The Reality Game - Samuel C. Woolley

What does Globalization have to do with books and lectures here in Berkeley, especially former visiting Tech Research Fellow at Cal’s CITRIS Samuel Woolley’s The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth?  They make us think about truth, distortions, and the global and personal ways the “free” internet, commercial, political and social media reflect on our minds, bodies and actions.

A marvelous and readable in-depth survey of the quest for truth and democracy online, Reality Game balances privacy and security with PR firms out to make a buck spreading disinformation among lone rangers, agents provocateurs, savage and/or unsuspecting hordes of international groups and our own (FB and Google) post-utopian “dictatorships” who think they can dodge responsibility for the very real harms that result from their malaise. AI (Artificial Intelligence), robotic voices, traumatized Silicon Valley hate- and porn-weeders and troll-responders working on contract are all here.

“… even the most advanced machines and software systems are still tools. They are only as useful as the people, and motives, behind their creation and implementation,” Woolley says.

We’re on the brink of cyber-disaster (again) politically in 2020 and have been in general for at least 14 years, but we have the tools and personal will available to us if we will USE them to keep on turning the industry, government and our fellow surfers around, holding them and ourselves accountable and making sure the changes we vote for and speak out about happen. 

Knowing many good, bad and ugly histories of the Arab Spring, Occupy Movement, (the "Battle of Seattle") and other semi-successes as well as journalist-stalking, trolling, doxxing, election tampering from Bolsonaro's Brazil back to Florida's "dimpled chads," and forward into "ethical design" by something more than "all white and all male" artificial intelligence engineers; Woolley is a young voice of wisdom and fact-finding as well as hope.

As upbeat an analysis as The Reality Game is, he still knows the tech industry, corporate and authoritarian governments and random individuals will be hard challenges to take on. But we will not go backwards. We will go forwards together.

My Internet hero, Doug Engelbart, one of the inventors and designers of the mouse, internet networking and other "computational" tools for utopian and humanistic ends; is often overshadowed by millionaire digital and military industrialists’ mass marketing and use of "personal" isolated, product-centered models; but he went for goals like Woolley's as early as 1968.

He "reasoned that because the complexity of the world's problems was increasing, and because any effort to improve the world would require the coordination of groups of people, the most effective way to solve problems was to augment human intelligence and develop ways of building collective intelligence. 

He believed that the computer, which was at the time thought of only as a tool for automation, ["number crunching," soon to replace human Hidden Figures like Katherine Johnson at NASA,] would be an essential tool for future knowledge workers to solve such [large-scale global] problems. He was a committed, vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and computer networks to help cope with the world's increasingly urgent and complex problems." (Wikipedia, "Douglas Engelbart," 1 March, 2020)

Has Engelbart's exciting and beloved new tool, the Internet, been "weaponized?" It has, but Woolley explains how, so that we can choose to avoid some of the "computational propaganda" pitfalls.

Are we "augmenting" human intelligence or are we radically narrowing, herding, blunting and dumbing-down information for speed and greed? Are we just overwhelmed with data, information and images that we can't sift down into "knowledge," let alone share together and discuss civilly to create "wisdom.?" Are we using tech to "cope" with or create more global "urgent and complex problems?"

Dr. Samuel C. Woolley is a "qualitative" researcher in a quantitative world of bookselling, grant seeking, digital, academic and political "trolls;" but I believe his heart's in the right place, refusing to let the Truth get "broke" as long and he and fellow utopians and journalists stay with the upgrades, underlying motivations and "stay woke" to humans' and tech's more nefarious manipulations and distortions by "man" and machine, as well as possibilities for communication and solutions...

At the beginning of his book, he quotes Betty Reid Soskin, US National Park Service Ranger at the Rosie the Riveter Park site in Richmond, California:

“Every generation I know now has to re-create democracy in its time because democracy will never be fixed. It was not intended to. It’s a participatory form of governance [and] we all have the responsibility to form that more perfect union.”

---Betty Reed Soskin, US National Park Service Ranger, Richmond, CA.

And I add personal responsibility “…you better free your mind instead.” John Lennon, (You Say You Want a) Revolution. 

Hannah Arendt said that Adolf Eichmann's main crime against (himself and his own) humanity was that "he didn't THINK." 

He “only obeyed orders” and acted like a machine, automaton or object. Going all the way back to Plato, Arendt said, one THINKS, particularly about political actions that will affect others, before taking action, if we are to be HUMAN, to be humane. "Arendt insists that moral choice remains even under totalitarianism, and that this choice has political consequences even when the chooser is politically powerless...[and that in the case of occupied Denmark:]

One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence. It was not just that the people of Denmark refused to assist in implementing the Final Solution, as the peoples of so many other conquered nations had been persuaded to do (or had been eager to do) — but also, that when the Reich cracked down and decided to do the job itself it found that its own personnel in Denmark had been infected by this and were unable to overcome their human aversion with the appropriate ruthlessness, as their peers in more cooperative areas had." ("Eichmann in Jerusalem" [A Report on The Banality of Evil], The New Yorker 1963, separate volume, 1964,Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia)

Before we "like," "delete," “friend,” hit SEND, post a photo, ("just follow orders," "do my job...") forward a diatribe, design software or hardware, distort videos, fill in our ballots, stay home on election day or bend algorithms, do we THINK? Especially if we are in the 1%, privileged, powerful, wealthy, racially, sexually or religiously dominant class? Or the lowest echelon of the economy and networked universe, "off the grid," easily coerced or digitally illiterate?

Or just bored, lonely, angry, frustrated, alarmed, tired, cranky (et cetera) and can't imagine how our post might intimidate, isolate, humiliate or actually harm another human being or group of people with the words, images or actions that we send or repeat, thoughtlessly or intentionally?

See my post from Karam's 9/11 Backlash, if you can't imagine how words can chill or kill...

The Automation Revolution has overtaken the Industrial Revolution -- where do we go now?

“You say you'll change the constitution

Well you know

We all want to change your head

You tell me it's the institution

Well you know

You better free your mind instead…” ? John Lennon, (1988), The Beatles (The White Album), Lennon and McCartney, (1968).

see also, Cathy O'Neil,Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, (2016,) Crown, NY, NY. and

Robert Scheer, They Know Everything about You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies are Destroying Democracy, (2015, 2017), Nation and Bold Type Books.

Dr. Samuel Woolley is a writer and researcher specializing in the study of automation/AI, emergent technology, politics, persuasion, and social media. He is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and program director for computational propaganda research at the Center for Media Engagement, both at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining UT, Woolley founded and directed the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future, a 50-year-old think tank based in the heart of Silicon Valley. He also cofounded and directed the research team at the Computational Propaganda Project at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He has written on political manipulation of technology for a variety of publications including Wired, the Atlantic Monthly, Motherboard/VICE, TechCrunch, the Guardian, Quartz and Slate. His research has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal and on The Today Show, 60 Minutes, and Frontline. His work has been presented to members of NATO, the US Congress, the UK Parliament, and to numerous private entities and civil society organizations. His PhD is from the University of Washington. He tweets from @samuelwoolley.