Technology Labyrinth

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 replica 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 profiles 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 committ ourselves to digital breadcrumbs and clinical depressions. Jonathan Haidt pushes at the increasing awareness of the effects these technologies have had on our kids, trading hospital room floors instead of halcyon years. Traditional childh-ood used to mean picking on the neighborhood 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. 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’ and our applications are increasingly locked in eco-systems that are ephemeral at best. Personally I lost half my modern music collection (if it’s acceptable to call digital files a collection) when Rdio, a nascent streaming music platform was overtaken by competitors. You might call it in equivalence with those shopping cart sensors placed on the wheels so shady cus- tomers don’t decide to joyride the carts back home. Landlords and merchants build invisible technological fences of infra-red lasers that limit how far past the store’s frontiers any errant shopping cart wheel is able to stroll. The equivalence is apt – 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 Haidt would surely agree, it’s also 10x the human emotional cost and tragedy, with elites slap- ping all kinds of politically correct labels over our kids with manic energies and clinical bipolar littanies, ritalins and where call center agents are borderline care takers. The real opportunity, or ‘conundrum’ if you don’t ascribe to 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 experts who amass fortunes in consulting. Microsoft developers quickly discovered this with Sharepoint data blobs consuming all the memory and resources in unmanageable clusters of code. In software 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 or whomever – any steps Apple might have taken to appease these unreasonable requests from law enforcement agents would have had severe structural consequences for Apple. 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 the courtroom because police would like to demonstrate the evils of sensor data in affidavit form. The courts are overloaded with the shotgun approach to solving front line problems by disgruntled officials who readily atta- ck citizens in profiles, confrontations and frivolous charges. This labyrinth bureau- cracy, now including shadow bans and doxing methods, transitioning poverty into crime into addiction and into gangs who armed with smartphones and other nonlocal wire- less (let’s be honest, EM isn't just for the scientists) are more organized on street corners around the world than the 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 impotence and yet, regularly in courtrooms body cams are found to be broken and surveillance camera footage already erased. The labyrinth favours elitism hunting down rivals and are now equipped with such technological standards that even online activity is not without its suspicious tailings. In closing, 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 and it’s high time the bureaucrats were chopped down a notch as such.

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