PARANOIA IS OUR DUTY

                                          

Here are the facts of the situation:

It was early last summer. My wife was at an airport. The weather was hot and her shuttle bus was late. She was texting with a family member who had come down with a cough. The family member had taken a COVID test and reported to my wife that it was negative. My wife, returning to the topic of her stressful day, typed the words “I need a,” intending to write “I need a drink.” But the autocomplete feature on her phone, interceding at the speed of thought – of artificial, digital thought -- offered another suggestion: “I need a booster.”

The nightmare is all right there, if you unpack it: The unsought programming of human behavior by pervasive, everyday technologies controlled by deceptive, obscure external actors. They’re deceptive, in this case, because autocomplete is sold as a kind of extension of your will, frontrunning your most probable verbal choices in order to save you time and ease your writing. The feature is not sold, so far as I’m aware, as a life coach, a public health aide, or a physician. But it had behaved like one that day, and my wife, who notices everything, had caught it – she even took a screenshot. When she told me of the incident, it confirmed an emerging feeling that my own texts were often interrupted by digital guides less interested in finishing my thoughts than in foisting on me their own. Strangely, the unusual suggestions were of a sexual cast sometimes – “orgasm” seemed to have popped up several times; not a word I tend to use in texts – which is why I remembered the occasions. Still, I couldn’t cite one in detail. Going with the eerie flow of life in a mediated, moderated age, I’d chosen to ignore them. I’d let them pass.

It’s choice we face constantly these days, particularly in our dealings with technology and the information flooding through it: Should we indulge our suspicions about the machine and the whole murky power complex it represents, or should we dismiss them, in some cases or all?

The argument for repeatedly dismissing them – because they are aroused repeatedly – seems to me to grow weaker by the day, if it is even an argument at all. To return to my wife’s “I need a booster” experience, which may seem minor in isolation but is enormous if treated as one instance of something that very likely happens countless times a day and for an unfathomable range of motives, not many people I know would advocate for phones which plant hypnotic prompts in users’ heads during their innocent conversations with relatives, under the cover of helping the user type. The partisans of covert mind control are still quite few, I like to think, even when the cause in question is popular. The party of thoughtless quiescence in such matters is vast, however, and it rarely defends its inaction. It’s rarely asked to.

Maybe it should be held to higher standards. Just last week, two troubling stories circulated about the secret workings of social media. Facebook, we learned, has been compiling posts which it deems “anti-government” and forwarding them to the FBI. To judge by press reports, these allegedly subversive posts included ones which questioned the results of the 2020 election, but they weren’t limited to such. How the posts were identified remains a mystery – algorithmically, through key words, or in some other way? – but the facts the operation occurred and that ideological filtering of posts is deemed so reliable by Facebook’s managers that they treat it as a form of legal evidence, is startling enough. Meanwhile, over at Twitter, we were told by an in-house whistle blower testifying before the senate, at least one Chinese spy was on the payroll. Other security lapses were also alleged. “It’s not farfetched,” the whistle blower asserted, “to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all the senators inside this room.”

Old news, I hear readers thinking. But it is new news – new news which explicitly confirms long-held suspicions of a general kind. And, for other observers, of a definite kind. They thought ahead, saw patterns, warned us of them, and urged on us a host of actions, from denouncing these services to cancelling them to calling for them to be to public account. Which is starting, however feebly, to happen. Not because of the quite people but the loud ones.

These excitable thinkers would be the “paranoid,” or so they’re often designated by those whose habit is to watch another amusing video when it’s shown that Tik-Tok, for example, logs its users’ every keystroke, collecting passwords and heaven knows what else and passing them along to hostile powers. They would be those who, on reading of my wife’s text, would leap to speculate on the implications of an AI-driven program to mold the thoughts, and ultimately the actions, of the human race. The entire race, I say, no less than that, because it is the nature of “paranoia” that its reach exceeds its grasp. Not content to dwell on individual cases, it strives to explore, to extrapolate, to guess, usually in the negative. It entertains the possibility that the anonymous lords of auto-complete might someday trade spooky nudges for bold directives, overriding or even supplanting our weakened wills. By then, we may not possess wills, nor desire them. Too disruptive to the training process.

To voluntarily run such bleak scenarios inside one’s busy little brain is thought to be unhealthy by the experts. Therapists call it “catastrophizing.” They are given to writing prescriptions for the condition. In extreme cases, they view such thinking as evidence of schizophrenia, for which an oft-used medication is a pill with the trade name Abilify. Last week, on my Twitter feed, I saw an ad for it – for a special version of the pill which contains, get this, a tiny transmitter which relays physical data to smart phone apps. The transmitter not only tells the phone (or several phones, if the patient “authorizes” them) if the pill has been swallowed, it also discloses how long the patient has “rested” recently and how many steps they’ve taken. Fascinating. Fascinating that big pharma should seek to implant tiny monitors in people whose illness is often marked the delusion that they have tiny monitors inside them.

But I digressed. Or did I? The topic was paranoia, its pros and cons, and the question I was driving toward is whether it’s tantamount to a duty now, at least for those who pretend to think at all. To learn about a psychoactive drug that broadcasts Bluetooth signals to nearby phones, and then to remember we live in a society of medical mandates with penalties attached, and to further recall that the data on one’s phones is subject to scrutiny by spies and cops, should require of an even an amateur intellectual a measure of cautionary creative inference. What’s the alternative, really? Deep sedation? How much more unconsciousness can you take, and how much more of it should we take, who don’t wish to wake up shuffling along in surveilled, entranced submission to whoever’s doing our thinking for us?

Do your duty, I say. Be responsible. Be paranoid. The future intends to complete itself without you, and if you don’t like it, you may need a pill – which you may be unable to refuse. Go crazy now, on your own terms, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll have some say over how crazy you’ll be driven then.