had access to the same facts, and they could come to their own conclusions, though to say that there wasn’t bias then would be dishonest. It just happened slower, and because it happened slower, more skepticism would come into play so that faking stuff was harder to do.

Enter The Internet

It followed that the early adopters (I was one) were akin to the first car owners because we understood the basics of how things worked. If we wanted a faster connection, we figured out what was slowing our connections and we did it largely without search engines – and then search engines made it easier. Websites with good information were valued, websites with bad information were ignored.

Traditional media increasingly found that the Internet business model was based on advertising, and it didn’t translate as well to the traditional methods of advertising. To stay competitive, some news became opinions and began to spin toward getting advertisers to click on websites. The Internet was full of free information, and they had to compete.

Over a few decades, the Internet became more pervasive, and the move toward mobile phones – which are not used mainly as phones anymore – brought information to us immediately. The advertisers and marketers found that next to certain content, people were more likely to be interested in certain advertising so they started tracking that. They started tracking us and they stored all this information.

Enter Social Media

Soon enough, social media came into being and suddenly you could target and even microtarget based on what people wanted. When people give up their information freely online, and you can take that information and connect it to other things, you can target people based on clusters of things that they pay attention to.

Sure, you could just choose a political spectrum – but you could add religious beliefs, gender/identity, geography, etc, and tweak what people see based on a group they created from actual interactions on the Internet. Sound like science fiction? It’s not.

Instead of a shared reality on one axis, you could target people on multiple axes.

Cambridge Analytica

Enter the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal:

Cambridge Analytica came up with ideas for how to best sway users’ opinions, testing them out by targeting different groups of people on Facebook. It also analyzed Facebook profiles for patterns to build an algorithm to predict how to best target users.

“Cambridge Analytica needed to infect only a narrow sliver of the population, and then it could watch the narrative spread,” Wylie wrote.

Based on this data, Cambridge Analytica chose to target users that were  “more prone to impulsive anger or conspiratorial thinking than average citizens.” It used various methods, such as Facebook group posts, ads, sharing articles to provoke or even creating fake Facebook pages like “I Love My Country” to provoke these users.

“The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower explains how the firm used Facebook data to sway elections“, Rosalie Chan, Business Insider (Archived) October 6th, 2019

This had drawn my attention because it impacted the two countries I am linked to; the United States and Trinidad and Tobago. It is known to have impacted the Ted Cruz Campaign (2016), the Donald Trump Presidential Campaign (2016), and interfering in the Trinidad and Tobago Elections (2010).

The timeline of all of that, things were figured out years after the damage had already been done.

The Shared Realities By Algorithm

When you can splinter groups and feed them slightly different or even completely different information, you can impact outcomes, such as elections. In the U.S., you can see it with television channel news biases – Fox news was the first to be noted. When the average attention span of people is now 47 seconds, things like Twitter and Facebook (Technosocial dominant) can make this granularity more and more fine.

Don’t you know at least one person who believe some pretty whacky stuff? Follow them on social media, I guarantee you you’ll see where it’s coming from. And it gets worse now because since AI has become more persuasive than the majority of people and critical thinking has not kept pace.

When you like or share something on social media, ask yourself whether someone has a laser pointer and just adding a red dot to your life.

The Age of Generative AI And Splintered Shared Realities

An AI attached to the works of humans

Recently, people have been worrying about AI in elections and primarily focusing on deepfakes. Yet deepfakes are very niche and haven’t been that successful. This is probably also because it has been the focus, and therefore people are skeptical.

The generative AI we see, large language models (LLMs) were trained largely on Internet content, and what is Internet content largely? You can’t seem to view a web page without it? Advertising. Selling people stuff that they don’t want or need. Persuasively.

And what do sociotechnical dominant social media entities do? Why, they train their AIs on the data available, of course. Wouldn’t you? Of course you would. To imagine that they would never use your information to train an AI requires more imagination than the Muppets on Sesame Street could muster.

Remember when I wrote that AI is more persuasive? Imagine prompting an AI on what sort of messaging would be good for a specific microtarget. Imagine asking it how to persuade people to believe it.

And imagine in a society of averages that the majority of people will be persuaded about it. What is democracy? People forget that it’s about informed conversations and they go straight to the voting because they think that is the measure of a democracy. It’s a measure, and the health of that measure reflects the health of the discussion preceding the vote.

AI can be used – and I’d argue has been used – successfully in this way, much akin to the story of David and Goliath, where David used technology as a magnifier. A slingshot effect. Accurate when done right, multiplying the force and decreasing the striking surface area.

How To Move Beyond It?

Well, first, you have to understand it. You also have to be skeptical about why you’re seeing the content that you do, especially when you agree with it. You also have to understand that, much like drunk driving, you don’t have to be drinking to be a victim.

Next, you have to understand the context other people live in – their shared reality and their reality.

Probably more importantly, is not calling people names because they disagree with you. Calling someone racist or stupid is a recipe for them to stop listening to you.

Where people – including you – can manipulated by what is shown in your feeds by dividing, find the common ground. The things that connect. Don’t let entities divide us. We do that well enough by ourselves without suiting their purposes.

The future should be about what we agree on, our common shared identities, where we can appreciate the nuances of difference. And we can build.

Trinidad and Tobago Changes Regimes (2025)

A map view of the 2025 election results in Trinidad and Tobago, where the UNC won without question.
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Well, elections in Trinidad and Tobago are over, and it’s time for everyone’s favorite game, regime change. The United National Congress (UNC) ousted the incumbent People’s National Movement (PNM). The UNC was decidedly weak in opposition, yet the results of the election are without question.

Over the next months, there will be replacements, cancellations, as the individuals that backed the UNC are given their rewards. That wouldn’t be a problem except there is a definite historical bias of both parties to exclude merit in their considerations, akin to what we see in the United States now with the Trump administration.

Where I live, there’s a majority of PNM supporters and party members, so I expect I’ll hear about this though I don’t really care. The UNC and PNM have not impressed me, but the UNC definitely impressed the majority and now they have to produce in a way that pleases vox populi.

I’ve had my dances with politicians from all parties, and I’m just waiting to see what happens at this point.

The last time the UNC lead, the government took about 7.8 acres of land that they still haven’t paid for while they paid others. The last time the UNC lead, the political leader and some other politicians allegedly stood on my land and said that the land had no deed – but a few years later, they approached me to help NGOs. When I pointed out what was alleged, I was told, “dat is small ting”. At the same meeting, they tried to get me to help with the maps, and as someone who advocates privacy, I simply could not do that because I don’t trust political parties and their backers to use the information appropriately. I stand by that.

Then there was the one laptop per child that they tried, which they started off just as reports were coming in that it was a failure for various reasons. That did not stop them.

And the PNM government, for the most part, just didn’t seem to find their way. I spoke with some of the politicians over the years, and they were about the same as the UNC politicians with a different allegiance.

Will the change be enough? I’m waiting to see, but I’m not hopeful with the same political leader of the UNC running things. Will foreign exchange become more easily had? Will issues with electricity and water be addressed? Will Trinidad and Tobago diversify the economy, and will they be random stabs at it or will there be something that works? Will there be constitutional reform?

I have no idea.

So let’s see what the new administration does. Winning an election means you convinced people you will do the subjectively right things. Staying in power is pretty much the same.

Running a country, on the other hand, has been an elusive goal of government in Trinidad and Tobago.

Having watched both parties for a few decades, you’ll excuse me if I’m comfortably numb.

Democracy Is About People, Stupid.

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what the hell?

There’s little that hasn’t been written or said about the U.S. Presidential Election. When asked about it, I have been saying that there were two bad candidates and one of them had to win.

This pisses off people who are emotionally attached to one of the two. I’m ok with that. One represented individual oligarchy, one represented corporate oligarchy, and if you can’t tell which is which then maybe you’re part of the problem.

The people whose candidate won have been pretty happy. The people whose candidate lost have been trying to figure out why. It’s gotten so bad that LinkedIn has become a toxic waste dump of curated perspectives on… well, that, the Democratic party, and all the other stuff that probably shouldn’t be posted by people who want to hire someone or be hired by someone. It’s become further polarized because of it.

And that’s what helped get the result. People are viewing ‘those people’, whoever they are, as all sorts of negative things without understanding things.

Jon Stewart and Sarah Smarsh had a conversation about it… and the content probably should have been spoken about decades ago. It’s almost an hour long, but some people really need to watch this.

Identity, class… things that I hear progressive democrats talk about a lot and yet they somehow miss the boat consistently on that.

America is a big and diverse place, and it’s bigger and more diverse than most perspectives I’ve seen expressed. I have friends across the spectrum. I don’t have to agree with them, but I do have to understand their perspectives.

When looking at politics, people look at the narratives provided and if it fits their personal experience and identity better than the other narrative, they choose that one. Rationality might be discussion before voting, but voting is emotional for a lot of people.

It’s about people. Stereotyping them in a negative way ain’t gonna make things better. Understand the people who a democracy is supposed to represent, don’t depend on data analytics.

Go outside and listen. Respect people enough not to treat them like spreadsheet.

How Democracy Died.

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Half watching the world’s rhetoric spinning against it’s axis, I ended up in a conversation with a supporter of the opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. We both agreed that the present leadership of the opposition party, the UNC, should step down, and the argument presented was that ‘we need to support her because…”

It’s a bad argument, albeit pragmatic. It’s like saying you’re going to have another drink when you’ve just dodged the barstools to get to the bar, weaving as if the entire bar were being tilted like the old pinball games. “One more drink…”

It’s a short term solution to a long term problem, and like such solutions, it generally comes with a hangover.

This same person – a friend, someone I respect – made the mistake that the U.S. Presidential debate hosted by CNN demonstrated why Biden should step down (I do not disagree) and why Trump should win. So the short term solution only applies to something he’s passionate about, but at a distance discussing another country, his argument changed. Why?

Passion disguised as pragmatism versus pragmatism.

There are so many problems with democracy that it makes young intelligent people look into other modes of government, from communism to socialism, and they’re equally screwed up at best because people are… people, regardless of what system you put them in. I’m half surprised sometimes that someone doesn’t suggest monarchies again, but then what is a dictatorship but a crownless monarchy, and what does democracy do when it wants to protect it’s interests? It embraces dictatorships with the belief that they can be controlled as much as voters think politicians can be controlled.

If you find yourself on a planet where they vote for politicians, leave. That’s my advice.

Politicians dress in whatever fabric of society is most popular, and like good marketers, sometimes they create the need to fulfill. Elected officials don’t do what we want them to do, they do what they want to do. We could simply remove them and vote on things rather elevate puppets we cannot control. You want to go to way? How much in taxes are you willing to put that way? Are you willing to go fight? To send your children to war? No? Well, you don’t really want a war.

You want to help here? Great, how much are you willing to pay in taxes to do so?

Of course, that dooms underprivileged communities, but they were doomed by the same systems that rule the world now, and no, no matter how much you protest, you’re still part of a system that allows and ignores protest. It’s not about voices, it’s about what’s trendy and popular because people don’t vote for rationality, they vote for comfort. When they get in that voting booth, all bets are off: It’s about how they feel.

And who are they most feeling about? Themselves and their circle, not some ideal that is lost when people outgrow Disney remakes of the classics. People aren’t as good at thinking as feeling.

That, you see, is how democracy died. The marketers became campaign managers, and the game is completely rigged.

Being ‘woke’ and being ‘enlightened’ are different, and are vectors, not scalars.

The Oversimplification of Democracy.

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There’s a lot of “Vote for xyz or zyx might win!” going on already in social media, with more than 5 months before an election.

It’s a sign that people are used to a system so broken that they demand crutches.

Personally, I detest that sort of fearmongering. With so much time left before an election, the candidates can and should be working harder to get the votes. Potential voters shouldn’t be smeared by their supporters for not settling so early.

Every election is a negotiation between candidates and voters.

I didn’t want to write about the crappy choices we have for President of the United States in 2024, but recent conversations on Mastodon just irk me a bit.

To get votes, candidates have to convince voters that they’ll work on issues that are important to the voters. These should not be cults. These should be people with open eyes and realistic expectations, which is as hard to find these days as a technology announcement that doesn’t have ‘AI’ in it.

The Negotiation.

Everyone gets so stuck on votes, but the implicit issue is not the votes but what the votes are for. Votes are for ideals and issues, and we vote for candidates because of ideals and issues – and fear. Fear strips the power away from us. It makes us victims of our choices.

To settle for a candidate 5 months and some weeks before an election when one could be demanding more of them seems like bad negotiation to me. It also seems like bad democracy. Candidates should be encouraged to be better candidates. As it happens, the United States is pretty polarized right now because of Trump, and the supporters of Trump will say it’s because of everyone who disagrees with them. There’s no middle ground when we look back at January 6th and the attack on the Capitol, we see just how divided we are – and how easily manipulated some are. It is something to worry about.

That does not mean we shouldn’t negotiate. I wouldn’t go on record for voting for anyone this early into an election because it’s bad negotiation. We certainly don’t have all that we want. We also can’t get all that we want, but we can certainly negotiate better than, “OK, you have my vote, I’ll hope for the best Mr. Politician making campaign promises.” When you have one candidate farting up a storm in court, the other candidate has every opportunity to do better with 5 months+.

The worst thing for democracy are elections so polarized that both sides vote out of fear. Everyone loses. There are no Trump supporters interested in changing the minds of Biden supporters, and vice versa. The fact that neither group of voters feels that their candidate is good enough is reflected in the fear mongering. It also shows a lack of confidence in their candidate. A candidate should be able to stand on their own two feet and attract votes. Any time you have to market a product so viciously, you have a shitty product.

I’ll say this: there’s no way I’ll vote for Trump. That does not automatically mean that Biden gets my vote. Biden has to earn a vote, just like any other candidate, and while he may be the better candidate in my eyes, that does not yet make him a good candidate.

People who are already saying that they’ll vote for their candidate are doing themselves a disservice in my eyes, which is always the problem when decisions seem so clear: The candidate doesn’t feel uncomfortable, the candidate doesn’t have to work as hard, and who suffers? The people, of course. When the President spoke at Morehouse and people were showing unity with Palestinians (not Hamas, as some like to color it), they were doing their jobs as members of a democracy, signaling to a candidate an issue that they care about enough to protest. The candidate may realize that they should do more, if they’re paying attention. That’s the point. That’s negotiating.

What’s interesting is how campaign funding balances on issues like this. We’re seeing it play out with protests over what Israel is doing in Gazah. The unflinching support of the United States in killing civilians is not popular by any poll. How much is that campaign funding changing that?

The Third Parties.

Third party candidates are often judged based on how the two main political parties do.

“So and so stole votes…” No, to steal something it had to have belonged to someone in the first place. The presumption alone that they belonged to the candidate in the first place is the height of disrespect. Had the candidate that lost spoke to the issues those people voted for, they probably wouldn’t have lost.

Putting that on people who didn’t vote for the candidate effectively dismisses the issues that they feel are important, and it’s condescending. No one asks, “Hey, why didn’t you vote for my candidate?”

The truth is that we do need stronger third parties because the parties we have aren’t too concerned about the voters. They dictate and manipulate issues because they always get to pull out the trump card , “But that other person might win and it will be the end of the world!”. I’ve heard that since… the days of Jimmy Carter, though I imagine I heard it much younger during the Nixon years.

Third parties, in my eyes, demonstrate issues that the other parties aren’t concerned about. Young people should get involved with them or start their own, not because they have a chance of winning a presidential candidacy but because you nurture a seed to grow a tree, and the trees we have are old and rotten. Do I suggest spending a vote on them? It is not for me to suggest that, but you can grow a party without voting for them, by supporting them in other ways and making issues you care about get better visibility. Third parties may not win elections, but they certainly can make issues more visible.

That’s an important function. And should those 3rd parties get votes, then it says that those issues meant something to the people who voted, more so than what the other candidates stood for or against.

Losing votes to a 3rd candidate isn’t the fault of those that voted that way. It’s the fault of the candidate that lost those votes to a 3rd party candidate. Some people try to flip that around and say that voting for a 3rd party candidate is a wasted vote, and to an extent that might be true – but if it were a wasted vote, or a lost vote, it would have no value to the person that takes umbrage with it, and implicitly it dismisses the concerns of a fellow voter without even a fair hearing.

Why? Because the system seems broken? It does seem that way. Yet if we concede that the system is broken and don’t do anything to fix the system, those 3rd parties may be the only path to fixing it since the two major parties don’t seem interested in doing so.

Of course, we can just keep doing what we’ve been doing and expecting a different result. For me, any change will likely be beyond the scope of my lifetime; I’m on the downward slope. Yet there are those younger, coming up, who can make things just a bit better, incrementally, and deserve the opportunity to vote their conscience regardless of how others feel about it.

Their future depends on it.

The False Dilemma and Democracy.

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For no good reason, I was going through the list of logical fallacies and, given that the US Presidential Election is coming up, the False Dilemma stood out:

A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when in fact, there could be many. (Wikipedia, accessed 22 March 2024).

This has been one of the things that has confused me for some time with regard to democracy, amongst other things. In the context of democracy, it seems that the two party system has become dominant – the binary system. I don’t know why this is. It can’t be a simple reason.

I did what we do these days. I asked ChatGPT why democracies devolve into two party systems. You can see it’s response through the image, and it made me look up the bullet points of First-Past-The-Post, Winner-Takes-All Effect (in the context of voting), Duverger’s Law, etc.

Most interesting is the last paragraph:

…While these factors explain the prevalence of two-party systems in certain democracies, it’s important to note that not all democracies follow this pattern. Some countries have proportional representation or mixed electoral systems that encourage the presence and success of multiple political parties, leading to multi-party systems that reflect a wider range of political perspectives.

This got me curious. Which countries are these? The answer is (in alphabetical order): Brazil, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden.

That’s 8 countries. There are a total of 74 democracies in the world as of 2024, with 50 of them considered ‘flawed democracies’ according to WorldPopulationReview, which references the 2020 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.

I filled out the form to get the 2023 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, and wondered why I needed to fill out a form.

There are 195 countries in the world. Less than half are democracies (74/195) according to that information, but according to other information there is more democracy:

OurWorldInData.org/democracy | CC BY, source link: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/countries-democracies-nondemocracies-fh?time=earliest..2022

That’s a bit confusing. 47.14% of 195 countries being non-democracies is 91.923 countries, and while I love precision, countries are not decimals. 52.86% of the world being electoral democracies means that 103.077 countries are electoral democracies. It’s just math.

We’ll have to accept that there is some error in what constitutes a democracy or not. Let’s work with the original 74 democracies.

Of the 74 democracies, only 24 are not considered flawed. How many of those countries that are not 2-party systems considered not flawed? According to this data, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden are not flawed, but Brazil, India and Italy are.

5/8ths of democracies that are not 2 party systems are considered democracies, 3/8ths are considered flawed democracies.

When I started writing this, I had hoped that countries with more than 2 political parties would be considered more democratic, and on the scoring it’s not very clean cut. In fact, Brazil, India and Italy being flawed democracies demonstrates that a system not made up of 2 parties isn’t a silver bullet.

Is it that false dilemma’s can have more than 2 options? It’s possible.

A false dilemma is also an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available, and maybe that’s the real problem: It’s not the number of options, it’s access to better options.

Any adult knows that being stuck with options we don’t agree with is unfortunately common. Yet a democracy is supposed to allow for better options. Why aren’t we seeing that?

We Gotta Do Better Than this.

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Joe Trump, effectively the main presidential candidate in 2024.

I don’t know how we got here, with Presidential Candidates like Donald Trump and Joe Biden as presidential candidates.

Well, actually, I do have an idea, but I don’t know that it’s right or true. What I do know is that both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are not attractive in any way. I remember a similar time with Gore and G.W. Bush, and look how well that turned out – we invaded Iraq for no good reason, the manufactured consent being about weapons of mass destruction and the only ones we found were the ones we brought with us.

Many of we veterans were against that. Nobody really listened. Look how well that turned out.

Trump is… well. An ambulatory legal disaster. Biden is… at best, conflicted. Both candidates can’t keep things straight because they are old. There’s a line somewhere between experienced and old that they have both crossed some time ago. One harnesses the anger at an establishment that doesn’t work for them while doing nothing about it, even making it worse, while the other is running on not being the other guy.

Reproduction rights – oh, who are we fooling, they’re women’s rights – will be a part of the campaign. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade does not make sense to me. If you’re religious, you believe in God, and God is supposed to sort out things at a personal level according to a variety of scriptures. Legislating away choices that are supposed to be between a person and their deity of choice or lack thereof seems peculiar to me. I don’t have to agree with someone else’s choice that doesn’t affect me.

In fact, that particular choice regarding abortion only impacts taxpayers when there is no abortion. That’s where we then have the need for social programs for humans that one day will become adults for at least 18 years. Do I agree with abortion personally? Sometimes, sometimes not, but it boils down to it not being my choice and I won’t force someone to have a child they don’t want or cannot support. That just sounds like a bad mix. So in my mind, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade seems… stupid. Meanwhile, in Alabama, things got really weird.

People do things I disagree with all the time. I’m not special enough to dictate to anyone else how they should do things. I wouldn’t want to be. My own life is weird enough. And how is this an election issue?

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has no real oversight, which is just astounding when you see how much lobbyism impacts the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is hardly ‘supreme’ unless in a Taco Bell Burrito sense, with similar effects to the dietary tract.

What else is there. Oh, growing socioeconomic divides that neither candidate speaks to in a meaningful way.

We have the “I wish Israel would listen” issue with 65% of Americans against what Israel is doing to some degree. Neither party wants to take on that, and when most decisions cannot be explained in politics it usually becomes about money. Around the world where the wars are, we see corporate needs. Ukraine – oil, minerals, and farmland. Where the Palestinians are – were, hopefully still are – oil. Let’s not forget what’s going on in the Congo.

I like capitalism. I do. The system we have now, though, is overreach without a reach-around. There do not seem to be checks and balances. The masses, upset, are told what the issues are, the candidates are told what the talking points are, and the lobbyists keep everything lubricated to get the interests of those with more free speech than others to center stage.

Dystopian fiction doesn’t have a market when we live it, so unless you plan to do some time traveling to sell your book, forget it.

There are third party candidates. The major parties will have people decrying them about splitting the vote, but I have something to tell you. Voting for a bad candidate to win is just that. That is a wasted vote, and if you don’t like your candidate, you’re telling your political party of choice that you’ll keep taking it. That you like it. And they won’t change.

I know the blind followers of political parties. The rhetoric is the same, the names and issues changed or inverted to just keep the herds going on the paths chosen for us. I do not like their choices, but like abortion, it’s not my right to tell them how to vote and in the same vein, it’s not their right to tell me how I should vote.

Somewhere along the way, people might vote for their interests again rather than playing a fabricated tug of war on issues that goes out of it’s way to dehumanize the ‘others’. ‘Trump Supporters are stupid’, ‘Libtards’, etc – not the way to have a meaningful discussion about the future of a nation, and implicitly, the world – a world that is watching, with enemies that are probably laughing at the whole thing.

They should. It’s idiotic.

Whatever part of the political spectrum that you fall on, all I have to say is that you should do better with your candidates – and I’ll throw the third party candidates in there as well.

If you can’t be critical of all the candidates, you’re not a voter. You’re a sheep.

That’s what I have to say about the 2024 Presidential Election. I don’t expect to write about it because I’m not interested in politics, I’m interested in doing better, and it doesn’t seem like politics is a part of that.

A Thought On Democracy.

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By Saioa López, Lucy van Dorp and Garrett Hellenthal – López, S., van Dorp, L., & Hellenthal, G. (2015). Human Dispersal Out of Africa: A Lasting Debate. Evolutionary Bioinformatics Online, 11(Suppl 2), 57–68. http://doi.org/10.4137/EBO.S33489 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844272/, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50508700

Those of us in democracies think that they’re the best way of doing things that we have found so far. We tend to think that democracy started off when it was first called democracy by the Greeks.

Yet, if we look throughout human history, we see what democracy looks like.

However you believe humans showed up, be it by deity or evolution, the common thread is that humans started somewhere. From that somewhere, humans scattered all over.

We don’t talk about why because we don’t know why.

We could have fun speculating. Maybe there wasn’t enough food in an area. Maybe one group migrated away from another group because they couldn’t agree on which end of the spear to use when hunting, where the group that used the wrong end was erased by history because of their stupidity. Maybe they couldn’t agree on how many stones to throw at an adulterer. Who knows? The point is that a group made a decision to leave and voted with their feet.

There’s a reason we use this term.

This was democracy. If you didn’t like how things were going you could leave. You could wander off that way in the belief and/or hope that things would get better over there, and maybe it had something with the society where you were.

Humanity did this until it started running into each other again. Our technology advanced, and we could cover greater distances than our ancestors did, and we could do it faster.

Suddenly, there’s nowhere to go. We run into situations these days where nations that are democratic are often split close to 50/50 on decisions, and nobody can leave. No group can get together and form it’s own nation-state, really, because that would require every other nation-state to identify that it is a nation-state.

Nomadic humanity has nowhere to go. We don’t talk about this because there’s quite simply nowhere to go. We can’t go anywhere without bumping into other humans, and there’s always some reason that we can’t get along that magically seems to reinforce those borders where people who are dressed the same wearing rubber gloves. There is a ritual to crossing borders, a ritual which has become more and more complex because people find comfort within their boundaries.

You can get political asylum, but the people within the nation-state you’re going to have to agree that you need it.

We have people that have built walls around other people, then complain about how they behave within those walls even if they don’t agree with the way people do things within those walls. That never ends well unless the wall comes down.

What are these borders worth to us? I’m sure I don’t know. They’re worth it to some people.

For now…

A World Built, Part III.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 10 Comments

Stonehenge in 1877
Picture of Stonehenge from 1877, public domain, courtesy Wikipedia

We’re not sure exactly how it started, this world we have now. Archaeologists and other scientists are still figuring that out, and they’ve got theories. Some of the latest at the time of this writing can be found in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, if you want to dive into it.

So far, the story of our past has been revealed as far as our origins and migration from what is now the Southern part of the continent of Africa. Were we hunters and gatherers? Were we tribes? Probably, though the tribes were most likely opportunistic in what we ate. The world provided. Migration was part of the survival of our ancestors, since we didn’t cultivate things.

While theories may vary, our ancestors wandered around, ate, and procreated. We figured out communication, and while we likely communicated about that saber-toothed tiger at the watering hole nearby, it’s also likely we communicated about what was happening in the tribe. “Biff is out hunting, so Alana is entertaining Atouk in the cave.”, perhaps with a knowing wink. Gossip, which supported the social organization of the tribe.

The Internet shows not that much has changed in that regard. In reading updates on Twitter today, in the middle of all the things about Ukraine, troubles of democracy in the United States and the United Kingdom, Russian propaganda and the latest things escaping China’s iron firewall, there was some silly article about someone I don’t care about wearing Versace. That it showed up in my feed is likely because other people I know found it popular enough that Twitter offered it up as something I might be interested in. It’s gossip about what people are wearing. Nevermind the odd fetish with Elon Musk’s every bit of reverse flatulence.

The point here is not what we talk about, but that we do. While times have changed and every now and then the metaphorical saber-toothed tiger pops up, most of the time it’s about other people. The technologies have shifted, from our discovery of writing, to radio, to television, to the Internet. We communicate about things that are important to us as individuals even though they may not be important at all, at least on the surface.

Let’s go back to those tribes migrating from what we know as the southern part of the African continent. Certainly, some left because other tribes were eating their own food, perhaps even establishing territories. Some may have left because they wanted to see what was over there, the part of us that enjoys exploring. Or maybe Biff caught wind of Atouk and Alana and, in an early version of a romance novel, they eloped and made their own way up north without Biff, forming their own tribe. Nobody really knows how that all went, and the likelihood is good we will never know.

This continued, trekking across land bridges, going here and there. Of course, Homo Sapiens weren’t Homo Sapiens yet, and we encountered variations of ourselves. We’re not sure what happened there, whether they integrated or not, but as an example neanderthal DNA has shown up in some people. We were busy eating and having sex in the caravan of life, scattering across the world for whatever reasons we had.

We would later figure out agriculture and form societies in place. This required more structure, and our language evolved as our structure did. Everywhere there were people, people did things at least a little bit differently, and having moved beyond basic twig technology, we built cities. Some of us built early ships to fish, or to see what was over there, or to trade. Trade likely happened before our societies became stationary, but it truly evolved when we stayed in one place. Some places had some things, other places had other things, and so societies traded. Currencies became a part of this.

Other things happened. We developed nations with borders that were usually demarcated by what we thought were permanent landmarks. Water was a great boundary, or so we thought. The border of Guyana and Venezuela proves that this is not so even to this day. Other boundaries were negotiated, agreed upon.

Borders are fictions we created to keep us from them. It’s territorial, and while a fiction it’s an agreed upon fiction. It’s real in that regard, but the concept of borders themselves is something we just made up so that the influence of the fictions of one nation don’t overlap into another. What’s more, it became recursive with personal property, where there are borders between properties, with associated drama. Currencies are much the same thing.

The laws societies chose to live by were also agreed upon fictions. Some would say that there was morality involved in these laws. Some theologians claim that the morality came from some omnipotent being that no one has evidence of other than someone millennia ago scribbled something down, and work from that faith – which is perfectly fine. I’m of the camp that morality is based on empathy, and theology reinforced it. Fighting over that doesn’t seem productive so I don’t bother. The point is that we found ways to live in larger groups rather than splitting off all the time into tribes that wandered off to find somewhere else to be – though that does continue to happen, albeit rarely and not in a while. The Mayflower comes to mind.

Our societies are based on mutual agreements, social contracts, that are mutually agreed upon fictions. We see this now as Russia’s unprovoked aggression continues to cost lives in Ukraine of not just Ukrainians, but people from around the world who answered the call for the ideals of democracy. Maybe it was too much Sesame Street. Maybe it was too much Disney. Maybe it was too much about how good democracy is when it’s just the best choice we’ve come up with, and we haven’t figured out how to institute it homogeneously. Where wars of the past have been less clear, the war for Ukrainian sovereignty has a ring to it that we find right, whereas the actions of Russia – unless you have a steady intake of Russian propaganda – are wrong.

This is an interesting example not because it’s happening now, or because I’m solidly in the camp of supporting Ukraine. It’s because for at least a hundred years, Russia has written the history of those within it’s empire which, unlike most European empires, was landlocked. Rather than going to visit old relatives and subjugating them, as European empires did, Russia’s history is one of picking on the people it could get to once the Tsardom of Russia gained prominence after the influence of the various Khanates that were derived from the Golden Horde were defeated or waned. The Tsardom was that of war and expansionism, Imperial in nature, and was brutal as most empires were at the time. What Spain was doing in South America in the 1500s against indigenous peoples, the Tsardom did to it’s neighbors to expand. This is a simplification. To get into it completely, I offer you should read any history about Eastern Europe not written by someone from Russia.

Empire is about getting rid of those that disagree with the empire, or subjugating them. Language, religion… all of these things are a part of colonialism that a large portion of nations suffer a hangover from to this day, with borders drawn by former empires that those who lived there had no say in. The history of Eastern Europe is largely overlooked in this context because the rest of Europe was busy fighting with their neighbors over lands far from their shores.

That colonialism extends to this day, though it’s more popular to talk about hegemonies now. Most of the world has moved on from colonialism though former colonies, their riches depleted by former empires, have not done as well – which is understatement.

There is something awkward about some humans using sailing technology to go visit old relatives and subjugate them, but then at the same time people were still figuring out that the world was not flat despite the protestations of religion. You’d think that might have made it into a religious text. Perhaps there will be updates on the religious texts soon, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

With all of this going on, people were forced to look at the world through the eyes of those that ruled them, and if you decided to go back to nomadic roots, you had to pick the place with the fictions you liked or, if you were lucky, go start your own somewhere – as happened with the United States.

Then we have the ideologies of government, with Communism, Socialism, and Democracy. Democracy, while imperfect and hardly standardized around the world, has been adopted by the majority of nations on the planet not because it’s the best but because it’s the best we have. Yet even in a democracy, the systems are gamed.

All of these things are, at their core, things we agreed upon to an extent. One may be better off having been born into a democracy by accident of geography, but that hardly means that what that nation does is something the individual agrees with because there are gaps in representation.

A lot of this is at least appears broken right now as the world, which doesn’t agree to any of our fictions, dances across borders with pandemics and climate change. When there should be more work as a global society, we see more isolationism. When our species could be considered an organism living in an ecosystem, we hardly act it.

Yet we remember how to play with toys and are guided by them, and our methods of communication are influenced by a few outside of democracy.

Maybe it’s time to revise some fictions.

Ukraine: A Light, A Hope.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Ukrainian FlagOne of the things I have been very involved with over the past months is Ukraine, particularly on Twitter but also in other ways. Yesterday, in a Twitter space hosted by Sparkles, the question went around asking what we were doing to support Ukraine, and even why. There was, of course, commonality because social media drives like minds to come together, and for unlike minds to be ignored.

For me, though, it’s complicated. When in 2014 the annexation of Crimea happened, I expected the world to do something. The world did do something, but clearly not enough as 8 years later, a brutal invasion with siege tactics began on February 24th, 2022, and the world decided to do something. A lot of the world, anyway, as far as sending weapons over. At the onset, looking at Ukraine as I had, I saw something that the world has not seen in anything other than history books: A young democracy defending it’s sovereignty, it’s way of life… where former colonies became independent one way or the other around 75 years ago, Ukraine is 31 years old. It’s young.

I’m older than Ukraine as it stands now by 19 years, but the culture of Ukraine is much, much older. That part of the world is something I had only passing knowledge of, in my lifetime colored by the Cold War. Knowledge I lacked, and still lack in some ways, was because of this implicit part of life where ‘Soviet Union Bad’ was sufficient to cover everything that the Soviet Union did. Insight into that part of the world did not seem necessary, and it ends up that it was being colored by all the major news outlets still having their offices in Moscow. Whatever news I got was likely written in Moscow and influenced by Moscow. I had no knowledge of Russia’s imperial past.

It seems most of the world suffered the same. We tend to forget that aspect of colonialism, where the narrative is still that of the Empire, present or former, as nations begin to get their legs under them. We tend to use broad labels on things we don’t understand – Season 2 of The Wire, as an example, had a Ukrainian named Serhei constantly having to correct people that he wasn’t Russian, that he was Ukrainian, and that his name was not Boris. Granted, he did not play a good guy in The Wire, but back when the show first came out, had I been paying attention, I might have paid more to that issue that seemed like nuance then.

The world got smaller over the last decades, but my mental shorthand did not permit me to expand on nuances like that. There was the career, which was mainly either looking for the next job or doing a job with the work ethic of my father who was a workaholic. Thus time to explore the world was limited to what was right in front of me but for the last few decades, where I started truly exploring things beyond the scope of work and my work in the last decades also forced me to explore things. Software Engineering was good like that in some ways, in other ways it would have you so focused on the minutiae that the forest was invisible.

The world was busy, I was busy, and if we’re all honest it doesn’t seem like we got much done.

And so what happened in Ukraine, and is still happening, hit me with a visceral need to get involved. The wars of the world in the last decades have been, at best, unclear and uncertain. The ‘War on Terrorism’ made no sense to me because terrorism isn’t about direct conflict, it’s about creating terror. Afghanistan, Syria, and yes, Palestine and Israel, all largely created by conflicts of other powers who just seem to have had this curious need to use what we once called the cradle of humanity as their testing ground of weapons. Meanwhile, in the United States, I would frequently hear about how evil Islam was, where extremist Islam almost seems to have grown extremist Christianity again.

Or was it the other way around? I’m not sure. I don’t even think it matters anymore. In a world of globalization, extremism somehow became trendy.

But this invasion of Ukraine by Russia was clear cut. A sovereign democracy, young and getting it’s legs, attacked by a neighbor who is a nuclear power. There was a clear right and wrong because the world has rules, and these rules were being broken. As time progressed, I became educated on just how wrong it is.

I grew up on a steady diet of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. When I became involved with Free Software and Open Source software, ‘freedom’ took on new meaning: freedom means nothing when it stands alone, a lonely word. Freedom from what? From oppression? Yes. Freedom from other people negatively interfering in your affairs, as long as you don’t negatively interfere in the affairs of others? Yes. Freedom from not having a say? Yes. We Americans talk about freedom a lot, but as the last few decades have shown, especially recently, we don’t really know what freedom is anymore. And in the Caribbean, Latin America, ‘freedom’ varies.

Democracy? Ask 100 people what democracy is and create a definition from those 100 people, you have a definition of democracy that the majority agree upon – which is the implicit flaw in democracy. This is not to say that pure socialism, communism or anarchy are better – we have established that they’re not fairly well across the world – but we’re also seeing that the instantiations of the idea of democracy are also flawed.

Today, Boris Johnson resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and I read things about the Westminster system [of democracy] being broken. Today, in the United States, people are wondering what the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) will overturn that will impact democracy. Today, in Trinidad and Tobago, people are still talking about the Prime Minister and the Attorney General. Democracy itself has not failed, mind you – but the stabs at it that have been implemented are not doing so well.

But in Ukraine, democracy is in full swing, and as imperfect as democracy may be implemented anywhere, nothing unites people like genocide, war crimes and an attempted erasure of culture and history as Russia is attempting to do. Elder democracies are sending weapons even as domestic issues around the world related to economies and by extension flawed socioeconomic striations, and even the very idea that there should be equitable opportunity. Women’s rights issues, which in my lifetime were pushing forward well beyond voting, have become degraded recently… there is much wrong with our implementations of democracy, but the problem is not democracy itself.

So when I look at Ukraine, a young democracy that has so much potential to learn from the mistakes of other implementations since it’s still only decades old… I see promise. Hope. And in contrast, a Russian state, a de facto authoritarian state, violently trying to erase it and the promise it holds in both freedom and democracy, I see the potential for the rest of the world to learn from this, and to learn from Ukraine what has been forgotten.

Hope. The world could most certainly use hope right now.