36C3 preroll music
Herald Angel: Please welcome our next speaker, Adam. Adam will be talking about
the politics of a supposedly neutral and how you can read them Adam calls himself a
survivor of the American capitalism so please give it up to Adam and enjoy
applause
Adam: inaudible can you move the mic in Yes, thank you. hi so originally this
talk was supposed to be about algorithms and then I realized that I was falling
prey to exactly the thing I was trying to critique so I expanded the title a bit
in the talk between the entire system and
an algorithm that is the kind of the piece that is hard to discuss so I wanted
to just start with mathematical formalisms this is a variable it doesn't
seem to have any political implications on its own other than it can be used for a
lot of things it can it can stand for anything here's a variable squared this
might have implications this could be used to calculate the area of property that
you own this may be fewer may be something electrical triangles could be used in
some kind of projection of Cartesian coordinates over indigenous landscapes
this goes boom now we start getting into actual applications so yeah most of this
might seem obvious or it might seem completely foreign so just help fidget or
something to give me cues yeah mathematical formalism are sometimes
considered objective but obviously they only exist in a context so Howard Zinn has
a book about his life called you can't be neutral on a moving train there is that
any mathematics exists in social context that were constructed for a
reason and then omission is almost equally important if depending on what's
happening it could be more important omission would just be the things that
are not included in your formula and your algorithm silence is the voice of
complicity I'm sort of misusing that but no algorithms are the same as anything
else you should follow the money if you want to understand what's happening it's
just a materialist and pretty effective way of understanding things think about
who created the algorithm what is it used for what types of effects might it
have and what would the alternatives be if this wasn't the way that the subject
matter was being treated. Unfortunately algorithms are almost never part of
public debate they're hidden there they're the private property of
corporations of governments who don't think that we need to know what the
details are they're hidden intentionally or not behind the language of
mathematics so in order to critique this at this level of mathematical formula
you need to be literate in both mathematics and politics or sociology just
they don't necessarily go together that that immediately narrows down the number
of people who might be talking about the content of a formula so all I'm doing
here is I'm just giving a few examples and showing how something that might be
neutral is absolutely not I'm starting with human population, population
obviously has been a hot subject for centuries and the projections are wildly
different and hypothetical and obviously it matters a lot we're at a turning point
in our planets ecology at least and so when you see a graph like this you need to
think what is this ? Why does it have such a wide range ? There's this blue line
that goes straight up but then there's this other line that looks like some type
of collapse or rebound back down to a sustainable level and then you have the
if you look at who's putting this out there they're not interested in the
political aspects at this top level they actually want to take those out of their
predictions although you see something like the red dashed lines and those are
80 % prediction certainty and the dotted lines are 95 % prediction certainty
I would say that's all pretty unlikely because they haven't factored in some
important parts about the world such as the Earth's carrying capacity most
estimates say that this red line or sorry the estimates are very different but one
plausible estimate is that we passed the Earth's carrying capacity in 1992 in
which case most of these curves are bogus and something entirely different is going
to happen to not include that in your population projections is, I would say,
irresponsible. Here's another publication by the same well-meaning organization but
this you can see there's, well, I'll let you think about what that means for a
second yourself this is the population change in each country given in as
a heat map so you see some populations are growing more slowly than others some
are growing quickly and you see these little buttons at the bottom let you look
at the more developed and least developed regions which is another obstacle to
participation, it's a pretty World Bank sort of perspective the global
development view and then you see that the population of African countries is
growing more quickly which throws a racial element into it too and unfortunately
that's how this type of map is used I can't read this because it's too awful but
but this is sort of the state of rhetoric around population and the public
discussion and this, the same author 1968 pretty mainstream is saying this is one
way to take care of population growth. laugh So you can see it gets bad
quickly and we need to be involved in actually re-conceptualizing these models
We can't let there just be a graph like this, that doesn't include this. We can't
let there be a map like this that doesn't talk about the power dynamics between
countries and the history of racialized politics. Yeah, here, just a few
consequences of how population models actually affect the world and then of
course there are there follow-on effects of population anxieties causing other
political effects. Here's an alternative model and this one is a bit more
interesting I just wanted to paint the status quo so that I could I could show
you what the alternative might be. This is a model that was actually the first. It
was only put out a few years ago and it was the first to combine the idea of
ecological cycles with the Earth's carrying capacity ecological
resource consumption with class conflict. In this case the humans are eating
the planet, the planet slowly regenerates, and the rich are eating the poor.
This is actually, surprisingly, a controversial thing to say.
That predicts a completely different sort of population trajectory than the United
Nations drafted. The green line here is the earth's resources, the red line is the
commoners population and the blue line are the elites. In this case there they're
like a unchecked predator and as soon as they're introduced they eat all the poor
people, if you play with this model I have an interactive version online you can
sorry, this is not my model but I made an interactive visualization for it that
lets you change the parameters and see what happens if you drag the inequality
control back and forth then you see that you can get a completely different
behavior here you get the population skyrocketing and then stabilizing and
that's sort of just the natural thing that you would do if there's a single
predator-prey cycle and and you're you know you're just rabbits eating grass for
example I don't think there's time for a tour right now unfortunately but it might
be fun for you. The point I wanted to make though that with this second
predator-prey cycle between rich and poor people, you're actually introducing
Marxism into the formula. This has been used to explain capitalism's
periodic crises which capitalism still won't admit exist, interestingly enough,
capitalism says there's always some external driver behind the crises but yeah
so if you take this assumption in the formula and you say capitalism does cause
periodic crises and rich people are acting like predators what do you do ?
You need class struggle, you need to create more equality. So this is
just another example of how we should try to be involved in the
construction of these models and their use in our world. Labor supply is also very
important but maybe not as interesting. Don't worry about this ! I tried to not
include math because part of the point here is to make these ideas accessible
with or without math but I did want this picture up here just to show that in the
dominant form, in the dominant neoclassical economic perspective if you
pay people too much they stop working and if so you want to pay them just little
enough that they work as much as they possibly can and there are all types of a
crazy assumptions built into these formulas like humans are able to make
rational choices rather than just taking the next job in desperation I've never
lived in this world I've only lived in maybe this world where I want to fight
back against this formula as much as I can sorry I'll let you read this if you want
but yeah this formula is missing all of the things that relate to my working world
like my motivation for working is not just consumption of things. There's
essential survival and then there's wanting to be motivated by contributing to
the world somehow there's organized labor which i think about pretty often and most
jobs that would be another way out of this formula and you can see the effects
of this type of policy are that the richest 5% keep getting richer and
everyone else stays the same. More effects of the neoclassical labor supply and then
this is sort of more active I don't think there are a ton of people working on
this but I'd like to just go through the question anyway. Wikipedia has never had
paid advertisements and it's valuable because people visit it extremely often
and trust it, based on its reputation. So if you put advertisements on here
people this is sort of, like this would be the holy grail for most advertisers! It
would be that you would have your product advertised on top of something that people
already believed so their skepticism would be much lower there was actually a
discussion about putting paid advertisements on Wikipedia in 2001
little-known fact Wikipedia was started as part of a porn company Bomis and the
the chief of this porn company Jamie Wales said that there would be paid
advertising on Wikipedia caused a huge fight a Spanish Wikipedia split off and
formed the Encyclopedia Libre Universal I think it's called and pretty much because
of this fork Wikipedia was then forced into not having paid advertisements and
split off from Bomis when we do have advertising on Wikipedia which brings in
money it's basically just two relentless stream of money and we have to
turn it off to not raise too much and So here's the extremely materialistic
view of what could be done with Wikipedia we have 244 billion page views per year
We could put in for advertising slots this is a industry standard number
in fact I think it's four per page so as you scroll there would be more and more
ads and then at this price we could bring in almost three billion dollars a year
which is a huge profit margin at the low operating cost of 100 million. If you
create this type of formula then you have Wikipedia suddenly becomes and
something that you can buy and sell, it becomes something that corporations would
want to take over and control the content of it's obviously soulless. Here's another
view of advertising on Wikipedia. Who creates the value in Wikipedia? The
editors do. Who's allowed to run the fundraising campaigns only three
organizations actually my employer Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia
Switzerland and the Wikimedia Foundation, which interestingly enough is the one
organization in the group of Wikipedia chapters, it's the one organization which
is not democratically controlled. It's a self-perpetuating board and this
charismatic porn leader, Jimmy Wales (I hope this is recorded) he's still the some
kind of honorary chair of the board he has a renewable membership for life and
the board members appoint themselves yeah so why are they allowed to be the only
ones raising money through Wikipedia because they own the trademarks so it's a
pretty typical arrangement when it comes down to it and there's some kind of power
sharing deal that although I know about it and I was close to people who do
understand it I never learned what's in there so I can't tell you much about it.
So if you follow this train of logic then you can come up with another set of
formulas which is actually the flow of value around Wikipedia and its content and
if we did that we might be able to say hey there's there's an excellent argument
for having democratic control of the resources and then more along those lines
if you take the same problem domain and you and you come up with different
formulas inside of it you can you can do things like say what would editors like
from this system that exists to post advertisements which does exist by the way
if they're just not paid advertisements editors might want a better way of sharing
the resources among themselves. They obviously would fight tooth and nail to
prevent paid advertising from ever being on there but they do want each other they
want each other's campaigns to be more effective so that we're not constantly
showing banners with no return I also wanted to point to this paper which is
the one that caused me the anxiety at the beginning of the talk protective
optimization technologies and I would love for you all to click it because it's
it's another it's it's like a formal perspective of looking beyond the
algorithm at the entire system that the algorithm is embedded in the slides are
attached to the talk link if you want that's all I have does anybody feel like
asking questions? Extremely brave people want to ask questions?
Question: Hi so I was five minutes late but perhaps do you have more examples on
how you see some kind of a political not twist but like background when you see
graphs or statistics? Do you have any more examples when you see that happened how
do you detect this when you're a beginner and you look at this statistical graph
how can you analyze it and find out what the political background or like missing
preconceptions are? Adam: Thanks I wish I'd prepared a few
more and I'm just doing this from an armchair also I my day job is just in
programming and so the only reason I think about this stuff is because I'm I
have spent a long time working for evil companies unfortunately, and so I'm
always trying to second-guess what the company is actually doing and, but
to do that there's no real trick that I can think of it's really just the Chomsky
approach would be: follow the money! Where does the money come from? Where does
it go ? Why do people want this to exist ? And so you have some formula,
some system if you have one in mind, please suggest it! And then, yeah,
there's the thing that you could do like literature review where you you just look
at similar attempts to look at that same problem domain and find what people have
left out of the one that you're looking at but but I don't think there's the
concrete system to do it because that that would like allow you to invent everything
in the world so it's kind of case-by-case as far as I can tell sorry.
Question: And if you were Jimmy Wales back in the day and you would be setup like a
benevolent dictator for life, how would you have faced yourself out? How would be
your take on? What should be the correct way or correct way of Wikipedia
raising for example funds if in the end the people who create value are editors?
Adam: When Wikipedia was first started it was officially a membership organization
and so everybody who is editing or uploading files or changing the source
code was considered a member in Germany it's a Verein I think and so everybody was
supposed to have one vote for the board of trustees and that pretty much takes
care of the problem right there if you don't in Wikimedia foundation was
illegally changed to be a non membership organization a few years in and actually
it was illegal because they didn't announce it to the people who were
technically members so I suppose editors would should feel free to sue the
Wikimedia Foundation for control for example there's no statute of limitations
on this particular thing that happened but in general I would say from my
tiny bit of experience doing grassroots organizing an organization is something
like a child it's you don't want to have it live in your house its whole life and
you don't want to be telling it to get up and brush its teeth in the morning
the measure of success should be something more like it takes a life of its
own it might be direction you didn't consider and so to do that you have to
devolve the power from yourself. Does that answer the question? Okay all right well
thank you so much for coming I hope it was useful.
postroll music
subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2020. Join, and help us!