and these freedoms for us all. not just the inhibiting hierarchies enjoyed by those who own — in more ways than one — this thing we know as tech. and therefore our democracies.
mil williams, stockholm sweden, 12th april 2023
there is so much #darkfigure being delivered by people in tech, and our law-enforcement and security agencies have given up on developing systems which could counter such #neocrime:
the agencies rely heavily on machines plus humans — in that order — because their tech partners are interested in the monetisation virtues of this order of priorities:
meantime, the bad hackers use humans plus machines — in this order — to creatively imagine, imagineer, and only then engineer new and covert ways of committing crimes that remain as invisible as possible for as long as possible.
and it’s not even that our agencies are criminal in the main (though some take advantage of #darkfigure extensively to bend, or sometimes go so far as to break, the law), but their ongoing inability to recognise the importance of humans over machines is negligence of a sort:
and even more so, the illegitimate criminal power of the human+machine workflows and deals over the agency machine+human combos is utterly ignored, in the absence of truthful criteria re innovation and procurement. and yet it would be so easy to begin a process of repurposing, with integrity, of existing technologies to ensure people are made bigger by machines and not diminished.
i’m sorry. but it has to be observed, painful though the recognition, if a given, will be.
because this next one has to be taken on the chin, if we are to improve our capacity to fight creative criminality in a collective future-present:
9/11 came about because horribly creative humans used machines as tools to kill other humans, who failed to prevent it from happening because their tech partners had consistently recommended using machine+human workflows.
not because they really believed this was true; that is, that human intuition was a lesser value than the incremental thinking engendered by machines.
no.
rather, because machines+humans make more money, more easily, than workflows that consist of humans+machines … that is, humans expanded and enhanced by machines.
mil williams, stockholm sweden, 12th april 2023
and so the only way we can prevent such horrors in the future — particularly the invisible ones such as the recent us defense leaks due to bad hackers and web actors, some of which date back to october 2022 and are only just now discovered, as well as the cctv hacking reported in the guardian newspaper article above — is to begin to reverse the order and purpose of tech.
this — what follows now — is what i suggest and advocate most firmly: humans always first, enhanced and expanded by tools whose primary rationale no longer remains monetising a tech partner into obscene levels of technological wealth whatever the wider human cost but, instead, delivering without exception on making a safer and more secure, more legitimate, more socially responsible, and more honest world all round.
and these freedoms for us all. not just the inhibiting hierarchies enjoyed by those who own — in more ways than one — this thing we know as tech. and therefore our democracies:
mil's page 