Downsides of the Metaverse

 

One important task of the discipline of engineering ethics is to take a look at new technologies and say in effect, "Wait a minute—what could go wrong here?"  Blogger Joe Allen at the website Salvo has done that with the Metaverse idea recently touted by Mark Zuckerberg, when Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will now be known (officially, anyway) as Meta.

 

Allen denies that Zuckerberg was merely trying to distract attention away from the recent bad publicity Facebook has been receiving, and claims that the Metaverse idea is something Zuckerberg and others have been dreaming of for years, especially proponents of the quasi-philosophy known as transhumanism.  What are these dreams?

 

In the Metaverse of the future, you will be able to put on virtual-reality equipment such as goggles or a helmet, and enter an alternate universe fabricated in the same way that the Facebook universe, or the many MMOG (massively multiplayer online games) systems try to do in a comparatively feeble way today.  But the goal of metaverse technology is to make the simulation better than ordinary reality, to the point that you'll really want to stay there. 

 

It's not hard to imagine downsides for this picture.  Allen quotes Israeli author Yuval Harari as saying that mankind's power to "create religions" combined with Metaverse technology will lead to "more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era."  The Nazis could do no more than put on impressive light shows and hire people such as Leni Riefenstahl to produce propaganda films such as "Triumph of the Will."  Imagine what someone like Joseph Goebbels could have done if he had been put in charge of an entire metaverse, down to every last detail.

 

Impossible?  Facebook and other companies are investing billions to make it happen, and Allen points out that companies are also lobbying Washington to spend federal money on developing the infrastructure needed to support the massive bandwidth and processing power that it will take. 

 

COVID-19 pushed many of us a considerable distance toward the Metaverse when we had to begin meeting people on Zoom rather than in person.  Zoom is better than not meeting people at all, I suppose, but it already has contributed in a small way to a breakdown in what I'd call decorum.  For example, judges have had to reprimand lawyers for coming to hearings on Zoom while lying in bed with no clothes on. And I've talked on Zoom with students who wouldn't dream of showing up in class with what they were wearing in the privacy of their bedrooms, in which I found myself a reluctant virtual guest.

 

Of course, if we had the Metaverse, the lawyer could appear as an avatar in a top hat, tuxedo, and tails if that was what the judge wanted to see.  But the point is that there is a whole complex of social-interaction rules or guidelines that children take years to learn (if they ever do learn), and in a Metaverse, those rules would be set by whoever or whatever is running the system, not just by the individuals involved.

 

Zuckerberg insists, according to Allen, that his Metaverse will be "human-centered."  That may be true, but a maximum-security prison is human-centered too—designed to keep certain humans in the center of the prison.  While Facebook has its positive features—my wife just learned through it yesterday of the passing of an old family friend—the damage it has done to what was formerly called civil discourse, and the sheer amount of bile that social media sites have profited from, show us that even with the relatively low-tech means we currently have, the downsides of corporate-mediated social interactions reach very low points indeed.

 

Does this mean we should jump in with a bunch of government regulations before the genie gets out of the bottle?  Oddly, Zuckerberg is calling for some kind of regulation even now.  But as Allen points out, Zuckerberg may be thinking that eventually, even government power will take a back seat to the influence that the corporate-controlled Metaverse will have over things.

 

Those who see religions as creations of the human brain, and human reality as something to be created from scratch and sold at a profit—these are defective views of what humanity is, as Pope St. John Paul II pointed out with respect to the anthropology of Marxism.  Transhumanist fantasies about recreating the human universe in our image share with Marxism the belief that human beings are the summit of intelligent life, and there is nothing or no One else out there to be considered as we remake the virtual world to be whatever we want it to be.  Even if you grant the dubious premise that the Zuckerbergs of the world merely want to make life better for us all instead of just getting richer, you have to ask the question, "What does 'better' mean to you?"  And whether the machinery is Communist or capitalist, the bottom-line answer tends to be the satisfaction of personal desires. 

 

Any system, human or mechanical, that leaves God out of the picture leads people down a garden path that ends in slavery, as John Bunyan's Pilgrim discovered in Pilgrim's Progress.  Before we are compelled to join the Metaverse in order to earn a living, we should take a very hard look at what those who are planning it really want to do.  Once again, we have a chance to set a new technology on the right path before we let it go on to produce mega-disasters we then have to learn from.  It's the engineers who come up with this stuff, and in view of the lack of interest or even comprehension that government representatives have for such things, perhaps it's the engineers who need to ask the hard questions about what could go wrong with the Metaverse—before it does. 

 

Sources:  Joe Allen's article "The Metaverse:  Heaven for Soy Boys, Hell on Earth for Us" is on the Salvo website at https://salvomag.com/post/the-metaverse-heaven-for-soy-boys-hell-on-earth-for-us.  I also referred to an article on John Paul II's views on anthropology and Marxism at https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/jpii-anthropology.

Asteroid Mining: What's In the Stars For It?

 

Mining has been a part of civilization ever since there was such a thing as civilization.  And even before manned space travel moved from the realm of speculation to reality, science-fiction writers were imagining mines on Mars or asteroids, and how things might go right, or more typically, wrong. 

 

As part of an exhibition on the future, the Smithsonian Institute recently sponsored some science-fiction writers to come up with brief stories about future technologies, and author Madeline Ashby chose the topic of asteroid mining.  I will leave the artistic judgment of her work to those more qualified than I to assess such things.  But the story she wrote touches on some issues that are only going to get more serious in the coming years, as commercial space flight gets cheaper and asteroid mining becomes a real possibility.

 

In forty words or less, Ashby's story describes the return of a woman to the artists' colony where she was born, and where her father invested some of the colony's money in an asteroid-mining venture that paid off twenty years later.  Right there, we can stop and say something about what would be needed if such an eventuality could occur.

 

First, we will need to establish property rights in space.  Currently, the issue of who owns a piece of extraterrestrial land is, shall we say, up in the air.  If you launch a satellite or manned vehicle into space, you own what you launched.  And I suppose the U. S. government holds practical title to the moon rocks that the Apollo astronauts brought back with them.  (As a side note, it seems we haven't done a very good job of keeping track of those rocks, as Wikipedia has an entire article on stolen and missing moon rocks, especially the ones that President Nixon gave away to foreign countries.) 

 

But the manned moon landings were about as far from a money-making operation as you could get.  When it becomes economically feasible to mount exploration and extraction operations for valuable minerals in space, nobody is going to want to spend the billions necessary to do that unless they can be reasonably sure they will get their money back, and then some.  And the only way that can happen is if there is a stable and predictable legal framework in place to guarantee such conditions, or at least make them reasonably likely.

 

The way humanity has handled this sort of thing in the past is by getting there first and either claiming the property by force, or buying the minerals from the people who were mining it already.  In space, we assume we won't find little green men wearing mining helmets, so the first case seems to be more likely.  Ashby's story imagines the enactment of a universal "right-to-salvage" law in space, and something like this will have to be agreed upon by all interested parties before serious space mining can occur.  Depending on how valuable and critical to the world economy space-mined products become, the legal framework of space mining could become a major threat to world peace if something goes wrong.  Turning the problem over to the U. N. might help, but the U. N.'s track record of settling major disputes is not exactly stellar, so to speak. 

 

Rather than get tangled in policy issues that would take many pages to thrash out, I think I will close with just two examples of how resource extraction can go very wrong, and at least moderately right. 

 

Ivory and rubber are not minerals, but in the 1890s they were both highly valued and to be found mainly in Africa.  In 1885, King Leopold of Belgium managed to convince an international conference to grant him personally a large tract of land on which lived some 30 million people, and which became known (ironically) as the Congo Free State.  Leopold, who never visited the colony, ran it as his personal fiefdom, driving his colonial exploiters and supervisors to grab whatever they could, at whatever human cost, to the point that failure to meet production quotas on the part of native workers often led to amputation of a hand.  After two decades of literally hellish conditions, courageous reporters and writers brought the miseries of the Congo to the attention of the world, and the worst excesses were stopped.  But to this day, valuable minerals such as coltan, from which the tantalum in electronic devices is extracted, continue to be extracted under hazardous, illegal, and exploitative conditions in Africa.

 

Some analysts blame these conditions on something called the "resource curse," which is a pattern shown by some countries with rich natural resources that paradoxically have worse health, economic growth, or development outcomes than neighboring countries without such resources.  The resource curse is not an inevitable effect of mineral wealth, however, and I will close with my example of how things can go better.

 

When oil was discovered in West Texas in the 1920s, it created an unexpected windfall for Texas A&M and the University of Texas.  Along with the founding of these institutions in 1876 and 1883, respectively, the State of Texas made grants of land to the schools, as (uniquely among states joining the Union after 1776) Texas retained ownership of public lands, instead of ceding them to the federal government.  For decades, these grants didn't pay much in the way of dividends except for property sales to the occasional rancher.  But with the discovery of oil, money began to flow into the university coffers in the form of what became the Permanent University Fund, an endowment that as of 2021 amounts to some $32 billion. 

While we can have a debate some other time as to the wisdom of extracting all that oil, the fact remains that a good bit of that oil money has wound up paying for the preservation and extension of knowledge, which is what universities do at their best. 

 

I have no idea where the future of asteroid mining lies, but most likely its consequences will fall somewhere between the two extremes of heartless exploitation and generous beneficence.  Let's hope for more of the latter and less of the former.

 

Sources:  An article in Slate at https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/speculation-short-story-madeline-ashby.html briefly describes the upcoming Smithsonian exhibit and contains the Madeline Ashby story about asteroid mining.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the Congo Free State and "Stolen and missing Moon rocks," and obtained the $32 billion figure and the history of the Permanent University Fund from  .

How Did COVID-19 Start?

 

Nearly two years after the initial fatalities that would turn out to be caused by the COVID-19 virus, we still do not know the answer to that question.  But last week, the U. S. National Institutes of Health revealed that it was funding "gain-of-function" research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan during 2018 and 2019, in direct contradiction to Dr. Anthony Fauci's testimony before Congress that no such research was being supported by NIH there. 

 

In times past, plagues were regarded as simply acts of God, and while people tried to avoid transmitting infections by means of quarantines and travel restrictions, it was rarely possible to pinpoint the exact time and place where a given pandemic began.  But with advances in genetics and biochemistry, infectious agents can often be tracked down and successfully traced to their source, as was done with a localized outbreak of what came to be known as Legionnaires' disease, when it was traced to bacteria harbored in an air-conditioning water system.

 

By all measures, the COVID-19 pandemic has been the worst plague in modern times in terms of economic and social disruptions, casualties, and deaths.  According to the website www.worldometers.info/coronavirus, COVID-19 has been responsible for about 4.9 million deaths worldwide so far.  If for no other reason than to learn from our mistakes, it should be an urgent global priority to discover how the pandemic started, and whether it was by accidental transfer from an animal species such as bats to humans, or by means of deliberate creation of more aggressive viruses than occur in nature and accidental spread from the laboratory that created them.

 

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic started in a country that has systematically suppressed the information that would help in deciding this question.  But the following facts are known.

 

Shi Zhengli, a viral researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has worked for years with viruses taken from wild bats, as bats have the peculiar ability to host a wide variety of viruses that can be harmful to other species without themselves becoming ill.  To perform this research, she and her colleagues traveled far and wide to collect samples from bats in remote caves in other parts of China.  She has continued to perform research connected with COVID-19 in China after the pandemic began, and denies that there has ever been an accident in her institute resulting in infection of staff or students. 

 

Wuhan is by all accounts the city where COVID-19 first claimed its victims.  It is the largest city in central China with a population of about 11 million.

 

As we now know, the NIH funded so-called "gain-of-function" research through an organization called EcoHealth Alliance, headed by researcher Peter Daszak, which was conducted in association with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Gain-of-function is a bland phrase that means an infectious agent has been enhanced in its ability to infect a host.  While some argument can be made that concocting such viruses is the only way to figure out a defense against them, it is obviously an extremely dangerous thing to do.  Dr. Zhengli admits that prior to COVID-19, much of her viral research was done in lab conditions that were less safe (so-called "BSL-2" and "BSL-3") than the highest-security BSL-4 labs.

 

Let's imagine a different scenario and ask some questions about it.  Suppose nuclear weapons had not yet been invented, but researchers were hot on the track of cracking the secret of nuclear energy.  Suppose also in this contrafactual fantasy world that the U. S. funded some of this research at a center in Sao Paolo, Brazil.  Suddenly one day, a huge explosion happens in Sao Paolo, wiping it off the map and sending radiation into the air that eventually kills a total of 4.9 million people worldwide.  Despite the fact that most of the relevant data to determine the exact cause was vaporized in the explosion, wouldn't it be wise at least to do our very best to figure out what happened, with or without the cooperation of the Brazilian government?

 

In a sense, we already know what to do.  Whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, actually originated in a lab accident in Wuhan or in an exotic-food market there, we now know that early detection and faster responses to highly contagious new diseases might make the difference between another world-crippling pandemic and a minor contained outbreak. 

 

In the case of COVID-19, the Chinese government delayed for weeks before even publicly acknowledging the magnitude of the problem, and criticized brave medical workers who tried to publicize the seriousness of the nascent epidemic.  In retrospect, this was exactly the wrong thing to do, but it is the natural response of most governments to minimize something that is not yet so obviously awful that denials will look silly. 

 

One hopes that if a similar outbreak happened in, say, Chattanooga, state and federal officials would be more forthcoming than their Chinese counterparts in telling the rest of us about what was going on.  As to the measures that would have stopped the epidemic in its tracks, it seems that only a city-wide 100% quarantine with extreme measures taken to enforce it would have worked, and maybe not even then.  Any government will be reluctant to impose such a draconian measure unless there are very good reasons to do so. 

 

But as things stand, there are still unanswered questions about what other activities EcoHealth Alliance was doing in China that they were supposed to report on but didn't.  Unless the Chinese government suddenly becomes more forthcoming about what really happened in Wuhan, we may never know how COVID-19 really began.  But we certainly know how it spread.

 

In investigations of engineering disasters, future accidents of a similar nature can't reliably be forestalled until the exact mechanism of the one under investigation is understood.  We have part of the picture of COVID-19's origins, but not the whole story.  The best we can do now is to be much more aware of rapidly spreading fatal diseases in the future, and willing to take what may look like extreme measures locally to prevent another global pandemic. 

 

Sources:  National Review carried on its website the article "The Wuhan Lab Coverup" at https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/the-wuhan-lab-cover-up/.  I also referred to the NIH letter at https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1450947395508858880 and the Wikipedia article on Shi Zhengli. 

Federal Regulators Turn the Heat Up on Tesla

 

On Tuesday, Oct. 12, the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sent a letter to the automaker Tesla telling it to issue a recall notice if a software upgrade to its vehicles involves a safety issue.  This is the latest development in an escalating conflict between federal regulators and the electric-car maker, whose flamboyant CEO, Elon Musk, seems to enjoy twitting regulators of all kinds.  But beyond personalities, what we are seeing here is a conflict between a traditional legal system and a technology that has advanced beyond it.

 

The immediate issue that prompted the letter was an "over-the-air" software upgrade that Tesla made in late September.  The NHTSA had started investigating a number of crashes of Tesla vehicles into emergency vehicles that were parked and had their flashers operating.  The upgrade was intended to improve the ability of Tesla vehicles to avoid hitting emergency vehicles in low-light conditions. 

 

What annoyed the NHTSA was not that Tesla addressed the problem they were looking into, but the fact that they didn't issue a recall notice along with all the formalities and paperwork that are required along with it.

 

On the one hand, Tesla's position makes a certain amount of sense.  Back in the pre-software days when every automotive defect required a trip to the repair shop, the only way to get something fixed was to issue a recall to every traceable owner of every involved vehicle and try to get them all repaired within a reasonable time frame.  But now that software comprises a growing part of the overall system that we still call an automobile, upgrades can be done remotely and silently over the Internet without the owner even being aware of it.  So why go through all the hassle and bother of a recall when the thing can be done without anybody but the automaker knowing about it?

 

On the other hand, the NHTSA seems to think that such so-called "stealth recalls" can lead to problems.  How do car owners know the upgrade has really been done?  How will purchasers of used cars know they're getting a car with all pertinent upgrades?  What if an accident happens before the upgrade is done and there's no public record of whether the particular car involved was upgraded before the accident?  It's issues like these that are presumably behind the NHTSA's insistence that even over-the-air upgrades have to be accompanied by recall notices if they affect safety issues.

 

Of course, which upgrades affect safety is not always an easy matter to determine.  But the upgrade issued to improve the discrimination of emergency-vehicle lights certainly falls in that category.  This is not a trivial matter for Tesla, because if the NHTSA decides the firm has not complied with recall regulations by Nov. 1, they can fine the company $114 million.  Even to Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, that is not chump change.  And there are the people called shareholders to consider.

 

Concerns like these are not confined to the NHTSA's dealings with Tesla, as cars from all makers are starting to resemble rolling software platforms rather than the all-mechanical vehicles of old.  The AP report describing the conflict attributes the agency's tougher stance to a general trend on the part of the Biden administration to clamp down on automated-vehicle safety issues, rather than tread lightly for fear of crippling the new technology in its cradle, so to speak. 

 

A dyed-in-the-wool libertarian might criticize the NHTSA for insisting on its bureaucratic rules being followed despite the fact that Tesla was doing the right thing, namely, fixing the emergency-vehicle-light problem that was attracting public attention.  But decades of experience with government regulation of auto safety includes numerous examples, ranging from introducing double-layer safety glass to defective-air-bag recalls, in which it is pretty clear that left to their own devices, the automakers would not have acted to protect the public from the hazards caused by their own products. 

 

The problem I see is not whether to regulate, but how to regulate in light of "over-the-air" recalls that do not require physical trips to a repair shop that are hard to document.  Clearly, the old-fashioned recall regulations need revisiting in the light of current technology, and it's always easier for a bureaucracy to use the regulations it has rather than to rethink them on the fly. 

 

But suppose there had been some kind of National Internet Security Administration in place at the dawn of the Internet, and in the 1990s they'd passed a regulation requiring all web-browser designing firms to write letters (not emails, but letters) to all users whenever an upgrade to their web browser was made that affected security.  That might have made a little sense back when web browsers were upgraded once a year, but anyone using Microsoft products knows upgrades are done almost daily, affecting all kinds of things, including security.  If such a regulation were still in place about notifying users, we'd all be buried in a blizzard of mail from software companies.  This would be a boon for the U. S. Postal Service, but not for anyone else.

 

So clearly, new technologies call for new regulatory processes.  One can imagine some kind of software certification for purchasers of used cars, verifying that the cars they buy have all the software upgrades made up to the date of purchase.  That would require cooperation among the automakers, used-car dealers, state and federal regulators, and customers, but these parties have worked together in the past, and it can happen again.  As for written notifications any time safety-related software is upgraded, it sounds to me a little like the NHTSA is hounding Tesla just for hounding's sake. 

 

In a related concern, there are genuine issues regarding how easy it is for drivers to fool Tesla's autopilot into thinking the driver is paying attention to the roadway when in fact the driver is playing a video game or even sitting in the back seat.  And Tesla needs to be taken to task for that issue.  But it's not good sense to punish a company for doing the right thing, which the NHTSA appears to have done in this case.

 

Sources:  Many news outlets published the Oct. 13 AP story by Tom Krisher which was entitled on the AP website "US regulators seek answers from Tesla over lack of recall," at https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-software-881ef270cbfdc6e4f62b88400588686f, to which I referred.

Against Cartesian Dualism

 

Every now and then, it's useful to look at the philosophical underpinnings of current thought and what implications they have for engineering ethics.  In a recent post on the website of the journal First Things, professor of biblical and religious studies Carl Trueman noted that Cartesian dualism—a way of looking at the human person promulgated by René Descartes (1596-1650)—is enjoying a comeback in the popular mind, although modern philosophy has long since discarded it as an inadequate model.

 

If you know anything about Descartes, you will probably recall his most famous saying:  "I think, therefore I am."  He arrived at that conclusion after discarding everything he could think of that might possibly not be true—the evidence of his senses, things he knew on authority, and so on.  Whatever else might be false, he reasoned, he couldn't help thinking that he was still thinking, and therefore there must be a thinker somewhere.  He was so impressed by this idea that he developed a whole philosophy around it, which came to be known as Cartesian dualism.

 

Descartes believed that the soul—which in modern terms pretty much amounts to what we would call the mind—was a "spiritual substance" that was immaterial, without dimensions or location.  And the body he believed to be completely material, an entirely separate substance from the soul, consisting of the brain, the nerves, the muscles, etc., all of which operate under the control of the immaterial mind and will.  As to exactly how the immaterial controlled the material, Descartes wasn't sure.  But he thought the point of contact might be the pineal gland, a small pine-cone-shaped gland near the middle of the brain.

 

Modern science has discovered that the pineal gland, far from controlling the entire body, mainly secretes melatonin, which affects sleep patterns—but that's about it.  And modern philosophy has discarded Cartesian dualism, because nobody after Descartes was ever able to show how a completely immaterial thing like Descartes' hypothetical soul could affect a physical thing like the body.

 

But this news evidently hasn't reached a lot of women athletes who submitted an "amicus" (friend of the court) brief to the U. S. Supreme Court, urging the court to uphold abortion rights in the upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, in which the State of Missouri is seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that made abortion legal in the U. S.

 

As Trueman observes, the women in the amicus brief speak of their bodies as nothing more than sophisticated tools or instruments, operated by their minds and wills.  They say that they "depend on the right to control their bodies and reproductive lives in order to reach their athletic potential."  If we stop with only that quotation, we can see that (a) the operative verb is "control" and (b) the purpose of controlling the body is to "reach their athletic potential." 

 

In other words, for these women, their body is a means to the end of achieving success in athletics, just as a fast race car is a means to achieving success in the Indy 500.  And prohibiting abortion is like compelling a race-car driver to give a ride to a 300-pound hitchhiker during the race. 

 

Cartesian dualism shows up in lots of places these days outside of law courts.  The whole transhumanist movement, of which famed entrepreneur Elon Musk is a proponent, is based on the idea that the real you is basically a software program running on the wet computer called the brain.  The phrase "meat cage" that some people use to describe the body partakes of this same idea—that we are not our bodies, but that we use our bodies in a way not much different in principle than using a car or a computer. 

 

Perhaps the most pernicious feature of Cartesian dualism is the temptation to assess the humanity or non-humanity of other people based on our judgment as to whether they have a mind worthy of the name.  I would imagine it is easier to contemplate an abortion if you believe the fetus in question has not developed a mind yet.  And the same goes for people who are mentally disabled, suffer from Alzheimer's disease, or are otherwise incapacitated to the extent that their minds no longer control their bodies adequately.  Perhaps it's just as well to sever the connection between the mind and the body if the mind can't do its job controlling the body any more.

 

Well, if Cartesian dualism isn't true, how should we think of the relation between the mind and will (or soul, to use the more old-fashioned term) and the body?  The model of the person Descartes was trying to displace is called hylomorphism, originated by Aristotle.  Philosopher Peter Kreeft explains that Aristotle's theory considers the body to be what the person is made of, and the soul as the form or molding and patterning influence of the body.  So matter (Greek hyle) is "informed" by form (morphe) to create one integral thing with two aspects or causes:  the material cause, namely the body, and the formal cause, namely the soul.  But the human person is one unique thing, not two.

 

If hylomorphism was more popular than Cartesian dualism, I think we would see a lot of salutary changes in everything from attitudes toward the life issues (abortion, euthanasia, etc.) to medical and surgical procedures (sex-change operations, transhumanist initiatives) and even tattoos.  If you thought you were hiring a tattoo artist to burn an image of some hip-hop star on your very being, instead of just some piece of machinery you happen to be living in now, you might think twice before doing it. 

 

But the spirit of the age favors Cartesian dualism.  As consumers, we are urged to treat the rest of the world as a selectable, disposable warehouse of products and services—why not treat our bodies the same way?  I'm glad that my university is a rare holdout among public institutions of higher education for continuing to require that all its undergraduates take at least one philosophy course.  In such a course, they stand  a chance of hearing about Cartesian dualism and why it is no longer respectable.  And they might even take what they hear in class seriously, and apply it to their lives.  Such a hope is all that keeps some educators going.

 

Sources:  Carl Trueman's article "The Body Is More Than a Tool" appeared on the First Things website at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/10/the-body-is-more-than-a-tool.  Elon Musk's promotion of transhumanism is described at https://futurism.com/elon-musk-is-looking-to-kickstart-transhuman-evolution-with-brain-hacking-tech.  Peter Kreeft demolishes Cartesian dualism (and a lot of other false philosophical ideas) in his book Summa Philosophica (St. Augustine's Press, 2012).  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on hylomorphism.

Should Kids Use Instagram?

 

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal published "The Facebook Files," a series of investigative reports that was partially based on internal documents leaked by a whistleblower.  The overall impression left by the revelations is one of hypocrisy:  a company saying in public how seriously they take their responsibility to protect their users from harm and police their content, but in private giving free passes for certain favored "whitelisted" users and conducting research that reveals how harmful Instagram can be to teenagers, especially girls.

 

Just how harmful is it?

 

Time Magazine's summary of the WSJ articles includes such tidbits as the following.  Internal research presented at Facebook showed in 2019 that "Instagram makes body image issues worse for one in three teen girls."  Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, "6% of American users traced the issue to the photo-sharing app."  Eating disorders and depression are also linked to Instagram use by young people, which according to the article comprise about half of Instagram's user base.  "Young" was not defined, but presumably we are talking about people in their teens and early 20s.

 

In a Congressional hearing held Sept. 30 in response to the revelations, Facebook's Antigone Davis, the firm's global head of safety, disagreed with how the WSJ characterized the company's research.  She emphasized that users benefit from Instagram, which helps them in dealing with the hard issues that beset teens.  The reason for the research, she said, was "to make our platform better, to minimize the bad and maximize the good, and to proactively identify where we can improve."  But on Monday, the firm announced that it was pausing its work on a product tentatively called Instagram Kids, designed for users under 13.  Of course, anybody who is old enough to type and read can say they are 13 and try to get an Instagram account today, and millions have succeeded. 

           

One Senator drew a parallel between Facebook and the tobacco industry, which concealed internal research for years showing that smoking caused lung cancer and publicly denied the facts it knew about privately.  Suicide isn't lung cancer, but dead is dead.  While it's unlikely that a statistically significant number of teen suicides can be definitely linked to Instagram, it is an unvarnished fact that teen suicides in the U. S. have risen dramatically since the early 2000s, rising from a rate of about 10 per 100,000 in age group 15-19 to 14.5 per 100,000 by 2017, the latest year for which national numbers are available.  And COVID-19 has not improved matters in that regard.

 

Correlation is not causation, and there are many factors besides Instagram that make it hard for teenagers to negotiate life these days.  But the question before us is this:  does the harm done by Instagram (and similar photo-based media) to teenagers outweigh whatever perceived benefits the services provide?

 

Phrased that way, the question implies that the proper way to analyze this issue is a cost-benefit study.  But I'm not at all sure that's the right way to do it.  For one thing, the benefits are of many different kinds, as are the costs.

 

The most obvious benefit is financial, to Facebook, its investors, and similar media giants, along with their advertisers who pay Facebook gargantuan fees to sell goods and services.  Another category of benefit is whatever good feelings, sensations, and experiences users get from using Instagram and similar products.  The parallel to tobacco is relevant, because studies both by Facebook and outsiders show that social-media use is highly addictive, and is purposely designed to be that way.  This is an open secret, deplored even by some developers of social media, but it is well known and needs to be considered in any discussion. 

 

It's one thing if a mature, responsible adult decides to indulge in an addictive product, but there are reasons that states have minimum ages for purchasing tobacco and alcohol.  Society has made a judgment that teenagers below a certain age need to be protected from these substances, because their ability to judge such matters as alcohol or tobacco use is not yet fully developed.  Having been a teenager myself, I can vouch for the truth of that statement.

 

Some states such as Texas have already taken steps to restrict certain social-media firm activities such as banning individuals based on political content.  If we as a society decide that the benefits of Instagram to teens are not worth the harms, we could try to make it illegal for them to use it.  Under the present social dispensation, that idea sounds almost ludicrous.  But in 1965, who would have imagined that a scant thirty years or so later, smokers would be a disdained minority, unable to light up in workplaces, restaurants, or bars, and condemned to puff in freezing weather at least twenty feet from the nearest entrance?  Yet it happened, and a big factor in the social turn against smoking was the blatant hypocrisy the tobacco firms indulged in, as investigations later showed.

 

I have had at least one young person talk to me wistfully about what it was like growing up without social media, saying that he thought his smartphone was one of the biggest differences between my generation and his, and not a good one, either.  As powerful as the tobacco interests were, their wings were clipped, and they paid huge sums to states in retribution for the harms that were caused. 

 

I don't know what's going to happen to Facebook in the future with regard to their teenage customers.  In the Greek myth about Antigone, she got into trouble with a king who had defeated and killed her brother in battle, and who didn't want anyone mourning for him or burying him.  She tried to anyway, and ended up committing suicide. 

 

Facebook's Antigone Davis may be trying to bury some facts that refuse to stay buried.  With regard to the whistleblower who leaked internal data to the press, she said, "We've committed to not retaliating for this individual speaking to the Senate."  But a lawyerly reading of that sentence shows it says nothing about not retaliating for anything else the person did.  And if the experience of other whistleblowers is any guide, that person's career in social media is over, and they might as well start studying for their real-estate license or something else they can do on their own.

 

Sources:  I refereed to an NPR article on the Facebook revelations and Antigone Davis's remote testimony before Congress at https://www.npr.org/2021/09/30/1041864356/instagram-kids-safety-congress-hearing, as well as a Time article at https://time.com/6097704/facebook-instagram-wall-street-journal/.  The statistics on teen suicide are from https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/7/11/18759712/teen-suicide-depression-anxiety-how-to-help-resources. 

Texas Moves to Ban Social Media Banning

 

On Sept. 9, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 20, a law designed to keep social media companies with more than 50 million subscribers from blocking users whose viewpoints the company disapproves of.  Scheduled to take effect in December, the law has already attracted controversy and threats of lawsuits to keep it from going into effect.

 

Currently, if a user is de-platformed from a large site such as Facebook, there are not a lot of alternatives.  The overarching law in the U. S. pertaining to such situations is Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which prevails if there is a conflict between it and a state law.  However, there is wiggle room that Section 230 leaves, at least according to State Rep. Briscoe Cain, who authored the Texas statute.  Cain regards social media in the same light as telephone companies—that is, "common carriers" whose business it is to take on any and all comers and not discriminate among them based on content. 

 

Such discrimination happens all the time, as one unconfirmed incident I heard of recently attests.  A man at the church I attend volunteers at a local pregnancy resource center, which is holding an online fundraising event in a few weeks.  He told me that the center has found that some of their emails sent to supporters have mysteriously disappeared, implying that the internet service providers' spam filters had been adjusted to block emails from the center. 

 

Another example taken at random from a web search concerns Ryan Moore, a self-described writer and advertising broker, who tried to advertise a video he made in the spring of 2019 in which he was wearing a red "MAGA" (Make America Great Again) hat.  While I have not viewed the video (I checked the link and it is now "unavailable") his description of it sounds mild enough—criticism of the Christchurch, New Zealand terrorist bombing, good wishes for a nice St. Patrick's Day, and so on.  Not only did Google refuse his ad to promote his video, it permanently banned him from ever having a Google ad account again, and confirmed this decision when Moore inquired, saying "Since this decision is final, the account will not be reinstated." 

 

I could multiply such instances that range everywhere from a single post being blocked to the wholesale destruction of an entire business when the Parler app and website were de-platformed by Google and Apple in 2019. 

 

Not everyone who gets de-platformed is defensible, and even Rep. Cain probably does not want to allow hard-core child pornography to go unrestricted on the Internet (although it probably does if you look hard enough).  But HB 20 is an attempt to redress the huge power imbalance that happens when an individual or small organization has its access to social media blocked by a giant well-funded firm that exercises essentially monopoly powers.

 

Either the Texas attorney general or the wronged entity could sue under the new bill, and this may be a point of vulnerability, in that opponents of the bill claim it may interfere with the ability of social media companies to regulate their own content.  Of course it will.  NetChoice, a trade association which counts Google, PayPal, and Facebook among its members, issued a statement condemning the passage of HB 20 and saying that it will probably be blocked by a federal court once it goes into effect.  NetChoice's position is that social media firms, as private entities, are entitled to carry only content that they choose, and by using their facilities, users put themselves at the mercy of the firm's discretion. 

 

This reminds me of a scene out of the 1940 Disney animated film "Fantasia," which set to music cartoon characters both familiar and otherwise.  In time with the famous ballet music "Dance of the Hours," viewers are greeted by a company of baby hippopotamuses, each with a frilly pink lace tu-tu encircling her waist.

 

The analogy is clear—we have a troop of baby-hippo Big Tech giants stomping over the public stage, asking us to believe that their private-firm tu-tus, which might have been appropriate in the very early days when legacy media such as TV and newspapers overshadowed them, mean that whatever they decide about their content is their own business because it affects so few people. 

 

The tu-tus no longer fit, if they ever did.  Big Tech now operates a lot of 900-pound gorillas, to mix the animal metaphor, who do exactly as they please with regard to content that currently will not gain attention any other way than being filtered through the social-media monopoly.  The Texas legislation is one state's attempt to make dealing with social media a little less unfair.

 

I note a disturbing trend of which this controversy is only one example.  A nation, to be a nation, must share a common pool of underlying principles or philosophies, in order to endure.  By their behavior in China, for example, Big Tech firms such as Apple, Google, and Facebook make it clear that nations mean little or nothing to them when it comes to the bottom line.  Of course they need to stay within the law, but "the law" is a slippery and many-faceted thing, especially when you have deep enough pockets to hire enough lawyers to keep even states busy for years just trying to keep from being overwhelmed with lawsuits. 

 

In past controversies involving freedom of speech in this country, opposing sides could at least agree on the statement, "Well, at least we're all Americans."  But I have a hard time picturing the leaders of Big Tech freely admitting such a thing even in public, let alone in private.  Great wealth confers great power, and as Lord Acton said, power corrupts.  It is not yet time to despair that the systems of government that the founders deeded to us can overcome the exercise of raw power with the rule of law, which is all we have to guard ourselves against despotism.  But the upcoming battle over the implementation of HB 20 will be yet another skirmish in the war that is currently being fought over the right of free speech, which Big Tech increasingly wants to define for itself. 

 

Sources:  I referred to a Texas Tribune article "Social media companies can’t ban Texans over political viewpoints under new law" at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/02/texas-social-media-censorship-legislature/ and an article from The Verge at https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22661626/texas-social-media-law-hb-20-signed-greg-abbott..  Ryan Moore described his permanent ban from Google advertising in the Des Moines Register on Sept. 26, 2019 at https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2019/09/26/one-many-conservatives-banned-social-media/3773954002/.