Category Archives: Internet, technology

#democracy too

We all know there is no such thing as normal people or normal actions. No two normals look alike. Your normal looks different from mine.

Still, I feel confident in my statement: Normal is out. We are bombarded by so much information that it takes something beyond our own concept of normal to drag our attention away from our comfy interaction with like-minded people in our chosen information silos; the ones provided by courtesy of the Chinese, Elon Musk, international investors or local media providers.

All too often it takes something negative to catch our interest.

In a media overload world, a happy life is seldom interesting unless it involves a mind-boggling rags-to-riches story or is achieved after serious, preferably health-threatening, setbacks. Great grades and a stellar job record do not a good story make. Ruining your successful career spectacularly – now that is clickworthy. Genders are interesting mainly if there is an internal or external struggle or an equality issue involved. Faith is newsworthy if it involves celebrities or leads to violence or oppression rather than good deeds.

If you want to be heard, make sure you are not too normal, whatever that means in your target group. You can opt for a memorable hair style like Boris Johnson, an interesting age gap marriage like President Macron and his Finnish counterpart, Niinistö, or you can ride the minority van, with skin colour, gender or sexuality as your strength. Unusually good or bad looks never hurt either.

Actually, any of the above alone may not make the cut these days. The world is looking for something more – and more – whatever that is.

Even a fish has to be quite out of the ordinary to grab our attention. Hence my featured image, which also symbolises my take on the effects of social media. It’s an ugly picture.

No wonder everyone is out there riding their own “ism” be it fanaticism, racism, or some other ism. Even Putin and Trump have realised that plain old crazy is not enough; you need to spice it up with wars, conspiracy theories and isms.

Sadly, my favourite news media, Helsingin Sanomat, all too often falls into the trap of letting social media algorithms take the driver’s seat, while HS takes the backseat with its semi-analytical follow-ups on the latest “talk of the town”. It’s the easy way out in search of clicks: Tailgate social media regardless of whether the issues trending on it are truly worth the coverage journalistically. It’s also the way to get caught up in warped agendas driven by social media savvy parties instead of doing your own thinking and legwork.

I am aware that I am crying for journalism as we have known it – and still know it, when my favourite news media is at its best. Things change. Maybe traditional journalism is fated to take the backseat. But why seat yourself there voluntarily?

As far as the Chinese are concerned, the more mindless the TikTok content and its followers become, the better. In China itself, TikTok is not allowed. Elon Musk, in turn, makes no secret that X is now his – to do with as he pleases – and rules do not please him. Social media platforms do not care a jot about fact-checking, good journalistic practices or democracy. They pose as a way to become heard, but their algorithms make sure that not everyone is. Why help them?

Our view of what is to be considered a fact may change as we learn new things. That is as it should be. However, thanks to social media, more and more people seem to be buying into the thought that facts are only a matter of opinion; just pick your own alternative fact and go with it, no proof required. The same trend seems to apply to the rule of law; if it doesn’t “work” for you, just ignore it and do as you wish.

As like finds like by courtesy of social media algorithms, fiction becomes fact to so many that no fact-checking can halt the process. Western democracies are slowly being trained to a life of panem et circences (bread and circuses). With AI in the mix, the stories will only get wilder and wilder and so will probably the voters along with them.

As the lines between possible and impossible, true and false, and right and wrong become blurred, it becomes increasingly tempting to vote for someone, who – ably aided by algorithms- sells you an exciting story and promises you both bread and the full circus experience. It’s such an easy solution: Just jump on the circus wagon, forget your troubles and doubts and hope for the best.

How did billions of people end up being led by their noses without protest? What about free will and independent decision-making? When did we lose this War Over Minds to evil algorithms? Is the damage irreversible? How far are we gone? When all is said and done, will our sense of real and unreal, true and false, right and wrong be totally lost?

The way things are going, we will vote ourselves out of democracy before we know it. For all the wrong reasons – just because we can.

The fight to save Western democracies starts at home. You may not have to risk your life in the physical sense, but you must be ready to make sacrifices that may feel life-changing. Leave your social media accounts – at least the ones that are clearly led by parties beyond all control. You will not beat them by joining them.

Let the fight begin #democracy too!

Wait – I realise I am not on TikTok, X, Instagram or Facebook. No algorithms will push this message forward. Then again, even if I was, would they really push it? You can see where this is going. It is, indeed, an ugly picture.

Please don’t let me be misunderstood

The futile hope expressed above is shared by many. Songs have been sung about it, most notably by Eric Burdon and the Animals in 1965.

Sadly, misunderstandings are not on a downward trend. The modern Western world, as we have come to know it, is becoming increasingly postmodern. The focus is more on values, rights, symbols and identities.

To better understand these changes, I googled my way through various “philosophy for dummies” articles and revisited some books I had read years ago.

I started with scepticism. Sceptics (too) come in many forms depending on the time and the culture. To make a long story short I will quote Wikipedia: “Philosophical sceptics are often classified in two general categories: Those who deny all possibility of knowledge, and those who advocate for the suspension of judgement due to the inadequacy of evidence.”

In theory, it could be said that Donald Trump’s former counselor Kellyanne Conway was just taking a philosophical approach to the matter, when she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump’s inauguration by stating that Spicer gave alternative facts.

Along those lines, we could even argue that she took philosophy to a higher level, when she later referred multiple times to a non-existent Bowling Green massacre. In terms of ultimate scepticism: Who is to say what is existent and non-existent?

Don’t get me wrong – despite my philosophical forays, I am still a firm believer in reason and knowledge. Kellyanne Conway’s untruths are still fiction not fact.

But the more we communicate, the more evident it becomes that philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein got it right, when he argued that the logical structure of language draws a limit to meaning and thereby to the the expression of thought. To simplify in the extreme: We will always be misunderstood and misunderstand because we each think in our own, subjective way. There is no language and use thereof that everyone would understand alike. Language and the use of it is always relative.

When we combine this limitation with an increasing focus on the individual and on values, rights, symbols and identities instead of more quantifiable issues, the possibilities for misunderstanding become almost limitless.

The more we discuss things that Wittgenstein considered undiscussable due to the limits of language, the more we venture away from sense to nonsense. The issues themselves are not nonsense, but any statement about them is, if Wittgenstein is to be believed.

No wonder we tend to exist in our own, Internet-facilitated bubbles these days. As we discuss the undiscussable, it helps that we at least start off on the same page whether in terms of religion, values, rights, symbols or identities.

At this point I have to stress that in many parts of the world people are either still fighting to survive in a material sense or fighting to get themselves and their opinions heard. Postmodernism is a luxury that is not affordable to all. No wonder Western ideals seem foreign and even naive to many – not only outside the Western world, but also within it, which should not be ignored.

I myself struggle at times to buy into broadly defined, high-flying programmes for the betterment of mankind, or demands for a wide range of services to meet the individual needs of all and sundry.

I am stuck back in the modern world; bemoaning the lack of reason, knowledge, practicality and cost-efficiency, and worrying about financing.

To avoid misunderstandings – programmes that aim to contain the negative effects of climate change are a necessity, not something I would consider high-flying.

The refrain of my theme song starts off with “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good.” It seems at times that our postmodern Western world is positively drowning in good intentions.

Maybe the nature of our intentions is the only thing that truly matters in the long run? Which would lead us into the nightmare of defining good and evil.

First we would have to decide, whether to approach the matter through religion, ethics, philosophy or psychology. The mind boggles – there are so many branches and trees that is impossible to see the whole forest.

Maybe I should go with Spinoza, and define good as something we certainly know is useful to us and evil as something we certainly know hinders us from possessing anything good. Or maybe not – I can just hear Putin defending his war in Ukraine to the Russian people in terms of Spinoza.

So maybe I will just go with the idea that evil actions consist of elements related to unbalanced behaviour involving e.g. expediency, selfishness, ignorance and neglect. Good intentions would in turn consist of elements like compassion, moderation and humility.

As you can see, I am making choices. There is no absolute as far as good and evil goes. There  is my choice and your choice. Which makes it easier to understand why Finland’s and Sweden’s good intentions may not always be considered good in Turkey. Compromises have to be made.

Unless we fully understand this, there is no way for alliances to work in an increasingly postmodern world: A world in which people in their respective bubbles are boosting each others belief that their own definition of good is the right one.

To take this a full circle. Was Kellyanne Conway, and by extension Trump,  just a philosopher with good intentions? Well, pigs may farm, if Orwell is to be believed, but they have yet to fly.

But Kellyanne was onto something. In an increasingly postmodern world everything is subjective. This inevitably affects politics too.

People find it harder and harder to get down from their high moral horses, and cope with the idea that there is a whole world out there that doesn’t see things their way. The question is, where will this fragmentation lead us?

Putin probably looked at the Western world and saw the fragmentation – a weakness as far as he understood. A costly misunderstanding. He never saw the underlying strength. In a postmodern world that focuses less on the material, independence and the right to chart your own path becomes the one thing people are ready to support and defend to the extreme. It is not about countries anymore, it is about each one of us personally.

To come back to my blog title – you will probably misunderstand this blog to some extent, but I have realised that this is not necessarily a bad thing. All thoughts are equal when we discuss the undiscussable.

From 1984 to the metaversum

Peace reigns in the little city of Tammisaari. Nothing in this idyllic corner of the world brings to mind George Orwell’s iconic novel 1984. Yet my thoughts drift to it.

Orwell was far ahead of his time, but not far enough. He imagined a world ruled by totalitarian superpowers; a world full of mass surveillance; a world where history was rewritten, alternative facts were introduced as truths, and cults were built around leaders. We saw all of these trends escalating, when the Terrifying Triplets, Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping (identical in mindset, if not parentage), were in charge of the world’s superpowers. Two out of the three still remain in office, and the third is frantically scrambling to get back into the game using every imaginable – and most probably some unimaginable – means.

The Chinese have taken Orwell a step further. Especially those, who subscribe to the Chinese cultural concept Tianxia and envision a world with only one center from which the rulers of different areas derive their power. While the Western world plays around with concepts like ‘back to the 60’s, 80’s, or whatever’, the Chinese play around with the concept of ‘back to a worldwide rule similar to that of the Emperor of China’. The latter lasted for thousands of years.

But even Orwell and the Chinese have yet to imagine a metaversum – a virtual world above and beyond our present one. Talk about thinking out of the box – straight into the Matrix. Kudos to Zuckerberg and those faceless entities behind him. They really think big. Why bother with physical wars, states and borders, treaties and laws. Just take the world population and virtually shift it to the metaversum ruled by you.

And yes, I do understand that the metaverse in itself is nothing new, hence the term metaversum to distinguish between the underlying technology and the content.

My favourite newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, recently ran an article on the rise of companies like Atai Life Sciences, Mind Medicine and Compass Pathways. All of these companies engage in research of psychedelics and the use of them to fight e.g. mental illness. At first glance, this has nothing to do with the topic above. However, the ownership and direction of a company can easily change.

These seemingly separate issues took on a whole new life during a lively family discussion about potential combinations of the metaversum and psychedelics. As the family library used to contain hundreds of science fiction books before its remove to Kindle, some pretty scary alternatives were envisioned. The potential for the trip of a lifetime – in more ways than one – was clear.

As you can see, I am jumping all over the place, combining issues with a free hand. There is a common thread, however. I wonder when we will confess to ourselves that things are slowly, but surely, spinning out of the national and international controls we have set up so far. Even though it is hard to notice in slumbering cities like Tammisaari.

I know climate change is a big issue, and I support every effort to save Planet Earth. But what about its people? Are we doing enough to ensure that they will be free to enjoy the planet we – hopefully – save; or will the world fall on its own digital sword one way or another, while we just watch from the sides and blog about it?

I keep coming back to the totalitarian mantra from 1984: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”. It seems the world is intent on building on said strength. A foundation similar to quicksand.

I feel as overwhelmed as Orwell’s main character, Winston. Democracy seems to be slipping away. Not only due to actions of the Terrifying Triplets and like-minded leaders but also due to actions of multinational companies seemingly beyond democratic controI.

Call me suspicious, but I have stayed out of Facebook aka Meta and I will definitely stay out of the metaversum. Most of my cheerfully facebooking friends will probably not even notice that they entered it.

Leaders and followers

Important fights are being fought today – and have been fought throughout history – in the name of social, political and economic equality. Many of them for causes that I support; not only with words but with actions.

However, being a niceoldlady and an old school liberal, I have a tough time buying into some of the fighting methods. All too often the fighters are so caught up in the righteousness of their cause that they are intolerant in the name of tolerance, harass in the name of non-harassment and at times even call for glaringly unequal treatment in the name of equality.

To be clear, when denouncing calls for glaring inequality, I don’t mean calls for measures that can help minorities catch up with the head start that years of inequality have given those in positions of power. Sometimes such catching up can best be facilitated through measures that in themselves are unequal treatment including, but not limited to, quotas.

However, lines have to be drawn somewhere. Mine are drawn pretty much at the point where French writer Pauline Harmange proudly states: ‘Mois les hommes, je les déteste’, which basically translates to ‘I Hate Men’. This is not just a catchy title for her pamphlet as one might assume; it is the prevailing sentiment throughout her essay. The thinking being that you are allowed to blatantly hate those that have done you wrong, if you are in a minority.

Even if one were to buy into that theory, the problem remains that not all men have done Harmange, or women in general, wrong. Still Harmange feels free to profess to hate men in general. I am not into hating, but should I profess to hate something, it would be sweeping generalisations and hate speech.

Then there are those, who feel free to rewrite history and interpret past actions with total disregard for facts and truth just to prove their point. My favourite newspaper recently carried a major story on women as software engineers. To make a short story longer, the writer took all sorts of liberties both with facts and their interpretation.

As if gender equality wasn’t a good enough cause on its own merits, the writer saw a great conspiracy in the fact that Finnish card punchers in the early 1960’s and 70’s were predominantly female, while a majority of the early 70’s software engineers were male.

As one commentator pointed out, card punching (a computer-related job, which in itself required great concentration and careful execution, but had nothing to do with software engineering) was as closely related to software engineering as my online banking is. In order for the software to work properly, the inputted information has to be correct, but that does make the one who punches or types in the information a software engineer.

Instead of acknowledging this, the article writer sweepingly alluded that the female card punchers could be considered the first software engineers, and that the hiring tests for software engineers were different from those for card punchers in order to favour men. The fact that the jobs were totally different – hence the hiring tests were different too – did not fit into her storyline. Therefore it was disregarded.

The writer then proceeded to speculate that the use of the term software was related to the fact that the early card punching “software engineers” were women and hence the programs were considered easy to produce i.e. ‘soft’ as opposed to the term hardware, which referred to something difficult and hard.

And here I was, thinking that the use of the term hardware originated from the mid 15th century concept of small metal goods i.e. referred to the physical components of a computer.

The sad thing is that with less emphasis on proving a point by any means – right or wrong – and more emphasis on getting the facts right, the article would have been interesting. Instead, it became a sorry example of how a good article can turn bad and a good cause can be undermined by blatantly disregarding facts.

Finland was actually training both male and female software engineers as fast as they could be hired in the early 70’s. The real story to tell would have been, why the number of female software engineers didn’t increase in proportion to the early numbers. That story did not make its way to the surface past the alternative facts, so it has yet to be told.

Wrongs do not a right make. The spreading of hate and unreason – or just alternative facts and untruths – do not promote equality; they promote hate and unreason as well as an increasing disregard for facts and truth.

Yet my favourite newspaper chose not to correct the story, but to argue that by reading the whole article a discerning reader would realise that card punchers were not software engineers, despite what the title of the article and the alternative facts presented in the early paragraphs of it claimed.

Since when did good journalism mean that the sorting of facts from fiction was to be left to the reader?

Social media has a tendency to make mountains out of molehills, but it also has the power to highlight wrongs that deserve our attention, yet they might never have come to our notice through old school channels. Most people recognise that things may be blown out of proportion, or less thoroughly researched, on social media sites. Which is why it’s so important that traditional media continues to take a more factual and in depth approach.

Originally newspapers where just that – papers with the latest news. With the growth of electronic media as well as the internet and social media, newspapers didn’t have the means to keep themselves in the forefront as news breakers. Instead, they focused on the context and the background of news.

Today social media darlings with little or no journalistic background are invited to write for newspapers in order to keep up with times and win over the next generation of readers. Unfortunately, fact-checking seems to be the first to suffer from this development.

Why give up your true competitive advantage? In addition to its adherence to time-tested journalistic ethics and standards, the reliability of its fact-checking process has so far been the true value-added of my favourite newspaper. Both are missing on social media.

Life is messy. Life is complicated. Life is seldom Instagram-ready or Twitter-formatted. Social media can serve as a podium for all sorts of voices: from silly to wise, from scary to nice, from hate to love; but we still need the context and the background.

A good newspaper is all about getting the story right and interesting enough – not about making sure it’s catchy and instantly trends whatever the cost. There will always be leaders and followers. A good newspaper does not let itself fall into the latter category as times change. It finds new ways to build on its competitive advantage instead of eroding it.

Divine intervention

Years ago my four-year old son came home from his day care centre in a huff. Someone at the centre had taken on the daunting task of explaining God to four-year-olds. My son’s take on the matter was that God resided in heaven and heaven was somewhere in the clouds.

If the story of Amazon kicking Parler off Amazon Cloud had broken that day, my son would probably have seen it as divine intervention.

However, as that story was to unfold some 40 years later, my son’s mind was instead wrapped around the – in his mind totally impossible – idea that people searched for God. How could that be true, he questioned. There is no ladder tall enough to reach the clouds.

On a more serious note, when global mega-actors like Facebook, Twitter and Amazon finally restrict the results of their own actions – their enabling of the spreading of fake news, hate and violence – there is nothing divine about their intervention. They are just scrambling to safeguard their backs.

It’s like the call for non-violence that Trump finally made. Too little, too late, and guided purely by self-interest.

None of these people should have been given the power they have today: not Trump, not the decision makers of Facebook, Twitter and Amazon. I think we all see it clearly, but have no idea what to do about it.

Yet the problem needs to be addressed. There has to be a reasonable way to make sure that social media giants can’t act as gods of free – or censored – speech on their platforms without any real outside control. Owners come and go, platforms easily remain, whether benign – or not.

It’s not only about allowing calls for hate and violence on worldwide platforms. It’s just as much about the ability to suddenly turn the off-switch on a president, however misguided he may be. None of these decisions should be solely up to a few decision makers, whose primary loyalty is to their investors.

Since self-restriction is difficult, there has to be enough outside pressure to ensure that the fine line between free speech and criminal, systematic misguidance is drawn by institutions that have been set up for that purpose with due process.

No border safety measures and defence programs are more important than this. The ever-existing missile threat may prove to be a small problem compared to the threat posed by the potential to subtly and systematically spread disinformation to billions of people.

This has to become a priority for decision makers, however long their to-do lists already are.

Trump did teach us something valuable. The Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly has the right of it: We need to look infinitely harder at who we elect, including examining the candidate’s character and ethics.

However, since this is easier said than done, we also need to look infinitely harder at how lying and bullying could become the presidential norm overnight.

My favourite newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, published a remarkably thorough info package on the what, where, when and why of the Epiphany of Trump’s Presidency.

I am not referring to the Christian holiday Epiphany – although the dates do coincide. I am referring to the storming of the U.S. Capitol; the sudden manifestation of the essential nature of Trump’s presidency: Self-inflicted chaos.

One of Helsingin Sanomat’s excellent articles explained how the angry dissent that Trump built on has been steadily growing online since the early days of the web. What the article forgot to mention is that extremist groups become big much more easily, when they have access to big platforms with algorithms that speed up their growth.

Trump could write the manual on “How to lie and bully your way to the White House”, but he could not have succeeded in creating the chaos of today without Twitter and Facebook.

It’s time to move on and make sure that votes still matter, that good government still matters. We need international co-operation and legislation to ensure that reason prevails on and off social media in the future.

Note: My featured image is an excerpt from Angeles Santos’ painting “A World”. Since the painting is from 1929, it’s safe to say that is was never meant as a commentary on Trump or social media. But somehow it fits our world today. Sadly, my camera never caught the whole painting.

App attack

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Say dog

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