WHILE YOU'RE NOT WATCHING

What follows is a link to the trailer for a movie called  “The Wolf,” featuring Christian Slater.  It explains in dramatic  terms our risk from Big Data.  That is, we’re not talking about a predatory animal here, we’re talking about the most dangerous nonhuman unrobot in our future: statistics.  Algorithm numbers mean predictability means controllability.  Credit cards are one means among others.  Some suggest Trump won the election using Big Data to target and empower his constituency with seemingly personal messages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3QXMMV-Srs&t=20s

This is not an Netflix Original film.  It is an extended advertisement for secure HP printers.  (Watch it on YouTube.)  You don’t even have to be personally online to be hacked.  This secret monitoring is more slick and effective than demanding the passwords of your cell phone, computer, or iPad when you board a plane or cross a border — even if your device happens to actually belong to NASA as just happened.

It is legally forbidden to demand the check-out records of a library because it reveals the mind of the checker-outer.  This dates back to when the bad boys who intended damage would check out books about bombs.  Or even before that when the biggest danger in the world was seen not as Islamists but as Marxists.  Who would read “Mein Kampf” except bad people? 

Suppose the community were urban or academic, sophisticated about computers and legitimately studying dangerous topics.  One simply goes online and seemingly (to oneself) is “secretly” downloading the directions for maybe an atomic bomb.  Except that a person obsessed that way is unlikely to realize that the computer’s connection is revealing to authorities who you are, where you are, your history, your Dark Web contact for acquiring illicit uranium, and so on.  Things you don’t even realize CAN be known — like your fondness for Twinkies, which you really ought to buy in bulk, but rather pick up at Safeway where the cash register reports the small purchase.

Groceries bought at major chains are recorded on the internet at the same time that your check is validated by “asking” your bank if you have enough money and deducting that amount at the same time.  Now that credit cards have built-in chips, they can record and communicate far more information.   I can think of no more effective way — not even raiding corporate information like whether you are insured or what’s on your rap sheet anywhere in the nation — to control citizens en masse than by controlling — not even their credit card actions — but their food supply.  (And their meds.) When even the mom-and-pop stores and gas service stations use “smart” cash registers, computers could sort through for all categories.  Even now hunting and fishing license applications can find delinquent dads who are behind on child support.

Overpopulation is one way to beat this system, in the same way that a certain kind of bamboo in China produces so much seed simultaneously that no number of rodents or insects can consume them, and then stops making seeds for long enough that the predators die of starvation.  I mean, if every conversation that criticizes the government is recorded, who is going to filter the actual words?  An algorithm.  According to the assumptions of the person who designs the algorithm formula.

Groups of people have figured this out and systematically stockpile enough food supplies to last a very long time.  Some of them are worrying about floods or drought. While law enforcement chased marijuana growers, the food hoarders were converting the advice for surviving atomic war into recommended caches of food  — and water, though that’s tough in a climate cold enough to freeze liquids.  It also stockpiles paranoia, both against authority figures and against neighbors who might want to share or simply raid.  These are not dynamics that support democracy.

When I switched from mostly Netflix to watching old movies on YouTube, I became aware of how much of the incoming Big Data to my screen is as controlled as what is reported back to them.  Unless I knew the specific name of a film, YouTube guessed what I might want to watch and only showed me that option.  Sometimes they made a faulty guess or I entered something somewhere else (credit card or Amazon or simply a Google search) that triggered a film or essay I had not known about.  Usually irrelevant and uninteresting, but once in a while rather alarming.

Not so much “alarming” in terms of a threat, but rather opening up a category I hadn’t known existed.  Often they were tagged according to categories of criminality.  Most people don’t realize that criminality is not about black and white, though the best laws draw boundaries that can be defined and proven in court.  They don’t think about the consequences of criminalizing something likeb littering, much less giving officers power to arrest and confine for the crime of “walking while black” or “driving while Native American.”  

However, a certain class of businessmen resents very much any kind of regulation or inspection that cramps their style.  Working for the Bureau of Buildings in Portland made it vividly clear that even though the codes and requirements builders had to obey were meant for safety and sound construction practices, they were highly resented and evaded as much as possible because they cost money.  That was practical and realistic.  The manipulation of them or, even more potently, the control of fees, taxes, export duties, and so on could be used as weapons to route profit into certain pockets.

Cops say they need a law against acts like littering or spitting or even suspicion of mental disability to use in gray areas meant for the greater good.  Anyway, if people are offended by chickens or potholes, they shouldn’t have to put up with them.  Chickens carry flu, don’t they?  Potholes destroy automobiles, don’t they? 

Bob used to say two things that he learned from being a ground-level judge.  One was that if you do things that are bizaare and unexpected enough, no one will suspect you.  Thus Jonah Bar Jones could kill and eat the neighborhood boys without notice.  The other thing was that you can do anything until someone pushes back.  Even if a practice is illegal and there is a law on the books, if no one complains there is no investigation likely, much less formal accusation.

Using the “Cloud” for information storage is no more safe than individual home systems unless they are off the internet and STAY off the internet.  Paper is still more secure, but not if it is produced on a spying printer, as this little advertising film shows.  Best round up your pencils and pens.

Because twice I’ve worked jobs that were meant to address bad behavior (animal control and building permits) and because I’ve often lived in communities that were on the edge of subsistence, I see things that nice standard “safe” people never imagine.  It was a ministry handicap if the task was to preserve the illusion of safety.

One of my seminary classmates used to say, “You have the mind of a troll, Mary.”  He also was fond of remarking,  “This would be a nice place if you could get rid of all the people.”  He left the ministry under a cloud because of endorsing conspiracy theories about 9/11, the ones that proposed CIA involvement.  Luckily, it was about time for him to retire anyway.  He wrote about American fascism.

NEWSPAPERS ARE DOOMED

“The Shatzkin Files” is an on-line newsletter in which Mike Shatzkin ponders matters having to do with print, but not the writing of it.  He is the second generation of his family to be book sellers, not just in terms of shops but also in terms of sales and distribution systems.  Therefore he thinks about details most of us aren’t aware even exist.  http://www.idealog.com/blog/newspaper-publishers-face-different-much-immediate-threats-book-publishers/

The first time I woke up to these issues was a presentation that Russell Chatham made at the Montana Festival of the Book many years ago where he explained that a bound book is a commodity that is taxed, so printing and binding a lot of books in order to capture the lower prices of scale, meant exposing the books to warehouse misadventures in case of fire or flooding, but also losing value because of being taxed.  Therefore, he printed the pages of his books, but didn’t bind them.  The loose pages, which is where the factor of scale was in the paper and ink, were not taxable.

Another moment of realization was visiting the Fort Benton museum that has an attached bookstore and wondering why — since they were the guardians and exhibitors of Bob Scriver’s Blackfeet bronzes — they didn’t stock “Bronze Inside and Out,” which is the book I wrote about Bob and these specific bronzes.  Their explanation was “no one told us to do it.”  They were completely dependent on the system of publishers who send “drummers” around to bookstores, displaying and recommending what would sell.  No one explored what was available outside of that system or thought about the value it would add to stock the book.

In the last newsletter, Shatzkin was comparing book publishing to newspaper publishing, which he hadn’t really focused on before.  He figures that periodicals as we know them are doomed, because their income is not dependent on subscriptions but rather on advertising.  The two sources are interlinked since the amount advertisers will pay depends on how many readers there are and whether they are read by a demographic that will buy the product advertised.  As the young, who are the most likely to buy high-profit things like clothes and electronics, have wandered away from reading any print at all, they no longer subscribe to newspapers, but they will look at glossy bright images.

The months that I worked at the Prairie Star were educational.  The two salesmen there went out on the road to sell advertising, but they were required by law to print no more advertising than the bottom third of every page in order to qualify for certain advantages, like lower postage rates.  I had assumed that I would be there to do a certain amount of writing, but it turned out that the actual copy was simply downloaded from county agents and ag colleges.  It was valuable enough but free and accessible by anyone with a computer.  In 1999 not so many people had computers or knew how to access specific materials.  Since the readers of the paper were farmers and ranchers, they were outdoor people.  But they also did a lot of figuring about equipment and materials, so the major job of a clerk was logging in payment for the classified ads.  These, of course, soon migrated to the Internet.

The case of the big prestige newspapers was different.  The NYTimes and the Washington Post are active participants in the governing of the country, monitors of events we’d never know about otherwise.  Increased costs of a paper-and-ink distribution confronting a citizenship less and less able to read and analyze print, much less willing to participate in the machinery of running a country, means that readership goes down.  What advertisers remain are the ones who haven’t yet converted to Internet advertising, which they must eventually.  

As a countervailing force, digital advertising is now saturating everything online, aggressively intruding into articles and vids even as we read, so that even their own consumer research -- questions that must be answered in order to clear the screen -- obstruct the real articles.  Always the new annoyance and impediment.  It becomes less and less worth the effort.  I go to the library.

The major newspapers of the country impose limits on how many articles one can read (pay walls) without subscribing, which is legitimate from one point of view, but one can read the paper newspapers at the library.  More and more information depends on whether a person has the funds to be in the class advertisers want and we become numb to advertising-based commodification of something like the presidency.  To save money, the big papers skimp on overseas reporters who could keep us aware of the world and they shrink arts coverage.  For years every Sunday I read the arts section of the NYTimes.  For a long time I subscribed to the separately published Book Review section, but also it was given away free in the better bookstores.  The equivalent is not where I can find it online.

Journalism was the focus of Ivan Doig at Northwestern, with a strong element of history.  In time he found himself diverted to a kind of semi-literary fiction, popular, though none became movies.  He was not a digital guy.  At the same time I was getting a theatre education which slid over to religion, not surprising if you know the history of the relationship between the two.  History focuses on facts and forces in the real world.  It's print-friendly.  Theatre goes to possibilities and the forces beneath tragedy.  It loves Netflix.

Journalism is a print medium while theatre depends upon oral presentation.  Serious literary work is often both when sales depend upon readings.  Sid Gustafson’s many readings around the state to promote his book called “Swift Dam,” which also mixes reporting and fantasy, builds awareness but also trust, because the people can see the author in person and gauge his sincerity.  Video interviews would not be quite as effective.  His "audible" stories are somewhere in between.

Can journalism, like our many news hours and panels on video, ever come up to the standards of print, where thought and skill must be frozen into a version that can be dissected, footnoted, pinned down to a point in time?  Can print be stabilized, made into a contract-like entity?

Shatzkin points out that newspapers and magazines are compendiums, while a published book is a coherent argument or plot that can’t be chopped up, though some experiment with that.

“The aggregation created by each newspaper was intended to compete as an aggregation. In the 20th century, a consumer didn’t have the choice of reading the Times’s op-ed page and the News’s coverage of the Yankees unless s/he bought both newspapers. But, even with the paywalls that are up today (and weren’t up at the beginning), there is a lot of competition for almost every single individual piece of content in every newspaper. And it has also become just about impossible for a printed newspaper to deliver you any “surprises”: any news that is important to you personally that you won’t have seen first in an email or an online aggregator (including that own newspaper’s web site.) Any “scoop” will be “reported” by competitors and the information itself would be in the public domain very quickly after it is released.

“So, the fundamental distinction between the businesses is that publishers often sell an indivisible unit and newspapers (and magazines) sell aggregates of content nuggets, each of which is valued differently by different readers of the paper and each of which has its own array of competitors.”

Maybe the American people have learned to react to slogans rather than reasonable arguments.  Perhaps this explains why we're now hearing that Facebook and Google before the election were consciously allowing the online publication of lies in paid political form — which they now repudiate since the sale has been made and there’s no need for advertising anymore.  No profit.  Form follows profit.

PAIN AND SUFFERING

Hieronymus Bosch

Suffering is everywhere and yet it is so hard to understand even though the motivation is very high.  Pain seems to signal something urgently, and yet it often makes the sufferer close down and pull away from everyone.  Holding still, being quiet, trying not to feel, are not good strategies for finding the cause, but that’s what our instinct tells us.  Clench, clamp, chill.

Plain ordinary pain is one thing: step on a nail, slice your finger while meaning to cut something else, strike something hard -- these traumas are clearly what pain is for, to draw your attention and motivate an effort to clean, to bandage, to protect.  Yet the mechanisms that take the information to the brain and interpret trauma there can get “stuck”:  person whose damaged part has been removed (an amputated leg) so that it theoretically CAN’T hurt, goes right on hurting.

But pain is only one kind of suffering.  A few kinds of emotional anguish can be resolved by a second person who is willing to pay close attention and offer reassurance, interpretation, hope for a better future.  An impulse to help a suffering person is present in small children or in animals.  Loneliness, guilt, an inability to see a way out of a trap, a loss of hope for an end to troubles, an inability to imagine and therefore move towards something better --

these are the anguish that religious institutions promise to ease but sometimes only make worse.

Being virtuous doesn’t seem to have much to do with avoiding suffering, it seems to me.  Entirely innocent people suffer terrible trauma and disease and some of the treatments that can save lives also impose ghastly agony.  Consider burns where the treatment is excruciating, so much so that the nurses come to hate the patient because they hate hurting a person so much.

There’s no equivalence.  In the Eastern contexts, like Buddhism, the emphasis is not on escaping but on enduring, partly by withdrawing desire which can lead into the floating detachment of opium.

For some people suffering is handled with anger, rage rage against the injustice and sometimes that will kindle fires of adrenaline and other warrior molecules that have evolved to handle attacks, hunter’s focused obsession, the molecules that paralyze the mouse in the claws of the cat by putting it into a kind of victim’s euphoria.

A while back the media and script writers discovered displaced suffering and especially torture that does not hurt you but the person you care about,  because that’s also torture, courtesy of empathy.  For a while there were crime plots about girls kidnapped in pairs so that one could be tortured to make the other obey without scarring her with lesions.  So much about suffering is suggested to us by script writers rather than shrinks or docs or priests.

Do you remember Peter Pain?

Advertising puts in its two cents worth, suggesting pains of various kinds and then offering relief through meds or some other handy product.  

There is a kind of pain that is not pain, at least not in the way we understand it as physical discomfort, but rather a psychological state like depression or even just floating nothingness.  The body wants to be busy and the brain will begin to go haywire or lose function unless there’s a steady flow.  That’s the insane punishment of solitary confinement, which doesn’t have to be physical confinement.  Just solitary.

Understanding suffering need not be a matter of book learning, but of experience.  When I was working in a nursing home there were patients who were legitimately (with medical cause) suffering who begged for relief.  The nursing staff would begin to be annoyed with them and to talk about addiction, even withholding the drugs to punish the patient for not being cooperative.  

Addiction is the big Scare Threat, and yet these were sometimes dying people.  Addiction over-rides pain, but I’ve known people who WERE truly addicted in the worse kind of dependence on that escape, but who were still able to “kick” drugs.  It wasn’t easy and the kind of pain was the kind I dread most: nausea, the invasion within.  It was a decision of some kind on their part, maybe a desire for clarity.  A goal beyond suffering.

Another kind of suffering is invasion of space, maybe as simple as coming inside that invisible circle around a person or animal or even insect close enough to be a threat.  Do not walk up behind a person who has been in prison -- the circle around that person is BIG.  There are some people who either can’t perceive the line or have somehow learned to stand very close.  In some cultures people will stand close enough to feel and smell your breath.  Personally, I have to clench my teeth to be on a crowded bus.  Why do you think I’m in Montana!

But to have one’s body invaded through orifices or with a needle or blade through skin, even with a careful and well-lubricated instrument, can add insult and outrage to real pain.  If you’re an old woman having a pelvic, prepare for pain and then the comment “Oh, these elderly vaginas are like that.”  With no easing off.  

In France the insertion of urinary catheters into a male is done with anesthesia.  You can watch this procedure on YouTube.  I’ve watched on video a careful soothing nurse do this for a boy who couldn’t even hear her through his suffering.  The passing of body-generated “stones” -- kidney stones -- is screamingly painful.

There is fMRI study of pain:  http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/01/breakthrough-on-chronic-pain/  

Here’s a little jargon sample.  “Finding increased levels of the translocator protein in regions like the thalamus — the brain’s sensory gateway for pain and other stimuli — is important, since we know that this protein is highly expressed in microglia and astrocytes, the immune cells of the central nervous system, when they are activated in response to some pathologic event.”  The translation is that one can see pain on a computer screen.  It turned out to be quite consistent.

But it’s not possible to see suffering.  Suffering can be moral, which is to say invisible and relative.  I found a Swedish study that looked at women with borderline personality disorder.

“The main findings were that BPD patients suffer to an extent that is often unendurable, leading to deliberate self-harm (DSH) and suicide attempts to relieve suffering or just try to get away from it all (paper II). In study III the BPD patients showed significantly poorer quality-of-life (even physical) than normal population controls of comparable age. The suffering, suicide attempts, DSH and poor quality-of-life . . . put the patients in a position of voluntarily or involuntarily getting involved with psychiatric care. . . . On one hand, psychiatric professionals can add to the suffering by not being understanding and being disrespectful, on the other hand they can be helpful and relieve suffering by being respectful, understanding and validating. There was a clear relationship between the patients ́ experience of validation and the experience of being helped.” 

The third explicit goal of the study was to relieve the suffering of the counselor burdened with the task of helping!  I’ve heard more than one shrink complain about having to counsel women, interpreting them as shirking, childish, and boring.  The woman feels this, of course, and so do boys who go for help but instead get sighs over their intractability.  Myself, I find that a bad counselor is like a clumsy catheter inserter, an unjustifiable invader who only adds to the suffering.  I run.  I shirk.  I'm childish.

There are a few who enjoy authorized hurting of others.  At this point my psychiatric nurse friend will mention Dr. Mengele.  If you’re too young to remember him, use Google.  But brace yourself.

(to be continued)