1960s Acetic Anhydride: Opium to Heroin

 

Opium Series

The Last Phoenix by Carl Douglass, 1997, Excerpts
(Vietnam War)

Acetic anhydride: the chemical use to convert opium to heroin, shipped in military holds that were as untouchable as the diplomatic pouch. The bags were discretely labeled and handled. The chemical was transported in flour sacks marked with the large lettered logo C.A.R.E., and accompanied by a statement “Gift of the Generous American People.” In the course of their business arrangement, the generous American people shipped in thousands of pounds of the valuable chemical which was then transported by US Army trucks over GVN highways without VC attack and transshipped across the borders of Viet Nam, Laos, and Burma without Pathet Lao, police or customs agent impediment. A considerable amount of money changed hands; large profits were realized; and triumph of international relations of sorts resulted when a common language and purpose [money] was involved.

Prophets and Profits

Christ Series

Karen Armstrong [Catholic Scholar]

It has been suggested that Jesus was crucified by the Romans for an attempted rebellion. Some Biblical scholars have seen the account of his overturning the tables of the moneylenders in the Temple as a truncated version of a coup, by means of which he and his followers took over the Temple for a period of three days.

The Woman with the Alabaster Jar by Margaret Starbird, Excerpt

The action that led to his immediate arrest by the authorities in Jerusalem was the overturning of the tables of moneychangers in the temple of Jerusalem during the Passover festival. Scattering coins all over the temple floor was a radical attack on the religious establishment of the Temple priests and Sadducees, the ruling elite who collaborated with the Roman authorities to preserve peace and order in the province.

Muhammad - A Biography of the Prophet by Karen Armstrong, 1993, Excerpts

The Quraysh had become rich beyond their wildest dreams in the old nomadic days. They saw wealth and capitalism as their salvation, which seemed to have rescued them from a life of poverty and danger and given them an almost godlike security. They were no longer hungry, no longer plagued by enemy tribes. Money began to acquire a quasi-religious value. But aggressive capitalism was not really compatible with the old communal tribal ethic. It encouraged a rampant greed and individualism.

Instead of sharing their wealth equally, according to the old tribal ethic, individuals were building up personal fortunes. They were exploiting the rights of orphans and widows, absorbing their inheritance into their own estates, and were not looking after the weaker, poorer members of the tribe as the old ethos had required. Their new prosperity had severed their links with traditional values and many of the less successful Quraysh felt obscurely disoriented and lost. Naturally the most successful merchants, bankers, and financiers were delighted with the new system. Only two generations away from the penury of the nomadic life, they believed that money and material goods could save them. They made a new religion of money.

The new prosperity drew people’s attention to the disparity between rich and poor. All the great religious leaders and prophets had addressed themselves to these issues and provided their own distinctive solutions. The younger generation was growing disenchanted and seemed to be searching for a new spiritual and political solution to the malaise and disquiet in the city.

Chairman Alan Greenspan -- Monetary Policy Report to the Congress

16 Feb 2005

In a democratic society, such a stark bifurcation of wealth and income trends among large segments of the population can fuel resentment and political polarization. These social developments can lead to political clashes and misguided economic policies that work to the detriment of the economy and society as a whole.

Computerized Emotion Detection

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

The program of emotional rendition began with MIT Media Lab professor Rosalind Picard and the new field of computer science that she called “affective computing.” She was among the first to recognize the opportunity for a computational system to automate the analysis of Ekman’s facial configurations and correlate micro-expressions with their emotional causality. The idea was creating software modules capable of detecting emotions, expressions or other characteristics of a user from image information.

She also noted the possibility of intrusive workplace monitoring, and she voiced reservations about the possibility of a dystopian future in which “malevolent” governmental forces use affective computing to manipulate and control the emotions of populations. By early 2014, Facebook had already applied for an “emotion detection” patent designed to implement each of Picard’s fears.

Stealth Wear

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Berlin-based artist Adam Harvey, whose work is aimed at the problem of surveillance and foiling the power of those who surveil. Harvey’s art begins with reverse engineering computer vision algorithms in order to detect and exploit their vulnerabilities through camouflage and other forms of hiding. He is perhaps best known for his “Stealth Wear,” a series of wearable fashion pieces intended to overwhelm, confuse, and evade drone surveillance and, more broadly, facial-recognition software. Silver-plated fabrics reflect thermal radiation, “enabling the wearer to avert overhead thermal surveillance.” Harvey’s fashions are inspired by traditional Islamic dress, which expresses the idea that “garments can provide a separation between man and God.” Now he redirects that meaning to create garments that separate human experience from the powers that surveil.

Adam Harvey Projects

https://ahprojects.com/projects/

Realeyes

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Realeyes says that its data sets contain over 5.5 million individually annotated frames of more than 7,000 subjects from all over the world: “We are continuously working to build the world’s largest expression and behavior datasets by increasing the quality and volume of our already-existing categories, and by creating new sets—for other expressions, emotions, different behavioral clues or different intensities. Having automated this process, it can then be scaled up to simultaneously track the emotions of entire audiences.”

A Realeyes white paper explains that its webcams record people watching videos in their homes “so we can capture genuine reactions.” Algorithms process facial expressions, and “emotions are detected, aggregated, and reported online in real time, second by second enabling our clients to make better business decisions.” Realeyes emphasizes its own “proprietary metrics” to help marketers “target audiences” and “predict performance”.

Realeyes: https://www.realeyesit.com/

Affectiva Emotion AI

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Rosalind Picard eventually became part of this new emotion detection industry with a company called Affectiva. By 2016, Rana El-Kaliouby was Affectiva’s CEO, redefining its business as “Emotion AI” and calling it the next frontier of artificial intelligence. The company had raised $34 million in venture capital, included 32 Fortune 100 companies and 1,400 brands from all over the world among its clients, and claimed to have the largest repository of emotion data in the world, with 4.8 million face videos from 75 countries, continuing to expand its supply routes with data sourced from online viewing, video game participation, driving, and conversation.

This is the commercial context in which Kaliouby came to feel that it is perfectly reasonable to assert that an “emotion chip” will become the base operational unit of a new “emotion economy.” She speaks to her audiences of a chip embedded in all things everywhere, running constantly in the background, producing an emotion pulse.

Affectiva: https://www.affectiva.com/

Facial Action Coding System (FACS)

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

The conception of emotions as observable behavioral data first took root in the mid-1960s with the work of Paul Ekman, then a young professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Ekman argued that “actions speak louder than words.” Even when a person is determined to censor or control his or her emotional communications, Ekman postulated that some types of nonverbal behaviors “escape control and provide leakage.” He recognized the potential utility of a “categorical scheme” that reliably traced the effects of expression back to their causes in emotion, and in 1978 Ekman published the Facial Action Coding System (FACS).

FACS distinguishes the elemental movements of facial muscles, breaking them down into twenty-seven facial “action units,” along with more for the head, eyes, tongue, and so on. Later, Ekman concluded that six “basic emotions” (anger, fear, sadness, enjoyment, disgust, and surprise) anchored the wider array of human emotional expression.

Facebook Likes

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

In 2013 a provocative study by Kosinski, Stillwell, and Microsoft’s Thore Graepel revealed that Facebook “likes” could automatically and accurately estimate a wide range of personal attributes that people would typically assume to be private, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.

The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people’s moods and behavior. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site. The “personal relevancy” score scans and collects everything posted in the past week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook page you’ve liked.

Experiments are run on every user at some point in their tenure on the site. Whether that is seeing different size ad copy, or different marketing messages, or different call-to-action buttons, or having their feeds generated by different ranking algorithms.

Facebook is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later. Facebook owns an unprecedented means of behavior modification that operates covertly and in the absence of social or legal mechanisms of agreement, contest, and control.

Big Other

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Power was once identified with the ownership of the means of production, but it is now identified with ownership of the means of behavioral modification that is Big Other. Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power reduces human experience to measurable observable behavior while remaining steadfastly indifferent to the meaning of that experience.

Big Other does not care what we think, feel, or do as long as its millions, billions, and trillions of sensate, actuating, computational eyes and ears can observe, render, datafy, and instrumentalize the vast reservoirs of behavioral surplus that are generated in the galactic uproar of connection and communication.

Google tripled its number of machine intelligence scientists in just the last few years and has become the top contributor to the most prestigious scientific journals—four to five times the world average in 2016. Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, their genius is meant to storm the gates of human experience, transforming it into data and translating it into a new market colossus that creates wealth by predicting, influencing, and controlling human behavior.