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🔬 Technology Labyrinths

Have you ever found yourself lost in a funhouse, going from
mirror to mirror rushing for the exit (or even the entrance?) meanwhile
the monsters and zombies harass each step? Or perhaps you’re more of a
country folk and have participated in a corn maze, complete with Jack
Nicholson frozen in ice for the tourists in town on the long weekend?

Well – in the early 2000s, after all the Y2K panic and before the rise
of the ubiquity of smartphones-as-organs there was a legitimate period
of time where society was faced with the very serious decision on whether
or not to shift our lives onto digital infra-structures. People resisted
online banking, social media or even choosing Google instead of the yellow
pages. It all seems a bit absurd now to think humanity ever had a choice
on whether to commit ourselves to digital breadcrumbs and clinical depre-
ssions. Jonathan Haidt pushes at the increasing awareness of the effects
these technologies have had on kids, trading hospital room floors instead
of halcyon years. Traditional childhood used to mean picking on the neighb-
orhood kid of the day who chose to wear pink at the basketball courts. Now
that kind of behavior might be ousted on the socials as some brutal hate
speech in need of correctives by some technological subcommittee by decree.

In the book "We the Data (W. Wong, 2023), the author brings us through
everyday situations from doorbell cameras to social media subcommittees that
make all kinds of decisions about personal rights, technological rights
and the delicate subject of bio/neural data and IP. This new phenom-
enon, so-called 'datafication' becomes a shared resource of communities
and cultures all over the world where artificial intelligence sits atop
as an enhancement layer of these sophisticated IT cultures. Scientific
advancements in this framework, she would say cannot be separated from
human rights - datafication gets wrapped up and pixelated sometimes for
profit sometimes for not. Our autonomy and resilience is on the line in
cooperative ecosystems, increasingly technological. Instead of being 'data
subjects', she argues we think of ourselves as 'data stakeholders'.

The great bargain given up by humanity as having led us to this point
where language has been solved and humans remain none wiser on where
goes the meaning - is that IT systems make us impotent ahead of customer
requests that ‘do not compute’. Our applications are increasingly
locked in eco-systems that are ephemeral at best. I lost half my mod-
ern music collection (if it’s acceptable to call digital files a
collection) when Rdio, a nascent streaming music
platform was overtaken by competitors.

Much more than in explorations
of a city’s sidewalks and trails, virtual reality is often a waiting
game of trapped humans waiting for operators to decrypt and unlock the
realities on the other side of patience, or else the elevator music. Road
rage has been with us for a few decades but virtual madness, smittened
and paranoid is a 10x at a fraction of the cost. As Jonathan Haidt would
surely agree, it’s also 10x the human emotional cost, with elites slap-
ping all kinds of politically correct labels over our kids - themselves
with manic energies and little time for boring classrooms.

The real opportunity, or ‘conundrum’ if you don’t ascribe to the capitalist
rhetoric that exists today relates not to solving our IT issues with more
IT but instead designing new IT systems in conjunction with unsupervised
machine learning models that simplify these bloated IT cans of worms into a
fine spaghetti dinner with garlic bread and a nice chianti! Building
large scale IT infrastructures isn’t easy, requiring Snowden-like con-
sultants and experts who amass fortunes all the while. Microsoft deve-
lopers quickly discovered this with Sharepoint data blobs consuming
all the memory and resources in unmanageable clusters of code. In soft-
ware engineering, wrong turns aren’t easily stepped back in redundancy
like biological systems but instead become vulnerabilities and target
vectors for accidents and malicious actors. When the FBI was hounding
Apple for a backdoor to their devices, in order to help them investigate
criminals – any steps Apple might have taken to appease these unreasonable
requests from law enforcement agents would have had severe structural
consequences for them. Politically-appointed judges unilaterally solving
tech issues as if Apple’s pyraminds of sand were quite so
simple does also border on the absurd, as if dragging our hearts through
courtrooms of affidavit forms-as-products. The courts are overloaded
with this shotgun approach to solving front line problems with disgruntled
officials in lineups and confrontations and frivolous charges making their way
in front of activist judges. This labyrinth bureaucracy, now including shadow bans
and doxing or ransomware, transitioning poverty into crime into addiction and
into gangs, who armed with smartphones and other nonlocal wireless (let’s
be honest, EM isn't just for the scientists anymore) are more organized
on street corners around the world than the many cathedrals of golden arches
at McDonalds. Body cams and surveillance cameras were supposed to be
the great bargain for humanity in exchange for all this bureaucratic
impotence and yet, regularly in courtrooms body cams are found to be
broken and surveillance camera footage already erased or never turned
on in the first place. Algorithms on Youtube know your browser habits
in cookies and cultural tastes better than you do. The Edge browser,
an evolution of internet explorer (ie) is now paired with copilot, its
Ai LLM, thereby circumventing Google and changing the face of search.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning structures present us with
an opportunity to design our own lives, to make strong technological
decisions for our lifestyles and routines. They have empowered us
as masters of our realms and we shouldn’t settle for meandering IT
systems from a bygone era.

Contact us today for a free consultation on your own digital ai strat-
egy.


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