Echo Chambers, Ant Mills and Social Networks.

There’s been an ant mill, sometimes called a death spiral, that had gone viral on social media some time ago. It’s a real thing.

Army ants follow by pheromones, and if they get separated from the main group, they can end up following each other in circles until they either find a path out or die of exhaustion.

It’s mesmerizing to watch. It’s almost like they’re being held in orbit by something like gravity, but that’s not the case. They’re just lost ants, going in circles.

I’ve seen enough things on the Internet come and go to see a sort of commonality.

It’s actually a pretty good metaphor for echo chambers in social media. Social media isn’t just singular echo chambers, the echo chambers are based on attributes.

If you like, as an example, dogs, you can get into an echo chamber of dog memes. If you also happen to like cats – it is possible to like both – you can get into an echo chamber of cat memes. These are pretty benign echo chambers, but when you start seeing the same memes over and over, you can be pretty sure that echo chamber is in a spiral. You lose interest. You leave, finding a different ‘pheromone trail’ to follow or just… taking a hard right when everyone is going left.

With centralized social networks such as Facebook or Twitter X, algorithms feed these echo chambers that connect people. When those echo chambers become stale, the connections with others within the echo chamber remain and before you know it you have the equivalent of an ant mill of humans in a social network. To stay in that echo chamber, critical thinking is ignored and confirmation biases are fed.

This also accelerates when the people who provide content to the echo chambers – the pheromones, if you will – leave. Some might follow them elsewhere, but the inertia keeps many there until… well, until they’re exhausted.

This seems a logical conclusion to the algorithmic display of content, or promoting certain posts all the time in search results.

Do you find yourself using the same apps, doing the same things over and over with diminishing returns of happiness (assuming there is happiness in your echo chamber)? Does it seem like you’ve seen that meme before?

You might be in a spiral.

Get out. Don’t die sniffing someone else’s posterior.

Week One of Mastodon.

I’ve been on Mastodon a week now and thought I should write a little bit about the experience.

There’s not much to write about. It works. There are interesting people to follow, I’m confident that my data isn’t being collected, and my feed is always interesting because someone else’s algorithm isn’t controlling what I see.

It also ends up that when I wrote that when I attempted to use Mastodon it was ‘like trying to shag an unwilling octopus’, it had a lot to do with the people who landed there from my elder networks and didn’t really explain anything – leaving me wondering about which server to join, whether I needed to build my own server, etc.

It’s actually quite easy. It doesn’t really matter which server you’re on – I’m on social.mastodon – because they all connect through the Fediverse, which is to say that they are decentralized.

Relative to other social networks.

That last part is so important to me. When I was active on Facebook, I saw a very large decline over the years of quality content that I wanted to see. This was underlined by the latest discovery that Facebook is spamming users.

Twitter, or if you’re a Musk-bro, ‘X’, is much the same thing. What’s hilarious is that both of those social networks are trying to train their generative AIs and have the worst platforms because of AI and algorithms. Web 2.0 meets AI, chaos ensues.

LinkedIn deserves mention here since so many people use it, but… as far as professional networking, I don’t think it counts as much as building real connections outside of the leering eyes of Microsoft, and being asked to help write articles for them which I’m sure will be used to train their AI just so I can have a cool title. Nope, no thanks. Hit me in the wallet.

Pros and Cons.

I have yet to have a negative experience with anyone on Mastodon. In fact, when you respond to someone’s post for the first time, I get prompted to basically be courteous, and so I expect other people are as well.

I do miss being able to comment on something I retransmit – in Mastodon speak, that’s boosting. I’m not sure why that is, but I’ve found it’s not something I actually need.

The only thing that Mastodon lacks so far are connections with some family and friends who haven’t moved to Mastodon. That’s simply a factor of inertia, much like in the 1990s many people thought ‘The Internet’ was AOL, which Facebook has mimicked pretty well.

In all, I’m finding Mastodon worthwhile, and much less twitchy than the other social networks, largely because I’m not seeing crap I don’t want to see.

If I have a quiet mind to do other things and a social network is in the background, I consider that a win. Mastodon is a win.

A Spanish Wired.com

When my friend, Miguel Ángel Pérez Álvarez (MAPA), posted an article from Wired.com, I was surprised to find out that Wired has a Spanish version marketed toward Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Panama and Peru. It doesn’t appear to have crossover to the English version which is peculiar, given how I know MAPA.

MAPA and I had made each other’s acquaintance through MISTICA and CARDICIS, which were both about breaking down language and cultural barriers using technology, CARDICIS more so than MISTICA.

I was writing about what he actually wrote but I kept coming back to this point. His article is as poignant in Spanish as English, and I’m not sure why Wired.com hasn’t thought to translate the articles between the two.

That it has existed and I didn’t know about it disturbs me a bit. I don’t know what good articles I missed there just because I happen to be an anglophone. Fortunately, my Spanish is much improved.

We talk about bias, and here we have a language bias. Again.

NatGeo Lays Off More Writers. :(

In probably the saddest news for me this week, National Geographic has layed off the last remaining staff writers.

It was a matter of time, I suppose, with the Internet shaking things up for better and worse, and with National Geographic being a business – but how many of us have really considered National Geographic a business? In many ways, it is akin to the BBC in showing us our world, so much so that I hope that their lawyers don’t get upset over me using one of their most famous covers as part of this post.

I’ll take it down if you want to, NatGeo Legal Department, but I’d rather keep it alive as a memory of a wonderful magazine that enriched so many of our lives before the Internet.

It seems I would worry about such a thing from NatGeo, but since they are majority owned right now by Disney, Defender of Mice, Cheese Rights and Copyrights, I just want to be on an even keel.

The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. — involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine’s small audio department.

The layoffs were the second over the past nine months, and the fourth since a series of ownership changes began in 2015. In September, Disney removed six top editors in an extraordinary reorganization of the magazine’s editorial operations.

Departing staffers said Wednesday the magazine has curtailed photo contracts that enabled photographers to spend months in the field producing the publication’s iconic images.

In a further cost-cutting move, copies of the famous bright-yellow-bordered print publication will no longer be sold on newsstands in the United States starting next year, the company said in an internal announcement last month.

National Geographic lays off its last remaining staff writers, Washington Post, Paul Farhi, June 28, 2023

It’s interesting that WaPo didn’t paywall that article, which they’ve been pretty annoyingly good at. Bezos needs to get to space, we know.

But wait, there’s more.

“Staffing changes will not change our ability to do this work, but rather give us more flexibility to tell different stories and meet our audiences where they are across our many platforms,” the spokesperson said. “Any insinuation that the recent changes will negatively impact the magazine, or the quality of our storytelling, is simply incorrect.”

The full-time staff will be replaced by a roster of freelance writers, save for certain digital content that will be written by in-house editors, the former staffer said. National Geographic currently employs only two designated text editors, a group of so-called multi-platform editors who handle both print and digital, and a group of digital-only editors, the former staffer said.

National Geographic magazine has laid off the last of its staff writers, CNN, Liam Reilly, June 29th 2023

It’s worth noting that the Washington Post had only one paragraph on what CNN expanded on – and that may be appropriate because it seems to be the Company Line.

It wasn’t until I got to Quartz that I started to see things a little differently.

Disney CEO Bob Iger announced a $5.5 billion plan to cut costs across the company in February. The entertainment goliath has since fired 7,000 employees in multiple rounds of layoffs. One of Iger’s priorities is to turn around struggling streaming service Disney+.

“Instead of chasing (subscribers) with aggressive marketing and aggressive spend on content, we have to start chasing profitability,” said Iger at a Disney all-hands meeting in November, as Reuters reported.

NatGeo, which Disney bought from 21st Century Fox in 2019, has been just one brand hit hard by Iger’s cost savings plan. In September, six senior editors at the publication were also terminated.

National Geographic will soon disappear from newsstand shelves, Quartz.com, Julia Malleck, June 30th, 2023

I mean, c’mon.

This is where the term ratf*cked came from, maybe. Is that a term? Maybe it should be.

Distilling Traffic

Having pulled Data Transfer out of cars, I’ll revisit traffic itself:

“…Each of them is a physical record of their ancestors, dating back to their, marked by life events – living memory. In minds alone, each human brain is 100 terabytes, with a range of 1 Terabyte to 2.5 Petabytes according to present estimates. Factor in all the physical memory of our history and how we lived, we’re well past that…”

me, Traffic, RealityFragments, June 6th 2023

So while we’re all moving memory in traffic, we’re also moving history. Our DNA holds about 750 megabytes, according to some sources, of our individual ancestry as well as a lot of tweaks to our physiology that make us different people. Let’s round off the total memory to 2 Terabytes, 1 conservative terabyte for what our brain holds and roughly another terabyte of DNA (conservative here, liberal there…). 100 cars with only drivers is 200 Terabytes.

Conservatively. Sort of. Guesstimate built of guesstimates. It’s not so much about the values as the weight, as you’ll see.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard Feynman, Chapter 1, The Law of Gravitation, p. 34 – The Character of Physical Law (1965)

Now, from all that history, we have ideas that have been passed on from generation to generation. Books immediately come to mind, as do other things like language, culture and tradition. All of these pass along ideas from generation, distilling things toward specific ends even while we distill our own environment to our own ends, or lack thereof which is an end. That’s a lot of information linked together, and that information is linked to the ecological systems that we’re connected to and their history.

Now, we’re beginning to train artificial intelligences on training models. What are in those training models? In the case of large language models, probably lots of human writing. In the case of images, lots of images. And so on. But these models are disconnected in ways that we are not, and we are connected in ways that we’re still figuring out.

I mean, we’re still learning some really interesting stuff about photosynthesis, something most of us were likely taught about in school. So these data models AI’s are being trained on through deep learning are subject to change and have to be changed as soon as information in that data model is outdated.

Who chooses what gets updated? It’s likely not you or me since we don’t even know what’s in these training models. For all we know, it’s data from our cellphones tracking us in real time, which isn’t that farfetched, but for now we can be fairly sure it’s someone who has decided what is in the machine learning models in the first place. Which, again, isn’t us.

What if they decide to omit… your religious text of choice? Or let’s say that they only want to train it on Mein Kampf and literature of that ilk. Things could go badly, and while that’s not really in the offing right now… we don’t know.

This impacts future generations and what they will do and how they will do it. It even impacts present generations. This seems like something we should be paying attention to.

We all live in our own little bubbles, after all, and our bubbles don’t have much influence on learning models for artificial intelligence. That could be a problem. How do we deal with it?

First, we have to start with understanding the problem, and most people including myself are only staring at pieces of the problem from our own little bubbles. Applications like ChatGPT just distill bubbles depending on their models.

Language as a Communication Technology

We don’t talk about how much language is a communication technology with it’s own compatibilities and incompatibilities. Until around 2004, I had no idea how much of an impact it had. CARDICIS opened my eyes to a lot, as simple as it was.

Growing up, the education system and or my school decided that it was a brilliant idea to teach both Spanish and French at the same time, and I quickly decided neither was worth pursuing not because of my teachers, but because I did not understand how important it was and because it was initially difficult for me. Then I got behind, then I got further behind, and then I was past the point of no return for the academic aspect in secondary school.

If the system was dumb, so was I, but the system was older and I had the excuse of being young and ignorant.

I bring this up for a few reasons. In the vein of what I have been writing about bias, medium and messages and other stuff in the context of artificial intelligence, language is a bigger deal than what most monophones (people who speak only one language) might begin to understand.

“Because language flows in the same direction as other elements of culture… For the most part, language flows in the other direction, from the conquerors to the conquered.”

Speaking Of Tongues: Justin E.H. Smith On The Mysteries Of Language“, Justin E.H. Smith, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris

Language through conquest has long been a topic of colonialism. The Treaty of Torsedillas that Spain and Portugal agreed to started off by a Papal decree. Conquest was religious, divided by language because of division of European nations. England, France and the Netherlands simply chose to ignore the treaty. England was still Catholic when the treaty was written, and continued to be until 1534.

The medium was the language, and the message was the language, but the message brought new medium of religion which had it’s own message, and so on.

“…I think we’re now moving into a period when we will leave it to the machines to speak to each other. A lot of the tedious work of coding came during an early phase of computing. We’re developing artificial intelligence to do that for us. When we have only machines speaking machine, however, it’s going to be a big problem, because their language is going to proliferate beyond our ability to fully grasp even how it’s proliferating.”

Speaking Of Tongues: Justin E.H. Smith On The Mysteries Of Language“, Justin E.H. Smith, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris.

Well, when artificial intelligences did start talking to each other – we’ve already seen it happen, as in 2017 when Facebook chatbots were designed to negotiate with each other. In 2022, DALL-E2 was noted using it’s own language as well. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had not happened before and we didn’t hear about it. We certainly will be hearing more about it.

None of this is simple. Different languages evolved largely because of geographic isolation until people started wandering between civilizations. There’s other types of isolation too, but in the end what is remarkable is that these large language models, and machine learning/deep learning with a multilingual content may be some of the best ways for us to get that universal translator that Star Trek always has breaking (probably Microsoft updates), and that Douglas Adams simplified to a BabelFish.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Hokusai.

And it goes beyond that.

Consider The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. Some of you reading this, if not most at the time of this writing, read left to right so when we view the image, we see the wave first, then the boats. Many people don’t even notice the boats and the people on them.

Yet the artist Hokusai was Japanese, and Japanese look from right to left. A native Japanese speaker would likely see the boats first, and therefore the peril those in the boats are in seems more real. A simple thing like the direction of reading impacts how we view images even beyond language.

As a software engineer, I wrestled with internationalization, different keyboard types, etc – but if we accept language as a communication technology, as well as an art, it’s pretty clear that transmitting and receiving information lacks the depth of interpreting.

That can be much more complicated for us, as well as our creations presenting unbiased output for us.

Justin E. H. Smith, who I quoted from an interview, has a fresh book coming out that you can pre-order now: The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning

The Process Is Underway

tt_tech_growthIt took me decades to figure out something that I should have long ago. Call it naivete. When I first came back to Trinidad and Tobago, I thought my software engineering knowledge and experience would be considered worthwhile and useful, but all too often it was rejected in the need to pursue more local and deprecated technology use. It would drive me nuts.

No more. After considering the events around and surrounding what I wrote about starting with the basics, it dawned on me that the culture, at least for the last decades, demanded making it’s own mistakes. The winning bidder in technology is generally something that was marketed to the government, or which requires an allegiance to the software manufacturer in Redmond, Washington, all the while complaining about the United States.
For me, it seems technology usage lags by about 20 years behind the United States, which is becoming very awkward with the new technologies coming out faster than the crippling bureaucracy of Trinidad and Tobago can adapt – and when they adapt, it’s without learning the lessons of the last 20 years in other countries. That’s a very negative thing to write, but all too often it’s true.

Technology, though, can’t exist in a vacuum. Technology can only serve those who know how to operate it, or they get burned. Listening to a conversation today in a coffee shop, where an apparent meeting was taking place to sell tech adaptation services or something along those lines, the guy in running shorts with ear buds in was explaining to the professionally attired woman that he had saved the world with technology at other companies, and thus he knew what he was talking about.

I chuckled even though their loud conversation was annoying while I was reading because I’d see those guys for at least 3 decades sell themselves as solutions. People then buy the solutions, and then complain about the solutions, then want to fix the solutions because nobody wants to admit bad money was spent, even in a committee… until eventually they get someone who actually has some experience but they’re too broke to pay. There was a part of me that just wanted to look at them and say in a very level voice, “That’s a bunch of bullshit”, but then I remembered something very important.

It’s part of the process, and I may have been underestimating that woman’s bullshit sensor and that’s what needs to evolve. The bullshit sensor, and perhaps the bullshit feedback mechanism. Bypassing that is dangerous, and it’s a necessary part of technology growth. In fact, I’d offer that there’s quite a bit of that bovine fecal matter stuck in the cogs of bureaucracy from various fields beyond technology.

So I sat and finished my coffee, reading my book, satisfied that the process was underway, and that bullshit sensors would self-adjust or deprecate. I had no part of it and that made my day brighter.

Maintenance vs. Disposable Culture

Last shots of RX7 before selling.Like some of you, I grew up in what I call a maintenance culture. We took care of what we had because it wasn’t disposable, because we appreciated it, and because we wanted it to last longer. You still find it here and there when you open the hood of a vehicle and see a neatly dressed engine, or when you see a shiny pair of boots. There’s a quiet dignity, though, to the closed engine hood with a clean engine underneath. Most sane people don’t open their hoods to show off. They do it because they feel it needs to be done and they feel better knowing it is done.

I mention all of this because I was chatting with a lawyer not long ago and I summarized some of what we see as a difference between the maintenance culture we grew up in as and the Disposable Culture that now exists.

Cars? Disposable. Shoes? Disposable. Glasses? Disposable. Utensils? Disposable. Computers? Disposable. Telephones? Disposable every time someone comes out with a new phone – status symbols. Everything has been so disposable for so long.

That’s changing, maybe, but not by much, and not for the same reasons.

Reviewed by Bird, Headed for LandfillEntire generations have gone without getting the deposits back on glass bottles – they just threw the plastic bottles away, as if tossing them in a bag or a bin would make them disappear from the Universe. Unfortunately for all of us, the Universe has different priorities and destroying plastic bottles is not one of them – all but the most ignorant see that now.

The same holds true of computers, whose boards house all form of nasty things that don’t belong in a water table.

Some people have recycled for years, sometimes more to claim some moral high ground instead of the Grand Purpose of Giving The Universe a Break.

And still, the Maintenance culture is not returning. It exists still – we still might marvel at the cars in Cuba, maintained with parts made in Cuba, as needed. Or in other parts of the world where simple things such as water still remain a commodity. We take care of things, as a society, until they are items that we cherish.

No one cherishes an old Chromebook. The Chromebook I’m tapping this out on was probably purchased in 2013, and is as unfashionable as last year’s iPhone. Yet it works, even with the recent misadventures of being dropped and stepped on by the author.

But how did this all come to be, anyway? How did we go from not buying new things when the old ones worked just fine, when we maintained things – how did we go from there to  throwing phones away every year?

Cheaper manufacturing is a key to this – we produce a lot more a lot faster, which means that we have more to sell – and marketers build on an odd human instinct to want to have some form of elevated status by having the newest things. Some might say that this is so that they can attract sexual partners, that it has an evolutionary benefit, but having seen some of the children growing up now I’m not certain there is an actual evolutionary benefit to attracting sexual partners so that a new generation of children like some I’ve seen becomes predominant. If you have well behaved children that value people more than things, I encourage you to continue having them if only to even the odds.

What I’m getting at is that a maintenance culture leads to a maintenance society. A disposable culture leads to a disposable society.

We’re definitely disposable these days, it seems.

On Trinidad and Tobago, Policing and Crime

I’m no expert on Law Enforcement. I am, however, a lifelong student of systems with experience ranging from agriculture to medicine, business to the military, and of different cultures. I’m sure I’ll aggravate some people with this, maybe these are the right people to be aggravated.

It’s difficult to live in Trinidad and Tobago and not consider crime. To the simple, it is simple, to the political, it’s politics, and there’s little difference between those two. How crime is considered by the populace affects crime itself – it affects the approaches, it affects the way things are implemented, it affects what is actually considered crime outside of the police service and justice systems. There are so many perspectives on it that, on a slow grey morning, I find the time to explore some of them with you, gentle reader.

The Broad Strokes: The Context

In his January 4th, 2018 Bitdepth, Mark Lyndersay mentions the pronounced dichotomy and the grey in between when it comes to how people see crime in Trinidad and Tobago:

…There are at least two societies active in T&T, one committed to all the lovely sentiments that church-going, law abiding citizens are supposed to abide by and another that LOLs at that type of thinking before stuffing a pistol into their cargo pants and going off to demand what they want…

This is, of course, a brief explanation that is accurate in being vague. It’s exactly right. Speaking for myself, as someone who is not church-going, I fall more closely to the first group than the last. And, because of the nature of Trinidad and Tobago, I end up drinking beer now and then around some more close to the latter at local bars. The street knows who the criminals are, and a balance is there between self-preservation and being an extreme law-abiding member of the South Oropouche Police Council for me.

It’s also interesting to note that Mark Lyndersay and I look at things differently in that we’re generally in different circles garnering the perspectives of different people in different ways. This is one of the many reasons I value what he thinks.

And yet, we can talk about crime in Trinidad and Tobago and come to similar conclusions. In fact, most people have very similar thoughts. I’m just taking the time to go deeper into my perspective.

In Trinidad and Tobago, like other places, there is a veil of what remains unspoken in most company. You just don’t talk about certain things, mainly because you don’t know who you’re talking to will talk to with your name attached. I’ve seen it come back and bite others soundly not in their posterior but in their neck over the years – why would decades of experience relent to yet another attempt by

The same is true of at least some members of the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) that I encounter as well. With whispers of corruption echoing through the country beyond what occupies the traditional media, there’s a hard balance to be struck between the police service and the communities that they police. Trust is the core issue, but there is something more endemic: The criminals themselves are ‘law enforcement’ oftheir own areas, sometimes more so than the TTPS, but with their own local ‘laws’.

This leads to the ‘Community Leader’ label that has been applied by politicians for those that operate toward the darker side of grey. The only thing keeping some politicians from those labels are the Laws which don’t necessarily reflect Ethics in society; that so many politicians are lawyers is something that I consider now and then. Community Leaders know each other for what they are, some are just law abiding but have as fluid of ethics as their understanding of Law permits.

This didn’t all just happen one day. It didn’t happen because those without ethics woke up one morning and decided to go on sociopathic or psychopathic sprees; seeds do not grow in soil that is not suited for them.

Socioeconomics

Having came and left Trinidad and Tobago quite a few times over the decades, I have the luxury of snapshots that allow me to see some differences more easily. The poor, as they are, have always been poor. However, people living outside of their means seems to have escalated more. This is not just in Trinidad and Tobago; it’s global, but the degree here in a small island nation is a little more tangible and seems to have accelerated more quickly than other places I have seen.

Why? Well, the most obvious issue is that the economy is arguably not as diversified as it used to be. The sugar cane industry was lost due to government and private industry inefficiencies on a broad canvas of a decrease in demand in sugar due to different sources for sugar, such as corn. Generally, other businesses have been about importing things and reselling them locally; this does well when oil prices are high but it also developed an economical infrastructure that is crippled when oil prices are low. Factor in outright corruption and theft by people sitting comfortably abroad on their ill-gotten gains, and you have what we have now.

Because there was unemployment, the answer was having people cut grass and paint stones white. This was disguised under different acronyms attributed to different political parties by some. This work, sadly, became a means of income near enough to that of a recent University graduate to make it worthy of comparison. Factor in the national pastime of alcohol and politics, like everywhere else, and you find people doing less than more. The minimum wage, something I don’t really agree with in principle due to it’s easily being gamed, is hard pressed to keep abreast of the cost of living.

It seems that there are more single parents, it seems that there are more parents where both partners work to support the family. I write ‘seems’ because there’s really no publicly accessible statistics of worth that I know of; another issue that keeps coming back in my writings.

Because there seems to be more parents working to support their children, there’s less time effectively being spent with children. The moral majority, which is neither, will likely indicate that there are more children having children. Again, I have no statistics. Maybe that’s true, maybe that’s not, but it does seem like the nurture is increasingly required of primary and secondary school education systems whose ability to nurture has become more handicapped. Further, I’d say that the curriculum isn’t as challenging as when I went to school in Trinidad and Tobago – but I am biased and admit that openly.

Meanwhile, one of the other national pastimes of the country is leaving the country. This is what is termed as ‘brain drain’; as someone who could fall into that category, I can say that opportunity in this country is limited – it’s not so much about one’s ability to do things as much as knowing the right people and having enough letters behind your name to make you seem plausible to people who don’t know anything about what it is you do. Even in this downturned global economy, there does seem to be better opportunity for the young to go abroad than to stay… here. The system feeds itself by starving itself.

The centralization of the Trinidad and Tobago budget, too, is a little disturbing. On one hand, the government decides how to support those who supply something locally – for example, chicken – versus those who import. Where money influences politics and businesses that import with more influence, local suppliers are forced to compete at a global level within a limited economy. I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing, but I do know that I’m uncomfortable with a system so easily corrupted controlling such things.

The government now, with less in it’s coffers every year, wants to tax those who are earning less more to compensate for decades of poor planning and lack of diversification. It means less for the government to spend on things to correct the problems that the government created in the first place with bad policy and lack of diversification. Those who like talking about politics will now bring out their knives to stab at their opponents – but really, both sides of the political soap opera contributed and the political discussion simply keeps the easily distracted… easily distracted.

Public servants act like they’re doing you a favor sometimes; in some cases you can find tax-free businesses running to allow people to get through the rampant bureaucracy and poor customer service to get simple things done. Bribery is an open secret. Poor customer service is noted by at least one Minister publicly. This translates to time and money losses for citizens for things already paid for by the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago; in some cases these losses are necessary to avoid penalties and fines that are at least as antiquated as the processes involved.

On the ground, people are not happy with the government – and it’s not a matter of politics if you tune out the politicians. Right now, the national discussion is about how many murders there have been for the year already – more than New York City – and protests in various areas related to infrastructure. One more humorous protest even seems to have worked… so far.

This is, sadly, a result of systems that have worked exactly as designed – except with the perimeters well outside of what the systems were designed for.

Porous borders

I listened as a policeman formerly stationed in Cedros lamented to me that there were 25 points of entry and Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard support has to happen through calling Port of Spain. All manner of things make their way through the borders on an twin island Republic which boasts a Defence Force on land and a Coast Guard at sea – the former assisting the Police, the latter the Police cannot seem to work with. On islands. I’m no expert, but I would think having rapid response vessels in key areas might cut down on illegal trafficking – from guns to drugs, from people to animals.

Politics

I am amused every time someone laments that whoever is the Prime Minister is at fault for crime – and I write that because indirectly, they are in some ways, but the expectation seems to be that the sitting Prime Minister should don a spandex outfit and go fight crime themselves. There’s a reason, aside from not wanting to see anyone in politics wearing spandex, that this does not happen.

The second politicians directly control the police services, or other matters of national security, and they do so without appropriate checks and balances there is the potential for abuse. Don’t like your Opposition? To the Gulag! Don’t like journalists? To the Gulag! Don’t like someone for any reason? To the Gulag!

So, directly, politicians can’t be blamed for such things. And while we have had Ministers of National Security over the year and all sorts of toys bought by the government to support them, they are little more than figureheads. The problem is so well entrenched that it will not be removed overnight – and, as I pointed out above, the larger view of the nation requires that across the board, policies must be implemented that mitigate socioeconomic issues as well as access to government services.

Silver Bullet?

There is no silver bullet. There is no way to deal with this overnight; this goes well beyond simply ‘fighting crime’ but dealing with the issues that create the fertile ground in which it grows. We live in a connected world now, where the Internet allows people to see things faster than any leader can steer through – but steer they must. The delays of antiquated bureaucracies need to be streamlined with common sense and appropriate technology usage (what we’ve seen so far in technology leaves much to be desired).

It boils down to trust – not trust in politicians, we change those like diapers, but trust in systems of governance.

2018: Tech and Society

Brighter FutureOn the human meta level, it’s pretty clear that robotics and AI will continue making inroads into our societies in ways that we aren’t yet prepared for. Personally, it’s amusing when what got me into software engineering for a living as a young man increasingly becomes a reality 2 decades later. In fact, it’s the only reason I code these days, and coding itself as we know it is in it’s twilight.

While blue collar jobs have always been what has been worried about as far as ‘machines taking jobs’, there is a clear bias to deal with expense. Where technology can make things cheaper, it does, so those with high salaries and jobs that can be automated will be increasingly put on notice. This leaves us with the dilemma of how people will earn a living, a real problem in a world where bureaucracies have demonstrably been slow to react to these changes, where politics around the world has somehow become more palpably connected with fear, where people see things faster, and where our ability to use technology to communicate dwarfs our ability to do so.

Renewable energy has gone beyond being a novelty – even here in Trinidad and Tobago, when over a decade ago my father tried to sell the government on solar powered street lights, the local electricity company – state owned T&TEC – announced in late 2017 that they’ll be doing stuff with it. Technology lags in countries around the world, and 2018 will continue increasing that divide – but a nation’s ability to use technology does not define it’s advancement, as economic policies on a global scale have the developed world in for a redefinition. BRIC is a reality, and network power continues to make them powerhouses.

I think of my nieces in college, my nephews about to start college, and how their education can be made worthwhile by simply being relevant over the next few decades of their lives – but their lives will be redefined by things larger than the education systems that they will be indentured to. We are on the precipice of change that we cannot possibly understand the implications of until we’re on the other side of it.

And 2018 will be increasingly about that.