WeekSignals: Embracing the nomads / Rejecting the neurolinks
One of the human freedoms is to be able to move. But also, to have mental sanctuary
Welcome to WeekSignals, a regular collection of odd tales which portend shifts in bigger, deeper trends (according to the futures method of detecting ‘weak signals’). To engage me more directly on this service, mail here.
Embracing the nomads
An affecting column in the FT, where Robert Wright interviews Gypsies and Travellers for their thoughts on the UKGov’s coming police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, currently moving through parliament. This would “criminalise some forms of trespass on private land and give police the power to confiscate caravans”.
The piece also references the joke by comedian Jimmy Carr against Gypsies in his recent Netflix comedy special (“the light entertainment equivalent” of parts of the police bill, says one of Wright’s interviewees. “It’s all part of creating the same mood music”).
There’s something else throbbing away at a deep level here. American/European anxieties about migrants, immigration and asylum seekers may have burgeoned during the borderless era of market- and internet-led globalisation. Brexit, and other populisms, equated control of borders with regained sovereignty.
But the spectacle of dangerous, sometimes fatal crossings over straits and channels, by those fleeing desiccated, war-torn societies, is a daily reminder to Northern populations: Because of global warming, hundreds of millions will soon be on the move, fleeing from unliveable conditions, whether social or environmental.
Now, Gypsies, Travellers and Roma are people who have historically made a virtue of their mobility. The calls in the FT piece are for the creation of more places where travellers can land their wagons and caravans, so that they can reside without alienating local communities. Yet the aggression of the new laws - rooted in some old assumptions in English law, as George Monbiot notes - is, I suggest, driven by an anticipation that old orders of property and living may soon be overrun.
Perhaps travellers aren’t social pests for whom tolerance has run out (the injury the Carr joke inflicts). Instead, they may be harbingers of a future where the climate-crushed of the world will be seeking their spot to live, in the leafy zones of their destroyers.
So keep an eye out for: expressions of solidarity with Gypsies/Travellers/Roma from those elements of Gens Z and Alpha who i) already enjoy their own “gypsy” moment on the summer festival circuits, and associate temporary encampment with pleasure and solidarity; and ii) who are themselves in a crisis of housing, and may well be interested in developing their own forms of nomadism, in order to find new, better quality places to live (see for example, House of Transformation’s Re:build project). The Roma may find the “Mobila” standing alongside them…
Another anchor for this insight: the reverberations from Wengrow and Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything (see my E2 piece), which establishes one of the great human freedoms - the freedom to move and/or leave - in the historical and artifactual records of the last 20,000 years.
Rejecting the neurolinks
One of the interesting techniques in sensing for weak signals is attending to what feels currently taboo, or at least unpleasantly marginal (seeing “travellers” as virtue not vice may be an example of that). This Consequence story about the majority of monkeys fitted with Elon Musk’s brain-machine interface Neuralink dying off (often quite horribly) has a classic yuk-factor paragraph, worth quoting:
“Pretty much every single monkey that had had implants put in their head suffered from pretty debilitating health effects,” said the PCRM [Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine]’s research advocacy director Jeremy Beckham. “They were, frankly, maiming and killing the animals.”
Neuralink chips were implanted by drilling holes into the monkeys’ skulls. One primate developed a bloody skin infection and had to be euthanized. Another was discovered missing fingers and toes, “possibly from self-mutilation or some other unspecified trauma,” and had to be put down. A third began uncontrollably vomiting shortly after surgery, and days later “appeared to collapse from exhaustion/fatigue.” An autopsy revealed the animal suffered from a brain hemorrhage.
(Hope your breakfast is still intact.) Yes, the Neuralink story is in general framed medically, as a device to help reconnect minds to disabled or broken bodies. And for the alleviation of human pain or torment, animal organisms have long been forcibly disrupted, and human ones put themselves up for experiment.
Yet there are two ethical vectors into the future that open up from this gruesome story. One vector reminds me of the story the neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms tells about his mentor, the affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp: that Panksepp moved away from animal experimentation the more he established their sentience, rooted in the adaptive emotions that mammals (and some other species) share. Indeed, Panksepp became famous as the “prof who tickles rats to make them laugh”.
Musk’s “break things and move fast” Silicon Valley mentality may work well for making chunks of metal and plastic smarter and more mobile, on streets or in space. But when BTMF turns the lab into a cross between bedlam and the charnel house, willfully inducing suffering in real consciousnesses, I doubt whether Musk will surpass objections from a growing veganite, biophiliac tendency.
The second vector is highlighted by the concept, proposed by Shoshana Zuboff, of some kind of mental and social “sanctuary”. In order that digital citizens can hope to form our own will, we shall need a zone of self-formation suggests Zuboff: a realm prior to and free from algorithms and AIs constantly trying to programme our preferences, in their reading of our interaction data.
There are signs that digital ethicists like Zuboff are winning. Again, the ever-vigilant FT notes this week that lawmakers in Europe, the US and beyond are beginning to coordinate themselves around digital regulation. And nothing could be more emotive than protecting children from those who wish to modify and addict their behaviour:
California lawmakers plan to introduce a new bill to protect children’s data online this Thursday, mirroring the UK’s recently introduced children’s code, as part of growing momentum globally for stricter regulation on Big Tech.
The California age appropriate design code bill will require many of the world’s biggest tech platforms headquartered in the state — such as social media group Meta and Google’s YouTube — to limit the amount of data they collect from young users and the location tracking of children in the state.
If passed into law, it will also place restrictions on profiling younger users for targeted advertising, mandate the introduction of ‘age-appropriate’ content policies, and ban serving up behavioural nudges that might trick them into weakening their privacy protections.
The move signals how global policymakers are increasingly working in concert and influencing one another, while Big Tech firms have launched frantic lobbying efforts against other upcoming laws which target their operations in the US, Europe and beyond.
If a “sanctuary” for healthy child development is slowly being forged, in an era of external control-by-information… then how much more resistance will there be to an internal intrusion through the skull itself? Where the off-switch may not ultimately be to hand?
What to get ahead of? The increasingly-levelled charge that your digital offer, the interactions and data-processing it involves, isn’t an enhancement of human will and intention, but some creepy subverter of the user’s/consumer’s/citizen’s autonomy and purposiveness.
Look to concepts/practices like centaur chess or other hybrid human-AI initiatives (like Mulgan’s collective intelligence), that show some kind of equity or partnership between advanced tech and vibrant humans.
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