Artificial Intellligene – AI

Shutting Down – On Disassociation, Feeling Overwhelmed and Powerless, Retreating, and Denial

/ stefanfeller / 1 Comment

On the featured picture: The Class of 76 of my High School. I’m in there, too. Almost invisible in the background.

I grew up with Peter Gabriel’s towering work, whether in “Genesis”, or with Gabriel’s later solo phases of artistic development. One of my all-time favourites songs is “Signal To Noise”. Here are the lyrics:

“You know the way that things go

When what you fight for starts to fall

And in that fuzzy picture

The writing stands out on the wall

So clearly on the wall

Send out the signals, deep and loud

And in this place can you reassure me

With a touch, a smile while the cradle’s burning

All the while the world is turning to noise

Oh, the more that it’s surrounding us

The more that it destroys

Turn up the signal

Wipe out the noise

Send out the signals, deep and loud

Man, I’m losing sound and sight

Of all those who can tell me wrong from right

When all things beautiful and bright sink in the night

Yet there’s still there’s something in my heart

That can find a way to make a start

To turn up the signal

Wipe out the noise

Wipe out the noise

Wipe out the noise

You know that’s it

You know that’s it

You know that’s it

Receive and transmit

Receive and transmit

Receive and transmit

No receive and transmit

No receive

Receive and transmit

Receive and transmit

Receive and transmit

Receive and transmit”

Let the lyrics sink in first and consider whether, and how, you relate. Then take in the soundscape of the song. Here is a reference to the epic musical performance in it’s original version: Peter Gabriel – Signal To Noise – 2003 Original via Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zM7QaPiwqE. And here a live version featuring the combination of Gabriel’s rock band, combined with the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan surrounded by his fellow performers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5KcEy3y23w. Consider how you feel, against your own memories of the time growing up with his music. Or against the background of your memories of the early 2000’s. Or against your cultural positions or affinities. Or against your current mood, whether you are depressed and feeling hopeless, or feeling hopeful. Or not knowing how you are feeling at all.

 In all cases you will come to own specific contexts of how you relate to the lyrics, the soundscape, and the combination of a rock ballad with arabic tunes and sounds, and visuals.

As always on my blog, I am after something like common patterns. In this case, I am trying to wrap my mind around an impression which I have: That there is a rapidly increasing and all-pervasive desire of shutting down which I come across in many personal conversations, and which I suspect, with some personal heuristical indication, appears to be increasingly endemic at least in those societal contexts in which I live and move around.

Since a very long time, I am no stranger to feelings as they are expressed in these lines, the way I personally relate to them. This song is part of a playlist on my devices which I continue to listen to all over again, since many years. Like with any piece of art, my emotional relationship to it is based on the context of my personal memories, the way I grew up, the way I relate to the iconic music of my defining young years, the Rock music of the late Sixties and early Seventies which later made me select which performers I would follow, and what kind of new music I would let in, and where I simply wasn’t interested at all, and how I come back to my defining Classic Rock music as I grow older. Yes, of course, this is how nostalgic feelings develop, too. A friend for many years, who is considerably younger than I am, shares some favorite music with me every day during these weeks advancing the Christmas Holidays. That music is so different, and I relate so differently.

But I am also putting this masterpiece into my personal and professional context of history and experiences which include many severely traumatising events which I have had to process, and continue to do so. I do know a great many people who struggle with that they have gotten stuck in this trauma process, so I will offer an important word of optimism from the outset on. Because if you read the lyrics, they end with an impression that there is no way forward. Yet, there is one. It is a long and arduous process, but a promising one, always requiring outside help. I do strongly recommend professional help being part of it. I am not suffering from my trauma past. Not any longer. As far as I can tell. My processing work continues. But there is hope, and there is a way. I have integrated my past, welcome it, do not regret it, am not stuck in it. But I relate very much to the feeling of utter hopelessness which I listen to in conversations with an increasing amount of people who appear to have been on a different trajectory of lifetime developments than I have been and who seemed to have led lifes with much less trauma-induced self-harming behavior than I have. Until relatively recently that is.

And I feel much has begun with the Covid-19 pandemic.

In most simple terms, trauma is a consequence of harmful events. A trauma literally is a wound. Trauma is not the triggering event, but its consequence. Physical wounds, emotional wounds, cognitive wounds, spiritual wounds. That is why medical doctors describe wounds using the word “trauma”, like in the case of “concussion trauma”. In the very same way events create wounds in the brain.

The body-brain-relationship on cognitive level includes that physical wounds, trauma in the body, creates mirroring wounds in the neurophysiological setup of the brain. The brain reflects the sensoric input through constant neuronal change. Like every part of our body, for example, has a mirroring section in the neuronal setup of our brains, changes to this body, even temporary changes like through wounds will be reflected in the neuronal setup of our brains, and in a way that you can see on an MRI scanner or using other devices.

But it also goes the other way round. Not only that physical injuries create their mirror-representations in the brain, cognitive injuries will also become visible in the body. Traumatising events can leave the body seemingly unharmed, but not the mind, and then as a consequence of the complex reaction to trauma, the wound in the mind becomes visible on the “outside”, through behavior, or also through somatic consequences. We even name them “psychosomatic”. Think headaches, ulcer, strokes, cardiac arrests, and myriads of other forms of the mind-body-interrelationship which constitutes us. If I go any deeper, I will already have to be selective in describing the many interrelated consequences of trauma. If you think deeply, you will recognize that any border between “body” and “mind” is artificial. It literally is All One.

That is why it is so wrong, and so dangerous, to perhaps minimize, or belittle, psychosomatic illnesses. Like as if “just being stronger” would be a remedy. Using the same “logic”, less educated people will belittle traumatisation as a “desease of the weak”. Nothing could be more wrong.

Harmful events creating trauma can be “one-of-a-kind” but severe. Or cumulative by constant, but may be with less severe events forming a chain. Or in its most extreme forms, trauma can be the consequence of a repetition of severe events, each of which in itself would already constitute heavy traumatization but where the repetition creates devastating results. Like as if you would use a hammer and constantly bang on the concussion which you already got from the first time when the hammer hit your hand incidentially, and not the nail which your hand was holding against the wood. 

You would never do that, would you? Hammering on the same wound all over again which you received in the first place? Pretty unheard of? Not really. Think of cases of severe mental illness, where people can’t keep themselves from banging their head against a wall, for example. Or take self-abusive sexual behavior re-enacting severe trauma from earlier abuse. The Internet is chock-full with videos of it, simple Google-searches show. In addition, many browser histories will be filled with such searches.

The conduit especially visible in the last example which I use in the previous paragraph is: In cases of mental trauma the mind often goes into re-enactment-mode, meaning that people with an initial trauma for example in early childhood will develop a life pattern of seeking situations in which they unknowingly or knowingly expose themselves to trauma, over and over again. I only began to understand that at the age of 55 years. I was not aware of this pattern, and it took quite a while until I reached an initial position from which I began to appreciate the consequences of my patterns on a cognitive level. That includes, importantly, people whose depression is masked to the extent that they even don’t know they suffer from it.

So, the first half if my interpretation of that song is one in which Peter Gabriel expresses the feeling that hope is drowning, then he expresses a glimpse of hope: Man, I’m losing sound and sight Of all those who can tell me wrong from right When all things beautiful and bright sink in the night Yet there’s still there’s something in my heart That can find a way to make a start.

Was I too early offering a glimpse of hope for instances in which all things bright seem to disappear, when even pain relief doesn’t work any longer? Because Gabriel’s lyrics include that, towards the end, hope seems to disappear. “No receive“. The signal seems to be lost, drowned in the noise of things falling apart. People who do not have personal experience with depression will have a hard time to even relate on a cognitive level.

Without a deeper investigation, my feeling is that an increasing number of people is experiencing what Peter Gabriel is expressing. A word of academic caution: Even if I can give testimony that in the overwhelming number of conversations which I have, people confirm that they feel numb, angry, depressed, helpless, just wanting to shut off communication and retreating to a beautiful peaceful place, it still is nothing else than my selective subjective experience. 

But I travel a lot, I talk with friends, colleagues, and random people in societies all over the world. What I hear is often the same: It feels like a tendency to increased and enduring depressed feelings. Conversations communicate a struggle with hopelessness, feeling overhwelmed, feeling helpless, feeling exasperation and desperation. And there is anger, all over these conversations. Sometimes visible. Sometimes repressed and masked. Just listen long enough and deeply, you will see the repressed hidden anger.

It is not that I’m stuck in something myself and therefore selectively only talk to people who feel “like me”. My recovery from trauma and it’s life-long consequences, including systematic re-enactment of trauma by exposing myself to more of it, it is based on experiential wisdom which is confirmed by cutting edge science, whether psychology, psychotherapy, trauma-treatment, or the vast knowledge coming from neuroscience. It includes that I always remind myself to remember the codeword H.A.L.T.: Never get too Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. 

In this context, emphasis on “angry”, and on “lonely”.

Living my time- and science-tested recovery way-of-life I work very hard on practicing positive attitudes and principles of living. I deeply know what anger, resentment, fear, and the feeling of helplessness can do and to which dark places it can get lead. 

Do people who have never had to recognize severe trauma know how much they have been traumatized? The word “traumatised” may often be used in superficial conversations, without a deeper understanding. It mainstreamed into conversations, before, during, and after the Covid-19-pandemic. Does the intellectual knowledge of the fact that one received severe trauma help, on deeper levels? My personal experience is confirmed by science: No, intellectual knowledge does not necessarily help. A typical response is: “I can fix it myself. I just have to change the circumstances. I don’t have to change myself. I’ll just fix it”. Of course this will prove wrong with no exception. The path from intellectual acknowledgement of own traumatisation towards a deeper understanding creating the willingness to seek and to receive help, it usually is a long-winded path with many injuries to oneself and to loved ones until one is able to recognize this fact. Until then, even those who try to be helpful will stand in the way when they will not submit to the victim’s expectation to be helped in fixing the environment, instead of helping to address the real roots of what individuals have to change within themselves, in order to embark on a path of healing. Witnessing the path down to rock bottom, not being able to help someone to avoid it, especially in the case of people one loves dearly, it can be heartbreaking. Being pushed aside as a consequence of the paranoid level of self-protection which has arisen in a traumatised person using every survival strategy under the sun in order to find relief from a pain too big to be acknowledged by oneself, it is a tough experience. Giving in, meeting the expectations of a suffering trauma survivor to stay stuck, or to believe that it is the circumstances, and not oneself who has to change, it moves any supporting person from the side of solutions to the side of problems. It is called co-dependence.

How many of us have experienced radical trauma during the pandemic? Each of us has own memories which we have neatly put into a mental closet. How many of us remember the traumatic isolation? Sure, I also know people who will report that they enjoyed the solitude. But many suffered from a deprivation of social contacts on an unprecedented level. Others suffered from trauma through the stress which Covid-19 brought into their private lifes, locking them up in one place, amplifying the catastrophic way of interaction in unhealthy relationships and abusive situations with no means to escape. Domestic violence increased. Cases of suicide and attempted suicide increased. The impact on children during a period of their lifes requiring social contact to peers has been catastrophic, and there is ample scientific research on this, whilst long-term impact studies necessarily are only in their infancy. Our lifes only started to normalize less than two years ago. Few people remind us of these times by still wearing masks in public. It seems like we have muted our traumatic memories to the maximum. For now. Just think how societies would react if a new serious wave of a pandemic would lead to a medical recommendation to repeat the containment measures which we applied from 2020 onwards. Literally everyone whom I present with this hypothetical scenario responds with “Unthinkable”.

Now, the next conduit: Remember how we witnessed the escalative proliferation of conspiracy theories at the same time, and fueled by the pandemic, and with some politicians and a bunch of crazy people pouring gasoline on the wildfire?

Talking about the meaninglessness of “truth” has become the new normal. Who would have not said you’re crazy if one would have described today’s reality to you just, say, less than ten years ago? Since 2014, this blog alone carries many examples of developments which always “upped the ante”. Until now with no peak in sight. We live in societies in which the deterioration of mannered attitude and bi-partisan discussion culture progressed into something where people will roll their eyes and say “Again? Please give me a break!” Or where people have taken sides and can’t talk to the other side any longer. Or where they have a hard time even acknowledging that the other side has a point, or can at least sense the shoes the other side is wearing.

Which is a another pointer towards a human attitude which also is a typical consequence of trauma reflected in earlier paragraphs of this writing: Denial.

Another one is Anger. Anger in it’s repressed forms as a consequence of trauma. Anger as a strong emotion used for control and manipulation. Anger as one of the key emotions exploited in social media and through algorhythms on basis of Artificial Intelligence. Remember what I wrote about H.A.L.T.?

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?

[Takes a bite of steak]

Cypher: Ignorance is bliss.

Cypher in the iconic movie “The Matrix” about the Grace of Ignorance 

Can anyone relate to pure figures of suffering?

The scene with Cypher as quoted above is the most incredible way how to bite into a piece of juicy steak I have ever seen in any movie. Watch it.

Remember the statistics and figures with daily, sometimes hourly global development of how the Covid-19-virus rampaged through the World? The figures of infections, the figures of infection-related deaths, and then a year later on the figures of vaccinations, and how we struggled to see a relationship between vaccinations and a downward trend in infection-related deaths? Remember the denial, and how our societies were ripped into vaccination-supporters and vaccination-deniers, and how militant this discussion was, partly? How the fact whether someone was supporting or refusing vaccinations ripped through families? I remember a conversation where someone in my family spoke about a vaccination-denier who got severely sick, almost dying, from Covid-19. I could hear a subdued element of “Schadenfreude”. And remember how we needed to exemplify suffering through singling out individual stories of suffering in order to grasp the extent of what was happening, on a massive, global scale?

That was 2020 and 2021. Remember the numbers blowing your mind related to the suffering of people in Afghanistan after the implosion of all international activities there in 2021? An implosion and withdrawal which came, at least for many, without clear signs. And in any case, notwithstanding how premeditated it was, in its execution it happened fast, not in steps allowing to adjust policy of withdrawal. And then there was the highly unanticipated progress of the Taliban, taking over large swaths of Afghanistan, and then Kabul, much to their own surprise even. Do you remember the figures of casualties on the side of civilians? Or do you, more than that, remember the pictures from Kabul airport, and the individual stories of people. Do you remember the stories of Afghan women? How often do you read about the suffering of Afghan women, these days? Are you aware of the refusal of the Taleban, but not only them, related to the figures, and the facts of human rights violations? Have you been exposed to stories of denial, like it was the case with Covid-19? Stories of distortion and manipulation of facts, and conspiracy theories, and blaming the respective other side, singling out and protecting own decisions in a collaborative catastrophy with many factors needed to be taken into account, whilst people were looking for simple answers to yet another shocking and traumatising chain of events?

That was 2020 and 2021. Remember the numbers blowing your mind, of the suffering of people in the Ukraine, following the ongoing onslaught and the suffering through displacement, deportation of children, forced adoption, the war crimes and the crimes against humanity in occupied territory of the Ukraine, in 2022, whilst people in late 2021 would still dispute the intentions of an autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin? Who was helped in his disinformation campaign not only by denial and wishful thinking on the side of the West, but also through people like Nr 45 in the U.S., who until today sings songs of praise related to him, and to the dictatorial killer in North Korea, and an autocratic leader in China? Do you remember the statistics, and how we needed to create empathy which can not be reflected in numbers, by flooding the news with individual stories of suffering, and heroism, of the Ukrainian people?

Were you, at that time in 2022, still able to pay attention to Afghanistan? Were you, by then, able to also take in the sheer numbers of suffering of people in other parts of the World, less relevant to your own local and regional neighourhood? Like in Africa, just as an example?

That was 2020 and 2021 and 2022. What does the figure “1.200” do to you, on a level of empathic relating to suffering, when Hamas unleashed unimaginable terror, atrocities, murder, maiming, raping, mutilating Isaeli citizens October 07, 2023? The international news were only able to create understanding through individual stories, bordering, sometimes overstepping the limits of what can be put into press and TV by responsible media. Very much unlike the video streaming and glorification undertaken by Hamas. Almost immediately, despite the fact that I am almost not present at all on social media, I received messages from friends who had friends in Israel who, in their outrage and unimaginable pain even justified thinking about retaliation, and corporate responsibility of the Palestinian people. Reasonable words of caution against such holding a people responsible on a collective level drowned in the anger, fury, despair, pain. And in a specific German context which is visible in previous articles on this blog, it also began to deeply affect the German society, both related to how we deal with our Holocaust past and our collective responsibility to protect the Israeli State and its citizens, and how we experienced the consequences within our own multi-cultural setup which includes citizens and residents and temporary residents and people granted asylum who live in Germany, constituting parts of the German society.

What does the figure “18.000” do to you, related to the rough and daily increasing estimation of death tolls of Palestinian civilians? Except, that the collective figure of “1.200” and “18.000” defies any reference model which you had from previous news, where the decrying of massive suffering was already stressing your tolerance. Again, you are confronted with unimaginable suffering as reported in individual stories which are needed in any reporting, in order to make you being able to relate on an empathy level. Do you belong to those who have already forgotten the Covid-19-casualties and the suffering in Afghanistan and who barely think about the numbers as we digested them from the Ukraine just a year earlier?

In this section of my long writing, I want to make the point how deeply this collective development, taken together, has been traumatising us on a societal level. Pandemic, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, I often hear “What will come next?”. Almost no capacity left for appreciating suffering in other parts of the World. We take this in within an onslaught of news which still includes more, including climate change and natural catastrophes, including worrying political developments. And each of these news stories scare the hell out of us.

And please remember what I wrote earlier: Brains are highly social organs, and in addition to what trauma on an individual level does to us on a neurophysiological level, the same is true when we mourn the loss of a relative, or a loved one, or experience heart-break. And the same is true with our societal connections.

Each of the developments above has led to individual and societal traumatisation on a level which I have not witnessed in my personal lifetime, in this life. Can’t remember what happened in my previous lifes. Maybe I am blessed.

Leading to my final part of dealing with typical reactions to trauma, beyond being wounded, becoming numb, becoming angry, entering into denial: Another important effect of trauma, because of the way the survival mechanisms in our brains work, is shutting down.

This, I believe, I personally witness more recently, and especially since October 07, 2023. Remember the following lines from Peter Gabriel’s song: ” Man, I’m losing sound and sight Of all those who can tell me wrong from right When all things beautiful and bright sink in the night“.

I feel we are ripped into pieces because we loose orientation. We can not compare 1.200 and 18.000, since every single life is invaluable. Where is the guidance on a question like “How many civilian casualties compose a violation of the responsibility of a Party to a War to protect the civilian population?” How do we stomach numbers according to which more than 70% of the Palestinian population are internally displaced, mostly having no shelter, no food, no water, at the brink of starvation, with almost no medical provisions?

In many discussions which I am part of, I can feel how this rips us into pieces. Not only in a specific German context. You can read about it in great detail and masterfully written in this essay in the “New Yorker“, which was sent to me by my nephew (the one who wrote a response to my blog article). Please, if you can, follow the link. But this rupture includes all of us, including the United Nations, for example. Please, also read the OpEd by Michelle Nunn, Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, Jan Egeland, Abby Maxman, Jeremy Konyndyk and Janti Soeripto, titled “Why the U.S. Must Change Course on Gaza Today“.

Ms. Nunn is president and chief executive of CARE USA. Ms. McKenna is chief executive of Mercy Corps. Mr. Egeland is secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. Ms. Maxman is president and chief executive of Oxfam America. Mr. Konyndyk is president of Refugees International. Ms. Soeripto is president and chief executive of Save the Children U.S. – How much higher can you get in the international humanitarian community?

This OpEd is heartbreaking in it’s own right. Because it struggles with some of the questions which are part of this long essay of mine.

I need to conclude on “Shutting Down”, being part of my title for this blog entry, too: I am increasingly confronted with statements like “I can’t bear this any more”, or “I don’t want to hear about it any more”, or “I want to leave to an island where I can just live a simple life, leaving all this behind”.

I can understand this reaction.

I also note reactions like regressing into familiar local contexts. In these cases people shut their eyes and ears, because they can’t bear the emotional pain any longer, and regress into a combination of denial, and self-serving domestic points. Like, “See, I understand all this, but is anyone talking about what is happening in my neighborhood?”.

I also can understand this, though I am fiercely calling for remaining compassionate and understanding for a global interconnection of events. No domestic problem can be solved without taking the global interconnection into account.

Finally, I note denial, regression, fake news, conspiracy theories, and radicalisation as a pattern which emerges also from the desire to find simplified answers to seemingly intractable problems. This is mixed with pure selfishness, egotism, and malice.

Whilst I appreciate the mechanics behind it, I can not even begin to understand this, nor tolerate it. Also this extremism, on the left and the right, narrowing the focus of observing problems to the point of almost becoming deaf and blind for anything outside the own area of interest, it both is a consequence of the long story on trauma which I have written down here, and at the same time it acts like an escalating agent. It puts gasoline on the wildfire which has become a global storm.

That is why shutting down must be fought with all individual and collective means. Without empathy, compassion, and the attempt to lovingly understand and to support collective values, we are literally doomed.

Does Compassion Know Boundaries?

/ stefanfeller / Leave a comment

On the featured picture: Art by Eva-Maria Horstick, arteve.de. Part of a series created by using AI-tools. Eva was in the final preparations for an exposition in Israel when the Hamas attack October 07 created mass casualties, suffering, despair, trauma, and the grounds for even more suffering. Her project in Israel is on hold with no certainty whether it has a future, or not.

I am fascinated by the train of thought stemming from the recent reaction to the blog post “The Attack on Humanity by Terrorism: Blinding and manipulating through inciting hatred and fear on an unimaginable scale – The monster hides in plain sight” from my nephew Nils: “Never again” must signify “never again for anyone”, regardless of your ethnicity, religion or constructed social identities – A letter from my nephew“. It also makes sense to read the blog entry which is, so to speak, sitting between these two posts: “Bits and Pieces – November Thoughts – Some Book and Video Recommendations“.

Why is that?

If one reads these posts in a sequential manner, the complexity of the topics at hand becomes apparent. May be even overwhelming. Sometimes I feel they can become confusing. After all, we all try to make sense of our environment.

Making sense of information is what brains do for a living. Here is a book recommendation: “Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain” by David Eagleman (Canongate Books; Main edition – 1 July 2021). It is fascinating. I may have my own difficulties to accept the comparison of animal brains (including our own) with all-purpose-computing devices, but on a neurophysiological level it is correct for sensory and at least some higher cognitive functions. Whether this includes what we name “awareness” is subject to research, but we don’t know this yet. Which could make me getting lost in talking about Artificial Intelligence, but I won’t, except for using a blog picture which has been created using AI-Tools. Look at more of it here: arteve.de. Sometimes I think awareness is holding a key stitching so many confusing topics together.

Brains do constantly work on making sense of any sensory input, and I think the same is true for any sort of cognitive input by means of abstract forms of information, beyond what we process through our five senses. To operate in this world requires an ability to conclude on what is happening “around us”. Like we make sense of optical input through our eyes, we are also wired to interpret the information which is reaching us through communication, through news, chatter, gossip.

Meaning: We construct a representation of the world around us. If you read David Eagleman”s newest book, or the one I have been referring to in other blog entries, “The Brain”, you will appreciate that what we perceive as “the outer world” in reality is a construct inside our brain. Using this comparison, it is easy to accept that, for example, our visual representation of the world around us is limited to that part of the electromagnetic spectrum which we call “visible light” (telling, that name, isn’t it?). Same with acoustic input: We don’t hear what bats hear, or cats, or dogs, (ultra high frequencies) or elephants (ultra low frequencies). We construct our inner representation of what we call the “outer world” through the possibilities and limitations of our sensory input. The brain is agnostic where this input comes from. Throw input data on a brain, it will automatically work on making sense of it. Eagleman’s book offers fascinating insight into how this can lead to replacement or even enhancement of capabilities to create an inner world which we mistakenly equal with the outer world.

The same is true for processing information about the world as we have created it with our constructs which hold larger groups or societies together. We try to make sense of all sorts of data, and information. With that, we establish something which we then may call “truth”. Which is a treacherous word. In the realm of the fabrics for societal cohesion there is no space for “objective truth”. Rather it is about concepts which compete with each other. Terms used in social media such as “influencer” and “follower” are bluntly revealing this. Donald Trump’s choice of “Truth Social” as a brand name for his own bullhorn social media platform is telling: It’s about my truth, not your truth. Which renders any coherent use of the term “truth” very fragile, at least.

The interpretation of, say, visual information on physical objects in our environment is relatively stable: As long as the light gets reflected from an apple, even different lighting conditions will usually make me “see” an apple. Not a peach, not a shoe, not a snake, but an apple. Information encoded in light reflected from physical objects is less prone to manipulation, though it is possible. By contrast, the interpretation of data about our highly complex individual, social and political relationships, the interpretation of concepts which have no physical representation in the world (for example law, human rights, cultural norms, spiritual or religious or secular beliefs) is highly dependent on a great number of factors manipulating the result about what we believe to understand. There seems not to be one reality which could be universally accepted by all. There seem to be many competing “realities”. For one, thirty years ago I decided to prefer Apple computers and to ridicule Windows computers. It sticks, until today. Once you’re locked into one explanation of reality, it is very hard to stay open-minded enough to look at information which appears to go against the foundations of what you have decided to “follow”. Which is where “influencing” comes in: It is meant to get you into this select perception, and preferably to keep you there.

What do people make with this fact? How do I live with the recognition that my interpretation of my environment is fundamentally different from anybody else’s interpretation, but that none is holding a universal truth?

The brain is a highly social organ: It can not survive without other brains. It needs connections, it needs proximity to and synchronicity with other brains, it constantly does one thing: Establishing a framework of reference which does make sense within a shared reality with others. The hermit in a mountain cave who lives a solitary life and is able to come to autonomous attitudes and conclusions through “deep thinking” is a highly idealised concept, appealing only to very rare individuals. And even a hermit had to grow up in a social context before deciding to choose solitary self-confinement. The reality is: We depend on belonging to groups, for the sanity of our own mind depends on it. We can’t do without “influencing“ and “following”, all of us. That is also why I believe the pandemic created a global mental depression through massive deprivation of brains from what they need, and why I put the pandemic into the row of destabilising developments of the current world order: The effects contribute to our global development until today.

And again, why am I asking this question against the context I started with above?

It has to do with what is stressing our societal cohesion, in many different societies: Can I empathise with suffering of people without having to be on “one side, or the other side”? Can I acknowledge, as my nephew and I suggest from different vantage points, that we acknowledge suffering equally, and not limited to the fate of one group? Look at hashtags on Tic Toc: #istandwithisrael, and #istandwithpalestine appear to be mutually exclusive. Just one example for an attitude leading to “If you’re not with me, you’re against me.” Why do people follow such a foolish logic?

How do I make sense of data, information, conclusions, interpretations, efforts to manipulate, by reducing complexity and establishing an explanatory pattern? Are there any principles which can help guiding me on a higher plane of consciousness?

In attempting to avoid a futile and not-so-competent academic discourse, I am sure, however, that one crucial factor in how we interpret the world around us is what I would call “simplification”, or “categorization”, or “reduction”. Brains are highly specialised in identifiying patterns in incoming data or information, and that has been useful since the emergence of the pre-frontal cortex many millennia ago. What is setting Homo Sapiens apart from our ancestors may also be what is haunting us most: Any categorization reduces complexity, but also limits our appreciation about what happens. Whilst we have achieved an outstanding and evolutionary unique ability creating mental concepts which allow for cohesion of larger groups and societies, we still use the same hardware (our brains) for reducing complexity, and establishing peer connections with others. From there, competition arises, which is a good concept. But also intolerance arises. And conflict. And yes, we have developed fancy tools far more powerful than sticks and stones for successfully killing other fellow human beings. Have we missed out on developing commensurate tools allowing for empathy and compassion beyond the peer groups we have been born into, drawn into, chosen to belong to?

I don’t think so. Wisdom traditions hold these values since thousands of years. Which, against the evolutionary context of our brain development, still is a drop in the bucket. Meaning: The development and cultivation of compassion and empathy in a contemporary context is subject to evolution, too.

We have to work on this. Hard. Otherwise we will be history ourselves.

Addendum on Cyber Warfare

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Yesterday I published a piece on the need to better comprehend, and possibly to regulate, the implications which come from the use of new and highly sophisticated systems in the field of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). New applications with abilities to understand, and to respond, in natural language, or in the form of complex visual compositions are crossing a boundary line where it becomes very difficult for an unknowing observer to identify that the communication partner is an A.I. system. Their capabilities are scarily powerful, ranging from natural conversations through writing poems, articles or other complex pieces of writing, or even computer code, just based on natural language input.

I mentioned the possibility for such systems to be abused in malicious contexts. Like any modern piece of software, their inner workings are almost impossible to understand for people who do not take their time for an in-depth learning curve. At the same time, their capacities are fascinating. Meaning that they and their results are looking so good, and the dangers coming from their unregulated use appear so abstract, that they permeate into the real word with a speed which makes curbing unwanted effects a gigantic mission (almost) impossible.

Now, on the general dangers from this cyberworld, here a very comprehensive and meticulous documentation which the English version of the German news magazine DER SPIEGEL put online yesterday: “The “Vulkan Files”: A Look Inside Putin’s Secret Plans for Cyber-Warfare. I just want to recommend reading it. The full scale of Russia’s integral user of cyber weapons into regular warfare and State sponsored terrorism becomes very obvious. The report is based on comprehensive research including insider information which DER SPIEGEL conducted together with investigative partner organisations.

Looking at it, the strategic range of hostile activities, in and way beyond the current war of aggression raging against the Ukraine, becomes clear. Those hostile cyber activities are an integral part in larger operations, and they target the West, as well as any people posing a threat to Putin’s control regime. Which does not come at a surprise. Recent public discussions have made it very difficult to qualify what we collectiviely are finding ourselves in. People with authorized public voices have to tread their words very carefully, simply because any language of war can escalate a situation which is meant to be escalated by those in Russia who wage a war against the Ukraine, and who, that would be safe to say, are extremely hostile against the West, and do not hesitate to lure the West into a larger scale conflict of some kind. Oh, no, wrong: We are already in a larger scale conflict, and we try to defend ourselves, and to de-escalate that situation back into the realm of international diplomacy.

Subject to attacks in the cyber-realm are any people, organisations, or infrastructure deemed worthy to be attacked in gaining influence, information, control, manipulate through desinformation, influence public opinion, or just to exercise visible destructive power. It does not matter whether it is you, a civilian or a military or a political target, or an industrial or government target. Depending on the malicious intent, literally everyone is subject to these attacks, like, influencing your opinion and framework of perception of Russia’s war activities, and Putin and his collaborators committing crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

DER SPIEGEL is able to exhibit the contours of the full scale of it, and only by one of those actors who try to use this cyber-power. A lot has been written about others, such as in Iran, in North Korea, or in China. But the Russian side of things becomes more and more obvious, partly because, as DER SPIEGEL states, these activities are not even meant to be covert to a full extent any more. But make no mistake, the cutting edge use of state of the art tools will always be kept in the dark.

Stating what we all should know. But in this context, new A.I. tools such as language based models, are already being used, and are increasingly being used. They may become the new “power tool”.

Few things are more important than systematic cyber security strategies, including police and military defense and deterrence. In countries of the European Union, in countries aspiring to join the E.U., and generally within countries who contribute the upholding of principles including Human Rights, a rule of law, and democracy as a means of basing the power on the will expressed by the people, not by dictators, oligarchs, autocrats, or, I may add, any people who put their own power beyond the limits of a rule of law. Those inlude Organized Crime.

In some countries I work in, these vulnerabilties take the form of wide open barn doors. There is a need to collectively close these doors. Yes, the Internet is about freedom of communication and information exchange, for the prosper of All. But exactly this is under attack. Often invisible. Until massive cyber attacks bring governance to a screeching halt. Which is what we have witnessed in some countries not mentioned in DER SPIEGEL, between 2019 and 2022.

Would You Trust an Alien Without Knowing Anything About That Alien?

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We are at the brink of exactly doing that.

Like many others, I have poked around a little bit into the topic of A.I. driven computerized models, whether language models which make the news all over the place, such as GPT-4, “a state-of-the-art language model that makes it feel like you are communicating with a person rather than a machine“, or the amazing capabilities of A.I. such as DALL-E 2, an “AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.“

In both cases, I quote from the respective websites where these systems are hosted. GPT- 4 is introduced as a system that literally makes me feel like I converse with a human being. Or, in the case of DALL-E 2, it does not only talk about realistic images, but also about “art”.

So I asked GPT-4 “What is art?”. I got the following response: “Hello! “Art” is a term that refers to various creative and expressive activities that involve the production of visual, auditory, or performance-based works that are valued for their aesthetic or emotional appeal. It can include various forms of media, such as painting, sculpture, music, literature, film, photography, and dance. Art can be created for a variety of reasons, including personal expression, communication, cultural or political commentary, or simply for the sake of beauty or entertainment. The definition of art is subjective and can vary depending on cultural and historical context, as well as individual interpretation.”

Please note that GPT-4 does not give me any sources of reference for this definition. This definition is a product of the language model itself, which has been trained against an immense data set retrieved from public sources on the Internet, and which has compiled its own answer from those many sources without explaining its path from parsing the dataset towards providing me with the definition that you can read above.

If I google “What is art?”, I get many responses for which the Wikipedia definition is just an example: “Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.” The process of reading through all different sources with definitions of art is my own intellectual process, and if I adhere to some proper standards, I refer to several sources and then explain why I have come up with a select definition.

This is missing in GPT-4’s answer to my question.

Now: Is this deliberate, or just an ommission? The problem is that nobody can reproduce how GPT-4 has come to an answer of the above, by parsing its vast knowlege database. A.I. language models are highly complex “neuronal network models”. There is no way to read these neuronal networks out, like that you can trace and reproduce the process in a classical linear piece of software code performing iterations on an algorythm. Too much technological speak? Sorry for that, this is important here.

So, next step: I am asking GPT-4 “Is art a human feature?“. Long story short, GPT-4 gives me an explanation about a dispute in science whether creating art is a uniqely human capability, or whether animals, or some animals, share this. I note that GPT-4 is only talking about humans and other animals, not about machines.

Which leaves me with the impression that the creators of the website which is introducing DALL-E 2 have an understanding of “art” that would include the assumption that A.I. can create art. Otherwise they wouldn’t have said that, or?

Except, hold on, here I came up with a seemingly weird thought: What if the creators of DALL-E 2’s website would ask GPT-4 to generate a website template for them? For the non-initiated: GPT-4 has vast abilities which go lightyears beyond my little example above. You can use GPT-4 for writing poems, articles, essays, or to write complex EXCEL-formulae, or highly sophisticated computer code. Meaning, you can ask (and many do) GPT-4 to create a template for a website, too. Then you would have a situation in which one A.I-system describes another A.I.-system, and no external visitor of that website would have any means to identify which language is coming from humans, and which language is coming from the use of GPT-4. This is, as I will try to explain, the core of the problem.

And that is, for the purpose of screwing up your mind at whichever time of the day you are reading this, enough to find an entry point into a mind-boggling discussion and a development in industry which appears to be unprecedented in terms of speed. We do not talk years, we do not even talk several months, the news about further developments and implementations of A.I. language systems into anything from social media into faking your PHD-thesis paper, or decisionmaking, or the inclusion of GPT-4 into renowned web browsers such as Microsoft’s BLING, these news hammer the streets in a battle rhythm defined by weeks, or days.

And the point I want to make is that we have no clue about the consequences. Many people won’t understand, or just being fascinated, or not knowing about the ever more pervasive use of these models in any daily errand we undertake, at all.

Yet, we are at the brink of a revolution of which some of the most renowned experts on this globe say that it might eat up it’s own children.

What? Why? Because language creates our reality which we perceive. In a sane environment, if I listen to language, something called “trust” is involved, since I allow myself to listen to something which creates, or shapes, my reality. If I don’t trust, or trust the wrong people, the result is that, for example, social media is messing around with my sanity. But in all these cases, I listen to, and perhaps trust, real people.

If I don’t know whether the information I get is originating from people, or from an A.I., and if I combine the creative power of A.I. with the cpability of generating complex constructs such as a website in my little example above, an article, or a book, leaving the impression that these products are human-made, I simply render my trust to an Artificial Intelligence, which I have to trust, in case I know about its participation, or where I am left in the dark in case the use of such A.I. is not made known to me. Because of this possible use of such A.I. based language models creating entirely non-human-made realities, indistinguishable from human information and manipulation, this is giving the creeps to a large body of well-minded scientists, and to interested laymen.

Confused? Well, imagine you are giving GPT-4 the task to overhaul Wikipedia. Wikipedia is based on common contributions by millions of people, and a quality mechanism. Now, if GPT-4 enters this crowd in disguise, what if, all of a sudden, the “human” feature in defining “art” is not part of the definition of art any longer? Which simply means that we allow A.I. to shape how we perceive the world. And the question is: “Do we know what we are doing, and do we have enough checks and balances built in?”

Simply because it won’t only be the well-meaning people who explore the fascinating abilities of new forms of A.I. like this. Anyone with a creative malicious mind will explore the power of these models, as well. Some already have. These models have already been used to generate malicious computer code meant to crack systems wide open. Just the beginning.

We begin to trust Aliens in creating our reality in which we live. Here is what people with a renowned academic background have to say on this matter:

I have written about the work of Yuval Noah Harari on several occasions. Quoting from a Guest Essay in the New York Times, “Yuval Noah Harari is a historian; the author of “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus” and “Unstoppable Us”; and a founder of the social impact company Sapienship. Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin are founders of the Center for Humane Technology and co-hosts of the podcast “Your Undivided Attention.””

March 24, 2023, Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin wrote a Guest Essay in the New York Times titled “You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, and We’re Out of Blue Pills“. I have read quite some of Yuval’s fascinating books, starting with “Sapiens”, which opened my eyes in many ways. In other books, he is describing advances in genetic technology and advances in Artificial Intelligence as some of the most future-defining developments of our times. He does so since many years, so the alarm bells rung by Harari, Harris, and Raskin are not a sign of panicking, but of profound research on these issues.

They are not alone. “WIRED” is one of many news outlets reporting about an open letter signed by hundreds of prominent A.I. experts, including Elon Musk. Frankly, that name does not necessarily lend too much credibility to me, but I am biased there, for many reasons including an unhinged narcissistic attitude towards the power of capitalism. Yet, it does not mean he is wrong in joining, for whichever motivation. The fact that hundreds of the World’s best of the best warn “In Sudden Alarm, Tech Doyens Call for a Pause on ChatGPT“, it gives important weight to this discussion which requires so much of a technological and societal understanding which is not necessarily a part of the common toolbox of people who allow this sort of technology creeping into the foundations of how our societies and ourselves as individuals “function”.

What is it about?
The use of Artificial Intelligence is not new, and it is, in many ways, already pervading into all corners of our daily lifes. I will explain, in order to work out the profound difference which GPT-4 and other such models make.

Cybernetics and computer technology are a field of interest for me since many decades. Pretty much for the same time, I have read of attempts to replicate the inner workings of the brain, through its neuronal networks, within computing systems. Those early mathematical and computational models attempting to replicate neuronal functions of living brains, they existed in universities and laboratories for a long time. They translated into computer code, much of which was leading to little demonstrations only. Then, these neuronal networks were hosted in ever more powerful computational environments. At the same time, processing power of chips made so incredible advances that any drone, any smartphone, any robotic vacuum cleaner has enough computing power to host software that has neuronal network simulations built in as a vital part.

The same goes for the vast computing networks driving internet-wide applications. Whether for the purpose of global logistics, whether complex predictive systems used to forecast the weather, whether military applications, medical applications, predictive policing software, or, notoriously, social media, they all use A.I. in the form of applications which can learn, are able to identify patterns, and to produce predictive results.

The key, in layman’s terms, sits with the way how these digital neuronal networks store information. They do not store that information in a form which would allow us to retrieve it from a harddisk, look at it, and understand it. Very much like in biological brains, the network itself stores the information as an “inner state”. You put some information through the entry sensors of such a network, the “inner state” will compute, the output side of the system will produce a result, and you can even feed this result back to the sensor side with added information about whether the prediction was correct, or not precise enough. Subsequently, the system will learn.

These systems have amazing capacities. The lenses of your smartphone will compute the picture which you are taking by using A.I. This software will detect “things”, and optimize the photo-shooting. Then, go into the photo app and ask for pictures including mountains, or clouds, or cats, or “Stefan Feller”. In case there are pictures with such features, chances are high the app will present a considerable number of findings. The robotic vacuum will learn how to navigate in your mess. The medical system will become better in diagnosing your desease, or ailment. FaceBook will learn how to push ads, depending on things including your mood, or anything else. In my line of professional work, the forensic software which is comparing shell casings of bullets will come up with similar pictures if they are in its database. Examples are literally countless.

Yet, all these systems operate with very limited language communication. You type in “cat” and you get a set of cat pictures. Alexa, Siri and others are not based (not currently) on GPT-4 – technology, their ability to understand you and to respond in plain language is very limited. GPT-4 is different.

Within a rapid development where new versions are put out in days, or weeks, language based models are able to communicate in natural language and they give you results in complex sentences, paragraphs, or even spoken, which can include the generation of a computer programme, a website, an article, or a casual conversation about love. The fact that you are talking to a machine is almost invisible for those who don’t know. The complexity of the answer, based of vast data retrieved from the Internet, does hide the source and any wrong or biased dataset can add to the learning mistakes which GPT-4 may be making in the act of communicating. There is a growing body of evidence that provocative language, cursing, provocation or many other examples (including that a language model used by Microsoft professed it’s love, or pretended to be a visually impaired human, but not a computer software) is based on the quantity of profane or emotionalised language retreived from bilions of social media entries.

Amongst all these funny stories, and all the amazing benefits which the uncounted avenues of human ingenuity offer, the danger zone gets drowned. Drowned like earlier, when we only realized the damage inflicted by social media when it was too late. Or, when scientists warned about the dangers of nuclear fission and fusion, calling for self-restraint and not to harness this power militarily.

Here a link to warnings about the potential criminal implications, in a warning from EUROPOL.

The most recent news: This article in the German tech magazine “Heise” explains how to install a local GPT-Clone on local “bread-and-butter”-hardware. Meaning that one can use the power of this software without leaving traces in external server-logs. So, buy your own little server park, install such a system, embed it into some computer code, and let it hammer out fake and manipulative news on social media and blogging sites with a speed which is not limited through the number of persons writing fake articles, but by the raw processing power of your computer setup.

Or, to quote Harari et. al. again: “By 2028, the U.S. presidential race might no longer be run by humans.“

So, on one hand we have a body of experts which truly says that we may be in a situation where we have not enough knowledge about what we are unleashing onto society. In Harari et. al. words: “We have summoned an alien intelligence. We don’t know much about it, except that it is extremely powerful and offers us bedazzling gifts but could also hack the foundations of our civilization. We call upon world leaders to respond to this moment at the level of challenge it presents.“

On the other hand, the chance of a responsible proactive discussion may be slim, taking into account how we collectively stumbled into any new world offered by technology. Remember the warnings on the potentially devastating consequences of nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion? But I agree we need to have such a discussion.

I don’t find better words than Harari et.al.:

“A.I. indeed has the potential to help us defeat cancer, discover lifesaving drugs and invent solutions for our climate and energy crises. There are innumerable other benefits we cannot begin to imagine. But it doesn’t matter how high the skyscraper of benefits A.I. assembles if the foundation collapses.

The time to reckon with A.I. is before our politics, our economy and our daily life become dependent on it. Democracy is a conversation, conversation relies on language, and when language itself is hacked, the conversation breaks down, and democracy becomes untenable. If we wait for the chaos to ensue, it will be too late to remedy it.”

Dopamine Nation – About A Book – Or More?

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Introduction

Unlike some of the recent blog entries here, including the previous, this is about the world within. Or is it?

“OMG, he is getting philosophical again.” I will do my best to limit it. But I need a conduit into why I want to write about a book which I read recently: Dopamine Nation (Dopamine nation: finding balance in the age of indulgence / Anna Lembke, M.D., 2021, ISBN 9781524746728 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524746735 (ebook)).

Neurophysiology is part of science. Neuroscience is scientific research aiming to understand the inner workings of the brain. That includes the human brain, the most complex entity that we know about in the Universe. No superstition here: There may be, and I believe there are, more complex entities in the Universe, whatever the Universe is. But our knowledge about the Universe is extremely local, and extremely limited along the temporal dimension as well. In this corner of this Universe, and now, our own brain is the most complex composite physical entity that we know about. Its complexity pales everything else. I highly recommend, as I have done before, David Eagleman’s popular science book “The Brain“. I love it, my children loved it, and the TV series “The Brain” (PBS Documentary, 2015, available on Apple TV) with which David Eagleman stunningly transformed his book into a highly enjoyable visual companion to the book is still relevant, and thoroughly enlightening.

The brain is made from neurons and from other matter. The uniqueness of the human brain sits with that a stunning number of, give or take, 100 billion neurons are forming a highly complex neuronal network. Connected with sophisticated sensory input devices, having a plethora of means to communicate, and being able to steer the body and to contribute to regulate the inner functions of this larger entity we call “our body”, the combined result is much more than a walking and talking biological robot: Self-awareness and the emergence of a persona, in my case “Stefan Feller”, are amongst the results of these inner workings.

Describing it this way allows me to stay away from the philosophical, or spiritual, part. Whilst this part is extremely important to me personally, I can draw a line excluding the question whether this emerging persona is all there is. I will leave it with one thought by pointing to what some refer to as a “soul”, others may name it a “consciousness”, and as to which extent this is only specific for humans, or also true for other living beings, or even beyond, for everything there is. That’s where belief plays a role, inner perception and introspection kicks in, and a whole bunch of belief systems and dogmatic approaches may include deterministic, agnostic, spiritual, or religious explanations for “what there is”. I’m sorry to say, but fanatism starts in this realm, too. That’s part of my other blog entries.

Notwithstanding whether this “walking and talking biological robot” has only a persona, or is also a temporary seat for a soul, one fact is part of neuroscience: That physical processes govern this brain, and that chemical substances are key in not only how the brain works on a biological level, but also how this “resulting persona” is composed, how this persona is able to contribute to the complex equilibrium making this a healthy body, hosting a healthy mind, being part of a healthy “super structure”, meaning a community, a society, a culture, a nation (as the title of the book suggests).

What I want to say: The brain plays an important role by, so to speak, being the “home base” for my identity. Therefore,“Stefan Feller” and how this construct perceives, interprets, acts, reacts, thinks, or not, feels, and how, all that is highly dependent on chemistry. Dopamine is a chemical substance.

Neuroscience increasingly contributes to understanding how human beings perceive, regulate, act, react, are motivated, are functional, less functional, dysfunctional, are mentally sane, sometimes not, or less, and so much more. Neuroscience is able to contribute to important questions such as how to achieve happiness. On an individual level, and on a societal level.

And that is where I wanted to arrive, after so many times re-phrasing my writing, at the end of this introduction: The way how chemical substances produced by, and used by, the body and the brain, and how they are part of complex inner regulative systems ensuring stability, sanity, healthiness, and happiness, of body and mind, by extension they have a profound impact on the health and sanity of a society at large. Dopamine, and how we regulate the inner systems in our brain which are using Dopamine, affects not only the condition in which an individual, but also societies find themselves in.

That’s what Anna Lembke’s book is about. That’s why it has the title “Dopamine Nation”.

The Chemistry – And Neuroscience for Dummies

Dopamine is a chemical substance. In human beings, Dopamine is produced by the body itself, in the brain, and in the kidneys. The use of Dopamine for functions in living organisms is pretty widespread, it appears to be synthesized in plants and most animals.

Dopamine is also a member of a family of chemical substances which we call “hormones”. Which are, according to, for example, “MedLine Plus”, “your body’s chemical messengers“. As far as I want to take this explanation here, Dopamine appears to serve several of such uses in the body, but for the context of this book review only one is relevant: Dopamine is part of a family of substances called “neurotransmitters“. Dopamine is released by neurons in order to send signals to other neurons. From a chemical perspective, it is enough to appreciate that Dopamine is produced in specific areas of the brain, whilst the use of Dopamine by neurons in the brain is affecting many regions.

There are more than 100 substances which are currently identified as being neurotransmitters, the list appears to be open-ended. Neurotransmitters serve a vast array of functions which we increasingly understand, and as far as I would know, the ability of neurons to establish regulative systems in the brain without neurotransmitters is non-existent. Think about the brain without neurotransmitters: If I understand it correctly, you’re annihilated. Take away neurotransmitters, and not only a few functions break down. Simply put, the processes which also lead to the establishment of your persona, they are gone.

Including that which we describe as a free will, or as an illusion of free will. Whether we have one, or not, the jury is out and in this discussion philosophers, neurophysicists, even quantum-physicists, other scientists engage with people of faith, and even with people who have no idea what they are talking about. So, this is not more than a side-remark to make you smile, but also to think deeply about whether you have a “free will”, and what it means.

However, at minimum the workings of regulative systems in the brain which require neurotransmitters have a heavy impact on the ability of you to “freely” decide. If these regulative systems run off kilter, life as you know it changes. If the systems using Dopamine run haywire, your life becomes unmanageable.

Anna Lembke‘s book “Dopamine Nation” is dealing with regulative systems in the brain, or more specifically, with a subset of them. Broadly speaking, Lembke talks about the reward pathways in the brain. The brain, including these so-called reward pathways, is a product of millions of years of evolution, adding new layers, new parts, new features, to systems which we share with many other beings. All these, including what we sometimes call the “lizard brain”, contribute to the complex entity that we call “our brain”. More recently, in evolutionary terms, brain parts such as the frontal temporal lobe have been added. Added, not replaced something evolutionary older. Everything, including the “lizard parts” of the brain, contributes to what makes “us” the entities we are, how we perceive ourselves, how we are driven, consciously, or mostly without even knowing it. Ask specialists in the advertising industry about the latter. I should perhaps ask ChatGPT. But that’s for another blog entry.

But Anna Lembke’s book is not an academic piece relevant for students of neuroscience. She is covering vast territory of consequences that happen when the regulative balance within the reward pathways of the brain is triggered. There are parts of the book where she explains in layman’s language what happens when this system in the brain is allowed to work as it is supposed to work since millions of years.

Her focus, however, sits with what happens when it is put out of homoestasis for longer periods of time.

The Relevance

I am not lazy by saying that I won’t attempt to summarize the workings of this regulative process in the brain, and what happens when the delicate balance is lost.

On one hand, I want to encourage you to read the book, and/or other literature on these findings. On another note, though I feel very qualified in personally appreciating the consequences of the reward pathways entering a runaway process, I don’t feel qualified to summarize what already has been simplifed and summarized by Anna Lembke. But I will say that Annal Lembke and I share a deep-seated personal understanding, from different perspectives of professional qualification, about the consequences of the reward pathways not working any longer in a healthy way. In additon, we also share a personal experience about what happens then. So, I am not superstitious by elevating my own experience to the one of a distinguished scientific expert. Rather, as Anna Lembke describes her own experiences with addiction, I feel that I can safely say that I have my own experiences as well.

And in my own case, I am successfully adressing those since now ten years, by arresting the runaway process, and experiencing a lifestyle which is beyond my wildest dreams. Insofar, that my life has not only become more manageable, but that it also makes sense beyond what was the situation before: I was extremely successful in my work life, but my private life accumulated more and more damage, to myself, and to people I held, and hold, closest to my heart.

Anna Lembke’s book, beyond the neuroscientific explanation of how the parts of the brain which regulate reward, and pain, includes an impressive compilation of personal stories from her work as a therapist. Some of these you will find shocking. You should read all of them.

This is because Anna Lembke’s book does not start with explaining neuroscience, and then entering into the field of treatment of compulsive self-rewarding behavior which turns, over time, slowly and surely, the life of a human being and the lifes of persons around that person into one or another of the many forms of nightmare. If you happen to think about compulsive and addictive forms of self-abuse in a limited way, associating mainly alcohol or substance abuse with it, if you think that the plethora of possible behavioral forms of self-abuse are for the morally weak, you are in for a ride.

I hope this book would open your eyes, in that case.

But even there, the book does not end. Anna Lembke makes it abundantly clear that the consequences of runaway processes in the reward pathways of the human brain are going far beyond what we would want to see, and what we don’t want to see. In my view, she makes a very convincing argument for the pervasiveness of an attitude within our societies which she labels “the age of indulgence”. She clearly demonstrates the myriad forms by which we have gotten used to, and are exposed to, instant gratification. From where I sit, with my own experience, and with the heuristic and vast knowledge stemming from my own work on myself within a network of uncounted individuals who have found one of probably several ways how to re-establish a healthy form of living, allowing self-moderation, wholeness, and happiness, I can only testify for that what Anna Lembke is describing in those parts of her book is very relevant.

Yet, I am not done with praising this book:

Anna Lembke does not only explain that the dysfunctional processes within the reward pathways of the brain affect those who then have to experience a rock-bottom before being ready to acknowledge defeat, and being open to real recovery, and then healing. She goes beyond, by saying that this dysfunctionality has increasingly become the new normal. Like, any parent talking about the effects of Tic Toc on their children will immediately agree. Just mentioning this as one example. I don’t want to become too narrow in my focus here, the opportunities for constant, easy and immediate gratification go so far beyond any limited or exemplary explanation that I don’t feel qualified to eleborate here on it. Because, I even don’t know whether you have made it until here, or if you have given up already, thinking “What the hell is he now talking about?“

“What the hell I am talking about? I am talking about something which experts in the advertisement industry have understood since long. Something which those who design social media applications have brought to the next level. And using Artificial Intelligence for those computer algorhythms has brought the incorporation of neuroscientific understanding of how one can become addicted into perfection. May be you want to watch “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix. There you will hear it from those who admit that they have designed their products exactly this way.

And that, using and re-phrasing a catchphrase of one of my favorite Youtube personae, Sabine Hossenfelder, “That’s what Anna Lembke is talking about”.

Perhaps my little own personal disclosure has made it interesting for you to get until here. My blog is addressing topics of trauma and reconciliation for a reason which includes my own experiences with that. But if you have never thought about this topic, you may have a long way to go, both in appreciating the sheer width and depth of this societal problem, and especially because, as long as you are suffering from the consequences of this dysfunction yourself, you are literally unable to see it, in your own case.

Lastly, I join Anna Lembke in her thoughts about how the collective wisdom of the recovery community, especialy those known as Twelve Step Groups, could be beneficial way beyond recovery, as it is commonly understood. Again, from my own and very specific experience, I can testify that the number of people who are increasingly asking this question, is growing. I am meeting a lot of them on an almost daily basis.

Zoom is a blessing. I am still working on less long-winded sentences. Apologies, I wanted to be precise.

And love from Tigger and me. His reward pathways are a little out of control as well, I have been too permissive in giving him treats. But we are working on that…

The Reason For Storytelling: If You and I Don’t, Only Others Do – On Gaslighting Taken To a Global Level

/ stefanfeller / 2 Comments

“Around 1 percent of U.S. veterans of World War II remain alive to tell their stories. It is estimated that by the end of this decade, fewer than 10,000 will be left. The vast majority of Americans today are unused to enduring hardship for foreign policy choices, let alone the loss of life and wealth that direct conflict with China or Russia would bring.”

In a Guest Essay in the New York Times, titled “World War III Begins With Forgetting”, Stephen Wertheim made this point. I can relate.

Like: The fewer people remember, and talk about, the Holocaust and the horrifying evil done to the world by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, the more it becomes, at least, possible to mystify and to glorify it, and using the most ridiculous of all arguments. Like Kanye West, who now goes by the name Ye. “The Hill” is just bearer of one of countless reports about an interview which he, accompanied by Nick Fuentes, one of the most atrocious racists of recent times, managed to place in a show hosted by the likewise awful racist and xenophobist Alex Jones. Old stuff. Except that the use of social media bullhorns and supporting media is taking it to new levels. Because, whether it is ridiculous or not to praise the architect of the Holocaust wrongly as the guy who invented highways, or the microphone, it does not matter. I have heard arguments like that from my late father in law of my second marriage, more than thirty years ago. There were no Social Media by then. Today, the matter is to get a radical message out, upping the ante, on a path to mainstreaming a “truth” which is not only unsupported by any evidence, but also suppressing any historical truth about what happened. My stomach would turn upside down when I would even quote what Ye said. But wherever on whichever dubious platform, such as Alex Jones’, such outrageous comments are made, within hours the message is also spread through any mainstream media. One side of them glorifying it, the other side vilifying it. For those intents and purposes behind the message itself, both work out very well.

Before I get to the gaslighting argument, upping even this ante, two other examples for why storytelling is so necessary, and which danger sits with when witnesses of horrifying events pass away in numbers: The older the Mothers of Srebenica get, the less can be done against the minimising narrative related to the horror of the Srebrenica genocide. I met the Mothers often, and I truly admire their relentless sticking to telling their stories of a genocide. This is not a function of their healing when they repeat to tell their stories. It is a sacrifice, for the good of keeping a memory alive as a cautionary tale. One day I took my visiting father with me. They are so kind, they offered him coffee and spoke with him just because he was an interested human being. No other intent, no benefit for them. My father cried and cried. Until today, more than twenty years later, he talks about the deep impact of his visiting them.

The same holds true for the genocide in Rwanda, and in uncounted other situations. The more people grow up who have no direct memory of what happened in Germany, in Bosnia&Hercegovina, in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Stalin’s Russia, during the brutal McCarthyism and under Jim Crow in the United States, or in the Armenian genocide, or else, the less the voices of those can be mitigated who minimise, refute, deny. If context is not there, nothing describes the extent of atrocious behavior against the Uighurs, the suffering of minorities in Myanmar, and I need to end with “and and and”, because the list is so long.

Storytelling is a social function which can not be replaced by the noise on Social Media. Quite to the contrary, storytelling is one of the needed antidotes against the devastating effect which unhinged Social Media has. Because even the function of Social Media is subject to a gaslighting narrative, putting an unrestrained version of Twitter, for example, into a manipulative context of an alleged support of free speech, whilst the ulterior motive only is to make profit, and to increase own control.

By the way, I believe that there is a reason for why Number 45, since his account got reinstated by Elon, has not used this account ever since: Not only that this would take away from his own bullhorn (Truth Social), he does not need to use his old Twitter account, and can chose smartly when that time would be there. Simply because the message that his account got reinstated is already enough for gaining even more “followers”. These “followers” likely rise in numbers directly on “Truth Social”, and on connected accounts including on Twitter, as a direct consequence of the reinstatement.

When I grew up, “Followers” was used as a term for people following a certain religious or spiritual belief system. I still object against the manipulative use of terms such as “Friend” or “Follower” on social media. That’s why, in this tiny world of “Durabile”, my blog, I don’t care about how few people “follow” my blog here. What I care about is that the day before yesterday this blog surpassed the threshold of 10.000 reads within those 120 posts since 2014. It just tells me that my storytelling is a tiny contribution to the overall need of telling stories.

Because there is no absolute truth, and no objective truth, as I pointed out here. Now, I am quoting myself from that blog post: QUOTE “Truth as a means of control. Number 45 did this on countless occasions, and more recently he is hard-pressed by people who are attempting to establish even more radical forms of white supremacy, xenophobia, racism, and anti-semitism. Read in The Rolling Stone: “How Trump Got Trolled by a Couple of Fascists“. UNQUOTE

I wrote this post December 01. Four days before writing this post. At that time, I found the analysis relevant which is reflected in the article in “The Rollingstone”. Meaning, that Ye, Fuentes and likeminded people were on a path pressing Nr 45 into even more radical messages.

What happened since? In a few statements including on Truth Social, Nr. 45 did what we saw on many occasions when there was an uproar: He minimised. Distracted. Sold ambigous messages. Allowed messages that he wasn’t aware. That he did not know Fuentes.

I have no personal doubt that all this is part of the MO. Because, as always, the next attack is even more extreme. Meanwhile, inasmuch as I love Jimmy Kimmel, he and other well-minded Late Night Comedy hosts find themselves in the trap that each of their shows ridiculing Nr 45 helps him.

Which is what I want to end with here, today: I just read a story in the British BBC: Under the headline “Trump’s call for ‘end’ of constitution condemned by Democrats“, BBC is reporting on a message from Number 45 on his platform “Truth Social”. According to this report, the White House condemned former President Trump after he called for the termination of the U.S. constitution. I quote from BBC: QUOTE In the post, Mr Trump referred to vague allegations of “massive & widespread fraud and deception” and asked whether he should be immediately returned to power. “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!” he said. UNQUOTE Setting parts of the text in bold letters is done by me, not by BBC.

I can’t wait watching Jimmy Kimmel ridiculing Nr 45, but I mourn those months when he and others managed to find comedy topics which would not contribute to antagonism, by condemning it. May be I’ll write Jimmy’s staff an email.

This is unprecedented in contemporary history as I remember it. Since 2016 there is a history of statements in this blog concluding that it is getting worse before it gets better. But a former President of the United States fighting an accuse, possibly an indictment, for inciting sedition by establishing a narrative that is ripping down the foundations of the U.S. Constitution, this is unheard of.

There is a clause in the German Constitution sometimes named the “Stauffenberg clause“: “Gegen Jeden, der es unternimmt, diese Ordnung zu beseitigen, haben alle Deutschen das Recht auf Widerstand”. Or, in my translation: “Against anyone who is undertaking to remove this constitutional order, all Germans have the right to resist.” It can be found in Article 20, I grew up with, it’s part of my DNA and part of my pride. It’s one of the defining differences between today’s German Constitution and it’s predecessor before the Nazis demolished it: The Weimar Constitution. It is meant as a pillar, albeit, perhaps symbolic, in efforts to robustly protect a constitution from enemies within. Sometimes during 2016 I referred to it in discussions with friends on the U.S. Constitution. Then, with tears in my eyes, I played the song “Kristallnaach”, by the famous German Rockband BAP.

So, one of my hypothetical thoughts is about whether there will be people on the far-right in Germany who think about how to establish a narrative that the German constitutional order is subject to removal from within, by justifying their resistance in saying that the government and the establishment is the enemy of what the Forefathers, the Founders of our Constitution, meant. This is not far-fetched, and it is the same logic.

We have come this far in an approach of extremists in removing the foundations of contemporary democracies, and the rule of law. A few years ago, I would not have believed that one day I would read a report such as the one here on BBC. This has become the new normal, one and a half years before the next battle on presidential elections will begin, in 2024. So, my question is: What’s next, if this has already become the new normal now.

Of course, this question includes where those on the Republican side are, and which legal, ethical, and moral, responsibility they assume, by openly or tacitly condoning such a development. That, on one hand, is part of domestic politics in the U.S. in which I am only an external bystander. But over here, in Europe, we fight the same fight. And we are affected by what is happening “over there”. And vice versa.

We are in this together, only. There is no space for claiming “that’s not my business”, or for complacency. Each day, we are waking up with new worse news than before.

So, why all this under the headline “Storytelling”?

One of my next blog entries will talk about one of my recent books reads, “Dopamine Nation”, by Dr. Anna Lembke. Full quote of the book in my next article. But here is the connection: Within a universe of contemporary addictive sources of Dopamine release through substance and behavioral abuse, one key problem sits with Social Media. I will also refer to the challenges one of my children has with the addictive suffering using Tic Toc.

I believe we can not use Social Media for the kind of storytelling I mean in this blog. For many reasons which I will try to explain there. But for starters, Social Media does not support peaceful fact-based storytelling implicitly through it’s algorhythms. I have own examples, including this blog, or my Youtube channel. I stay away from inciting or upsetting messages and their promotion, as a consequence, nowhere in the suggestion lists of these sites any of my writing or my videos will come up.

There is a need not only to regulate Social Media, but also to devise strategies how storytelling remains a vital democratic and humble function of our societies and cultures. Storytelling is inherently local, or topological. It is unsensational, and personal. Peaceful, mindful, truthful, honest, personal storytelling. No rambling, no yelling involved.

I hope that I adhere to my own standards, here.

“With The Help of Social Media Memories Can Be Erased“ – Considerations on the Relativity of Truth

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Preface: I read the interview with Maria Ressa (see below) and began to express my thoughts about social media manipulation during a few days in Bucharest. It turned out not to be an easy-going process, I was struggling with something that I now identify as the question “Can I find an objective truth?” In a way this felt to me like an extension of my thinking which I began with Part 1 – 3 grappling with aspects of “perception”.

The following travel to Toronto, including some severe jetlag, didn’t help me feeling comfortable with the results of my thought processes, so I let the issue lingering in my drafts folder. Now, with some rest and witnessing a beautiful spring morning in Ontario, I’ll try it again.

What is truth?

Maria Ressa has been awarded the Nobel Price for Peace in 2021, together with Dmitry Muratov, for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace. Her journalist work is including 20 years as a correspondent and investigative reporter. The title of this blog entry includes a quote from her.

12.02.2022, the German online portal of the news broadcast “Tagesthemen” carried an interview with Maria Ressa on occasion of the Philippine Presidential elections. The elections were won by Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos jr., son of the late Dictator Ferdinand Marcos sr., who ruled the country between 1965 and 1986, until he was finally ousted. Together with his family and his cronies, he stands for decades of authoritarian reign, massive corruption, and reckless brutality. The family fled their country with an estimated 10bn USD. A good summary on occasion of the 2022 elections can be found in this BBC piece.

For context: The outgoing President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte leaves a reign of shame for history, too. Most remembered will be the wave of extra-judicial killings with which he allowed the Police to mutate into a murderous gang, killing scores of people, pretending that a strong-armed fight against drug kings would necessitate this and that there would not be a need for due judicial process. I remember U.S. President Nr. 45 speaking admirably of Duterte. Which in itself does not make Duterte a likeable person, Nr 45 also fell in love with North-Korea’s dictator, and, well, his docile relationship with Vladimir Putin will never be forgotten either. Pied pipers.

The core message of Maria Ressa in this German article is that memories of decades of history can be erased, if social media is masterfully used. Not only that memory can be changed, that alternate versions of the same historical events can be created, no, Ressa says that corporate memories can be erased by social media manipulation. Disinformation campaigns on an industrial scale allow that, according to her. The BBC article quoted above would also indicate a manipulation aiming at changing the perception of history by “Bongbong” and associates for at least the last ten years.

Of course, an interview shortened for the digestion of the general public can not provide the same evidence as academic research would do. But for my thoughts it appears to be enough to rely both on the journalistic ethics behind two renowned public broadcasters and on the fact that a credible investigative journalist won the World’s most prestigious award.

The past years have established a large body of evidence that social media is used systematically for manipulation of public opinion on a gargantuan scale. Many will remember the impact of such activities in the run-up of U.S. presidential elections, 2016. The litany of actual examples would be too long to read. December 2020 I wrote about one example, explaining a NATO study on aspects of this topic.

The case of the Philippine Presidential elections is frightening. Bongbong Marcos has won in a landslide election, not by a margin. No need for Bongbong even to prepare for challenging an election as being manipulated, and to contest it. According to Ressa, Bongbong’s victory is based on a manipulation of the electorate on an industrial scale. On lies that create a narrative of Ferdinand Marcos sr. being a hero, the greatest leader of the Philippine Nation ever, and that his son, if he will win the elections, will give the money back to the poor. We will see whether he will do that. My experience would tell me that chances are slim if the whole election is already based on an epic manipulation of historical reality.

The overwhelming victory appears, strictly speaking by counting the votes, sound. Yet, the manipulation sits straight in front of our eyes: Democracy has been defeated with a never-ending stream of content on social media re-branding the image of the Marcos’ family. Phillipinos were told that the dictatorial regime was a golden age, free of crime. Which is pretty much the opposite of what is on historical record.

But, is there something like one common repository of historical records? That’s what I am struggling with here: Is there something like an objective truth?

In an Address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin on January 27th, 1921 on Geometry and Experience, Albert Einstein elaborates on the relationship between the laws of mathematics and reality: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” (Project Gutenberg eBooks, “Sidelights on Relativity”, EBook #7333).

In the case of historical truths I would transfrom this sentence into “As far as a historical record refers to reality, it is not certain; and as far as such a record is certain, it does not refer to reality.”

This leaves many people very confused. In my belonging to a group of people, I do establish and participate in a historical context about what happened which is based on a common framework through which the members of this group identify. If the framework is very different between two or several different groups of people, their interpretation of what happened in the past can have little or no common grounds. And always when two or several different explanations clash in a discourse, we try to identify an objective yardstick against which we construct our argument why we believe we hold the truth. And we fail on agreeing on the same yardstick, the same objective measuring rod. The results can include so many divergent views, like two different groups entirely disagreeing on whether historical events were constituting a genocide, or not. The result being that the shared reality of such different groups differs in so fundamental ways that coexistence is the best option, always with the threat of violent discourse looming.

There is nothing new in the above. The new aspect, insofar as my writing goes, relates to the claim that systematic social media manipulation can entirely change the public record of history. Again, the past is filled with examples how systematic disinformation campaigns can establish new perceived realities within a group. Being a German national, I like to refer to disinformation campaigns undertaken by the ilk surrounding Hitler. Goebbels for sure is an example of masterful application of deceit and the use of manipulation in order to control the German populace.

But is there something new stemming from the ubiquity of social media of these days? If the general method of manipulation through disinformation is a tool which has been used for millenia in order to control populations for the benefit of a ruling elite, what is the new dimension which comes from social media?

Maria Ressa, in that “Tagesthemen” interview, also refers to the manipulation machine used by Russia in relation to the situation on the Krim, and in the Ukraine: She claims that the first step is about oppression, and the second step is about extinguishing memory. Based upon the experiences she has made in her home country, the Phillipines, she anticipates the same method being utilised in the context of Russias intent to aggressively usurp the Ukraine. She claims that social media have the effect to divide and to radicalise. Thus, she challenges the argument that social media is a tool vital for guaranteeing the freedom of speech. Instead of being used to allow free speech, according to her the algorithms used by Twitter, FaceBook, Tic Toc, and so many more, they make sure that priority will be given to content which is distributed broadly, preferably even virally. Of course, this is the ad-driven business-model behind social media enterprises. According to Ressa, therefore the distribution of facts will always loose against the distribution of lies, hate, and resentment. Drowning the news related to factual reporting, Ressa then states that the result is an entire loss of a shared reality.

The yardstick of a common historical record has unalterably changed, the division has been established, power can be exerted by controlling the perceived reality. Ressa makes the case for a global threat for values including democracy, but she also hints at, perhaps in my view, the biggest threat of our contemporary times: That we will disagree about the climate crisis as a consequence of global warming.

Which is, probably, on top of the list of global challenges which require a joint reality framework holding true for all people and nations on this globe.

As so often, I have no simple answer. Because there simply is no simple answer at all. We tend to simplify, and to go to extremes. Which always amplifies the problem once a complex system is brought out of its previous delicate state of balance, whilst we do not know how to create a new balance, instead of the entire system collapsing.

So, who is right? Maria Ressa with claiming that social media has the potential to destroy realities, and the underlying framework allowing for democracy, or Elon Musk, who has repeatedly tweeted that taking Nr 45 off Twitter has been one of the biggest mistakes, and that this is all about guaranteeing the freedom of speech?

I am still navigating through the depths of this question, and personal consequences. Should I maintain my Twitter account (which is a microscopic grain of sand in the Twitterverse) once Musk owns Twitter? What I know is that I would be extremely careful about listening to a person who happens to be the richest person in the world, who is able to just buy a social media firm in a snap, take it off from the stock market in order to make the changes of his liking, and then to put it back on the stock market. Why should I trust somebody who has one single intention: Using things for a business model based on profitmaking? Why should I believe that a statement about freedom of opinion is unbiased, if the motivation behind is purely enterprise-driven, and the methodology being used is taking every single accountability mechanism offline?

Also not new. But for me, the new thing is that one person has the potential to make a decision that has global implications on a level unheard of in history, whilst any mechanisms of public accountability appear to be on national level, and to some extent on a level of international organisations, but where the credibility of these international organisations is under massive systematic attack.

I will tell you if I stay on Twitter.

Sunday News Blues

/ stefanfeller / Leave a comment

Here are a few clustered “pieces of news” which I found myself reading about, and following on various other media, throughout the past couple of days:

  • Afghanistan related news continued to show up on my newsfeeds with a somewhat toned down tendency. Whilst still being a main topic, the fierceness and rage of those weeks in August is lessening. We become used to information about women being deprived from education and from participating in forms of public life, we seem to begin to resign into facing a reality where two decades of successful promotion of women’s rights are being wiped out within weeks. We become used to news about journalists being deprived from the freedom to report. We hear from the humanitarian community warning about an imminent desaster, and we learn about a Taleban government comprising our worst previous enemies. Sometimes I feel that government is just sitting it out: “Don’t produce too bad news about violations of human rights, the international media train will move on after a while.”
  • New news capable to create attention by producing feelings of being upset, being angry, they moved on to Mali. Already being a country where military control replaced civilian governance, within a growing set of West African countries moving away from democratic rules of governance, we now see a potential engagement of the Russian “Wagner Group” mercenaries, on request of the Malian ruling military class, and certainly on basis of profound Russian geo-strategic interests, leading to that France, Germany, and others raise questions of conditionality related to the engagement of our own military capacities, within the United Nations peacekeeping Mission MINUSMA, within EU-led military training missions, and through a multilateral set of counterterrorism forces operating in Mali, and the wider region. Feels like another looming implosion.
  • The most recent clash is a different one: France recalling her Ambassadors to the United States and to Australia for “consultations” after being completely kept in the dark on discussions that led to what now is coined AUKUS. A new alliance being formed in secrecy between the U.S., Australia, and the UK, in a global undertaking confronting China in the Indo-Pacific. A multi-billion deal delivering French conventionally-powered submarines to Australia being scrapped with nothing else than shortest notice, in favor of nuclear-powered submarine technology provided by the U.S., assisted by the UK. These news somewhat also feel like the bookends to a discussion in between, a discourse about the future of the North-Atlantic alliance, and the parallel soul-searching of the European Union where we have a place in all this, including through own military capacities and capabilities. A French President and a French Foreign Minister asking as to which extent there is an extension of abandonment which some hoped to be only temporary during the Trump administration, into the Biden administration. Everyone who is reading this will grasp at least a sense of how profound global alliances and interests are changing. In a different piece, for other channels, I reflected on how much this also affects the work of the United Nations, within the field of peace&security, through political and peacekeeping efforts. Just mentioning that, here. And lastly, at least I begin to make an argument about the emergence of the big picture which explains also why the hard decisions on leaving Afghanistan may have been made: It is about re-organizing political and military might along new geo-strategic lines, and not being timid when implementing it.
  • On a sarcastic note, then there also is rapper Nicki Minaj. For many, here is what CBS graced us with: “The White House has offered Nicki Minaj a call with a doctor, according to an official, after she expressed concerns this week about getting the COVID-19 vaccine. The rapper tweeted on Monday that she wants to do more research before getting vaccinated and claimed that a friend of her cousin’s had experienced adverse effects from it, which health officials have refuted. “My cousin in Trinidad won’t get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen,” Minaj tweetedMonday. “His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding. So just pray on it & make sure you’re comfortable with ur decision, not bullied.” Well, sarcasm also reflecing on that this tweet provides a perfect example for how the media frenzy is providing opportunities for something which I am attempting to describe below.

The above almost arbitrary selection of newsbites which caught my attention yesterday and on this sunny and pleasantly chilly autumn morning in Belgrade, it made me thinking. Because, more often than not, my news selection leaves me with frustration, despair, worry. I know very well what these emotions do to me. If being allowed to go on the rampage, they make me restless and I find myself in a spiral of obsessive reading. My days may not be ending on a positive note then. Like in many other areas of my life, it is about emotional moderation, sometimes we call it emotional sobriety. There is a very thin line between compassion and obsession. If I don’t find a way into some form of loving non-attachment, I take everything personal.

I have to pick and choose amongst the thousands of pieces of information offered by my newsreader. The settings of this newsreader only subscribe to channels which I find interesting, acceptable, in line with my cultural and political belief system. So sorry, Fox News, Bild Zeitung, or alikes. Not subscribing. As a consequence, I have to accept a filtered view on the state of affairs because of my own choices. Solid journalism is not free from beliefs. A robotic emotionless and value-neutral set of information items does not exist. With every new reading, I am solidifying the neural pathways forming my own framework of how I see the world outside myself. With every piece of my writing here, I am doing the same.

The engineers and master-minds behind the advertising machinery and the machinery of political manipulation know about this. Walking in their shoes, I reckon they have at least two questions driving them when optimising their strategies:

  • How to keep people in an existing framework, sometimes also referred to as “ecosystem”? Cynical emphasis put on “eco”. I prefer “belief system” as being a bit more precise. If I go one step further, I would even question “belief” and replace it with “emotion”. Whether we talk about a preference to, say right-wing or left-wing political beliefs, or people using Android or iOS, or PCs or Macintoshs, or being a hard-core fan of BMW or Mercedes, it doesn’t matter. Examples are endless. It’s all about emotions, creating emotional attachment, and emotional dependency.
  • How to manage cross-overs, meaning, getting people moving over from one system to another? That, too, is all about emotions.

In a digital realm profoundly based on psychological knowledge how to manipulate, and how to exploit the neuroscience of addiction, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a blessing for those performing Black Magic. As a consequence, I navigate to the best of my education and ability to at least identify some of the manipulation efforts which are ferociously thrown at me every time I enter the Internet. Not only my computer needs a firewall, my brain needs a firewall as well, allowing me to stay clear from malicious forms of manipulation and from fake news. This goes so much deeper than only avoiding spam and malware attacks. “Social engineering” is a term which had been coined by the hacker scene. But AI takes social engineering to a quantum leap, and a new meaning: Very much like the hacker uses some fake personal credibility through phone calls in order to gain entry, social media perverts the personal meaning of “friends”. One click allows me to request somebody to be my “friend”. Nobody does this free from emotions: Whether I ask somebody in person to be my friend, or I push a button, the emotional reaction is very similar, may be except for sociopaths. With that person’s accepting click, we’re done! I have a new friend, and it is creating an emotional reaction again. If, then, a friend tells me a story, I tend to believe, or to support the attitude behind. That’s what friends do, right?

AI aiming at getting me to become a member of a group of friends, or a “follower” of another category of people, called “influencers”, that’s the wizardry of really smart social engineering. By the way, as perverted the digital meaning of “friend” may be, as cynically clear is the meaning of “influencer”. An “influencer” does what the name is suggesting: Influencing. Not “reasoning”, “informing”, or “entertaining”, but “influencing”. Stomach this. I don’t want to be a friend, nor a follower of, say, Nicki Minaj (see above). My son is dreaming of becoming an “influencer”. Because it’s all about status. But then the opposite to “being an influencer” is “being influenced”. There both is a benign meaning given to it by the new generations of smartphone kids, and a very malicious one, covertly applied by those who manipulate for reasons of profit, or ideological, religious, or political agenda. For those less benign, it is about that content only serves one purpose: Generating a click. There is no difference between somebody using that in order to catch followers adoring long and carefully draped blond hair sitting on top of a rosy face, and somebody who does this in order to catch attention to some specific upper torso specifics.

Nicki Minaj’s boobie-trapped testicle-reasoning against Covid-19-vaccines contributes to fueling the mistrust of millions, and of course because it just is a fancy way for Nicki to create attention for her media circus. No accountability, or sense of responsibility, Ms. Minaj, taking into account the Covid-deaths, suffering, and infringements on the rights of vaccinated people? People who can not pay themselves into privileged high-society realms, now including space, since this weekend’s SpaceX Inspiration4 spaceflight of a billionaire with his three friends?

One of the reasons why democratic values are so much challenged these days: Democracy works best when people make educated choices, and when there is at least some pretention of that all of us are equal. At least that was the idea. If we don’t find a way back into this understanding, democracy may be shown the way to the exit door.

My personal choices in this new world include that I stay almost entirely away from social media sites, like Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram, Tic Toc. I also am extremely concerned about their impact on emotional health issues of teenagers. Parenting two teenagers who struggle heavily with this, like millions of other teenagers too, I need to put this aside for another blog entry.

Yes, I have a select set of Youtube channels and I actively use Youtube to broaden my views on things I am interested in. Yes, I have a LinkedIn profile which I use only in a very restricted manner. But mainly, my own subjective worldview is based on choices I make when reading news in the Internet, using my Newsreader. I try to avoid the worst honeytraps of manipulation, and to mitigate the remainder through educated choices.

I consider myself being moderately good at this. I am aware of that I am blessed with sound education, a very broad experience, a non-local life-style, and broad cross-cultural and inter-cultural experiences. In this, I belong to a global minority. This summer allowed me, again, to see this. I traveled for many months and I stayed on campsites all over Europe, making many experiences meeting people from all walks of life. Sourcing my information from verified channels makes me part of a minority.

It’s not only about the quality of the news sources. It also is about the depth and the width. In order to understand (or trying to) global events, I need to maintain a global perspective. In order to understand complexity and interdepedency of events, I need to inform myself about a large variety of topics. Otherwise, developments seem local, disconnected, and hard to understand. Many people who I have met don’t do that. They source their information from unverified sources, they show limited interest to what happens outside their neighborhood, they feel overwhelmed by the onslaught of complex bad news. But they all try to make meaning.

No surprise then how seductive the simplifications offered by pied pipers are. Threatening narratives sell on feeding grounds soaked with fear. This I have expressed in various pieces on my blog here, and I feel it is not enough. There is some more, but I struggle with how to describe it in a way that is making sense without becoming too lengthy in this piece.

But I would end with that people in democratic societies vote. We are one week away from German Federal elections. I keep fingers crossed. Until then, I’ll go for a forest walk now enjoying the beautiful Belgrade late summer.

A different approach to upsetting news – Take away their demolition power – The glass is half full, not half empty

/ stefanfeller / Leave a comment

This morning, a German news story popped up. The report informs about the plans of Hungary‘s right-wing political party „Fidesz“ to institutionalize further discrimination against members of the LGBTQI-community. Prime Minister Victor Orban of Hungary, a Member State of the European Union, has tabled a law prohibiting educational programs, and any program advertising topics related to people and communities identifying anything other than heterosexual. Homophobia enshrined into law, if successful. Chances are, it may be.

According to the „Tagesschau“-report behind the link https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/ungarn-fidesz-homosexualitaet-101.html, educational programs at school that inform and sensibilisize for the rights and needs of minority groups identifying other than heterosexual shall be prohibited. Behind the acronym LGBTQI stand all who identify as lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, queer, and intersexual. One of my beloved children would, as a consequence, be ostracized if being educated in Hungary. I dare say I am proud of the exceptionally human educational system of the country where they are being educated. They grow up in a country where they are encouraged to freely identify as whoever they feel they are.

Not in Hungary, or elsewhere where xenophobia and chauvinism continue to take alarming roots, in the middle of the European Union. Let me be clear: We have this everywhere, including in Germany. But a draft law planning to prohibit books, films, and other „content“, aiming at children and juveniles with the intent to prohibit depicting any form of sexuality deviating from heterosexuality, that is entirely another level of erosion of values based on democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human and individual values. I hope that there will be a strong reaction from Brussels. But the mere fact that such an attempt is made is deeply alarming.

As often, this report falls into the category of news which deeply upset me, make me sad, angry, resentful. There are many bits and pieces of such news in my draft folder. They relate to what happens with Muslim minorities in Myanmar, ethnic and religious minority groups in China, including reports about Chinese authorities forcefully subjecting members of that minority group to training Artificial Intelligence software to identify emotions on their faces, with even Microsoft ringing the alarm bells of Orwell‘s „1984“ taken to the the power of 2. My draft folder includes reports about widespread sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and rape, on a broad basis, perpetrators being Afghan Police commanders, victims being female Afghan police officers.

I could go on and on. Of course, the world is chock full with news like these. And these stories need to be told, as this is one vital precondition to act. „AAA“ stands for Awareness, Acceptance, and Action. All three terms are equally relevant.

But from personal experience I know what these stories do: Some people get numb. Some people get cynical. Some people get into a constant spiral of being upset. On the other side of the aisle, these stories positively feed the xenophobia and hate and intolerance of those who have already been caught in the webs of those pied pipers who appear to be a staple of contemporary times.

I name them pied pipers. They thrive off antagonisation. Many of them for ideological reasons. Some of them, including Nr 45 in the U.S., taking this method to the ultimate extreme: They don‘t care about content at all, they only care for the principle of always raising the stakes of antagonisation. This I will try to analyse in a future blog entry, because this method is both simple and complex, and there are people around who have copied this from Nr. 45. Mechanically it is simple: Just respond to anything with radical antagonisation. Psychologically, it is complex: Systematic gaslighting is including that one gaslights oneself. I have written about it here.

But what to do when everything is aimed at making you angry, because this in itself is the aim of the exercise? Does it mean one either becomes a „useful idiot“, as Lenin put it, by angrily responding (and thus doing exactly what the other side intended), or shutting up and thus becoming a member of the group of „silent lambs“? Does it lead to ever more resignation and the feeling of helplessness, harboring deep-seated resentment?

I believe there could be another path: Every story told about the cold heartless business of eroding hard-fought-for values should be accompanied by a story of hope, a profoundly positive story.

So I try this here.

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Two days ago, I came back to Serbia after a stay in Germany and another stay in Bosnia & Herzegovina. I was timing my arrival, because my second Covid-19-vaccination was due this weekend.

Here is my story about how I got vaccinated in Serbia:

As a consequence of policy decisions, Serbia had secured considerable amounts of vaccines early on, whether Sinopharm, Sputnik, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, whatever. In difference to neighboring States in the region, and also in difference to, for example Germany, they had a large supply early on. Serbia‘s fast vaccination campaign got noticed internationally.

At the same time when own citizens began to receive their first shots (and not after), the Serbian government started to provide vaccines to the international diplomatic community in Serbia, but they wouldn’t stop there: A week or so after they had opened the possibility to get vaccinated to diplomatic missions, my landlord called me and said she had just watched the announcement on TV that the government was offering vaccines to anyone, including foreigners, as long as one had a foreign ID card and a Serbian phone number.

Mid March, on a Saturday morning, I traveled to the largest vaccination site on the Belgrade Fair compound. I approached a security guard, politely asking whether the information that I could get a shot as a foreigner with no residence in Serbia, would be correct. The guard went in, and came out a minute later with a young staffer, who introduced himself as „Ivan“. In the most friendly manner I have come across, Ivan took me through all registration, helped me arrive at the cubicle with a sign „AstraZeneca“ on it, and fifteen minutes after arriving at the fair I got my first vaccine shot. Ivan accompanied me to the rest area, we had a blast of small talk, and brought me back to the exit of the fair. We parted not without having exchanged contact details before. Since then, Ivan and I exchanged a few mails and planned on having a coffee at the latest when my second shot would be due, after 12 weeks.

Of course, this extraordinary experience made me so grateful. And this gratitude for a most personal experience of kindness also remained throughout the following weeks, when Serbia got credited for this unbuerocratic handling, when many people from neighboring countries of the Western Balkans, and even „vaccine tourists“ form EU countries, arrived at the Belgrade Fair. The public discussion included comments that this also could be seen as a smart public relations move by the Government. All reasonable, but the personal kindness was not an exception and went way beyond what could be named „professional courtesy“, and I heard of it many times.

Now, 11 weeks later I was in Sarajevo, preparing to come back to Belgrade, anticipating an eMail notifying me about my second appointment. With precision, I got this mail, and a text message on my phone. But before that, I received a mail from Ivan.

Ivan had noted the second vaccination date. He offered to help me again. Which I found more than kind, it was „super considerate“. So, two days ago, I met Ivan again. At the Belgrade Fair. And like the first time, I was met with most friendly staff all over the vaccination site, taking me through the second round of vaccination. After which, Ivan and I had planned to have a coffee.

On the way to the coffee place, Ivan greeted a friend, Marco. Friendly and outgoing like Ivan, I got into a conversation with Marco. This led to literally two hours of intense and wonderful time over several coffees, with both Ivan and Marco. Because, as it turned out, Marco had a story to tell which I also wanted to hear in its entirety.

Both Ivan and Marco are youth workers, engaged in supporting meaningful activities for young people. Ivan in Belgrade, Marco as part of a regional non-governmental organization operating in all six jurisdictions of the Western Balkans. As an NGO, I learned, they had gotten international recognition for their work on helping young people all over the Western Balkans, including in reconciling with the divisions which form part of the legacy of conflict and war.

I need to keep it short here, because this blog entry is already one of the longer ones. The work of this NGO will be subject to future blog entries anyway, as soon as I have learned more. But I already know that young people here are fighters for the future of the values that we sometimes feel others are eroding. The point which I want to make here: By chance, and simply because I was curious and open-minded, I learned about what young people here in this region of the world do in order to overcome pre-occupations, divisive nationalist language, and hate. They promote tolerance. They operate truly regional, stay out of politics, and emphasize their pride of being truly multi-ethnic.

They are the present, and the future here, so their stories need to be told. These others, including some pied pipers, those who try to control the news cycle, they may be part of the past, and not knowing it, yet. Telling positive stories, sometimes small, sometimes large, always wonderful, that may help.

Ivan, Marco, and I, we plan a dinner next week. I am going to ask them what they do in terms of LGBTQI rights, and their promotion. I am sure we are going to have another blast of a good conversation.

Which helps me a lot when I see bad news, next time.

Social Media Manipulation – An Example

/ stefanfeller / 1 Comment

So, here is a little story: STRATCOM is the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence. Recently, they re-ran a test of “the ability of social media companies to identify and remove manipulation”. The result is published, the report can be viewed and downloaded here. It is titled “Social Media Manipulation 2020”.

What did they do, in a nutshell? The researchers used thirty-nine authentic posts on FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Tic Toc. As far as I see from related news, for this they cooperated with two U.S. politicians, one a Republican, the other one a Democrat. The German news about it can be found on the German tech-news-site HEISE. Using these thirty-nine posts on social media, STRATCOM bought fake engagement on these posts from three specialised Russian service providers. Providers like these offer manipulated engagement with existing posts, for example. I guess they also offer much more, but this is just an example in which authentic posts of legitimate and appropriate information content were used, since this is NATO. The researchers paid the ridiculously small amount of 300 Euro to these Russian providers.

What did they get in return? 1150 comments, 9690 likes, 323202 views, and 3726 shares! Meaning plain and simple: I can create content on social media, with good, questionable or malicious intentions, and instead of hoping that I will attract many comments, likes, and views on my own, I can buy fake ones. Comments, likes and views increase the “digital weight” of the post. The more of this “digital value”, the more likely other people will look on these pieces of information or disinformation, and the more likely also these posts will be ranked higher by Internet search engines, such as Google. Finally, I can also buy distribution, through shares, of these artificially boosted posts. The more “oomph” I have in getting these informations pieces out into the right target groups, the more I increase chances of further distribution. And I pay very little money for it.

So, let me use a hypothetical example, but one which is commonly being used for manipulation purposes: I create a story with specific target groups in mind. Examples are countless. Like fake news stories which were designed for target groups of color in the U.S. in 2016. They were designed to raise doubt within these groups that a contender, in that case the democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, would be really interested in matters of grave concern for those communities of color. The unauthentic or fake pieces of news were designed to reduce the willingness of people in these target groups to participate in the elections. Many of us, I guess and hope, know about this form of manipulation. It also happened 2020, and it is fair to say that both domestic actors and foreign forces all over the world use this tactic in order to influence the outcome of an electoral process. It happens everywhere, it is commonplace. And it is manipulation at least, and more often violating law in many jurisdictions. But what it chiefly does: It contributes to burning credibility of truth to ashes. It leads to so much confusion about which information I can trust, and which not, that people may give up, or they just decide to only believe what their “friends” say.

By the way, coming to think of it: When sites like FaceBook (I don’t remember who came up with it first) began to abuse the term “friend” for the process of clicking a button asking somebody to “be my friend” and the invited party just accepting this request, I had a revolting feeling in my stomach. It lasts until today and is one of the reasons why I only engage minimally on social media. The notion of reducing the term “friend” to a digital connection with no real deeper meaning feels like the strike of an evil genius to me. It leads to the craving of having as many friends as possible, it is part of the addictive design of social media sites. It hollows out any real understanding of what friendship means. Terms like “friend” and “follower” are almost equal in their meaning. I need these digital friends for status and validation. Having friends has become an online currency. It is like a material possession, not an internal value which gives me the comfort of a deeper emotional, intellectual and spiritual connection to another person in whose well-being I take an interest. It adds to real-world-isolation because it strips the notion of having friends from what the term means in real social life. May be that is for a deeper reflection in another blog article. But ultimately, this manipulation can be used in order to get people into a network of “friends” for purposes of influencing them, depriving them from other sources of information, making them pawns in a game they do not understand, but crave to be part of. Emotions like the wish to belong mix with emotions such as fear, and anger, fake information is being used as a narrative giving them a feeling of meaning.

Back to the STRATCOM report: The first remarkable fact in the results of this research for me was the price for this form of manipulation. 300 Euro is so cheap that this service can be used as a mass tool, whenever this suits own devious interests. 

Secondly, this is a shadowy grey and a criminal market. The methodology can be used by State actors with sophisticated technology and staff at hand. Or money, just hiding traces and buying a service from some groups like the above. Likewise, non-State actors can use it for political purposes, for ideological purposes, for religious purposes, or as a marketing tool. Which is a hint towards how wide the scope of potential manipulation is. The targets are you and I, and we may, very often, not ever know that we were manipulated. So, this is a profound ethical issue with consequences for whether, and how, we want to regulate it, how we want to deal with it.

Thirdly, STRATCOM re-ran the test because they did it before. They did that because the industry promised they would get better at identifying manipulation like this, better at identifying fake, or robot, accounts. Better at curbing influence. The conclusions of the report state that “platforms continue to vary in their ability to counter manipulation of their services”. Read the details, I’m not going to rank services here myself. But there are platforms where manipulation requires a small effort and where costs are one thenth of what is to be invested on other platforms.

Fourthly, the report makes it clear that these actors are not a few, they are an industry. One chapter is titled “The Social Media Manipulation Industry”. With market rules which survived efforts to fight this industry. Quoting the report: “Social media manipulation remains widely available, cheap, and efficient, and continues to be used by antagonists and spoilers seeking to influence elections, polarise public opinion, sidetrack legitimate political discussions, and manipulate commercial interests online.” 

Fifthly, the report states that this industry prospered during 2020. I finish with quoting the three core insights which the researchers came up with:

  1. “The scale of the industry is immense. The infrastructure for developing and maintaining social media manipulation software, generating ficticious accounts, and providing mobile proxies is vast. We have identified hundreds of providers. Several have many employees and generate significant revenues. It is clear that the problem of inauthentic activity is extensive and growing.
  2. During the past year the manipulation industry had become increasingly global and interconnected. A European service provider will likely depend on Russian manipulation software and infrastructure providers who, in turn, will use contractors from Asia for much of the manual labour required. Social media is now a global industry with global implications.
  3. The openness of this industry is striking. Rather than lurking a shadowy underworld, it is an easily accessible marketplace that most web users can reach with little effort through any search engine. In fact, manipulation service providers still advertise openly on major social media platforms and search engines.” 

What do do? Of course, we have a regulation debate. Part of the findings relate to that social media promised earlier to root out this phenomenon, but that they have not become good at it. To me it feels like the contrary, may be because of unwillingness, sloppiness, or the sheer size of the problem. Or any combination of these three. However, regulation always leads to an escalation, or attempts to evade, if the business model generates revenue. Which it clearly does.

My take is to focus on education. I am not a young nerd. I am a nerd in my early sixties. This world rapidly changes, and often I don’t like the course. But disengagement is, I feel, not an option. It is about giving people the knowledge and skills to make their own informed decisions. That is a core principle of open societies based on democratic rules. Truth matters, so we need to know about how truth is demolished in the digital invisible world of the Internet. We need to be able to learn, staying curious about learning, engaging in meaningful discussions, empower people to better identify manipulation when it occurs, giving them the skillset needed for quality decisions for their own lives.

When I talk to my youngest children about how much of their personal information is sucked from their smartphones, iPads, and computers without their knowledge, I am often presented with a sense of “why bother, I don’t feel it, I don’t feel harmed, or hurting”. May be we need to find ways how to reinforce the understanding as to which extent the digital and the real world are interconnected. People seem to discriminate between these two worlds. 

Education is more relevant than regulation. Which motivated me writing this article. Hope you enjoyed reading it.