In 1971, the urbanist William Whyte began filming mundane daily activities in American urban spaces. From a rooftop perspective, Whyte’s camera zoomed in on New Yorkers strolling about, eating their lunches, conversing, touching, reading papers, and most notably, people watching. His influential work is captured in the 1980 film, “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.”
It now makes for poignant viewing to see strangers, coworkers and friends so publicly engaged with one another (ironically, while being ‘surveilled’ by Whyte). Needless to say, magic rectangles and social distancing directives were still far off in the future. A half century on, Whyte’s world is in retreat. In fact, a range of media pundits, techno-prophets and politicians are now suggesting that technologically unmediated and spontaneous human interaction is unlikely to return to post-vaccine civic spaces.
Welcome to the “New Normal.”
Hooray for Stakeholder Capitalism
In 2020 Klaus Schwab, cofounder of the World Economic Forum, observed that the “one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyle. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office.”
In June of last year, the WEF publicly trumpeted what it calls “The Great Reset.” Of the three main elements of the reset, the third is harnessing “the innovations of the the Fourth Industrial Revolution” under the aegis of corporate governance: biometric and blockchained personal identification, machine learning and predictive systems, smart autonomous transportation, smart city grids, telemedicine and machine-mediated “human enhancement.” Other elements include an emphasis on sustainable technologies that protect biodiversity and mitigate climate change.
“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future,” Schwab says. The WEF is not some peripheral organization engaged in whimsical, blue-sky spitballing. A June 2020 online summit on The Great Reset featured UN Secretary General António Guterres, Prince Charles, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva, and other major figures extolling the brave new world of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
“The COVID-I9 crisis has shown us our old systems are not fit anymore for the 21st century,” Schwab insisted at the summit, promising the making of a “new social contract.”
Schwab is a cheerleader for what he calls “stakeholder capitalism,” a twist on shareholder capitalism. But considering his decades-long hosting duties at the WEF’s annual billionaires’ group grope in Davos, Switzerland, you’d be forgiven for thinking “stakeholder” is code for “stinking rich,” who will continue to swan in and out of Davos annually on private jets.
As with all historical examples of social engineering, from covert and overt wars to industrialization and deindustrialization, there appears to be no place for representative democracy in this great or not-so-great reset. This isn’t a recent problem. New technologies are rarely preceded by democratic debate. And once they are in place, powerful interests resist efforts to regulate or reign in their downsides.
Wrenching the Gears
Alison McDowell is a Pennsylvania-based independent researcher, activist and writer focused on the private and public institutions involved in the burgeoning Fourth Industrial Revolution. She is not what you would call an enthusiast for Schwab’s transhumanist vision.
For the past several years, McDowell has traveled across the US, relating her findings at university events, public gatherings, and on podcasts. Beginning in 2020, the pandemic took her investigations and concerns to a new a level.
“The civil rights we thought we had are about to be superseded by a digital wallet of “rights” and “privileges” governed by blockchain smart contracts. Everyone will be a data commodity – a digital brand – white, black, brown, or indigenous. Those in power will seek to play us off against one another, and sadly it seems to be working well for them so far,” she writes on her website, wrenchinthegears.com, where her prose ranges from wonkish to poetic. (I encourage readers to investigate her site, where she drills down into specifics, citing the PR releases and public statements of corporate bodies.)
In her view, advancements in technology and artificial intelligence are acting as the fulcrum for a “militarized world for state surveillance and hedge funds.”
Digital ID has been rolled out in some places for the unhoused and refugees; and McDowell foresees that children in schools will follow. The much ballyhooed “blockchain” system - essentially a ledger of traceable electronic transactions - will be an essential component. “California intends to create blockchain health records, using the pandemic as justification. These interoperable databases can then be used to mine student health data and track kids and trace them and traumatize them through daily health checks tied to QR codes, without which they are literally locked out of their rights to access in-person instruction.”
“We know the not-too-distant future plan is to turn most people into bundles of securitized debt tracked back to a blockchain ID,” writes McDowell. Information on people’s financial, health, and education status will be increasingly commodified, with their individual performance in the workplace, school or elsewhere turned into profitable metrics. Think the tranching of subprime mortgages prior to the 2008 credit crisis, personalized and on steroids.
McDowell, like many other observers, suspects that Universal Basic Income (UBI) is on the way in a number of western nations. Where she differs is suggesting this bargain - offered to citizens by governments under regulatory capture - will be Faustian. Acceptance of UBI will be attached to the surrender of previously taken-for-granted rights, pitched as redundant or superseded by technocratic means of electronic participation.
With the pandemic, increasing numbers of workers and students found themselves working remotely behind screens. For students, the increased digitization in online learning platforms may involve wearing headsets to communicate with instructors and fellow students in digital 3-D spaces. However, McDowell feels virtual reality will take a backseat to augmented reality. For example, a worker in New Delhi with haptic attachments will be able to robotically stock shelves in Duluth.
Workers will be turned into geofenced “task rabbits,” globally competing in virtual spaces for microcontract work. “Powerful forces are hell bent on turning us into programmable avatars, digital twins, that are disconnected from nature, isolated, and ready to be mined as data commodities,” she writes.
In medicine, global vaccination programs and associated biometrics are prefacing “digital identity systems involving interoperable education and health data,” which offer an immense opportunity for profiteering by the corporate state, right down to individual DNA - what McDowell calls “colonization at the cellular level.”
The activist frequently travels across the US, visiting the epicenters of the Forth Industrial Revolution. An example is Utah, where she “visited seventeen locations in the region that have ties to human capital finance, educational technology, faith institutions, surveillance, and the Internet of Bodies via sensors, 5G, genomics, and bioinformatics. It was a veritable “Disneyland” of social impact investing.”
Surrender, Human
“As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans,” former Wired editor Kevin Kelly insists in his 2016 book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. “The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.”
Kelly’s giddy optimism about “forced...surrender” sounds to me like cybernetic Stockholm Syndrome.
My copy of the 2014 coffee table book The Human Face of Big Data is filled with nifty infographics, up-tempo pull quotes and grinning faces. “Every animate and inanimate object on earth will soon be generating data, including our homes, our cars, and yes, even our bodies,” reads the caption on the back cover, above a picture of a brightly-lit baby surrounded by a clutch of gadget-clutching visitors half-shrouded in darkness. The baby lies on her back in a brightly lit crib, seen and scanned yet untouched by human hands.
It’s a telling, pre-pandemic image of a child physically distanced from her device-wielding observers.
Perhaps the true risk from AI is from a more mundane direction than Hollywood-style killer robots. It’s from following a path where education, jobs, interpersonal connections, health and neural activity is mediated and measured by AI-fed automated systems of control, gamed not for human advancement but corporate profit. Where distanced children and adults end up as profitable but powerless nodes on an electronic system that is increasingly nonhuman.
It could be argued that our ancestors were on the fast track from the savanna to the surveillance state the first time a hominid struck a spark from a piece of flint. The instruments humans built — out of stone, bronze, iron and a succession of alloys and ceramics — would end up performing like the brooms in Disney’s Fantasia: working diligently under the Sorcerer’s spell, only to outpace him altogether in a cascading chaos of fearsome accomplishments.
Yet even if this is this is the case, it doesn’t mean the Sorcerer’s subjects have to passively accept the top-down social engineering of Schwab’s “fourth industrial revolution.”
McDowell fears an accelerated “thingification” of human beings, using Dr. Martin Luther King’s preferred term for dehumanization. “The Singularity is the ultimate settler colonizer, and humanity is in its crosshairs,” she writes, in language reminiscent of John Lilly’s musings on Solid State Intelligence. “What IS certain is that if we do not cut the knot soon, we humans will find ourselves responsible for exterminating the natural world. Carbon supplanted by silicon, an AI simulacrum.”
The activist tries to skew her message in a positive direction by drawing attention to the nondigital world - the one of fields, streams, grasslands, forests and living beings - an ongoing experiment in interconnection that is billions of years older than blockchain and bitcoin. Going from industrial parks to wilderness areas, she and others occasionally perform “Revocations of Consent” - ritualized events to honour the living world while rejecting its virtualized doppelgangers.
Holding up banners, burning sage and giving talks might seem an impossibly small gestures in the face of mass thingification, but there probably isn’t much more an independent researcher and mother can do other than bear witness, both online and off. Yet the video below gives some sense of how the seeds she and others plant may germinate, in a world that has drifted far from the time of William Whyte’s rooftop camera footage.
“Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal,” stated WEF leader Klaus Schwab in 2020. “The short response is: never.”
Hi Geoff,
This was a fascinating/scary read and I love the accompanying illustrations. The word 'stakeholders' usually refers to all who are affected by a corporation's actions. Employees are stakeholders as are the people who live in the environment in which business is being conducted--like people living near pipelines that rupture.
There is this, too. The government wants to capture tax that is fleeing to offshore havens and that is easier to do through a 'reset.'
The over all cultural, social impact favors people who are autistic or on the spectrum. When technology becomes the dominant way of interacting some of us develop an acquired form of autism, imo.
But through technology enabled social media, some of us have become more tribal, more emotional as well.
It's possible that the connective tissue between the two modes of being is black and white thinking. Lack of subtlety that plays on the hyper rational, utilitarian left brain. And on the extrovert spectrum--the black and white thinking that kicks in when people become part of a mob.
The people who seem to be benefiting from the fire hose of info and images online, are the artists, the writers, the creatives. That might be the self correcting mechanism that checks some of the worst of the downsides of an authoritarian technocracy.
I am sorry if you made all of these points in your article already. Maybe I am being redundant.
Not redundant observations at all! I have been thinking about writing something about the construction of identity in the digital age...it does favour those on the spectrum, i think. And it does seem the binary thinking, and associated political division online, is largely an artifact of herd behaviour commodified and accelerated by algorithms favouring ‘engagement.’ Of course, those algorithms are written by people.
I hope you’re right that artistry and creativity acts as some kind of self-correcting mechanism to authoritarian technocracy. Emergent novelty in complex systems (from cellular to social) is never predictable, it only appears to be ‘inevitable’ after the fact. But with the rise of AI, that can go either well, terrible, or both!