Information Fascism: How the Open Web was Betrayed by its 'Advocates'

Conversations online involving politics and/or religion are frequently associated with the weird and the dramatic. The nadir for many such exchanges tends towards accusations of  being a "fascist" or "racist" or some other fashionable political pejorative being thrown around. I particularly find the term "fascist" to be the most laughable, mostly because people tend to be hopelessly liberal with the term for the sake of spiting someone they don't like. As George Orwell wrote in 1944:

"the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'".

Scholars and historians have a hard time defining what is or isn’t fascism. Ordinary people tend to label people they dislike as fascists. In many cases this name calling does not escalate beyond an online skirmish. But, in recent times, some of these name callers have begun to implement their belief into actual social policies in the real world: we’ve begun to see some of the biggest advocates of the open web and web technology: tech companies and statesmen and women in Liberal Democracies and Republics, openly endorsing the idea that perceived fascists should be openly censored without any means to defend or appeal. This is whole new level of political stupidity coming from the powers that be, and a dangerous trend that may threaten to turn the whole web into its censored, state-sponsored Chinese equivalent.

The recent collective ban imposed on InfoWars by many of the major tech players online is but one example of this growing trend. I venture to say that we are seeing the beginnings of a general endorsement of methods/tactics that can be collectively labelled as "Information Fascism", the total ban of anything deemed unacceptable by these tech giants and the ilk who blindly support/petition them (the governments of Europe and America in particular).

But hang on, didn't we just say that it is hard to define Fascism? And besides, surely banning things such as hate speech, outright bigotry, and enforcing an atmosphere of diversity of thoughts and ideas is a good thing? Indeed, that is probably good. However, diversity movement has become increasingly cynical with regards to its views on permissibility of speech, which I find to be abhorrent. The movement's insistence of rights based on class is in conflict with basic egalitarian values, rule of law and human equality. It is no surprise that there has been a backlash, offline and online. A backlash that has resulted in the some of the movement's adherents advocating for complete censorship of characters and ideas that openly challenge their severely flawed and inconsistent class and identity politics platform. And if that isn't enough, we have the Antifa group, an aggressive group that prefer to argue with their fists than anything else.

Censorship backed by violence happens to be a fundamental quality of an intolerant, fascist society. The diversity is rendered meaningless if people are threatened and "de-platformed" for speaking out their minds against the intolerant "cultural establishment". While Antifa is perhaps limited by its numbers and ideology (despite the abundance of misguided sympathisers), the adoption of online censorship without appeal by states and tech giants undermines and betrays the spirit of the web and affects our entire civilisation. We have basically turned the whole web into the Chinese web.

What difference is there between the Chinese social web and the rest of the world in the Era of Censorship?

Good intentions almost always have second order, sometimes negative, consequences. Empowering tech giants with the unspoken right to censor and ban without appeal, people online on platforms that can arguably be called "social public goods" introduces the possibility of creating a national community of privileged, dominant bullies who can potentially lead the rest to destruction, simply because they fail to consider other lines of thought. The Internet via social media has a tangible effect on our laws and governments. Therefore, it is important to not rob people of the right to freely express their honest thoughts simply because certain influential people (the "cultural bourgeoisie") find their ideas detestable.

The Internet's giant platforms have the power to shape the conversation, and thus people. Tech giants are arbitrators that should not exist ideally. But they do exist nevertheless. Their influencing the conversation will potentially allow the state via co-operations to create truly fascist communities via unilateral censorship. Here we discover the fundamental definition of Fascism, with help from classical liberal economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek:

“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.”

You could replace "communism" with "Californian utopianism" or "Silicon valley utopianism" or even "techno-utopianism". No utopia can survive criticism or true diversity of ideas. And that is why utopians would rather censor and ban ideological dissidents so they can unite people in their state-sponsored, corporate dream of apparent utopia. And in the process of creating a "safe" social utopia online, tech giants risk creating the very society that they claim to fight against, through information fascism.

The End of Cassini: Why We Must Keep Exploring

An illustration of Cassini’s “Grand Finale” at Saturn (NASA/JPL)

Semper Exploro. Always exploring. The spirit of this motto filled my heart as I watched the planned disintegration of the 20 year old Saturn orbiter Cassini unfold on social media. When the spacecraft finally stopped signalling the homeworld at 1155 UTC on September 15th, I realised that, although the mission was a resounding success, the spirit of Semper Exploro demands that we should send another probe in its place. After all, there is so much left undiscovered at the Saturnian system; what lies under the icy crust of the geyser-spewing moon Enceladus? What do the seas of Titan actually look like? Cassini has left us with even more questions than before it entered orbit in 2004 after a 7 year journey across the solar system. And those questions should be answered not merely because it is scientifically relevant (it is a given), but because the spirit of exploration which Cassini embodied and which Semper Exploro captures so well has the potential to further unite humanity and bring about the best of us in more ways than what any formal ideological framework can do. And we need a better alternative today, now more than ever.

Exploring can be a risky venture, but its a worthy risk. Indeed, an explorer’s death may be the only kind of death worthy of glorification. We stand today only because of a few men and women who risked it all stepping into the unknown in all kinds of fields. With exploration comes advancement. With curiosity comes the gifts of innovation. With ventures comes prosperity. With each expedition into the unknown comes priceless knowledge that uplifts us all as a species. How much more prosperous would we be today had we dedicated all our efforts to kill or dominate one another towards instead settling space, curing illnesses and so forth? The most logical answer would be: many times over, perhaps a thousand fold.

Film works like Star Trek that attempt to portray the future as an advanced utopia are sometimes criticised of being overoptimistic, naive and ignorant of ‘reality on the ground’. But reality is only what we allow it to be. If we want, we could have a Star Trek kind of future right now. If we want, we could have institutions whose only purpose is to explore, discover and advance peaceful prosperity across the stars. Yes, even with our severely flawed humanity we can still have our cake and eat it IF we believe we can. After all, this flawed humanity is the same humanity that has created the better present we see today. And experience can serve as a catalyst; people today are more motivated than ever to improve not just their own circumstances, but the circumstances of everyone else around them, simply because of inspired hope. The momentum created by this hopeful belief means that, for the most part, we have no where else to go but up.

We cannot hope to have a smooth ride to the future. But fantastic endeavours like the Cassini mission can help remind and solidify our global desire as a species: to see what’s on the other side of the distant horizon. To learn and grow wiser. And to do it with everyone around us.

If we can just keep on exploring, perhaps one day we might discover an even better version of ourselves than we could ever have imagined. But we must keep exploring. Semper exploro forever Cassini.

On Designing Relevant AI Products for Humans

Many attempts at creating effective user experiences with artificial intelligence (AI) tend to produce news worthy results but not so much in terms of upping mainstream adoption.

Routine AI use for most consumers is still not an everyday thing (broadly speaking anyway, it may not be so if you look at certain demographic groups and interest groups such as tech enthusiasts). No one’s as dependent on AI assistants in the same way as we are so dependent on, say, Word processors or Google Search or mobile devices.

Intelligent assistants are still a novelty, and that may stem from the problem of their design. Most people don’t want to converse with machines on philosophical matters (though it ought to be cool), they just need to make a reference. People don’t want virtual girls in holographic displays asking them how their day went after coming home from work. And people seem to naturally want to troll chatbots in an attempt to explore the limits of their “intelligence”, and perhaps have a laugh while at it.

In fact, the more we attempt to define AI use in the context of human specific activities, the less it is used. It is perhaps a result of our bias towards emulating the all-knowing, all-powerful and very personal/witty AI found in films like Her or in sci-fi games like Halo. This kind of cultural hinting naturally leads many people to believe that, because the AI is being presented in a very human-like fashion, then it should act like a human. The fact of the matter is that, in almost all cases, you’re probably going to see through the facade before 10mins of continuous use have elapsed.

AI simply isn’t human, and designers shouldn’t help us pretend that they are.

Instead of trying to approach the question of AI usage when designing interfaces purely from the perspective of our sci-fi fantasies (who knows the future anyway?), we could perhaps start with the user; what do they actually need? They probably might not need an AI with a built-in personality.

They might instead need an AI that can do small but useful stuff efficiently and reliably. Successful intelligent agents that do just that usually lack any form of personality or similar bells and whistles. 

Take Google’s strategy; Google’s assistant and intelligent products haven’t a hint of personality besides the voice used for their voice search functionality. This cuts out a lot of cultural and psychological baggage from the conversation. Since the product clearly appears as a machine, people will not lead themselves to believe that their assistants can do human-like stuff (sparing the occasional witty answers and trivia). This can be beneficial because the user isn’t distracted by the product’s attempts at sounding human. The user is instead empowered without him/her even realising it. It just works.

I used to think building an assistant as cold and impersonal as Google Now would be a bad move, but I can now see the logic when comparing Google Now to the competition. Cortana looks so lively, and yet she disappoints me precisely because you keep looking for the human-likeness as it all but disappears with continued usage. Ditto Siri. I get so distracted by their apparent witty personality that I can’t seem to get at their actual functionality. Why do I need a witty robot in the house?

By far, the most interesting thing that Google has ever added to it’s Google Now app was no less impersonal, but it was extremely useful IMO. Now on Tap is able to recognise elements displayed at anytime on a phone, allowing a search to be done without leaving any given opened app. If it doesn’t detect what you want, you can simply highlight it and it would search for that. It is a perfect design; minimalistic, useful and brutally impersonal. It just works.

Intelligent apps shouldn’t be built to seem explicitly human; they should be built to get some actual work done. And they should do it without distracting. I know this might not be the kind of interesting personal robot some of us would have imagined, but it is probably the only way to make things less awkward between man and machine. The uncanny valley is not a place that you’d like your app to end up in, certainly not the rest of the consumer AI market and industry.

AI is still an emerging technology, like the Internet before it went mainstream. We are still trying to understand how to integrate the technology into the normal, everyday workflow of average human beings. Human-AI UX design choices may prove to be what makes or breaks consumer AI applications. The potential rewards for successfully breaking the design problem are tantalising; designers must keep seeking the perfect problem-solution fits that real people might care about and design around that.